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AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE (AAAS)—Ancient economies in the preindustrial world were more dynamic than previously thought, driven by factors beyond simple population growth (or “extensive growth”), according to a new archaeological study* of classical Roman Britain. The analysis suggests that levels of per capita productivity in this province rose over a 400-year period, in part because of complex changes in transportation costs and societal exchanges. This suggests the society also experienced “intensive growth,” which arises from technological innovation or social change and has been considered a hallmark of modern, post-industrial economies. “The identification of a preindustrial society in which both intensive and extensive economic growth occurred is important because it suggests the differences between the economic systems of preindustrial and contemporary societies are more a matter of degree than of kind,” Scott Ortman and colleagues write. Researchers have theorized that preindustrial economies primarily relied on extensive growth, while modern economies also display intensive growth. This raises the question of whether ancient economies could generate sustained increases in per capita productivity, or whether the observed differences are due to limitations with current archaeological methods. To understand economic dynamism in the ancient world, Ortman et al. examined archaeological data from settlements in Roman Britain, which was incorporated into the empire as a province by the emperor Claudius in 43 AD. The scientists analyzed the relationship between the sizes of Roman settlements in Britain and three socioeconomic measures: the loss of coins, the consumption of fine wares, and the expansion of housing. All three measures increasingly scaled as the settlements grew in population and showed consistent patterns of intensive, per capita economic growth from the Late Iron Age (200 BC to 50 AD) through to the end of the Late Roman period in 400 AD. The calculations also linked the rise in productivity to a two-fold reduction in transportation costs gleaned from pottery excavations. The team speculates these costs decreased as the Romano-British inhabitants adopted a more Roman identity, built towns with standardized layouts, and gained access to more powerful draft animals and advanced food preparation technologies.

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Remains of Bath, an iconic ancient Roman settlement in Britain. eduardovieiraphoto, Pixabay

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Article Source: AAAS news release

*Identification and Measurement of Intensive Economic Growth in a Roman Imperial Province, Science Advances, 5-Jul-2024. 10.1126/sciadv.adk5517 

WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS—Nine hundred years ago, the Cahokia Mounds settlement just across the Mississippi River from present-day St. Louis bustled with roughly 50,000 people in the metropolitan area, making it one of the largest communities in the world. By 1400, however, the once-popular site was practically deserted, a mass departure that remains shrouded in mystery.

One popular theory is that the Cahokia residents abandoned the settlement after a massive crop failure brought on by a prolonged drought. But a new study* in the journal The Holocene by Natalie Mueller, assistant professor of archaeology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, and Caitlin Rankin, PhD ’20, suggests the Cahokians likely had other reasons to leave town.

Rankin dug deep into the soil at the historic Cahokia site to collect isotopes of carbon, atoms left behind by the plants growing when the human population collapsed and drought was common across the Midwest.

All plants use one of two types of carbon, Carbon 12 and Carbon 13, for photosynthesis, but not all plants do photosynthesis the same way. Plants adapted to dry climates — including prairie grasses and maize, an important new crop during the Cahokia period — incorporate carbon into their bodies at rates that leave behind a tell-tale signature when the plants die and decay.

Most of the other plants that the Cahokians would have harvested for food — including squash, goosefoot and sumpweed — will leave a different signature, one they share with plants from wetlands and native forests.

Rankin’s samples showed that ratios of Carbon 12 and Carbon 13 stayed relatively consistent during that crucial period — a sign there was no radical shift in the types of plants growing in the area. “We saw no evidence that prairie grasses were taking over, which we would expect in a scenario where widespread crop failure was occurring,” Mueller said.

The Cahokians are known for their ingenuity, and Rankin said they may have had the engineering and irrigation skills to keep crops flourishing under difficult conditions. “It’s possible that they weren’t really feeling the impacts of the drought,” said Rankin, now an archaeologist with the Bureau of Land Management in Nevada.

Mueller added that the sophisticated society that blossomed at Cahokia almost certainly included a storage system for grains and other foods. Residents also enjoyed a varied and diverse diet — including fish, birds, deer, bear and forest fruits and nuts — that would have kept them nourished even if a few food sources disappeared.

To get a better grasp of the diets and agricultural practices of Indigenous people of the Midwest, Mueller hopes to build a database that collects paleo-botanical evidence from across the region. “Gathering that information would help us see if people switched to different crops in response to climate change,” she said. She’s also planning to grow certain food crops in controlled conditions on campus to understand how they might have responded to ancient droughts and other challenges.

So, why did the Cahokians leave their land of plenty? Mueller suspects it was a gradual process. “I don’t envision a scene where thousands of people were suddenly streaming out of town,” she said. “People probably just spread out to be near kin or to find different opportunities.”

“They put a lot of effort into building these mounds, but there were probably external pressures that caused them to leave,” Rankin said. “The picture is likely complicated.”

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The remains of the most sophisticated prehistoric native civilization north of Mexico are preserved at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in Illinois. Archaeologist Natalie Mueller’s new study casts doubt on a popular theory about why the ancient city was abandoned. Photo: Joe Angeles / Washington University

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Artist’s conception of the Cahokia Mounds site in its day. Michael Hampshire for the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site. CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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This story was originally published on the Ampersand website.

*Correlating Late-Holocene climate change and population dynamics at Cahokia Mounds (American Bottom, USA), The Holocene, 19-Jun-2024. 10.1177/09596836241254488 

UNIVERSITY OF READING—Bone remains found in a Tibetan cave 3,280 m above sea level indicate an ancient group of humans survived here for many millennia, according to a new study* published in Nature.  

The Denisovans are an extinct species of ancient human that lived at the same time and in the same places as Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. Only a handful of Denisovan remains have ever been discovered by archaeologists. Little is known about the group, including when they became extinct, but evidence exists to suggest they interbred with both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. 

A research team led by Lanzhou University, China, the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, CAS, China, and involving the University of Reading studied more than 2,500 bones from the Baishiya Karst Cave on the high-altitude Tibetan Plateau, one of the only two places where Denisovans are known to have lived.  

Their new analysis, published today (Wednesday, 3 July) in Nature, has identified a new Denisovan fossil and shed light on the species’ ability to survive in fluctuating climatic conditions — including the ice age — on the Tibetan plateau from around 200,000 to 40,000 years ago. 

Dr Geoff Smith, a zooarchaeologist at the University of Reading, is a co-author of the study. He said: “We were able to identify that Denisovans hunted, butchered and ate a range of animal species. Our study reveals new information about the behaviour and adaptation of Denisovans both to high altitude conditions and shifting climates. We are only just beginning to understand the behaviour of this extraordinary human species.” 

Dietary diversity 

Bone remains from Baishya Karst Cave were broken into numerous fragments, preventing identification. The team used a novel scientific method that exploits differences in bone collagen between animals to determine which species the bone remains came from.  

Dr Huan Xia, of Lanzhou University, said: “Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) allows us to extract valuable information from often overlooked bone fragments, providing deeper insight into human activities.”  

The research team determined that most of the bones were from blue sheep, known as the bharal, as well as wild yaks, equids, the extinct woolly rhino, and the spotted hyena. The researchers also identified bone fragments from small mammals, such as marmots, and birds.  

Dr Jian Wang, of Lanzhou University, said: “Current evidence suggests that it was Denisovans, not any other human groups, who occupied the cave and made efficient use of all the animal resources available to them throughout their occupation.”  

Detailed analysis of the fragmented bone surfaces shows the Denisovans removed meat and bone marrow from the bones, but also indicate the humans used them as raw material to produce tools.  

A new Denisovan fossil 

The scientists also identified one rib bone as belonging to a new Denisovan individual. The layer where the rib was found was dated to between 48,000 and 32,000 years ago, implying that this Denisovan individual lived at a time when modern humans were dispersing across the Eurasian continent. The results indicate that Denisovans lived through two cold periods, but also during a warmer interglacial period between the Middle and Late Pleistocene eras.   

Dr Frido Welker, of the University of Copenhagen, said: “Together, the fossil and molecular evidence indicates that Ganjia Basin, where Baishiya Karst Cave is located, provided a relatively stable environment for Denisovans, despite its high-altitude. 

“The question now arises when and why these Denisovans on the Tibetan Plateau went extinct.” 

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Baishiya Karst Cave. Dongju Zhang, CC BY-SA 4.0. Wikimedia Commons

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF READING news release.

*Middle and Late Pleistocene Denisovan subsistence at Baishiya Karst Cave, Nature, 3-Jul-2024. 10.1038/s41586-024-07612-9 

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A glance at recorded history shows us that humans have “always” felt a need to explain phenomena perceived to exist beyond our comprehension. Today, we turn to science to seek answers to our questions about the universe. But in the past, preliterate people developed spirituality to deal with their deepest metaphysical queries.

But when exactly did this conceptual revelation evolve and why did it take root so strongly?

In all regions of the world where writing has evolved, we find documents that corroborate humanity’s long history of creating stories to fill in the gaps, defining the limits of our understanding. In many cases, such stories provide deeply symbolic narratives intended to unite people and help them deal with themes that are difficult to explain, like the emergence of life and the paradoxes surrounding the inevitability and permanence of death.

In many parts of the world, uncannily similar cosmological stories appeared soon after the founding of the first urbanized civilizations (i.e., creation myths) These stories serve to address metaphysical issues, and often (anthropocentrically) provide anecdotal accounts to explain how humans fit into the overall scheme of things. Some stories evolved into myths and were steeped in moral reckonings that served to model and control individual conduct in response to the growing population density, which followed the establishment of production-consumption economies.

Cultural convergence is, however, not just commonly observed in creation myths. The Acheulian techno-behavioral revolution; Upper Paleolithic blade technologies; Holocene farming and megalithic structures; and the invention of writing are all examples of landmark techno-social developments that occurred in similar timeframes in vastly different areas of the globe where cultural transmission through direct contact was unlikely to have occurred.

Before science, our ancestors dealt with the unknown by inventing stories that they incorporated into their lives as reasonable replacements for truth. Even though they shared a lack of scientific grounding, some of these stories were passed on over the centuries and eventually became enduring religious beliefs that continue to be embraced by many people.

The ancient mythical stories inscribed on Bronze Age monuments or incised into clay tablets recount exhaustive stories that imply an older origin or perhaps a long history of oral transmission. The question arises: without written accounts, how can we discern when prehistoric humans began to replace real-life situations with abstract ideas as a way to rationalize what they could not understand?

Myths are stories that provide alternative interpretations of real-life events and are socialized through specific ritual behaviors. They are as distinct and diverse as the cultural entities that created them. Cyclicity is a common feature of these stories that are often ritualized in specific calendrical phases, with strong ties to celestial events associated with seasonal changes. The ritualized narration involves role-playing and specific attire and takes place within family units or in large communal gatherings. Such periodic get-togethers strengthen social ties, while their predictability provides reassuring stability that people can count on, especially during uncertain times.

History is replete with more recent examples of religion being used as a means of controlling large masses of people by manipulating their fears of cosmic reprisal or other non-verifiable retribution. In modern society, this strategy remains an incredibly powerful tool that has been effectively exercised by just a handful of individuals highly placed within a social hierarchy. But religious practices and spiritualism are essential social mechanisms in the many thousands of hunter-gatherer lifestyles we have emerged from.

Early forms of spiritualism can be defined as expressions of a belief in unseen cosmic forces thought to be guiding the universe. In archeological records, evidence of spiritual behavior is very difficult to identify before the invention of writing. In fact, we know very little about how early Homo sapiens and other forms of the genus Homo they encountered (like Neandertals and Denisovans), dealt with the disturbing emotional void caused, for example, by untimely death, or other kinds of trauma originating from uncontrollable or unknown sources.

The human brain is programmed to use reason to process what is seen and experienced to be able to comprehend situations and react to them in ways that are optimal for self-preservation. While we turn to science today to understand the world that surrounds us, our ancestors were left to wonder and question their universe. Prehistoric people would have experienced natural disasters (flooding, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and periods of intense weather deregulation) the true causes for which would have been beyond their grasp. Creating stories to explain such events would have permitted them to remember and learn from them, as well as to deal with them emotionally.

Assigning reasoning to catastrophic or cosmological events by transforming them into myth is an effective survival strategy that allows humans to share and process significant occurrences. This approach fatalistically transfers these events to an imaginary force beyond human control. Unlike science, spiritual or religious claims cannot be proven or tested, nor do they provide empirical knowledge allowing us to intervene or change the situation.

Among the existential predicaments troubling human consciousness, death stands out as a singularly problematic theme that has long been a source of human angst; we simply cannot conceptually grasp the idea of termination of self; of infinite nothingness following our demise. Archeologists concede that intentional burials could represent the first concrete evidence of a spiritual act performed by our ancestors, one that could imply that they were experiencing a new awareness or discomfort in dealing with the concept of death.

During the Lower Paleolithic (a cultural period dating globally to between around 2.6 million and 350,000 years ago), hominins left abundant evidence of their passing in open-air contexts, rock shelters, and caves in Africa and Eurasia. So far, none of these discoveries suggest that the H. erectus (or other related species) carried out special handling of the remains of their dead, whose bones have been found discarded alongside those of the animals they consumed and the tools they used to butcher them.

Identifying sepulchers in ancient prehistoric contexts is difficult for archeologists because natural erosive forces tend to erase the evidence over time. Intentional burial may, however, be identified by the presence of human remains (one or more individuals) found in anatomic connection (indicating rapid or careful inhumation); corpses arranged in particular postures (fetal position); or intentionally modified (disarticulation and displacement of body parts); or in specific orientations (facing in a particular cardinal direction); or intentional modification of the substratum (digging of a pit); or by the presence of grave goods (red ocher, shells, beads, antlers, ivory, etc.).

Intentional displacement of the dead is evidenced at the 430,000-year-old site of the Sima de los Huesos, where the skeletal remains of some 29 pre-Neandertal individuals were found at the bottom of a deep pit within a karst cave system at the Sierra de Atapuerca, in Spain. A single, carefully crafted handaxe discovered among the human fossils makes this exceptional accumulation of pre-Neandertals even more intriguing because the tool has been interpreted as some kind of “offering.”

The oldest burials presently documented are from the Levant and date to around 100,000 years ago. They were found in cave sites attributed to the Neandertals and anatomically modern humans that coexisted in the area during the Middle Paleolithic (the period dated roughly between 350,000 and 40,000 years ago). Meanwhile, the discovery of an intentional burial of a modern human infant in Panga ya Saidi, Kenya, dating back 78,000 years, is the earliest burial found in Africa.

Cases of intentional burial have long been recognized at Neandertal sites across Eurasia, underpinning the growing body of evidence suggesting that these hominins had developed complex symbolic behaviors previously thought to be reserved only for our species. These burials, alongside evidence of aesthetic concerns in the fabrication of their tools and even body ornaments, and art demonstrate that the Neandertals possessed some form of spiritual awareness and perhaps even primitive forms of coded symbolic behavior. Sometimes exogenous materials like rare or unusual rocks, carnivore teeth, or even flowers (in the case of Shanidar cave, in Iran) were deposited in these burials, further strengthening this hypothesis.

Intentional human inhumations associated with grave goods are also known from the Eurasian Upper Paleolithic (especially the Gravettian cultural period; 32,000 to 26,000 years ago). During this phase of human evolution, spectacular cave paintings conveyed stylized animals, abstract signs and symbols, and even shamanistic figures, indicating perhaps that these ancient people possessed animist spiritual visions.

During the Neolithic Period (roughly 10,000–8,000 years ago, depending on the region), people developed more sedentary lifestyles, strengthening their ties with the lands they adopted and within which they buried their dead. Depending on the region, this practice eventually developed into various forms of ancestor veneration, fortifying societal links and regional identities. Strong social ties gave individuals a sense of “belonging” that was consolidated on the spiritual level by creating rituals that were woven into the stories they told.

New compartmentalized arrangements were established, and societies that produced, accumulated, and traded goods needed to find ways to protect them. The reinforcement of religious belief codified behavioral norms that sharpened differences and reinforced the frontiers separating people based on culture. Civilizations were thus established within imaginary frontiers that were endlessly redrawn through successive battles based on imagined interpopulation differences.

In the modern world, religion continues to be a powerful influential force shaping the lives of millions of people. It is easy to understand why so many people still cling to the security provided by ritualized participative behaviors. The hope afforded by spiritual belief helps fight the feeling of alienation in a globalized and digitalized world dominated by technologies beyond our understanding.

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This article was produced by Human Bridges.

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Cover Image, Top Left: Shaman. Lisaleo, Pixabay

The fossil record of our ape ancestors in Africa is almost nonexistent for a period of about 8 or 9 million years. This long gap lasted from about 16.5 million to 7 to 9 million years ago, during the Miocene geological epoch.

Yet fossil remains in Europe and Asia show an abundance of ape species flourishing and evolving new traits during that gap period for African apes.

The unanswered question is: How did the current ape species found in Africa evolve? The ape species now living in Africa are the closest living evolutionary relatives that humans have. For this reason, it is important to know where they came from. Are they the descendants of those apes that migrated to Eurasia during the Miocene and then returned to Africa? Or is the lack of African fossil remains from that period simply a result of local conditions, such as wet acidic soils, that might have destroyed them?

Paleoanthropologists have approached the puzzle from different angles. One hypothesis for the missing ape fossil record in Africa is that apes originated in Africa and then migrated to Eurasia in the mid-Miocene, where they evolved the preconditions for evolving into humans. In this scenario, the better-adapted ape species that weathered the late Miocene climate change, then returned to Africa where the human lineage then evolved.

Reconstructing Ape Lineages

Another approach is to infer the missing ape evolution that might have occurred in Africa, but without leaving any fossil remains, by using genomic evidence from living ape species to reconstruct the missing lineages. University of Cambridge paleontologists Robert A. Foley and Marta Mirazón Lahr proposed a model of what this possible ape evolution might look like in a January 2024 article in Trends in Ecology & Evolution.

Foley and Mirazón Lahr refer to the inferred evolutionary tree of extinct apes as “ghost lineages.” “Ghost lineages are species or groups of species that have not been observed directly, either in fossils or living species, but which have been inferred from gene sequences,” the authors said in an interview.

Tracing these ghosts is made possible by modern genomics, especially DNA analysis.

“We know about these ghosts by building phylogenetic or evolutionary trees of known species––such as apes, humans, Neanderthals, and so on––and looking for points in the trees that can only be explained if there were other, unknown species involved,” they said. “These are the hypothetical ghost lineages. Research has shown ghost lineages in hominin, chimpanzee, and gorilla lineages, as well as in many other taxa.” (Taxa is the technical term for divisions of species.)

“In hominin evolution they are ‘ghosts’ in the sense that we think they must have existed and been part of our history, leaving only traces in our DNA.” (Hominins is the term for humans and our fossil relatives.)

African Ape Ghosts

Foley and Mirazón Lahr discuss two plausible ghost models for extinct African apes based on the existing genomic evidence: a low-divergence and a high-extinction model.

In the low-divergence model, the Gorilla lineage branched off from the last common ancestor of Pan (ape ancestor) and Homo (human ancestor) between about 7.2 and 11 million years ago. Then both Pan and Gorilla ancestors of today’s existing ape species branched off from their ghost lineages. This view holds that the ancestors of the living ape species had only two periods of species growth, about 3 to 3.5 million years ago, and later, less than 2 million years ago.

As Foley and Mirazón Lahr point out, this rate of divergence “contrasts strongly with that of the hominins,” but it is still possible. “It seems unlikely given the geographical range, environmental diversity, and time involved, that so little divergence occurred.”

The other hypothesis is the high-extinction ghost model, which holds that the African ape evolution followed a similar trajectory to that of hominins. The apes diversified and dispersed into new regions, but earlier lineages became extinct. This is a scenario that Foley and Mirazón Lahr find “more probable.” This high-extinction pattern follows what is known about the hominin fossil record from fossil finds in the last 50 years.

Foley and Mirazón Lahr stressed the importance of knowing more about the missing ape evolutionary evidence in the interview. “Chimpanzees and bonobos are the closest living relatives of humans, having a last common ancestor about 7 million years ago. Humans and their ancestors must have evolved in parallel to the African apes. However, with no fossil record, we know virtually nothing about African ape evolution.”

“There is a general tendency to think that unlike us, they have changed little since the last common ancestor,” they said. “However, this is almost certainly not true, and we need an ape fossil record to tell us when, where, and how the living apes evolved. Similarities and differences from the evolutionary history of humans will be ground-breaking discoveries.”

Pieces of the Puzzle

Paleoanthropologists have proposed possible explanations for the puzzle of the missing Late Miocene ape fossils. For one, the climate and geography changes in Africa may have not allowed the preservation of ape remains in this period. It’s also possible that the forest soil of ape habitats was too acidic for fossils to survive. Another factor may be that paleontologists have not looked in the right places for ape fossils.

But Late Miocene ape fossils are not entirely missing from Africa. A partial lower jaw and 11 teeth from a now-extinct ape species that lived about 10 million years ago was discovered in Nakali, Kenya in 2005 by an international team of paleontologists, which named it Nakalipithecus nakayamai.

The authors of an article describing this find write that it “suggests that it is highly probable that large-bodied hominoids survived through the Middle to Late Miocene in Africa, giving rise to the last common ancestor of African great apes and humans.” (Hominoids are humans, their fossil ancestors, and the anthropoid apes, which include chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans.)

Another ape fossil find by a different international team, is from the Chorora Formation near the southern part of the Afar rift, named Chororapithecus abyssinicus. The fossil is dated about 8 million years ago, and as the journal Nature reports, “The attribution to the gorilla lineage looks all the more important as it helps constrain the split between gorillas and the lineage leading to hominins and chimpanzees, and suggests that this split occurred in Africa.”

A Hot Debate

The paleoanthropology community is not unified in its solutions to the missing ape evolutionary puzzle, and some think that it’s likely that apes made a round-trip, prompted by climate changes in the Miocene. In this view, apes originated in Africa and some dispersed to Eurasia for a few million years, where they evolved some proto-human characteristics, and then returned to Africa about 7 to 9 million years ago.

Asked about the Eurasian scenario, Foley and Mirazón Lahr replied: “This is a tricky one! The idea that the last common ancestor of the African apes and hominins was recent (in the geological sense, about 9 million years ago) is hotly debated. On the one hand, it is tempting to see a long line of ape evolution in Africa––there is a very rich fossil record of them. But on the other hand, fossils most similar to the African apes are found in Western Asia and the eastern Mediterranean.”

And here, the views of the collaborators diverged: Robert A. Foley felt that “this makes the ‘into Africa’ hypothesis more probable,” but co-author Marta Mirazón Lahr said, “the absence of later Miocene fossils in Africa––a big blank space––leaves the question open.”

Future fossil discoveries are likely to shed more light on some of the ghost apes and help solve the puzzle.

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This article was produced by Human Bridges.

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Cover Image, Top Left: Alexas_Fotos, Pixabay

PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES—A study* uncovers the timeline of human colonization of the Canary Islands. Indigenous people of the Canary Islands are descended from the North African Berber population, and the region was also visited and explored by Romans. Previous studies using radiocarbon data have failed to unambiguously establish the timing of arrival of human groups and colonization of the Canary Islands. Jonathan Santana and colleagues developed Bayesian models of colonization from reliable radiocarbon data, correcting for a phenomenon termed the marine reservoir effect. The effect is produced when atmospheric CO₂ slowly mixes with the ocean surface, resulting in inaccurate radiocarbon data. Further, the authors focused on radiocarbon-dated objects that were clearly related to human activities. The analysis revealed that Romans first arrived on the Canary Islands during the 1st century BCE and that North African Berber groups arrived later and permanently settled the region between the 1st and 4th centuries CE. The earliest Berber settlement was on the island of Lanzarote. The Roman and Berber peoples likely did not inhabit the islands simultaneously, and Berber groups colonized the islands rapidly. According to the authors, the study suggests that Berbers traveled to the Canary Islands independently and were not moved to the archipelago by the Romans, as previously thought.

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View of the Canary Islands coast. Guillaume Baviere, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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

SCIENTIFIC REPORTS—Repetitive tasks carried out by ancient Egyptian scribes — high status men with the ability to write who performed administrative tasks — and the positions they sat in while working may have led to degenerative skeletal changes, according to a study* published in Scientific Reports.

Petra Brukner Havelková and colleagues examined the skeletal remains of 69 adult males — 30 of whom were scribes — who were buried in the necropolis at Abusir, Egypt between 2700 and 2180 BCE. They identified degenerative joint changes that were more common among scribes compared to men with other occupations. These were in the joints connecting the lower jaw to the skull, the right collarbone, the top of the right humerus (where it meets the shoulder), the first metacarpal bone in the right thumb, the bottom of the thigh (where it meets the knee), and throughout the spine, but particularly at the top. The authors also identified bone changes that could be indicative of physical stress caused by repeated use in the humerus and left hip bone, which were more common among scribes than men with other occupations. Other skeletal features that were more common among scribes were an indentation on both kneecaps and a flattened surface on a bone in the lower part of the right ankle.

The authors suggest that the degenerative changes observed in the spines and shoulders of scribes could result from them sitting for prolonged periods in a cross-legged position with the head bent forwards, the spine flexed, and their arms unsupported. However, changes to knees, hips, and ankles could indicate that scribes may have preferred to sit with the left leg in a kneeling or cross-legged position and the right leg bent with the knee pointing upwards (in a squatting or crouching position). The authors note that statues and wall decorations in tombs have depicted scribes sitting in both positions, in addition to standing, while working. Degeneration to the jaw joints could have resulted from scribes chewing the ends of rush stems to form brush-like heads they could write with, while degeneration to the right thumb could have been caused by repeatedly pinching their pens.

The findings provide greater insight into the lives of scribes in ancient Egypt during the third millennium BCE.

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The “Abusir papyrus”, created in Egypt about 2454 to 2311 BC. Found in Abusir. This papyrus is one of the most important administative documents yet found. It describes daily life in a funerary temple during the reign of Pharaoh Neferirkare. It describes administrative procedures, financial procedures, a list of priests’ duties, a calendar of rituals and ceremonies, a list of offerings to be made, reports of temple income, and a list of temple objects (including notations on which were damaged or missing). Image and text: Tim Evanson, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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Article Source: SCIENTIFIC REPORTS news release.

*Ancient Egyptian scribes and specific skeletal occupational risk markers (Abusir, Old Kingdom), Scientific Reports, 27-Jun-2024. 10.1038/s41598-024-63549-z 

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AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE (AAAS)—Fossilized fragments from a Neanderthal child’s ear bear congenital malformations that are consistent with Down Syndrome, according to a new study*. The child lived past six years of age – a lifespan likely made possible by communal caregiving and collaborative parenting within the child’s Paleolithic community. Ancient humans and Neanderthals are known to have cared for their sick. One theory argues that caregiving emerged as a self-interested pact between participants who could reciprocate the behavior, while another hypothesis dictates that hominin caregiving was born out of altruism with no expectation for reciprocity. Prehistoric children with congenital diseases and/or injuries, whose survival to adulthood was uncertain at best, could not be counted on for reciprocation. Their lifespans can reveal how respective hominin communities perceived caregiving. Now, Mercedes Conde-Valverde and colleagues share evidence that suggests hominin caregiving emerged due to compassion rather than reciprocation. They describe fossilized inner ear bones from a child with a severe congenital ear pathology that is closely linked to Down Syndrome today. Excavated in 1989 from the Cova Negra archaeological site in the province of Valencia, Spain, these remains had traits associated with Neanderthals and developmental structures found in hominins over six years of age. They also contained signs of pathology, including a smaller cochlea and abnormalities specific to the shortest ear canal called the Lateral Semicircular Canal (LSC), which, together, cause hearing loss and disabling vertigo. “The only syndrome that is compatible with the entire set of malformations present in [the remains] is Down Syndrome,” Conde-Valverde et al. write. They explain that the child’s mother would have struggled to provide care while simultaneously keeping up with the daily challenges of a foraging lifeway in the Paleolithic. This, they conclude, suggests that “caregiving and collaborative parenting occurred together in Neanderthals and that both prosocial behaviors were part of a broader social adaptation of high selective value that must have been very similar to that of our species.”

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Original temporal bone fossil and 3D reconstruction of Cova Negra fossil CN-46700 in anterior view. Julia Diez-Valero

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3D models of the inner ear of Cova Negra fossil showing the dilatation of the lateral semicircular canal compared with Kebara 1, a Neanderthal that do not show the pathology. Julia Diez-Valero

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AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE (AAAS)—A new analysis* of artifacts and fossils from a prehistoric rock shelter in central Iberia challenges the idea that the region housed no humans from 42,000 to 19,000 years ago. Instead, the shelter holds traces of ongoing occupation in the Upper Paleolithic, including tools associated with Early European modern humans called Aurignacians. Hominins are known to have occupied the Iberian Peninsula for most of the Paleolithic, save for a period between Neanderthals’ extinction roughly 42,000 years ago and the Last Glacial Maximum’s thaw 19,000 years ago. It was thought that mountainous central Iberia’s cold and harsh climate during this time rendered it an uninhabitable “nobody’s land” and established a geographic boundary between early human populations. Recently though, research has indicated that some humans actually lived in this area as early as 26,000 years ago. Yet, a period of 16,000 years remains where the region’s history of habitation is unknown. Now, Nohemi Sala and colleagues fill in this temporal gap with the discovery of an Upper Paleolithic rock shelter called the Abrigo de la Malia found in 2017 in Guadalajara, Spain. They employed techniques, including radiocarbon dating, to examine sediment, fossilized teeth and bone, and charcoal fragments at Malia. This work indicated the shelter had continuous human activity 36,200 – 31,760 years ago and frequent re-settlement up to 26,260 years ago. Other artifacts from the site, such as shaped flint and bone blades, resemble those found at Aurignacian sites. This Upper Paleolithic culture prevailed in Europe from around 43,000 to 28,000 years ago. The shelter occupants’ ties to the Aurignacians imply that harsh conditions in central Iberia at the time did not prevent cultural exchange.

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Above and below: The Abrigo de la Malia site during its excavation. Javier Trueba-MSF

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Flint Blade from the Upper Paleolithic units of La Malia rock shelter site. Javier Trueba-MSF

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Phalanx of a herbivore with unambiguous signs of human intervention (cut marks) from the Abrigo de la Malia early Upper Paleolithic unit. Javier Trueba-MSF

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Article Source: AAAS news release

*Nobody’s land? The oldest evidence of early Upper Paleolithic settlements in inland Iberia, Science Advances, 26-Jun-2024. 10.1126/sciadv.ado3807 

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AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE (AAAS)—The population of Rapa Nui before European contact was far smaller than thought, a new analysis* of historic subsistence farming practices on the island finds. Results indicate the agricultural system could sustain less than 4,000 people – a number well below the 17,000 proposed by earlier research. The work challenges the theory that pre-contact Rapa Nui communities outgrew their resources and suffered ecological and social collapse. “Contrary to popularized narratives about a runaway population size that overexploited natural resources, our results suggest that significant demographic increases (“overshoot”) did not occur in the past,” Dylan Davis and colleagues write. Rapa Nui is a little under 164 square kilometers (km²) and, as such, has finite natural resources. Before European contact in the early 1700s, communities on the island used rock gardening to increase soil productivity. This strategy layered fist-sized rocks, broken rocks, and bigger boulder rocks on soil to prevent moisture loss and reduce nutrient leaching. Past work estimated that rock gardens took up 4.9 to 21.1 km² of the island, sustaining up to 17,000 people. These estimates boosted the idea that people drained Rapa Nui’s limited resources through exploitative farming and overshot its carrying capacity. However, Davis et al.’s new study argues that the maximum number of people on Rapa Nui was only ever near 3,901. Using 5 years of high-resolution shortwave infrared and near-infrared data obtained by satellite, the team searched for archaeological sites of rock gardening, identifiable by distinct patterns of vegetation and soil composition. Their machine learning-based analyses showed that rock gardens took up only 0.76 km² of land and that the practice alone could have supported just around 2,000 people. If accounting for marine food sourcing and foraging, the island could have held a little under 4,000. “Prior estimates were between 5 and 20 times too high,” the authors conclude. “The extent of rock gardening cultivation found in the occupied coastal areas comports with estimates of the population from observations made by early European visitors.”

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Visual comparison between true color imagery (what humans can see by eye), near-infrared imagery (commonly used for vegetation mapping), and short-wave infared (which can identify moisture content variation and minerals in soil). Rock gardens are most visible when looking at the short-wave infared imagery. Satellite imagery courtesy of Maxar. Map created by Dylan Davis

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Article Source: AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE (AAAS) news release.

ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY—Each of us individually is the accumulated product of thousands of generations that have come before us in an unbroken line. Our culture and technology today are also the result of thousands of years of accumulated and remixed cultural knowledge.

But when did our earliest ancestors begin to make connections and start to build on the knowledge of others, setting us apart from other primates? Cumulative culture — the accumulation of technological modifications and improvements over generations — allowed humans to adapt to a diversity of environments and challenges. But, it is unclear when cumulative culture first developed during hominin evolution.

A study* published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Arizona State University researcher Charles Perreault and doctoral graduate Jonathan Paige, concludes that humans began to rapidly accumulate technological knowledge through social learning around 600,000 years ago.

“Our species, Homo sapiens,” said Perreault, “has been successful at adapting to ecological conditions — from tropical forests to arctic tundra — that require different kinds of problems to be solved. Cumulative culture is key because it allows human populations to build on and recombine the solutions of prior generations and to develop new complex solutions to problems very quickly. The result is, our cultures, from technological problems and solutions to how we organize our institutions, are too complex for individuals to invent on their own.” Perreault is a research scientist with the Institute of Human Origins and associate professor with the School of Human Evolution and Social Change.

To investigate when this technological turn may have begun, Paige and Perreault analyzed changes in the complexity of stone tool manufacturing techniques across the last 3.3 million years of the archaeological record to explore the origin of cumulative culture.

As a baseline for the complexity of stone tool technologies achievable without cumulative culture, the researchers analyzed technologies used by nonhuman primates — like chimpanzees — and stone tool manufacturing experiments involving inexperienced human flintknappers and randomized flaking.

The researchers broke down the complexity of the stone tool technologies by the number of steps (PUs or procedural units) that each tool-making sequence involved. The results suggested that from around 3.3 to 1.8 million years ago — when australopiths and earliest Homo species were around — stone tool manufacturing sequences remained within the range of the baselines (1 to 6 PUs). From around 1.8 million to 600,000 years ago, manufacturing sequences began to overlap with and slightly exceed the complexity baseline (4 to 7 PUs). But, after around 600,000 years ago, the complexity of manufacturing sequences rapidly increased (5 to 18 PUs).

“By 600,000 years ago or so, hominin populations started relying on unusually complex technologies, and we only see rapid increases in complexity after that time as well. Both of those findings match what we expect to see among hominins who rely on cumulative culture,” said Paige, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Missouri and ASU PhD graduate.

Tool-assisted foraging may have been the impetus for the earliest beginning of the evolution of cumulative culture. Early hominins, 3.4 to 2 million years ago, likely relied on foraging strategies that require tools, like accessing meat, marrow and organs, leading to changes in brain size, life span and biology that set the stage for cumulative culture. While other forms of social learning may have influenced tool making, it is only in the Middle Pleistocene when there is evidence for rapid increases in technological complexity and the development of other kinds of new technologies.

The Middle Pleistocene also shows consistent evidence of controlled use of fire, hearths and domestic spaces, likely essential components of the development of cumulative culture. Other kinds of complex technologies also developed in the Middle Pleistocene, including wooden structures constructed with logs hewn using hafted tools, which are stone blades affixed to wooden or bone handles.

This all suggests that cumulative culture arose near the beginning of the Middle Pleistocene epoch, possibly predating the divergence of Neanderthals and modern humans.

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Oldowan core, Koobi Fora, Kenya (First time period, below baselines). Curry, Michael. 2020. Oldowan Core, Koobi Fora. Museum of Stone Tools. Retrieved June 10, 2024. From: https://une.pedestal3d.com/r/DGHMTdkn4_

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Acheulean cleaver, Algeria. Second time period, around baseline. Curry, Michael. 2020. Acheulean Cleaver, Morocco, Koobi Fora. Museum of Stone Tools. Retrieved June 10, 2024. From: https://une.pedestal3d.com/r/JMVajqyz29

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Levallois core, Late Pleistocene Algeria. Characteristic of 600 kya technologies (third period). Watt, Emma. 2020. Levallois Core, Algeria. Museum of Stone Tools. Retrieved June 10, 2024. From: https://une.pedestal3d.com/r/JMVajqyz29

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Article Source: ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY news release.

*3.3 million years of stone tool complexity suggests cumulative culture began during the Middle Pleistocene, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 17-Jun-2024. 

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After a sharp increase in uncontrollable wildfires across the northern U.S. and Canada in recent decades, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the U.S. Forest Service have been open to new approaches and ways to address the inherent weaknesses of their bureaucracies. Due to their lack of historical understanding of past fire management methods, they turned to archaeologists, who have collected information on more than 10,000 years of human activity. For their approach, these government agencies studied the perspectives and wisdom of Indigenous peoples offered through shared oral histories.

Outreach and deliberations by federal officials led to the creation of the People, Fire, and Pines working group in 2018. The working group was formed with support from the Coalition of Archaeological Synthesis (CfAS).

Thanks to the advances in technology and the accumulation of an increasingly detailed global data set of human history, modern archaeology has more usable information for government and society than in decades past. CfAS, one of the leading early drivers of this approach, helped the working group conduct two workshops in 2018 and 2019. These workshops attempted to bridge a gap between Western and Indigenous perspectives to create a more holistic understanding of human fire use in North America since the most recent ice age. The participants of the workshops studied the Indigenous knowledge of the Border Lakes region, developed across the millennia of living on and with the land, along with archaeological and tree-ring data gathered by researchers from red pine forests in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) and the Great Lakes region.

The first workshop reached out to members of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa and the Bois Forte Band of Lake Chippewa, focusing on “Indigenous fire stewardship” and the “Western concepts of wilderness.” The second workshop was held at the Lac La Croix First Nation Reserve and delved further into the discussion on ways to propel collaborative efforts. The workshops, along with other outputs from the group, including museum exhibits, documentaries, and peer-reviewed papers, have helped reshape the perspectives surrounding Indigenous fire stewardship and the damaging effects of settler groups, who actively disrupted the long-standing relationships between people and their environment.

In a 2020 paper, People, Fire, and Pines project organizer Evan Larson, a dendrochronologist and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, along with two University of Minnesota researchers, analyzed tree-ring data from 500 years of red pine forest growth in the BWCAW of northern Minnesota. This research began with a focus on the scars left behind by forest fires and co-occurring cultural modification of bark removal for medicinal and utilitarian purposes, and it later broadened to include the historical relationship between people and fire. Though the Indigenous peoples fundamentally changed and shaped these landscapes with fire for centuries, the Western population, who later moved into these lands, designated culturally relevant landscapes as “wilderness” and inaccurately defined these areas as “untrammeled by man,” under the Wilderness Act of 1964. In fact, humans have shaped the region of northern Minnesota for thousands of years through fire and forest management practices.

The research conducted in the BWCAW and facilitated through CfAS support continues to expand the understanding of Indigenous fire stewardship through the Wisconsin Sea Grant-funded project Nimaawanji’idimin giiwitaashkodeng. The “Fire, blueberries and treaty rights” episode of the podcast, “The Water We Swim In,” offers a glimpse into the story that emerged from this work. In the episode, members of Nimaawanji’idimin giiwitaashkodeng, which translates to, “We are gathering around the fire,” share their experiences with cultural fire use and gathering blueberries among the pine trees. In the context of paleoecological and archaeological data, the ecological evidence of past surface fire activity obtained from the study confirms that the BWCAW was periodically burned to achieve forest conditions that were more desirable to the Border Lakes Anishinaabeg community and are linked to the resilience and ecological health of pine forests throughout the region.

Many other North American ecosystems burned periodically as well—sometimes through forest fires started by lightning strikes, but more often through intentional fires set by Native American communities. More than a mere tool for survival and achieving agricultural goals, fire became integral to and deeply rooted within the culture of Indigenous groups. For example, the Ojibwe of the Great Lakes region regarded fire as a sacred force, identifying more than 700 uses for it. The Ojibwe spirit of fire, Oshkigin, was a symbol of renewal and transformation.

Fire is one of our most ancient and important tools for human modification of local environments. Prescribed burning or controlled burning, when used responsibly, is particularly valuable in forest management. For instance, one of the ways in which managed fire benefits the ecology and ecosystem health of forests is that burning unwanted vegetation from the forest floor allows for new seeds to germinate, which increases variability in the type and height of plants growing.

Red pine forests, like those found in the Border Lakes area, especially benefit from this use of fire as their seeds require exposed soil to grow. Moreover, a greater balance between woody and grassy/herbaceous plants improves food availability for livestock, wildlife, and pollinators. Clearing dead or dry vegetation in this manner also allows for fire-dependent species and important food sources to grow, such as the blueberry in the Great Lakes region. Blueberries used to proliferate in the region due to fire-based interventions from the Ojibwe community, who cleared patches of the forest floor and made them conducive to berry bush growth. In addition, reducing the amount of dry vegetation on forest floors also limits the potential severity of future wildfires by minimizing the available fuels.

The arrival of European settlers to the North American continent, however, brought about a turning point in the relationship between people and fire. While North American Indigenous groups viewed fire as a great assistance to landscape management, the Europeans only saw it as a destructive force that needed to be avoided at all costs, and this led them to implement policies that suppressed all fire. The shift in attitude within the continent and suppression of Indigenous culture caused a significant loss in traditional fire knowledge and practices, leading to ecological consequences and large wildfires. As a member of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, Melonee Montano, mentioned in the podcast episode “Fire, blueberries and treaty rights,” the land has “literally been waiting” for fire and fire-based intervention.

By studying material cultural resources, such as evidence of bark collection and forest fires left behind in the form of scars on trees, archaeological researchers gain insight into past societies and the environments people lived in during those times. In the case of wildfires, a better understanding of past human involvement in shaping local landscapes can help prevent catastrophic fires in the future.

Collaboration between researchers, forest management agencies, such as the U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service, and descendant communities creates an opportunity to reassess current practices and policies surrounding wilderness management. Since the formation of the People, Fire, and Pines group, fire management plans have been revised in partnership with the Lac La Croix First Nation to include prescribed fire in the Quetico Provincial Park of Ontario, Canada, where “[t]hese fires are important in allowing the regeneration of red and white pine and maintaining their presence on the landscape.” Burn plans for the Cloquet Forestry Center in Minnesota were also changed to include cultural fire use through a collaboration between the University of Minnesota and the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. This initiative was funded by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Since the change in burn plans, multiple successful prescribed fires have been conducted by Ojibwe firefighters in the Cloquet Forestry Center.

The resurgence of cultural fire practices, stemming from the initiatives started by the People, Fire, and Pines project, underlines the value of combining Indigenous and archaeological knowledge. By reclaiming controlled burns and implementing centuries-old fire practices to support effective forest management today, the relationship between people and their surrounding environments can be reestablished. This restoration will not only benefit all parties in the Border Lakes region and beyond but will also increase forest ecosystem diversity and resilience to fires, offering a hopeful future for forest management in a changing climate.

The success of these initiatives sets a precedent for other institutions, which may benefit from a similar collaborative approach by the sharing of temporal data among researchers, archaeologists, and descendent communities. Organizations, such as CfAS, have begun to change the context of archaeological research by fostering collaboration across multiple institutions and disciplines.

Analyzing prehistoric data to better understand the root causes of modern issues that originated in the greater global past, like human contributions to climate change, conflict, and disease, can be used to facilitate solutions to current issues and avoid greater ones in the future.

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A controlled burn at Patuxent Research Refuge maintains native grasslands, removes woody vegetation, and controls invasive species such as Korean Lespedeza. Brad Knudsen/USFWS, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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This article was produced by Human Bridges.

MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY—Located in the heart of Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, the ancient Maya city of Chichén Itzá is one of North America’s most iconic and enigmatic archaeological sites. It rose to power in the aftermath of the Classic Maya collapse and was a populous and powerful political center in the centuries preceding the arrival of the Spanish. Chichén Itzá’s influence extended throughout the Maya region and deep into the heart of Central Mexico. Famed for its monumental architecture, including more than a dozen ballcourts and numerous temples, among them the massive temple of El Castillo adorned with feathered serpents, it has been under archaeological investigation for more than a century.

Chichén Itzá is perhaps best known for its extensive evidence of ritual killing, which includes both the physical remains of sacrificed individuals and representations in monumental art. The controversial dredging of the site’s Sacred Cenote in the early 20th century identified the remains of hundreds of individuals, and a full-scale stone representation of a massive tzompantli (skull rack) in the site’s core point to the centrality of sacrifice within the ritual life at Chichén Itzá. Despite its notoriety, however, the role and context of ritual killing at the site remain poorly understood.

A large proportion of sacrificed individuals at the site are children and adolescents. Although there is a widespread belief that females were the primary focus of sacrifice at the site, sex is difficult to determine from juvenile skeletal remains by physical examination alone, and more recent anatomical analyses suggest that many of the older juveniles may in fact be male. In 1967, a subterranean chamber was discovered near the Sacred Cenote that contained the scattered remains of more than a hundred young children. The chamber, which was likely a repurposed chultún (water cistern), had been enlarged to connect to a small cave. Among the ancient Maya, caves, cenotes (natural sinkholes), and chultúns have long been associated with child sacrifice, and such subterranean features were widely viewed as connection points to the underworld.

To better understand ritual life and the context of child sacrifice at Chichén Itzá, an international team of researchers from institutions including the Max Planck Institutes for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA, Leipzig) and Geoanthropology (MPI-GEA, Jena), the National School of Anthropology and History (ENAH, Mexico City), the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH-Yucatan, Mérida), and Harvard University (Cambridge) conducted an in-depth genetic investigation of the remains of 64 children ritually interred within the chultún at Chichén Itzá.

A ritual sacrifice focused on males and close kin

Dating of the remains revealed that the chultún was used for mortuary purposes for more than 500 years, from the 7th to 12th centuries AD, but that most of the children were interred during the 200-year period of Chichén Itzá’s political apex between 800 to 1,000 AD. Unexpectedly, genetic analysis revealed that all 64 tested individuals were male. Further genetic analysis revealed that the children had been drawn from local Maya populations, and that at least a quarter of the children were closely related to at least one other child in the chultún. These young relatives had consumed similar diets, suggesting they were raised in the same household. “Our findings showcase remarkably similar dietary patterns among individuals exhibiting a first- or second-degree familial connection,” says co-author Patxi Pérez-Ramallo, postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Archaeology and Cultural History, NTNU University Museum, Trondheim, Norway and the MPI-GEA.

“Most surprisingly, we identified two pairs of identical twins,” says Kathrin Nägele, co-author and group leader at the MPI-EVA. “We can say this with certainty because our sampling strategy ensured we would not duplicate individuals.” Taken together, the findings indicate that related male children were likely being selected in pairs for ritual activities associated with the chultún.

“The similar ages and diets of the male children, their close genetic relatedness, and the fact that they were interred in the same place for more than 200 years point to the chultún as a post-sacrificial burial site, with the sacrificed individuals having been selected for a specific reason,” says Oana Del Castillo-Chávez, co-author and researcher in the Physical Anthropology Section at the Centro INAH Yucatán.

Connections to the Popol Vuh

Twins hold a special place in the origin stories and spiritual life of the ancient Maya. Twin sacrifice is a central theme in the sacred K’iche’ Mayan Book of Council, known as the Popol Vuh, a colonial-era book whose antecedents can be traced back more than 2,000 years in the Maya region. In the Popol Vuh, the twins Hun Hunahpu and Vucub Hunahpu descend into the underworld and are sacrificed by the gods following defeat in a ballgame. The twin sons of Hun Hunahpu, known as the Hero Twins Hunahpu and Xbalanque, then go on to avenge their father and uncle by undergoing repeated cycles of sacrifice and resurrection in order to outwit the gods of the underworld. The Hero Twins and their adventures are amply represented in Classic Maya art, and because subterranean structures were viewed as entrances to the underworld, the interment of twins and pairs of close kin within the chultún at Chichén Itzá may recall rituals involving the Hero Twins.

“Early 20th century accounts falsely popularized lurid tales of young women and girls being sacrificed at the site,” says Christina Warinner, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences and Anthropology at Harvard University and a group leader at the MPI-EVA. “This study*, conducted as a close international collaboration, turns that story on its head and reveals the deep connections between ritual sacrifice and the cycles of human death and rebirth described in sacred Maya texts.”

The enduring genetic legacy of colonial epidemics

The detailed genetic information obtained at Chichén Itzá has also allowed researchers to investigate another major outstanding question in Mesoamerica: the long-term genetic impact of colonial-era epidemics on Indigenous populations. Working closely with residents of the local Maya community of Tixcacaltuyub, researchers found evidence of genetic positive selection in immunity-related genes, and specifically selection for genetic variants that are protective against Salmonella infection. During the 16th century in Mexico, wars, famines, and epidemics caused a population decline as high as 90 percent, and among the most serious epidemics was the 1545 cocoliztli epidemic, recently identified as being caused by the pathogen Salmonella enterica Paratyphi C.

“The present-day Maya carry the genetic scars of these colonial-era epidemics,” says lead author Rodrigo Barquera, immunogeneticist and postdoctoral researcher at the MPI-EVA. “Multiple lines of evidence point to specific genetic changes in the immune genes of present-day Mexicans of Indigenous and mixed-ancestry descent that are linked to enhanced resistance to Salmonella enterica infection.”

The study of ancient DNA is increasingly allowing more detailed and complex questions to be asked about the past. “The new information gained from ancient DNA has not only allowed us to dispel outdated hypotheses and assumptions and to gain new insights into the biological consequences of past events, it has given us a glimpse into the cultural lives of the ancient Maya,” says senior author Johannes Krause, Director of the Department of Archaeogenetics at the MPI-EVA. Such studies also empower Indigenous researchers to shape narratives of the past and set priorities for the future. “It is significant to me as a research professor of indigenous origin that I can contribute to the construction of knowledge,” says María Ermila Moo-Mezeta, Mayan co-author of the study and researcher at the Autonomous University of Yucatán (UADY). “I consider the preservation of the historical memory of the Mayan people to be important.”

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El Castillo, also known as the Temple of Kukulcan, is among the largest structures at Chichén Itzá and its architecture reflects its far-flung political connections. Johannes Krause

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Portion of reconstructed stone tzompantli, or skull rack, at Chichén Itzá. Johannes Krause

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Detail from the reconstructed stone tzompantli, or skull rack, at Chichén Itzá. Christina Warinner

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Article Source: MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY news release.

*Ancient genomes reveal insights into ritual life at Chichén Itzá, Nature, 12-Jun-2024. 10.1038/s41586-019-0000-0 

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PLOS—The Greek island of Aegina was home to a Late Bronze Age purple dye workshop, according to a study* published June 12, 2024 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Lydia Berger of Paris Lodron University of Salzburg, Austria and colleagues.

Colored dyes were a significant commodity in the Mediterranean region during the Late Bronze Age, and understanding the production of these dyes is valuable for interpretations of culture and trade at the time. In this study, Berger and colleagues describe the site of a purple dye workshop from the 16th century BC located at Aegina Kolonna in the Saronic Gulf.

The presence of a dye workshop at this site is inferred from three main lines of evidence: purple pigment preserved on ceramic fragments, which are likely remnants of dye containers; dyeing tools, including grinding stones and a waste pit; and crushed shells of marine snails whose bodies are harvested for these pigments. Analysis of the shells and the chemical composition of the pigments indicate that the workshop predominantly used one species of Mediterranean snail, the banded dye-murex.

Excavation at this site also uncovered many burnt bones from young mammals, mainly piglets and lambs. The authors hypothesize that these could be the remains of animals ritually sacrificed as spiritual offerings to protect the site of production, a practice known from other cultural sites, although the exact connection between these bones and the dye production is not yet fully clear.

This site provides valuable insights into the tools and processes of Mycenaean purple dye production. Further research might reveal more information about the scale of dye production at Kolonna Aegina, the details of the on-site procedures, and the use of this dye in regional trade.

The authors add: “For the first time, the discovery of remarkable quantities of well-preserved pigment, together with a large number of crushed mollusk shells and a few functional facilities, allow a detailed insight into the production of purple-dye on the Greek island of Aegina around 3600 years ago. Chemical analysis by HPLC, malacological, zoological, and archaeological studies illustrate the technical process and peculiarities of early dye production and prove a workshop within the Late Bronze Age settlement.”

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Aegina Kolonna: view of the site from the Northeast (Aegina Kolonna excavation, Department of Classics, Paris Lodron University of Salzburg). Small pictures from the left: drawing of a purple snail of the 16th c. (in S. Münster, Cosmographia, 1544), Hexaplex trunculus from Late Bronze Age Aegina Kolonna (photo by G. Forstenpointner), purple pigment sample from Aegina Kolonna (photo by L. Berger). Aegina Kolonna excavation, Department of Classics, Paris Lodron University of Salzburg, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

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Article Source: PLoS ONE news release.

*Berger L, Forstenpointner G, Frühauf P, Kanz F (2024) More than just a color: Archaeological, analytical, and procedural aspects of Late Bronze Age purple-dye production at Cape Kolonna, Aegina. PLoS ONE 19(6): e0304340. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0304340

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CNRS—All domestic horses living on the planet today, whether racetrack champions, pony-club companions, or heavy draft giants, find their origins in the western Russian steppes of the third millennium BCE. However, the exact chronology of horse domestication and the widespread integration of horse power into human societies remained highly debated. A new study* published by Nature on June 6^th reports that the proliferation of domestic horses started by the end of the third millennium BCE, around ~4,200 years ago. This date marks the start of a new era in human history, in which horses considerably speeded up communication and trade networks across Eurasia, catalyzing unprecedented exchanges and interactions among diverse cultures. This work was coordinated by Ludovic Orlando, director of the Centre of Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse (CAGT, CNRS/Université Paul Sabatier), and involved 133 researchers from 113 institutions around the world.

The research team gathered an extensive collection of horse archaeological remains spanning the Eurasian continent. They combined radiocarbon dating with ancient DNA sequencing to characterize a comprehensive genome time-series providing fine-grained resolution into the genetic transformations coinciding with the emergence of equestrianism.

“I have started working on horses about a decade ago. At that time, we only had a handful of ancient genomes. With this new work, we now have several hundreds. It was particularly important to gain resolution into Central Europe, the Carpathian and the Transylvanian basins, as this area was central to ongoing debates about horseback riding driving the massive migrations from the steppes around ~5,000 years ago, and possibly earlier.”, said Pablo Librado, first author of the study, and now Tenured Scientist at the Institut de Biologia Evolutiva of Barcelona (IBE), a joint centre of the CSIC and the Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

The research team scrutinized their data for three indicators of horse husbandry. First, they traced when the progenitors of modern domestic horses began to spread outside their native domestication homeland. Next, they reconstructed the horse demography all along the third millennium BCE to precisely date the earliest signs of breeding and large-scale production of horses. Last, they uncovered evidence of significant shifts in the horse reproductive lifespan, indicating deliberate manipulation of animal reproduction by early breeders. The remarkable alignment of all three lines of evidence around ~4,200 years ago strongly suggests that domestic horses were produced in sufficiently large numbers to sustain a growing demand across the continent only then, and not earlier. Therefore, the date of ~4,200 years ago marks the true onset of horse-based mobility as we recognize it. Horse-based mobility persisted as the fastest mode of terrestrial transportation until the advent of mechanical engines in the 20^th century.

Yet, ancient DNA research had depicted earlier changes in the genetic landscape of Europeans, during the first half of the third millennium BCE, following the massive expansion of people coming from the steppes, and often considered speakers of a proto-Indo-European language. Since the horse genetic map started to change much later, the research team could discount horseback riding as a driving force for the success of those human migrations, despite horse-related terminology forming a common basis to most Indo-European languages.

“One question that puzzled me for years pertains to the scale of the production: how could such a substantial number of horses be bred so suddenly from a relatively small domestication area to meet the increasingly global demand by the turn of the second millennium BCE? Now we have an answer. Breeders controlled the reproduction of the animal so well that they almost halved the time interval between two generations. Put simply, they were able to accelerate the breeding process, effectively doubling their production rate.”, added Ludovic Orlando.

The methodology developed in this study for measuring generation times is new, and leverages the full potential of ancient genome time series. As genomes evolve, they accumulate mutations and recombine every generation. The number of mutations they carry and DNA cross-overs they went through provide a direct measure for the multitude of generations leading to them. When coupled with radiocarbon dates, the numbers of generations can be converted into calendar years. The research team found that more generations accumulated in the last two centuries, concurring with the emergence of many modern bloodlines through intensive selective breeding. Strikingly, the generational clock was also found to tick faster around ~4,200 years ago, right at the time when the mass production and geographic diffusion of domestic horses started.

“Our methodology for measuring temporal changes in generation times holds great potential. It arms the archaeozoological toolkit with a new way to monitor the development of controlled breeding across various domestic species beyond horses. But it can also help elucidate the generation interval in our hunter-gatherer ancestors and how these intervals evolved alongside shifts in lifestyle or significant climatic changes.” adds Pablo Librado, who developed the underlying statistical framework.

For now, and sticking to horses, the research team also reported exceptionally brief generational intervals within a distinct lineage, separate from that leading to modern domestic horses. This lineage was excavated at Botai, a site from Central Asia where evidence of horse milking, harnessing and corralling has been both reported and debated. The discovery of shortened generation times identified adds credit to models depicting settled human groups domesticating the horse in the region to secure consistent access to resources such as meat and milk, which were vital for their subsistence. The Botai people, however, did not engage in extensive long-distance migrations alongside their horses, since the genetic makeup of their horses remained local and did not expand across Eurasia.  

“Our evidence supports two domestications in horses. The first, occurring around ~5,500 years ago, aimed to address the decline in horse populations and provide sustenance for populations inhabiting the steppes of Central Asia. The domestic horse as we know it emerged around ~4,200 years ago from the second domestication. This one truly transformed human history by providing fast mobility for the first time.”, concluded Ludovic Orlando.

This work was mainly supported by the European Research Council (CoG PEGASUS, and SyG Horsepower).

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Horse herders riding, guiding, catching or enjoying their horses in Inner Mongolia, China, July 2019. © Ludovic Orlando.

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Horse herder catching one of his horses with a lasso in Mongolia, Khomiin Tal plateau, May 2014. © Ludovic Orlando.

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Article Source: CNRS news release.

*Widespread horse-based mobility arose around 2,200 BCE in Eurasia, Nature, 6-Jun-2024. 10.1038/s41586-024-07597-5 

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A peer-reviewed paper in the prestigious journal Near Eastern Archaeology reports the first-ever discoveries of ancient Assyrian military camps. Created circa 700 BC during military conquests across the Middle East, they mark the expansion of the Assyrian Empire, which became the prototype for the subsequent Persian, Greek, and Roman empires. 

The initial discovery came from a scene carved into the stone walls of the Assyrian King Sennacherib’s palace commemorating his conquest of Lachish, a city to the south of Jerusalem. Matching the landscape in this image to features of the actual landscape (using early aerial photographs of Lachish prior to modern development) created a virtual map to the site of Sennacherib’s camp. This led to ruins similar in size and shape to the camp in Sennacherib’s relief. An archaeological survey of the site found no evidence of human habitation for 2600 years, followed by pottery sherds from the exact time of Sennacherib’s invasion of Lachish, after which it was again abandoned for centuries. Moreover, the ancient Arabic name for the ruins was Khirbet al Mudawwara, “The Ruins of the Camp of the Invading Ruler.” 

The Survey of Palestine had investigated a very similar ruin to the north of Jerusalem and found it consistent with a military camp. They hypothesized that it had been built by Titus during the later Roman invasion of Jerusalem. However, Roman military camps were always rectangular, whereas this was oval, the characteristic shape of Assyrian camps. The hill it occupied was known in Arabic as Jebel el Mudawwara, “The Mountain of the Camp of the Invading Ruler.” 

This appears to be the site of Sennacherib’s camp from the siege of Jerusalem, which was featured in the three books of the Bible, depicted in great works of art by, for example, Peter Paul Rubens and Gustave Doré, and celebrated in verse by Lord Byron. In the Bible story, the Angel of the Lord passed through the camp in the night slaying the Assyrian soldiers. The Babylonian historian Berosus wrote that a plague devastated the Assyrian army. And the Greek historian Herodotus claimed that mice invaded the Assyrian camp in the night and chewed through their bow strings and shield straps, leaving them defenseless in battle the next morning. 

This hill’s earlier history is equally impressive. Isaiah 10:24-32 describes the Assyrian advance toward Jerusalem, culminating with them stopping at Nob and challenging Jerusalem from there. This connects the Assyrian camp at Jerusalem with Nob, the lost priestly city that held the tabernacle, the holiest site in Judaism prior to the construction of the temple. However, according 1 Samuel 21-22, after the priests there aided the hero David, King Saul had every man, woman, child, and animal in Nob killed. Nob was not mentioned again for some 300 years, until the Assyrians occupied it. 

In the 1930s, taking advantage of its defensibility, the British built an ammunition storage depot on Jebel el Mudawwara and renamed it Ammunition Hill. In 1948, the Jordanian Arab Legion captured the hill and built a network of defensive trenches. In 1967, in one of the fiercest battles of the Six-Day War, Israeli paratroopers fought through the trenches to take the hill. It is now a memorial and museum of that bloody battle. 

Using what has been learned from these first two siege-camp sites, including the distinctive toponym Mudawwara, additional Assyrian military camps have been identified. In some cases, it has also been possible to use the newly discovered camps to locate the sites of ancient cities that were known to have been besieged by the Assyrians but whose locations were unknown or uncertain. 

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Stone panels commemorating the conquest of Lachish from the walls of the Assyrian Emperor Sennacherib’s palace show his military camp. The twenty-four guard towers in the camp’s perimeter wall, each with three windows visible, indicate a substantial fortification. S. C. Compton

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Bottom: The entire scene from Sennacherib’s palace wall as drawn by its excavator, Austen Henry Layard, in 1849. Top: The same landscape as photographed from a plane in 1945, prior to modern alterations to the landscape. Correlating the two indicated a likely location for the ruins of Sennacherib’s camp. Created from two public domain images: Austen Henry Layard’s 1849 excavation drawings of the Lachish relief and a 1945 aerial photograph taken as part of a mapping effort by the British Mandate government of Palestine.

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Ruined walls visible today at the site of Sennacherib’s Lachish camp. S.C. Compton

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The earliest aerial photograph of Jerusalem (lower left) with an oval fortification visible on a hill in the upper right. Public Domain, from the collection of the Library of Congress.

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The site of Sennacherib’s Jerusalem camp, now known as Ammunition Hill. S.C. Compton

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The peer-reviewed paper, The Trail of Sennacherib’s Siege Camps, by Stephen C. Compton and published in Near Eastern Archaeology, can be accessed through a membership with ASOR.

Cover Image, Top Left: Aerial view of Ammunition Hill, suggested to be the site of Sennacherib’s Jerusalem siege camp anciently. deror_avi, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

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SHENZHEN, China, May 28, 2024 – Tencent today announced the launch of Oracle Bones Corpus (殷契文渊), an online research platform and database for oracle bone researchers and enthusiasts. This revamped website not only offers new innovative tools for visualizing shallow indentations, but also employs artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the efficiency of mapping glyphs to modern Chinese characters. Available in Simplified Chinese, the platform is now live at https://www.jgwlbq.org.cn/home. 

First discovered in the early 20^th century, oracle bones record some of the oldest known iterations of Chinese characters, dating back millennia. To date, around 160,000 pieces of oracle bones have been discovered, from which around 4,500 unique characters have been found. While significant progress has been made, deciphering the scripts remains a challenge. Among all the characters which have been found, less than half (approximately 1,500 characters) have been matched to their modern counterparts. 

Oracle Bones Corpus aims to a provide mature, standardized system and technological tool for conducting effective research. Its database lets researchers examine and compare – either side-by-side or layered on top of each other in an interactive viewer – the different digitized versions of oracle bones, including historical photos, high-resolution 3D models, as well as digital replicas and enhanced ink rubbings.  

With the new update, Oracle Bones Corpus introduces tools that directly address the main difficulties associated with studying oracle bones: visualization and character recognition. Because of their fragility, the priceless oracle bones are often prohibited from being handled. The pieces are also scattered across China and the world, further restricting access. For a long time, researchers have had to depend on Chinese ink rubbings and photographic copies, but the quality of the records produced by these methods falls short of modern expectations. Tencent’s Indentation Highlight (微痕增强) feature offers a solution by enhancing the visibility of shallow carvings on the oracle bones. This allows for a detailed analysis of the strokes that form the glyphs and the chiseled grooves at the back.  

For character recognition, researchers previously had to laboriously compare each image and sometimes even resort to hand-drawn notes to find recurring glyphs. This AI assistance significantly boosts the efficiency and accuracy of deciphering ancient Chinese text. Additionally, characters are indexed for easy searchability, allowing researchers and interested users to quickly locate relevant academic papers for further study. By harnessing the technology, researchers can greatly shorten the processing time of oracle bones. 

Commenting on the initiative, Zhan Shu, Head of Digital Culture Lab, Tencent’s Sustainable Social Value, said, “With Oracle Bones Corpus, we have established a platform for all the stakeholders in oracle bone research to work together toward a common goal. We look forward to seeing more oracle bones digitized and invite researchers and anthropology enthusiasts to decipher the secrets of these ancient texts.” 

In promotion of oracle bone research, Tencent also co-developed the Amazing Oracle Bones (了不起的甲骨文) educational Weixin Mini Program. Through fun, interactive experiences such as word of the day, 3D model viewing and oracle bone trivia quizzes, the Mini Program aims to raise public awareness and interest in oracle bone research. Additionally, users may also submit their interpretations of unidentified characters to researchers through the Mini Program and contribute to the on-going deciphering efforts.  

Oracle Bones Corpus (https://www.jgwlbq.org.cn/home) and Amazing Oracle Bones are both live and open to the public.

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The Oracle Bones Corpus platform allows researchers and enthusiasts to easily examine digital facsimiles of each oracle bone within the vast database. Tencent

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The platform lets researchers examine and compare the different digitized versions of oracle bones, including historical photos, high-resolution 3D models, as well as digital replicas and enhanced ink rubbings. Tencent

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About Tencent 

Tencent is a world-leading internet and technology company that develops innovative products and services to improve the quality of life of people around the world. Founded in 1998 with its headquarters in Shenzhen, China, Tencent’s guiding principle is to use technology for good. Our communication and social services connect more than one billion people around the world, helping them to keep in touch with friends and family, access transportation, pay for daily necessities, and even have fun. Tencent publishes some of the world’s most popular video games and other high-quality digital content, enriching interactive entertainment experiences for people around the globe. Tencent also offers a range of services such as cloud computing, advertising, FinTech, and other enterprise services to support our clients’ digital transformation and business growth. 

Tencent has been listed on the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong since 2004. 

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Article Source: Tencent news release.

Cover Image, Top Left: Oracle bone, showing incised ancient script. Gary Todd, Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, Wikimedia Commons

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FLINDERS UNIVERSITY—Researchers have gleaned new insights into the great human migration, revealing how environmental conditions in northern Eurasia and the Americas shaped the journey of ancestors who left Africa tens of thousands of years ago.

The Out of Africa theory suggests that more than 70,000 years ago, some groups left Africa to spread across Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Americas. However, it remains unclear how much the environment they encountered beyond Africa facilitated or hindered their journey.

Researchers combined climate models, genetic data, and archaeological evidence to examine how regional environmental conditions influenced migration and to re-establish our long-lasting connection to nature. 

The multidisciplinary analysis*, led by Flinders University ecologist Dr Frédérik Saltré and recently published in Nature Communications, demonstrates that while the relative importance of environmental factors varies across regions, our ancestors travelled primarily through warm and humid areas containing a mix of forest and grasslands near rivers.  

“The first human migrants favored routes that provided essential resources and facilitated travel, as well as regions with a mix of forests and open areas for shelter and food, while allowing them to expand into new territories,” Dr Saltré, whose study was supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH), said.

In Europe, humans likely first spread from the Fertile Crescent through the Caucasus Mountains into Scandinavia approximately 48,300 years ago and Western Europe around 44,100 years ago, following warmer and wetter conditions. 

In northern Asia, migration routes followed major rivers to cope with harsher climates before reaching Beringia, a currently submerged land bridge between Siberia and Alaska, approximately 34,700 years ago. 

In North America, humans initially migrated along the Pacific coast around 16,000 years ago, and then approximately 3000 years later, moved inland through the ice-free corridor by the Mackenzie River. 

In South America, migration followed wetter grasslands bordering the Amazon, leveraging connectivity provided by major rivers by 14,800 years ago.

Professor Tom Higham of the University of Vienna said the power of these new modeling approaches in understanding the deep human past is exciting for archaeological science.

“For too long we have been working rather separately in our different approaches. Incorporating new modeling methods with the latest climatic, archaeological, and environmental data allows really exciting insights into understanding how ancient humans moved and adapted across vast continents tens of thousands of years ago.” 

Professor Corey Bradshaw, also from Flinders University and a Chief Investigator at CABAH, said modeling provides a powerful framework for exploring and understanding the complexities of deep history, offering insights into how past events and conditions have shaped the present.

“Knowing where people first trekked beyond the cradle of human evolution gives us a flavor of how adaptable our early ancestors were, what environmental challenges they faced, and how they overcame them and survived. We can also infer the technological innovations that were at play during those times—such as watercraft, clothing, and other tools—that allowed people to exploit the most hostile environments.”

Associate Professor Bastien Llamas from The University of Adelaide and a Deputy Director in CABAH said merging genetic data with historical climate information and archaeological discoveries is a powerful method for inferring past human migration patterns.

“Studying genetic differences between groups of people helps us understand ancient migration patterns. Typically, this results in a basic map showing general movements from one area to another without detailed routes. However, by combining genetic data with information about past climates, environments, and archaeological findings, we can create much more detailed and accurate maps of how people moved over time and across different regions.” 

Dr Saltré said the study’s results help us appreciate the importance of biodiversity in how our ancestors adapted to and overcame environmental challenges. 

“It underscores how climate and ecology shaped human prehistory, highlighting biodiversity’s role in human survival and mobility, demonstrating that rich ecosystems enabled humans to thrive in new environments for thousands of years. The biodiversity crisis that we are experiencing now compromises our ability to thrive. Despite the advanced technology we have today, I genuinely wonder if we will last long without maintaining the bulk of current biodiversity.”

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The infographic shows the routes most likely favored by the first human migrants across Eurasia and the Americas. These routes are estimated using a statistical combination of archaeological and genetic data. Colored areas indicate the type of ecosystems encountered, based on climate and vegetation models. The inset image illustrates the ideal migration conditions: warm and humid areas containing a mix of forest and grasslands near rivers. Flinders University

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Article Source: FLINDERS UNIVERSITY news release.