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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Article Source: HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM news release

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Article Source: University of Cambridge news release

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

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

The Northern Dispersal of Cereal Grains

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

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

The Trans-Eurasian Exchange and Crop Dispersal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A West African ceramic jar. JamesDeMers, Pixabay

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

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DNA testing kits: What are the privacy risks?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Article Source: GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA news release

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Article Source: University of Oregon and Binghamton University news releases

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

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.

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

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

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

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Article source: Science Advances news release

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Diver holds cranium from the prehistoric skeleton. Eugenio Acevez.

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

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Article Sources: University of Heidelberg and PLOS news releases

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Article Source: University of York news release

The paper is published in Quaternary Science Reviews.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Article Source: PLOS news release

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA – BERKELEY news release

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

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

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Article Source: A PNAS news release

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Article Source: AMERICAN FRIENDS OF TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY news release

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PLOS—During the 4th and 3rd millennia BC, Italy was home to complex networks of metalwork exchange, according to a study* published January 22, 2020 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Andrea Dolfini of Newcastle University (UK), and Gilberto Artioli and Ivana Angelini of the University of Padova (Italy).

Research in recent decades has revealed that copper mining and metalwork in Italy began earlier and included more complex technologies than previously thought. However, relatively little is known about metalwork exchange across the country, especially south of the Alps. In this study, Dolfini and colleagues sought to understand how commonly and how widely copper was imported and exchanged throughout Late Neolithic (Copper Age) Italy.

The researchers conducted an analysis of 20 copper items, including axe-heads, halberds, and daggers, from central Italy dating to the Copper Age, between 3600 and 2200 BC. Comparing archaeological data and chemical signatures of these items to nearby sources of copper ore, as well as to other prehistoric sites, they were able to determine that most of the examined objects were cast from copper mined in Tuscany, with the rest sourced from the western Alps and possibly the French Midi.

These results not only confirm the importance of the Tuscan region as a source of copper for Copper Age communities in Italy, reaching as far as the Tyrolean area home of the Alpine Iceman, but also reveal the unexpected finding that non-Tuscan copper was a significant import to the region at this time. These data contribute to a growing picture of multiple independent networks of Copper Age metal exchange in the Alps and neighboring regions. The authors note that future research might uncover other early sources of copper, as well as more details of the interactions between these early trade networks.

The authors add: “The first systematic application of lead isotope analysis (a geological sourcing technique) to Copper Age metal objects from central Italy, 3600-2200 BC, has shed new light on the provenance of the copper used to cast them. The research has revealed that, while some of the copper was sourced from the rich ore deposits of Tuscany, as was expected, some is from further afield. This unforeseen discovery demonstrates that far-reaching metal exchange networks were in operation in prehistoric Europe over a thousand years before the Bronze Age.”

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Articulated burial and dismembered human remains from Ponte San Pietro, tomb 22. The chamber tomb is typical of the Rinaldone burial custom, central Italy, c.3600-2200 BC. Reprinted from Miari 1995 under a CC BY licence, with permission from Monica Miari, original copyright 1995. Dolfini et al, 2020

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*Dolfini A, Angelini I, Artioli G (2020) Copper to Tuscany – Coals to Newcastle? The dynamics of metalwork exchange in early Italy. PLoS ONE 15(1): e0227259. 

Article Source: PLOS news release

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HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL—An international team led by Harvard Medical School scientists has produced the first genome-wide ancient human DNA sequences from west and central Africa.

The data, recovered from four individuals buried at an iconic archaeological site in Cameroon between 3,000 and 8,000 years ago, enhance our understanding of the deep ancestral relationships among populations in sub-Saharan Africa, which remains the region of greatest human diversity today.

The findings*, published Jan. 22 in Nature, provide new clues in the search to identify the populations that first spoke and spread Bantu languages. The work also illuminates previously unknown “ghost” populations that contributed small portions of DNA to present-day African groups.

Map of Africa with Cameroon in dark blue and approximate location of Shum Laka marked with star. Image adapted from Alvaro1984 18/Wikimedia Commons

Research highlights:

• DNA came from the remains of two pairs of children who lived around 3,000 years ago and 8,000 years ago, respectively, during the transition from the Stone Age to the Iron Age.
• The children were buried at Shum Laka, a rock shelter in the Grassfields region of northwestern Cameroon where ancient people lived for tens of thousands of years. The site has yielded prolific artifacts along with 18 human skeletons and lies in the region where researchers suspect Bantu languages and cultures originated. The spread of Bantu languages–and the groups that spoke them–over the past 4,000 years is thought to explain why the majority of people from central, eastern and southern Africa are closely related to one another and to west/central Africans.
• Surprisingly, all four individuals are most closely related to present-day central African hunter-gatherers, who have very different ancestry from most Bantu speakers. This suggests that present-day Bantu speakers in western Cameroon and across Africa did not descend from the sequenced children’s population.
• One individual’s genome includes the earliest-diverging Y chromosome type, found almost nowhere outside western Cameroon today. The findings show that this oldest lineage of modern human males has been present in that region for more than 8,000 years, and perhaps much longer.
• Genetic analyses indicate that there were at least four major lineages deep in human history, between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago. This radiation hadn’t been identified previously from genetic data.
• Contrary to common models, the data suggest that central African hunter-gatherers diverged from other African populations around the same time as southern African hunter-gatherers did.
• Analyses reveal another set of four branching human lineages between 60,000 and 80,000 years ago, including the lineage known to have given rise to all present-day non-Africans.
• The Shum Laka individuals themselves harbor ancestry from multiple deep lineages, including a previously unknown, early-diverging ancestry source in West Africa.

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The Shum Laka rock shelter in Cameroon, home to an ancient population that bears little genetic resemblance to most people who live in the region today. Pierre de Maret

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*Mark Lipson, et al., “Ancient West African foragers in the context of African population history,” Nature, DOI 10.1038/s41586-020-1929-1

Article Source: HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL news release 

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HARVARD UNIVERSITY—A new study in the journal Nature Sustainability overturns long-held interpretations of the role humans played in shaping the American landscape before European colonization. The findings give new insight into the rationale and approaches for managing some of the most biodiverse landscapes in the eastern U.S.

The study, led by archaeologists, ecologists, and paleoclimatologists at Harvard, Emerson College and elsewhere, focuses on the coast from Long Island to Cape Cod and the nearby islands of Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, Block Island, and Naushon–areas that historically supported the greatest densities of Native people in New England and today are home to the highest concentrations of rare habitats in the region, including sandplain grasslands, heathlands, and pitch pine and scrub oak forests.

“For decades, there’s been a growing popularization of the interpretation that, for millennia, Native people actively managed landscapes – clearing and burning forests, for example – to support horticulture, improve habitat for important plant and animal resources, and procure wood resources,” says study co-author David Foster, Director of the Harvard Forest at Harvard University. This active management is said to have created an array of open-land habitats and enhanced regional biodiversity.

But, Foster says, the data reveal a new story. “Our data show a landscape that was dominated by intact, old-growth forests that were shaped largely by regional climate for thousands of years before European arrival.”

Fires were uncommon, the study shows, and Native people foraged, hunted, and fished natural resources without actively clearing much land.

“Forest clearance and open grasslands and shrublands only appeared with widespread agriculture during the European colonial period, within the last few hundred years,” says Wyatt Oswald, a professor at Emerson College and lead author of the study.

The authors say the findings transform thinking about how landscapes have been shaped in the past – and therefore how they should be managed in the future.

“Ancient Native people thrived under changing forest conditions not by intensively managing them but by adapting to them and the changing environment,” notes Elizabeth Chilton, archaeologist, co-author of the study, and Dean of the Harpur College of Arts and Sciences at Binghamton University.

To reconstruct historical changes to the land, the research team combined archaeological records with more than two dozen intensive studies of vegetation, climate, and fire history spanning ten thousand years. They found that old-growth forests were predominant for millennia but are extremely uncommon today.

“Today, New England’s species and habitat biodiversity are globally unique, and this research transforms our thinking and rationale for the best ways to maintain it,” says Oswald. “It also points to the importance of historical research to help us interpret modern landscapes and conserve them effectively into the future.”

The authors also note the unique role that colonial agriculture played in shaping landscapes and habitat. “European agriculture, especially the highly varied activity of sheep and cattle grazing, hay production, and orchard and vegetable cultivation in the 18th and 19th centuries, made it possible for open-land wildlife species and habitats that are now rare or endangered – such as the New England cottontail – to thrive,” says Foster. Open-land species have declined dramatically as forests regrow on abandoned farmland, and housing and commercial development of both forests and farms have reduced their habitat.

Foster notes that the unique elements of biodiversity initiated through historical activities can be encouraged through analogous management practices today.

“Protected wildland reserves would preserve interior forest species that were abundant before European settlement,” he says. “Lands managed through the diversified farming and forestry practices that created openlands and young forests during the colonial period would support another important suite of rare plants and animals.”

For successful conservation models that leverage this historical perspective, the authors point to efforts by The Trustees of Reservations, the oldest land trust in the world, which manages more than 25,000 acres in Massachusetts embracing old and young forests, farms, and many cultural resources. The organization uses livestock grazing to keep lands open for birds like bobolinks and meadowlarks, which in turn supports local farmers and produces food for local communities.

Jocelyn Forbush, Executive Vice President for the Trustees, says, “Maintaining the legacy of our conserved openlands in Massachusetts is an important goal for The Trustees and we are increasingly looking to agricultural practices to yield a range of outcomes. In particular, we are employing grazing practices to support the habitats of our open and early successional lands in addition to the scenic and cultural landscapes that shape the character of our communities.”

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Archaeologists Dianna Doucette, Deena Duranleau, and Randy Jardin conducting investigations at the Lucy Vincent Beach Site, Martha’s Vineyard. The long-held belief that native people used fire to create a diverse landscape of woodlands, grasslands, heathlands, and shrublands in New England has led to a widespread use of prescribed fire as a conservation tool. Research by Oswald and colleagues indicates that these openlands actually arose following European contact, deforestation, and agricultural expansion. Elizabeth Chilton, Binghamton University

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Article Source: HARVARD UNIVERSITY news release

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UNIVERSITY OF GOTHENBURG—The human-caused biodiversity decline started much earlier than researchers used to believe. According to a new study published in the scientific journal Ecology Letters the process was not started by our own species but by some of our ancestors.

The work was done by an international team of scientists from Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

The researchers point out in the study that the ongoing biological diversity crisis is not a new phenomenon, but represents an acceleration of a process that human ancestors began millions of years ago.

“The extinctions that we see in the fossils are often explained as the results of climatic changes but the changes in Africa within the last few million years were relative minor and our analyses show that climatic changes were not the main cause of the observed extinctions,” explains Søren Faurby, researcher at Gothenburg University and the main author of the study.

“Our analyzes show that the best explanation for the extinction of carnivores in East Africa is instead that they are caused by direct competition for food with our extinct ancestors,” adds Daniele Silvestro, computational biologist and co-author of the study.

Carnivores disappeared

Our ancestors have been common throughout eastern Africa for several million years and during this time there were multiple extinctions according to Lars Werdelin, co-author and expert on African fossils.

“By investigating the African fossils, we can see a drastic reduction in the number of large carnivores, a decrease that started about 4 million years ago. About the same time, our ancestors may have started using a new technology to get food called kleptoparasitism,” he explains.

Kleptoparasitism means stealing recently killed animals from other predators. For example, when a lion steals a dead antelope from a cheetah.

The researchers are now proposing, based on fossil evidence, that human ancestors stole recently killed animals from other predators. This would lead to starvation of the individual animals and over time to extinction of their entire species.

“This may be the reason why most large carnivores in Africa have developed strategies to defend their prey. For example, by picking up the prey in a tree that we see leopards doing. Other carnivores have instead evolved social behavior as we see in lions, who among other things work together to defend their prey,” explains Søren Faurby

Humans today affect the world and the species that live in it more than ever before.

“But this does not mean that we previously lived in harmony with nature. Monopolization of resources is a skill we and our ancestors have had for millions of years, but only now are we able to understand and change our behavior and strive for a sustainable future. ‘If you are very strong, you must also be very kind’,” concludes Søren Faurby and quotes Astrid Lindgrens book about Pippi Longstocking.

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Leopard, by Hans Ring, Naturfotograferna.

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Dinofelis, painting by Mauricio Antón.

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF GOTHENBURG news release

*Brain expansion in early hominins predicts carnivore extinctions in East Africa
Digital publication: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ele.13451

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UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT BOULDER—Did Neanderthals wear swimsuits? Probably not. But a new study suggests that some of these ancient humans might have spent a lot of time at the beach. They may even have dived into the cool waters of the Mediterranean Sea to gather clam shells.

The findings come from Grotta dei Moscerini, a picturesque cave that sits just 10 feet above a beach in what is today the Latium region of central Italy.

In 1949, archaeologists working at the site dug up some unusual artifacts: dozens of seashells that Neanderthals had picked up, then shaped into sharp tools roughly 90,000 years ago.

Now, a team led by Paola Villa of the University of Colorado Boulder has uncovered new secrets from those decades-old discoveries. In research published today in the journal PLOS ONE, she and her colleagues report that the Neanderthals didn’t just collect shells that were lying out on the beach. They may have actually held their breath and went diving for the perfect shells to meet their needs.

Villa, an adjoint curator in the CU Museum of Natural History, said the results show that Neanderthals may have had a much closer connection to the sea than many scientists thought.

“The fact they were exploiting marine resources was something that was known,” Villa said. “But until recently, no one really paid much attention to it.”

Cave discoveries

When archaeologists first found shell tools in Grotta dei Moscerini, it came as a surprise. While Neanderthals are well-known for crafting spear tips out of stone, few examples exist of them turning shells into tools.

But the find wasn’t a fluke. The 1949 excavation of the cave unearthed 171 such tools, all valves from shell belonging to a local species of mollusk called the smooth clam (Callista chione). Villa explained that the ancient humans used stone hammers to chip away at these shells, forming cutting edges that would have stayed thin and sharp for a long time.

“No matter how many times you retouch a clam shell, its cutting edge will remain very thin and sharp,” she said.

But did the Neanderthals, like many beachgoers today, simply collect these shells while taking a stroll along the sand?

To find out, Villa and her colleagues took a closer look at those tools. In the process, they found something they weren’t expecting. Nearly three-quarters of the Moscerini shell tools had opaque and slightly abraded exteriors, as if they had been sanded down over time. That’s what you’d expect to see, Villa said, on shells that had washed up on a sandy beach.

The rest of the shells had a shiny, smooth exterior.

Those shells, which also tended to be a little bit bigger, had to have been plucked directly from the seafloor as live animals.

“It’s quite possible that the Neanderthals were collecting shells as far down as 2 to 4 meters,” Villa said. “Of course, they did not have scuba equipment.”

Researchers also turned up a large number of pumice stones from the cave that Neanderthals had collected and may have used as abrading tools. The stones, Villa and her colleagues determined, washed onto the Moscerini beach from volcanic eruptions that occurred more than 40 miles to the south.

Going for a dip

She’s not alone in painting a picture of beach-loving Neanderthals.

In an earlier study, for example, a team led by anthropologist Erik Trinkaus identified bony growths on the ears of a few Neanderthal skeletons. These features, called “swimmer’s ear,” can be found in people who practice aquatic sports today.

For Villa, the findings are yet more proof that Neanderthals were just as flexible and creative as their human relatives when it came to eking out a living–a strong contrast to their representation in popular culture as a crude cavemen who lived by hunting or scavenging mammoths.

“People are beginning to understand that Neanderthals didn’t just hunt large mammals,” Villa said. “They also did things like freshwater fishing and even skin diving.”

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General morphology of retouched shell tools, Figs C-L are from the Pigorini Museum. Villa et al., 2020

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Other coauthors on the new study included researchers from the French National Centre for Scientific Research, the University of Geneva, Roma Tre University, Sapienza University of Rome and the University of Pisa.

Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT BOULDER news release. Also, Neanderthals went underwater for their tools, at PLOS.

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