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MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY—The last decade has seen rapid development in the archaeology of Saudi Arabia. Recent discoveries range from early hominin sites hundreds of thousands of years old to sites just a few hundred years old. One enigmatic aspect of the archaeological record of western Arabia is the presence of millions of stone structures, where people have piled rocks to make different kinds of structures, ranging from burial tombs to hunting traps. One enigmatic form consists of vast rectangular shapes. Archaeologists working with the AlUla Royal Commission gave these the name ‘mustatils,’ which is Arabic for rectangle.

Mustatils only occur in northwest Saudi Arabia. They had been previously recognized from satellite imagery and as they were often covered by younger structures, it had been speculated that they might be ancient, perhaps extending back to the Neolithic.

In this new article led by Dr Huw Groucutt (group leader of the Extreme Events Research Group which is a Max Planck group spanning the Max Planck Institutes for Chemical Ecology, the Science of Human History, and Biogeochemistry) an international team of researchers under the auspices of the Green Arabia Project (a large project headed by Prof. Michael Petraglia from the Department of Archaeology at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and the Saudi Ministry for Tourism as well as collaborators from multiple Saudi and international institutions) conducted the first every detailed study of mustatils. Through a mixture of field survey and analyzing satellite imagery, the team have considerably extended knowledge on these enigmatic stone structures.

More than one hundred new mustatils have been identified around the southern margins of the Nefud Desert, between the cities of Ha’il and Tayma, joining the hundreds previously identified from studies of Google Earth imagery, particularly in the Khaybar area. The team found that these structures typically consist of two large platforms, connected by parallel long walls, sometimes extending over 600 meters in length. The long walls are very low, had no obvious openings and are located in diverse landscape settings. It is also interesting that little in the way of other archaeology – such as stone tools – was found around the mustatils. Together these factors suggest that the structures were not simply utilitarian entities for something like water or animal storage.

At one locality the team were able to date the construction of a mustatil to 7000 thousand years ago, by radiocarbon dating charcoal from inside one of the platforms. An assemblage of animal bones was also recovered, which included both wild animals and possibly domestic cattle, although it is possible that the latter are wild auroch. At another mustatil the team found a rock with a geometric pattern painted onto it.

“Our interpretation of mustatils is that they are ritual sites, where groups of people met to perform some kind of currently unknown social activities,” says Groucutt. “Perhaps they were sites of animal sacrifices, or feasts.”

The fact that sometimes several of the structures were built right next to each other may suggest that the very act of their construction was a kind of social bonding exercise. Northern Arabia 7,000 years ago was very different to today. Rainfall was higher, so much of the area was covered by grassland and there were scattered lakes. Pastoralist groups thrived in this environment, yet it would have been a challenging place to live, with droughts a constant risk.

The team’s hypothesis is that mustatils were built as a social mechanism to live in this challenging landscape. They may not be the oldest buildings in the world, but they are on a uniquely large scale for this early period, more than two thousand years before pyramids began to be constructed in Egypt. Mustatils offer fascinating insights into how humans have lived in challenging environments and future studies promise to be extremely useful at understanding these ancient societies.

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New archaeological research in Saudi Arabia documents hundreds of stone structures interpreted as monumental sites where early pastoralists carried out rituals. Image shows character of these structures as two platforms connected by low walls. Note researchers at far end for scale. Huw Groucutt

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Mustatils only occur in northwest Saudi Arabia. They had been previously recognized from satellite imagery and as they were often covered by younger structures, it had been speculated that they might be ancient, perhaps extending back to the Neolithic. Image shows view from inside the largest mustatil yet identified, stretching for over 600 metres. Huw Groucutt

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

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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA – IRVINEIrvine, Calif., – Physical evidence found in caves in Laos helps tell a story about a connection between the end of the Green Sahara – when once heavily vegetated Northern Africa became a hyper-arid landscape – and a previously unknown megadrought that crippled Southeast Asia 4,000 to 5,000 years ago.

In a paper published today in Nature Communications, scientists at the University of California, Irvine, the University of Pennsylvania, William Paterson University of New Jersey and other international institutions explain how this major climate transformation led to a shift in human settlement patterns in Southeast Asia, which is now inhabited by more than 600 million people.

“In this study, we provide the first proof for a strong link between the end of the Green Sahara and Southeast Asian monsoon failure during the mid- to late Holocene period,” said co-author Kathleen Johnson, UCI associate professor of Earth system science. “Our high-resolution and well-dated record suggests a strong connection between Northern Africa and mainland Southeast Asia during this time.”

To create a paleoclimate record for the study, Johnson and other researchers gathered stalagmite samples from caves in Northern Laos. In her UCI laboratory, they measured the geochemical properties of the oxygen and carbon isotopes, carbon-14, and trace metals found in the specimens. This helped them verify the occurrence of the drought and extrapolate its impacts on the region.

Johnson said they combined data from the analysis of these stalagmite-derived proxies with a series of idealized climate model simulations – conducted by co-author Francesco Pausata of the University of Quebec in Montreal – in which Saharan vegetation and dust concentrations were altered in a way that permitted them to investigate the ocean-atmosphere feedbacks and teleconnections associated with such an abrupt shift in precipitation.

The modeling experiments suggested that reduced plant growth in the Sahara led to increased airborne dust that acted to cool the Indian Ocean and shift the Walker circulation pattern eastward, causing it to behave in ways similar to modern-day El Niño events. This, ultimately, led to a large reduction in monsoon moisture across Southeast Asia that lasted more than 1,000 years, according to Johnson.

Anthropologists and archaeologists have previously studied the effects of the demise of the Green Sahara, also known as the African humid period, on population centers closer to Western Asia and North Africa, noting the collapse of the Akkadian Empire of Mesopotamia, the de-urbanization of the Indus Civilization (near present-day Pakistan and India) and the spread of pastoralism along the Nile River.

But the link to the origin of the Southeast Asia megadrought and lifestyle pattern shifts in the region had not been previously investigated, according to lead author Michael Griffiths, professor of environmental science at William Paterson University of New Jersey.

“Archaeologists and anthropologists have been studying this event for decades now, in terms of societal adaptations and upheavals, but its exact cause has eluded the scientific community,” said Griffiths, who was a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration-supported postdoctoral scholar in Johnson’s lab and has collaborated with her on this research topic for more than 10 years.

“Results from this work provide a novel and convincing explanation for the origin of the Southeast Asia megadrought and could help us better understand, to varying degrees, the observed societal shifts across many parts of the tropics and extra-tropics,” he said.

The researchers suggest that the centuries-long megadrought corresponds to the “missing millennia” in Southeast Asia between 4,000 and 6,000 years ago, a time characterized by a noticeable lack of archaeological evidence in interior Southeast Asia compared to earlier and later portions of the Holocene.

They propose that the mid-Holocene megadrought may have been an impetus for mass population movements and the adoption of new, more resilient subsistence strategies – and that it should now be considered as a possible driver for the inception of Neolithic farming in mainland Southeast Asia.

“This is outstanding evidence for the type of climate change that must have affected society, what plants were available, what animals were available,” said co-author Joyce White, adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. “All of life had to adjust to this very different climate. From an archaeological point of view, this really is a game changer in how we try to understand or reconstruct the middle Holocene period.”

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To create a paleoclimate record for the study, co-author Kathleen Johnson, UCI associate professor of Earth system science, and other researchers collected stalagmite samples from caves in Northern Laos. The specimens hold geochemical evidence of past climate change in the highly populated Asian monsoon region. Amy Ellsworth

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA – IRVINE news release

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SWANSEA UNIVERSITY—Three mummified animals from ancient Egypt have been digitally unwrapped and dissected by researchers, using high-resolution 3D scans that give unprecedented detail about the animals’ lives – and deaths – over 2000 years ago.

The three animals – a snake, a bird and a cat – are from the collection held by the Egypt Centre at Swansea University. Previous investigations had identified which animals they were, but very little else was known about what lay inside the mummies.

Now, thanks to X-ray micro CT scanning, which generates 3D images with a resolution 100 times greater than a medical CT scan, the animals’ remains can be analyzed in extraordinary detail, right down to their smallest bones and teeth.

The team, led by Professor Richard Johnston of Swansea University, included experts from the Egypt Centre and from Cardiff and Leicester universities.

The ancient Egyptians mummified animals as well as humans, including cats, ibis, hawks, snakes, crocodiles and dogs. Sometimes they were buried with their owner or as a food supply for the afterlife.

But the most common animal mummies were votive offerings, brought by visitors to temples to offer to the gods, to act as a means of communication with them. Animals were bred or captured by keepers and then killed and embalmed by temple priests. It is believed that as many as 70 million animal mummies were created in this way.

Although other methods of scanning ancient artifacts without damaging them are available, they have limitations. Standard X-rays only give 2-dimensional images. Medical CT scans give 3D images, but the resolution is low.

Micro CT, in contrast, gives researchers high resolution 3D images. Used extensively within materials science to image internal structures on the micro-scale, the method involves building a 3D volume (or ‘tomogram’) from many individual projections or radiographs. The 3D shape can then be 3D printed or placed into virtual reality, allowing further analysis.

The team, using micro CT equipment at the Advanced Imaging of Materials (AIM) facility, Swansea University College of Engineering, found:

• The cat was a kitten of less than 5 months, according to evidence of unerupted teeth hidden within the jaw bone.
• Separation of vertebrae indicate that it had possibly been strangled
• The bird most closely resembles a Eurasian kestrel; micro CT scanning enables virtual bone measurement, making accurate species identification possible
• The snake was identified as a mummified juvenile Egyptian Cobra (Naja haje).
• Evidence of kidney damage showed it was probably deprived of water during its life, developing a form of gout.
• Analysis of bone fractures shows it was ultimately killed by a whipping action, prior to possibly undergoing an ‘opening of the mouth’ procedure during mummification; if true this demonstrates the first evidence for complex ritualistic behavior applied to a snake.

Professor Richard Johnston of Swansea University College of Engineering, who led the research, said:

“Using micro CT we can effectively carry out a post-mortem on these animals, more than 2000 years after they died in ancient Egypt.

With a resolution up to 100 times higher than a medical CT scan, we were able to piece together new evidence of how they lived and died, revealing the conditions they were kept in, and possible causes of death.

These are the very latest scientific imaging techniques. Our work shows how the hi-tech tools of today can shed new light on the distant past.”

Dr Carolyn Graves-Brown from the Egypt Centre at Swansea University said:

“This collaboration between engineers, archaeologists, biologists, and Egyptologists shows the value of researchers from different subjects working together.

Our findings have uncovered new insights into animal mummification, religion and human-animal relationships in ancient Egypt.”*

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Mummy snake: The coiled remains of an Egyptian Cobra, undisturbed for thousands of years. Digitally dissected and revealed beneath the wrappings. Swansea University

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Digitally dissected lower jaw (mandible) and teeth of the mummified kitten. Reveals fractures and unerupted mandibular first molars (red) indicating it was a kitten at the time of death. Scale: skull total length = 68.9 mm. Swansea University

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*Evidence of diet, deification, and death within ancient Egyptian mummified animals. Richard Johnston*, Richard Thomas, Rhys Jones, Carolyn Graves-Brown, Wendy Goodridge, Laura North. To be published in Scientific Reports at 16.00 (London) on Thursday 20 August 2020, and available from that time at this link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-69726-0

Article Source: SWANSEA UNIVERSITY news release

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AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE—An analysis of facial expressions in ancient Mesoamerican sculptures finds that some emotions expressed in these artworks match the emotions that modern U.S. participants would anticipate for each discernible context, including elation, sadness, pain, anger, and determination or strain. For instance, elation was predicted in the context of social touch while anger was predicted in the context of combat. The results support the hypothesis that some emotions conveyed through facial expressions are universal, reinforcing that feelings can be expressed nonverbally in ways that transcend culture. While previous studies have explored cross-cultural similarities and differences in how facial expressions convey emotions, these studies have typically asked people from Eastern or indigenous cultures to match depictions of Western expressions to situations or words in their native language. Such work may be perceived as biased since it treats Western emotional expression as the norm. To circumvent this bias, Alan Cowen and colleagues asked U.S. research subjects to label emotions expressed in ancient American art sculptures, which predated exposure to modern Western civilizations. The researchers combed through tens of thousands of images of Mesoamerican sculptures on museum websites, identifying 63 authentic sculptures that displayed facial expressions within clearly identifiable contexts, such as a smiling mother holding a baby. Next, Cowen et al. digitally separated each sculpture’s expression from its context, producing, for example, one image of just the smile and one image of the mother holding the baby, with no expression visible. They asked the U.S. participants to label each image of a sculpture’s facial expression with the emotion it depicted, and, separately, to label images of a sculpture’s context with the emotion they would expect to see. Sculptures depicting some emotions passed the test of universality, with facial expression labels (“elated,” for the mother’s facial expression) matching the expectations of participants who only saw the context (an expressionless mother holding a baby). This suggests that emotional expressions can be inferred through universal human themes, such as a mother-child relationship, even without a common language. “We would eventually be interested in replicating this work in other cultures,” says Cowen, noting examples of sculpture from ancient Egyptian, Indian, and Chinese cultures that could potentially be analyzed using similar study protocols. “For the time being, we are heavily focused on studying emotional expression in everyday life across many countries, aided by machine learning tools.”

Article Source: AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE news release

Cover image, top left: Dezalb, Pixabay

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Science, AAAS—The Stone Age inhabitants of southern Africa used a mixture of grasses and ash to create comfortable, pest-free bedding at least 200,000 years ago, according to a new study. The findings represent the earliest known human use of grass bedding – exceeding previous evidence for the behavior by more than 100,000 years. Because plant material is so poorly preserved in the archaeological record, evidence for the early use of plants outside of being a source of food is rare and often difficult to interpret. Until now, the oldest-known use of plant bedding by Stone Age humans dated to around 77,000 years ago, where layered sedge interspersed with medicinal plants and the ashes of previous bedding was used to cover the living spaces of rockshelter habitations. Lyn Wadley and colleagues, however, describe new archaeological findings from the Border Cave site in the KwaZulu region of South Africa, that indicates that these practices likely began far earlier. The Border Cave site contains a well-preserved record of intermittent human occupation spanning nearly 230,000 years. Using a range of microscopic and spectroscopic techniques, Wadley et al. identified the ephemeral micromorphological traces of the ancient grass bedding within thin slices of the cave’s complex stratigraphy. According to the findings, the Stone Age inhabitants of Border Cave used sheaves of leaved grass to create bedding atop layers of ash, which may have been used to deter ticks and other biting insects from infesting these living spaces. Relatedly, in the oldest bedding, remains of camphor-bush – an aromatic plant that is still used in East African bedding to repel insects – were identified. Wadley et al. argue that the findings suggest an early potential for the cognitive, behavioral and social complexity that become more apparent in the archaeological record beginning 100,000 years ago.

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Border Cave in the Lebombo Mountains. Panorama from drone images. A. Kruger

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Border Cave in the Lebombo Mountains. Drone image. A. Kruger

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Border Cave excavations. D. Stratford

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Field photograph of Border Cave 200,000-year-old fossilized grass fragments. L. Wadley

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Border Cave on site chemical analysis of ash, using ATR-FTIR (Fourier Transform Infrared
Spectroscopy). L. Wadley

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Article Source: Science news release
This research appears in the 14 August 2020 issue of Science. Science is published by AAAS, the nonprofit science society.

Cover Image, Top Left: Border Cave excavations. F. d’Errico

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PLOS and CNRS—Ancient people in the Near East had begun the practice of intentionally cremating their dead by the beginning of the 7th millennium BC, according to a study published August 12, 2020 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Fanny Bocquentin of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and colleagues.

Excavations at the Neolithic site of Beisamoun in Northern Israel have uncovered an ancient cremation pit containing the remains of a corpse that appears to have been intentionally incinerated as part of a funerary practice. These remains were directly dated to between 7013-6700 BC, making them the oldest known example of cremation in the Near East.

The gender of the human remains found inside remains unknown. What is known is that the individual was a young adult injured by a flint projectile several months prior to their death in spring some 9,000 years ago. Preserved due to it being buried, the pit represents the oldest proof of direct1 cremation in the Middle-East. An international team lead by CNRS archaeo-anthropologist Fanny Bocquentin2 with aid from PhD candidate Marie Anton and several experts in animal, plant, and mineral remains, discovered and studied the bones found inside the pyre. An analysis of the clay used to coat the inside of the pit showed the 355 bone fragments, some of which were burnt, were exposed to temperatures reaching 700°C. The position of the bones and the preserved joints seem to indicate the body was placed seated onto the pyre and was not moved during or after cremation. Whether used as fuel, as ornamentation, or as a scent, siliceous traces indicated the presence of flowering plants, which made it possible to identify the season the person died. In addition to the exceptional pyre pit, the cremated remains of five other adults were discovered at the site. They dated back to the same period as burials whose traces were discovered among the ruins of abandoned dwellings. 

This early cremation comes at an important period of transition in funerary practices in this region of the world. Old traditions were on the way out, such as the removal of the cranium of the dead and the burial of the dead within the settlement, while practices like cremation were new. This change in funeral procedure might also signify a transition in rituals surrounding death and the significance of the deceased within society. Further examination of other possible cremation sites in the region will help elucidate this important cultural shift.

Bocquentin says: “The funerary treatment involved in situ cremation within a pyre-pit of a young adult individual who previously survived from a flint projectile injury—the inventory of bones and their relative position strongly supports the deposit of an articulated corpse and not dislocated bones.” She adds, “This is a redefinition of the place of the dead in the village and in society.”

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A section of the Beisamoun site (Israel) where the pyre pit is visible. © mission Beisamoun

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Picture of bones in situ: A. Segment of axial skeleton: ribs and vertebrae exposed in the middle of the structure. B. Right coxal in situ; preserved almost complete by a piece of collapsed mud wall (see Fig 2D). C. Four right pedal proximal phalanges found directly under the right coxal. Bocquentin et al, 2020 (PLOS ONE, CC BY)

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Flint point thrust inside a burnt shoulder blade © mission Beisamoun

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Article Source: Adapted from news releases from PLOS and the CNRS.

*Bocquentin F, Anton M, Berna F, Rosen A, Khalaily H, Greenberg H, et al. (2020) Emergence of corpse cremation during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of the Southern Levant: A multidisciplinary study of a pyre-pit burial. PLoS ONE 15(8): e0235386. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0235386

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UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD—Radiocarbon dating is set to become more accurate than ever after an international team of scientists improved the technique for assessing the age of historical objects.

The team of researchers at the Universities of Sheffield, Belfast, Bristol, Glasgow, Oxford, St Andrews and Historic England, plus international colleagues, used measurements from almost 15,000 samples from objects dating back as far as 60,000 years ago, as part of a seven-year project.

They used the measurements to create new international radiocarbon calibration (IntCal) curves, which are fundamental across the scientific spectrum for accurately dating artefacts and making predictions about the future. Radiocarbon dating is vital to fields such as archaeology and geoscience to date everything from the oldest modern human bones to historic climate patterns.

Archaeologists can use that knowledge to restore historic monuments or study the demise of the Neanderthals, while geoscientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), rely upon the curves to find out about what the climate was like in the past to better understand and prepare for future changes.

Professor Paula Reimer, from Queen’s University Belfast and head of the IntCal project, said: “Radiocarbon dating has revolutionised the field of archaeology and environmental science. As we improve the calibration curve, we learn more about our history. The IntCal calibration curves are key to helping answer big questions about the environment and our place within it.”

The team of researchers have developed three curves dependent upon where the object to be dated is found. The new curves, to be published in Radiocarbon, are IntCal20 for the Northern Hemisphere, SHCal20 for the Southern Hemisphere, and Marine20 for the world’s oceans.

Dr Tim Heaton, from the University of Sheffield and lead author on the Marine20 curve, said: “This is a very exciting time to be working in radiocarbon. Developments in the field have made it possible to truly advance our understanding. I look forward to seeing what new insights into our past these recalculated radiocarbon timescales provide.”

The previous radiocarbon calibration curves developed over the past 50 years, were heavily reliant upon measurements taken from chunks of wood covering 10 to 20 years big enough to be tested for radiocarbon.

Advances in radiocarbon testing mean the updated curves instead use tiny samples, such as tree-rings covering just single years, that provide previously impossible precision and detail in the new calibration curves. Additionally, improvements in understanding of the carbon cycle have meant the curves have now been extended all the way to the limit of the radiocarbon technique 55,000 years ago.

Radiocarbon dating is the most frequently used approach for dating the last 55,000 years and underpins archaeological and environmental science. It was first developed in 1949. It depends upon two isotopes of carbon called stable 12C and radioactive 14C.

While a plant or animal is alive it takes in new carbon, so has the same ratio of these isotopes as the atmosphere at the time. But once an organism dies it stops taking in new carbon, the stable 12C remains but the 14C decays at a known rate. By measuring the ratio of 14C to 12C left in an object the date of its death can be estimated.

If the level of atmospheric 14C were constant, this would be easy. However, it has fluctuated significantly throughout history. In order to date organisms precisely scientists need a reliable historical record of its variation to accurately transform 14C measurements into calendar ages. The new IntCal curves provide this link.

The curves are created based on collecting a huge number of archives which store past radiocarbon but can also be dated using another method. Such archives include tree-rings from up to 14,000 years ago, stalagmites found in caves, corals from the sea and cores drilled from lake and ocean sediments. In total, the new curves were based upon almost 15,000 measurements of radiocarbon taken from objects as old as 60,000 years.

Alex Bayliss, Head of Scientific Dating at Historic England, said: “Accurate and high-precision radiocarbon dating underpins the public’s enjoyment of the historic environment and enables better preservation and protection.

“The new curves have internationally important implications for archaeological methodology, and for practices in conservation and understanding of wooden built heritage.”

Darrell Kaufman of the IPCC said: “The IntCal series of curves are critical for providing a perspective on past climate which is essential for our understanding of the climate system, and a baseline for modelling future changes.”

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD news release

Cover Image, Top Left: Kestrel, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, Wikimedia Commons

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PLOS—A new analysis of ancient genomes suggests that different branches of the human family tree interbred multiple times, and that some humans carry DNA from an archaic, unknown ancestor. Melissa Hubisz and Amy Williams of Cornell University and Adam Siepel of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory report these findings in a study published 6th August in PLOS Genetics.

Roughly 50,000 years ago, a group of humans migrated out of Africa and interbred with Neanderthals in Eurasia. But that’s not the only time that our ancient human ancestors and their relatives swapped DNA. The sequencing of genomes from Neanderthals and a less well-known ancient group, the Denisovans, has yielded many new insights into these interbreeding events and into the movement of ancient human populations. In the new paper, the researchers developed an algorithm for analyzing genomes that can identify segments of DNA that came from other species, even if that gene flow occurred thousands of years ago and came from an unknown source. They used the algorithm to look at genomes from two Neanderthals, a Denisovan and two African humans. The researchers found evidence that 3 percent of the Neanderthal genome came from ancient humans, and estimate that the interbreeding occurred between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago. Furthermore, 1 percent of the Denisovan genome likely came from an unknown and more distant relative, possibly Homo erectus, and about 15% of these “super-archaic” regions may have been passed down to modern humans who are alive today.

The new findings confirm previously reported cases of gene flow between ancient humans and their relatives, and also point to new instances of interbreeding. Given the number of these events, the researchers say that genetic exchange was likely whenever two groups overlapped in time and space. Their new algorithm solves the challenging problem of identifying tiny remnants of gene flow that occurred hundreds of thousands of years ago, when only a handful of ancient genomes are available. This algorithm may also be useful for studying gene flow in other species where interbreeding occurred, such as in wolves and dogs.

“What I think is exciting about this work is that it demonstrates what you can learn about deep human history by jointly reconstructing the full evolutionary history of a collection of sequences from both modern humans and archaic hominins,” said author Adam Siepel. “This new algorithm that Melissa has developed, ARGweaver-D, is able to reach back further in time than any other computational method I’ve seen. It seems to be especially powerful for detecting ancient introgression.”

Article Source: PLOS news release

*Hubisz MJ, Williams AL, Siepel A (2020) Mapping gene flow between ancient hominins through demography-aware inference of the ancestral recombination graph. PLoS Genet 16(8): e1008895. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1008895

Funding: MJH and AS were supported by US National Institutes of Health grant R35-GM127070 (to AS) (https://www.nih.gov), and MJH was additionally supported by National Science Foundation GRFP DGE-1650441 (https://www.nsf.gov). ALW was supported by an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (https://sloan.org/fellowships/) and a seed grant from Nancy and Peter Meinig. This work used the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), which is supported by National Science Foundation grant number ACI-1548562 (https://www.nsf.gov). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the US National Institutes of Health. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Feature image, top left: A genome sequencing machine. KennethR, Pixabay

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MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY—A new study led by archaeologists from the CNRS, the Inrap, the Ohio State University and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, reports on fluted points from the archaeological sites of Manayzah in Yemen and Ad-Dahariz in Oman. Fluted stone tools are a distinctive, technologically advanced form of projectile points, including spearheads and arrowheads. Fluting is a specific technique that involves the extraction of an elongated flake along the length of a projectile point, leaving a distinctive groove or depression at the base of the spearhead or arrowhead.

Fluting is a distinct technological tradition invented by early human cultures that spread across the Americas. Fluted point technology is very well known in North America, evidenced by finds across the continent dating from 13,000 to 10,000 years ago. As lead author Dr. Rémy Crassard of the CNRS notes, “Until the early 2000s, these fluted points were unknown elsewhere on the planet. When the first isolated examples of these objects were recognized in Yemen, and more recently in Oman, we recognized that there could be huge implications.”

The sites of Manayzah and Ad-Dahariz yielded dozens of fluted points. The Arabian examples date to the Neolithic period, about 8,000 to 7,000 years ago, at least two thousand years later than the American examples. As Professor Petraglia of the Max Planck explains, “Given their age and the fact that the fluted points from America and Arabia are separated by thousands of kilometers, there is no possible cultural connection between them. This is then a clear and excellent example of cultural convergence, or independent invention in human history.”

The new PLOS ONE article carefully examines the fluted points found in south Arabia. Detailed technological analysis, backed up by stone tool experiments and replication by an expert modern flintknapper, illustrate the similarities between the American and Arabian fluting procedures.

In addition to the similarities, the authors of the new study also investigated the contrasts between the technologies of the two regions. Technological differences were apparent in the nature and location of the flute. The authors emphasize that the ‘fluting method’ was likely a mental conceptualization of stone tool manufacture, more than just a technical way to produce a projectile and hafting zone. Whereas the apparent function of fluting in the Americas is to facilitate hafting, or attaching the point to a shaft, most of the Arabian fluted points do not have hafting as a functional final aim. The fluting concept and the method itself are the same in both American and Arabia, yet the final aim of fluting appears to be different.

Arabian and American fluted point technologies were highly specialized stone tool production methods. The PLOS ONE study of Arabian fluting technology demonstrates that similar innovations and inventions were developed under different circumstances and that such highly-skilled and convergent production methods can have different anthropological implications. As discussed in the article, Professor McCorriston argues that “fluting in Arabia was used as a display of skill, rather than serving a purely functional purpose such as hafting, as is more widely accepted in the Americas.”

In Arabian prehistory, southern Arabia experienced developments of local origin, with multiple examples of inventions and innovations not culturally transmitted by outside traditions. The fluting method is then a hallmark of this indigenous development in the south Arabian Neolithic.

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The sites of Manayzah (Yemen) and Ad-Dahariz (Oman) yielded dozens of fluted points. The Arabian examples date to the Neolithic period, about 8,000 to 7,000 years ago, at least two thousand years later than the American examples. Joy McCorriston, OSU

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Fluting is a specific technique that involves the extraction of an elongated flake along the length of a projectile point, leaving a distinctive groove or depression at the base of the spearhead or arrowhead. Rémy Crassard, CNRS

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Detailed technological analysis, backed up by stone tool experiments and replication by an expert modern flintknapper, illustrate the similarities between the American and Arabian fluting procedures. Jérémie Vosges, CNRS

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

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PENN STATE—A llama carved from a spondylus shell and a cylindrical laminated gold foil object were the contents of a carved stone box—an offering—found at the bottom of Lake Titicaca, according to researchers from Penn State and the Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. The offering, found near an island in the lake, was not located where others had found offerings in the past.

“We knew they (Inca) did some form of ritual offerings and that they did them in the lake,” said Jose Capriles, assistant professor of anthropology, Penn State. “The 16th and 17th century chronicles indicate there were submerged offerings.”

Lake Titicaca is located in the Andes between Bolivia and Peru. It is the largest lake in South America and was important to many cultures, including the Tiwanaku and the Inca.

Amateur divers in 1977 found other offerings, or artifacts that could be part of offering bundles near the Island of the Sun, but these were not intact offerings. Professional divers between 1988 and 1992 investigated the area of the Khoa reef and found pre-Inca and Inca artifacts including stone boxes with miniature figures. Recent excavations show that the Khoa reef was an important ceremonial site for the Inca and prior societies; however, this new group of artifacts was not found on the Khoa reef, but on the K’akaya reef.

Capriles and Christophe Delaere, junior research fellow, Université libre de Bruxelles, report their findings today (Aug. 4) in Antiquity.

“Since 2012, the Université libre de Bruxelles has implemented a research program with the goal of locating and inventorying the underwater heritage of Lake Titicaca,” said Delaere. “Our team has systematically surveyed around the islands and reefs in the Bolivian side of Lake Titicaca.”

The K’akaya Archipelago is west of Challapata Bay in the eastern shore of Lake Titicaca and is a series of a main island and three small ones. K’akaya reef is the last islet of the small chain and is covered in bird droppings.

The divers retrieved the box intact although currents had eroded one side. The box was tightly sealed, but not watertight. Resting in the box, beneath the silt that had filtered in, was the spondylus shell llama and the rolled gold foil.

One indication that these boxes contain artifacts valuable enough for offerings, beside the gold foil, is the spondylus shell llama. The closest location where the Inca could obtain this spiny oyster shell was in warm coastal ocean waters off the coast of Ecuador.

Finding this box in a new location suggests to the researchers that Lake Titicaca was a locus of ritual and ceremonial activity by the Inca. Similar offerings are found in other parts of what was the Inca Empire, some on land and some on water, but the researchers think that the lake was important in the consolidation of the empire.

According to Capriles, as the Inca radiated out from Cuzco in Peru, Lake Titicaca became a focal point. Prior archaeological evidence indicates that many of the islands, reefs and archipelagos contain ruins of temples and other monumental architecture.

“Most of what we know outside of archaeology is from the Spanish,” said Capriles. “Indications were that Lake Titicaca was a pilgrimage center for the Inca, but also served as a focal point for alliances with other groups.”

Spanish myths about the Inca dumping their gold into Lake Titicaca are apparently untrue, but the lake holds much more information still to be uncovered, said the researchers.

The artifacts reside with the Bolivian municipality of Escoma, which has jurisdiction over the area in which they were found.

“One of the goals of our underwater archaeological survey was to identify the existence of similar sites and to our surprise we found at least one,” said Delaere. “It presents not only one of the rare intact discoveries of an Inca underwater offering, but also that it was found at another place in the lake, which has an important implication for understanding the relationship between the expanding Inca empire, the local communities who lived in the lake, and Lake Titicaca itself prior to European contact.

“The inland underwater world remains largely unexplored and offers outstanding opportunities to understand prehistoric societies,” said Delaere. “The underwater heritage of Lake Titicaca still has many surprises to reveal.”

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Stone box with carved shell llama and rolled gold foil. Teddy Sequin

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Map of Lake Titicaca showing islands. José Capriles, Penn State and Christophe Delaere, Université libre de Bruxelles

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Article Source: PENN STATE news release

Université libre de Bruxelles and Wiener-Anspach Foundation supported this work.

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TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY—Ancient sediment found in a central Texas cave appears to solve the mystery of why the Earth cooled suddenly about 13,000 years ago, according to a research study co-authored by a Texas A&M University professor.

Michael Waters, director of The Center for The Study of the First Americans and Distinguished Professor at Texas A&M University, and colleagues from Baylor University and the University of Houston have had their work published in Science Advances.

Some researchers believed the event – which cooled the Earth by about 3 degrees Centigrade, a huge amount – was caused by an extraterrestrial impact with the Earth, such as a meteor collision.

But Waters and the team found that the evidence left in layers of sediment in Hall’s Cave were almost certainly the result of volcanic eruptions.

Waters said that Hall’s Cave, located in the Texas hill country, has a sediment record extending over 20,000 years and he first began researching the cave in 2017.

“It is an exceptional record that offers a unique opportunity for interdisciplinary cooperation to investigate a number of important research questions,” he said.

“One big question was, did an extraterrestrial impact occur near the end of the last ice age, about 13,000 years ago as the ice sheets covering Canada were melting, and cause an abrupt cooling that thrust the northern hemisphere back into the ice age for an extra 1,200 years?”

Waters and the team found that within the cave are layers of sediment, first identified by Thomas Stafford (Stafford Research Laboratories, Colorado), that dated to the time of the proposed impact that could answer the question and perhaps even identify the trigger that started the ancient cold snap.

The event also likely helped cause the extinction of large mammals such as mammoth, horse and camel that once roamed North America.

“This work shows that the geochemical signature associated with the cooling event is not unique but occurred four times between 9,000 and 15,000 years ago,” said Alan Brandon, professor of geosciences at University of Houston and head of the research team.

“Thus, the trigger for this cooling event didn’t come from space. Prior geochemical evidence for a large meteor exploding in the atmosphere instead reflects a period of major volcanic eruptions.

“I was skeptical,” Brandon said. “We took every avenue we could to come up with an alternative explanation, or even avoid, this conclusion. A volcanic eruption had been considered one possible explanation but was generally dismissed because there was no associated geochemical fingerprint.”

After a volcano erupts, the global spread of aerosols reflects incoming solar radiation away from Earth and may lead to global cooling post eruption for one to five years, depending on the size and timescales of the eruption, the team said.

“The Younger Dryas, which occurred about 13,000 years ago, disrupted distinct warming at the end of the last ice age,” said co-author Steven Forman, professor of geosciences at Baylor.

The Earth’s climate may have been at a tipping point at the end of Younger Dryas, possibly from the ice sheet discharge into the North Atlantic Ocean, enhanced snow cover and powerful volcanic eruptions that may have in combination led to intense Northern Hemisphere cooling, Forman said.

“This period of rapid cooling coincides with the extinction of a number of species, including camels and horses, and the appearance of the Clovis archaeological tradition,” said Waters.

Brandon and fellow University of Houston scientist Nan Sun completed the isotopic analysis of sediments collected from Hall’s Cave. They found that elements such as iridium, ruthenium, platinum, palladium and rhenium were not present in the correct proportions, meaning that a meteor or asteroid could not have caused the event.

“The isotope analysis and the relative proportion of the elements matched those that were found in previous volcanic gases,” said Sun, lead author of the report.

Volcanic eruptions cause their most severe cooling near the source, usually in the year of the eruption, with substantially less cooling in the years after the eruption, the team said.

The Younger Dryas cooling lasted about 1,200 years, “so a sole volcanic eruptive cause is an important initiating factor, but other Earth system changes, such as cooling of the oceans and more snow cover were needed to sustain this colder period, “Forman said.

Waters added that the bottom line is that “the chemical anomalies found in sediments dating to the beginning of the Younger Dryas are the result of volcanism and not an extraterrestrial impact.”

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Workers excavating Hall’s Cave in Central Texas. Mike Waters/Texas A&M University

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Article Source: TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY news release

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Science Advances, AAAS—Most of the hulking sandstone boulders – called sarsens – that make up the United Kingdom’s famous Stonehenge monument appear to share a common origin 25 kilometers away in West Woods, Wiltshire, according to an analysis of the stones’ chemical composition. The findings support the theory that the stones were brought to Stonehenge at around the same time, contradicting a previous suggestion that one large sarsen, the Heel Stone, originated in the immediate vicinity of the monument and was erected earlier than the others. The results may also help scientists identify the route the monument’s ancient builders would have taken to transport the enormous rocks to their celebrated resting site. “Until recently we did not know it was possible to provenance a stone like sarsen,” says David Nash, the lead author of the study. “It has been really exciting to use 21^st century science to understand the Neolithic past and answer a question that archaeologists have been debating for centuries.” Since technology for determining the origins of the enormous sarsens, which tower at up to 30 feet tall, weigh as much as 25 tons, and make up most of Stonehenge, did not exist until recently, most research has revolved around the monument’s smaller “bluestones” – various types of rock that clearly were not gathered locally. To learn where the behemoth boulders came from, Nash and colleagues used portable x-ray fluorescence spectrometry (PXRF) to initially characterize their chemical composition, then analyzed the data statistically to determine their degree of chemical variability. Next, the researchers performed inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) and ICP-atomic emission spectrometry (ICP-AES) of samples from a core previously drilled through one sarsen stone and a range of sarsen boulders from across southern Britain. After comparing these signatures, Nash et al. were able to point to West Woods as the sarsens’ earliest home. The reason the monument’s builders selected this site remains a mystery, although the researchers suggest the size and quality of West Woods’ stones, and the ease with which the builders could access them, may have factored into the decision.

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Stonehenge in the Wiltshire landscape. Andre Pattenden (English Heritage)

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Map showing the locations of Stonehenge and West Woods, together with possible routeways over which sarsen stones might have been transported to the monument. David Nash (University of Brighton)

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Jake Ciborowski (University of Brighton) analysing the sarsen core extracted from Stone 58 at Stonehenge using a portable x-ray fluorescence spectrometer. Sam Frost (English Heritage)

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Plan of Stonehenge using the numbering system devised by W.M. Flinders Petrie in the late 19th century. David Nash (University of Brighton)

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Large sarsen stone at West Woods, the probable source area for most sarsens used to construct Stonehenge. Katy Whitaker (Historic England/University of Reading)

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Article Source: Science Advances news release

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

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PLOS—Alarming results from a 2019 survey of well-known archaeological site Ageröd reveal drastic bone and organic matter deterioration since the site’s initial excavations in the 1940s, suggesting action is needed to preserve findings from Ageröd and similar sites, according to a study* published July 29, 2020 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Adam Boethius from Lund University, Sweden, and colleagues.

Archaeologists need organic remains like bone and plant matter to reconstruct ancient human cultures and environments; however, organic matter is only preserved under specific conditions, becoming rarer as sites deteriorate due to environmental change like drainage and pollution. Boethius and colleagues here attempt to measure and analyze this phenomenon using the well-known Swedish Mesolithic peat bog site Ageröd I (8700-8200 cal BP), uncovered in the 1930s with excavations in the 1940s and 1970s, and renowned for its abundant and well-preserved quantities of bone and flint.

In 2019, the authors and colleagues excavated five test pits (five square meters total) at Ageröd, near areas containing the greatest number of remains as found in previous excavations. They then compared 61 bone, tooth, and antler fragments (as determined to the species or family level) uncovered in the test pits with 3716 bone fragments previously retrieved during the 1940s and 1970s excavations.

Osteological analyses of the bone remains from 2019 as compared with those found in the 1940s and 1970s indicate that bones at Ageröd have suffered accelerated deterioration over the last 75 years, with measured bone weathering averages going from 2.8 in the 40s (hard, heavy bones with occasional cracks) to 3.4 in the 70s (lighter bones with bigger cracks and interior exposure) to 3.7 in 2019 (light and heavily eroded bones, outer surface loss). More worryingly, complete destruction of some bones was suggested in this latest excavation, which uncovered no smaller fur game bones or bird bones, in contrast to earlier excavations–likely because small mammals and birds have smaller, lighter bones that break down faster than heavier bones. The authors also detected oxidized pyrite in the bones from 2019, in contrast to those from the 40s and 70s (which showed only non-oxidized pyrite). This suggests that oxygen was re-introduced into the bog environment between the 1970s excavations and 2019, destabilizing the typically anoxic bog conditions and permitting pyrite to oxidize and produce sulphuric acid (which drops soil pH and damages organic matter) as a by-product.

Although the 2019 excavation was much smaller in scope than previous excavations–in part to help limit further potential destruction at the site–the careful location of the test pits suggests the decay and loss of bone remains documented here is likely indicative of issues occurring across Ageröd. The authors note that Ageröd has not been subjected to more or heavier encroachment than most other archaeological sites, raising concerns as to the state of preservation in similar sites. They note that though Ageröd still holds significance, it has already lost many of its unique preservation properties–and if future steps to protect the site are not taken, then the organic remains preserved in its peat bog for 9000 years will soon be lost forever.

The authors add: “The fact is that we know very little of the state of our buried archaeological remains from most areas, but we are increasingly becoming aware of their rapid destruction. Unfortunately, this destruction is not only a matter of connecting the present with long lost ancient cultures or societies, as an interest of the ancient past. The record being destroyed is also a long-term perspective database which, if properly used, can help us create models of future environmental scenarios. Especially if going back to periods after the last Ice Age when the climate experienced rapid changes in global warming while human groups started to affect their local environment at much higher levels than previously seen. Unfortunately, the older the remains, the rarer and more vulnerable they become and if the pattern observed at Ageröd is similar in other areas we are in an extreme hurry to remedy the situation and recreate soils that allow organic preservation or, indeed, excavate the remains. If we do nothing, wait and hope for the best it is likely that the archaeo-organic remains in many areas will be gone in a decade or two. Once it is gone there is no going back and what is lost will be lost forever. It is worth considering, especially given recent advances in archaeological molecular science, i.e. aDNA and stable isotopes etc. If the organic remains deteriorate, these type of analyses will not be possible to do anymore and given the information we are now generating from them it will be a devastating blow to our understanding of ancient cultures, diet and subsistence strategies, migration and mobility etc.”

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Organic bone preservation at Ageröd. a-d bones from 2019; e-i from old excavations. a) astragalus and calcaneus from wild boar found articulated in the transition between white cultural layer and lower peat in trench 205, likely deposited in wet conditions with tendons and ligament still connected, weathering category 8. b) metatarsal from aurochs found in white cultural layer in trench 217, weathering category 6. c) radius diaphysis from elk found in white cultural layer in trench 201, one of the best-preserved bone fragments from the 2019 excavation, weathering category 3. d) tibia from red deer found in white cultural layer of trench 205, weathering category 7. e) drilled and ornated cervid antler from the 1940s, weathering category3. f) “net sinker” made from burr of red deer antler, from the 1940s excavation, weathering category 2. g) scapula from red deer found in the white layer in the 1970s, weathering category 3. h) femur diaphysis from aurochs from the 1940s, weathering category 2. i) slotted bone point from the 1940s, in mint condition with resin and inserted microliths. All photos realized for this publication by the authors (OM and AB). Boethius et al (2020)–PLOS ONE, CC BY 4.0

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Article Source: PLOS news release

*Boethius A, Kjällquist M, Magnell O, Apel J (2020) Human encroachment, climate change and the loss of our archaeological organic cultural heritage: Accelerated bone deterioration at Ageröd, a revisited Scandinavian Mesolithic key-site in despair. PLoS ONE 15(7): e0236105. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0236105

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DICKINSON COLLEGE (Carlisle, Pa.) – Researchers studying lead white pigments on Andean ceremonial drinking vessels known as qeros have found new similarities among these artifacts that could help museums, conservators, historians and scholars better understand the timeline and production of these culturally significant items during the colonial period (1532-1821). In a study published in the journal Heritage Science, researchers used isotope measurements of lead white pigments in the decorative patterns on 20 colonial qeros to reveal linkages among vessels that were unknown previously.

The analysis identified only three isotope signatures among the lead white pigments decorating the qeros. Two of these isotopic signatures, present on a total of eight qeros, are the same as found in lead white paints used in European artwork from the same period. This match suggests these qeros are decorated with pigments imported to the Andes from Europe. The third signature, found on 12 of the qeros, suggests that the lead white was manufactured locally in the Andes.

The analysis was carried out by Allison Curley, a former Dickinson College undergraduate who is now a graduate student in earth & environmental sciences at the University of Michigan, and her mentor, geochemist Alyson Thibodeau, assistant professor of earth sciences at Dickinson, along with a team of researchers from the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the UCLA/Getty Program in Conservation of Archaeological and Ethnographic Materials; and the American Museum of Natural History.

“Little is known about the history of colonial qeros now in museum or private collections. The results could lead to a better understanding of the objects’ chronology and production,” explained Thibodeau. “For example, it is possible that qeros made earlier in the colonial period are decorated with European lead white, while qeros made later are decorated with lead white made from Andean ores. Further, the results strongly suggest some form of centralization in pigment acquisition, manufacture and distribution in the colonial period.”

“The consistency of the data was both surprising and satisfying,” said Curley, who has been collaborating with Thibodeau on this project since 2017. “It is exciting to see geochemistry provide insights into some longstanding historical and archaeological questions, and I was absolutely thrilled to present these findings to the Society for American Archaeology and to the conservators at the Smithsonian.”

“It’s important for those studying qeros all over the world to have a better understanding of the Andean people who made and used qeros during a time of colonial rule,” said Emily Kaplan, conservator for the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, which has the largest collection of qeros in the United States. Kaplan hopes the research will lead to more radiocarbon dating, which will reveal more about the chronology of qero production. “Style and iconography have been used to help establish production timelines, but there’s a lot of guesswork involved,” she said.

Ceremonial drinking vessels have been used for toasting rituals in the Andes for millennia. Wooden qeros made in the colonial period were typically fabricated in identical pairs to make ceremonial toasts for social, political and religious occasions. These items retain their cultural significance to this day and are recognized as a symbol of the Inka Empire. Because they provide a window into the Andean indigenous colonial experience, qeros have been studied by art historians, archaeologists and anthropologists.

The study, “Isotopic composition of lead white pigments on qeros: implications for the chronology and production of Andean ritual drinking vessels during the colonial era,” is available online and is included in the Heritage Science collection, “Pigments, dyes, and colors in Latin American archaeometric investigations.”

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Lead researcher Allison Curley with qeros from the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. Alyson Thibodeau

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Emily Kaplan using portable X-Ray Fluorescence to detect elements in pigments on a qero at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. NMAI staff

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A qero from the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. Alyson Thibodeau

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Article Source: Dickinson College news release

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UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN THE FACULTY OF HEALTH AND MEDICAL SCIENCES—The fatal disease smallpox is older and more widespread than scientists so far have proved. A new study by an international team of researchers from the University of Copenhagen and the University of Cambridge shows that the Vikings also suffered from smallpox.

Through the ages, the highly infectious disease smallpox has killed hundreds of millions of people. But it is unclear exactly when the disease emerged. There has been found evidence of smallpox from individuals from the 17th century while written records suggest the disease is much older.

Now a new study shows that the disease dates 1,000 years further back in time than previously shown. Researchers from the University of Copenhagen (UCPH) and the University of Cambridge have found proof that smallpox also existed in the Viking Age. The new results have been published in the scientific journal Science.

“We have found the oldest evidence of smallpox. Moreover, it seems to have been surprisingly common as early as in the Viking Age,” says Associate Professor Martin Sikora, Globe Institute, UCPH, and the University of Cambridge. He continues:

“Smallpox is the infection in the world that has killed most people. For that reason alone, it is very important and interesting to know how the disease developed. It gives us a unique opportunity to understand the viruses’ evolution: How did it change and become the pathogen that we know of today.”

Widespread in Northern Europe

The researchers have studied and analyzed the DNA of 13 individuals from Northern Europe infected with smallpox. The samples are 1,000 years older than the previous oldest sample known to have been infected based on ancient DNA, and they thus push the timeline for smallpox further back in time.

The study also shows the disease has been more widespread than previously assumed. The general idea used to be that smallpox was not endemic to Northern Europe during that time period.

“We show that not only was it endemic in Europe, but it was actually quite widespread in Northern Europe already at the year 600. That means that the disease was almost certainly far more established at a much earlier age than previously thought,” says Professor Eske Willerslev, Globe Institute, UCPH.

The researchers have also discovered that the viruses circulating during the Viking Age were distinct from their modern counterparts, and not directly ancestral to the viruses that caused the last big outbreak of smallpox in the 20th century.

“They share a common ancestor, but they also have unique features that differentiate them from the ones circulating later on in history. It turns out that the viruses we have found were some of these very, very early and different versions of the devastating pathogens known from the 20th century. It is the first time we can trace these early smallpox viruses and compare their genomes and mutations and see how the disease evolved over time,” says Eske Willerslev.

Catalogue of Mutations

Even though the disease has been eradicated today, it is still very useful to know how it developed and mutated through the ages.

Smallpox is a so-called poxvirus, a large family of viruses with many different types infecting a diverse set of host species. One such example is monkeypox, which typically infects monkeys but has also been known to cause a disease similar to smallpox in humans. It is therefore useful to known how other types of poxviruses mutate and survive.

“When we know how the disease mutated through time, it gives us an opportunity to put together a catalogue of how these pathogens might mutate in the future: What mutations and combinations make such a pathogen viable and successful? If they had those mutations in the past, they can most likely get them again.”

“It is one of a few examples where ancient genetic research has direct implications for present-day and future health,” says Martin Sikora.

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A Viking grave. Efraim Stochter, Pixabay

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN THE FACULTY OF HEALTH AND MEDICAL SCIENCES news release

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PLOS—The diets of ancient foxes were influenced by humans, and these small carnivores might be tracers of human activity over time, according to a study* published July 22, 2020 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Chris Baumann of the University of Tübingen, Germany and colleagues.

Foxes love leftovers. In the wild, foxes regularly feed on scraps left behind by larger predators like bears and wolves, but the closer foxes live to human civilization, the more of their diet is made up of foods that humans leave behind. In this study, Baumann and colleagues hypothesized that if this commensal relationship goes back to ancient times, then foxes might be useful indicators of human impact in the past.

The authors compared ratios of Carbon and Nitrogen isotopes between the remains of various herbivores, large carnivores, and red and Arctic foxes from several archaeological sites in southwest Germany dating to the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic. At sites older than 42,000 years, when Neanderthals sparsely occupied the region, fox diets were similar to their local large carnivores. But in the younger sites, as Homo sapiens became common in the area, foxes developed a more unique diet consisting largely of reindeer, which are too big for foxes to hunt but which are known to have been important game for ancient humans of the time.

These results suggest that during the Upper Palaeolithic, these foxes made a shift from feeding on scraps left by local large predators to eating food left behind by humans. This indicates that foxes’ reliance on human food goes back a good 42,000 years. The authors propose that, with further studies investigating this fox-human relationship, ancient fox diets may be useful indicators of human impact on ecosystems over time.

The authors add: “Dietary reconstructions of Ice Age foxes have shown that early modern humans had an influence on the local ecosystem as early as 40,000 years ago. The more humans populated a particular region, the more the foxes adapted to them.”

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Summary figure for the commensal fox hypothesis. The blue area marks the impact of humans on dietary resources. For low δ15N foxes, humans had no influence, while for intermediate δ15N foxes they had a very strong influence (restricted diet). High δ15N foxes may be influenced (e.g. by scavenging at kill sites) or may be of natural origin (e.g. by scavenging from megafauna that died naturally). Baumann et al, 2020 (PLOS ONE, CC BY 4.0)

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*Baumann C, Bocherens H, Drucker DG, Conard NJ (2020) Fox dietary ecology as a tracer of human impact on Pleistocene ecosystems. PLoS ONE 15(7): e0235692. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0235692

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University of Cambridge and University of Copenhagen—A cave in a remote part of Mexico was visited by humans around 30,000 years ago – 15,000 years earlier than people were previously thought to have reached the Americas.

Painstaking excavations of Chiquihuite Cave, located in a mountainous area in northern Mexico controlled by drug cartels, uncovered 1,900 stone tools from a small section of the high-altitude cave.

Archaeological analysis of the tools and DNA analysis of the sediment in the cave uncovered a new story of the colonization of the Americas which now traces evidence of the first Americans back to 25,000-30,000 years ago.

The results, which have been published in Nature today (July 22 2020), challenge the commonly held theory that the Clovis people were the first human inhabitants of the Americas 15,000 years ago.

DNA scientist Professor Eske Willerslev, of St John’s College, University of Cambridge, and director of The Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre, University of Copenhagen, led the study with archaeologist Dr Ciprian Ardelean, of the University of Zacatecas in Mexico. 

Professor Willerslev said: “For decades people have passionately debated when the first humans entered the Americas. Chiquihuite Cave will create a lot more debate as it is the first site that dates the arrival of people to the continent to around 30,000 years ago – 15,000 years earlier than previously thought. These early visitors didn’t occupy the cave continuously, we think people spent part of the year there using it as a winter or summer shelter, or as a base to hunt during migration. This could be the Americas oldest ever hotel.”

The 10-year long research project raises more questions about the early humans who lived in the Americas than it solves.

Dr Ardelean said: “We don’t know who they were, where they came from or where they went. They are a complete enigma. We falsely assume that the indigenous populations in the Americas today are direct descendants from the earliest Americans, but now we do not think that is the case.

“By the time the famous Clovis population entered America, the very early Americans had disappeared thousands of years before. There could have been many failed colonizations that were lost in time and did not leave genetic traces in the population today.”

Chiquihuite Cave is a high-altitude site, 2750 meters above sea level. Nearly 2000 stone tools and small tool fragments, known as flakes, were discovered. DNA analysis of the plant and animal remains from the sediment packed around the tools in the cave dates the tools and the human occupation of the site to 25,000-30,000 years ago. Human DNA was not found which adds weight to the theory that the early people didn’t stay for long in the cave.

Dr Mikkel Winther Pedersen, a geneticist from the University of Copenhagen and one of the first authors of the paper, said: “We identified DNA from a wide range of animals including black bears, rodents, bats, voles and even kangaroo rats. We think these early people would probably have come back for a few months a year to exploit reoccurring natural resources available to them and then move on. Probably when herds of large mammals would have been in the area and who had little experience with humans so they would have been easy prey. The location of Chiquihuite Cave definitely rewrites what has conventionally been taught in history and archaeology and shows that we need to rethink where we look for sites of the earliest people in Americas.”

The Stone Tools

As far back as 30,000 years ago, humans had already developed techniques for producing tools. In this Mexican cave, researchers found 1,900 stone tools.

The unique feature of the Chiquihuite Cave is the “floor”, which consists of six layers of detritus and dust – all in all, a ten-foot column of ancient remains – which is so compressed and stable that by using various advanced measuring methods, it has been possible to date the layers one by one, from top to bottom.

Each layer has contained deposits of stone tools such as knives, scrapers and arrowheads, which the researchers have also been able to date.

“The cave finds are extremely interesting. These archaeological finds are so far the oldest in America. And the excavated stone tools are of a type unique to America,” Professor at Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, Mexico, Ciprian F. Ardelean, states.

Ice Cap Across North America

Until now, science has assumed that the earliest immigration to America took place approx. 15,000 years ago. At the time, a narrow opening in the ice along the northern Pacific coastline was created, which made it possible to walk from Siberia onto the American continent.

At the time, there were no other access routes to the continent, because North America was covered by a thick ice cap, which only later – approx. 13,000 years ago – melted enough to enable passage.

30,000 years ago, when the first stone tools were left in the Chiquihuite Cave, the massive ice cap had not yet covered all of North America, which means that it would have been possible to walk from Siberia and down through the American continent, Eske Willerslev explains.

The Chiquihuite Cave site is very difficult to reach and would have been a good vantage point for the early people to defend themselves from as they could look out for miles over the valley without being seen. It is in an area of Mexico that is now controlled by drugs cartels. The academics were escorted by armed police to the base of the mountain before they made their way up to the cave on foot.

Dr Pedersen said: “It was an unforgettable experience. It is a very unsafe place to travel so we were accompanied by Mexican police officers in armoured cars to the foot of the mountain. We left before sunrise to climb up to the cave so that we weren’t spotted.”

The visiting DNA scientists slept in the cave during their research visit and over the past 10 years Dr Ardelean has spent a number of months living in the cave to carry out the painstaking excavations.

Dr Ardelean added: “The peopling of the Americas is the last holy grail in modern archaeology. Unconventional sites need to be taken seriously and we need to go out and intentionally look for them. This site doesn’t solve anything, it just shows that these early sites exist. We are dealing with a handful of humans from thousands of years ago so we cannot expect the signals to be very clear. We have literally dug deeper than anyone has done in the past.”

The earliest human DNA from the Americas currently remains at 12,400 years ago, Dr Ardelean explained: “We have shown the previously long held date of human presence is not the oldest date for populating the Americas, it is the explosion date of populating the Americas.”

Professor Willerslev concluded: “I will never forget being part of this research, it was an unbelievable experience. The implications of these findings are as important, if not more important, than the finding itself. This is only the start of the next chapter in the hotly debated early peopling of the Americas.”

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View of the Sierra El Astillero mountains where the Chiquihuite cave was found in 2012. Devlin A. Gandy

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Team members entering the Chiquihuite cave. Devlin A. Gandy

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Assistant professor Mikkel Winther Pedersen from the University of Copenhagen sampling the cave sediments for DNA. Devlin A. Gandy

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Assistant professor Mikkel Winther Pedersen with team members carefully sampling the different cultural layers in the cave. Mads Thomsen

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Assistant professor Mikkel Winther Pedersen with team members carefully sampling the different cultural layers in the cave. Devlin A. Gandy

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Stone tool found below the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) layer, within Stratigraphic Component C, at Chiquihuite Cave. Ciprian Ardelean.

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Article Source: Edited and adapted from news releases of the University of Copenhagen and St. John’s College, University of Cambridge

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UNIVERSITÀ DI BOLOGNA—Homo Neanderthalensis did not become extinct because of changes in climate. At least, this did not happen to the several Neanderthal groups that lived in the western Mediterranean 42,000 years ago. A research group of the University of Bologna came to this conclusion after a detailed paleoclimatic reconstruction of the last ice age through the analysis of stalagmites sampled from some caves in Apulia, Italy.

The researchers focused on the Murge karst plateau in Apulia, where Neanderthals and Homo sapiens coexisted for at least 3,000 years, from approximately 45,000 to 42,000 years ago. This study was published in Nature Ecology & Evolution. Data extracted from the stalagmites showed that climate changes that happened during that time span were not particularly significant. “Our study shows that this area of Apulia appears as a ‘climate niche’ during the transition from Neanderthals to Homo sapiens” explains Andrea Columbu, researcher and first author of this study. “It doesn’t seem possible that significant climate changes happened during that period, at least not impactful enough to cause the extinction of Neanderthals in Apulia and, by the same token, in similar areas of the Mediterranean”.

THE CLIMATE CHANGE HYPOTHESIS

The hypothesis that a changing climate was a factor in Neanderthals extinction (that happened in Europe nearly 42,000 years ago) found considerable support among the scientific community. According to this theory, during the last ice age, sharp and rapid changes in climate were a decisive factor in Neanderthals’ extinction because of the increasingly cold and dry weather.

We can find confirmation of these sharp changes in the analysis of ice cores from Greenland and from other paleoclimatic archives of continental Europe. However, when it comes to some Mediterranean areas where Neanderthals had lived since 100,000 years ago, the data tell a different story. The Western Mediterranean is rich in prehistoric findings and, until now, no one ever carried out a paleoclimatic reconstruction of these Neanderthal-occupied areas.

THE IMPORTANCE OF STALAGMITES

Where can we find answers about the past climate of the Western Mediterranean? The research group of the University of Bologna turned to the Murge plateau in Apulia. “Apulia is key to our understanding of anthropological movements: we know that both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens lived there approximately 45,000 years ago”, says Andrea Columbu. “Very few other areas in the world saw both species co-existing in a relatively small space. This makes the Murge plateau the perfect place to study the climate and the bio-cultural grounds of the transition from Neanderthal to Sapiens”.

How is it possible to provide a climate reconstruction of such a remote period? Stalagmites have the answer. These rock formations rise from the floor of karst caves thanks to ceiling water drippings. “Stalagmites are excellent paleoclimatic and paleoenvironmental archives”, explains Jo De Waele, research coordinator and professor at the University of Bologna. “Since stalagmites form through rainwater dripping, they provide unquestionable evidence of the presence or absence of rain. Moreover, they are made of calcite, which contains carbon and oxygen isotopes. The latter provide precise information about how the soil was and how much it rained during the formation period of stalagmites. We can then cross these pieces of information with radiometric dating, that provide an extremely precise reconstruction of the phases of stalagmites’ formation”.

A (RELATIVELY) STABLE CLIMATE

The pace at which stalagmites formed is the first significant result of this study. Researchers found out that Apulian stalagmites showed a consistent pace of dripping in the last and previous ice ages. This means that no abrupt change in climate happened during the millennia under investigation. A draught would have been visible in the stalagmites.

Among all the stalagmites that were analyzed, one was particularly relevant. Researchers sampled this 50-cm long stalagmite in the Pozzo Cucù cave, in the Castellana Grotte area (Bari) and they carried out 27 high-precision datings and 2,700 analyses of carbon and oxygen stable isotopes. According to dating, this stalagmite formed between 106,000 and 27,000 years ago. This stalagmite represents the longest timeline of the last ice age in the western Mediterranean and in Europe. Moreover, this stalagmite did not show any trace of abrupt changes in climate that might have caused Neanderthals’ extinction.

“The analyses we carried out show little variation in rainfall between 50,000 and 27,000 years ago, the extent of this variation is not enough to cause alterations in the flora inhabiting the environment above the cave”, says Jo De Waele. “Carbon isotopes show that the bio-productivity of the soil remained all in all consistent during this period that includes the 3,000 years-long coexistence between Sapiens and Neanderthals. This means that significant changes in flora and thus in climate did not happen”.

THE TECHNOLOGY HYPOTHESIS

The results seem to show that the dramatic changes in the climate of the last ice age had a different impact on the Mediterranean area than in continental Europe and Greenland. This may rule out the hypothesis that climate changes are responsible for Neanderthals dying out.

How do we explain their extinction after a few millennia of coexistence with Homo sapiens? Stefano Benazzi, a palaeontologist at the University of Bologna and one of the authors of the paper, provides an answer to this question. “The results we obtained corroborate the hypothesis, put forward by many scholars, that the extinction of Neanderthals had to do with technology”, says Benazzi. “According to this hypothesis, the Homo sapiens hunted using a technology that was far more advanced than Neanderthals’, and this represented a primary reason to Sapiens’ supremacy over Neanderthals, that eventually became extinct after 3,000 years of co-existence”.

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Researchers sampled this 50-cm long stalagmite in the Pozzo Cucù cave, in the Castellana Grotte area (Bari) and they carried out 27 high-precision datings and 2,700 analyses of carbon and oxygen stable isotopes. O. Lacarbonara

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THE AUTHORS OF THE STUDY

The study was published in Nature Ecology & Evolution with the title “Speleothem record attests to stable environmental conditions during Neanderthal- modern human turnover in southern Italy”. Representing the University of Bologna, we have Andrea Columbu, Veronica Chiarini and Jo De Waele from the Department of Biological, Geological and Environmental Sciences, and Stefano Benazzi from the Department of Cultural Heritage.

Other scholars also participated in the study: from the University of Innsbruck (Austria) where the isotopic analyses were carried out, from Melbourne University (Australia) and Xi’an Jiaotong University (China), that carried out the radiometric dating.

Grotte di Castellana, the Apulian Speleology Association and, for the major part, local speleology groups provided funding for this study.

Article Source: UNIVERSITÀ DI BOLOGNA news release

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UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK—Thousands of years ago the UK was physically joined to the rest of Europe through an area known as Doggerland. However, a marine inundation took place during the mid-holocene, separating the British landmass from the rest of Europe, which is now covered by the North Sea.

Scientists from the School of Life Sciences at the University of Warwick have studied sedimentary ancient DNA (sedaDNA) from sediment deposits in the southern North Sea, an area which has not previously been linked to a tsunami that occurred 8150 years ago.

The paper, led by the University of Bradford and involving Universities of Warwick, Wales St. Trinity David, St. Andrews, Cork, Aberystwyth, Tartu as well as the Smithsonian and Natural History Museum, ‘Multi-Proxy Characterisation of the Storegga Tsunami and Its Impact on the Early Holocene Landscapes of the Southern North Sea’, published in the Journal Geosciences, sees Life Scientists from the University of Warwick work specifically on the sedimentary ancient DNA from Doggerland.

A number of innovative breakthroughs were achieved by the University of Warwick scientists in terms of analysing the sedaDNA. One of these was the concept of biogenomic mass, where for the first time they were able to see the how the biomass changes with events, evidence of this presented in the paper refers to the large woody mass of trees from the tsunami found in the DNA of the ancient sediment.

New ways of authenticating the sedaDNA were also developed, as current methods of authentication do not apply to sedaDNA which has been damaged whilst under the sea for thousands of years because there is too little information for each individual species. Researchers therefore came up with a new way, metagenomic assessment methodology, whereby the characteristic damage found at the ends of ancient DNA molecules is collectively analyzed across all species rather than one.

Alongside this a key part of analyzing the sedaDNA is to determine whether or not it was deposited in situ or has moved over time. This led researchers to develop statistical methods to establish which scenario was appropriate, using stratigraphic integrity they were able to determine that the sedaDNA in the sediment deposits had not moved a massive amount since deposition by assessing the biomolecules vertical movement in the core column of the sedaDNA.

Identifying which organisms the ancient fragmented molecules of DNA came from is also challenging because often there is nothing to directly compare. In a fourth innovation the researchers refined algorithms to define these regions of “dark phylogenetic space” from where organisms must have originated overcome this issue.

Professor Robin Allaby from the School of Life Sciences at the University of Warwick comments: “This study represents an exciting milestone for sedimentary ancient DNA studies establishing a number of breakthrough methods to reconstruct an 8,150 year old environmental catastrophe in the lands that existed before the North Sea flooded them away into history.”

Professor Vince Gaffney from the School of Archaeological and Forensic Sciences at the University of Bradford said: “Exploring Doggerland, the lost landscape underneath the North Sea, is one of the last great archaeological challenges in Europe. This work demonstrates that an interdisciplinary team of archaeologists and scientists can bring this landscape back to life and even throw new light on one of prehistory’s great natural disasters, the Storegga Tsunami.

“The events leading up to the Storegga tsunami have many similarities to those of today. Climate is changing and this impacts on many aspects of society, especially in coastal locations.”

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Mp showing location of ancient Doggerland. Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

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A map of the UK and the area studied is starred. University of Bradford

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The sediment of which the sedaDNA was studied. Dr Martin Bates, UWTSD

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK news release

Paper available to view at: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3263/10/7/270

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