GOLDSCHMIDT CONFERENCE—Analysis of ancient Roman coins has shown that the defeat of the Carthaginian general Hannibal led to a flood of wealth across the Roman Empire from the silver mines of Spain. This finding, which gives us a tangible record of the transition of Rome from a regional power to an Empire, is presented at the Goldschmidt geochemistry conference in Paris.
The Second Punic War, where Hannibal famously marched his elephants across the Alps in a failed attack on Rome, has been regarded as one of the pivotal events of European history. Rome entered the war as the dominant power in Italy, but emerged an empire(1). The war led to the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, with the Romans gradually gaining control over the lucrative Spanish silver mines from around 211 B.C. Revenues from the rich Spanish silver mines coupled with booty and extensive war reparations from Carthage, helped fund the expansion of its territory.
Now the application of geochemical analysis techniques has provided proof of the importance of the Spanish silver to the Roman conquest. A group of scientists based in Germany and Denmark and led by Prof Fleur Kemmers and Dr Katrin Westner (Institute for Archaeological Sciences, Goethe University, Frankfurt) analysed 70 Roman coins dating from 310-300 B.C. to 101 B.C., a period which bracketed the Second Punic War. Using Mass Spectrometry, they were able to show that lead in the coins made after 209 B.C. has distinctive isotopic signatures which identified most of the later coins as presumably originating from Spanish sources. The changing origin of the coin bullion is mirrored by differing ratios of the lead isotopes 208Pb, 207Pb, 206Pb and 204Pb, which serve as geological clocks recording the formation age of the ores used to extract the silver. After 209 B.C., the lead isotope signatures mostly correspond to those of deposits in southeast and southwest Spain or to mixtures of metal extracted from these districts.
“Before the war we find that the Roman coins are made of silver from the same sources as the coinage issued by Greek cities in Italy and Sicily(2). In other words the lead isotope signatures of the coins correspond to those of silver ores and metallurgical products from the Aegean region”, said Katrin Westner. “But the defeat of Carthage led to huge reparation payments to Rome, as well as Rome gaining high amounts of booty and ownership of the rich Spanish silver mines. From 209 B.C. we see that the majority of Roman coins show geochemical signatures typical for Iberian silver”.
“This massive influx of Iberian silver significantly changed Rome’s economy, allowing it to become the superpower of its day. We know this from the histories of Livy and Polybius and others, but our work gives contemporary scientific proof of the rise of Rome. What our work shows is that the defeat of Hannibal and the rise of Rome is written in the coins of the Roman Empire”
Commenting, Professor Kevin Butcher (Department of Classics and Ancient History, University of Warwick, UK) said:
“This research demonstrates how scientific analysis of ancient coins can make a significant contribution to historical research. It allows what was previously speculation about the importance of Spanish silver for the coinage of Rome to be placed on a firm foundation”.
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Hannibal Crossing the Alps; detail from a fresco ca 1510, Palazzo del Campidoglio (Capitoline Museum), Rome. José Luiz, Wikimedia Commons
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This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Recent findings shedding new light on the whereabouts of the remains of Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great; how an archaeologist-sculptor is bringing bones of the dead back to life; archaeologists uncovering town life at the dawn of civilization; an exclusive interview with internationally acclaimed archaeologist James M. Adovasio about what makes the Meadowcroft Rockshelter prominent in the ongoing search for the first Americans; what archaeologists are finding at the site of the ancient city of Gath, the home town of the biblical Philistine giant, Goliath; and how scientists are redrawing the picture of human evolution in Europe. Find it on Amazon.com.
THE LEAKEY FOUNDATION—The discovery in Kenya of a remarkably complete fossil ape skull reveals what the common ancestor of all living apes and humans may have looked like. The find, announced in the scientific journal Nature on August 10th, belongs to an infant that lived about 13 million years ago. The research was done by an international team led by Isaiah Nengo of Stony Brook University-affiliated Turkana Basin Institute and De Anza College, U.S.A.
Among living primates, humans are most closely related to the apes, including chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and gibbons. Our common ancestor with chimpanzees lived in Africa 6 to 7 million years ago, and many spectacular fossil finds have revealed how humans evolved since then.
In contrast, little is known about the evolution of the common ancestors of living apes and humans before 10 million years ago. Relevant fossils are scarce, consisting mostly of isolated teeth and partial jaw bones. It has therefore been difficult to find answers to two fundamental questions: Did the common ancestor of living apes and humans originate in Africa, and what did these early ancestors look like?
Now these questions can be more fully addressed because the newly discovered ape fossil, nicknamed Alesi by its discoverers, and known by its museum number KNM-NP 59050, comes from a critical time period in the African past. In 2014, it was spotted by Kenyan fossil hunter John Ekusi in 13 million-year-old rock layers in the Napudet area, west of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya. “The Napudet locality offers us a rare glimpse of an African landscape 13 million years ago,” says Craig S. Feibel of Rutgers University-New Brunswick. “A nearby volcano buried the forest where the baby ape lived, preserving the fossil and countless trees. It also provided us with the critical volcanic minerals by which we were able to date the fossil.”
The fossil is the skull of an infant, and it is the most complete extinct ape skull known in the fossil record. Many of the most informative parts of the skull are preserved inside the fossil, and to make these visible the team used an extremely sensitive form of 3D X-ray imaging at the synchrotron facility in Grenoble, France. “We were able to reveal the brain cavity, the inner ears and the unerupted adult teeth with their daily record of growth lines,” says Paul Tafforeau of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility. “The quality of our images was so good that we could establish from the teeth that the infant was about 1 year and 4 months old when it died.”
The unerupted adult teeth inside the infant ape’s skull also indicate that the specimen belonged to a new species, Nyanzapithecus alesi. The species name is taken from the Turkana word for ancestor “ales.” “Until now, all Nyanzapithecus species were only known from teeth and it was an open question whether or not they were even apes,” notes John Fleagle of Stony Brook University. “Importantly, the cranium has fully developed bony ear tubes, an important feature linking it with living apes,” adds Ellen Miller of Wake Forest University.
Alesi’s skull is about the size of a lemon, and with its notably small snout it looks most like a baby gibbon. “This gives the initial impression that it is an extinct gibbon,” observes Chris Gilbert of Hunter College, New York. “However, our analyses show that this appearance is not exclusively found in gibbons, and it evolved multiple times among extinct apes, monkeys, and their relatives.”
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Alesi, the skull of the new extinct ape species Nyanzapithecus alesi (KNM-NP 59050). Credit: Fred Spoor
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That the new species was certainly not gibbon-like in the way it behaved could be shown from the balance organ inside the inner ears. “Gibbons are well known for their fast and acrobatic behavior in trees,” says Fred Spoor of University College London and the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology, “but the inner ears of Alesi show that it would have had a much more cautious way of moving around.”
“Nyanzapithecus alesi was part of a group of primates that existed in Africa for over 10 million years,” concludes lead author Isaiah Nengo. “What the discovery of Alesi shows is that this group was close to the origin of living apes and humans and that this origin was African.”
The work was supported by The Leakey Foundation and trustee Gordon Getty, the Foothill-De Anza Foundation, the Fulbright Scholars Program, the National Geographic Society, the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility and the Max Planck Society.
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This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Recent findings shedding new light on the whereabouts of the remains of Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great; how an archaeologist-sculptor is bringing bones of the dead back to life; archaeologists uncovering town life at the dawn of civilization; an exclusive interview with internationally acclaimed archaeologist James M. Adovasio about what makes the Meadowcroft Rockshelter prominent in the ongoing search for the first Americans; what archaeologists are finding at the site of the ancient city of Gath, the home town of the biblical Philistine giant, Goliath; and how scientists are redrawing the picture of human evolution in Europe. Find it on Amazon.com.
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO—TORONTO, ON – The remains of a majestic female statue uncovered at the archaeological site of Tayinat in Turkey may challenge our understanding of the public role of women in the ancient world.
Excavations led by University of Toronto archaeologists in southeast Turkey near the Syrian border have unearthed a beautifully carved head and upper torso of a female figure. The remnants are largely intact, although the face and chest appear to have been intentionally – possibly ritually – defaced in antiquity.
The preserved remnants are made of basalt and measure 1.1 metres long and .7 metres wide, suggesting the full figure of the statue would have been four to five metres high. The lower body is missing. The statue was found within a monumental gate complex that would have provided access to the upper citadel of Kunulua – later Tayinat – the capital of the Iron Age Neo-Hittite Kingdom of Patina (ca. 1000-738 BCE). The site is approximately 75 kilometres west of the Syrian city of Aleppo.
“Her striking features include a ring of curls that protrude from beneath a shawl that covers her head, shoulders and back,” says Timothy Harrison, professor of near eastern archaeology in the Department of Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto (U of T) and director of U of T’s Tayinat Archaeological Project (TAP). Since 1999, TAP researchers have been documenting Tayinat’s exceptional cultural record to advance understanding of early social complexity and the rise of state-ordered societies in the ancient world.
“The statue was found face down in a thick bed of basalt stone chips that included shard-like fragments of her eyes, nose and face, but also fragments of sculptures previously found elsewhere within the gate area,” says Harrison, ” including the head of the Neo-Hittite King Suppiluliuma that we discovered in 2012. The recovery of these tiny fragments will make it possible to restore much if not all of the face and upper body of the original figure.”
Supppiluliuma, who ruled in the early ninth century BCE, was named after a famed Bronze Age Hittite warrior and statesman who challenged the then-dominant Egyptian Empire for control of the lands between the Mediterranean and the Euphrates River.
“That parts of these monumental sculptures have been found deposited together, suggests there may have been an elaborate process of interment or decommissioning as part of their destruction,” says Harrison.
The identity of the female figure has not yet been determined, but the archaeological team has some ideas.
“It is possible that she is a representation of Kubaba, divine mother of the gods of ancient Anatolia,” says Harrison. “However, there are stylistic and iconographic hints that the statue represents a human figure, possibly the wife of King Suppiluliuma, or even more intriguingly, a woman named Kupapiyas, who was the wife – or possibly mother – of Taita, the dynastic founder of ancient Tayinat.”
Two inscribed monuments carved in Hieroglyphic Luwian, the ancient language of the Hittites, found near Hama in Syria more than 50 years ago, provide a description of Kupapiyas, the only named female known from this region in the early part of the first millennium BCE. She lived for more than 100 years, and appears to have been a prominent matriarchal figure, though no memory of her is preserved in any historical sources for the first millennium BCE.
“The discovery of this statue raises the possibility that women played a more prominent role in the political and religious lives of these early Iron Age communities than the existing historical record might suggest,” Harrison says.
The statue also provides valuable insight into the innovative character and cultural sophistication of the indigenous Iron Age cultures that emerged in the eastern Mediterranean following the collapse of the great civilized powers of the Bronze Age at the end of second millennium BCE.
The presence of lions, sphinxes, and colossal human statues in the citadel gateways of the Neo-Hittite royal cities of Iron Age Syro-Anatolia continued a Bronze Age Hittite tradition that accentuated the symbolic role of these transitional spaces as boundary zones between the ruling elite and their subjects. By the ninth and eighth centuries BCE, these elaborately decorated monumental gateways had come to serve as dynastic promenades, legitimizing the power and authority of the ruling elite.
The Tayinat gate complex appears to have been destroyed following the Assyrian conquest of the site in 738 BCE, when the area was paved over and converted into the central courtyard of an Assyrian sacred precinct. Tayinat was then transformed into an Assyrian provincial capital, equipped with its own governor and imperial administration.
“Scholars have long speculated that the reference to Calneh in Isaiah’s oracle against Assyria (Isaiah 10:9-10) alludes to their devastation of Kunulua,” says Harrison. “The destruction of the Luwian monuments and conversion of the area into an Assyrian religious complex may represent the physical manifestation of this historic event, subsequently memorialized in Isaiah’s oracle.”
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The 3,000-year-old female statue was uncovered at a citadel gate complex in Turkey by University of Toronto archaeologists leading the Tayinat Archaeological Project. Initial speculations are that the figure is a representation of either Kubaba, divine mother of the gods of ancient Anatolia, or the wife of Neo-Hittite king Suppiluliuma, or Kupapiyas, who was the wife – or possibly mother – of Taita, the dynastic founder of ancient Tayinat. Credit: Photo courtesy of Tayinat Archaeological Project
TAP is an international project, involving researchers from numerous countries, and more than 20 universities and research institutes. It operates in close collaboration with the Ministry of Culture of Turkey, and provides research opportunities and training for both graduate and undergraduate students. The 2017 season was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the University of Toronto.
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This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Recent findings shedding new light on the whereabouts of the remains of Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great; how an archaeologist-sculptor is bringing bones of the dead back to life; archaeologists uncovering town life at the dawn of civilization; an exclusive interview with internationally acclaimed archaeologist James M. Adovasio about what makes the Meadowcroft Rockshelter prominent in the ongoing search for the first Americans; what archaeologists are finding at the site of the ancient city of Gath, the home town of the biblical Philistine giant, Goliath; and how scientists are redrawing the picture of human evolution in Europe. Find it on Amazon.com.
UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND—Humans may have exited out of Africa and arrived in Southeast Asia 20,000 years earlier than previously thought, a new study involving University of Queensland researchers suggests.
Findings from the Macquarie University-led study also suggest humans could have potentially made the crossing to Australia even earlier than the accepted 60,000 to 65,000 years ago.
Dr Gilbert Price of UQ School of Earth and Environmental Sciences said the dating of a cave site in West Sumatra, called Lida Ajer, provided first evidence for rainforest use of modern humans.
“Rainforests aren’t the easiest place to make a living, especially for a savannah-adapted primate, so it suggests that these people were ahead of the curve in terms of intelligence, planning and technological adaptation,” Dr Price said.
He said the study stood on the shoulders of brilliant Dutch paleo-anthropologist Eugene Dubois, famed for his discovery of ‘Java Man’.
“He visited a series of caves in Sumatra in the late 1800s, and in one in particular, recovered some human teeth, which is quite interesting in itself, but no one had spent much time trying to determine their significance,” Dr Price said.
“Fast forward over 100 years later, both the team of lead author Dr Kira Westaway of Macquarie University and my crew (separately) were lucky enough to re-discover and visit the caves.
“It was quite an adventure. We ended up sharing notes and the collaboration was born.”
As a result of thorough documentation of the cave, reanalysis of the specimens, and a new dating program, it was confirmed the teeth were modern humans, Homo sapiens, but dated to as old as 73,000 years ago.
A barrage of dating techniques were applied to the sediment around the fossils, to overlying and underlying rock deposits in the cave and to associated mammal teeth, indicating that the deposit and fossils were laid down between 63,000 to 73,000 years ago.
“This cave has been shrouded in doubt since it was first excavated” Dr Westaway said.
“We employed a range of dating techniques from different institutions to establish a robust chronology that would, after 120 years, finally put an end to the uncertainty associated with the age and significance of these teeth.”
Advanced equipment at UQ’s Centre for Geoanalytical Mass Spectrometry, a hub backed by researchers from Queensland’s major research institutions, was used in the analysis.
“We were lucky to have some of the best dating facilities in the world at our disposal, including the same pieces of equipment at UQ that had earlier dated the famous ‘Hobbit’ fossils of Southeast Asia,” Dr Price said.
Dr Westaway said the hardest part was trying to find the site again, with only a sketch of the cave and a rough map from a copy of Dubois’s original field notebook to guide them.
Southeast Asia is a key region in the path of human dispersal from Africa round to Australia, as all hominins would have had to pass through this region en route to Australia.
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The Lida Ajer modern human tooth (left top) with its corresponding scanned image (left bottom) compared to an orangutan tooth (right). Credit: Tanya Smith and Rokus Awe Due
The research was supported by Australian Research Council grants, a Leaky Foundation grant, the Human Origins Research Fund, the Calleva Foundation, and additional funds from Macquarie University and Australian National University
The paper, An early modern human presence in Sumatra at 73-63 thousand years ago (doi: 10.1038/nature23452), was published in Nature and provides details of researchers from more than a dozen institutions involved in the study.
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This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Recent findings shedding new light on the whereabouts of the remains of Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great; how an archaeologist-sculptor is bringing bones of the dead back to life; archaeologists uncovering town life at the dawn of civilization; an exclusive interview with internationally acclaimed archaeologist James M. Adovasio about what makes the Meadowcroft Rockshelter prominent in the ongoing search for the first Americans; what archaeologists are finding at the site of the ancient city of Gath, the home town of the biblical Philistine giant, Goliath; and how scientists are redrawing the picture of human evolution in Europe. Find it on Amazon.com.
UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT BOULDER—Aug. 10, 2017–Ancient DNA used to track the mass exodus of Ancestral Pueblo people from Colorado’s Mesa Verde region in the late 13th century indicates many wound up in the Northern Rio Grande area north of Santa Fe, New Mexico, inhabited today by the Tewa Pueblo people.
Here’s the twist: The DNA came from domesticated turkeys that had been kept by ancient Pueblo people in both places, according to University of Colorado Boulder Assistant Professor Scott Ortman, one of four lead study authors. The study indicates DNA from turkey bones unearthed at Mesa Verde matched the turkey DNA in the northern Rio Grande area after the Mesa Verde society buckled.
“What we found was good evidence of a substantial influx of turkeys into the northern Rio Grande region that had the same genetic composition as turkeys from the Mesa Verde region,” Ortman said. “This is a new line of evidence suggesting a strong connection between contemporary Tewa Pueblo people in New Mexico and the Pueblo people who lived in Mesa Verde country before its collapse.”
A paper on the subject was published in a recent issue of the science journal PLOS ONE. In addition to Ortman, the study included co-authors from Washington State University, the University of California, Davis and the University of Oklahoma.
The Mesa Verde region was a hub of Southwest Puebloan society, populated by as many as 30,000 people in the middle of the 13th century, Ortman said. But a severe drought in 1277, coupled with resource depletion and social upheaval, is thought to have triggered a massive migration south to New Mexico and Arizona by the end of the 13th century.
For the study, Ortman and his colleagues used mitochondrial DNA–which is passed down from mother to offspring–extracted from turkey bones buried in the Mesa Verde region before the migration and mitochondrial DNA collected from the northern Rio Grande region before and after the Mesa Verde was abandoned.
Turkeys had been kept as a source of feathers to make blankets and other goods by the Mesa Verde inhabitants before A.D. 1000, Ortman said. But after that the archaeological record shows the Mesa Verde people began raising the turkeys as a meat source, causing turkey bones to become much more common in the archaeological record.
The study showed the genetic composition of the turkey population in the northern Rio Grande changed substantially before and after the Mesa Verde exodus. Since the genetic composition of the northern Rio Grande turkeys after the migration period was genetically indistinguishable from the birds that lived in the Mesa Verde country before the migration, it appears the migrating people took their turkeys with them, he said.
Ortman said the people fleeing the Mesa Verde area in the 13th century likely moved to many places in present-day New Mexico and Arizona during the great migration.
“The argument we are making is that a sizable chunk of the Mesa Verde population moved to the northern Rio Grande region,” Ortman said. “And this group of migrants stimulated the formation of the Tewa Pueblo people that live in the area.”
Previously, Ortman and his colleagues used biological, linguistic, oral tradition and material culture evidence to suggest that the ancestors of the Tewa-speaking Pueblo people in New Mexico lived in the Mesa Verde region and migrated to the northern Rio Grande during the 13th century. The recent study is the first ever to use ancient DNA to look at the scientific puzzle, Ortman said.
While the research team also looked at mitochondrial DNA from what were thought be domestic dogs buried at Mesa Verde and in the northern Rio Grande area, it did not pan out for an interesting reason, Ortman said. While the remains of most of the Mesa Verde canids were genetically dogs, almost all of the canids buried in the northern Rio Grande–traditionally thought to be dogs–were actually coyotes.
“It’s an interesting puzzle as to why the northern Rio Grande people buried so many coyotes,” he said.
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This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Recent findings shedding new light on the whereabouts of the remains of Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great; how an archaeologist-sculptor is bringing bones of the dead back to life; archaeologists uncovering town life at the dawn of civilization; an exclusive interview with internationally acclaimed archaeologist James M. Adovasio about what makes the Meadowcroft Rockshelter prominent in the ongoing search for the first Americans; what archaeologists are finding at the site of the ancient city of Gath, the home town of the biblical Philistine giant, Goliath; and how scientists are redrawing the picture of human evolution in Europe. Find it on Amazon.com.
UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA—An innovative study published today in the journal Science Advances demonstrates how decorations on ancient pottery can be used to discover new evidence for how groups interacted across large regions. The research, conducted by John P. Hart, Director of Research and Collections at the New York State Museum; Jennifer Birch, Assistant Professor at the University of Georgia; and Christian Gates St-Pierre, Assistant Professor at the University of Montreal, sheds new light on the importance of a little-understood Iroquoian population in upstate New York and its impact on relations between two emerging Native American political powers in the 16th century.
Iroquoians in northeastern North America are best known for the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) and Wendat (Huron) confederacies in upstate New York and southern Ontario. There are extensive early historic records of both groups. Descendants of these confederacies and their respective nations that remain in these areas today have rich oral traditions that speak to their histories before and after European contact. Archaeology fills out these records through the excavation and analyses of ancestral communities.
Other Iroquoian groups did not persist and, for some, archaeology is the primary means of understanding their histories. One such group occupied the eastern end of Lake Ontario south of the head waters of the St. Lawrence River. Known by archaeologists as the Jefferson County Iroquoians, this group had abandoned their territory by the early 17th century. Archaeologists have pondered their “disappearance” for over a century, asking two primary questions, “why did they disperse” and “where did they go”? However, Hart, Birch and Gates St-Pierre ask a very different question, “what role did the Jefferson County Iroquoians play in Iroquoian social networks”?
Northern Iroquoians made pottery vessels with often complex geometrical decorations, which Hart and his colleagues suggest signaled membership in regional interaction networks. Using social network analysis with a statistic that measured the similarities of pottery decorations between sites, they demonstrate that the Jefferson County Iroquoians played a key role in regional interactions during the 16th century. As brokers between Iroquoian ancestral Haudenosaunee and Wendat groups, the Jefferson County Iroquoians were intermediaries in relationships between these groups. According to Birch, “by focusing on the connections between communities and regions, rather than a single scale of analysis, we are better able to understand how people’s everyday activities relate to the larger-scale social and political histories.”
After the Jefferson County population dispersed in the early 17th century, no other group took the place as “brokers” between Iroquoian people living in New York and Canada. The dispersal of Jefferson County populations effectively ended this brokerage function and may have contributed to the escalation of conflict between the Huron-Wendat and Iroquois confederacies. These results add to a growing literature on the use of network analyses with archaeological data and contribute new insights into processes of population relocation and geopolitical realignment, as well as the role of borderlands and frontiers in non-state societies.
This study is part of an ongoing effort by Hart and colleagues that employs social network analysis to better understand the relationships between Iroquoian populations in New York and Canada. According to Hart, “the past is a much more complex place than ordinarily considered. Our results highlight how our views of the past can be informed through the application of new methods and techniques.”
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Tribal territory of Iroquois (Five Nations) in colonial times. Wikimedia Commons
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This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Recent findings shedding new light on the whereabouts of the remains of Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great; how an archaeologist-sculptor is bringing bones of the dead back to life; archaeologists uncovering town life at the dawn of civilization; an exclusive interview with internationally acclaimed archaeologist James M. Adovasio about what makes the Meadowcroft Rockshelter prominent in the ongoing search for the first Americans; what archaeologists are finding at the site of the ancient city of Gath, the home town of the biblical Philistine giant, Goliath; and how scientists are redrawing the picture of human evolution in Europe. Find it on Amazon.com.
PLOS—Human bones may have been engraved as part of a cannibalistic ritual during the Paleolithic period, according to a study* published August 9, 2017 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Silvia Bello from The Natural History Museum, UK and colleagues.
Human bones bearing cuts and damage are frequently found at Magdalenian (approximately 12 to 17,000 years BP) European sites and one of the most extensive assemblages can be found at Gough’s Cave in Somerset, UK. Previous analysis of the human bones from the site found evidence of human cannibalism, but paleontologists debate about whether some of the marks found on the bones were intentionally engraved or simply the result of butchery.
The authors of the present study examined a right human radius excavated in 1987 at Gough’s Cave. The bone had been modified by cut marks, percussion damage and human tooth marks, as well as unusual zig-zagging cuts on one side. To investigate whether these zig-zagging cuts were a result of intentional engraving of the bone, the researchers used macro- and micro-morphometric analysis of the marks and compared them to other artifacts from the same period.
The researchers’ analysis reveals that the marks were engraved intentionally, which suggests that these engravings were a purposeful component of a multi-stage cannibalistic ritual. While the researchers can only speculate as to the symbolic significance of the engravings, they suggest that they represent an early and unique example of cannibalistic funerary behavior that has not been previously recognized in the Paleolithic period.
Silvia Bello, Calleva Researcher at the Natural History Museum, says: “The sequence of modifications performed on this bone suggests that the engraving was a purposeful component of the cannibalistic practice, rich in symbolic connotations. Although in previous analyses we have been able to suggest that cannibalism at Gough’s Cave was practiced as a symbolic ritual, this study provides the strongest evidence for this yet.”
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Engraved artifacts from Gough’s Cave. Credit: Bello et al (2017)
The research work of SMB, SAP and CBS was supported by the Calleva Foundation and the Human Research Fund at the Natural History Museum (London). The research work of RW was funded by the Leverhulme Trust (Grant RPG-2013-348). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
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This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Recent findings shedding new light on the whereabouts of the remains of Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great; how an archaeologist-sculptor is bringing bones of the dead back to life; archaeologists uncovering town life at the dawn of civilization; an exclusive interview with internationally acclaimed archaeologist James M. Adovasio about what makes the Meadowcroft Rockshelter prominent in the ongoing search for the first Americans; what archaeologists are finding at the site of the ancient city of Gath, the home town of the biblical Philistine giant, Goliath; and how scientists are redrawing the picture of human evolution in Europe. Find it on Amazon.com.
UNIVERSITY OF UTAH—Aug. 7, 2017—Hundreds of thousands of years ago, the ancestors of modern humans diverged from an archaic lineage that gave rise to Neanderthals and Denisovans. Yet the evolutionary relationships between these groups remain unclear.
A University of Utah-led team developed a new method for analyzing DNA sequence data to reconstruct the early history of the archaic human populations. They revealed an evolutionary story that contradicts conventional wisdom about modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans.
The study found that the Neanderthal-Denisovan lineage nearly went extinct after separating from modern humans. Just 300 generations later, Neanderthals and Denisovans diverged from each other around 744,000 years ago. Then, the global Neanderthal population grew to tens of thousands of individuals living in fragmented, isolated populations scattered across Eurasia.
“This hypothesis is against conventional wisdom, but it makes more sense than the conventional wisdom.” said Alan Rogers, professor in the Department of Anthropology and lead author of the study that will publish online on August 7, 2017 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
A different evolutionary story
With only limited samples of fossil fragments, anthropologists assemble the history of human evolution using genetics and statistics.
Previous estimates of the Neanderthal population size are very small — around 1,000 individuals. However, a 2015 study showed that these estimates underrepresent the number of individuals if the Neanderthal population was subdivided into isolated, regional groups. The Utah team suggests that this explains the discrepancy between previous estimates and their own much larger estimate of Neanderthal population size.
“Looking at the data that shows how related everything was, the model was not predicting the gene patterns that we were seeing,” said Ryan Bohlender, post-doctoral fellow at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas, and co-author of the study. “We needed a different model and, therefore, a different evolutionary story.”
The team developed an improved statistical method, called legofit, that accounts for multiple populations in the gene pool. They estimated the percentage of Neanderthal genes flowing into modern Eurasian populations, the date at which archaic populations diverged from each other, and their population sizes.
A family history in DNA
The human genome has about 3.5 billion nucleotide sites. Over time, genes at certain sites can mutate. If a parent passes down that mutation to their kids, who pass it to their kids, and so on, that mutation acts as a family seal stamped onto the DNA.
Scientists use these mutations to piece together evolutionary history hundreds of thousands of years in the past. By searching for shared gene mutations along the nucleotide sites of various human populations, scientists can estimate when groups diverged, and the sizes of populations contributing to the gene pool.
“You’re trying to find a fingerprint of these ancient humans in other populations. It’s a small percentage of the genome, but it’s there,” said Rogers.
They compared the genomes of four human populations: Modern Eurasians, modern Africans, Neanderthals and Denisovans. The modern samples came from Phase I of the 1000-Genomes project and the archaic samples came from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. The Utah team analyzed a few million nucleotide sites that shared a gene mutation in two or three human groups, and established 10 distinct nucleotide site patterns.
Against conventional wisdom
The new method confirmed previous estimates that modern Eurasians share about 2 percent of Neanderthal DNA. However, other findings questioned established theories.
Their analysis revealed that 20 percent of nucleotide sites exhibited a mutation only shared by Neanderthals and Denisovans, a genetic timestamp marking the time before the archaic groups diverged. The team calculated that Neanderthals and Denisovans separated about 744,000 years ago, much earlier than any other estimation of the split.
“If Neanderthals and Denisovans had separated later, then there ought to be more sites at which the mutation is present in the two archaic samples, but is absent from modern samples,” said Rogers.
The analysis also questioned whether the Neanderthal population had only 1,000 individuals. There is some evidence for this; Neanderthal DNA contains mutations that usually occur in small populations with little genetic diversity.
However, Neanderthal remains found in various locations are genetically different from each other. This supports the study’s finding that regional Neanderthals were likely small bands of individuals, which explains the harmful mutations, while the global population was quite large.
“The idea is that there are these small, geographically isolated populations, like islands, that sometimes interact, but it’s a pain to move from island to island. So, they tend to stay with their own populations,” said Bohlender.
Their analysis revealed that the Neanderthals grew to tens of thousands of individuals living in fragmented, isolated populations.
“There’s a rich Neanderthal fossil record. There are lots of Neanderthal sites,” said Rogers. “It’s hard to imagine that there would be so many of them if there were only 1,000 individuals in the whole world.”
Rogers is excited to apply the new method in other contexts.
“To some degree, this is a proof of concept that the method can work. That’s exciting,” said Rogers. “We have remarkable ability to estimate things with high precision, much farther back in the past than anyone has realized.”
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These population trees with embedded gene trees show how mutations can generate nucleotide site patterns. The four branch tips of each gene tree represent genetic samples from four populations: modern Africans, modern Eurasians, Neanderthals, and Denisovans. In the left tree, the mutation (shown in blue) is shared by the Eurasian, Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes. In the right tree, the mutation (shown in red) is shared by the Eurasian and Neanderthal genomes. Credit: Alan Rogers, University of Utah
Chad Huff of the Department of Epidemiology at the MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas also contributed to the study. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (BCS 1638840), the Center for High Performance Computing at the University of Utah and the National Cancer Institute (R25CA057730 and CA016672).
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UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE—Norway is famed for its cod. Catches from the Arctic stock that spawns each year off its northern coast are exported across Europe for staple dishes from British fish and chips to Spanish bacalao stew.
Now, a new study published today in the journal PNAS suggests that some form of this pan-European trade in Norwegian cod may have been taking place for 1,000 years.
Latest research from the universities of Cambridge and Oslo, and the Centre for Baltic and Scandinavian Archaeology in Schleswig, used ancient DNA extracted from the remnants of Viking-age fish suppers.
The study analysed five cod bones dating from between 800 and 1066 AD found in the mud of the former wharves of Haithabu, an early medieval trading port on the Baltic. Haithabu is now a heritage site in modern Germany, but at the time was ruled by the King of the Danes.
The DNA from these cod bones contained genetic signatures seen in the Arctic stock that swims off the coast of Lofoten: the northern archipelago still a centre for Norway’s fishing industry.
Researchers say the findings show that supplies of ‘stockfish’ – an ancient dried cod dish popular to this day – were transported over a thousand miles from northern Norway to the Baltic Sea during the Viking era.
Prior to the latest study, there was no archaeological or historical proof of a European stockfish trade before the 12th century.
While future work will look at further fish remains, the small size of the current study prevents researchers from determining whether the cod was transported for trade or simply used as sustenance for the voyage from Norway.
However, they say that the Haithabu bones provide the earliest evidence of fish caught in northern Norway being consumed on mainland Europe – suggesting a European fish trade involving significant distances has been in operation for a millennium.
“Traded fish was one of the first commodities to begin to knit the European continent together economically,” says Dr James Barrett, senior author of the study from the University of Cambridge’s McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
“Haithabu was an important trading centre during the early medieval period. A place where north met south, pagan met Christian, and those who used coin met those who used silver by weight.”
“By extracting and sequencing DNA from the leftover fish bones of ancient cargoes at Haithabu, we have been able to trace the source of their food right the way back to the cod populations that inhabit the Barents Sea, but come to spawn off Norway’s Lofoten coast every winter.
“This Arctic stock of cod is still highly prized – caught and exported across Europe today. Our findings suggest that distant requirements for this Arctic protein had already begun to influence the economy and ecology of Europe in the Viking age.”
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One of the ancient Viking cod bones used in the study. The bones, dating from between 800 to 1066 AD, were found on the site of the early medieval Baltic port of Haithabu. Credit: Dr. James Barrett
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Stockfish is white fish preserved by the unique climate of north Norway, where winter temperature hovers around freezing. Cod is traditionally hung out on wooden frames to allow the chill air to dry the fish. Some medieval accounts suggest stockfish was still edible as much as ten years after preservation.
The research team argue that the new findings offer some corroboration to the unique 9th century account of the voyages of Ohthere of Hålogaland: a Viking chieftain whose visit to the court of King Alfred in England resulted in some of his exploits being recorded.
“In the accounts inserted by Alfred’s scribes into the translation of an earlier 5th century text, Ohthere describes sailing from Hålogaland to Haithabu,” says Barrett. Hålogaland was the northernmost province of Norway.
“While no cargo of dried fish is mentioned, this may be because it was simply too mundane a detail,” says Barrett. “The fish-bone DNA evidence is consistent with the Ohthere text, showing that such voyages between northern Norway and mainland Europe were occurring.”
“The Viking world was complex and interconnected. This is a world where a chieftain from north Norway may have shared stockfish with Alfred the Great while a late-antique Latin text was being translated in the background. A world where the town dwellers of a cosmopolitan port in a Baltic fjord may have been provisioned from an Arctic sea hundreds of miles away.”
The sequencing of the ancient cod genomes was done at the University of Oslo, where researchers are studying the genetic makeup of Atlantic cod in an effort to unpick the anthropogenic impacts on these long-exploited fish populations.
“Fishing, particularly of cod, has been of central importance for the settlement of Norway for thousands of years. By combining fishing in winter with farming in summer, whole areas of northern Norway could be settled in a more reliable manner,” says the University of Oslo’s Bastiaan Star, first author of the new study.
Star points to the design of Norway’s new banknotes that prominently feature an image of cod, along with a Viking ship, as an example of the cultural importance still placed on the fish species in this part of Europe.
“We want to know what impact the intensive exploitation history covering millennia has inflicted on Atlantic cod, and we use ancient DNA methods to investigate this,” he says.
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JOHANNES GUTENBERG UNIVERSITAET MAINZ—By analyzing the DNA of two prehistoric dogs from Germany, an international research team led by Krishna R. Veeramah, Ph.D., of Stony Brook University in the USA has determined that their genomes were the probable ancestors of modern European dogs. The study also suggests that all contemporary dogs have a common origin and emerged through a single domestication process of wolves 20,000 to 40,000 years ago. Researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) also participated in the study, the results of which recently have been published in Nature Communications.
Dogs were the first animals to be domesticated by humans. The oldest remains of dogs that can be clearly distinguished from those of wolves originate from what is now Germany and are about 15,000 years old. Unfortunately, the archaeological record is ambiguous, with claims of ancient domesticated dog bones from the most varied locations as far away as Siberia.
Only last year were researchers able to sequence the genome of a 5,000-year-old dog from Ireland using the latest paleogenomic techniques. The results of the study led the research team at the University of Oxford to suggest dogs were domesticated not once but twice. In addition, the research team also hypothesized that an indigenous dog population domesticated in Europe was replaced by incoming migrants independently domesticated in East Asia during the Neolithic period.
“Contrary to the results of this previous analysis, we found that our ancient dogs from the same time period were very similar to modern European dogs, including the majority of breed dogs people keep as pets,” explained Veeramah, Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook University. “This suggests that there was no mass Neolithic replacement that occurred on the continent and that there was likely only a single domestication process for the dogs observed in the fossil record from the Stone Age and that we also see and live with today.”
In their article “Ancient European dog genomes reveal continuity since the Early Neolithic,” Veeramah and his colleagues used the older 7,000-year-old dog to narrow the timing of dog domestication to the 20,000 to 40,000 years ago range. They found evidence that the younger, 4,700-year-old dog represents a mixture of European dogs and a population that resembles current Central Asian/Indian dogs. This finding may reflect people migrating from the Asian steppe to Europe at the beginning of the Bronze Age, bringing their own dogs with them.
“Our study shows how the analysis of entire ancient genomes can help us to gradually understand complex processes, such as dog domestication. Only direct insights into the past like this enable us to disentangle the effects of the many parallel and successive events that are involved, including targeted breeding by humans as well as population movements and admixture of multiple populations,” added Dr. Amelie Scheu, one of the primary authors of the article and a research assistant in the Palaeogenetics Work Group at the Institute of Organismic and Molecular Evolutionary Biology at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.
Overall, however, the question where exactly dogs were first domesticated in geographic terms remains a mystery, although Krishna R. Veeramah expects that the sequencing of additional ancient Eurasian genomes will help to eventually solve the issue.
The study and findings are a collaboration between scientists at Stony Brook University and the University of Michigan in the USA, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and the University of Bamberg in Germany, Trinity College Dublin in Ireland, and the Directorate-General for Cultural Heritage in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany.
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GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY—An often cited claim that humans, who are smarter and more technologically advanced than their ancestors, originated in response to climate change is challenged in a new report by a Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology researcher at George Washington University.
Many scientists have argued that an influx, described as a “pulse,” of new animal species appear in the African fossil record between 2.8 and 2.5 million years ago, including our own genus Homo. Experts believe it takes a broad-scale event like global climate change to spark the origination of so many diverse new species. However, W. Andrew Barr, a visiting assistant professor of anthropology, published a report that says it’s possible the pulse of new species could have occurred by chance and might not be directly related to climate change.
It is generally accepted that when major environmental changes occur, some species will go extinct and others will originate, which can create a cluster or pulse of new species in the fossil record. However, there is not a set definition of what is considered a pulse, so experts have disagreed about which clusters constitute meaningful events and which can be explained as random fluctuations.
Dr. Barr used computer simulation to model what the fossil record might look like over time in the absence of any climate change and found clusters of species originations that were of similar magnitude to the clusters observed in the fossil record. This means random patterns are likely under-credited for their role in speciation fluctuation, he said.
Dr. Barr’s findings mean scientists may need to rethink widely-accepted ideas about why human ancestors became smarter and more sophisticated.
“The idea that our genus originated more than 2.5 million years ago as part of a turnover pulse in direct response to climate change has a deep history in paleonthropology,” Dr. Barr said. “My study shows that the magnitude of that pulse could be caused by random fluctuations in speciation rates. One implication is that we may need to broaden our search for why our genus arose at that time and place.”
He compared the pattern to flipping a coin. If you flip a coin 100 times, you would expect to record 50 heads and 50 tails. However, if you are only looking at 10 coin flips, you could see a greater imbalance, instead recording seven heads and only three tails. This would even out over time, but in the short-run, you could see clusters of these independent coin flips, he said.
Similarly, fluctuations in turnover in Dr. Barr’s model are pronounced, but are caused purely by random processes.
“The idea the the origin of Homo is part of a climate-caused turnover pulse doesn’t really bear out when you carefully look at the evidence and compare it against other possible explanations,” Dr. Barr said.
This research challenges scientists to be careful about the stories they tell about the history of human adaption, Dr. Barr said. Traits that make humans different from our ancestors, like larger brains and greater technological sophistication, could have arisen for a variety of reasons, he said.
“We can sit in the present and tell stories of the past that make sense of our modern day adaptations,” he said. “But these could have evolved for reasons we don’t know.”
Each blue rectangle shows the range of a hypothetical fossil species, with an origination and extinction date. The red highlighted box shows a cluster of originations that occur at about the same time. Credit: W. Andrew Barr
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This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Recent findings shedding new light on the whereabouts of the remains of Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great; how an archaeologist-sculptor is bringing bones of the dead back to life; archaeologists uncovering town life at the dawn of civilization; an exclusive interview with internationally acclaimed archaeologist James M. Adovasio about what makes the Meadowcroft Rockshelter prominent in the ongoing search for the first Americans; what archaeologists are finding at the site of the ancient city of Gath, the home town of the biblical Philistine giant, Goliath; and how scientists are redrawing the picture of human evolution in Europe. Find it on Amazon.com.
UNIVERSITY OF OTAGO—New insights into the lifeways – and death rites – of the ancient people of Ireland are being provided through funerary studies led by a researcher at the Department of Anatomy at New Zealand’s University of Otago.
The findings, which have been published in the journal Bioarchaeology International, are part of a project applying modern techniques and research questions to human remains that were originally excavated more than 100 years ago.
The new paper, whose lead author is Dr Jonny Geber, focuses on the 5000 years-old Passage Tomb Complex at Carrowkeel in County Sligo in the north-west of Ireland. This site is one of the most impressive Neolithic ritual landscapes in Europe, but despite that, is relatively unknown.
The research team analysed bones from up to seven passage tombs that included both unburnt and cremated human remains from around 40 individuals. Much remains unknown about these Stone Age people.
Dr Geber says he and his colleagues determined that the unburnt bone displayed evidence of dismemberment.
“We found indications of cut marks caused by stone tools at the site of tendon and ligament attachments around the major joints, such as the shoulder, elbow, hip and ankle,” he says.
Dr Geber says the new evidence suggest that a complex burial rite was undertaken at Carrowkeel, that involved a funerary rite that placed a particular focus on the “deconstruction” of the body.
“This appears to entail the bodies of the dead being ‘processed’ by their kin and community in various ways, including cremation and dismemberment. It was probably done with the goal to help the souls of the dead to reach the next stages of their existence.”
This study has been able to show that the Carrowkeel complex was most likely a highly significant place in Neolithic society in Ireland, and one which allowed for interaction and a spiritual connection with the ancestors.
The evidence suggests that the people of Neolithic Ireland may have shared similar beliefs and ideologies concerning the treatment of the dead with communities beyond the Irish Sea, according to the researchers, Dr Geber says.
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Cairn K—Part of a 5000 years-old Passage Tomb Complex at Carrowkeel in County Sligo in the north-west of Ireland. This site is one of the most impressive Neolithic ritual landscapes in Europe, but despite that, is relatively unknown. Researchers have now analysed bones from up to seven passage tombs that included both unburnt and cremated human remains from around 40 individuals Credit: Sam Moore
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MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY—The first review of the global impact of humans on tropical forests in the ancient past shows that humans have been altering these environments for at least 45,000 years. This counters the view that tropical forests were pristine natural environments prior to modern agriculture and industrialization. The study, published today in Nature Plants, found that humans have in fact been having a dramatic impact on such forest ecologies for tens of thousands of years, through techniques ranging from controlled burning of sections of forest to plant and animal management to clear-cutting. Although previous studies had looked at human impacts on specific tropical forest locations and ecosystems, this is the first to synthesize data from all over the world.
The paper, by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Liverpool John Moores University, University College London, and École française d’Extrême-Orient, covered three distinct phases of human impact on tropical forests, roughly correlating to hunting and gathering activities, small-scale agricultural activities, and large-scale urban settlements.
Big impacts of small hunter-gatherer groups
In the deep past, groups of hunter-gatherers appear to have burned areas of tropical forests, in particular in Southeast Asia as early as 45,000 years ago, when modern humans first arrived there. There is evidence of similar forest burning activities in Australia and New Guinea. By clearing parts of the forest, humans were able to create more of the “forest-edge” environments that encouraged the presence of animals and plants that they liked to eat.
There is also evidence, though still debated, that these human activities contributed to the extinction of forest megafauna in the Late Pleistocene (approximately 125,000 to 12,000 years ago), such as the giant ground sloth, forest mastodons, and now-extinct large marsupials. These extinctions had significant impacts on forest density, plant species distributions, plant reproductive mechanisms, and life-cycles of forest stand, that have persisted to the present day.
Farming the forest
The earliest evidence for farming in tropical forests is found in New Guinea, where humans were tending yam, banana and taro by the Early-Mid Holocene (10,000 years ago). Early farming efforts in tropical forests, supplemented by hunting and gathering, had significant consequences. Humans domesticated forest plants and animals, including sweet potato, chili pepper, black pepper, mango, banana and chickens, altering the forest ecologies and contributing significantly to global cuisine today.
In general, when groups employed indigenous tropical forest agricultural strategies based on local plants and animals, these did not result in significant or lasting damage to the environment. “Indeed, most communities entering these habitats were initially at low population densities and appear to have developed subsistence systems that were tuned to their particular environments,” states Dr. Chris Hunt of Liverpool John Moores University, a co-author of the study.
However, as agricultural intensity increased, particularly when external farming practices were introduced into tropical forests and island environments, the effects became less benign. When agriculturalists bringing pearl millet and cattle moved to the area of tropical forests in western and central Africa about 2,400 years ago, significant soil erosion and forest burning occurred. Similarly, in Southeast Asia, large areas of the tropical forests were burned and cleared from c. 4,000 years ago following the arrival of rice and millet farming. For example, the increase in demand for palm oil has led to clear-cutting of tropical forests to make room for palm plantations. “These practices, which induce rampant clearance, reduce biodiversity, provoke soil erosion, and render landscapes more susceptible to the outbreak of wild fires, represent some of the greatest dangers facing tropical forests,” notes Hunt.
Sprawling cities in the jungle
Despite previous notions of tropical forests as “green deserts” not suitable for human habitation, recent discoveries using new technologies have shown that ancient populations created vast urban settlements in these habitats. New data, including surveys made with canopy-penetrating Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) mapping, have revealed human settlement in the Americas and Southeast Asia on a scale that was previously unimagined. “Indeed, extensive settlement networks in the tropical forests of Amazonia, Southeast Asia, and Mesoamerica clearly persisted many times longer than more recent industrial and urban settlements of the modern world have so far been present in these environments,” notes Dr. Patrick Roberts of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, lead author of the paper.
Lessons can be learned from how these ancient urban centers dealt with environmental challenges that are still faced by modern cities in these areas today. Soil erosion and the failure of agricultural systems necessary to feed a large population are problems encountered by large urban centers, past and present. In some Mayan areas, urban populations “gardened” the forest, by planting a variety of complementary food crops in and around the existing forest rather than clearing it. On the other hand, other groups appear to have over-stressed their local environments through forest clearing and monoculture planting of corn, which, in combination with climate change, resulted in dramatic population declines.
Another interesting finding is that ancient forest cities showed the same tendency towards sprawl as is now being recommended by the architects of modern cities in these zones. In some cases these extensive urban fringes appear to have provided a sort of buffer-zone, helping to protect the urban centers from the effects of climate change and providing food security and accessibility. “Diversification, decentralization and ‘agrarian urbanism’ appear to have contributed to overall resilience,” states Dr. Damian Evans, a co-author of the paper. These ancient forest suburbs are now being studied as potential models of sustainability for modern cities.
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View from the Canopy Floor in the Cloud Forest Sanctuary, Xalapa, Mexico. Despite previous notions of tropical forests as ‘green deserts’ not suitable for human habitation it is now clear that human occupation and modification of these habitats occurred as far back as 45,000 years ago. As our species expanded into these settings beyond Africa, they burnt vegetation to maintain resources patches and practiced specialized, sustainable hunting of select animals such as primates. Credit: Patrick Roberts
The global data compiled for this paper shows that a pristine, untouched tropical forest ecosystem does not exist – and has not existed for tens of thousands of years. There is no ideal forest environment that modern conservationists can look to when setting goals and developing a strategy for forest conservation efforts. Rather, an understanding of the archaeological history of tropical forests and their past manipulation by humans is crucial in informing modern conservation efforts. The researchers recommend an approach that values the knowledge and cooperation of the native populations that live in tropical forests. “Indigenous and traditional peoples – whose ancestors’ systems of production and knowledge are slowly being decoded by archaeologists – should be seen as part of the solution and not one of the problems of sustainable tropical forest development,” states Roberts. The researchers also emphasize the importance of disseminating the information learned from archaeology to other disciplines. By working together, these groups can help to establish a better understanding of the tropical forest environments and how best to protect them.
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View from the Ancient City of Polonnaurwa into Sri Lankan Dry Zone Tropical Forest at Dusk. New methodologies have also shown that ancient populations created vast urban settlements in these habitats. Lessons can be learned from how these ancient urban centers dealt with environmental challenges, such as mud-slides, soil erosion, and drought, that are still faced by increasingly dense urban populations in these areas today. Credit: Patrick Roberts
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This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Recent findings shedding new light on the whereabouts of the remains of Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great; how an archaeologist-sculptor is bringing bones of the dead back to life; archaeologists uncovering town life at the dawn of civilization; an exclusive interview with internationally acclaimed archaeologist James M. Adovasio about what makes the Meadowcroft Rockshelter prominent in the ongoing search for the first Americans; what archaeologists are finding at the site of the ancient city of Gath, the home town of the biblical Philistine giant, Goliath; and how scientists are redrawing the picture of human evolution in Europe. Find it on Amazon.com.
MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON HEALTH SCIENCES/UW MEDICINE and the HOWARD HUGHES MEDICAL INSTITUTE—An analysis of ancient DNA has revealed that Ancient Minoans and Mycenaens were genetically similar with both peoples descending from Neolithic Anatolian and Aegean farmers who likely migrated to Greece and Crete.
The Minoan Civilization and its counterpart on the Greek Mainland, the Mycenaean Civilization, were Europe’s first literate societies and the cultural ancestors of later Classical Greece. However, the question of the origins of the Minoans and their relationship to the Mycenaeans has long puzzled researchers. A paper* published today in Nature suggests that, rather than being recently arrived, advanced outsiders, the Minoans had deep roots in the Aegean. The primary ancestors of both the Minoans and Mycenaeans were populations from Neolithic Western Anatolia and Greece and the two groups were very closely related to each other, and to modern Greeks.
The Minoans and Mycenaeans occupy an important place in Greek, and European, history. The Minoan civilization (c. 2600 to 1100 BC) has been described as the first literate society in Europe, with their Linear A script. Because Linear A, and the hieroglyphic scripts used on Crete, were never deciphered, the origins of the language they represent are not clear but it is thought to be distinct from early Greek. Minoan Crete is the setting for many Greek legends and immediately conjures images of the Labyrinth and the Minotaur. The Mycenaean civilization (c. 1700 to 1050 BC) originated in mainland Greece eventually controlling the nearby islands, including Crete. Their Linear B script represented an early form of Greek.
Despite this rich archaeological and textual history, the origins of the Minoans have long puzzled researchers. Their cultural innovations, including the first European writing system, vast palace complexes, and vibrant art, seeming to spring up in isolation on Crete, have led to speculation that they moved to the area from a more advanced society in another location. The Mycenaeans, with their roots in mainland Greece, seem to have adopted much of the Minoan technology and culture, but it is not clear how they were related. Now, an international team of researchers from the University of Washington, the Harvard Medical School and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, together with archaeologists and other collaborators in Greece and Turkey, report the first genome-wide DNA sequence data on the Bronze Age inhabitants of mainland Greece, Crete, and southwestern Anatolia. “We wanted to determine if the people who made up the Minoan and Mycenaean populations were actually genetically distinct or not. How were they related to each other? Who were their ancestors? And how are modern Greeks related to them?” says Johannes Krause, director at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and one of the corresponding authors of the study.
To answer these questions, the researchers analyzed genome-wide data from 19 individuals, including Minoans, Mycenaeans, a Neolithic individual from mainland Greece, and Bronze Age individuals from southwestern Anatolia, which they were able to recover despite the notoriously poor preservation in the Mediterranean. More specifically, the ancient DNA, carefully extracted from bones and teeth, included 10 Minoans, four Mycenaeans, three individuals from southwest Anatolia (Turkey), an individual from Crete that dates from after the arrival of the Mycenaeans on the island, and one Neolithic sample (5,400 BCE) from the mainland that predated the emergence of the Greek civilizations. The researchers then compared and contrasted the new DNA samples with previously reported data from 332 other ancient individuals, 2,614 present-day humans, and two present-day Cretans. The DNA samples were collected by Stamatoyannopoulos and his archaeologist collaborators, and were initially analyzed in his laboratory. Subsequently, Stamatoyannopoulos began collaborating with Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute, who undertook comprehensive genomic DNA sequencing using techniques developed in his laboratory, and P David Reich of Harvard Medical School, who worked with Iosif Lazaridis on collation and statistical genetic analysis of the data. By comparing the ancient DNA data with previously published data from nearly 3,000 others, both ancient and modern, the researchers were able to clarify the relationships between these groups.
The researchers found that the Minoans, rather than coming from a distant civilization, were locals, descended from the first Neolithic farmers of western Anatolia and the Aegean. They found that the Minoans and Mycenaeans were very closely related, but with some specific differences that made them distinct from each other. Both the Bronze Age Minoans and Mycenaeans, as well as their neighbors in Bronze Age Anatolia, derived most of their ancestry from a Neolithic Anatolian population, and a smaller component from farther east, related to populations in the Caucasus and Iran.
A passion for history inspired Stamatoyannopoulos to initiate this project: “For over 100 years, many hotly contested theories have circulated concerning the origin of the inhabitants of Bronze Age, Classical, and modern Greece, including the so-called ‘Coming of the Greeks’ in the late second millennium, the ‘Black Athena’ hypothesis of the Afroasiatic origins of Classical Greek civilization, and the notorious theory of the 19th century German historian Fallmerayer, who popularized the belief that the descendants of the ancient Greeks had vanished in early Medieval times.”
While the new study does not resolve all the outstanding questions, it provides key answers. Importantly, the findings disprove the widely held theory that the Mycenaeans were a foreign population in the Aegean and were not related to the Minoans.
Previously unknown migration event?
It was previously believed that this eastern ancestry was brought to Europe by steppe pastoralists from the north, who themselves shared this eastern ancestry. However, although the Minoans have this eastern heritage, they do not show genetic heritage from the northern steppe populations. On the other hand, the Mycenaeans show evidence of both eastern and northern genetic heritage. This indicates that, at least in some cases, this eastern heritage from the Caucasus and Iran arrived in Europe on its own, perhaps in a previously unknown migration event. It also indicates that the migration of the northern steppe pastoralists reached as far as mainland Greece, but did not reach the Minoans on Crete.
The study helps to provide boundaries on the timing of the arrival of both the eastern and the northern ancestry. “Neolithic samples from Greece, down to the Final Neolithic, approximately 4100 BC, do not possess either type of ancestry, suggesting that the admixture we detect probably occurred during the 4th-2nd millennium BCE time window,” explains David Reich of Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute and a co-corresponding author of the study. To determine the timing of these events more precisely, further samples from broader time periods and geographic locations will be necessary.
Modern Greeks closely related to ancient Mycenaeans
While they are not identical to the Bronze Age populations, modern Greeks are genetically closely related to the Mycenaeans. Modern Greeks show some additional admixture with other groups and a corresponding decrease in heritage from the Neolithic Anatolians. This suggests that there has been a large degree of population continuity in Greece, but it has not been isolated.
“It is remarkable how persistent the ancestry of the first European farmers is in Greece and other parts of southern Europe, but this does not mean that the populations there were completely isolated. There were at least two additional migrations in the Aegean before the time of the Minoans and Mycenaeans and some additional admixture later. The Greeks have always been a ‘work in progress’ in which layers of migration through the ages added to, but did not erase the genetic heritage of the Bronze Age populations,” stated Iosif Lazaridis of Harvard Medical School, a lead author of the study.
The findings help to clarify some aspects of the relationships in Bronze Age Greece, but leave other questions open. The scientists hope to clarify the time period of this possible new influx of eastern genetic heritage, and the logistics of the arrival of northern steppe heritage – slowly over time, or in a mass migration – in future research.
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Linear A inscription on a clay tablet from Crete, probably 15th century BC. (Archaeological Museum of Heraklion) Because Linear A, and the hieroglyphic scripts used on Crete, were never deciphered, the origins of the language they represent are not clear but it is thought to be distinct from early Greek. Credit: By Zde – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52832727
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The Bull-Leaping-Fresco from the Great Palace at Knossos, Crete. (The original is located at Heraklion Archaeological Museum, Heraklion, Crete) Credit: By Lapplaender – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5880046
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Clay tablet, dated to 1450-1375 BC, inscribed with Linear B script. The Linear B script of the Mycenaen civilization (c. 1600 to 1100 BC) represented an early form of Greek. It was descended from the still undeciphered older Linear A script from the Minoan civilization (c. 2600 to 1100 BC). Credit: By vintagedept – Flickr: Clay Tablet inscribed with Linear B script, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17430575
*Genetic origins of the Minoans and Mycenaeans Authors: Iosif Lazaridis, Alissa Mittnik, Nick Patterson, Swapan Mallick, Nadin Rohland, Saskia Pfrengle, Anja Furtwängler, Alexander Peltzer, Cosimo Posth, Andonis Vasilakis, P.J.P. McGeorge, Eleni Konsolaki-Yannopoulou, George Korres, Holley Martlew, Manolis Michalodimitrakis, Mehmet Özsait, Nesrin Özsait, Anastasia Papathanasiou, Michael Richards, Songül Alpaslan Roodenberg, Yannis Tzedakis, Robert Arnott, Daniel M. Fernandes, Jeffery R. Hughey, Dimitra M. Lotakis, Patrick A. Navas, Yannis Maniatis, John A. Stamatoyannopoulos, Kristin Stewardson, Philipp Stockhammer, Ron Pinhasi, David Reich, Johannes Krause, George Stamatoyannopoulos
Publication: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature23310
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SMITHSONIAN—Using new methods to analyze stone projectile points crafted by North America’s earliest human inhabitants, Smithsonian scientists have found that these tools show evidence of a shift toward more experimentation in their production beginning about 12,500 years ago, following hundreds of years of consistent stone-tool production created using uniform techniques. The findings provide clues into changes in social interactions during a time when people are thought to have been spreading into new parts of North America and adapting to different environments, beginning a period of cultural diversification.
The research team, led by Sabrina Sholts, a curator in the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and Sebastian Wärmländer at Stockholm University, used digital 3-D models to scrutinize the angles and contours on the surfaces of North American projectile points. In doing so, they discovered a turning point at which the techniques used to produce the points became more variable. That variability suggests that individual toolmakers, who may have had fewer opportunities than their predecessors to learn from others, began working out how to make the tools on their own. The findings were reported July 12 in the journal PLOS ONE.
“Our study really allows stone tools to speak in a new way,” said Joseph Gingerich, a research associate at the museum and assistant professor of anthropology at Ohio University. “By being able to document subtle changes in stone tool technology, we can better understand how social interactions among artisans changed in North America over 12,000 years ago.”
The earliest well-documented group of people in North America, known as Clovis, is recognized by distinctive pointed stone projectiles that appear about 13,500 years ago. These culture-defining tools, called Clovis points, are sharp-edged and symmetrical, with a groove near the base–called a flute–where a spear shaft may have fit. Anthropologists consider them to be a very sophisticated technology.
The highly mobile hunter-gatherers of the Clovis culture spread quickly across North America, and Clovis points have been found all over the continent. In 2012, Sholts and colleagues analyzed 50 authentic and replicate Clovis points, examining how their surfaces had been shaped as flakes of stone were chipped away to craft the tool. Using an approach Sholts and Wärmländer originally developed for studying bones, the researchers laser scanned each point to create a three-dimensional model and then analyzed its contours, measuring and comparing subtle surface features that cannot be discerned by eye. “It’s a way to capture all the individual actions to reduce the core, which reflect the technique used to shape it,” Sholts said.
The analysis revealed remarkable consistency among the ancient artifacts compared to almost perfect copies made by a modern knapper, an artisan that crafts stone tools using ancient techniques. The team concluded that the manufacturing technique used by the Clovis people was so uniform that it must have been passed on directly from one knapper to another.
According to the archaeological record, Clovis technology was used for several hundred years. A variety of other styles emerged later, though they never spread across the continent like Clovis points did. To learn more about the groups that manufactured these later styles, the authors of the new study analyzed the surface features of 100 projectile points from collections at several museums, including the Smithsonian collection, which is curated by anthropologist Dennis Stanford.
The new study included Clovis points and samples of four later styles of fluted points, which had been recovered from sites in the eastern United States. The team analyzed the points’ surface contours as they had done in the earlier study and also introduced a new method of analyzing digital models to assess the objects’ three-dimensional asymmetry.
Using another new technique developed by Wärmländer and co-author Stefan Schlager of the University of Freiburg, the team determined that the overall three-dimensional shapes of the points did not vary significantly. However, they did find increased variability in the surface contours among some of the later styles of points, indicating that those tools had not been produced using a consistent technique.
The increase in variability among the later points suggests a decrease in social learning and possibly a reduction in overall interactions among North American populations beginning around 12,500 years ago, the researchers say. This is consistent with anthropologists’ current thinking about how people were living during this time. “There seems to be evidence of increased experimentation during this period, due to groups moving away from each other and pushing into new environments,” Sholts said.
“For a long time in North America, the archaeological record shows both consistency in stone tool technology and other aspects of culture,” Gingerich said. “In documenting a change in stone tool technology, we likely document the start of greater regional adaptations among some of the first hunter-gatherers in North America.”
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Above and below: Scientists analyzed three-dimensional models of Clovis projectile points from Smithsonian and other museum collections to examine how patterns and marks made in crafting these tools began to vary regionally 12,500 years ago. These regional differences signal cultural diversification and adaptation, suggesting that groups of early hunter-gatherer Americans may have changed the way they were social interacting at this time. This figure shows one analysis used to study shapes left behind from their production on either side of the projectile points. Credit: Sebastian Wärmländer, Stockholm University.
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Cell Press and Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute—Thousands of years ago, the Canaanite people lived in a part of the world we now recognize as Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, establishing a culture that became influential in the Middle East and beyond. The Canaanites created the first alphabet, established colonies throughout the Mediterranean, and were mentioned many times in the Bible.
However, historical records of the Canaanites are limited. They were mentioned in ancient Greek and Egyptian texts, and the Bible which reports widespread destruction of Canaanite settlements and annihilation of the communities. Experts have long debated who the Canaanites were genetically. Who were they and what ultimately happened to them?
Now, researchers who’ve sequenced the first ancient Canaanite genomes along with genomes representing people from modern-day Lebanon have new information to help answer those questions. DNA evidence reported in the American Journal of Human Genetics on July 27* shows that the Canaanites did not just disappear. Instead, they survived and are the ancestors of the people now living in modern-day Lebanon.
“We found that the Canaanites were a mixture of local people who settled in farming villages during the Neolithic period and eastern migrants who arrived in the region about 5,000 years ago,” said Marc Haber (@MarcHaber) of The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the United Kingdom. “The present-day Lebanese are likely to be direct descendants of the Canaanites, but they have in addition a small proportion of Eurasian ancestry that may have arrived via conquests by distant populations such as the Assyrians, Persians, or Macedonians.”
Marc Haber, Chris Tyler-Smith, and colleagues came to that conclusion after sequencing the complete genomes of five Canaanite individuals who lived almost 4,000 years ago in what’s now the modern-day Lebanese city of Sidon. They also sequenced the genomes of 99 present-day Lebanese. Those sequences enabled the researchers to analyze the Canaanites’ ancestry and assess their relationship to the people living in Lebanon today. Dr Marc Haber, first author from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, said: “It was a pleasant surprise to be able to extract and analyse DNA from 4,000-year-old human remains found in a hot environment, which is not known for preserving DNA well. We overcame this challenge by taking samples from the petrous bone in the skull, which is a very tough bone with a high density of ancient DNA. This method of extraction combined with the lowering costs of whole genome sequencing made this study possible.”
The researchers estimate that new Eurasian people mixed with the Canaanite population about 3,800 to 2,200 years ago at a time when there were many conquests of the region from outside. Despite all that moving around, the Lebanese derive most of their ancestry from a Canaanite-related population, they report, suggesting that there’s been substantial genetic continuity in the region since at least the Bronze Age–a conclusion that agrees with the archaeological record.
“In light of the enormously complex history of this region in the last few millennia, it was quite surprising that over 90 percent of the genetic ancestry of present-day Lebanese was derived from the Canaanites,” Tyler-Smith said.
The findings highlight the utility of genetic studies for elucidating the history of people like the Canaanites, who left few written records themselves. The researchers say they would now like to understand the earlier and later genetic history of Lebanon and how it relates to the surrounding regions.
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A large jar burial containing the remains of one of the individuals sequenced in the study. Credit: Dr. Claude Doumet-Serhal – The Sidon excavation
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The burial of a single sub adult individual sequenced in the study. Credit: Dr. Claude Doumet-Serhal – The Sidon excavation
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The Sidon excavation site which included the burials of the studied individuals. Credit: Dr. Claude Doumet-Serhal – The Sidon excavation
The researchers were supported by The Wellcome Trust.
*American Journal of Human Genetics, Haber et al.: “Continuity and Admixture in the Last Five Millennia of Levantine History from Ancient Canaanite and Present-Day Lebanese Genome Sequences” http://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(17)30276-8
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PLOS—The genomes of individuals who lived on the Iberian Peninsula in the Bronze Age had minor genetic input from Steppe invaders, suggesting that these migrations played a smaller role in the genetic makeup and culture of Iberian people, compared to other parts of Europe. Daniel Bradley and Rui Martiniano of Trinity College Dublin, in Ireland, and Ana Maria Silva of University of Coimbra, Portugal, report these findings July 27, 2017 in PLOS Genetics.*
Between the Middle Neolithic (4200-3500 BC) and the Middle Bronze Age (1740-1430 BC), Central and Northern Europe received a massive influx of people from the Steppe regions of Eastern Europe and Asia. Archaeological digs in Iberia have uncovered changes in culture and funeral rituals during this time, but no one had looked at the genetic impact of these migrations in this part of Europe. Researchers sequenced the genomes of 14 individuals who lived in Portugal during the Neolithic and Bronze Ages and compared them to other ancient and modern genomes. In contrast with other parts of Europe, they detected only subtle genetic changes between the Portuguese Neolithic and Bronze Age samples resulting from small-scale migration. However, these changes are more pronounced on the paternal lineage. “It was surprising to observe such a striking Y chromosome discontinuity between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age, such as would be consistent with a predominantly male-mediated genetic influx” says first author Rui Martiniano. Researchers also estimated height from the samples, based on relevant DNA sequences, and found that genetic input from Neolithic migrants decreased the height of Europeans, which subsequently increased steadily through later generations.
The study finds that migration into the Iberian Peninsula occurred on a much smaller scale compared to the Steppe invasions in Northern, Central and Northwestern Europe, which likely has implications for the spread of language, culture and technology. These findings may provide an explanation for why Iberia harbors a pre-Indo-European language, called Euskera, spoken in the Basque region along the border of Spain and France. It has been suggested that Indo-European spread with migrations through Europe from the Steppe heartland; a model that fits these results.
Daniel Bradley says “Unlike further north, a mix of earlier tongues and Indo-European languages persist until the dawn of Iberian history, a pattern that resonates with the real but limited influx of migrants around the Bronze Age.”
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Archaeological remains of individual MC337 excavated from the site of Hipogeu de Monte Canelas I, Portugal, and analysed by the archaeologist Rui Parreira and the anthropologist Ana Maria Silva. Credit: Rui Parreira
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UNIVERSITY OF YORK—A Bronze Age wooden container found in an ice patch at 2,650m in the Swiss Alps could help archaeologists shed new light on the spread and exploitation of cereal grains following a chance discovery.
The team of archaeologists were expecting to find a milk residue left behind in the container — perhaps from a porridge-type meal wolfed down by a hunter or herder making their way through a snowy Alpine pass.
But instead they discovered lipid-based biomarkers for whole wheat or rye grain, called alkylresorcinols.
The team say the discovery of these biomarkers in the residue could be used as a new tool to help archaeologists map and trace the development of early farming in Eurasia.
The domestication of plants, such as wheat, was one of the most significant cultural and evolutionary steps of our species, but direct evidence of their use in early culinary practices and economies has remained frustratingly elusive.
Plants quickly degrade in archaeological deposits therefore archaeologists are increasingly using molecular techniques to look for their remains.
Dr André Colonese, from BioArCh, Department of Archaeology, University of York, said : “We didn’t find any evidence of milk, but we found these phenolic lipids, which have never been reported before in an archaeological artefact, but are abundant in the bran of wheat and rye cereals and considered biomarkers of wholegrain intake in nutritional studies.”
“This is an extraordinary discovery if you consider that of all domesticated plants, wheat is the most widely grown crop in the world and the most important food grain source for humans, lying at the core of many contemporary culinary traditions.
“One of the greatest challenges of lipid analysis in archaeology has been finding biomarkers for plants, there are only a few and they do not preserve very well in ancient artefacts. You can imagine the relevance of this study as we have now a new tool for tracking early culinary use of cereal grains, it really is very exciting. The next step is to look for them in ceramic artefacts,” Dr Colonese added.
The team combined microscopic and molecular analyses to identify lipids and proteins using gas chromatography mass spectrometry, a technique routinely applied to ceramic artefacts. Over the last 30 years, thousands of ceramic artefacts from Europe have been analyzed for their molecular content, most revealing evidence of milk and meat products, but hardly any evidence of cereals.
Dr Jessica Hendy, from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, said: “The evidence of cereals came from the detection of lipids, but also from preserved proteins. This analysis was able to tell us that this vessel contained not just one, but two types of cereal grains — wheat and barley or rye grains.
Combining these two kinds of molecular analysis, along with microscopy, is strong evidence that cereals were being transported across this alpine pass.”
“Detecting a molecular marker for cereals also has widespread implications for studying early farming. It enables us to piece together when and where this important food crop spread through Europe,” Dr Hendy added.
Dr Francesco Carrer, from Newcastle University, said: “This evidence sheds new light on life in prehistoric alpine communities, and on their relationship with the extreme high altitudes. People travelling across the alpine passes were carrying food for their journey, like current hikers do. This new research contributed to understanding which food they considered the most suitable for their trips across the Alps.”
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The Bronze Age wooden container was been found in an ice patch at 2,650m in the Swiss Alps. Credit: Archaeological Service of the Canton of Bern
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The Bronze Age wooden container. Credit: Archaeological Service of the Canton of Bern
The study involved collaboration between the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, the Archaeological Service of the Canton of Bern, the Integrative Prähistorische und Naturwissenschaftliche Archäologie, Newcastle University, the University of Copenhagen and the University of Oxford, and is published in Scientific Reports.
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PLOS—Analysis* of strontium isotopes in teeth from Neolithic cattle suggest that early Europeans used different specialized herding strategies, according to a study published July 26, 2017 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Claudia Gerling from University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland, and colleagues.
Over the course of the Neolithic, secondary products from cattle such as milk, manure and animal power became more important. This led to larger herds, and the increased demand for grazing resources could have led to herding strategies that took advantage of grazing grounds away from the permanent settlement. However, until now there was little direct evidence for prehistoric cattle mobility.
To reconstruct cattle mobility and infer herding management, the researchers analyzed strontium isotopes in 39 molars from 25 cattle in a Neolithic settlement in what is now Switzerland. The settlement, which was occupied for 15 years, had 27 houses and the teeth could be assigned to 12 of them. Strontium signatures reflect local soil and plants, and can vary over relatively short distances.
The researchers found that the cattle molars had three strontium patterns, which likely reflected different herding strategies. The first pattern was consistent with the local strontium baseline, suggesting local cattle herding; the second pattern was a mix of local and non-local strontium signatures, suggesting seasonal movement; and the third was mostly non-local strontium signatures, suggesting year-round herding away from the site.
In addition, the researchers found that these three herding strategies were not uniformly represented in various areas of the settlement. This suggests differential access to the most favorable grazing grounds, which could have contributed to social inequalities between groups or households. Consequently, say the researchers, the increasing importance of cattle may have been a starting point for the socioeconomic differentiation that later became widespread during the European Bronze Age.
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Cattle mobility patterns at the Neolithic wetland site of Arbon Bleiche 3. Settlement plan with reconstructed houses and distribution of cattle mobility patterns (MP) 1-3. Credit: Gerling et al (2017)
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University of the Witwatersrand—The flexibility and ability to adapt to changing climates by employing various cultural innovations allowed communities of early humans to survive through a prolonged period of pronounced aridification.
The early human techno-tradition, known as Howiesons Poort (HP), associated with Homo sapiens who lived in southern Africa about 66,000 to 59,000 years ago indicates that during this period of pronounced aridification they developed cultural innovations that allowed them to significantly enlarge the range of environments they occupied.
This cultural flexibility may have been the key to success for modern humans, says a team of international researchers, made up of archaeologists, paleo climatologists, and climate modellers from the French CNRS1 and the EPHE PSL Research University, Bergen University as well as Wits University. Their research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“The most distinct of the many cultural innovations in the HP culture were the invention of the bow and arrow, different methods of heating raw materials (stone) before knapping to produce arrow heads, engraving ostrich eggshells with elaborate patterns, intensive use of hearths and relatively intense hunting and gathering practices,” says Professor Christopher Henshilwood, one of the team members from Wits and Bergen Universities.
Howiesons Poort is a techno-tradition in the Middle Stone Age in Africa named after the Howieson’s Poort Shelter archaeological site near Grahamstown in South Africa. It lasted around 5,000 years between roughly 65,800 and 59,500 years ago.
Using paleo climatic data and paleo climatic simulations, the researchers of the current study found that the HP tradition developed during a period of pronounced aridity.
This paleo climatic data and the distribution of archaeological sites associated with the HP, as well of that of the Still Bay tradition, which existed in the same environments about 5,000 years before (76,000 to 71,000 years ago), enabled the researchers to model the emergence of these traditions with two predictive algorithms that permitted them to reconstruct the ecological niche associated with each tradition and determine whether these niches differed significantly through time.
The results clearly indicate that HP populations were capable, despite the pronounced aridity that characterised the period in which they lived, to exploit territories and ecosystems that the preceding Still Bay people did not occupy.
While the Still Bay era is also characterised by highly innovative technologies – including engraving of ochre, use of personal ornaments, manufacture of highly stylised bone tools, heating silcrete (red rock) to produce better material for knapping bifacial points (spear points) using hard hammer and finally pressure flaking technology – the research team points out that HP’s ecological niche expansion coincides with the development of technological innovations that were both efficient and more flexible than those of the Still Bay.
“It seems from the little evidence that we have that the population of Homo sapiens in southern Africa was considerably larger during the Howiesons Poort period,” says Henshilwood.
“There are many more HP sites than Still Bay sites in southern Africa and their location is widespread across southern Africa. Note that neither the Still Bay or HP is found outside of southern Africa.”
Henshilwood says the Still Bay people did not disappear. There just seems to be a gap between 72,000 years ago to 66,000 years ago, where there is almost no evidence of any people in southern Africa.
This study, which documents the oldest known case of an eco-cultural niche expansion, demonstrates that the processes that allowed our species to develop modern behaviours must be examined at regional scales and in conjunction with past climatic data.
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The Klipdrift Shelter in the De Hoop Nature Reserve in the southern Cape, South Africa, where Howiesons Poort deposits were excavated. Credit: Stephen Alvarez
The emergence of our species (Homo sapiens) in Africa, at least 260,000 years ago, was not immediately accompanied by the development of behavioural characteristics of more recent prehistoric and historically documented populations. For tens of thousands of years after their emergence (anatomically), modern human populations in Africa continued to use technologies that differed little from those of the non-modern populations that preceded them or that inhabited other regions both inside and outside the African continent.
A number of archaeological discoveries during the past twenty years have shown that from at least 100,000 years ago some populations in Africa, especially those in southern Africa, made pigmented compounds, wore personal ornaments, made abstract engravings, and manufactured bone tools. It is within this period, and those that follow, that archaeologists are able to recognize distinct techno- traditions, to determine with a certain degree of precision their age, and place these time periods within their proper climatic contexts.
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