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Supercomputer model simulations reveal cause of Neanderthal extinction

INSTITUTE FOR BASIC SCIENCE—Climate scientists from the IBS Center for Climate Physics discover that, contrary to previously held beliefs, Neanderthal extinction was neither caused by abrupt glacial climate shifts, nor by interbreeding with Homo sapiens. According to new supercomputer model simulations, only competition between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens can explain the rapid demise of Neanderthals around 43 to 38 thousand years ago.

Neanderthals lived in Eurasia for at least 300,000 years. Then, around 43 to 38 thousand years ago they quickly disappeared off the face of the earth, leaving only weak genetic traces in present-day Homo sapiens populations. It is well established that their extinction coincided with a period of rapidly fluctuating climatic conditions, as well as with the arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe. However, determining which of these factors was the dominant cause has remained one of the biggest challenges of evolutionary anthropology.

To quantify which processes played a major role in the collapse of Neanderthal populations one needs to use mathematical models that can realistically simulate the migration of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, their interactions, competition and interbreeding in a changing climatic environment. Such models did not exist previously.

In a new paper published in the journal Quaternary Science Review, Axel Timmermann, Director of the IBS Center for Climate Physics at Pusan National University, presents the first realistic computer model simulation of the extinction of Neanderthals across Eurasia. The model, which is comprised of several thousands of lines of computer code and is run on the IBS supercomputer Aleph, solves a series of mathematical equations that describe how Neanderthals and Homo sapiens moved in a time-varying glacial landscape and under shifting temperature, rainfall and vegetation patterns. In the model both hominin groups compete for the same food resources and a small fraction is allowed to interbreed. The key parameters of the model are obtained from realistic climate computer model simulations, genetic and demographic data.

“This is the first time we can quantify the drivers of Neanderthal extinction,” said Timmermann. “In the computer model I can turn on and off different processes, such as abrupt climate change, interbreeding or competition” he said. By comparing the results with existing paleo-anthropological, genetic and archeological data, Timmermann demonstrated that a realistic extinction in the computer model is only possible if Homo sapiens had significant advantages over Neanderthals in terms of exploiting existing food resources. Even though the model does not specify the details, possible reasons for the superiority of Homo sapiens could have been associated with better hunting techniques, stronger resistance to pathogens or higher level of fecundity.

What exactly caused the rapid Neanderthal demise has remained elusive for a long time. This new computer modeling approach identifies competitive exclusion as the likely reason for the disappearance of our cousins. “Neanderthals lived in Eurasia for the last 300,000 years and experienced and adapted to abrupt climate shifts that were even more dramatic than those that occurred during the time of Neanderthal disappearance. It is not a coincidence that Neanderthals vanished just at the time when Homo sapiens started to spread into Europe” says Timmermann. He adds “The new computer model simulations show clearly that this event was the first major extinction caused by our own species”.

A research team at the IBS Center for Climate Physics is now improving the computer model to also include megafauna and implement more realistic climate forcings. “This is a new field of research in which climate scientists can interact with mathematicians, geneticists, archaeologists and anthropologists”, said Axel Timmermann.

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Computer simulations of population density of Neanderthals (left) and Homo sapiens (right) 43,000 years ago (upper) and 38,000 years ago (lower). Orange/green circles indicate archeological sites of Neanderthals/Homo sapiens during 5,000-year-long intervals centered around 43 and 38 thousand years before present. IBS

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Article Source: INSTITUTE FOR BASIC SCIENCE news release

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Oldest connection with Native Americans identified near Lake Baikal in Siberia

MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY—Using human population genetics, ancient pathogen genomics and isotope analysis, a team of researchers assessed the population history of the Lake Baikal region, finding the deepest connection to date between the peoples of Siberia and the Americas. The current study, published in the journal Cell, also demonstrates human mobility, and hence connectivity, across Eurasia during the Early Bronze Age.

Modern humans have lived near Lake Baikal since the Upper Paleolithic, and have left behind a rich archaeological record. Ancient genomes from the region have revealed multiple genetic turnovers and admixture events, indicating that the transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age was facilitated by human mobility and complex cultural interactions. The nature and timing of these interactions, however, remains largely unknown.

A new study published in the journal Cell reports the findings of 19 newly sequenced ancient human genomes from the region of Lake Baikal, including one of the oldest reported from that region. Led by the Department of Archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, the study illuminates the population history of the region, revealing deep connections with the First Peoples of the Americas, dating as far back as the Upper Paleolithic period, as well as connectivity across Eurasia during the Early Bronze Age.

The deepest link between peoples

“This study reveals the deepest link between Upper Paleolithic Siberians and First Americans,” says He Yu, first author of the study. “We believe this could shed light on future studies about Native American population history.”

Past studies have indicated a connection between Siberian and American populations, but a 14,000-year-old individual analyzed in this study is the oldest to carry the mixed ancestry present in Native Americans. Using an extremely fragmented tooth excavated in 1962 at the Ust-Kyahta-3 site, re-searchers generated a shotgun-sequenced genome enabled by cutting edge techniques in molecular biology.

This individual from southern Siberia, along with a younger Mesolithic one from northeastern Siberia, shares the same genetic mixture of Ancient North Eurasian (ANE) and Northeast Asian (NEA) ancestry found in Native Americans, and suggests that the ancestry which later gave rise to Native Americans in North- and South America was much more widely distributed than previously assumed. Evidence suggests that this population experienced frequent genetic contacts with NEA populations, resulting in varying admixture proportions across time and space.

“The Upper Paleolithic genome will provide a legacy to study human genetic history in the future,” says Cosimo Posth, a senior author of the paper. Further genetic evidence from Upper Paleolithic Siberian groups is necessary to determine when and where the ancestral gene pool of Native Americans came together.

A web of prehistoric connections

In addition to this transcontinental connection, the study presents connectivity within Eurasia as evidenced in both human and pathogen genomes as well as stable isotope analysis. Combining these lines of evidence, the researchers were able to produce a detailed description of the population history in the Lake Baikal region.

The presence of Eastern European steppe-related ancestry is evidence of contact between southern Siberian and western Eurasian steppe populations in the preamble to the Early Bronze Age, an era characterized by increasing social and technological complexity. The surprising presence of Yersinia pestis, the plague-causing pathogen, points to further wide-ranging contacts.

Although spreading of Y. pestis was postulated to be facilitated by migrations from the steppe, the two individuals here identified with the pathogen were genetically northeastern Asian-like. Isotope analysis of one of the infected individuals revealed a non-local signal, suggesting origins outside the region of discovery. In addition, the strains of Y. pestis the pair carried is most closely related to a contemporaneous strain identified in an individual from the Baltic region of northeastern Europe, further supporting the high mobility of those Bronze age pathogens and likely also people.

“This easternmost appearance of ancient Y. pestis strains is likely suggestive of long-range mobility during the Bronze Age,” says Maria Spyrou, one of the study’s coauthors. “In the future, with the generation of additional data we hope to delineate the spreading patterns of plague in more detail,” concludes Johannes Krause, senior author of the study.

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Excavation in 1976 of the Ust’-Kyakhta-3 site located on right bank of the Selenga River in the vicinity of Ust-Kyakhta village in the Kyakhtinski Region of the Republic of Buryatia (Russia). A. P. Okladnikov

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Recent view on the Selenga River close to the archeological site Ust-Kyakhta-3. G. Pavlenok

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The fragmented tooth of individual UKY001 excavated from an archeological layer at the Ust-Kyakhta-3 site dated to the Upper Paleolithic, around 14,000 years old. G. Pavlenok (Published in Pavlenok, G.D., and Zubova, A. V. (2019). New Dental Finds Associated with the Paleolithic Selenga Culture, Western Trans-Baikal Region. Archaeol. Ethnol. Anthropol. Eurasia 47.)

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

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New study records dual hand use in early human relative

UNIVERSITY OF KENT—Research by anthropologists at the University of Kent has identified hand use behavior in fossil human relatives that is consistent with modern humans.

The human lineage can be defined by a transition in hand use. Early human ancestors used their hands to move around in the trees, like living primates do today, whereas modern human hands have evolved to primarily perform precision grips.

However, new research led by Dr Christopher Dunmore, Dr Matthew Skinner and Professor Tracy Kivell from Kent’s School of Anthropology and Conservation has revealed that the hand of an ancient human relative was used for both human-like manipulation as well as climbing.

Their discovery came from analyzing and comparing the internal bony structures of fossil knuckle and thumb joints from the hands of several fossil species from South Africa, eastern Africa and Europe. These included: Australopithecus sedibaAustralopithecus africanusAustralopithecus afarensisHomo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens dated between 12 thousand and three million years old.

The knuckles at the base of Australopithecus sediba‘s fingers were found to have an internal trabecular structure consistent with branch grasping, but that of their thumb joints is consistent with human-like manipulation. This unique combination is different to that found in the other Australopithecus species studied and provides direct evidence that ape-like features of this species were actually used, probably during climbing. Furthermore, it supports the idea that the transition to walking on two legs was gradual in this late surviving member of the Australopithecus genus.

Dr Dunmore said: ‘Internal bone structures are shaped by frequent behaviors during life. Therefore, our findings can support further research into the internal structure of hands in relation to stone tool use and production. This approach may also be used to investigate how other fossil hominin species moved around and to what degree climbing might have remained an important part of their lifestyle.’

Professor Kivell said: ‘The internal bone structure can reveal hidden evidence that gives us insight into how our fossil human relatives behaved. We were really excited to see this particular hand-use pattern in Australopithecus sediba as it was so different from other australopiths. The fossil record is revealing more and more diversity in the ways our ancestors moved around, and interacted with, their environments – the human evolutionary story is even more complex and interesting than we previously thought.’

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Malapa cave, where Australopithecus sediba was found. Lee Berger

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The skull of MH1 (A. sediba specimen) at the site. Photo by Brett Eloff, courtesy Lee Berger

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The Malapa Hominin 2 (MH2) articulated in situ, where it was found in the cave. Peter Schmid, courtesy Tracy Kivell

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The MH2 hand in palmar (left) and dorsal views (right). Peter Schmid, courtesy Tracy Kivell

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Article Source: A UNIVERSITY OF KENT news release

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A lost world and extinct ecosystem

ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY—Archaeological sites on the far southern shores of South Africa hold the world’s richest records for the behavioral and cultural origins of our species. At this location, scientists have discovered the earliest evidence for symbolic behavior, complex pyrotechnology, projectile weapons and the first use of foods from the sea.

The Arizona State University Institute of Human Origins (IHO) field study site of Pinnacle Point sits at the center of this record, both geographically and scientifically, having contributed much of the evidence for these milestones on the evolutionary road to being a modern human.

The scientists working on these sites, led by IHO Associate Director Curtis Marean, have always faced a dilemma in understanding the context of these evolutionary milestones — much of the landscape used by these ancient people is now submerged undersea and thus poorly known to us. Marean is a Foundation Professor with the ASU School of Human Evolution and Social Change and Honorary Professor with Nelson Mandela University in South Africa.

The archaeological records come from caves and rockshelters that now look out on to the sea, and in fact, walking to many of the sites today involves dodging high tides and waves. However, through most of the last 200,000 years, lowered sea levels during glacial phases, when the ice sucks up the water, exposed a vast plain. The coast was sometimes as much as 90 km distant! Our archaeological data shows that this was the prime foraging habitat for these early modern humans, and until recently, we knew nothing about.

That has now changed with the publication of 22 articles in a special issue of Quaternary Science Reviews titled “The Palaeo-Agulhas Plain: A lost world and extinct ecosystem.” About ten years ago, Marean began building a transdisciplinary international team to tackle the problem of building an ecology of this ancient landscape. ASU, Nelson Mandela University, the University of Cape Town, and the University of California at Riverside anchored the research team. Funded primarily by a $1 million National Science Foundation grant to Marean, with significant funding and resources from the Hyde Family Foundations, the John Templeton Foundation, ASU, IHO, and XSEDE, they developed an entirely new way to reconstruct “paleoecologies” or ancient ecosystems.

This began with using the high-resolution South African regional climate model — running on U.S. and South African supercomputers — to simulate glacial climate conditions. The researchers used this climate output to drive a new vegetation model developed by project scientists to recreate the vegetation on this paleoscape. They then used a wide variety of studies such as marine geophysics, deep-water diving for sample collection, isotopic studies of stalagmites and many other transdisciplinary avenues of research to validate and adjust this model output. They also created a human “agent-based model” through modern studies of human foraging of plants, animals, and seafoods, simulating how ancient people lived on this now extinct paleoscape.

“Pulling the threads of all this research into one special issue illustrates all of this science,” said Curtis Marean. “It represents a unique example of a truly transdisciplinary paleoscience effort, and a new model for going forward with our search to recreate the nature of past ecosystems. Importantly, our results help us understand why the archaeological records from these South African sites consistently reveal early and complex levels of human behavior and culture. The Palaeo-Agulhas Plain, when exposed, was a ‘Serengeti of the South”‘ positioned next to some of the richest coastlines in the world. This unique confluence of food from the land and sea cultivated the complex cultures revealed by the archaeology and provided safe harbor for humans during the glacial cycles that revealed that plain and made much of the rest of the world unwelcoming to human life.”

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Looking out at the Palaeo-Agulhas Plain from the cave entrance at the Pinnacle Point, South Africa, research site–left, 200,000 years ago during glacial phases and lower sea levels, and right, today where the ocean is within yards of the cave entrances at high tides. Erich Fisher

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Article Source: ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY news release

If you liked this article, you may also like Where Hominins Became Human, published previously in Popular Archaeology.

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Archaeology: Fossilized footprints suggest ancient humans divided labor

SCIENTIFIC REPORTS—The largest collection of footprints from the human fossil record in Africa is described in Scientific Reports this week. The findings, which further our understanding of human life during the Late Pleistocene period (126,000 to 11,700 years ago), suggest a division of labour in ancient human communities.

Kevin Hatala and colleagues uncovered 408 human footprints in Engare Sero, Tanzania after the site was discovered by members of a nearby Maasai community. The researchers dated the footprints to between 19,100 and 5,760 years ago. Based on their size, the distances between them and their orientations, the authors suggest that 17 tracks of footprints were created by a group of individuals moving together at walking speed in a southwesterly direction. The group was likely made up of 14 adult females, two adult males and one young male. The authors speculate that the females who made the tracks were foraging together and were visited or accompanied by the males, as this behavior is observed in modern hunter-gatherers such as the Ache and Hadza. The findings may indicate a division of labor based on sex in ancient human communities.

For an additional six tracks of footprints oriented to the northeast, the authors estimate a broader range of variation in speed, which may suggest that they were not created by a single group traveling together, but by various individuals running and walking at different speeds.

The findings provide a snapshot of the movements and group behavior of modern humans living in east Africa during the Late Pleistocene period.

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The Late Pleistocene human footprints near Lake Natron. Richard Mortel, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license, Wikimedia Commons

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*Article Source: Scientific Reports news release and study report

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Ancient DNA unveils important missing piece of human history

CHINESE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES HEADQUARTERS—Newly released genomes from Neolithic East Asia have unveiled a missing piece of human prehistory, according to a study conducted by Prof. FU Qiaomei’s team from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The study, published in Science on May 14, reveals that population movement played a profound role in the early genetic history of East Asians.

The researchers used advanced ancient DNA capture techniques to retrieve ancient DNA from 25 individuals dating back 9,500-4,200 years and one individual dating back 300 years from northern and southern East Asia.

The newly sequenced DNA casts a spotlight on an important period in East Asia’s early history: the transition from hunter-gathering to agricultural economies.

One hypothesis for population movement in East Asia is that during the Neolithic, a “second layer” of agriculturalists replaced a “first layer” of hunter-gatherers in East and Southeast Asia.

While the genetics of ancient humans in Southeast Asia, Siberia, and the Japanese archipelago have been well-studied, little has been known until now about the genetics of ancient humans in northern and southern China.

Prof. FU and her team found that these Neolithic humans share the closest genetic relationship to present-day East Asians who belong to this “second layer.” This suggests that by 9,500 years ago, the primary ancestries composing the genetic makeup of East Asians today could already be found in mainland East Asia.

While more divergent ancestries can be found in Southeast Asia and the Japanese archipelago, in the Chinese mainland, Neolithic populations already displayed genetic features belonging to present-day East Asians.

Notably, this includes the Early Neolithic southern East Asians dating to ~8,000 years from this study that should have been “first layer” early Asians, according to the earlier hypothesis. In fact, Prof. FU and her team showed that they shared a closer relationship to present-day “second layer” East Asians. Thus, the results of the current study fail to support a “two layer” dispersal model in Neolithic East Asia in this area.

The scientists also found that Early Neolithic East Asians were more genetically differentiated from each other than present-day East Asians are. In early Neolithic East Asia since 9,500 BP, a northern ancestry existed along the Yellow River and up into the eastern steppes of Siberia, distinct from a southern ancestry that existed along the coast of the southern Chinese mainland and islands in the Taiwan Strait since 8,400 BP.

Population movement may have already started impacting East Asians by the Late Neolithic. For example, the Late Neolithic southern East Asians may have shared a connection to coastal northern East Asians and the former’s ancestry may have extended north as well.

Today, most East Asian populations are not clearly separated into two distinct groups. Present-day mainland East Asians from both the north and south share a closer genetic relationship to northern Neolithic East Asians along the Yellow River than to southern Neolithic East Asians on the southern coast of China.

Further analyses show that they are almost all a mixture of northern and southern ancestry from Neolithic East Asia, with northern ancestry playing a larger role. Population movement, particularly from the north along the Yellow River southward was a prominent part of East Asian prehistory after the Neolithic.

Interestingly, present-day Han Chinese in all provinces, north and south, show a similar amount of northern and southern influences.

Southern ancestry, while less represented in mainland East Asia today, had extensive influence on other regions. Present-day Austronesian speakers, who share a close genetic relationship to present-day mainland East Asians but live across a wide swath of islands in Southeast Asia and the Southwest Pacific, show a remarkably close genetic relationship to Neolithic populations from the southern coast of China.

Archaeological materials dating back to the Middle Neolithic have long hinted at the connection between Austronesian islanders and populations in mainland East Asia. Now, the genetic relationships uncovered by Prof. FU and her team show unambiguous evidence that Austronesian speakers today originated from a proto-Austronesian population that derived from southern China at least 8,400 year ago.

The history revealed by these 26 ancient humans highlights the profound impact that population movement and mixture had on human history, but they also reveal continuity that extends back 9,500 years. Unlike in Europe, influences from Central Asia had no role in the formation of East Asian ancestry, with mixing largely occurring regionally between northern and southern populations in East Asia.

The whole slate of ancestries present across East Asia during the Neolithic is still unknown, as genome-wide data have not been retrieved from many inland regions of mainland East Asia.

But coastal connections between ancient populations in Siberia, Japan, China, and Southeast Asia suggest that as more ancient DNA is retrieved and studied, a complex history of population contact and admixture in East Asian human prehistory will be revealed.

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Skull of Qihe 2, a ~8,400-year-old individual from Qihe Cave, Fujian, China. FAN Xuechun

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Piece of petrous bone from a ~9,500-year-old individual from Bianbian Cave, Shandong, China. This individual was part of a northern ancestry group found along the Yellow River and up into the eastern steppes of Siberia. GAO Wei

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Article Source: CHINESE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES HEADQUARTERS news release

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Researchers trace evolution of self-control

UNIVERSITY OF YORK—Human self-control evolved in our early ancestors, becoming particularly evident around 500,000 years ago when they developed the skills to make sophisticated tools, a new study suggests.

While early hominins such as Homo erectus could craft basic handaxes as early as 1.8 million years ago, our hominin ancestors began to create more elaborate and carefully designed versions of these tools sometime before 500,000 years ago.

The authors of the study*, from the University of York, say these advances in craftsmanship suggest individuals at this time possessed characteristics which demonstrate significant self-control, such as concentration and frustration tolerance.

The study highlights a collection of 500,000 year-old flint axes unearthed from a gravel quarry in the village of Boxgrove in West Sussex. The axes are highly symmetrical suggesting careful workmanship and the forgoing of immediate needs for longer term aims.

Senior author of the study, Dr Penny Spikins, from the Department of Archaeology said: “More sophisticated tools like the Boxgrove handaxes start to appear around the same time as our hominin ancestors were developing much bigger brains.

“The axes demonstrate characteristics that can be related to self-control such as the investment of time and energy in something that does not produce an immediate reward, forward planning and a level of frustration tolerance for completing a painstaking task.

“In the present day our capacity for self-control has become particularly important. Without the advanced levels of self-control we possess as a species, lockdown would be impossible. It takes self-control to put the needs of the community first rather than focus on our own immediate ends. Our study offers some clues as to where in human history this ability originated.”

The researchers also point to evidence that the production of highly symmetrical and elaborate axes would have required knowledge and skill accumulated over a life time.

In one study, it took people trying to replicate the axes discovered at Boxgrove 16 hours of practice to even produce a recognizable handaxe.

Lead author of the study, James Green, a PhD student in the Department of archaeology at the University of York, added: “By deciphering the mental and physical processes involved in the production of prehistoric artifacts, we can gain valuable insights into the abilities of the individuals who made them.

“These axes demonstrate social learning and effortful activity directed at honing skills. They also provide some of the earliest evidence of something being deliberately made in a sequence from a picture in someone’s mind.

“Self-control is not unique to humans, but may have played an important role in our evolution. It’s key to many of the traits which define modern humans such as pro-sociality, cooperation and caring for the vulnerable.”

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The paleolithic handaxe. Credit/Source: The Portable Antiquities Scheme, CC By-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF YORK news release

*Not just a virtue: The evolution of self-control is published in Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture

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Geometry guided construction of earliest known temple, built 6,000 years before Stonehenge

AMERICAN FRIENDS OF TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY—The sprawling 11,500-year-old stone Göbekli Tepe complex in southeastern Anatolia, Turkey, is the earliest known temple in human history and one of the most important discoveries of Neolithic research.

Researchers at Tel Aviv University and the Israel Antiquities Authority have now used architectural analysis to discover that geometry informed the layout of Göbekli Tepe’s impressive round stone structures and enormous assembly of limestone pillars, which they say were initially planned as a single structure.

Three of the Göbekli Tepe’s monumental round structures, the largest of which are 20 meters in diameter, were initially planned as a single project, according to researchers Gil Haklay of the Israel Antiquities Authority, a PhD candidate at Tel Aviv University, and Prof. Avi Gopher of TAU’s Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations. They used a computer algorithm to trace aspects of the architectural design processes involved in the construction of these enclosures in this early Neolithic site.

Their findings were published in Cambridge Archaeological Journal in May.

“Göbekli Tepe is an archaeological wonder,” Prof. Gopher explains. “Built by Neolithic communities 11,500 to 11,000 years ago, it features enormous, round stone structures and monumental stone pillars up to 5.5 meters high. Since there is no evidence of farming or animal domestication at the time, the site is believed to have been built by hunter-gatherers. However, its architectural complexity is highly unusual for them.”

Discovered by German archaeologist Dr. Klaus Schmidt in 1994, Göbekli Tepe has since been the subject of hot archaeological debate. But while these, and other early Neolithic remains, have been intensively studied, the issue of architectural planning during these periods and its cultural ramifications have not.

Most researchers have made the case that the Göbekli Tepe enclosures at the main excavation area were constructed over time. However, Haklay and Prof. Gopher say that three of the structures were designed as a single project and according to a coherent geometric pattern.

“The layout of the complex is characterized by spatial and symbolic hierarchies that reflect changes in the spiritual world and in the social structure,” Haklay explains. “In our research, we used an analytic tool — an algorithm based on standard deviation mapping — to identify an underlying geometric pattern that regulated the design.”

“This research introduces important information regarding the early development of architectural planning in the Levant and in the world,” Prof. Gopher adds. “It opens the door to new interpretations of this site in general, and of the nature of its megalithic anthropomorphic pillars specifically.”

Certain planning capabilities and practices, such as the use of geometry and the formulation of floor plans, were traditionally assumed to have emerged much later than the period during which the Göbekli Tepe was constructed — after hunter-gatherers transformed into food-producing farmers some 10,500 years ago. Notably, one of the characteristics of early farmers is their use of rectangular architecture.

“This case of early architectural planning may serve as an example of the dynamics of cultural changes during the early parts of the Neolithic period,” Haklay says. “Our findings suggest that major architectural transformations during this period, such as the transition to rectangular architecture, were knowledge-based, top-down processes carried out by specialists.

“The most important and basic methods of architectural planning were devised in the Levant in the Late Epipaleolithic period as part of the Natufian culture and through the early Neolithic period. Our new research indicates that the methods of architectural planning, abstract design rules and organizational patterns were already being used during this formative period in human history.”

Next, the researchers intend to investigate the architectural remains of other Neolithic sites throughout the Levant.

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Göbekli Tepe, Enclosure C. Gil Haklay/AFTAU.

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Geometric pattern underlying the architectural planning of a complex at Göbekli Tepe. A diagram superimposed over the schematic plan. Gil Haklay/AFTAU.

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Article Source: AMERICAN FRIENDS OF TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY news release

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If you liked this article, you will like Göbekli Tepe: Discovering the World’s Oldest Religious Site, a major feature article previously published in Popular Archaeology.

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The oldest Upper Paleolithic Homo sapiens in Europe

MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY—Two studies report new Homo sapiens fossils from the site of Bacho Kiro Cave in Bulgaria. “The Bacho Kiro Cave site provides evidence for the first dispersal of H. sapiens across the mid-latitudes of Eurasia. Pioneer groups brought new behaviors into Europe and interacted with local Neanderthals. This early wave largely predates that which led to their final extinction in western Europe 8,000 years later”, says Jean-Jacques Hublin, director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

An international research team, led by Jean-Jacques Hublin, Tsenka Tsanova and Shannon McPherron of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and Nikolay Sirakov and Svoboda Sirakova of the National Institute of Archaeology with Museum at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in Sofia, Bulgaria, renewed excavations at Bacho Kiro Cave in 2015. The most spectacular finds come from a rich, dark layer near the base of the deposits. Here the team uncovered thousands of animal bones, stone and bone tools, beads and pendants and the remains of five human fossils.

Protein analysis

Except for one human tooth, the human fossils were too fragmented to be recognized by their appearance. Instead, they were identified by analyzing their protein sequences. “Most Pleistocene bones are so fragmented that by eye, one cannot tell which species of animal they represent. However, the proteins differ slightly in their amino acid sequence from species to species. By using protein mass spectrometry, we can therefore quickly identify those bone specimens that represent otherwise unrecognizable human bones”, says Frido Welker, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Copenhagen and research associate at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

To know the age of these fossils and the deposits at Bacho Kiro Cave, the team worked closely with Lukas Wacker at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, using an accelerator mass spectrometer to produce ages with higher precision than normal and to directly date the human bones.

“The majority of animal bones we dated from this distinctive, dark layer have signs of human impacts on the bone surfaces, such as butchery marks, which, along with the direct dates of human bones, provides us with a really clear chronological picture of when Homo sapiens first occupied this cave, in the interval from 45,820 to 43,650 years ago, and potentially as early as 46,940 years ago”, says Helen Fewlass of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “The radiocarbon dates at Bacho Kiro Cave are not only the largest dataset of a single Palaeolithic site ever made by a research team, but also are the most precise in terms of error ranges”, say researchers Sahra Talamo from the University of Bologna and Bernd Kromer from the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig.

DNA sequencing

Though some researchers have suggested that Homo sapiens may have already occasionally entered Europe by this time, finds of this age are typically attributed to Neanderthals. To know which group of humans were present at Bacho Kiro Cave, Mateja Hajdinjak and Matthias Meyer of the genetics team led by Svante Pääbo at the Department of Evolutionary Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology sequenced the DNA from the fragmented fossils bones.

“Given the exceptionally good DNA preservation in the molar and the hominin fragments identified by protein mass spectrometry, we were able to reconstruct full mitochondrial genomes from six out of seven specimens and attribute the recovered mitochondrial DNA sequences from all seven specimens to modern humans. Interestingly, when relating these mtDNAs to those of other ancient and modern humans, the mtDNA sequences from Layer I fall close to the base of three main macrohaplogroups of present-day people living outside of Sub-Saharan Africa. Furthermore, their genetic dates align almost perfectly with those obtained by radiocarbon”, says Mateja Hajdinjak, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Francis Crick Institute in London and research associate at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

The results demonstrate that Homo sapiens entered Europe and began impacting Neanderthals by around 45,000 years ago and likely even earlier. They brought into Bacho Kiro Cave high quality flint from sources up to 180 km from the site which they worked into tools like pointed blades perhaps to hunt and very likely to butcher the remains of the animals found at the site.

“The animal remains from the site illustrate a mix of cold and warm adapted species, with bison and red deer most frequent”, says palaeontologist Rosen Spasov from the New Bulgarian University. These were butchered extensively but were also used as a raw material source. “The most remarkable aspect of the faunal assemblage is the extensive collection of bone tools and personal ornaments”, says zooarchaeologist Geoff Smith from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Cave bear teeth were made into pendants, some of which are strikingly similar to ornaments later made by Neanderthals in western Europe.

Homo sapiens replaced Neanderthals

Taken together, the Bacho Kiro Cave sediments document the period of time in Europe when Middle Paleolithic Neanderthals were replaced by Upper Paleolithic Homo sapiens (the so-called transition period), and the first Homo sapiens assemblages are what archaeologists call the Initial Upper Paleolithic. “Up to now, the Aurignacian was thought of as the start of the Upper Paleolithic in Europe, but the Initial Upper Paleolithic of Bacho Kiro Cave adds to other sites in western Eurasia where there is an even older presence of Homo sapiens“, notes Nikolay Sirakov of the National Institute of Archaeology with Museum at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

“The Initial Upper Paleolithic in Bacho Kiro Cave is the earliest known Upper Palaeolithic in Europe. It represents a new way of making stone tools and new sets of behavior including manufacturing personal ornaments that are a departure from what we know of Neanderthals up to this time”, says Tsenka Tsanova of the Department of Human Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “The Initial Upper Paleolithic probably has its origin in southwest Asia and soon after can be found from Bacho Kiro Cave in Bulgaria to sites in Mongolia as Homo sapiens rapidly dispersed across Eurasia and encountered, influenced, and eventually replaced existing archaic populations of Neanderthals and Denisovans.”

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Excavations in Initial Upper Paleolithic Layer I at Bacho Kiro Cave (Bulgaria). Four Homo sapiens bones were recovered from this layer along with a rich stone tool assemblage, animal bones, bone tools, and pendants. Tsenka Tsanova, License: CC-BY-SA 2.0

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Stone artifacts from the Initial Upper Paleolithic at Bacho Kiro Cave: 1-3, 5-7 Pointed blades and fragments from Layer I; 4 Sandstone bead with morphology similar to bone beads; 8 The longest complete blade. Tsenka Tsanova, License: CC-BY-SA 2.0

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Article Source: MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY news release

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Neanderthals were choosy about making bone tools

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA – DAVIS—Evidence continues to mount that the Neanderthals, who lived in Europe and Asia until about 40,000 years ago, were more sophisticated people than once thought. A new study from UC Davis shows that Neanderthals chose to use bones from specific animals to make a tool for specific purpose: working hides into leather.

Naomi Martisius, research associate in the Department of Anthropology, studied Neanderthal tools from sites in southern France for her doctoral research. The Neanderthals left behind a tool called a lissoir, a piece of animal rib with a smoothed tip used to rub animal hides to make them into leather. These lissoirs are often worn so smooth that it’s impossible to tell which animal they came from just by looking at them.

Martisius and colleagues used highly sensitive mass spectrometry to look at residues of collagen protein from the bones. The method is called ZooMS, or Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry. The technique breaks up samples into fragments that can be identified by their mass to charge ratio and used to reconstruct the original molecule.

Normally, this method would involve drilling a sample from the bone. To avoid damaging the precious specimens, Martisius and colleagues were able to lift samples from the plastic containers in which the bones had been stored and recover enough material to perform an analysis.

Favoring bovine ribs over deer

The results show that the bones used to make lissoirs mostly came from animals in the cattle family, such as bison or aurochs (a wild relative of modern cattle that is now extinct). But other animal bones from the same deposit show that reindeer were much more common and frequently hunted for food. So the Neanderthals were choosing to use only ribs from certain types of animals to make these tools.

“I think this shows that Neanderthals really knew what they were doing,” Martisius said. “They were deliberately picking up these larger ribs when they happened to come across these animals while hunting and they may have even kept these rib tools for a long time, like we would with a favorite wrench or screwdriver.”

Bovine ribs are bigger and more rigid than deer ribs, making them better suited for the hard work of rubbing skins without wearing out or breaking.

“Neanderthals knew that for a specific task, they needed a very particular tool. They found what worked best and sought it out when it was available,” Martisius said.

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Evidence continues to mount that the Neanderthals, who lived in Europe and Asia until about 40,000 years ago, were more sophisticated people than once thought. A new study from UC Davis shows that Neanderthals chose to use bones from specific animals to make a tool for specific purpose: working hides into leather. Naomi Martisius, UC Davis

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA – DAVIS, news release

The results were published May 8 in Scientific Reports. Coauthors on the study are Teresa Steele, professor of anthropology and Mark Grote at UC Davis; Frido Welker, University of Copenhagen; Tamara Dogandi?, Virginie Sinet-Mathiot and Shannon McPherron, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Liepzig; William Rendu, Université de Bordeaux, France; Arndt Wilcke, Fraunhofer Institute for Cell Therapy and Immunology, Liepzig; and Marie Soressi, Leiden University, The Netherlands. The work was partly supported by the NSF.

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Ancient Andes, analyzed

HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL—An international research team has conducted the first in-depth, wide-scale study of the genomic history of ancient civilizations in the central Andes mountains and coast before European contact.

The findings, published online May 7 in Cell, reveal early genetic distinctions between groups in nearby regions, population mixing within and beyond the Andes, surprising genetic continuity amid cultural upheaval, and ancestral cosmopolitanism among some of the region’s most well-known ancient civilizations.

Led by researchers at Harvard Medical School and the University of California, Santa Cruz, the team analyzed genome-wide data from 89 individuals who lived between 500 and 9,000 years ago. Of these, 64 genomes, ranging from 500 to 4,500 years old, were newly sequenced–more than doubling the number of ancient individuals with genome-wide data from South America.

The analysis included representatives of iconic civilizations in the Andes from whom no genome-wide data had been reported before, including the Moche, Nasca, Wari, Tiwanaku and Inca.

“This was a fascinating and unique project,” said Nathan Nakatsuka, first author of the paper and an MD/PhD student in the lab of David Reich in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS.

“It represents the first detailed study of Andean population history informed by pre-Colonial genomes with wide-ranging temporal and geographic coverage,” said Lars Fehren-Schmitz, associate professor at UC Santa Cruz and co-senior author of the paper with Reich.

“This study also takes a major step toward redressing the global imbalance in ancient DNA data,” said Reich, professor of genetics at HMS and associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

“The great majority of published ancient DNA studies to date have focused on western Eurasia,” he said. “This study in South America allows us to begin to discern at high resolution the detailed history of human movements in this extraordinarily important part of the world.”

Attention on the Andes

The central Andes, surrounding present-day Peru, is one of the few places in the world where farming was invented rather than being adopted from elsewhere and where the earliest presence of complex civilizations in South America has been documented so far. While the region has been a major focus of archaeological research, there had been no systematic characterization with genome-wide ancient DNA until now, the authors said.

Geneticists, including several of the current team members, previously studied the deep genetic history of South America as a whole, including analysis of several individuals from the Andean highlands from many thousands of years ago. There have also been analyses of present-day residents of the Andes and a limited number of mitochondrial or Y-chromosome DNA analyses from individual ancient Andean sites.

The new study, however, expands on these findings to provide a far more comprehensive portrait. Now, Nakatsuka said, researchers are “finally able to see how the genetic structure of the Andes evolved over time.”

By focusing on what is often called pre-Columbian history, the study demonstrates how large ancient DNA studies can reveal more about ancient cultures than studying present-day groups alone, said Reich.

“In the Andes, reconstruction of population history based on DNA analysis of present-day people has been challenging because there has so been much demographic change since contact with Europeans,” Reich explained. “With ancient DNA data, we can carry out a detailed reconstruction of movements of people and how those relate to changes known from the archaeological record.”

‘Extraordinary’ ancient population structure

The analyses revealed that by 9,000 years ago, groups living in the Andean highlands became genetically distinct from those that eventually came to live along the Pacific coast. The effects of this early differentiation are still seen today.

The genetic fingerprints distinguishing people living in the highlands from those in nearby regions are “remarkably ancient,” said Nakatsuka, who will receive his PhD in systems, synthetic and quantitative biology in May.

“It is extraordinary, given the small geographic distance,” added Reich.

By 5,800 years ago, the population of the north also developed distinct genetic signatures from populations that became prevalent in the south, the team found. Again, these differences can be observed today.

After that time, gene flow occurred among all regions in the Andes, although it dramatically slowed after 2,000 years ago, the team found.

“It is exciting that we were actually able to determine relatively fine-grained population structure in the Andes, allowing us to differentiate between coastal, northern, southern and highland groups as well as individuals living in the Titicaca Basin,” said Fehren-Schmitz.

“This is significant for the archaeology of the Andes and will now allow us to ask more specific questions with regards to local demographies and cultural networks,” said study co-author Jose Capriles of Pennsylvania State University.

Genetic intermingling

The team discovered genetic exchanges both within the Andes and between Andean and non-Andean populations.

Ancient people moved between south Peru and the Argentine plains and between the north Peru coast and the Amazon, largely bypassing the highlands, the researchers found.

Fehren-Schmitz was especially interested to uncover signs of long-range mobility in the Inca period. Specifically, he was surprised to detect ancient North Coast ancestry not only around Cusco, Peru, but also in a child sacrifice from the Argentinian southern Andes.

“This could be seen as genetic evidence for relocations of individuals under Inca rule, a practice we know of from ethnohistorical, historical and archaeological sources,” he said.

Although the findings of genetic intermingling throughout the Andes correlate with known archaeological connections, they will likely prompt additional archaeological research to understand the cultural contexts underlying the migrations, said Nakatsuka.

“Now we have more evidence demonstrating important migrations and some constraints on when they happened, but further work needs to be done to know why exactly these migrations occurred,” he said.

Long-term continuity

The analyses revealed that multiple regions maintained genetic continuity over the past 2,000 years despite clear cultural transformations.

The finding contrasts with many other world regions, where ancient DNA studies often document substantial genetic turnover during this period, said Reich.

The population structures that arose early on persisted through major social changes and on into modern societies, the authors said. The discoveries offer new evidence that can be incorporated alongside archaeological and other records to inform theories on the ancient history of different groups in the region.

“To our surprise, we observed strong genetic continuity during the rise and fall of many of the large-scale Andean cultures, such as the Moche, Wari and Nasca,” said Nakatsuka. “Our results suggest that the fall of these cultures was not due to massive migration into the region, e.g., from an invading military force, a scenario which had been documented in some other regions of the world.”

Two exceptions to the continuity trend were the vast urban centers that the Tiwanaku and Inca cultures called home. Rather than being fairly genetically homogeneous, the capital regions of these civilizations were cosmopolitan, hosting people from many genetic backgrounds, the team found.

“It was interesting to start to see these glimpses of ancestral heterogeneity,” said Nakatsuka. “These regions have some similarity to what we see now in places like New York City and other major cities where people of very different ancestries are living side by side.”

Cooperative authorship

The study included authors from many disciplines and many countries, including Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, Chile, Germany, Peru, the United Kingdom and the United States.

“This is an impressive interdisciplinary but, just as importantly, international collaboration,” said study co-author Bastien Llamas of the University of Adelaide. “All worked very closely to draft this manuscript under the leadership of Fehren-Schmitz and Reich.”

It was important to team up with local scientists who belong to communities that descend from the individuals analyzed in the study, Fehren-Schmitz said, and to obtain permission from and continually engage with indigenous and other local groups as well as local governments.

The analysis of DNA from ancient individuals can have significant implications for present-day communities. One concerns the physical handling of the skeletal materials, which might be sensitive to the groups involved.

The work provided opportunities to heal past wounds. In one case, a sample from Cusco, previously housed in the U.S., was repatriated to Peru. Other remains that had long ago been taken improperly from burial sites were able to be carbon-dated and reburied.

In the absence of pre-Columbian written histories, archaeology has been the main source of information available to reconstruct the complex history of the continent, said study co-author Chiara Barbieri of the University of Zurich.

“With the study of ancient DNA, we can read the demographic history of ancient groups and understand how ancient and present-day groups are related,” she said. “The link with the genetic study of living populations opens a direct dialogue with the past and an occasion to involve local communities.”

The researchers sought to deeply involve communities with the help of archaeologists from each area, said Nakatsuka. Their efforts included giving public talks about the study and translating materials into Spanish.

“We were really happy to have the summary and key findings of our paper translated and included as part of the Cell paper itself, to increase accessibility of our work,” said Nakatsuka. “We hope future studies will do similar translations, including versions suitable for lay audiences for schools, museum exhibits and cultural organizations, which we are in the process of doing as well.”

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An international research team has conducted the first in-depth, wide-scale study of the genomic history of ancient civilizations in the central Andes mountains and coast before European contact. The analysis included representatives of iconic civilizations in the Andes from whom no genome-wide data had been reported before, including the Moche, Nasca, Wari, Tiwanaku and Inca. Shown here is a detail from the Tiwanaku Gate of the Sun. Miguel Angel López

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Article Source: HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL news release

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Demographic expansion of several Amazonian archaeological cultures by computer simulation

UNIVERSITAT POMPEU FABRA – BARCELONA—Expansions by groups of humans were common during prehistoric times, after the adoption of agriculture. Among other factors, this is due to population growth of farmers which was greater than of that hunter-gatherers. We can find one example of this during the Neolithic period, when farming was introduced to Europe by migrations from the Middle East.

However, in South America, it was not clear whether the same would have occurred as it was argued that no cultural group had expanded across such long distances as in Europe or Asia. In addition, it was believed that the type of agriculture practiced by pre-Columbian peoples in the Amazon would not allow them to expand at the same rate.

Research conducted by three members of the Culture and Socio-Ecological Dynamics Research Group (CaSEs) at the UPF Department of Humanities shows that expansions by some archaeological cultures in South America can be simulated by computer through population growth and migration in the same way as the Neolithic in Europe. This is the case of so-called Saladoid-Barrancoid culture, which spread from the Orinoco to various parts of Amazonia, even reaching the Caribbean.

The article, published on 27 April in the journal PLOS ONE, involved Jonas Gregorio de Souza, a Marie Curie researcher, as first author, together with Jonas Alcaina Mateos, a predoctoral researcher, and Marco Madella, UPF-ICREA research professor and director of the CaSEs Research Group.

“The use of computer simulations to test human migrations in prehistoric times is an approach that has proved productive in other continents, but had not been applied to the area of the tropics of South America. We have shown that some cultural expansions that have taken place from Amazonia may be the result of similar demographic processes to the Neolithic in Eurasia”, says Jonas Gregorio de Souza.

A computational model to simulate the expansions of four archaeological cultures

The article uses a computational approach to simulate human expansions in prehistory. “We use parameters derived from the ethnography of farmers in the Amazon to simulate the rate of population growth, the fission of villages, how far and how often they moved”, the authors state. Based on these parameters, they created a computer model to simulate expansions from different points and dates and compare the results with archaeological data.

The researchers used radiocarbon dates from different archaeological cultures over a large area of territory in the last 5,000 years, which were compared with the prediction of the model, to assess whether their rate of territorial expansion could be explained as being a demographic phenomenon (rather than another type, such as cultural diffusion).

The four archaeological cultures or traditions analyzed were the Saladoid-Barrancoid, the Arauquinoid, the Tupiguarani, and the (closely related) Una, Itararé and Aratu traditions. In most regions where they settled, these cultures introduced the cultivation of domesticated plants, marked the transition towards more permanent settlements, and spread an economic model called “polycultureagroforestry”.

However, the authors warn that some expansions could not be predicted by the simulations, suggesting that they were caused by other factors: “Although some archaeological expansions can be predicted, by the simulations, as demographic processes, others are not easily explained in the same way. This is possibly due to different processes that drive their dispersal, such as cultural diffusion, or because the archaeological data are inconclusive or sparse”, they conclude.

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Computer simulation of the expansions of several archaeological cultures in South America. UPF

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Article Source: UNIVERSITAT POMPEU FABRA – BARCELONA news release

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African skeletons from early colonial Mexico tell the story of first-generation slaves

MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY—Five centuries after Charles I of Spain authorized the transport of the first African slaves to the Viceroyalty of New Spain, the ancestry of the hundreds of thousands of abducted and enslaved people forms an integral part of the genetic and cultural heritage of the Americas. The origins and experiences of those enslaved individuals, however, remains largely unknown.

This study*, published in Current Biology, applies an interdisciplinary approach to explore the backgrounds and living conditions of three African individuals recovered from a mass grave on the grounds of Hospital Real de San José de los Naturales, an early colonial period hospital in Mexico City officially devoted to the indigenous population. Dated to the 16th century, these individuals tell the stories of some of the earliest people forcefully relocated to the Americas in the early years of European colonialism.

Multidisciplinary study reconstructs the lives of early enslaved Africans

The three individuals in the study first caught the attention of the team with their distinct dental modifications, a filing of the upper front teeth consistent with cultural practices recorded for African slaves which can still be observed in some groups living in western Africa today.

“Combining molecular biology, isotopic data and bioinformatic tools with classical historical, anthropological and archaeological evidence allowed us to gain insights into the life history of some of the earliest African slaves in the Americas,” says Johannes Krause, director of the Department of Archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPI SHH).

Genetic analysis showed that all three individuals shared a Y-chromosome lineage that is highly prevalent in Sub-Saharan Africa, and which is now the most common lineage among African Americans. Combined with isotopic data showing that all three individuals were born outside of Mexico and osteobiographies showing years of physical abuse before premature death, the findings suggest that these individuals may be among the first Africans to reach the Americas after being abducted in their homelands in Sub-Saharan Africa.

“Modern lab techniques allow us to gather incredible amounts of data from very little biological material. The amount of information we can give back to archaeologists, anthropologists and society today using only one tooth from each individual is something we could only dream about just ten years ago,” says Rodrigo Barquera, the study’s lead author.

The spread of pathogens across the Atlantic

Researchers from all three departments and one independent group of the MPI SHH and two laboratories from the ENAH combined their expertise to tell the story of these individuals, examining not only their ancestry and origins, but also their health status and life experiences. The team was able to reconstruct two full pathogen genomes from tooth samples. One individual was infected with a strain of the Hepatitis B virus (HBV) typically found in western Africa today.

“Although we have no indication that the HBV lineage we found established itself in Mexico, this is the first direct evidence of HBV introduction as the result of the transatlantic slave trade,” says Denise Kühnert, leader of the tide research group at MPI SHH. “This provides novel insight into the phylogeographic history of the pathogen.”

Another individual was infected with Treponema pallidum pertenue which causes yaws, a painful infection of the bones similar to syphilis that affects joints and skin. The same strain of yaws has been previously identified in a 17th century colonist of European descent, suggesting the establishment of this disease lineage of African origin in the early colonial population of Mexico.

“This study sheds light into early cases of yaws after the European colonization of the Americas,” says Aditya Kumar Lankapalli of MPI SHH. “Future studies should focus on understanding the transmission and introduction of this pathogen to the Americas. More high-coverage ancient Treponema genomes will allow us to get a better understanding of the coevolution and adaptation of this pathogen to humans.”

“Interdisciplinary studies like this will make the study of the past a much more personal matter in the future,” adds Thiseas C. Lamnidis. The authors hope that future interdisciplinary endeavors will continue to provide insights into the lives, deaths and legacies of historically oppressed groups whose stories have been buried, often in mass graves.

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The skull of one of the individuals studied, in which the dental modifications are apparent, and the tubes used for isotope and genetic tests, both of which were carried out as part of our study. One of the strong points of our paper is the junction of several disciplines in telling a whole story, which we exemplify in this picture combining two different lab approaches together with ethnohistory and anthropology to get a complete picture. Collection of San José de los Naturales, Osteology Laboratory, (ENAH), Mexico City, Mexico. Photo: R. Barquera

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Skulls and dental decoration patterns for the three African individuals from the San José de los Naturales Royal Hospital. A. Skull from individual 150 (SJN001). B. Skull from individual 214 (SJN002). C. Skull from individual 296 (SJN003). D. Close-up of dental modification patterns for individual 150 (SJN001). E. Close-up of dental modification patterns for individual 214 (SJN002). F. Close-up of dental modification patterns for individual 296 (SJN003). Collection of San José de los Naturales, Osteology Laboratory, (ENAH), Mexico City, Mexico. Photo: R. Barquera & N. Bernal.

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Some osteological findings for individual 150 (SJN001). A. Exostosis at the insertion of the coracoclavicular ligament and origin site of the deltoid muscle. B. Thoracic vertebra displaying early signs of a developing of Schmörl’s hernia on the inferior aspect of the vertebral body. C. Green coloration acquired by contact with copper on the cervical vertebrae. D. Green coloration acquired by contact with copper on the costal end of a rib diaphysis. Collection of San José de los Naturales, Osteology Laboratory, (ENAH), Mexico City, Mexico. Photo: R. Barquera & N. Bernal.

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

*”Origin and Health Status of first generation Africans from early Colonial Mexico”, Rodrigo Barquera et al., Current Biology DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2020.04.002

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Deformed skulls in an ancient cemetery reveal a multicultural community in transition

PLOS—The ancient cemetery of Mözs-Icsei d?l? in present-day Hungary holds clues to a unique community formation during the beginnings of Europe’s Migration Period, according to a study* published April 29, 2020 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Corina Knipper from the Curt-Engelhorn-Center for Archaeometry, Germany, István Koncz, Tivadar Vida from the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary and colleagues.

As the Huns invaded Central Europe during the 5th century, the Romans abandoned their Pannonian provinces in the area of modern-day Western Hungary. Pannonia’s population entered a period of continuous cultural transformation as new foreign groups arrived seeking refuge from the Huns, joining settlements already populated by remaining local Romanized population groups and other original inhabitants. (Later, the Huns themselves would fall to an alliance of Germanic groups.) To better understand this population changing rapidly under chaotic circumstances, Knipper and colleagues turned to the cemetery of Mözs-Icsei d?l? in the Pannonian settlement of Mözs, established around 430 AD.

The authors conducted an archaeological survey of the cemetery and used a combination of isotope analysis and biological anthropology to investigate the site’s previously-excavated burials.

They found that Mözs-Icsei d?l? was a remarkably diverse community and were able to identify three distinct groups across two or three generations (96 burials total) until the abandonment of Mözs cemetery around 470 AD: a small local founder group, with graves built in a brick-lined Roman style; a foreign group of twelve individuals of similar isotopic and cultural background, who appear to have arrived around a decade after the founders and may have helped establish the traditions of grave goods and skull deformation seen in later burials; and a group of later burials featuring mingled Roman and various foreign traditions.

51 individuals total, including adult males, females, and children, had artificially deformed skulls with depressions shaped by bandage wrappings, making Mözs-Icsei d?l? one of the largest concentrations of this cultural phenomenon in the region. The strontium isotope ratios at Mözs-Icsei d?l? were also significantly more variable than those of animal remains and prehistoric burials uncovered in the same geographic region of the Carpathian Basin, and indicate that most of Mözs’ adult population lived elsewhere during their childhood. Moreover, carbon and nitrogen isotope data attest to remarkable contributions of millet to the human diet.

Though further investigation is still needed, Mözs-Icsei d?l? appears to suggest that in at least one community in Pannonia during and after the decline of the Roman Empire, a culture briefly emerged where local Roman and foreign migrant groups shared traditions as well as geographical space.

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Upper part of the body of grave 43 during excavation. The girl had an artificially deformed skull, was place in a grave with a side niche and richly equipped with a necklace, earrings, a comb and glass beads. The girl belonged to a group of people with a non-local origin and similar dietary habits, which appeared to have arrived at the site about 10 years after its establishment. Wosinsky Mór Museum, Szekszárd, Hungary.

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Artificially deformed skull of an adult woman. Permanent binding during childhood caused the elongation of the braincase and the depressions in the bone. Balázs G. Mende. Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary

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Article Source: PLOS news release

*Knipper C, Koncz I, Ódor JG, Mende BG, Rácz Z, Kraus S, et al. (2020) Coalescing traditions–Coalescing people: Community formation in Pannonia after the decline of the Roman Empire. PLoS ONE 15(4): e0231760. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0231760

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Evidence of Late Pleistocene human colonization of isolated islands beyond Wallace’s Line

MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY—A new article published in Nature Communications applies stable isotope analysis to a collection of fossil human teeth from the islands of Timor and Alor in Wallacea to study the ecological adaptations of the earliest members of our species to reach this isolated part of the world. Because the Wallacean islands are considered extreme, resource poor settings, archaeologists believed that early seafaring populations would have moved rapidly through this region without establishing permanent communities. Nevertheless, this has so far been difficult to test.

This study, led by scientists from the Department of Archaeology, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPI SHH), alongside colleagues from the Australian National University and Universitas Gadjah Mada, used an isotopic methodology that reveals the resources consumed by humans during the period of tooth formation. They demonstrate that the earliest human fossil so far found in the region, dating to around 42,000-39,000 years ago, relied upon coastal resources. Yet, from 20,000 years ago, humans show an increasing reliance on tropical forest environments, away from the island coasts. The results support the idea that one distinguishing characteristic of Homo sapiens is high ecological flexibility, especially when compared to other hominins known from the same region.

Pleistocene hominin adaptations in Southeast Asia

Over the last two decades, archaeological evidence from deserts, high-altitude settings, tropical rainforests, and maritime habitats seem to increasingly suggest that Late Pleistocene humans rapidly adapted to a number of extreme environments. By contrast, our closest hominin relatives, such as Homo erectus and Neanderthals, apparently used various mixtures of forests and grasslands, albeit from as far apart as the Levant, Siberia, and Java. However, this apparent distinction needs testing, especially as finds of another closely related hominin, the Denisovans, have been found on the high-altitude Tibetan Plateau.

As one of the corresponding authors on the new paper, Sue O’Connor of Australian National University says, “The islands beyond Wallace’s Line are ideal places to test the adaptive differences between our species and other hominins. These islands were never connected to mainland Southeast Asia during the Pleistocene, and would have ensured that hominins had to make water crossings to reach it.” Tropical forest settings like those in Wallacea are often considered barriers to human expansion and are a far cry from the sweeping ‘savannahs’ with an abundance of medium to large mammals that hominins are believed to have relied on.

Fossils and stone tools show that hominins made it to Wallacean islands at least one million years ago, including the famous ‘Hobbit,’ or Homo floresiensis, on the island of Flores. When our own species arrived 45,000 years ago (or perhaps earlier), it is thought to have quickly developed the specialized use of marine habitats, as evidenced by one of the world’s earliest fish hooks found in the region. Nevertheless, as co-author Ceri Shipton puts it “the extent of this maritime adaptation has remained hotly debated and difficult to test using snapshots based on, often poorly preserved, animal remains.”

Stable isotope analysis and Late Pleistocene humans

This new paper uses stable carbon isotopes measured from fossil human teeth to directly reconstruct the long-term diets of past populations. Although this method has been used to study the diets and environments of African hominins for nearly half a century, it has thus far been scarcely applied to the earliest members of our own species expanding within and beyond Africa. Using the principle ‘you are what you eat,’ researchers analyzed powdered hominin tooth enamel from 26 individuals dated between 42,000 and 1,000 years ago to explore the types of resources they consumed during tooth formation.

The new paper shows that the earliest human fossil available from the region, excavated from the site of Asitau Kuru on Timor, was indeed reliant on maritime resources, suggesting a well-tuned adaptation to the colonization of coastal areas. “This fits with our existing models of rapid human movement through Wallacea on the way to Australia,” says co-author Shimona Kealy of the Australian National University.

From around 20,000 years ago, however, human diets seem to have switched inland, towards the supposedly impoverished resources of the island forests. Although some individuals maintained the use of coastal habitats, the majority seemingly began to adapt to the populations of small mammals and tropical forest plants in the region. As co-author Mahirta at Universitas Gadjah Mada puts it, “Coastal resources such as shellfish and reef fish are easy to exploit and available year-round, however growing populations likely forced early island occupants to look inland to other resources.”

A species defined by flexibility

This study provides the first direct insights into the adaptations of our own species as it settled in a series of challenging island environments in Wallacea. “Early human populations here, and elsewhere, could not only successfully use the enormous variety of often-extreme Pleistocene environments,” suggests Patrick Roberts, lead author of the study and Group Leader at MPI SHH, “they could also specialize in them over substantial periods of time. As a result, even if some local populations did fail, the species as a whole would go on to become tremendously prolific.”

As dense tropical rainforests replaced mixed grass and woodlands, other hominins in Southeast Asia went extinct. Ecological flexibility, supported by unique technologies and the capacity for social relationships and symbolism, seem to have carried Homo sapiens through the climactic fluctuations of the Late Pleistocene, however. The authors concede that more work is needed to conclusively test the ecological distinction between hominin species. The discovery of Denisovan populations in the tropical environments of Asia or application of this isotopic approach to other hominins in the tropics could yet show Homo sapiens to be less exceptional. Nonetheless, for the time being it seems that it was our species that could best adapt to the variety of environments across the face of the planet, leaving it, by the end of the Pleistocene, the last hominin standing.

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The site of Makpan, Alor. Sue O’Connor

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Shell fish hook recovered from the site of Lene Hara dating to 11,000 years ago. An earlier, less complete example was recovered from Asitau Kuru, indicating an early marine specialization for humans arriving on these islands. Sue O’Connor.

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Maps showing the location of the sites studied within Wallacea. Asitau Kuru, Lene Hara, Matja Kuru 1 and 2 (Timor), Makpan, and Tron Bon Lei (Alor). Roberts, et al., (2020), Australian National University CartoGIS 19-282 KD

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

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Genetic research links Koban culture people with ancient and modern ethnic groups of the Northern Caucasus

A group of scientists from the Institute of Archaeology RAS, NRC “Kurchatov Institute” and other scientific organizations for the first time have conducted a genetic analysis of the remains from cemeteries of the Koban culture, dated between the 9th and 5th centuries AD. The analysis of paleo- DNA of mitochondrial and Y-chromosome haplogroups has confirmed genetic succession of cultures of the ancient Caucasus and its relation both with ancient and with modern ethnic groups that inhabited this region. The results of the research were published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

The skeletal remains of fourteen representatives of the Koban archaeological culture were selected for the research. Five were excavated from burials of barrow ‘Klin-Yar 3’ in the vicinity of modern Kislovodsk between 1994-1996, and nine others from a complex of archaeological sites near the village Zayukovo in Kabardino-Balkaria, which has been studied systematically since 2014 by the co-operative expedition of the State Historical Museum and Kabardino-Balkaria State University with participation of the IA RAS.

The samples of paleo DNA were extracted from teeth and bones in the laboratory of NRC “Kurchatov Institute” to identify maternal and paternal haplogroups, the groups that unite men who have common ascendants with similar mutation in the core or mitochondrial genome.

The analysis of the ancient DNA of the individuals from the burials of the Koban archaeological culture revealed the predominance of some mitochondrial and Y-chromosome haplogroups that spread in ancient Europe and Caucasus.

The main haplogroups of Y-chromosomes studied by the researchers are common for Caucasus and Europe in the period of the Iron Age: E1a2a, G2a1a, R1b and R1a.

The haplogroup G2a1a, which now is widely spread among the Ossetians, Balkars and Svans, is usually associated with Middle Eastern and European Neolithic cultures. Of special interest is the haplogroup discovered earlier during the examination of the buried in T-shape catacombs, which are traditionally related to the Alans inhabited Ciscaucasia and the Northern Caucasus in the period from the 1st to the beginning of the 2nd millennium.

The haplogroups R1a and R1b are usually associated with Indo-European migrations, described as the Scythes and Sarmatians. Today, these haplogroups together with the haplogroup E1a2a are identified as modern Northern Caucasian ethnic groups: the Balkars, the Karachi, the Darghins, the Lezghians and the Abkhazians. Therefore, the genetic researches have confirmed the theory about the Scythian influence on the Koban culture, which until the present has been based solely on archaeological material.

The haplogroups of the mitochondrial DNA of the humans who were buried in the cemeteries of Klin-Yar-3 and Zayukovo-3 are related to groups that were discovered earlier both as ancient and modern ethnic groups of the Northern Caucasus.

Among the burials, the male individual from the burial Zayukovo-3 stands out with a rare HV mitochondrial haplogroup that penetrated Europe through the territory of Caucasus after the last Ice Age Maximum (26.5 – 19 thousand years ago) and in the Neolithic period (10 – 3 thousand years ago). Moreover, this man was different with an unusual genetic origin and the paternal line, the haplogroup of the Y-chromosome of this sample D1a2a1, has been widely described in Eastern Asia.

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The places of the burials of the Koban archaeological culture (1 – Klin-Yar 3; 2 – Zayukovo-3). Institute of Archaeology RAS

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Bronze items from the barrow Zayukovo-3. Photo by A. Kadieva (SHM) and S. Demidenko (IA RAS)

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Article Source: Institute of Archaeology RAS news release

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X-ray analysis sheds light on construction and conservation of artifacts from Henry VIII’s warship

UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK—21st century X-ray technology has allowed University of Warwick scientists to peer back through time at the production of the armor worn by the crew of Henry VIII’s favored warship, the Mary Rose.

Three artifacts believed to be remains of chainmail recovered from the recovered hull have been analyzed by an international team of scientists led by the Universities of Warwick and Ghent using a state-of-the-art X-ray facility called XMaS (X-ray Materials Science) beamline.

They analyzed three brass links as part of continuing scientific investigations into the artifacts recovered during the excavation of the wreck in the Solent. These links have often been found joined to make a sheet or a chain and are most likely to be from a suit of chainmail armor. By using several X-ray techniques available via the XMaS beamline to examine the surface chemistry of the links, the team were able to peer back through time to the armor’s production and reveal that these links were manufactured from an alloy of 73% copper and 27% zinc.

Emeritus Professor Mark Dowsett from the University of Warwick’s Department of Physics said: “The results indicate that in Tudor times, brass production was fairly well controlled and techniques such as wire drawing were well developed. Brass was imported from Ardennes and also manufactured at Isleworth. I was surprised at the consistent zinc content between the wire links and the flat ones. It’s quite a modern alloy composition.”

The exceptionally high sensitivity analysis revealed traces of heavy metals, such as lead and gold, on the surface of the links, hinting at further history to the armor yet to be uncovered.

Professor Dowsett explains: “The heavy metal traces are interesting because they don’t seem to be part of the alloy but embedded in the surface. One possibility is that they were simply picked up during the production process from tools used to work lead and gold as well. Lead, mercury and cadmium, however, arrived in the Solent during WW2 from the heavy bombing of Portsmouth Dockyard. Lead and arsenic also came into the Solent from rivers like the Itchen over extended historical periods.

“In a Tudor battle, there might be quite a lot of lead dust produced by the firing of munitions. Lead balls were used in scatter guns and pistols, although stone was used in canon at that time.”

The Tudor warship the Mary Rose was one of the first warships that Henry VIII ordered not long after he ascended to the throne in 1509. Often considered to be his favorite, on 19 July 1545 it sank in the Solent during a battle with a French invasion fleet. The ship sank to the seabed and over time the silts covered and preserved its remains as a remarkable record of Tudor naval engineering and ship board life.

In 1982 the remaining part of the hull was raised and is now housed in the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth alongside many thousands of the 19,000 artifacts that were also recovered, many of which were remarkably well preserved by the Eocene clays.

After recovery, the three artifacts were subjected to different cleaning and conservation treatments to prevent corrosion (distilled water, benzotriazole (BTA) solution, and cleaning followed by coating with BTA and silicone oil). This research also analyzed the surface chemistry of the brass links to assess and compare the levels of corrosion between the different techniques, finding that all had been effective at preventing corrosion since being recovered.

Professor Dowsett added: “The analysis shows that basic measures to remove chlorine followed by storage at reduced temperature and humidity form an effective strategy even over 30 years.”

XMaS is owned by the Universities of Liverpool and Warwick and is located in Grenoble, France, at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF). It works with over 90 active research groups, representing several hundred researchers, in diverse fields ranging across materials science, physics, chemistry, engineering and biomaterials and contributes to societal challenges including energy storage and recovery, tackling climate change, the digital economy and advances in healthcare.

It is a National Research Facility and is currently undergoing a major upgrade thanks to £7.2million funding from the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills through the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

Professor Mieke Adriaens, Head of the Electrochemistry and Surface Analysis Group at Ghent University said: “XMaS is extremely versatile and flexible in the analytical strategies which can be devised and implemented. What’s more, the beamline scientists are amongst the best we’ve encountered anywhere. It is fascinating to examine ancient technology using specially developed analytical methods which can then be applied to modern materials too. It was also a real privilege to be allowed access to these unique artifacts and to play a part in unravelling their story.”

Professor Eleanor Schofield, Head of Conservation at the Mary Rose: “This study clearly shows the power of combining sophisticated techniques such as those available at a synchrotron source. We can glean information not only on the original production, but also on how it has reacted to being the marine environment and crucially, how effective the conservation strategies have been.

Co-author Professor Pam Thomas, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research at the University of Warwick, said: “We are very pleased that researchers at Warwick are continuing to put our expertise in Analytical Sciences at the forefront of research on important historical artifacts. The long tradition of X-ray scattering and diffraction science within the Department of Physics at Warwick continues to give high-quality data and leads to penetrating insight across a wide range of scientific problems. It is testament both to the expertise at the XMaS beamline of ESRF and in the X-Ray Diffraction Research Technology Platform (RTP) at Warwick.”

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A cleaned and conserved link. Mark Dowsett with permission from the Mary Rose Trust

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The conserved Mary Rose at the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth. ©Johnny Black

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK news release

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Icelandic DNA jigsaw puzzle brings new knowledge about Neanderthals

AARHUS UNIVERSITY—An international team of researchers has put together a new image of Neanderthals based on the genes Neanderthals left in the DNA of modern humans when they had children with them about 50,000 years ago. The researchers found the new pieces of the puzzle by trawling the genomes of more than 27,000 Icelanders. Among other things, they discovered that Neanderthal women gave birth when they were older than the Homo sapiens women at that time, and Neanderthal men became fathers when they were younger.

It is well-known that a group of our ancestors left Africa and, about 50,000 years ago, met Neanderthals in Europe, and then had children with them.

Now, a new analysis shows that the Neanderthals may have had children with another extinct species of human (Denisovans), before they met Homo Sapiens, and that these children have been fertile and transferred genes from both species further on to modern people.

The analysis also shows that the Neanderthal women living 100,000 – 500,000 years ago on average became mothers at a later age than the contemporary Homo sapiens women living in Africa. On the other hand, Neanderthal men fathered at a younger age than their Homo sapiens cousins in Africa.

How can an analysis show all that?

Neanderthals may well be extinct, but small pieces of their DNA live on in us. All living people outside Africa have up to two per cent Neanderthal genes in their DNA.

However, this two per cent is scattered as small fragments in our genomes, and not all individuals have inherited the same fragments. The fragments are like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and if they are put together correctly, they will show a picture of the genome in the Neanderthal population that the modern Homo sapiens had children with.

New method to find the pieces

First, of course, we have to find these pieces. And this is precisely what the group of researchers from Denmark, Iceland and Germany did to produce their results, published today in the scientific journal Nature.

One of them, Laurits Skov, postdoc from the Bioinformatics Research Centre (BiRC) at Aarhus University, has developed a method for tracing Neanderthal fragments in our DNA. Laurits and PhD student Moisès Coll Macià took the method to Iceland, where the genetics firm deCODE has amassed genetic data and health information for more than half of the Icelandic population.

“We spent several months at deCODE in Reykjavik on what can be called field studies for a computational biologist. By combining my method with deCODE’s data and expertise, we have analyzed 27,566 genomes, and this makes our study 10 times larger than previous studies of Neanderthal genes in human DNA,” says Laurits Skov.

Together, the many fragments account for approximately half of a complete Neanderthal genome.

Denisovan genes gone astray?

However, the researchers also found significant fragments of genetic material from another archaic species of human, Denisovans, in the DNA of the Icelanders, and this was something of a surprise. Up to now, Denisovan genes have primarily been found in Australian Aborigines, East Asians and people in Papua New Guinea. So how did these genes end up in Islanders’ DNA? And when?

Based on the distribution of genes and mutations, the researchers came up with two possible explanations.

Neanderthals may have had children with Denisovans before they met the Homo sapiens. This would mean that the Neanderthals with whom Homo sapiens had children were already hybrids, who transferred both Neanderthal and Denisovan genes to the children.

“Up to now, we believed that the Neanderthals modern people have had children with were “pure” Neanderthals. It’s true that researchers have found the remnants of a hybrid between Denisovans and Neanderthals in a cave in East Asia, but we have not known whether there were more of these hybrids and whether, thousands of years later, they had children with modern humans,” explains Professor Mikkel Heide Schierup from BiRC.

Or, Homo sapiens met Denisovans long before they met Neanderthals. So far, it has been thought that modern humans met Neanderthals and had children with them first, and not until tens of thousands of years later did they have children with Denisovans.

“Both explanations are equally likely, and both explanations will be scientific news,” says Mikkel Heide Schierup.

Neanderthal genes of little importance

The study also shows that the Neanderthal DNA has no great importance for modern humans.

“We have previously thought that many of the Neanderthal variants previously been found in modern human DNA were associated with an increased risk of diseases. However, our study shows that the human gene variants located directly beside the Neanderthal genes are better explanations for the risk. We have also found something that can only be explained by Neanderthal genes, but this doesn’t mean that much,” says Mikkel Heide Schierup.

The properties and risks of diseases that can be linked to Neanderthal DNA are: slightly lower risk of prostate cancer, lower levels of hemoglobin, lower body length (one millimeter) and slightly faster blood plasma clotting.

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DNA of Icelanders provides new knowledge about extinct human species. Astrid Reitzel, Aaarhus University

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Article Source: AARHUS UNIVERSITY news release

Examining heart extractions in ancient Mesoamerica

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS JOURNALS—Sacrificial rituals featuring human heart extraction were a prevalent religious practice throughout ancient Mesoamerican societies. Intended as a means of appeasing and honoring certain deities, sacrifices served as acts of power and intimidation as well as demonstrations of devotion and gratitude. Human sacrifices were highly structured, complex rituals performed by elite members of society, and the ceremonies included a myriad of procedures imbued with symbolic significance.

The specific techniques performed, the instrumentation utilized, and the underlying mythology motivating sacrifices varied across civilizations. Given the diversity of sacrificial rituals throughout Mesoamerica, Vera Tiesler and Guilhem Olivier assert an interdisciplinary approach incorporating scientific and humanistic evidence is needed in order to gain more nuanced insights into the procedural elements and the religious implications of human sacrifice during the Classic and Postclassic periods.

In the study, “Open Chests and Broken Hearts: Ritual Sequences and Meanings of Human Heart Sacrifice in Mesoamerica,” published in Current Anthropology, Tiesler and Olivier conduct an anatomical analysis of skeletal evidence and compare it with systematically checked historical sources and over 200 instances of ceremonial heart extraction in codices. Focusing on the location of openings created in the chest to allow for the removal of a victim’s heart and blood, the authors examine the resulting fractures and marks in articulated skeletons to infer about the nature of the entry wound and the potential instrumentation used.

The breadth of source material and the multitude of disciplinary approaches has led to debate among scholars. While the archaeological record provides evidence of these ceremonies, less tangible elements of the rituals–such as the symbolism of these processes–may be harder to discern. Descriptions of human sacrifice and heart extraction can likewise be found in written witness testimonies and in Mesoamerican iconography. However, witness accounts were often inconsistent, especially concerning the position of the extraction site.

Utilizing forensic data in conjunction with an analysis of ethnohistorical accounts, the authors detail three distinct heart extraction methods: cutting directly under the ribs (subdiaphragmatic thoracotomy); making an incision between two ribs (intercostal thoracotomy); or by horizontally severing the sternum in order to access the heart (transverse bilateral thoracotomy). While previous research indicates subdiaphragmatic thoracotomy was a common practice, Tiesler and Olivier expand upon the existing literature by providing reconstructions of intercostal thoracotomy and transverse bilateral thoracotomy.

In addition to providing a more comprehensive understanding of extraction techniques and devices, the study reveals new interpretations of the relationship between thoracotomy procedures and conceptualizations of the human body as a source of “vitalizing matter,” or food for the gods. Hearts and blood were offered as sustenance to deities representing the sun and the earth in recognition of their sacrifices during the creation of the universe. Data–including linguistic analysis of ancient Mesoamerican terminology–reinforce suggestions that these rites served as acts of obligation, reciprocation, and re-enactment.

The interdisciplinary nature of the study enables future research by offering a framework for analyzing sacrificial rituals in other ancient societies, including ancient civilizations in the Andes and India.

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Human heart sacrifices in Mesoamerica. CINVESTAV Unidad Mérida

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Ritual official holding a dripping heart, pierced with a large curved knife, Atetelco murals, Teotihuacan. Courtesy of the authors, Tiesler and Olivier

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS JOURNALS news release

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Study sheds light on unique culinary traditions of prehistoric hunter-gatherers

UNIVERSITY OF YORK—Hunter-gatherer groups living in the Baltic between seven and a half and six thousand years ago had culturally distinct cuisines, analysis of ancient pottery fragments has revealed.

An international team of researchers analyzed over 500 hunter-gatherer vessels from 61 archaeological sites throughout the Baltic region.

They found striking contrasts in food preferences and culinary practices between different groups – even in areas where there was a similar availability of resources. Pots were used for storing and preparing foods ranging from marine fish, seal and beaver to wild boar, bear, deer, freshwater fish hazelnuts and plants.

The findings suggest that the culinary tastes of ancient people were not solely dictated by the foods available in a particular area, but also influenced by the traditions and habits of cultural groups, the authors of the study say.

A lead author of the study, Dr Harry Robson from the Department of Archaeology at the University of York, said: “People are often surprised to learn that hunter-gatherers used pottery to store, process and cook food, as carrying cumbersome ceramic vessels seems inconsistent with a nomadic life-style.

“Our study looked at how this pottery was used and found evidence of a rich variety of foods and culinary traditions in different hunter-gatherer groups.”

The researchers also identified unexpected evidence of dairy products in some of the pottery vessels, suggesting that some hunter-gatherer groups were interacting with early farmers to obtain this resource.

Dr Robson added: “The presence of dairy fats in several hunter-gatherer vessels was an unexpected example of culinary ‘cultural fusion’. The discovery has implications for our understanding of the transition from hunter-gatherer lifestyles to early farming and demonstrates that this commodity was either exchanged or perhaps even looted from nearby farmers.”

Lead author of the study, Dr Blandine Courel from the British Museum, added: “Despite a common biota that provided lots of marine and terrestrial resources for their livelihoods, hunter-gatherer communities around the Baltic Sea basin did not use pottery for the same purpose.

“Our study suggests that culinary practices were not influenced by environmental constraints but rather were likely embedded in some long-standing culinary traditions and cultural habits.”

The study, led by the Department of Scientific Research at the British Museum, the University of York and the Centre for Baltic and Scandinavian Archaeology (Stiftung Schleswig-Holsteinische Landesmuseen, Germany), used molecular and isotopic techniques to analyze the fragments of pottery.

Senior author, Professor Oliver Craig from the Department of Archaeology at the University of York, said: “Chemical analysis of the remains of foods and natural products prepared in pottery has already revolutionized our understanding of early agricultural societies, we are now seeing these methods being rolled out to study prehistoric hunter-gatherer pottery. The results suggest that they too had complex and culturally distinct cuisines.”

Organic residue analysis shows sub-regional patterns in the use of pottery by Northern European hunter-gatherers is published in Royal Society Open Science. The research was funded by the European Research Council through a grant awarded to the British Museum.

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Pottery fragments found at the Havnø kitchen midden, Northern Denmark. Harry Robson, University of York

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF YORK news release

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