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UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT BOULDER—Today’s modern cities, from Denver to Dubai, could learn a thing or two from the ancient Pueblo communities that once stretched across the southwestern United States. For starters, the more people live together, the better the living standards.

That finding comes from a study published today in the journal Science Advances and led by Scott Ortman, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado Boulder. He’s one of a growing number of antiquarians who argue that the world’s past may hold the key to its future. What lessons can people living today take from the successes and failures of civilizations hundreds or thousands of years ago?

Recently, Ortman and Jose Lobo from Arizona State University took a deep dive into data from the farming towns that dotted the Rio Grande Valley between the 14th and 16th centuries. Modern metropolises should take note: As the Pueblo villages grew bigger and denser, their per capita production of food and other goods seemed to go up, too.

Busy streets, in other words, may lead to better-off citizens.

“We see an increasing return to scale,” said Ortman, an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology who is also affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. “The more people work together, the more they produce per person.”

Whether the same thing is true today remains an open question, especially amid the unprecedented impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on cities and human proximity. But the results from the sunny Southwest suggest that it’s an idea worth exploring.

“The archaeological record can help us to learn about issues we care about today in ways that we can’t do using the data available to us from modern societies,” Ortman said.

The good dishes

The research is an offshoot of an effort that Ortman leads called the Social Reactors Project, which has explored patterns of growth in civilizations from ancient Rome to the Incan world.

It’s an attempt to chase down an idea first proposed in the 18th century by Adam Smith, often known as the father of modern economics. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith made the case for the fundamental benefits of market size–that if you make it easier for more people to trade, the economy will grow.

Just look at any city in the U.S. where you might find a hair salon next to a bakery next to a doggie daycare.

“As people interact more frequently, a person can make and do fewer things themselves and get more of what they need from their social contacts,” Ortman said.

The problem, he explained, is that such “agglomeration-driven” growth is difficult to isolate in today’s big and complex cities. The same isn’t true for the Rio Grande Valley.

Before the arrival of the Spaniards in the 16th century, hundreds of villages spanned the region near what is now Santa Fe. These settlements ranged in size from a few dozen residents to as many as 3,000 people, most of whom made their living by growing crops like maize and cotton.

Such a subsistence lifestyle didn’t mean that these communities were simple.

“The traditional view in ancient history was that economic growth didn’t happen until the onset of the industrial revolution,” Ortman said.

He and Lobo decided to put that assumption to the test. The duo pored through an exhaustive database of archaeological finds from the region–capturing everything from the number and size of rooms in Pueblo communities to the pottery from rubbish heaps.

They unearthed a clear trend: When villages got more populous, their residents seemed to get better off on average–exactly as Smith predicted. Living spaces grew in size and families collected more painted pottery.

“You might think of it as more sets of dishes for sharing meals together,” Ortman said.

Social connection

That growth, the team discovered, also seemed to follow a pattern that researchers on the Social Reactors Project have seen in a range of civilizations throughout history. Every time villages doubled in size, markers of economic growth increased by about 16% on average.

Ortman said that the effect doesn’t happen in the same way everywhere. Factors like inequality and racism, for example, can keep urban residents from working together even when they live in cramped spaces.

But, Ortman added, these Pueblo communities hold an important lesson for modern-day societies: the more people can connect with others, the more prosperous they become.

“All other things being equal, urbanization should lead to improvements in the material conditions of life for people everywhere,” he said. “We suspect this is why the world continues to urbanize, despite all of the associated problems.”

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Mesa Verde represents classic ancient pueblo living. Dassel, Pixabay

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT BOULDER news release

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UNIVERSITY OF EXETER—Innovation by ancient farmers to improve soil fertility continues to have an impact on the biodiversity of the Amazon, a major new study shows.

Early inhabitants fertilized the soil with charcoal from fire remains and food waste. Areas with this “dark earth” have a different set of species than the surrounding landscape, contributing to a more diverse ecosystem with a richer collection of plant species, researchers from the State University of Mato Grosso in Brazil and the University of Exeter have found.

The legacy of this land management thousands of years ago means there are thousands of these patches of dark earth dotted around the region, most around the size of a small field. This is the first study to measure the difference in vegetation in dark and non-dark earth areas in mature forests across a region spanning a thousand kilometers.

The team of ecologists and archaeologists studied abandoned areas along the main stem of the Amazon River near Tapajós and in the headwaters of the Xingu River Basin in southern Amazonia.

Lead author Dr Edmar Almeida de Oliveira said: “This is an area where dark earth lush forests grow, with colossal trees of different species from the surrounding forest, with more edible fruit trees, such as taperebá and jatobá.”

The number of indigenous communities living in the Amazon collapsed following European colonization of the region, meaning many dark earth areas were abandoned.

The study, published in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography, reveals for the first time the extent to which pre-Columbian Amerindians influenced the current structure and diversity of the Amazon forest of the areas they once farmed.

Researchers sampled around 4,000 trees in southern and eastern Amazonia. Areas with dark earth had a significantly higher pH and more nutrients that improved soil fertility. Pottery shards and other artefacts were also found in the rich dark soils.

Professor Ben Hur Marimon Junior, from the State University of Mato Grosso, said: “Pre-Columbian indigenous people, who fertilized the poor soils of the Amazon for at least 5,000 years, have left an impressive legacy, creating the dark earth, or Terras Pretas de Índio”

Professor José Iriarte, an archaeologist from the University of Exeter, said: “By creating dark earth early inhabitants of the Amazon were able to successfully cultivate the soil for thousands of years in an agroforestry system

“We think ancient communities used dark earth areas to grow crops to eat, and adjacent forests without dark earth for agroforestry.”

Dr Ted Feldpausch, from the University of Exeter, who co-authored the study with Dr Luiz Aragão from the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) in Brazil, said: “After being abandoned for hundreds of years, we still find a fingerprint of the ancient land-use in the forests today as a legacy of the pre-Colombian Amazonian population estimated in millions of inhabitants.

“We are currently expanding this research across the whole Amazon Basin under a project funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) to evaluate whether historical fire also affected the forest areas distant from the anthropogenic dark earths”.

Many areas with dark earth are currently cultivated by local and indigenous populations, who have had great success with their food crops. But most are still hidden in the native forest, contributing to increased tree size, carbon stock and regional biodiversity. For this reason, the lush forests of the “Terra Preta de Índio” and their biological and cultural wealth in the Amazon must be preserved as a legacy for future generations, the researchers have said. Areas with dark earth are under threat due to illegal deforestation and fire.

“Dark earth increases the richness of species, an important consideration for regional biodiversity conservation. These findings highlight the small?scale long?term legacy of pre?Columbian inhabitants on the soils and vegetation of Amazonia,” said co-author Prof Beatriz Marimon, from the State University of Mato Grosso.

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Innovation by ancient farmers to improve soil fertility continues to have an impact on the biodiversity of the Amazon, a major new study shows. Ben Hur Marimon Junior

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF EXETER news release

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Cover Image, Top Left: Blackend464

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UNIVERSITY OF YORK—Prehistoric pioneers could have relied on shellfish to sustain them as they followed migratory routes out of Africa during times of drought, a new study suggests.

The study* examined fossil reefs near to the now-submerged Red Sea shorelines that marked prehistoric migratory routes from Africa to Arabia. The findings suggest this coast offered the resources necessary to act as a gateway out of Africa during periods of little rainfall when other food sources were scarce.

The research team, led by the University of York, focused on the remains of 15,000 shells dating back 5,000 years to an arid period in the region. With the coastline of original migratory routes submerged by sea-level rise after the last Ice Age, the shells came from the nearby Farasan Islands in Saudi Arabia.

The researchers found that populations of marine mollusks were plentiful enough to allow continuous harvests without any major ecological impacts and their plentiful availability would have enabled people to live through times of drought.

Lead author, Dr Niklas Hausmann, Associate Researcher at the Department of Archaeology at the University of York, said: “The availability of food resources plays an important role in understanding the feasibility of past human migrations – hunter-gatherer migrations would have required local food sources and periods of aridity could therefore have restricted these movements.

“Our study suggests that Red Sea shorelines had the resources necessary to provide a passage for prehistoric people.”

The study also confirms that communities settled on the shorelines of the Red Sea could have relied on shellfish as a sustainable food resource all year round.

Dr Hausmann added: “Our data shows that at a time when many other resources on land were scarce, people could rely on their locally available shellfish. Previous studies have shown that people of the southern Red Sea ate shellfish year-round and over periods of thousands of years. We now also know that this resource was not depleted by them, but shellfish continued to maintain a healthy population.”

The shellfish species found in the archaeological sites on the Farasan Islands were also found in abundance in fossil reefs dating to over 100 thousand years ago, indicating that these shellfish have been an available resource over longer periods than archaeological sites previously suggested.

Co-author of the study, Matthew Meredith-Williams, from La Trobe University, said: “We know that modeling past climates to learn about food resources is extremely helpful, but we need to differentiate between what is happening on land and what is happening in the water. In our study we show that marine foods were abundant and resilient and being gathered by people when they couldn’t rely on terrestrial food.”

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Living specimen of the marine mollusc Conomurex fasciatus. Millions of these shells were found on the Farasan Islands in Saudi Arabia as the food refuse of prehistoric fishers. Niklas Hausmann

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF YORK news release

*Shellfish resilience to prehistoric human consumption in the southern Red Sea: Variability in Conomurex fasciatus across time and space is published in Quaternary International. The research was funded by the European Research Council.

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PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES—Remains of hunter-gatherers found in a French cave offer fresh insight into Paleolithic mortuary rituals, according to a study*. Around 30,000 years ago, before the Last Glacial Maximum, the Gravettian culture was known for its prolific cave art, Venus figurines, and elaborate burials. Sacha Kacki, Sébastien Villotte, Erik Trinkaus, and colleagues describe the details and dynamics of burials at the Grotte de Cussac, a cave discovered 20 years ago in southwestern France. The authors used photographs and 3D photogrammetric models due to restrictions on direct contact with cave surfaces or remains. In one area deep in the cave, the authors observed a complete male skeleton in the shallow bowl-like depression of a former bear nest and bones from at least two individuals sorted anatomically in other former nests. Additionally, the authors observed bones from at least three individuals sorted into hollows along the wall. The bones appeared to be sorted roughly by lower and upper anatomy. The authors report that the burial sites at Cussac were farther inside the cave than is typical. The authors also found elaborate cave art, with more than 800 engravings—another feature unusual for burial sites. According to the authors, the mortuary practices at Cussac offer rich insight into the social diversity and complex interactions between the living and the dead in this foraging culture.

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The disarticulated skeletal remains of an adult male deposited in a bear nest. Pascal Mora

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Photogrammetric model of the bones of an adult and an adolescent, clustered on one side of a bear nest. Pascal Mora

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

*”Complex mortuary dynamics in the Upper Paleolithic of the decorated Grotte de Cussac, France,” by Sacha Kacki et al.

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MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY—The origins of human innovation have traditionally been sought in the grasslands and coasts of Africa or the temperate environments of Europe. More extreme environments, such as the tropical rainforests of Asia, have been largely overlooked, despite their deep history of human occupation. A new study provides the earliest evidence for bow-and-arrow use, and perhaps the making of clothes, outside of Africa ~48-45,000 years ago -in the tropics of Sri Lanka.

The island of Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean, just south of the Indian subcontinent, is home to the earliest fossils of our species, Homo sapiens, in South Asia. It also preserves clear evidence for human occupation and the use of tropical rainforest environments outside of Africa from ~48,000 to 3,000 years ago – refuting the idea that these supposedly resource-poor environments acted as barriers for migrating Pleistocene humans. The question as to exactly how humans obtained rainforest resources – including fast-moving food sources like monkeys and squirrels – remains unresolved.

In this new study, published in Science Advances, an international team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPI-SHH) in Germany, Griffith University in Australia and the Department of Archaeology, Government of Sri Lanka, present evidence for the earliest use of bow-and-arrow technologies by humans anywhere outside of Africa. At ~48,000 years old, these tools are earlier than the first similar technology found in Europe. Clear evidence for use on the preserved bone arrowheads shows that they were likely used for hunting difficult-to-catch rainforest prey. Not only that, but the scientists show that other bone tools may have been used for making nets or clothing in tropical settings, dramatically altering traditional assumptions about how certain human innovations were linked with specific environmental requirements.

Hunting in the open and sheltering from the cold?

European cultural products in the form of cave art, amazingly detailed bone carvings, bone tool technologies, and tailored clothing have been frequently held up as the pinnacle of Late Pleistocene human cultural development. There, symbolic and technological innovations have been seen as key survival mechanisms equipping expanding populations to face cold northern climates. Meanwhile, discoveries of older bow-and-arrow technology and artistic or symbolic behaviors in open grassland or coastal settings in Africa have framed ‘savannah’ and marine environments, respectively, as key drivers behind early hunting and cultural experiments by Pleistocene humans in their evolutionary homeland.

As co-author of the new study, Patrick Roberts of the MPI-SHH argues that “this traditional focus has meant that other parts of Africa, Asia, Australasia, and the Americas have often been side-lined in discussions of the origins of material culture, such as novel projectile hunting methods or cultural innovations associated with our species.” Nevertheless, the last twenty years have highlighted how Pleistocene humans occupied and adapted to a variety of extreme environments as they migrated beyond Africa, including deserts, high-altitude settings and tropical rainforests such as those of Sri Lanka.

A tropical home

The new study saw scientists turn to the beautifully preserved material culture from the cave of Fa-Hien Lena, deep in the heart of Sri Lanka’s Wet Zone forests. As co-author Oshan Wedage, PhD at MPI-SHH, states, “Fa-Hien Lena has emerged as one of South Asia’s most important archaeological sites since the 1980s, preserving remains of our species, their tools, and their prey in a tropical context.” Some of the main finds from the site include remarkable single and doubled pointed bone tools that scientists had suspected were used in the exploitation of tropical resources. Direct proof had been lacking, however, in the absence of detailed high-powered microscopic analysis.

Michelle Langley of Griffith University, the lead author of the new study, is an expert in the study of microscopic traces of tool use and the creation of symbolic material culture in Pleistocene contexts. Applying cutting edge methods to the Fa-Hien Lena material confirmed the researchers’ hypothesis. As Langley states, “the fractures on the points indicate damage through high-powered impact – something usually seen in the use of bow-and-arrow hunting of animals. This evidence is earlier than similar findings in Southeast Asia 32,000 years ago and is currently the earliest clear evidence for bow-and-arrow use beyond the African continent.”

The evidence for early human innovation did not stop there. Applying the same microscopic approach to other bone tools, the team identified implements which seem to have been associated with freshwater fishing in nearby tropical streams, as well as the working of fiber to make nets or clothing. “We also found clear evidence for the production of colored beads from mineral ochre and the refined making of shell beads traded from the coast, at a similar age to other ‘social signaling’ materials found in Eurasia and Southeast Asia, roughly 45,000 years ago,” says Michelle Langley. Together, this reveals a complex, early human social network in the tropics of South Asia.

A flexible toolkit for new hunting grounds

The new study highlights that archaeologists can no longer link specific technological, symbolic, or cultural developments in Pleistocene humans to a single region or environment. “The Sri Lankan evidence shows that the invention of bows-and-arrows, clothing, and symbolic signaling occurred multiple times and in multiple different places, including within the tropical rainforests of Asia,” says co-author Michael Petraglia of the MPI-SHH. In addition to insulation in cold environments, clothes may have also helped against tropical mosquitoes, “and instead of just hunting large grassland mammals,” adds zooarchaeologist Noel Amano, another MPI-SHH co-author, “bows and arrows helped humans procure small, tree-dwelling primates and rodents.”

While archaeologists have long focused on the uniqueness of European markers of behavioural modernity, the new study is part of a growing awareness that many regions of the world saw extraordinary and complex new technologies emerge at the end of the Palaeolithic. “Humans at this time show extraordinary resourcefulness and the ability to exploit a range of new environments,” notes Nicole Boivin, Director at the MPI-SHH and study coauthor. “These skills enabled them to colonize nearly all of the planet’s continents by about 10,000 years ago, setting us clearly on the path to being the global species we are today.”

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Map of Sri Lanka with the site of Fa-Hien Lena shown alongside views of the cave and section from which the materials of the study come. Wedage et al., 2019

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Fa-Hien Lena has emerged as one of South Asia’s most important archaeological sites since the 1980s, preserving remains of our species, their tools, and their prey in a tropical context. Langley et al., 2020

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The team found clear evidence for the production of colored beads from mineral ochre and the refined making of shell beads traded from the coast, at a similar age to other ‘social signaling’ materials found in Eurasia and Southeast Asia, roughly 45,000 years ago. Adapted from Langley et al., 2020

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

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CNRS—Carved from burnt bone, this miniature bird statuette is the oldest known Chinese work of art, according to an international team involving the CNRS, the universities of Bordeaux (France), Shandong (China), Bergen (Norway), and the Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel). It was unearthed at Lingjing, a site in Henan Province, in an archaeological context dated to between 13,800 and 13,000 years ago. This discovery pushes back the origins of animal sculpture and representations in East Asia by more than 8,500 years (1). The stylistic and technical particularities of the figurine – it is the only known Palaeolithic sculpture representing an animal standing on a pedestal – point to an original artistic tradition, different from those known in Western Europe and Siberia. The object’s exceptional state of preservation and the researchers’ use of state-of-the-art analytical techniques, such as confocal microscopy and microtomography, have enabled the team to meticulously reconstruct the Palaeolithic artist’s approach. This discovery is published on June 10th 2020 in the journal PLOS ONE.

To find out more, watch this video: https://youtu.be/dCWwTLnrV2Y

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Photo (top) and 3D reconstruction using microtomography (bottom) of the miniature bird sculpture. Its production combined four different techniques (abrasion, gouging, scraping and incision), which left 68 microfacets on the surface of the object. © Francesco d’Errico and Luc Doyon

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Article Source: CNRS news release

Notes: (1) Previously, the oldest known sculptures were the jade and steatite animal figurines from Shangzhai, a 6000 year old site near Beijing.

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In contrast to the prehistoric remains of the Near East, the megalithic monuments of Arabia remain largely unknown. These monumental structures, made of dry stone walls, still hold many secrets in terms of their construction, function and chronology. An international collaboration of scientists from France, Saudi Arabia and Italy, led by Olivia Munoz, a researcher at the CNRS, have discovered a 35-meter long triangular platform in the oasis of Dûmat al-Jandal (northern Saudi Arabia). Built in several phases from the 6th millennium BC, this exceptional monument was probably dedicated to ritual practices, some of which were probably funerary and commemorative. To arrive at these conclusions, scientists studied and dated the objects and human remains from deposits found in and around the platform – in the two side niches and also in nearby tombs. These discoveries, which are published in the journal Antiquity on June 9^th, 2020*, demonstrate a ritual use during Prehistory, and are a potentially symbolic imprint left by nomadic pastoralists in the landscape during this remote period.

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The platform during excavation © MADAJ

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Aerial view of the platform © MADAJ, Marianne Cotty, Olivia Munoz et Ronald Schwerdtner

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Article Source: A CNRS news release

*Marking the sacral landscape of a north Arabian oasis: a sixth-millennium BC monumental stone platform and surrounding burials, Olivia Munoz, Marianne Cotty, Guillaume Charloux, Charlène Bouchaud, Hervé Monchot, Céline Marquaire, Antoine Zazzo, Rémy Crassard, Olivier Brunet, Vanessa Boschloos, Thamer al-Malki. Antiquity, 9 June 2020. DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2020.81

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UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE—For the first time, archaeologists have succeeded in mapping a complete Roman city, Falerii Novi in Italy, using advanced ground penetrating radar (GPR), allowing them to reveal astonishing details while it remains deep underground. The technology could revolutionize our understanding of ancient settlements.

The team, from the University of Cambridge and Ghent University, has discovered a bath complex, market, temple, a public monument unlike anything seen before, and even the city’s sprawling network of water pipes. By looking at different depths, the archaeologists can now study how the town evolved over hundreds of years.

The research, published today in Antiquity, harnessed recent advances in GPR technology which make it possible to explore larger areas in higher resolution than ever before. This is likely to have major implications for the study of ancient cities because many cannot be excavated either because they are too large, or because they are trapped under modern structures.

GPR works like regular radar, bouncing radio waves off objects and using the ‘echo’ to build up a picture at different depths.* By towing their GPR instruments behind a quad bike, the archaeologists surveyed all 30.5 hectares within the city’s walls – Falerii Novi was just under half the size of Pompeii – taking a reading every 12.5cm.

Located 50 km north of Rome and first occupied in 241 BC, Falerii Novi survived into the medieval period (until around AD 700). The team’s GPR data can now start to reveal some of the physical changes experienced by the city in this time. They have already found evidence of stone robbing.

The study also challenges certain assumptions about Roman urban design, showing that Falerii Novi’s layout was less standardized than many other well-studied towns, like Pompeii. The temple, market building and bath complex discovered by the team are also more architecturally elaborate than would usually be expected in a small city.

In a southern district, just within the city’s walls, GPR revealed a large rectangular building connected to a series of water pipes which lead to the aqueduct. Remarkably, these pipes can be traced across much of Falerii Novi, running beneath its insulae (city blocks), and not just along its streets, as might normally be expected. The team believes that this structure was an open-air natatio or pool, forming part of a substantial public bathing complex.

Even more unexpectedly, near the city’s north gate, the team identified a pair of large structures facing each other within a porticus duplex (a covered passageway with central row of columns). They know of no direct parallel but believe these were part of an impressive public monument, and contributed to an intriguing sacred landscape on the city’s edge.

Corresponding author, Professor Martin Millett from the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Classics, said:

“The astonishing level of detail which we have achieved at Falerii Novi, and the surprising features that GPR has revealed, suggest that this type of survey could transform the way archaeologists investigate urban sites, as total entities.”

Millett and his colleagues have already used GPR to survey Interamna Lirenas in Italy, and on a lesser scale, Alborough in North Yorkshire, but they now hope to see it deployed on far bigger sites.

“It is exciting and now realistic to imagine GPR being used to survey a major city such as Miletus in Turkey, Nicopolis in Greece or Cyrene in Libya”, Millett said. “We still have so much to learn about Roman urban life and this technology should open up unprecedented opportunities for decades to come.”

The sheer wealth of data produced by such high-resolution mapping does, however, pose significant challenges. Traditional methods of manual data analysis are too time consuming, requiring around 20 hours to fully document a single hectare. It will be some time before the researchers finish examining Falerii Novi but to speed the process up they are developing new automated techniques.

Falerii Novi is well documented in the historical record, is not covered by modern buildings and has been the subject of decades of analysis using other non-invasive techniques, such as magnetometry, but GPR has now revealed a far more complete picture.

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Ground Penetrating Radar map of the newly discovered temple in the Roman city of Falerii Novi, Italy. L. Verdonck

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A slice of Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) data from the Roman city of Falerii Novi (Italy) revealing the outlines of the town’s buildings. L. Verdonck

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Computer-aided object detection in the GPR data from the case-study area. L. Verdonck

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE news release

*L. Verdonck, A. Launaro, F. Vermeulen & M. Millett, ‘Ground-penetrating radar survey at Falerii Novi: a new approach to the study of Roman cities’, (9 June 2020). DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2020.82

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UPPSALA UNIVERSITY—What kind of interactions did the various Stone Age cultures have with one another? In a new interdisciplinary study, researchers have combined archaeological and genetic information to better understand Battle Axe cultural influences discovered in graves of the Pitted Ware culture. The findings are published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

Archaeological remains have shown that in the middle part the Stone Age, there were at least three different but partially contemporary cultural groups in Sweden. The groups are often called: Funnel Beaker culture, which is associated with Scandinavia’s first farmers; Pitted Ware culture, which is mainly linked to fishing and hunting; and Battle Axe culture, which represents a blended culture of herding and farming.

In addition to sustaining themselves in different ways, the three groups had different burial rituals and different kinds of objects. The research team behind the new study has previously been able to show that people in the three cultural groups also differed genetically.

The genetic mapping the researchers did at that time was invaluable as they investigated why some Pitted Ware graves seemed to be influenced by the Battle Axe culture, even though the two cultures lived relatively differently during their centuries of co-existence.

Gotland has several large, well-preserved cemeteries with typical Pitted Ware culture graves. The dead were usually buried lying on their backs and with gifts, such as hunting tools and bones from seals, among other things. Neither large stone blocks nor mounds were placed on the graves.

“In addition to the typical Pitted Ware graves, there were also several atypical graves with apparent influences from Battle Axe culture. For example, some individuals were buried lying on their sides with their legs pulled up, and some had battle axes as burial gifts, which is usually associated with Battle Axe culture,” says Professor Jan Storå, archaeologist at Stockholm University and one of the authors of the study.

The researchers have analyzed DNA from 25 Stone Age individuals from four Pitted Ware culture burial grounds on Gotland. About half of the individuals were buried in typical Pitted Ware culture graves and the other half of the graves showed influences from Battle Axe culture.

To their surprise, the researchers found that none of the individuals were genetically related to people from Battle Axe culture. On the contrary, everyone appeared to belong to a very homogeneous group that demonstrated the most genetic similarity to the hunter-gatherer groups of earlier periods.

“This is a unique study that contributes to our understanding of the interactions between the cultural groups of the Stone Age. We can conclude that people in Pitted Ware culture were influenced by, among others, Battle Axe culture, but because we found no genetic connection between the groups, contact was likely in the form of trade and other means, rather than through migration,” says Helena Malmström, archaeogeneticist at Uppsala University and one of the authors of the study.

The study is a part of the interdisciplinary Atlas Project, where researchers are studying prehistoric population patterns in Scandinavia and Eurasia through genetic data from prehistoric individuals.

About these ancient cultures:

Funnel Beaker culture: Scandinavia’s first farming culture, which sustained itself with farming and livestock. Existed between 4,800 and 6,000 years ago. Found in southern and central Sweden and in northern parts of continental Europe. Had characteristic ceramics with funnel-shaped necks. Used so-called megalithic graves, stone monuments in which a large number of people were buried. Megalithic graves were most common in Scania, along the west coast and in Falbygden in Västergötland. People buried in Funnel Beaker graves were most genetically similar to early farmers from Anatolia and continental Europe. They differ genetically from earlier Stone Age hunter-gatherers.

Battle Axe culture: Named after their characteristic axes. Came after Funnel Beaker culture and were contemporaries of the later phase of Pitted Ware culture. Often described as a blended herding and farming culture. Existed between 4,300 and 4,800 years ago. Found primarily in southern and central Sweden. Linked to continental European Corded Ware culture. Primarily had single or double graves in which the dead were placed lying on their sides, with their legs pulled up. People found in Battle Axe culture graves show a new genetic component that is not present in the people of the Funnel Beaker or Pitted Ware cultures. This makes them a new group of migrating people in the area with connections to Eastern Steppe herders.

Pitted Ware culture: Named after the characteristic pitted ornamentation of their ceramics. Existed between 4,400 and 5,400 years ago. Partially contemporaries first with Funnel Beaker culture and then with Battle Axe culture. Mainly lived in coastal areas and on Gotland, Öland and Åland. Lived on fishing and hunting, including seal. Often buried their dead lying on their backs in single or double graves. People buried in Pitted Ware culture graves were genetically similar to earlier Scandinavian hunter-gatherers.

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The man in grave 54 from the Ajvide Pitted Ware burial ground on Gotland is buried flat on his back, which is typical of Pitted Ware graves. Göran Burenhult

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The woman in grave 36 from the Ajvide Pitted Ware burial ground on Gotland is lying in a different burial position, which was influenced by Battle Axe culture. Göran Burenhult

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Article Source: UPPSALA UNIVERSITY news release

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MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY—The Caribbean was one of the last regions of the Americas to be settled by humans. Now, a new study published in the journal Science sheds new light on how the islands were settled thousands of years ago.

Using ancient DNA, an international team of researchers found evidence of at least three population dispersals that brought people to the region.

“Our results give a glimpse of the early migration history of the Caribbean and connect the region to the rest of the Americas,” says Hannes Schroeder, Associate Professor at the Globe Institute, University of Copenhagen, and one of the senior authors of the study. “The DNA evidence adds to the archaeological data and enables us to test specific hypotheses as to how the Caribbean was first settled.”

More data, more details

The researchers analyzed the genomes of 93 ancient Caribbean islanders who lived between 400 and 3200 years ago using bone fragments excavated from 16 different archaeological sites across the Caribbean.

Due to the region’s warm climate, the DNA from the samples is not very well preserved. Using targeted enrichment techniques, the researchers managed to extract genome-wide information from the remains.

“New methods and technology allowed us to increase the number of ancient genomes from the Caribbean by almost two orders of magnitude,” says Johannes Krause, Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, another senior author of the study. “With all that data we are able to paint a very detailed picture of the early migration history of the Caribbean.”

The researchers’ findings indicate that there have been at least three different population dispersals into the region: two earlier dispersals into the western Caribbean, one of which seems to be linked to earlier population dispersals in North America, and a third, more recent wave, which originated in South America.

Connections across the Caribbean Sea

Although it is still not entirely clear how the early settlers reached the islands, there is growing archaeological evidence that, far from being a barrier, the Caribbean Sea served as a kind of ‘aquatic highway’ that connected the islands with the mainland and each other.

“Big bodies of water are traditionally considered barriers for humans and ancient fisher hunter gatherer communities are usually not perceived as great seafarers. Our results continue to challenge that view, as they suggest there was repeated interaction between the islands and the mainland,” says Kathrin Nägele, PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany and one of the lead authors of the study.

Biological and cultural diversity in the ancient Caribbean

“The new data support our previous observations that the early settlers of the Caribbean were biologically and culturally diverse, adding resolution to this ancient period of our history,” says Yadira Chinique de Armas, Assistant Professor in Bioanthropology at the University of Winnipeg and co-director of three large-scale excavations in Cuba.

The researchers also found genetic differences between the early settlers and the newcomers from South America who, according to archaeological evidence, entered the region around 2800 years ago.

“Although the different groups were present in the Caribbean at the same time, we found surprisingly little evidence of admixture between them,” adds Cosimo Posth, group leader at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and joint-first author of the study.

“The results of this study provide yet another layer of data that highlights the complex and multi-nature of pre-Columbian Caribbean societies and their connections to the American mainland prior to the colonial invasion. It’s reflected in the archaeology of the region, but it is fascinating to see it supported by the biological data,” says Corinne Hofman, Professor of Archaeology at Leiden University and PI of the ERC Synergy project NEXUS1492. “Genetic data provide a new depth to our findings,” agrees Mirjana Roksandic, Professor at the University of Winnipeg and the PI on the SSHRC project.

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Canimar Abajo. Kathrin Nägele

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Excavating Canimar Abajo (2018). Esteban Grau Gonzalez

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Mirjana Roksandic excavating Playa del Mango. Luis Viera Sanfiel

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

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PLOS—Integrating radiocarbon dating and microarchaeology techniques has enabled more precise dating of the ancient Wilson’s Arch monument at Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, according to a study* published June 3, 2020 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Johanna Regev from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, and colleagues.

Radiocarbon dating has rarely been used in archaeological explorations of the Classical and Post-Classical age in the Eastern Mediterranean (approximately the 8th century BC-6th century AD) –this is due to the technique’s imprecision, as well as a historical reliance on using material culture findings like coins or texts to estimate dates of specific monuments.

In this study, Regev and colleagues focused on pinpointing the specific construction dates for Wilson’s Arch, an arch of “The Great Causeway”, an ancient bridge linking Jerusalem’s Temple Mount to the houses of Jerusalem’s upper city, and which was excavated in 2015-2019 as part of a tourist development project. Wilson’s Arch has been the subject of much scholarly debate, with construction dates suggested from the time of Herod the Great, Roman colonization, or even the early Islamic period in Jerusalem (a span of about 700 years).

To better understand the specific timing of Wilson’s Arch (and the historical context in which it was constructed), Regev and colleagues used an integrative approach in the field during its excavation, conducting radiocarbon dating of 33 construction material samples directly at the site (generally charred organic matter, like seeds or sticks, present in mortar), as well as stratigraphic and microarchaeological analyses.

The authors were able to narrow the dates of construction for the initial Great Causeway bridge structure as having occurred between 20 BC and 20 AD, during the reign of Herod the Great or directly after his death. They also discovered a second stage of construction: between 30 AD and 60 AD, the bridge doubled in size as Wilson’s Arch in its current form was finalized (during this period of direct Roman rule, there’s evidence the Romans began or expanded on many building projects around Jerusalem, including an aqueduct supplying the Temple Mount with water).

Regev and colleagues note that their technique of using many samples for radiocarbon dating, coupled with stratigraphic analysis, could be broadly applied in many other densely-built ancient cities in order to fine-tune building dates for specific remains.

The authors add: “Radiocarbon high resolution chronology of charred remains reshapes Jerusalem’s history, resolving a long-standing debate regarding the entrance to its holiest site: the Temple Mount.”

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Wilson’s Arch excavation area. (A) Map of the old city of Jerusalem and the location Wilson’s Arch. Copyrights: Israel Antiquities Authority, 2020. (B) An artistic reconstruction of the Temple Mount in the time of Herod the Great (1st century AD). The arrow points to the arch known today as Wilson’s Arch. Copyrights: Ritmeyer Archaeological Design, 2020. (C,D) Photographs of the site. The scale bar in D is 1 meter in length. (E,F) A 3D reconstruction of the site. As the site is under constant renovations, a model is used here to illustrate the location of the various features and strata. A section drawing of strata 1,4,5 was imposed on the Western Wall to illustrate their relative position. Regev et al, 2020 (PLOS ONE, CC BY 4.0)

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Article Source: PLOS news release

*Regev J, Uziel J, Lieberman T, Solomon A, Gadot Y, Ben-Ami D, et al. (2020) Radiocarbon dating and microarchaeology untangle the history of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount: A view from Wilson’s Arch. PLoS ONE 15(6): e0233307. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0233307

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UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA—From the ground, it’s impossible to tell that the plateau underfoot is something extraordinary. But from the sky, with laser eyes, and beneath the surface, with radiocarbon dating, it’s clear that it is the largest and oldest Mayan monument ever discovered.

Located in Tabasco, Mexico, near the northwestern border of Guatemala, the newly discovered site of Aguada Fénix lurked beneath the surface, hidden by its size and low profile until 2017. The monument measures nearly 4,600 feet long, ranges from 30 to 50 feet high and includes nine wide causeways.

The monument was discovered by an international team led by University of Arizona professors in the School of Anthropology Takeshi Inomata and Daniela Triadan, with support from the university’s Agnese Nelms Haury program and under the authorization of the National Institute of Anthropology and History of Mexico.

They used lidar – or light detection and ranging – technology, which uses laser-emitting equipment from an airplane. Laser beams penetrate the tree canopy, and their reflections off the ground’s surface reveal the three-dimensional forms of archaeological features. The team then excavated the site and radiocarbon-dated 69 samples of charcoal to determine that it was constructed sometime between 1,000 to 800 B.C. Until now, the Maya site of Ceibal, built in 950 B.C., was the oldest confirmed ceremonial center. This oldest monumental building at Aguada Fénix turned out to be the largest known in the entire Maya history, far exceeding pyramids and palaces of later periods.

The team’s findings are published today in the journal Nature.

“Using low-resolution lidar collected by the Mexican government, we noticed this huge platform. Then we did high-resolution lidar and confirmed the presence of a big building,” Inomata said. “This area is developed – it’s not the jungle; people live there – but this site was not known because it is so flat and huge. It just looks like a natural landscape. But with lidar, it pops up as a very well-planned shape.”

The discovery marks a time of major change in Mesoamerica and has several implications, Inomata said.

First, archaeologists traditionally thought Maya civilization developed gradually. Until now, it was thought that small Maya villages began to appear between 1000 and 350 B.C., what’s known as the Middle Preclassic period, along with the use of pottery and some maize cultivation.

Second, the site looks similar to the older Olmec civilization center of San Lorenzo to the west in the Mexican state of Veracruz, but the lack of stone sculptures related to rulers and elites, such as colossal heads and thrones, suggests less social inequality than San Lorenzo and highlights the importance of communal work in the earliest days of the Maya.

“There has always been debate over whether Olmec civilization led to the development of the Maya civilization or if the Maya developed independently,” Inomata said. “So, our study focuses on a key area between the two.”

The period in which Aguada Fénix was constructed marked a gap in power – after the decline of San Lorenzo and before the rise of another Olmec center, La Venta. During this time, there was an exchange of new ideas, such as construction and architectural styles, among various regions of southern Mesoamerica. The extensive plateau and the large causeways suggest the monument was built for use by many people, Inomata said.

“During later periods, there were powerful rulers and administrative systems in which the people were ordered to do the work. But this site is much earlier, and we don’t see the evidence of the presence of powerful elites. We think that it’s more the result of communal work,” he said.

The fact that monumental buildings existed earlier than thought and when Maya society had less social inequality makes archaeologists rethink the construction process.

“It’s not just hierarchical social organization with the elite that makes monuments like this possible,” Inomata said. “This kind of understanding gives us important implications about human capability, and the potential of human groups. You may not necessarily need a well-organized government to carry out these kinds of huge projects. People can work together to achieve amazing results.”

Inomata and his team will continue to work at Aguada Fénix and do a broader lidar analysis of the area. They want to gather information about surrounding sites to understand how they interacted with the Olmec and the Maya.

They also wants to focus on the residential areas around Aguada Fénix.

“We have substantial information about ceremonial construction,” Inomata said, “but we want to see how people lived during this period and what kind of changes in lifestyle were happening around this time.”

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LiDAR has been instrumental in revealing major new monumental discoveries in Mesoamerica in recent years, allowing scientists to pierce the jungle canopy to “see” ancient monuments that is otherwise shrouded beneath the tropical cover. Dezalb, Pixabay

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA news release

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CELL PRESS—The collection of more than 25,000 fragments of ancient manuscripts known as the Dead Sea Scrolls include, among other ancient texts, the oldest copies of books of the Hebrew Bible. But finding a way to piece them all together in order to understand their meaning has remained an incredibly difficult puzzle, especially given that most pieces weren’t excavated in an orderly fashion. Now, researchers reporting in the journal Cell* on June 2 have used an intriguing clue to help in this effort: DNA “fingerprints” lifted from the animal skins on which the texts were written.

“The discovery of the 2,000-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls is one of the most important archaeological discoveries ever made,” says Oded Rechavi (@OdedRechavi) of Tel Aviv University in Israel. “However, it poses two major challenges: first, most of them were not found intact but rather disintegrated into thousands of fragments, which had to be sorted and pieced together, with no prior knowledge on how many pieces have been lost forever, or–in the case of non-biblical compositions–how the original text should read. Depending on the classification of each fragment, the interpretation of any given text could change dramatically.”

The second challenge is that most of the scrolls were acquired not directly from eleven Qumran caves near the Dead Sea but through antiquity dealers. As a result, it’s not clear where many of the fragments came from in the first place, making it that much more difficult to put them together and into their proper historical context.

Since their discovery, mainly in the late 1940s and 1950s, scholars tried to put them together like a jigsaw puzzle, relying primarily on visible properties of the fragments in order to learn about their relationship to other fragments. In the new study, Rechavi and colleagues including Noam Mizrahi, Tel Aviv University, Israel, and Mattias Jakobsson, Uppsala University, Sweden, decided to look deeper for clues. From each piece, they extracted ancient DNA of the animals that were used to make the parchments. Then, using a forensic-like analysis, they worked to establish the relationship between the pieces based on that DNA evidence and on scrutiny of the language within the texts under investigation.

The DNA sequences revealed that the parchments were mostly made from sheep, which wasn’t known. The researchers then reasoned that pieces made from the skin of the same sheep must be related, and that scrolls from closely related sheep were more likely to fit together than those from more different sheep or other species.

The researchers stumbled onto an interesting case in which two pieces thought to belong together were in fact made from different animals–sheep and cow. It suggested they don’t belong together at all. The most notable example came from scrolls that comprise different copies of the biblical, prophetic book of Jeremiah, which are also some of the oldest known scrolls.

“Analysis of the text found on these Jeremiah pieces suggests that they not only belong to different scrolls, they also represent different versions of the prophetic book,” says Mizrahi. “The fact that the scrolls that are most divergent textually are also made of a different animal species is indicative that they originate at a different provenance.”

Most likely, he explains, the cow fragments were written elsewhere because it wasn’t possible to raise cows in the Judean desert. The discovery also has larger implications. The researchers write that the fact that different versions of the book circulated in parallel suggests that “the holiness of the biblical book did not extend to its precise wording.” That’s in contrast to the mutually exclusive texts that were adopted later by Judaism and Christianity, they note.

“This teaches us about the way this prophetic text was read at the time and also holds clues to the process of the text’s evolution,” Rechavi says.

Other highlights include insight into the relationship among different copies of a non-biblical, liturgical work known as the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, found in both Qumran and Masada. The analysis shows that the various copies found in different Qumran Caves are closely related genetically, but the Masada copy is distinct. The finding suggests that the work had a wider currency in the period.

“What we learn from the scrolls is probably relevant also to what happened in the country at the time,” Mizrahi says. “As the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice foreshadows revolutionary developments in poetic design and religious thinking, this conclusion has implications for the history of Western mysticism and Jewish liturgy.”

The evidence also confirmed that some other fragments of uncertain origin likely came from other places and not the Qumran caves. In one case, the DNA evidence suggests a fragment from a copy of the biblical book of Isaiah–one of the most popular books in ancient Judea–likely came from another site, which suggests to the researchers the potential existence of an additional place of discovery that still awaits identification.

Although the DNA evidence adds to understanding, it can only “reveal part of the picture and not solve all the mysteries,” Rechavi says. The researchers had to extract DNA from tiny amounts of materials–what they refer to as scroll “dust” in certain cases–and say there are also many scrolls that have yet to be sampled and others that can’t be, for fear it might ruin them.

Nevertheless, the researchers hope that more samples will be tested and added to the database to work toward a more complete Dead Sea Scroll “genome.” They now think they can apply the same methods to any ancient artifact that contains enough intact DNA or perhaps other biological molecules.

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One of the Qumran caves where the Dead Sea Scroll fragments were found. Courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority, Photographer Shai Halevi

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a tiny fragment of the scrolls being sampled for testing. Courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority, Photographer Shai Halevi

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Article Source: Cell Press news release

*Cell, Anava, Neuhof, Gingold, Sagy, et al.: “Illuminating Genetic Mysteries of the Dead Sea Scrolls” https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)30552-3

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MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY—While recent advances in ancient DNA analysis have established the major patterns of prehistoric human migration in western Eurasia, the population history of eastern Eurasia remains little understood. Northern China is of particular importance, as it harbored two of the world’s earliest agricultural centers for millet farming: the Yellow and West Liao River basins. Both basins are famous for their rich archaeological cultures and their influence on nearby regions. However, little is known about their genetic interactions and how these affected the dispersal of millet farming over northern China and surrounding regions.

To tackle these questions, a team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPI SHH) in Germany collaborated with geneticist Prof. Dr. Yinqiu Cui and her team at the School of Life Sciences at Jilin University in China. With joint forces, they were able to sequence 55 genomes from across northern China dating between 7,500 and 1,700 years ago, covering the Yellow River, West Liao River and Amur River regions. Their results add to discussions concerning the relationship between genetic contacts and subsistence change while providing the first comprehensive genetic overview of northern China.

Correlated changes of genes and subsistence

The researchers find that, contrary to the strong genetic continuity in the Amur basin, genetic profiles in the West Liao River region substantially changed over time. Yellow River, however, showed a general genetic stability but received genetic contribution from populations related to present-day groups in southern China since the middle Neolithic.

“Although the genetic changes in each region differ in timing and intensity, each shift is correlated with changes in subsistence strategy,” says lead author Chao Ning of the MPI SHH’s eurasia3angle team. “As we look backwards in time, an increase of Amur River affinity in West Liao River corresponds with the inclusion of a pastoral economy during the Bronze Age, prior to that, an increased Yellow River affinity in the same region is correlated with the intensification of millet farming in the late Neolithic. Finally, our earliest results show that an affinity of Yellow River to populations from southern China (e.g. from the Yangtze River basin) since the middle Neolithic is concordant with the northward dispersal of rice farming.”

Corresponding author Choongwon Jeong, formerly a geneticist on the eurasia3angle team now affiliated with Seoul National University in South Korea, puts the findings in perspective. “We realize that our current dataset needs ancient genomes from people who brought rice agriculture into northeast China, such as ancient farmers from the Shandong and Lower Yangtze River regions, but nevertheless our study is a major step forward in understanding how this region developed.”

“For me, as a linguist, our findings truly are an eye-opener,” says senior author Martine Robbeets, principal investigator of the eurasia3angle team. “As the West Liao River Basin is associated with the origin of the Transeurasian language family and the Yellow River Basin with the Sino-Tibetan family, our results fuel the debate on the historical correlation between archaeological cultures, languages and genes.”

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Human remains in house foundation F40 of the Haminmangha site. Yonggang Zhu, School of Archaeology Jilin University

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Location of the 19 archaeological sites covering 55 ancient individuals in this study. Each symbol corresponds to a site from a specific region. Ning et al., 2020

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

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TAYLOR & FRANCIS GROUP—Analysis of the material on two Iron Age altars discovered at the entrance to the “holy of holies” of a shrine at Tel Arad in the Beersheba Valley, Israel, were found to contain Cannabis and Frankincense, according to new article in the journal, Tel Aviv.

Past excavations revealed two superimposed fortresses, dated to the 9th to early 6th centuries BCE, which guarded the southern border of biblical Judah. Highly important Iron Age finds were unearthed, including a well-preserved shrine that was dated to ca. 750-715 BCE.

Two limestone altars (the smaller altar is 40 cm high and about 20 × 20 cm at the top; the larger is about 50 cm high and 30 × 30 cm at the top) were found lying at the entrance to the “holy of holies” of the shrine.

Evidently, they had played an important role in the cult practices of the shrine. An unidentified black solidified organic material was preserved on the altars’ surfaces. Past analysis of these materials failed to identify their content and this dark material was recently submitted to organic residue analysis by modern methods.

The study reveals that on the smaller altar cannabis had been mixed with animal dung to facilitate heating, while the larger altar contained traces of frankincense that was mixed with animal fat to promote evaporation.

These unique findings shed new light on cult practices in biblical Judah, suggesting cannabis was used here as a deliberate psychoactive, to stimulate ecstasy as part of cultic ceremonies.

Lead author Eran Arie from The Israel Museum in Jerusalem commented, “This is the first time that cannabis has been identified in the Ancient Near East; Its use in the shrine must have played a central role in the cultic rituals performed there.”

Frankincense comes from Arabia. Therefore, the presence of frankincense at Arad indicates the participation of Judah in the south Arabian trade even before the patronage and encouragement of the Assyrian empire. Arad provides the earliest evidence for frankincense in a clear cultic context. Frankincense is mentioned as a component of the incense that was burned in the Temple of Jerusalem for its pleasant aroma.

The “fortress mound” of Tel Arad in the Beersheba Valley in southern Israel was excavated over 50 years ago under the direction of the late TAU Professor Yohanan Aharoni.

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Front view of the shrine at Arad, rebuilt in the Israel Museum. The top-down view of the altars: on where you can see the black residue of cannabis and frankincense. Collection of the Israel Antiquities Authority, Photo © The Israel Museum, by Laura Lachman.

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Article Source: TAYLOR & FRANCIS GROUP news release

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HARVARD UNIVERSITY and MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY—New research on one history’s most important trading hubs provides some of the earliest genetic glimpses at the movement and interactions of populations that lived in parts of Western Asia between two major events in human history: the origins of agriculture and the rise of some of the world’s first cities.

The work reveals how a high level of human movement in the region not only led to the spread of ideas and material culture but to a more genetically connected society well before the rise of cities, not the other way around, as previously thought.

The researchers, made up of an international team of scientists including Harvard anthropology professor Christina Warinner, looked at DNA data from 110 skeletal remains in West Asia dated 3,000 to 7,500 years ago. The remains came from archaeological sites in the Anatolia (present-day Turkey), the Northern Levant which includes countries on the Mediterranean coast such as Israel and Jordan, and countries in the Southern Caucasus which include present-day Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Based on their analysis, the scientists describe two genomic events that occurred around 8,500 years ago and 4,000 years ago that pointed to long-term genetic mixing in the region and subtle population movements within the area, shedding light on a long-standing question.

“Within this geographic scope, you have a number of distinct populations, distinct ideological groups that are interacting quite a lot and it hasn’t really been clear to what degree people are actually moving or if this is simply just a high contact area from trade,” said Warinner, assistant professor of anthropology at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Sally Starling Seaver Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. “What we can see is that rather than this period being characterized by dramatic migrations or conquest, what we see is the slow mixing of different populations, the slow mixing of ideas, and it’s percolating out of this melting pot that we see the rise of urbanism — the rise of cities,”

The study was led by the Max Planck-Harvard Research center for the Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterranean and published in the journal Cell. Warinner was a senior author on the paper.

Historically, Western Asia, which includes the modern-day Middle East, is one of the world’s most important geographical locations. Early on it not only created some of humanity’s earliest cities but its early trade routes laid the foundation for what would become the Silk Road, a route that commercially linked Asia, Africa, and Europe.

Even prior to being connected with other regions, however, populations across Western Asia had already developed their own distinct traditions and systems of social organization and complexity. The areas studied in this paper played major roles in this development from early farming to pastoral communities to early state-level societies.

With the study, the researchers wanted to fill in some of the anthropological gaps between the origins of agriculture and of cities to better understand these different communities came together to eventually form cities.

“What we see in archeology is that the interconnectivity within Western Asia increased and areas such as Anatolia, the Northern Levant, and the Caucasus became a hub for [the] exchange of ideas and material culture,” said Eirini Skourtanioti, a Ph.D. student at the Max Plank Institute and the lead author of the study, in a video accompanying the release of the paper. “The goal of our study was to understand the role of human mobility throughout this process.”

The researchers included an international team of authors from many disciplines and countries, including Australia, Azerbaijan, France, Italy, Germany, South Korea, Turkey, and the United States. They gathered the 110 ancient remains and took samples from their teeth and part of the temporal bone called the petrous, which is part of the inner ear. The samples from the skeletons were all previously excavated and were housed in different museums and labs around the world. The genetic analysis was all conducted by scientists at the Max Planck Institute, including Warinner.

In the paper, the authors outline how approximately 8,500 years ago, populations across Anatolia and the Southern Caucasus began genetically mixing. It resulted in a gradual change in genetic profile that over a thousand years slowly spread across the both areas and entered into what is now Northern Iraq. Known as a cline in genetics, this mixture indicated to the researchers ongoing human mobility in the area and the development of a regional genetic melting pot in Anatolia and its surrounding areas.

The other shift researchers detected wasn’t as gradual. They looked at samples from the ancient cities of Alalakh and Ebla in what is today southern Turkey and northern Syria and saw that around 4,000 years ago the Northern Levant experienced a relatively sudden introduction of new people.

The subtle genetic shifts points to a mass migration event. The timing of this migration corresponds with a massive drought in Northern Mesopotamia. It is likely where the migrants that entered the Northern Levant area originated from. The scientists can’t be sure because there are currently no well preserved genomes for Mesopotamia.

Along with findings on interconnectivity in the region, the paper presents new information about long distance migration during the late Bronze age about 4,000 years ago. Researchers determined that a lone corpse genetically belonged in Central Asia at the time, not the site that is part of present-day Turkey where the skeletal remains were found. In addition to being a genetic outlier, the individual, who was identified as female, was unearthed at the bottom of a well which was in use at the time of her consignment.

“I was fascinated by our results for the ‘lady in the well,'” says Philipp Stockhammer, co-director of MHAAM and another senior author of the study. “She provides a unique insight into individual female mobility over large distances. We know from literary sources that women travelled in this time throughout Western Asia – very often as marriage partners. However, the story of this woman of Central Asian origin will remain an enigma.”

“We can’t exactly know her story, but we can piece together a lot of information that suggests that either she or her ancestors were fairly recent migrants from Central Asia,” said Warinner, who is also a group leader in the Department of Archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute. “We don’t know the context in which they arrived in the Eastern Mediterranean but this is a period of increasing connectivity in this part of the world.”

The corpse had many injuries and the way she was buried indicates a violent death. Warinner hopes more genomic analysis can play some type of role in unraveling the ancient woman’s story.

For Warinner, who earned her master’s in 2008 and her Ph.D. in 2010 from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, these types of studies are proof of the insights DNA analysis can provide when more traditional clues don’t tell the full story.

“What’s really interesting is that we see these populations are mixing genetically long before we see clear material culture evidence of this—so, long before we see direct evidence in pottery or tools or any of these more conventional archaeological evidence artifacts,” Warinner said. “That’s important because sometimes we’re limited in how we see the past. We see the past through artifacts, through the evidence people leave behind. But sometimes events are happening that don’t leave traces in conventional ways, so by using genetics, we were able to access this much earlier mixing of populations that wasn’t apparent before.”

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A partial map of West Asia, which includes Anatolia (present-day Turkey), the Northern Levant, and the Southern Caucasus. An international team of researchers showed populations from Anatolia and the Caucasus started genetically mixing around 6,500 BC and that small migration events from Mesopotamia 4,000 years ago brought further genetic mixture to the region. The orange marker shows the route from Central Asia. DNA from a lone ancient woman revealed proof of long distance migration during the late Bronze age about 4,000 years ago from Central Asia to the Mediterranean Coast. Image courtesy of the Max Planck-Harvard Research center for the Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterranean

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Skeletal remains of ‘Lady in the Well’ from the site of Alalakh in Hatay, Turkey. Murat Akar © Alalakh Excavations Archive

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Article Sources: HARVARD UNIVERSITY and MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY news releases

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