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In mid-September, a large treasure was unearthed during a dig at the Abbey of Cluny, in the French department of Saône-et-Loire: 2,200 silver deniers and oboles, 21 Islamic gold dinars, a signet ring,¹ and other objects made of gold. Never before has such a large cache of silver deniers been discovered. Nor have gold coins from Arab lands, silver deniers, and a signet ring ever been found hoarded together within a single, enclosed complex. 

Anne Baud, an academic at the Université Lumière Lyon 2, and Anne Flammin, a CNRS engineer—both from the Laboratoire Archéologie et Archéométrie (CNRS / Université Lumière Lyon 2 / Claude Bernard Lyon 1 University)—led the archaeological investigation, in collaboration with a team of 9 students from the Université Lumière Lyon 2 and researchers from the Maison de l’Orient et de la Méditerranée Jean Pouilloux (CNRS / Université Lumière Lyon 2).

The excavation campaign, authorized by the Bourgogne–Franche-Comté Regional Department of Cultural Affairs (DRAC), began in mid-September and ended in late October. It is part of a vast research program focused on the Abbey of Cluny. Students in the Master of Archaeology and Archaeological Science program at the Université Lumière Lyon 2 have been participating in archaeological digs at the Abbey of Cluny since 2015. This experience in the field complements their academic training and gives them an insight into professional archaeology. 

At the site, the team, led by Anne Baud et Anne Flammin, including the students from the Université Lumière Lyon 2, discovered a treasure consisting of more than 2,200 silver deniers and oboles—mostly minted by the Abbey of Cluny and probably dating to the first half of the 12th century—in a cloth bag, traces of which remain on some of the coins; and a tanned hide bundle, found among the silver coins, fastened with a knot, enclosing:

• 21 Islamic gold dinars struck between 1121 and 1131 in Spain and Morocco, under the reign of Ali ibn Yusuf (1106–1143), who belonged to the Berber Almoravid dynasty.
• a gold signet ring with a red intaglio depicting the bust of a god and an inscription possibly dating the ring back to the first half of the 12th century
• a folded sheet of gold foil weighing 24 g and stored in a case
• a small circular object made of gold

Vincent Borrel, a PhD student at the Archaeology and Philology of East and West (CNRS / ENS) research unit—AOROC for short—is currently studying the treasure in more detail to identify and date the various pieces with greater precision.

A precious find . . .

This is an exceptional find for a monastic setting and especially for Cluny, which was one of the largest abbeys of Western Europe during the Middle Ages. The treasure was buried in fill where it apparently remained for 850 years. It includes items of remarkable value: 21 gold dinars and a signet ring, a very expensive piece of jewelry that few could own during the Middle Ages. At that time, Western currency was mostly dominated by the silver denier. Gold coins were reserved for rare transactions. The 2,200 or so silver deniers, struck at Cluny or nearby, would have been for everyday purchases. This is the largest stash of such coins ever found. The fact that Arab currency, silver deniers, and a signet ring were enclosed together makes this discovery all the more interesting.

. . . opening new avenues of research into the history of the Abbey of Cluny

This discovery will breathe new life into research delving into the past of the abbey, a historic site open to the public and managed by the Centre des Monuments Nationaux (CMN). It also raises new questions worth answering:

– Who owned the treasure? Was it a monk, a church dignitary, or a rich layman?
– What can the coins teach us? Where were the silver deniers of Cluny struck? Where did they circulate? How did Islamic dinars minted in Spain and Morocco end up at Cluny?
– Why was the treasure buried?
– What building lay above the treasure when it was hidden? Was it a building, now in ruins, that we know little about?

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 Above: (1) Knotted tanned hide bundle before extraction of contents; (2) & (4) gold dinars; (3) signet ring with intaglio; (5) contents of knotted tanned hide bundle. © Alexis Grattier— Université Lumière Lyon 2

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 The Abbey of Cluny. Marc Tobias Wenzel, Wikimedia Commons

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Article Source: A CNRS and Université Lumière Lyon 2 press release

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¹ The use of signet rings during the Middle Ages is frequently attested. They served various domestic functions, being used to seal coffers, money pouches, and correspondence.

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UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO—TORONTO, ON – Excavations in the Republic of Georgia by the Gadachrili Gora Regional Archaeological Project Expedition (GRAPE), a joint undertaking between the University of Toronto (U of T) and the Georgian National Museum, have uncovered evidence of the earliest winemaking anywhere in the world. The discovery dates the origin of the practice to the Neolithic period around 6000 BC, pushing it back 600-1,000 years from the previously accepted date.

The earliest previously known chemical evidence of wine dated to 5400-5000 BC and was from an area in the Zagros Mountains of Iran. Researchers now say the practice began hundreds of years earlier in the South Caucasus region on the border of Eastern Europe and Western Asia.

Excavations have focused on two Early Ceramic Neolithic sites (6000-4500 BC) called Gadachrili Gora and Shulaveris Gora, approximately 50 kilometres south of the modern capital of Tbilisi. Pottery fragments of ceramic jars recovered from the sites were collected and subsequently analyzed by scientists at the University of Pennsylvania to ascertain the nature of the residue preserved inside for several millennia.

The newest methods of chemical extraction confirmed tartaric acid, the fingerprint compound for grape and wine as well as three associated organic acids – malic, succinic and citric – in the residue recovered from eight large jars. The findings are reported in a research study this week in Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

“We believe this is the oldest example of the domestication of a wild-growing Eurasian grapevine solely for the production of wine,” said Stephen Batiuk, a senior research associate in the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations and the Archaeology Centre at U of T, and co-author of the study published in PNAS.

“The domesticated version of the fruit has more than 10,000 varieties of table and wine grapes worldwide,” said Batiuk. “Georgia is home to over 500 varieties for wine alone, suggesting that grapes have been domesticated and cross-breeding in the region for a very long time.”

GRAPE represents the Canadian component of a larger international, interdisciplinary project involving researchers from the United States, Denmark, France, Italy and Israel. The sites excavated by the U of T and Georgian National Museum team are remnants of two villages that date back to the Neolithic period, which began around 15,200 BC in parts of the Middle East and ended between 4500 and 2000 BC in other parts of the world.

The Neolithic period is characterized by a package of activities that include the beginning of farming, the domestication of animals, the development of crafts such as pottery and weaving, and the making of polished stone tools.

“Pottery, which was ideal for processing, serving and storing fermented beverages, was invented in this period together with many advances in art, technology and cuisine,” said Batiuk. “This methodology for identifying wine residues in pottery was initially developed and first tested on a vessel from the site of Godin Tepe in central western Iran, excavated more than 40 years ago by a team from the Royal Ontario Museum led by fellow U of T researcher T. Cuyler Young. So in many ways, this discovery brings my co-director Andrew Graham and I full circle back to the work of our professor Cuyler, who also provided some of the fundamental theories of the origins of agriculture in the Near East.

“In essence, what we are examining is how the Neolithic package of agricultural activity, tool-making and crafts that developed further south in modern Iraq, Syria and Turkey adapted as it was introduced into different regions with different climate and plant life,” Batiuk said. “The horticultural potential of the south Caucasus was bound to lead to the domestication of many new and different species, and innovative ‘secondary’ products were bound to emerge.”

The researchers say the combined archaeological, chemical, botanical, climatic and radiocarbon data provided by the analysis demonstrate that the Eurasian grapevine Vitis vinifera was abundant around the sites. It grew under ideal environmental conditions in early Neolithic times, similar to premium wine-producing regions in Italy and southern France today.

“Our research suggests that one of the primary adaptations of the Neolithic way of life as it spread to Caucasia was viniculture,” says Batiuk. “The domestication of the grape apparently led eventually led to the emergence of a wine culture in the region.”

Batiuk describes an ancient society in which the drinking and offering of wine penetrates and permeates nearly every aspect of life from medical practice to special celebrations, from birth to death, to everyday meals at which toasting is common.

“As a medicine, social lubricant, mind-altering substance, and highly valued commodity, wine became the focus of religious cults, pharmacopeias, cuisines, economics, and society throughout the ancient Near East,” he said.

Batiuk cites ancient viniculture as a prime example of human ingenuity in developing horticulture, and creative uses for its byproducts.

“The infinite range of flavors and aromas of today’s 8,000-10,000 grape varieties are the end result of the domesticated Eurasian grapevine being transplanted and crossed with wild grapevines elsewhere over and over again,” he said. “The Eurasian gravepine that now accounts for 99.9 per cent of wine made in the world today, has its roots in Caucasia.”

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 A drone photograph of excavations at the Gadachrili Gora site in Repubilc of Georgia. Credit: Stephen Batiuk

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 Base of Neolithic jar being prepared for sampling for residue analysis. Credit: Judyta Olszewski

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 A Neolithic jar—possibly a Neolithic qvevri used for brewing wine—from the site of Khramis Didi Gora, on display at the Georgian National Museum. Credit: Judyta Olszewski

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Article Source: University of Toronto news release

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MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY—New research answers a long-debated question among anthropologists, archaeologists and geneticists: when farmers first arrived in Europe, how did they interact with existing hunter-gatherer groups? Prior studies have suggested these early Near Eastern farmers largely replaced the pre-existing European hunter-gatherers. Did the farmers wipe out the hunter-gatherers, through warfare or disease, shortly after arriving? Or did they slowly out-compete them over time? The current study, published today in Nature, suggests that these groups likely coexisted side-by-side for some time after the early farmers spread across Europe. The farming populations then slowly integrated local hunter-gatherers, showing more assimilation of the hunter-gatherers into the farming populations as time went on.

The Neolithic transition – the shift from a hunter-gatherer to a farming lifestyle that started nearly 10,000 years ago – has been a slowly unraveling mystery. Recent studies of ancient DNA have revealed that the spread of farming across Europe was not merely the result of a transfer of ideas, but that expanding farmers from the Near East brought this knowledge with them as they spread across the continent.

Numerous studies have shown that early farmers from all over Europe, such as the Iberian Peninsula, southern Scandinavia and central Europe, all shared a common origin in the Near East. This was initially an unexpected finding given the diversity of prehistoric cultures and the diverse environments in Europe. Interestingly, early farmers also show various amounts of hunter-gatherer ancestry, which had previously not been analyzed in detail.

The current study, from an international team including scientists from Harvard Medical School, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, focused on the regional interactions between early farmers and late hunter-gatherer groups across a broad timespan in three locations in Europe: the Iberian Peninsula in the West, the Middle-Elbe-Saale region in north-central Europe, and the fertile lands of the Carpathian Basin (centered in what is now Hungary). The researchers used high-resolution genotyping methods to analyze the genomes of 180 early farmers, 130 of whom are newly reported in this study, from the period of 6000-2200 BC to explore the population dynamics during this period.

“We find that the hunter-gatherer admixture varied locally but more importantly differed widely between the three main regions,” says Mark Lipson, a researcher in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and co-first author of the paper. “This means that local hunter-gatherers were slowly but steadily integrated into early farming communities.”

While the percentage of hunter-gatherer heritage never reached very high levels, it did increase over time. This finding suggests the hunter-gatherers were not pushed out or exterminated by the farmers when the farmers first arrived. Rather, the two groups seem to have co-existed with increasing interactions over time. Further, the farmers from each location mixed only with hunter-gatherers from their own region, and not with hunter-gatherers, or farmers, from other areas, suggesting that once settled, they stayed put.

“One novelty of our study is that we can differentiate early European farmers by their specific local hunter-gatherer signature,” adds co-first author Anna Szécsényi-Nagy of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. “Farmers from Spain share hunter-gatherer ancestry with a pre-agricultural individual from La Braña, Spain, whereas farmers from central Europe share more with hunter-gatherers near them, such as an individual from the Loschbour cave in Luxembourg. Similarly, farmers from the Carpathian Basin share more ancestry with local hunter-gatherers from their same region.”

The team also investigated the relative length of time elapsed since the integration events between the populations, using cutting-edge statistical techniques that focus on the breakdown of DNA blocks inherited from a single individual. The method allows scientists to estimate when the populations mixed. Specifically, the team looked at 90 individuals from the Carpathian Basin who lived close in time. The results – which indicate ongoing population transformation and mixture – allowed the team to build the first quantitative model of interactions between hunter-gatherer and farmer groups.

“We found that the most probable scenario is an initial, small-scale, admixture pulse between the two populations that was followed by continuous gene flow over many centuries,” says senior lead author David Reich, professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School.

These results reflect the importance of building thorough, detailed databases of genetic information over time and space, and suggest that a similar approach should be equally revealing elsewhere in the world.

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 Sampling petrous bone of Early Neolithic grave from Bátaszék (Hungary). Credit: Anett Osztás 

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Geographic locations of the samples analyzed in the study “Parallel palaeogenomic transects reveal complex genetic history of early European farmers” with a close-up of Hungary (based on figure 1a-b from Nature, Lipson/Szécsényi-Nagy et al. 2017, http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature24476). Credit: Nature, Lipson/Szécsényi-Nagy et al. 2017.

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

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UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE—A wide-ranging new study of fossils spanning over four million years suggests that stature and body mass advanced at different speeds during the evolution of hominins – the ancestral lineage of which Homo sapiens alone still exist.

Published today in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the research also shows that, rather than steadily increasing in size, hominin bodies evolved in “pulse and stasis” fluctuations, with some lineages even shrinking.

The findings are from the largest study of hominin body sizes, involving 311 specimens dating from earliest upright species of 4.4m years ago right through to the modern humans that followed the last ice age.

While researchers describe the physical evolution of assorted hominin species as a “long and winding road with many branches and dead ends”, they say that broad patterns in the data suggest bursts of growth at key stages, followed by plateaus where little changed for many millennia.

The scientists were surprised to find a “decoupling” of bulk and stature around one and a half million years ago, when hominins grew roughly 10cm taller but would not consistently gain any heft for a further million years, with an average increase of 10-15kgs occurring around 500,000 years ago.

Before this event, height and weight in hominin species appeared to evolve roughly “in concert”, say the authors of this first study to jointly analyse both aspects of body size over millions of years.

“An increase solely in stature would have created a leaner physique, with long legs and narrow hips and shoulders. This may have been an adaptation to new environments and endurance hunting, as early Homo species left the forests and moved on to more arid African savannahs,” says lead author Dr Manuel Will from Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology, and a Research Fellow at Gonville and Caius College.

“The higher surface-to-volume ratio of a tall, slender body would be an advantage when stalking animals for hours in the dry heat, as a larger skin area increases the capacity for the evaporation of sweat.”

“The later addition of body mass coincides with ever-increasing migrations into higher latitudes, where a bulkier body would be better suited for thermoregulation in colder Eurasian climates,” he says.

However, Dr Will points out that, while these are valid theories, vast gaps in the fossil record continue to mask absolute truths. In fact, Will and colleagues often had to estimate body sizes from highly fragmented remains – in some cases from just a single toe bone.

The study found body size to be highly variable during earlier hominin history, with a range of differently shaped species: from broad, gorilla-like Paranthropus to the more wiry or ‘gracile’ Australopithecus afarensis. Hominins from four million years ago weighed a rough average of 25kg and stood at 125-130cm.

As physicality morphs over deep time, increasingly converging on larger body sizes, the scientists observe three key “pulses” of significant change.

The first occurs with the dawn of our own defined species bracket, Homo, around 2.2-1.9m years ago. This period sees a joint surge in both height (around 20 cm) and weight (between 15-20kg).

Stature then separated from heft with a height increase alone of 10cm between 1.4-1.6m years ago, shortly after the emergence of Homo erectus. “From a modern perspective this is where we see a familiar stature reached and maintained. Body mass, however, is still some way off,” explains Will.

It’s not until a million years later (0.5-0.4m years ago) that consistently heavier hominins appear in the fossil record, with an estimated 10-15kg greater body mass signalling adaptation to environments north of the Mediterranean.

“From then onwards, average body height and weight stays more or less the same in the hominin lineage, leading ultimately to ourselves,” says Will.

There are, however, a couple of exceptions to this grand narrative: Homo naledi and Homo floresiensis*. Recently discovered remains suggest these species swam against the tide of increasing body size through time.

“They may have derived from much older small-bodied ancestors, or adapted to evolutionary pressures occurring in small and isolated populations,” says Will. Floresiensis was discovered on an Indonesian island.

“Our study shows that, other than these two species, hominins that appear after 1.4m years ago are all larger than 140cm and 40kg. This doesn’t change until human bodies diversify again in just the last few thousand years.”

“These findings suggest extremely strong selective pressures against small body sizes which shifted the evolutionary spectrum towards the larger bodies we have today.”

Will and colleagues say evolutionary pressures that may have contributed include ‘cladogenesis’: the splitting of a lineage, with one line – the smaller-bodied one, in this case – becoming extinct, perhaps as a result of inter-species competition.

They also suggest that sexual dimorphism – the physical distinction between genders, with females typically smaller in mammals – was more prevalent in early hominin species but then steadily ironed out by evolution.

Study co-author Dr Jay Stock, also from Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology, suggests this growth trajectory may continue.

“Many human groups have continued to get taller over just the past century. With improved nutrition and healthcare, average statures will likely continue to rise in the near future. However, there is certainly a ceiling set by our genes, which define our maximum potential for growth,” Stock says.

“Body size is one of the most important determinants of the biology of every organism on the planet,” adds Will. “Reconstructing the evolutionary history of body size has the potential to provide us with insights into the development of locomotion, brain complexity, feeding strategies, even social life.”

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*Both Homo naledi and Homo floresiensis are of a surprisingly young age, says Will: between ~300,000 and 100,000-60,000 years respectively

Article Source: University of Cambridge news release

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UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI—In the more than two years since University of Cincinnati researchers unearthed the 3,500-year-old tomb of a Bronze Age warrior in southwest Greece, an incredible trove of riches has emerged, including four gold signet rings that have challenged accepted wisdom among archaeologists about the origins of Greek civilization.

But that wasn’t the only secret hidden there beneath the hard-baked clay.  It would take another year before the so-called “Griffin Warrior” revealed his most stunning historical offering yet: an intricately carved gem, or sealstone, that UC researchers say is one of the finest works of prehistoric Greek art ever discovered.

The “Pylos Combat Agate,” as the seal has come to be known for the fierce hand-to-hand battle it portrays, promises not only to rewrite the history of ancient Greek art, but to help shed light on myth and legend in an era of Western civilization still steeped in mystery.

The seal is the latest and most significant treasure to emerge from the treasure-laden tomb of the Griffin Warrior, which was hailed as the most spectacular archaeological discovery in Greece in more than half a century when it was uncovered in an olive grove near the ancient city of Pylos in 2015.

The remarkably undisturbed and intact grave revealed not only the well-preserved remains of what is believed to have been a powerful Mycenaean warrior or priest buried around 1500 B.C., but also an incredible trove of burial riches that serve as a time capsule into the origins of Greek civilization.

But the tomb didn’t readily reveal its secrets. It took conservation experts more than a year to clean the limestone-encrusted seal, say dig leaders Shari Stocker, a senior research associate in UC’s Department of Classics, and Jack Davis, the university’s Carl W. Blegen professor of Greek archaeology and department head.

As the intricate details of the seal’s design emerged, the researchers were shocked to discover they had unearthed no less than a masterpiece.

“Looking at the image for the first time was a very moving experience, and it still is,” said Stocker. “It’s brought some people to tears.” Davis and Stocker say the Pylos Combat Agate’s craftsmanship and exquisite detail make it the finest discovered work of glyptic art produced in the Aegean Bronze Age.

“What is fascinating is that the representation of the human body is at a level of detail and musculature that one doesn’t find again until the classical period of Greek art 1,000 years later,” explained Davis. “It’s a spectacular find.”

Even more extraordinary, the husband-and-wife team point out, is that the meticulously carved combat scene was painstakingly etched on a piece of hard stone measuring just 3.6 centimeters, or just over 1.4 inches, in length. Indeed, many of the seal’s details, such as the intricate weaponry ornamentation and jewelry decoration, become clear only when viewed with a powerful camera lens and photomicroscopy.     

“Some of the details on this are only a half-millimeter big,” said Davis. “They’re incomprehensibly small.”

The miniature masterpiece portrays a victorious warrior who, having already vanquished one unfortunate opponent sprawled at his feet, now turns his attention to another much more formidable foe, plunging his sword into the shielded man’s exposed neck in what is sure to be a final and fatal blow.  

It’s a scene that conjures the sweeping and epic battles, larger-than-life heroes and grand adventures of Homer’s “The Iliad,” the epic Greek poem that immortalized a mythological decade-long war between the Trojan and Mycenaean kingdoms. While the researchers can’t say that the image was intended to reflect a Homeric epic, the scene undoubtedly reflects a legend that was well known to Minoans and Mycenaeans, says Stocker.

“It would have been a valuable and prized possession, which certainly is representative of the Griffin Warrior’s role in Mycenaean society,” she explained. “I think he would have certainly identified himself with the hero depicted on the seal.”

Though the seal and other burial riches found within the tomb suggest the Griffin Warrior held an esteemed position in Mycenaean society, that so many of the artifacts are Minoan-made raises intriguing questions about his culture.

Scholarly consensus has long theorized that mainlander Mycenaeans simply imported or robbed such riches from the affluent Minoan civilization on the large island of Crete, southeast of Pylos. Although the Minoans were culturally dominant to the Greek mainlanders, the civilization fell to the Mycenaeans around 1500-1400 B.C.—roughly the same time period in which the Griffin Warrior died.

In a series of presentations and a paper published last year, Davis and Stocker revealed that the discovery of four gold signet rings bearing highly detailed Minoan iconography, along with other Minoan-made riches found within the tomb, indicates a far greater and complex cultural interchange took place between the Mycenaeans and Minoans.

But the skill and sophistication of the Pylos Combat Agate is unparalleled by anything uncovered before from the Minoan-Mycenaean world, say the researchers. And that raises a bigger question: How does this change our understanding of Greek art in the Bronze Age?   

“It seems that the Minoans were producing art of the sort that no one ever imagined they were capable of producing,” explained Davis. “It shows that their ability and interest in representational art, particularly movement and human anatomy, is beyond what it was imagined to be. Combined with the stylized features, that itself is just extraordinary.”

The revelation, he and Stocker say, prompts a reconsideration of the evolution and development of Greek art.  

“This seal should be included in all forthcoming art history texts, and will change the way that prehistoric art is viewed,” said Stocker.

Stocker and Davis will present findings from the Pylos Combat Agate in a paper to be published later this month in the journal Hesperia.  

Meanwhile, work continues in unlocking the full mysteries of the Griffin Warrior’s tomb. Davis and Stocker, along with other UC staff specialists and students, have altogether catalogued more than 3,000 burial objects discovered in the grave, some of which are still in the process of being cleaned and preserved.    

“There will be many more surprises to come, for sure,” said Davis.

In the spring of 2016, a UC-based team made a rich and rare discovery of an intact, Bronze Age warrior’s tomb dating back to about 1500 B.C. in the Pylos region of Greece. The Greek Culture Ministry declared the find the “most important to have been discovered [in continental Greece] in 65 years” by the Greek Culture Ministry.

The tomb revealed a remarkably intact skeleton, which UC researchers dubbed the “Griffin Warrior” for the discovery of an ivory plaque adorned with a griffin—a mythical beast with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle—buried with him.

The 3,500-year-old shaft grave also revealed more than 3,000 objects arrayed on and around the warrior’s body, including four solid gold rings, silver cups, precious stone beads, fine-toothed ivory combs and an intricately built sword, among other weapons.

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 The tiny sealstone depicting warriors in battle measures just 1.4 inches across but contains incredible detail. Credit: University of Cincinnati

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 A digitally altered illustration of the seal found in the tomb of the Griffin Warrior. Credit: University of Cincinnati

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 UC archaeologist Shari Stocker stands at the site of the Griffin Warrior, a 3,500-year-old tomb in southern Greece. Credit: University of Cincinnati

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Article Source: University of Cincinnati news release

For more background, an in-depth major feature article about this tomb discovery as published in Popular Archaeology in its Winter 2016 issue can be accessed here: The Tomb of the Griffin Warrior

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PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES—A study* suggests that marks on ancient fossilized bones thought to have been inflicted by hominid butchers may instead be the result of animal biting and trampling. Traces and pits found on the surfaces of fossilized bones have been previously used to infer the use of stone tools by hominids for butchering carcasses. However, whether the observed marks represent butchery using stone tools or trampling and biting by carnivores remains unsettled, calling into question the inferred ages of hominid stone tool use. Tim D. White and colleagues analyzed mammal bones from the Plio-Pleistocene fossil record in Ethiopia’s Middle Awash site that were dated to around 4.2 million years ago, 3.4 million years ago, and 2.5 million years ago. Combined with contextual evidence, analysis of cuts, marks, grooves, and pits on dozens of fossil bones, which included a pair of Australopithecus humeral shafts and an equid femur recovered from water-deposited sands, suggested that several of the marks were likely the result of crocodile bites rather than stone tool use. Further, analysis of a bovid tibial midshaft specimen and a bovid mandible proved inconclusive, leaving open the possibility of one or both agents. Given that previous interpretations of hominid subsistence and tool use were based on the analysis of relatively small fossil assemblages from such sites as Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge and Ethiopia’s Hadar village, where the Australopithecine fossil Lucy was discovered, the findings suggest the need for reassessment of assemblages used to infer early hominid behavior, according to the authors.

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 Linear marks and pits on a 2.5 million-year-old ungulate leg bone from Bouri, Ethiopia. Credit: PNAS

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Article Source: PNAS news release

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*”Hominid butchers and biting crocodiles in the African Plio-Pleistocene,” by Yonatan Sahle, Sireen El Zaatari, and Tim D. White.

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In a Perspective article* published in the November 3, 2017 issue of Science, Todd J. Braje and colleagues discuss the various theories behind how people first arrived and settled in North America, emphasizing that the conventional belief – that the first people to arrive came via the Beringia land bridge – is becoming less widely accepted. They cite evidence for human occupation at least ~14,500 years ago, which is a millennium or more sooner than the Beringia land bridge became passable, roughly 13,500 years ago. In particular, the authors favor the kelp highway hypothesis, which proposes that deglaciation of the outer coast of North America’s Pacific Northwest after ~17,000 years ago created a possible dispersal corridor rich in aquatic and terrestrial resources along the Pacific Coast. However, testing the kelp highway hypothesis is challenging because much of the archaeo­logical evidence would have been sub­merged by rising seas since the last glacial maximum. Recent underwater discoveries, such as one site in Florida, where butchered mastodon bones and chipped stone tools were found and estimated to be roughly 14,500 years old, show how it may also be possible to receive evidence from such submerged sites along the Pacific coast. Braje et al. outline key areas where additional research can be focused. In the search for clues as to how the peopling of the Americas occurred, including formerly glaciated areas where ancient shorelines have not shifted so dramatically, is important, they say.

Article Source: Edited and adapted from the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) news release.

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For related articles, see the premium articles recently published in the Fall 2017 issue of Popular Archaeology Magazine: The “Little Victims” of Civilization, by renowned archaeology author Brian Fagan, and West Coast Rising. Both articles are available to premium subscribers to Popular Archaeology.

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*”Finding the First Americans,” by T.J. Braje at San Diego State University in San Diego, CA; T.D. Dillehay at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN; J.M. Erlandson at University of Oregon in Eugene, OR; R.G. Klein at Stanford University in Stanford, CA; T.C. Rick at National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.

Image, top left: View of the Monte Verde site, where a human presences as early as possibly 18,000 years ago was discovered. Geologia Valdivia, Wikimedia Commons

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WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY—Every day, information washes over the world like so much weather. From casual conversations, tweets, texts, emails, advertisements and news stories, humanity processes countless discrete pieces of socially transmitted information.

Anthropologists call this process cultural transmission, and there was a time when it did not exist, when humans or more likely their smaller brained ancestors did not pass on knowledge. Luke Premo, an associate professor of anthropology at Washington State University, would like to know when that was. Writing in the October issue of Current Anthropology, he and three colleagues challenge a widely accepted notion that cultural transmission goes back more than 2 million years.

Exhibit A in this debate is the Oldowan chopper, a smooth, fist-sized rock with just enough material removed to make a crude edge. Writing in Nature in 1964, the prominent paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey connected the tools with what he said was the first member of the human genus, Homo habilis, or “handy man.” Leakey and his colleagues did not explicitly say Homo habilis learned how to make the tool through cultural transmission, but the word “culture” alone implies it, said Premo.

“All of their contemporaries figured that any stone tool must be an example of culture because they thought that humans are the only animals that make and use tools and humans rely on cultural transmission to do so,” said Premo. “It made sense to them at the time that this ability might in fact distinguish our genus from all others.”

More than half a century later, Premo and colleagues at the University of Tubingen, George Washington University and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology are asking for better evidence that the technique for making early stone tools was culturally transmitted. Writing in the journal Current Anthropology, they say the tools could have been what lead author Claudio Tennie calls “latent solutions” that rely on an animal’s inherent skill rather than cultural transmission. Homo habilis could have learned to make the Oldowan tool on his or her own, much as wild chimps use sticks to fish for termites.

“Our main question is: How do we know from these kinds of stone tools that this was a baton that somebody passed on?” said Premo, hefting an Oldowan tool in his hand. “Or was it just like the chimp case, where individuals could figure out how to do this on their own during the course of their lifetimes?”

The Oldowan tool may look “cool and new and like it would require a lot of brain power.” But the animal world has complicated creations, like beehives, beaver lodges and spider webs, that don’t require cultural transmission.

This type of tool also changed little for more than 1 million years, suggesting that the individuals who made them had the same mental and motor abilities. Techniques that are culturally transmitted, said Premo, tend to undergo at least slight changes, if not the more frequent churn of innovations we see in contemporary society.

Some hominin technologies, like the Mousterian stone tools used by Neanderthals and others 160,000 to 40,000 years ago, require many steps to prepare, increasing the likelihood that they had to be passed on. If cultural transmission is so recent, said Premo, it could explain why too much information can overwhelm us.

Clearly, our ability to transmit our culture has helped us pass on the techniques we need to thrive in a wide range of environments across the planet.

“It does explain our success as a species,” Premo said. “But the reason we are successful might be much more recent than what many anthropologists have traditionally thought.”

Moreover, the human system of transmitting information “can be hijacked. If you’ve got this system in which you receive information that can affect your behaviors… all it takes is somebody broadcasting information to you that makes you act in a way they prefer. And if you’re getting hundreds of messages every day, it can be difficult to discern what is important for you from what is important for somebody else.”

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 Paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey suggested in the 1960s that the Oldowan chopper, a crude stone tool, was the result of humans sharing information with each other. Researchers are now challenging that assumption. Credit: Bob Hubner, WSU Photo Services

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Article Source: Washington State University news release

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UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE—Researchers have pinpointed the date of what could be the oldest solar eclipse yet recorded. The event, which occurred on 30 October 1207 BC, is mentioned in the Bible, and could have consequences for the chronology of the ancient world.

Using a combination of the biblical text and an ancient Egyptian text, the researchers were then able to refine the dates of the Egyptian pharaohs, in particular the dates of the reign of Ramesses the Great. The results are published in the Royal Astronomical Society journal Astronomy & Geophysics.

The biblical text in question comes from the Old Testament book of Joshua and has puzzled biblical scholars for centuries. It records that after Joshua led the people of Israel into Canaan – a region of the ancient Near East that covered modern-day Israel and Palestine – he prayed: “Sun, stand still at Gibeon, and Moon, in the Valley of Aijalon. And the Sun stood still, and the Moon stopped, until the nation took vengeance on their enemies.”

“If these words are describing a real observation, then a major astronomical event was taking place – the question for us to figure out is what the text actually means,” said paper co-author Professor Sir Colin Humphreys from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Materials Science & Metallurgy, who is also interested in relating scientific knowledge to the Bible.

“Modern English translations, which follow the King James translation of 1611, usually interpret this text to mean that the sun and moon stopped moving,” said Humphreys, who is also a Fellow of Selwyn College. “But going back to the original Hebrew text, we determined that an alternative meaning could be that the sun and moon just stopped doing what they normally do: they stopped shining. In this context, the Hebrew words could be referring to a solar eclipse, when the moon passes between the earth and the sun, and the sun appears to stop shining. This interpretation is supported by the fact that the Hebrew word translated ‘stand still’ has the same root as a Babylonian word used in ancient astronomical texts to describe eclipses.”

Humphreys and his co-author, Graeme Waddington, are not the first to suggest that the biblical text may refer to an eclipse, however, earlier historians claimed that it was not possible to investigate this possibility further due to the laborious calculations that would have been required.

Independent evidence that the Israelites were in Canaan between 1500 and 1050 BC can be found in the Merneptah Stele, an Egyptian text dating from the reign of the Pharaoh Merneptah, son of the well-known Ramesses the Great. The large granite block, held in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, says that it was carved in the fifth year of Merneptah’s reign and mentions a campaign in Canaan in which he defeated the people of Israel.

Earlier historians have used these two texts to try to date the possible eclipse, but were not successful as they were only looking at total eclipses, in which the disc of the sun appears to be completely covered by the moon as the moon passes directly between the earth and the sun. What the earlier historians failed to consider was that it was instead an annular eclipse, in which the moon passes directly in front of the sun, but is too far away to cover the disc completely, leading to the characteristic ‘ring of fire’ appearance. In the ancient world the same word was used for both total and annular eclipses.

The researchers developed a new eclipse code, which takes into account variations in the Earth’s rotation over time. From their calculations, they determined that the only annular eclipse visible from Canaan between 1500 and 1050 BC was on 30 October 1207 BC, in the afternoon. If their arguments are accepted, it would not only be the oldest solar eclipse yet recorded, it would also enable researchers to date the reigns of Ramesses the Great and his son Merneptah to within a year.

“Solar eclipses are often used as a fixed point to date events in the ancient world,” said Humphreys. Using these new calculations, the reign of Merneptah began in 1210 or 1209 BC. As it is known from Egyptian texts how long he and his father reigned for, it would mean that Ramesses the Great reigned from 1276-1210 BC, with a precision of plus or minus one year, the most accurate dates available. The precise dates of the pharaohs have been subject to some uncertainty among Egyptologists, but this new calculation, if accepted, could lead to an adjustment in the dates of several of their reigns and enable us to date them precisely.

Article Source: University of Cambridge news release

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UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO—When the ancestors of modern humans migrated out of Africa, they passed through the Middle East and Turkey before heading deeper into Asia and Europe.

Here, at this important crossroads, it’s thought that they encountered and had sexual rendezvous with a different hominid species: the Neanderthals. Genomic evidence shows that this ancient interbreeding occurred, and Western Asia is the most likely spot where it happened.

A new study explores the legacy of these interspecies trysts, with a focus on Western Asia, where the first relations may have occurred. The research, published on Oct. 13 in Genome Biology and Evolution, analyzes the genetic material of people living in the region today, identifying DNA sequences inherited from Neanderthals.

“As far as human history goes, this area was the stepping stone for the peopling of all of Eurasia,” says Omer Gokcumen, PhD, an assistant professor of biological sciences in the University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences. “This is where humans first settled when they left Africa. It may be where they first met Neanderthals. From the standpoint of genetics, it’s a very interesting region.”

The study focused on Western Asia. As part of the project, scientists analyzed 16 genomes belonging to people of Turkish descent.

“Within these genomes, the areas where we see relatively common Neanderthal introgression are in genes related to metabolism and immune system responses,” says Recep Ozgur Taskent, the study’s first author and a UB PhD candidate in biological sciences. “Broadly speaking, these are functions that can have an impact on health.”

For example, one DNA sequence that originated from Neanderthals includes a genetic variant linked to celiac disease. Another includes a variant tied to a lowered risk for malaria.

The bottom line? The relations that our ancestors had with Neanderthals tens of thousands of years ago may continue to exert an influence on our well-being today, Gokcumen says.

He led the study with Taskent and Mehmet Somel, PhD, from the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. Co-authors included Nursen Duha Alioglu and Evrim Fer from the Middle East Technical University, and Handan Melike Donertas from the Middle East Technical University and European Bioinformatics Institute.

Early contact with Neanderthals, but relatively little Neanderthal DNA

In addition to exploring the specific functions of genetic material that the Turkish population inherited from Neanderthals, the study also examined the Neanderthals’ influence on human populations in Western Asia more broadly.

The region is thought to be where modern humans first interbred with their Neanderthal kin. And yet, research has shown that people living in this area today have relatively little Neanderthal DNA compared to people in other parts of the world.

The new study supports this finding. The research team analyzed genomic data from dozens of Western Asian individuals, and observed that, on average, with a few exceptions, these populations carry less Neanderthal DNA than Europeans, Central Asians and East Asians.

The differences in Neanderthal ancestry between Western Asian and other populations may be due to the region’s unique position in human history, Taskent says.

Tens of thousands of years ago, when modern humans first left Africa to populate the rest of the world, Western Asia was the first stopping point — the only land-based route for accessing the rest of Eurasia.

People who live in Europe, Central Asia and East Asia today may be descended from human populations that treated Western Asia as a waystation: These human populations lived there temporarily, mating with the region’s Neanderthals before moving on to other destinations.

In contrast, the ancestors of present-day Western Asians had a deeper connection to the region: They settled in Western Asia instead of just passing through. These ancient humans had contact with Neanderthals, too, but two factors may have diluted the Neanderthals’ influence.

The first was a constant influx of genetic material from ancient Africans, who had no Neanderthal DNA and who continued to pass through Western Asia for thousands of years as human societies grew in Europe and Asia. The second was the hypothesized presence of a “basal Eurasian” population — a population of Western Asians that never interbred with Neanderthals.

“Both of these factors may have helped to limit the amount of Neanderthal DNA that was retained by human populations in the region,” Taskent says.

Article Source: University at Buffalo news release

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FIELD MUSEUM—Tsunamis spell calamity. These giant waves, caused by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and underwater landslides, are some of the deadliest natural disasters known; the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean killed over 230,000 people, a higher death toll than any fire or hurricane. Scientists studying the effects of tsunamis have now shed light on what could be the earliest record of a person killed in a tsunami: someone who lived 6,000 years ago in what’s now Papua New Guinea in the southwest Pacific. Their skull was found in geological sediments having the distinctive hallmarks of ancient tsunami activity. This means, scientists posit in a new paper in PLOS ONE, that this skull could be from the earliest known tsunami victim.

“If we are right about how this person had died thousands of years ago, we have dramatic proof that living by the sea isn’t always a life of beautiful golden sunsets and great surfing conditions,” says John Terrell, Regenstein Curator of Pacific Anthropology at The Field Museum and one of the study’s authors. “Maybe this individual can help us as scientists to convince skeptics today that all of us on earth must take climate change and rising sea levels seriously as the threats they truly are.”

The skull in question was found in 1929, buried in the ground near the small town of Aitape on the northern of Papua New Guinea, about 500 miles north of Australia. Terrell has been doing archaeological and anthropological research in this coastal region of New Guinea, the second largest island in the world, since 1990. The new PLOS One study is a continuation of that work, contributed to by the University of New South Wales, l’Université de Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Auckland, New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, the University of Papua New Guinea, Papua New Guinea National Museum and Art Gallery, and The Field Museum. As a member of this international team, Terrell says he has long wondered what to make of this tantalizing human find.

“The skull has always been of great archaeological interest because it is one of the few early skeletal remains from the area,” says Mark Golitko of the University of Notre Dame and The Field Museum. “It was originally thought that the skull belonged to Homo erectus until the deposits were more reliably radiocarbon dated to about 5,000 to 6,000 years. Back then, sea levels were higher and the area would have been just behind the shoreline.”

In 2014 Golitko and others went back to the exact place where this skull had been found to look for new clues about what killed this individual. “We have now been able to confirm what we have long suspected,” says James Goff at the University of New South Wales in Australia, the report’s first author. “The geological similarities between the sediments at the place where the skull was found and sediments laid down during the 1998 tsunami that hit this same coastline have made us realise that human populations in this area have been affected by these massive inundations for thousands of years.”

“Given the evidence we have in hand, we are more convinced than before that this person was either violently killed by a tsunami, or had their grave ripped open by one–leading to their head but not the rest of their body being naturally reburied where it then remained undiscovered in the ground for some 6,000 or so years,” explains Goff.

“It is easy to be fooled by the great beauty of the Sepik coast of Papua New Guinea into thinking that surely this part of the world must be as close to paradise-on-earth as anybody could want. This person’s skull is witness to the fact that here as elsewhere natural disasters can suddenly and unexpectedly turn the world upside down,” says Terrell.

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 The cranium of a person who lived in what’s now Papua New Guinea, 6,000 years ago. Credit: Arthur Durband

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Article Source: Field Museum news release

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WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS—An older Neandertal from about 50,000 years ago, who had suffered multiple injuries and other degenerations, became deaf and must have relied on the help of others to avoid prey and survive well into his 40s, indicates a new analysis published Oct. 20 in the online journal PLoS ONE.

“More than his loss of a forearm, bad limp and other injuries, his deafness would have made him easy prey for the ubiquitous carnivores in his environment and dependent on other members of his social group for survival,” said Erik Trinkaus, study co-author and professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

Known as Shanidar 1, the Neandertal remains were discovered in 1957 during excavations at Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan by Ralph Solecki, an American archeologist and professor emeritus at Columbia University.

Previous studies of the Shanidar 1 skull and other skeletal remains had noted his multiple injuries. He sustained a serious blow to the side of the face, fractures and the eventual amputation of the right arm at the elbow, and injuries to the right leg, as well as a systematic degenerative condition.

In a new analysis of the remains, Trinkaus and Sébastien Villotte of the French National Centre for Scientific Research confirm that bony growths in Shanidar 1’s ear canals would have produced profound hearing loss. In addition to his other debilitations, this sensory deprivation would have made him highly vulnerable in his Pleistocene context.

As the co-authors note, survival as a hunter-gatherer in the Pleistocene presented numerous challenges, and all of those difficulties would have been markedly pronounced with sensory impairment. Like other Neandertals who have been noted for surviving with various injuries and limited arm use, Shanidar 1 most likely required significant social support to reach old age.

“The debilities of Shanidar 1, and especially his hearing loss, thereby reinforce the basic humanity of these much maligned archaic humans, the Neandertals,” said Trinkaus, the Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor.

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 Two views of the ear canal of the Neandertal fossil Shanidar 1 show substantial deformities that would likely have caused profound deafness. Credit: Erik Trinkaus

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Article Source: Washington University in St. Louis news release

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The complete journal article can be read here: External auditory exostoses and hearing loss in the Shanidar 1 Neandertal. PLoS ONE

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UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK —Ancient hunter-gatherers began to systemically affect the evolution of crops up to thirty thousand years ago – around ten millennia before experts previously thought – according to new research by the University of Warwick.

Professor Robin Allaby, in Warwick’s School of Life Sciences, has discovered that human crop gathering was so extensive, as long ago as the last Ice Age, that it started to have an effect on the evolution of rice, wheat and barley – triggering the process which turned these plants from wild to domesticated.

In Tell Qaramel, an area of modern day northern Syria, the research demonstrates evidence of einkorn being affected up to thirty thousand years ago, and rice has been shown to be affected more than thirteen thousand years ago in South, East and South-East Asia.

Furthermore, emmer wheat is proved to have been affected twenty-five thousand years ago in the Southern Levant – and barley in the same geographical region over twenty-one thousand years ago.

The researchers traced the timeline of crop evolution in these areas by analysing the evolving gene frequencies of archaeologically uncovered plant remains.

Wild plants contain a gene which enables them to spread or shatter their seeds widely. When a plant begins to be gathered on a large scale, human activity alters its evolution, changing this gene and causing the plant to retain its seeds instead of spreading them – thus adapting it to the human environment, and eventually agriculture.

Professor Allaby and his colleagues made calculations from archaeobotanical remains of crops mentioned above that contained ‘non-shattering’ genes – the genes which caused them to retain their seeds – and found that human gathering had already started to alter their evolution millennia before previously accepted dates.

The study shows that crop plants adapted to domestication exponentially around eight thousand years ago, with the emergence of sickle farming technology, but also that selection changed over time. It pinpoints the origins of the selective pressures leading to crop domestication much earlier, and in geological eras considered inhospitable to farming.

Demonstrating that crops were being gathered to the extent of being pushed towards domestication up to thirty thousand years ago proves the existence of dense populations of people at this time.

Professor Robin Allaby commented:

“This study changes the nature of the debate about the origins of agriculture, showing that very long term natural processes seem to lead to domestication – putting us on a par with the natural world, where we have species like ants that have domesticated fungi, for instance.”

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Professor Robin Allaby, University of Warwick. Credit: University of Warwick

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Article Source: University of Warwick news release

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The research, ‘Geographic mosaics and changing rates of cereal domestication’, is published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

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UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA—Turquoise is an icon of the desert Southwest, with enduring cultural significance, especially for Native American communities. Yet, relatively little is known about the early history of turquoise procurement and exchange in the region.

University of Arizona researchers are starting to change that by blending archaeology and geochemistry to get a more complete picture of the mineral’s mining and distribution in the region prior to the 16th-century arrival of the Spanish.

In a new paper, published in the November issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, UA anthropology alumnus Saul Hedquist and his collaborators revisit what once was believed to be a relatively small turquoise mine in eastern Arizona. Their findings suggest that the Canyon Creek mine, located on the White Mountain Apache Indian Reservation, was actually a much more significant source of turquoise than previously thought.

With permission from the White Mountain Apache Tribe, Hedquist and his colleagues visited the now essentially exhausted Canyon Creek source—which has been known to archaeologists since the 1930s—to remap the area and collect new samples. There, they found evidence of previously undocumented mining areas, which suggest the output of the mine may have been 25 percent higher than past surveys indicated.

“Pre-Hispanic workings at Canyon Creek were much larger than previously estimated, so the mine was clearly an important source of turquoise while it was active,” said Hedquist, lead author of the paper, who earned his doctorate from the UA School of Anthropology in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences in May.

In addition, the researchers measured ratios of lead and strontium isotopes in samples they collected from the mine, and determined that Canyon Creek turquoise has a unique isotopic fingerprint that distinguishes it from other known turquoise sources in the Southwest. The isotopic analysis was conducted in the lab of UA College of Science Dean Joaquin Ruiz in the Department of Geosciences by study co-author and UA geosciences alumna Alyson Thibodeau. Now an assistant professor at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, Thibodeau did her UA dissertation on isotopic fingerprinting of geological sources of turquoise throughout the Southwest.

“If you pick up a piece of turquoise from an archaeological site and say ‘where does it come from?’ you have to have some means of telling the different turquoise deposits apart,” said David Killick, UA professor of anthropology, who co-authored the paper with Hedquist, Thibodeau and John Welch, a UA alumnus now on the faculty at Simon Fraser University. “Alyson’s work shows that the major mining areas can be distinguished by measurement of major lead and strontium isotopic ratios.”

Based on the isotopic analysis, researchers were able to confidently match turquoise samples they collected at Canyon Creek to several archaeological artifacts housed in museums. Their samples matched artifacts that had been uncovered at sites throughout much of east-central Arizona—some more than 100 kilometers from the mine—suggesting that distribution of Canyon Creek turquoise was broader than previously thought, and that the mine was a significant source of turquoise for pre-Hispanic inhabitants of the Mogollon Rim area.

The researchers also were able to pinpoint when the mine was most active. Their samples matched artifacts found at sites occupied between A.D. 1250-1400, suggesting the mine was primarily used in the late 13th and/or 14th centuries.

“Archaeologists have struggled for decades to find reliable means of sourcing archaeological turquoise—linking turquoise artifacts to their geologic origin—and exploring how turquoise was mined and traded throughout the greater pre-Hispanic Southwest,” said Hedquist, who now lives in Tempe, Arizona, and works as an archaeologist and ethnographer for Logan Simpson Inc., a cultural resources consulting firm. “We used both archaeology and geochemistry to document the extent of workings at the mine, estimate the amount of labor spent at the mine and identify turquoise from the mine in archaeological assemblages.”

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Research Paves Way for Future Studies

Turquoise is a copper mineral, found only immediately adjacent to copper ore deposits. While detailed documentation of pre-Hispanic turquoise mines is limited, the work at Canyon Creek could pave the way for future investigations.

“I think our study raises the bar a bit by combining archaeological and geochemical analyses to gain a more complete picture of operations at one mine: when it was active, how intensely it was mined and how its product moved about the landscape,” Hedquist said. “Researchers have only recently developed a reliable means of sourcing the mineral, so there’s plenty of potential for future research.”

Similar work involving the UA is already underway to explore the origin of turquoise artifacts found at the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan in Mexico.

“Canyon Creek is but one of many ancient turquoise mines,” Hedquist said. “This study provides a standard for the detailed documentation of ancient mineral procurement and a framework for linking archaeological turquoise to specific geologic locations. Building on other archaeological patterns—the circulation of pottery and flaked stone artifacts, for example—we can piece together the social networks that facilitated the ancient circulation of turquoise in different times and places.”

A better understanding of the pre-Hispanic history of turquoise is important not only to archaeologists and mining historians but to modern Native Americans, Killick said.

“It’s of great interest to modern-day Apache, Zuni and Hopi, whose ancestors lived in this area, because turquoise continues to be ritually important for them,” he said. “They really have shown a great deal of interest in this work, and they’ve encouraged it.”

Article Source: University of Arizona news release

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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH FLORIDA (USF HEALTH)—Natural disasters such as Hurricane Irma are putting the nation at risk of losing parts of our American heritage. The monster storm hit St. Augustine with flooding and surge, creating grave concerns for the national monuments Castillo de San Marcos and Fort Matanzas. Made from coquina, a fragile sedimentary rock comprised of mostly shell, these masonry forts face ongoing threats from erosion and storm damage.

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YALE UNIVERSITY—A new study linking paleoclimatology—the reconstruction of past global climates—with historical analysis by researchers at Yale and other institutions shows a link between environmental stress and its impact on the economy, political stability, and war-fighting capacity of ancient Egypt.

The team of researchers examined the hydroclimatic and societal impacts in Egypt of a sequence of tropical and high-latitude volcanic eruptions spanning the past 2,500 years, as known from modern ice-core records. The team focused on the Ptolemaic dynasty of ancient Egypt (305-30 B.C.E.)—a state formed in the aftermath of the campaigns of Alexander the Great, and famed for rulers such as Cleopatra—as well as material and cultural achievements including the great Library and Lighthouse of Alexandria.

Using an interdisciplinary approach that combined evidence from climate modelling of large 20th-century eruptions, annual measurements of Nile summer flood heights from the Islamic Nilometer—the longest-known human record of environmental variability—between 622 and 1902, as well as descriptions of Nile flood quality in ancient papyri and inscriptions from the Ptolemaic era, the authors show how large volcanic eruptions impacted on Nile river flow, reducing the height of the agriculturally-critical summer flood.

The findings, published in the journal Nature Communications, show that integrating evidence from historical writings with paleoclimate data can advance both our understanding of how the climate system functions, and how climatic changes impacted past human societies.

“Ancient Egyptians depended almost exclusively on Nile summer flooding brought by the summer monsoon in east Africa to grow their crops. In years influenced by volcanic eruptions, Nile flooding was generally diminished, leading to social stress that could trigger unrest and have other political and economic consequences,” says Joseph Manning, lead author on the paper and the William K. & Marilyn Milton Simpson Professor of History and Classics at Yale.

The reason for reduced flooding of the Nile is because volcanic eruptions can disrupt the climate by injecting sulfurous gases into the stratosphere, says Francis Ludlow, the study’s corresponding author. Ludlow is a climate historian who began collaborating with Manning as a postdoctoral fellow at Yale, and is now based in history in Trinity College, Dublin. These gases react to form aerosols that remain in the atmosphere in decreasing concentrations for one or two years, reflecting incoming solar radiation back to space. These volcanic aerosols can influence global hydroclimate. The reduction in surface temperatures can lead to reduced evaporation over waterbodies, and hence lessen rainfall. If the aerosols are dispersed primarily in the Northern Hemisphere, the greater cooling in this hemisphere can also diminish the summertime heating that drives the northward migration of monsoon winds over Africa up to the Ethiopian highlands where the Blue Nile is supplied with its summer floodwaters.

Because the Ptolemaic era is one of ancient Egypt’s most well-documented periods, the dates of major political events are known with some confidence, note the researchers, adding that what is often less clear from the ancient writings is what specific factors triggered events like revolts. The researchers were able to show a recurring close timing between such events and the dates of major volcanic eruptions. Knowledge of the historical context is essential to fully understanding how shocks from diminished Nile flooding acted to trigger revolts and constrain Ptolemaic war making, say the researchers, explaining that the shocks from poor Nile flooding would have occurred against a background of multiple socioeconomic and political difficulties that would have compounded the impacts of Nile variability.

“Egypt and the Nile are very sensitive instruments for climate change, and Egypt provides a unique historical laboratory in which to study social vulnerability and response to abrupt volcanic shocks,” says Manning. “Nile flood suppression from historical eruptions has been little studied, despite well documented Nile failures with severe social impacts coinciding with eruptions in 939, in 1783-1784 in Iceland, and 1912 in Alaska,” he adds.

“With volcanic eruption dates fixed precisely in time, we can see society in motion around them. This is the first time for ancient history that we can begin to talk about a dynamic understanding of society,” says Manning.

According to Manning, this research not only alters the perception of climatic changes on various scales, from short-term shocks to slower-moving, long-term changes, but it is also revolutionizing the understanding of human societies and how the forces of nature shaped them in the past. “The study is of particular importance for the current debate about climate change,” says Manning.

“It is very rare in science and history to have such strong and detailed evidence documenting how societies responded to climatic shocks in the past,” says Jennifer Marlon, research scientist in the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, and a co-author on the study.

The study reflects a significant advance in the integration of research among scientists and historians, and points to the need for more interdisciplinary scholarship to better document and analyze how humans have related and responded to past environmental changes, says Marlon.

The researchers note that the study provides historical context for what is happening today and what may happen in the future and demonstrates that there is need for further investigation into the effects of climate change on modern societies worldwide.

“There hasn’t been a large eruption affecting the global climate system since Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991,” says Manning. “We are living in a period where we are fairly quiescent in terms of large volcanic eruptions that are affecting climate. A lot of volcanoes erupt each year but they are not affecting the climate system on the scale of some past eruptions. Sooner or later we will experience a large volcanic eruption, and perhaps a cluster of them, that will act to exacerbate drought in sensitive parts of the world.”

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A fortified Ptolemaic Egyptian town next to the Nile River. Wildfire Games, Wikimedia Commons 

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Article Source: Yale University news release

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Other authors on the study are Alexander R. Stine, San Francisco State University; William R. Boos, University of California-Berkeley; and Michael Sigl, Paul Sherrer Institute.

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CHINESE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES HEADQUARTERS—The biological makeup of humans in East Asia is shaping up to be a very complex story, with greater diversity and more distant contacts than previously known, according to a new study in Current Biologyanalyzing the genome of a man that died in the Tianyuan Cave near Beijing, China 40,000 years ago. His bones had enough DNA molecules left that a team led by Professor FU Qiaomei, at the Molecular Paleontology Lab at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP), could use advanced ancient DNA sequencing techniques to retrieve DNA from him that spans the human genome.

Though several ancient humans have been sequenced in Europe and Siberia, few have been sequenced from East Asia, particularly China, where the archaeological record shows a rich history for early modern humans. This new study on the Tianyuan man marks the earliest ancient DNA from East Asia, and the first ancient genome-wide data from China.

The Tianyuan man was studied in 2013 by the same lab. Then, they found that he showed a closer relationship to present-day Asians than present-day Europeans, suggesting present-day Asian history in the region extends as far back as 40,000 years ago. With new molecular techniques only published in the last two years, Professor FU and her team, in a joint collaboration with experts at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology and UC Berkeley, sequenced and analyzed more regions of the genome, particularly at positions also sequenced in other ancient humans.

Since 2013, DNA generated from ancient Europeans has shown that all present-day Europeans derive some of their population history from a prehistoric population that separated from other early non-African populations soon after the migration out of Africa. The mixed ancestry of present-day Europeans could bias tests of genetic similarity, including the results found for the Tianyuan man. With the newly published data, however, the Fu lab showed that his genetic similarity to Asians remained in comparisons including ancient Europeans without mixed ancestry. They confirmed that the closest relationship he shares is with present-day Asians. That was not, however, the most exciting result they found.

With a close relationship to present-day Asians, they expected him to act similarly to present-day Asian populations with respect to Europeans. It was a surprise when they found that a 35,000-year-old individual from Belgium, GoyetQ116-1, who in other ways behaved as an ancient European, shared some genetic similarity to the Tianyuan individual that no other ancient Europeans shared. It is unlikely that this is due to direct interactions between populations near the east and west coasts of Eurasia, since other ancient Europeans do not show a similar result. Instead, the researchers suggested that the two populations represented by the Tianyuan and GoyetQ116-1 individuals derived some of their ancestry from the same sub-population prior to the European-Asian separation. The genetic relationship observed between these two ancient individuals is direct evidence that European and Asian populations have a complex history.

A second unexpected result shed some light on human genetic diversity in prehistoric East Asia. In 2015, a study comparing present-day populations in Asia, the Pacific and the Americas showed that some Native American populations from South America had an unusual connection to some populations south of mainland Asia, most notably the Melanesian Papuan and the Andamanese Onge. That study proposed that the population that crossed into the Americas around 20,000 years ago could not be thought of as a single unit. Instead, one or more related but distinct populations crossed at around the same time period, and at least one of these groups had additional ties to an Asian population that also contributed to the present-day Papuan and Onge.

No trace of this connection is observed in present-day East Asians and Siberians, but unlike them, the Tianyuan man also possesses genetic similarities to the same South Americans, in a pattern similar to that found for the Papuan and Onge. The new study directly confirms that the multiple ancestries represented in Native Americans were all from populations in mainland Asia. What is intriguing, however, is that the migration to the Americas occurred approximately 20,000 years ago, but the Tianyuan individual is twice that age. Thus, the population diversity represented in the Americas must have persisted in mainland Asia in two or more distinct populations since 40,000 years ago.

The Tianyuan man is only one individual, but the deeper sequencing of his genome by Professor FU and her team reveals a complicated separation for ancient Europeans and Asians and hints at a diverse genetic landscape for humans in East Asia. Their study also showed that he derives from a population that is related to present-day East Asians, but is not directly ancestral to these populations, further suggesting that multiple genetically distinct populations were located in Asia from 40,000 years ago until the present.

The Tianyuan man shows us that between 40,000 years ago and the present, there are many unanswered questions about the past populations of Asia, and ancient DNA will be the key solving those questions.

Article Source: Chinese Academy of Sciences news release

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CELL PRESS—Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile) has long been a source of intrigue and mystery. How did such a small community of people build so many impressively large statues? And what happened to cause that community to collapse? Researchers have also been curious about what kind of contact Rapa Nui’s inhabitants, known as Rapanui, might have had with South Americans prior to the arrival of Europeans. Earlier evidence seemed to support early contact between the Rapanui and Native Americans .

But a new study of ancient DNA evidence collected from archaeological samples and reported in Current Biology on October 12th calls those findings back into question. The new study finds no genetic evidence that ancient inhabitants of Rapa Nui intermixed with South Americans. While the findings can’t exclude the possibility that cultural contact took place between the two populations, if long-distance treks across the ocean did occur, “they did not leave genetic traces among the individual samples,” said Lars Fehren-Schmitz of the University of California, Santa Cruz. “We were surprised that we didn’t find any Native American admixture in our ancient Rapanui specimens.”

The idea that there had been early Pacific contact with South America, or even that a Southern Pacific migration route contributed to the peopling of the Americas, has been a long-standing debate in the field. In their new study, Fehren-Schmitz and colleagues wanted to find out what DNA from ancient Rapanui samples had to say on the matter.

The researchers sequenced DNA from five individual samples representing Rapanui both before and after European contact. They report that the DNA, including both complete mitochondrial genomes and low-coverage autosomal genomes, indicates that the DNA of the sampled individuals falls within the genetic diversity of present-day and ancient Polynesians.

“We can reject the hypothesis that any of these individuals had substantial Native American ancestry,” Fehren-Schmitz said. “Our data thus suggest that the Native American ancestry in contemporary Easter Islanders was not present on the island prior to European contact and may thus be due to events in more recent history.”

The new study highlights the value of ancient DNA for testing hypotheses about the past. It’s clear from earlier evidence that living Rapanui do have a small proportion of Native American ancestry. But, the researchers in the new study say, “it is especially difficult to disentangle movements of people in the prehistoric period from more recent times.” The question remains: How and when did this population exchange happen?

The researchers say they’d now like to generate genome-wide data from additional ancient Oceania and western South American populations. The goal is to develop a more detailed picture of the populations that lived within each of these regions and potential interactions among them.

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Moai at Ahu Nau Nau, Anakena, the site from which the samples derive. Credit: Terry Hunt

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Article Source: Cell Press news release

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This research was funded by a University of California Presidential Research Catalyst Award, with additional support from the Swedish Research Council and the National Science Foundation.

Current Biology, Fehren-Schmitz and Jarman et al.: “Genetic Ancestry of Rapanui before and after European Contact” http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(17)31194-6

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CELL PRESS—Indigenous people have been on the far northeastern edge of Canada for most of the last 10,000 years, moving in shortly after the ice retreated from the Last Glacial Maximum. Archaeological evidence suggests that people with distinct cultural traditions inhabited the region at least three different times with a possible hiatus for a period between 2,000 and 3,000 years ago.

Now, researchers who’ve examined genetic evidence from mitochondrial DNA provide evidence that two of those groups, known as the Maritime Archaic and Beothuk, brought different matrilines to the island, adding further support to the notion that those groups had distinct population histories. The findings are published in Current Biology on October 12.*

“Our paper suggests, based purely on mitochondrial DNA, that the Maritime Archaic were not the direct ancestors of the Beothuk and that the two groups did not share a very recent common ancestor,” says Ana Duggan of McMaster University. “This in turn implies that the island of Newfoundland was populated multiple times by distinct groups.”

The relationship between the older Maritime Archaic population and Beothuk hadn’t been clear from the archaeological record. With permission from the current-day indigenous community, Duggan and her colleagues, led by Hendrik Poinar, examined the mitochondrial genome diversity of 74 ancient remains from the island together with the archaeological record and dietary isotope profiles. All samples were collected from tiny amounts of bone or teeth.

The sample set included a Maritime Archaic subadult more than 7,700 years old found in the L’Anse Amour burial mound, the oldest known burial mound in North America and one of the first manifestations of the Maritime Archaic tradition. The majority of the Beothuk samples came from the Notre Dame Bay area, where the Beothuk retreated in response to European expansions. Most of those samples are from people that lived on the island within the last 300 years. The DNA evidence showed that the two groups didn’t share a common maternal ancestor in the recent past, but rather one that coalesces sometime in the more distant past.

“These data clearly suggest that the Maritime Archaic people are not the direct maternal ancestors of the Beothuk and thus that the population history of the island involves multiple independent arrivals by indigenous peoples followed by habitation for many generations,” the researchers write. “This shows the extremely rich population dynamics of early peoples on the furthest northeastern edge of the continent.”

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Article Source: Cell Press news release

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Funding and financial support was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Grant program, the Canada Research Chairs program (HNP), the Wilson Foundation, the Ontario Genomics Institute, Illumina Canada, Memorial University of Newfoundland, thee J.R. Smallwood Foundation, the Institute of Social and Economic Research, Beothuk Institute, McMaster University, and Robert Corsini (McMaster Class of 1967).

*Current Biology, Duggan et al.: “Genetic Discontinuity between the Maritime Archaic and Beothuk Populations in Newfoundland, Canada” http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(17)31091-6

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For the people who have lived in the rural area of Góry in eastern Wielkopolska, Poland, the ancient tombs have been known for perhaps two hundred years, if not longer. Many of them were gradually dismantled by the locals, at least at the surface, to acquire stones for modern constructions. Others, however, remained hidden and thus less conspicuous within the forests, surviving to the present as earthen mounds, their interiors still intact, their secrets still buried. It has only been recently that archaeologists rediscovered them, with the help of LiDAR, the remote sensing technology that measures the distance to objects from the air to the surface by revealing them with a pulsed laser light, uncovering surface forms and features that have gone undetected or unrecognized by the naked eye on the ground. Their significance, from an archaeological and historical perspective, is high, because they are about 5,5000 years old — remnants of the European megalithic past.

“The earthen mounds of the Góry megaliths are up to 90 meters long and 1.5 meters high and are in a very good state,” reports a press release of the Foundation Development YES – Open Pit MinesNO (DY-OPMN), an organization dedicated to their preservation.  “Only the outer stones had been removed through ages of farming in the region. The rest is virtually intact.” The Foundation reports that there are 15 tombs, including 14 long-barrow tombs of the Neolithic Funnelbeaker culture, and one Lusatian culture tomb dated to the Early Bronze age at about 3 thousand years ago. They have remained to this day largely unexplored and unexcavated by archaeologists, save for initial survey. But once investigated, they could emerge as one of the most important sites of megalithic culture in Europe, joining discoveries such as Grønsalen on the Isle of Man in Denmark, Brú na Bóinne in Newgrange, Ireland, West Kennet Long Barrow in England, La Roche aux Fées and the Carnac Stones in France, and the megalithic temples of Malta. 

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 Above and below: Barely visible on the landscape, for now, the Góry tombs remain secluded within their forest shroud. Credit Leszek Pazderski

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Above and below: Reconstructed megalithic tombs in Wietrzychowice (50 km to the East of Góry). Credit: Leszek Pazderski 

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 Above and below: Reconstructed Funnelbeaker ceramic vases from a Neolithic settlement near the Góry site. (Most probably its inhabitants were the builders of the Góry megaliths). Credit: Krzysztof Gorczyca

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Endangered Heritage

But these tombs also sit atop a coal deposit — a deposit that Poland’s ZE PAK mining company  (through the planned Ościsłowo open-pit mine) is very keen to exploit — and as soon as possible. It is a familiar story.  There are others like this one out there: the Mes Aynak site in Afghanistan is one high profile example. In the Góry megaliths case, Poland’s historical monuments conservation authority has begun the process to formally place the site on the protected monuments list. This means that, for now, the tombs are protected until the decision is made. But if the decision goes against them, the mining company will be approved for a permit to begin their excavation, leading to the destruction of the tombs. If, on the other hand, the decision favors preservation of the tombs, then ZE PAK may need to rethink their plans.

The DY-OPMN organization is campaigning to get the news out to the public.“Are the Poles ready to sacrifice a priceless piece of European history, barely researched and still full of secrets?” state their representatives in the press release. “Do the short-term profits of one company justify such a sacrifice? Foundation “Development YES – Open Pit Mines NO” believes that the cultural heritage should be protected from destruction for future generations.”

They may have more than the protection of cultural treasures on their side in the case. “The planned Ościsłowo open-pit mine would [also] devastate the environment and economy of the Wielkopolska region,” they maintain. 

For now, everyone waits.

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