MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY—An international research team, coordinated by the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPI-SHH) and the Eurasia Department of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) in Berlin, is the first to carry out systematic genetic investigations in the Caucasus region. The study, published in Nature Communications, is based on analyses of genome-wide data from 45 individuals in the steppe and mountainous areas of the North Caucasus. The skeletal remains, which are between 6,500 and 3,500 years old, show that the groups living throughout the Caucasus region were genetically similar, despite the harsh mountain terrain, but that there was a sharp genetic boundary to the adjacent steppe areas in the north.
The Caucasus, an area that today includes parts of Russia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Iran and Turkey, is a crucial intersection for the history of Europe, both genetically and culturally. Today it is one of the regions of the world with the highest linguistic diversity, and in the past, populations from the Caucasus were instrumental in shaping the genetic components of today’s Europeans. During the Bronze Age, important technological innovations, developed in the Caucasus and beyond, were transported to Europe through this region, such as the first highly effective metal weapons and the wheel and wagon.
“We assume that in the wake of the Neolithic period, sometime before 5,000 BC when a more sedentary lifestyle with domesticated animals and plants was established, populations from the southern Caucasus spread over the mountains to the north and there met with nomadic populations from the Eurasian steppe,” says Dr. Wolfgang Haak, group leader for molecular anthropology at the MPI-SHH and leader of the study. “The genetic boundary corresponds in principle to the ecological and geographical regions: the mountains and the steppe. Today, on the other hand, the Caucasus mountains themselves are more of a barrier to gene flow.”
Over the centuries, an interaction zone was formed, where the traditions of the Mesopotamian civilization and those of the Caucasus met with the cultures of the steppe. This intertwining is evident in the cultural exchange and transfer of technological and social innovations, as well as the occasional exchange of genes, which the study shows also took place between groups of quite distinct genetic backgrounds.
Cultural contact zone, genetic border region
The skeletal remains studied come from different Bronze Age cultures. The Maykop culture in particular, based on its spectacular grave goods, which had close parallels in the south, was long regarded as a population that had migrated to the North Caucasus from Mesopotamia.
The current paleogenetic study paints a more nuanced picture of mobility during the Bronze Age. People with a distinct southern Caucasus ancestry were already north of the mountain ridges by the 5th millennium BC. It is highly likely that these groups formed the basis for the local Early Bronze Age Maykop culture of the 4th millennium BC. Intriguingly, the Maykop individuals tested are genetically distinct from the groups in the adjacent steppes to the north.
“The genetic results do not support scenarios of large-scale migrations from the south during the Maykop period, or even from the northwest, as was postulated by some archaeologists. These findings have major implications for our understanding of the local development of North Caucasus cultures in the 4th millennium BC,” explains Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Svend Hansen, Director of the DAI’s Eurasia-Department.
By the 3rd millennium BC, pastoralist groups from the steppe were bringing about a fundamental change in the population of Europe. The current study confirms parallel changes in the Caucasus along the southern border of the steppe zone. “During the 3rd and 2nd millennium BC, however, the people living in the Northern Caucasus all shared a similar genetic makeup even though they can be recognized (archaeologically) as different cultural groups,” says Sabine Reinhold, co-director of the archaeological team. “Individuals belonging to Yamnaya or Catacomb cultural complexes, according to archaeological analyses of their graves, are genetically indistinguishable from individuals from the North Caucasian culture in the foothills and in the mountains. Local or global cultural attributions were apparently more important than common biological roots.”
Subtle gene flow from the west contributed to the formation of early Yamnaya groups
The massive population shifts in the 3rd millennium BC, in connection with the expansion of the groups from the steppe who were part of what is known as the Yamnaya culture, have long been associated with the transfer of significant technological innovations from Mesopotamia to Europe. Recent studies at the DAI’s Eurasia department on the spread of early wagons or metal weapons have shown, however, that an intensive exchange between Europe, the Caucasus and Mesopotamia began much earlier. However, can evidence of these technological exchanges also be provided by the genetic interactions revealed in the current study? And if so, in which direction do they point?
The genomes of the Yamnaya individuals from the steppe bordering the Caucasus indeed show subtle genetic traces that are also characteristic of the neighboring farming populations of south-eastern Europe. Detailed analysis now shows that this subtle gene flow cannot be linked to the Maykop population, but must have come from the west.
“These are exciting and surprising findings, which highlight the complexity of the processes that lead to the formation of Bronze Age steppe pastoralist,” says Chuan-Chao Wang, population geneticist postdoc at the MPI-SHH and first author of the study, now professor at Xiamen University in China.
Hansen adds, “These subtle genetic traces from the west are indeed remarkable and suggest contact between people in the steppes and western groups, such as the Globular Amphora culture, between the 4th and the 3rd millennium BC.”
It appears that the world of the 4th millennium BC was well-connected long before the major expansion of steppe pastoralist and related groups. In this wide-ranging network of contacts, people not only spread and exchanged know-how and technological innovations, but occasionally also exchanged genes, and not only in one direction.
Indeed, individuals from the north-eastern dry steppes of the North Caucasus region show genetic traces that hint at a deep and far-reaching connection to people in Siberia, Northeast Asia, and the Americas. “This shows that Eurasia was the site of many exciting chapters in human prehistory that are still shrouded in mystery. Our aim is to investigate these in close collaboration with archaeologists and anthropologists,” says Prof. Johannes Krause, Director of the MPI Archaeogenetics Department and co-leader of the study.
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This is a of the Maykop culture from the burial mound Marinskaya 5. A. Kantorovich
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Ancient city of Azerbaijan – Derbent occupies the narrow gateway between the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus Mountains connecting the Eurasian steppes to the north and the Iranian Plateau to the south. Elnur Neciyev, Wikimedia Commons
AKSON RUSSIAN SCIENCE COMMUNICATION ASSOCIATION—Scientists from Russia and Uzbekistan found a unified fortification system on the northern border of ancient Bactria. This country existed in the 3rd century BC. The fortress found blocked the border and protected the oases of Bactria from nomadic raids. During the excavations, scientists revealed the fortress citadel, drew up a detailed architectural plan and collected rich archaeological material providing evidence for the construction, life, and the death of the fortress as a result of the assault.
In the 4th century BC, a significant part of the Central Asia territory belonged to Bactria, which, as a separate satrapy, was part of the Achaemenid Empire. In 329 BC Bactria became part of the Alexandrian empire and after his death joined the kingdom of Seleucid: the largest Hellenistic state in the East, created by the commander Alexander Seleucius I Nicator and his son Antiochus I Soter. Gradually, the state became weakened by numerous military campaigns and the struggle for power. As a result, once flourishing Bactria ceased to exist in the 2nd century BC when Iranian-speaking nomads from the northern territories, the Saki and Yuadzhi, invaded the country.
Recently, Russian scientists completed excavations in this area and determined the fortress construction time: about 95-90 years of the 3rd century BC, the time of the Antiochus I reign and the very beginning of the formation of the Seleucid state. The fortress was inhabited for about 150 years.
The fortress consisted of a diamond-shaped main quadrangle, a triangular citadel (phylacterion) surrounded by powerful double walls with an internal gallery about nine meters wide, and extension walls, which were fortified with 13 rectangular bastions-towers, three of which were also outboards. Outside the fortress there was a marketplace where local residents brought goods needed by the garrison soldiers.
The archaeologists recorded the location of each item using a total station or GPS, and then created a single plan tied to the terrain. As a result, the scientists managed to establish where the marketplace was, the road to the entrance to the fortress, and determined the location of the assault: there were more than 200 arrowheads, combat darts and troops. It is curious that the proposed battlefield is located to the east of the fortress, which suggests a possible environment or the breakthrough of the enemy through a system of border fortifications.
The warriors who defended Uzundar wore armor: in the inside-wall room of the south-western fortified wall, archaeologists discovered armor-clad plates and two right-handed iron heads from helmets. So far, scientists can not exactly determine what type of helmets these patches represented—a pseudoattical or Melos group, so it is still possible that these are the same helmets that the Alexandrian forces wore during the Antiochus I Soter period.
“This findings are sensational: direct analogies are known from the Takhti-Sanga temple, but there they were bronze, and we found iron fragments in Uzundar. To date, there are only a few specimens and sculptures with which to compare these cheeks and determine their type. We also found fastening details, which provide important information on manufacturing technology, according to tradition, but to answer these questions requires lengthy research,” says Nigora Dvurechenskaya, researcher at the Department of Classical Archaeology, Head of the Bactrian detachment of the Central Asian Archaeological Expedition.
In addition to weapons, archaeologists have collected a large number of ceramics, as well as a rich numismatic collection: about 200 coins of very good preservation identified as coins of Antiochus I and all the rulers of the Greco-Bactrian kingdom from Diodot to Heliocles of very different denominations: from silver drachmas to copper mites. Such a variety proves that Bactria at the very beginning of the Seleucid kingdom formation was part of a developed monetary circulation system. Thus, the materials of Uzundara allow us o study and reconstruct all spheres of life of the Seleucid and Greco-Bactrian fortresses.
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View of the Uzundara citadel from above. Nigora Dvurechenskaya et al.
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PLOS—Ancient cremated human remains, despite being deformed, still retain sexually diagnostic physical features, according to a study released January 30, 2019 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Claudio Cavazzuti of Durham University, UK and colleagues. The authors provide a statistical approach for identifying traits that distinguish male and female remains within a population.
The ability to determine the sex of ancient human remains is essential for archaeologists tracking demographic data and cultural practices across civilizations. Large burial assortments can provide representative samples of ancient populations, but the process of cremation, which has been popular for millennia, warps and fragments bone, altering skeletal measurements that archaeologists might otherwise use to sex an individual. Few studies have attempted to identify skeletal traits that are sexually diagnostic after cremation. Thus, archaeologists lack a reliable method to sex cremated remains in the absence of external clues such as gendered grave goods.
Cavazzuti and colleagues aimed to resolve this deficiency by measuring 24 skeletal traits across 124 cremated individuals with clearly engendered grave goods (such as weapons for men and spindle whorls for women) from five Italian necropolises dating between the 12th and 6th centuries BCE. Assuming that gender largely correlates to sex, the authors statistically compared sex to variation in anatomical traits. Of the 24 traits examined, eight predicted sex with an accuracy of 80% or more, a reliability score similar to those obtained for uncremated ancient remains.
The authors conclude that anatomical sex determination is possible in cremated remains, though they caution that the measurements identified in this study differ from those used to sex modern cremated remains, indicating that sexually diagnostic traits differ between populations across time and space. Nonetheless, they suggest that, for ancient populations with large sample sizes, the statistical methods used in this study may be able to differentiate male and female remains.
Cavazzuti adds: “This is a new method for supporting the sex determination of human cremated remains in antiquity. Easy, replicable, reliable.”
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Bone fragments used for diagnostic study. Claudio Cavazzuti, 2018
UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD—Oxford University scientists have played a key role in new research identifying the earliest evidence of some of the first known humans – Denisovans and Neanderthals, in Southern Siberia.
Professor Tom Higham and his team at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit at the University of Oxford worked in collaboration with a multi-disciplinary team from the UK, Russia, Australia, Canada and Germany, on the detailed investigation over the course of five years, to date the archaeological site of Denisova cave. Situated in the foothills of Siberia’s Altai Mountains, it is the only site in the world known to have been occupied by both archaic human groups (hominins) at various times.
The two new studies published in Nature, now put a timeline on when Neanderthals and their enigmatic cousins, the Denisovans, were present at the site and the environmental conditions they faced before going extinct.
Denisova cave first came to worldwide attention in 2010, with the publication of the genome obtained from the fingerbone of a girl belonging to a group of humans not previously identified in the palaeoanthropological record; the Denisovans. Further revelations followed on the genetic history of Denisovans and Altai Neanderthals, based on analysis of the few and fragmentary hominin remains. Last year, a bone fragment discovered by researchers at Oxford’s Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art and the University of Manchester, yielded the genome of the daughter of Neanderthal and Denisovan parents–the first direct evidence of interbreeding between two archaic hominin groups. But reliable dates for the hominin fossils recovered from the cave have remained elusive, as have dates for the DNA, artifacts, and animal and plant remains retrieved from the sediments.
Excavations for the past 40 years led by Professors Anatoly Derevianko and Michael Shunkov from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography (Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences) in Novosibirsk, revealed the longest archaeological sequence of Siberia.
In the new research, the Oxford team obtained fifty radiocarbon ages from bone, tooth and charcoal fragments recovered from the upper layers of the site, as part of the ERC funded ‘PalaeoChron’ project. In addition to these, more than 100 optical ages were obtained for the cave sediments, most of which are too old for radiocarbon dating, by researchers at the University of Wollongong in Australia. A minimum age for the bone fragment of mixed Neanderthal/Denisovan ancestry was also obtained by uranium-series dating by another Australian team. “This is the first time we are able to confidently assign an age to all archaeological sequence of the cave and its contents” said Professor Higham.
To determine the most probable ages of the archaic hominin fossils, a novel Bayesian model was developed by the Oxford team that combined several of these dates with information on the stratigraphy of the deposits and genetic ages for the Denisovan and Neanderthal fossils relative to each other–the latter based on the number of substitutions in the mitochondrial DNA sequences, which were analysed by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.
The improved age estimates for the hominin fossils obtained using the novel Bayesian age model, “incorporates all of the dating evidence available for these small and isolated fossils, which can sometimes be displaced after deposition in a cave sequence” said Dr Katerina Douka (Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Germany), lead author of the study that reports the new radiocarbon dates and the human fossils age estimates.
“This new chronology for Denisova Cave provides a timeline for the wealth of data generated by our Russian colleagues on the archaeological and environmental history of the cave over the past three glacial-interglacial cycles” said lead author of the optical dating study, Professor Zenobia Jacobs of the University of Wollongong in Australia.
The new studies show that the cave was occupied by Denisovans from at least 200,000 years ago, with stone tools in the deepest deposits suggesting human occupation may have begun as early as 300,000 years ago. Neanderthals visited the site between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago, with “Denny”, the girl of mixed ancestry, revealing that the two groups of hominins met and interbred around 100,000 years ago.
Most of the evidence for Neanderthals at Denisova Cave falls within the last interglacial period around 120,000 years ago, when the climate was relatively warm, whereas Denisovans survived through much colder periods, too, before disappearing around 50,000 years ago.
Modern humans were present in other parts of Asia by this time, but the nature of any encounters between them and Denisovans remains open to speculation in the absence of any fossil or genetic traces of modern humans at the site.
The Oxford team also identified the earliest evidence thus far in northern Eurasia for the appearance of bone points and pendants made of animal teeth that are usually associated with modern humans and signal the start of the Upper Palaeolithic. These date to between 43,000 and 49,000 years ago.
So, ‘while these new studies have lifted the veil on some of the mysteries of Denisova Cave, other intriguing questions remain to be answered by further research and future discoveries’ said Professor Richard ‘Bert’ Roberts, a co-author on the two papers.
Professor Higham commented that ‘it is an open question as to whether Denisovans or modern humans made these personal ornaments found in the cave. We are hoping that in due course the application of sediment DNA analysis might enable us to identify the makers of these items, which are often associated with symbolic and more complex behavior in the archaeological record’.
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The Denisova Cave camp and surrounds (Photo credit/copyright: Tom Higham, University of Oxford).
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Entrance to Denisova Cave. (Photo credit/copyright: Tom Higham, University of Oxford).
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Natalia Belousova (Russian Academy of Sciences) and Tom Higham taking samples from the Main Chamber at Denisova Cave. (photo credit and copyright Sergey Zelinski, Russian Academy of Sciences).
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Tom Higham and Katerina Douka at the Altai site of Chagyrskaya Cave. (photo courtesy and copyright Sergey Zelinski, Russian Academy of Sciences).
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Accelerator mass spectrometer at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, University of Oxford, where the samples were dated. (photo courtesy Oxford University Press Office).
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Bone points and pierced teeth from the early Upper Paleolithic layers of Denisova Cave sampled for radiocarbon dating. (photo credit/copyright Katerina Douka).
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UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD—A much debated ancient human skull from Mongolia has been dated and genetically analyzed, showing that it is the earliest modern human yet found in the region, according to new research from the University of Oxford. Radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis have revealed that the only Pleistocene hominin fossil discovered in Mongolia, initially called Mongolanthropus, is in reality a modern human who lived approximately 34 – 35 thousand years ago.
The skullcap, found in the Salkhit Valley northeast Mongolia is, to date, the only Pleistocene hominin fossil found in the country.
The skullcap is mostly complete and includes the brow ridges and nasal bones. The presence of archaic or ancient features have led in the past to the specimen being linked with uncharacterized archaic hominin species, such as Homo erectus and Neanderthals. Previous research suggested ages for the specimen ranging from the Early Middle Pleistocene to the terminal Late Pleistocene.
The Oxford team re-dated the specimen to 34,950 – 33,900 years ago. This is around 8,000 years older than the initial radiocarbon dates obtained on the same specimen.
To make this discovery, the Oxford team employed a new optimized technique for radiocarbon dating of heavily contaminated bones. This method relies on extracting just one of the amino acids from the collagen present in the bone. The amino acid hydroxyproline (HYP), which accounts for 13% of the carbon in mammalian collagen, was targeted by the researchers. Dating this amino acid allows for the drastic improvement in the removal of modern contaminants from the specimens.
The new and reliable radiocarbon date obtained for the specimen shows that this individual dates to the same period as the Early Upper Palaeolithic stone tool industry in Mongolia, which is usually associated with modern humans. The age is later than the earliest evidence for anatomically modern humans in greater Eurasia, which could be in excess of 100,000 years in China according to some researchers.
This new result also suggests that there was still a significant amount of remaining contamination in the sample during the original radiocarbon measurements. Additional analyses performed in collaboration with scientists at the University of Pisa (Italy) confirmed that the sample was heavily contaminated by the resin that had been used to cast the specimen after its discovery.
“The research we have conducted shows again the great benefits of developing improved chemical methods for dating prehistoric material that has been contaminated, either in the site after burial, or in the museum or laboratory for conservation purposes.” said Dr Thibaut Devièse first author on the new paper and leading the method developments in compound specific analysis at the University of Oxford. “Robust sample pretreatment is crucial in order to build reliable chronologies in archaeology.”
DNA analyses were also performed on the hominin bones by Professor Svante Pääbo’s team at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Diyendo Massiliani and colleagues reconstructed the complete mitochondrial genome of the specimen. It falls within a group of modern human mtDNAs (haplogroup N) that is widespread in Eurasia today, confirming the view of some researchers that the cranium is indeed a modern human. Further nuclear DNA work is underway to shed further light on the genetics of the cranium.
‘This enigmatic cranium has puzzled researchers for some time”, said Professor Tom Higham, who leads the PalaeoChron research group at the University of Oxford. “A combination of cutting edge science, including radiocarbon dating and genetics, has now shown that this is the remains of a modern human, and the results fit perfectly within the archaeological record of Mongolia which link moderns to the Early Upper Palaeolithic industry in this part of the world.’
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MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY—Investigations into what it means to be human have often focused on attempts to uncover the earliest material traces of ‘art’, ‘language’, or technological ‘complexity’. More recently, however, scholars have begun to argue that more attention should be paid to the ecological uniqueness of our species. A new study, published in Archaeological Research in Asia, reviews the palaeoecological information associated with hominin dispersals into Southeast Asia and Oceania throughout the Pleistocene (1.25 Ma to 12 ka). Our species’ ability to specialize in the exploitation of diverse and ‘extreme’ settings in this part of the world stands in stark contrast to the ecological adaptations of other hominin taxa, and reaffirms the utility of exploring the environmental adaptations of Homo sapiens as an avenue for understanding what it means to be human.
The paper, published by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History focuses on hominin movements across the supposed ‘Movius Line’ a boundary previously argued to separate populations with different cultural and cognitive capacities. While such divisions and assumptions are now clearly outdated, the authors argue that focus on this part of the world may, instead, be used to study the different patterns of colonization of diverse tropical and maritime habitats by different members of our ancestral line. As Noel Amano, co-author on the study states, ‘analysis of biogeochemical records, animal assemblages, and fossil plant records associated with hominin arrival can be used to reconstruct the degree to which novel or specialized adaptations were required at a given place and time’.
Southeast Asia offers a particularly exciting region in this regard as such records can be linked to a variety of hominins throughout the Pleistocene, including Homo erectus, Homo floresiensis(or ‘the Hobbit’), and Homo sapiens. As Patrick Roberts, lead author of the study states the accumulated evidence shows, ‘While earlier members of our genus appear to have followed riverine and lacustrine corridors, Homo sapiens specialized in adaptations to tropical rainforests, faunally depauperate island settings, montane environments, and deep-water marine habitats.’ The authors hope that, in the future, the growth of new methods and records for determining past hominin ecologies will enable similar comparisons to be undertaken in different parts of the world, further testing the unique capacities of our species during its global expansion.
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Lowland Palawan, the Philippines — Southeast Asia offers a particularly exciting region in regard to early hominin movements across the supposed “Movius Line”, a boundary previously argued to separate populations. Records from the region can be linked to a variety of hominins throughout the Pleistocene, including Homo erectus, Homo floresiensis (or “the Hobbit”), and Homo sapiens. Noel Amano
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UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON—Neanderthals have been imagined as the inferior cousins of modern humans, but a new study by archaeologists at UCL reveals for the first time that they produced weaponry advanced enough to kill at a distance.
The study, published in Scientific Reports, examined the performance of replicas of the 300,000 year old Schöningen spears – the oldest weapons reported in archaeological records – to identify whether javelin throwers could use them to hit a target at distance.
Dr Annemieke Milks (UCL Institute of Archaeology), who led the study, said: “This study is important because it adds to a growing body of evidence that Neanderthals were technologically savvy and had the ability to hunt big game through a variety of hunting strategies, not just risky close encounters. It contributes to revised views of Neanderthals as our clever and capable cousins.”
The research shows that the wooden spears would have enabled Neanderthals to use them as weapons and kill at distance. It is a significant finding given that previous studies considered Neanderthals could only hunt and kill their prey at close range.
The Schöningen spears are a set of ten wooden throwing spears from the Palaeolithic Age that were excavated between 1994 and 1999 in an open-cast lignite mine in Schöningen, Germany, together with approximately 16,000 animal bones.
The Schöningen spears represent the oldest completely preserved hunting weapons of prehistoric Europe so far discovered. Besides Schöningen, a spear fragment from Clacton-on-Sea, England dating from 400,000 years ago can be found at the Natural History Museum, London.
The study was conducted with six javelin athletes who were recruited to test whether the spears could be used to hit a target at a distance. Javelin athletes were chosen for the study because they had the skill to throw at high velocity, matching the capability of a Neanderthal hunter.
Owen O’Donnell, an alumnus of UCL Institute of Archaeology, made the spear replicas by hand using metal tools. They were crafted from Norwegian spruce trees grown in Kent, UK. The surface was manipulated at the final stage with stone tools, creating a surface that accurately replicated that of a Pleistocene wooden spear. Two replicas were used, weighing 760g and 800g, which conform to ethnographic records of wooden spears.
The javelin athletes demonstrated that the target could be hit at up to 20 meters, and with significant impact which would translate into a kill against prey. This is double the distance that scientists previously thought the spears could be thrown, demonstrating that Neanderthals had the technological capabilities to hunt at a distance as well as at close range.
The weight of the Schöningen spears previously led scientists to believe that they would struggle to travel at significant speed. However, the study shows that the balance of weight and the speed at which the athletes could throw them produces enough kinetic energy to hit and kill a target.
Dr Matt Pope (UCL Institute of Archaeology), co-author on the paper, said: “The emergence of weaponry – technology designed to kill – is a critical but poorly established threshold in human evolution.
“We have forever relied on tools and have extended our capabilities through technical innovation. Understanding when we first developed the capabilities to kill at distance is therefore a dark, but important moment in our story.”
Dr Milks concluded: “Our study shows that distance hunting was likely within the repertoire of hunting strategies of Neanderthals, and that behavioral flexibility closely mirrors that of our own species. This is yet further evidence narrowing the gap between Neanderthals and modern humans.”
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A Schoningen spear in situ. P. Pfarr NLD
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This is a replica spear produced by Owen O’Donnell, an alumnus of UCL Institute of Archaeology. Annemieke Milks (UCL)
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The spear fragment from Clacton-on-Sea, England dating from 400,000 years ago. Annemieke Milks (UCL)
*Annemieke Milks, David Parker & Matt Pope. ‘External ballistics of Pleistocene hand-thrown spears: experimental performance data and implications for human evolution’ is published in Scientific Reports on Friday 25 January 2019.
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UNIVERSITY OF SEVILLE—A new study of Bajondillo Cave (Málaga) by a team of researchers based in Spain, Japan and the UK, coordinated from the Universidad de Sevilla, reveals that modern humans replaced Neanderthals at this site approximately 44,000 years ago. The research, to be published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, shows that the replacement of Neanderthals by modern humans in southern Iberia began early, rather than late, in comparison to the rest of Western Europe.
Western Europe is a key area for understanding the timing of the replacement of Neanderthals by early modern humans (AMH). Typically in Western Europe, late Neanderthals are associated with stone tools belonging to Mousterian industries (named after the Neanderthal site of Le Moustier in France), while the earliest modern humans are associated with succeeding Aurignacian industries (named after the French site of Aurignac).
The final replacement of Neanderthals by AMH in western Europe is usually dated to around 39,000 years ago. However, it’s claimed that the southern Iberian region documents the late survival of the Mousterian, and therefore Neanderthals, to about 32,000 years ago, with no evidence for the early Aurignacian found elsewhere in Europe.
This new dating study of Bajondillo Cave instead calibrates the replacement of Mousterian industries by Aurignacian ones there to between ~45-43,000 years ago, raising questions about the late survival of Neanderthals in southern Iberia. Further research is necessary to determine whether the new Bajondillo dating indicates an earlier replacement of Neanderthals across the whole of southern Iberia, or in fact, an altogether more complex scenario of co-existence over several millennia.
Co-author Jimenez-Espejo explains that the takeover by modern humans at the site at Bajondillo was not associated with a Heinrich (severe cooling) event. “Heinrich events represent the harshest and most variable climate conditions in Western Europe at the millennial scale, but at least in this Mediterranean coastal region, they did not control the Mousterian to Aurignacian transition.”
This research also highlights coastal corridors as the favored routes for early AMH.
Professor Chris Stringer, Research Leader at the Natural History Museum and co-author of the study, said ‘Finding such an early Aurignacian from a cave so close to the sea adds to speculation that the Mediterranean coast could have been used by modern humans dispersing into Europe. This dating also fits with growing evidence that Homo sapiens had already spread rapidly across much of Eurasia more than 40,000 years ago’.
Considering the importance of coastal regions, co-author Arturo Morales-Muñiz suggested that the Bajondillo evidence also revives the idea that the Strait of Gibraltar could have been a potential dispersal route for early modern humans out of Africa.
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Bajondillo Cave and Malága Bay (Spain) at the end of the 1950s. Foreground images show Neanderthal (La Chapelle-aux-Saints, France, left) and early Modern Human (from Abri Cro-Magnon, France, right) skulls. Left lithic tool corresponds to Mousterian technology, and right Aurignacian, both recovered at Bajondillo Cave. University of Seville
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These are selected archaeological sites in Western Europe with Aurignacian industries actually or potentially older than 42,000 years, including Bajondillo Cave (Spain). Orange arrows indicate potential expansion routes across Europe at low sea level. Images on the left show a Neanderthal skull (La Chapelle-aux-Saints, France) and a Mousterian tool recovered at Bajondillo Cave. On the right the images show a Modern Human skull (Abri-Cro-Magnon, France) and an Aurignacian tool recovered at Bajondillo Cave. University of Seville
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UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON—Skin color is one of the most visible and variable traits among humans and scientists have always been curious about how this variation evolved. Now, a study* of diverse Latin American populations led by UCL geneticists has identified new genetic variations associated with skin color.
The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, found that the variation of light skin among Eurasian people evolved independently from different genetic backgrounds.
The genetic study analyzed pigmentation in over 6,000 Latin Americans, who have a mix of Native American, European and African ancestry.
It is well established that Native Americans are genetically closely related to East Asians, the initial settlement of the Americas occurring some 15-20,000 years ago, through migration from Eastern Siberia into North America. As a consequence, genetic variations in Native Americans are often shared with East Asians.
This study identifies five new associated regions involving skin, eye and hair color. Genes affecting skin color in Europeans have been extensively studied, but here researchers identified an important variation in the gene MFSD12 seen uniquely in East Asians and Native Americans.
They show it was under natural selection in East Asians after they split from Europeans around 40,000 years ago, and was then carried over to America by ancient migrations of Native Americans. It is the first time this gene has been linked to skin color in Native Americans and East Asians.
Dr Kaustubh Adhikari (UCL Genetics Institute), said: “Our work demonstrates that lighter skin color evolved independently in Europe and East Asia. We also show that this gene was under strong natural selection in East Asia, possibly as adaptation to changes in sunlight levels and ultraviolet radiation.”
Human physical diversity has fascinated biologists for centuries and despite the discovery of hundreds of genes related to such variation, there is still a lot to be understood in order to gain a fuller picture. Scientists have been calling for more diversity in genetics research to ensure that everyone benefits from the medical outcomes of research.
Only recently scientists published the first major study on the genes linked to skin tone diversity in Africa. Latin Americans are similarly underrepresented in genetics research, in particular in pigmentation research.
“It is commonly thought that variation in pigmentation, such as skin color, in Latin Americans primarily arises due to people’s varying degree of European or African ancestry. But our new study shows that there is variation inherited from their Native ancestors as well”, said Dr Javier Mendoza-Revilla (UCL Genetics Institute).
Professor Desmond Tobin (Charles Institute of Dermatology, University College Dublin) explained: “The pigment melanin determines our hair, skin and eye color. This gene MFSD12 influences how melanin is produced and stored in the skin, thus affecting our skin color. A darker skin produces more melanin, which can help prevent UV light from damaging our DNA and so offers protection against skin cancer.”
“Interestingly, this gene also turned up in the skin color study in Africans, but the variants were entirely different than those we observe in our study, highlighting the huge genetic diversity in humans and the need to diversify our study populations”, emphasized Professor Andres Ruiz-Linares (UCL Genetics Institute), who led the CANDELA project spanning participants from five countries: Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Mexico and Peru.
In addition to skin tone variation, the scientists also noted a wide variation in eye color among Latin Americans. “Just like skin color, early research on eye color was Europe-centric, and mostly focused on the distinction between blue vs. brown eyes. But we show that eye color is a broad continuum, and by studying the subtler variation within brown to black, we found two new genes linked to it”, said Dr Anood Sohail (University of Cambridge).
The study’s findings help explain the variation of skin, hair and eye color of Latin Americans, shed light on human evolution, and inform an understanding of the genetic risk factors for conditions such as skin cancer.
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Study sheds new light on the evolution of skin color. Image from Wikimedia Commons
*Kaustubh Adhikari, Javier Mendoza-Revilla, Anood Sohail, et.al. ‘A GWAS in Latin Americans highlights the convergent evolution of lighter skin pigmentation in Eurasia’ will be published in Nature on Monday 21st January
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DARTMOUTH COLLEGE—The fossil site of Malapa in the Cradle of Humankind, South Africa, discovered by Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in August 2008, has been one of the most productive sites of the 21st century for fossils of early human ancestors or hominins. A new hominin species, Australopithecus sediba (Au. sediba), was named by Berger and his colleagues, following the discovery of two partial skeletons just under two million years old, a juvenile male individual– Malapa Hominin 1 (MH1)– and an adult female, Malapa Hominin 2 (MH2). The skeletons are under the custodianship of the University of the Witwatersrand, where they are being kept. Each partial skeleton is more complete than the famous “Lucy,” an Australopithecus afarensis or early hominin species found in 1974 in Ethiopia. Now, 10 years later after the discovery of Malapa, full descriptions of the hominin fossil material, as well as raw measurement data and surface scans of the fossils, available at Morphosource.org, are published in a special issue of the open access journal, PaleoAnthropology.
“The anatomies we are seeing in Australopithecus sediba are forcing us to reassess the pathway by which we became human,” explained co-editor Jeremy DeSilva, an associate professor of anthropology at Dartmouth, and co-author of four of the papers, including ones on the lower limb and computer animation of the walking mechanics.
The special issue is comprised of nine separate papers analyzing: the skull; vertebral column and thorax; pelvis; upper limb: shoulder, arm and forearm; hand; and lower limb fossils of Au. sediba; along with descriptions of body size and proportions; and walking mechanics, including a 3D computer animation of Au. sediba walking. The papers are co-authored by leading anthropologists, who are members of the main group of researchers that Berger had assembled for the study of the Malapa material. The research draws on approximately 135 specimens from MH1, MH2 and what may be a third individual, all of which were uncovered between 2008 and 2016.
The researchers find that Au. sediba is in fact a unique species, refuting earlier critics who questioned its validity as a species. Au. sediba is distinct from both Australopithecus africanus, with which it shares a close geographic proximity, and from early members of the genus Homo (e.g., Homo habilis) in both East and South Africa; yet, it also shares features with both groups, suggesting a close evolutionary relationship.
“Our findings challenge a traditional, linear view of evolution. It was once thought that a fossil species a million years younger than Lucy would surely look more human-like. For some anatomies of Australopithecus sediba, like the knee, that is true. But, for others, like the foot, it is not. Instead, what we’re witnessing here are parallel lineages, illustrating how different hominin experiments were unfolding early in our complex evolutionary history,” explained DeSilva.
These new research papers address critiques of Au. sediba from other colleagues while correcting some initial observations and testing new ideas regarding this extraordinary collection. For example, other researchers hypothesized that this was more than one species due to the differences in the size and shape of the vertebrae. “The differences in these vertebrae can simply be attributed to their developmental age differences: the juvenile individual’s vertebrae have not yet completed growth, whereas the adult’s vertebra growth is complete,” explained co-editor Scott A. Williams, an associate professor of anthropology in the Center for the Study of Human Origins at New York University, and co-author of two of the papers, including the one on the vertebral column.
The special issue also finds that Au. sediba was well adapted to terrestrial bipedalism or walking on just two feet but also spent significant time climbing in trees, perhaps for foraging and protection from predators.
This larger picture sheds light on the lifeways of Au. sediba and also (whether directly or indirectly) on a major transition in hominin evolution, that of the largely ape-like species included broadly in the genus Australopithecus to the earliest members of our own genus, Homo.
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The cranium of Malapa hominid 1 (MH1) from South Africa, named “Karabo”. The combined fossil remains of this juvenile male is designated as the holotype for Australopithecus sediba. Photo by Brett Eloff. Courtesy Profberger and Wits University, Wikimedia Commons
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Lee Berger with the partial skeleton of Australopithecus sediba. Photo by Brett Eloff, courtesy Lee Berger and the University of the Witwatersrand. Lee Berger, Wikimedia Commons
Guest Editors: Scott A. Williams, Jeremy M. DeSilva
Malapa at 10: Introduction to the special issue on Australopithecus sediba (Williams, S.A., DeSilva, J.M., and de Ruiter, D.J.)
The skull of Australopithecus sediba (de Ruiter, D.J., Carlson, K.B., Brophy, J.K., Churchill, S.E., Carlson, K.J., and Berger, L.R.)
The vertebrae, ribs, and sternum of Australopithecus sediba (Williams, S.A., Meyer, M.R., Nalla, S., García-Martínez, D., Nalley, T.K., Eyre, J., Prang, T.C., Bastir, M., Schmid, P., Churchill, S.E., and Berger, L.R.)
The shoulder, arm, and forearm of Australopithecus sediba (Churchill, S.E., Green, D.J., Feuerriegel, E.M., Macias, M.E., Mathews, S., Carlson, K.J., Schmid, P., and Berger, L.R.)
The hand of Australopithecus sediba (Kivell, T.L., Churchill, S.E., Kibii, J.M., Schmid, P., and Berger, L.R.)
The pelvis of Australopithecus sediba (Churchill, S.E., Kibii, J.M., Schmid, P., Reed, N.D., and Berger, L.R.)
The anatomy of the lower limb skeleton of Australopithecus sediba (DeSilva, J.M., Carlson, K.J., Claxton, A., Harcourt-Smith, W.E.H., McNutt, E.J., Sylvester, A.D., Walker, C.S., Zipfel, B., Churchill, S.E., and Berger, L.R.)
Body size and proportions of Australopithecus sediba (Holliday, T.W., Churchill, S.E., Carlson, K.J., DeSilva, J.M., Schmid, P., Walker, C.S., and Berger, L.R.)
Computer animation of the walking mechanics of Australopithecus sediba (Zhang, A.Y. and DeSilva, J.M.)
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CENTER FOR GENOMIC REGULATION—By combining deep learning algorithms and statistical methods, investigators from the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE), the Centro Nacional de Análisis Genómico(CNAG-CRG) of the Centre for Genomic Regulation(CRG) and the Institute of Genomics at the University of Tartu have identified, in the genome of Asiatic individuals, the footprint of a new hominid who cross bred with its ancestors tens of thousands of years ago.
Modern human DNA computational analysis suggests that the extinct species was a hybrid of Neanderthals and Denisovans and cross bred with Out of Africa modern humans in Asia. This finding would explain that the hybrid found this summer in the caves of Denisova-the offspring of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father-, was not an isolated case, but rather was part of a more general introgression process.
The study, published in Nature Communications, uses deep learning for the first time ever to account for human evolution, paving the way for the application of this technology in other questions in biology, genomics and evolution.
Humans had descendants with an species that is unknown to us
One of the ways of distinguishing between two species is that while both of them may cross breed, they do not generally produce fertile descendants. However, this concept is much more complex when extinct species are involved. In fact, the story told by current human DNA blurs the lines of these limits, preserving fragments of hominids from other species, such as the Neanderthals and the Denisovans, who coexisted with modern humans more than 40,000 years ago in Eurasia.
Now, investigators of the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE), the Centro Nacional de Análisis Genómico (CNAG-CRG) of the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), and the University of Tartu have used deep learning algorithms to identify a new and hitherto-unknown ancestor of humans that would have interbred with modern humans tens of thousands of years ago. “About 80,000 years ago, the so-called Out of Africa occurred, when part of the human population, which already consisted of modern humans, abandoned the African continent and migrated to other continents, giving rise to all the current populations”, explained Jaume Bertranpetit, principal investigator at the IBE and head of Department at the UPF. “We know that from that time onwards, modern humans cross bred with Neanderthals in all the continents, except Africa, and with the Denisovans in Oceania and probably in South-East Asia, although the evidence of cross-breeding with a third extinct species had not been confirmed with any certainty”.
Deep learning: deciphering the keys to human evolution in ancient DNA
Hitherto, the existence of the third ancestor was only a theory that would explain the origin of some fragments of the current human genome (part of the team involved in this study had already posed the existence of the extinct hominid in a previous study). However, deep learning has made it possible to make the transition from DNA to the demographics of ancestral populations.
The problem the investigators had to contend with is that the demographic models they have analysed are much more complex than anything else considered to date and there were no statistic tools available to analyse them. Deep learning “is an algorithm that imitates the way in which the nervous system of mammals works, with different artificial neurons that specialize and learn to detect, in data, patterns that are important for performing a given task”, stated Òscar Lao, principal investigator at the CNAG-CRG and an expert in this type of simulations. “We have used this property to get the algorithm to learn to predict human demographics using genomes obtained through hundreds of thousands of simulations. Whenever we run a simulation we are traveling along a possible path in the history of humankind. Of all simulations, deep learning allows us to observe what makes the ancestral puzzle fit together”.
It is the first time that deep learning has been used successfully to explain human history, paving the way for this technology to be applied in other questions in biology, genomics and evolution.
An extinct hominid could explain the history of humankind
The deep learning analysis has revealed that the extinct hominid is probably a descendant of the Neanderthal and Denisovan populations. The discovery of a fossil with these characteristics this summer would seem to endorse the study finding, consolidating the hypothesis of this third species or population that coexisted with modern human beings and mated with them. “Our theory coincides with the hybrid specimen discovered recently in Denisova, although as yet we cannot rule out other possibilities”, said Mayukh Mondal, an investigator of the University of Tartu and former investigator at the IBE.
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Jaume Bertranpetit, researcher at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology, and Oscar Lao, researcher at the Centre for Genomic Regulation, co-led the study. Pilar Rodriguez
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UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN – FACULTY OF HUMANITIES—11,500 years ago in what is now northeast Jordan, people began to live alongside dogs and may also have used them for hunting, a new study from the University of Copenhagen shows. The archaeologists suggest that the introduction of dogs as hunting aids may explain the dramatic increase of hares and other small prey in the archaeological remains at the site.
Dogs were domesticated by humans as early as 14,000 years ago in the Near East, but whether this was accidental or on purpose is so far not clear. New research published in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology by a team of archaeologists from the University of Copenhagen and University College London may suggest that humans valued the tracking and hunting abilities of early dogs more than previously known.
A study of animal bones from the 11,500 year old settlement Shubayqa 6 in northeast Jordan not only suggests that dogs were present in this region at the start of the Neolithic period, but that humans and dogs likely hunted animals together:
“The study of the large assemblage of animal bones from Shubayqa 6 revealed a large proportion of bones with unmistakable signs of having passed through the digestive tract of another animal; these bones are so large that they cannot have been swallowed by humans, but must have been digested by dogs,” explained zooarchaeologist and the study’s lead author Lisa Yeomans.
Lisa Yeomans and her colleagues have been able to show that Shubayqa 6 was occupied year round, which suggests that the dogs were living together with the humans rather than visiting the site when there were no inhabitants:
“The dogs were not kept at the fringes of the settlement, but must have been closely integrated into all aspects of day-to-day life and allowed to freely roam around the settlement, feeding on discarded bones and defecating in and around the site.”
Can new hunting techniques account for the increase in small prey?
When Yeomans and her co-authors sifted through the analyzed data, they also noted a curious increase in the number of hares at the time that dogs appeared at Shubayqa 6. Hares were hunted for their meat, but Shubayqa 6’s inhabitants also used the hare bones to make beads. The team think that it is likely that the appearance of dogs and the increase in hares are related.
“The use of dogs for hunting smaller, fast prey such as hares and foxes, perhaps driving them into enclosures, could provide an explanation that is in line with the evidence we have gathered. The long history of dog use, to hunt both small as well as larger prey, in the region is well known, and it would be strange not to consider hunting aided by dogs as a likely explanation for the sudden abundance of smaller prey in the archaeological record,” said Lisa Yeomans.
“The shift may also be associated with a change in hunting technique from a method, such as netting, that saw an unselective portion of the hare population captured, to a selective method of hunting in which individual animals were targeted. This could have been achieved by dogs.”
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Selection of gazelle bones from Space 3 at Shubayqa 6 displaying evidence for having been in the digestive tract of a carnivore. University of Copenhagen
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One of the excavated structures at the Shubayqa 6 site. University of Copenhagen
Read the study, Close companions: Early evidence for dogs in northeast Jordan and the potential impact of new hunting methods, published in Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.
About Shubayqa 6
Shubayqa 6 is situated on the northern edge of the Qa’ Shubayqa, around 130 km northeast of the Jordanian capital, Amman. It is the ?rst substantial early Neolithic settlement identi?ed in the Black Desert and has been under investigation since 2012; this and previous studies demonstrate that settlement in this semi-arid to arid zone was more intensive than previously thought and that the area could sustain large populations of animals and humans.
The excavations were carried out in collaboration with the Department of Antiquities of Jordan as part of a project funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research, Danish Institute in Damascus and H.P. Hjerl Mindefondet for Dansk Palæstinaforsking.
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OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY, COLUMBUS, Ohio – A relative of modern humans that lived at least 104,000 years ago in northern China showed evidence of dental growth and development very similar to that of people today, a new study found.
An international team of scientists performed the first systematic assessment of dental growth and development in an East Asian archaic hominin fossil that is known as the Xujiayao juvenile. The fossil is of a 6 1/2-year-old who lived between 104,000 and 248,000 years ago found at the Xujiayao site in northern China.
The researchers were surprised to find that in most ways, this child’s dental development was very similar to what you would find in a child today, said Debbie Guatelli-Steinberg, co-author of the study and professor of anthropology at The Ohio State University. “The Xujiayao juvenile is the oldest fossil found in east Asia that has dental development comparable to modern humans,” Guatelli-Steinberg said.
“It may suggest that these archaic humans had a slow life history like modern humans, with a prolonged period of childhood dependency.”
The study was published today (1-16-19) in the journal Science Advances.
Teeth provide some of the best data anthropologists have about the growth and development of our ancient ancestors, she said. That’s because growth lines in teeth retain a record of dental development.
Compared to our primate cousins, modern humans – including their teeth – take a long time to form and develop. Anthropologists believe this characteristic is associated with humans’ longer periods of child dependency – how long a juvenile relies on support from a caregiver.
Among other techniques, the researchers used synchrotron X-ray imaging to look inside the fossil to see the internal structure of the teeth, including growth lines that revealed the rate of tooth development.
The results were surprising in part because so many other features of this hominin are not modern, such as the shape and thickness of the skull and the large size of the teeth, according to the researchers. “We don’t know exactly where this enigmatic East Asian hominin fits in human evolution,” said Song Xing, lead author of the study, who is at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. “It has some affinities to archaic human relatives like the Denisovans and Neanderthals with, as we found, some more modern features. It is a strange mosaic.”
Using the growth lines in the teeth, the researchers estimated the death of the Xujiayao juvenile at about 6 1/2 years of age, said study co-author Mackie O’Hara, a graduate student in anthropology at Ohio State. The first molar of this juvenile – what we call the 6-year-molar today – had erupted a few months before death and had started to wear a bit. The root was about three-quarters complete, similar to humans today.
“We found that this juvenile was growing up – at least dentally – according to a schedule similar to that of modern people,” O’Hara said.
Another aspect that was similar to modern humans was the perikymata, which are the incremental growth lines that appear on the surface of the tooth. “We found that the way these perikymata were distributed on the Xujiayao juvenile teeth was close to what we see in modern humans, and not to Neanderthals,” Guatelli-Steinberg said.
Another interesting finding related to the long-period growth line, which is laid down about every eight days in modern humans. “This juvenile had a 10-day rhythm, which you don’t see very often in early hominins,” she said. “Most of the early hominins had a shorter rhythm, closer to seven days. This is another aspect that is much more modern.”
The one aspect of dental development in the Xujiayao juvenile that was not modern was the rate of growth in the roots of the teeth. Here, the juvenile showed relatively fast growth, compared to a slower growth in modern humans.
While the dental development of this juvenile suggested it had a slow life course similar to modern humans, Guatelli-Steinberg cautioned that we don’t know what happens in later childhood in hominins like this one. “It would be interesting to see if dental development in later childhood, such as the growth and development of third molars, was also similar to modern humans,” she said.
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The original Xujiayao fossil. Song Xing, Chinese Academy of Sciences
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The buccal view of the Xujiayao incisor and canine showing the pattern of perikymata distribution. Song Xing and Paul Tafforeau
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UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD—Scientists at the University of Sheffield studying ancient DNA have created a tool allowing them to more accurately identify ancient Eurasian populations, which can be used to test an individual’s similarity to ancient people who once roamed the earth.
Currently the study of ancient DNA requires a lot of information to classify a skeleton to a population or find its biogeographical origins.
Now scientists have defined a new concept called Ancient Ancestry Informative Markers (aAIMs) – a group of mutations that are sufficiently informative to identify and classify ancient populations.
The research, led by Dr Eran Elhaik, from the University of Sheffield’s Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, saw the identification of a small group of aAIMs that can be used to classify skeletons to ancient populations.
Dr Elhaik said: “We developed a new method that finds aAIMs efficiently and have proved that it is accurate.”
AIMs (Ancestry Informative Markers) have a long history in science and have been employed for the past decade by health and forensic experts.
But Dr Elhaik said that when his team applied traditional AIMs-finding tools to ancient DNA data, they were disappointed with their low accuracy.
“Ancient populations are much more diverse than modern ones,” he said. “Their diversity was reduced over the years following events such as the Neolithic revolution and the Black Death.
“Although we have many more people today they are all far more similar to each other than ancient people. In addition, the ancient data themselves are problematic due to the large amount of degraded DNA.”
To overcome these challenges, Dr Elhaik developed a specialized tool that identifies aAIMs by combining traditional methodology with a novel one that takes into account a mixture.
“Ancient genomes typically consist of hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of markers. We demonstrated that only 13,000 markers are needed to make accurate population classifications for ancient genomes and while the field of ancient forensics does not exist yet, these aAIMs can help us get much closer to ancient people.”
He added: “Until now you couldn’t test people for ancient DNA ancestry because commercial microarrays, such as the ones used for genetic genealogy, don’t have a lot of markers relevant for paleogenomics – people could not study their primeval origins.
“This finding of aAIMs is like finding the fingerprints of ancient people. It allows testing of a small number of markers – that can be found in a commonly available array – and you can ask what part of your genome is from Roman Britons or Viking, or Chumash Indians, or ancient Israelites, etc.
“We can ask any question we want about these ancient people as long as someone sequenced these ancient markers. So this paper brings the field of paleogenomics to the public.”
Researchers said to make the study’s findings more accurate for identifying and classifying ancient people throughout the world, the framework and methods of the study should be applied again when more comprehensive ancient DNA databases are available.
The full study Ancient Ancestry Informative Markers for Identifying Fine-Scale Ancient Population Structure in Eurasians is published in the journal Genes.
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The Eurasian landmass, home to many ancient populations.
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EUROPEAN SYNCHROTRON RADIATION FACILITY—Rembrandt van Rijn revolutionized painting with a 3D effect using his impasto technique, where thick paint makes a masterpiece protrude from the surface. Thanks to the ESRF, the European Synchrotron, Grenoble, France, three centuries later an international team of scientists led by the Materials Science and Engineering Department of the Delft University of Technology and the Rijksmuseum have found how he did it. The study is published in Angewandte Chemie.
Impasto is thick paint laid on the canvas in an amount that makes it stand from the surface. The relief of impasto increases the perceptibility of the paint by increasing its light-reflecting textural properties. Scientists know that Rembrandt, epitome of the Dutch Golden Age, achieved the impasto effect by using materials traditionally available on the 17thcentury Dutch colour market, namely lead white pigment (a mixture of hydrocerussite Pb3(CO3)2(OH)2 and cerussite PbCO3), and organic mediums (mainly linseed oil). The precise recipe was, however, unknown until today.
Plumbonacrite, Pb5(CO3)3O(OH)2 is the mysterious, missing ingredient of the impasto effect, researchers from The Netherlands and France have discovered. It is extremely rare in historic paint layers. It has been detected in some samples from 20th century paintings and in a degraded red lead pigment in a Van Gogh painting. “We didn’t expect to find this phase at all, as it is so unusual in Old Masters paintings”, explains Victor Gonzalez, main author of the study and scientist at the Rijksmuseum and Delft University of Technology. “What’s more, our research shows that its presence is not accidental or due to contamination, but that it is the result of an intended synthesis”, he adds.
The European Synchrotron, ESRF, played an essential role in these findings. The team sampled tiny fragments from the Portrait of Marten Soolmans (Rijksmuseum), Bathsheba (The Louvre) and Susanna (Mauritshuis), three of Rembrandt’s masterpieces. Using the ESRF’s beamlines, they quantified the crystalline phases in Rembrandt’s impasto and in the adjacent paint layers, modelled the pigment crystallites morphology and size and obtained crystalline phase distribution maps at the microscale.
The samples were less than 0.1mm in size, requiring the small and intense beam delivered by the synchrotron. The scientists analysed them on two ESRF beamlines, ID22 and ID13, where they combined High-angular Resolution X-Ray Diffraction (HR-XRD) and micro-X-Ray Diffraction (μ-XRD) . “In the past, we have already successfully used the combination of these two techniques to study lead-white based paints. We knew that the techniques can provide us with high quality diffraction patterns and therefore with subtle information about paint composition”, explains Marine Cotte, scientist at the ESRF, 2018 Descartes-Huygens Prize laureate for her research on art conservation.
The analysis of the data showed that Rembrandt modified his painting materials intentionally. “The presence of plumbonacrite is indicative of an alkaline medium. Based on historical texts, we believe that Rembrandt added lead oxide (litharge) to the oil in this purpose, turning the mixture into a paste-like paint”, explains Cotte.
The breakthrough yields the path for the long-term preservation and conservation of Rembrandt’s masterpieces. However, the number of samples studied is not extensive enough to assess if lead white impastos systematically contain plumbonacrite. “We are working with the hypothesis that Rembrandt might have used other recipes, and that is the reason why we will be studying samples from other paintings by Rembrandt and other 17th Dutch Masters, including Vermeer, Hals, and painters belonging to Rembrandt’s circle”, explains Annelies van Loon, scientist at the Rijksmuseum.
In addition to this, the team will reconstruct specific impasto-like samples, preparing and ageing them under CO2 rich and CO2 free atmospheres (to assess the origin of carbonates in plumbonacrite) and in humid and dry conditions (to assess the effect of water).
This work, led by the Materials Science and Engineering Department of the Delft University of Technology and the Rijksmuseum is a collaboration between academia (Institut de Recherche de Chimie Paris, Sorbonne University and University of Amsterdam), Cultural Heritage research institutes (C2RMF: Centre de Recherche et des Restauration des Musées de France), museums (Rijksmuseum and Mauritshuis) and the ESRF.
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The Portrait of Marten Soolmans by Rembrandt van Rijn, at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands
BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY—BINGHAMTON, N.Y. – The ancient people of Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile) built their famous ahu monuments near coastal freshwater sources, according to a team of researchers including faculty at Binghamton University, State University of New York.
The island of Rapa Nui is well-known for its elaborate ritual architecture, particularly its numerous statues (moai) and the monumental platforms that supported them (ahu.) Researchers have long wondered why ancient people built these monuments in their respective locations around the island, considering how much time and energy was required to construct them. A team of researchers including Binghamton University anthropologist Carl Lipo used quantitative spatial modeling to explore the potential relations between ahu construction locations and subsistence resources, namely, rock mulch agricultural gardens, marine resources, and freshwater sources—the three most critical resources on Rapa Nui. Their results* suggest that ahu locations are explained by their proximity to the island’s limited freshwater sources.
“The issue of water availability (or the lack of it) has often been mentioned by researchers who work on Rapa Nui/Easter Island,” said Lipo. “When we started to examine the details of the hydrology, we began to notice that freshwater access and statue location were tightly linked together. It wasn’t obvious when walking around—with the water emerging at the coast during low tide, one doesn’t necessarily see obvious indications of water. But as we started to look at areas around ahu, we found that those locations were exactly tied to spots where the fresh groundwater emerges—largely as a diffuse layer that flows out at the water’s edge. The more we looked, the more consistently we saw this pattern. Places without ahu/moai showed no freshwater. The pattern was striking and surprising in how consistent it was. Even when we find ahu/moai in the interior of the island, we find nearby sources of drinking water. This paper reflects our work to demonstrate that this pattern is statistically sound and not just our perception.”
“Many researchers, ourselves included, have long speculated associations between ahu/moai and different kinds of resources, e.g., water, agricultural land, areas with good marine resources, etc.,” said lead author Robert DiNapoli of the University of Oregon. “However, these associations had never been quantitatively tested or shown to be statistically significant. Our study presents quantitative spatial modeling clearly showing that ahu are associated with freshwater sources in a way that they aren’t associated with other resources.”
According to Terry Hunt of the University of Arizona, the proximity of the monuments to freshwater tells us a great deal about the ancient island society.
“The monuments and statues are located in places with access to a resource critical to islanders on a daily basis—fresh water. In this way, the monuments and statues of the islanders’ deified ancestors reflect generations of sharing, perhaps on a daily basis–centered on water, but also food, family and social ties, as well as cultural lore that reinforced knowledge of the island’s precarious sustainability. And the sharing points to a critical part of explaining the island’s paradox: despite limited resources, the islanders succeeded by sharing in activities, knowledge, and resources for over 500 years until European contact disrupted life with foreign diseases, slave trading, and other misfortunes of colonial interests.”
The researchers currently only have comprehensive freshwater data for the western portion of the island and plan to do a complete survey of the island in order to continue to test their hypothesis of the relation between ahu and freshwater.
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Monumental Maois statues on Easter Island. Horacio Fernandez, Wikimedia Commons
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Binghamton University archaeologist Carl Lipo is part of an international team of researchers working to solve the ancient mysteries of Easter Island. Binghamton University, State University of New York
Also contributing to this research were Matthew Becker and Tanya Brosnan (California State University, Long Beach); Sean Hixon (Pennsylvania State University); and Alex E. Morrison (University of Auckland).
*The paper, “Rapa Nui (Easter Island) monument locations explained by freshwater sources,” was published in PLoS One.
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Standing at its base, it is impossible not to feel a sense of awe. Stretching high above and across, it is now covered with grass, stairs built against its face to enable the casual visitor to traverse its height to its summit, 100 feet skyward. It is not a natural hill. It is a massive mound of earth purposefully constructed by perhaps hundreds of toiling laborers more than 1100 years ago near present-day Collinsville, Illinois. Known today as Monks Mound, it is the largest monumental pyramidal construction north of the great ancient Maya centers in Central America. Indeed, at its base it is about the same size as the Great Pyramid of Giza of ancient Egypt, with a perimeter larger than that of the great Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacán, Mexico.
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Monks Mound as it appears today.
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Monks Mound is arguably the most iconic example of the energy, ingenuity, sense of planning, and organizing capacity of a Native American population that otherwise would have blended into what many later European explorers and settlers would have judged as unremarkable “savages” on a landscape regarded ripe for the taking. But for over 5,000 years, a variety of peoples with both differing and common cultural traditions and heritage built thousands of similar mounds across thousands of square miles stretching from the Great Lakes to the Ohio River Valley to the Mississippi River Valley and this great river’s tributaries. Anciently, for the indigenous inhabitants who constructed these monumental earthworks, it was a land of abundance, a fertility that afforded unmatched hunting, fishing, and other food gathering. The region drew people and eventually supported large population centers, some of which rivaled and even exceeded the urban centers that grew from North American European settlement before the turn into the 19th century AD.
An Ancient Practice
When and where did this mound building begin?
By far the earliest example of this activity discovered to date can be found in southeastern Louisiana, a mound site that was radiocarbon dated to approximately 4500 BCE, although the dating is debated. It was initially excavated in 1967 as one of the two Monte Sano site mounds. If the dating is correct, this would place the site within the Archaic period. Better known, however, is the Watson Brake site, another Archaic period site located near Monroe in northern Louisiana. Dated to about 3500 BCE, long before the construction of the pyramids of ancient Egypt, it features 11 mounds from 3 to 25 ft in height, all connected by ridges that form an oval almost 900 ft across. Building continued for 500 years. In addition to this is the Archaic site of Poverty Point, also in Louisiana near the village of Epps in West Carroll Parish, which was built about 1500 BCE. A complex of more than one square mile, it consists of six earthwork crescent ridges arranged in a concentric pattern, divided by radial aisles. It also includes three mounds and evidence of residential construction extending about 3 miles along the bank of the Bayou Macon. Notably, the culture associated with Poverty Point has revealed archaeological evidence of a wide trading network showing commercial links with points well beyond its area of habitation.
The discovery and analysis of sites and artifacts from this time period have upended the traditional paradigm of monumental construction as a key activity that emerged out of developed agriculture and centrally organized societies. We now know that the peoples who originally constructed the mounds of sites like Watson Brake and Poverty Point were primarily hunter-gatherers, suggesting that there is much more to learn about the true capabilities and achievements of hunter-gatherer cultures, particularly in North America.
Archaeological inquiry related to the early cultures of North America has thus, among other things, explored the question of when and where developed agriculture and more complex, centralized societies, key elements of urbanization, actually emerged.
Smith Creek
Straddling the bluffs that overlook the Mississippi River in southwestern Mississippi sits an archaeological site known today as Smith Creek. It is one of many Native American mound sites that dot the 350-mile Mississippi Mound Trail near the banks of the Mississippi River. The site stands out from many of the others because it provides evidence of a long human occupation spanning 1,600 years across three different cultures, beginning with the Tchefuncte from about ca. 500 BC – 1 AD. The Tchefuncte, an Early Woodland period culture, were a hunter-gathererpeople who lived in coastal areas and lowlands, living on a variety of food sources, including clams, alligators, fish, deer, raccoons and birds. They produced large amounts of simple pottery, which led to improved food management, better storage and cooking. But it was the Coles Creek Culture(ca AD 700 – 1200), the next group that occupied Smith Creek, that was responsible for the distinguishing monumental platform mound-and-plaza complex remains so prominently featured at the site. Coles Creek culture flourished during the Late Woodland period, generally in the Lower Mississippi valley. It marks a time when population increased dramatically, with evidence of increasing cultural and political complexity, such that near the end of its time they had developed simple elite polities. At Smith Creek, the archaeological evidence also shows a transition to another, succeeding culture, the Plaquemine (AD 1300 – 1500), a society distinguished by a continuation of the platform mound-and-plaza construction and, notably, maize agriculture (as well as cultivation of pumpkins, squash, beans and tobacco), although these people also continued to hunt, fish, and gather wild plants. The Plaquemines generally had established trade contacts with other Mississippian culture peoples to the north and east, contemporaneous with the Mississippian culture at Cahokia.
Megan Kassabaum, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and archaeologist with the University of Pennsylvania, has been exploring Smith Creek since 2013, when she conducted a series of test excavations. Based on those initial findings, she has returned to conduct full scale excavations in 2015, 2016, and 2018 with crews from the University of Pennsylvania. As Director of the excavations and research, she is exploring some key questions that will hopefully elucidate the evolution of the site. She hopes to eventually shed new light, at least at Smith Creek, on the transition from hunting and gathering to maize agriculture, from egalitarian to hierarchical social organization, from the use of the platform mound-and-plaza complexes as ritual centers to ongoing occupation as elite villages, and the relationship of these developments in time and function. “A suite of important social changes is thought to take place during Coles Creek and early Plaquemine times (i.e., at the transition between the Woodland and Mississippi Periods),” she says. “It is often stated that around this time people began regularly constructing large, flat-topped platform mounds, started relying heavily on corn agriculture, and began living in societies ruled by powerful chiefs. My work at Smith Creek aims to pick apart this complicated transition temporally and culturally to determine the complex relationships between these societal traits. In particular, I am interested in the relationships between monument construction, communal identity, and power.”
Thus far, her excavations have yielded, she says, millions of artifacts that include “even the tiniest evidence of human occupation” using methods from dry screening to wet screening and flotation for carbonized organic remains. Of these, well over 100,000 larger artifacts (1/4 inch and larger) have been excavated and analyzed. Most of the larger artifacts consist of ceramic sherds from storage, cooking, and serving vessels; animal bone (food remains); stone projectile points and other tools and debitage; and daub that was used in construction. In addition to that, her team found some bone tools, a quartz crystal, and a ceramic ear spool.
To date, the Smith Creek archaeological area consists of three large earthen mounds (Mound A, Mound B, and Mound C) surrounding an open plaza. Kassabaum describes Mound A as a platform mound that had been built in multiple stages, Mound B as a burial mound surrounded by a ditch, and Mound C as being less defined because much of it has eroded into a nearby stream. Reports Kassabaum:
“We have put excavation units into or near all three of the mounds at Smith Creek. On Mound A, we have investigated the final summit of the mound, a midden located on one of its previous summits, and the northern toe of the mound. Our excavations on Mound B have been limited because avocational excavations in the 1960s showed that the mound contained human remains. That said, I have done a detailed study of the records and artifacts associated with those early excavations and we have investigated a constructed platform that sits between the mound and the surrounding ditch. On Mound C, we have investigated the toe of the primary mound structure and a secondary structure that extends south off of the main mound. Finally, we have also focused excavations in off-mound areas including three different locations in the plaza. These have largely uncovered Plaquemine midden deposits, though in the Northeast Plaza area, we have spent a great deal of time investigating a probable Tchefuncte structure that underlies these midden deposits.”
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Location of the Smith Creek site within Wilkinson County, Mississippi. Base map from https://d-maps.com/carte.php?num_car=198678&lang=en.
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Topographic map of Smith Creek showing Mounds A, B, and C surrounding an open plaza. The 1960s excavation trench is visible as a dip along the southern flank of Mound B. Modern excavation units are shown as colored rectangles; Wilkinson County is colored red on the inset map. Map created by Kyle G. Olson.
Within the mound fill, we mostly recover pottery, but midden deposits have been excavated from mound surfaces in Mounds A and C. These surface deposits are made up primarily of ceramic and food remains. The ceramic styles present in these deposits, along with the radiocarbon dates, suggest that the mounds were largely constructed and used during Coles Creek times, though at least some additional construction seems to have taken place later on during Plaquemine times. The nature of the food remains on the mound summits and flanks suggests that food consumption might have played a role in the construction episodes. For example, on Mound C, we uncovered the articulated bones of a fish tail laying flat along the mound flank, suggesting that an episode of food consumption occurred immediately before the next phase of mound construction (such that no scavenging of the leftovers took place before they were buried with more fill).
Throughout the flotation samples that we take from the site, we find charred seeds of EAC (Eastern Agricultural Complex) plants including chenopod, maygrass, and knotweed. Though these analyses are just getting underway, initial examination of chenopod seeds under the scanning electron microscope indicate that both wild and domesticated varieties are present at the site. This fits well with the evidence from the nearby Feltus site, which also indicates domestication of chenopod during Coles Creek times. We also find a heavy reliance on nuts (hickory, pecan, walnut, and acorn) during the time.
— Megan Kassabaum
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Photograph of Mound A at Smith Creek, looking northwest along Highway 24. Photo by Meg Kassabaum.
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Field supervisor, Arielle Pierson, in the 2018 excavation unit south of Mound C. The unit walls show clear stratigraphic evidence of mound building and a post likely associated with a summit structure. Photo by Meg Kassabaum.
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Dr. Meg Kassabaum on site in 2015, readying the South Plaza excavations for photography. Photo by Tom Stanley, Penn Museum.
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Diagnostic sherds from Smith Creek dating to the three primary periods of use: Tchefuncte (left), Coles Creek (middle), and Plaquemine (right). Photography by Meg Kassabaum.
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Surprises and Implications
Along the way, Kassabaum and her team have encountered a few surprises. One of these was the surprisingly sizable amount of artifacts identifiable to the Tchefuncte period. Kassabaum states that Tchefuncte sites are comparatively few, and when they are found, the artifact assemblages are relatively small. Here, a significant number of Tchefuncte ceramic ware was found, associated with a large circular structure in the Northeast Plaza location of the site.
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2016 field school student, Isaac Burg, and field supervisors, Anna Graham, Ben Davis, and Kyle Olson, excavating in the Northeast Plaza. The profile walls of the excavation unit shows the thick Plaquemine midden and the unit floor shows the curving feature associated with the probable Tchefuncte structure. Photo by Meg Kassabaum.
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Dr. Meg Kassabaum on site in 2018, photographing features associated with the probable Tchefuncte structure in the Northeast Plaza. Photo by Arielle Pierson.
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In addition, Kassabaum was surprised to find evidence for a significant amount of earth construction beyond that required for the mounds themselves. “I was quite surprised to find large secondary structures associated with both Mounds B and C, both of which would likely have been written off as natural without archaeological testing,” says Kassabaum. “This is a good reminder that archaeological work regularly underestimates the degree of planning and amount of purposeful construction present at pre-contact sites.”
Thus far, a new picture is beginning to emerge about the developmental life of the site. Evidence supports a 1,600-year occupation, with three transitions. Kassabaum suggests that Smith Creek must have been a consistently important location, beginning as early as the Early Woodland and extending through Plaquemine times. Most of the mound-building (large flat-top platform mound surrounding a central plaza) took place during the Late Woodland Coles Creek time, built over a landscape that already must have had some meaning for the people who lived in the area. Curiously, no Middle Woodland occupation has yet been identified at the site.
This said, Smith Creek has some important implications within the larger context of the mound-building cultures in the region and in North America generally. “In general,” summarizes Kassabaum, “the Coles Creek culture represents an interesting moment in the history of mound building in the Eastern United States because it is when the platform mound-and-plaza complex that characterizes the subsequent Mississippian period becomes a widespread site type. My research, and the work being done by some of my colleagues, suggests that this site layout developed before the shift to corn agriculture and before the development of institutionalized status differentiation, which goes against the received wisdom about the type of sociopolitical organization that led to the construction of large platform mounds.”
Going Forward
Currently, Kassabaum and her team are working on completing the analysis of the latest, 2018 season finds. This includes acquiring a number of very important radiocarbon dates. “Accurately dating the various assemblages is essential for this site because of the surprisingly early age of some of the deposits,” says Kassabaum, “and it is important to determine at what point in history important changes like reliance on maize agriculture developed.”
In the future, Kassabaum hopes to further understand the degree to which the inhabitants modified the landscape and answer questions about mound functions, which will include some additional investigation/testing of the platform mounds. Specifically, this would entail opening up a large excavation at the summit of Mound A to determine what function any building at that location performed. Additionally, she would like to identify more middens that might be associated with the Coles Creek Culture in order to understand and compare the various activities that may have occurred at the site over time.
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For interested visitors, Smith Creek, near Woodville, Mississippi, is marked with a historical marker that explains the site. Smith Creek is also featured in the exhibit, Moundbuilders: Ancient Architects of North America at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. A small exhibit about Mississippi’s mound builders and the work at Smith Creek is also projected to open at the Wilkinson County Museum in Woodville in June 2019.
Jesse Holth is a freelance writer and editor with a background in archaeology, history, and science. She has previously worked with the Royal BC Museum, the University of Victoria, and World Elephant Day. Jesse has degrees in English and Anthropology, specializing in Archaeology. She is passionate about history, education, and conservation.
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Editor’s Note: Recent archaeological discoveries have overturned traditional thinking about the capability of ancient humans to navigate the seas, shedding new light on the dispersal of humans prehistorically across the globe. What follows is English maritime writer/historian Bob Hobman’s own narrative of the quest by an organized group of modern seafarers to test the possibilities of ancient seafaring.
As of this writing, eight men and women sailors, keen to exploring what made the world’s first seafarers tick, are readying themselves on Rote Island in eastern Indonesia for a 600 km voyage to cross the Timor Sea on a bamboo raft. They are members of The First Mariners, a global group of people who, by employing the concept of experimental archaeology, are recreating the maritime technology, boats and prehistoric voyages of our hominin ancestors; the world’s first sailors who emerged from the last Homo sapiens dispersal out of Africa some 100,000+ years ago.
Our Middle Pleistocene ancestors were likely not as ‘primitive’ as some scholars suggest. Certainly 70,000 years have seen some changes to human existence, but the oceans have remained mostly unchanged. Granted, glaciation periods have dramatically adjusted sea levels over the millennia, but they had little affect once humans established a harmony with the deep sea.
Approximating Ancient Voyages
In 1985, a seacraft named the ‘Sarimanok’, a 20-meter long double outrigger canoe adzed from a single tree in the Southern Philippines, was constructed to re-enact the migration from Indonesia of human settlers on Madagascar (based on archaeological evidence) some 2,500 years ago (See video below). The canoe sailed from Bali in June, with eight crew and arrived safely on Madagascar seven weeks later. No modern materials were used in the canoe’s construction or sailing rig and the crew survived on what food was available at the time. It was this voyage which inspired the founding of The First Mariners.
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In 2014, stone tools uncovered on Crete – previously thought to have been inhabited for about 12,000 years – were found to be 130,000 years old. The First Mariners set about building an 11-meter raft from thumb diameter stalks of the wild cane arundo donax, harvested on the southern Peloponnese island of Kythira, to follow the trail of the Lower Palaeolithic toolmakers from there to Crete, Greece’s largest island which in human times has always been surrounded by sea. The crew of 10 paddled standing up, with some meager assistance by a propped-up ‘sail’ of split cane, raised whenever a following breeze arose. It took 48 hours to cover the 100 kilometers from Kythira’s southernmost harbor of Kapsali to the old Venetian port of Chania. The original deep sea crossing to Crete would have been only nine kilometers.
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The cane raft ‘Melida’ and it’s 100 km voyage from Kapsali Bay, the southernmost tip of Kythira Island in the Peloponnese in July, 2014. The experiment was to follow the first inhabitants of Crete. Discovery of stone tools placed them in the Lower Palaeolithic, about 130,000 years ago. Bob Hobman, The First Mariners
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Flashing back to Indonesia, some 18 years earlier, The First Mariners gathered on the east coast of Bali to film themselves crossing the unpredictable and regularly violent Lombok Strait on a simple bamboo raft tied together with nipa palm fibre rope. This vessel was a cut-down version of the 15-meter bamboo raft which six months earlier had successfully carried a crew of five from Timor to Melville Island off the Australian coast near Darwin.
Why were those Indonesian voyages important?
Academics rarely agree on everything, but most agree that, geologically, Bali/Java – and therefore the great continent of Eurasia — were never joined to the island system and Australia to their east — not since the beginning of humankind. At best the distance to Lombok and then the rest of the islands – including Flores – heading resolutely eastward toward Australia, was 50 kilometers. And that meant, if one were to make the voyage by boat, it was necessary to stage on the little island of Nusa Penida in between.
Anything set afloat on the eastern shore of Bali during the annual Northwest monsoon from April until October is most likely to wash up on Lombok, or Sumbawa, or even further east on the impressively large island of Flores where some scholars suggest that Homo erectus seafarers may have ended up around 840,000 BP years ago. This would have been the hominins’ first ocean crossing. Why they would do this almost a million years ago we may never know, although that does not stop scholars endlessly speculating on whether such a feat was intentional or accidental or something in between. Suffice it to say that humans will go where they want to go, even without a particularly good reason. And they will always find a conveyance to carry them.
The First Mariners repeated the Homo erectus feat on its second attempt. Fourteen paddlers aboard a nine meter long bamboo raft landed on Lombok’s Gili Islands assisted by a roughly woven mat held up to catch whatever there was of a southerly breeze and to help equate the notorious currents which plague the Lombok Strait.
But Homo erectus didn’t seem to maintain this new-found maritime technology. Archaeologically, there is a gap of 800,000 years before the next hominin traces are found in the region — not Homo erectus or Neanderthal — but Homo sapiens, the first representatives of anatomically modern humans. If the dating of stone tools on Crete and Gavdos islands in the Mediterranean is anything near accurate, then humans were already using seacraft by 135,000 years ago. Taking the Greek Islands as an example, humans probably staged their voyages by bridging small gaps along the way with intervisibility: targeting destinations which could be seen.
It is this activity that may have defined the voyage from the islands at the eastern point of the great continent of Eurasia, reached by a wave of nomadic Homo sapiens, to become the last humans to disperse out of Africa and eventually settle Oceania. An estimated 70,000 years ago they could have arrived at the same water barrier – defined now by the Wallace Line*, which demarks the botanical boundary between Asia and Oceania – and repeated what Homo erectus had done to cross it. But they didn’t stop. They kept going, morphing along the way from land nomads into the world’s first islanders and sea nomads.
By at least 65,000 BC, so the latest archaeological clues tell us, they had discovered what is today known as Australia and began colonizing it. By 30,000 BC, according to the archaeological record, they had settled all the islands of Wallacea, the Philippines, and Melanesia of the Western Pacific. With very few exceptions, these locations were all visible to each other. Was Australia (the ancient Sahul Land) included? Could the ancient Sahul continental shelf islands, which were above sea level at the time, provided safe and easily navigable access to the mainland beyond?
It is our hypothesis that these ancient ‘Wallaceans’ –there seems to be no contradicting theory – are the ancestors of the Melanesians and all the indigenous inhabitants of Sahul Land, the vast combined landmass of Papua New Guinea, Australia and Tasmania before the polar ice melted and the sea rose to terrestrially separate them.
The topography has changed since then, and not just a little. For the past 6,000 years the Timor Sea has been up to 600 km wide and its eastern shores not visible from anywhere. At least that’s what we thought. After decades of plodding research into the peopling of Sahul Land, the beginnings of the Australian Aboriginal, academia is suddenly taking an interest in the subject. It is the academic fuel that feeds an experimental archaeological group like The First Mariners, with the result that we are keeping a close eye on what the learned are saying. And the academics are keenly watching what we are doing, as well.
For the past 6,000 years the Timor Sea has been 600 km wide. Before that the gap between the continents of Australia and Eurasia was in places no more than a sixth of that distance, and maybe even much less now that the results of a recent surge of academic interest are coming to light. The traditional consensus is that Sahul Land could not be seen from Asia, that to make a landfall there was either a mistake or the result of an exceedingly bold adventure.
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The Sarimanok at sea. It was named after a legendary bird of the Maranao people, who originate from Mindanao, an island in the Philippines. Bob Hobman, The First Mariners
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The route of the Sarimanok across the Indian Ocean to Madagascar. Bob Hobman, The First Mariners
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From Wallacea to Oceania
The First Mariners team set up its first camp on Rote Island, south of Timor. It was 1998, a year in which the ‘El Nino’ phenomenon with its reverse winds would spell doom for the voyage of the 23-meter bamboo-pontoon raft ‘Nale Tasih I.’ It was El Nino and an infestation of the dreaded ‘bamboo borer’ (Dinoderus minutus). Steadily sinking and unable to make headway against the unseasonal easterly winds, the raft and its 14-strong crew turned back to Rote Island after a mere 48 hours at sea.
The group re-assembled nine months later at the southern tip of Timor to build a smaller ‘Nale Tasih II’. It set out for Australia in front of the northwest monsoon wind in December, 2000, with a crew of four and a seasick, non-swimmer scientist aboard. After six days the 11-meter raft crossed the shallow Australian continental shelf, the ancient border of Sahul Land, and seven days later, 60 nautical miles short of its destination, it was storm driven onto a Melville Island beach.
By bridging the ancient sea gap between the continents, ‘Nale Tasih II’ had technically repeated the crossing to Sahul just as the Wallaceans may have done to become the original Australians.
So why repeat it now with a new venture?
The smaller (11 metres) “Nale Tasih II” succeeded in reaching Melville Island, some 80 kilometres from Darwin. With a crew of five, the voyage took 13 days. Bob Hobman, The First Mariners
“Nale Tasih II” (pictured right) was only partly representative of the raft the ancients most likely would have used. The rectangular, relatively modern-rigged sail we employed was actually more likely made from nipa palm fibre, woven on Neolithic hand looms by the people of Rote. The raft also was built with metal tools which, according to The First Mariners’ fussy parameters, disqualifies it as a reasonable replication of the craft that is most likely to have made the first crossing of the Timor Sea.
Now we can follow up – with practical application –the speculative voyaging routes which Australian scientists like Michael Bird and Brendan Brooke and the American anthropologist Thomas Whitley of Sonomo State University, Ca. are publishing.
The northern route from Wallacea to Papua New Guinea is challenging the commonly recognized ‘southern route’ from Timor which makes use of a chain of what are now being described as ‘habitable, resource rich’ islands that could have been used as stepping stones for the voyagers when extreme low temperatures enlarged the world’s two ice caps and lowered sea levels, in some parts of the planet a whopping 200 meters.
The Nale Tasih III. Bob Hobman, The First Mariners
The new raft will comply with all the unwritten rules of Middle Pleistocene maritime technology. A Dutch master stone tool expert is already fashioning a full assemblage of the era’s stone tools. Two local botanists will ensure that gathering food for the crossing will follow strict principles and the raft’s unsophisticated sail will be layers of the great fan-like fronds of the Borassus flabellifer sugar palm, a native of the Indian sub-continent but which could well have been around at the time of the first voyages.
The crew’s basic diet will be fish baked over a coral hearth fire ignited by various techniques learned on the earlier voyages. The banana is thought to have originated in neighboring Papua New Guinea. Bamboo shoots will be shredded to provide vegetable material and so will the tops of coconut palms. Fish of all descriptions are readily speared as they seek relief from the sun’s blazing noon zenith beneath the wide and slow-moving raft. Without ceramic pots it is also possible to boil water in a leak-proof lontar palm basket the locals call haik and the raft will carry a large supply of mature coconuts for the nut’s water and flesh and its outer shell to feed the fire. Birds’ eggs are allowed, and honey. Drinking water from the region’s annual west monsoon rain squalls will be trapped in bamboo tubes.
With the following northwest monsoon wind the voyage could take less than two weeks. As it was for the original journey, there will be no pre-established landfall, although Darwin of course would be a convenient one since much of Australia’s mostly uninhabited northwest coastline offers an unwelcome shore to vessels of any ilk.
It will not be a drift voyage. Nor will it be a sailing venture, but something in between. The raft’s crew will have paddles but also a great pile of palm leaves. As the first human conquerors of the Timor Sea would have done, some kind of basic sail must have been employed. Humans are notoriously adept at exploiting nature to ease their burden. The First Mariners believe that even the earliest hominins were not stupid or suicidal enough to treat the oceans and enclosed seas like the Mediterranean with anything but caution and a great deal of respect. Their early craft would have been devised to reach pelagic and deep water fish.**
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The 19-metrer-long “Nale Tasih I” under full sail and clearly sinking. Bamboo wrongly harvested at the waning stage of the moon allowed access to the ravaging dreaded ‘Powderpost Beetle’ which caused flooding of the culms. Combined with adverse winds, the voyage from Rote Island to northern Australia was abandoned after 48 hours. Bob Hobman, The First Mariners
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A bamboo raft is born. Construction begins on the raft ‘Nale Tasih II’ at the dark of the moon’s high tide mark on a beach near Kupang on Indonesia’s most eastern island of Timor. The raft’s body will be finished by the high tide of the full moon two weeks later and can be floated without damaging the bark rope lashings underneath. Bob Hobman, The First Mariners
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The first two ’Nale Tasih’ rafts employed an ancient, pre-ceramic local cooking technique. The ends of a ‘lontar’ palm leaf are squeezed together and secured to a transverse stick to make an instant, watertight basket which, suspended over heated coals will cook foxtail millet, tubers or rice. It resists burning as long as there is water inside. Bob Hobman, The First Mariners
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The route of “Nale Tasih II.” Rigged with a hand woven palm-fibre sail and pushed by the seasonal Northwest monsoon, the raft averaged a little over 1.5 knots. Bob Hobman, The First Mariners
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Our Homo sapiens ancestors have been nothing if not experimental, and humans with their renowned persistence found a way to — not control the ocean or master it — but come to terms with it very well over the past 100,000 years or more. Some more than others, but some not at all, like Australia’s first colonists who, while still part of the world’s most ancient living culture, seem to have turned their backs to the sea in time to become super-terrestrials, wiping out the continent’s megafauna in record time while not producing any notable examples of maritime technology during their 65,000-year-long tenure.
But that is not something for The First Mariners to ponder. Perhaps at a later time. For now, our mandate is to get the settlers to that broad island continent we today call Australia.
*Wallace’s Line delineates Australian and Southeast Asian fauna. The deep water of the Lombok Strait between Bali and Lombok formed a water barrier even when lower sea levels linked the now-separated islands and landmasses on either side anciently. (Wikipedia)
**This Timor Sea crossing is currently planned to take place in February, 2020.
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