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James Mellaart: Pioneer…..and Forger

Posted on October 11, 2019 by Eberhard Zangger -

Eberhard Zangger (born 1958 in Kamen, Germany) is a Swiss geoarchaeologist, corporate communications consultant and publicist. Eberhard Zangger studied geology and paleontology at the University of Kiel and obtained a PhD from Stanford University in 1988. After this he was a senior research associate in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge (1988–91). He is currently president of the board of trustees of the international non-profit foundation Luwian Studies.

In May 2016, Luwian Studies went public with a website in German, English and Turkish. As part of its research, the foundation has systematically catalogued extensive settlement sites of the Middle and Late Bronze Age in Western Asia Minor. These sites are presented in a public database on the website. The foundation provides financial support for archaeological excavations and surveys, as well as for linguistic studies dedicated to the cultures of the Middle and Late Bronze Age in western Asia Minor.

James Mellaart (1925–2012) is one of the most dazzling researchers in Anatolian archaeology. Almost singlehandedly, he discovered the Neolithic in Asia Minor and first initiated and then conducted excavations at Beycesultan, Hacılar Höyük, and Çatalhöyük. In the 1950s and 1960s, Mellaart was considered the world’s most famous prehistorian. An archaeologically interested audience around the globe followed his successes in the field. Nothing Mellaart did was irrelevant – both researchers and laymen admired him for his pioneering work, the fact that he had the courage to draw sweeping conclusions, his enthralling, amply illustrated lectures, and the sheer endless series of gripping books showcasing his detailed first-hand knowledge.

Despite this, accusations abound that some of the alleged archaeological artifacts that Mellaart presented in the form of drawings could have sprung from his imagination. In 1959 Mellaart published the so-called Dorak Treasure: artifacts he claimed to have seen in a house in Izmir which soon afterwards could no longer be located. Three years later, Turkish newspapers launched a campaign against Mellaart, starting with an eight-column-wide headline, accusing him of having smuggled this treasure across the border. This was followed by police and scientific investigations. In the end, Mellaart was acquitted of the accusations of smuggling and stealing artifacts. Nevertheless, he lost the support of the British Institute of Archaeology in Ankara and thus the opportunity to work in the field – for life – because of a number of undiplomatic blunders.

Dealing with Mellaart tends to polarize people: one is either a great admirer or a foe, and the intensity of these emotions apparently increases with proximity. The closer scholars were to him, the more intrigued or horrified they were. As the 100^th anniversary of Mellaart’s birth approaches, the number of people who knew him personally is dwindling. For upcoming generations of scientists it would have been virtually impossible to reach a balanced judgment on Mellaart’s credibility; the facts are just too garbled.

It is therefore something of a relief that now, some sixty years after the Dorak Affair, we have finally achieved clarity. A scientific evaluation of notes found last year concealed deep in Mellaart’s former study has just been published. The documents leave no doubt that the famous prehistorian lived in a dream world. For decades he tried to substantiate his lofty fantasies with invented Neolithic murals and translations of equally fictitious Late Bronze Age tablets – always insisting that these were his modest reflections on really existing prehistoric artifacts.

Mellaart kept absolutely everything

James and Arlette Mellaart in his study on the occasion of his 80th birthday. ©Charlie Hopkinson

James Mellaart was born in London in 1925, the son of an art dealer. When he was seven years old the family moved to Amsterdam because of the global economic crisis. His mother died there shortly afterwards. Her early passing apparently left a permanent mark on Mellaart’s character. In 1947 he left the Netherlands to study Egyptology at University College London, and never returned. After completing his studies, he received a position as a lecturer in 1964, and gave up teaching entirely only in 2005. Although Mellaart never had a doctorate himself, he did train doctoral students. He lived near Finsbury Park in North London for almost forty years, together with his wife Arlette, who came from the Turkish upper class. They had acquired and connected two small adjoining apartments there. Visitors raved about the flat’s cozy atmosphere, a place replete with valuable books and Anatolian kilims. On the walls hung the gold-framed decrees of Ottoman sultans, testifying to the special status of Arlette Mellaart’s family in Turkish society.

There was a remarkable disorder in Mellaart’s study, for the great explorer was a compulsive hoarder. He kept most of the projects, each in an A3 carton that was folded in the middle. Since Mellaart dealt with many hundred topics, the room was in places stacked waist-high with such folders. A photo taken on the occasion of the 80th birthday impressively documents this chaotic filing system. Mellaart did not part with anything: even junk mail and empty cigar boxes did not leave the apartment. That is how the fantasies to which Mellaart had devoted himself over the decades finally came to light. His study did not just contain the final results of his work as intended for publication (!), but also the elaborate drafts and tool kits that were required for their fabrication.

The “Sea Peoples” and the significance of Bronze Age Western Asia Minor

James Mellaart had fooled scientists – including me – throughout his life. Although we never met, we shared a common conviction. Independently of each other, we had both arrived at the conclusion that western Turkey must contain numerous, still-hidden Middle and Late Bronze Age sites. We both also believed that a large part of the Sea Peoples had their home in this region. Their attacks on the shores of the eastern Mediterranean shortly after 1200 BC contributed to the downfall of the Bronze Age cultures of the heroic era. Some of the mercenaries who supported the Hittite king Muwatalli (c. 1295–1272 BC) in 1274 at the Battle of Kadesh came from western Anatolia. The same names then appear in the Sea People inscriptions known from Upper Egypt, and are also found again in Homer’s Iliad among the allies of the Trojans during the Trojan War. The western part of modern Turkey must therefore have been densely populated around 1200 BC. And yet few Bronze Age settlements in this region have been excavated on a substantial scale to date.

This left a huge area of uncharted territory on the map of archaeologically known cultures. Legendary Troy, of all places, lies in this no-man’s-land, but the site was simply given a special status in archaeological paradigms. The empty space between the Mycenaean dominion in southern Greece and the Hittites in central Asia Minor is otherwise filled with what appears to have been uncivilized nomads roaming across the country in yurts and possessing no knowledge of writing. In fact, the only European scholar since Heinrich Schliemann who dared to launch a large-scale archaeological excavation of a Bronze Age site in western Turkey was James Mellaart. The site, called Beycesultan, is being dug up again today under the direction of Eşref Abay of Ege University in Izmir.

In 1995 James Mellaart heard about my book, “Ein neuer Kampf um Troia,” published the year before, in which I argued (like others before and after me) that a large part of the Sea Peoples must have come from Western Asia Minor. Mellaart then wrote me two letters of 22 pages in total with incredibly detailed information about the end of the Bronze Age. He said that he had extracted this information from translations of Late Bronze Age documents. At the time, colleagues advised me against following up on Mellaart’s letters, so I paid no attention to them for over twenty years. However, because of this trusting correspondence – and our shared beliefs about the importance of Bronze Age Western Asia Minor – I was granted the privilege of being the first scientist to review Mellaart’s estate.

In June 2017, Mellaart’s son Alan handed to me what his father had considered to be the most valuable asset in his inheritance. Naturally, I considered this a special honor, and during my first visit to the apartment in London would have never thought of asking permission to examine the rest of the estate.

The fabricated “Beyköy Text”

The documents I received were called the “Beyköy Text” by Mellaart. In 1993 he had mentioned in passing in three of his publications that such a text existed. From his letters, and thanks to a telephone conversation we had in 1995, I knew that these documents were English translations of allegedly Late Bronze Age texts said to have been found near the village of Beyköy in western Turkey at the end of the 19th century. The material included some one hundred typewritten pages of a text that is said to have been originally written on bronze tablets in Akkadian cuneiform script and Hittite language. Including various copies and manuscripts of unpublished evaluations, the whole pile I received from Alan Mellaart comprised about 500 sheets of paper.

The foundation board of Luwian Studies, a charitable non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the study of Bronze Age cultures in Western Asia Minor, decided to have these texts examined by various scientists over a five-year period. Additional indications of the authenticity of the documents would be welcome to justify the application of such substantial research funds. For this reason I asked Alan Mellaart to revisit his father’s study to search for additional evidence that the documents were indeed genuine. So, in February 2018, Alan Mellaart and I returned to North London to examine James Mellaart’s former study over the course of five days. At the very end, we came across an extensive collection of handwritten drafts of the “Beyköy Text.” Mellaart had placed the items he claimed to be the unpublished translations of Late Bronze Age tablets at the entrance to his study, clearly visible and appropriately labeled. The kits he had used to fabricate these documents, however, were kept well hidden. But not only that: I also found pieces of slate with pictorial carvings that were obviously sketches that Mellaart had published as reconstructed murals from Çatalhöyük. By this point there was no longer any doubt that Mellaart was a forger. The fact that he had carefully hidden the drafts hints at a sense of wrongdoing and suggests that Jimmy Bey, as Mellaart was called in Turkey, had also concealed them from his wife.

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Alan Mellaart in his parents’ apartment in North London. ©Luwian Studies

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As the news of Mellaart’s falsification became public, several eyewitnesses came forward confirming our findings. I learned that Mellaart sometimes sketched artifacts that existed only in his imagination, even in the presence of friends. Tactfully, these companions turned a blind eye and had remained silent until today. Now we know that the allegedly “reconstructed” wall paintings from Çatalhöyük, which Mellaart had presented some twenty years after excavations were concluded, as well as the “Beyköy Text,” were pure inventions. Companions of Mellaart with whom I have been able to speak in the meantime also assume that the Dorak Treasure, which had caused a stir in 1962, was also invented, because the story follows the same pattern as the later cases. On the other hand the artifacts that were recovered in Mellaart’s excavations and which are now exhibited in the Turkish museums are without doubt genuine.

The large Luwian hieroglyph inscription remains enigmatic

In the pile of documents which Alan Mellaart passed on to me in June 2017, there were not just translations of allegedly cuneiform tablets, but also drawings of some Luwian hieroglyphic texts. Among these, one stands out, since the original must have been an almost thirty-meter-long inscription on limestone. According to Mellaart, this inscription was also found in Beyköy at the end of the 19th century; however, its research history is certainly invented. I sent the drawings of this hieroglyphic inscription to the Dutch linguist Fred Woudhuizen to ask for his opinion. He saw no reason to question the document’s authenticity and suggested a joint publication. Our work was published in December 2017 as a preliminary online publication in Talanta – Proceedings of the Dutch Archaeological and Historical Society, and is printed in the issue of Talanta that has just come out.

When word spread among colleagues that we were working on the publication of these Luwian hieroglyphic texts, we learned that the great inscription had already been shown and discussed in 1989 at an international conference in Ghent. Since then, there had been a consensus among insiders that this drawing was a forgery. In our paper, Fred Woudhuizen and I devoted five pages to linguistic arguments for and against forgery, but we came to the opposite conclusion. The now-released volume of Talanta contains another article by us with additional arguments that by and large point to the authenticity of the Luwian hieroglyphic inscription we call “Beyköy 2.”

During the past thirty years, since the inscription was first shown, important new insights have been gained in the field of Luwian linguistics. Thanks to these developments, the inscription can now be read much better. For example, it contains a sign for “great prince” which was not seen in a Luwian inscription until 2001. If Mellaart had forged the inscription, he would have invented a character whose existence was confirmed years later. It is thus more likely that Mellaart actually saw the Beyköy 2 inscription somewhere and that he had an opportunity to copy it. His unpublished translations and interpretations also show that he did not nearly understand its (grammatically correct) content.

Mellaart’s approach was always similar: in order to connect spectacular finds with his own models of interpretation, he filled the gap with invented drawings or texts. As part of his excavations in Çatalhöyük he had indeed discovered among many geometric murals one impressive landscape panorama. Twenty years later, he produced seventy additional ones! The “Beyköy Text,” which was also completely invented, may have been meant to link the Luwian inscription (Beyköy 2) with Mellaart’s theories on Bronze Age political developments. However, since the drawing of the Luwian hieroglyphic inscription was also retrieved from Mellaart’s “workshop,” this document will inevitably be treated with care until further notice, even if many linguistic arguments point to its authenticity. It would have been the find of the century – the account describing the end of the Bronze Age, composed by no lesser person than the Luwian Great King himself. Through his ruthlessness, Mellaart may have deprived archaeology of this important find.

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Allegedly “reconstructed” mural from Çatalhöyük. ©Luwian Studies

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Notes and drafts that were required to compose the “Beyköy Text”. ©Luwian Studies

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Large Luwian hieroglyphic inscription (“Beyköy 2”) retrieved from Mellaart’s estate. ©Luwian Studies

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One question remains: Why, for half a century, did the world’s most famous archaeologist invent artifacts that never really existed? The unpublished manuscripts in Mellaart’s estate reveal a feeling of superiority. Mellaart enjoys the importance of his own inventions for archaeology. His fantasies were designed to underpin his professional ideas about Anatolian prehistory with “facts.” They also brought him back into the limelight – confirming ideas that he had always claimed to boot. It was, it turns out, a juvenile prank he apparently played throughout his life. His concepts and ideas may not have been all that wrong; the evidence, however, was forged.

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Source

All contributions to the 50th volume of Talanta – Proceedings of the Dutch Archaeological and Historical Society, which has now been published, are dedicated to documents from Mellaart’s estate. This paper is a summary of the almost 60-page article “James Mellaart’s Fantasies,” which is available online as a PDF for free download from https://luwianstudies.academia.edu/EZangger.

Aksum’s Hidden Heritage

Posted on October 11, 2019 by Samuel Walker -

Samuel C. Walker was born and raised in East Africa and subsequently spent fifteen years in the Middle East including Yemen, Israel/West Bank, Jordan, Sudan, and Egypt. He currently is working in Ethiopia. He holds two Bachelor’s degrees; Religious Studies – Anthropology, and Natural Sciences & History, and two Master’s degrees; History and education (Western Oregon U) and Archaeology & Heritage Mgmt. (University of Leicester). For seven years he lived in the Micronesian Pacific islands conducting research on climate change, ecologies, and conducting research as lead field supervisory archaeologist for US Navy projects for EIS and cultural resource management. Since 2013, Walker has worked in Ethiopia, including establishing a Master’s program in Archaeology for Heritage Management and serving as lead field and supervisory archaeologist. As part of his research dissertation, he is working on creating graduate level field-intensive Cultural Resource Management teams (CRMT) specifically to address the critical needs of archaeological site identification, comprehensive field survey, data recovery and excavation field management skills, laboratory analysis and cultural material conservation, and presentation and display of these rich tangible and intangible heritages.

Most visitors to Aksum, Ethiopia’s 2,000-year-old capital, glimpse little of its past glory. It is estimated that over 95% of this city’s classical wonders still lie buried beneath the desolation of centuries past or languish, neglected by the more pressing demands of an emerging nation. Tourists are regularly shown a few stelae, or standing stones, some secondary-use royal tombs, and the small 7th century AD/CE Dungur villa purporting to be the palace of the Queen of Sheba (11^th-10^th cent. BC/BCE). The common practice of guides simply repeating fabricated myths with little grounding in archaeological or historical-geographical contexts leaves most tourists disappointed, perplexed, and cynical as they were promised one of the largest and longest-lived empires in Africa.

This, hopefully, is changing.

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Fig. 1 – Aerial view of Aksum with Old Town (top left) and the Stelae Field in central foreground. Photo is taken to the west-northwest. (Photo SCW- 2013).

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As an archaeologist born and raised in East Africa, I was invited to set up the Master’s program for Archaeology and Heritage at Aksum University in April 2012. I was enthusiastic at the prospect. During my year and a half tenure in the region, no day was ever routine. Surveying the buried old town and its immediate surroundings daily tantalized me with just enough secrets to keep me coming back for more. With every footfall, the very ground seemed to reverberate and writhe under the labor pains of this heritage’s sheer will to be re-born. That, sadly, was not to be. As with so many academic efforts over the past decades, Aksum’s amazing archaeological investigation along with its tourism opportunities were held hostage by regional bureaucratic obstacles, unfounded rumors, and orchestrated misinformation. That has yet to change.

For many and varied reasons, little archaeology has been permitted in Aksum. The reports from the 1906 Deutsche Aksum-Expedition (published 1913) still serve as the definitive archaeological work for Aksum, yet all four volumes, printed in German, are still not available in English or Amharic. Aksum has seen two other more modern excavations in 1972-74 by Dr. Chittick and in 1994-97 with Prof. David Phillipson, along with a few heritage-related smatterings related more to salvage excavations than modern scientific inquiry. Subsequently, an entire generation of Ethiopian cultural resource professionals and archaeologists has been denied thorough training in field management skills or direct access to this remarkable heritage, limiting the brilliant story Aksum can tell.

The long-term negative impacts of preventing young Ethiopian scholars from accessing their heritage in meaningful ways has created a generational gap in field-based capacities, experienced researchers, and published academicians. The short-sighted practice of allowing only outside academic PhDs to excavate continues to hamper field-training along with curtailing awareness of the full range of the phased approach to archaeology.

The decades of negligence by political appointees, however, can quickly be remedied, but it will take courage and integrity from the new leadership, along with a concerted effort and thoughtful, deliberate, field-intensive instruction. It will also require a new model for implementing best practices and modern cultural resource management principles. It is hoped with new leadership and competent authorities we will begin to address the many shortcoming of the previous regime. These decades of inattention, however, have also taken a remarkably tragic toll on existing heritages, not only in Aksum, but across the nation.

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Fig. 2 – Image of the Stelae Field from the Deutsche Aksum Expedition – 1906.

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In terms of tourism, then, this also means that anyone who visited Aksum within the last four decades would see relatively the same sites, virtually untouched. The image above, over 100 years old, illustrates how little has changed since 1906. Outside of the chance discovery of a new Ezana inscription found while digging a house foundation in 1982, few new artifacts or information are available to tourists. Compare that to similarly archaeologically-rich countries such as Greece, Italy, Egypt, Israel, and Jordan. Every year these countries have multiple new sites and cultural materials for tourists to visit. Additionally, the public relations benefits of these discoveries counter much of the negative press these countries have to deal with. Ethiopia has so many positive stories to tell, but given the limited utilization of its heritage, those stories get buried by the negative press of civil unrest or internally displaced peoples. Hopefully, this too is beginning to change.

For well over a decade, the status of the steady and relentless decline of the main heritage and cultural resources associated with Aksum were documented and repeatedly reported by archaeologists like Drs. David and Laurel Phillipson, the late Dr. Fatovich, and more recently, by myself, to the appropriate authorities in Mekele, Tigrai’s capital, and Addis Ababa. In 2013-2014, working as Coordinator of the Master’s Program in Archaeology and Heritage-management at Aksum University, I revisited and updated those previous assessments, including further recommendations and discoveries. As of August, 2019, few if any of the recommendations from previous reports have been implemented, leading to a series of emergent crises.

A Collapsing Heritage

Due to multiple natural and human factors, aside from neglect, the condition of the two main standing stelae in Aksum (No. 2 and No. 3), now face a critical situation. Stela 2, taken during Italy’s brief occupation (1936-1941), was returned from Rome in 2005 and re-erected in its original position. Unfortunately, as is too often the case, engineers conducted their project without proper oversight or consultation of cultural resource or heritage management experts, let alone archaeologists. As such, the two meters thick foundation of Stela No. 2 is pushing downward, like a piston, upon the now-collapsing, waterlogged, underground chambers of the original structures.

Stela No. 3 is currently shifting, due to the added compression of the re-erection of Stela No. 2, which when secured, was fixed within a foundation of two meters thick of concrete. Prior to the re-installation of returned Stela No. 2, a sub-surface geo-physical survey was conducted in accordance with the requirements of UNESCO. This research identified layers of clayish soils, between 2 meters to 3.5 to 4 meters depth, atop the underlying layer of non-permeable basalt, a rock similar to the hill of Mai Qoho to the southeast. In antiquity, many subterranean shaft tombs and chambers were carved through the clays and into the softer volcanic matrix atop this basalt. Several of these tombs are associated with various stelae on the surface. The underlying clays, due to an inflow of water and a heightened water table (current cause unknown) are slowly being pushed out, away by the downward pressure of the newly added mass of Stela No. 2.

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Fig. 3 – Map of Aksum – Yellow lines represent ancient roads. The old town is to the lower left. The black and red squares are the chamber tombs of Emperor Kaleb and Gebre Maskel (7^th cent. CE) reutilizing an elite structure from the classic period from the 2^nd cent. CE.

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Consequently, all nearby structures and sub-surface chambers, including the west mausoleum and the unexcavated east tomb, are under threat of collapse. Additionally, the huge concrete anchors holding Stela No.3 appear also to be moving. The staircase leading to the east chambers of the Mausoleum collapsed once already, and the reconstructed wall is again buckling and in danger of failing a second time. A heavy concrete slab-roof was also placed atop the Mausoleum, and the shifting clays upslope are pushing this concrete south, threatening to collapse the existing tomb chambers and south wall.

There is an immediate need to mitigate against the increasing possibility of the collapse of Stela No. 3, as this could lead not only to the destruction of the stela itself, but create a domino effect on close-by stelae and sub-surface chambers and unidentified underlying or unexcavated sites.

A more broad, long-term plan and set of recommendations must be developed by a team of professionally trained, local and international experts in archaeology, heritage management, conservation, etc. to work alongside engineers within various specialties, including, but not limited to soils, hydrology, civil, architectural, and geology, and thus begin to design a thorough data recovery plan to accurately and comprehensively address the whole stelae park and multiple associated sites neglected for years. Partners and local stake-holders should include those previously involved in work associated with Aksum archaeology, survey, conservation and assessment. The MoCT, along with the PM’s office, are mandated by the UNESCO convention to lead this project.

One of the most visible indicators of these negative effects relates to the structure of the 3^rd-4^th century CE Tomb of the Brick Arches, 80 meters to the east of Stela No. 3. For over a decade now, a serious rise of the water table within the tomb chambers, to over 60-80 cm of standing water even in the dry season, demonstrates a broader, ubiquitous problem. Currently a metal door is in place and the tomb is not accessible to the public. This standing water identifies the whole field as supersaturated and thus much of the cultural materials and chambers are subject to substantial degradation. If chambers begin to subside, sinkholes could cause further instability within the whole stelae park.

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Fig. 4 – Tomb of the Brick Arches with over a meter of standing water within the sub-surface chambers. Note the white lines are the water surface. The back arch, covered in water over a meter high. (photo – SCW)

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Stela 3, the largest of the decorated standing stelae, was restrained during the re-erection of Stela No. 2 to secure it in place. It currently inclines slightly to the north-northeast. Like other stelae, this represents a multi-storied, elite-building. The heavy base plate exhibits an engraved vine decoration around the perimeter and bowls in the center. The entire structure surrounding the stela is built up, with a perimeter wall and steps from the main parking lot area. Two guyed cables currently support the stela. These were installed during the re-erection of Stela No. 2 to the west, and have yet to be removed pending further study and analysis of the consequence of removing them. The degree of inclination of Stela No. 3 has been checked by the cables for the last decade, but present an uglyfying aspect to the whole park.

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Fig. 5 – Stela No. 3 with decade-old truss and guyed cables holding it in place. Looking east. (photo – SCW)

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Over the last decade, the fabric truss holding the stela has been weakened by weather and UV from the sun, with no upkeep or proper analysis from previous authorities. Earlier recommendations demanded that funds immediately be set aside to study the feasibility of removing the guyed cables and adjusting the stela to either an upright position, or stabilizing it at its present inclination, including replacing the fabric. Unfortunately, past inactions have exacerbated the present situation, leaving now the radical alternative of actually laying Stela No. 3 down upon the ground until a proper analysis and permanent solution can be found. For obvious reasons, this solution would be highly unpopular, even if the most prudent.

Stela No. 4, a smaller, nearly identical stela to No. 3, lies prone in a northern direction near the current entrance of Enda Eyasu Church, where it was toppled during the Gudit wars of mid-tenth century CE. The cover plate is decorated in a similar fashion as Stela No. 3 and is still in place, if slightly lifted, with the other placement stones in situ. A mitigation excavation of Stela No. 4 would provide a Cultural Resource Management (CRM) team an analysis of the means of assessing the similar erection techniques and technology of Stela No. 3, and therefore provide a safe, proof-of-concept for properly addressing the critical factors facing Stela No. 3.

While conducting the analytical excavation of Stela No. 4, it would make sense to improve access to the other elements of the Stelae Field North. The apex of Stela No. 4, broken into two parts, has been removed to two separate locations. The uppermost part is in the Ezana Gardens park near the Telecom offices and the bottom section is in the church complex of the Fasilidas Mary of Zion church. This apex, containing unique features of two spear points and on the obverse, a shield, also has two circles from which two plaques were affixed. It would make touristic and research sense to bring the two disparate parts back together, placing them in the Aksum museum for proper viewing and safekeeping until Stela No. 4 could be restored fully.

Stela 5 is a decorated stela broken into six pieces and fallen in the river bed of Mai Miheja. Much of the stela is now completely covered by river deposits. Only the cover-plates and the lowest sections of this stela are visible.

Stela 6, similar to Stela 4, is collapsed and mostly intact, and therefore, a good candidate for further analysis. It is the 6th largest, and is decorated on its all sides with an Aksumite elite-structure building motif. Its double apex, fractured from the main body, is well preserved and in situ.

Stela 7 is intact and located at the northern end of the Enda Yesus church compound lying on top of the undecorated Stela 36, in a north to south direction. Stela 7 displays unique decorations with what has been referred to as a house decoration atop a stylized proto-Iolic or Ionic column. The underside decoration is visible to visitors only by laying prone on the ground or kneeling. There have been requests from the public and local authorities for the re-erection of this stela, as tradition stated that its re-erection will usher in a period of wealth and fortune to Aksum as the design is said to represent the symbol of the Ark of the Covenant. Until proper research is conducted and a thorough analysis of the whole area is conducted, it is ill-advised that any shift of status be attempted. Sadly, there are many other issues related to the long-term neglect of Aksum’s heritage, but none are as critical or emergent as the various stelae and monuments within the vicinity.

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Fig. 6 – Stela No. 7 with unique proto-Ionic or –Aeolic capital design. Local tradition states this to be a representation of the chapel housing the Arc of the Covenant – (photo – SCW)

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Artifacts Reduced to Curiosities

Addressing the second critical lapse over the last decades relates to found-objects. A substantial component of any heritage management in any region relates to chance finds dug up during construction, road building, agriculture, etc. The persistent inexperience of how to manage found-objects is also a tragic consequence to the broader lack of proper field-intensive archaeological research and hands-on expertise as it relates to conservation and cultural resource management within local universities and among the various agencies and authorities.

Often while living in Aksum and conducting survey with my colleagues, farmers and priests proudly showed us many items plowed up from fields, or discovered while digging foundations, tombs, or latrines. For the most part, these simple ceramic vessels or figurines, coins, beads, or small metal objects constituted mere curiosities with marginal contextual archaeological value beyond site identification and possible chronologies. Many regional farmers and churches have baskets full of such finds which are often sold to tourists for a pittance.

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Fig. 7 – Cultural materials commonly found in fields are kept in rural churches. These ceramic vessels represent all periods of ancient Ethiopian history. The coins are from the last five centuries of the Aksumite Empire (end of the 3^rd into the end of the 7^th cent, CE). (photo – SCW)

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One evening in September 2103, I received a somewhat frantic call from a merchant saying some farmers had brought in some special items and would I be able to assess them. What they had uncovered was a series of cast bronze plaques, and other cultural materials the likes of which were not even found in the museum. These included large cast-bronze/copper Ethio-Sabaean inscriptions (8^th-5^th cent. BCE), images of lions, humans, and winged sphinx, ceramic figurines and vessels, along with various small finds such as name-stamps, and inscribed stone amulets. I photographed what I could and immediately sent the images in e-mails to the former director of the Authority for Research and Conservation of Cultural Heritage (ARCCH) and the then-director of the Bureau of Culture and Tourism in Mekele, the state capital, asking them about the best way for them to take possession of these items.

The law as stated:

From Part Three in the PROCLAMATION NO 209/2000 A Proclamation to Provide for Research and Conservation of Cultural Heritage – 35 – Fortuitous Discovery of Cultural Heritage

1/ Any person who discovers any Cultural Heritage in the course of an excavation connected with mining explorations, building works, road construction or other similar activities or in the course of any other fortuitous event, shall forthwith report same to the Authority, and shall protect and keep same intact, until the Authority takes delivery thereof.

2/ The Authority shall upon a receipt of a report submitted pursuant to Sub-Article (1) hereof, take all appropriate measures to examine, take delivery of, and register the Cultural Heritage so discovered.

3/ Where the Authority fails to take, within six months, appropriate measures in accordance with Sub-Article (2) of this Article, the person who has discovered the Cultural Heritage may be released from his responsibility by submitting a written notification, with a full description of the situation, to the Regional government official.

4/ The Authority shall ensure that the appropriate reward is granted to a person who has handed over a Cultural Heritage discovered fortuitously in accordance with Sub-Articles (1) and (2) of this article. And such person shall be entitled to reimbursement, of expenses, if any, incurred in the course of discharging his duties under this Article.

There was little interest and only a tepid response. Surprised, I brought it up to our university department head. On the advice of local colleagues, they suggested we ask the merchant if we could take some of the smaller, early Ge’ez inscriptions out of the shop and, in the presence of two respected visiting archaeologists, brought them to the Culture and Tourism office in Aksum. We implored their office to take possession of them. We were told to return them to the merchant, since their source was unidentified and therefore knowledge related to their context was lost. As such, they were perceived to have little value. This level of lack of training or understanding of heritage is incomprehensible.

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Fig. 8 – Montage of various found-artifacts from the Ethio-Sabaean period – (8^th-5^th cent. BCE). Top left, very rare depiction of a human face in profile; top right are fired clay fertility figurines; bottom left, cast Sabaean inscription, center, lion in profile, bottom right, winged sphinx with serpent tail. These photos were taken in a merchant’s shop and reported to the appropriate authorities at the time – 2104. (photo – SCW)

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Inscriptions are some of the most coveted finds in archaeology. Stunned, we returned all the artifacts to the shop owner and left it at that. When I had opportunity to personally meet with the authorities at the ARCCH or the Mekele Bureau of Culture and Tourism (BoCT), I inquired if anything had been done regarding the artifacts. I was told it was not in their purview and to leave it alone. Disheartened, I complied.

Strangely, six months on, using the very photographs I had sent to the authorities, the Reporter Amharic newspaper published an article, without verification or evidence, falsely accusing me of having looted the very objects I had brought to the attention of the authorities in the first place. The absurdity of these claims amply illustrated the lack of understanding, at the highest levels, of protocol related to found objects, heritage management and archaeology, let alone the stated law.

With little regard to the artifacts themselves, this quickly became a political football. When this story broke, the farmers and others with whom my university colleagues, including the Dean, had painstakingly been negotiating to transfer the materials to the museum, shied away and much of the cultural material was lost, destroyed, or reburied. According to regulation 4, the authorities apparently viewed as an appropriate reward for bringing these items to their attention, defamation of me and my colleagues and a continual retelling of their pathological nonsense. Ignoring the fact I came to Aksum on a fifth of my US salary and had reported and sent images to the authorities in the first place, the fabricated story of my looting the said objects became an easy out for the those charged with caring for, yet failed to secure them in the first place.

With over twenty years of field archaeology experience across three continents, never once has there been even a single accusation of impropriety. Imagine the irony incumbent within the framework that the only evidence they could muster to level such accusations stemmed from the fact I had reported these items in exact accordance with the law. Fortunately, despite this, and through immeasurable effort and courage, a few trusted colleagues and I were eventually able to convince the merchant to give the remaining valuable objects he had retained to the local Aksum museum for safe keeping. With my university colleague, a city representative, and the MoCT officer as witness, we deposited these items, where, I believe, they remain today in storage.

Had such accusations truly been about the artifacts, those finds could easily have been safeguarded when I initially informed the authorities. Five years on, no local authority has inquired of the museum about the finds, let alone researched or displayed them. Additionally, this falsehood remains the dominant narrative with current ARCCH authorities failing to verify any of these untruths or bothering to investigate the fiasco. This disconnect with reality is illustrated by the fact I am frequently tasked by the MoCT to conduct workshops and was requested to present as an expert at the National Conference for Strengthening Heritage Protection in Ethiopia by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

Sadly, this politically motivated debacle, with its subsequent loss of significant cultural materials, has been an all-too-common outcome for inadvertently discovered artifacts. This proves the need for new and clear protocols for addressing preservation of heritage with more open and directed communication between the respective authorities. For so many of my Ethiopian colleagues, the previous unqualified or corrupt political appointees created obstacles to the greater success of broader Ethiopian scholarship, leaving an unconscionable gap in professional training. This dogged fabrication has stolen five years of capacity and archaeological research from true Ethiopian scholars and Ethiopia’s future. Does this not deserve a thorough investigation? A related article can be found at https://www.ethiopia-insight.com/2018/11/07/aksums-true-glory-kept-under-wraps-by-fearful-bureaucracy/

Irrespective, these materials are here published for the first time. If they can still be found in the Aksum museum storage, it is my hope that with new, honest and intelligent leadership, these priceless, not-looted artifacts can actually be displayed and researched by a competent cohort of academics.

Ethiopia’s ongoing challenges regarding heritage management integrally relates directly to how the law concerning found-artifacts is written, or rather implemented. Does there currently exist no legal means for people in government to take possession of found items, even if freely given, without being defamed? Lessons can be learned from the experience of other countries. In the UK and many Scandinavian countries, found-items discovered in farming, building, road construction, etc. are compensated for by the state who therefore can legally take possession. This provides a very good model for ensuring especially valuable items, remain in-country for both research and presentation. It would serve Ethiopia’s long-term heritage interests to consider changing its current, but outdated law related to heritages. Today, many valuable, irreplaceable antiquities and artifacts, inadvertently excavated by farmers, builders, construction, etc. are still sold to tourists or the local antiquities dealer for a paltry sum or lay hidden in churches and homes across the country.

The Profession Dearth

A third major challenge Ethiopia faces is positively presenting its own heritage. With the growing body of skilled, committed, honest Ethiopian scholars, however, many projects, even at the university level, continue to be curtailed by the mismanagement or wrangling of a few politically appointed authorities. Whether it stems from extreme risk-aversion or a lack of clear procedures in working toward proper management or preservation of heritage, every delay sees further destruction of irreplaceable cultural material and sites, and lessens Ethiopia’s footing in launching a reputable and world-class tourism and heritage experience.

Ethiopia continues to rely almost exclusively upon outside academics, which has primarily benefited North American or European archaeologists or researchers. The primary focus of these scholars remains their own research leaving little capacity, time, or resources to adequately train Ethiopian counterparts. Thankfully, there are noted exceptions, however, even the few, field-trained, Ethiopian archaeologist working with these teams have had minimal engagement with the broader training and understanding of framing research questions, compiling desk-based analysis, or initiating comprehensive survey, let alone engaging in proper, current field management skills, formulating data recovery plans, conducting artifact analysis, or participating in full publications of excavations. Additionally, many of these outside scholars spend only a month in Ethiopia each year, exacerbating a knowledge gap in their own development of critical, applicable theories appropriate for Ethiopia’s and Africa’s unique data sets.

Academic PhDs have substantially far less field or excavation experience or expertise in field management skills and implementation than does a modern cultural resource management (CRM) specialist, let alone an entire CRM team. Yet, the ARCCH still relies solely upon such academic professionals. As a result, the vast majority of heritage or archaeological research conducted in Ethiopia over the previous decades has, therefore, focused almost exclusively upon externally driven agendas with questions, hypothesis, theories, or data sets derived from ‘Eurocentric’ academic models rather than indigenous, social-cultural interpretations of the data. Many Ethiopian scholars and their research questions are left out of the equation.

Imagine any other institution relying purely upon academics to facilitate practice. What would result if only physicians who taught in universities were allowed to practice medicine? As it is, a whole cadre of nurses, aides, certified nurse midwives, nurse practitioners, physicians, and other healthcare professionals daily care for the majority of health needs of a nation. Cultural resource management teams fulfil the same basic roles within most heritage and archaeological management issues across the globe. Yet even after decades of ARCCH approved archaeological research and excavations, Ethiopia possesses not a single Cultural Resource Management Team. Is it any wonder Ethiopia has so little to show from its astounding archaeological record and heritage corpus? Ethiopia still gleans comparatively few copper coins from tourism while it sits atop a veritable mountain of heritage gold.

This heavy-reliance on academic institutions indicates a tremendous ignorance of the shifts in the nature of global archaeological principles and best practices over the last four decades. By implementing this archaic model, Ethiopia continues to limit indigenous opportunity and lags far behind the majority of African and other developing nations in trained professionals across all fields related to heritage, cultural resource management, conservation, and tourism development. A more thorough analysis of this critical problem can be found at: https://www.ethiopia-insight.com/2018/10/29/ethiopia-must-overhaul-archaic-heritage-system-to-protect-ancient-treasures/

A Future in Waiting

Despite such challenges, I remain optimistic. During my time in Aksum, and many subsequent visits as part of my broader research, we have identified and/or recorded new sites from the Neolithic and Da’mat (5^th– 2^nd cent. BCE) periods, elite structures from both Early and Classic Aksumite periods (2^nd– 6^th cent. CE), a necropolis, and Portuguese fortifications (16^th-17^th cent.), along with an encampment of Emperor Yohannes IV (1870s). I am emboldened now, with the new leadership, to publish many of these finds, and to ask the current leadership to act boldly. All these and many other remarkable discoveries remain concealed, awaiting research.

Fortunately, even as many colleagues have moved on, we continue to plan and work toward obtaining official permits for opening up the ground for proper archaeological field excavation and training in excavation and cultural resource management skills. In Tigrai, that may still be decades off. But within other regions, it is hoped that the new authorities will find the courage and integrity to clear my name and we can all get back to the business of training field-management personnel to enhance Ethiopian capacity in cultural resource management skills.

With properly trained, competent public servants in the emerging heritage and tourism sector, Ethiopia’s cadre of new archaeologists and heritage and cultural resource management specialists will be successful in preserving and presenting Ethiopia’s rich and deep heritage. I envision the next wave of exploration, discovery, and excavation under the skillful hands and careful eyes of these trustworthy Ethiopian archaeologists and technicians. Of course, this is dependent upon the resoluteness and honesty of good people to stand against the autocratic and debilitating misinformation and obstructions of the past.

Young Ethiopian model in front of the Stelae Field (Stela No. 2) where there is rightfully much national pride related to heritage. – (photo – SCW)

Meanwhile, along with my colleagues, a veritable panoply of scholars wait. And so does a young girl sitting in the shade of the returned ancient stela in the Stelae Park, beginning to learn what it means that she is offspring of the most powerful empire sub-Saharan Africa has ever known. And herein remains the dream—this child, and so many like her, resting in the shadow of her heritage, may soon learn to apprehend her heritage in authentic ways. She will continue to visualize her emerging story of identity, as we carefully excavate and reveal this hidden, neglected jewel of ancient splendor. We will continue our research, hopeful, where our goal remains to transmit that specialized knowledge, expertise and experience of excavation and heritage management. Then, Ethiopia may sing again of her own ancient glories to the rest of the world.

DNA study sheds new light on the people of the Neolithic battle axe culture

Posted on October 10, 2019 by No Author -

UPPSALA UNIVERSITY—In an interdisciplinary study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, an international research team has combined archaeological, genetic and stable isotope data to understand the demographic processes associated with the iconic Battle Axe Culture and its introduction in Scandinavia.

In 1953, a significant burial site belonging to the Battle Axe Culture was found when constructing a roundabout in Linköping. 4,500 years ago, a man and a woman were buried together with a child, a dog and a rich set of grave goods including one of the eponymous battle axes. “Today, we call this site ‘Bergsgraven’. I have been curious about this particular burial for a long time. The collaboration of archaeologists with geneticists allows us to understand more about these people as individuals as well as where their ancestors came from,” says archaeogeneticist Helena Malmström of Uppsala University, lead author of the study.

The Scandinavian Battle Axe Culture appears in the archaeological record about 5,000 years ago and archaeologically it resembles the continental European Corded Ware Culture. “The appearance and development of the culture complex has been debated for a long time, especially whether it was a regional phenomenon or whether it was associated with migratory processes of human groups, and – if the latter – from where,” says osteoarchaeologist Jan Storå of Stockholm University, one of the senior authors of the study.

By sequencing the genomes of prehistoric individuals from present-day Sweden, Estonia and Poland, the research team showed that the Scandinavian Battle Axe Culture and continental Corded Ware Culture share a common genetic ancestry, which had not been present in Scandinavia or central Europe before 5,000 years ago. “This suggests that the introduction of this new cultural manifestation was associated with movements of people. These groups have a history which we ultimately can trace back to the Pontic Steppe north of the Black Sea,” says population geneticist Torsten Günther of Uppsala University, co-lead author of the study.

In previous studies, the research team had been able to show that other cultural changes during the Stone Age, such as the introduction of farming practices, were also associated with movements of people. Torsten Günther: “Again, archaeogenomic analyses reveal new and surprising results concerning demographic processes in the Stone Age.” Jan Storå adds: “Prehistoric movements of people have played a major role in spreading innovations. But there is also some integration and reconnection of previous elements. For example, we find that people sharing the genetic signal of the Battle Axe sites were re-using megalithic tombs for their burials.”

Comparisons between these individuals and other prehistoric Scandinavians provided further valuable insights. Mattias Jakobsson, population geneticist at Uppsala University and one of the senior authors of this study, notes: “It is also interesting that the herders from the Battle Axe Culture differed from other contemporary farmer and hunter-gatherer groups in Scandinavia. At least three genetically and culturally different groups lived side-by-side for centuries and did not mix a lot.”

There is some evidence for low levels of genetic admixture between the incoming herders and other farming cultures. The research team was not able to determine whether this took place before or after their arrival in Scandinavia. “That remains an open question and still leaves room for future studies as more data from additional individuals as well as other geographic regions should provide a more detailed resolution,” concludes Helena Malmström.

The Bergsgraven burial as well as a reconstruction of the individuals is usually on exhibition at Östergötlands Museum in Linköping. “Östergötlands Museum is currently closed for renovation and renewal. Therefore, the display of the Bergsgraven grave has been temporarily removed, but it will be a central part of the upcoming exhibition, in which we aim to integrate current archaeological and historical research. This is a rare opportunity to build a new exhibition, and of course we want to tell the audience about the new analyses and interpretations made of the material,” says Per Nilsson, archaeologist at Östergötlands Museum.

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A skeleton of a male individual associated with the Neolithic Age Battle Axe culture on exhibition in Linköping, Sweden. Genomic DNA extracted from this individual was analyzed in the study. Jonas Karlsson, Östergötlands museum

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Article Source: UPPSALA UNIVERSITY news release

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Study finds prehistoric humans ate bone marrow like canned soup 400,000 years ago

Posted on October 10, 2019 by No Author -

AMERICAN FRIENDS OF TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY—Tel Aviv University researchers, in collaboration with scholars from Spain, have uncovered evidence of the storage and delayed consumption of animal bone marrow at Qesem Cave near Tel Aviv, the site of many major discoveries from the late Lower Paleolithic period some 400,000 years ago.

The research provides direct evidence that early Paleolithic people saved animal bones for up to nine weeks before feasting on them inside Qesem Cave.

The study, which was published in the October 9 issue of Science Advances, was led by Dr. Ruth Blasco of TAU’s Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations and Centro Nacional de Investigación Sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH) and her TAU colleagues Prof. Ran Barkai and Prof. Avi Gopher. It was conducted in collaboration with Profs. Jordi Rosell and Maite Arilla of Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV) and Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social (IPHES); Prof. Antoni Margalida of University of Lleida, University of Bern, and the Institute for Game and Wildlife Research (IREC); and Prof. Daniel Villalba of University of Lleida.

“Bone marrow constitutes a significant source of nutrition and as such was long featured in the prehistoric diet,” explains Prof. Barkai. “Until now, evidence has pointed to immediate consumption of marrow following the procurement and removal of soft tissues. In our paper, we present evidence of storage and delayed consumption of bone marrow at Qesem Cave.”

“This is the earliest evidence of such behavior and offers insight into the socioeconomics of the humans who lived at Qesem,” adds Dr. Blasco. “It also marks a threshold for new modes of Paleolithic human adaptation.”

“Prehistoric humans brought to the cave selected body parts of the hunted animal carcasses,” explains Prof. Rosell. “The most common prey was fallow deer, and limbs and skulls were brought to the cave while the rest of the carcass was stripped of meat and fat at the hunting scene and left there. We found that the deer leg bones, specifically the metapodials, exhibited unique chopping marks on the shafts, which are not characteristic of the marks left from stripping fresh skin to fracture the bone and extract the marrow.”

The researchers contend that the deer metapodials were kept at the cave covered in skin to facilitate the preservation of marrow for consumption in time of need.

The researchers evaluated the preservation of bone marrow using an experimental series on deer, controlling exposure time and environmental parameters, combined with chemical analyses. The combination of archaeological and experimental results allowed them to isolate the specific marks linked to dry skin removal and determine a low rate of marrow fat degradation of up to nine weeks of exposure.

“We discovered that preserving the bone along with the skin, for a period that could last for many weeks, enabled early humans to break the bone when necessary and eat the still nutritious bone marrow,” adds Dr. Blasco.

“The bones were used as ‘cans’ that preserved the bone marrow for a long period until it was time to take off the dry skin, shatter the bone and eat the marrow,” Prof. Barkai emphasizes.

Until recently, it was believed that the Paleolithic people were hunter gatherers who lived hand-to-mouth (the Stone Age version of farm-to-table), consuming whatever they caught that day and enduring long periods of hunger when food sources were scarce.

“We show for the first time in our study that 420,000 to 200,000 years ago, prehistoric humans at Qesem Cave were sophisticated enough, intelligent enough and talented enough to know that it was possible to preserve particular bones of animals under specific conditions, and, when necessary, remove the skin, crack the bone and eat the bone marrow,” Prof. Gopher explains.

According to the research, this is the earliest evidence in the world of food preservation and delayed consumption of food. This discovery joins other evidence of innovative behaviors found in Qesem Cave including recycling, the regular use of fire, and cooking and roasting meat.

“We assume that all this was because elephants, previously a major source of food for humans, were no longer available, so the prehistoric humans in our region had to develop and invent new ways of living,” concludes Prof. Barkai. “This kind of behavior allowed humans to evolve and enter into a far more sophisticated kind of socioeconomic existence.”

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Marrow inside a metapodial bone after six weeks of storage. Dr. Ruth Blasco/AFTAU

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Article Source: AMERICAN FRIENDS OF TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY news release

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Early hunter-gatherers interacted much sooner than previously believed

Posted on October 7, 2019 by No Author -

BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY, BINGHAMTON, NY – A nearly 4,000-year-old burial site found off the coast of Georgia hints at ties between hunter-gatherers on opposite sides of North America, according to research led by faculty at Binghamton University, State University of New York.

A research team led by Matthew Sanger, assistant professor of anthropology at Binghamton University, analyzed human remains, stone tools and a copper band found in an ancient burial pit in the McQueen shell ring on St. Catherine’s Island, Georgia. The burial at the shell ring closely resembles similar graves found in the Great Lakes region, suggesting an exchange network between the Great Lakes and the coastal southeast United States. Similarities in mortuary practices suggest that the movement of objects between these two regions was more direct and unmediated than archaeologists previously assumed.

“Our excavations revealed remarkable parallels between the shell ring in the coastal Southeast and in broadly contemporaneous sites in the Great Lakes including: the use of cremation to handle the dead, cremating the dead in an area separate from where the bones were eventually buried, the use of copper as a burial item, the burial of multiple people at the same time, and the use of ocher in the burial,” said Sanger. “Not only are these practices very similar, our analyses clearly show that the copper found at the shell ring originated in the Great Lakes and was therefore traded between the two regions. Notably, all of these practices are rare, or entirely absent, from the regions between the Great Lakes and the southeast, which suggests that there was not some sort of general diffusion of traditions, but rather a direct “transplant.”

According to the researchers, these findings challenge prevalent notions that view preagricultural Native American communities as relatively isolated from one another and suggest instead that wide social networks spanned much of North America thousands of years before the advent of domestication.

“These findings strongly suggest that Native Americans living in the Eastern Woodlands more than 3,000 years ago were far more interconnected than we have ever thought,” said Sanger. “Rather than living in small groups with limited contacts, Native American communities were cosmopolitan; they traded with distant peoples, they engaged in complex social and economic relationships, and they had direct and indirect knowledge spanning hundreds if not thousands of kilometers. Amazingly, all of this occurred thousands of years before Native Americans invented agricultural practices – the point at which “social complexity” is thought to emerge by many archaeologists.”

The discovery of long-distance exchange of prestige goods among Archaic period communities living in the U.S. Southeast challenges traditional notions of hunter-gatherers as living in relative isolation and instead suggests nonagrarian groups created and maintained vast social networks thousands of years earlier than typically assumed.

“Traditionally, archaeologists have thought that agriculture played a key role in the creation of long-distance interactions as domesticated food sources can produce massive surpluses, which can then be used to establish more complex social and political power structures and relations,” said Sanger. “Increasingly though, archaeologists from around the world are finding that non-agricultural people engaged in activities long thought reserved for farmers. Our findings at the shell ring are part of a much broader revolution in archaeology where non-agricultural people are viewed as living far more complex, interconnected and interesting lives than previously assumed.

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Native Americans had long-distance networks before agriculture.

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Article Source: Binghamton University news release

The paper, “Great Lakes Copper and Shared Mortuary Practices on the Atlantic Coast: Implications for Long-Distance Exchange during the Late Archaic,” was published in American Antiquity.

Ancient farming in Maya wetlands

Posted on October 7, 2019 by No Author -

PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES—A study* explores how ancient Maya cultivated wetlands in Belize. Wetlands can function as farming fields during times of extreme weather events and provide evidence of environmental changes. However, current knowledge of how the Maya used wetlands for farming is limited. Timothy Beach and colleagues used airborne lidar surveys and radiocarbon dating to determine the chronology and ancient uses of 4 Maya wetland complexes in Belize’s Rio Bravo watershed. The area of wetland complexes totaled 14.08 km2. Although some field systems within the complexes dated between approximately 1,800 to 900 years ago, most dated to approximately 1,400 to 1,000 years ago. The wetlands served as large-scale, polycultural, agricultural systems for growing Maya crops, such as avocado, maize, and squash, and were active during extreme weather events, such as droughts, and times of population expansion in the Late Classic. The authors also determined that the Birds of Paradise complex is 5 times larger than initially thought, and the authors found an even larger complex. The findings suggest that wetland fields may have been adaptations to major shifts in Maya civilization as the demand for food increased, according to the authors.

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Pictured is the Birds of Paradise ancient Maya wetland field system and parts of the nearby Maya sites of Gran Cacao (bottom-left) and Akab Muclil (top-left) in northwestern Belize. Image courtesy of Timothy Beach, Sara Eshleman, Samantha Krause, Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach, and Colin Doyle

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Article Source: PNAS news release

*”Ancient Maya wetland fields revealed under tropical forest canopy from laser scanning and multiproxy evidence,” by Timothy Beach et al

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Early humans evolved in ecosystems unlike any found today

Posted on October 7, 2019 by No Author -

UNIVERSITY OF UTAH—To understand the environmental pressures that shaped human evolution, scientists must first piece together the details of the ancient plant and animal communities that our fossil ancestors lived in over the past 7 million years. Because putting together the puzzle of millions-of-years-old ecosystems is a difficult task, many studies have reconstructed the environments by drawing analogies with present-day African ecosystems, such as the Serengeti. A study led by a University of Utah scientist calls into question such approaches and suggests that the vast majority of human evolution occurred in ecosystems unlike any found today. The paper was published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

To test for differences between modern and ancient environments, the researchers analyzed a dataset of more than 200 present-day African mammal communities and more than 100 fossil communities spanning the past 7 million years in eastern Africa, a time period encompassing all of human evolution. They found that prior to 700,000 years ago, mammal communities looked far different from those today. For example, fossil communities supported a greater diversity of megaherbivores, species over 2,000 pounds, such as elephants. Likewise, the dietary structure of fossil communities frequently departed from those seen today, with patterns of grass- and leaf-eating species fluctuating in abundance. Around 1 million years ago, fossil communities began transitioning to a more modern makeup, which the authors suggest is the likely outcome of long-term grassland expansion coupled with arid climate pulses. The new paper adds to growing evidence that scientists need to critically re-evaluate our understanding of the ancient ecosystems in which early humans evolved.

“For a long time, our field has been trying to pin down how environmental changes influenced human evolution, but we’ve got to be able to reconstruct past environments right in the first place,” said lead author Tyler Faith, curator of archaeology at the Natural History Museum of Utah and assistant professor of anthropology at the U. “If we continue to reconstruct ancient environments on the basis of modern African ecosystems, we are likely missing an entire realm of possibilities in how past ecosystems functioned. Our study invites our fellow researchers to think more critically about that.”

Linking changes in mammal communities to ecosystem functions

Eastern Africa is a boon for mammal fossils, making it an ideal region to piece together ancient ecosystems over the past 7 million years. With their extensive database of both ancient and modern mammal communities, the researchers focused on three traits: diet, body size, and digestive strategy. For all of these traits, they found that the makeup of ancient herbivore communities differed significantly from those of today. This is key, as herbivores directly shape the structure of ecosystems in ways that impact a wide variety of animal and plant species.

“Large herbivores aren’t just passive parts of an ecosystem, we know that they can shape the landscape. They’re eating the plants, and the biggest ones are knocking down trees or trampling soils, which collectively influences vegetation structure, fire regimes, nutrient cycling, and impacts other organisms, including humans,” said Faith.

For example, modern African ecosystems are dominated by ruminants–relatives of cows and antelopes that have four compartments in their stomachs to thoroughly break down food. Non-ruminants equipped with simple stomachs are comparatively rare, with at most eight species coexisting in the same area today. Non-ruminants, including relatives of elephants, zebras, hippos, rhinos and pigs, are like digestive conveyor belts, said Faith. They eat larger quantities of plants to make up for their inefficient digestion. In contrast to the present-day pattern, eastern African fossil records document landscapes rich in non-ruminant communities, with dozens of species co-existing within the same area.

Fossil and modern communities were also vastly different in terms of body sizes. The fossil records document lots more megaherbivores than their modern counterparts. A steady decline of megaherbivores began 4.5 million years ago until they represented a more modern distribution 700,000 years ago.

What is the impact of these eating machines all living together in the same places, when it’s not the case today?

“These ancient herbivore communities were probably consuming far more vegetation, which means less fuel for wildfires. Because fire is an important part of modern ecosystems in Africa and favors grasslands over woodlands, it’s going to fundamentally alter how things are working at the level of entire ecosystems, starting with the plant communities,” adds John Rowan, co-author and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “Paleontologists have been aware of that, but until now, no one’s really tried to measure just how different the past was compared to the present.”

Drying climate and grasslands drive a shift

What drove shifts in mammal communities over the past 7 million years? One of the most well-documented changes is the expansion of grasslands throughout the past 4 million years. Many of the fossil megaherbivores preferred wooded environments, whereas ruminants thrive in the wide-open savannas that dominate parts of eastern Africa today. The fossil record of herbivores closely follows the shifting environments, with changes in the representation of these groups tracking long-term grassland expansion.

Around 1 million years ago, fossils show a shift in mammal community dietary structure that grassland expansion alone fails to explain. The non-ruminants that had dominated eastern African ecosystems fell into a sharp decline. This corresponds to marine dust records suggesting the region experienced pulses of climate drying that would have hit non-ruminants especially hard because they depend on reliable access to surface water, meaning that many species may have disappeared alongside the rivers and lakes they depended on. Additionally, the conveyor belt eating strategy of non-ruminants relies on accessing abundant vegetation, which would have declined during periods of drought.

Looking forward

The authors do not fault previous researchers for relying so heavily on analogies with present-day African ecosystems, emphasizing that a study of this scope has only recently become possible.

“Paleontology has hit a big data era,” said Faith. Co-author and Colorado State University assistant professor Andrew Du added, “With the assembly of large, comprehensive datasets, we can now ask important questions that are fundamentally different from those asked in the past. We can investigate larger-scale patterns and dynamics that undoubtedly influenced the course of human evolution.”

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The geographic distribution of the modern (left) and fossil (right) larger herbivore communities analyzed in the paper. Faith et. al., PNAS 2019

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A comparative analysis of fossil (gray shaded) and modern (light gray shaded) mammal communities. The study found little overlap between the types of mammals that thrived in the past versus in modern East African ecosystems. J. Tyler Faith adapted figure from Faith et. al., PNAS 2019

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Artist Heinrich Harder’s illustration of the extinct Deinotherium, an ancient relative to modern-day elephants that appeared in the Middle Miocene 20 million years ago and lived until the Early Pleistocene, around 2 million years ago. Harder completed the illustration in the early 1900s using fossils as his model. Heinrich Harder

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Article Source: University of Utah news release

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Revealing the Hidden Text on the Herculaneum Scrolls

Posted on October 4, 2019 by No Author -

Diamond Light Source—Researchers led by the renowned ancient artifacts decoder, Professor Brent Seales, will be using Diamond, the UK’s national synchrotron science facility in the heart of Oxfordshire, to examine a collection of world-famous ancient artifacts owned by the Institut de France. Using this powerful light source and special techniques the team has developed, the researchers are working to virtually unwrap two complete scrolls and four fragments from the damaged Herculaneum scrolls. After decades of effort, Seales thinks the scans from Diamond represent his team’s best chance yet to reveal the elusive contents of these 2,000-year-old papyri.

Prof Seales is director of the Digital Restoration Initiative at the University of Kentucky (US), a research program dedicated to the development of software tools that enable the recovery of fragile, unreadable texts. According to Seales, “Diamond Light Source is an absolutely crucial element in our long-term plan to reveal the writing from damaged materials, as it offers unparalleled brightness and control for the images we can create, plus access to a brain trust of scientists who understand our challenges and are eager to help us succeed.?Texts from the ancient world are rare and precious, and they simply cannot be revealed through any other known process. Thanks to the opportunity to study the scrolls at Diamond Light Source, which has been made possible by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew Mellon Foundation, we are poised to take a tremendous step forward in our ability to read and visualize this material. The scan session promises to be a key moment in our quest for a reliable pathway to reading the invisible library.”

Over the past two decades, Prof Seales and his team have worked to digitally restore and read the vast amount of material in the “invisible library” of irreparably damaged manuscripts. In 2015 they achieved singular success when they visualized the never-before and never-to-be-seen writing trapped inside five complete wraps of the ancient Hebrew scroll from En Gedi (see Science Advances). For the first time ever, a complete text from an object so severely damaged that it could never be opened physically was digitally retrieved and recreated, representing a true technical breakthrough (see Virtually Unwrapping the En Gedi Scroll). It is this technology that Seales’ team plans to deploy on the data collected at Diamond.

A long-term goal of Prof Seales has been to reveal the contents of the most iconic items in the invisible library, the Herculaneum scrolls. Buried and carbonized by the deadly eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, the scrolls are too fragile to be opened and represent the perfect storm of important content, massive damage, extreme fragility, and difficult-to-detect ink.

These famous papyri were discovered in 1752 in an ancient Roman villa near the Bay of Naples believed to belong to the family of Julius Caesar. As such, they represent the only surviving library from antiquity. The majority of the 1,800 scrolls reside at the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, although a few were offered as gifts to dignitaries by the King of Naples and wound up at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, the British Library, and the Institut de France.

Last May, Prof Seales headed a small team of undergraduate students in Paris to survey the Institut de France’s Herculaneum collection. They examined two completely intact scrolls, along with four small fragments from scrolls unrolled in the late 1800s. All six items will be scanned at Diamond. Because the four fragments contain many layers and feature visible, exposed writing on the top, they will provide the key data needed to develop the next iteration of the team’s “virtual unwrapping” software pipeline, a machine learning algorithm that will enable the visualization of carbon ink.

The use of carbon ink is one of the main reasons these scrolls have evaded deciphering, according to Prof Seales. Unlike metal-based inks, such as the iron gall used to write medieval documents, carbon ink has a density similar to that of the carbonized papyrus on which it sits. Therefore, it appears invisible in X-ray scans.

“We do not expect to immediately see the text from the upcoming scans, but they will provide the crucial building blocks for enabling that visualization. First, we will immediately see the internal structure of the scrolls in more definition than has ever been possible, and we need that level of detail to ferret out the highly compressed layers on which the text sits. In addition, we believe strongly–and contrary to conventional wisdom–that tomography does indeed capture subtle, non-density-based evidence of ink, even when it is invisible to the naked eye in the scan data. The machine learning tool we are developing will amplify that ink signal by training a computer algorithm to recognize it-pixel by pixel-from photographs of opened fragments that show exactly where the ink is–voxel by voxel–in the corresponding tomographic data of the fragments. The tool can then be deployed on data from the still-rolled scrolls, identify the hidden ink, and make it more prominently visible to any reader.”

The scanning of these delicate items at the leading science facility, Diamond, will be a mammoth undertaking, for all involved. Because of their extreme fragility, the Seales team fabricated custom-fit cases for the scrolls that enable as little handling as possible. Only highly trained conservators are allowed to handle the samples. The Director of the Bibliothèque at the Institut de France, Mme Françoise Bérard will personally pack the scrolls into their special cases for travel to the UK, and after arrival they will be inserted into the I12 beamline at Diamond. The I12 beamline or JEEP (Joint Engineering, Environmental, and Processing) beamline is a high energy X-ray beamline for imaging, diffraction and scattering, which operates at photon energies of?53-150 keV.

While a handful of the scrolls from Herculaneum have been subjected to physical (and largely disastrous) efforts to open them, no one as yet has managed to reveal complete texts from the hundreds that remain tightly closed. Principle Beamline Scientist on the Diamond I12 Beamline where the experiment will take place, Dr. Thomas Connolley, adds; “This is the first time an intact scroll has been scanned in such detail at Diamond Light Source. We are very excited to work with the research team, playing our part in what we hope will be a major step forward in unlocking the secrets that the scrolls contain.”

“It’s ironic, and somewhat poetic,” concludes Seales, “that the scrolls sacrificed during the past era of disastrous physical methods will serve as the key to retrieving the text from those survive but are unreadable. And by digitally restoring and reading these texts, which are arguably the most challenging and prestigious to decipher, we will forge a pathway for revealing any type of ink on any type of substrate in any type of damaged cultural artifact.”

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End view of one of the two Herculaneum scrolls from L’Institut de France being scanned at Diamond Light Source by the University of Kentucky, Digital Restoration Initiative team. Diamond Light Source

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Science Advances, AAAS: “Seeing” the Writing Hidden on the Reverse Side of an Ancient Text—Using the shortwave-infrared hyperspectral imaging— scientists have revealed portions of Greek text hidden on the back of an ancient scroll discovered in the 18^th century. The findings confirm the value of this imaging technique both for reading text on the reverse side of the Herculaneum papyri scrolls, which have been mounted to a support, and for reading the writing on the front of the scrolls. While 18^th-century drawings suggested the existence of writing on the back of the papyri, scholars have been unable to remove the scrolls from the paperboard to which they are permanently glued because this would involve painstaking work and could cause them to disintegrate. A. Tournié et al. applied the shortwave-infrared hyperspectral imaging to the most famous scroll, which contains text from the philosophical work History of the Academy by Philodemus, demonstrating its superior usefulness compared with previous imaging conducted at 950 nanometers. The researchers selected a passage in which scholars had identified the word “charmed” or “bewitched,” showing clearly with their improved resolution that the word was actually “enslaved.” However, while the technique produces better contrast than imaging at 950 nanometers, Tournié and colleagues note that it does enable holes and thin fractures or wrinkles to be mistaken for ink. They note that this issue could be resolved in the future by using a lens that leads to a spatial resolution of about 100 micrometers.

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Conventional picture of PHerc. 16911021. K. Fleischer, University of Würzburg

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Scanning the scroll samples. A. Tournié, Centre de Recherche sur la Conservation

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Article Source: Diamond Light Source and Science Advances news releases

Oldest miniaturized stone toolkits in Eurasia

Posted on October 2, 2019 by No Author -

MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY—Microliths – small stone tools – are often interpreted as being part of composite tools, including projectile weapons, and essential to efficient hunting strategies of Homo sapiens. In Europe and Africa, the earliest appearance of these lithic toolkits are linked to hunting medium and large-sized animals in grassland or woodland settings, or as adaptations to risky environments during periods of climatic change. Yet the presence of small, quartz stone tools in Sri Lanka suggests the existence of more diverse ecological contexts for the development and use of these technologies by some of the earliest members of our species migrating out of Africa.

The paper*, published in PLOS One and led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History alongside colleagues from Sri Lankan and other international institutions, reports microliths from the cave site of Fa-Hien Lena in the tropical evergreen rainforests of Sri Lanka, which have been dated to between 48,000 and 45,000 years ago. This is as early, or earlier, than the well-known ‘Upper Palaeolithic’ technologies of Europe associated with Homo sapiens, and highlights that these sophisticated toolkits were a key part of our species’ ecological flexibility as it colonized the Eurasian continent.

Tropical rainforests: a unique challenge

In the last decade, growing archaeological evidence has documented the use of tropical rainforest resources by Homo sapiens in several locations in South Asia, South East Asia, and Melanesia between 45,000 and 36,000 years ago. This is much earlier than previously considered, especially given stereotypes that these environments were ‘barriers’ to human migration, with disease, dangerous animals, and limited resources all posing challenges. Instead, research on human dispersal in Asia has focused on potential human use of coastal and savanna environments.

The island of Sri Lanka, at the southern tip of South Asia, has emerged as a particularly important area for investigating the adaptations of prehistoric hunter-gatherers to tropical rainforests. The earliest South Asian human fossils are found in Sri Lankan caves and rockshelters, in levels dated to about 45,000-36,000 years ago, and scientific analyses of these remains has highlighted human reliance on closed forest resources. Early microliths, commonly associated with efficient hunting strategies by our species, have also been found, yet more detailed analyses have been lacking. Finding such artifacts in this context is significant given that microliths have commonly been linked to hunting medium to large game in grassland settings.

‘Microliths’: why care?

Traditionally, the miniaturization of stone tool technology has been seen as a major step in the development of novel, projectile technologies such as the bow and arrow. While definitions are variable, the focus of human stone tool producers on the creation of small, sharp lithics is something that has been witnessed in Africa, Europe, and India from around 60,000-45,000 years ago. Early occurrences of this strategy have also been documented in Sri Lanka since the 1980s, by Siran Deraniyagala, but were frequently neglected due to a Eurocentric belief that such tools could not have been produced in this part of the world prior to similar technologies in Europe (at the time dated to only ~20,000 years ago).

Microlithic toolkits may also denote how fast and along which routes our species migrated through Asia. For example, a prominent argument states that microlith technologies emerged in Africa, and then rapidly dispersed along the Indian Ocean rim, acting as a proxy for the supposedly first, rapid movement of Homo sapiens through coastal settings. However, significant, local differences have been noted for microlith stone tools in Asia and Africa, alongside regional technological continuity, and a clear ‘coming and going’ of these type of tools as situations demanded them or not. Investigation of these tools and their adaptive context in different parts of the world is therefore crucial to discussions of human evolution and the archaeology of the last 100,000 years.

A Sri Lankan specialty

Sri Lanka has been a prominent part of discussions of early human adaptations to tropical rainforests, though there has been a lack of systematic, detailed analysis of the technological strategies associated with clear geochemical evidence or animal remains that demonstrate a clearly specialized adaptation. “We undertook detailed measurements of stone tools and reconstructed their production patterns at the site of Fa-Hien Lena Cave, the site with the earliest evidence for human occupation in Sri Lanka,” says PhD student Oshan Wedage of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, lead author of the study.

“We found clear evidence for the production of ‘miniaturized’ stone tools or ‘microliths’ at Fa-Hien Lena, dating to the earliest period of human occupation,” Wedage continues. “Interestingly, our evidence also shows that stone tool technology changed little over the long span of human occupation, from 48,000 to 4,000 years ago,” says Andrea Picin, also of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, co-author of the study. This would imply that the technological adaptation practiced by the earliest rainforest foragers on the island proved to be remarkably successful over the course of millennia.

Dedicated ‘plasticity’

“While we suspect that these small stone tools were used as part of projectile technologies, as we have also found for bone tools at the same site, residue analysis and impact fracture analysis is ongoing,” says Michael Petraglia, co-corresponding author of the paper. “Whatever the results, these miniaturized stone tools place Sri Lanka in a central position in terms of discussing technological sophistication among our species. We have essentially uncovered the ‘Upper Palaeolithic’ of the rainforest.”

Patrick Roberts, another co-corresponding author, continues, “It is evident that these microliths were part of a flexible human toolkit that enabled Homo sapiens to spread into all of the world’s environments, demonstrating unparalleled ecological ‘plasticity’ when compared to other hominin species.” The data from Sri Lanka is just one example of human populations demonstrating a remarkable ability to specialize their technological and cultural approaches to novel ecological situations during their movement across the majority of the Earth’s continents by 12,000 years ago.

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Fa Hien Cave in rainforests of Sri Lanka. Max Planck Institute

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Fa Hien Cave overlooking rainforest. Max Planck Institute

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Oldest microlithic artifacts from Fa Hien Cave. Max Planck Institute

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

*Oshan Wedage, Andrea Picin, James Blinkhorn, Katerina Douka, Siran Deraniyagala, Nikos Kourampas, Nimal Perera, Ian Simpson, Nicole Boivin, Michael Petraglia, Patrick Roberts, Microliths in the South Asian rainforest ~45-4 ka: new insights from Fa-Hien Lena Cave, Sri Lanka https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0222606

Dishing the dirt on an early human cave

Posted on September 26, 2019 by No Author -

FLINDERS UNIVERSITY—Fossil animal droppings, charcoal from ancient fires and bone fragments litter the ground of one of the world’s most important human evolution sites, new research reveals.

The latest evidence from southern Siberia shows that large cave-dwelling carnivores once dominated the landscape, competing for more than 300,000 years with ancient tribes for prime space in cave shelters.

A team of Russian and Australian scientists have used modern geoarchaeological techniques to unearth new details of day-to-day life in the famous Denisova Cave complex in Siberia’s Altai Mountains.

Large carnivores such hyena, wolves and even bears and at least three early nomadic human groups (hominins) – Denisovans, Neanderthals, and early Homo sapiens – used this famous archaeological site, the researchers say in a new Scientific Reports study* examining the dirt deposited in the cave complex over thousands of years.

“These hominin groups and large carnivores such as hyenas and wolves left a wealth of microscopic traces that illuminate the use of the cave over the last three glacial-interglacial cycles,” says lead author, Flinders University ARC Future Fellow Dr Mike Morley.

“Our results complement previous work by some of our colleagues at the site that has identified ancient DNA in the same dirt, belonging to Neanderthals and a previously unknown human group, the Denisovans, as well as a wide range of other animals”.

But it now seems that it was the animals that mostly ruled the cave space back then.

Microscopic studies of 3-4 meters of sediment left in the cave network includes fossil droppings left by predatory animals such as cave hyenas, wolves and possibly bears, many of their kind made immortal in ancient rock art before going extinct across much of Eurasia.

From their ‘micromorphology’ examination of the dirt found in Denisova Cave, the team discovered clues about the use of the cave, including fire-use by ancient humans and the presence of other animals.

The study of intact sediment blocks collected from the cave has yielded information not evident to the naked eye or gleaned from previous studies of ancient DNA, stone tools or animal and plant remains.

Co-author of the new research, University of Wollongong Distinguished Professor Richard (Bert) Roberts, says the study is very significant because it shows how much can be achieved by sifting through sedimentary material using advanced microscopy and other archaeological science methods to find critical new evidence about human and non-human life on Earth.

“Using microscopic analyses, our latest study shows sporadic hominin visits, illustrated by traces of the use of fire such as miniscule fragments, but with continuous use of the site by cave-dwelling carnivores such as hyenas and wolves,” says Professor Roberts.

“Fossil droppings (coprolites) indicate the persistent presence of non-human cave dwellers, which are very unlikely to have co-habited with humans using the cave for shelter.”

This implies that ancient groups probably came and went for short-lived episodes, and at all other times the cave was occupied by these large predators.

The Siberian site came to prominence more than a decade ago with the discovery of the fossil remains of a previously unknown human group, dubbed the Denisovans after the local name for the cave.

In a surprising twist, the recent discovery of a bone fragment in the cave sediments showed that a teenage girl was born of a Neanderthal mother and Denisovan father more than 90,000 years ago.

Denisovans and Neanderthals inhabited parts of Eurasia until perhaps 50,000 to 40,000 years ago, when they were replaced by modern humans (Homo sapiens).

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Flinders University researcher Dr Mike Morley taking samples from Denisova Cave complex. Dr. Paul Goldbert, University of Wollongong

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Microscopic studies of sediment left in the cave includes fossil droppings left by predatory animals such as hyenas and wolves. Dr Mike Morley, Flinders University

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profiles of sediment showing a Denisova fossil poo gallery, including hyena, wolf and other unidentified. Dr. Mike Morley, Flinders University

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Article Source: Flinders University news release

*’Hominin and animal activities in the microstratigraphic record from Denisova Cave (Altai Mountains, Russia)’ 2019 (9:13785) by MW Morley, P Goldberg, VA Uliyanov, MB Kozlikin, MV Shunkov, AP Derevianko, Z Jacobs and RG Roberts has been published in Scientific Reports DOI: 10.1038/s41598-019-49930-3

First evidence for early baby bottles used to feed animal milk to prehistoric babies

Posted on September 25, 2019 by No Author -

UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL—A team of scientists, led by the University of Bristol, has found the first evidence that prehistoric babies were fed animal milk using the equivalent of modern-day baby bottles.

Possible infant feeding vessels, made from clay, first appear in Europe in the Neolithic (at around 5,000 BC), becoming more commonplace throughout the Bronze and Iron Ages.

The vessels are usually small enough to fit within a baby’s hands and have a spout through which liquid could be suckled. Sometimes they have feet and are shaped like imaginary animals. Despite this, in the lack of any direct evidence for their function, it has been suggested they may also be feeding vessels for the sick or infirm.

The researchers wanted to investigate whether these were in fact infant feeding vessels (baby bottles) so they selected three examples found in very rare child graves in Bavaria. These were small (about 5 – 10 cm across) with an extremely narrow spout.

The team used a combined chemical and isotopic approach to identify and quantify the food residues found within the vessels. Their findings, published today in the journal Nature, showed that the bottles contained ruminant milk from domesticated cattle, sheep or goat.

The presence of these three obviously specialized vessels in child graves combined with the chemical evidence confirms that these vessels were used to feed animal milk to babies either in the place of human milk and/or during weaning onto supplementary foods.

Prior to this study, the only evidence for weaning came from isotopic analysis of infant skeletons, but this could only give rough guidelines of when children were weaned, not what they were eating/drinking. The study thus provides important information on breastfeeding and weaning practices, and infant and maternal health, in prehistory.

This is the first study that has applied this direct method of identification of weaning foods to infants in the past and opens the way for investigations of feeding vessels from other ancient cultures worldwide.

Lead author, Dr Julie Dunne from the University of Bristol’s School of Chemistry, said: “These very small, evocative, vessels give us valuable information on how and what babies were fed thousands of years ago, providing a real connection to mothers and infants in the past.”

She continued: “Similar vessels, although rare, do appear in other prehistoric cultures (such as Rome and ancient Greece) across the world. Ideally, we’d like to carry out a larger geographic study and investigate whether they served the same purpose.”

Project partner, Dr Katharina Rebay-Salisbury from the Institute for Oriental and European Archaeology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, who directs an ERC-funded project on motherhood in prehistory, added: “Bringing up babies in prehistory was not an easy task. We are interested in researching cultural practices of mothering, which had profound implications for the survival of babies. It is fascinating to be able to see, for the first time, which foods these vessels contained.”

Professor Richard Evershed FRS who heads up Bristol’s Organic Geochemistry Unit and is a co-author of the study, added: “This is a striking example of how robust biomolecular information, properly integrated with the archaeology of these rare objects, has provided a fascinating insight into an aspect of prehistoric human life so familiar to us today.”

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Modern-day baby feeding from reconstructed infant feeding vessel of the type investigated here. Helena Seidl da Fonseca

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Late Bronze Age feeding vessels from Vösendorf, Austria. Enver-Hirsch © Wien Museum

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL news release

First glimpse at what ancient Denisovans may have looked like, using DNA methylation data

Posted on September 19, 2019 by No Author -

CELL PRESS—If you could travel back in time 100,000 years, you’d find yourself living among multiple groups of humans, including anatomically modern humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans. But exactly what our Denisovan relatives might have looked like had been anyone’s guess for a simple reason: the entire collection of Denisovan remains includes a pinky bone, three teeth, and a lower jaw. Now, researchers reporting in the journal Cell have produced reconstructions of these long-lost relatives based on patterns of methylation in their ancient DNA.

“We provide the first reconstruction of the skeletal anatomy of Denisovans,” says author Liran Carmel of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “In many ways, Denisovans resembled Neanderthals, but in some traits, they resembled us, and in others they were unique.”

Overall, the researchers identified 56 anatomical features in which Denisovans differed from modern humans and/or Neanderthals, 34 of them in the skull. For example, the Denisovan’s skull was probably wider than that of modern humans or Neanderthals. They likely also had a longer dental arch.

Carmel, along with study first author David Gokhman and their colleagues, came to this conclusion by using genetic data to predict the anatomical features of the Denisovans. Rather than relying on DNA sequences, they extracted anatomical information from gene activity patterns. Those gene activity patterns were inferred based on genome-wide DNA methylation or epigenetic patterns, chemical modifications that influence gene activity without changing the underlying sequence of As, Gs, Ts, and Cs.

The researchers first compared DNA methylation patterns between the three hominin groups to find regions in the genome that were differentially methylated. Next, they looked for evidence about what those differences might mean for anatomical features based on what’s known about human disorders in which those same genes lose their function.

“By doing so, we can get a prediction as to what skeletal parts are affected by differential regulation of each gene and in what direction that skeletal part would change–for example, a longer or shorter femur,” Gokhman explains.

To test the method, the researchers first applied it to two species whose anatomy is known: the Neanderthal and the chimpanzee. They found that roughly 85% of the trait reconstructions were accurate in predicting which traits diverged and in which direction they diverged. By focusing on consensus predictions and the direction of the change rather than trying to predict precise measurements, they were able to produce the first reconstructed anatomical profile of the little-understood Denisovan.

The evidence suggests that Denisovans likely shared Neanderthal traits such as an elongated face and a wide pelvis. It also highlighted Denisovan-specific differences, such as an increased dental arch and lateral cranial expansion, the researchers report.

Carmel notes that while their paper* was in review, another study came out describing the first confirmed Denisovan mandible. And, it turned out that the jaw bone matched their predictions.

The findings show that DNA methylation can be used to reconstruct anatomical features, including some that do not survive in the fossil record. The approach may ultimately have a wide range of potential applications.

“Studying Denisovan anatomy can teach us about human adaptation, evolutionary constraints, development, gene-environment interactions, and disease dynamics,” Carmel says. “At a more general level, this work is a step towards being able to infer an individual’s anatomy based on their DNA.”

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Image shows a portrait of a juvenile female Denisovan based on a skeletal profile reconstructed from ancient DNA methylation maps. Maayan Harel

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Image shows a preliminary portrait of a juvenile female Denisovan based on a skeletal profile reconstructed from ancient DNA methylation maps. Maayan Harel

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image shows a portrait of a juvenile female Denisovan based on a skeletal profile reconstructed from ancient DNA methylation maps. Maayan Harel

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Article Source: CELL PRESS news release

*Gokhman et al.: “Reconstructing Denisovan Anatomy Using DNA Methylation Maps” https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(19)30954-7

If you liked this article, you may like The First Siberians, a recent, in-depth feature article about the discoveries at Denisova Cave, published at Popular Archaeology for premium members.

A technological ‘leap’ in the Edomite Kingdom during the 10th century BCE

Posted on September 18, 2019 by No Author -

PLOS—During the late 10th century BCE, the emerging Edomite Kingdom of the southern Levant experienced a “leap” in technological advancement, according to a study released September 18, 2019 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Erez Ben-Yosef of Tel Aviv University, Israel and colleagues. This finding supports the use of a “punctuated equilibrium” model for the development of ancient technology.

Punctuated equilibrium was originally proposed as a model for evolutionary change characterized by long-term stasis punctuated by short-lived episodes of rapid change, in contrast to a “gradualistic” model of slow and consistent change over time. In this study, Ben-Yosef and colleagues propose that the same theoretical model might be a useful tool for understanding the advancement of ancient technologies.

To test this hypothesis, the authors compiled an unparalleled dataset of over 150 samples of slag leftover from metallurgical technology in the Wadi Arabah region of the Levant in the Middle East, dating from 1300 to 800 BCE. Using copper content as a proxy for the efficiency of smelting techniques, they established a timeline of metallurgical advancement. The analysis revealed a long period of relatively gradual development across the region followed by a rapid “leap” to more efficient technology in the late 10th century BCE.

This case study provides support for the idea that ancient technologies could, in some cases, have developed through occasional “leaps” of rapid change. In this circumstance, the technological leap was an important part of the emergence of the Biblical Edomite Kingdom and the transition of this region from the Bronze Age into the Iron Age.

“Our study sheds new light on the emergence of the archaeologically-elusive biblical kingdom of Edom, indicating that the process started much earlier than previously thought” says Ben-Yosef. “That said, the study’s contribution goes beyond the Edomite case, as it provides significant insights on ancient technological evolution and the intricate interconnections between technology and society. The results demonstrate that the punctuated equilibrium evolutionary model is applicable to ancient technological developments, and that in turn, these developments are proxies for social processes”.

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Excavations of ancient copper mines as part of Tel Aviv University’s Central Timna Valley Project. Copper production technologies and the organization of the industry reflect the society responsible for this enterprise. E. Ben-Yosef and the Central Timna Valley Project

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Article Source: PLOS news release

*Ben-Yosef E, Liss B, Yagel OA, Tirosh O, Najjar M, Levy TE (2019) Ancient technology and punctuated change: Detecting the emergence of the Edomite Kingdom in the Southern Levant. PLoS ONE 14(9): e0221967. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0221967

Extinct human species gave modern humans an immunity boost

Posted on September 18, 2019 by No Author -

GARVAN INSTITUTE OF MEDICAL RESEARCH—Findings from the Garvan Institute of Medical Research show modern humans acquired a gene variant from Denisovans that heightened their immune reactions, indicating adaptation of the immune system to a changing environment.

The breakthrough study, published in Nature Immunology, is the first to demonstrate a single DNA sequence variant from an extinct human species that changes the activity of the modern human immune system.

The Denisovans – an extinct human species related to Neanderthals – interbred with modern humans ~50,000 years ago during the migrations of modern humans from Africa to what is now Papua New Guinea and Australia. Today, up to 5% of the genome of people indigenous to Papua New Guinea is derived from Denisovans.

The Garvan study reveals that modern humans acquired a gene variant from Denisovans that increases a range of immune reactions and inflammatory responses – including reactions that protect humans from disease-causing microbes.

“Our study indicates that the Denisovan gene variant heightens the inflammatory response in humans,” says co-senior author Associate Professor Shane Grey, who heads the Transplantation Immunology Laboratory at Garvan.

“Previous research has found collections of gene variants from extinct human species that appear to have provided an advantage to humans living at high altitudes or to resist viruses, but have been unable to pinpoint which if any were actually functional,” he adds. “This study is the first to identify a single, functional variant, and suggests that it also had an evolutionary benefit on the human immune system.”

Discovering an immune switch

Harmful versions of a gene called TNFAIP3 have long been associated with the overactive immunity in autoimmune conditions, including inflammatory bowel diseases, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, lupus, psoriasis and type 1 diabetes. The TNFAIP3 gene codes for a protein called A20 that helps ‘cool’ the immune system by reducing immune reactions to foreign molecules and microbes.

As part of a collaboration between Garvan, the Sydney Children’s Hospital, Randwick, the Children’s Hospital at Westmead, and the Clinical Immunogenomics Research Consortium of Australasia (CIRCA), the researchers analysed the genomes of families in which one child presented with a severe and unusual autoimmune or inflammatory condition.

“Four separate families had the same DNA variant in the TNFAIP3 gene, changing one amino acid in the A20 protein from an isoleucine to a leucine (I207L)”, says Professor Goodnow, Executive Director of the Garvan Institute and co-senior author of the study. “However, the presence of this variant in healthy family members indicated it was not sufficient to cause inflammatory disease on its own.”

The researchers extracted immune cells from the families’ blood samples, and found that, in cell culture, they produced a stronger inflammatory response than the immune cells of other individuals.

Tracing back immunity

Using datasets made available through the Simons Genome Diversity Project, the Indonesian Genome Diversity Project, Massey University, and the Telethon Kids Institute, which includes genome sequence data on hundreds of diverse human populations, co-first author and Flinders University senior researcher Dr Owen Siggs investigated the worldwide distribution of the TNFAIP3 variant.

The I207L variant carried by the Sydney families was absent from most populations but common in indigenous populations east of the Wallace Line, a deep ocean trench passing between Bali and Lombok and separating Asian fauna to the west from Australian fauna to the east. The I207L variant was common in people throughout Oceania, including people with Indigenous Australian, Melanesian, Maori and Polynesian ancestry.

“The fact that this rare version of the gene was enriched in these populations, and displayed genetic signatures of positive selection, means it was almost certainly beneficial for human health,” says Associate Professor Grey.

The team also discovered the I207L variant in the genome sequence of an extinct human species, extracted from a 50,000-year-old finger bone of a Denisovan girl, found inside the Denisova cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia. “Making that connection was extremely exciting,” says Dr Siggs.

The I207L variant was present in two copies in the Denisovan girl but absent from Neanderthal remains from the same cave, indicating that the immunity-enhancing gene variant arose after the divergence of the Denisovan and Neanderthal lineages ~400,000 years ago.

Dialling up the immune system

To investigate the Denisovan gene variant’s effects on the immune system, co-first author Dr Nathan Zammit replicated the I207L variant in a mouse model. “When exposed to a pathogenic Coxsackie virus strain – a virus which was originally isolated from a fatal case of human infant infection – mice with the Denisovan variant had stronger immune reactions and resisted the infection better than mice without the Denisovan gene,” Dr Zammit explains.

“Our study indicates that the Denisovan variant, and others like it, act on a ‘temperature control’ dial in the immune system, turning up the temperature to change how we respond to different microbes,” says Professor Goodnow.

“It was previously thought that A20, a gene that’s central to the immune system, is binary – either it’s switched on or off,” adds Associate Professor Grey. “We’ve found it in fact tunes us as individuals to optimal ‘Goldilocks points’ in between – where immune reactions are neither too hot nor too cold – and that blows the field wide open.”

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Map shows the frequency of the Denisovan TNFAIP3 gene variant in modern human populations of Island South East Asia and Oceania, it is found to be common east of the Wallace Line. Owen Siggs

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Article Source: GARVAN INSTITUTE OF MEDICAL RESEARCH news release

Northern France was already inhabited more than 650,000 years ago

Posted on September 17, 2019 by No Author -

CNRS—The first evidence of human occupation in northern France has been put back by 150,000 years, thanks to the findings of a team of scientists from the CNRS and the Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle at the emblematic site of Moulin Quignon in the department of the Somme. The site, now located in the gardens of a housing estate in Abbeville, was rediscovered in 2017 after falling into oblivion for over 150 years.

More than 260 flint objects, including 5 bifaces or hand axes, dating from 650,000 to 670,000 years ago, have been uncovered in sands and gravel deposited by the river Somme about 30 metres above the current valley.

This also makes Moulin Quignon the oldest site in north-western Europe where bifaces have been found. The discovery confirms the central position of the Somme Valley in current debates about Europe’s oldest settlements.

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Acheulean handaxe discovered at a Paleolithic site in the Somme region of France. Didier Descouens, Wikimedia Commons

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Article Source: CNRS news release

The study was published on 11 September 2019 in the online journal Scientific Reports http://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-49400-w

Early humans used tiny, flint ‘surgical’ tools to butcher elephants

Posted on September 12, 2019 by No Author -

AMERICAN FRIENDS OF TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY—The Acheulian culture endured in the Levant for over a million years during the Lower Paleolithic period (1.4 million to 400,000 years ago). Its use of bifaces or large cutting tools like hand axes and cleavers is considered a hallmark of its sophistication — or, some researchers would argue, the lack thereof.

A new Tel Aviv University-led study published in Nature‘s Scientific Reports on September 10 reveals that these early humans also crafted tiny flint tools out of recycled larger discarded instruments as part of a comprehensive animal-butchery tool kit. This suggests that the Acheulians were, in fact, far more sophisticated than previously believed.

The international team of researchers, led by Dr. Flavia Venditti and Prof. Ran Barkai of TAU’s Department of Archeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures together with colleagues from La Sapienza Rome University, discovered tiny flint flakes in the Lower Paleolithic Late Acheulian site of Revadim. In the past, this site yielded various stone assemblages, including dozens of hand axes, as well as animal remains, primarily of elephants.

The new research is based on expert analyses of 283 tiny flint items some 300,000-500,000 years old.

“The analysis included microscopic observations of use-wear as well as organic and inorganic residues,” explains Dr. Venditti. “We were looking for signs of edge damage, striations, polishes, and organic residue trapped in depressions in the tiny flint flakes, all to understand what the flakes were used for.”

According to the microscopic use signs and organic residue found on the tiny flakes, these flint specimens were not merely industrial waste left over from the production of larger tools. In addition, they were the deliberate product of recycled discarded artifacts and intended for a specific use.

“For decades, archaeologists did not pay attention to these tiny flakes. Emphasis was instead focused on large, elaborate hand axes and other impressive stone tools,” says Prof. Barkai. “But we now have solid evidence proving the vital use of the two-inch flakes.”

“We show here for the first time that the tiny tools were deliberately manufactured from recycled material and played an important role in the ancient human toolbox and survival strategies,” adds Dr. Venditti.

The Acheulian culture, which was also prevalent in Africa, Europe, and Asia at the time, was characterized by the standard production of large impressive stone tools, mainly used in the butchery of the enormous animals that walked the earth.

“Ancient humans depended on the meat and especially the fat of animals for their existence and well-being. So the quality butchery of the large animals and the extraction of every possible calorie was of paramount importance to them,” Prof. Barkai says.

According to the study, which was conducted over the course of three years, the tiny tools were used at stages of the butchery process that required precise cutting, such as tendon separation, meat carving and periosteum removal for marrow acquisition. Some 107 tiny flakes showed signs of processing animal carcasses. Eleven flakes also revealed organic and inorganic residues, mainly of bone but also of soft tissue. Experiments carried out with reproductions of the tools showed that the small flakes must have been used for delicate tasks, performed in tandem with larger butchery tools.

“We have an image of ancient humans as bulky, large creatures who attacked elephants with large stone weapons. They then gobbled as much of these elephants as they could and went to sleep,” Prof. Barkai says. “In fact, they were much more sophisticated than that. The tiny flakes acted as surgical tools created and used for delicate cutting of exact parts of elephants’ as well as other animals’ carcasses to extract every possible calorie.

“Nothing was wasted. Discarded stone tools were recycled to produce new tiny cutting implements. This reflects a refined, accurate, thoughtful, and environmentally conscious culture. This ecological awareness allowed ancient humans to thrive for thousands of years.”

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Tiny flake from Revadim site: Reconstruction of hand grip during use. Prof. Ran Barkai, Tel Aviv University

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The removal of meat from a bone using a replica of the Revadim tiny flake. Prof. Ran Barkai, Tel Aviv University

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Skin cutting using a replica of the Revadim tiny flake. Prof. Ran Barkai, Tel Aviv University

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Article Source: AMERICAN FRIENDS OF TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY news release

Bones of Roman Britons provide new clues to dietary deprivation

Posted on September 10, 2019 by No Author -

UNIVERSITY OF BRADFORD—Researchers at the University of Bradford have shown a link between the diet of Roman Britons and their mortality rates for the first time, overturning a previously-held belief about the quality of the Roman diet.

Using a new method of analysis, the researchers examined stable isotope data (the ratios of particular chemicals in human tissue) from the bone collagen of hundreds of Roman Britons, together with the individuals’ age-of-death estimates and an established mortality model.

The data sample included over 650 individuals from various published archaeological sites throughout England.

The researchers – from institutions including the Museum of London, Durham University and the University of South Carolina – found that higher nitrogen isotope ratios in the bones were associated with a higher risk of mortality, while higher carbon isotope ratios were associated with a lower risk of mortality.

Romano-British urban archaeological populations are characterised by higher nitrogen isotope ratios, which have been thought previously to indicate a better, or high-status, diet. But taking carbon isotope ratios, as well as death rates, into account showed that the nitrogen could also be recording long-term nutritional stress, such as deprivation or starvation.

Differences in sex were also identified by the researchers, with the data showing that men typically had higher ratios of both isotopes, indicating a generally higher status diet compared to women.

Dr Julia Beaumont of the University of Bradford said: “Normally nitrogen and carbon stable isotopes change in the same direction, with higher ratios of both indicating a better diet such as the consumption of more meat or marine foods. But if the isotope ratios go in opposite directions it can indicate that the individual was under long-term nutritional stress. This was corroborated in our study by the carbon isotope ratios which went down, rather than up, where higher mortality was seen.”

During nutritional stress, if there is insufficient intake of protein and calories, nitrogen within the body is recycled to make new proteins, with a resulting rise in the ratio of nitrogen isotopes in the body’s tissues.

Dr Beaumont added: “Not all people in Roman Britain were high-status; there was considerable enslavement too and we know slaves were fed a restricted diet. Our research shows that combining the carbon and nitrogen isotope data with other information such as mortality risk is crucial to an accurate understanding of archaeological dietary studies, and it may be useful to look at existing research with fresh eyes.”

The paper, A new method for investigating the relationship between diet and mortality: hazard analysis using dietary isotopes is published in Annals of Human Biology.

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A soldier’s tombstone from Roman-era London. Museum of London

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Article Source: University of Bradford news release

The paper, A new method for investigating the relationship between diet and mortality: hazard analysis using dietary isotopes is published in Annals of Human Biology. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03014460.2019.1662484

What the cranium of modern humans’ ancestor would have looked like

Posted on September 10, 2019 by No Author -

Despite having lived about 300,000 years ago, the oldest ancestor of all members of Homo sapiens had a surprisingly modern skull—as suggested by a model created by scientist Aurélien Mounier of the Histoire Naturelle de l’Homme Préhistorique laboratory (CNRS / Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle) and Cambridge University professor Marta Mirazón Lahr. After comparing the virtually rendered skull to those of five African fossil specimens contemporaneous with the first appearance of Homo sapiens, the two researchers posit that our species emerged through interbreeding of South and East African populations. Their findings are published in Nature Communications (10 September 2019).

Our species, Homo sapiens,arose in Africa roughly 300,000 years ago. But how and where exactly? Because few African fossils less than 500,000 years old have been discovered to date, we’re missing pieces to complete the puzzle of the history of our species. In this new study, the researchers wanted to expand the pool of available fossils … by creating virtual ones.

Accordingly, they took exhaustive measurements of 263 skulls of fossil and modern hominins [1] from 29 different populations, [2] to prepare 3D models.

Mounier and Mirazón Lahr demonstrated there was a close connection between the average cranial dimensions for each of the 29 populations and the respective positions of these populations in a phylogenetic tree largely constructed using genetic data. [3] This relationship allowed the researchers to calculate the likely skull dimensions of the most recent ancestor of all Homo sapiens groups. The virtual 300,000-year-old fossil has relatively modern features: its round cranium, relatively high forehead, and slight brow ridges and facial projection make it similar in morphology to some fossils that are only 100,000 years old.

The researchers compared their virtual fossil skull to five real fossil skulls from African members of the genus Homo who lived 130,000 to 350,000 years ago and are occasionally thought to have been our ancestors. Their analysis suggests our species arose through the hybridization of populations from South and East Africa. On the other hand, North African populations—possibly represented by the Jebel Shroud fossil—are believed to have interbred with Neanderthals after migration into Europe, accounting to a lesser extent for the makeup of our species.

This study also sheds light on the history of our species outside of Africa. It supports the hypothesis, advanced by others on the basis of genetic evidence,[4] that after an initial exodus from Africa that only left its mark in Oceania, a second migration allowed Homo sapiens to successively populate Europe, Asia, and finally, the Americas.

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Phylogenetic tree of 29 fossil and modern human species considered in study
The grey skulls were drawn from the sample used to model the skull of the virtual ancestor, shown in red.
From left to right: KNM-ER 3733 (H. ergaster), La Ferrassie (H. neanderthalensis), Qafzeh 6 (fossil H. sapiens), Kh-1739 (South Africa, Khoikhoi), AUS001 (Australia), Eu.34.4.1 (Hungary), EAS-ORSA0427 (China) and NA82 (Huron, Canada). © Aurélien Mounier – CNRS/MNHN

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Notes

1. Subgroup of great apes including the human genus (Homo) and related extinct genera like Australopithecus and Paranthropus, but not chimpanzees.
2. Twenty-one modern populations from various parts of the world and eight fossil populations.
3. Excluding the earliest species of the genus Homo (i.e. H. habilis, H. ergaster, and H. georgicus), for which no DNA—only morphological data—is available.
4. Genomic analyses inform on migration events during the peopling of Eurasia, Luca Pagani et al. Nature, 21 September 2016.https://doi.org/10.1038/nature19792

Article Source: CNRS news release

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Neanderthal footprints and social structure

Posted on September 9, 2019 by No Author -

PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES—A study* of 80,000-year-old footprints in Normandy, France offers a glimpse into the social structure of Neanderthals. Fossil footprints represent a snapshot in time because they are preserved only when rapidly buried. Jérémy Duveau and colleagues analyzed hundreds of 80,000-year-old fossilized hominin footprints in Normandy, France to provide a glimpse into the social structure of Neanderthals. The 257 footprints analyzed at the Le Rozel site lie in a coastal creek bed and were likely preserved by wind-driven sand when the area was part of a dune system. Though the authors did not find hominin bones at the site, they uncovered stone tools of similar age and characteristics to those found at other European Neanderthal sites. The authors note that the prints are consistent with known Neanderthal foot morphology and underscore that Neanderthals would have been the only hominin in Western Europe at the time. The documented footprint assemblage indicated a probable group size of 10 to 13 individuals. Analysis of the length and width of the prints suggested that most of the prints belonged to adolescents and children, with more children than adolescents. The youngest child was estimated to be 2 years of age. This is in contrast to the site of El Sidrón in Spain, the only other Neanderthal site that provides relatively reliable information about group composition, which showed a group consisting mostly of adults. According to the authors, the footprints at Le Rozel provide an unusual window into Neanderthal group size and composition.

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Excavation of a footprint layer on the archeological site from Le Rozel. Image courtesy of Dominique Cliquet

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One of the Neandertal footprints discovered at Le Rozel. Image courtesy of Dominique Cliquet

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Article Source: Adapted from the subject PNAS news release

*“The composition of a Neandertal social group revealed by the hominin footprints at Le Rozel (Normandy, France),” by Jérémy Duveau, Gilles Berillon, Christine Verna, Gilles Laisné, and Dominique Cliquet, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

If you liked this article, you may also like Laetoli: The Unfolding Story, and Footprints in the Silt, both published by Popular Archaeology.

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See, first-hand, the original fossils. See original artifacts. See the actual sites. Talk with the famous scientists. Join us on this unique specialized study tour.

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First ancient DNA from Indus Valley civilization links its people to modern South Asians

Posted on September 5, 2019 by No Author -

CELL PRESS—Researchers have successfully sequenced the first genome of an individual from the Harappan civilization, also called the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC). The DNA, which belongs to an individual who lived four to five millennia ago, suggests that modern people in India are likely to be largely descended from people of this ancient culture. It also offers a surprising insight into how farming began in South Asia, showing that it was not brought by large-scale movement of people from the Fertile Crescent where farming first arose. Instead, farming started in South Asia through local hunter-gatherers adopting farming. The findings appear September 5 in the journal Cell*.

“The Harappans were one of the earliest civilizations of the ancient world and a major source of Indian culture and traditions, and yet it has been a mystery how they related both to later people as well as to their contemporaries,” says Vasant Shinde, an archaeologist at Deccan College, Deemed University in Pune, India, and the chief excavator of the site of Rakhigarhi, who is first author of the study.

The IVC, which at its height from 2600 to 1900 BCE covered a large swath of northwestern South Asia, was one of the world’s first large-scale urban societies. Roughly contemporary to ancient Egypt and the ancient civilizations of China and Mesopotamia, it traded across long distances and developed systematic town planning, elaborate drainage systems, granaries, and standardization of weights and measures.

Hot, fluctuating climates like those found in many parts of lowland South Asia are detrimental to the preservation of DNA. So despite the importance of the IVC, it has been impossible until now to sequence DNA of individuals recovered in archaeological sites located in the region. “Even though there has been success with ancient DNA from many other places, the difficult preservation conditions mean that studies in South Asia have been a challenge,” says senior author David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, the Broad Institute, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Answering questions about the ancient people of the Indus Valley was in fact the primary reason Reich founded his own ancient DNA laboratory in 2013.

In this study, Reich, post-doctoral scientist Vagheesh Narasimhan, and Niraj Rai, who established a new ancient DNA laboratory at the Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences in Lucknow, India, and led the preparation of the samples, screened 61 skeletal samples from a site in Rakhigarhi, the largest city of the IVC. A single sample showed promise: it contained a very small amount of authentic ancient DNA. The team made over 100 attempts to sequence the sample. Reich says: “While each of the individual datasets did not produce enough DNA, pooling them resulted in sufficient genetic data to learn about population history.”

There were many theories about the genetic origins of the people of the IVC. “They could resemble Southeast Asian hunter-gatherers or they could resemble Iranians, or they could even resemble Steppe pastoralists–all were plausible prior to the ancient DNA findings,” he says.

The individual sequenced here fits with a set of 11 individuals from sites across Iran and Central Asia known to be in cultural contact with the IVC, discovered in a manuscript being published simultaneously (also led by Reich and Narasimhan) in the journal Science. Those individuals were genetic outliers among the people at the sites in which they were found. They represent a unique mixture of ancestry related to ancient Iranians and ancestry related to Southeast Asian hunter-gatherers. Their genetic similarity to the Rakhigarhi individual makes it likely that these were migrants from the IVC.

It’s a mix of ancestry that is also present in modern South Asians, leading the researchers to believe that people from the IVC like the Rakhigarhi individuals were the single largest source population for the modern-day people of India. “Ancestry like that in the IVC individuals is the primary ancestry source in South Asia today,” says Reich. “This finding ties people in South Asia today directly to the Indus Valley Civilization.”

The findings also offer a surprising insight into how agriculture reached South Asia. A mainstream view in archaeology has been that people from the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East–home to the earliest evidence of farming–spread across the Iranian plateau and from there into South Asia, bringing with them a new and transformative economic system.

Genetic studies to date seemed to add weight to this theory by showing that Iranian-related ancestry was the single biggest contributor to the ancestry in South Asians.

But this new study shows that the lineage of Iranian-related ancestry in modern South Asians split from ancient Iranian farmers, herders, and hunter-gatherers before they separated from each other–that is, even before the invention of farming in the Fertile Crescent. Thus, farming was either reinvented locally in South Asia or reached it through the cultural transmission of ideas rather than through substantial movement of western Iranian farmers.

For Reich, Shinde, and their team, these findings are just the beginning. “The Harappans built a complex and cosmopolitan ancient civilization, and there was undoubtedly variation in it that we cannot detect by analyzing a single individual,” Shinde says. “The insights that emerge from just this single individual demonstrate the enormous promise of ancient DNA studies of South Asia. They make it clear that future studies of much larger numbers of individuals from a variety of archaeological sites and locations have the potential to transform our understanding of the deep history of the subcontinent.”

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Map depicting the geographical span of the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC), showing the location of Rakhigarhi (blue), other significant IVC sites (red), and sites to the north and west from other archaeological cultures (other colors). The yellow labels indicate two sites where a minority of buried individuals yielded ancient DNA matched that of the Rakhigarhi individuals. Vasant Shinde / Deccan College Post Graduate and Research Institute

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Photograph of the skeleton analyzed in this study, shown associated with typical Indus Valley Civilization grave goods and illustrating the typical North-South orientation of IVC burials. Vasant Shinde / Deccan College Post Graduate and Research Institute

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Photograph of a red slipped ware globular pot placed near the head of the skeleton that yielded ancient DNA. There are lines as well as indentations on the upper right side, just below the rim. The indentations on the body of the pot could be examples of ancient graffiti and/or “Indus script”. Vasant Shinde / Deccan College Post Graduate and Research Institute

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Article Source: Cell Press news release

*“An Ancient Harappan Genome Lacks Ancestry from Steppe Pastoralists or Iranian Farmers” https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(19)30967-5

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