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Editor’s Note: The following University of Helsinki news release publicizes the latest research supporting one of the causes of the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire, also written about by author and professor Kyle Harper in his latest book, The Fate of Rome, and published in a major feature premium article by Kyle Harper, The Archaeology of the Invisible and the Fall of Rome, in the Spring 2018 issue of Popular Archaeology Magazine.

UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI—A recent study published in an esteemed academic journal indicates that volcanic eruptions in the mid 500s resulted in an unusually gloomy and cold period. A joint research project of the Chronology Laboratory of the Finnish Museum of Natural History and Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke) suggests that the years 536 and 541-544 CE were very difficult for many people.

An extended period of little light may make it difficult for humans to survive. The level of production of plants is dependent on the amount of available sunlight. Food production, i.e, farming and animal husbandry, rely on the same solar energy. Humans, meanwhile, become more prone to disease if they are not exposed to enough sunlight to produce vitamin D.

“Our research shows that the climate anomaly, which covered all of the northern hemisphere, was the compound result of several volcanic eruptions,” says Markku Oinonen, director of the Chronology Laboratory.

The aerosols that were released into the atmosphere with the eruptions covered the sun for a long time.

The exceptionally poor climate conditions were significantly detrimental to farming and reduced the production of vitamin D among the populace. This means that the people who were already weakened by hunger also had to grapple with a compromised immune system.

Trees are a re­cord of the past

The study is based on dendrochronology or tree-ring dating. The series of annual growth rings from subfossil – or intact – tree deposits covers the past 7,600 years. The trees are often found on the bottom of small lakes, and Luke has been taking samples and recording the findings since the 1990s.

“Researchers have put together an annual growth ring calendar of treeline pine spanning more than 7,600 years. Various historical events can be contrasted with the calendar. The growth ring calendar is an important indicator of global climate change,” says researcher Samuli Helama from Luke.

The samples in the recent study were dated with the help of the growth ring calendar at Luke, and sample shavings were carved out of them for each calendar year. The Chronology Laboratory then conducted isotope analyses on the samples.

Car­bon iso­topes in­dic­ate sum­mer weather

The results of the study are based on the analysis of the variation of carbon isotopes in the annual growth rings of trees. The variety in carbon isotopes reflects the photosynthesis of the trees, which in turn is largely dependent on the amount of solar radiation available during the summer.

The new study tracks the correlation of carbon isotope variation and volcanic eruptions from the 19th century until recent years, and shows the dramatic reduction in available sunlight in 536 as well as between 541 and 544 CE. The variation of summer temperatures was similarly reconstructed on the basis of the density of the trees’ annual growth rings.

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A subfossil tree trunk being lifted out of a lake. Samuli Helama / Natural Resources Institute Finland

Hard times brought the plague

The unusually poor years coincide with the bubonic plague epidemic that devastated the Roman Empire. The epidemic caused by the Yersinia pestis bacterium began in 542 CE and killed approximately half, or more, of the inhabitants of what was then considered the Eastern Roman Empire. The plague spread through Europe, from the Mediterranean, possibly as far north as Finland, and had killed tens of millions of people by the 8th century.

The study was conducted as a consortium project by the University of Helsinki and Luke, with participation from researchers of the University of Eastern Finland, the Finnish Meteorological Institute, the Geological Survey of Finland and the University of Turku. The research was funded by the Academy of Finland.

Article Source: University of Helsinki news release

The study was published in the international series Scientific Reports: Helama S, Arppe L, Uusitalo J, Holopainen J, Mäkelä H M, Mäkinen H, Mielikäinen K, Nöjd P, Sutinen R, Taavitsainen J-P, Timonen M and Oinonen M 2018. Volcanic dust veils from sixth century tree-ring isotopes linked to reduced irradiance, primary production and human health. Scientific Reports 8, http://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-19760-w.

For readers interested in further reading about this topic, see The Archaeology of the Invisible and the Fall of Rome by Kyle Harper.

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PLOS—Renewed excavations at the Late Pleistocene Leang Burung 2 rock shelter archaeological site on the island of Sulawesi, Indonesia have revealed new evidence of early human occupation, according to findings by Adam Brumm of Griffith University’s Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, and colleagues from Indonesia’s National Research Centre for Archaeology (ARKENAS), published* April 11, 2018 in the journal PLOS ONE.

The island of Sulawesi is generally assumed to have been a key stepping-stone on early human dispersal routes with modern humans possibly making first landfall as early as 65,000 years ago, based on early colonization dates for Australia. The limestone rock-shelter at Leang Burung 2 in the Maros karsts of Sulawesi has long held significance in our understanding of early human dispersals into ‘Wallacea’, the vast zone of oceanic islands between continental Asia and Australia. In 1975, artifacts recovered at Leang Burung 2 were interpreted as evidence of occupation by modern humans between 25,000 and 34,000 years ago, but excavations were discontinued before bedrock or sterile deposits were reached.

Brumm and colleagues returned to Leang Burung 2 in 2007 and between 2011 and 2013 to reassess the dating and interpretation of early findings and to dig nearly 3 meters deeper for more ancient materials. Their analysis suggests that the upper layers of sediment are of mixed age, and thus the artifacts from the 1975 excavation may be younger than previously thought. But in the newly-excavated lower levels of the deposit, they discovered and dated archaic cobble-based cores and flakes that indicate human occupation at the site at least 50,000 years ago. These new artifacts provide key insights into the history of human occupation and cultural evolution across the Indonesian region.

While the identity of the ancient toolmakers is unknown, it is possible that these were the same early modern humans that produced 40,000-year-old cave art found in neighbouring caves or they could be a separate population of more ancient humans or human relatives that had long inhabited Sulawesi. The researchers note that these recent excavations do not yet reach the lowest layers of the deposit, and that further exploration at nearby sites may recover even older remains of human occupation, as well as more dateable materials to confirm their preliminary age estimates.

Adam Brumm says: “We have uncovered archaeological evidence for an ancient population of ‘Ice Age’ hunter-gatherers that inhabited Leang Burung 2 rock-shelter around 50,000 years ago. This early ‘culture’, so far as it can be discerned from stone tools and associated faunal remains, is strikingly different to that of the modern human foragers who were creating sophisticated cave art in nearby sites by 40,000 years ago, perhaps suggesting the first inhabitants of this site may not only have been members of a different culture but also a distinct human species.”

These are stone artifacts excavated from the deep deposits at Leang Burung 2. (a) limestone core, square D10, spit 54 (Layer A); (b) limestone core, square D11, spit 55 (Layer A/B); (c) retouched limestone flake, square D11, spit 47 (Layer I); (d) multiplatform limestone core, square D11, spit 55. (Layer A); (e) limestone flake, square D11, spit 50 (Layer A). Scale bars are 10 mm. Brumm et al (2018)

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Article Source: PLOS news release

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*Brumm A, Hakim B, Ramli M, Aubert M, van den Bergh GD, Li B, et al. (2018) A reassessment of the early archaeological record at Leang Burung 2, a Late Pleistocene rock-shelter site on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. PLoS ONE 13(4): e0193025

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MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY—A project led by the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History has discovered a fossilized finger bone of an early modern human in the Nefud Desert of Saudi Arabia, dating to approximately 90,000 years ago. The discovery, described in Nature Ecology and Evolution, is the oldest directly dated Homo sapiens fossil outside of Africa and the Levant and indicates that early dispersals into Eurasia were more expansive than previously thought.

Researchers conducting archaeological fieldwork in the Nefud Desert of Saudi Arabia have discovered a fossilized finger bone of an early member of our species, Homo sapiens. The discovery is the oldest directly dated Homo sapiens fossil outside of Africa and the immediately adjacent Levant, and indicates that early dispersals into Eurasia were more expansive than previously thought. Prior to this discovery, it was thought that early dispersals into Eurasia were unsuccessful and remained restricted to the Mediterranean forests of the Levant, on the doorstep of Africa. The finding from the Al Wusta site shows that there were both multiple dispersals out of Africa, and these spread further than previously known.

Oldest directly dated Homo sapiens fossil outside of Africa and the Levant

The results, published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, detail the discovery made at the site of Al Wusta, an ancient fresh-water lake located in what is now the hyper-arid Nefud Desert. Numerous animal fossils, including those of hippopotamus and tiny fresh water snails were found at Al Wusta, as well as abundant stone tools made by humans. Among these finds was a well preserved and small fossil, just 3.2 cm long, which was immediately recognized as a human finger bone. The bone was scanned in three dimensions and its shape compared to various other finger bones, both of recent Homo sapiens individuals and bones from other species of primates and other forms of early humans, such as Neanderthals. The results conclusively showed that the finger bone, the first ancient human fossil found in Arabia, belonged to our own species. Using a technique called uranium series dating, a laser was used to make microscopic holes in the fossil and measure the ratio between tiny traces of radioactive elements. These ratios revealed that the fossil was 88,000 years old. Other dates obtained from associated animals fossils and sediments converged to a date of approximately 90,000 years ago. Further environmental analyses also revealed the site to have been a freshwater lake in an ancient grassland environment far removed from today’s deserts.

Lead author Dr. Huw Groucutt, of the University of Oxford and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, states, “This discovery for the first time conclusively shows that early members of our species colonized an expansive region of southwest Asia and were not just restricted to the Levant. The ability of these early people to widely colonize this region casts doubt on long held views that early dispersals out of Africa were localized and unsuccessful.”

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Fossil finger bone of Homo sapiens from the Al Wusta site, Saudi Arabia. Ian Cartwright

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Survey and mapping of the Al Wusta site. Klint Janulis

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General view of the excavations at the Al Wusta site, Saudi Arabia. The ancient lake bed (in white) is surrounded by sand dunes of the Nefud Desert. Michael Petraglia

Modern deserts of the Arabian Peninsula were once lush grasslands that humans were able to colonize

Project Lead, Professor Michael Petraglia of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History adds, “The Arabian Peninsula has long been considered to be far from the main stage of human evolution. This discovery firmly puts Arabia on the map as a key region for understanding our origins and expansion to the rest of the world. As fieldwork carries on, we continue to make remarkable discoveries in Saudi Arabia.”

The international consortium of researchers involved in this project is headed by the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, in partnership with the Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage. Additional partners include the Saudi Geological Survey, King Saud University, the University of Oxford and other key institutions in the United Kingdom and Australia.

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

See the previously published in-depth Popular Archaeology interview with chief scientists conducting research on early humans in Arabia here.

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UNIVERSIDAD DE SAN MARTIN DE PORRES–A multinational South American team from Peru, Brasil and Bolivia led by the Universidad de San Martin de Porres at Lima, Peru, published the first genetic study on the modern descendants of the imperial Inca lineages in the journal Molecular Genetics and Genomics. This work supported by funds from the Genographic Project (Geno 2.0), shows new insights about Inca origins and lineages.

The Inka people arrived and in the Cusco valley and in a few centuries they built the Tawantinsuyu, the largest empire in the Americas. The Tawantinsuyu was the cultural climax of 6,000 years of Central Andes civilizations overlapping the modern countries of Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, the South of Colombia and the North of Argentina and Chile. In contrast with the richness of archeological and cultural evidence, pre Columbian history vanishes in time as it intermingles with myths due to the lack of writing systems before the arrival of the European chroniclers. Very little is known about Inca origins and some genetic information could help reconstruct part of their history. Unfortunately the mummies and bodily remains of the Inca emperors, worshiped as gods, were burned and buried in unknown locations due to religious and political persecution by the Christian conquistadors and inquisitors, so no direct material remains to study their DNA. “Thus for now, only the genetic analysis of modern families of Inca descent could provide some clues about their ancestors” remarks geneticist Jose Sandoval, first author, working at Universidad de San Martin de Porres at Lima, Peru.

There were two foundational myths for the origin of the Incas before they established in Cusco valley to build their capital city. One is that Manco Capac and Mama Ocllo, considered children of the Sun God and founder parents of the civilization, came from Lake Titicaca about 500 km southwards from the border of North Bolivia and South Peru, more or less the same region where the Tiwanaku empire existed a few centuries before. The second myth narrates that four Ayar brothers, with divine powers, came out from the caves inside of a hill in the area of Paccarictambo, 50 km south of Cusco and only one of them, Manco, arrived in the Cusco valley. Concerning the succession of the rulers (between 12 to 14), most chroniclers mention only one patrilineal heritage, however other authors think that it was a complex selection of military and administrative skills not necessarily electing the son of a previous Inca. “A unique patrilineal cluster would be expected in the first case. In the second case, two or more patrilineal patterns will be evident” says geneticist Ricardo Fujita, senior author, also at Universidad de San Martin de Porres”. The research team included historian Ronald Elward, who studied documentation of twelve Inca noble families and followed up from the conquista times to their contemporary descendants. “Most of them still living in the towns of San Sebastian and San Jeronimo, Cusco, Peru, at present, are probably the most homogeneous group of Inca lineage” says Elward.

Markers for Y chromosome and mtDNA were used for the genetic analysis of these families and compared with a database for 2400 native individuals from Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador and Brazil. “The results show distinctive patrilineal origins to two founder individuals who lived between 1000 to 1500 AD, a period between the decline of former Tiwanaku (south) and Wari (north) contemporary empires, and the rise of the Inca empire a few centuries later” says geneticist Fabricio Santos from the Universidad Federal de Minas Gerais at Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The first patrilineal haplotype named AWKI-1 (awki means crown prince in quechua language) is found in the putative families descending from 2 earlier Incas Yahuar Huacac and Viracocha. The same pattern of the Inca descendants was also found in individuals living south to Cusco, mainly in Aymaras of Peru and Bolivia. The second patrilineal haplotype named AWKI-2 was found in one descendant of a more recent Inca, Huayna Capac, father of the two brothers (Huascar and Atahualpa) who were fighting a fraternal war over the empire at the arrival of the conquistadors. “AWKI-2 is also found in dozens of individuals from different locations in the Andes and occasionally in the Amazon, suggesting a populational expansion” says Dr. Santos.

“In addition to San Sebastian and San Jeronimo, most locations of AWKI-1, AWKI-2 were southwards to Cusco including the basin of lake Titicaca and neighboring Paccarictambo, in agreement with the two foundational myths of the Incas” says Ricardo Fujita, “probably two pictures at different times of the same journey with final destination Cusco” adds Fujita. “It is also remarkable that in these contemporary Inca nobility families there is a continuity since pre-Columbian times” says Ronald Elward. The analysis of their mtDNA suggested a highly varied matrilineal marker whose counterparts are found all over the Andes reflecting a high genetic flow. “This probably reflects the political alliances by arranged marriages between Cusco nobility and daughters of lords of kingdoms and chiefdoms all over the empire” states Jose Sandoval.

This work is the continuation of several studies performed by the team to reconstruct South American history by genetics and also funded by a previous grant of the Genographic Project(Geno 1.0) led in South America by Fabricio Santos. Two published works included the unique ancient roots of the Uros, people from the Floating Islands of the Lake Titicaca and the Quechwa-Lamistas in Peruvian Amazon. Modern Uros are Aymara speaking people that some have thought to be people from the Aymara ethnia who profited tourism by living on the floating islands. However the team showed that they were genetically isolated people who had lost their original Uro language, shifting to the more widely used Aymara language. On the other hand the Kechwa-Lamista are Amazonian people who speak the Andean Quechua language and they were presumed descendants of Andeans Chancas, former enemies of the Incas, and were chased by them towards the Amazon. DNA showed that they are actually descendants of linguistically different Amazonian people who were gathered by Catholic missions and were taught the Quechua language (learn by the missionaries at the Andes) for a better evangelization.

“In some cases Genetics shows us something different than the official history. What is not written or badly written in historical records, can be revealed by what is written in our DNA. ” concludes Ricardo Fujita. “This study is just the tip of the iceberg in trying to solve part of several enigmas of one of the most remarkable civilizations. The DNA of one Inca monarch’s bodily remains or of one direct descendant who lived at the beginning of the Spanish colonization could give more certainty about the Inca lineage, and our team is looking forward to it” declares Jose Sandoval.

Article Source: UNIVERSIDAD DE SAN MARTIN DE PORRES news release

Above: Ruins of temples in Maukallacta in the district of Paccarictambo at about 50 km south Cusco, built by the Incas to honor their ancestors. One of the probable intermediate origins of the Inca lineage in the journey to Cusco. Ricardo Fujita

Above: Machu Picchu, perhaps the best-known ancient site of the Incas. Martin St-Amant

PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES (PNAS)—Researchers report* evidence for the early spread of agriculture into central Anatolia. The means by which agriculture expanded beyond the Fertile Crescent of Southwest Asia, where agriculture originated in the 10th and 9th millennia BC, is unclear. Douglas Baird and colleagues report a wide range of archaeological evidence of agriculture from the 10th-millenium and 9th-millennium sites of P?narba?? and Boncuklu on the Central Anatolian plateau in Turkey. At Boncuklu, the presence of macrofossils and phytoliths of wheat chaff, along with seeds of agricultural weeds commonly found in early farming sites, suggest the cultivation of crops, and the nitrogen isotope compositions of sheep and goat remains indicate a dietary signature that suggests small-scale experimentation with herding of these animals. By contrast, P?narba?? exhibited none of the evidence of crop cultivation found at Boncuklu. Analysis of stone tools and ancient DNA from both sites suggest that the inhabitants represented an indigenous population, rather than migrants from earlier agricultural communities to the south and east. According to the authors, the findings suggest that indigenous people adopted cultivation and herding only on a small scale, probably not for economic reasons, but some communities like P?narba?? resisted the adoption of agriculture altogether. Hence, the spread of agriculture was not uniform throughout the region, according to the authors.

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 A boar jaw inserted into a niche in the wall of a Neolithic house at Boncuklu, Turkey. PNAS

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  Incised stone plaque from Boncuklu, Turkey. PNAS

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 Shell beads that formed a necklace, from a Neolithic house burial at Boncuklu, Turkey. PNAS

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Article Source: PNAS news release

*Article: “Agricultural origins on the Anatolian plateau,” by Douglas Baird et al.

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SMITHSONIAN TROPICAL RESEARCH INSTITUTE—Police detectives analyze isotopes in human hair to find out where a murder victim was born and grew up. Ashley Sharpe, an archaeologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, and colleagues combined clues from carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and strontium isotope analysis discovering the earliest evidence that the Maya raised and traded dogs and other animals, probably for ceremonial use.

Their results are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences during the week of March 19.

“In Asia, Africa and Europe, animal management went hand-in-hand with the development of cities,” said Sharpe. “But in the Americas people may have raised animals for ceremonial purposes. The growth of cities doesn’t seem to be directly tied to animal husbandry.”

Sharpe found that animal trade and management began in the Preclassic Period some 2,500 years ago and intensified during the Classic Period, making it likely that organized ceremonies involving animal and human sacrifice and raising animals for food played important roles in the development of Maya civilization.

Isotopes are atoms that have the same number of protons and electrons but different numbers of neutrons and therefore have different physical properties. For example, carbon has two stable isotopes: carbon 12 with six protons and six neutrons and carbon 13 with six protons and seven neutrons. Carbon in animals’ bodies comes from the plant tissues they consume directly or indirectly. Most plants use the most common type of photosynthesis to turn carbon dioxide into carbohydrates. This process leaves mostly the lighter carbon isotope, carbon 12, behind, bound up in carbohydrate molecules. Corn, sugar cane and other grasses use another type of photosynthesis that concentrates heavier, carbon 13 molecules. Nitrogen isotopes in proteins demonstrate a similar pattern.

Sharpe and colleagues analyzed the isotopes in animal remains from Ceibal, Guatemala, a Maya site with one of the longest histories of continuous occupation, and one of the earliest ceremonial sites. Most of the bones and teeth they tested were from the Maya Middle Preclassic period (700-350 B.C.).

“The animal remains fall into two categories, those with lower carbon isotopes, indicating they were eating mostly wild plants, and those with higher isotopes, which were probably eating corn.”

All of the dogs, two northern turkeys, Meleagris gallopavo, the turkey species that was eventually domesticated, and one of two large cats were probably eating corn or other animals that fed on corn, such as a peccary (wild pig).

Because people in the region often killed animals that came into gardens and areas where crops were being cultivated, it is possible that peccaries and turkeys may also have been eating crop plants, but it is likely that turkeys were managed by the end of the Classic Period.

Deer bones showed butcher marks, but they were hunted from the forest, not domesticated according to isotope analysis of bones that also had lower carbon isotopes.

One large cat and a smaller cat, probably a margay, Leopardus wiedii, had lower carbon isotopes indicating that they ate animals that fed on wild plants.

The ratio of two strontium isotopes reflects the local geology in a region. Forty-four of the 46 animals had strontium isotope ratios matching Ceibal and the surrounding southern lowlands region. However, to Sharpe’s surprise, jaw bones from two dogs excavated from deep pits at the heart of the ancient ceremonial complex had strontium isotope ratios matching drier, mountainous regions near present-day Guatemala City. “This is the first evidence from the Americas of dogs being moved around the landscape,” Sharpe said. “Around 1000 A.D. there’s evidence that dogs were moved out to islands in the Caribbean, but the Ceibal remains are dated at about 400 B.C.” Part of the jaw bone and teeth of a big cat was found with one of the dogs in the same deposit.

“The interesting thing is that this big cat was local, but possibly not wild,” Sharpe said. “Based on its tooth enamel, it had been eating a diet similar to that of the dogs since it was very young. Perhaps it was captured and raised in captivity, or it lived near villages and ate animals that were feeding on corn. We still have to look at the DNA to figure out if it was a jaguar or a puma.”

Sharpe is looking forward to understanding more about the context of these finds. “The results in this publication are based on excavations we did in 2012. My colleagues at the Ceibal-Petexbatun Archaeological Project will publish additional analyses, and I’m looking forward to finding out if all of the human remains at the site are from the region.”

“It’s interesting to consider whether humans may have had a greater impact managing and manipulating animal species in ancient Mesoamerica than has been believed,” Sharpe said. “Studies like this one are beginning to show that animals played a key role in ceremonies and demonstrations of power, which perhaps drove animal-rearing and trade.”

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Ashley Sharpe, staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, found the remains of dogs from the Guatemalan highlands at Ceibal, a lowland site, indicating that the Mayas were moving or trading dogs for ceremonial use. Ashley Sharpe 

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Article Source: Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute news release

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This study was funded by the National Science Foundation, Sigma Xi Scientific Research Society, University of Florida Latin American Studies Program Tinker Grant, University of Florida Department of Anthropology Charles Fairbanks Award and Alphawood Foundation.

The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, headquartered in Panama City, Panama, is a unit of the Smithsonian Institution. The Institute furthers the understanding of tropical biodiversity and its importance to human welfare, trains students to conduct research in the tropics and promotes conservation by increasing public awareness of the beauty and importance of tropical ecosystems. Website. Promo video.

Reference: Sharpe, A.E., Emery, K.F., Inomata, T. et al. 2018. Earliest isotopic evidence in the Maya region for animal management and long-distance trade at the site of Ceibal, Guatemala. PNAS. Doi: 10.1073/pnas.1713880115

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UNIVERSITY OF HUDDERSFIELD—By analyzing a prehistoric site in the Libyan desert, a team of researchers from the universities of Huddersfield, Rome and Modena & Reggio Emilia has been able to establish that people in Saharan Africa were cultivating and storing wild cereals 10,000 years ago. In addition to revelations about early agricultural practices, there could be a lesson for the future, if global warming leads to a necessity for alternative crops.

The importance of the find came together through a well-established official collaboration between the University of Huddersfield and the University of Modena & Reggio Emilia.

The team has been investigating findings from an ancient rock shelter at a site named Takarkori in south-western Libya. It is desert now, but earlier in the Holocene age[our present age], some 10,000 years ago, it was part of the “green Sahara” and wild cereals grew there. More than 200,000 seeds – in small circular concentrations – were discovered at Takarkori, which showed that hunter-gatherers developed an early form of agriculture by harvesting and storing crops.

But an alternative possibility was that ants, which are capable of moving seeds, had been responsible for the concentrations. Dr Stefano Vanin, the University of Huddersfield’s Reader in Forensic Biology and a leading entomologist in the forensic and archaeological fields, analyzed a large number of samples, now stored at the University of Modena & Reggio Emilia. His observations enabled him to demonstrate that insects were not responsible and this supports the hypothesis of human activity in collection and storage of the seeds.

The investigation at Takarkori provides the first-known evidence of storage and cultivation of cereal seeds in Africa. The site has yielded other key discoveries, including the vestiges of a basket, woven from roots, that could have been used to gather the seeds. Also, chemical analysis of pottery from the site demonstrates that cereal soup and cheese were being produced.

A new article that describes the latest findings and the lessons to be learned appears in the journal Nature Plants. Titled Plant behaviour from human imprints and the cultivation of wild cereals in Holocene Sahara, it is co-authored by Anna Maria Mercuri, Rita Fornaciari, Marina Gallinaro, Savino di Lernia and Dr Vanin.

One of the article’s conclusions is that although the wild cereals, harvested by the people of the Holocene Sahara, are defined as “weeds” in modern agricultural terms, they could be an important food of the future.

“The same behavior that allowed these plants to survive in a changing environment in a remote past makes them some of the most likely possible candidates as staple resources in a coming future of global warming. They continue to be successfully exploited and cultivated in Africa today and are attracting the interest of scientists searching for new food resources,” state the authors.

Research based on the findings at Takarkori continues. Dr Vanin is supervising PhD student Jennifer Pradelli – one of a cohort of doctoral candidates at the University of Huddersfield funded by a £1 million award from the Leverhulme Trust – and she is analyzing insect evidence in order to learn more about the evolution of animal breeding at the site.

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  A Takarkori rock shelter. University of Huddersfield

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Article Source: University of Huddersfield news release

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University of the Witwatersrand—The Howiesons Poort of southern Africa is a well-known techno-tradition in the Middle Stone Age. Material culture associated with it includes backed stone tools, the manufacturing of bone tools and other implements, and engraved ochre and ostrich eggshell that have been taken as early signs of symbolic expression. Since its first inception, the Howiesons Poort (between roughly 65,800 BP and 59,500 BP) has been considered unusual because of its so-called ‘innovative technologies’ reminiscent of the Later Stone Age/Upper Palaeolithic. In the recent years, the hunting technology associated with this exceptional industry has been discussed and debated.

Research collaboration between the University of Liège (TraceoLab) and the University of the Witwatersrand, led by Dr Paloma de la Peña, a researcher at the Evolutionary Studies Institute at Wits University in South Africa, has revealed one of the strongest and oldest bodies of evidence for the use of barbs as projectiles in prehistory. This discovery was made when small quartz implements from Sibudu, showing tiny notches on their edges, were examined in detail to understand the reasons for such features. Sibudu is a rock shelter located near Tongaat in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa, and has a long and diverse archaeological sequence. It has in recent years become central to the study of South African Middle Stone Age culture and technology. The research was published today in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

Barbs are laterally hafted armatures that serve to increase the cutting capacity of a projectile if hafted parallel to the haft or to retain the projectile in the animal if hafted obliquely to the haft. They can be used either independently on self-pointed spears or arrows, or in combination with weapon tips. Their use is well-known from the later stages of the European Upper Palaeolithic, but it is not clear when they first appeared, or how widely they were used before the European Upper Palaeolithic and the African Later Stone Age. The presence of barbs usually implies the use of some kind of glue, which adds to the technical know-how of prehistoric hunter-gatherers.

In their study of the Sibudu material, the authors undertook an extensive experimental program where they knapped quartz tools similar to the archaeological ones, and replicated processes that they thought would be responsible for the formation of notches. The experiments included intentional making of notches on some of the tools, the use of others as projectile elements, and the exposure of some to trampling to simulate the situation at settlement sites. The experimental and archaeological material was then analyzed in-depth using specialized methods that focus on microscopic wear features. The viewing of the experimental and archaeological wear patterns side by side led the archaeologists to propose that use as barbs is the best explanation for the damage observed on those pieces that can be considered ancient tools, while many of the artifacts in the studied sample only show accidental damage coming from knapping, and in some cases trampling or other taphonomic processes.

The Howiesons Poort barbs were identified on the basis of combinations of features such as the impact breaks and obliquely oriented lateral edge damage, visible with a stereomicroscope, and microscopic linear features that require magnifications of 100–500× and special filters to be seen. The authors also present evidence of the use of unretouched quartz blanks as barbs. These findings imply that the Howiesons Poort hunting weaponry was more varied than previously imagined, and involved the mounting of both formal tools – such as the famous segments – and unretouched knapping products as elements in composite weapons.

For some researchers, the Howiesons Poort still represents an anomalous and short-lived technological development, whereas for others it reflects the origins of complex cognition in the Middle Stone Age. The recent identification of barbs adds weight to the view of technological sophistication and innovation in the Middle Stone Age of Southern Africa.  

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The archaeological site of Sibudu, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. View of the excavation area within the rock shelter. M. Ecker, Wikimedia Commons

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Quartz implements with micronotches from Sibudu (KwaZulu Natal, South Africa). The discovery of these types of pieces motivated the present functional study that found evidence of the use of quartz barbs in Sibudu’s Howiesons Poort. TraceoLab, Dr Paloma de la Peña and the University of the Witwatersrand

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Experimental knapping of quartz to establish a framework for understanding the quartz micronotches. TraceoLab and Aurore Val  

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Examples of experimental hafted barbs before and after use. On the left the barbs attached with sinew moved along the shaft and hit each other upon impact. On the right only small fragments of the barbs attached with sinew and resin remain on the shaft after the shoot, resulting in small fragments partly comparable to the archaeological material. TraceoLab 

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 Quartz micronotches identified as barbs and possible barbs after the usewear analyses. TraceoLab

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 Microscopic traces of two of the quartz micronotches identified as barbs. TraceoLab

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Article Source: Wits University news release

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JOHANNES GUTENBERG UNIVERSITAET MAINZ—The transition from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages in Europe is marked by two key events in European history, i.e., the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the migration into this Empire by various barbarian tribes such as the Goths, Alemanni, Franks, and Lombards. This resulted in a profound cultural and socioeconomic transformation throughout the continent, and many settlements from this epoch would subsequently develop into the villages and towns we still know today. An international team led by anthropologist Dr. Michaela Harbeck from the Bavarian State Collection for Anthropology and Palaeoanatomy (SAPM) and population geneticist Professor Joachim Burger of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) has now performed the first genomic analysis of populations that lived on the former territory of the Roman Empire in Bavaria, Germany, from around 500 AD and provided the first direct look at the complex population dynamics of what has popularly been known as the Migration Period, or “Völkerwanderung” in German. In addition to anthropologists from Mainz and Munich, the team also includes Dr. Krishna Veeramah, a population geneticist from Stony Brook University in the US, as well as colleagues from the United Kingdom and Switzerland.

In an interdisciplinary study funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, the international research team analyzed the ancient genomes of almost 40 early medieval people from southern Germany. While most of the ancient Bavarians looked genetically like Central and Northern Europeans, one group of individuals had a very different and diverse genetic profile. Members of this group were particularly notable in that they were women whose skulls had been artificially deformed at birth. Such enigmatic deformations give the skull a characteristic tower shape and have been found in past populations from across the world and from different periods of time. “Parents wrapped their children’s heads with bandages for a few months after birth in order to achieve the desired head shape,” explained Dr. Michaela Harbeck. “It is difficult to answer why they carried out this elaborate process, but it was probably used to emulate a certain ideal of beauty or perhaps to indicate a group affiliation.” So far, scholars have only speculated about origins of the practice in medieval Europe. “The presence of these elongated skulls in parts of eastern Europe is most commonly attributed to the nomadic Huns, led by Atilla, during their invasion of the Roman Empire from Asia, but the appearance of these skulls in western Europe is more mysterious, as this was very much the fringes of their territory,” said Dr. Krishna Veeramah, first author of the study.

By analyzing DNA obtained from these elongated skulls, Professor Joachim Burger’s team revealed that these women likely migrated to early Bavarian settlements from eastern Europe. “Although there is evidence that there was some genetic contribution from Central Asia, the genomic analysis points to the fact that women with deformed skulls in this region are genetically most similar to today’s south eastern Europeans, and that the Huns likely played only a minor role in directly transmitting this tradition to Bavaria,” Burger noted. Besides their deformed skulls, these women also tended to have darker hair and eye color than the other Bavarians they were buried and probably lived with, who primarily had fair hair and blue eyes.

But the migration of females to Bavaria did not only involve those possessing elongated skulls. Only a little later, two women can be identified who most closely resemble modern Greeks and Turks. In contrast, there was no evidence of men with drastically different genetic profiles. “Most of these foreign women are found with grave goods that look unremarkable compared to the rest of the buried population,” added Veeramah. “These cases of female migration would have been invisible from the material culture alone.”

“This is an example of long-range female mobility that bridges larger cultural spaces and may have been a way for distant groups to form new strategic alliances during this time of great political upheaval in the absence of a previous Roman hegemony,” stated Burger. “We must expect that many more unprecedented population-dynamic phenomena have contributed to the genesis of our early cities and villages.”

“Interestingly, though our results are preliminary, there are no major traces of genetic ancestry in these early inhabitants of Bavaria that might have come from soldiers of the Roman army,” said Harbeck. “We need to keep investigating on an even broader basis how much Celtic and Roman ancestry is in these early Bavarians.”

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These are strong, intermediate, and non-deformed skulls (from left to right) from the Early Medieval sites Altenerding and Straubing in Bavaria, Germany. State Collection for Anthropology and Palaeoanatomy Munich

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These eare early Medieval Grave goods from Altenerding, Bavari Germany. Bavarian State Archaeological Collection

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Article Source: JOHANNES GUTENBERG UNIVERSITAET MAINZ news release

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UPPSALA UNIVERSITY—In a multidisciplinary study published in PNAS, an international team of researchers combined archaeological, genetic and stable isotope data to encapsulate 4,000 years of Iberian biomolecular prehistory.

The team analyzed human remains of 13 individuals from the north and south of Spain, including the rich archaeological site of El Portalón, which forms part of the well-known site of Atapuerca in Burgos and in itself harbors 4 millennia of Iberian prehistory. The study also involved important sites like Cueva de los Murciélagos in Andalusia, from which the genome of a 7,245 year-old Neolithic farmer was sequenced making it the oldest sequenced genome in southern Iberia representing the Neolithic Almagra Pottery Culture – the early agriculturalists of southern Spain.

Background

Prehistoric migrations have played an important role in shaping the genetic makeup of European populations. After the last glacial maximum about 20,000 years ago, Europe was inhabited by hunter-gatherer groups and two major migrations during the last 10,000 years had massive impacts on lifestyle and the gene pool of European populations. First, groups originally coming from the Middle East and Anatolia introduced farming practices to Europe during the Neolithic. Less than 5,000 years ago, herder groups from the Pontic-Caspian steppe spread over the European continent. As both of these movements originated in the east, the most western parts of the continent were last to be reached by these migrations. While archaeogenetic studies have shown that both of these migrations have replaced more than half of the gene pool in Central and Northern Europe, much less is known about the influence of these events in Iberian populations, particularly in the most southern areas such as Andalusia.

Two independent migrations spread farming practices across Europe

The first farmers mainly reached Iberia following a coastal route through the northern Mediterranean Sea. The new study demonstrates that Neolithic Iberians show genetic differences to the migrant farmers that settled in Central and Northern Europe. “This suggests that all early farmers in Iberia trace most of their ancestry to the first Neolithic people that migrated into the peninsula and that later contributions from their central European counterparts were only minor”, says archaeogeneticist Cristina Valdiosera from La Trobe University in Australia, one of the lead authors of the study.

These Mediterranean route migrants show a strong genetic connection with the modern-day inhabitants of the Mediterranean island of Sardinia. “We can probably consider modern Sardinians relatively direct descendants of the people who spread farming practices across the Mediterranean region around 8,000 years ago”, adds Mattias Jakobsson, population geneticist at Uppsala University, Sweden and one of the senior authors of the study.

First wave of eastern migration involved small number of individuals

Despite potential other entrances into Iberia, such as North Africa or mainland Europe, the researchers did not find substantial regional differences within Iberia. Uppsala University’s Torsten Günther, population geneticist and one of the lead authors of this study, says: “While geographic differences seem minor, we do see some differences over time due to interaction and genetic exchange between groups.” The first Iberian farmers show remarkably low levels of genetic diversity, indicating that the first wave of eastern migration to establish itself on the peninsula was relatively small. Following this initial period of low diversity, the newly arrived populations grew in size and mixed with the local hunter-gatherers, rapidly increasing genetic diversity during later periods.

Low genetic impact of later/Bronze Age migrations in Iberia

While recent studies have demonstrated that a massive migration of Pontic-Caspian steppe herders during the Late Neolithic/Bronze Age transition is responsible for a major population turnover in central and northern Europe, the authors report in this study that the genetic influence of this migration on contemporary southwestern Europeans, namely the prehistoric Iberians, was only minor. This confirms that the genetic history of Iberia was unique as it has mostly been influenced by the main prehistoric migration associated with the introduction of farming practices – the Neolithic Revolution.

Homogenous diet in Iberian farmers

The authors also investigated the diet of these Neolithic farmers throughout almost 4,000 years, corroborating that despite the significant biological interaction between culturally different groups the farming culture predominated from the very beginning and continued over time. Molecular archaeologist Colin Smith from La Trobe University, one of the senior authors, explains: “Interestingly, while we do see a substantial genetic influx of hunter-gatherer ancestry into farmers over time, the diet of these early farmers does not change. Their terrestrial diet is characteristic of farming cultures and persist temporally and geographically across the millennia.”

The study illustrates the power of interdisciplinary research for understanding the full complexity of European prehistory. “Overall, these results emphasize the differences between the westernmost populations and their central European counterparts and highlight the need for detailed regional studies to reveal the full complexity of prehistoric migrations,” Dr. Valdiosera concludes.

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El Portalón cave in the Sierra de Atapuerca (northern Spain) contains four millennia of biomolecular prehistory. Eneko Iriarte (Universidad de Burgos)

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Skeletal remains of a 7,245-year-old Early Neolithic Farmer from Andalusia, Spain (Cueva de los Murciélagos) sequenced in this study. 1) Diagram of funerary position, 2) Skull of the individual, 3) Funerary remains as discovered in the cave. Rafael Martínez-Sánchez (Universidad de Granada) and Antonio Moreno Rosa (Universidad de Córdoba)

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Representation of an Iberian Neolithic farmer. Maria de la Fuente (Maria de la Fuente Archaeological Illustrations) 

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Article Source: Uppsala University news release

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ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY—Imagine a year in Africa when summer never arrives. The sky takes on a gray hue during the day and glows red at night. Flowers do not bloom. Trees die in the winter. Large mammals like antelope become thin, starve and provide little fat to the predators (carnivores and human hunters) that depend on them. Then, this same disheartening cycle repeats itself, year after year. This is a picture of life on earth after the eruption of the super-volcano, Mount Toba in Indonesia, about 74,000 years ago. In a paper* published this week in Nature, scientists show that early modern humans on the coast of South Africa thrived through this event.

An eruption a hundred times smaller than Mount Toba – that of Mount Tambora, also in Indonesia, in 1815 – is thought to have been responsible for a year without summer in 1816. The impact on the human population was dire – crop failures in Eurasia and North America, famine and mass migrations. The effect of Mount Toba, a super-volcano that dwarfs even the massive Yellowstone eruptions of the deeper past, would have had a much larger, and longer-felt, impact on people around the globe.

The scale of the ash-fall alone attests to the magnitude of the environmental disaster. Huge quantities of aerosols injected high into the atmosphere would have severely diminished sunlight – with estimates ranging from a 25 to 90 percent reduction in light. Under these conditions, plant die-off is predictable, and there is evidence of significant drying, wildfires and plant community change in East Africa just after the Toba eruption.

If Mount Tambora created such devastation over a full year – and Tambora was a hiccup compared to Toba – we can imagine a worldwide catastrophe with the Toba eruption, an event lasting several years and pushing life to the brink of extinctions.

In Indonesia, the source of the destruction would have been evident to terrified witnesses – just before they died. However, as a family of hunter-gatherers in Africa 74,000 years ago, you would have had no clue as to the reason for the sudden and devastating change in the weather. Famine sets in and the very young and old die. Your social groups are devastated, and your society is on the brink of collapse.

The effect of the Toba eruption would have certainly impacted some ecosystems more than others, possibly creating areas – called refugia – in which some human groups did better than others throughout the event. Whether or not your group lived in such a refuge would have largely depended on the type of resources available. Coastal resources, like shellfish, are highly nutritious and less susceptible to the eruption than the plants and animals of inland areas.

When the column of fire, smoke and debris blasted out the top of Mount Toba, it spewed rock, gas and tiny microscopic pieces (cryptotephra) of glass that, under a microscope, have a characteristic hook shape produced when the glass fractures across a bubble. Pumped into the atmosphere, these invisible fragments spread across the world.

Panagiotis (Takis) Karkanas, director of the Malcolm H. Wiener Laboratory for Archaeological Science, American School of Classical Studies, Greece, saw a single shard of this explosion under a microscope in a slice of archaeological sediment encased in resin.

“It was one shard particle out of millions of other mineral particles that I was investigating. But it was there, and it couldn’t be anything else,” says Karkanas.

The shard came from an archaeological site in a rockshelter called Pinnacle Point 5-6, on the south coast of South Africa near the town of Mossel Bay. The sediments dated to about 74,000 years ago.

“Takis and I had discussed the potential of finding the Toba shards in the sediments of our archaeological site, and with his eagle eye, he found one,” explains Curtis W. Marean, project director of the Pinnacle Point excavations. Marean is the associate director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University and honorary professor at the Centre for Coastal Palaeoscience at Nelson Mandela University, South Africa.

Marean showed the shard image to Eugene Smith, a volcanologist with the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, and Smith confirmed it was a volcanic shard.

“The Pinnacle Point study brought me back to the study of glass shards from my master’s thesis 40 years earlier,” says Smith.

Early in the study, the team brought in expert cryptotephra scientist Christine Lane who trained graduate student Amber Ciravolo in the needed techniques. Racheal Johnsen later joined Ciravalo as lab manager and developed new techniques.

From scratch, with National Science Foundation support, they developed the Cryptotephra Laboratory for Archaeological and Geological Research, which is now involved in projects not only in Africa, but in Italy, Nevada and Utah.

Encased in that shard of volcanic glass is a distinct chemical signature, a fingerprint that scientists can use to trace to the killer eruption. In their paper in Nature, the team describes finding these shards in two archaeological sites in coastal South Africa, tracing those shards to Toba through chemical fingerprinting and documenting a continuous human occupation across the volcanic event.

“Many previous studies have tried to test the hypothesis that Toba devastated human populations,” Marean notes. “But they have failed because they have been unable to present definitive evidence linking a human occupation to the exact moment of the event.”

Most studies have looked at whether or not Toba caused environmental change. It did, but such studies lack the archaeological data needed to show how Toba affected humans.

The Pinnacle Point team has been at the forefront of development and application of highly advanced archaeological techniques. They measure everything on site to millimetric accuracy with a “total station,” a laser-measurement device integrated to handheld computers for precise and error-free recording.

Naomi Cleghorn with the University of Texas at Arlington, recorded the Pinnacle Point samples as they were removed.

Cleghorn explains, “We collected a long column of samples – digging out a small amount of sediment from the wall of our previous excavation. Each time we collected a sample, we shot its position with the total station.”

The sample locations from the total station and thousands of other points representing stone artifacts, bone, and other cultural remains of the ancient inhabitants were used to build digital models of the site.

“These models tell us a lot about how people lived at the site and how their activities changed through time,” say Erich Fisher, associate research scientist with the Institute of Human Origins, who built the detailed photorealistic 3D models from the data. “What we found was that during and after the time of the Toba eruption people lived at the site continuously, and there was no evidence that it impacted their daily lives.”

In addition to understanding how Toba affected humans in this region, the study has other important implications for archaeological dating techniques. Archaeological dates at these age ranges are imprecise – 10 percent (or 1000s of years) error is typical. Toba ash-fall, however, was a very quick event that has been precisely dated. The time of shard deposition was likely about two weeks in duration – instantaneous in geological terms.

“We found the shards at two sites,” explains Marean. “The Pinnacle Point rockshelter (where people lived, ate, worked and slept) and an open air site about 10 kilometers away called Vleesbaai. This latter site is where a group of people, possibly members of the same group as those at Pinnacle Point, sat in a small circle and made stone tools. Finding the shards at both sites allows us to link these two records at almost the same moment in time.”

Not only that, but the shard location allows the scientists to provide an independent test of the age of the site estimated by other techniques. People lived at the Pinnacle Point 5-6 site from 90,000 to 50,000 years ago. Zenobia Jacobs with the University of Wollongong, Australia, used optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) to date 90 samples and develop a model of the age of all the layers. OSL dates the last time individual sand grains were exposed to light.

“There has been some debate over the accuracy of OSL dating, but Jacobs’ age model dated the layers where we found the Toba shards to about 74,000 years ago – right on the money,” says Marean. This lends very strong support to Jacobs’ cutting-edge approach to OSL dating, which she has applied to sites across southern Africa and the world.

“OSL dating is the workhorse method for construction of timelines for a large part of our own history. Testing whether the clock ticks at the correct rate is important. So getting this degree of confirmation is pleasing,” says Jacobs.

In the 1990s, scientists began arguing that this eruption of Mount Toba, the most powerful in the last two million years, caused a long-lived volcanic winter that may have devastated the ecosystems of the world and caused widespread population crashes, perhaps even a near-extinction event in our own lineage, a so-called bottleneck.

This study shows that along the food-rich coastline of southern Africa, people thrived through this mega-eruption, perhaps because of the uniquely rich food regime on this coastline. Now other research teams can take the new and advanced methods developed in this study and apply them to their sites elsewhere in Africa so researchers can see if this was the only population that made it through these devastating times.

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The research team has been excavating caves at Pinnacle Point, South Africa, for nearly 20 years. Glass shards from Mount Toba were discovered at the PP5-6 location. Erich Fisher 

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 The glass shards at Pinnacle Point were carried nearly 9000 km from the source in Indonesia. Erich Fisher

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The photo shows a volcanic glass shard erupted 74,000 years ago from the Toba volcano in Indonesia found at an archaeological site nearly 9000 km away at Vleesbaai, South Africa. Racheal Johnsen

Article Source: Arizona State University news release

If you liked this article, read Where Hominins Became Human, in the Fall 2016 issue of Popular Archaeology.

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*Publication: Eugene Smith, Zenobia Jacobs, Racheal Johnsen, Minghua Ren, Erich C. Fisher, Simen Oestmo, Jayne Wilkins, Jacob A. Harris, Panagiotis Karkanas, Shelby Fitch, Amber Ciravolo, Deborah Keenan, Naomi Cleghorn, Christine S. Lane, Thalassa Matthews, and Curtis W. Marean (2018). Humans thrived in South Africa through the Toba super-volcanic eruptions ~74,000 years ago. Nature DOI:10.1038/nature25967.

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AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY—Researchers from The Australian National University (ANU) have helped put together the most comprehensive study ever conducted into the origins of people in Vanuatu – regarded as a geographic gateway from Asia to the Remote Pacific.

The new research, published across two separate research papers, uses a combination of DNA analyses of ancient skeletons and modern samples, as well as archaeological evidence, to put together a complete timeline of migration to the island nation.

The results confirm that Vanuatu’s first people were of the Lapita culture and arrived 3,000 years ago from South East Asia, followed by Papuan arrivals from the island of New Britain, in the Bismarck Archipelago just to the east of New Guinea and part of the nation of Papua New Guinea.

Dr Stuart Bedford of the ANU School of Culture History and Language said this was the first time researchers had been able to look at a full sequence of DNA samples from the Vanuatu islands.

“We’ve been able to track a complete genetic timeline at regular intervals starting with the first inhabitants right through to modern times,” Dr Bedford said.

“The very first generation of people into Vanuatu are primarily Asian, then very quickly you see a series of migrations of Papuan people from the Bismarck Archipelago who had been living in the region for around 50,000 years.

“That trend continues over the next 3,000 years right up until today as the genetic ancestry was mostly replaced by that of Papuan migrants. The people of Vanuatu today, like many peoples of the Pacific, can claim a dual heritage.”

Co Researcher Professor Matthew Spriggs of the ANU School of Archaeology and Anthropology said for the first time researchers could determine exactly where these Papuan migration groups came from.

“They came from New Britain, a Papuan island just east of New Guinea,” Professor Spriggs said.

“This makes sense. New Britain has some of the earliest known Lapita sites.

“So what we think happened is that Lapita people after arriving in New Britain moved fairly directly on to Vanuatu and encouraged some of the local populations already in place on New Britain to move there as well.”

Dr Bedford said the strength of the Lapita culture was evident in the continuity of the language.

“The Lapita people who originally came to Vanuatu from South East Asia spoke a form of Austronesian,” Dr Bedford said.

“That language persisted and over 120 descendant languages continue to be spoken today, making Vanuatu the most linguistically diverse place on Earth per capita.

“This is a unique case, where a population’s genetic ancestry was replaced but its languages continued.”

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 Burial excavations on Uripiv Island Malakula. ANU

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Ancient skeleton at the Teouma site on Efate. ANU

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Article Source: Australian National University news release

The two papers were published in the Nature Ecology & Evolution and Current Biology journals respectively.

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The faces of disaster through the ages are legion, and the dusty places of archaeological digs in Israel have been no exception, as archaeologists at the Tel Gezer excavation site in central Israel will tell you after they encountered 3,200-year-old skeletal remains of three individuals. 

As they were conducting excavations during the summer of 2017, traces of human bones emerged as they dug within a stratum that evidenced a fiery destruction. They were articulated skeletons. The archaeologists could see that one of them, an adult, whose remains were badly decomposed and burned, was lying with hands over the head. The bones of a child, whose remains were also burned and badly decomposed, were also found. And finally, as they were closing down the season, they found the remains of yet a third individual, an adult, whose bones were significantly better preserved. This person, it appeared, was lying in a fetal-like position, as if to defend against the falling debris of surrounding collapsing walls, the stones and mud-brick of which still lay atop the skeleton when archaeologists encountered it. The physical circumstances of the remains clearly suggested that these were not intended burials.

Who were they and what happened in this place over 3,000 years ago? 

According to co-directors Dr. Steven Ortiz of the Tandy Institute for Archaeology and Dr. Sam Wolff of the Israel Antiquities Authority and colleagues, they were likely inhabitants of the city, likely Canaanite at this time, that fell in a conflagration during the onslaught of Egyptian armed forces under Pharaoh Merenptah, ancient Egypt’s famous fourth ruler during the Nineteenth Dynasty. Merenptah is known to have undertaken several major military campaigns, at least one of which took his army into what was ancient Canaan during the 13th century B.C. 

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Remains of the third adult skeleton, found within the Late Bronze Age destruction. Courtesy Steven Ortiz and Tandy Institute for Archaeology-Tel Gezer Excavations, from A Decade of Discovery: The Tandy Excavations at Tel Gezer, Popular Archaeology, Spring 2018

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Excavating the third adult. Courtesy Steven Ortiz and Tandy Institute for Archaeology-Tel Gezer Excavations, from A Decade of Discovery: The Tandy Excavations at Tel Gezer, Popular Archaeology, Spring 2018 

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The mummy of Merenptah, who orchestrated several major military campaigns, including one that laid waste to the cities in Canaan. Wikimedia Commons

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Above: The Merneptah (Merenptah) Stele. Also known as the Israel Stele or the Victory Stele of Merneptah—it is an inscription by the ancient Egyptian king Merneptah (reign: 1213 to 1203 BC) discovered by Flinders Petrie in 1896 at Thebes, and now housed in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The text is largely an account of Merenptah’s victory over the Libyans and their allies, but the last 3 of the 28 lines deal with a separate campaign in Canaan, then part of Egypt’s imperial possessions. The stele is sometimes referred to as the “Israel Stela” because a majority of scholars translate a set of hieroglyphs in line 27 as “Israel.” The relevant lines of the inscription have been translated:

The princes are prostrate, saying, “Peace!”
Not one is raising his head among the Nine Bows.
Now that Tehenu (Libya) has come to ruin,
Hatti is pacified;
The Canaan has been plundered into every sort of woe:
Ashkelon has been overcome;
Gezer has been captured;
Yano’am is made non-existent.
Israel is laid waste and his seed is not;
Hurru is become a widow because of Egypt.

The “nine bows” is a term the Egyptians used to refer to their enemies; the actual enemies varied according to time and circumstance. Hatti and Ḫurru are Syro-Palestine, Canaan and Israel are smaller units, and Ashkelon, Gezer and Yanoam are cities within the region; according to the stele, all these entities fell under the rule of the Egyptian empire at that time.

Image: Webscribe, Wikimedia Commons   Narrative: The Merneptah Stele, Wikipedia Commons 

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The discovery capped off ten years of excavations which, though focused primarily on Iron Age period occupations that evidenced structures and artifacts from the time of the biblical account’s United Monarchy of Israel and the reigns of later Judahite kings, also yielded finds attributable to Late Bronze Age occupation, a critical time period in the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East. 

A summary report of the excavation project’s ten years of work are published in the Spring 2018 Issue of Popular Archaeology Magazine, to be released in March.

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The archaeological site of Sedeinga is located in Sudan, a hundred kilometers to the north of the third cataract of the Nile, on the river’s western shore. Known especially for being home to the ruins of the Egyptian temple of Queen Tiye, the royal wife of Amenhotep III, the site also includes a large necropolis containing sepulchers dating from the kingdoms of Napata and Meroe (seventh century BCE–fourth century CE), a civilization¹ mixing local traditions and Egyptian influences. Tombs, steles, and lintels have just been unearthed by an international team led by researchers from the CNRS and Sorbonne Université as part of the French Section of Sudan’s Directorate of Antiquities, co-funded by the CNRS and the Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs.² They represent one of the largest collections of Meroitic inscriptions, the oldest language of black Africa currently known.

The necropolis of Sedeinga stretches across more than twenty-five hectares and is home to the vestiges of at least eighty brick pyramids and over a hundred tombs, dating from the kingdoms of Napata and Meroe (seventh century BCE–fourth century CE). The research programs carried out since 2009³ have focused on the chronology of the construction of this necropolis, which is difficult as there is very little remaining historical information on this civilization. The researchers have shown that most of the pyramids and tombs are buildings dating from the era of the Napata kingdom that were later adjusted by the Meroitics. These adjustments were thus made five centuries after the initial building on the site, which the Meroitics supplemented with new chapels built out of brick and sandstone blocks on the western side of the pyramids, and which were intended for the worship of the deceased. This practice was particular to the Napatans and Meroitics, who veritably revered the monuments of the past, unlike their Egyptian neighbors.

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 Aerial photo of the dig in December 2017 © Vincent Francigny / Sedeinga archaeological mission

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Pieces of decorated sandstone, such as steles as well as lintels and door surrounds, have been discovered at the surface, providing magnificent examples of Meroitic funerary art. For example, pigments—mainly blue in color—have been preserved on a stele found lying on its side. This is rare for objects of this kind, which typically are subjected to the vagaries of time. Another exceptional find: a chapel lintel representing Maat, the Egyptian goddess of order, equity, and peace. This is the first extant representation of this goddess depicting her with African characteristics. During the last excavation campaign in late 2017, the researchers discovered a stele in the name of a Lady Maliwarase. The stele sets out her kinship with the notables of Nubia (in the north of the kingdom of Meroe): she was the sister of two grand priests of Amon, and one of her sons held the position of governor of Faras, a large city bordering the second cataract of the Nile. The archeologists have also unearthed a lintel inscribed with four lines of text describing the owner of the sepulcher, another great lady, Adatalabe. She hailed from an illustrious lineage that included a royal prince, a member of the reigning family of Meroe. These two steles written for high-ranking women are not isolated examples in Sedeinga. In Meroitic society, it was indeed women who embodied the prestige of a family and passed on its heritage.

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The Ataqeloula stele, discovered in November 2017 at the Sedeinga necropolis. It dates from the second century CE and commemorates a woman from Sedeinga high society, as well as prestigious members of her family. © Vincent Francigny / Sedeinga archaeological mission

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The funerary chapel surround, depicting the goddess Maat. It also dates from the second century CE (Meroe kingdom) © Vincent Francigny / Sedeinga archaeological mission

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Stele in the name of Lady Maliwarase. © Claude Rilly / Sedeinga archaeological mission

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Funerary chapel lintel. The four lines of text describe the owner, Lady Adatalabe © Vincent Francigny / Sedeinga archaeological mission

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All these discoveries advance our knowledge of Meroitic civilization, which was born of the cultural intermixing of Egypt and black Africa that still characterizes Sudan today. These funerary objects represent the largest collection of texts in Meroitic, the oldest language of black Africa, written in characters borrowed from ancient Egyptian.

Article Source: CNRS news release

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¹ The kingdoms of Napata and Meroe formed one and the same civilization, known as the “Kush kingdom” by their ancient Egyptian neighbors.
² The director of the mission, Claude Rilly, is a CNRS researcher at the Langage, Langues et Cultures d’Afrique Noire laboratory (CNRS/Inalco). He is co-leading this mission with Vincent Francigny, director of the SFDAS (MEAE). This research has been funded by the excavation commission of the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs (MEAE) and the Orient et Méditerranée – Textes-Archéologie-Histoire laboratory (CNRS/Sorbonne Université/Université Panthéon-Sorbonne/EPHE/Collège de France). The campaign carried out between November, 14 and December 19, 2017, the last to date, was awarded the Fondation Jean et Marie-Thérèse Leclant prize.
³ Excavation work on the site began in 1963 and recommenced in 2009. It will continue until 2020 and is divided into three four-year plans, the last of which began in November 2017.

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COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND APPLIED SCIENCE—Thanksgiving gatherings could get bigger—a lot bigger—as science uncovers the familial bonds that bind us. From millions of interconnected online genealogy profiles, researchers have amassed the largest, scientifically-vetted family tree to date, which at 13 million people, is slightly bigger than a nation the size of Cuba or Belgium. Published in the journal Science, the new dataset offers fresh insights into the last 500 years of marriage and migration in Europe and North America, and the role of genes in longevity.

“Through the hard work of many genealogists curious about their family history, we crowdsourced an enormous family tree and boom, came up with something unique,” said the study’s* senior author, Yaniv Erlich, a computer scientist at Columbia University and Chief Science Officer at MyHeritage, a genealogy and DNA testing company that owns Geni.com, the platform that hosts the data used in the study. “We hope that this dataset can be useful to scientists researching a range of other topics.”

The researchers downloaded 86 million public profiles from Geni.com, one of the world’s largest collaborative genealogy websites, and used mathematical graph theory to clean and organize the data. What emerged among other smaller family trees was a single tree of 13 million people spanning an average of 11 generations. Theoretically, they’d need to go back another 65 generations to converge on one common ancestor and complete the tree. Still, the dataset represents a milestone by moving family-history searches from newspaper obituaries and church archives into the digital era, making population-level investigations possible. The researchers also make it easy to overlay other datasets to study a range of socioeconomic trends at scale.

“It’s an exciting moment for citizen science,” said Melinda Mills, a demographer at University of Oxford who was not involved in the study “It demonstrates how millions of regular people in the form of genealogy enthusiasts can make a difference to science. Power to the people!”

The dataset details when and where each individual was born and died, and mirrors the demographics of Geni.com individuals, with 85 percent of profiles originating from Europe and North America. The researchers verified that the dataset was representative of the general U.S. population’s education level by cross-checking a subset of Vermont Geni.com profiles against the state’s detailed death registry.

“The reconstructed pedigrees show that we are all related to each other,” said Peter Visscher, a quantitative geneticist at University of Queensland who was not involved in the study. “This fact is known from basic population history principles, but what the authors have achieved is still very impressive.”

Marriage, Migration and Genetic Relatedness Industrialization profoundly altered work and family life, and these trends coincide with shifting marriage choices in the data. Before 1750, most Americans found a spouse within six miles (10 kilometers) of where they were born, but for those born in 1950, that distance had stretched to about 60 miles (100 kilometers), the researchers found. “It became harder to find the love of your life,” Erlich jokes.

Before 1850, marrying in the family was common—to someone who was, on average, a fourth cousin, compared to seventh cousins today, the researchers found. Curiously, the researchers found that between 1800 and 1850, people traveled farther than ever to find a mate—nearly 12 miles (19 kilometers) on average—but were more likely to marry a fourth cousin or closer. Changing social norms, rather than rising mobility, may have led people to shun close kin as marriage partners, they hypothesize.

In a related observation, they found that women in Europe and North America have migrated more than men over the last 300 years, but when men did migrate, they traveled significantly farther on average.

Genes and Longevity To try and untangle the role of nature and nurture in longevity, the researchers built a model and trained it on a dataset of 3 million relatives born between 1600 and 1910 who had lived past the age of 30. They excluded twins, individuals who died in the U.S. Civil War, World War I and II, or in a natural disaster (inferred if relatives died within 10 days of each other).

They compared each individual’s lifespan to that of their relatives and their degree of separation and found that genes explained about 16 percent of the longevity variation seen in their data—on the low end of previous estimates which have ranged from about 15 percent to 30 percent.

The results indicate that good longevity genes can extend someone’s life by an average of five years, said Erlich. “That’s not a lot,” he adds. “Previous studies have shown that smoking takes 10 years off of your life. That means some life choices could matter a lot more than genetics.”

Significantly, the study also shows that the genes that influence longevity act independently rather than interacting with each other, a phenomenon called epistasis. Some scientists have used epistasis to explain why large-scale genomic studies have so far failed to find the genes that encode complex traits like intelligence or longevity.

If some genetic variants act together to influence longevity, the researchers would have seen a greater correlation among closely related individuals who share more DNA, and thus more genetic interactions. However, they found a linear link between longevity and genetic relatedness, ruling out widespread epistasis.

“This is important in the field because epistasis has been proposed as a source of ‘missing heritability,'” said the study’s lead author, Joanna Thornycroft, a former graduate student at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, now at Wellcome Sanger Institute.

Adds Visscher: “This is entirely in line with theory and previous inference from SNP [variant] data, yet for some reason many researchers in human genetics and epidemiology continue to believe that there is a lot of non-additive genetic variation for common diseases and quantitative traits.”

The dataset is available for academic research via FamiLinx.org, a website created by Erlich and his colleagues. Though FamiLinx data is anonymized, curious readers can check Geni.com to see if a family member may have added them there. If so, there is a good chance that they may have made it into the 13 million-person family tree.

In addition to his position at MyHeritage, a company that allows consumers to discover their family history through genetic tests and its genealogy platform, Erlich is a computer science professor at Columbia Engineering, a member of Columbia’s Data Science Institute, and an adjunct core member of the New York Genome Center (NYGC).

Other study authors are Assaf Gordon, of NYGC and the Whitehead Institute; Tal Shor, of MyHeritage and Technion; Omer Weissbrod of Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science; Dan Geiger of Technion; Mary Wahl of Whitehead Institute, NYGC and Harvard; Michael Gershovits, Barak Markus and Mona Sheikh of Whitehead Institute; Melissa Gymrek of University of California at San Diego; and Gaurav Bhatia, Daniel MacArthur and Alkes Price of Harvard and the Broad Institute.

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In the above 6,000 person family tree cleaned and organized using graph theory, individuals spanning seven generations are represented in green, with their marital links in red. Columbia University 

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Article Source: Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science news release

*Study: Quantitative analysis of population-scale family trees with millions of relatives.

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For over three decades, archaeologist Anabel Ford, Director of the Mesoamerican Research Center of the University of California, Santa Barbara, has been exploring and studying the ancient Maya site of El Pilar. Divided along the imaginary line between western Belize and northeastern Guatemala, El Pilar is considered the largest site in the Belize River region, boasting over 25 known plazas and hundreds of other structures, covering an area of about 120 acres. Monumental construction at El Pilar began in the Middle Preclassic period, around 800 BCE, and at its height centuries later it supported more than 20,000 people. Visitors today can see some of its structural remains revealed by archaeology, although Ford has taken care to ensure that most of it remains un-exposed, enshrouded and thus protected within its jungle canopy. She is as much an ardent conservationist as she is an archaeologist. 

She is also among the pioneering archaeologists who have recently applied a new technology, known as LiDAR, or Light Detection and Ranging, a remote sensing method using pulsed laser to “see”, often from airborne devices or aircraft, what cannot be seen on the surface from the air by the naked eye. Over the past few years it has been used to uncover a much larger ancient Maya world — such as monumental structures and other cultural features that have remained invisible because they have been hidden for centuries beneath the dense cloak of a tropical landscape. The media has sensationalized some recent LiDAR-related discoveries by other archaeological teams, such as the detection of more than 60,000 ancient Maya cultural features within Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve, touted in a National Geographic article as a “major breakthrough” in Maya archaeology; and the University of Arizona article that reported the discovery of thousands more structures previously undetected in the area of ancient Ceibal, also in Guatemala. And Ford, now already a veteran of four years applying LiDAR to El Pilar and its surrounding region, has already “covered 10 km^2”  of the forested area by applying the new technology.  

But she is not hesitant to add that “LiDAR is not a magic wand”.* She asserts that “there is still a vital need to use ground-truthing procedures to validate findings by archaeologists in the field”.* What she means is that, once an initial LiDAR survey is done, the long and heavy-duty work of verifying the data includes physically identifying and/or uncovering the corresponding features on the ground. “In the course of our field validation over the past four years,” she writes in a recent report of her findings, “we have learned much about the relationship between the landscape and the LiDAR-based visualizations, and importantly between the visualizations and the validation of cultural features. It really all boils down to putting “boots on the ground.”* 

In other words, though the startling and amazing initial discoveries being made with LiDAR from the air may be grist for sensational news stories, it only tells a small part of the whole story of discovery, the most important aspect of which takes place on the surface through the hard work of ground-truthing — testing the visual data with the reality on the ground. Ford has already thus far “validated 1,214 “GoTo” points, mapped 1,335 new cultural features, verified 611 domestic structures, and mapped 7 civic monumental sites”, according to her report.* Through her efforts with LiDAR in 2013, she also uncovered and defined the features of a unique Maya monumental structure at El Pilar which she has dubbed the “Citadel”, an architectural edifice with no precedent in the Maya world.

Given the massive amounts of data that LiDAR has provided, says Ford, the resulting research, analysis and groundwork will go on for years to come, opening a significantly expanded window on the ancient Maya world.

Ford and her colleagues report about the findings in an article published in the upcoming Spring 2018 issue of Popular Archaeology Magazine, to be released in March.

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 ‘Before’: Air view of the El Pilar area. Courtesy BRASS/El Pilar

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‘After’: Mapping using LiDAR data reveals the ancient structures at El Pilar, many of which have been invisible for centuries. Courtesy BRASS/El Pilar

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*From LiDAR is not a magic wand, a feature article to be published in Reports in the Spring 2018 issue of Popular Archaeology Magazine.

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