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CNRS—Almost 80 years after its discovery, a large shell from the ornate Marsoulas Cave in the Pyrenees has been studied by a multidisciplinary team from the CNRS, the Muséum de Toulouse, the Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès and the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques-Chirac (1): it is believed to be the oldest wind instrument of its type. Scientists reveal how it sounds in a study published in the journal Science Advances on 10th February 2021.

The Marsoulas Cave, between Haute-Garonne and Ariège, was the first decorated cave to be found in the Pyrenees. Discovered in 1897, the cave bears witness to the beginning of the Magdalenian (2) culture in this region, at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum. During an inventory of the material from the archaeological excavations, most of which is kept in the Muséum de Toulouse, scientists examined a large Charonia lampas (sea snail) shell, which had been largely overlooked when discovered in 1931.

The tip of the shell is broken, forming a 3.5 cm diameter opening. As this is the hardest part of the shell, the break is clearly not accidental. At the opposite end, the shell opening shows traces of retouching (cutting) and a tomography scan has revealed that one of the first coils is perforated. Finally, the shell has been decorated with a red pigment (hematite), characteristic of the Marsoulas Cave, which indicates its status as a symbolic object.

To confirm the hypothesis that this conch was used to produce sounds, scientists enlisted the help of a horn player, who managed to produce three sounds close to the notes C, C-sharp and D. As the opening was irregular and covered with an organic coating (3), the researchers assume that a mouthpiece was also attached, as is the case for more recent conches in collection of the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac. 3D impressions of the conch will enable this lead to be explored and verify whether it can be used to produce other notes.

The first carbon-14 dating of the cave, carried out on a piece of charcoal and a fragment of bear bone from the same archaeological level as the shell, provided a date of around 18,000 years. This makes the Marsoulas conch the oldest wind instrument of its type: to date, only flutes have been discovered in earlier European Upper Palaeolithic contexts; the conches found outside Europe are much more recent.

In addition to immersing us in the sounds produced by our Magdalenian ancestors, this shell reinforces the idea of exchanges between the Pyrenees and the Atlantic coast, more than 200 kilometers away.

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At 31 cm in height, 18 cm in diameter (at the widest point) and up to 0.8 cm thick, this conch, which bears witness to a colder sea, is thus larger and thicker than more recent ones. © Carole Fritz et al. 2021.

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Reconstruction of the instrument being played. In the background, a red dotted buffalo decorates the walls of the Marsoulas Cave; similar motifs decorate the instrument. © Carole Fritz et al. 2021 / drawing: Gilles Tosello

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– Listen to the sound of the Marsoulas conch: https://soundcloud.com/cnrs_officiel/marsoulas-shell-conch-sound/s-234KE5bFZO1

– See the 3D model: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/triton-700k-0bddff3405144c7b8f91f902e28bcc9b

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Article Source: CNRS news release

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UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON—Genes that determine the shape of a person’s facial profile have been discovered by a UCL-led research team.

The researchers identified 32 gene regions that influenced facial features such as nose, lip, jaw, and brow shape, nine of which were entirely new discoveries while the others validated genes with prior limited evidence.

The analysis of data from more than 6,000 volunteers across Latin America was published today in Science Advances.

The international research team, led from UCL, Aix-Marseille University and The Open University, found that one of the genes appears to have been inherited from the Denisovans, an extinct group of ancient humans who lived tens of thousands of years ago.

The team found that the gene, TBX15, which contributes to lip shape, was linked with genetic data found in the Denisovan people, providing a clue to the gene’s origin. The Denisovans lived in central Asia, and other studies suggest they interbred with modern humans, as some of their DNA lives on in Pacific Islanders and Indigenous people of the Americas.

Co-corresponding author Dr Kaustubh Adhikari (UCL Genetics, Evolution & Environment and The Open University) said: “The face shape genes we found may have been the product of evolution as ancient humans evolved to adapt to their environments. Possibly, the version of the gene determining lip shape that was present in the Denisovans could have helped in body fat distribution to make them better suited to the cold climates of Central Asia, and was passed on to modern humans when the two groups met and interbred.”

Co-first author Dr Pierre Faux (Aix-Marseille University) said: “To our knowledge this is the first time that a version of a gene inherited from ancient humans is associated with a facial feature in modern humans. In this case, it was only possible because we moved beyond Eurocentric research; modern-day Europeans do not carry any DNA from the Denisovans, but Native Americans do.”

Co-first author Betty Bonfante (Aix-Marseille University) added: “It is one of only a few studies looking for genes affecting the face in a non-European population, and the first one to focus on the profile only.”

Researchers have only been able to analyse complex genetic data from thousands of people at once over the last two decades, since the mapping of the human genome enabled the use of genome-wide association studies to find correlations between traits and genes. This study compared genetic information from the study participants with characteristics of their face shape, quantified with 59 measurements (distances, angles and ratios between set points) from photos of the participants’ faces in profile.

Co-corresponding author Professor Andres Ruiz-Linares (Fudan University, UCL Genetics, Evolution & Environment, and Aix-Marseille University) said: “Research like this can provide basic biomedical insights and help us understand how humans evolved.”

The findings of this research could help understand the developmental processes that determine facial features, which will help researchers studying genetic disorders that lead to facial abnormalities.

The results also contribute to the understanding of the evolution of facial appearance in human and other species. One of the newly discovered genes found in this study is VPS13B, which influenced nose pointiness; the researchers also found that this gene affects nose structure in mice, indicating a broadly shared genetic basis among distantly related mammal species.

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New genetic data give clues to the evolution of the human face. Pexels, Pixabay

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON news release

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UNIVERSITÀ DI BOLOGNA—Neanderthals’ gut microbiota already included some beneficial micro-organisms that are also found in our own intestine. An international research group led by the University of Bologna achieved this result by extracting and analyzing ancient DNA from 50,000-year-old fecal sediments sampled at the archaeological site of El Salt, near Alicante (Spain).

Published in Communication Biology, their paper puts forward the hypothesis of the existence of ancestral components of human microbiota that have been living in the human gastrointestinal tract since before the separation between the Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals that occurred more than 700,000 years ago.

“These results allow us to understand which components of the human gut microbiota are essential for our health, as they are integral elements of our biology also from an evolutionary point of view” explains Marco Candela, the professor of the Department of Pharmacy and Biotechnology of the University of Bologna, who coordinated the study. “Nowadays there is a progressive reduction of our microbiota diversity due to the context of our modern life: this research group’s findings could guide us in devising diet- and lifestyle-tailored solutions to counteract this phenomenon”.

THE ISSUES OF THE “MODERN” MICROBIOTA

The gut microbiota is the collection of trillions of symbiont micro-organisms that populate our gastrointestinal tract. It represents an essential component of our biology and carries out important functions in our bodies, such as regulating our metabolism and immune system and protecting us from pathogenic micro-organisms.

Recent studies have shown how some features of modernity – such as the consumption of processed food, drug use, life in hyper-sanitized environments – lead to a critical reduction of biodiversity in the gut microbiota. This depletion is mainly due to the loss of a set of microorganisms referred to as “old friends”.

“The process of depletion of the gut microbiota in modern western urban populations could represent a significant wake-up call,” says Simone Rampelli, who is a researcher at the University of Bologna and first author of the study. “This depletion process would become particularly alarming if it involved the loss of those microbiota components that are crucial to our physiology”.

Indeed, there are some alarming signs. For example, in the West, we are witnessing a dramatic increase in cases of chronic inflammatory diseases, such as inflammatory bowel disease, metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes and colorectal cancer.

HOW THE “ANCIENT” MICROBIOTA CAN HELP

How can we identify the components of the gut microbiota that are more important for our health? And how can we protect them with targeted solutions? This was the starting point behind the idea of identifying the ancestral traits of our microbiota – i.e. the core of the human gut microbiota, which has remained consistent throughout our evolutionary history. Technology nowadays allows to successfully rise to this challenge thanks to a new scientific field, paleomicrobiology, which studies ancient microorganisms from archaeological remains through DNA sequencing.

The research group analyzed ancient DNA samples collected in El Salt (Spain), a site where many Neanderthals lived. To be more precise, they analyzed the ancient DNA extracted from 50,000 years old sedimentary feces (the oldest sample of fecal material available to date). In this way, they managed to piece together the composition of the micro-organisms populating the intestine of Neanderthals. By comparing the composition of the Neanderthals’ microbiota to ours, many similarities aroused.

“Through the analysis of ancient DNA, we were able to isolate a core of microorganisms shared with modern Homo sapiens”, explains Silvia Turroni, researcher at the University of Bologna and first author of the study. “This finding allows us to state that these ancient micro-organisms populated the intestine of our species before the separation between Sapiens and Neanderthals, which occurred about 700,000 years ago”.

SAFEGUARDING THE MICROBIOTA

These ancestral components of the human gut microbiota include many well-known bacteria (among which Blautia, Dorea, Roseburia, Ruminococcus and Faecalibacterium) that are fundamental to our health. Indeed, by producing short-chain fatty acids from dietary fibre, these bacteria regulate our metabolic and immune balance. There is also the Bifidobacterium: a microorganism playing a key role in regulating our immune defenses, especially in early childhood. Finally, in the Neanderthal gut microbiota, researchers identified some of those “old friends”. This confirms the researchers’ hypotheses about the ancestral nature of these components and their recent depletion in the human gut microbiota due to our modern life context.

“In the current modernization scenario, in which there is a progressive reduction of microbiota diversity, this information could guide integrated diet- and lifestyle-tailored strategies to safeguard the micro-organisms that are fundamental to our health”, concludes Candela. “To this end, promoting lifestyles that are sustainable for our gut microbiota is of the utmost importance, as it will help maintain the configurations that are compatible with our biology”.

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The research group analysed the ancient DNA extracted from 50,000 years old sedimentary faeces (the oldest sample of faecal material available to date). The samples were collected in El Salt (Spain), a site where many Neanderthals lived. University of Bologna

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Article Source: UNIVERSITÀ DI BOLOGNA news release

THE AUTHORS OF THE STUDY

The study titled “Components of a Neanderthal gut microbiome recovered from fecal sediments from El Salt” was published in Communication Biology. The University of Bologna participated in this study thanks to Marco Candela, Simone Rampelli, Silvia Turroni and Elena Biagi from the Department of Pharmacy and Biotechnology; Annalisa Astolfi from the Interdepartmental Center for Cancer Research “Giorgio Prodi”; Patrizia Brigidi from the Department of Medical and Surgical Sciences; and Stefano Benazzi from the Department of Cultural Heritage.

Moreover, this study saw the participation of researchers from the Universidad de La Laguna (Spain), from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) as well as the University of Oklahoma (USA) and Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (Austria).

UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT BOULDER—A new analysis of a horse previously believed to be from the Ice Age shows that the animal actually died just a few hundred years ago–and was raised, ridden and cared for by Native peoples. The study sheds light on the early relationships between horses and their guardians in the Americas.

The findings, published today in the journal American Antiquity, are the latest in the saga of the “Lehi horse.”

In 2018, a Utah couple was doing landscaping in their backyard near the city of Provo when they unearthed something surprising: an almost complete skeleton of a horse about the size of a Shetland pony. Scientists and the media took note. Preliminary data suggested that the horse might be more than 10,000 years old.

“It was found in the ground in these geologic deposits from the Pleistocene–the last Ice Age,” said William Taylor, lead author of the new research and a curator of archaeology at the CU Museum of Natural History at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Based on a detailed study of the horse’s bones and DNA, however, Taylor and his colleagues concluded that it wasn’t an Ice Age mammal at all. Instead, the animal was a domesticated horse that had likely belonged to Ute or Shoshone communities before Europeans had a permanent presence in the region.

But Taylor is far from disappointed. He said the animal reveals valuable information about how Indigenous groups in the West looked after their horses.

“This study demonstrates a very sophisticated relationship between Indigenous peoples and horses,” said Taylor, also an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology. “It also tells us that there might be a lot more important clues to the human-horse story contained in the horse bones that are out there in libraries and museum collections.”

Written in bone

Taylor leads an effort funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, called “Horses and Human Societies in the American West.” And he’s something akin to a forensic scientist–except he studies the remains of ancient animals, from horses to reindeer. He said that researchers can learn a lot by collecting the clues hidden in bones.

“The skeleton that you or I have is a chronicle of what we’ve done in our lives,” Taylor said. “If I were to keel over right now, and you looked at my skeleton, you’d see that I was right-handed or that I spend most of my hours at a computer.”

When Taylor first laid eyes on the Lehi horse in 2018, he was immediately skeptical that it was an Ice Age fossil. Ancient horses first evolved in North America and were common during the Pleistocene, he said, going extinct at about the same time as many other large mammals like mammoths. This horse, however, showed characteristic fractures in the vertebrae along its back.

“That was an eyebrow raiser,” Taylor said.

He explained that such fractures often occur when a human body bangs repeatedly into a horse’s spine during riding–they rarely show up in wild animals, and are often most pronounced in horses ridden without a frame saddle. So he and his colleagues decided to dig deeper.

DNA analyses by coauthors at the University of Toulouse in France revealed that the Lehi horse was a roughly 12-year-old female belonging to the species Equus caballus (today’s domestic horse). Radiocarbon dating showed that it had died sometime after the late 17th century. The horse also seemed to be suffering from arthritis in several of its limbs.

“The life of a domestic horse can be a hard one, and it leaves a lot of impacts on the skeleton,” Taylor said.

He added that scientists originally believed that the horse was so ancient in part because of its location deep in the sands along the edge of Utah Lake: Its caretakers appear to have dug a hole and intentionally buried the animal after it died, making it look initially as if it had come from Ice Age sediments.

And despite the animal’s injuries, which would have probably made the Lehi horse lame, people had continued to care for the mare–possibly because they were breeding her with stallions in their herd.

Hidden history

For Carlton Shield Chief Gover, a coauthor of the new study, the research is another example of the buried history of Indigenous groups and horses.

He explained that most researchers have tended to view this relationship through a European lens: Spaniards brought the animals to the Americas on boats, and white settlers shaped how Native peoples interacted with them.

But that view glosses over just how uniquely Indigenous the horse became in the Americas after those first introductions.

“There was a lot going on that Europeans didn’t see,” said Shield Chief Gover, a graduate student at CU Boulder and a tribal citizen of the Pawnee Nation. “There was a 200-year period where populations in the Great Plains and the West were adapting their cultures to the horse.”

For many Plains groups, horses quickly changed nearly every aspect of life.

“There was more raiding and fewer battles,” Shield Chief Gover said. “Horses became deeply integrated into Plains cultures, and changed the way people moved, traded, hunted and more.”

He and Taylor hope that their research will, alongside Indigenous oral traditions, help to shed light on those stories. Taylor, for his part, suspects that the Lehi horse may not be the only set of remains mistakenly shelved with Ice Age animals in museum collections around the country.

“I think there are a lot more out there like this,” he said.

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Study coauthor Isaac Hart of the university of Utah compares a healthy talus bone from the Lehi horse with one heavily impacted by arthritis. William Taylor

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT BOULDER news release

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THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM—While scientists and historians have long surmised that etchings on stones and bones have been used as a form of symbolism dating back as early as the Middle Paleolithic period (250,000-45,000 BCE), findings to support that theory are extremely rare.

A recent discovery by archeologists from the Hebrew University and the University of Haifa alongside a team from the Le Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France have uncovered evidence of what may be the earliest-known use of symbols. The symbols were found on a bone fragment in the Ramle region in central Israel and are believed to be approximately 120,000 years old.

Remarkably the fragment remained largely intact and the researchers were able to detect six similar etchings on one side of the bone, leading them to believe that they were in the possession of something which held symbolic or spiritual significance. The find which was recently published in the scientific journal ‘Quaternary International’ was discovered in a trove of flint tools and animal bones exposed at a site during archaeological excavations.

Dr. Yossi Zaidner of the Institute of Archeology at Hebrew University says that the site was likely used as a camp or a meeting place for Paleolithic hunters who would then slaughter the animals they caught at that location. The identified bone is believed to have come from an extinct large wild cattle, a species which was very common in the Middle East at that time.

Using three-dimensional imaging, microscopic methods of analysis and experimental reproduction of engravings in the laboratory, the team was able to identify six different engravings ranging from 38 to 42 millimeters in length. Dr. Iris Groman-Yaroslavski from the University of Haifa explained, “Based on our laboratory analysis and discovery of microscopic elements, we were able to surmise that people in prehistoric times used a sharp tool fashioned from flint rock to make the engravings.”

The paper’s authors stress that their analysis makes it very clear that the engravings were definitely intentionally man made and could not have been the result of animal butchering activities or natural processes over the millennia. They pointed to the fact that the grooves of the engravings discovered are in a clear U-shape and wide and deep enough that they could not have been made by anything other than humans intent on carving lines into the bone.

The analysis was also able to determine that the work was performed by a right-handed craftsman in a single working session.

Ms. Marion Prévost from the Institute of Archeology at Hebrew University says that every indication was that there was a definite message behind what was carved into the bone. “We reject any assumption that these grooves were some sort of inadvertent doodling. That type of artwork wouldn’t have seen this level of attention to detail.”

So then what was the message behind the six lines in the bone? The authors write, “This engraving is very likely an example of symbolic activity and is the oldest known example of this form of messaging that was used in the Levant. We hypothesize that the choice of this particular bone was related to the status of that animal in that hunting community and is indicative of the spiritual connection that the hunters had with the animals they killed.”

Dr. Zaidner said, “It is fair to say that we have discovered one of the oldest symbolic engraving ever found on earth- and certainly the oldest in the Levant. This discovery has very important implications for understanding of how symbolic expression developed in humans. At the same time, while it is still not possible to determine the exact meaning of these symbols we hope that continued research will unveil those key details.”

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Illustration and photograph of the bone and the engravings. Marion Prévost

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Above and below: The find within its archaeological context at the site. Courtesy HUJI

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Article Source: THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM news release

PLOS—New analysis of a 20th Dynasty mummified individual reveals her rare mud carapace, according to a study* published February 3, 2021 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Karin Sowada from Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, and colleagues.

Studies of mummified bodies from the late New Kingdom to the 21st Dynasty (c. 1294-945 BC) have occasionally reported a hard resinous shell protecting the body within its wrappings, especially for royal mummies of the period. Here, Sowada and colleagues describe their discovery of a rare painted mud carapace enclosing an adult mummy in Sydney’s Chau Chak Wing Museum.

Sir Charles Nicholson bought the mummified body, lidded coffin, and mummy board as a set during a trip to Egypt in 1856-7, donating it to the University of Sydney in 1860. The coffin inscription identifies the owner as a titled woman named Meruah, and the iconography dates it to approximately 1000 BC. Though the mummified individual underwent a full computed tomography (CT) scan in 1999, the authors rescanned the body for the current study using updated technology.

Using this new visualization of the dentition and skeleton, the authors determined the mummified individual was a young middle adult (26-35 years). Though the body scans did not reveal external genitalia, and internal reproductive organs had been removed during the mummification process, osseous secondary sexual characteristics (hip bones, jaw, and cranium) strongly suggest the mummified individual was female. The current analysis of the mummification technique and radiocarbon dating of textile samples from the linen wrappings place the mummified individual in the late New Kingdom (c. 1200-1113 BC). This means the body is older than the coffin, suggesting local 19th century dealers placed an unrelated body in the coffin to sell as a complete set. The new scans also revealed the extent and nature of the mud carapace, showing the mud shell fully sheaths the body and is layered within the linen wrappings. Images of the inmost layers indicate the body was damaged relatively shortly after initial mummification, and the mud carapace and additional wrappings applied to reunify and restore the body. In addition to its practical restorative purpose, the authors suggest the mud carapace gave those who cared for the deceased the chance to emulate elite funerary practices of coating the body in an expensive imported resin shell with cheaper, locally available materials.

Though this mud carapace treatment has not been previously documented in the literature, the authors note it’s not yet possible to determine how frequent this treatment may have been for non-elite mummies in the late New Kingdom of ancient Egypt—and suggest further radiological studies on other non-royal mummies may reveal more about this practice.

The authors add: “The mud shell encasing the body of a mummified woman within the textile wrappings is a new addition to our understanding of ancient Egyptian mummification.”

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Mummified individual and coffin in the Nicholson Collection of the Chau Chak Wing Museum, University of Sydney. A. Mummified individual, encased in a modern sleeve for conservation, NMR.27.3. B. Coffin lid, NMR.27.1. (Published under a CC BY license, with permission from the Chau Chak Wing Museum, original copyright 2019). Sowada et al, PLOS ONE (CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

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Article Source: PLOS news release

*Sowada K, Power RK, Jacobsen G, Murphy T, McClymont A, Bertuch F, et al. (2021) Multidisciplinary discovery of ancient restoration using a rare mud carapace on a mummified individual from late New Kingdom Egypt. PLoS ONE 16(2): e0245247.  https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0245247

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GFZ GEOFORSCHUNGSZENTRUM POTSDAM, HELMHOLTZ CENTRE—Large parts of today’s Sahara Desert were green thousands of years ago. Prehistoric engravings of giraffes and crocodiles testify to this, as does a stone-age cave painting in the desert that even shows swimming humans. However, these illustrations only provide a rough picture of the living conditions. Recently, more detailed insights have been gained from sediment cores extracted from the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Libya. An international research team examined these cores and discovered that the layers of the seafloor tell the story of major environmental changes in North Africa over the past 160,000 years. Cécile Blanchet of the German Research Centre for Geosciences GFZ and her colleagues from Germany, South Korea, the Netherlands and the USA report on this in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Together with the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, a team of scientists organized a research cruise on the Dutch vessel Pelagia to the Gulf of Sirte in December 2011. “We suspected that when the Sahara Desert was green, the rivers that are presently dry would have been active and would have brought particles into the Gulf of Sirte”, says lead author Cécile Blanchet. Such sediments would help to better understand the timing and circumstances for the reactivation of these rivers.

Using a method called “piston coring”, the scientists were able to recover 10-meters long columns of marine mud. “One can imagine a giant hollow cylinder being pushed into the seafloor”, says co-author Anne Osborne from GEOMAR, who was onboard the research ship. “The marine mud layers contain rock fragments and plant remains transported from the nearby African continent. They are also full of shells of microorganisms that grew in seawater. Together, these sediment particles can tell us the story of past climatic changes”, explains Blanchet.

“By combining the sediment analyses with results from our computer simulation, we can now precisely understand the climatic processes at work to explain the drastic changes in North African environments over the past 160,000 years”, adds co-author Tobias Friedrich from the University of Hawai’i.

From previous work, it was already known that several rivers episodically flowed across the region, which today is one of the driest areas on Earth. The team’s unprecedented reconstruction continuously covers the last 160,000 years. It offers a comprehensive picture of when and why there was sufficient rainfall in the Central Sahara to reactivate these rivers. “We found that it is the slight changes in the Earth’s orbit and the waxing and waning of polar ice sheets that paced the alternation of humid phases with high precipitation and long periods of almost complete aridity”, explains Blanchet.

The fertile periods generally lasted five thousand years and humidity spread over North Africa up to the Mediterranean coast. For the people of that time, this resulted in drastic changes in living conditions, which probably led to large migratory movements in North Africa. “With our work we have added some essential jigsaw pieces to the picture of past Saharan landscape changes that help to better understand human evolution and migration history”, says Blanchet. “The combination of sediment data with computer-simulation results was crucial to understand what controlled the past succession of humid and arid phases in North Africa. This is particularly important because it is expected that this region will experience intense droughts as a consequence of human-induced climate change.”

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Engraving of Giraffes near Gobero in Niger, ca. 8,000 yrs old, witness green times in the desert. Mike Hettwer, 2006, www.hettwer.com

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Overview of the area of study in Northern Africa and off the coast of Libya. The old river courses and the place where the sediment core was taken can also be seen. Axel Timmermann

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Article Source: GFZ GEOFORSCHUNGSZENTRUM POTSDAM, HELMHOLTZ CENTRE news release

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CELL PRESS—Despite long-standing ideas about the importance of thumb evolution in tool use and development, questions remain about exactly when human-like manual dexterity and efficient thumb use arose—and which hominin species was the first to have this ability. Now, researchers who’ve analyzed the biomechanics and efficiency of the thumb across different fossil human species using virtual muscle modeling have new insight into when these abilities first arose and what they’ve meant for the development of more complex human culture. The findings, appearing January 28 in the journal Current Biology*, suggest that a fundamental aspect of human thumb opposition first appeared approximately 2 million years ago and was not found in the earliest proposed stone tool makers.

“Increased manual dexterity in the form of efficient thumb opposition was among the early defining characteristics of our lineage, providing a formidable adaptive advantage to our ancestors,” said Katerina Harvati of the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. “It is likely a crucial element underlying the development of complex culture over the last 2 million years, shaping our biocultural evolution.”

Earlier attempts to study thumb dexterity evolution had relied on comparisons between the skeletal anatomy of modern humans and earlier hominin species. The assumption was that similarities in skeletal remains to the human form could be taken as evidence of dexterity. In the new study, the team led by Harvati took a new and more comprehensive approach.

“Our methodology integrates cutting-edge virtual muscle modeling with three-dimensional analysis of bone shape and size,” first author and hand biomechanics expert Alexandros Karakostis, explains. “This process includes the precise 3D study of the areas of the bones where muscles attach in life. Importantly, we were able to validate the predictions of our models by confirming that the differences observed between living taxa—chimpanzees and modern humans—reflect those reported from past experimental studies.”

By applying this new approach to answer the question, the researchers showed that thumb efficiency and dexterity had increased to a significant extent in hominins that lived 2 million years ago in South Africa. At the same time, they found that the degree of this dexterity was consistently lower in the earliest proposed tool-making species, the Australopithecines. That includes the species Australopithecus sediba, which is also dated to approximately 2 million years ago. That’s notable because researchers had previously suggested that the human-like thumb proportions of A. sediba reflected tool-making capabilities.

“One of the greatest surprises was to find that hominin hand fossils from the Swartkrans site in South Africa, which date to ca. 2 million years ago and are attributed to either early Homo or to the extinct hominin side branch Paranthropus robustus, could achieve a thumb-using dexterity similar to that of modern humans,” Karakostis said.

The new findings further show that later-arising species, belonging to our own genus Homo—including Neanderthals as well as early and recent Homo sapiens—share similarly high degrees of manual dexterity. Those findings applied also to the small-brained species Homo naledi, despite the fact that this species has not yet been found in association with stone tools.

“These consistently high dexterity levels in species of Homo are indicative of the great adaptive value of thumb opposition for human biocultural evolution,” Harvati says.

The researchers note that the most important implication of their new findings is that an early increase of thumb dexterity about 2 million years ago may have been a foundation for the gradual development of complex culture. They highlight that this timeframe includes important biocultural developments such as the appearance of the large-brained Homo erectus lineage and its dispersal out of Africa. Around the same time, humans gradually began to exploit animal resources and to rely more heavily on stone tool technologies.

The researchers now plan to look even more closely at specific groups, such as Neanderthals, so as to further elucidate the details of their manual dexterity and how they may have differed from that of modern humans. They’ll also more closely investigate the habitual manual activities of early hominins to further shed light on the behaviors that marked the transition to systematic tool production and use among our distant ancestors.

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This image diagrams the difference between human and chimpanzee models of thumb muscles, which the researchers used to study the evolution of thumb dexterity. Professor Katerina Harvati, Dr. Alexandros Karakostis, and Dr. Daniel Haeufle

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This work was supported by the European Research Council, the German Research Foundation, and the Ministry of Science, Research, and the Arts Baden-Württemberg.

*Current Biology, Karakostis et al.: “Biomechanics of the human thumb and the evolution of dexterity” https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(20)31893-5

Article Source: Cell Press news release

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TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY—”King Solomon made for himself the carriage; he made it of wood from Lebanon. Its posts he made of silver, its base of gold. Its seat was upholstered with purple, its interior inlaid with love.” (Song of Songs 3:9-10)

For the first time, rare evidence has been found of fabric dyed with royal purple dating from the time of King David and King Solomon.

While examining the colored textiles from Timna Valley – an ancient copper production district in southern Israel – in a study that has lasted several years, the researchers were surprised to find remnants of woven fabric, a tassel and fibers of wool dyed with royal purple. Direct radiocarbon dating confirms that the finds date from approximately 1000 BCE, corresponding to the biblical monarchies of David and Solomon in Jerusalem. The dye, which is produced from species of mollusk found in the Mediterranean, over 300 km from Timna, is often mentioned in the Bible and appears in various Jewish and Christian contexts. This is the first time that purple-dyed Iron Age textiles have been found in Israel, or indeed throughout the Southern Levant. The research was carried out by Dr. Naama Sukenik from the Israel Antiquities Authority and Prof. Erez Ben-Yosef, from the Jacob M. Alkow Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures at Tel Aviv University, in collaboration with Prof. Zohar Amar, Dr. David Iluz and Dr. Alexander Varvak from Bar-Ilan University and Dr. Orit Shamir from the Israel Antiquities Authority. The unexpected finds are being published today in the prestigious PLOS ONE journal.

“This is a very exciting and important discovery,” explains Dr. Naama Sukenik, curator of organic finds at the Israel Antiquities Authority. “This is the first piece of textile ever found from the time of David and Solomon that is dyed with the prestigious purple dye. In antiquity, purple attire was associated with the nobility, with priests, and of course with royalty. The gorgeous shade of the purple, the fact that it does not fade, and the difficulty in producing the dye, which is found in minute quantities in the body of mollusks, all made it the most highly valued of the dyes, which often cost more than gold. Until the current discovery, we had only encountered mollusk-shell waste and potsherds with patches of dye, which provided evidence of the purple industry in the Iron Age. Now, for the first time, we have direct evidence of the dyed fabrics themselves, preserved for some 3000 years”.

Prof. Erez Ben-Yosef from Tel Aviv University’s Archaeology Department says, “Our archaeological expedition has been excavating continuously at Timna since 2013. As a result of the region’s extremely dry climate, we are also able to recover organic materials such as textile, cords and leather from the Iron Age, from the time of David and Solomon, providing us with a unique glimpse into life in biblical times. If we excavated for another hundred years in Jerusalem, we would not discover textiles from 3000 years ago. The state of preservation at Timna is exceptional and it is paralleled only by that at much later sites such as Masada and the Judean Desert Caves. In recent years, we have been excavating a new site inside Timna known as ‘Slaves’ Hill’. The name may be misleading, since far from being slaves, the laborers were highly skilled metalworkers. Timna was a production center for copper, the Iron Age equivalent of modern-day oil. Copper smelting required advanced metallurgical understanding that was a guarded secret, and those who held this knowledge were the ‘Hi-Tech’ experts of the time. Slaves’ Hill is the largest copper-smelting site in the valley and it is filled with piles of industrial waste such as slag from the smelting furnaces. One of these heaps yielded three scraps of colored cloth. The color immediately attracted our attention, but we found it hard to believe that we had found true purple from such an ancient period”.

According to the researchers, true purple [argaman] was produced from three species of mollusk indigenous to the Mediterranean Sea: The Banded Dye-Murex (Hexaplex trunculus), the Spiny Dye-Murex (Bolinus brandaris) and the Red-Mouthed Rock-Shell (Stramonita haemastoma). The dye was produced from a gland located within the body of the mollusk by means of a complex chemical process that lasted several days. Today, most scholars agree that the two precious dyes, purple [argaman] and light blue, or azure [tekhelet] were produced from the purple dye mollusk under different conditions of exposure to light. When exposed to light, azure is obtained whereas without light exposure, a purple hue is obtained. These colors are often mentioned together in the ancient sources, and both have symbolic and religious significance to this day. The Temple priests, David and Solomon, and Jesus of Nazareth are all described as having worn clothing colored with purple.

The analytical tests conducted at Bar Ilan University’s laboratories, together with dyes that were reconstructed by Prof. Zohar Amar and Dr. Naama Sukenik, can identify the species used to dye the Timna textiles and the desired hues. In order to reconstruct the mollusk dyeing process, Prof. Amar traveled to Italy where he cracked thousands of mollusks (which the Italians eat) and produced raw material from their dye glands that was used in hundreds of attempts to reconstruct ancient dyeing. “The practical work took us back thousands of years,” says Prof. Amar, “and it has allowed us to better understand obscure historical sources associated with the precious colors of azure and purple.”

The dye was identified with an advanced analytical instrument (HPLC) that indicated the presence of unique dye molecules, originating only in certain species of mollusk. According to Dr. Naama Sukenik, “Most of the colored textiles found at Timna, and in archaeological research in general, were dyed using various plant-based dyes that were readily available and easier to dye with. The use of animal-based dyes is regarded as much more prestigious, and served as an important indicator for the wearer’s high economic and social status. The remnants of the purple-dyed cloth that we found are not only the most ancient in Israel, but in the Southern Levant in general. We also believe that we have succeeded in identifying the double-dyeing method in one of the fragments, in which two species of mollusk were used in a sophisticated way, to enrich the dye. This technology is described by the Roman historian Pliny the Elder, from the first century CE, and the dye it produced was considered the most prestigious.”

Prof. Ben-Yosef identifies the copper-production center at Timna as part of the biblical Kingdom of Edom, which bordered the kingdom of Israel to the south. According to him, the dramatic finds should revolutionize our concepts of nomadic societies in the Iron Age. “The new finds reinforce our assumption that there was an elite at Timna, attesting to a stratified society. In addition, since the mollusks are indigenous to the Mediterranean, this society obviously maintained trade relations with other peoples who lived on the coastal plain. However, we do not have evidence of any permanent settlements in the Edomite territory. The Edomite Kingdom was a kingdom of nomads in the early Iron Age. When we think of nomads, it is difficult for us to free ourselves from comparisons with contemporary Bedouins, and we therefore find it hard to imagine kings without magnificent stone palaces and walled cities. Yet in certain circumstances, nomads can also create a complex socio-political structure, one that the biblical writers could identify as a kingdom. Of course, this whole debate has repercussions for our understanding of Jerusalem in the same period. We know that the Tribes of Israel were originally nomadic and that the process of settlement was gradual and prolonged. Archaeologists are looking for King David’s palace. However, David may not have expressed his wealth in splendid buildings, but with objects more suited to a nomadic heritage such as textiles and artifacts.” According to Ben-Yosef, “It is wrong to assume that if no grand buildings and fortresses have been found, then biblical descriptions of the United Monarchy in Jerusalem must be literary fiction. Our new research at Timna has showed us that even without such buildings, there were kings in our region who ruled over complex societies, formed alliances and trade relations, and waged war on each other. The wealth of a nomadic society was not measured in palaces and monuments made of stone, but in things that were no less valued in the ancient world – such as the copper produced at Timna and the purple dye that was traded with its copper smelters.”

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Wool fibers dyed with Royal Purple,~1000 BCE, Timna Valley, Israel. Dafna Gazit, courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority

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Wool textile fragment decorated by threads dyed with Royal Purple, ~1000 BCE, Timna Valley, Israel. Dafna Gazit, courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority

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Excavating Slaves’ Hill. Sagi Bornstein, courtesy of the Central Timna Valley Project.

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Article Source: TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY news release

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SOUTHERN METHODIST UNIVERSITY, DALLAS—Wildfires are the enemy when they threaten homes in California and elsewhere. But a new study led by SMU suggests that people living in fire-prone places can learn to manage fire as an ally to prevent dangerous blazes, just like people who lived nearly 1,000 years ago.

“We shouldn’t be asking how to avoid fire and smoke,” said SMU anthropologist and lead author Christopher Roos. “We should ask ourselves what kind of fire and smoke do we want to coexist with.”

An interdisciplinary team of scientists published a study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences documenting centuries of fire management by Native American farmers. The team included scientists from SMU, the University of Arizona, Harvard University, Simon Fraser University, the US Geological Survey, Baylor University, the University of Illinois, and the University of South Florida.

Jemez people learned how to live with and manage fire long ago

Ancestors of the Native American community in the Jemez Mountains of northern New Mexico lived continuously in fire-prone forests for more than five centuries. Similar to today’s communities in the western U.S. forests, Pueblos of the Jemez people had relatively high population densities, and the forested landscape they managed was an area larger than the city of Chicago.

Starting in the 1100s, the Jemez people limited fire spread and improved forest resilience to climate variability by creating purposeful burning of small patches of the forest around their community, researchers found.

“The area around each village would have been a fire-free zone,” Roos said. “There were no living trees within two football fields of each village, and the hundreds or thousands of trampling feet mean that fine fuels, such as grasses, herbs, and shrubs, to carry surface fires would have been rare too. The agricultural areas would have seen targeted applications of fire to clean fields after harvest, to recycle plant nutrients as fertilizer, and to clear new fields.”

Roos calls those controlled burns “the right kind of fire and smoke.” The Jemez practice of burning wood for heat, light, and cooking in their homes also removed much of the fuel that could burn in wildfires, he said.

Roos said the ancient Jemez model could work today. Many communities in the western United States, including those of Native Americans, still rely on wood-burning to generate heat during the winter, he said. Regularly setting small, low-intensity fires in a patchwork around where people live to clear out flammable material would also follow the Jemez model, he said.

“Some sort of public-private tribal partnership might do a lot of good, empowering tribal communities to oversee the removal of the small trees that have overstocked the forests and made them vulnerable to dangerous fires, while also providing wood fuel for people who need it,” Roos said.

Since 2018, wildfires have destroyed more than 50,000 structures in California alone. Global warming is only expected to make the amount and severity of wildfires worse.

Almost every major study of fire activity over the last 10,000 years indicates that climate drives fire activity, particular larger fires. Yet, many examples from traditional societies suggest the role of climate can be blunted or buffered by a patchwork of small, purposeful burns before the peak natural fire season. In the Jemez Mountains, the climate influence was weakened and large fires were rare when Jemez farmers used fire preemptively in many small patches, effectively clearing out the materials that fuel today’s megafires.

In contrast, today’s forests are filled with these young trees, increasing the chances they can generate huge flames and waves of flaming embers that can catch homes on fire.

The scientists used a variety of methods to document how Jemez people handled smoke and fire centuries ago, including interviewing tribal elders at Jemez Pueblo. The team also compared tree-ring fire records with paleoclimate records, which indicated that fire activity was disconnected from climate during the time when Jemez’s population was at a peak. In addition, charcoal and pollen records show that Jemez people began using fire to establish an agricultural landscape and to promote habitats for large animals, such as mule deer and elk.

Roos noted that tolerance of fire and smoke hazards probably went hand-in-hand with recognition of the benefits of fire and smoke.

“Paul Tosa, former governor of Jemez Pueblo, said ‘Fire brings richness to the land,'” Roos noted. “We could do very well to learn from the wisdom of Jemez peoples and change our relationship to fire and smoke at the wildland-urban interface.”

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Christopher Roos, professor of anthropology at SMU (Southern Methodist University). Christopher Roos

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Article Source: SOUTHERN METHODIST UNIVERSITY news release

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The American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE) announces the relaunch of the Theban Mapping Project (TMP) website, providing a new resource for educators, students, and researchers by showcasing and detailing what is currently known about the tombs of New Kingdom Egypt’s ancient pharaohs and their families. 

“With the launch of the redesigned Theban Mapping Project website, ARCE is pleased to make available once again to the world this important data set,” said Dr. David A. Anderson, Associate Professor of Archaeology, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. “With something for both school children and academics alike, the TMP is a wealth of information about the burial places of some of Egypt’s most famous ancient rulers.” 

The TMP website is not an entirely new creation. It was first developed in response to the massive outpouring of worldwide public interest in 1989 with the rediscovery and excavation by the TMP team of the entrance to KV5, the family mausoleum for the sons of Rameses II. The excavation revealed that KV5 was the largest known tomb in the Valley of the Kings, and the website, then known as KV5.com, was established to provide worldwide access to information about TMP’s work. The website, however, crashed in 2010 and could not be restored—until now.   

“The American University in Cairo, long home of the Theban Mapping Project, is delighted that ARCE has resurrected and improved the TMP website, and is providing a permanent home for it,” says Dr. Salima Ikram, Distinguished University Professor at the American University in Cairo. “This is a wonderful opportunity for the TMP, ARCE, and the American University in Cairo to collaborate in the promotion of the study of ancient Egypt worldwide, with the new, accessible website providing fresh generations of students, scholars, and lovers of ancient Egypt with a unique way in which to learn about ancient Egypt.” 

The Theban Mapping Project was established in 1978 by Egyptologist Dr. Kent R. Weeks at the University of California, Berkeley, with the original mandate to create an archaeological map of the Valley of the Kings.  In 1985, it was moved to the American University in Cairo. 

The TMP team initiated work in Luxor’s West Bank in 1979, mapping the terrain and creating resulting architectural plans of the ancient tombs it contained, beginning with the Valley of the Kings. In March and June 1978, the project commenced its first season with a team of eight consisting of Dr. Weeks, a chief surveyor, a cartographer, three assistant surveyors and architects, an inspector of antiquities from the Egyptian Antiquities Organization (the predecessor of the Supreme Council of Antiquities) and an Egyptologist. During the first season, the survey grid was laid out, upon which all future work has been built. This grid was constructed on the existing grid created at the Temple of Karnak. Eight tombs in the Valley of the Kings were surveyed during this season (KV1, KV2, KV3, KV4, KV5, KV6, KV46 and KV55). In 1979, the second season of work was carried out on the Berkeley Map of the Theban Necropolis which focused on obtaining complete aerial photographic coverage of the entire necropolis. Another ten tombs in the Valley of the Kings were surveyed, planned and the survey grid network was extended north and south to the limits of the Theban necropolis. It was in 1989 when the TMP team rediscovered the entrance to KV5 and began excavating. 

The work in the Valley of the Kings has been ongoing, with seasonal and daily activity largely unseen by the world. But the new website will change that.

“On the new TMP website, individuals of all ages, from elementary school to retirement, can explore the wonder of the Valley of the Kings from anywhere in the world,” promises Anderson. “Through rich visual content, accessible articles, and future updates, the new website will be a resource for everything Valley of the Kings for years to come.” 

The Theban Mapping Project website can be accessed here.

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Valley of the Kings with pyramid-shaped Qurn above. Photographed by Francis Dzikowski.

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Article Source: American Research Center in Egypt press release

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UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE—Social inequality was “recorded on the bones” of Cambridge’s medieval residents, according to a new study of hundreds of human remains excavated from three very different burial sites within the historic city centre.

University of Cambridge researchers examined the remains of 314 individuals dating from the 10th to the 14th century and collected evidence of “skeletal trauma” – a barometer for levels of hardship endured in life.

Bones were recovered from across the social spectrum: a parish graveyard for ordinary working people, a charitable “hospital” where the infirm and destitute were interred, and an Augustinian friary that buried wealthy donors alongside clergy.

Researchers carefully catalogued the nature of every break and fracture to build a picture of the physical distress visited upon the city’s inhabitants by accident, occupational injury or violence during their daily lives.

Using x-ray analysis, the team found that 44% of working people had bone fractures, compared to 32% of those in the friary and 27% of those buried by the hospital. Fractures were more common in male remains (40%) than female (26%) across all burials.

The team also uncovered noteworthy cases, such as a friar who resembles a modern hit-and-run victim, and bones that hint at lives blighted by violence. The findings are published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

“By comparing the skeletal trauma of remains buried in various locations within a town like Cambridge, we can gauge the hazards of daily life experienced by different spheres of medieval society,” said Dr Jenna Dittmar, study lead author from the After the Plague project at the University’s Department of Archaeology.

“We can see that ordinary working folk had a higher risk of injury compared to the friars and their benefactors or the more sheltered hospital inmates,” she said.

“These were people who spent their days working long hours doing heavy manual labour. In town, people worked in trades and crafts such as stonemasonry and blacksmithing, or as general laborers. Outside town, many spent dawn to dusk doing bone-crushing work in the fields or tending livestock.”

The University was embryonic at this time – the first stirrings of academia occurring around 1209 – and Cambridge was primarily a provincial town of artisans, merchants and farmhands, with a population of 2500-4000 by the mid-13th century.

While the working poor may have borne the brunt of physical labour compared to better-off people and those in religious institutions, medieval life was tough in general. In fact, the most extreme injury was found on a friar, identified as such by his burial place and belt buckle.

“The friar had complete fractures halfway up both his femurs,” said Dittmar. The femur [thigh bone] is the largest bone in the body. “Whatever caused both bones to break in this way must have been traumatic, and was possibly the cause of death.”

Dittmar points out that today’s clinicians would be familiar with such injuries from those hit by automobiles – it’s the right height. “Our best guess is a cart accident. Perhaps a horse got spooked and he was struck by the wagon.”

Injury was also inflicted by others. Another friar had lived with defensive fractures on his arm and signs of blunt force trauma to his skull. Such violence-related skeletal injuries were found in about 4% of the population, including women and people from all social groups.

One older woman buried in the parish grounds appeared to bear the marks of lifelong domestic abuse. “She had a lot of fractures, all of them healed well before her death. Several of her ribs had been broken as well as multiple vertebrae, her jaw and her foot,” said Dittmar.

“It would be very uncommon for all these injuries to occur as the result of a fall, for example. Today, the vast majority of broken jaws seen in women are caused by intimate partner violence.”

Of the three sites, the Hospital of St John the Evangelist contained the fewest fractures. Established at the end of the 12th century, it housed select needy Cambridge residents, providing food and spiritual care. Many had skeletal evidence of chronic illnesses such as tuberculosis, and would have been unable to work.

While most remains were “inmates”, the site also included “corrodians”: retired locals who paid for the privilege of living at the hospital, much like a modern old-age care home.

The Hospital was dissolved to create St John’s College in 1511, and excavated by the Cambridge Archaeological Unit (CAU), part of the University, in 2010 during a renovation of the College’s Divinity School building.

CAU excavated the Augustinian Friary in 2016 as part of building works on the University’s New Museums Site. According to records, the friary acquired rights to bury members of the Augustinian order in 1290, and non-members in 1302 – allowing rich benefactors to take a plot in the friary grounds.

The friary functioned until 1538, when King Henry VIII stripped the nation’s monasteries of their income and assets to fortify the Crown’s coffers.

The parish of All Saints by the Castle, north of the River Cam, was likely founded in the 10th century and in use until 1365, when it merged with a neighboring parish after local populations fell in the wake of the Black Death bubonic plague pandemic.

While the church itself has never been found, the graveyard – next to what is still called Castle Hill – was first excavated in the 1970s. Remains were housed within the University’s Duckworth Collection, allowing researchers to revisit these finds for the latest study.

“Those buried in All Saints were among the poorest in town, and clearly more exposed to incidental injury,” said Dittmar. “At the time, the graveyard was in the hinterland where urban met rural. Men may have worked in the fields with heavy ploughs pulled by horses or oxen, or lugged stone blocks and wooden beams in the town.

“Many of the women in All Saints probably undertook hard physical labours such as tending livestock and helping with harvest alongside their domestic duties.

“We can see this inequality recorded on the bones of medieval Cambridge residents. However, severe trauma was prevalent across the social spectrum. Life was toughest at the bottom – but life was tough all over.”

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The remains of an individual buried in the Augustinian friary, taken during the 2016 excavation on the University of Cambridge’s New Museums site. Nick Saffell

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The remains of numerous individuals unearthed on the former site of the Hospital of St. John the Evangelist, taken during the 2010 excavation on the site of the Divinity School building, St John’s College, University of Cambridge. Cambridge Archaeological Unit

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X-rays of butterfly fractures to both femora of an adult male buried in the Augustinian friary. Dr Jenna Dittmar

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE news release

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DURHAM UNIVERSITY—The first people to settle in the Americas likely brought their own canine companions with them, according to new research which sheds more light on the origin of dogs.

An international team of researchers led by archaeologist Dr Angela Perri, of Durham University, UK, looked at the archaeological and genetic records of ancient people and dogs.

They found that the first people to cross into the Americas before 15,000 years ago, who were of northeast Asian descent, were accompanied by their dogs.

The researchers say this discovery suggests that dog domestication likely took place in Siberia before 23,000 years ago. People and their dogs then eventually travelled both west into the rest of Eurasia, and east into the Americas.

The findings are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).

The Americas were one of the last regions in the world to be settled by people. By this same time, dogs had been domesticated from their wolf ancestors and were likely playing a variety of roles within human societies.

Research lead author Dr Angela Perri, in the Department of Archaeology at Durham University, said: “When and where have long been questions in dog domestication research, but here we also explored the how and why, which have often been overlooked.

“Dog domestication occurring in Siberia answers many of the questions we’ve always had about the origins of the human-dog relationship.

“By putting together the puzzle pieces of archaeology, genetics and time we see a much clearer picture where dogs are being domesticated in Siberia, then disperse from there into the Americas and around the world.”

Geneticist and co-author Laurent Frantz (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich) said: “The only thing we knew for sure is that dog domestication did not take place in the Americas.

“From the genetic signatures of ancient dogs, we now know that they must have been present somewhere in Siberia before people migrated to the Americas.”

Co-author Professor Greger Larson, Oxford University, said: “Researchers have previously suggested that dogs were domesticated across Eurasia from Europe to China, and many places in between.

“The combined evidence from ancient humans and dogs is helping to refine our understanding of the deep history of dogs, and now points toward Siberia and Northeast Asia as a likely region where dog domestication was initiated.”

During the Last Glacial Maximum (from ~23,000-19,000 years ago) Beringia (the land and maritime area between Canada and Russia), and most of Siberia, was extremely cold, dry, and largely unglaciated.

The harsh climatic conditions leading up to, and during this period may have served to bring human and wolf populations into close proximity given their attraction to the same prey.

This increasing interaction, through mutual scavenging of kills from wolves drawn to human campsites, may have began a relationship between the species that eventually led to dog domestication, and a vital role in the populating of the Americas.

As co-author and archaeologist David Meltzer of Southern Methodist University (Dallas, TX) notes, “We have long known that the first Americans must have possessed well-honed hunting skills, the geological know-how to find stone and other necessary materials and been ready for new challenges.

“The dogs that accompanied them as they entered this completely new world may have been as much a part of their cultural repertoire as the stone tools they carried.”

Since their domestication from wolves, dogs have played a wide variety of roles in human societies, many of which are tied to the history of cultures worldwide.

Future archaeological and genetic research will reveal how the emerging mutual relationship between people and dogs led to their successful dispersal across the globe.

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Early settlers in the Americas were accompanied by their dogs. Ettore Mazza

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Article Source: DURHAM UNIVERSITY news release

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St. John’s College, University of Cambridge—Huge strides have been made towards deciphering a ‘mysterious’ Greek script that could transform our knowledge of a Bronze Age civilization.

Known as Linear A, the ancient script from Crete appears on some 1,400 inscriptions, most of which are on clay tablets dating back to c1800-1450 BC, during the island’s flourishing Minoan era. A later prehistoric Greek script called Linear B was cracked in the 1950s – but Linear A has continued to elude scholars.

The Minoans were a Bronze Age civilization based on Crete and other islands in the Aegean Sea. Named after the legendary King Minos, this lost civilization was one of Europe’s first urban societies. Ruled from vast palaces, its people were accomplished artists and maritime traders, but their civilization fell into decline after a devastating volcanic eruption on the nearby island of Thera.

Now Dr Ester Salgarella, Junior Research Fellow in Classics at St John’s College, Cambridge, has shed fresh light on the Minoan Linear A script and proved a close genetic link to Linear B, which appeared 50-150 years later in mainland Greece and Crete, c1400-1200 BC. Her research, which has been hailed as ‘an extraordinary piece of detective work,’ could provide the key for linguists to unlock the secrets of the Minoan language – and learn more about its society and culture.

Taking an interdisciplinary approach using evidence from linguistics, inscriptions, archaeology and palaeography (the study of the handwriting of ancient scripts), Dr Salgarella examined the two scripts in socio-historical context. To compare them more easily, she has created an online resource of individual signs and inscriptions called SigLA – The Signs of Linear A: a paleographic database. 

She said: “At the moment there is a lot of confusion about Linear A. We don’t really know how many signs are to be taken as core signs, there’s even been a partial misclassification of signs in the past. This database tries to clear up the situation and give scholars a basis for advancement. 

“We don’t have a Rosetta Stone to crack the code of Linear A, and more linguistic analysis is required, but this structural analysis is a foundation stone.”

The discovery of the Rosetta Stone, which was inscribed with writing in ancient Egyptian and Greek, helped linguists to understand Egyptian hieroglyphics in the 19th century.

Parallels between signs in Linear A and B have been identified before, but Dr Salgarella has shown that a great many graphic variants of signs in the Minoan script were carried onto Linear B. “This combined palaeographical and structural examination – using sign typology and associations – has led me to revise the current script classification and to argue that these two scripts are actually two sides of the same coin,” said Dr Salgarella. “Most scholars have assumed that because the two languages are different the scripts must be distinct, but the relationship is more subtle than this.”

Following the fall of the Minoan civilization, there is a gap of about 50 years with no archaeological evidence of either script on Crete. Dr Salgarella, who has revealed her findings in her newly published book, Aegean Linear Script(s): Rethinking the Relationship between Linear A and Linear B, said: “There is sufficient evidence that Linear B is a derivative from Linear A, so the question is, how did this transmission process happen? I wanted to find out how we can account for the similarities and, more importantly, the differences, and fill in these gaps.”

The Minoans used Linear A primarily, but not exclusively, for administrative purposes. Small clay ‘labels’ found on Crete bear short Minoan inscriptions on one side and imprints of fibres or string on the other. These suggest the labels were used to secure information written on folded or rolled perishable material, such as papyrus. 

Natural disasters caused fires, which destroyed any writing materials and baked the inscriptions into the clay labels and tablets. It’s possible, said Dr Salgarella, that in the two generations between the periods when Linear A ended and Linear B appeared, writing may not have been used widely, but her findings show parts of the earlier script did survive and was adapted by the Greeks into Linear B.

The open access SigLA database of inscriptions has been developed in collaboration with computer scientist Dr Simon Castellan, from the University of Rennes, France. It features a list of 300 standard signs and 400 inscriptions copied by hand. It is still under construction but more than 3,000 individual signs found within the inscriptions are currently searchable.

To form words, the scripts use syllabaries, which means that one written sign or symbol is not a single sound but a syllable. “Other signs are more like Chinese ideograms, or picture words,” said Dr Salgarella. Structural analysis involved looking at how the signs function, the direction they read, and whether they represent syllables, words or punctuation. 

Composite signs fall into ‘configurational categories’. “I could see that there is some kind of rationale on how to put them together,” said Dr Salgarella. By examining the patterns, she was able to come to a better understanding of how to read the composite signs, and make sense of some of the combinations.

Dr Salgarella hopes her findings will be a stepping stone to further research by linguists, paleographers and archaeologists working together. She said: “Collecting the Linear A inscriptions in a unified database is of paramount importance to be able to answer sophisticated paleographical and linguistic questions about the Linear A script as well as the Minoan language it encodes, which will help us reconstruct the socio-historical context of the Minoan civilization.”

Professor Tim Whitmarsh, A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture and Fellow of St John’s, said: “Cracking Linear B was a huge post-war triumph for Classics, but Linear A has remained elusive. Dr Salgarella has demonstrated that Linear B is closely related to its mysterious and previously illegible predecessor. She has brought us one step closer to understanding it. It’s an extraordinary piece of detective work.”

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A Minoan clay tablet inscribed with Linear A, on display in Crete’s Archaeological Museum of Heraklion. Dr Ester Salgarella

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Linear B clay tablet. Dr Ester Salgarella

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One of the hand-drawn tablets from the SigLA database featuring different Linear A signs. Dr Ester Salgarella.

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Dr Ester Salgarella began studying Linear A and B during her PhD. Her findings are revealed in her book, Aegean Linear Script(s) (Cambridge University Press) Dr Ester Salgarella.

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Article Source: St. John’s College, University of Cambridge news release

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MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY—Chimpanzees, one of the closest relatives of humans, cooperate on a group level – in combative disputes, they even cooperate with group members to whom they are not related. Those involved in fights with neighboring groups put themselves at risk of serious injury or even death.

Within the context of the Tai Chimpanzee Project researchers observed three chimpanzee communities in Tai National Park in Cote d’Ivoire documenting social relationships, territory range and intergroup encounters amongst others. “We have been able to analyze almost 500 vocal and physical battles from the last 25 years with participation of at least one of the three habituated communities, some of which have caused severe injury or death”, says Liran Samuni, the first author of the study.

The study* showed that males, as well as females participate in the battles and that three factors increased the likelihood of participation in the intergroup encounter when there were many individuals participating, when maternal kin joined and when non-kin social bond partners were present. “It seems chimpanzees not only consider the sheer number in their sub-group when moving into battle, but they consider the presence of a trusted group member, who will support them in case of an attack”, adds Catherine Crockford, senior author of the study. “These results suggest”, Liran Samuni continues, “that the link between strong, enduring social relationships and costly collective acts is not uniquely human, but is present in one of our closest living relatives, the chimpanzee.”

“This study is part of a series of several investigations linking in-group cooperation with out-group competition”, explains Roman Wittig, director of the Tai Chimpanzee Project and senior author of the studies. “We were able to show that out-group competition reduces chimpanzees’ reproduction and their territory size. On the other hand, out-group competition increases in-group cohesion and, likely facilitated by the neurohormone oxytocin, reduces the likelihood of defection in battle.”

Data from the Tai Chimpanzee Project, with four neighboring communities observed on a daily basis, will be a key source for scientific investigations into the ultimate and proximate causes of group-level cooperation. “The Tai chimpanzees can teach us”, Roman Wittig points out, “what social tools enable human’s unique capacity for large-scale cooperation with non-kin”.

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Chimpanzees join their close bond partners – related group members and friends – to battle rivals. Liran Samuni, Taï Chimpanzee Project

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Article Sources: MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY news release

*Liran Samuni, Catherine Crockford, Roman Wittig, Group-level cooperation in chimpanzees is shaped by strong social ties, Nature Communications, 22 January 2021

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TEL-AVIV UNIVERSITY—Researchers from the Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University unraveled the function of flint tools known as ‘chopping tools’, found at the prehistoric site of Revadim, east of Ashdod. Applying advanced research methods, they examined use-wear traces on 53 chopping tools, as well as organic residues found on some of the tools. They also made and used replicas of the tools, with methods of experimental archaeology. The researchers concluded that tools of this type, found at numerous sites in Africa, Europe and Asia, were used by prehistoric humans at Revadim to neatly break open bones of medium-size animals such as fallow deer, gazelles and possibly also cattle, in order to extract the nutritious high-calory bone marrow.

The study was conducted by Dr. Flavia Venditti of the University of Tübingen and Prof. Ran Barkai and Dr. Aviad Agam of the Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, in collaboration with the Laboratory of Technological and Functional Analyses of Prehistoric Artefacts (Sapienza, University of Rome) and researchers from Sapienza, University of Rome. The paper was published in January 2021 in the PLOS One Journal.

Prof. Ran Barkai: “For years we have been studying stone tools from prehistoric sites in Israel, in order to understand their functions. One important source of tools is Revadim, an open-air site (as opposed to a cave) dating back to 500,000-300,000 years before our time, and rich with remarkably well-preserved findings. Over the years we have discovered that Revadim was a highly favored site, reinhabited over and over again by humans, most probably of the late Homo Erectus species. Bones of many types of game, including elephants, cattle, deer, gazelles and others, were found at the site.”

The researchers add that the prehistoric inhabitants of Revadim developed an effective multipurpose toolkit – not unlike the toolkits of today’s tradesmen. After discovering the functions of some stone tools found at the site, the researchers now focused on chopping tools – flint pebbles with one flaked, sharp and massive edge. Prof. Barkai: “The chopping tool was invented in Africa about 2.6 million years ago, and then migrated with humans wherever they went over the next two million years. Large quantities of these tools have been found at almost every prehistoric site throughout the Old World – in Africa, Europe, the Middle East and even China – evidence for their great importance. However, until now, they had never been subjected to methodical lab testing to find out what they were actually used for.”

The researchers analyzed a sample of 53 chopping tools from Revadim, looking for use-wear traces and organic residues. Many specimens were found to exhibit substantial edge damage as a result of chopping hard materials, and some also showed residues of animal bones, preserved for almost half a million years! Following these findings, experimental archaeology was also applied: The researchers collected flint pebbles from the vicinity of Revadim, manufactured replicas of prehistoric chopping tools and used them to break open bones of dead medium-size animals. Comparisons between the use-wear traces and organic residues on the replicated tools and those on the prehistoric originals significantly substantiated the study’s conclusions.

Prof. Barkai: “Early humans broke animal bones in two to extract bone marrow. This requires great skill and precision, because shattering the bone would damage the bone marrow. The chopping tool, which we examined in this study, was evidently outstandingly popular, because it was easy to make, and highly effective for this purpose. This is apparently the reason for its enormous distribution over such a long period of time. The present study has expanded our knowledge of the toolkit of early humans – one more step toward understanding their way of life, tracking their migrations, and unraveling the secrets of human evolution.”

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A chopping tool from late Acheulian Revadim. Prof. Ran Barkai

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Article Source: TEL-AVIV UNIVERSITY news release

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PLOS—In the Early Bronze Age of Europe, ancient people used bronze objects as an early form of money, even going so far as to standardize the shape and weight of their currency, according to a study* published January 20, 2020 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Maikel H. G. Kuijpers and C?t?lin N. Popa of Leiden University, Netherlands.

Money is an important feature of modern human society. One key feature of money is standardization, but this can be difficult to identify in the archaeological record since ancient people had inexact forms of measurement compared with today. In this study, the authors assessed possible money from the Early Bronze Age of Central Europe, comparing the objects based on their perceived – if not precise – similarity.

The objects studied were made of bronze in shapes described as rings, ribs, and axe blades. The authors examined more than 5,000 such objects from more than 100 ancient hoards. They statistically compared the objects’ weights using a psychology principle known as the Weber fraction, which quantifies the concept that, if objects are similar enough in mass, a human being weighing them by hand can’t tell the difference.

They found that even though the objects’ weights varied, around 70% of the rings were similar enough to have been indistinguishable by hand (averaging about 195 grams), as were subsets of the ribs and axe blades.

The authors suggest that this consistent similarity in shape and weight, along with the fact that these objects often occurred in hoards, are signs of their use as an early form of standardized currency. Later, in the Middle Bronze Age of Europe, more precise weighing tools appear in the archaeological record along with an increase in scrap bronze, pointing to a developed system of weighing.

The authors add: “The euros of Prehistory came in the form of bronze rings, ribs and axes. These Early Bronze Age artefacts were standardized in shape and weight and used as an early form of money.”

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Ribs (Spangenbarren). M.H.G. Kuijpers, author photo (CC-BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

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Rings (Osenringen). M.H.G. Kuijpers, author photo (CC-BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

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Article Source: PLOS news release

*Kuijpers MHG, Popa CN (2021) The origins of money: Calculation of similarity indexes demonstrates the earliest development of commodity money in prehistoric Central Europe. PLoS ONE 16(1): e0240462. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0240462

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PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES—A recent study* of an ancient wildland-urban interface managed by ancestors of Jemez Pueblo in northern New Mexico could provide an alternate model for modern fire management. As communities expand into fire-prone wildland regions, the threat of wildfire hazards such as property loss increase. Christopher I. Roos and colleagues worked with the Pueblo of Jemez and three other tribes to reconstruct fire use and human impact near settlements in the dry ponderosa pine forests of the Jemez Mountains across centuries. The authors analyzed charcoal and pollen from six sites to look at patterns of fire activity, vegetation change, and herbivore abundance over a 2,000 year period. The authors modeled fire behavior over time by factoring in population size, agricultural land use, fuelwood harvest, and human ignition. Initial settlement from 1100-1300 CE increased fire frequency in the landscape. Wood harvesting and frequent, patchy fires led to landscape that burned often but not extensively. Population collapse following the Spanish invasion brought the return of frequent, widely spreading fires. According to the authors, the landscape avoided extreme fire behavior even given large fires or conducive conditions like drought, and the experiences could inform local management of fire and fuels at modern wildland-urban interfaces.

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Archaeological remains of a “fieldhouse” in Jemez ponderosa pine forests. More than 3,000 similar structures surround more than two dozen villages and towns occupied by Jemez people from 1100-1700 CE. Kacy Hollenback 

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Article Source: PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES news release

*”Native American fire management at an ancient wildland-urban interface in the Southwest United States,” by Christopher I. Roos et al.

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If you think archaeology is much like the popular depictions we often experience through the entertainment industry, you need to think again. 

In a report published in the scientific journal, Nature Ecology and Evolution, researchers of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History relate how real archaeology, the archaeology practiced today by researchers and scholars throughout the world, is actually radically different than the classical archaeology performed by explorers a century or more ago, exemplified typically by scenes of people digging within controlled earthen square units, unearthing remarkably preserved, sensational artifacts—a stereotype often projected to the public by the media. But, as the researchers relate in the paper, much ‘archaeology’ as we know it today is actually more often conducted in the labs behind the scenes, where new techniques and technology is applied to analyze the finds brought from the field, employing a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding not only the artifacts themselves but the contextual landscapes of the finds, human settlement patterns and behavior, and how it all relates to other subject matter and disciplines. As noted in the subject Max Planck Institute press release by Nicole Boivin, lead author of the study and Director of the Institute’s Department of Archaeology: “Archaeology today is a dramatically different discipline to what it was a century ago. While the tomb raiding we see portrayed in movies is over the top, the archaeology of the past was probably closer to this than to present-day archaeology. Much archaeology today is in contrast highly scientific in orientation, and aimed at addressing modern-day issues.”*

“Addressing modern-day issues” is an operative phrase here. Key to understanding the evolution of the discipline today, say the study authors, is recognizing how archaeological research is now bing applied to studying and developing solutions to present-day issues. “It is clear that the past offers a vast repertoire of cultural knowledge that we cannot ignore,” states Professor Boivin in the Max Planck Institute press release.* Recognizing this, researchers are examining the way people in past societies enriched their agricultural land, mitigated or prevented devastating fires, moved and distributed water and made their settlements ‘greener’  without using fossil fuel energy sources. 

The study authors emphasize that today’s advancements in the application of technological and social solutions to global present-day problems, such as climate change, must work in tandem with archaeology. 

“It’s not about glorifying the past, or vilifying progress,” states Boivin in the press release. “Instead, it’s about bringing together the best of the past, present and future to steer a responsible and constructive course for humanity.”

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Around the world today, we can find many examples of how past cultural and technological practices and solutions are being revived to address pressing environmental and land management challenges. Examples include (left to right) mobilization of ancient terra preta (anthropogenic dark earth) technology, revitalization of landesque capital (long-term landscape investments) and adoption of traditional fire management regimes. Michelle O’Reilly

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Archaeological studies of low-density, agrarian-based cities such as ancient Angkor Wat in Cambodia are increasingly being used to inform the development of more sustainable urban centers in the future. Alison Crowther

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*Article Source: A new archaeology for the Anthropocene era, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History

If you liked this article, see Beyond Monuments: Ancient Maya Landscapes Revealed Through Technology for an example of modern archaeology at its best.

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Walking through this lush, tropical forest, visitors may not realize at first that they are among the monumental remains of a large ancient Maya center. Where are all the great stone pyramids, ball-courts, temples, and other monuments so often attributed to great ancient Maya centers? Yet, one sees a tropical landscape that is anything but flat. There is a jungle-shrouded mound here, another one over there. A well-planned walking path winds through what a visitor might describe as the Maya version of the Garden of Eden. Like the very first 18th and 19th century explorers of the Maya world, one sees what could be ancient structures still hidden beneath their canopy shroud. Some of them here have now been partially exposed, betraying what might lie beneath and leaving the rest to the imagination. Visitors soon acquire the impression that this place is very different than any other encountered in the Maya world. Straddling the border between Guatemala and Belize, it is known as El Pilar. It has been explored and studied by archaeologist Dr. Anabel Ford of the University of California, Santa Barbara for decades.

“Based on excavations exposures, several key locales at El Pilar have been consolidated for viewing under the forest canopy, while most have been preserved under a mantel of earth for later consideration,” wrote Ford and co-author Maggie Knapp in a previous article about the site*. “Partial exposures offer examples of the monumental architecture, while the covered temples can be compared with those exposed at other sites. The objective of Archaeology under the Canopy [the program plan for excavating and researching El Pilar] is to maintain architectural harmony and integrity and to give priority to the monuments at risk.” With this approach, Ford hopes to better preserve the site’s monumental features, sustaining the stability of the structures that otherwise would deteriorate due to environmental temperature, humidity, and precipitation effects — all factors that erode plaster walls and the delicate, elaborate facades that characterize ancient Maya works.

Thus, most of the monumental features of this ancient city remain ‘hidden’ beneath its tropical forest shroud. But now, teams of researchers, led by Ford, have recently undertaken a new way of “seeing” the ancient settlement and its surrounding context with high-tech eyes, significantly expanding their understanding of the true complexity and size of its otherwise ‘invisible’ human-modified landscape.

“We have integrated LiDAR imagery into settlement surveys for seven years to examine the landscape beyond  “downtown” El Pilar,” writes Ford and her team of researchers about their recent research**. LiDAR is a method for measuring distances in the topography of an area by directing laser light from aerial positions to the surface and then measuring its reflection with a sensor. The differences in laser return times and wavelengths are then applied to mapping technology to create digital 3-D and other images of the landscape, as well as creating new data sets about the landscape.

“We have documented over 1,862 structures over the 14 square kilometers surveyed to date, with more to be added by future work,” says Ford and her colleagues**.

Much more than this, Ford and her team of researchers have also identified a variety of other features related to how the ancient inhabitants managed or modified their environment within El Pilar’s landscape ‘footprint’, including aguadas (small reservoirs), chultuns (storage pits), berms, depressions, terraces and quarries — all features that would otherwise elude the casual eye as one traverses the area on foot, but which signal site investigators where to look on the ground for evidence of the ancient peoples’ presence and activities.

Additionally, by consulting and cooperating with the indigenous people of today’s El Pilar area — the ‘citizen scientists’ — the researchers have greatly enhanced their ability to accurately interpret what they are finding. Altogether, combining the LiDAR surveys and analysis with the input and knowledge of the indigenous participants have provided a gold mine of information for analysis, promising a fuller and more detailed understanding of the settlement, agricultural activity, and clues to the lifestyle of these ancient people.

Ford believes this overall approach has important implications and significance for the study of the ancient Maya across all of Mesoamerica.

Says Ford and her colleagues: “The combination of these different ways of knowing has a synergistic effect, which deepens mutual understanding across cultures and creates a more holistic framework for conducting research, and we are excited about the direction we are headed.”**

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Map of the El Pilar core, or “city center”, made possible by LiDAR. Courtesy BRASS/El Pilar

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For more about this, see the article, Modeling Ancient Maya Landscapes, in the Winter 2021 issue of Popular Archaeology Magazine. 

*El Pilar: Archaeology under the Canopy, by Anabel Ford and Maggie Knapp, Popular Archaeology Magazine, September 6, 2011. 

**Modeling Ancient Maya Landscapes, by Sherman Horn, Anabel Ford, Thomas Crimmel, Justin Tran, and Jason Woo, Popular Archaeology, Jan. 10, 2021.

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Join Anabel Ford on this unique mega-trip to Mesoamerica!

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