MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY—The Toba super-eruption was one of the largest volcanic events over the last two million years, about 5,000 times larger than Mount St. Helen’s eruption in the 1980s. The eruption occurred 74,000 years ago on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia, and was argued to have ushered in a “volcanic winter” lasting six to ten years, leading to a 1,000 year-long cooling of the Earth’s surface. Theories purported that the volcanic eruption would have led to major catastrophes, including the decimation of hominin populations and mammal populations in Asia, and the near extinction of our own species. The few surviving Homo sapiens in Africa were said to have survived by developing sophisticated social, symbolic and economic strategies that enabled them to eventually re-expand and populate Asia 60,000 years ago in a single, rapid wave along the Indian Ocean coastline.

Fieldwork in southern India conducted in 2007 by some of this study’s authors challenged these theories, leading to major debates between archaeologists, geneticists and earth scientists about the timing of human dispersals Out of Africa and the impact of the Toba super-eruption on climate and environments. The current study continues the debate, providing evidence that Homo sapiens were present in Asia earlier than expected and that the Toba super-eruption wasn’t as apocalyptic as believed.

The Toba volcanic super-eruption and human evolution

The current study* reports on a unique 80,000 year-long stratigraphic record from the Dhaba site in northern India’s Middle Son Valley. Stone tools uncovered at Dhaba in association with the timing of the Toba event provide strong evidence that Middle Palaeolithic tool-using populations were present in India prior to and after 74,000 years ago. Professor J.N. Pal, principal investigator from the University of Allahabad in India notes that “Although Toba ash was first identified in the Son Valley back in the 1980s, until now we did not have associated archaeological evidence, so the Dhaba site fills in a major chronological gap.”

Professor Chris Clarkson of the University of Queensland, lead author of the study, adds, “Populations at Dhaba were using stone tools that were similar to the toolkits being used by Homo sapiens in Africa at the same time. The fact that these toolkits did not disappear at the time of the Toba super-eruption or change dramatically soon after indicates that human populations survived the so-called catastrophe and continued to create tools to modify their environments.” This new archaeological evidence supports fossil evidence that humans migrated out of Africa and expanded across Eurasia before 60,000 years ago. It also supports genetic findings that humans interbred with archaic species of hominins, such as Neanderthals, before 60,000 years ago.

Toba, climate change and human resilience

Though the Toba super-eruption was a colossal event, few climatologists and earth scientists continue to support the original formulation of the “volcanic winter” scenario, suggesting that the Earth’s cooling was more muted and that Toba may not have actually caused the subsequent glacial period. Recent archaeological evidence in Asia, including the findings unearthed in this study, does not support the theory that hominin populations went extinct on account of the Toba super-eruption.

Instead, archaeological evidence indicates that humans survived and coped with one of the largest volcanic events in human history, demonstrating that small bands of hunter-gatherers were adaptable in the face of environmental change. Nevertheless, the peoples who lived around Dhaba more than 74,000 years ago do not seem to have significantly contributed to the gene pool of contemporary peoples, suggesting that these hunter-gatherers likely faced a series of challenges to their long-term survival, including the dramatic environmental changes of the following millennia. In summarizing the wider implications of this study, Professor Michael Petraglia of the Max Planck Institute says, “The archaeological record demonstrates that although humans sometimes show a remarkable level of resilience to challenges, it is also clear that people did not necessarily always prosper over the long term.”

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Stone tools found at the Dhaba site corresponding with the Toba volcanic super-eruption levels. Pictured here are diagnostic Middle Palaeolithic core types. Chris Clarkson

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Standing on the Dhaba site, overlooking the Middle Son Valley, India. Note the archaeological trench location on the left hand side of the photo. Christina Neudorf

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

*Chris Clarkson, Clair Harris, Bo Li, Christina M. Neudorf, Richard G. Roberts, Christine Lane, Kasih Norman, Jagannath Pal, Sacha Jones, Ceri Shipton, Jinu Koshy, M.C. Gupta, D.P. Mishra, A.K. Dubey, Nicole Boivin, and Michael Petraglia; Human occupation of northern India spans the Toba super-eruption ~74,000 years ago. Nature Communications, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-14668-4.

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UNIVERSITY OF UTAH—For three years, anthropologist Alan Rogers has attempted to solve an evolutionary puzzle. His research untangles millions of years of human evolution by analyzing DNA strands from ancient human species known as hominins. Like many evolutionary geneticists, Rogers compares hominin genomes looking for genetic patterns such as mutations and shared genes. He develops statistical methods that infer the history of ancient human populations.

In 2017, Rogers led a study which found that two lineages of ancient humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans, separated much earlier than previously thought and proposed a bottleneck population size. It caused some controversy–anthropologists Mafessoni and Prüfer argued that their method for analyzing the DNA produced different results. Rogers agreed, but realized that neither method explained the genetic data very well.

“Both of our methods under discussion were missing something, but what?” asked Rogers, professor of anthropology at the University of Utah.

The new study has solved that puzzle and in doing so, it has documented the earliest known interbreeding event between ancient human populations—a group known as the “super-archaics” in Eurasia interbred with a Neanderthal-Denisovan ancestor about 700,000 years ago. The event was between two populations that were more distantly related than any other recorded. The authors also proposed a revised timeline for human migration out of Africa and into Eurasia. The method for analyzing ancient DNA provides a new way to look farther back into the human lineage than ever before.

“We’ve never known about this episode of interbreeding and we’ve never been able to estimate the size of the super-archaic population,” said Rogers, lead author of the study. “We’re just shedding light on an interval on human evolutionary history that was previously completely dark.”

The paper was published on Feb. 20, 2020, in the journal Science Advances.

Out of Africa and interbreeding

Rogers studied the ways in which mutations are shared among modern Africans and Europeans, and ancient Neanderthals and Denisovans. The pattern of sharing implied five episodes of interbreeding, including one that was previously unknown. The newly discovered episode involves interbreeding over 700,000 years ago between a distantly related “super-archaic” population which separated from all other humans around two million years ago, and the ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans.

The super-archaic and Neanderthal-Denisovan ancestor populations were more distantly related than any other pair of human populations previously known to interbreed. For example, modern humans and Neanderthals had been separated for about 750,000 years when they interbred. The super-archaics and Neanderthal-Denisovan ancestors were separated for well over a million years.

“These findings about the timing at which interbreeding happened in the human lineage is telling something about how long it takes for reproductive isolation to evolve,” said Rogers.

The authors used other clues in the genomes to estimate when the ancient human populations separated and their effective population size. They estimated the super-archaic separated into its own species about two million years ago. This agrees with human fossil evidence in Eurasia that is 1.85 million years old.

The researchers also proposed there were three waves of human migration into Eurasia. The first was two million years ago when the super-archaics migrated into Eurasia and expanded into a large population. Then 700,000 years ago, Neanderthal-Denisovan ancestors migrated into Eurasia and quickly interbred with the descendants of the super-archaics. Finally, modern humans expanded to Eurasia 50,000 years ago where we know they interbred with other ancient humans, including with the Neanderthals.

“I’ve been working for the last couple of years on this different way of analyzing genetic data to find out about history,” said Rogers. “It’s just gratifying that you come up with a different way of looking at the data and you end up discovering things that people haven’t been able to see with other methods.”

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Neanderthal-Denisovan ancestor interbred with an unknown super-archaic human species. Chloedancer99, Pixabay

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF UTAH news release

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AARHUS UNIVERSITY—Symbolic behavior – such as language, account keeping, music, art, and narrative – constitutes a milestone in human cognitive evolution. But how, where and when did these complex practices evolve? This question is very challenging to address; human cognitive processes do not fossilize, making it very difficult to study the mental life of our Stone Age ancestors. However, in a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal PNAS, an interdisciplinary team of cognitive scientists and archaeologists from Denmark, South Africa and Australia takes up the challenge. They used engravings on ochre nodules and ostrich eggshells made between about 109 000 and 52 000 years ago in a series of five cognitive science experiments to investigate their potential symbolic function.

The engravings originate from the South African Middle Stone Age sites of Blombos Cave and Diepkloof Rock Shelter, and are considered among the earliest examples of human symbolic behavior. They were found in different layers of the cave sediments, which has made it possible to reconstruct the approximate time and order in which they were produced. Lead scientist Kristian Tylén, Associate Professor at the Department of Linguistics, Cognitive Science and Semiotics and at the Interacting Minds Centre, Aarhus University, Denmark, explains:

“It is remarkable that we have a record of a practice of making engravings spanning more than 40 000 years. This allows us to observe how the engraved patterns have been developed and refined incrementally over time to become better symbols – that is – tools for the human mind, similar to the way instrumental technologies, such as stone tools, are honed over time to do their job more efficiently”.

In the experiments, participants were shown the engraved patterns while the researchers measured their responses in terms of visual attention, recognition, memory, reaction times, and discrimination of patterns belonging to different points in time. The experiments suggest that over the period of more than 40 000 years, the engravings evolved to more effectively catch human visual attention, they became easier to recognize as human-made, easier to remember and reproduce, and they evolved elements of group-specific style. However, they did not become easier to discriminate from each other within or between each of the two sites.

Several previous studies have presented speculations on the possible symbolic function of the Blombos and Diepkloof engravings. Some have suggested that they should be regarded as fully-developed symbols pointing to distinct meanings, more or less like written glyphs. This suggestion is, however, not supported by the present study:

“It is difficult to make well-grounded interpretations of these ancient human behaviors”, says archaeologist and co-author Niels N. Johannsen, Associate Professor at the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies and at the Interacting Minds Centre, Aarhus University, “and we have been missing a more systematic, scientific approach. The main advantage of our experimental procedure is that we work directly with the archaeological evidence, measuring cognitive consequences of the changes that these engravings have undergone through time – and from these data, we argue, we are in a better position to understand the possible function of the engravings made by our ancestors tens of thousands of years ago.”

The experimental findings suggest that the engravings from Blombos and Diepkloof were created and refined over time to serve an aesthetic purpose, for instance as decorations. However, they also evolved elements of style that could have worked to mark the identity of the group, that is, they could be recognized as coming from a particular group.

The experiments make use of contemporary participants and concerns could be raised that the measurements say little about cognitive processes unfolding in the minds of stone age humans 100 000 years ago.

Kristian Tylén explains:

“Previous investigations have relied exclusively on studies of archaeological artifacts, the size and shape of cranial casts, or the mapping of genes. These are very indirect measures of human cognitive processes. While our experimental approach is also indirect in the sense that we cannot travel back in time and directly record the cognitive processes of our Stone Age ancestors, it is, on the other hand, dealing directly with those basic cognitive processes critically involved in human symbolic behavior.”

The study can thus inform foundational discussions of the early evolution of human symbolic behavior. Not unlike manual tools, the findings suggest that the engravings were incrementally refined over a period of more than 40 000 years to become more effective ‘tools for the mind’ as their producers became more skilled symbol makers and users. In the challenging pursuit of understanding human cognitive evolution, the approach and findings provide novel insights into the minds of our Stone Age ancestors that cannot be achieved through the traditional methods of archaeology and genetics, or by theoretical work alone.

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Blombos Cave ochre fragment engravings. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blombos_Cave_-_3.jpg. https://originalrockart.wordpress.com/. Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license 

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Article Source: AARHUS UNIVERSITY news release

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UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS—Analysis of Paleolithic-era teeth from a 28,500-year-old fossil site in the Czech Republic provides supporting evidence for two groups of canids – one dog-like and the other wolf-like – with differing diets, which is consistent with the early domestication of dogs.

The study, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, was co-directed by Peter Ungar, Distinguished Professor of anthropology at the University of Arkansas.

The researchers performed dental microwear texture analysis on a sample of fossils from the Předmostí site, which contains both wolf-like and dog-like canids. Canids are simply mammals of the dog family. The researchers identified distinctive microwear patterns for each canid morphotype. Compared to the wolf-like canids, the teeth of the early dog canids – called “protodogs” by the researchers – had larger wear scars, indicating a diet that included hard, brittle foods. The teeth of the wolf-like canids had smaller scars, suggesting they consumed more flesh, likely from mammoth, as shown by previous research.

This greater durophagy – animal eating behavior suggesting the consumption of hard objects – among the dog-like canids means they likely consumed bones and other less desirable food scraps within human settlement areas, Ungar said. It provides supporting evidence that there were two types of canids at the site, each with a distinct diet, which is consistent with other evidence of early-stage domestication.

“Our primary goal was to test whether these two morphotypes expressed notable differences in behavior, based on wear patterns,” said Ungar. “Dental microwear is a behavioral signal that can appear generations before morphological changes are established in a population, and it shows great promise in using the archaeological record to distinguish protodogs from wolves.”

Dog domestication is the earliest example of animal husbandry and the only type of domestication that occurred well before the earliest definitive evidence of agriculture. However, there is robust scientific debate about the timing and circumstances of the initial domestication of dogs, with estimates varying between 15,000 and 40,000 years ago, well into the Ice Age, when people had a hunter-gatherer way of life. There is also debate about why wolves were first domesticated to become dogs. From an anthropological perspective, the timing of the domestication process is important for understanding early cognition, behavior and the ecology of early Homo sapiens.

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Peter Ungar with the jaw of a dog-like canid at the Moravian Museum in the Czech Republic. Peter Ungar

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS news release

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UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND—Australia’s first plant foods – eaten by early populations 65,000 years ago – have been discovered in Arnhem Land.

Preserved as pieces of charcoal, the morsels were recovered from the debris of ancient cooking hearths at the Madjedbebe archaeological site, on Mirarr country in northern Australia.

University of Queensland archaeobotanist Anna Florin said a team of archaeologists and Traditional Owners identified 10 plant foods, including several types of fruits and nuts, underground storage organs (‘roots and tubers’), and palm stem.

“By working with Elders and co-authors May Nango and Djaykuk Djandjomerr, the team was also able to explain how the plants were likely used at Madjedbebe,” Ms Florin said.

“Many of these plant foods required processing to make them edible and this evidence was complemented by grinding stone technology also used during early occupation at the site.”

“The First Australians had a great deal of botanical knowledge and this was one of the things that allowed them to adapt to and thrive in this new environment.

“They were able to guarantee access to carbohydrates, fat and even protein by applying this knowledge, as well as technological innovation and labour, to the gathering and processing of Australian plant foods.”

Madjedbebe is a sandstone rock shelter at the base of the Arnhem Land escarpment, and is Australia’s oldest documented site.

Excavation director Professor Chris Clarkson from UQ’s School of Social Science said he was surprised and delighted by the quantity of archaeobotanical evidence recovered from the site.

“Madjedbebe continues to provide startling insights into the complex and dynamic lifestyle of the earliest Australian Aboriginal people,” Professor Clarkson said.

The oldest occupation layer at Madjedbebe also holds evidence for the oldest edge ground stone axes in the world, the earliest grindstone technology outside Africa, the early shaping of stone spearheads, many kilograms of ground ochre, and the first recorded use of reflective pigments in the world.

“The site is an important cultural place to Mirarr people today who strive to protect their heritage from numerous threats, including mining,” Ms Florin said.

Justin O’Brien, CEO of Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation which represents the Mirarr Traditional Owners, said that research on country – working in meaningful partnership with Traditional Owners – was a powerful way to share Mirarr’s enduring culture with a broader audience.

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Madjedbebe is a sandstone rock shelter at the base of the Arnhem Land escarpment, and is Australia’s oldest documented site. University of Queensland

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A team of archaeologists and Traditional Owners identified 10 plant foods. University of Queensland

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The study is published in Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-14723-0).

Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND news release

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THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM—”And the Lord delivered Lachish into the hand of Israel, which took it on the second day, and smote it with the edge of the sword, and all the souls therein…” -Joshua, 10:32

The Biblical Book of Joshua tells the story of the ancient Israelites’ entry into the Promised Land after a 40-year sojourn in the desert. Now, a team of archaeologists led by Professor Yosef Garfinkel at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Institute of Archaeology and Professor Michael Hasel at Southern Adventist University in Tennessee, have opened a window onto the Canaanite society that inhabited the land during that era.

In a study published last month in Levant, Garfinkel and his co-authors revealed, for the first time ever, extensive ruins of a Canaanite temple dating to the 12th century BCE that they uncovered in National Park Tel Lachish, a large Bronze Age-era settlement near the present-day Israeli city of Kiryat Gat.

Lachish was one of the most important Canaanite cities in the Land of Israel during the Middle and late Bronze Ages; its people controlled large parts of the Judaean lowlands. The city was built around 1800 BCE and later destroyed by the Egyptians around 1550 BCE. It was rebuilt and destroyed twice more, succumbing for good around 1150 BCE. The settlement is mentioned in both the Bible and in various Egyptian sources and was one of the few Canaanite cities to survive into the 12th century BCE.

“This excavation has been breath-taking,” shared Garfinkel. “Only once every 30 or 40 years do we get the chance to excavate a Canaanite temple in Israel. What we found sheds new light on ancient life in the region. It would be hard to overstate the importance of these findings.”

The layout of the temple is similar to other Canaanite temples in northern Israel, among them Nablus, Megiddo and Hazor. The front of the compound is marked by two columns and two towers leading to a large hall. The inner sanctum has four supporting columns and several unhewn “standing stones” that may have served as representations of temple gods. The Lachish temple is more square in shape and has several side rooms, typical of later temples including Solomon’s Temple.

In addition to these archaeological ruins, the team unearthed a trove of artifacts, including bronze cauldrons, Hathor-inspired jewelry, daggers and axe-heads adorned with bird images, scarabs, and a gold-plated bottle inscribed with the name Ramses II, one of Egypt’s most powerful pharaohs. Near the temple’s holy of holies, the team found two bronze figurines. Unlike the winged cherubs in Solomon’s Temple, the Lachish figurines were armed “smiting gods”.

Of particular interest was a pottery sherd engraved with ancient Canaanite script. There, the letter “samek” appears, marked by an elongated vertical line crossed by three perpendicular shorter lines. This makes it the oldest known example of the letter and a unique specimen for the study of ancient alphabets.

Only time will tell what treasures still remain to be uncovered in the ancient city of Lachish.

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Canaanite Temple at Tel Lachish. Courtesy of the Fourth Expedition to Lachish

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A Canaanite storage jar sherd with an inscription bearing the letter “samek.” T. Rogovski

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Article Source: HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM news release

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UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE—The first articulated Neanderthal skeleton to come out of the ground for over 20 years has been unearthed at one of the most important sites of mid-20th century archaeology: Shanidar Cave, in the foothills of Iraqi Kurdistan.

Researchers say the new find offers an unparalleled opportunity to investigate the “mortuary practices” of this lost species using the latest technologies.

Shanidar Cave was excavated in the 1950s, when archaeologist Ralph Solecki uncovered partial remains of ten Neanderthal men, women and children.

Some were clustered together, with clumps of ancient pollen surrounding one of the skeletons. Solecki claimed this showed Neanderthals buried their dead and conducted funerary rites with flowers.

The ‘flower burial’ captured the public imagination, and prompted a reappraisal of a species that – prior to Shanidar Cave – was thought to have been dumb and animalistic.

It also sparked a decades-long controversy over whether evidence from this extraordinary site did actually point to death rituals, or burial of any kind, and if Neanderthals were really capable of such cultural sophistication.

More than 50 years later, a team of researchers have reopened the old Solecki trench to collect new sediment samples, and discovered the crushed skull and torso bones of another Shanidar Neanderthal.

The discovery has been named Shanidar Z by researchers from Cambridge, Birkbeck and Liverpool John Moores universities.

The work was conducted in conjunction with the Kurdistan General Directorate of Antiquities and the Directorate of Antiquities for Soran Province. The find is announced today in a paper published in the journal Antiquity.

“So much research on how Neanderthals treated their dead has to involve returning to finds from sixty or even a hundred years ago, when archaeological techniques were more limited, and that only ever gets you so far,” said Dr Emma Pomeroy, from Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology, lead author of the new paper.

“To have primary evidence of such quality from this famous Neanderthal site will allow us to use modern technologies to explore everything from ancient DNA to long-held questions about Neanderthal ways of death, and whether they were similar to our own.”

Ralph Solecki died last year aged 101, having never managed to conduct further excavations at his most famous site, despite several attempts.

In 2011, the Kurdish Regional Government approached Professor Graeme Barker from Cambridge’s McDonald Institute of Archaeology about revisiting Shanidar Cave. With Solecki’s enthusiastic support, initial digging began in 2014, but stopped after two days when ISIS got too close. It resumed the following year.

“We thought with luck we’d be able to find the locations where they had found Neanderthals in the 1950s, to see if we could date the surrounding sediments,” said Barker. “We didn’t expect to find any Neanderthal bones.”

In 2016, in one of the deepest parts of the trench, a rib emerged from the wall, followed by a lumbar vertebra, then the bones of a clenched right hand. However, meters of sediment needed carefully digging out before the team could excavate the skeleton.

During 2018-19 they went on to uncover a complete skull, flattened by thousands of years of sediment, and upper body bones almost to the waist – with the left hand curled under the head like a small cushion.

Early analysis suggests it is over 70,000 years old. While the sex is yet to be determined, the latest Neanderthal discovery has the teeth of a “middle- to older-aged adult”.

Shanidar Z has now been brought on loan to the archaeological labs at Cambridge, where it is being conserved and scanned to help build a digital reconstruction, as more layers of silt are removed.

The team is also working on sediment samples from around the new find, looking for signs of climate change in fragments of shell and bone from ancient mice and snails, as well as traces of pollen and charcoal that could offer insight into activities such as cooking and the famous ‘flower burial’.

Four of the Neanderthals, including the ‘flower burial’ and the latest find, formed what researchers describe as a “unique assemblage”. It raises the question of whether Neanderthals were returning to the same spot within the cave to inter their dead.

A prominent rock next to the head of Shanidar Z may have been used as a marker for Neanderthals repeatedly depositing their dead, says Pomeroy, although whether time between deaths was weeks, decades or even centuries will be difficult to determine.

“The new excavation suggests that some of these bodies were laid in a channel in the cave floor created by water, which had then been intentionally dug to make it deeper,” said Barker. “There is strong early evidence that Shanidar Z was deliberately buried.”

CT-scans in Cambridge have revealed the petrous bone – one of the densest in the body; a wedge at the base of the skull – to be intact, offering hope of retrieving ancient Neanderthal DNA from the hot, dry region where “interbreeding” most likely took place as humans spilled out of Africa.

Added Pomeroy: “In recent years we have seen increasing evidence that Neanderthals were more sophisticated than previously thought, from cave markings to use of decorative shells and raptor talons.

“If Neanderthals were using Shanidar cave as a site of memory for the repeated ritual interment of their dead, it would suggest cultural complexity of a high order.”

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View of the entrance to Shanidar Cave, in the foothills of the Baradost Mountains of North-East Iraqi Kurdistan. Graeme Barker

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The bones of the Neanderthal’s left hand emerging from the sediment in Shanidar Cave. Graeme Barker

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The Neanderthal skull, flattened by thousands of years of sediment and rock fall, in situ in Shanidar Cave, Iraqi Kurdistan. Graeme Barker

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Article Source: University of Cambridge news release

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MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY—Most people are familiar with the historical Silk Road, but fewer people realize that the exchange of items, ideas, technology, and human genes through the mountain valleys of Central Asia started almost three millennia before organized trade networks formed. These pre-Silk Road exchange routes played an important role in shaping human cultural developments across Europe and Asia, and facilitated the dispersal of technologies such as horse breeding and metal smelting into East Asia. One of the most impactful effects of this process of ancient cultural dispersal was the westward spread of northeast Asian crops and the eastward spread of southwest Asian crops. However, until the past few years, a lack of archaeobotanical studies in Central Asia left a dearth of data relating to when and how this process occurred.

This new study, led by scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, provides details of recently recovered ancient grains from the far northern regions of Inner Asia. Radiocarbon dating shows that the grains include the oldest examples of wheat and barley ever recovered this far north in Asia, pushing back the dates for early farming in the region by at least a millennium. These are also the earliest domesticated plants reported from the northern half of Central Asia, the core of the ancient exchange corridor. This study pulls together sedimentary pollen and ancient wood charcoal data with archaeobotanical remains from the Tiangtian archaeological site in the Chinese Altai Mountains to reveal how humans cultivated crops at such northern latitudes. This study illustrates how adaptable ancient crop plants were to new ecological constraints and how human cultural practices allowed people to survive in unpredictable environments.

The Northern Dispersal of Cereal Grains

The ancient relatives of wheat and barley plants evolved to grow in the warm and dry climate of the eastern Mediterranean and southwest Asia. However, this study illustrates that ancient peoples were cultivating these grasses over five and a half thousand kilometers to the northeast of where they originally evolved to grow. In this study, Dr. Xinying Zhou and his colleagues integrate paleoenvironmental proxies to determine how extreme the ecology was around the archaeological cave site of Tangtian more than five millennia ago, at the time of its occupation. The site is located high in the Altai Mountains on a cold, dry landscape today; however, the study shows that the ecological setting around the site was slightly warmer and more humid at the time when people lived in and around this cave.

The slightly warmer regional conditions were likely the result of shifting air masses bringing warmer, wetter air from the south. In addition to early farmers using a specific regional climate pocket to grow crops in North Asia, analysis showed that the crops they grew evolved to survive in such northern regions. The results of this study provide scholars with evidence for when certain evolutionary changes in these grasses occurred, including changes in the programed reliance of day length, which signals to the plant when to flower, and a greater resistance to cold climates.

The Trans-Eurasian Exchange and Crop Dispersal

The ancient dispersal of crops across Inner Asia has received a lot of attention from biologists and archaeologists in recent years; as Dr. Spengler, one of the study’s lead authors, discusses in his recent book Fruit from the Sands, these ancient exchange routes shaped the course of human history. The mingling of crops originating from opposite ends of Asia resulted in the crop-rotation cycles that fueled demographic growth and led to imperial formation. East Asian millets would become one of the most important crops in ancient Europe and wheat would become one of the most important crops in East Asia by the Han Dynasty. While the long tradition of rice cultivation in East Asia made rice a staple of the Asian kitchen, Chinese cuisine would be unrecognizable without wheat-based food items like steamed buns, dumplings, and noodles. The discovery that these plants dispersed across Eurasia earlier than previously understood will have lasting impacts on the study of cultivation and labor practices in ancient Eurasia, as well as the history cultural contact and shifts in culinary systems throughout time.

These new discoveries provide reason to question these views, and seem to suggest that mixed small-scale human populations made major contributions to world history through migration and cultural and technological exchange. “This study not only presents the earliest dates for domesticated grains in far North Asia,” says Professor Xiaoqiang Li, director of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, “it represents the earliest beginning of a trans-Eurasian exchange that would eventually develop into the great Silk Road”.

Dr. Xinying Zhou, who headed the study and directs a research team at the IVPP in Beijing, emphasizes that “this discovery is a testament to human ingenuity and the amazing coevolutionary bond between people and the plants that they maintain in their cultivated fields.

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Dr. Xinying Zhou and his team from the IVPP in Beijing excavated the Tangtian Cave site during the summer of 2016. Xinying Zhou

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A photo of the stone men (Chimulchek Culture) in the steppe area of Altai Mountains. These figures are characteristic of the peoples who live in the area around the time of occupation at Tangtian. These specific examples are located at the Chimulchek site (ca. 4000 years old) and not far from Tangtian Cave. Ceramic sherds from the cave suggest that the occupants in the cave shared similar cultural traits to other people in the region. Jianjun Yu

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

*Xinying Zhou, Jianjun Yu, Robert Nicolas Spengler, Hui Shen, Keliang Zhao, Junyi Ge, Yige Bao, Junchi Liu, Qingjiang Yang, Guanhan Chen, Peter Weiming Jia, and Xiaoqiang Li. 5200-year-old cereal grains from the eastern Altai Mountains predate the trans-Eurasian crop exchange. Nature Plants  DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-019-0581-y

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AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE—Ancestors of modern West Africans interbred with a yet-undiscovered species of archaic human, similar to how ancient Europeans mated with Neanderthals, researchers report. Their work helps inform how archaic hominins added to the genetic variation of present-day Africans, which has been poorly understood, in part because of the sparse fossil record in Africa and the difficulty of obtaining ancient DNA. The authors’ computer modeling technique overcomes these challenges, enabling the discovery of genetic contributions from archaic hominins when fossils or DNA are lacking. Well-established research shows that sequences of Neanderthal DNA are found in modern European populations, and Denisovan DNA appears in Oceanian populations. These segments arrived in modern humans through introgression, the process by which members of two populations mate, and the resulting hybrid individuals then breed with members of the parent populations. Recent studies have shown that, though modern West Africans do not have Neanderthal or Denisovan ancestry, there may have been introgression by other ancient hominins in their past. Now, by comparing 405 genomes of West Africans with Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes, Arun Durvasula and Sriram Sankararaman found differences that could be best explained by introgression by an unknown hominin whose ancestors split off from the human family tree before Neanderthals. The authors’ data suggests this introgression may have happened relatively recently, or it may have involved multiple populations of archaic human, hinting at complex and long-lived interactions between anatomically modern humans and various populations of archaic hominins. The authors call for more analysis of modern and ancient African genomes to reveal the nature of this complex history.

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A West African ceramic jar. JamesDeMers, Pixabay

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

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DNA testing kits: What are the privacy risks?

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GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA—Boulder, Colo., USA: In Australia, the onset of human occupation (about 65,000 years?) and dispersion across the continent are the subjects of intense debate and are critical to understanding global human migration routes. A lack of ceramic artifacts and permanent structures has resulted in a scarcity of dateable archaeological sites older than about 10,000 years.

Existing age constraints are derived largely from radiocarbon dating of charcoal and/or optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating of quartz grains in rock shelter sediments, and there is a need for independent age constraints to test more controversial ages. In southeastern Australia, only six sites (located in Tasmania, New South Wales, and South Australia) older than 30,000 years are considered definitively dated by 14C and/or OSL methods, with ages spanning 37,000-50,000 years.

The strong oral traditions of Australian Aboriginal peoples have enabled perpetuation of ecological knowledge across many generations and can likely provide additional archeological insights. Some surviving traditions allude to different geological events, such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and meteorite impacts. It has been proposed that some of these traditions may have been transmitted for thousands of years.

The Newer Volcanic Province of southeastern Australia contains over 400 basaltic eruption centers, a number of which are thought to have erupted within the last 100,000 years, although precise ages remain elusive for most. Technological improvements over the last decade have firmly established applicability of the 40Ar/39Ar dating technique (which relies on the natural radioactive decay of 40K in minerals) to archeological timescales, enabling many of these younger volcanoes to be dated by this method.

Rare reported occurrences of archaeological evidence beneath volcanic ash deposits and lava flows, and the longevity of Aboriginal oral histories, presents an opportunity for novel investigation into the timing of human occupation of this region. In particular, oral traditions surrounding the Budj Bim Volcanic Complex (previously Mount Eccles) in western Victoria have been interpreted to reference volcanic activity.

This new study published in Geology presents a new 40Ar/39Ar eruption age of 36,900 ± 3,100 thousand years for the Budj Bim Volcanic Complex and an age of 36,800 ± 3,800 thousand years for the nearby Tower Hill Volcanic Complex; the latter is of archaeological significance due to the historical discovery of a stone axe from a sequence of volcanic ash deposits.

These ages fall within the range of 14C and OSL ages reported for the six earliest known occupation sites in southeastern Australia. The age of Tower Hill directly represents the minimum age for human presence in Victoria. If oral traditions surrounding Budj Bim do indeed reference volcanic activity, this could mean that these are some of the longest-lived oral traditions in the world.

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Lake Surprise, Budj Bim Volcanic Complex, Victoria, Australia. Creative Commons

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Article Source: GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA news release

Erin L. Matchan, David Phillips, Fred Jourdan, and Korien Oostingh. Early human occupation of southeastern Australia: New insights from 40Ar/39Ar dating of young volcanoe. Erin Matchan, erin.matchan@unimelb.edu.au. Paper URL: https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/article/doi/10.1130/G47166.1/581018/Early-human-occupation-of-southeastern-Australia

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University of Oregon and Binghamton University—The timing of the collapse of Easter Island’s monument-building society did not occur as long thought, according to a fresh look at evidence by researchers at four institutions. 

The island of Rapa Nui, otherwise known as Easter Island, is well-known for its elaborate ritual architecture, particularly its numerous statues (moai) and the monumental platforms that supported them (ahu). A widely-held narrative posits that construction of these monuments ceased sometime around 1600, following a major societal collapse. Located about 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles) from South America and 2,000 kilometers (1,242 miles) from any other inhabited island, it is believed to have been settled in the 13th century by Polynesian seafarers. They soon began building massive stone platforms stacked with megalithic statues and large, cylindrical stone hats that were used for cultural and religious rituals, including burial and cremation. A widely-held narrative is that monument construction stopped around 1600 after a major societal collapse.

Researchers, led by the University of Oregon’s Robert J. DiNapoli, examined radiocarbon dates, relative architectural stratigraphy and ethnohistoric accounts to quantify the onset, rate and end of monument construction as a means of testing the collapse hypothesis.

“Archaeologists assign ages to the archaeological record by getting what are known as radiocarbon dates,” said Carl Lipo, an anthropologist at Binghamton University. “These dates represent the amount of time since some organisms (a bush, tree, etc.) died. Assembling groups of these dates together to look at patterns requires some sophisticated statistical analyses that have only recently been available to archaeologists. In this paper, we use these tools to provide the first-ever look at the history of platform construction on Easter Island.”

The project began as part of DiNapoli’s dissertation, which is focused on the process of building the monuments’ architecture. Looking at 11 sites, the researchers examined the necessary sequence of construction, beginning with building a central platform and then adding different structures and statues.

That helped make sense of differing radiocarbon dates found at various excavation sites. Monument construction, according to the team, began soon after initial Polynesian settlement and increased rapidly, sometime between the early 14th and mid-15th centuries, with a steady rate of construction events that continued well beyond the hypothesized collapse and the European arrival.

When the Dutch arrived in 1722, their written observations reported that the monuments were in use for rituals and showed no evidence for societal decay. The same was reported in 1770, when Spanish seafarers landed on the island.

“Their stays were short and their descriptions brief and limited,” DiNapoli said. “But they provide useful information to help us think about the timing of building and using these structures as part of their cultural and religious lives.”

However, when British explorer James Cook arrived four years later, in 1774, he and his crew described an island in crisis, with overturned monuments.

“The way we interpret our results and this sequence of historical accounts is that the notion of a pre-European collapse of monument construction is no longer supported,” DiNapoli said.

“Once Europeans arrive on the island, there are many documented tragic events due to disease, murder, slave raiding and other conflicts,” said co-author Carl Lipo, an anthropologist at Binghamton University in New York.

“These events are entirely extrinsic to the islanders and have, undoubtedly, devastating effects. Yet, the Rapa Nui people – following practices that provided them great stability and success over hundreds of years – continue their traditions in the face of tremendous odds,” he said. “The degree to which their cultural heritage was passed on – and is still present today through language, arts and cultural practices – is quite notable and impressive. I think this degree of resilience has been overlooked due to the collapse narrative and deserves recognition.”

“What we found is that once people started to build monuments shortly after arrival to the island, they continued this construction well into the period after Europeans arrived,” said Lipo. “This would not have been the case had there been some pre-contact “collapse”—indeed, we should have seen all construction stop well before 1722. The lack of such a pattern supports our claims and directly falsifies those who continue to support the ‘collapse’ account.

The researchers believe that their model-based approach to test hypotheses regarding the chronology of collapse can be extended to other case studies around the world where similar debates remain difficult to resolve.

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Ahu Nau Nau, a cultural and religious site built by Rapa Nui society on Easter Island’s Anakena beach, was among 11 sites where previously gathered data were examined as part of the new study led by University of Oregon doctoral candidate Robert DiNapoli. The site is located on the north shore of the Easter Island. Robert DiNapoli

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East Polynesia (left), and Rapa Nui showing the locations of all documented platform ahu as well as those analyzed in this study (right). Journal of Archaeological Science

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Schematic of a typical platform ahu showing a plan view (top) and cross-section (bottom). Figure adapted from Martinsson-Wallin (1994) and Skjølsvold (1994). Journal of Archaeological Science

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Article Source: University of Oregon and Binghamton University news releases

The paper, “A model-based approach to the tempo of collapse: The case of Rapa Nui (Easter Island),” was published in the Journal of Archaeological Science. Also contributing to this research were Timothy M. Rieth (International Archaeological Research Institute) and Terry Hunt (University of Arizona).

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.

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Science Advances—By using a relatively rare approach to date pre-historic rock paintings in Western Australia – involving dating the remnants of mud wasp nests found over and under the art – scientists found the artwork to be much younger than previously suspected. The study is one of few in recent decades to attempt the challenge of dating of wasp nest materials in order to determine the age of prehistoric art. To date, evidence has indicated the Gwion paintings of the Kimberly region of Australia were painted as far back as 17,000 years ago (17kya) and over the span of several thousand years, suggesting a remarkably long-lived artistic tradition. This body of artwork, however, has been notoriously hard to date. Now, Damien Finch and colleagues present evidence suggesting the Gwion motifs were painted during a narrow timeframe, about 12,400 years ago. To do this, they used radiocarbon dating, a technique to determine how long ago living material died. Working with the traditional owners of the aboriginal sites, they analyzed the nests of wasps that build mud nests on rock walls, sometimes incorporating charcoal from regular local brushfires. By dating the charcoal in the nests, researchers estimated when the nests were built. By dating nests that were painted over, they determined the maximum age of the artwork. By dating nests on top of paintings, they found minimum ages. The possible age ranges of 19 of the 21 paintings studied overlap during a brief period between 12 and 13 kya. Two samples fall outside of that range. One, which was found under a painting but dated at only 6,900 years old, is thought to be unreliable and possibly contaminated. However, the second was found over a painting and more reliably estimated to be 16,600 years old, complicating the findings. The authors call for further mud nest samples to be responsibly identified and dated.

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Researchers record details of mud wasp nest overlying one of a pair of Gwion rock art motifs prior to removal of the nest for radiocarbon dating. Mark Jones

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Two classic Gwion human figures with headdresses and arm and waist decorations. Mark Jones

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Article source: Science Advances news release

*“12,000-Year-old aboriginal rock art from the Kimberley region, Western Australia,” by D. Finch; A. Gleadow; J. Hergt; H. Green at University of Melbourne in Melbourne, VIC, Australia; V.A. Levchenko at Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation in Sydney, VIC, Australia; P. Heaney at Lettuce Create in Strathpine, QLD, Australia; P. Veth; S. Harper; S. Ouzman at University of Western Australia in Crawley, WA, Australia; C. Myers at Dunkeld Pastoral Co. Pty Ltd. Theda Station in Kununurra, WA, Australia.

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UNIVERSITY OF HEIDELBERG—A prehistoric human skeleton found on the Yucatán Peninsula in southern Mexico is at least 10,000 years old and most likely dates from the end of the most recent ice age, the late Pleistocene. An international research team led by geoscientists from Heidelberg University studied the remains of the approximately 30-year-old woman. The uranium-thorium dating technique was used to determine the age of the fossil record, which provides important clues on the early settlement history of the American continent.

The skeleton was discovered near the city of Tulúm in the Chan Hol cave, which is now water-filled as the result of global warming and sea-level rise approximately 8,000 years ago. Nine other prehistoric skeletons had already been discovered in this intricate submerged cave system near the coast in the eastern part of the peninsula. According to Prof. Dr Wolfgang Stinnesbeck, the leader of the research team, not all of the ten skeletons were complete, but they were well preserved. They offer valuable archaeological, palaeontological and climatic information about the American continent and its first inhabitants, the Paleoindians. The Tulúm skeletons exhibit round-headed – mesocephalic – cranial characteristics different to the long-headed – dolicocephalic – morphology of Paleoindians from Central Mexico and North America, explains Prof. Stinnesbeck, who teaches and conducts research at the Institute of Earth Sciences of Heidelberg University.

To the researchers, the head shape is an indication that two morphologically different groups of Paleoindians must have lived in America at the same time. They may have reached the American continent from different geographical points of origin. Or a small group of early settlers may have been living in isolation on the Yucatán Peninsula and developed a different skull morphology over a short period of time. Prof. Dr Silvia Gonzalez and Dr Sam Rennie, both from Liverpool John Moores University (Great Britain), suggest that the early settlement history of the Americas is therefore more complicated and may date back earlier than commonly believed.

The woman’s remains were recovered by Mexican divers Vicente Fito and Iván Hernández and then documented. She was approximately 30 years old at the time of her death. Her skull had multiple injuries, but they may not have been the cause of death. The researchers also discovered signs of a potential treponemal bacterial infection that caused severe alteration of the cranial bones. Like the other Tulúm skeletons, the woman’s teeth had cavities, possibly due to a diet high in sugar. In contrast, the teeth of most Paleoindian skeletons from Central Mexico and North American are worn down and cavity-free, suggesting they ate hard food.

To precisely date the find, the researchers used a dating method from physics based on the radioactive decay of uranium and its conversion into thorium. The researchers dated the uranium-thorium isotopes of a lime crust that had grown on the finger bones in the originally dry Chan Hol cave. Prof. Dr Norbert Franck and his team from the Institute of Environmental Physics of Heidelberg University were able to give the skeleton a minimum age of 9,900 years. However, the body was then already skeletonised and the prehistoric find may be older.

In 2017, Wolfgang Stinnesbeck and his team of researchers had already documented another human skeleton from Chan Hol cave, which was then considered to be 13,000 years old based on a stalagmite that had grown on its hip bone. For the researchers, these bone finds prove the unexpectedly early settlement of southern Mexico. Scientists from Germany, Great Britain, and Mexico took part in the research, which was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The results of the research were published in the journal “PLOS ONE“.

The authors add (from PLOS ONE): “The Tulúm skeletons indicate that either more than one group of people reached the American continent first, or that there was enough time for a small group of early settlers who lived isolated on the Yucatán peninsula to develop a different skull morphology. The early settlement history of America thus seems to be more complex and, moreover, to have occurred at an earlier time than previously assumed.”

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The skeleton was found in the Chan Hol underwater cave near the city of Tulúm on Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula. Eugenio Acevez

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Diver holds cranium from the prehistoric skeleton. Eugenio Acevez.

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Team from Liverpool John Moores University, UK, involved in the Ixchel skeleton description and comparisons with other Paleoindian skeletons from Central Mexico and Brazil. Dr Sam Rennie (right) and Prof Silvia Gonzalez (left). Jerónimo Avilés Olguín

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Article Sources: University of Heidelberg and PLOS news releases

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UNIVERSITY OF YORK—The research – which was undertaken at the University of York – also suggests there was no single point of origin for the world’s oldest pottery.

Academics extracted and analyzed ancient fats and lipids that had been preserved in pieces of ancient pottery – found at a number of sites on the Amur River in Russia – whose dates ranged between 16,000 and 12,000 years ago.

Professor Oliver Craig, Director of the BioArch Lab at the University of York, where the analysis was conducted, said: “This study illustrates the exciting potential of new methods in archaeological science: we can extract and interpret the remains of meals that were cooked in pots over 16,000 years ago.

“It is interesting that pottery emerges during these very cold periods, and not during the comparatively warmer interstadials when forest resources, such as game and nuts, were more available.”

Why these pots were first invented in the final stages of the last Ice Age has long been a mystery, as well as the kinds of food that were being prepared in them.

Researchers also examined pottery found from the Osipovka culture also on the Amur River. Analysis proved that pottery from there had been used to process fish, most likely migratory salmon, which offered local hunters an alternative food source during periods of major climatic fluctuation. An identical scenario was identified by the same research group in neighbouring islands of Japan.

The new study demonstrates that the world’s oldest clay cooking pots were being made in very different ways in different parts of Northeast Asia, indicating a “parallel” process of innovation, where separate groups that had no contact with each other started to move towards similar kinds of technological solutions in order to survive.

Lead author, Dr Shinya Shoda, of the National Research Institute for Cultural Properties in Nara, Japan said: “We are very pleased with these latest results because they close a major gap in our understanding of why the world’s oldest pottery was invented in different parts of Northeast Asia in the Late Glacial Period, and also the contrasting ways in which it was being used by these ancient hunter-gatherers.

“There are some striking parallels with the way in which early pottery was used in Japan, but also some important differences that we had not expected. This leaves many new questions that we will follow up with future research.”

Professor Peter Jordan, senior author of the study at the Arctic Centre and Groningen Institute of Archaeology, University of Groningen, the Netherlands said: “The insights are particularly interesting because they suggest that there was no single “origin point” for the world’s oldest pottery. We are starting to understand that very different pottery traditions were emerging around the same time but in different places, and that the pots were being used to process very different sets of resources.

“This appears to be a process of “parallel innovation” during a period of major climatic uncertainty, with separate communities facing common threats and reaching similar technological solutions.”

The last Ice Age reached its deepest point between 26,000 to 20,000 years ago, forcing humans to abandon northern regions, including large parts of Siberia. From around 19,000 years ago, temperatures slowly started to warm again, encouraging small bands of hunters to move back into these vast empty landscapes.

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Shards of pottery from a cooking pot used by Siberian hunters. Yanshina Oksana

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Article Source: University of York news release

The paper is published in Quaternary Science Reviews.

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PLOS—Ancient skulls from the cave systems at Tulum, Mexico suggest that the earliest populations of North America may have already had a high level of morphological diversity, according to a study published January 29, 2020 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Mark Hubbe from Ohio State University, USA, Alejandro Terrazas Mata from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico, and colleagues.

Debate about the origins of the earliest humans in the Americas has relied on relatively little data, in part due to the rarity of early human remains in North America.

The coastal, mostly-flooded limestone cave system in the city of Tulum in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo encompasses at least eight different sites with ancient human remains (approximately 13-8 kya). After dating and scanning four relatively well-preserved skulls retrieved from different sites within this cave network, Hubbe and colleagues used craniofacial morphology to compare these skulls with a reference dataset of worldwide modern human populations.

The authors found unexpectedly high diversity among the skulls. While the oldest skull showed close morphological associations with modern arctic North Americans in Greenland and Alaska, the second-oldest skull demonstrated strong affinities with modern European populations–a new finding for early American remains using this type of reference comparison. Of the two remaining skulls, one appeared to show associations with Asian and Native American groups, while the other showed associations to arctic populations in addition to having some modern South American features.

These findings are surprising considering that previous studies have not shown this level of diversity: earlier work on South American remains has instead found consistent associations with modern Australo-Melanesian and African groups, and with Late Pleistocene specimens found in Europe and Asia. The authors posit that early North American colonizers may have been highly diverse, but that diversity reduced when some populations dispersed into South America. This study underscores the need to pursue new archaeological evidence across the continent to build more robust models of early diversity, migration and dispersal across the Americas.

The authors add: “Four ancient skulls discovered in the submerged caves of Quintana Roo, Mexico, show that Early Americans had high biological diversity since the initial occupation of the continent.”

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Original position of the skeletal remains inside submerged cave of Muknal. Jerónimo Avilés

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Article Source: PLOS news release

*Hubbe M, Terrazas Mata A, Herrera B, Benavente Sanvicente ME, González González A, Rojas Sandoval C, et al. (2020) Morphological variation of the early human remains from Quintana Roo, Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico: Contributions to the discussions about the settlement of the Americas. PLoS ONE 15(1): e0227444.

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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA – BERKELEY—A University of California, Berkeley, archaeologist has dug up ancient human feces, among other demographic clues, to challenge the narrative around the legendary demise of Cahokia, North America’s most iconic pre-Columbian metropolis.

In its heyday in the 1100s, Cahokia—located in what is now southern Illinois—was the center for Mississippian culture and home to tens of thousands of Native Americans who farmed, fished, traded and built giant ritual mounds.

By the 1400s, Cahokia had been abandoned due to floods, droughts, resource scarcity and other drivers of depopulation. But contrary to romanticized notions of Cahokia’s lost civilization, the exodus was short-lived, according to a new UC Berkeley study.

The study takes on the “myth of the vanishing Indian” that favors decline and disappearance over Native American resilience and persistence, said lead author A.J. White, a UC Berkeley doctoral student in anthropology.

“One would think the Cahokia region was a ghost town at the time of European contact, based on the archeological record,” White said. “But we were able to piece together a Native American presence in the area that endured for centuries.”

The findings, just published in the journal American Antiquity, make the case that a fresh wave of Native Americans repopulated the region in the 1500s and kept a steady presence there through the 1700s, when migrations, warfare, disease and environmental change led to a reduction in the local population.

White and fellow researchers at California State University, Long Beach, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Northeastern University analyzed fossil pollen, the remnants of ancient feces, charcoal and other clues to reconstruct a post-Mississippian lifestyle.

Their evidence paints a picture of communities built around maize farming, bison hunting and possibly even controlled burning in the grasslands, which is consistent with the practices of a network of tribes known as the Illinois Confederation.

Unlike the Mississippians who were firmly rooted in the Cahokia metropolis, the Illinois Confederation tribe members roamed further afield, tending small farms and gardens, hunting game and breaking off into smaller groups when resources became scarce.

The linchpin holding together the evidence of their presence in the region were “fecal stanols” derived from human waste preserved deep in the sediment under Horseshoe Lake, Cahokia’s main catchment area.

Fecal stanols are microscopic organic molecules produced in our gut when we digest food, especially meat. They are excreted in our feces and can be preserved in layers of sediment for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

Because humans produce fecal stanols in far greater quantities than animals, their levels can be used to gauge major changes in a region’s population.

To collect the evidence, White and colleagues paddled out into Horseshoe Lake, which is adjacent to Cahokia Mounds State Historical Site, and dug up core samples of mud some 10 feet below the lakebed. By measuring concentrations of fecal stanols, they were able to gauge population changes from the Mississippian period through European contact.

Fecal stanol data were also gauged in White’s first study of Cahokia’s Mississippian Period demographic changes, published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal. It found that climate change in the form of back-to-back floods and droughts played a key role in the exodus of Cahokia’s Mississippian inhabitants.

But while many studies have focused on the reasons for Cahokia’s decline, few have looked at the region following the exodus of Mississippians, whose culture is estimated to have spread through the Midwestern, Southeastern and Eastern United States from 700 A.D. to the 1500s.

White’s latest study sought to fill those gaps in the Cahokia area’s history.

“There’s very little archaeological evidence for an indigenous population past Cahokia, but we were able to fill in the gaps through historical, climatic and ecological data, and the linchpin was the fecal stanol evidence,” White said.

Overall, the results suggest that the Mississippian decline did not mark the end of a Native American presence in the Cahokia region, but rather reveal a complex series of migrations, warfare and ecological changes in the 1500s and 1600s, before Europeans arrived on the scene, White said.

“The story of Cahokia was a lot more complex than, ‘Goodbye, Native Americans. Hello, Europeans,’ and our study uses innovative and unusual evidence to show that,” White said.

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Monk’s Mound in Cahokia. Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain Image

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA – BERKELEY news release

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PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES—A study examines the dispersal of Neanderthals into Siberia. Neanderthals once populated Europe and Asia, spreading as far east as southern Siberia. Chagyrskaya Cave, located in the foothills of Siberia’s Altai Mountains, has yielded 74 Neanderthal fossils and thousands of stone artifacts and animal and plant remains dating to between 59,000 and 49,000 years ago. Kseniya Kolobova, Richard Roberts, and colleagues analyzed more than 3,000 stone tools from Chagyrskaya Cave and discovered that the tools closely resemble Micoquian tools made by Neanderthals in eastern Europe, more than 3,000 km west of Chagyrskaya Cave. Environmental reconstructions based on ancient fauna and flora suggest that Chagyrskaya Neanderthals hunted bison and were adapted to the cold and dry climate. However, the nearby site of Denisova Cave, which was occupied by Neanderthals more than 100,000 years ago, exhibited no evidence of Micoquian artifacts. DNA from a Chagyrskaya Neanderthal also indicated a closer connection with eastern European Neanderthals than with a 110,000 year-old Neanderthal from Denisova Cave. The findings suggest at least two separate dispersals of Neanderthals into southern Siberia, with the most recent arrivals carrying Micoquian tools from their ancestral homeland in eastern Europe, according to the authors.

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Stone tool used as a meat knife by Neanderthals at Chagyrskaya Cave (Altai Mountains, southern Siberia, Russia) around 54,000 years ago. Alexander Fedorchenko (Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russia).

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Article Source: A PNAS news release

*”Archaeological evidence for two separate dispersals of Neanderthals into southern Siberia,” by Kseniya A. Kolobova et al.

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AMERICAN FRIENDS OF TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY—The ancient Samaria ostraca — eighth-century BCE ink-on-clay inscriptions unearthed at the beginning of the 20th century in Samaria, the capital of the biblical kingdom of Israel — are among the earliest collections of ancient Hebrew writings ever discovered. But despite a century of research, major aspects of the ostraca remain in dispute, including their precise geographical origins — either Samaria or its outlying villages — and the number of scribes involved in their composition.

A new Tel Aviv University (TAU) study finds that just two writers were involved in composing 31 of the more than 100 inscriptions and that the writers were contemporaneous, indicating that the inscriptions were written in the city of Samaria itself.

Research for the study was conducted by Ph.D. candidate Shira Faigenbaum-Golovin, Dr. Arie Shaus, Dr. Barak Sober and Prof. Eli Turkel, all of TAU’s School of Mathematical Sciences; Prof. Eli Piasetzky of TAU’s School of Physics; and Prof. Israel Finkelstein, Jacob M. Alkow Professor of the Archaeology of Israel in the Bronze and Iron Ages, of TAU’s Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology. The study was published in PLOS ONE on January 22, 2020.

The inscriptions list repetitive shipment details of wine and oil supplies to Samaria and span a minimal period of seven years. For archaeologists, they also provide critical insights into the logistical infrastructure of the kingdom of Israel. The inscriptions feature the date of composition (year of a given monarch), commodity type (oil, wine), name of a person, name of a clan and name of a village near the capital. Based on letter-shape considerations, the ostraca have been dated to the first half of the eighth century BCE, possibly during the reign of King Jeroboam II of Israel.

“If only two scribes wrote the examined Samaria texts contemporaneously and both were located in Samaria rather than in the countryside, this would indicate a palace bureaucracy at the peak of the kingdom of Israel’s prosperity,” Prof. Finkelstein explains.

“Our results, accompanied by other pieces of evidence, seem also to indicate a limited dispersion of literacy in Israel in the early eighth century BCE,” Prof. Piasetzky says.

“Our interdisciplinary team harnessed a novel algorithm, consisting of image processing and newly developed machine learning techniques, to conclude that two writers wrote the 31 examined texts, with a confidence interval of 95%,” said Dr. Sober, now a member of Duke University’s mathematics department.

“The innovative technique can be used in other cases, both in the Land of Israel and beyond. Our innovative tool enables handwriting comparison and can establish the number of authors in a given corpus,” adds Faigenbaum-Golovin.

The new research follows up from the findings of the group’s 2016 study, which indicated widespread literacy in the kingdom of Judah a century and a half to two centuries later, circa 600 BCE. For that study, the group developed a novel algorithm with which they estimated the minimal number of writers involved in composing ostraca unearthed at the desert fortress of Arad. That investigation concluded that at least six writers composed the 18 inscriptions that were examined.

“It seems that during these two centuries that passed between the composition of the Samaria and the Arad corpora, there was an increase in literacy rates within the population of the Hebrew kingdoms,” Dr. Shaus says. “Our previous research paved the way for the current study. We enhanced our previously developed methodology, which sought the minimum number of writers, and introduced new statistical tools to establish a maximum likelihood estimate for the number of hands in a corpus.”

Next, the researchers intend to use their methodology to study other corpora of inscriptions from various periods and locations.

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Ostraca (ink on clay inscriptions) from Samaria, the capital of biblical Israel. The inscriptions are dated to the early 8th century BCE. Colorized Ostraca images are courtesy of the Semitic Museum, Harvard University. American Friends of Tel Aviv University. Colorized images courtesy of the Semitic Museum, Harvard University.

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Article Source: AMERICAN FRIENDS OF TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY news release

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