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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Early contact with Neanderthals, but relatively little Neanderthal DNA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Article Source: University at Buffalo news release

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Article Source: Field Museum news release

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Article Source: Washington University in St. Louis news release

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Professor Robin Allaby commented:

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

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

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Article Source: University of Warwick news release

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Research Paves Way for Future Studies

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

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

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

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

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

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

Article Source: University of Arizona news release

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Article Source: Yale University news release

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Article Source: Chinese Academy of Sciences news release

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Article Source: Cell Press news release

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Article Source: Cell Press news release

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Endangered Heritage

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

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

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

For now, everyone waits.

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UNIVERSITY OF EXETER—Amazonian farmers discovered how to manipulate wild rice so the plants could provide more food 4,000 years ago, long before Europeans colonized America, archaeologists have discovered.

Experts from the UK and Brazil have found the first evidence that ancient South Americans learned how to grow bigger rice crops with larger grains, but this expertise may have been lost after 1492 when the indigenous population was decimated, research shows.

The evidence of the success of early rice farmers on the vast wetlands near the Guaporé River in Rondônia state, Brazil, could help modern day plant breeders develop rice crops which are less susceptible to disease and more adaptable to the effects of climate change than the Asian varieties. Different species of rice were first grown approximately 11,000 years ago in the Yangtze River, China, and around 2,000 years ago in West Africa.

The University of Exeter study, funded in part by the European Research Council, also shows how important the huge wetlands and tropical forests of lowland South America were in providing food for early human settlers in South America. Ancient inhabitants managed to domesticate cassava, peanuts and chilli peppers crops for food.

The archaeologists analyzed 16 samples of microscopic plant remains from ten different time periods found during excavations during 2014 led by the University of São Paulo in South West Amazonia. More phytoliths, hard, microscopic pieces of silica made by plant cells, were found at higher ground level, suggesting rice began to play a larger role in the diet of people who lived in the area – and more was farmed – as time went on.

Changes in the ratio of husk, leaf and stem remains found at different ground levels also suggest the Amazon residents became more efficient harvesters over time, bringing more grain and fewer leaves to the site. The rice grown, Oryza sp, also became bigger over time compared to the wild rice first cultivated by the South Americans. This area has been occupied by humans for at least 10,000 years.

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 The team arriving at Monte Castelo and wild rice. Credit: University of Exeter

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Monte Castelo excavation in progress—collecting samples. Credit: University of Exeter

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Increase in size from wild to domesticated rice phytoliths. Credit: University of Exeter, L Hilbert

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Professor Jose Iriarte, from the University of Exeter, who led the research, said: “This is the first study to identify when wild rice first began to be grown for food in South America. We have found people were growing crops with larger and larger seeds. Even though they were also eating wild and domesticated plants including maize, palm fruits, soursop and squash, wild rice was an important food, and people began to grow it at lake or river edges.

“During a time when the climate was getting wetter and the wetlands expanding, this critical seasonal resource that is ripe at the peak of the flooding season when other resources are dispersed and scarce, residents of Monte Castelo began to grow larger rice.”

Evidence for mid-Holocene rice domestication in the Americas by Lautaro Hilbert and Jose Iriarte from the University of Exeter, Elizabeth Veasey, Carlos Augusto Zimpel, Eduardo Goes Neves and Francisco Pugliese from the Universidade de São Paulo, Bronwen S. Whitney from Northumbria University and Myrtle Shock from the Universidade Federal do Oeste de Pará, is published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.

Article Source: University of Exeter news release

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VISUAL SCIENCE—Visual Science and the RAS Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, with support from the All-Russian Science Festival “Nauka 0+”, have reconstructed the faces of the Sungir people—Homo sapiens who lived 30,000 years ago in Central Russia and are believed to be ancestors of today’s Northern and Eastern Europeans. The new virtual reality 3D animation brings the Sungir people to life. The scientifically accurate visualization is based on skeletal remains from the Sungir site, one of the northernmost Paleolithic settlements in Europe, as well as data from previous efforts to reconstruct the Sungir people’s appearance.

What is Sungir?

• Located in the Vladimir region of central Russia, Sungir is by far the northernmost prehistoric settlement of early modern humans in Europe. It was first excavated by archaeologists in 1956.
• More than 80,000 cultural and household artifacts have been found at the site, which is believed to have been a seasonal hunting camp. Many are made from mammoth bones, Arctic fox canines and stone. Beads, pendants, zoomorphic figurines, engravings and clothing have been among the findings.
• Remains of nine people have been discovered at the site. The best-preserved belonged to two siblings, aged approximately 10 and 13. These were used to create the VR 3D animation.
• Decades of research on the Sungir site have advanced our understanding of human development, migration, and the cultures of Paleolithic Europe.

To create the visualization, two Sungir skulls were laser-scanned and photographed in high definition. The data was then run through state-of-the-art 3D modeling software, where existing data and modern facial reconstruction techniques were applied. The VR animation outlines the steps involved, from marking reference points on the skulls to reconstructing the soft tissues of the head, nose and ear cartilages, to create the final “living” 3D portrait.

The VR animation is based on contemporary research as well as earlier sculptural reconstructions of Sungir people made by Mikhail Gerasimov’s method.

“In the mid-20th century, Soviet archaeologist and anthropologist Mikhail Gerasimov created the first scientifically accurate method for anthropological facial reconstruction based on a person’s skull,” said Sergey Vasilyev, Head of the Department of Physical Anthropology at RAS Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology. “Previously, scientists noted that there is a dependency between the shape of the skull and the elements of appearance. The anatomical and radiographic research methods used by Gerasimov allowed scientists to not only determine standards for the thickness of soft tissues along the face profile line, but also to reveal patterns in the distribution of the soft tissues’ thickness, depending on skull surface morphology development. The structure of particular facial elements was determined by individual morphological features of the skull. Gerasimov’s successors developed techniques to restore the nose and ears. The degree of reconstruction authenticity was determined by a number of facial reconstruction projects that used the skulls of modern people, whose lifetime portraits were available. The methodology was tested mainly on forensic material. The Gerasimov method is still in use in Russia, Europe and the United States. In recent years, reconstruction has become easier due to the introduction of ultrasound scanning and computer tomography.” 

“As a scientist, I find this project extremely interesting,”added Viktor Sadovnichiy, rector of Moscow State University and the co-chairman of the All-Russian Science Festival “Nauka 0+. “This is a meeting of multiple scientific disciplines – history, archaeology, cutting- edge computer technology. The result is a work of the highest order, which will find an audience both among the Festival attendees, who will be able to immerse themselves in the world of the Paleolithic, as well as among pedigreed scientists, who will find confirmation of hypotheses that had been put forward earlier” 

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 An illustration of the reconstruction process. VR animation by Visual Science

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 Two individuals, whose remains have been found at Sungir, were reconstructed using the cutting edge techniques. VR animation by Visual Science

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Museums and schools around the world can access the visualization for free using Android apps compatible with Google Cardboard or any other VR headset at 4K resolution.

“Cutting-edge science combined with computer graphics is a powerful tool for promoting science among children and inspiring young people to learn about history and the natural world. The Sungir site is a global treasure. Special clothing and decorative elements suggest an amazingly high level of cultural development among Homo sapiens living 30,000 years ago. By visualizing these details with scientific rigor, we’re able to share Sungir with the widest possible audience.” — Ivan Konstantinov, CEO of Visual Science.

“I like Sungir VR-animation because the reconstruction was made with high precision and attention to details. The physiognomy of the children, shown in the visualization, recalls Dolni Vestonice 15—remains found at the upper paleolithic site in the Czech Republic” — Professor Jiri Svoboda, Sc.D., Head of Research Centre for Palaeolithics and Paleoanthropology at the Institute of Archaeology of the Czech Academy of Sciences.

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3D VR facial reconstruction of 30 000 y. o. Homo sapiens from Visual Science on Vimeo.

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Article Source: A Visual Science news release

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About Visual Science

Visual Science is an award-winning scientific visualization, communication and education studio. Founded in 2007, it develops 3D animations, educational videos, medical illustrations, interactive science apps, and more.

Visual Science has completed hundreds of projects for companies and organizations around the world. They include Nobel Prize laureates, leading scientific publishers (Wiley, Elsevier, Macmillan Publishers, Springer), educational institutions (Cambridge University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Monash University), top-20 pharmaceutical and biotech companies (Johnson & Johnson, Takeda, Novo Nordisk, Roche, Nycomed), advertising agencies, museums, and broadcasting companies.

Since 2010, our projects have attracted millions of views from 148 countries, and have been featured in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Nature, PBS, New Scientist, Mashable, National Geographic, Popular Science, Wired, Spiegel and other media outlets.

Visual Science created the first complete, scientifically accurate model of the HIV virus at the atomic level. The company’s 3D models of the HIV and Ebola viruses were awarded “Best Illustration” (2010) and “Honorable Mention – Infographics” (2011) respectively by Science Magazine and the National Science Foundation.

The company has an extensive network of expert consultants, including more than 70 scientists at world-leading research centers across the globe, from Harvard University (USA) to HKUST (Hong Kong).

Article Source: A Visual Science news release

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UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA—Humans migrated out of Africa as the climate shifted from wet to very dry about 60,000 years ago, according to research led by a University of Arizona geoscientist.

Genetic research indicates people migrated from Africa into Eurasia between 70,000 and 55,000 years ago. Previous researchers suggested the climate must have been wetter than it is now for people to migrate to Eurasia by crossing the Horn of Africa and the Middle East.

“There’s always been a question about whether climate change had any influence on when our species left Africa,” said Jessica Tierney, UA associate professor of geosciences. “Our data suggest that when most of our species left Africa, it was dry and not wet in northeast Africa.”

Tierney and her colleagues found that around 70,000 years ago, climate in the Horn of Africa shifted from a wet phase called “Green Sahara” to even drier than the region is now. The region also became colder.

The researchers traced the Horn of Africa’s climate 200,000 years into the past by analyzing a core of ocean sediment taken in the western end of the Gulf of Aden. Tierney said before this research there was no record of the climate of northeast Africa back to the time of human migration out of Africa.

“Our data say the migration comes after a big environmental change. Perhaps people left because the environment was deteriorating,” she said. “There was a big shift to dry and that could have been a motivating force for migration.”

“It’s interesting to think about how our ancestors interacted with climate,” she said.

The team’s paper, “A climatic context for the out-of-Africa migration,” is published online in Geology this week. Tierney’s co-authors are Peter deMenocal of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, and Paul Zander of the UA.

The National Science Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation funded the research.

Tierney and her colleagues had successfully revealed the Horn of Africa’s climate back to 40,000 years ago by studying cores of marine sediment. The team hoped to use the same means to reconstruct the region’s climate back to the time 55,000 to 70,000 years ago when our ancestors left Africa.

The first challenge was finding a core from that region with sediments that old. The researchers enlisted the help of the curators of the Lamont-Doherty Core Repository, which has sediment cores from every major ocean and sea. The curators found a core collected off the Horn of Africa in 1965 from the R/V Robert D. Conrad that might be suitable.

Co-author deMenocal studied and dated the layers of the 1965 core and found it had sediments going back as far as 200,000 years.

At the UA, Tierney and Paul Zander teased out temperature and rainfall records from the organic matter preserved in the sediment layers. The scientists took samples from the core about every four inches (10 cm), a distance that represented about every 1,600 years.

To construct a long-term temperature record for the Horn of Africa, the researchers analyzed the sediment layers for chemicals called alkenones made by a particular kind of marine algae. The algae change the composition of the alkenones depending on the water temperature. The ratio of the different alkenones indicates the sea surface temperature when the algae were alive and also reflects regional temperatures, Tierney said.

To figure out the region’s ancient rainfall patterns from the sediment core, the researchers analyzed the ancient leaf wax that had blown into the ocean from terrestrial plants. Because plants alter the chemical composition of the wax on their leaves depending on how dry or wet the climate is, the leaf wax from the sediment core’s layers provides a record of past fluctuations in rainfall.

The analyses showed that the time people migrated out of Africa coincided with a big shift to a much drier and colder climate, Tierney said.

The team’s findings are corroborated by research from other investigators who reconstructed past regional climate by using data gathered from a cave formation in Israel and a sediment core from the eastern Mediterranean. Those findings suggest that it was dry everywhere in northeast Africa, she said.

“Our main point is kind of simple,” Tierney said. “We think it was dry when people left Africa and went on to other parts of the world, and that the transition from a Green Sahara to dry was a motivating force for people to leave.”

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Article Source: University of Arizona news release

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ST JOHN’S COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE—Early humans seem to have recognised the dangers of inbreeding at least 34,000 years ago, and developed surprisingly sophisticated social and mating networks to avoid it, new research has found.

The study, reported in the journal Science, examined genetic information from the remains of anatomically modern humans who lived during the Upper Palaeolithic, a period when modern humans from Africa first colonised western Eurasia. The results suggest that people deliberately sought partners beyond their immediate family, and that they were probably connected to a wider network of groups from within which mates were chosen, in order to avoid becoming inbred.

This suggests that our distant ancestors are likely to have been aware of the dangers of inbreeding, and purposely avoided it at a surprisingly early stage in prehistory.

The symbolism, complexity and time invested in the objects and jewellery found buried with the remains also suggests that it is possible that they developed rules, ceremonies and rituals to accompany the exchange of mates between groups, which perhaps foreshadowed modern marriage ceremonies, and may have been similar to those still practised by hunter-gatherer communities in parts of the world today.

The study’s authors also hint that the early development of more complex mating systems may at least partly explain why anatomically modern humans proved successful while other species, such as Neanderthals, did not. However, more ancient genomic information from both early humans and Neanderthals is needed to test this idea.

The research was carried out by an international team of academics, led by the University of Cambridge, UK, and the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. They sequenced the genomes of four individuals from Sunghir, a famous Upper Palaeolithic site in Russia, which is believed to have been inhabited about 34,000 years ago.

The human fossils buried at Sunghir represent a rare and highly valuable, source of information because very unusually for finds from this period, the people buried there appear to have lived at the same time and were buried together. To the researchers’ surprise, however, these individuals were not closely related in genetic terms; at the very most, they were second cousins. This is true even in the case of two children who were buried head-to-head in the same grave.

Professor Eske Willerslev, who holds posts both as a Fellow at St John’s College, Cambridge, and at the University of Copenhagen, was the senior author on the study. “What this means is that even people in the Upper Palaeolithic, who were living in tiny groups, understood the importance of avoiding inbreeding,” he said. “The data that we have suggest that it was being purposely avoided.”

“This means that they must have developed a system for this purpose. If small hunter-gatherer bands were mixing at random, we would see much greater evidence of inbreeding than we have here.”

Early humans and other hominins such as Neanderthals appear to have lived in small family units. The small population size made inbreeding likely, but among anatomically modern humans it eventually ceased to be commonplace; when this happened, however, is unclear.

“Small family bands are likely to have interconnected with larger networks, facilitating the exchange of people between groups in order to maintain diversity,” Professor Martin Sikora, from the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen, said.

Sunghir contains the burials of one adult male and two younger individuals, accompanied by the symbolically-modified incomplete remains of another adult, as well as a spectacular array of grave goods. The researchers were able to sequence the complete genomes of the four individuals, all of whom were probably living on the site at the same time. These data were compared with information from a large number of both modern and ancient human genomes.

They found that the four individuals studied were genetically no closer than second cousins, while an adult femur filled with red ochre found in the children’s’ grave would have belonged to an individual no closer than great-great grandfather of the boys. “This goes against what many would have predicted,” Willerslev said. “I think many researchers had assumed that the people of Sunghir were very closely related, especially the two youngsters from the same grave.”

The people at Sunghir may have been part of a network similar to that of modern day hunter-gatherers, such as Aboriginal Australians and some historical Native American societies. Like their Upper Palaeolithic ancestors, these people live in fairly small groups of around 25 people, but they are also less directly connected to a larger community of perhaps 200 people, within which there are rules governing with whom individuals can form partnerships.

“Most non-human primate societies are organised around single-sex kin where one of the sexes remains resident and the other migrates to another group, minimising inbreeding” says Professor Marta Mirazón Lahr, from the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies at the University of Cambridge. “At some point, early human societies changed their mating system into one in which a large number of the individuals that form small hunter-gatherer units are non-kin. The results from Sunghir show that Upper Palaeolithic human groups could use sophisticated cultural systems to sustain very small group sizes by embedding them in a wide social network of other groups.”

By comparison, genomic sequencing of a Neanderthal individual from the Altai Mountains who lived around 50,000 years ago indicates that inbreeding was not avoided. This leads the researchers to speculate that an early, systematic approach to preventing inbreeding may have helped anatomically modern humans to thrive, compared with other hominins.

This should be treated with caution, however: “We don’t know why the Altai Neanderthal groups were inbred,” Sikora said. “Maybe they were isolated and that was the only option; or maybe they really did fail to develop an available network of connections. We will need more genomic data of diverse Neanderthal populations to be sure.”

Willerslev also highlights a possible link with the unusual sophistication of the ornaments and cultural objects found at Sunghir. Group-specific cultural expressions may have been used to establish distinctions between bands of early humans, providing a means of identifying who to mate with and who to avoid as partners.

“The ornamentation is incredible and there is no evidence of anything like that with Neanderthals and other archaic humans,” Willerslev added. “When you put the evidence together, it seems to be speaking to us about the really big questions; what made these people who they were as a species, and who we are as a result.”

The research paper, Ancient genomes show social and reproductive behaviour of early Upper Paleolithic foragers, is published in the October 5 issue of Science.

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Detail of one of the burials from Sunghir, in Russia. The new study sequenced the genomes of individuals from the site and discovered that they were, at most, second cousins, indicating that they had developed sexual partnerships beyond their immediate social and family group. Wikimedia Commons

Article Source: St. John’s College, University of Cambridge news release

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AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE—Two new studies on ancient genomes provide valuable insights into the lives of our ancestors and their cousins, the Neandertals. First, scientists have sequenced a new genome of a female Neandertal, which is only the second genome of the species to be fully sequenced with such a high level of quality. The advancement confirms a number of theories about Neandertals, but also reveals new genetic contributions of the species to modern-day humans. Neandertals are the closest evolutionary relatives of all present-day humans and therefore provide a unique perspective on human biology and history. Five Neandertal genomes have been sequenced to date, yet only one yielded high-quality data, an individual found in Siberia known as the “Altai Neandertal.” Three less well-defined genomes come from individuals found in a cave, Vindija, in Croatia, and one from Mezmaiskaya Cave, in Russia. Here, Kay Prüfer and colleagues successfully analyzed billions of DNA fragments sampled from a new individual in the Croatian cave, dubbed Vindija 33.19, a female who lived roughly 52,000 years ago. Similar to previous findings, the genetic data suggest that Neandertals lived in small and isolated populations of about 3,000 individuals. The previously sequenced Altai Neandertal genome suggested that the individual’s parents were half-siblings, prompting scientists to wonder if Neandertals commonly interbred with family members – yet the new Vindija genome does not have similar incestual patterns, suggesting that the extreme inbreeding between the parents of the Altai Neandertal may not have been ubiquitous among Neandertals. Vindija 33.19 does appear to share a maternal ancestor with two of the three other individuals from the Croatian cave who were genetically sequenced, however. The authors use the Vindija 33.19 genome to analyze divergences and gene flow among Neandertals, Denisovans (another extinct species of hominin), and modern humans. Among many findings, they report that early modern human gene flow into Neandertal populations occurred between 130,000 and 145,000 years ago, before the Croatian and Siberian Neandertals diverged. Based on the new high-quality genome, the authors estimate that modern non-African populations carry between 1.8-2.6% Neandertal DNA, which is higher than previous estimates of 1.5-2.1%. Lastly, they identify a wealth of new gene variants in the Neandertal genome that are influential in modern day humans, including variants related to plasma levels of LDL cholesterol and vitamin D, eating disorders, visceral fat accumulation, rheumatoid arthritis, schizophrenia and responses to antipsychotic drugs. A second study by Martin Sikora et al. focuses on the genomes of four archaic, anatomically modern humans that were found at the Sunghir burial site, in Russia. The genomes provide a rare glimpse into the social organization of humans during the Upper Paleolithic period. The individuals, who lived sometime between 34,600 and 33,600 years ago, are all male and unrelated to each other. Furthermore, the researchers did not find inbreeding signatures, as seen with the Altai Neandertal. Given the genetic diversity of these individuals, despite being a part of a small genetic population, the authors suggest that they likely mated outside of their hunter-gatherer clans. The authors also highlight ways in which these genomes compare and mix with Neandertal genomes.

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 Ancient genomes extraction process in the lab. Shown here is a Neandertal bone. Wikimedia Commons

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Article Source: AAAS news release

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UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE—Two herpes simplex viruses infect primates from unknown evolutionary depths. In modern humans these viruses manifest as cold sores (HSV1) and genital herpes (HSV2).

Unlike HSV1, however, the earliest proto-humans did not take HSV2 with them when our ancient lineage split from chimpanzee precursors around 7 million years ago. Humanity dodged the genital herpes bullet – almost.

Somewhere between 3 and 1.4 million years ago, HSV2 jumped the species barrier from African apes back into human ancestors – probably through an intermediate hominin species unrelated to humans. Hominin is the zoological ‘tribe’ to which our species belongs.

Now, a team of scientists from Cambridge and Oxford Brookes universities believe they may have identified the culprit: Paranthropus boisei, a heavyset bipedal hominin with a smallish brain and dish-like face.

In a study published today in the journal Virus Evolution, they suggest that P. boisei most likely contracted HSV2 through scavenging ancestral chimp meat where savannah met forest – the infection seeping in via bites or open sores.

Hominins with HSV1 may have been initially protected from HSV2, which also occupied the mouth. That is until HSV2 “adapted to a different mucosal niche” say the scientists. A niche located in the genitals.

Close contact between P. boisei and our ancestor Homo erectus would have been fairly common around sources of water, such as Kenya’s Lake Turkana. This provided the opportunity for HSV2 to boomerang into our bloodline.

The appearance of Homo erectus around 2 million years ago was accompanied by evidence of hunting and butchery. Once again, consuming “infected material” would have transmitted the virus – only this time it was P. boisei being devoured.

“Herpes infect everything from humans to coral, with each species having its own specific set of viruses,” said senior author Dr Charlotte Houldcroft, a virologist from Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology.

“For these viruses to jump species barriers they need a lucky genetic mutation combined with significant fluid exchange. In the case of early hominins, this means through consumption or intercourse – or possibly both.”

“By modelling the available data, from fossil records to viral genetics, we believe that Paranthropus boisei was the species in the right place at the right time to both contract HSV2 from ancestral chimpanzees, and transmit it to our earliest ancestors, probably Homo erectus.”

When researchers from University of California, San Diego, published findings suggesting HSV2 had jumped between hominin species, Houldcroft became curious.

While discussing genital herpes over dinner at Kings College, Cambridge, with fellow academic Dr Krishna Kumar, an idea formed. Kumar, an engineer who uses Bayesian network modelling to predict city-scale infrastructure requirements, suggested applying his techniques to the question of ancient HSV2.

Houldcroft and her collaborator Dr Simon Underdown, a human evolution researcher from Oxford Brookes, collated data ranging from fossil finds to herpes DNA and ancient African climates. Using Kumar’s model, the team generated HSV2 transmission probabilities for the mosaic of hominin species that roamed Africa during “deep time”.

“Climate fluctuations over millennia caused forests and lakes to expand and contract,” said Underdown. “Layering climate data with fossil locations helped us determine the species most likely to come into contact with ancestral chimpanzees in the forests, as well as other hominins at water sources.”

Some promising leads turned out to be dead ends. Australopithecus afarensis had the highest probability of proximity to ancestral chimps, but geography also ruled it out of transmitting to human ancestors.

Ultimately, the researchers discovered the key player in all the scenarios with higher probabilities to be Paranthropus boisei. A genetic fit virally who was found in the right places to be the herpes intermediary, with Homo erectus – and eventually us – the unfortunate recipients.

“Once HSV2 gains entry to a species it stays, easily transferred from mother to baby, as well as through blood, saliva and sex,” said Houldcroft.

“HSV2 is ideally suited to low density populations. The genital herpes virus would have crept across Africa the way it creeps down nerve endings in our sex organs – slowly but surely.”

The team believe their methodology can be used to unravel the transmission mysteries of other ancient diseases – such as human pubic lice, also introduced via an intermediate hominin from ancestral gorillas over 3 million years ago.

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  A cast of a P. boisei skull, used for teaching at Cambridge University. Credit: Louise Walsh

Article Source: University of Cambridge news release

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UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN – FACULTY OF HUMANITIES—5,000 years ago, the Yamnaya culture migrated into Europe from the Caspian steppe. In addition to innovations such as the wagon and dairy production, they brought a new language – Indo-European – that replaced most local languages the following millennia. But local cultures also influenced the new language, particularly in southern Scandinavia, where Neolithic farmers made lasting contributions to Indo-European vocabulary before their own language went extinct, new research shows.

Most historical linguists agree that words such as ‘wheel’, ‘wagon’, ‘horse’, ‘sheep’, ‘cow’, ‘milk’ and ‘wool’ can be attributed to the Yamnaya people who migrated into Europe from the Caspian steppe 5,000 years ago. The nomadic and pastoral Yamnayans introduced their material culture to the local peoples through a new language known as Proto-Indo-European, from which most European languages descend.

However, not all words in the European languages are of Proto-Indo-European origin, linguists say; there are words for flora and fauna, which must have been incorporated into Indo-European from local cultures. But where could such cultural exchange have taken place? According to a new study* published in American Journal of Archaeology by archaeologist Rune Iversen and linguist Guus Kroonen from the University of Copenhagen, southern Scandinavia 2,800 BC provides an ideal setting for such an exchange:

“The archaeological evidence tells us that between 2,800 and 2,600 BC two very different cultures co-existed in southern Scandinavia: there was the local, Neolithic culture known as the Funnel Beaker Culture with its characteristic funnel-shaped ceramics and collective burial practices and the new Single Grave Culture influenced by the Yamnaya culture. The Funnel Beaker Culture was eventually superseded by the Single Grave Culture, but the transition took hundreds of years in the eastern part of southern Scandinavia, and the two cultures must have influenced each other during this time, “says archaeologist Rune Iversen, who has specialised in this particular transitional period.

Peas, beans, turnips and shrimps

Historical linguist Guus Kroonen points to a number of words for local flora and fauna and important plant domesticates that the incoming speakers of Indo-European could not have brought with them to southern Scandinavia.

“There is a cluster of words in European languages such as Danish, English, and German – the Germanic languages – which stand out because they do not conform to the established sound changes of Indo-European vocabulary. It is words like sturgeon, shrimp, pea, bean and turnip that cannot be reconstructed to the Proto-Indo-European ancestor,” Guus Kroonen explains and adds:

“This tells us that these words must have entered Indo-European after it had spread from the Caspian steppe to the various parts of Europe. In other words: the new Single Grave Culture is likely to have adopted much farming and hunting terminology from the local Funnel Beaker Culture that inhabited southern Scandinavia and Denmark till around 2,600 BC. When Indo-European in Northern Europe developed into Proto-Germanic, the terminology for local flora and fauna was preserved, which is why we know and can study the terms today.”

Guus Kroonen adds that this farming terminology may be vestiges of a now extinct language spoken by the people who initially brought farming to Europe from Anatolia 9,000-6,000 years ago.

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This is the distribution of the earliest Single Grave culture burials in southern Scandinavia, ca. 2850-2800. The Single Grave Culture co-existed with the local Funnel Beaker Culture, which inhabited the island of Zealand, for 200 years. Credit: University of Copenhagen

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Article Source: University of Copenhagen news release

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*Rune Iversen’s and Guus Kroonen’s paper, Talking Neolithic: Linguistic and Archaeological Perspectives on How Indo-European Was Implemented in Southern Scandinavia in American Journal of Archaeology.

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UPPSALA UNIVERSITY—A genomic analysis of ancient human remains from KwaZulu-Natal revealed that southern Africa has an important role to play in writing the history of humankind. A research team from Uppsala University, Sweden, the Universities of Johannesburg and the Witwatersrand, South Africa, presents their results in the September 28th early online issue of Science.

The team sequenced the genomes of seven individuals who lived in southern Africa 2300-300 years ago. The three oldest individuals dating to 2300-1800 years ago were genetically related to the descendants of the southern Khoe-San groups, and the four younger individuals who lived 500-300 years ago were genetically related to current-day South African Bantu-speaking groups. “This illustrates the population replacement that occurred in southern Africa”, says co-first author Carina Schlebusch, population geneticist at Uppsala University.

The authors estimate the divergence among modern humans to have occurred between 350,000 and 260,000 years ago, based on the ancient Stone Age hunter-gatherer genomes. The deepest split time of 350,000 years ago represents a comparison between an ancient Stone Age hunter-gatherer boy from Ballito Bay on the east coast of South Africa and the West African Mandinka. “This means that modern humans emerged earlier than previously thought”, says Mattias Jakobsson, population geneticist at Uppsala University who headed the project together with Stone Age archaeologist Marlize Lombard at the University of Johannesburg.

The fossil record of east Africa, and in particular the Omo and Herto fossils have often been used to set the emergence of anatomically modern humans to about 180,000 years ago. The deeper estimate for modern human divergence at 350,000-260,000 years ago coincides with the Florisbad and Hoedjiespunt fossils, contemporaries of the small-brained Homo naledi in southern Africa. “It now seems that at least two or three Homo species occupied the southern African landscape during this time period, which also represents the early phases of the Middle Stone Age”, says Marlize Lombard. It will be interesting to see in the future if we find any evidence of interaction between these groups.

“We did not find any evidence of deep structure or archaic admixture among southern African Stone Age hunter-gatherers. Instead, we see some evidence for deep structure in the West African population, but that affects only a small fraction of their genome and is about the same age as the deepest divergence among all humans”, says Mattias Jakobsson.

The authors also found that all current-day Khoe-San populations admixed with migrant East African pastoralists a little over a thousand years ago. “We could not detect this widespread East African admixture previously since we did not have an un-admixed San group to use as reference. Now that we have access to ancient DNA of people who lived on the landscape before the East African migration, we are able to detect the admixture percentages in all San groups. The admixture percentages in the Khoekhoe, historically identified as pastoralists, are higher than previously estimated”, says Carina Schlebusch.

Of the Iron Age individuals, three carry at least one Duffy null allele, protecting against malaria, and two have at least one sleeping-sickness-resistance variant in the APOL1 gene. The Stone Age individuals do not carry these protective alleles. “This tells us that Iron Age farmers carried these disease-resistance variants when they migrated to southern Africa”, says co-first author Helena Malmström, archaeo-geneticist at Uppsala University.

Marlize Lombard said that “archaeological deposits dating to the time of the split by 350,000-260,000 years ago, attest to South Africa being populated by tool-making hunter-gatherers at the time. Although human fossils are sparse, those of Florisbad and Hoedjiespunt are seen as transitional to modern humans.” These fossils may therefore be ancestral to the Ballito Bay boy and other San hunter-gatherers who lived in southern Africa 2000 years ago.

The transition from archaic to modern humans might not have occurred in one place in Africa but in several, including southern Africa and northern Africa as recently reported. “Thus, both palaeo-anthropological and genetic evidence increasingly points to multiregional origins of anatomically modern humans in Africa, i.e. Homo sapiens did not originate in one place in Africa, but might have evolved from older forms in several places on the continent with gene flow between groups from different places”, says Carina Schlebusch.

“It is remarkable that we can now sequence entire genomes of ancient human remains from tropical areas, such as the southeast coast of South Africa”, says Helena Malmström. This is promising for our several ongoing investigations in Africa.

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Demographic model of African history and estimated divergences. Vertical colored lines represent migration, with down-pointing triangles representing admixture into another group. Southern African hunter-gatherers are shown by red symbols, and Iron Age farmers as green symbols. Extracted from figure 3. Credit: Uppsala University

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Cumulatively these findings shed new light on our species’ deep African history and show that there is still much more to learn about our process of becoming modern humans and that the interplay between genetics and archaeology has an increasingly important role to play.

(For a related premium article about the earliest Homo sapiens published at Popular Archaeology, see On the Threshold of Modern Humanity.)

This article source: Edited from the Uppsala University news release

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PLOS—An isotopic analysis of megalithic graves and caves in Spain may suggest the existence of a degree of differentiation in the lifeways of people buried in these different funerary sites, according to a study* published September 27, 2017 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Teresa Fernández-Crespo and Rick Schulting from the University of the Basque Country, Spain, and the University of Oxford, UK.

Previous research on the burial practices of the Western European Neolithic has revealed variation in burial location and treatment, but their significance is difficult to interpret. To further investigate the meaning behind different burial practices within the same location and period, the authors of the present study analyzed the bone collagen carbon and nitrogen isotope measurements of 166 individuals from a series of broadly contemporary Late Neolithic (3500 to 2900 cal BC) mortuary monuments and caves, closely situated together in north-central Spain.

The researchers’ isotopic analysis of both megalithic graves and caves suggests a similar C3 plant-based human diet, mostly consisting of wheat and barley, as well as a substantial amount of protein from cattle and sheep. However, the study surprisingly reveals significant carbon isotope differences between people interred in both funerary site-types. These differences seem to be correlated with elevation, temperature, and precipitation, implying that land use was partitioned on a surprisingly local scale. The authors propose two possible explanations. The first is that this division of land could indicate different socioeconomic classes within the same community, with the lower classes being interred in caves with restricted access to agricultural resources, while the individuals of higher status in the community were buried in monumental graves whose construction would involve a considerable investment of labor. Alternatively, they also consider the possibility that this partitioning of the landscape may involve different populations performing different funerary practices and following distinct subsistence economies in some respect.

Further research on tooth dentine and enamel will explore the age at which the isotopic differences first appeared and investigate different patterns of mobility and landscape-use in the study area. This study offers new insights into different mortuary practices and specifically how they related to lifeways, particularly dietary and subsistence practices, and implications for the emergence of socioeconomic inequality in the Western European Neolithic.

“Using carbon and nitrogen stable isotope analysis of human and animal remains, our study has identified meaningful differences between those buried in caves and megalithic graves in the Late Neolithic of north-central Spain,” says Teresa Fernández-Crespo. “This implies that, despite living in close proximity, these communities had distinct lifeways involving a partitioning of the landscape.”

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Megalithic graves analysed (Chabola de la Hechicera), and in the background, the Cantabria mountain range, where the caves included in the study are located. Credit: Teresa Fernández-Crespo / UPV/EHU 

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Article Source: A PLOS ONE news release

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*Fernández-Crespo T, Schulting RJ (2017) Living different lives: Early social differentiation identified through linking mortuary and isotopic variability in Late Neolithic/ Early Chalcolithic north-central Spain. PLoS ONE 12(9): e0177881. 

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