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MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY—A multidisciplinary study has found evidence for humans hunting small mammals in the forests of Sri Lanka at least 45,000 years ago. The researchers discovered the remains of small mammals, including primates, with evidence of cut-marks and burning at the oldest archaeological site occupied by humans in Sri Lanka, alongside sophisticated bone and stone tools. The hunting of such animals is an example of the uniquely human adaptability that allowed H. sapiens to rapidly colonize a series of extreme environments apparently untouched by its hominin relatives.

In a new paper published in Nature Communications, an international team of scientists has revealed novel evidence for the unique adaptability of Homo sapiens. The study, led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, alongside colleagues from Sri Lankan and other international institutions, shows that human populations were able to specialize in the hunting of small arboreal animals for tens of thousands of years. This is the oldest and longest record of sophisticated, active primate hunting by foragers. This work also highlights the distinctive ecological capacities of H. sapiens relative to its hominin ancestors and relatives.

Tropical rainforests: a unique challenge

Recent research has demonstrated that our species adapted to a diversity of extreme environments as they spread around the world, including deserts, high altitude settings, palaeoarctic conditions, and tropical forests. Previously, however, discussion of the migration of our species into Europe, the Middle East, and Asia has often focused on our increased efficiency in hunting, butchering, and consuming medium to large game in open ‘savanna’ settings. Alternatively, coastal settings have been seen as important sources of protein, stimulating human evolution and migration.

Tropical rainforests have been somewhat neglected in discussions of human migrations and dispersal. In public and academic perception, these environments are often seen as isolated barriers to human movement, with disease, dangerous animals, and limited resources all posing challenges. In particular, when compared to the large animals of open savannas, small, fast forest monkeys and squirrels are difficult to capture and provide smaller amounts of protein.

Small mammals and hunting complexity

The procurement of small mammals has long been considered a feature of technological and behavioral ‘complexity’ or ‘modernity’ unique to our species. Previous research in Europe and West Asia has linked increased capture and consumption of agile small mammals both to human population growth and to climatically-driven crises. Traditionally, these have been considered to be particularly extreme ~20,000 years ago.

However, the onset and behavioral context of small mammal hunting in other parts of the world, particularly Asia, has remained poorly studied. This is particularly the case outside of temperate environments. “Over the last two decades, research has highlighted human occupation of tropical rainforests in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Melanesia at least as early as 45,000 years ago, so the potential for human reliance on small mammals in these settings prior to 20,000 years ago seems likely,” says co-senior author Dr. Patrick Roberts of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.

A Sri Lankan specialty

Sri Lanka has been a prominent part of discussions of early human adaptations to tropical rainforests, though there has been a general lack of systematic, detailed analysis of animal remains associated with archaeological sites on the island. For the current study, the researchers produced new chronological information, analysis of animal remains, and studies of lithic and bone tool assemblages from Fa-Hien Lena Cave, the site of the earliest fossil and archaeological evidence of H. sapiens in Sri Lanka.

“The results demonstrate specialized, sophisticated hunting of semi-arboreal and arboreal monkey and squirrel populations from 45,000 years ago in a tropical rainforest environment,” says Oshan Wedage, lead author of the study, of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. Co-author Dr. Noel Amano, also of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, adds, “This was complemented by sophisticated bone tool technologies which were, in turn, created from the bones of hunted monkeys.”

Fine-tuned adaptations, not ‘monkey business’

Together, the results of this new work demonstrate a highly tuned focus on monkey and other small mammal hunting over 45,000 years. A sustained focus on adult monkeys throughout this time period suggests that this strategy continued to be sustainable during this lengthy period and that the tropical rainforests were not over-taxed by human presence and practices.

“This ‘monkey menu’ was not a one-off, and the use of these difficult-to-catch resources is one more example of the behavioral and technological flexibility of H. sapiens,” says Prof. Michael Petraglia of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, a senior author of the study. Further detailed analysis of the tools and animal remains left behind by early members of our species promises to yield more insights into the variety of strategies that enabled H. sapiens to colonize the world’s continents and left us the last hominin standing.

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Exterior view of the entrance of Fa-Hien Lena cave in Sri Lanka. O. Wedage

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Tools manufactured from monkey bones and teeth recovered from the Late Pleistocene layers of Fa Hien Cave, Sri Lanka. N. Amano

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Gray tufted langur (S. priam), one of the monkey species targeted by early humans that settled in Fa Hien Cave, Sri Lanka. O. Wedage

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Article Source: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History news release

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UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON—Excavations at two quarries in Wales, known to be the source of the Stonehenge ‘bluestones’, provide new evidence of megalith quarrying 5,000 years ago, according to a new UCL-led study.

Geologists have long known that 42 of Stonehenge’s smaller stones, known as ‘bluestones’, came from the Preseli hills in Pembrokeshire, west Wales. Now a new study published in Antiquity pinpoints the exact locations of two of these quarries and reveals when and how the stones were quarried.

The discovery has been made by a team of archaeologists and geologists from UCL, Bournemouth University, University of Southampton, University of the Highlands and Islands and National Museum of Wales, which have been investigating the sites for eight years.

Professor Mike Parker Pearson (UCL Archaeology) and leader of the team, said: “What’s really exciting about these discoveries is that they take us a step closer to unlocking Stonehenge’s greatest mystery – why its stones came from so far away.”

“Every other Neolithic monument in Europe was built of megaliths brought from no more than 10 miles away.

We’re now looking to find out just what was so special about the Preseli hills 5,000 years ago, and whether there were any important stone circles here, built before the bluestones were moved to Stonehenge.”

The largest quarry was found almost 180 miles away from Stonehenge on the outcrop of Carn Goedog, on the north slope of the Preseli hills.

“This was the dominant source of Stonehenge’s spotted dolerite, so-called because it has white spots in the igneous blue rock. At least five of Stonehenge’s bluestones, and probably more, came from Carn Goedog,” said geologist Dr Richard Bevins (National Museum of Wales).

In the valley below Carn Goedog, another outcrop at Craig Rhos-y-felin was identified by Dr Bevins and fellow geologist Dr Rob Ixer (UCL Archaeology) as the source of one of the types of rhyolite – another type of igneous rock – found at Stonehenge.

According to the new study*, the bluestone outcrops are formed of natural, vertical pillars. These could be eased off the rock face by opening up the vertical joints between each pillar. Unlike stone quarries in ancient Egypt, where obelisks were carved out of the solid rock, the Welsh quarries were easier to exploit.

Neolithic quarry workers needed only to insert wedges into the ready-made joints between pillars, then lower each pillar to the foot of the outcrop.

Although most of their equipment is likely to have consisted of perishable ropes and wooden wedges, mallets and levers, they left behind other tools such as hammer stones and stone wedges.

“The stone wedges are made of imported mudstone, much softer than the hard dolerite pillars. An engineering colleague has suggested that hammering in a hard wedge could have created stress fractures, causing the thin pillars to crack. Using a soft wedge means that, if anything were to break, it would be the wedge and not the pillar,” said Professor Parker Pearson.

Archaeological excavations at the foot of both outcrops uncovered the remains of man-made stone and earth platforms, with each platform’s outer edge terminating in a vertical drop of about a metre.

“Bluestone pillars could be eased down onto this platform, which acted as a loading bay for lowering them onto wooden sledges before dragging them away,” said Professor Colin Richards (University of the Highlands and Islands), who has excavated Britain’s only other identified megalith quarry in the Orkney islands, off the north coast of Scotland.

An important aim of Professor Parker Pearson’s team was to date megalith-quarrying at the two outcrops. In the soft sediment of a hollowed-out track leading from the loading bay at Craig Rhos-y-felin, and on the artificial platform at Carn Goedog, the team recovered pieces of charcoal dating to around 3000 BC.

The team now thinks that Stonehenge was initially a circle of rough, unworked bluestone pillars set in pits known as the Aubrey Holes, near Stonehenge, and that the sarsens (sandstone blocks) were added some 500 years later.

The new discoveries also cast doubt on a popular theory that the bluestones were transported by sea to Stonehenge.

“Some people think that the bluestones were taken southwards to Milford Haven and placed on rafts or slung between boats and then paddled up the Bristol Channel and along the Bristol Avon towards Salisbury Plain. But these quarries are on the north side of the Preseli hills so the megaliths could have simply gone overland all the way to Salisbury Plain,” said Professor Kate Welham (Bournemouth University).

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The Stonehenge quarry. UCL

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Article Source: University College London news release

*’Megalith quarries for Stonehenge’s bluestones’–Mike Parker Pearson, Josh Pollard, Colin Richards, Kate Welham, Chris Casswell, Charles French, Duncan Schlee, Dave Shaw, Ellen Simmons, Adam Stanford, Richard Bevins & Rob Ixer.

PENN STATE—Australia has the highest rate of mammal extinction in the world. Resettlement of indigenous communities resulted in the spread of invasive species, the absence of human-set fires, and a general cascade in the interconnected food web that led to the largest mammalian extinction event ever recorded. In this case, the absence of direct human activity on the landscape may be the cause of the extinctions, according to a Penn State anthropologist.

“I was motivated by the mystery that has occurred in the last 50 years in Australia,” said Rebecca Bliege Bird, professor of anthropology, Penn State. “The extinction of small-bodied mammals does not follow the same pattern we usually see with people changing the landscape and animals disappearing.”

Australia’s Western Desert, where Bird and her team work, is the homeland of the Martu, the traditional owners of a large region of the Little and Great Sandy Desert. During the mid-20th century, many Martu groups were first contacted in the process of establishing a missile testing range and resettled in missions and pastoral stations beyond their desert home. During their hiatus from the land, many native animals went extinct.

In the 1980s, many families returned to the desert to reestablish their land rights. They returned to livelihoods centered around hunting and gathering. Today, in a hybrid economy of commercial and customary resources, many Martu continue their traditional subsistence and burning practices in support of cultural commitments to their country.

Twenty-eight Australian endemic land mammal species have become extinct since European settlement. Local extinctions of mammals include the burrowing bettong and the banded hare wallaby, both of which were ubiquitous in the desert before the indigenous exodus, Bird told attendees at the 2019 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science today (Feb. 17) in Washington, D.C.

“During the pre-1950, pre-contact period, Martu had more generalized diets than any animal species in the region,” said Bird. “When people returned, they were still the most generalized, but many plant and animal species were dropped from the diet.”

She also notes that prior to European settlement, the dingo, a native Australian dog, was part of Martu life. The patchy landscape created by Martu hunting fires may have been important for dingo survival. Without people, the dingo did not flourish and could not exclude populations of smaller invasive predators—cats and foxes—that threatened to consume all the native wildlife.

Bird and her team looked at the food webs—interactions of who eats what and who feeds whom, including humans—for the pre-contact and for the post-evacuation years. Comparisons of these webs show that the absence of indigenous hunters in the web makes it easier for invasive species to infiltrate the area and for some native animals to become endangered or extinct. This is most likely linked to the importance of traditional landscape burning practices, said Bird.

Indigenous Australians in the arid center of the continent often use fire to facilitate their hunting success. Much of Australia’s arid center is dominated by a hummock grass called spinifex.

In areas where Martu hunt more actively, hunting fires increase the patchiness of vegetation at different stages of regrowth, and buffer the spread of wildfires. Spinifex grasslands where Martu do not often hunt, exhibit a fire regime with much larger fires. Under an indigenous fire regime, the patchiness of the landscape boosts populations of native species such as dingo, monitor lizard and kangaroo, even after accounting for mortality due to hunting.

“The absence of humans creates big holes in the network,” said Bird. “Invading becomes easier for invasive species and it becomes easier for them to cause extinctions.” The National Science Foundation and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology supported this work.

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Satellite view of Australia. Wikimedia Commons

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Article Source: Penn State University news release

SANTA FE INSTITUTE—In two back-to-back symposia at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., on Sunday, Feb. 17 at 1:30 and 3:30 PM respectively, a cross-disciplinary cohort of scientists presented the first comprehensive investigations of how humans interacted with plant and animal species in different cultures worldwide through time. By compiling and comparing detailed data from pre-industrial and modern societies, the researchers are sketching a picture of humans’ roles and impacts in sustainable and unsustainable socio-ecological systems.

“Almost all food webs that have been compiled and studied have been put together without including humans,” says Jennifer Dunne (Santa Fe Institute), an ecologist and complex systems scientist who is leading the project with archaeologist Stefani Crabtree (Santa Fe Institute and Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity). “It takes a lot of time and effort to put these kinds of detailed data together. So even though ecologists have been studying food webs for decades, we’re only now in a position where we can start to rigorously compare human roles and impacts across different systems to understand sustainability in new kinds of ways,” says Dunne.

What do we learn when we do include humans?

As part of her presentation during the second symposium, Dunne revealed initial results from a comparison of food webs that explicitly include humans across several socioecological systems. Three are pre-industrial systems —the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, the Pueblo U.S. Southwest, and the Western Desert of Australia, and one is modern—the Tagus Estuary of Portugal. Given the diversity of cultures, ecologies, climates, and time periods represented in the data, Dunne suggests that we can start to learn “something more general about human roles in, and impacts on, ecosystems” by comparing these systems. For example, humans are often super-generalists compared to other predators—they feed on a huge variety of different species.

In some systems, humans as super-generalist predators can fit into ecosystems without causing extinctions or major environmental degradation. For example, according to Dunne’s pioneering analysis published in Scientific Reports in 2016, the Sanak Island (Alaska) Aleut fed on a whopping 122 of 513 taxa in the nearshore marine ecosystem. However, like other predators, they switched from their favorite prey—sea lions—to shellfish, kelp, or whatever was readily available when the weather did not allow them to hunt in open water. “Prey-switching is very stabilizing for food webs,” Dunne explains, “because it allows prey taxa populations to recover from exploitation, as the predator’s focus shifts to other prey that are easier to forage or hunt given current conditions.” That, plus limited use of hunting technology and other factors helped to minimize potential negative impacts of humans on the Sanak ecosystem—during approximately 7,000 years of human habitation, there is no evidence for any long-term local extinctions.

Humans also stabilized the desert ecosystem of Western Australia, where Crabtree and Rebecca Bliege Bird (Pennsylvania State University) are examining how the Martu Aboriginal foragers are embedded in their surrounding ecosystems. According to Crabtree, Martu Aboriginal foragers stabilized their ecosystem by providing several ecosystem services such as lighting small brush fires to expose the burrows of small prey. The scorched patches left on the landscape served as natural fire breaks against larger, more devastating wildfires. When the Martu were removed from their homeland in the mid-20th century, wildfires increased dramatically in size, and several small mammals, like the Rufous Hare-wallaby, went extinct.

Bird presented a newly published network analysis for the Aboriginal foragers during the first symposium, following Andrew Dugmore (University of Edinburgh) and George Hambrecht’s (University of Maryland) presentation of how Norse people in Iceland and Greenland used governance to mitigate anthropogenic degradation of the ecosystem.

Just as humans can have a stabilizing effect on their ecosystems, they can also play a destructive role. In the first symposium, archaeologist Jennifer Kahn (College of William and Mary) presented her ongoing historical analysis of the French Polynesian islands, including two cases where human interactions with their surroundings led to markedly different outcomes—both for the ecosystems and the societies embedded within them.

Crabtree, in the second symposium, presented her analysis of the 700-year trajectory of the Ancestral Pueblo people in the Southwest U.S., and the extent to which human interactions with the ecosystem eventually led them to depopulate the region.

Iain McKechnie (University of Victoria and Hakai Institute) then presented anthropological and archaeological data that illustrates the resilience of the indigenous peoples of the North American Northwest Coast as they interacted with both marine and terrestrial species.

In the final talk, Dunne cross-compared these and other systems and synthesized what we know, so far, about humanity’s roles across ecosystems and time periods. In addition to presenting new results about human roles in food webs, she also discussed new work that moves beyond feeding interactions to consider the myriad ways that humans interact with biodiversity in both simple and complex ways, for example by using species for medicine, shelter, tools, clothing, fuel, ritual purposes, and trade.

“Understanding ecosystems with humans as part of them is essential,” Crabtree says. “We’re not going anywhere. We are here to stay. We are going to keep impacting ecosystems, and we need to understand the ways that our impacts can lead to more sustainable and resilient systems.”

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In this depiction of the nearshore food web of Sanak Island, Alaska, spheres represent species or groups of species, and the links between them show feeding relationships. The colors of the spheres indicate types of taxa: green shows algae; blue shows seagrass, lichen, protozoa, bacteria, and detritus; yellow shows invertebrates such as snails, crabs, mussels, and octopus; orange shows fishes; purple shows birds; and red shows mammals such as sea otters. The red node near the center top of the image represents human hunter-gatherers (Aleut). It is the first comprehensive food web to include Homo sapiens. Image created by J.A. Dunne

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Article Source: Santa Fe Institute news release

UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA—Coinciding with the Pit Grave culture (4200-3600 years before our era), coming from Southern Europe, the Neolithic communities of the north-eastern Iberian Peninsula started a ceremonial activity related to the sacrifice and burial of dogs. The high amount of cases that are recorded in Catalonia suggests it was a general practice and it proves the tight relationship between humans and these animals, which, apart from being buried next to them, were fed a similar diet to humans’.

This is the conclusion of a research study* led by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and the University of Barcelona (UB), which provides new data to describe and understand the presence of dogs in sacred and funerary spaces of the middle Neolithic in the Iberian Peninsula, and gets an insight on the relation between humans and these animals. The study has been published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

The study analyzes the remains of twenty-six dogs found in funerary structures from four sites and necropolises of the Barcelona region, and has conducted an isotopic analysis for eighteen of them, to determine whether the relation with their owners included other aspects, such as a control of their diet.

Dogs were aged between one month and six years old, predominating those between twelve and eighteen years old, and had homogeneous sizes, between forty and fifty centimeters high. These were mainly buried in circular graves, together or near the humans, although some have been found separately in nearby graves and one was found at the entrance of the mortuary chamber. The skeletons were semi-complete in anatomical connection -only one was found as full, near a kid- without bone fractures or marks due to manipulation by evisceration, or any signs of predators.

“Choosing young animals aged up to one year old suggests there was an intention in the sacrifice. Although we can think it was for human consumption, the fact that these were buried near humans suggests there was an intention and a direct relation with death and the funerary ritual”, says Silvia Albizuri, researcher from the Prehistoric Studies and Research Seminar (SERP) of the UB and first author of the article. “This hypothesis is consistent, in addition, with the fact that they are found in an area of cultural influence that gives a symbolic value to the dog during that period, such as Southern France or Northern Italy”.

A diet rich in cereal and vegetables, controlled by humans

The isotopic study of the remains and its comparison with humans’ and other herbivorous animals’ diet in the site shows the diet of most of these animals was similar to the diet of humans, with a high presence of cereal, such as corn, and vegetables. In two puppies and two adult dogs, nutrition was mainly vegetarian and only a few cases had a diet rich in animal protein.

“These data show a close coexistence between dogs and humans, and probably a specific preparation of their nutrition, which is clear in the cases of a diet based on vegetables. They would probably do so to obtain a better control of their tasks on security and to save the time they would have to spend looking for food. This management would explain the homogeneity of the size of the animals”, says Eulàlia Subirà, researcher in the Research Group on Biological Anthropology (GREAB) of UAB.

Little-studied animals

The presence of dogs in prehistoric disposal structures is not common, which makes it a little-studied group among domestic animals. Their presence in graves is even lower. This is why the presence of these skeletons in anatomical connection like the ones in this study is considered exceptional.

There have been older cases of individual isolated burials in the Iberian Peninsula, but only later documented as a general practice related to the funerary ritual. This ritual spread and lasted during a hundred years, until the Iron Age.

Regarding food, there are only a few studies, with some cases of mixed diets in France, Anatolia and China. “Recently, we saw dogs have ten genes with a key function for starch and fat digestion, which would make the carbohydrates assimilation more efficient than its ancestor’s, the wolf. Our study helps to reach the conclusion that during the Neolithic, several vegetables were introduced to their nutrition”, notes Eulàlia Subirà.

The study allows reinforcing the idea that dogs played an important role in the economy of Neolithic populations, taking care of herds and settlements. That may be the vital relation that turned them into a companion in death or symbols in funerary rituals, the researchers conclude.

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Top: remains of adult dog in partial anatomical connection in La Serreta. Bottom: dog in anatomical connection between human skeletons, in the necropolis Bòbila Madurell. UB-UAB

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Article Source: University of Barcelona news release

*Albizuri, S.; Nadal, J.; Martín, P.; Gibaja, J. F.; Martín Cólliga, A.; Esteve, X.; Oms, X.; Martí, M.; Pou, R.; López-Onaindia, D., i Subirà, M. E. “Dogs in funerary contexts during the Middle Neolithic in the northeastern Iberian Peninsula (5th-early 4th millennium BCE)”. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, April 2019.

UNIVERSITY OF SEVILLE—The prestigious international journal Quaternary Science Reviews has just published a paper which has involved the participation of Gibraltarian scientists from The Gibraltar National Museum alongside colleagues from Spain, Portugal and Japan. The results which have been published come from an area of the Catalan Bay Sand Dune.

This work started ten years ago, when the first dates using the OSL method were obtained. It is then that the first traces of footprints left by vertebrates were found. In subsequent years the successive natural collapse of sand has revealed further material and has permitted a detailed study including new dates.

The sand sheets in the rampant dunes above Catalan Bay are a relic of the last glaciation, when sea level was up to 120 metres below present levels and a great field of dunes extended eastwards from the base of the Rock. The identified footprints correspond to species which are known, from fossil material, to have inhabited Gibraltar. The identified footprints correspond to Red Deer, Ibex, Aurochs, Leopard and Straight-tusked Elephant. In addition the scientists have found the footprint of a young human (106-126 cm in height), possibly Neanderthal, which dates to around 29 thousand years ago. It would coincide with late Neanderthal dates from Gorham’s Cave.

If confirmed to be Neanderthal, these dunes would become only the second site in the world with footprints attributed to these humans, the other being Vartop Cave in Romania. These findings add further international importance to the Gibraltar Pleistocene heritage, declared of World Heritage Value in 2016.

The research was supported by HM Government of Gibraltar under the Gibraltar Caves Project and the annual excavations in the Gibraltar Caves, with additional support to the external scientists from the Spanish EU project MICINN-FEDER: CGL2010-15810/BTE.

Minister for Heritage John Cortes MP commented, “This is extraordinary research and gives us an incredible insight into the wildlife community of Gibraltar’s past. We should all take a moment to imagine the scene when these animals walked across our landscape. It helps us understand the importance of looking after our heritage. I congratulate the research team on uncovering this fascinating, hidden evidence of our Rock’s past.”

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The place where the footprint was found. Universidad de Sevilla

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Article Source: University of Seville news release

If you liked this article, you may like The Last Neanderthals, a premium article published in Popular Archaeology.

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FIELD MUSEUM—About eight hundred years ago, a ship sank in the Java Sea off the coast of the islands of Java and Sumatra in Indonesia. There are no written records saying where the ship was going or where it came from–the only clues are the mostly-disintegrated structure of the vessel and its cargo, which was discovered on the seabed in the 1980s. Since the wreck’s recovery in the 1990s, researchers have been piecing together the world that the Java Sea Shipwreck was part of. In a new study in the Journal of Archaeological Science, archaeologists have demonstrated a new way to tell where the ceramic cargo of the ship originally came from: by zapping it with an X-ray gun.

“It’s amazing that we can pinpoint the production area of materials from an 800-year-old shipwreck,” says Wenpeng Xu, the study’s lead author, a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Chicago, which has a joint graduate program in Anthropology with the Field Museum. “It helps us learn the details of trade relationships–knowing how people interacted in the past is very important for us to understand the present.”

The Field Museum is home to an estimated 7,500 pieces of cargo recovered from the wreck, including the 60 ceramic pieces from the shipwreck analyzed in this study: bowls and boxes made of porcelain covered in a bluish-white glaze called qingbai. Based on the style of the ceramics, scientists knew that it came from southeastern China, but style alone isn’t enough to pinpoint a piece’s origin because many kilns produced similar-looking pieces. By comparing the chemical makeups of ceramics from the wreck and from different kiln sites in China, the researchers were able to more precisely determine where the ceramics were made.

Ceramics from different sites have different chemical compositions because of variations in the elements present in that region’s clay or in the recipes that potters used to mix their clay. If a piece of pottery from the shipwreck matches the pottery found at an archaeological site, it’s a pretty safe bet that the pottery originated there. “Each kiln site uses its own materials and ingredients for clay–that’s what makes each sample’s fingerprint unique,” explains Xu. “If the fingerprint of the sample matches the fingerprint of the kiln site, then it’s highly possible that that’s where the sample came from.” This is where the X-ray gun comes in.

“We used a portable X-ray fluorescence detector–it looks a lot like a ray gun,” says Lisa Niziolek, Field Museum Boone Research Scientist and co-author of the study. The science behind the compositional analysis is complex, but Niziolek breaks it down: “You’re shooting X-rays into a material you’re interested in. It excites the material’s atoms. Energy goes flying out, and this measures that energy. Different elements have different signatures of energy that comes back out.”

Knowing the precise origins of cargo on the ship reveals the size and complexity of trade networks at the time. The ceramics in the study were created over 2,000 miles from where the ship sank–about the distance between New York and Las Vegas.

“A key that’s emerging is that the shipwreck tells us that there were huge trade networks in the 12th and 13th centuries,” says Field Museum MacArthur Curator of Anthropology and study co-author Gary Feinman. “We’re taught to associate vast trade networks with Europeans like Magellan and Marco Polo, but Europeans weren’t a big part of this network that went from Asia to Africa. Globalization isn’t just a recent phenomenon–it’s not just Eurocentric, not just tied to modern capitalism. The ancient world was more interconnected than a lot of people thought.”

“People often refer to shipwrecks as time capsules, but the Java Sea Wreck is more than just that,” says Niziolek. “A time capsule represents a moment frozen in time, but that ignores the way these results reveal these vast and changing socioeconomic networks.”

Feinman agrees: “It’s almost the opposite of a nice, bounded time capsule, it’s more like a window that opens up to a wide horizon and tells us how this material came onto this ship before it sank.”

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Ceramic bowls in situ at the Java Sea Shipwreck site. Field Museum, Anthropology. Photographer Pacific Sea Resources.

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Ceramics from the Field Museum’s Java Sea Shipwreck collection being analyzed by portable X-ray fluorescence. Field Museum. Photographer Kate Golembiewski.

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Article Source: Field Museum news release

WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS—Since the beginning of archaeology, researchers have combed the globe searching for evidence of the first domesticated crops. Painstakingly extracting charred bits of barley, wheat, millet and rice from the remains of ancient hearths and campfires, they’ve published studies contending that a particular region or country was among the first to bring some ancient grain into cultivation.

Now, an international team of scientists, led by Xinyi Liu of Washington University in St. Louis, has consolidated findings from hundreds of these studies to plot a detailed map of how ancient cereal crops spread from isolated pockets of first cultivation to become dietary staples in civilizations across the Old World.

“The very fact that the ‘food globalization’ in prehistory spanned more than three thousand years indicates perhaps a major driver of the process was the perpetual needs of the poor rather than more ephemeral cultural choices of the powerful in the Neolithic and Bronze Age,” said Liu, assistant professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences.

Forthcoming Feb. 15 in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews, the study illustrates the current scientific consensus on the prehistoric food globalization process that transformed diets across Eurasia and Northern Africa between 7,000 and 3,500 years ago.

Co-authors include researchers from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom; Zheijiang University in China; the Lithuanian Institute of History; the Smithsonian Institution; and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing.

The study suggests that food globalization in prehistoric times was driven not by exotic appetities of ruling elites, but by the relentless, season-to-season ingenuity of poor peasant farmers looking for new ways to put just a little more food on their tables.

“Recent research developments shift the focus from chronology and routes to the drivers of the ‘food globalization’ process and considers the context in which agricultural and dietary innovations arose and what agents were involved,” Liu said. “These studies emphasize the role played by the primary agents of agricultural production, the ordinary farmers in the past.”

By trying new types of seed, plowing fields a little further up or down the mountain or shifting planting and harvest times, peasant farmers used a trial-and-error approach to overcome climatic challenges and expand the geographic boundaries of where certain grains could be planted. Gradually, this experimentation led to vastly improved yields as farmers learned to extend the growing season by planting both spring and fall crops in the same fields.

While many people are familiar with the global spread of food crops following the exploration of the New World — a process known as the Columbian Exchange — Liu contends that the prehistoric food globalization process had an equally dramatic impact on food cultivation in the Old World.

Wheat and barley moved from southwest Asia to Europe, India and China, while broom and foxtail millet moved in the other direction: from China to the West. Rice traveled across East, South and Southeast Asia; African millets and sorghum moved across sub-Saharan Africa and across the Indian Ocean, Liu said.

“While much of the exotic foods we enjoy today are the results of modern trade networks, the food globalization process clearly has its roots in prehistory,” Liu said. “Food globalization was well underway before the Columbia Exchange and the Islamic Agricultural Revolution. It predates even the earliest material evidence of trans-Eurasian contact, such as the Silk Route, by millennia.”

Liu’s study traces the farm-to-table journeys of mainstay cereal crops as they criss-crossed continents of the Old World in three distinct waves:

Before 5000 B.C., early farming communities sprang up in isolated pockets of fertile foothills and stream drainage basins where conditions were optimal for cultivating wild grains that originated nearby. Crop dispersals are generally limited to neighboring regions that are broadly compatible in terms of climate and seasonality.

Between 5000 and 2500 B.C., farmers found ways to push cultivation of various grains across wide regions where crop-compatible weather systems were contained within and separated by major mountain systems, such as those associated with the Tibetan Plateau and the Tianshan Mountains.

Between 2500 and 1500 B.C., farmers found ways to move beyond natural and climatic barriers that had long separated east and west, north and south — mastering the cultivation of grains that had evolved to flourish in the extreme elevations of the Tibetan Plateau or the drenching rains of Asian monsoons. Previously isolated agricultural systems were brought together, ushering in a new kind of agriculture in which the planting of both local and exotic crops enables multiple cropping and extended growing seasons.

“The whole process is not only about adoption but also about ‘rejection,’ reflect a range of choices that different communities made, sometimes driven by ecological expediency in novel environments, sometimes by culinary conservatism,” Liu said. “As the old Chinese saying goes: For what has been long united, it will fall apart, and for what has been long divided, it will come together eventually.”

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Prehistoric peasant farmers expanded the cultivation of domestic grains into extreme climate regions of the Old World, such as this barley field in Zuoni County, Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. Xinyi Liu/Washington University in St. Louis

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Article Source: Washington University in St. Louis news release

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, EVANSTON, Ill.—A new study may resolve an old debate about how tough the Vikings actually were.

Although TV and movies paint Vikings as robust souls, braving subzero temperatures in fur pelts and iron helmets, new evidence indicates they might have been basking in 50-degree summer weather when they settled in Greenland.

After reconstructing southern Greenland’s climate record over the past 3,000 years, a Northwestern University team found that it was relatively warm when the Norse lived there between 985 and 1450 C.E., compared to the previous and following centuries.

“People have speculated that the Norse settled in Greenland during an unusually, fortuitously warm period, but there weren’t any detailed local temperature reconstructions that fully confirmed that. And some recent work suggested that the opposite was true,” said Northwestern’s Yarrow Axford, the study’s senior author. “So this has been a bit of a climate mystery.”

Now that climate mystery finally has been solved.

The study is published in the journal Geology. Axford is an associate professor of Earth and planetary sciences in Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. The study is a part of Northwestern Ph.D. candidate G. Everett Lasher’s dissertation research, based in Axford’s lab.

To reconstruct past climate, the researchers studied lake sediment cores collected near Norse settlements outside of Narsaq in southern Greenland. Because lake sediment forms by an incremental buildup of annual layers of mud, these cores contain archives of the past. By looking through the layers, researchers can pinpoint climate clues from eons ago.

For this study, Lasher analyzed the chemistry of a mix of lake fly species, called chironomids, trapped inside the layers of sediment. By looking at the oxygen isotopes within the flies’ preserved exoskeletons, the team pieced together a picture of the past. This method allowed the team to reconstruct climate change over hundreds of years or less, making it the first study to quantify past temperature changes in the so-called Norse Eastern Settlement.

“The oxygen isotopes we measure from the chironomids record past lake water isotopes in which the bugs grew, and that lake water comes from precipitation falling over the lake,” said Lasher, first author of the paper. “The oxygen isotopes in precipitation are partly controlled by temperature, so we examined the change in oxygen isotopes through time to infer how temperature might have changed.”

Because recent studies concluded that some glaciers were advancing around Greenland and nearby Arctic Canada during the time Vikings lived in southern Greenland, Axford and Lasher expected their data to indicate a much colder climate. Instead, they found that a brief warm period interrupted a consistent cooling climate trend driven by changes in Earth’s orbit. Near the end of the warm period, the climate was exceptionally erratic and unstable with record high and low temperatures that preceded Viking abandonment of Greenland. Overall, the climate was about 1.5-degrees Celsius warmer than the surrounding cooling centuries. This warmer period was similar to southern Greenland’s temperatures today, which hover around 10-degrees Celsius (50-degrees Fahrenheit) in summer.

In another surprise, Axford and Lasher found that the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO)—a natural fluctuation in atmospheric pressure that is often responsible for climate anomalies in the region—probably was not in a dominantly positive phase for multiple Medieval centuries as had been hypothesized. (When the NAO is in its positive phase, it brings cold air to much of Greenland.)

“We found that the NAO could not explain Medieval climatic changes at our site,” Lasher said. “That might call into question its use in explaining long-term climate change over the last 3,000 years elsewhere.”

So what did cause the Vikings’ fortuitously warm climate? Lasher and Axford aren’t sure but speculate it might have been caused by warmer ocean currents in the region. The new data will be useful for climate modelers and climate researchers as they seek to understand and predict what might be in store for Greenland’s ice sheet as Earth warms rapidly in the future.

“Unlike warming over the past century, which is global, Medieval warmth was localized,” Axford said. “We wanted to investigate what was happening in southern Greenland at that time because it’s a climatically complex part of the world where counterintuitive things can happen.”

The Norse settlements in Greenland collapsed as local climate apparently became exceptionally erratic, and then ultimately consistently cold. But Axford and Lasher will leave it to the archaeologists to determine whether or not climate played a role in their departure.

“We went in with a hypothesis that we wouldn’t see warmth in this time period, in which case we might have had to explain how the Norse were hearty, robust folk who settled in Greenland during a cold snap,” Lasher said. “Instead, we found evidence for warmth. Later, as their settlements died out, apparently there was climatic instability. Maybe they weren’t as resilient to climate change as Greenland’s indigenous people, but climate is just one of many things that might have played a role.”

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Recovering a sediment core. Amanda Morris

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Article Source: Northwestern University news release

YALE UNIVERSITY—Long before human ancestors began hunting large mammals for meat, a fatty diet provided them with the nutrition to develop bigger brains, posits a new paper* in Current Anthropology.

The paper argues that our early ancestors acquired a taste for fat by eating marrow scavenged from the skeletal remains of large animals that had been killed and eaten by other predators. The argument challenges the widely held view among anthropologists that eating meat was the critical factor in setting the stage for the evolution of humans.

“Our ancestors likely began acquiring a taste for fat 4 million years ago, which explains why we crave it today,” says Jessica Thompson, the paper’s lead author and an anthropologist at Yale University. “The reservoirs of fat in the long bones of carcasses were a huge calorie package on a calorie-poor landscape. That could have been what gave an ancestral population the advantage it needed to set off the chain of human evolution.”

Thompson, who recently joined Yale’s faculty, completed the paper while on the faculty at Emory University.

While focusing on fat over meat may seem like a subtle distinction, the difference is significant, Thompson says. The nutrients of meat and fat are different, as are the technologies required to access them. Meat eating is traditionally paired with the manufacture of sharp, flaked-stone tools, while obtaining fat-rich marrow only required smashing bones with a rock, Thompson notes.

The authors review evidence that a craving for marrow could have fueled not just a growing brain size, but the quest to go beyond smashing bones with rocks to make more sophisticated tools and to hunt large animals.

“That’s how all technology originated — taking one thing and using it to alter something else,” Thompson says. “That’s the origin of the iPhone right there.”

Co-authors of the paper include anthropologists Susana Carvalho of Oxford University, Curtis Marean of Arizona State University, and Zeresenay Alemseged of the University of Chicago.

The human brain consumes 20% of the body’s energy at rest, or twice that of the brains of other primates, which are almost exclusively vegetarian. It’s a mystery to scientists how our human ancestors met the calorie demands to develop and sustain our larger brains.

A meat-centered paradigm for human evolution hypothesizes that an ape population began more actively hunting and eating small game, which became an evolutionary stepping stone to the human behavior of hunting large animals.

The paper argues that this theory does not make nutritional sense. “The meat of wild animals is lean,” Thompson says. “It actually takes more work to metabolize lean protein than you get back.”

In fact, eating lean meat without a good source of fat can lead to protein poisoning and acute malnutrition. Early Arctic explorers, who attempted to survive on rabbit meat exclusively, described the condition as “rabbit starvation.”

This protein problem, coupled with the energy required for an upright ape with small canines to capture and eat small animals, would seem to rule out eating meat as a pathway to fueling brain growth, Thompson says.

The new paper presents a new hypothesis, going back about 4 million years, to the Pliocene. As the human ancestor began walking primarily on two legs, heavily forested regions of Africa were breaking into mosaics, creating open grasslands.

“Our human ancestors were likely awkward creatures,” Thompson says. “They weren’t good in trees, like chimpanzees are, but they weren’t necessarily all that good on the ground either. So, what did the first upright walking apes in our lineage do to make them so successful? At this stage, there was already a small increase in the size of the brains. How were they feeding that?”

Thompson and her co-authors propose that our early ancestors wielded rocks as they foraged on open grassland. After a predator had finished eating a large mammal, these upright apes explored the leftovers by smashing them and discovered the marrow hidden in the limb bones.

“The bones sealed up the marrow like a Tupperware container, preventing bacterial growth,” Thompson says. And the only things that could crack open these containers, she adds, were the bone-cracking jaws of hyenas or a clever ape wielding a rock.

The hypothesis offers an explanation for how the human ancestor may have garnered the extra calories needed to foster a larger brain, long before there is evidence for controlled fire, which could have mitigated the problem of bacteria in rotting, scavenged meat. The fat hypothesis also predates by more than 1 million years most evidence for even basic toolmaking of simple stone flakes.

Scientists ought to begin looking for evidence of bone-smashing behavior in early human ancestors, Thompson said.

“Paleoanthropologists are looking for mostly complete bones, and then concentrating on identifying the animal that died,” Thompson says. “But instead of just wondering about the bone’s creature of origin, we should be asking, ‘What broke this bone?’ We need to start collecting tiny pieces of shattered bone to help piece together this kind of behavioral information.”

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An African grassland environment like this formed a typical backdrop for early human scavenging.

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Article Source: Yale University news release

*https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/701477

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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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Article Source:Edited from the Akson Russion Science Communication Association news release.

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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

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Article Source: PLOS news release

*Cavazzuti C, Bresadola B, d’Innocenzo C, Interlando S, Sperduti A (2019) Towards a new osteometric method for sexing ancient cremated human remains. Analysis of Late Bronze Age and Iron Age samples from Italy with gendered grave goods. PLoS ONE 14(1): e0209423. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0209423

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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The Salkhit skullcap © Maud Dahlem, Muséum de Toulouse (France).

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This is a view of the find spot in the Salkhit Valley, Mongolia © Institute of History and Archaeology & Academy of Sciences (Mongolia).

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Article Source: University of Oxford news release

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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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Article Source: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History news release

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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)

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Article Source: University College London news release

*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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Article Source: University of Seville news release

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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

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Article Source: University College London news release

*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

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Article Source: Dartmouth College news release

The Papers

PaleoAnthropology (2018)

Guest Editors: Scott A. Williams, Jeremy M. DeSilva

1. Malapa at 10: Introduction to the special issue on Australopithecus sediba (Williams, S.A., DeSilva, J.M., and de Ruiter, D.J.)
2. 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.)
3. 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.)
4. 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.)
5. The hand of Australopithecus sediba (Kivell, T.L., Churchill, S.E., Kibii, J.M., Schmid, P., and Berger, L.R.)
6. The pelvis of Australopithecus sediba (Churchill, S.E., Kibii, J.M., Schmid, P., Reed, N.D., and Berger, L.R.)
7. 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.)
8. 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.)
9. Computer animation of the walking mechanics of Australopithecus sediba (Zhang, A.Y. and DeSilva, J.M.)

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