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South African discovery turns page in story of humankind

Johannesburg – 6 December 2017  South Africa’s status as a major cradle in the African nursery of humankind has been reinforced with today’s unveiling of “Little Foot”, the country’s oldest, virtually complete fossil human ancestor.

Little Foot is the only known virtually complete Australopithecus fossil discovered to date. It is by far the most complete skeleton of a human ancestor older than 1.5 million years ever found. It is also the oldest fossil hominid in southern Africa, dating back 3.67 million years. The unveiling will be the first time that the completely cleaned and reconstructed skeleton can be viewed by the national and international media.

Discovered by Professor Ron Clarke from the Evolutionary Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, the fossil was given the nickname of “Little Foot” by Prof. Phillip Tobias, based on Clarke’s initial discovery of four small footbones. Its discovery is expected to add a wealth of knowledge about the appearance, full skeletal anatomy, limb lengths and locomotor abilities of one of the species of our early ancestral relatives.

“This is one of the most remarkable fossil discoveries made in the history of human origins research and it is a privilege to unveil a finding of this importance today,” says Clarke.

After lying undiscovered for more than 3.6 million years deep within the Sterkfontein caves about 40km north-west of Johannesburg, Clarke found several foot bones and lower leg bone fragments in 1994 and 1997 among other fossils that had been removed from rock blasted from the cave years earlier by lime miners. Clarke sent his assistants Stephen Motsumi and Nkwane Molefe into the deep underground cave to search for any possible broken bone surface that might fit with the bones he had discovered in boxes. Within two days of searching, they found such a contact, in July 1997.

Clarke realised soon after the discovery that they were on to something highly significant and started the specialized process of excavating the skeleton in the cave up through 2012, when the last visible elements were removed to the surface in blocks of breccia. 

“My assistants and I have worked on painstakingly cleaning the bones from breccia blocks and reconstructing the full skeleton until the present day,” says Clarke.

In the 20 years since the discovery, they have been hard at work to excavate and prepare the fossil. Now Clarke and a team of international experts are conducting a full set of scientific studies on it. The results of these studies are expected to be published in a series of scientific papers in high impact, peer reviewed international journals in the near future.

This is the first time that a virtually complete skeleton of a pre-human ancestor from a South African cave has been excavated in the place where it was fossilised.

“Many of the bones of the skeleton are fragile, yet they were all deeply embedded in a concrete-like rock called breccia,” Clarke explains.

“The process required extremely careful excavation in the dark environment of the cave. Once the upward-facing surfaces of the skeleton’s bones were exposed, the breccia in which their undersides were still embedded had to be carefully undercut and removed in blocks for further cleaning in the lab at Sterkfontein,” says Clarke.

The 20-year long period of excavation, cleaning, reconstruction, casting, and analysis of the skeleton has required a steady source of funding, which was provide­­­­d­­­­­ by the Palaeontological Scientific Trust (PAST) – a Johannesburg-based NGO that promotes research, education and outreach in the sciences related to our origins. Among its many initiatives aimed at uplifting the origin sciences across Africa, PAST has been a major funder of research at Sterkfontein for over two decades.

Professor Adam Habib, Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of the Witwatersrand says: “This is a landmark achievement for the global scientific community and South Africa’s heritage. It is through important discoveries like Little Foot that we obtain a glimpse into our past which helps us to better understand our common humanity.”

PAST’s chief scientist Professor Robert Blumenschine labels the discovery a source of pride for all Africans. “Not only is Africa the storehouse of the ancient fossil heritage for people the world over, it was also the wellspring of everything that makes us human, including our technological prowess, our artistic ability, and our supreme intellect,” he says.

The scientific value of the find and much more will be unveiled in a series of papers that Prof Clarke and a team of international experts have been preparing, with many expected in the next year.

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 Prof. Ron Clarke at the site of the Little Foot finds in Sterkfontein caves. Credit: Paul Myburgh

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 Little Foot embedded in its breccia block, set in Sterkfontein caves with Ron Clarke. Credit: Paul Myburgh 

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 Little Foot skull separated from its block. Profile of Ron Clarke to the right. Credit: Paul Myburgh

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Little Foot excavators Stephen Motsumi, Ron Clarke and Nikwane Molefe. Credit: Paul Myburgh 

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Article Source: News release written by Schalk Mouton of the University of the Witwatersrand

If you liked this article, you may like The Age of Little Foot, a premium article oublished in Popular Archaeology Magazine.

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Archaeologists revise chronology of the last hunter-gatherers in the Near East

UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN – FACULTY OF HUMANITIES—New research by a team of scientists and archaeologists based at the Weizmann Institute of Science and the University of Copenhagen suggests that the 15,000-year-old ‘Natufian Culture’ could live comfortably in the steppe zone of present-day eastern Jordan – this was previously thought to be either uninhabitable or only sparsely populated.

The hunter-gatherers of the Natufian Culture, which existed in modern-day Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria between c. 14,500 – 11,500 years ago, were some of the first people to build permanent houses and tend to edible plants. These innovations were probably crucial for the subsequent emergence of agriculture during the Neolithic era. Previous research had suggested that the centre of this culture was the Mount Carmel and Galilee region, and that it spread from here to other parts of the region. The new study by the Copenhagen-Weizmann team, published in Scientific Reports, challenges this ‘core region’ theory.

The new paper is based on evidence from a Natufian site located in Jordan, c. 150 km northeast of Amman. The site, called Shubayqa 1, was excavated by a University of Copenhagen team led by Dr. Tobias Richter from 2012-2015.

The excavations uncovered a well-preserved Natufian site, which produced a large assemblage of charred plant remains. These kinds of botanical remains are rare at many other Natufian sites in the region, and enabled the Weizmann-Copenhagen team to obtain the largest number of dates for any Natufian site yet in Israel or Jordan.

“We dated more than twenty samples from different layers of the site, making it one of the best and most accurately dated Natufian sites anywhere. The dates show, among other things, that the site was first settled not long after the earliest dates obtained for northern Israel, ca. 14,600 years ago. This suggests that the Natufian either expanded very rapidly, which we think is unlikely, or that it emerged more or less simultaneously in different parts of the region,” Dr. Richter reports, adding:

“The early date of Shubayqa 1 also shows that Natufian hunter-gatherers were more versatile than previously thought. Past research had linked the emergence of the Natufian to the rich habitat of the Mediterranean woodland zone. But the early dates from Shubayqa show that these late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers were also able to live quite comfortably in more open parkland steppe zones further east. Some of their subsistence appears to have relied heavily on the exploitation of club rush tubers, as well as other wild plants. They also hunted birds, gazelle and other animals,” says Tobias Richter.

Precise dating methodology

The dating was undertaken by Professor Elisabetta Boaretto at the Weizmann Institute of Science using Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, or AMS, dating. Boaretto is head of the D-REAMS lab in the Weizmann Institute – one of the few labs in the world that works with the technology and methods to analyze even the smallest organic remains from a site and precisely date them.

Using a specially designed mass spectrometer, Boaretto is able to reveal the amount of carbon-14 in a sample down to the single atom. Based on the half-life of the radioactive carbon-14 atoms, the dating done in her lab is accurate to around 50 years, plus or minus. For the analysis of the specimen from Shubayqa, the team was able to select only short-lived plant species or short-lived plant parts, such as seeds or twigs, to obtain the dates. This ensured the highest possible accuracy for the dates.

Boaretto says that the “core area” theory may have come about, in part, because the Mt. Carmel sites have been the best preserved and studied, until now. In addition to calling into question the idea of the Natufian beginning in one settlement and spreading outwards, the study suggests that the hunter-gatherers who lived 12,000 to 15,000 years ago were ingenious and resourceful. They learned to make use of numerous plants and animals where ever they were, and to tend them in a way that led to early settlement.

The authors say that this supports a view in which there were many pathways to agriculture and “the ‘Neolithic way of life’ was a highly variable and complex process that cannot be explained on the basis of single-cause models.”

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Archaeologists working at the Shubayqa 1 site. Credit: University of Copenhagen

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Article Source: University of Copenhagen – Faculty of Humanities news release

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Read the research paper ‘AMS Radicarbon Dates Suggest Complex Origins of the Late Epipalaeolithic Natufian in the Levant’ in Scientific Reports.

Read more about the Late Epipalaeolithic and Early Neolithic Occupation of the Black Desert project

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Adornments told about the culture of prehistoric people

LOMONOSOV MOSCOW STATE UNIVERSITY—Vladislav Zhitenev, a Russian archaeologist from MSU, studied bone jewelry found at Sungir Upper Paleolithic site. A group led by Vladislav Zhitenev found out that many items were crafted specifically for burial purposes, while others were worn on a daily basis. The style of the jewelry was influenced by many cultures of Europe and the Russian Plain. The article was published in EPAUL 147.

Sungir Upper Paleolithic site is located in Vladimir Region and is dated back to 29,000-31,000 years. Scientist began to study his place over thirty years ago. The encampment of prehistoric hunters includes a burial site of a 40-50 year old man and a grave of two children who died 10-14 years of age. Archaeological excavation revealed over 80 thousand different objects.

“This children’s grave contains more adornments and other burial items than any other Upper Paleolithic burial site in Eurasia,” – says Vladislav Zhitenev, the author of the study, doctor of historical sciences, and assistant professor of the Archaeology Department of the Faculty of History, MSU. Currently all findings are kept in the State Vladimir-Suzdal Museum Reserve.

Having studied pendants made from the teeth of Arctic fox, bone beads, and other personal ornaments, scientists found out that these items were worn for a long time as they exhibited rubbing marks and other signs of tear. Other ornaments found at the burials were made in a hurry and don’t look so smooth and convenient. Evidently, they were crafted specifically for the burial ceremony. These items include a large horse figurine with a disproportionately short back led. Although the surface of the figurine had been polished, it has a lot of manufacturing and processing marks.

It is still unknown why the grave of children appeared to contain so many objects including worn ones. According to one version, people used the child burial to make a sacrifice to save the community from an adversity of some kind, such as illness or hunger. Burial items were made not only by experienced craftsmen, but by children as well. One of the tusk disks found in the children’s grave was made carelessly and unskillfully. It is likely it was crafted by a kid.

Adornments are elements of a non-verbal language used by prehistoric people to tell friends from enemies and to learn about one’s social status and standing. By studying personal ornaments scientists learn more about different aspects of intercultural communication in the Upper Paleolithic period.

Vladislav Zhitenev found out that the man and the children lived relatively at the same time separated by several generations at most. This is confirmed by the identical style of peronal ornaments found in their graves. The children were buried at the same time, but the time period between their death and the passing of the man is still unknown. Radiocarbon dating method failed to provide an answer as it is not accurate to the year when applied to such prehistoric specimens. But when radiocarbon dating gives only approximate results, archaeologists turn to implicit data.

“When looking at an item, one can always see a master’s hand. Many adornments from the burial sites of the man and the children were crafted in the same way, as if by the same person. Alternatively, this technique could have been passed within the family, say, from father to son or from grandmother to granddaughter,” – explains Vladislav Zhitenev. Therefore, the man and the children were separated in time by no more than several dozen years.

Sungir adornments are difficult to classify and include into a certain cultural tradition, as they had been influenced by many cultures. On the one hand, they have a lot in common with the Aurignacian culture that was widely spread in Western and Central Europe in the Early Upper Paleolithic Stone Age. On the other hand, Sungir findings resemble those from some early sites in Kostenki. Finally, all these items are combined with stone objects crafted using a Neanderthal technology, although the remains found in Sungir belonged to Homo sapiens.

Having studied Sungir adornments, scientists found out that a part of them was crafted specifically for the burial ceremony, and another one was worn on a daily basis; the man and the children lived roughly at the same time; and the crafting style was influenced by many cultures including the Aurignacian culture and the culture of the Russian Plain.

In his further studies Vladislav Zhitenev plans to focus on intercultural communication, for example, to find difference between the sites with and without a Neanderthal component.

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 This is bone jewelry found at Sungir in the burial of children (1-3) and in the cultural layer (4). Credit: Vladislav Zhitenev

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Article Source: LOMONOSOV MOSCOW STATE UNIVERSITY news release.

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First-of-its-kind mummy study reveals clues to girl’s story

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY—Who is she, this little mummy girl? Northwestern University scientists and students are working to unravel some of her mysteries, including how her body was prepared 1,900 years ago in Egypt, what items she may have been buried with, the quality of her bones and what material is present in her brain cavity.

As part of a comprehensive scientific investigation, the mummy traveled from Evanston to Argonne National Laboratory on Nov. 27 for an all-day X-ray scattering experiment. It was the first study of its kind performed on a human mummy.

“This is a unique experiment, a 3-D puzzle,” said Stuart R. Stock, research professor of cell and molecular biology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, who led the synchrotron experiment. “We have some preliminary findings about the various materials, but it will take days before we tighten down the precise answers to our questions. We have confirmed that the shards in the brain cavity are likely solidified pitch, not a crystalline material.”

The Roman-Egyptian mummy—which resides at the Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary on Northwestern’s Evanston campus—is one of only approximately 100 portrait mummies in the world. These mummies have an extremely lifelike painting of the deceased individual incorporated into the mummy wrappings and placed directly over the person’s face. The Romans introduced to Egypt these 2-D portraits of the dead after almost 3,000 years of idealized 3-D images. (Think King Tut).

Just over three feet long, the little girl’s body is swaddled in a copious amount of linen. The outermost wrappings have been arranged in an ornate geometric pattern of overlapping rhomboids and also serve to frame the portrait. The face, painted with beeswax and pigment, gazes serenely outward, her dark hair gathered at the back. She is wearing a crimson tunic and gold jewelry.

The study of this rare archeological object, owned by Garrett-Evangelical, is part of an interdisciplinary class at Northwestern focused, in part, on filling out the contextual story of where this mummy came from and who she was.

Thirteen materials science and humanities students are examining the materials and methods used to create both this intact portrait mummy and a well-preserved collection of Roman-Egyptian mummy portraits for an upcoming exhibition at Northwestern’s Block Museum of Art. Earlier in the quarter, the class traveled to California to study the portraits at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, which will loan the portraits to the Block Museum. (Unlike the Garrett mummy, each of these portraits has been separated from its mummy.)

The students already have discovered that the Garrett mummy’s portrait was put together in a very different way from the Hearst Museum portraits and likely is from a different workshop. These findings and others yet to come, including results from the synchrotron X-ray study of the Garrett mummy, will culminate in the Block Museum exhibition, “Paint the Eyes Softer: Mummy Portraits from Roman Egypt.”

“Intact portrait mummies are exceedingly rare, and to have one here on campus was revelatory for the class and exhibition,” said Marc Walton, a research professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering. He is teaching the fall quarter class with Taco Terpstra, assistant professor of classics and history at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

The “Paint the Eyes Softer” exhibition will reunite ancient neighbors: the girl portrait mummy is from the site of Hawara, a site close to Tebtunis, where the Hearst Museum’s mummy portraits are originally from. The Hawara, or Garrett, mummy is believed to be from a high-status family and was entombed in an underground chamber with four other mummies.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for our undergraduate students—and for me—to work at understanding the whole object that is this girl mummy,” Walton said. “Today’s powerful analytical tools allow us to nondestructively do the archaeology scientists couldn’t do 100 years ago.”

The synchrotron experiment at Argonne is a modern-day version of 19th-century England’s “mummy unwrapping” parties, Walton said. The Northwestern team collaborated with scientists at Argonne and used the extremely brilliant high-energy synchrotron X-rays produced by Argonne’s Advanced Photon Source to probe the materials and objects inside the mummy, while leaving the mummy and her wrappings intact.

“From a medical research perspective, I am interested in what we can learn about her bone tissue,” Stock said. “We also are investigating a scarab-shaped object, her teeth and what look like wires near the mummy’s head and feet.”

Prior to its trip to Argonne, the mummy had a CT scan at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in August, also led by Stock. The scan gave the researchers a 3-D map of the structure of the mummy and enabled them to confirm the girl is 5 years old (give or take nine months).

At the Advanced Photon Source, Stock and his team shined the pencil-shaped X-ray beam (about twice the diameter of a human hair) on areas of high-density in the mummy that were identified by the CT scan. They now will use the X-ray diffraction patterns as “fingerprints” to identify each crystalline material. For example, is the black rounded object seen on the CT scan a gold object or a rock?

The findings from the synchrotron experiment, CT scan and other scientific analyses and studies of history conducted by the students will help researchers and historians better understand the context in which the Garrett mummy was excavated in 1911 as well as Roman-period mummification practices. Also, conservators will use the information to best preserve the mummy.

“We’re basically able to go back to an excavation that happened more than 100 years ago and reconstruct it with our contemporary analysis techniques,” Walton said. “All the information we find will help us enrich the entire historic context of this young girl mummy and the Roman period in Egypt.”

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Portrait mummy of a girl, late 1st century CE, mummified remains of 5-year-old girl wrapped in linen, with a portrait in beeswax and pigments on wood. Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, Evanston, Illinois. Photo courtesy of Northwestern University

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Photo credit: Jim Prisching 

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 Northwestern University scientists performed an X-ray scattering experiment Nov. 27 at Argonne National Laboratory on a 1,900-year-old portrait mummy—the first study of its kind. Photo credit Jim Prisching

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Above and below: Images from CT scanning of the mummy. Photo credit: Northwestern University 

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Article Source: Northwestern Unversity news release

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First evidence for Julius Caesar’s invasion of Britain discovered

UNIVERSITY OF LEICESTER—The first evidence for Julius Caesar’s invasion of Britain has been discovered by archaeologists from the University of Leicester. The findings will be explored as part of the BBC Four’s Digging For Britain on Wednesday 29 November.

Based on new evidence, the team suggests that the first landing of Julius Caesar’s fleet in Britain took place in 54BC at Pegwell Bay on the Isle of Thanet, the north—east point of Kent.

This location matches Caesar’s own account of his landing in 54 BC, with three clues about the topography of the landing site being consistent with him having landed in Pegwell Bay: its visibility from the sea, the existence of a large open bay, and the presence of higher ground nearby.

The project has involved surveys of hillforts that may have been attacked by Caesar, studies in museums of objects that may have been made or buried at the time of the invasions, such as coin hoards, and excavations in Kent.

The University of Leicester project, which is funded by the Leverhulme Trust, was prompted by the discovery of a large defensive ditch in archaeological excavations before a new road was built. The shape of the ditch at Ebbsfleet, a hamlet in Thanet, is very similar to some of the Roman defences at Alésia in France, where the decisive battle in the Gallic War took place in 52 BC.

The site, at Ebbsfleet, on the Isle of Thanet in north-east Kent overlooking Pegwell Bay, is now 900 m inland but at the time of Caesar’s invasions it was closer to the coast. The ditch is 4-5 metres wide and 2 metres deep and is dated by pottery and radiocarbon dates to the 1st century BC.

The size, shape, date of the defences at Ebbsfleet and the presence of iron weapons including a Roman pilum (javelin) all suggest that the site at Ebbsfleet was once a Roman base of 1st century BC date.

The archaeological team suggest the site may be up to 20 hectares in size and it is thought that the main purpose of the fort was to protect the ships of Caesar’s fleet that had been drawn up on to the nearby beach.

Dr Andrew Fitzpatrick, Research Associate from the University of Leicester’s School of Archaeology and Ancient History said: “The site at Ebbsfleet lies on a peninsular that projects from the south-eastern tip of the Isle of Thanet. Thanet has never been considered as a possible landing site before because it was separated from the mainland until the Middle Ages.

“However, it is not known how big the Channel that separated it from the mainland (the Wantsum Channel) was. The Wantsum Channel was clearly not a significant barrier to people of Thanet during the Iron Age and it certainly would not have been a major challenge to the engineering capabilities of the Roman army.”

Caesar’s own account of his landing in 54 BC is consistent with the landing site identified by the team.

Dr Fitzpatrick explained: “Sailing from somewhere between Boulogne and Calais, Caesar says that at sunrise they saw Britain far away on the left hand side. As they set sail opposite the cliffs of Dover, Caesar can only be describing the white chalk cliffs around Ramsgate which were being illuminated by the rising sun.

“Caesar describes how the ships were left at anchor at an even and open shore and how they were damaged by a great storm. This description is consistent with Pegwell Bay, which today is the largest bay on the east Kent coast and is open and flat. The bay is big enough for the whole Roman army to have landed in the single day that Caesar describes. The 800 ships, even if they landed in waves, would still have needed a landing front 1-2 km wide.

“Caesar also describes how the Britons had assembled to oppose the landing but, taken aback by the size of the fleet, they concealed themselves on the higher ground. This is consistent with the higher ground of the Isle of Thanet around Ramsgate.

“These three clues about the topography of the landing site; the presence of cliffs, the existence of a large open bay, and the presence of higher ground nearby, are consistent with the 54 BC landing having been in Pegwell Bay.”

The last full study of Caesar’s invasions was published over 100 years ago, in 1907.

It has long been believed that because Caesar returned to France the invasions were failures and that because the Romans did not leave a force of occupation the invasions had little or no lasting effects on the peoples of Briton. It has also been believed that because the campaigns were short they will have left few, if any, archaeological remains.

The team challenge this notion by suggesting that in Rome the invasions were seen as a great triumph. The fact that Caesar had crossed the sea and gone beyond the known world caused a sensation. At this time victory was achieved by defeating the enemy in battle, not by occupying their lands.

They also suggest that Caesar’s impact in Briton had long-standing effects which were seen almost 100 years later during Claudius’s invasion of Briton.

Professor Colin Haselgrove, the principal investigator for the project from the University of Leicester, explained: “It seems likely that the treaties set up by Caesar formed the basis for alliances between Rome and British royal families. This eventually resulted in the leading rulers of south-east England becoming client kings of Rome. Almost 100 years after Caesar, in AD 43 the emperor Claudius invaded Britain. The conquest of south-east England seems to have been rapid, probably because the kings in this region were already allied to Rome.

“This was the beginning of the permanent Roman occupation of Britain, which included Wales and some of Scotland, and lasted for almost 400 years, suggesting that Claudius later exploited Caesar’s legacy.”

The fieldwork for the project has been carried out by volunteers organised by the Community Archaeologist of Kent County Council who worked in partnership with the University of Leicester. The project was also supported by staff from the University of Leicester Archaeological Services (ULAS).

Kent County Council cabinet member Matthew Balfour said: “The council is delighted to have been able to work in partnership with the University of Leicester to help build on the incredible findings made during our road development. The archaeology of Thanet is very special and we are particularly pleased that such important findings have been made with the involvement of volunteers from the Kent community. When we built the road we ensured that the community played a big part in the archaeological works and it is satisfying to see the legacy of our original work continuing.”

Principal Archaeological Officer for Kent County Council Simon Mason, who oversaw the original road excavations carried out by Oxford Wessex Archaeology, said: “Many people do not realise just how rich the archaeology of the Isle of Thanet is. Being so close to the continent, Thanet was the gateway to new ideas, people, trade and invasion from earliest times. This has resulted in a vast and unique buried archaeological landscape with many important discoveries being regularly made. The peoples of Thanet were once witness to some of the earliest and most important events in the nation’s history: the Claudian invasion to start the period of Roman rule, the arrival of St Augustine’s mission to bring Christianity and the arrival of the Saxons celebrated through the tradition of Hengist and Horsa. It has been fantastic to be part of a project that is helping to bring another fantastic chapter, that of Caesar, to Thanet’s story.”

Andrew Mayfield said: “The project has been a fantastic opportunity for us to explore the extraordinary archaeology of Thanet alongside the University of Leicester team. Volunteers, both locally from Thanet and further afield in Kent, enthusiastically give up their time and the success of the dig is very much down to their hard work and commitment. We were also lucky to welcome students from both Canterbury Universities, a local branch of the Young Archaeologists Club as well as the local school. This was very much a team effort.”

The findings will be explored further as part of the BBC Four’s Digging For Britain. The East episode, in which the Ebbsfleet site appears, will be the second programme in the series, and will be broadcast on Wednesday 29 November 2017.

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A 3 Lidar model of topography of Thanet showing Ebbsfleet. Credit: University of Leicester

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 Aerial view of the Ebbsfleet excavation with Pegwell Bay & Ramsgate. Credit: University of Leicester

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 The Ebbsfleet 2016 defensive ditch under excavation. Credit: University of Leicester

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Article Source: University of Leicester news release

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Prehistoric women had stronger arms than today’s elite rowing crews

UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE—A new study comparing the bones of Central European women that lived during the first 6,000 years of farming with those of modern athletes has shown that the average prehistoric agricultural woman had stronger upper arms than living female rowing champions.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology say this physical prowess was likely obtained through tilling soil and harvesting crops by hand, as well as the grinding of grain for as much as five hours a day to make flour.

Until now, bioarchaeological investigations of past behaviour have interpreted women’s bones solely through direct comparison to those of men. However, male bones respond to strain in a more visibly dramatic way than female bones.

The Cambridge scientists say this has resulted in the systematic underestimation of the nature and scale of the physical demands borne by women in prehistory.

“This is the first study to actually compare prehistoric female bones to those of living women,” said Dr Alison Macintosh, lead author of the study published today in the journal Science Advances.

“By interpreting women’s bones in a female-specific context we can start to see how intensive, variable and laborious their behaviours were, hinting at a hidden history of women’s work over thousands of years.”

The study, part of the European Research Council-funded ADaPt (Adaption, Dispersals and Phenotype) Project, used a small CT scanner in Cambridge’s PAVE laboratory to analyse the arm (humerus) and leg (tibia) bones of living women who engage in a range of physical activity: from runners, rowers and footballers to those with more sedentary lifestyles.

The bones strengths of modern women were compared to those of women from early Neolithic agricultural eras through to farming communities of the Middle Ages.

“It can be easy to forget that bone is a living tissue, one that responds to the rigours we put our bodies through. Physical impact and muscle activity both put strain on bone, called loading. The bone reacts by changing in shape, curvature, thickness and density over time to accommodate repeated strain,” said Macintosh.

“By analysing the bone characteristics of living people whose regular physical exertion is known, and comparing them to the characteristics of ancient bones, we can start to interpret the kinds of labour our ancestors were performing in prehistory.”

Over three weeks during trial season, Macintosh scanned the limb bones of the Open- and Lightweight squads of the Cambridge University Women’s Boat Club, who ended up winning this year’s Boat Race and breaking the course record. These women, most in their early twenties, were training twice a day and rowing an average of 120km a week at the time.

The Neolithic women analysed in the study (from 7400-7000 years ago) had similar leg bone strength to modern rowers, but their arm bones were 11-16% stronger for their size than the rowers, and almost 30% stronger than typical Cambridge students.

The loading of the upper limbs was even more dominant in the study’s Bronze Age women (from 4300-3500 years ago), who had 9-13% stronger arm bones than the rowers but 12% weaker leg bones.

A possible explanation for this fierce arm strength is the grinding of grain. “We can’t say specifically what behaviours were causing the bone loading we found. However, a major activity in early agriculture was converting grain into flour, and this was likely performed by women,” said Macintosh.

“For millennia, grain would have been ground by hand between two large stones called a saddle quern. In the few remaining societies that still use saddle querns, women grind grain for up to five hours a day.

“The repetitive arm action of grinding these stones together for hours may have loaded women’s arm bones in a similar way to the laborious back-and-forth motion of rowing.”

However, Macintosh suspects that women’s labour was hardly likely to have been limited to this one behaviour.

“Prior to the invention of the plough, subsistence farming involved manually planting, tilling and harvesting all crops,” said Macintosh. “Women were also likely to have been fetching food and water for domestic livestock, processing milk and meat, and converting hides and wool into textiles.

“The variation in bone loading found in prehistoric women suggests that a wide range of behaviours were occurring during early agriculture. In fact, we believe it may be the wide variety of women’s work that in part makes it so difficult to identify signatures of any one specific behaviour from their bones.”

Dr Jay Stock, senior study author and head of the ADaPt Project, added: “Our findings suggest that for thousands of years, the rigorous manual labour of women was a crucial driver of early farming economies. The research demonstrates what we can learn about the human past through better understanding of human variation today.”

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Cambridge University Women’s Boat Club openweight crew rowing during the 2017 Boat Race on the river Thames in London. The Cambridge women’s crew beat Oxford in the race. The members of this crew were among those analysed in the study. Credit: Alastair Fyfe for the University of Cambridge

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Article Source: University of Cambridge news release

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Plague likely a Stone Age arrival to central Europe

MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY—A team of researchers led by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History has sequenced the first six European genomes of the plague-causing bacterium Yersinia pestis dating from the Late Neolithic to the Bronze Age (4,800 to 3,700 years ago). Analysis of these samples, published in Current Biology, suggests that the Stone Age Plague entered Europe during the Neolithic with a large-scale migration of people from the Eurasian steppe.

Plague caused by Y. pestis has been responsible for major historical pandemics, including the infamous Black Death in the 14th century AD. By analyzing ancient forms of the disease, the researchers hope to learn more about the evolution of the plague and how it became more virulent over time.

For this study, the team analyzed over 500 tooth and bone samples from Germany, Russia, Hungary, Croatia, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia and screened them for the presence of Y. pestis. They recovered full Y. pestis genomes from six individuals, greatly increasing the number of Y. pestis genomes available for study over this time period and providing an unprecedented opportunity to study how the disease evolved after its introduction into Europe.

Plague likely arrived in Central Europe at approximately the same time as steppe nomads

The scientists found that the Y. pestis genomes from this time period, which were found in different parts of Europe, were all fairly closely related. “This suggests that the plague either entered Europe multiple times during this period from the same reservoir, or entered once in the Stone Age and remained there,” explains Aida Andrades Valtueña of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, first author of the study. In order to clarify which scenario was more likely, the scientists examined their data in the context of the existing archaeological and ancient DNA evidence regarding the movement of peoples during the same period.

Beginning around 4,800 years ago, there was a major expansion of people from the Caspian-Pontic Steppe into Europe. These people carried distinct genetic markers that allow their movements and genetic influence, present in essentially all modern-day Europeans, to be traced. Interestingly, the earliest indications of the plague in Europe coincide with the arrival of steppe ancestry in the human populations. This supports the concept that the plague spread along with the large-scale migration of steppe nomads. “In our view, the human genetic ancestry and admixture, in combination with the temporal series within the Late Neolithic-Bronze Age Y. pestis lineage, support the view that Y. pestis was possibly introduced to Europe from the steppe around 4,800 years ago, where it established a local reservoir before moving back towards Central Eurasia,” explains Alexander Herbig of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, a corresponding author of the study.

Analysis confirms changes in plague virulence genes

The plague genomes recovered by the researchers confirm that changes were occurring during this period in genes related to plague virulence, as suggested in prior research. Further research will be needed to confirm how these changes affected the severity of the disease.

However, it is possible that Y. pestis was already capable of causing large-scale epidemics before it developed these traits. Johannes Krause, director of the Department of Archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and lead author of the study, explains, “The threat of Y. pestis infections may have been one of the causes for the increased mobility during the late Neolithic-early Bronze Age period.” In other words, the steppe people could have been moving to get away from the plague. Furthermore, the introduction of the disease in Europe could have played a role in the genetic turnover of European populations. “It’s possible that certain European populations, or the steppe people, may have had a different level of immunity.” Further research to analyze even more samples, from both Y. pestis and humans, from a broader temporal and geographic range will be needed to better answer these questions.

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Map of proposed Yersinia pestis circulation throughout Eurasia. A) Entrance of Y. pestis into Europe from Central Eurasia with the expansion of Yamnaya pastoralists around 4,800 years ago. B) Circulation of Y. pestis to Southern Siberia from Europe. Only complete genomes are shown. Credit: Aida Andrades Valtueña. Andrades Valtueña et al. (2017). The Stone Age Plague and its Persistence in Eurasia. Current Biology.

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 A male individual (6Post) from the Haunstetten Postillionstraße site, with a dagger, flint arrow heads, bracelet and bone pin. Credit: Stadtarchäologie Augsburg

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

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Ancient barley took high road to China

WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS—First domesticated 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, wheat and barley took vastly different routes to China, with barley switching from a winter to both a winter and summer crop during a thousand-year detour along the southern Tibetan Plateau, suggests new research from Washington University in St. Louis.

“The eastern dispersals of wheat and barley were distinct in both space and time,” said Xinyi Liu, assistant professor of archaeology in Arts & Sciences, and lead author of this study published in the journal PLOS One.

“Wheat was introduced to central China in the second or third millennium B.C., but barley did not arrive there until the first millennium B.C.,” Liu said. “While previous research suggests wheat cultivation moved east along the northern edge of the Tibetan Plateau, our study calls attention to the possibility of a southern route (via India and Tibet) for barley.”

Based on the radiocarbon analysis of 70 ancient barley grains recovered from archaeological sites in China, India, Kyrgyzstan and Pakistan, together with DNA and ancient textual evidence, the study tackles the mystery of why ancient Chinese farmers would change the seasonality of a barley crop that originated in a latitudinal range similar to their own.

The answer, Liu explains, is that barley changed from a winter to summer crop during its passage to China, a period in which it spent hundreds of years evolving traits that allowed it to thrive during short summer growing seasons in the highlands of Tibet and northern India.

“Barley arrives in central China later than wheat, bringing with it a degree of genetic diversity in relation to flowering time responses,” Liu said. “We infer such diversity reflects preadaptation of barley varieties along that possible southern route to seasonal challenges, particularly the high altitude effect, and that led to the origins of eastern spring barley.”

Liu’s research on the dispersal of wheat and barley cultivation adds a new chapter to our understanding of prehistoric food globalization, a process that began about 5000 B.C. and intensified around 1500 B.C. This ongoing research traces the geographic paths and dispersal times of crops and cultivation systems that expanded across Eurasia and eventually worldwide, from points of origination in North Africa and West, East and South Asia. The eastern expansion of wheat and barley is a key story in this process.

In the hot, arid southwest Asian region where wheat and barley were first domesticated, they were grown between autumn and subsequent spring to complete their life cycles before arrival of summer droughts. These early domesticated strains included genes carried over from wild grasses that triggered flowering and grain production as days grew longer with the approach of summer.

Because of this spring-flowering life cycle, early domesticated varieties of wheat and barley were poorly suited for cultivation in northern European climates with severe winters and a different day length pattern. Previous research by the second author in this study, Diane Lister, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Cambridge, has shown that barley and wheat adapted to European climates by evolving a mutation that switched off the genes that made flowering sensitive to increases in day length, allowing them to be sown in spring and harvested in fall.

Liu’s study shows that barley evolved similar mutations on its way to China as farmers pushed its cultivation high into the mountains of the Tibetan Plateau. By the time barley reached central China, its genetic makeup had been altered so that flowering was no longer triggered by day length, allowing it to be planted in both spring and fall.

The ancient movement of wheat and barley cultivation into China offers two distinct stories about the adaption of newly introduced crops into an existing agrarian/culinary system, Liu said.

Ancient wheat that traveled to China along Silk Road routes also was genetically modified by farmers who selected strains that produced small-sized grains more suited to a Chinese cuisine that prepared them by boiling or steaming the whole grains. Larger wheat grains evolved in Europe where wheat was traditionally ground for flour.

Along the southern migration route for barley, the main story is the flowering time—changed by farmers to gain control over the seasonal pressures of high-altitude cultivation, Liu said.

Recovery of these ancient grains has become more routine in the last decade as scholars mastered a flotation technique that allows the separation of seeds and other minute biological material from excavated dirt immersed in a bucket of water. This approach, pioneered in China by the third author of this study, Zhijun Zhao, a professor of archaeology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, has transformed the understanding of ancient farming in China.

The PLOS One findings reflect the contributions of 26 co-authors, including archaeologists who recovered the grains and those who analyzed them at leading archaeobotanical laboratories in the U.S., U.K., China and India. The team also includes leading experts for barley archaeogenetics, radiocarbon analysis and agricultural history around the globe.

“We’ve recently realized how much prehistoric crops moved around, on a scale much greater than anyone had envisaged,” said senior co-author Martin Jones, the George Pitt-Rivers Professor of Archaeological Science at Cambridge. “An intensive study of chronology, genetics and crop records now reveals how those movements laid the agrarian foundations of Bronze Age civilizations, enabling the control of seasons, and opening the way for rotation and multi-cropping.”

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Map of Eurasia shows the oldest radiocarbon-measured dates (B.C.) for individual grains of barley recovered from each region. Wheat and barley arrived in South Asia about a millennium before they arrived in East Asia. Free-threshing wheats spread to China along a route to the north of the Tibetan Plateau. Naked barley is likely to have been introduced to China via southern highland routes that remain to be identified. Image: Courtesy of PLOS One

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Article Source: Washington University in St. Louis news release

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Financial support was provided by the European Research Council (249642), National Natural Science Foundation of China (41620104007 and 41672171), National Social Science Foundation of China (11AZD116 and 14ZDB052), University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Y65201YY00), the Department of Science and Technology, New Delhi, India (EMR/2015/ 000881), and the International Center for Energy, Environment and Sustainability (InCEES) at Washington University.

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‘Sunken Cities’ will take visitors on deep dive into Egyptian art

ST. LOUIS, Nov. 20 — The Saint Louis Art Museum next year will present “Sunken Cities: Egypt’s Lost Worlds,” an exhibition showcasing antiquities from one of the greatest finds in the history of underwater archaeology. The North American premiere of “Sunken Cities” will be the most significant exhibition of ancient Egyptian art undertaken in St. Louis in more than 50 years.

Featuring colossal, 16-foot-tall sculptures and precious artifacts from the long-lost cities of Thonis-Heracleion and Canopus, “Sunken Cities” focuses on discoveries made during the last seven years of underwater excavation lead by Franck Goddio, president of the European Institute for Underwater Archaeology.

“Sunken Cities” opens March 25 and will be on view for an extended, six-month run. It recently was shown at the Museum Rietberg in Zurich, the British Museum in London and the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris.

“We long have sought an exhibition of ancient Egyptian antiquities that combines both rigorous archaeological research with objects of the highest artistic quality, and ‘Sunken Cities’ was a perfect match for us,” said Brent R. Benjamin, the Barbara B. Taylor Director of the Saint Louis Art Museum. “The museum is pleased to bring this groundbreaking, visually stunning exhibition to St. Louis for its first viewing in America.”

The exhibition is organized by the European Institute for Underwater Archaeology with the generous support of the Hilti Foundation and in collaboration with the Ministry of Antiquities of the Arab Republic of Egypt. The presenting sponsor of the exhibition in St. Louis is the William T. Kemper Foundation–Commerce Bank, Trustee with lead corporate support from Edward Jones.

In addition to more than 250 works of art discovered by Goddio’s team, the exhibition also includes complementary artifacts from museums in Cairo and Alexandria, some of which never have been shown outside of Egypt.

Thonis-Heracleion—a modern arrangement of the city’s Egyptian and Greek names—was built in the Nile delta. The city reached its zenith in the Late Period (664–332 BC), when it served as Egypt’s main Mediterranean port. By 800 AD, different natural catastrophies such as earthquake and soil liquefaction had caused both Thonis-Heracleion and the nearby community of Canopus to submerge, and ruins remained underwater for more than 1,000 years.

In 2000, Goddio discovered Thonis-Heracleion under 30 feet of water more than four miles off the Egyptian coast. The French archeologist’s research has revealed that this area was important both as a center of trade and as a site of religious pilgrimage. The excavation also helped scholars understand the Mysteries of Osiris, an annual water procession along the canals between Thonis-Heracleion and Canopus commemorating one of Egypt’s most important myths—the murder and resurrection of the god Osiris.

“Sunken Cities: Egypt’s Lost Worlds” is curated by Goddio. The presentation in St. Louis is co-curated by Lisa Çakmak, associate curator of ancient art at the Saint Louis Art Museum.

Museum Members can obtain tickets for “Sunken Cities: Egypt’s Lost Worlds” at the museum and from MetroTix starting Nov. 24. Tickets for the public will be available Dec. 1.

Article Source: St. Louis Art Museum news release

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 Colossal statue of a Ptolemaic king reassembled underwater after excavation and preliminary cleaning, Thonis-Heracleion, Egypt; red granite; Maritime Museum, Alexandria (SCA 279), IEASM Excavations
Photo: Christoph Gerigk © Franck Goddio/Hilti Foundation

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The bust of the colossal statue of the god Hapy has been strapped with webbings before being cautiously raised out of the water of Aboukir Bay, Egypt  Photo: Christoph Gerigk © Franck Goddio/Hilti Foundation 

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 Head of Serapis underwater on site in Canopus, Canopus, Egypt; 2nd century BC; marble; height: 23 1/4 inches; Bibliotheka Alexandrina, Alexandria (SCA 169), IEASM Excavations  Photo: Christoph Gerigk © Franck Goddio/Hilti Foundation

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 “Stele of Thonis-Heracleion” Thonis-Heracleion, Aboukir Bay, Egypt, 378–362 BC; height: 74 13/16 inches; National Museum, Alexandria (SCA 277), IEASM Excavations  Photo: Christoph Gerigk © Franck Goddio/Hilti Foundation

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 Bronze statuette of a pharaoh, Thonis-Heracleion, Aboukir Bay, Egypt; 30th–26th dynasty; height: 8 1/16 inches; (SCA 1305);
 Photo: Christoph Gerigk © Franck Goddio/Hilti Foundation

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The Saint Louis Art Museum is one of the nation’s leading comprehensive art museums with collections that include works of art of exceptional quality from virtually every culture and time period. Areas of notable depth include Oceanic art, pre-Columbian art, ancient Chinese bronzes and European and American art of the late 19th and 20th centuries, with particular strength in 20th-century German art. Admission to the Saint Louis Art Museum is free to all every day. For more information, call 314.721.0072 or visit slam.org.

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Researchers chart rising inequality across millennia

WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY—PULLMAN, Wash.–Researchers at Washington State University and 13 other institutions have found that the arc of prehistory bends towards economic inequality. In the largest study of its kind, the researchers saw disparities in wealth mount with the rise of agriculture, specifically the domestication of plants and large animals, and increased social organization.

Their findings, published this week in the journal Nature, have profound implications for contemporary society, as inequality repeatedly leads to social disruption, even collapse, said Tim Kohler, lead author and Regents professor of archaeology and evolutionary anthropology at Washington State University. The United States, he noted, currently has one of the highest levels of inequality in the history of the world.

“Inequality has a lot of subtle and potentially pernicious effects on societies,” Kohler said.

The study gathered data from 63 archaeological sites or groups of sites. Comparing house sizes within each site, researchers assigned Gini coefficients, common measures of inequality developed more than a century ago by the Italian statistician and sociologist Corrado Gini. In theory, a country with complete wealth equality would have a Gini coefficient of 0, while a country with all the wealth concentrated in one household would get a 1.

The researchers found that hunter-gatherer societies typically had low wealth disparities, with a median Gini of .17. Their mobility would make it hard to accumulate wealth, let alone pass it on to subsequent generations. Horticulturalists—small-scale, low-intensity farmers—had a median Gini of .27. Larger scale agricultural societies had a media Gini of .35.

To the researchers’ surprise, inequality kept rising in the Old World while it hit a plateau in the New World, said Kohler. The researchers attribute this to the ability of Old World societies “to literally harness big domesticated mammals like cattle and eventually horse and water buffalo,” Kohler said.

Draft animals, which were not available in the New World, let richer farmers till more land and expand into new areas. This increased their wealth while ultimately creating a class of landless peasants.

“These processes increased inequality by operating on both ends of the wealth distribution, increasing the holdings of the rich while decreasing the holdings of the poor,” the researchers write.

The Old World also saw the arrival of bronze metallurgy and a mounted warrior elite that increased Ginis through large houses and territorial conquests.

The researchers’ models put the highest Ginis in the ancient Old World at .59, close to that of contemporary Greece’s .56 and Spain’s .58. It is well short of China’s .73 and the United States .80, a 2000 figure cited in the Nature paper. The 2016 Allianz Global Wealth Report puts the U.S. Gini at .81 and Kohler has seen the U.S. Gini pegged at .85, “which is probably the highest wealth inequality for any developed country right now.”

This worries him for several reasons.

Societies with high inequality have low social mobility. Kohler pointed to a Science paper from earlier this year that found rates of mobility have fallen from 90 percent for U.S. children born in 1940 to 50 percent for children born in the 1980s. The results, wrote the researchers, “imply that reviving the ‘American dream’ of high rates of absolute mobility would require economic growth that is shared more broadly across the income distribution.”

Other studies have found that unequal societies tend to have poorer health, while more equal societies have higher life expectancies, trust and a willingness to help others, said Kohler.

“People need to be aware that inequality can have deleterious effects on health outcomes, on mobility, on degree of trust, on social solidarity—all these things,” he said. “We’re not helping ourselves by being so unequal.”

Decreasing inequality is extremely difficult and usually comes about through plague, revolution, mass warfare or state collapse, according to The Great Leveler, a new book by Stanford University’s Walter Scheidel. Kohler himself has documented four periods of mounting inequality among the ancient Pueblo people of the American Southwest, with each ending in violence and greater equality. The last one coincided with the complete depopulating of the Mesa Verde area.

“In each case, you see not just this decline in Gini scores, but we also see an increase in violence that accompanies that decline,” Kohler said. “We could be concerned in the United States, that if Ginis get too high, we could be inviting revolution, or we could be inviting state collapse. There’s only a few things that are going to decrease our Ginis dramatically.”

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mesaverdegregtally

Kohler himself has documented four periods of mounting inequality among the ancient Pueblo people of the American Southwest, with each ending in violence and greater equality. The last one coincided with the complete depopulating of the Mesa Verde area. Greg Tally, Wikimedia Commons 

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Article Source: Washington State University news release.

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Dating the Presence of Archeological Cultures During the Upper Paleolithic

Sophisticated radiocarbon dating at Israel’s Manot Cave is helping to better define when two ancient human groups were present in the Levant, a key region in the dispersal corridor to Europe. The results will help further understanding of the dispersal timeline of modern humans into Eurasia more broadly. While many different groups dispersed into Europe throughout history, the group that successfully colonized it was associated with unique behavioral and technological innovations, broadly referred to as the Upper Paleolithic. Central to understanding the spread of modern humans with Upper Paleolithic traditions is defining the timing of archaeological industries, particularly the Early Ahmarian and the Levantine Aurignacian, in the Levant. However, a timeline of Early Ahmarian and Levantine Aurignacian presence in the Levant has not been conclusively identified because many studies to date have been based upon contaminated samples; further, there have been limitations in radiocarbon dating. To obtain an improved chronology of archaeological industries in the Levant, Bridget Alex and colleagues designed their own “research program for radiocarbon dating” in which they developed pretreatment procedures to remove contaminants from 41 charcoal and 6 sediment samples and used geochemical and geoarchaeological methods to more carefully define the stratigraphic contexts from which the samples were recovered. Their analysis of radiocarbon dates and artifacts suggests the Early Ahmarian culture was present from 46,000-42,000 calibrated years before present (cal BP) and the Levante Aurignacian existed from 38,000-32,000 cal BP. The authors believe their results provide a foundation for future Levantine chronology studies, thus improving our understanding of the spread of modern humans and traditions.

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 Above and below: Archaeologists excavate in Manot Cave. Above credit: Bridget Alex, Below credit: Credit: Omry Barzilai

The Manot Cave is a cave in Western GalileeIsrael, discovered in 2008. It is notable for the discovery of a skull that belongs to a modern human, which was previously  estimated to be 54,700 years old. The partial skull was discovered at the beginning of the cave’s exploration in 2008. Its significance was realised after detailed scientific analysis, and was first published in an online edition of Nature on 28 January 2015. This age implied that the specimen is the oldest known human outside Africa, and is evidence that modern humans lived side-by-side with NeanderthalsThe cave is also noted for its “impressive archaeological record of flint and bone artefacts”. (Wikipedia) 

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Lead study author Dr. Bridget Alex collects sediment and charcoal samples for radiocarbon dating. Specifically here she prepares to remove a block of sediment for micromorphological analysis by wrapping it in plaster. Near base of cave (area C). Credit: Bridget Alex

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 Early Upper Paleolithic stone tools excavated from Manot Cave. Credit: Omry Barzilai

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 Assortment of stone tools excavated from Manot Cave. Credit: Bridget Alex

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Article Source: American Association for the Advancement of Science news release.

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Rare medieval treasure unearthed at the Abbey of Cluny

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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treasure

 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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Archaeologists find earliest evidence of winemaking

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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Neolithic farmers coexisted with hunter-gatherers for centuries in Europe

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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Height and weight evolved at different speeds in the bodies of our ancestors

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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Femoral head bones of different species illustrating the size range in the hominin lineage. From top to bottom: Australopithecus afarensis (4-3 million years; ~40 kg, 130 cm); Homo ergaster (1.9-1.4 million years; 55-60 kg; ~165 cm); Neanderthal (200.000-30.000 years; ~70 kg; ~163 cm). Credit: University of Cambridge

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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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Archaeologists unearth ‘masterpiece’ sealstone in Greek tomb

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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Crocodile bites, ancient butchery, and human evolution

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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The Peopling of the Americas

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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Researchers look for dawn of human information sharing

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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oldowanchopper

 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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Oldest recorded solar eclipse helps date the Egyptian pharaohs

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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