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Among Viking societies, Norway was much more violent than Denmark

Posted on August 28, 2024 by University of South Florida -

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH FLORIDA—TAMPA, Fla. (Aug. 28, 2024) – Rates of violence in Viking Age Norway and Denmark were long believed to be comparable. A team of researchers including University of South Florida sociologist David Jacobson challenges that assumption.

Their findings* show that interpersonal violence – violence not meted out as punishment by authorities — was much more common in Norway. This is evident in the much greater rates of trauma on skeletons and the extent of weaponry in Norway. The study, published in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, sheds new light on how Viking Age societies in Norway and Denmark differed in their experiences with violence and the role social structures played in shaping those patterns.

Jacobson is part of an interdisciplinary team that combined archaeology and sociology along with the study of skeletons and of runestones – raised stones bearing inscriptions – to reveal key differences in how violence, social hierarchies and authority influenced these dynamics in the two regions. The other scholars on the team are from Norway and Germany.

“The interdiscipilinary approach taken in this study shows us how social and political patterns can be revealed, even when there are a paucity of written sources,” Jacobson said.

Norway: A More Violent Society?

Researchers analyzed skeletal remains from Viking Age Norway and Denmark and found that 33% of the Norwegian skeletons showed healed injuries, indicating that violent encounters weren’t uncommon. By comparison, 37% of the skeletons showed signs of lethal trauma, highlighting the frequent and often fatal use of weapons in Norway.

A notable feature in Norway was the presence of weapons, particularly swords, alongside skeletons in graves. The study identified more than 3,000 swords from the Late Iron Age and Viking periods in Norway, with just a few dozen in Denmark. These findings suggest weapons played a significant role in Norwegian Viking identity and social status – further emphasizing the culture’s connection to violence.

Denmark: Steeper Social Hierarchies and Controlled Violence

In Denmark, the findings show a different pattern. Danish society was more centralized, with clearer social hierarchies and stronger central authority. Violence was more organized and controlled, often linked to official executions rather than acts of personal violence.

For example, skeletal remains in Denmark showed fewer signs of weapon-related injuries but included evidence of executions such as decapitations. Skeletal evidence suggests about 6% of Viking Danes died violently, almost all from executions.

Denmark’s more structured society also had a smaller percentage of graves containing weapons than Norway’s. Instead, social order was maintained through political control, reflected in the construction of large earthworks and fortifications. These monumental structures, particularly during the reign of King Harald Bluetooth in the 10th century, demonstrated Denmark’s greater capacity for coordinated labor and more organized social hierarchies.

Why the Differences?

The study suggests that Denmark’s more rigid social structure meant that violence was less frequent but more systematically enforced through official channels, such as executions. Meanwhile, Norway’s more decentralized society experienced more peer-to-peer violence, as indicated by the higher levels of trauma found in skeletons.

The findings also support the broader theory that stronger authority and steeper social hierarchies can reduce the overall levels of violence in a society by centralizing the use of force under official control.

“The findings of these patterns suggest that we are talking of distinct societies in the regions of Norway and Denmark,” Jacobson said. “This is quite striking, as the assumption has been that socially Viking Scandanavia was largely a singular space.”

Broader Implications

The research contributes to a growing body of work that explores how social structures influenced violence in historical societies. Similar patterns have been observed in other parts of the world, such as the Andes region of South America and in areas of North America, where less centralized societies also experienced higher levels of violence.

Jacobson said he hopes the study “is a step towards a new explanatory model, especially when written sources from the period are partial or even nonexistent.”

Note: Scholars from the University of Oslo, Deutscher Verband für Archäologie in Germany and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology also were part of the research team.

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About the University of South Florida

The University of South Florida, a high-impact research university dedicated to student success and committed to community engagement, generates an annual economic impact of more than $6 billion. With campuses in Tampa, St. Petersburg and Sarasota-Manatee, USF serves approximately 50,000 students who represent nearly 150 different countries. U.S. News & World Report has ranked USF as one of the nation’s top 50 public universities for five consecutive years, and this year USF earned its highest ranking ever among all universities public or private. In 2023, USF became the first public university in Florida in nearly 40 years to be invited to join the Association of American Universities, a prestigious group of the leading universities in the United States and Canada. Through hundreds of millions of dollars in research activity each year and as one of the top universities in the world for securing new patents, USF is a leader in solving global problems and improving lives. USF is a member of the American Athletic Conference. Learn more at www.usf.edu.

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From the Viking skeletal study: A skull displaying blunt force trauma with radiating lines. Lisa Mariann Strand

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From the Viking skeletal study: Antemortem damage is observable with remodeling of the occipital bone. Lisa Mariann Strand

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From the Viking skeletal study: Weapon related lesions identified on sacrum side and tibia. Lisa Mariann Strand

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH FLORIDA news release.

*Violence as a lens to Viking societies: A comparison of Norway and Denmark, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 26-Jun-2024.

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What role did fear play in Europe’s population growth?

Posted on August 28, 2024 by Complexity Science Hub -

COMPLEXITY SCIENCE HUB—[Vienna, August 26 2024] – Since the end of the last Ice Age, growth of human population was far from uniform, marked instead by periods of rapid expansion followed by sharp declines. The reasons behind these fluctuations remain only partially understood. Previous research by CSH scientists Peter Turchin, Daniel Kondor, and an international team of collaborators, demonstrated that social conflicts, rather than – or in addition to – environmental factors, could have significantly impacted these patterns. Now, they add another piece to the puzzle.

Wars and conflicts not only cause direct casualties but also create an atmosphere of distress and fear. This fear, by affecting where and how people settle, could have influenced substantially how the population in Europe developed, as shown in a study published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

Flight And Overpopulation

“Globally, scientists have extensively studied and debated the presence and role of conflicts in prehistory. However, estimating their effects, such as those on population numbers is still difficult,” explains Daniel Kondor from CSH. “This is even more complicated by potential indirect effects, like people who, out of fear, leave their homes or avoid certain areas.”

These indirect impacts of conflict could have caused significant, long-term population fluctuations in non-state societies, such as in Neolithic Europe (circa 7,000 BC to 3,000 BC), according to the study’s findings. “Our model shows that fear of conflict led to population declines in potentially dangerous areas. As a result, people concentrated in safer locations, such as hilltops, where overpopulation could lead to higher mortality and lower fertility,” Kondor explains.

Matching Archaeological Evidence

The ongoing threat would prevent the settlement of much of the remaining land. Co-author Detlef Gronenborn from the Leibniz Centre for Archaeology (LEIZA) in Mainz, Germany, adds: “The results from the simulation studies nicely match empirical evidence from archaeological field work, like for instance the Late Neolithic site of Kapellenberg near Frankfurt, dating to around 3700 BCE. Like there, we have many instances of a temporal abandonment of open agricultural land, associated with a retreat of groups to well-defendable locations and considerable investments in large-scale defense systems like ramparts, palisades and ditches.”

“This concentration of people in specific, often well-defended locations could have led to increasing wealth disparities and political structures that justified these differences,” adds Peter Turchin from CSH. “In that way, indirect effects of conflict might have also played a crucial role in the emergence of larger political units and the rise of early states.”

Complexity Science Meets Archaeology

To simulate population dynamics in Neolithic Europe, the researchers developed a computational model. To test the model, they utilized a database of archaeological sites, analyzing the number of radiocarbon age-measurements from various locations and time periods, under the assumption that this reflects the scale of human activities, and thus, ultimately, population numbers. “This allows us to examine the typical amplitudes and timescales of population growth and decline across Europe,” Kondor explains. “Our goal was for our simulation to reflect these patterns.”

In the future, the model could help interpret archaeological evidence, such as signs of overpopulation or land use patterns, which in turn can provide necessary context and data for further refinements to modeling. This is a typical example of interdisciplinary collaboration that CSH aims to foster. “Using complexity science methods, we develop mathematical models to analyze the rise and fall of complex societies and identify common factors,” Turchin explains. This involves collecting vast amounts of historical data, managed in specialized databases like the Seshat Global History Databank. “For the most complete picture possible, direct collaboration with archaeologists is immensely important. This study is a great example of the potential that such interdisciplinary collaboration can have,” Kondor emphasizes.

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About CSH

The Complexity Science Hub (CSH) is Europe’s research center for the study of complex systems. We derive meaning from data from a range of disciplines – economics, medicine, ecology, and the social sciences – as a basis for actionable solutions for a better world. Established in 2015, we have grown to over 70 researchers, driven by the increasing demand to gain a genuine understanding of the networks that underlie society, from healthcare to supply chains. Through our complexity science approaches linking physics, mathematics, and computational modeling with data and network science, we develop the capacity to address today’s and tomorrow’s challenges.

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Visualisation of situation around 3700 BCE. Magistrat der Stadt Hofheim; LEIZA-Leibniz-Zentrum für Archäologie, Architectura Virtualis 2020 www.leiza.de/kapellenberg

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Article Source: COMPLEXITY SCIENCE HUB news release.

*Landscape of Fear: Indirect effects of conflict can account for large-scale population declines in non-state societies, Journal of The Royal Society Interface, 28-Aug-2024. 10.1098/rsif.2024.0210

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Wood charcoal reveals the existence of a variety of woody plants around early millet sites and people started pruning, protecting and managing Prunus fruit trees as early as 8000 yr BP.

Posted on August 27, 2024 by Science China Press -

SCIENCE CHINA PRESS—This study* is led by Hui Shen, Keliang Zhao, Xinying Zhou, Xiaoqiang Li from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Zhenwei Qiu from National Museum of China. The researchers have reconstructed how early millet farmers explored and shaped local woody plants, and the protection and management of Prunus fruit trees to acquire more food resources since 8000 yr BP.

Early evidence of wheat and cotton in Nigeria

Posted on August 26, 2024 by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences -

PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES—Archaeological wheat and cotton remains reveal sophisticated trade networks and agricultural experimentation in Medieval West Africa, according to a study. Free-threshing wheat (Triticum aestivum and Triticum durum) and old-world cottons (Gossypium arboreum and Gossypium herbaceum) were introduced to West Africa as part of Trans-Saharan trade networks. Previous research on wheat and cotton in the region has been limited to arid sites associated with the arrival of Islamic merchants. Amanda Logan and colleagues analyzed archaeological wheat and cotton remains from the major Medieval urban center of Ilé-Ifè, Nigeria, located in a humid tropical forest. Analysis of 353 charred cotton seeds and seed coat fragments revealed that fiber was probably cultivated and manufactured into cloth locally. Two directly dated cotton seeds yielded dates of around 1201–1224 CE, which is roughly contemporaneous with cotton remains from arid sites further north. The authors identified 48 well-preserved grains of free-threshing wheat at the site and dated four grains to 1294–1397 CE. Wheat was likely imported to the site, given that the humid forest environment is not suitable for local cultivation. The authors suggest that cotton cloth and wheat likely represented luxury goods in the region. According to the authors, the rapid adoption of cotton illustrates a highly developed trade in commodity crops across Africa, centuries before cotton became central to European global trade.

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Profile of deep pit where wheat was found at Oduduwa College in Ilé-Ifè, Nigeria. Gérard Chouin, Ife-Sungbo Archeological Project

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Article Source: PNAS news release.

*“Early archaeological evidence of wheat and cotton from medieval Ile-Ife, Nigeria” by Amanda L. Logan et al., PNAS, 26-Aug-2024. https://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.2403256121

Cover Image, Top Left: ammeelamz, Pixabay

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To kill mammoths in the Ice Age, people used planted pikes, not throwing spears, researchers say

Posted on August 21, 2024 by University of California, Berkeley -

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA – BERKELEY—How did early humans use sharpened rocks to bring down megafauna 13,000 years ago? Did they throw spears tipped with carefully crafted, razor-sharp rocks called Clovis points? Did they surround and jab mammoths and mastadons? Or did they scavenge wounded animals, using Clovis points as a versatile tool to harvest meat and bones for food and supplies?

UC Berkeley archaeologists say the answer might be none of the above.

Instead, researchers say humans may have braced the butt of their pointed spears against the ground and angled the weapon upward in a way that would impale a charging animal. The force would have driven the spear deeper into the predator’s body, unleashing a more damaging blow than even the strongest prehistoric hunters would have been capable of on their own.

Drawing upon multiple sources of writings and artwork, a team of Berkeley archaeologists reviewed historical evidence from around the world about people hunting with planted spears.

They also ran the first experimental study* of stone weapons that focused on pike hunting techniques, revealing how spears react to the simulated force of an approaching animal. Once the sharpened rock pierced the flesh and activated its engineered mounting system, they say, the spear tip functioned like a modern day hollow-point bullet and could inflict serious wounds to mastodons, bison and saber-toothed cats.

“This ancient Native American design was an amazing innovation in hunting strategies,” said Scott Byram, a research associate with Berkeley’s Archeological Research Facility and first-author of a paper on the topic published today in the journal PLOS ONE. “This distinctive Indigenous technology is providing a window into hunting and survival techniques used for millennia throughout much of the world.”

The historical review and experiment may help solve a puzzle that has fueled decades of debate in archaeology circles: How did communities in North America actually use Clovis points, which are among the most frequently unearthed items from the Ice Age?

Named for the town of Clovis, New Mexico, where the shaped stones were first recovered nearly a century ago, Clovis points were shaped from rocks, such as chert, flint or jasper. They range from the size of a person’s thumb to that of a midsize iPhone and have a distinct, razor-sharp edge and fluted indentations on both sides of their base. Thousands of them have been recovered across the U.S. — some have even been unearthed within preserved mammoth skeletons.

They’ve also been a pop culture plot point. Characters in the video game “Far Cry Primal” use spears tipped with stone points to ambush mastodons. The movie 10,000 B.C. uses a similar spear to hunt mammoths. Scholars and hobbyists reconstruct Clovis points — and some even document on YouTube the process of building them and using them to hunt bison.

Those depictions make for a good story. But they likely fail to consider the realities of life in the Ice Age, said Byram and his co-author, Jun Sunseri, a Berkeley associate professor of anthropology.

Clovis points are often the only recovered part of a spear. The intricately designed bone shafts at the end of the weapon are sometimes found, but the wood at the base of the spear and the pine pitch and lacing that help make them function as a complete system have been lost to time.

Plus, research silos limit that kind of systems thinking about prehistoric weaponry, Jun said. And if stone specialists aren’t experts in bone, they might not see the full picture.

“You have to look beyond the simple artifact,” he said. “One of the things that’s key here is that we’re looking at this as an engineered system that requires multiple kinds of sub-specialties within our field and other fields.”

Building tools as strong, effective systems was likely a priority for communities 13,000 years ago. The tools needed to be resilient. The people had a limited number of suitable rocks to work with while traversing the land. They might go hundreds of miles without access to the right kind of long, straight poles from which to fashion a spear. So it stands to reason they wouldn’t want to risk throwing or destroying their tools without knowing if they’d even land the animal, said Byram, who mined archival records, spanning anthropology to art to Greek history, to trace the arc of planted pikes as weapons.

“People who are doing metal military artifact analysis know all about it because it was used for stopping horses in warfare,” Byram said. “But prior to that, and in other contexts with boar hunting or bear hunting, it wasn’t very well known. It’s a theme that comes back in literature quite a bit. But for whatever reason, it hasn’t been talked about too much in anthropology.”

To evaluate their pike hypothesis, the Berkeley team built a test platform measuring the force a spear system could withstand before the point snapped and/or the shaft expanded. Their low-tech, static version of an animal attack using a braced, replica Clovis point spear allowed them to test how different spears reached their breaking points and how the expansion system responded.

It was based on prior experiments where researchers fired stone-tipped spears into clay and ballistics gel — something that might feel like a pinprick to a 9-ton mammoth.

“The kind of energy that you can generate with the human arm is nothing like the kind of energy generated by a charging animal. It’s an order of magnitude different,” Jun said. “These spears were engineered to do what they’re doing to protect the user.”

The experiment put to the test something Byram had mulled for decades. When he was in graduate school and analyzing prehistoric stone tools, he crafted replica Clovis points and fashioned spears using traditional techniques. He remembered thinking how time-intensive a process it was to invest in a stone Clovis point — and how important it would be for the point to function effectively.

“It just started to make sense to me that it actually had a different purpose than some of the other tools,” Byram said. “Unlike some of the notched arrowheads, it was a more substantial weapon. And it was probably also used defensively.”

Conversations around a campfire early in the pandemic between Jun, a zooarchaeologist who learned from local communities during his time in Africa, and Kent Lightfoot, a Berkeley anthropology professor emeritus, prompted them to dig into the mystery. Through talks with his VhaVenda mentors, Jun learned how the engineering that went into the butt of some spears was just as critical as the work that went into the points.

“The sophisticated Clovis technology that developed independently in North America is testimony to the ingenuity and skills that early Indigenous people employed in their cohabitation of the ancient landscape with now-extinct megafauna,” said Lightfoot, a co-author of the study.

In the coming months, the team plans to further test its theory by building something akin to a replica mammoth. Using a type of slide or pendulum, they hope to simulate what an attack might have looked like as a planted Clovis-tipped pike made impact with a massive, fast-moving mammal.

“Sometimes in archaeology, the pieces just start fitting together like they seem to now with Clovis technology, and this puts pike hunting front and center with extinct megafauna,” Byram said. “It opens up a whole new way of looking at how people lived among these incredible animals during much of human history.”

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Clovis points are distinguishable, in part, due to their distinctive flute or channel flake scar near the base, as shown in these replicas. UC Berkeley researchers studied how the points functioned as part of a system and were used to bring down megafauna in the Ice Age. Courtesy of Scott Byram

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A high-speed photo sequence during a test after an 11.34 kg weight was dropped from 35 cm shows various moments as the stone point recedes into and splinters the pike shaft. Researchers said the way the stone point could have pierced animal flesh and the wood-and-bone shaft opened up suggests that the spear as a system functioned similar to a hollow-point bullet. Courtesy of Scott Byram

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Article Source: University of California – Berkeley news release

*Clovis points and foreshafts under braced weapon compression: Modeling Pleistocene megafauna encounters with a lithic pike, PLoS ONE, 21-Aug-2024. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0307996

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Fossil hotspots in Africa obscure a more complete picture of human evolution

Posted on August 20, 2024 by George Washington University -

GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY—WASHINGTON (August 20, 2024) – Much of the early human fossil record originates from just a few places in Africa, where favorable geological conditions have preserved a trove of fossils used by scientists to reconstruct the story of human evolution. One of these fossil hotspots is the eastern branch of the East African Rift System, home to important fossil sites such as Oldupai Gorge in Tanzania. Yet, the eastern branch of the rift system only accounts for 1% of the surface area of Africa—a fact that makes it possible to estimate how much information scientists who rely on such small samples are missing.

In a new study* published today in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, researchers at the George Washington University show the extent to which the concentration of sites in hotspots like the East African Rift System biases our understanding of human evolution and why scientists must take that bias into account when interpreting early human history.

“Because the evidence of early human evolution comes from a small range of sites, it’s important to acknowledge that we don’t have a complete picture of what happened across the entire continent,” says W. Andrew Barr, an assistant professor of anthropology at GW and lead study author. “If we can point to the ways in which the fossil record is systematically biased and not a perfect representation of everything, then we can adjust our interpretations by taking this into account.”

To determine the size of the bias in the fossil record, Barr and his co-author Bernard Wood, University Professor of Human Origins at GW, looked at the distribution of modern mammals that currently live in the rift valley. They found that very few medium- and large-bodied mammals are “rift specialists,” and the rift environment, in fact, represents on average 1.6 % of the total geographic range of modern mammal species.

In a second analysis, Barr and Wood looked at how the skulls of modern primates collected in the rift valley compared with the skulls of the same primates from other parts of the continent. They found that skulls from the rift valley represented less than 50% of the total variation among primate skulls in Africa.

While the science community has long recognized that the rift represents just a small sample of where ancient humans likely lived, the researchers say previous studies have not used modern mammals as analogs for human fossils to try to quantify the magnitude of the bias. Information from modern mammals can’t tell us exactly where else, and in what type of environments, our human ancestors lived, but they can provide clues that help us better understand the environments and physical differences of ancient humans, say the authors.

“We must avoid falling into the trap of coming up with what looks like a comprehensive reconstruction of the human story, when we know we don’t have all of the relevant evidence” says Wood. “Imagine trying to capture the social and economic complexity of Washington D.C. if you only had access to information from one neighborhood. It helps if you can get a sense of how much information is missing.”

The researchers also note the need for the scientific community to look beyond the rift to identify new fossil sites and expand the geographic range of the fossil record.

“There’s a smaller number of people who work outside these traditional hotspots and do the thankless labor of trying to find fossils in these contexts that are really hard to work in, where the geology isn’t favorable for finding fossils,” says Barr, whose own work involves looking for fossils beyond the hotspots. “It’s worth doing that sort of work to make our picture of mammal and human evolution from this time period more complete.”

WATCH: Hear more from Barr on the significance of these findings in this video here.

The paper, “Spatial sampling bias influences our understanding of early hominin evolution in eastern Africa,” was published August 20, 2024 in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

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Olduvai Gorge, a well-know hominin fossil site in the African Rift Valley. Dan Lundberg, CC-BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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Article Source: George Washington University news release.

*Spatial sampling bias influences our understanding of early hominin evolution in eastern Africa, Nature Ecology & Evolution, 20-Aug-2024. 10.1038/s41559-024-02522-5

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Decolonizing the past: the legacy of Minoan Archaeology

Posted on August 20, 2024 by Dan McLerran -

Anyone familiar with the Minoans has probably heard the term, “the first European civilization,” applied as a descriptor for this ancient society, best known historically in the popular literature as the subject of investigation by archaeologist Arthur Evans, who named the civilization after king Minos, the mythical king who reigned over the ancient Bronze Age city of Knossos on present-day Crete. And while the phrase may still hold some weight among many scholars of today, it likely also reflects the cultural and colonial mindset and disposition of the scholars and others whose lives and studies touched on the sensational discoveries that brought this advanced, early Aegean island society into the public light during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Enter here PhD candidate Mnemosyne Rice, who has been intensely researching the Minoans as part of her studies in Minoan Archaeology at Trinity College, Dublin. She discusses this and other related topics in the newly released Episode 5 of the new podcast series, Aegean Connections, hosted by Dr. Ester Salgarella. In this podcast episode, entitled Decolonizing the past: the legacy of Minoan Archaeology, Rice relates that, at least in part, what we have traditionally known about the Minoans has also been about the way the material discoveries were originally and traditionally interpreted by the gentlemen scholars and others who were influenced by the environment of European Colonialism that existed at the time of their discoveries. With this knowledge and with the development of a revised understanding of the ancient Minoan people, Rice has focused her PhD thesis on the evolution and intellectual history of how the material evidence of this civilization has been presented in museums, most particularly the British Museum in London and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, both of which curate and present limited collections and exhibitions of the same.

Rice also discusses the production of Linear A inscriptions (a largely undeciphered administrative script, and one of three scripts produced or used by the Minoans) as a craft, particularly on so-called non-administrative objects, such as stone vessels. She also describes and discusses her work on the project, The Many Lives of a Snake Goddess, which collects and studies the subsequent reuses of the famous Minoan Snake Goddess figure, which was first unearthed in the form of figurines at the Minoan palatial site of Knossos on Crete.

Anyone can listen to Episode 5 for free at the podcast series, Aegean Connections.

Cover Photo, Top Left: British Museum, hulkiokantabak, Pixabay

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Technique uses dental traits instead of ancient DNA to map the spread of paleo-human populations

Posted on August 16, 2024 by Abigail Eisenstadt -

AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE (AAAS)—A new approach* to map the spread of humans in the Paleolithic era relies on dental features rather than traces of DNA, the latter of which so rarely found in ancient remains. Scientists validated the technique by creating demographic models based on fossilized teeth from 450 Homo sapiens specimens in Europe that lived throughout the Last Ice Age. “This opens up the exciting possibility to [investigate] archaeological time depths or regions where obtaining ancient DNA is not feasible, and where skeletal phenotypic data is the only source of information available,” Hannes Rathmann and colleagues write. Modern H. sapiens established an enduring foothold in Europe around 50 to 45 thousand years ago (kya) during the Last Ice Age. This migration coincided with the Upper Paleolithic, an age marked by sophisticated stone tool use. Yet, little is known about how Upper Paleolithic populations spread across Europe. Here, Rathmann et al. have modified an existing machine learning-based statistical framework to map European Ice Age population dynamics over time. The technique typically uses DNA to create demographic models, which researchers then compare with archaeological data. The newly adapted method instead assesses dental traits, such as the shape of tooth roots and fissure formations on dental crowns. As a test, researchers used it to catalog 20 dental features in 450 European specimens from 47 to 7 kya in age. While doing so, the model chronologically grouped specimens according to three climate periods: the Middle Pleniglacial (47 to 28 kya), the Late Pleniglacial (28 to 14.7 kya), and the Late Glacial to Early Holocene (14.7 to 7 kya). It also sorted populations into a Western group that spanned Portugal to Germany and an Eastern group that ranged from Italy to Russia. The framework developed 14 demographic models, and one – model 5 – aligned most consistently with established archaeological theories of population movement in Europe. In this scenario, Western and Eastern populations remained connected throughout the entire Middle Pleniglacial. Then, as the Late Pleniglacial began, groups in the East pushed westward, causing extinction events in West populations. As the world cooled further in the Late Pleniglacial, leading into the coldest stage of the Ice Age called the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM; 26.5 to 19 kya), East and West became geographically and genetically isolated. Once the LGM ended, migration and genetic exchange resumed.

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Article Source: AAAS news release.

*Human population dynamics in Upper Paleolithic Europe inferred from fossil dental phenotypes, Science Advances, 16-Aug-2024. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adn8129

Cover Image, Top Left: Tooth. LionFive, Pixabay

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Trackways of Otero

Posted on August 15, 2024 by Michael Gordon -

Anyone who visits White Sands National Park in south central New Mexico cannot help but marvel at the stark yet uniquely beautiful, undulating formations of white, rich gypsum crystal sand dunes that make it stand out from most any other arid landscape on the planet. It is what draws its thousands of visitors every year. It spreads over 145,762 acres or 227.8 square miles within the Tularosa Basin, a vast geologic graben that lies between the Sacramento Mountains to the east and the San Andres and Oscura Mountains to the west. White Sands is the largest of its kind anywhere on Earth, its gypsum sand depth extending as much as 30 feet and its dunes reaching a hight as much as 60 feet — a mass of 4.1 billion metric tons. Despite its aridity, among its dunes live mammal populations of fox, rodents, coyotes, bobcats, badgers, rabbits, and porcupines; along with seven species of amphibians; reptiles, including a variety of lizards and snakes; and 220 species of birds. Cacti, desert grasses, and even some trees and shrubs pockmark the landscape — tracks of small animals can even be seen leading from plant to plant.

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Aerial view of White Sands. Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain

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But rewind backward over 12,000 years, and one sees a very different world. During the late Pleistocene, before the end of the Last Glacial Maximum (or LGM), the land here was characterized by lakes, rivers and streams. Vegetation was significantly more lush. It supported such animal species as mammoth, giant ground sloth, and dire wolves, mammals now long extinct. We know this because teams of scientists and specialists have spent years in the region surveying, excavating, and studying recovered finds that attest to this ancient reality. One of many locations in the region has revealed evidence of a great ancient inland body of water known to paleoclimatologists and paleontologists as Lake Otero, the largest of several lakes that characterized the Tularosa Basin between 36,000 and 19,000 years ago. Here, on what is today a dried up ancient lakebed known as a playa, teams of paleontologists and other specialists have revealed evidence for extinct late Pleistocene fauna such as mammoth, groundsloth, canid and felid carnivora (such as the dire wolf and the saber-toothed cat), bovids and camelids (such as ancient cattle species and ancient camels).

In January of 2020, one team of scientists uncovered something quite remarkable at a site they designated WHSA (White Sands) Locality 2 ………..

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Artist recreation of late Pleistocence landscape in present-day White Sands National Park. Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain

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An Extraordinary Trackway Exposed

It was in 2019 when a research team consisting of a core group of specialists—Dan Odess and David Bustos from the National Park Service, Kathleen Springer and Jeff Pagati from the US Geological Survey, Tommy Urban from Cornell University, and Matthew Bennet of Bournemouth University, discovered what appeared to be human footprints among those of what they knew to be extinct megafauna. Battling arid conditions and windblown sand, in January of 2020 they meticulously excavated and eventually revealed human, proboscidean (such as mammoths), and canid (such as dire wolf) footprints in all layers or levels throughout their trenching. But of particular interest were the human tracks — no less than 61 in all — showing, according to the researchers, “good anatomical definition”, meaning they exhibited good heel impressions, toe pads and longitudinal arch definition consistent with modern Homo sapiens footprints as well as human footprints documented at other Pleistocene sites across the world. Most important, the team was able to establish a controlled chronology for the footprints by dating their sediment context using radiocarbon ages of sediment samples containing macroscopic seeds of the aquatic plant Ruppia cirrhosa (from beds of ditch grass seeds) which sandwiched the relevant footprint-bearing layers. The dating sequence yielded calibrated ages from 22.86 ± 0.32 to 21.13 ± 0.25 ka.*

In other words, there may have been humans at this location 23,000 years ago, and perhaps even earlier.

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Read much more, including the latest update, in the complete premium article.

Cover Image, Top Left: Human fossil footprint tracks at the site. Courtesy Dan Flores.

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How bread dough gave rise to civilization

Posted on August 14, 2024 by John Innes Centre -

JOHN INNES CENTRE—A major international study* has explained how bread wheat helped to transform the ancient world on its path to becoming the iconic crop that today sustains a global population of eight billion.

“Our findings shed new light on an iconic event in our civilization that created a new kind of agriculture and allowed humans to settle down and form societies,” said Professor Brande Wulff, a wheat researcher at KAUST (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology) and one of the lead authors of the study which appears in Nature.

Professor Cristobal Uauy, a group leader at the John Innes Centre and one of authors of the study said: “This work exemplifies the importance of global collaboration and sharing of data and seeds across countries; we can achieve so much by combining resources and expertise across institutes and across international boundaries.”

The secret of bread wheat’s success, according to the research by institutes that make up the Open Wild Wheat Consortium (OWWC), lies in the genetic diversity of a wild grass called Aegilops tauschii.

Bread wheat is a hybrid between three wild grasses containing three genomes, (A, B and D) within one complex plant.

Aegilops tauschii, an otherwise inconspicuous weed, provided bread wheat’s D-genome when it crossed with early cultivated pasta wheat in the Fertile Crescent sometime between eight and eleven thousand years ago.

The chance hybridization on the banks of the southern Caspian Sea spawned an agricultural revolution. Cultivation of bread wheat rapidly spread across a wide new range of climates and soils as farmers enthusiastically adopted this dynamic new crop, with its high gluten content that creates an airier elasticated breadmaking dough.

This rapid geographical advance has puzzled wheat researchers. There is no wild bread wheat: and the kind of hybridization event that added the new D genome to wheat’s existing A and B genomes created a genetic bottleneck, whereby the new species had a much-reduced genetic diversity compared to its surrounding wild grasses. 

This bottleneck effect coupled with the fact that wheat is an in-breeding species – meaning it is self-pollinating – would suggest that bread wheat might struggle outside its Fertile Crescent origins. So how did it become well-travelled and widely adopted across the region?

In solving this conundrum, the international collaboration assembled a diversity panel of 493 unique accessions spanning the geographical range of Aegilops tauschii from north-western Turkey to eastern China.

From this panel the researchers selected 46 accessions reflecting the species traits and genetic diversity, to create a Pangenome, a high-quality genetic map of Aegilops tauschii.

Using this map, they scanned 80,000 bread wheat landraces – locally adapted varieties – held by CIMMYT and collected from around the world.

This data showed that around 75% of the bread wheat D-genome is derived from the lineage (L2) of Aegilops tauschii which originates from the southern Caspian Sea. The remaining 25% of its genetic make-up is derived from lineages across its range.

“This 25% influx of genetic material from other lineages of tauschii has contributed and defined the success of bread wheat,” said Professor Simon Krattinger, lead author of the study.

“Without the genetic viability that this diversity brings, we would most likely not eat bread on the scale we do today. Otherwise, bread wheat today would be a regional crop – important to the Middle East but I doubt that it would have become globally dominant without this plasticity that enabled bread wheat to adapt.”

A previous study by OWWC revealed the existence of a distinct lineage of Aegilops tauschii geographically restricted to present day Georgia in the Caucasus region – 500 kilometers from the Fertile Crescent. This Aegilops tauschii lineage (L3) is significant because it has provided bread wheat with the best-known gene for dough quality.

In this study the researchers hypothesized that if this were an historic introgression, akin to a Neanderthal genetic footprint in the human genome, they would find landraces in the CIMMYT collections that had a higher proportion of it.

Data analysis showed that CIMMYT wheat landraces collected from the Georgian region contained 7% L3 introgressions in the genome, seven times more than that of bread wheat landraces collected from the Fertile Crescent.

“We used the L3 tauschii accessions as a guinea pig to track and trace the hybridizations using 80,000 bread wheat landraces,” said Professor Krattinger.

“The data beautifully supports a picture where bread wheat emerges in the southern Caspian, then with migration and agricultural expansion it reached Georgia and here with gene flow and hybridizations with the peculiar, genetically distinct and geographically restricted L3 accessions it resulted in the influx of new genetic material.”

“This is one of the novel aspects of our study and it confirms that using our new resources we can trace the dynamics of these introgressions in bread wheat.”

In addition to solving this age-old biological mystery the new Aegilops tauschii open source Pangenome and germplasm made available by the OWWC, are being used by researchers and breeders worldwide to discover new disease resistance genes that will protect wheat crops against age-old agricultural plagues like wheat rust. They can also mine this wild grass species for climate resilient genes which can be bred into elite wheat cultivars.

Researchers at the John Innes Centre worked closely with colleagues from KAUST using bioinformatic approaches to track levels of DNA contributed to bread wheat by the L3 lineage of Aegilops tauschii. 

Professor Uauy concluded: “The study highlights the importance of maintaining genetic resources such as the BBSRC funded Germplasm Resources Unit here at the John Innes Centre which maintains historic collections of wild grasses that can be used to breed valuable traits such as disease resistance and pest resistance into modern wheat.” 

Origin and evolution of the bread wheat D genome appears in Nature.

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Aegilops tauschii – one of the wild grasses that gave rise to wheat. Ana Perera

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Article Source: JOHN INNES CENTRE news release.

*Origin and evolution of the bread wheat D genome, Nature, 14-Aug-2024. 10.1038/s41586-024-07808-z

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Stonehenge’s Altar Stone origins reveal advanced ancient Britain

Posted on August 14, 2024 by Curtin University -

CURTIN UNIVERSITY—New research led by Curtin University has revealed Stonehenge’s monumental six-tonne Altar Stone, long believed to originate from Wales, actually hails from Scotland.

Furthermore, the findings point to the existence of unexpectedly advanced transport methods and societal organisation at the time of the stone’s arrival at its current location in southern England about 5000 years ago.

Curtin researchers studied the age and chemistry of mineral grains within fragments of the Altar Stone, which is a 50cm thick sandstone block measuring 5 x 1 metres, that sits at the centre of Stonehenge’s iconic stone circle in Wiltshire.

Lead author PhD student Anthony Clarke from the Timescales of Mineral Systems Group within Curtin’s School of Earth and Planetary Sciences said analysis of the age and chemical composition of minerals within fragments of the Altar Stone matched it with rocks from northeast Scotland, while also clearly differentiating them from Welsh bedrock.

“Our analysis found specific mineral grains in the Altar Stone are mostly between 1000 to 2000 million years old, while other minerals are around 450 million years old,” Mr Clarke said.

“This provides a distinct chemical fingerprint suggesting the stone came from rocks in the Orcadian Basin, Scotland, at least 750 kilometres away from Stonehenge.

“Given its Scottish origins, the findings raise fascinating questions, considering the technological constraints of the Neolithic era, as to how such a massive stone was transported over vast distances around 2600 BC.

“This discovery also holds personal significance for me. I grew up in the Mynydd Preseli, Wales, where some of Stonehenge’s stones came from. I first visited Stonehenge when I was one year old and now at 25, I returned from Australia to help make this scientific discovery – you could say I’ve come full circle at the stone circle.”

Study co-author Professor Chris Kirkland, also from the Timescales of Mineral Systems Group at Curtin, said the findings had significant implications for understanding ancient communities, their connections, and their transportation methods.

“Our discovery of the Altar Stone’s origins highlights a significant level of societal coordination during the Neolithic period and helps paint a fascinating picture of prehistoric Britain,” Professor Kirkland said.

“Transporting such massive cargo overland from Scotland to southern England would have been extremely challenging, indicating a likely marine shipping route along the coast of Britain.

“This implies long-distance trade networks and a higher level of societal organisation than is widely understood to have existed during the Neolithic period in Britain.”

Funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project, the research was performed in collaboration with Aberystwyth University, The University of Adelaide and University College London.

Co-author Professor Richard Bevins from Aberystwyth University said the findings overturned what had been thought for the past century.

“We have succeeded in working out, if you like, the age and chemical fingerprints of perhaps one of the most famous of stones in the world-renowned ancient monument,” Professor Bevins said.

“While we can now say that this iconic rock is Scottish and not Welsh, the hunt will still very much be on to pin down where exactly in the north-east of Scotland the Altar Stone came from.”

Co-author Dr Robert Ixer of the UCL Institute of Archaeology said the findings were genuinely shocking, but if plate tectonics and atomic physics were correct, then the Altar Stone is Scottish.

“The work prompts two important questions: why and exactly how was the Altar Stone transported from the very north of Scotland, a distance of more than 700 kilometres, to Stonehenge?”

Curtin Vice-Chancellor Professor Harlene Hayne said much of the research and analysis done by Mr Clarke and Professor Kirkland was undertaken at the University’s renowned John de Laeter Centre.

“This fascinating study is another example of the stellar work being undertaken by Curtin University’s Timescales of Mineral Systems Group with the John de Laeter Centre, using state-of-the-art equipment in our GeoHistory Facility that supports important minerals research,” Professor Hayne said.

“It offers specialist mass spectrometers which are used to examine the composition of materials such as rock-forming minerals, archaeological artefacts, meteorites, ceramics and even biological substances such as teeth, bones and shell.

“Ongoing investment is required to maintain cutting-edge facilities like this, which are crucial for attracting the world’s best minds. In this case, we are delighted that our outstanding research reputation and facilities led PhD student Anthony Clarke to travel 15,000 kilometres from his home in Wales to study at Curtin and make this significant finding.”

Mr Clarke said he chose Curtin for his PhD because it also offered the chance to work alongside renowned researchers, such as Professor Kirkland.

“Curtin has given us the freedom and independence to explore fascinating work, such as Stonehenge and access to the world’s most advanced equipment and expert staff means I can complete all my work there,” Mr Clarke said.

“Western Australia itself as home to the oldest minerals on Earth, is an outstanding natural laboratory. So I’m very grateful to have had the opportunity to do this research in this outstanding place.”

The full study titled ‘A Scottish Provenance for the Altar Stone of Stonehenge’ is published in the journal Nature.

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The Altar Stone at Stonehenge. Credit: English Heritage

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Article Source: Curtin University news release.

*A Scottish Provenance for the Alatar Stone of Stonehenge, Nature, 14 August, 2024.

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New interpretation of runic inscription reveals pricing in viking age

Posted on August 13, 2024 by Stockholm University -

STOCKHOLM UNIVERSITY—A new interpretation of the runic inscription on the Forsa Ring (Forsaringen in Swedish), provides fresh insights into the Viking Age monetary system and represents the oldest documented value record in Scandinavia. The inscription describes how the Vikings handled fines in a flexible and practical manner. This is highlighted in research from the Department of Economic History and International Relations at Stockholm University, recently published in the Scandinavian Economic History Review.

“The Forsaringen inscription “uksa … auk aura tua” was previously interpreted to mean that fines had to be paid with both an ox and two ore of silver. This would imply that the guilty party had to pay with two different types of goods, which would have been both impractical and time-consuming,“ says Rodney Edvinsson, Professor of Economic History at Stockholm University, who conducted the study.

The Forsa Ring is an iron ring from Hälsingland, dated to the 9th or 10th century. The runic inscription on the ring describes fines for a specific offense, where payment was to be made in the form of oxen and silver. The ring is believed to have been used as a door handle and is currently the oldest known preserved legal text in Scandinavia. By changing the translation of the word “auk” from the previous interpretation “and” to the new interpretation “also,” the meaning changes so that fines could be paid either with an ox or with two ore of silver. An ore was equivalent to about 25 grams of silver.

“This indicates a much more flexible system, where both oxen and silver could be used as units of payment. If a person had easier access to oxen than to silver, they could pay their fines with an ox. Conversely, if someone had silver but no oxen, they could pay with two ore of silver,“ says Rodney Edvinsson.

The new interpretation shows that the Vikings had a system where both oxen and silver served as units of payment. This system allowed for multiple types of units of accounts to be used concurrently, reducing transaction complexity and making it easier for people to meet their financial obligations. The new interpretation also aligns better with how the system functioned later according to later regional laws and is, according to Rodney Edvinsson, significant for our understanding of both Scandinavian and European monetary history.

“As an economic historian, I particularly look for historical data to be economically logical, that is, to fit into other contemporary or historical economic systems. The valuation of an ox at two ore, or 50 grams of silver, in 10th-century Sweden resembles contemporary valuations in other parts of Europe, indicating a high degree of integration and exchange between different economies,“ says Rodney Edvinsson.

He has previously contributed to developing a historical consumer price index extending back to the 13th century, but this new interpretation provides insights into price levels even earlier in history.

“The price level during the Viking Age in silver was much lower than in the early 14th century and late 16th century, but approximately at the same level as in the late 15th century and the 12th century, when there was a silver shortage,“ says Rodney Edvinsson.

The study highlights the importance of using modern economic theories to interpret historical sources. By combining economic theory with archaeological and historical findings, new opportunities for interdisciplinary research and a deeper understanding of early economic systems are opened up.

What Did Things Cost During the Viking Age?

According to the new interpretation, an ox would cost 2 öre of silver, about 50 grams of silver, during the Viking Age. This corresponds to roughly 100,000 Swedish kronor today, if compared to the value of an hour’s work. The Forsa Ring’s fine amount was therefore quite high. One öre was likely equivalent to about nine Arabic dirhams, a currency that circulated in large quantities among the Vikings. A common price for a thrall was 12 öre of silver, or approximately 600,000 Swedish kronor today. The wergild for a free man, i.e., the fine paid to the family of the murdered to avoid blood revenge, was much higher, around 5 kilos of silver, which is about 10 million Swedish kronor today. The significant difference in value between a thrall and a free man reflects the power dynamics between free individuals and thralls in a slave society.

Read the publication: “Applying a transaction cost perspective to decode Viking Scandinavia’s earliest recorded value relation: insights from the Forsaringen’s runic inscription” in the Scandinavian Economic History Review.

The relevant inscription of the Forsa Ring translated to modern English:
One ox and [also/or] two öre of silver to the staff for the restoration of a sanctuary in a valid state for the first time; two oxen and [also/or] four öre of silver for the second time; but for the third time four oxen and eight öre of silver.

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Old ink drawing of the Forsa Ring with the runic inscription. Lars Kennerstedt/the Swedish National Heritage Board

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The Forsa Ring. Ulrika Eriksson/Svenska Kyrkan

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Article Source: Stockholm University news release.

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International Space Station crew carries out first-ever archaeological survey in space

Posted on August 7, 2024 by PLOS -

PLOS—An archaeological strategy adapted for space used daily photos to reveal how astronauts actually use areas aboard the International Space Station – and how this differs from intended uses. Justin Walsh of Chapman University, California, and colleagues present these findings* in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on August 7, 2024.

More than 270 people from 23 countries have visited the International Space Station (ISS) over more than two decades. Crew member interviews can reveal how people adapt to a novel environment—one featuring isolation, confinement, and microgravity—that is far removed from the context in which humans evolved. However, interviews may be unable to capture insights that could be captured by alternative approaches.

In order to better understand the “microsociety” of the ISS, Walsh and colleagues launched the International Space Station Archaeological Project, which applies an archaeological framework to the ISS and studies the materials used by its crew as artifacts.

For their first direct work on the space station, the team adapted a traditional archaeological strategy known as the shovel test pit, in which small pits are dug at intervals across a site to assess artifact distribution and select areas for more extensive excavation. In this case, the archaeologists asked the ISS crew to document six locations around the station, and instead of digging pits, taking daily photos of each location for 60 days in 2022.

The new article reveals findings from the first two of the six sample areas to be fully documented: one designated for equipment maintenance and another near the latrine and exercise equipment. Further analysis of photos in these areas using a novel open-source image analysis platform developed by the team revealed 5,438 instances of “artifacts” being used for varied purposes, such as writing tools, Post-It notes, and an augmented reality headset.

Cross-referencing the photos with astronaut activity reports, the researchers found that the area near the exercise equipment and latrine, while not designated for any particular purpose, had been used as storage for toiletries, resealable bags, and a rarely used computer. The equipment maintenance area was used primarily for storage, with little or no maintenance actually carried out there.

These findings demonstrate how traditional archaeological techniques can be adapted to study remote or extreme habitats. The findings could also help inform development of future space habitats.

The authors add: “The experiment is the first archaeology ever to happen off of the planet Earth. By applying a very traditional method for sampling a site to a completely new kind of archaeological context, we show how the ISS crew uses different areas of the space station in ways that diverge from designs and mission plans. Architects and planners of future space stations can learn valuable lessons from this work.”

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A sample location from the Sampling Quadrangle Assemblages Research Experiment (SQuARE), Square 03 in the starboard Maintenance Work Area of the International Space Station. An open crew berth is visible at right. The yellow dotted line indicates the boundaries of the sample area. NASA/ISSAP. Walsh et al., 2024, PLOS ONE, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

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Article Source: PLOS news release.

*Walsh JSP, Graham S, Gorman AC, Brousseau C, Abdullah S (2024) Archaeology in space: The Sampling Quadrangle Assemblages Research Experiment (SQuARE) on the International Space Station. Report 1: Squares 03 and 05. PLoS ONE 19(8): e0304229. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0304229

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Carvings at ancient monument may be world’s oldest calendar

Posted on August 6, 2024 by University of Edinburgh -

UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH—Markings on a stone pillar at a 12,000 year-old archaeological site in Turkey likely represent the world’s oldest solar calendar, created as a memorial to a devastating comet strike, experts suggest.

The markings at Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey – an ancient complex of temple-like enclosures adorned with intricately carved symbols – could record an astronomical event that triggered a key shift in human civilisation, researchers say.

The research* suggests ancient people were able to record their observations of the sun, moon and constellations in the form of a solar calendar, created to keep track of time and mark the change of seasons.

Fresh analysis of V-shaped symbols carved onto pillars at the site has found that each V could represent a single day. This interpretation allowed researchers to count a solar calendar of 365 days on one of the pillars, consisting of 12 lunar months plus 11 extra days.

The summer solstice appears as a separate, special day, represented by a V worn around the neck of a bird-like beast thought to represent the summer solstice constellation at the time. Other statues nearby, possibly representing deities, have been found with similar V-markings at their necks.

Since both the moon’s and the sun’s cycles are depicted, the carvings could represent the world’s earliest so-called lunisolar calendar, based on the phases of the moon and the position of the sun – pre-dating other known calendars of this type by many millennia.

Ancient people may have created these carvings at Göbekli Tepe to record the date a swarm of comet fragments hit Earth nearly 13,000 years ago – or 10,850 BC – researchers say.

The comet strike is suggested to have ushered in a mini ice age lasting over 1,200 years, wiping out many species of large animals. It could also have triggered changes in lifestyle and agriculture thought to be linked to the birth of civilisation soon afterwards in the fertile crescent of West Asia.

Another pillar at the site appears to picture the Taurid meteor stream – which is thought to be the source of the comet fragments – lasting 27 days and emanating from the directions of Aquarius and Pisces.

The find also appears to confirm that ancient people were able to record dates using precession – the wobble in Earth’s axis which affects the movement of constellations across the sky – at least 10,000 years before the phenomenon was documented by Hipparchus of Ancient Greece in 150 BC.

The carvings appear to have remained important to the people of Göbekli Tepe for millennia, suggesting the impact event may have triggered a new cult or religion that influenced the development of civilisation.

The find also supports a theory that Earth faces increased comet strikes as its orbit crosses the path of circling comet fragments, which we normally experience as meteor streams.

Dr Martin Sweatman, of the University of Edinburgh’s School of Engineering, who led the research, said:
“It appears the inhabitants of Göbekli Tepe were keen observers of the sky, which is to be expected given their world had been devastated by a comet strike. This event might have triggered civilisation by initiating a new religion and by motivating developments in agriculture to cope with the cold climate. Possibly, their attempts to record what they saw are the first steps towards the development of writing millennia later.”

The research is published in Time and Mind.

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Carvings at Göbekli Tepe are thought to represent the world’s oldest calendar. Dr Martin Sweatman

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH news release.

*Representations of calendars and time at Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe support an astronomical interpretation of their symbolism, Time and Mind, 24-Jul-2024. 10.1080/1751696X.2024.2373876

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Smallest arm bone in human fossil record sheds light on the dawn of Homo floresiensis

Posted on August 6, 2024 by Griffith University -

GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY—A paper out today in Nature Communications reports the discovery of extremely rare early human fossils from the Indonesian island of Flores, including an astonishingly small adult limb bone.

Dated to about 700,000 years old, the new findings shed light on the evolution of Homo floresiensis, the so-called ‘Hobbits’ of Flores whose remains were uncovered in 2003 at Liang Bua cave in the island’s west by a team co-led by Australian-New Zealand archaeologist Professor Mike Morwood (1950–2013).

Archaeological evidence suggests these diminutive, small-brained humans inhabited Liang Bua as recently as 50,000 years ago, a time when our own species (Homo sapiens) was already long established in Australia to the south.

There has been much debate about the origin of the mysterious humans from Flores. It was first hypothesised that Homo floresiensis was a dwarfed descendant of early Asian Homo erectus.

Another theory is that the ‘Hobbit’ is a late-surviving remnant of a more ancient hominin from Africa that pre-dates Homo erectus and was small in stature to begin with, in which case possible candidates include Homo habilis or the famous ‘Lucy’ (Australopithecus afarensis).

Other than Liang Bua, hominin fossils have only ever been found at a single location on Flores: the open-air site of Mata Menge 75km to the east of the cave. Located in the sparsely populated tropical grasslands of the So’a Basin, this site has previously yielded several hominin fossils (a jaw fragment and six teeth) excavated from a layer of sandstone laid down by a small stream around 700,000 years ago.

Pre-dating the Liang Bua hominins by 650,000 years, the Mata Menge fossil remains have been shown to belong to at least three individuals with even slightly smaller jaws and teeth than Homo floresiensis, implying that small body size evolved early in the history of Flores hominins.

However, as postcranial elements (bones from below the head) had not been found in the fossil record at this site it could not be confirmed that these So’a Basin hominins were at least as small as, if not slightly smaller than, Homo floresiensis.

It was also unclear what species the Mata Menge fossils belonged to, owing to the lack of more diagnostic specimens. However, some teeth were deemed to be intermediate in form between those of early Asian Homo erectus and Homo floresiensis.

The new study published in Nature Communications was led by Professor Yousuke Kaifu of the University of Tokyo, Iwan Kurniawan of the Center for Geological Survey in Indonesia, and Associate Professor Gerrit van den Bergh from the University of Wollongong.

It reports the discovery of three additional hominin fossils from Mata Menge dating to 700,000 years ago, the outcome of several field seasons of excavations at this site. Most importantly, the new assemblage includes the first postcranial element, a distal shaft of an adult humerus (lower half of the upper arm bone).

The recovery of a fossil limb bone from the Mata Menge excavation site has been long-awaited because of the wealth of evidence it provides regarding the ancestral origin of Homo floresiensis.

Digital microscopy of the microstructure indicates that the small humerus is from an adult individual. Based on the estimated length of the bone, the team was able to calculate the body height of this hominin to be about 100cm tall. This is around 6cm shorter than the estimated body height of the 60,000-year-old Homo floresiensis skeleton from Liang Bua (~106cm, based on the femoral length).

“This 700,000-year-old adult humerus is not just shorter than that of Homo floresiensis, it is the smallest upper arm bone known from the hominin fossil record worldwide,” said Professor Adam Brumm from Griffith University’s Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, a co-author of the paper.

“This very rare specimen confirms our hypothesis that the ancestors of Homo floresiensis were extremely small in body size; however, it is now apparent from the tiny proportions of this limb bone that the early progenitors of the ‘Hobbit’ were even smaller than we had previously thought.”

The two additional hominin teeth from Mata Menge are also small in size and one bears shape characteristics that are most consistent with early Homo erectus of Java. This similarity does not support the hypothesis that Homo floresiensis evolved from an earlier and more primitive type of hominin, the likes of which have never been recovered from Indonesia, or indeed the wider region outside Africa.

The Mata Menge human remains, which now total 10 fossil specimens, are from at least four individuals (including two children). All of them are very similar anatomically to the Liang Bua Homo floresiensis and can now be regarded as an older variant of this hominin. However, while a direct ancestor of the ‘Hobbit’, this earlier form had a less specialised dentition (more primitive teeth) than its descendant at Liang Bua.

Further, it is evident from the tiny arm bone that extreme body size reduction occurred early in the history of the Flores hominins.

“The evolutionary history of the Flores hominins is still largely unknown”, said Professor Brumm. “However, the new fossils strongly suggest that the ‘Hobbit’ story did indeed begin when a group of the early Asian hominins known as Homo erectus somehow became isolated on this remote Indonesian island, perhaps one million years ago, and underwent a dramatic body size reduction over time”.

The findings ‘Early evolution of extremely small body size in Homo floresiensis’ have been published in Nature Communications.

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The Mata Menge humerus fragment (left) shown at the same scale as the humerus of Homo floresiensis from Liang Bua. Yousuke Kaifu

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Article Source: Griffith University news release.

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Lost Worlds of Arabia

Posted on August 5, 2024 by James Kensington and Arianna Zakrzewski -

To traverse across this land for more than 30 minutes, anyone would need a good hat, sturdy shoes, eye shades, a good dose of sun block lotion, and an ample portable supply of fresh water. Those are just the basics. Anything more depends on your planned time, distance and activity.

This is, as was once also popularly described about the lunar surface, a magnificent desolation. The Great Nefud Desert spreads as an expansive oval shaped region across northern Saudi Arabia for about 70,000 square kilometers, characterized by rocky elevations of rock and sand ranging from 600 to 1,000 meters. Its face moves with shifting red sands, lifted by perpetual strong winds. Isolated red sandstone massifs pockmark the terrain, sculpted by tens of thousands of years of wind action, creating in some places an almost surreal landscape with an otherworldly feel. Summer temperatures can typically range between 30 to 54 degrees Celsius (between 85 and 120 degrees Fahrenheit). It goes without saying that vegetation is sparse, though a significant presence of ephemeral plants can be seen during ‘wet’ years. Despite the desolation here, modest communities of hyenas, jackals, wildcats, ungulates like gazelle, rodents and lizards make it their domicile.

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The Nefud. Retlaw Snellac Photography, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic, Wikimedia Commons

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Today, humans live here, too. Concentrated primarily in lowland areas such as near the Hejaz Mountains, they manage and inhabit oases where dates, vegetables, barley, and fruits are grown. Indeed, an entire city of about 20,000 people —Jubbah — is completely surrounded by the Nefud. Thus in modern times, people have learned how to live and even thrive in this desert.

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Jubba as viewed from space. Public Domain, Wikimeda Commons

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Following The Water

The Nefud was not always like this. In recent years, teams of scientists have walked and camped across the region, surveying, sampling, excavating, studying and documenting sites that today present evidence of ancient lakes — in geologic parlance, lacustrine deposits — of which many date back at least several hundred thousand years. One can see the remnants of these ancient lakes by walking across the surface, and especially by viewing the surface from aerial vantage points. They have a different color and consistency from what is often a context of windblown, sandy dunes. In these places, scientists have uncovered fossils and other evidence of water-endowed spaces that, tens of thousands of years ago, were frequented or inhabited by a variety of animal and plant species — ecosystems much like the savannas of Africa we see today. By analyzing the recovered fossils, climate models and records, and the lacustrine sediment records of these ancient lake remnants, scientists have discovered that, at wetter intervals in this desert environment’s arid past, ‘greener’ conditions afforded a critical accommodation for fluctuating communities of life.

The site of Ti’s al Ghadah in southwestern Nefud presents a perfect example of this. This site is located within an internal depression, or basin. As a 630-meter area ancient paleo-lake deposit outcrop, it has been dated to Pleistocene times and contains a rich array of fossil fauna.

“Ti’s al Ghadah is one of the most important palaeontological sites in the Arabian Peninsula and it currently represents the only dated collection of middle Pleistocene fossil animals in this part of the world, and includes animals such as elephant, jaguar and water birds,” says Mathew Stewart of the University of South Wales, lead author of a 2019 published study/paper* on the results of taphonomic and zooarchaeological investigations at the site.** Most notably, the paper documented the discovery of stone tools spatially associated with evidence of butchery of animals dated to between 500,000 and 300,000 years ago.

The implications were enormous. There were humans here — or, more accurately, hominins —even before the emergence of our own species, Homo sapiens. Said Michael Petraglia, the Ti’s al Ghadah project principal archaeologist and paper co-author, “This makes Ti’s al Ghadah the first, early hominin-associated fossil assemblage from the Arabian Peninsula, demonstrating that our ancestors were exploiting a variety of animals as they wandered into the green interior.”

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A trench at the site of Ti’s al Ghaddah, where a large collection of animal fossils dating to approximately 500,000 years ago have been found. Photo: Palaeodeserts Project, from One Small Arabian Fingerbone, by Huw S. Groucutt, Popular Archaeology July 7, 2018.

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Who were these hominins? If not Homo sapiens, then what species? Scientists don’t know the answer to this question, but researchers have discovered other sites that have demonstrated a hominin presence in Arabia. An Nasim, a paleo-lake site in an internal basin like Ti’s al Ghadah within the Nefud, was found to contain Acheulean-type stone tools, along with other fossil fauna, dated to between 350 and 250 ka (thousand years) ago. And the list of new artifact discoveries at similar sites continues to expand, including a remarkable recent discovery at another paleo-lake site in the Nefud known as Al Wusta in 2016………

Bone

The evidence for hominin occupation around the ancient paleo-lakes of Arabia has been evidenced primarily through stone tool artifact finds, including some proof of usage for processing animals at sites like Ti’s al Ghadah and the discovery of hominin footprints at the Alathar ancient paleolake deposit located within the western Nefud****. But Huw Groucutt, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford who has played a key role in the ongoing research on early humans in the Arabian Peninsula, tells the story of a tantalizing discovery made while investigating sites in the Nefud region:

“We made a quick visit to Al Wusta in 2014, which involved driving down steep dunes to the base of an inter-dunal depression. We noted some stone tools and interesting sediments, but it was late in the day and the sun was getting low in the sky so we did not stay long. It was clearly an interesting site, but we located dozens of interesting sites. It was a place to which we wanted to return at some point, and our team member Prof Nick Drake (Kings College London) kept mentioning the site as something that looked significant. In 2016 we returned to the site with a large interdisciplinary team of international and Saudi scholars. We walked to the far end of the site where we had not previously been, and immediately found numerous animal bones and human-made stone tools on the surface. These were scattered around deposits of lake sediments. Then our colleague, Dr Iyad Zalmout from the Saudi Geological Survey, picked up a small and well preserved fossil.”

The find turned out to be a human intermediate phalanx (middle finger bone, the bone from the knuckle toward the end of the finger). By employing a series of chronometric dating techniques, scientists were able to determine the age to be between 95-86 thousand years old.

That made this find rare and remarkable, as it represented the only direct fossil evidence ever found of human habitation in the region as long ago as nearly 90,000 years BP.

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The Al Wusta site from the top of a neighboring sand dune. Photo: Ian Candy. From One Small Arabian Fingerbone, by Huw S. Groucutt, Popular Archaeology July 7, 2018.

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Lithic artifacts (stone tools) from Al Wusta. Top row: two Levallois flakes, bottom: Levallois core. Photo: Eleanor Scerri. From One Small Arabian Fingerbone, by Huw S. Groucutt, Popular Archaeology July 7, 2018.

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The Al-Wusta 1 intermediate phalanx fingerbone. Photo: Ian R. Cartwright. From One Small Arabian Fingerbone, by Huw S. Groucutt, Popular Archaeology July 7, 2018.

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What kind of human?

So the phalanx was human, but to what species of human did it belong? Given the age, could it be Neanderthal?

“In many cases, a single fossil would not be enough to determine the species represented,” says Groucutt. “In the case of the finger bone, however, we are lucky in that this bone is very different in Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. In basic terms, Neanderthal intermediate phalanges are relatively shorter and are generally more robust, while those of Homo sapiens are relatively longer and are more gracile. The [measurement] values for the Al Wusta finger bone clearly aligns it with Homo sapiens.”

Combined with the associated lithics, the case then became a slam-dunk for early modern humans. Many of the Al Wusta site artifacts “feature an emphasis on centripetal Levallois technology”, says Groucutt. This is a manufacturing technique typical of Middle Paleolithic/Middle Stone Age period stone tools, common among finds associated with the early modern human presence at other sites, such as in east and north Africa.

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Above and below: Stone “hand axe” artifacts very recently discovered by an international team of archaeologists working with The Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU), directed by Dr Ömer ‘Can’ Aksoy and Dr Gizem Kahraman Aksoy of TEOS Heritage. These artifacts have been assessed on a preliminary basis as over 200,000 years old, assigning them to the Lower-Middle Palaeolithic period. Courtesy Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU) as reported in RCU news release, Giant Stone Hand Axe May Rewrite Prehistory in Saudi Arabia.

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Dispersal into Green Arabia

Luminescence dating of the sediments at the paleo-lake deposit sites indicates that the dates for the evidence of hominin occupation occurred at a time of higher rainfall in the region, when freshwater lakes, wetlands and rivers formed, inviting development of migration routes for animal species……. and hominins.

“It’s remarkable; every time it was wet, people were there,” says Petraglia from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. “This work puts Arabia on the global map for human prehistory.” As more evidence of hominin occupation in the region mounts, scientists are becoming increasingly convinced that the Arabian Peninsula was an important corridor for dispersal of hominins out of Africa into the rest of the world, occurring in different waves and at different times in prehistory.

And the findings portend the development of a broader and more complex story on human evolution. “Arabia has long been seen as empty throughout the past,” says Groucutt. “Our work shows that we still know so little about human evolution in vast areas of the world and highlights the fact that many surprises are still out there.”

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There is much more. Read the complete article.

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‘Screaming Woman’ mummy may have died in agony 3,500 years ago

Posted on August 2, 2024 by Frontiers -

FRONTIERS—In 1935, the Metropolitan Museum of New York led an archaeological expedition to Egypt. In Deir Elbahari near Luxor, the site of ancient Thebes, they excavated the tomb of Senmut, the architect and overseer of royal works – and reputedly, lover – of the famed queen Hatschepsut (1479-1458 BCE). Beneath Senmut’s tomb, they found a separate burial chamber for his mother Hat-Nufer and other, unidentified relatives.

Here, they made an uncanny discovery: a wooden coffin holding the mummy of an elderly woman, wearing a black wig and two scarab rings in silver and gold. But what struck the archaeologists was the mummy’s expression: with the mouth wide open, as if locked in a scream. They dubbed her the ‘Screaming Woman’.

Now, approximately 2,500 years after her burial, researchers from Egypt have used the most advanced scientific techniques to examine the Screaming Woman and learn about her life and death. The results are published in Frontiers in Medicine.

Costly material

“Here we show that she was embalmed with costly, imported embalming material. This, and the mummy’s well-preserved appearance, contradicts the traditional belief that a failure to remove her inner organs implied poor mummification,” said Dr Sahar Saleem, a professor of radiology at Kasr Al Ainy Hospital of Cairo University.

Until 1998, the Screaming Woman had been kept at Kasr Al Ainy School of Medicine in Cairo, where in the 1920s and 1930s researchers studied many royal mummies, including Tutankhamun. Subsequently, she was moved to the Cairo Egyptian Museum at the request of the Ministry of Antiquities. Ever since 1935, the mummy’s coffin and rings have been displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of New York.

In the new study*, Saleem used CT scans to ‘virtually dissect’ the mummy and estimate her age, identify pathologies, and state of preservation.

Saleem and her co-author Dr Samia El-Merghani also used advanced techniques like scanning electron microscopy (SEM), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), and x-ray diffraction analysis (XRD) to identify the materials.

The authors found that the mummy was still in a good condition even 2,500 years after its burial. The investigation enacted 89 years after the discovery of the mummified woman shows her unwrapped, lying supine with her legs extended and her hands folded above the groin. She lacked several teeth – likely lost before death, as there was evidence of bone resorption, which occurs when a tooth comes out and the socket is left to heal. Other teeth were broken or showed signs of attrition.

“Teeth lost during life may have been extracted. Dentistry had originated in ancient Egypt, with Hesy Re the first recorded physician and dentist in the world,” said Saleem.

Suffered from arthritis

From 2D and 3D CT images, Saleem estimated that the Screaming Woman had been 1.54 meters tall in life. From the morphology of the joint between the two pelvic bones, which smoothens with age, the CT images estimated that she was approximately 48 years old at the time of her death. She had suffered from mild arthritis of the spine, as evident from the presence of osteophytes or ‘bone spurs’ on the vertebrae.

Saleem found no embalming incision, which was consistent with the discovery that the brain, diaphragm, heart, lungs, liver, spleen, kidneys, and intestine were still present. This was a surprise, as the classic method of mummification in the New Kingdom (1550–1069 BCE) included the removal of all such organs except the heart.

FTIR analysis of her skin showed that the Screaming Woman had been embalmed with juniper and frankincense, costly materials that had to be imported into Egypt from the Eastern Mediterranean and East Africa or Southern Arabia, respectively. Likewise, her natural hair had been dyed with henna and juniper. The long wig, made from fibers from the date palm, had further been treated with quartz, magnetite, and albite crystals, probably to stiffen the locks and give them the black color favored by ancient Egyptians because it represented youth.

“These findings support the ancient trade of embalming materials in ancient Egypt. The expedition led by Queen Hatshepsut brought frankincense from Punt (possibly Somalia in Africa). The tomb of Tutankhamun also contained frankincense and juniper,” said Saleem.

There was no obvious cause of death.

Cadaveric spasm

But what had caused the mummy’s unforgettable expression? The rarity of the embalming material seemed to rule out that the mummification process had been careless and that the embalmers had simply neglected to close her mouth.

“The mummy’s screaming facial expression in this study could be read as a cadaveric spasm, implying that the woman died screaming from agony or pain,” hypothesized Saleem.

Cadaveric spasm is a rare form of muscular stiffening, typically associated with violent deaths under extreme physical conditions and intense emotion.

“The Screaming Woman is a true ‘time capsule’ of the way that she died and was mummified,” concluded Saleem.

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The Screaming Woman mummy. Sahar Saleem

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The Screaming Woman in the CT scan. Sahar Saleem

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The Screaming Woman’s rings, now in the Metropolitan Museum. Sahar Saleem

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Prof Sahar Saleem with the Screaming Woman mummy. Sahar Saleem

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Article Source: Frontiers news release.

*“Paleoradiological and Scientific Investigations of the Screaming Woman Mummy from the area beneath Senmut’s (1479-1458 BC) Theban Tomb (TT71)” in Frontiers in Medicine: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmed.2024.1406225/full

Frontiers is an award-winning open science platform and leading open access scholarly publisher. Our mission is to make research results openly available to the world, thereby accelerating scientific and technological innovation, societal progress and economic growth.

We empower scientists with innovative open science solutions that radically improve how science is published, evaluated, and disseminated to researchers, innovators, and the public. Access to research results and data is open, free and customized online, thereby enabling rapid solutions to the critical challenges we face as humanity.

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Pushing Back the Timeline on the Earliest Stone Tools

Posted on August 1, 2024 by Michael Gordon -

Rising to nearly 6,000 feet above sea level, Mount Homa dominates a Kenyan landscape that features sediments as old as the Miocene epoch — a geologic time period that ended more than 5 million years ago. This mountain’s real name, however, is Got Uma or God Marahuma, meaning “famous mountain,” bestowed by the Luo fishing people who have inhabited the surrounding region for centuries. Considered an inactive volcano, Got Uma, or Mount Homa, defines its namesake Peninsula, which extends into Africa’s massive Lake Victoria and helps to define the lake’s Winam Gulf, which laps the peninsula’s shoreline from the north. Though the peninsula, like anywhere else, has a regional and local natural and cultural history that extends back thousands of years, its most recent claim to fame lies in ancient sediments featuring a rich array of fossils that have drawn paleontologists, geologists, archaeologists, and many other scientists to explore and study a remarkable mosaic of prehistory. It is a mosaic that has also included evidence of a hominin presence — deep-time human relatives that have long become extinct.

Archaeologist Tom Plummer, Professor of Anthropology at Queens College, City University of New York, has been conducting field research on the Homa Peninsula since the 1990’s. Among other things, a record of significant fossil finds of Theropithecus oswaldi monkeys drew him and others to the area, as fossils of these monkeys have historically been frequently found near fossil evidence of hominins. Together with Richard Potts, who directs the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, along with a team of other scientists and universities, he has uncovered robust evidence for hominin activity as far back as over 2 million years ago at key locations across this landscape.

One of the first “eureka moments” of these discoveries emerged at a place on the northwestern shore of the peninsula.

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View of Mount Homa and surrounding landscape where investigations have taken place. Chip Clark (Smithsonian Institution), Public Domain

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Toolmaking and Butchery at Kanjera South

Early on, Plummer and a team of scientist specialists and excavators began investigating a site designated as Kanjera South, located near the margins of what was, at one time, an ancient lake. Digging methodically through fossil-bearing silts and fine sands, they penetrated several meters of sediment. In the process, they encountered stone artifacts and associated fauna, all revealed within three major beds. (A “bed” being a layer with a defined sequence of related or associated geologic events and fossil occurrences, such as what were initially described in excavations at Olduvai Gorge.) One 169-square meter excavation area alone yielded about 3,700 animal fossils and 2,900 artifacts in a sequence measured 1 meter in depth. Stone artifacts found during the excavation represented, according to Plummer, “one of the largest collections of Oldowan artifacts”* found to date, from anywhere in the world. The first Oldowan stone tools were discovered by archaeologist Louis Leakey in the 1930s at Olduvai Gorge. This very early technology usually consisted of simple cores, choppers, scrapers, awls and burins made of quartz, quartzite, basalt, obsidian, flint and chert. Early humans produced them by striking a core stone on the edge with a hammerstone to produce a conchoidal fracture with sharp edges and flakes that could be used for a variety of functions, such as cutting meat. Unmodified pieces, called manuports — stones transported from other locations — have also been found at some sites. Though the quantity and concentration of the Kanjera South finds at this location was significant, it was not altogether precedent-setting, because the Oldowan stone tool industry is considered, Plummer saya, “the oldest geographically widespread and long-lasting technology.”

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Location of Kanjera along the modern shoreline of Lake Victoria, East Africa. Joseph V. Ferraro, Thomas W. Plummer, Briana L. Pobiner, James S. Oliver, Laura C. Bishop, David R. Braun, Peter W. Ditchfield, John W. Seaman III, Katie M. Binetti, John W. Seaman Jr, Fritz Hertel, Richard Potts, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, Wikimedia Commons

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Artifacts made from a representative sample of raw materials from Kanjera. Photo credit: Tom Plummer. See The Hard Stuff of Culture: Oldowan Archaeology at Kanjera South, Kenya, by Tom Plummer, Popular Archaeology, May 30, 2016.

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But there was more.

Notable from their analysis of the Oldowan artifacts, Plummer and colleagues observed that they had been fashioned from a great variety of raw material sources, including not only local sources of carbonate, limestone, iolite, nephelinite, and fenitized stone, but also from non-local, more remote sources for the quartzite, rhyolite, granite, basalt, and schistose stone. This led to an interesting implication. As stated by Plummer in a 2012 article published in Popular Archaeology Magazine:

“What we found is that approximately 30% of the artifacts recovered from Kanjera were made from rocks that were transported to the site from conglomerates at least 10-13 km away (Braun et al., 2008)…The finding that there are not nearly enough cores to account for all of the flakes at the site further hints that the artifact sample at Kanjera was part of a larger transport system. It appears that cores were being carried by hominins, for use to dispense flakes…”*

In this sense, the Kanjera site is unusual compared to other Oldowan sites in East Africa and elsewhere.

“The fact that hominins were investing energy in the transport of hard raw materials, and more efficiently reducing them, suggests that artifact manufacture was of great importance in their day-to-day lives,” wrote Plummer in The Hard Stuff of Culture.*

But why?

Analysis of the faunal remains at the site has given some clues. The site investigators recorded a comparatively significant number of associated bones of small antelopes about the size of or slightly larger than today’s Grants Gazelles. Bone type representation accumulated at the location suggested complete carcasses were brought to the site. Moreover, use-wear analysis of the associated artifacts, as well as damage analysis of the bones, indicated intentional cut-marks using the stone tools.

“Damage to the fossils indicates that hominins were using stone tools to slice meat off of bones, and to break bones open for their fatty marrow,” wrote Plummer.* Carnivore toothmarks were also found on the bones but most of those marks were made after the cut marks, suggesting carnivore scavenging after the hominins had completed processing the carcasses.

“The overall pattern of hominin access to the complete carcasses of small antelopes may be the signal of hominin hunting,” suggests Plummer. “If so, this would be the oldest evidence of hunting to date in the archaeological record.”[statement made based on fossil and artifact discoveries made as documented in the record by 2015]*

Moreover, use-wear analysis of the artifacts also suggested that these hominins were not limited to a carnivorous diet. They were processing a variety of plant tissues, including tubers and wood.

A new window on early hominin behavior was beginning to emerge.

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A small bovid metatarsal, bearing cut marks; from bed KS-2 of Kanjera, an archaeological and paleoanthropological site on the southern shores of the Winam Gulf of Lake Victoria, Homa Bay County, Kenya (scale: 1 cm). Joseph V. Ferraro, Thomas W. Plummer, Briana L. Pobiner, James S. Oliver, Laura C. Bishop, David R. Braun, Peter W. Ditchfield, John W. Seaman III, Katie M. Binetti, John W. Seaman Jr, Fritz Hertel, Richard Potts. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, Wikimedia Commons

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A small bovid femur with numerous cut marks. From bed KS-2 of Kanjera. Joseph V. Ferraro, Thomas W. Plummer, Briana L. Pobiner, James S. Oliver, Laura C. Bishop, David R. Braun, Peter W. Ditchfield, John W. Seaman III, Katie M. Binetti, John W. Seaman Jr, Fritz Hertel, Richard Potts. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, Wikimedia Commons

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A shaft fragment from an ungulate leg bone showing a single, deep stone tool cutmark and carnivore toothmarks. One toothmark overlays the cutmark, indicating that the hominins had stripped meat off the bone prior to carnivore gnawing. Photo credit: Tom Plummer. See The Hard Stuff of Culture: Oldowan Archaeology at Kanjera South, Kenya, by Tom Plummer, Popular Archaeology, May 30, 2016.

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Retiming the Horizon at Nyayanga

While the discoveries and implications of Kanjera South were remarkable enough, Plummer and his colleagues soon found that there was much more to add to the story when they turned their attention to other sites west and south of Kanjera. Those efforts included a site known as Nyayanga (named after a nearby beach), located in the foothills of Mount Homa, a few hundred meters from the Lake Victoria shoreline.

It came on a personal referral. “Peter Onyango, one of the excavators working with us [at Kanjera South], told us that there were tools and fossils like we were finding at Kanjera near his home at a place called Nyayanga,” said Plummer. “So he showed us the place, and we began to research the exposures there.”

Plummer knew he faced a few given complications with the site location. “Because the area is densely populated with people and livestock, trampling can damage and disperse bones and stone tools as they erode out of the outcrop,” he explained. “Also, heavy rain during the wet season(s) can rapidly erode sediments of interest and wash away important fossils and artifacts.”

With these challenges, excavations began in earnest in 2015. Digging in 1 meter squares, they recorded and mapped all objects and fossils measuring greater than 2 centimeters with a laser theodolite. “All of the artifacts from the most ancient sediments at Nyayanga (Nyayanga Beds 1-4) were Oldowan tools,” said Plummer. The team recovered a total of 330 identifiable Oldowan artifacts, 195 from the surface and 135 in situ within the stratigraphic context. Although the assemblage was generally similar to those found at other locations, this one was distinctly characterized with a high frequency (20.6 %) of cores and a comparatively larger percentage of artifacts showing signs of percussive activity. The tools were manufactured from a variety of different raw materials, including quartz, quartzite and rhyolite.

A total of 1,776 bones were recovered and recorded, combined from two excavations (excavations 3 and 5). A large percentage of the bone remains were attributed to hippopotamids (hippos) at 57.1% and 61.9 %, respectively. Most significantly, Plummer’s team detected clear evidence of butchery among these large fauna. At least two hippos were recovered from excavation 3, the bones of one individual hippo associated with as many as 42 stone tools, including several in direct physical contact with the bones. One rib fragment featured a clear cut-mark with characteristics typically made by a stone tool, and three stone flakes exhibited use-wear patterns identifiable to butchery activity. In excavation 5, another array of bones attributable to a single individual hippo were recovered in association with 14 stone tool artifacts. Faunal remains of other animals were also found showing clear damage attributable to stone tools. Evidence pointed to hominin consumption of both meat and bone marrow.

But stone tool use was not confined to butchery activity at the site. “Our team’s analyses of stone tool butchery marks on fossils, and microscopic wear formed on stone tools used to cut and pound things, indicate that a diverse array of plant and animal foods was acquired and processed by the Nyayanga toolmakers,” says Plummer. The hominins who occupied the site, in other words, did not subsist entirely on megafauna. They had a diverse diet.

Moreover, analysis of soil carbonates, tooth enamel isotopes, and taxon in the area indicated that these hominins subsisted in a grassy woodland consisting of warm-season grasses along a stream channel and fresh-water springs within an overall savannah-like environment, a setting not unlike those found at other Oldowan sites such as Ledi-Geraru and Mille-Logya in Ethiopia. Such a habitat would have provided the hominins at this location with a diverse range of potable water, animal and plant food sources, and shelter.

What stood out most from the finds at Nyayanga, however, revolved around three eye-brow raising discoveries — the date range of the finds, the hominin fossil evidence, and the location of the finds…

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Read the complete article with Popular Archaeology premium.

Cover Image, Top Left: Examples of an Oldowan percussive tool, core and flakes from Nyayanga. T.W. Plummer, J.S. Oliver, and E. M. Finestone, Homa Peninsula Paleoanthropology Project

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Humans are born to run.

Posted on July 31, 2024 by University of California-Davis -

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA – DAVIS—The 2024 Summer Olympics are in full swing. One of the marquee events is of course the marathon, a grueling test of fitness and athleticism.

When it comes to endurance running, humans are among the very top mammals in their athletic prowess. While we may not be the best sprinters in the animal kingdom, we can run steadily for long distances, even in hot weather. Our locomotor muscles are dominated by slow-twitch, fatigue-resistant fibers and our unique ability to sweat allows our bodies to effectively dissipate heat.

Humans are so good at endurance running, it seems we were born to do it. But why?

A theory of endurance

In 1984, biologist David Carrier proposed the endurance pursuit hypothesis to explain why humans are such good long-distance runners. According to the theory, endurance running traits in humans evolved to allow us to run down large game animals through persistence hunting.

Twenty years later, Carrier’s theory was expanded upon by scientists Dennis Bramble and Daniel Lieberman, who highlighted the physiological traits conducive to endurance running. They proposed that such traits first appeared in the Homo genus nearly 2 million years ago and “may have been instrumental in the evolution of the human body form.”

The endurance pursuit hypothesis, however, isn’t without its skeptics.

“There are two reservations that have always clung to this hypothesis,” said Bruce Winterhalder, professor emeritus in the UC Davis Department of Anthropology and Graduate Group in Ecology. “One is that running is more costly than walking, so based on a simple cost-benefit analysis, it doesn’t look like an efficient way of hunting.”

“And then secondly, we have some examples of contemporary hunter-gatherers practicing endurance pursuits but probably less than a dozen cases,” he said. “For the skeptics, endurance pursuits can’t have been that important to hunting evolution in the Paleolithic if it’s not that important to hunter-gatherers now.”

But in a recent study* appearing in Nature Human Behaviour, Winterhalder and paleoanthropologist Eugène Morin, of Trent University, combine mathematical modeling and a multi-year, ethnohistoric investigation of first-hand accounts of endurance pursuits to bolster support for Carrier’s hypothesis.

Sifting through history

According to Winterhalder, the recent availability of thousands of digitized accounts written by explorers, missionaries and officials combined with analytical software capable of sifting through them was key to uncovering examples of endurance pursuits throughout history.

“We have software that allows us to search for information that dwarfs what we could do if we were trying to read through all the possible sources ourselves,” Winterhalder said.

Thanks to this technology, Winterhalder and Morin uncovered 391 descriptions of hunts, dating from 1527 through the early 20th century, that matched endurance pursuit tactics. Accounts originated from 272 locations around the world, which suggests that endurance pursuit hunting was widely practiced and occurred in diverse environments.

Analyzing the data

Across the historical data, endurance pursuits followed a similar trajectory: hunters encounter a prey animal; a pursuit occurs (with the prey animal rapidly outdistancing the hunters); the prey animal pauses to recuperate after exhausting themselves (allowing the slower-paced hunters to catch up); the prey animal flees again; and the cycle repeats until the animal is completely exhausted and overtaken.

Within that common pattern, tactics differed.

“There are a fair number of cases in which these pursuits are done by teams, by relay. We also have cases where there’s an individual who will climb a hill nearby and use hand signals to indicate where the animal is going, so the person following can take shortcuts and save energy,” Winterhalder said.

This cooperation during endurance pursuit hunting hints at a social element related to running in humans. According to Winterhalder, exhibiting such athletic prowess could have been a way for males to showcase their value among the community, elevating their social status or chances of finding mates.

In a follow-up study, Winterhalder and Morin plan to further examine female participation in endurance running. While instances of female participation only occurred in about 3-4% of the accounts in the study’s dataset, Winterhalder said that doesn’t necessarily mean females were not good runners.

“In a fair number of cases, we did find that there are festivals, feasts and ritual events that involve running contests,” Winterhalder said. “In cases where we find mentions of rituals or games, the participants generally are women, men and children.”

It also doesn’t mean that women weren’t involved in hunts as recent research shows “evidence that early women were also hunting.”

Backing it up with math

Since his graduate student days at Cornell University, Winterhalder has specialized in adapting mathematical models devised by biologists for calculating the value of pursuing game versus the time and energy costs.

For this latest study, Winterhalder and Morin used the models to account for increasing velocity during game pursuits. He and Morin then compared return rates from endurance pursuit hunts to other common foraging methods.

“We found that in contexts like high heat or a substrate that impedes the animal, such as crusted snow, the net return rate of food acquisition from endurance pursuits can match or exceed that of other methods of prey acquisition. The chance of pursuit failure appears to diminish, and exhausted prey are safer to approach. For early humans without ballistic weaponry, these are significant advantages,” Winterhalder said.

Winterhalder hopes the research will generate more interest in the scientific community about the origins of our running gait and, possibly, why some people find the activity to be incredibly satisfying, à la the proverbial “runner’s high.”

“To run long distances, to have an evolved gait that’s uniquely imbued with stamina is unusual in the animal world,” Winterhalder said. “If that inspires you to go for a run, great.”

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA – DAVIS news release.

*Ethnography and ethnohistory support the efficiency of hunting through endurance running in humans, Nature Human Behaviour, 13-May-2024. 10.1038/s41562-024-01876-x

Cover Image, Top Left: Pixabay

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The Great Maya Tombstone

Posted on July 31, 2024 by Georges Fery -

Freelance writer, researcher and photographer, Georges Fery (georgefery.com) addresses topics from history, culture, and beliefs to daily living of ancient and today’s indigenous societies of Mesoamerica and South America. His articles are published online at travelthruhistory.com, ancient-origins.net and popular-archaeology.com, and in the quarterly magazine Ancient American (ancientamerican.com). In the U.K. his articles are found in mexicolore.co.uk.

The author is a fellow of the Institute of Maya Studies instituteofmayastudies.org, Miami, FL and The Royal Geographical Society, London, U.K. (rgs.org). He is a member in good standing with the Maya Exploration Center, Austin, TX (mayaexploration.org) the Archaeological Institute of America, Boston, MA (archaeological.org), NFAA-Non Fiction Authors Association (nonfictionauthrosassociation.com) and the National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC. (americanindian.si.edu).

The iconography of the Maya tombstone in the Temple of the Inscriptions has raised more questions than well-founded answers. A close look at the tombstone, its setting and history, may help understand the Maya timeless message about life and death. The Temple is the final resting place of K’inich Janahb’ Pakal Ahaw, Lord of the B’aakal kingdom at Lakamha’, near today’s Palenque in Chiapas, Mexico, where he was born on March 13, 603. From the end of the fifth to the late ninth century, Lakamha’ was an important metropolis and a major regional player in politics, trade, and architecture. Pakal ruled the kingdom from 615 to 682, making him one of the longest-reigning Maya monarchs in history………..

As holy lord of the B’aakal kingdom, Pakal was supreme in secular and religious matters, superseding the high priest and priestess, for the prefix K’inich means Lord, while Ahaw connotes Holy. The Maya called their kings ch’ul ahaw or “lords of the life force,” for the universal power vested in them by the gods. He, and he alone, was anointed by the gods of the unifying forces of light of the Otherworld and those of darkness of the Underworld. In the Maya cosmology, these “worlds” were understood as “complementary opposites” for, paradoxically, both were in turn friendly and hostile over humans and nature. For these reasons, they needed to be pacified through rituals at dedicated times such as, among others, planting and harvesting and important communal milestones.

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Temple of the Inscriptions @georgefery.com

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In the last decade of his life, Pakal and his architects worked on his funerary monument, the Temple of the Inscriptions, facing the ancient city’s central plaza.

The temple is the most remarkable sanctuary ever built in Mesoamerica. The eight-level funerary pyramid, and the temple at its summit making up its ninth level, was designed by Pakal and his architects, who started its construction around 675, when Pakal was seventy-two years old. The structure was completed about five years before his death on August 8, 683. The temple at its top was dedicated on December 23, 688, by his son and heir, K’inich K’an B’ahlam (635-702), in time for his father’s funeral. The stepped pyramid’s foundations reach over ten feet below the central plaza’s grounds. The structure was originally covered with plaster that may have been painted red, for remains of pigment were found; of note is the absence of carvings on its stones. The name Temple of the Inscriptions comes from three large limestone panels found on the walls of the temple’s front corridor. In the past, the stepped pyramid was known as “Temple of the Laws” because on those panels are 617-glyphs that narrate Pakal’s achievements and proclaim his place in eternity.

The six piers atop the pyramid are adorned with stucco scenes. As noted by scholars, “we may never know what Pakal intended to display on the piers, for K’an B’ahlam, who completed the temple after his father’s death, took this public location to show the rituals in which he became heir to the throne and proved his divine nature.” In ancient Maya cosmology “the pyramid replicates the“First-True-Mountain of the World Rising out of the Primordial Waters of Creation” (Schele, Matthews, 1993, 1998). The crypt, located in the deepest recess of the pyramid, is associated with caves perceived as portals to the water world, for water is integral to the belief in the beginning of life in Maya cosmology, where the “Otherworld” points to a mythic world “above” the human plane, abode of the sun, beneficent gods, and life. Its opposite, the “Underworld” or world “below” is associated with sunset, the moon, malevolent gods, and death. The world of the living, between these two man-made worlds, is the “Middle World.” As Bassie-Sweet point out, “One of the most important structuring principles in Maya worldview was complementary or contrasting opposites, such as male/female, right/left, east/west, day/night, up/down or north/south” (2008).

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Temple of the Inscriptions, Cutaway @pueblosoriginarios.com

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To build the pyramid, not only did architects, master stonemasons and carvers answer Pakal’s architectural requirements, they also followed a sacred allegorical pattern that was beyond their professional expertise, helped in their tasks by calendar priests, knowledge keepers and wizards. For the burial ceremony, Pakal and his chu’lel – his “divine life force” or “blessed substance of the living universe” – were first brought from the palace up the pyramid’s front stairs. The stairs of the pyramid follow, as does the pyramid’s architecture, the four sacred directions of the Maya equilateral cross, the wacah chan or “world tree.” Each arm of the cross is associated with colors, deities, and functions. The pyramid faces northward onto Palenque’s main plaza. Climbing the stairway up to the temple, Pakal and his retinue faced South>yellow-Nohol (K’an Xib’Chac, germ of life, origin of the winds). After prayers, rituals, and invocations in the temple, Pakal’s body and his chu’lel’ were carried down the three sets of the intramural stairways leading down to the crypt. The first flight of stairs followed the path of the Sun, so Pakal and his retinue walked down heading East>red–Lakin (Chac Xib’Chac, sunrise, dawn). At mid-level, the second set of stairs sharply turns West>black-Ek (Ek Xib’Chac, sunset, dusk). Pakal’s last short five steps stairway into the crypt led him North>white–Xaman (Zac Xib’Chac, the resting place of the winds).

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First Flight of Stairs @georgefery.com

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When Pakal was placed in his coffin, his head pointing north, he transitioned from a divine king to a celestial ancestor. As the last rituals and invocations were completed, the crypt’s massive triangular stone door was closed. In his coffin, however, Pakal was never far from the living and, for this purpose, had a narrow conduit called the Tz’at Na Kan, or “Serpent of the Wise Ones,” built to fit the stairwells. It was called a psychoduct by the renowned Mexican archaeologist Alberto Ruz Lhuillier (1906-1979), who discovered the stairwells in 1950 and the crypt in 1952. The serpent’s head is made of a mix of limestone plaster and was attached to the bottom of the sarcophagus which connected with the “psychoduct,” a rectangular limestone molding outside the door, matching each stair with a hollow round tubelike center that ended below the floor of the temple. It was the Tzat Na Kan, through which Pakal and the priests established soul-to-soul contact, not soul-to-mind, at dedicated times. This feature is found in other structures at Palenque such as in Temples XIII and XVIII, albeit not so elaborate. They each have a tube-like conduit that runs vertically from the crypt to below the temple floor, and a small hole on the sarcophagus lid was drilled at the level of the face to let the ch’ulel’ pass. These funnels bolstered the belief that the individual in the grave was still socially alive after death, with prerogatives attached to his spiritual powers, for ch’ulel’ never dies. It was then accepted, as it is today in most beliefs and religions, that a person has a body, and a soul. It was, however, the deified chu’lel’ that was the object of veneration. Upon death, while the body’s soft tissues decayed, its chu’lel remained within the skeletal bones for the duration of the person’s past life and was then reunited with the ancestors to be assigned to another life.

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Cover Image, Top Left: Pakal. Jebulon, Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, Wikimedia Commons

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