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PLOS—Abnormal bony growths in the ear canal were surprisingly common in Neanderthals, according to a study published August 14, 2019 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Erik Trinkaus of Washington University and colleagues.

External auditory exostoses are dense bony growths that protrude into the ear canal. In modern humans, this condition is commonly called “swimmer’s ear” and is known to be correlated with habitual exposure to cold water or chilly air, though there is also a potential genetic predisposition for the condition. Such exostoses have been noted in ancient humans, but little research has examined how the condition might inform our understanding of past human lifestyles.

In this study, Trinkaus and colleagues examined well-preserved ear canals in the remains of 77 ancient humans, including Neanderthals and early modern humans from the Middle to Late Pleistocene Epoch of western Eurasia. While the early modern human samples exhibited similar frequencies of exostoses to modern human samples, the condition was exceptionally common in Neanderthals. Approximately half of the 23 Neanderthal remains examined exhibited mild to severe exostoses, at least twice the frequency seen in almost any other population studied.

The authors suggest that the most likely explanation for this pattern is that these Neanderthals spent a significant amount of time collecting resources in aquatic settings. However, the geographic distribution of exostoses seen in Neanderthals does not exhibit a definitive correlation with proximity to ancient water sources nor to cooler climates as would be expected. The authors propose that multiple factors were probably involved in this high abundance of exostoses, probably including environmental factors as well as genetic predispositions.

Trinkaus adds: “An exceptionally high frequency of external auditory exostoses (bony growths in the ear canal; “swimmer’s ear”) among the Neanderthals, and a more modest level among high latitude earlier Upper Paleolithic modern humans, indicate a higher frequency of aquatic resource exploitation among both groups of humans than is suggested by the archeological record. In particular, it reinforces the foraging abilities and resource diversity of the Neanderthals.”

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Above: The La Chapelle-aux-Saints Neanderthal skull, with the external auditory exostoses (“swimmer’s ear” growths) in the left canal indicated. Erik Trinkaus

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Article Source: PLOS ONE news release

*Trinkaus E, Samsel M, Villotte S (2019) External auditory exostoses among western Eurasian late Middle and Late Pleistocene humans. PLoS ONE 14(8): e0220464. 

Cover photo: Neandertal skull from La Chapelle aux Saints. PLoS, Wikimedia Commons

Much of what we know about the account of the infamous destruction of ancient Jerusalem by the military campaign of the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar in the 6th century B.C.E. derives from well-known written documents, particularly the Bible. It attests to a protracted siege of the city, followed finally by a successful breach that led to King Zedekiah’s (the king of Jerusalem) capture and a violent end to the city:

“Now in the fifth month, on the seventh day of the month, which was the nineteenth year of king Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, came Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard, a servant of the king of Babylon, unto Jerusalem.

And he burnt the house of the LORD, and the king’s house; and all the houses of Jerusalem, even every great man’s house, burnt he with fire.

And all the army of the Chaldeans, that were with the captain of the guard, broke down the walls of Jerusalem round about.

And the residue of the people that were left in the city, and those that fell away, that fell to the king of Babylon, and the residue of the multitude, did Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard carry away captive.”*

Jerusalem’s king, Zedekiah, was seized by pursuing Babylonian forces during his flight from the city. Carried away to the king of Babylon, his sons were killed before his eyes, after which he was blinded and taken to Babylon in fetters. 

It makes for a gruesome and sad story. But after 2,600 years, little remains outside the written account to verify the reality of the event.

In 2019, however, archaeologists in two separate excavations uncovered tantalizing new finds that point to a massive destruction that took place in Jerusalem, likely coinciding, they say, with the time assigned to the Babylonian destruction……….

The City of David Excavations

Arguably one of the largest excavations in Jerusalem, known popularly as the “City of David Excavations” in the Givati Parking Lot in the Tyropoeon Valley, has turned up some fascinating finds bearing on the history of the ancient city. Perhaps best known here were the excavations conducted by Doron Ben-Ami of Hebrew University and Yana Tchekhanovets of the Israel Antiquities Authority, who, since 2007, unearthed the basement of a large residential building dated to the Second Temple period — possibly the royal residence of Queen Helene, the queen who converted to Judaism; a large Roman period residential building wherein was found a gold earring inlaid with pearls and precious stones and a Roman boxer figurine weight; a Byzantine period building that yielded 264 gold coins; and evidence of later Muslim occupation, among many other finds. But it was during more recent excavations into the more ancient, Iron Age layers of the site where archaeologists Yuval Gadot of Tel Aviv University and Yiftah Shalev of the Israel Antiquities Authority and their team discovered the remains of what was interpreted as a large public building, showing evidence of a fiery destruction in the sixth century BCE – likely, they suggest, from the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. They uncovered stone debris, burnt wooden beams, and charred pottery shards. It had to have been a very important building, they maintain, as it featured finely cut ashlar stones and other architectural elements typical of such buildings, including a polished plaster floor. But even more intriguing was the finding of two small artifacts — a clay bulla (seal impression) and a stamp-seal featuring names in ancient Hebrew characters in a script style consistent with the 6th century BCE. During this time period, administrative officials used bullae, or small pieces of wet clay, on which to impress personal seals as official signatures for correspondence and other documents of parchment. The parchment is eventually destroyed by events or time but the clay bullae survive to be recovered by archaeologists and others in modern times. The stamp-seals, such as the incised bluish agate stone seal discovered in this excavation, were used to make bullae impressions.

According to Gadot and Shalev, “The discovery of a public building such as this, on the western slope of the City of David, provides a lot of information about the city’s structure during this period and the size of its administrative area. The destruction of this building in the fire, apparently during the Babylonian conquest of the city in 586 BCE, strengthens our understanding of the intensity of the destruction in the city.”**

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Above and below: Views of the Givati Parking Lot excavations. Deror Avi, Wikimedia Commons

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The Mount Zion Excavations

Not far from the Givati Parking Lot excavations, in an area adjacent to and below the southern Old City wall of Jerusalem, a team led by UNC Charlotte professor of history Shimon Gibson, Rafi Lewis of the Ashkelon Academic College, and James Tabor, UNC Charlotte professor of religious studies, have since 2007 conducted excavations that have revealed a layer-cake account of Jerusalem’s history revealed by artifacts and a sequence of structural remains dating back 3,000 years, from Medieval times back to the period of the Judahite monarchies hundreds of years before the time of Jesus. This excavation, in no small measure, has produced a number of remarkable finds relating to all of these time periods, including vaulted basement remains of aristocratic residential dwellings of the time of Herod the Great, a Byzantine street, and a defense ditch that was part of the fortifications encountered by the Crusaders’ campaign against Jerusalem in 1099 CE. Smaller finds included a white limestone cup dating from the first century CE, bearing an incised inscription; a first century CE plastered bathtub; and a 30-foot deep oval-shaped first century CE cistern that contained cooking pots, charcoal, evidence of burn marks, storage jars, and remains of an oven.

Most recently, however, the Mount Zion team uncovered evidence the excavation leadership suggest are evidentiary markers of the 587/586 BCE destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar. The evidence includes ash deposits, arrowheads of the type used by the ancient Babylonian forces of the period, Iron Age potsherds, oil lamps typical of the period, and a gold and silver tassel or earring. They have also detected signs of “a significant Iron Age structure in the associated area”.*** Full excavation of that building, however, must await future seasons, as it still underlies remains associated with later time periods. 

But even before excavation of the building, Gibson believes the current finds are telling.

“For archaeologists, an ashen layer can mean a number of different things,” said Gibson in a report about the finds in the UNC Charlotte article, published on August 11. “It could be ashy deposits removed from ovens; or it could be localized burning of garbage. However, in this case, the combination of an ashy layer full of artifacts, mixed with arrowheads, and a very special ornament indicates some kind of devastation and destruction. Nobody abandons golden jewelry and nobody has arrowheads in their domestic refuse.”

“The arrowheads are known as ‘Scythian arrowheads’ and have been found at other archaeological conflict sites from the 7th and 6th centuries BCE,” Gibson continues. “They are known at sites outside of Israel as well. They were fairly commonplace in this period and are known to be used by the Babylonian warriors. Together, this evidence points to the historical conquest of the city by Babylon because the only major destruction we have in Jerusalem for this period is the conquest of 587/586 BCE.”***

Gibson and his colleagues hope to excavate into the associated Iron Age structure remains in a future season, shedding additional light on the time period and the event that occurred at the location.

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Overhead view of the Mount Zion excavation site. UNC Charlotte and Mt Zion Archaeological Expedition

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One of the Scythian type arrowheads found in the destruction layer from 587/586 BCE. Mt Zion Archaeological Expedition/Virginia Withers

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Earring or tassle ornament made of gold and silver from the destruction layer of 587/586 BCE. Mt Zion Archaeological Expedition/Rafi Lewis

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*2 Kings 25: 8 — 11

**Rare seal bearing biblical name found in City of David excavation, 31 Mar 2019, Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs. (https://mfa.gov.il/MFA/IsraelExperience/History/Pages/Rare-seal-bearing-biblical-name-found-in-City-of-David-excavation-31-March-2019.aspx#)

***Evidence of the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem found in Mount Zion excavation, University of North Carolina at Charlotte news release, 11 Aug 2019.

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If you liked this article, you may like Digging into First Century Jerusalem’s Rich and Famous, an in-depth feature article about the Mount Zion excavations published previously in Popular Archaeology.

NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIVERSITY—The first Americans – humans who crossed onto the North American continent and then dispersed throughout Central and South America – all share common ancestry. But as they settled different areas, the populations diverged and became distinct. A new study from North Carolina State University shows that facial differences resulting from this divergence were due to the complex interaction of environment and evolution on these populations and sheds light on how human diversification occurred after settlement of the New World.

“If we want to understand variation in modern populations in Central and South America specifically, then we need to examine variation in prehistoric American populations during the formative period after they settled the continent but prior to European contact,” says Ann Ross, professor of biological sciences at NC State and lead author of a paper describing the work.

In the first craniofacial variation study to look at the continent as a whole – a study 20 years in the making – Ross and co-author Douglas Ubelaker of the Smithsonian Institution examined skulls from across Mesoamerica and Central and South America. The skulls dated from 730 – 1630 A.D., and came from environments ranging from arid to alpine to coastal. Using a 3D digitizer, the researchers recorded standard anatomical landmarks on the skulls in order to get a consensus configuration for each population group. They compared the group configurations to determine the types of variation associated with each group.

“There’s a lot of debate as to what models modern cranial variation,” Ross says. “Mutations would insert the most variation, but they’re very rare. Adaptation to environment is another possibility, but many researchers believe variation is largely due to a neutral process such as genetic drift, which occurs when populations separate and stop exchanging genes.”

Ross and Ubelaker found that highland populations from across the region were similar to each other, as were lowland populations. But comparing highland with lowland populations showed higher variation between the two groups.

“That makes sense,” Ross says. “You probably wouldn’t travel from the mountains to the beach in order to find a mate. And we know that these groups were exchanging more than just pots.”

While those results could be attributed in part to genetic drift, the researchers also found that other factors – such as adaptations to climate and altitude – also played a role in craniofacial differentiation between populations. Ross hopes that the work can serve as a baseline for future studies.

“Population divergence is a multifactorial process, a complex interplay of factors,” Ross says. “If you want to find out why these populations diverge you have to look at multiple factors, not just genetics or DNA.”

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Cranio-facial features varied across North and South America.

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Article Source: North Carolina State University news release

UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHARLOTTE—Researchers digging at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s ongoing archaeological excavation on Mount Zion in Jerusalem have announced a second significant discovery from the 2019 season – clear evidence of the Babylonian conquest of the city from 587/586 BCE.

The discovery is of a deposit including layers of ash, arrowheads dating from the period, as well as Iron Age potsherds, lamps and a significant piece of period jewelry – a gold and silver tassel or earring. There are also signs of a significant Iron Age structure in the associated area, but the building, beneath layers from later periods, has yet to be excavated.

The Mount Zion Archaeological Project, co-directed by UNC Charlotte professor of history Shimon Gibson, Rafi Lewis, a senior lecturer at Ashkelon Academic College and a fellow of Haifa University, and James Tabor, UNC Charlotte professor of religious studies, has been in operation for over a decade and has made numerous significant finds relating to the ancient city’s many historical periods, including the announcement made in July, 2019 on evidence concerning the sack of the city during the First Crusade. The current find is one of the oldest and perhaps the most prominent in its historical significance, as the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem is a major moment in Jewish history.

The team believes that the newly-found deposit can be dated to the specific event of the conquest because of the unique mix of artifacts and materials found — pottery and lamps, side-by-side with evidence of the Babylonian siege represented by burnt wood and ashes, and a number of Scythian-type bronze and iron arrowheads which are typical of that period.

Because of the site’s location, various alternative explanations for the artifacts can be eliminated, the researchers argue. “We know where the ancient fortification line ran,” noted Gibson, “so we know we are within the city. We know that this is not some dumping area, but the south-western neighborhood of the Iron Age city – during the 8th century BCE the urban area extended from the “City of David” area to the south-east and as far as the Western Hill where we are digging.”

The ash deposits, similarly, are not conclusive evidence of the Babylonian attack in themselves, but are much more so in the context of other materials.

“For archaeologists, an ashen layer can mean a number of different things,” Gibson said. “It could be ashy deposits removed from ovens; or it could be localized burning of garbage. However, in this case, the combination of an ashy layer full of artifacts, mixed with arrowheads, and a very special ornament indicates some kind of devastation and destruction. Nobody abandons golden jewelry and nobody has arrowheads in their domestic refuse.”

“The arrowheads are known as ‘Scythian arrowheads’ and have been found at other archaeological conflict sites from the 7th and 6th centuries BCE. They are known at sites outside of Israel as well. They were fairly commonplace in this period and are known to be used by the Babylonian warriors. Together, this evidence points to the historical conquest of the city by Babylon because the only major destruction we have in Jerusalem for this period is the conquest of 587/586 BCE,” he said.

The clay artifacts also help date the discovery. The lamps, Gibson notes, are the typical high-based pinched lamps of the period.

“It’s the kind of jumble that you would expect to find in a ruined household following a raid or battle,” Gibson said. “Household objects, lamps, broken bits from pottery which had been overturned and shattered… and arrowheads and a piece of jewelry which might have been lost and buried in the destruction.”

“Frankly, jewelry is a rare find at conflict sites, because this is exactly the sort of thing that attackers will loot and later melt down.”

“I like to think that we are excavating inside one of the ‘Great Man’s houses’ mentioned in the second book of Kings 25:9,” Gibson speculated. “This spot would have been at an ideal location, situated as it is close to the western summit of the city with a good view overlooking Solomon’s Temple and Mount Moriah to the north-east. We have high expectations of finding much more of the Iron Age city in future seasons of work. “

The building that is apparently part of the layer remains unexcavated. “One might ask why haven’t we excavated the whole building?” Gibson said. “The reason is that we are slowly taking the site down, level by level, period by period, and at the end of this last digging season two meters of domestic structures from later Byzantine and Roman periods have still to be dug above the Iron Age level below. We plan to get down to it in the 2020 season.”

The unexpected and rare piece of jewelry found is apparently a tassel or earring, with a bell-shaped gold upper part. Clasped beneath is a silver part made in the shape of a cluster of grapes. Gibson noted that this discovery of jewelry “is a unique find and it is a clear indication of the wealth of the inhabitants of the city at the time of the siege.” The only other discovery of jewelry in Jerusalem from this period was made many years ago in 1979 in an Iron Age tomb at Ketef Hinnom outside the city.

The researchers say that finding evidence of a critical historical event is what makes the discovery particularly exciting. Lewis, another co-director of the project, explained that “It is very exciting to be able to excavate the material signature of any given historical event, and even more so regarding an important historical event such as the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem.”

By all accounts the Babylonian conquest of the city by the Neo-Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar was ferocious and resulted in a great loss of life, with the razing of the city and the burning of houses, and the plundering and dismantling of King Solomon’s Temple to God. The local ruler of the Kingdom of Judah, King Zedekiah, made an attempt to flee the city with his retinue, but was eventually caught and taken captive to Babylon.

The Hebrew Bible relates the famine and suffering that the inhabitants of Jerusalem suffered during the lengthy Babylonian siege of the city: “So the city was besieged unto the eleventh year of King Zedekiah. On the ninth day of the [fourth] month the famine was sore in the city, so that there was no bread for the people of the land. Then a breach was made in the city, and all the men of war [fled] by night by the way of the gate between the two walls…. And he [Nebuzaradan, the Babylonian captain of the guard] burnt the house of the Lord, and the King’s house; and all the houses of Jerusalem, even every great man’s house, burnt he with fire.” (2 Kings 25: 1-9).

The Babylonian siege of Jerusalem lasted for quite a while even though many of the inhabitants wanted to give up. “King Zedekiah simply was not willing to pay tribute to Nebuchadnezzar and the direct result of this was the destruction of the city and the Temple”, said Gibson.

Every year religious Jews in Jerusalem and across the world pray and fast in remembrance of the destruction of the Jewish Temple to God in Jerusalem, first by the Babylonians in 587/586 BCE, resulting in the exile of the inhabitants of the city to Babylon, and yet again in 70 CE at the hands of the Roman legions led by Titus. To remember the devastating destruction of the Temple, Jews gather in synagogues around the world and at the Western Wall plaza in Jerusalem, to pray and mourn on Tisha B’ Av (the ninth day in the Hebrew month of Av) according to the Jewish calendar, which falls this year on August 11th.

The Mount Zion archaeological project is directed by Shimon Gibson and James Tabor from the College of Liberal and Arts Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, in conjunction with Rafi Lewis of Ashkelon Academic College and Haifa University, and with sponsorship from Aron Levy, John Hoffmann, Cherylee and Ron Vanderham, and Patty and David Tyler and others, and facilitated by Sheila Bishop for The Foundation for Biblical Archaeology.

The dig is also staffed by a host of volunteers, including UNC Charlotte students. The project has been a favorite summer activity of for many of UNC Charlotte’s Levine Scholars Program, the university’s highly selective national program for undergraduate scholars.

“Participating in the Mount Zion dig has been an amazing opportunity for the Levine Scholars,” said Diane Zablotsky, director of UNC Charlotte’s Levine Scholars Program. “Although they are from different backgrounds and study in different majors, they shared a unique experience that left them with a deep appreciation of archaeology, the history of Jerusalem, and broadened worldview.”

The site is within the “Sovev Homot” park administered by the Israel Nature and Parks Authority. Other substantial remains of the multi-period ancient city were uncovered during the 2019 season, including vaulted basements from the time of Herod the Great, a Byzantine street which was the south-westerly continuation of the main city street known as the Cardo Maximus, and a sunken defense ditch that ran in front of the fortifications which greeted the Crusader’s when they attacked Jerusalem in 1099 and hindered their assault on the city.

The complex architectural sequence of superimposed structures dating back 3000 years or so is being carefully mapped by a team of recorders and draftsmen headed by Steve Patterson. The University of North Carolina at Charlotte has been conducting archaeological excavations in Jerusalem since 2006 and much vital historical and archaeological information has been steadily extracted from the digging operations.

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One of the Scythian type arrowheads found in the destruction layer from 587/586 BCE. Mt Zion Archaeological Expedition/Virginia Withers

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Earring or tassle ornament made of gold and silver from the destruction layer of 587/586 BCE. Mt Zion Archaeological Expedition/Rafi Lewis

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One of the students of UNC Charlotte’s Levine Program, Miles Shen, holding in his hands a lamp dating from the Iron Age. Mt Zion Archaeological Expedition/James Tabor

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHARLOTTE news release

MARTIN-LUTHER-UNIVERSITÄT HALLE-WITTENBERG—People in Ethiopia did not live in low valleys during the last ice age. Instead they lived high up in the inhospitable Bale Mountains. There they had enough water, built tools out of obsidian and relied mainly on giant rodents for nourishment. This discovery was made by an international team of researchers led by Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) in cooperation with the Universities of Cologne, Bern, Marburg, Addis Ababa and Rostock. In the current issue of “Science“, the researchers provide the first evidence that our African ancestors had already settled in the mountains during the Paleolithic period, about 45,000 years ago.

At around 4,000 meters above sea level, the Bale Mountains in southern Ethiopia are a rather inhospitable region. There is a low level of oxygen in the air, temperatures fluctuate sharply, and it rains a lot. “Because of these adverse living conditions, it was previously assumed that humans settled in the Afro-Alpine region only very lately and for short periods of time,” says Professor Bruno Glaser, an expert in soil biogeochemistry at MLU. Together with an international team of archaeologists, soil scientists, paleoecologists, and biologists, he has been able to show that this assumption is incorrect. People had already begun living for long periods of time on the ice-free plateaus of the Bale Mountains about 45,000 years ago during the Middle Pleistocene Epoch. By then the lower valleys were already too dry for survival.

For several years, the research team investigated a rocky outcrop near the settlement of Fincha Habera in the Bale Mountains in southern Ethiopia. During their field campaigns, the scientists found a number of stone artifacts, clay fragments and a glass bead. “We also extracted information from the soil as part of our subproject,” says Glaser. Based on the sediment deposits in the soil, the researchers from Halle were able to carry out extensive biomarker and nutrient analyses as well as radiocarbon dating and thus draw conclusions as to how many people lived in the region and when they lived there. For this work, the scientists also developed a new type of paleothermometer which could be used to roughly track the weather in the region – including temperature, humidity and precipitation. Such analyses can only be done in natural areas with little contamination, otherwise the soil profile will have changed too much by more recent influences. The inhospitable conditions of the Bale Mountains present ideal conditions for such research since the soil has only changed on the surface during the last millennia.

Using this data, the researchers were not only able to show that people have been there for a longer period of time. The analyses may also have uncovered the reasons for this: during the last ice age the settlement of Fincha Habera was located beyond the edge of the glaciers. According to Glaser, there was a sufficient amount of water available since the glaciers melted in phases. The researchers are even able to say what people ate: giant mole rats, endemic rodents in the region the researchers investigated. These were easy to hunt and provided enough meat, thereby providing the energy required to survive in the rough terrain. Humans probably also settled in the area because there was deposit of volcanic obsidian rock nearby from which they could mine obsidian and make tools out of it. “The settlement was therefore not only comparatively habitable, but also practical,” concludes Glaser.

The soil samples also reveal a further detail about the history of the settlement. Starting around 10,000 years before the Common Era, the location was populated by humans for a second time. At this time, the site was increasingly used as a hearth. And: “For the first time, the soil layer dating from this period also contains the excrement of grazing animals,” says Glaser.

According to the research team, the new study in “Science” not only provides new insights into the history of human settlement in Africa, it also imparts important information about the human potential to adapt physically, genetically and culturally to changing environmental conditions. For example, some groups of people living in the Ethiopian mountains today can easily contend with low levels of oxygen in the air.

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The Fincha Habera rock shelter in the Ethiopian Bale Mountains served as a residence for prehistoric hunter-gatherers. Götz Ossendorf

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Wasama Valley in the Bale Mountains with today’s vegetation. During the Middle Stone Age
occupation, a valley glacier blocked the access to the central Plateau. Nevertheless, prehistoric
humans extracted (at 4240 masl: the ridge in the center of the photo) obsidian to produce their
tools. Götz Ossendorf

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Excavating and sampling of the archeological Middle Stone Age-deposits at Fincha Habera. Götz Ossendorf

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Typical Middle Stone Age tool (unifacial obsidian point) with use-wear traces of unearthed from the archeological deposits of Fincha Habera rock shelter. Götz Ossendorf

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Sampling of erratic boulders, which were deposited by a glacier on the central Sanetti Plateau in
the Bale Mountains. Consequently, the rock samples were analyzed and dated to reconstruct the
time of the respective glacier advance. S. Erlwein

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Article Source: MARTIN-LUTHER-UNIVERSITÄT HALLE-WITTENBERG news release

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA – BERKELEY—The Maya of Central America are thought to have been a kinder, gentler civilization, especially compared to the Aztecs of Mexico. At the peak of Maya culture some 1,500 years ago, warfare seemed ritualistic, designed to extort ransom for captive royalty or to subjugate rival dynasties, with limited impact on the surrounding population.

Only later, archaeologists thought, did increasing drought and climate change lead to total warfare—cities and dynasties were wiped off the map in so-called termination events—and the collapse of the lowland Maya civilization around 1,000 A.D. (or C.E., current era).

New evidence unearthed by a researcher from the University of California, Berkeley, and the U.S. Geological Survey calls all this into question, suggesting that the Maya engaged in scorched-earth military campaigns—a strategy that aims to destroy anything of use, including cropland—even at the height of their civilization, a time of prosperity and artistic sophistication.

The finding also indicates that this increase in warfare, possibly associated with climate change and resource scarcity, was not the cause of the disintegration of the lowland Maya civilization.

“These data really challenge one of the dominant theories of the collapse of the Maya,” said David Wahl, a UC Berkeley adjunct assistant professor of geography and a researcher at the USGS in Menlo Park, California. “The findings overturn this idea that warfare really got intense only very late in the game.”

“The revolutionary part of this is that we see how similar Maya warfare was from early on,” said archaeologist Francisco Estrada-Belli of Tulane University, Wahl’s colleague. “It wasn’t primarily the nobility challenging one another, taking and sacrificing captives to enhance the charisma of the captors. For the first time, we are seeing that this warfare had an impact on the general population.”

Total warfare

The evidence, reported today in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, is an inch-thick layer of charcoal at the bottom of a lake, Laguna Ek’Naab, in Northern Guatemala: a sign of extensive burning of a nearby city, Witzna, and its surroundings that was unlike any other natural fire recorded in the lake’s sediment.

The charcoal layer dates from between 690 and 700 A.D., right in the middle of the classic period of Maya civilization, 250-950 A.D. The date for the layer coincides exactly with the date—May 21, 697 A.D.—of a “burning” campaign recorded on a stone stela, or pillar, in a rival city, Naranjo.

“This is really the first time the written record has been linked to an event in the paleo data sets in the New World,” Wahl said. “In the New World, there is so little writing, and what’s preserved is mostly on stone monuments. This is unique in that we were able to identify this event in the sedimentary record and point to the written record, particularly these Maya hieroglyphs, and make the inference that this is the same event.”

Wahl, a geologist who studies past climate and is first author of the study, worked with USGS colleague Lysanna Anderson and Estrada-Belli to extract 7 meters of sediment cores from the lake. Laguna Ek’Naab, which is about 100 meters across, is located at the base of the plateau where Witzna once flourished and has collected thousands of years of sediment from the city and its surrounding agricultural fields. After seeing the charcoal layer, the archaeologists examined many of Witzna’s ruined monuments still standing in the jungle and found evidence of burning in all of them.

“What we see here is, it looks like they torched the entire city and, indeed, the entire watershed,” Wahl said. “Then, we see this really big decrease in human activity afterwards, which suggests at least that there was a big hit to the population. We can’t know if everyone was killed or they moved or if they simply migrated away, but what we can say is that human activity decreased very dramatically immediately after that event.”

This one instance does not prove that the Maya engaged in total warfare throughout the 650-year classic period, Estrada-Belli said, but it does fit with increasing evidence of warlike behavior throughout that period: mass burials, fortified cities and large standing armies.

“We see destroyed cities and resettled people similar to what Rome did to Carthage or Mycenae to Troy,” Estrada-Belli said.

And if total warfare was already common at the peak of Maya lowland civilization, then it is unlikely to have been the cause of the civilization’s collapse, the researchers argue.

“I think, based on this evidence, the theory that a presumed shift to total warfare was a major factor in the collapse of Classic Maya society is no longer viable,” said Estrada-Belli. “We have to rethink the cause of the collapse, because we’re not on the right path with warfare and climate change.”

‘Bahlam Jol burned for the second time’

Though Maya civilization originated more than 4,000 years ago, the Classic period is characterized by widespread monumental architecture and urbanization exemplified by Tikal in Guatemala and Dzibanché in Mexico’s Yucatan. City-states—independent states made up of cities and their surrounding territories—were ruled by dynasties that, archaeologists thought, established alliances and waged wars much like the city-states of Renaissance Italy, which affected the nobility without major impacts on the population.

In fact, most archaeologists believe that the incessant warfare that arose in the terminal Classic period (800-950 A.D.), presumably because of climate change, was the major cause of the decline of Maya cities throughout present day El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Belize and Southern Mexico.

So when Wahl, Anderson and Estrada-Belli discovered the charcoal layer in 2013 in Laguna Ek’Naab—a layer unlike anything Wahl had seen before—they were puzzled. The scientists had obtained the lake core in order to document the changing climate in Central America, hoping to correlate these with changes in human occupation and food cultivation.

The puzzle lingered until 2016, when Estrada-Belli and co-author Alexandre Tokovinine, a Mayan epigrapher at the University of Alabama, discovered a key piece of evidence in the ruins of Witzna: an emblem glyph, or city seal, identifying Witzna as the ancient Maya city Bahlam Jol. Searching through a database of names mentioned in Maya hieroglyphs, Tokovinine found that very name in a “war statement” on a stela in the neighboring city-state of Naranjo, about 32 kilometers south of Bahlam Jol/Witzna.

The statement said that on the day “… 3 Ben, 16 Kasew (‘Sek’), Bahlam Jol ‘burned’ for the second time.” According to Tokovinine, the connotation of the word “burned,” or puluuy in Mayan, has always been unclear, but the date 3 Ben, 16 Kasew on the Maya calendar, or May 21, 697, clearly associates this word with total warfare and the scorched earth destruction of Bahlam Jol/Witzna.

“The implications of this discovery extend beyond mere reinterpretation of references to burning in ancient Maya inscriptions,” Tokovinine said. “We need to go back to the drawing board on the very paradigm of ancient Maya warfare as centered on taking captives and extracting tribute.”

Three other references to puluuy or “burning” are mentioned in the same war statement, referencing the cities of Komkom, known today as Buenavista del Cayo; K’an Witznal, now Ucanal; and K’inchil, location unknown. These cities may also have been decimated, if the word puluuy describes the same extreme warfare in all references. The earlier burning of Bahlam Jol/Witzna mentioned on the stela may also have left evidence in the lake cores—there are three other prominent charcoal layers in addition to the one from 697 A.D.—but the date of the earlier burning is unknown.

Maya archaeologists have reconstructed some of the local history, and it’s known that the conquest of Bahlam Jol/Witzna was set in motion by a queen of Naranjo, Lady 6 Sky, who was trying to reestablish her dynasty after the city-state had declined and lost all its possessions. She set her seven-year-old son, Kahk Tilew, on the throne and then began military campaigns to wipe out all the rival cities that had rebelled, Estrada-Belli said.

“The punitive campaign was recorded as being waged by her son, the king, but we know it’s really her,” he said.

That was not the end of Bahlam Jol/Witzna, however. The city revived, to some extent, with a reduced population, as seen in the lake cores. And the emblem glyph was found on a stela erected around 800 A.D, 100 years after the city’s destruction. The city was abandoned around 1,000 A.D.

“The ability to tie geologic evidence of a devastating fire to an event noted in the epigraphic record, made possible by the relatively uncommon discovery of an ancient Maya city’s emblem glyph, reflects a confluence of findings nearly unheard of in the field of geoarchaeology,” Wahl said.

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UC Berkeley’s David Wahl and Lysanna Anderson of USGS with a local assistant taking a sediment sample from the center of Lake Ek’Naab from an inflatable platform. All the equipment had to be carried 2 kilometers down a steep jungle trail to the lake. Francisco Estrada-Belli, Tulane

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This view from a recent lidar survey shows the entire ceremonial center stretching for 2 kilimeters along a limestone ridge overlooking Laguna Ek’Naab (white spot), the sampling site for this paleoenvironmental study. Francisco Estrada-Belli, PACUNAM & Tulane University

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA – BERKELEY news release

MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY—The vast cultural and linguistic diversity of Latin American countries is still far from being fully represented by genetic surveys. Western South America in particular holds a key role in the history of the continent due to the presence of three major ecogeographic domains (the Andes, the Amazonia, and the Pacific Coast), and for hosting the earliest and largest complex societies. A new study in Molecular Biology and Evolution by an international team lead by scholars from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and from the University of Zurich reveals signatures of history, ecology and cultural diversity in the genetic makeup of living rural populations.

A thorough study, a collaboration between scientists and institutes from Europe, the USA, Mexico, Ecuador, Colombia and Peru, including geneticists, linguists and anthropologists, has shed new light on the population history of South America. The study, which involved working closely with local populations in numerous regions, was published in Molecular Biology and Evolution. The results confirmed the impact of large, complex societies already known from archaeological evidence, but also revealed previously unknown migrations and connections across vast distances, including in Amazonia, an area that has not been as deeply studied archaeologically.

Genetic studies have played a fundamental role in understanding the population history of the American continent. By reconciling genetic evidence with the archaeological record and with paleoclimatic data, scientists have been able to pinpoint the time and scale of the earliest migrations, possible routes through the continent, the subsequent formation of population structure, and preferential routes of population migration and contact. Yet the picture is necessarily superficial because of the lack of representative data from all the diverse regions of the continent. One recurrent simplification relies on the contrast between the Andes, site of the famous large complex societies of the Wari, Tiahuanaco and Inca who built a vast network of roads, and Amazonia, where people apparently have been living in small isolated groups. The Pacific Coast, key player in the earliest migration routes and theatre of other large-scale societies (like the Moche and Chimú, among others) is not properly incorporated in this traditional model.

“We wanted to bring attention to the fine-grained, complex events taking place during the pre-colonial and post-European contact times. We therefore visited diverse regions of South America, collecting new samples from rural populations with different cultural backgrounds. In our analysis, we focused on signals of contact and shared ancestry, trying to find exceptions to the current paradigm on the diversity of the continent,” explains Chiara Barbieri, a geneticist from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena now working at the University of Zurich, and lead author of the study.

“On a continental scale, one of the major findings is the presence of a distinct ancestry component in Amazonia, present at high frequency in populations from Ecuador and Colombia, near the Eastern Andes slope. This genetic component, previously undetected, might have started to differentiate from other ancestry components (for example the one frequently found in Amazonia and the one found in the Coast and Andes) more than 4,000 years ago. This has implications for understanding the early migrations and structure of the continent, and suggests that human diversity in Amazonia is larger than we thought,” adds Barbieri.

On a local scale, the high-resolution genomic data generated for this study was able to distinguish fine-grained cases of genetic exchange that correspond to population contact. These exchanges connect populations separated by hundreds of kilometers and who live in different ecogeographic domains. “Connections have been found between speakers of Quechua (a widely-spoken Andean language) through the Andes and part of Amazonia. Also, some populations of Loreto and San Martín (Amazonian regions) of Peru are genetically very close to the Cocama speakers (an Amazonian language) of Colombia. These genetic signatures suggest that here languages are diffused by movement of actual people instead of by cultural diffusion alone,” explain José Sandoval and Ricardo Fujita of the University of San Martín de Porres in Lima, Peru, who coauthored the study.

Finally, the genetic analyses show demographic traces of a large population that correspond to ancient complex societies both in the Andes and on the North Coast of Peru. Signatures of relatively large populations are also found in a few populations of Amazonia, suggesting the possibility of complex interactions in this region. Here archaeological excavations are less numerous, making the chances of uncovering relevant archaeological findings less likely. Lars Fehren-Schmitz, a biological anthropologist from the University of California, Santa Cruz, who contributed to the study, concludes, “Taken all together, these findings bring attention to the diversity and complexity of people from Amazonia and their interactions with neighboring regions of the Andes. The genetic inheritance of South American people still bears traces of the important events that took place before the historical record in colonial times.”

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The vast cultural and linguistic diversity of Latin American countries is still far from being fully represented by genetic surveys. A new study explores the genetic roots of 26 populations from diverse regions and cultures of western South America and Mexico. The results reveal long-distance connections between speakers of the same language, and new traces of genetic diversity within the Amazonia. Chiara Barbieri and Rodrigo Barquera

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

LANCASTER UNIVERSITY—A 3D model of an 18th century slave ship, which captures the cramped, dirty and stifling conditions experienced by enslaved Africans, has been launched as a new digital teaching tool.

The idea of creating a digital slave ship came from Lancaster University lecturer and historian of the Atlantic World Dr Nicholas Radburn.

He worked with a team of scholars and technicians from Emory University, a private university in Atlanta, Georgia, to bring the project to fruition.

Part of a leading digital humanities database project co-managed by Dr Radburn, the recreation of the French ship, ‘L’Aurore’, will be used in classrooms, museums, galleries and family historians worldwide.

Between 1500 and 1867, some 40,000 voyages carried 12.5 million Africans to the Americas, where they were sold into slavery.

The only remaining set of plans of a slave ship are for the ‘Aurore’. Those plans shaped the 3D model.

Dr Radburn is a co-editor of ‘Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database’, which documents the slave trade through a database of 36,000 slave voyages.

The site, which receives approximately 30,000 visitors a month from all over the world, is used extensively in classrooms and museum galleries, including the recently opened Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington D.C., which had 1.9m visitors last year.

“Although ‘Voyages’ is a key digital resource, it gives users little sense of the experiences of the 12.5 million Africans who were enslaved through the trade,” explains Dr Radburn.

“When I was undertaking my doctoral research, I discovered that the flat images of slave ships really didn’t capture the realities of the trade. To address this problem, and as part of ‘Voyage’s’ recent redesign, I developed the 3D model of a slave ship in collaboration with the digital team at Emory.”

The video of the 3D model, which took almost three years to produce, was launched on the ‘Voyages’ website earlier this year and has already received several thousand views and has been picked up on social media channels.

Viewers of the video take a trip right through the ‘Aurore’, which set sail from La Rochelle in France in August 1784 bound for Africa and onwards to what is now Haiti.

The clip provides a sense of the horrific conditions endured by 600 enslaved men, women, and children for the several months they were imprisoned on the vessel.

“We designed the model to be sensitive to the numerous issues of representing the slave trade,” added Dr Radburn. “The feedback we’ve received so far has been very positive.

“We hope it will provide teachers, museum curators and the general public with a different way of thinking about the slave trade that goes beyond existing images.

“We are in a digital age so this project was very much about using those tools to provide something better and more engaging.

“It’s been very rewarding. As a historian, I usually write and teach with traditional textual sources, so this was a very different project for me. Working with computer scientists, digital experts and a voice-over artist is not the usual remit of a historian.”

Dr Radburn explained the specialist knowledge he gained through studying history was essential to making the ship a reality.

“To build an accurate model of a slave ship, you’ve got to know about the slave trade” he added.

“Given that this is now on ‘Voyages’, a platform that already receives tens of thousands of visitors a month, the video should be become a standard tool for teaching the slave trade’s history in the future.”

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The 3D ship in full sail. © Picture reproduced courtesy of Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database

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Article Source: Lancaster University news release

FAR EASTERN FEDERAL UNIVERSITY—Archaeologists of the Far Eastern Federal University (FEFU), Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography SB RAS (Russia), Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral (ESPOL) (Ecuador), and Tohoku University (Japan) found shards of ceramic vessels associated with the cultural sediments of early periods of the Real Alto archaeological site in Ecuador. Findings date back to 4640 – 4460 BC, a period that borders with Valdivia, one of the oldest pottery-featured cultures in North and South America. A related article is published in Antiquity.

During the excavations at the site, Russian scientists found fragments of ceramic vessels at a depth of 75 cm to 1 meter. They belong to the insufficiently studied San Pedro complex. Radiocarbon analysis by mass spectrometer showed the pottery dates back to 4640-4460 BC. This period borders or coincides with the first stages of the Valdivia culture, the world famous ceramic figures, a kind of symbol of Ecuador. At the same time, the fragments of San Pedro pottery differ from the Valdivian by decorative composition and application.

The shards of San Pedro pottery correlate with fragments from Real Alto and other locations of archaeological excavations retrieved in the 70s and 80s, but attributed to no particular culture. Thus, the researchers received evidence to support additional arguments speaking to a new archaeological culture related to formative period. This one existed and developed simultaneously with Valdivia on the Pacific coast of Ecuador.

“The mass emergence of pottery was a kind of technical breakthrough associated with many aspects of human life and the level of economic development in different parts of the globe,” said Alexander Popov, who is Head of the Russian archeological expedition to Ecuador and Director of the Educational and Scientific Museum FEFU of the School of Arts and Humanities of Far Eastern Federal University. “Ceramic vessels belonging to different cultures developed simultaneously confirm that our ancestors had evolved in terms of cultural diversity. It is curious that, despite the different vectors of human development, in the technological sense we were moving in the same direction.”

According to the scientist, in the next stage of excavations the research team will look for additional artifacts of the new culture. Such findings may help determine conditions for the culture development with more precise accuracy.

Researchers believe that pottery fragments related to an even more archaic time can be found in Ecuador, i.e., a more archaic cultural layer may exist. From that point, one could determine whether pottery was invented in South America at the same time as in the other ceramic cultures of the globe, or if it was imported. The information will help with understanding the processes of parallel development of people on different sides of the Pacific Ocean and, in general, the multi-vector development of human communities.

FEFU researchers seek for common details and local options concerning the development of human civilization on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean—in South America and East Asia. The scientists are comparing the adaptation of ancient people to environmental changes that influenced the economic, domestic and other aspects of populations.

Previously FEFU archaeologists in Ecuador found ancient human remains dating back to 6 to 10 thousand years ago. Those excavations were carried out in the Atahualpa canton, yielding findings that belong to the Las Vegas archaeological culture of the Stone Age.

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Shards of an ancient ceramic vessel from the insufficiently studied San Pedro complex found on Real Alto site, Ecuador. FEFU press office

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The museum complex of the Real Alto site, Ecuador. FEFU press office

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Article Source: Far Eastern Federal University news release

UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHARLOTTE—The University of North Carolina at Charlotte-led archaeological dig on Jerusalem’s Mount Zion has been going on for over a decade, looking at an area where there were no known ruins of major temples, churches or palaces, but nonetheless sacred land where three millennia of struggle and culture has long lain buried, evidence in layer upon layer of significant historical events.

Virtually every dig season, a significant discovery has been made at the site, adding real detail to the records of this globally-renowned city, giving new insights to what has often been imperfectly preserved in ancient histories. This year’s findings are no different, confirming previously unverified details from nearly thousand-year-old historical accounts of the First Crusade – history that had never been confirmed regarding the five-week siege, conquest, sack and massacre of the Fatamid (Muslim)-controlled city in July of 1099.

The dig’s archeological team — co-directed by UNC Charlotte professor of history Shimon Gibson, Rafi Lewis, a faculty member at the University of Haifa and Ashkelon Academic College, and James Tabor, UNC Charlotte professor emeritus of religious studies — has revealed the rumored, but never physically detected, moat-trench the Fatamid defenders dug along the city’s southern wall to protect against siege engines – a defense that contemporary accounts claim helped stymie the southern assault.

Through stratigraphic evidence, the archaeologists have been able to confirm the 11th Century date of the 17-meter-wide by 4-meter-deep ditch, which abutted the Fatimid city wall (built in the same place as the current wall near the current Zion Gate), and have also found artifacts from the assault itself, including arrowheads, Crusader bronze cross pendants, and a spectacular piece of Muslim gold jewelry, which is probable booty from the conquest.

In past seasons, the team found remnants of a Fatamid city gate at the site, which, the archaeologists argue, makes the area a likely focal point for the Crusaders’ main southern assault on the city wall. Despite reported attempts to fill the trench by the attacking forces, the southern assault was ultimately unsuccessful. The city’s defenses were finally breached by a simultaneous operation from the north.

Near the trench, the archaeologists also unearthed an earthquake-damaged Fatamid structure, which was probably already a ruin at the time of the assault. The arrowheads, crosses and jewelry were found on the floor of the structure.

“There was, apparently, an extramural quarter of scattered buildings, outside the city to the south, and we excavated a building that was in a ruinous state, possibly damaged by the earthquake of 1033,” Gibson said. “You can imagine the Crusaders coming at and attacking the city from the south and they find the ditch and this ruined building, and they made use of it for cover, and that explains some of the arrowheads because they would have been raining down upon them” Gibson speculated.

“This is enormously important for Crusader scholarship,” said Lewis, an expert on medieval warfare, “because not only do we have the remains of the ditch that we only knew about from the sources but we also have the remains of the frontline battle itself.”

The archaeology clarifies a historical picture that is mainly only known from contemporary chroniclers who had been considered questionable in their accuracy. By all accounts, the Crusader attack on the city of Jerusalem was a bloody one and took place on two sides of the city. While the principal forces broke into the city from the north, little has been known about the attack from the south.

Peter Tudebode, a contemporary chronicler, recounts that the Provencal forces led by Raymond de Saint Gille on the south side, positioned themselves somewhere on Mount Zion and proceeded to attack the wall. However, there was a ditch in front of the wall and they could not get their wooden siege tower up against the wall, and so Raymond asked his men, under cover of night, to fill in the ditch for payment of gold dinars. Though the siege tower was able to proceed, the southern assault still did not succeed because of the defenders aggressive counter-measures.

Until the current find, however, there was no evidence that a ditch, trench or moat ever existed, calling into question the reality of the accounts of the southern assault.

The Mount Zion dig team’s discovery of the trench came through a puzzling observation made in earlier seasons at the site. “Just outside the city wall we noticed that, although the slope of the hill went down [from the wall], we found that the slope of a layer of fill was going in the opposite direction, dipping down [towards the wall],” Gibson noted. “That was our first clue – there was some feature that had been cut into the ground, which had been filled in later.”

The fill provided the dating that explained what the structure was: “What was nice was that the ditch itself was sealed with a burnt layer that had coins in it from the time of King Baldwin III,” Gibson said.

Baldwin III was an early crusader king who fought a civil war against his mother, in the course of which he burnt much of Jerusalem. Baldwin’s fiery attack was known to be in 1153, about half a century after the conquest, thus dating the ditch as a landscape feature in the period before.

“The ditch got filled in and it disappeared – to such an extent that a lot of archaeologists who had been working at different points in time believed that maybe this ditch was a figment of the chroniclers’ imaginations,” Gibson said. “That’s why this discovery is so important – for the first time, we can confirm details that appear in major historical texts.”

The artifacts associated with the find provide some intriguing details about the historical moment of the First Crusade. In the ditch’s fill the archaeologists found what might be a part of a battle standard made of metal, as well as pieces of Chinese celadon ware pottery, which show active trade with the far east during the Fatamid period.

The jewelry, which includes fine gold workmanship with pearls and colored beads, was found by staff archaeologists John Hutchins and Melanie Samed, and they carefully extracted it from the ruined house, where it had lain for 920 years. Gibson is fairly certain that it is booty from the sack or carried by the soldiers carrying out the attack, rather than a dropped domestic item, noting that looting was a real interest of the crusaders.

“It’s large and valuable, not something you would lose, you see, ” Gibson said. “This piece of jewelry may have been of Egyptian origin and it seems to have been used as an attachment for the ear, and because of its large size, perhaps also to hold a veil in position around a women’s head.” The Fatamid dynasty came from Egypt, and the gold work is a familiar Egyptian style of the period, with the use of gold and pearls in jewelry mentioned in documents from the Cairo Genizah.

Details bringing the moment of conquest to life are particularly important because the battle marks a critical moment in Jerusalem’s history. The crusaders takeover is one of several catastrophic moments in Jerusalem’s dramatic and violent history when the city was essentially wiped out and re-colonized by its conquerors.

“For three days, or perhaps even a week, the crusaders perpetrated every single atrocity under the sun – rape, pillage, murder,” Gibson said. “The chroniclers talk about ‘rivers of blood’ running in the streets of the city, and it may not be an exaggeration. Terrible crimes were committed, and a lot of people died, Christians included. Local Christians were considered just as heretical as the Muslims and the Jews. They turned Jerusalem into a ghost town.”

It is expected that further analysis of the artifacts will reveal further insights.

The Mount Zion Archaeological Project is conducted by Shimon Gibson and James Tabor from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, in conjunction with Rafi Lewis of Ashkelon Academic College, and with sponsorship from the Loy H. Witherspoon bequest, and from Aron Levy, John Hoffmann, Ron and Cherylee Vanderham, and David and Patty Tyler.

Substantial remains of the city dating back to the Iron Age (7th-6th centuries BCE) were also uncovered this summer season, and vaulted basements from the time of Herod the Great.

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Aerial view of the Mount Zion archeological dig, 2019 season. UNC Charlotte

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This earpiece, perhaps of Egyptian manufacture, is apparent loot from the First Crusade sack of Jerusalem in July, 1099. Virginia Withers

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Source: University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Shimon Gibson

UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO—From the perspective of Central and South America, the peopling of the New World was a complex process lasting thousands of years and involving multiple waves of Pleistocene and early Holocene period immigrants entering into the Neotropics.

Paleoindian colonists arrived in waves of immigrants entering the Neotropics, a region starting in the humid rainforests of southern Mexico before 13,000 years ago and brought with them technologies developed for adaptation to environments and resources found in North America.

As the ice age ended across the New World people adapted more generalized stone tools to exploit changing environments and resources. In the Neotropics these changes would have been pronounced as patchy forests and grasslands gave way to broadleaf tropical forests.

In new research published recently in PLOS One titled Linking late Paleoindian stone tool technologies and populations in North, Central and South America, scientists from The University of NewMexico led a study in Belize to document the very earliest indigenous stone tool tradition in southern Mesoamerica.

“This is an area of research for which we have very poor data regarding early humans, though this UNM-led project is expanding our knowledge of human behavior and relationships between people in North, Central and South America,” said lead author Keith Prufer, professor from The University of New Mexico’s Department of Anthropology.

This research, funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Alphawood Foundation, focuses on understanding the Late Pleistocene human colonization of tropics in the broad context of global changes occurring at the end of the last ice age (ca. 12,000-10,000 years ago). The research suggests the tools are part of a human adaptation story in response to emerging tropical conditions in what is today called the Neotropics, a broad region south of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (in S Mexico).

As part of the research, the team conducted extensive excavations at two rock shelter sites from 2014-2018. The excavation sites, located in the Bladen Nature Research, are almost 30 miles from the nearest road or modern human settlement in a large undisturbed rainforest that is one of the best-protected wildlife refuges in Central America.

“We have identified and established an absolute chronology for the earliest stone tool types that are indigenous to Central America,” said Prufer. “These have clear antecedents with the earliest known humans in both South America and North America, but appear to show more affinity with slightly younger Late Paleoindian toolkits in the Amazon and Northern Peru than with North America.”

The research represents the first endogenous Paleoindian stone tool technocomplex recovered from well-dated stratigraphic contexts for Mesoamerica. Previously designated, these artifacts share multiple features with contemporary North and South American Paleoindian tool types. Once hafted, these bifaces appear to have served multiple functions for cutting, hooking, thrusting, or throwing.

“The tools were developed at a time of technological regionalization reflecting the diverse demands of a period of pronounced environmental change and population movement,” said Prufer. “Combined stratigraphic, technological, and population paleogenetic data suggests that there were strong ties between lowland neotropic regions at the onset of the Holocene.”

These findings support previous UNM research suggesting strong genetic relationships between early colonists in Central and South America, following the initial dispersal of humans from Asia into the Americas via the arctic prior to 14,000 years ago.

“We are partnering with Belizean conservation NGO Ya’axche Conservation Trust in our fieldwork to promote the importance of ancient cultural resources in biodiversity and protected areas management,” said Prufer. “We spend a month every year camped out with no access to electricity, internet, phone or resupplies while we conduct excavations.”

This field research involves several UNM graduate students in Archaeology and Evolutionary Anthropology as well as collaborators at Exeter University (UK) and Arizona State University. The analysis for this study was done in part at UNM’s Center for Stable Isotopes, as well as with co-authors at Penn State and UC Santa Barbara. At UNM this involved the new radiocarbon preparation laboratories which are part of the Center for Stable isotopes, one of the anchors of UNM’s interdisciplinary PAIS research and teaching facility.

The senior co-authors are world leaders in the study of early humans in the tropics and are committed to conservation efforts of cultural resources and regional biodiversity. Additionally, Prufer’s long-term collaboration in indigenous Maya communities in the region was critical to the success of this project.

“This research suggests that further exploration of links between early humans living in the neotropics are needed to better understand how knowledge and technologies were shared, and will contribute to our understanding of processes that eventually led to the development of agriculture and sedentary communities,” said Prufer. “Further studies on how these tools were used for food processing will be a key aspect of this research.”

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UNM graduate student Paige Lynch conducting excavations at Mayahak Cab Pek in May 2019, part of ongoing UNM research into the earliest humans in the New World tropics. University of New Mexico

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Examples of Lowe type tools recovered from Tzibte Yux (A, B) and Mayhak Cab Pek (C, D). These are among the oldest known tools recovered from Mesoamerica. University of New Mexico

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Article Source: University of New Mexico news release.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA – SAN DIEGO—Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine say the loss of a single gene two to three million years ago in our ancestors may have resulted in a heightened risk of cardiovascular disease in all humans as a species, while also setting up a further risk for red meat-eating humans. The findings are published July 22, 2019 in PNAS.

Atherosclerosis — the clogging of arteries with fatty deposits — is the cause of one-third of deaths worldwide due to cardiovascular disease. There are many known risk factors, including blood cholesterol, physical inactivity, age, hypertension, obesity and smoking, but in roughly 15 percent of first-time cardiovascular disease events (CVD) due to atherosclerosis, none of these factors apply.

A decade ago, Nissi Varki, MD, professor of pathology at UC San Diego School of Medicine, with co-author Ajit Varki, MD, Distinguished Professor Of Medicine and Cellular And Molecular Medicine, and colleagues noted that naturally occurring coronary heart attacks due to atherosclerosis are virtually non-existent in other mammals, including closely related chimpanzees in captivity which share human-like risk factors, such as high blood lipids, hypertension and physical inactivity. Instead, chimp “heart attacks” were due to an as-yet unexplained scarring of the heart muscle.

In the new study, the Varkis, and Philip Gordts, PhD, assistant professor of medicine, and others report that mice modified to be deficient (like humans) in a sialic acid sugar molecule called Neu5Gc showed a significant increase in atherogenesis compared to control mice, who retain the CMAH gene that produces Neu5Gc.

The researchers — members of the Glycobiology Research and Training Center and/or the Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny at UC San Diego — believe a mutation that inactivated the CMAH gene occurred a few million years ago in hominin ancestors, an event possibly linked to a malarial parasite that recognized Neu5Gc.

In their findings, the research team said human-like elimination of CMAH and Neu5Gc in mice caused an almost 2-fold increase in severity of atherosclerosis compared to unmodified mice.

“The increased risk appears to be driven by multiple factors, including hyperactive white cells and a tendency to diabetes in the human-like mice,” said Ajit Varki. “This may help explain why even vegetarian humans without any other obvious cardiovascular risk factors are still very prone to heart attacks and strokes, while other evolutionary relatives are not.”

But in consuming red meat, humans are also repeatedly exposed to Neu5Gc, which researchers said prompts an immune response and chronic inflammation they call “xenosialitis.” In their tests, human-like mice modified to lack the CMAH gene were fed a Neu5Gc-rich, high-fat diet and subsequently suffered a further 2.4-fold increase in atherosclerosis, which could not be explained by changes in blood fats or sugars.

“The human evolutionary loss of CMAH likely contributes to a predisposition to atherosclerosis by both intrinsic and extrinsic (dietary) factors,” wrote the authors, “and future studies could consider using this more human-like model.”

In previous work, the Varkis and colleagues have shown that dietary Neu5Gc also promotes inflammation and cancer progression in Neu5Gc-deficient mice, suggesting that the non-human sugar molecule, which is abundant in red meat, may at least partially explain the link between high consumption of red meat and certain cancers.

Interestingly, the evolutionary loss of the CMAH gene appears to have produced other significant changes in human physiology, including reduced human fertility and enhanced ability to run long distances.

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The loss of NeuG5c in humans (retained in other primates) increases atherosclerosis risk by multiple mechanisms, including intrinsic factors such as heightened inflammatory response and hyperglycemia and extrinsic factors such as red meat-derived Neu5Gc-induced xenosialitis. Kunio Kawanishi

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Article Source: University of California, San Diego news release

LA TROBE UNIVERSITY—Researchers successfully reconstructed anthropic influences on sedimentation, including dredging and canal gates use, in the ancient harbor of Portus – a complex of harbor basins and canals that formed the hub of commerce in the capital of the Roman Empire.

The findings suggest that the Romans were proactively managing their river systems from earlier than previously thought – as early as the 2nd century AD.

The history was reconstructed using a range of high-resolution sediment analysis including piston coring, x-ray scanning, radiocarbon dating, magnetic and physical properties and mineral composition of the ancient harbour sediments.

La Trobe University Archaeology Research Fellow and marine geologist, Dr Agathe Lisé-Pronovost, said that ancient harbors can accumulate sediments more rapidly than natural environments, which is the case of Portus built in a river delta and where sediment accumulated at a rate of about one meter per century. Applying these methods allowed researchers to date and precisely reconstruct the sequence of events of the historical port, including dredging to maintain enough draught and canal gate use.

“Dating ancient harbor sediments is a major challenge, given ports are not only subjected to weather events throughout history, but the lasting effects of human activity,” Dr Lisé-Pronovost said.

“The methods we’ve applied have allowed us to address the dating issue and routine measurements of the sort could greatly improve chronostratigraphic analysis and water depth reconstruction of ancient harbor deposits.”

Dr Lisé-Pronovost and her team encourage geoarchaeologists to implement these innovative methods to their work.

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Graphic reconstruction of Portus: Claudius’ first harbor and hexagonal basin extension under Trajan. Ludopedia, Wikimedia Commons

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Article Source: La Trobe University news release

UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE—Genetic analysis has revealed that the ancestors of modern humans interbred with at least five different archaic human groups as they moved out of Africa and across Eurasia.

While two of the archaic groups are currently known – the Neanderthals and their sister group the Denisovans from Asia ¬- the others remain unnamed and have only been detected as traces of DNA surviving in different modern populations. Island Southeast Asia appears to have been a particular hotbed of diversity.

Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), researchers from the University of Adelaide’s Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD) have mapped the location of past “mixing events” (analyzed from existing scientific literature) by contrasting the levels of archaic ancestry in the genomes of present-day populations around the world.

“Each of us carry within ourselves the genetic traces of these past mixing events,” says first author Dr João Teixeira, Australian Research Council Research Associate, ACAD, at the University of Adelaide. “These archaic groups were widespread and genetically diverse, and they survive in each of us. Their story is an integral part of how we came to be.

“For example, all present-day populations show about 2% of Neanderthal ancestry which means that Neanderthal mixing with the ancestors of modern humans occurred soon after they left Africa, probably around 50,000 to 55,000 years ago somewhere in the Middle East.”

But as the ancestors of modern humans travelled further east they met and mixed with at least four other groups of archaic humans.

“Island Southeast Asia was already a crowded place when what we call modern humans first reached the region just before 50,000 years ago,” says Dr Teixeira. “At least three other archaic human groups appear to have occupied the area, and the ancestors of modern humans mixed with them before the archaic humans became extinct.”

Using additional information from reconstructed migration routes and fossil vegetation records, the researchers have proposed there was a mixing event in the vicinity of southern Asia between the modern humans and a group they have named “Extinct Hominin 1”.

Other interbreeding occurred with groups in East Asia, in the Philippines, the Sunda shelf (the continental shelf that used to connect Java, Borneo and Sumatra to mainland East Asia), and possibly near Flores in Indonesia, with another group they have named “Extinct Hominin 2”.

“We knew the story out of Africa wasn’t a simple one, but it seems to be far more complex than we have contemplated,” says Dr Teixeira. “The Island Southeast Asia region was clearly occupied by several archaic human groups, probably living in relative isolation from each other for hundreds of thousands of years before the ancestors of modern humans arrived.

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Map of sites with ages and postulated early and later pathways associated with modern humans dispersing across Asia during the Late Pleistocene. Regions of assumed genetic admixture are also shown. ka, thousand years ago. Katerina Douka & Michelle O’Reilly, Michael D. Petraglia

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“The timing also makes it look like the arrival of modern humans was followed quickly by the demise of the archaic human groups in each area.”

Article Source: University of Adelaide news release

PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES—Researchers report* the discovery of a previously unknown cultural horizon in a peat bog near L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, a site of Norse settlement in the New World. Paul Ledger and colleagues excavated in a peat bog approximately 30 meters east of the settlement, aiming to recover samples for a paleoenvironmental reconstruction of Norse environmental impacts. In the process, the authors discovered a previously unknown archaeological horizon at a depth of around 40 centimeters that contained trampled surfaces, charcoal, and wood working debris. The horizon revealed no culturally diagnostic artifacts. However, radiocarbon dating estimated that the layer was deposited sometime between the late 12th century and 13th century, postdating evidence for Norse occupation. Laboratory analyses recovered insect remains, including early records for beetle species assumed to be post-Columbian additions to the Canadian fauna. According to the authors, the physical character and biological content of the horizon recalls Norse deposits from the North Atlantic region; however, based on the current state of knowledge, the radiocarbon dates point to the layer resulting from indigenous activities.

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The researchers working at L’Anse aux Meadows, August 2018. Linus Girdland-Flink

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Article Source: PNAS news release

*”New horizons at L’Anse aux Meadows,” by Paul M. Ledger, Linus Girdland Flink, and Véronique Forbes.

American Association for the Advancement of Science—Archaeological and genetic evidence now suggests that humans arrived on the American continent around 15,000 years ago, according to a Review by Michael Waters of the latest research on the topic. There have been hints that the Americas were peopled before the traditional date of 13,000 years ago, but Waters notes that more rigorous analysis and dating at known sites in Alaska, the eastern United States and South America, plus the discovery of new sites, are “providing evidence of early occupation that cannot be dismissed.” The last decade of genomic research has also bolstered the case for early occupation, as it has been used to untangle the east Asian and northern Eurasian origins of the first Americans and to clarify the relationship of modern-day populations to founder populations in Beringia about 15,000 years ago. The new analyses suggest that regional archaeological cultures were established by at least 13,000 years ago in North America, about 12,900 years ago in South America, and that a western coastal route for migration might have been available as early as 16,000 years ago.

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Excavations at the 15,000-year-old Debra L. Friedkin site in 2016. Center for the Study of the First Americans, Texas A&M University

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15,000-year-old Stemmed Point in place at Friedkin site, Texas. Center for the Study of the First Americans, Texas A&M University

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Underwater excavations at the 14,600-year-old Page-Ladson site. Center for the Study of the First Americans, Texas A&M University

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14,550-year-old knife from the Page-Ladson site, Florida. Center for the Study of the First Americans, Texas A&M University

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Distribution and ages of the oldest sites in the Americas. Center for the Study of the First Americans, Texas A&M University

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Article Source: AAAS news release. This research appears in the 12 July 2019 issue of Science. Science is published by AAAS, the nonprofit science society.

UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT BOULDER—Chaco Canyon, a site that was once central to the lives of pre-colonial peoples called Anasazi, may not have been able to produce enough food to sustain thousands of residents, according to new research. The results could shed doubt on estimates of how many people were able to live in the region year-round.

Located in Chaco Culture National Historic Park in New Mexico, Chaco Canyon hosts numerous small dwellings and a handful of multi-story buildings known as great houses. Based on these structures, researchers think that it was once a bustling metropolis that was home to as many as 2,300 people during its height from 1050 to 1130 AD.

But Chaco also sits in an unforgiving environment, complete with cold winters, blazing-hot summers and little rainfall falling in either season.

“You have this place in the middle of the San Juan Basin, which is not very habitable,” said Larry Benson, an adjoint curator at the CU Museum of Natural History.

Benson and his colleagues recently discovered one more wrinkle in the question of the region’s suitability. The team conducted a detailed analysis of the Chaco Canyon’s climate and hydrology and found that its soil could not have supported the farming necessary to feed such a booming population.

The findings, Benson said, may change how researchers view the economy and culture of this important area.

“You can’t do any dry-land farming there,” Benson said. “There’s just not enough rain.”

Today, Chaco Canyon receives only about nine inches of rain every year and historical data from tree rings suggest that the climate wasn’t much wetter in the past.

Benson, a retired geochemist and paleoclimatologist who spent most of his career working for the U.S. Geological Survey, set out to better understand if such conditions might have limited how many people could live in the canyon. In the recent study, he and Ohio State University archaeologist Deanna Grimstead pulled together a wide range of data to explore where Chaco Canyon residents might, conceivably, have grown maize, a staple food for most ancestral Pueblo peoples.

They found that these pre-colonial farmers not only contended with scarce rain, but also destructive flash floods that swept down the canyon’s valley floor.

“If you’re lucky enough to have a spring flow that wets the ground ahead of planting, about three-quarters of the time you’d get a summer flow that destroys your crops,” Benson said.

The team calculated that Chacoans could have, at most, farmed just 100 acres of the Chaco Canyon floor. Even if they farmed all of the surrounding side valleys–a monumental feat–they would still have only produced enough corn to feed just over 1,000 people.

The researchers also went one step further, assessing whether past Chaco residents could have supplemented this nutritional shortfall with wild game like deer and rabbits. They calculated that supplying the 185,000 pounds of protein needed by 2,300 people would have quickly cleared all small mammals from the area.

In short, there would have been a lot of hungry mouths in Chaco Canyon. Benson and Grimstead published their results this summer in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

For Benson, that leaves two possibilities. Chaco Canyon residents either imported most of their food from surrounding regions 60 to 100 miles away, or the dwellings in the canyon were never permanently occupied, instead serving as temporary shelters for people making regular pilgrimages.

Either scenario would entail a massive movement of people and goods. Benson estimates that importing enough maize and meat to feed 2,300 people would have required porters to make as many as 18,000 trips in and out of Chaco Canyon, all on foot.

“Whether people are bringing in maize to feed 2,300 residents, or if several thousand visitors are bringing in their own maize to eat, they’re not obtaining it from Chaco Canyon,” Benson said.

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An image of the ruins of Chetro Ketl in Chaco Canyon (New Mexico, United States); shown is the complex’s great kiva.

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Article Source: University of Colorado at Boulder news release