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‘Screaming Woman’ mummy may have died in agony 3,500 years ago

FRONTIERS—In 1935, the Metropolitan Museum of New York led an archaeological expedition to Egypt. In Deir Elbahari near Luxor, the site of ancient Thebes, they excavated the tomb of Senmut, the architect and overseer of royal works – and reputedly, lover – of the famed queen Hatschepsut (1479-1458 BCE). Beneath Senmut’s tomb, they found a separate burial chamber for his mother Hat-Nufer and other, unidentified relatives.

Pushing Back the Timeline on the Earliest Stone Tools

Rising to nearly 6,000 feet above sea level, Mount Homa dominates a Kenyan landscape that features sediments as old as the Miocene epoch a geologic time period that ended more than 5 million years ago. This mountain’s real name, however, is Got Uma or God Marahuma, meaning “famous mountain,” bestowed by the Luo fishing people who have inhabited the surrounding region for centuries. Considered an inactive volcano, Got Uma, or Mount Homa, defines its namesake Peninsula, which extends into Africa’s massive Lake Victoria and helps to define the lake’s Winam Gulf, which laps the peninsula’s shoreline from the north. Though the peninsula, like anywhere else, has a regional and local natural and cultural history that extends back thousands of years, its most recent claim to fame lies in ancient sediments featuring a rich array of fossils that have drawn paleontologists, geologists, archaeologists, and many other scientists to explore and study a remarkable mosaic of prehistory. It is a mosaic that has also included evidence of a hominin presence — deep-time human relatives that have long become extinct.  

Archaeologist Tom Plummer, Professor of Anthropology at Queens College, City University of New York, has been conducting field research on the Homa Peninsula since the 1990’s. Among other things, a record of significant fossil finds of Theropithecus oswaldi monkeys drew him and others to the area, as fossils of these monkeys have historically been frequently found near fossil evidence of hominins. Together with Richard Potts, who directs the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, along with a team of other scientists and universities, he has uncovered robust evidence for hominin activity as far back as over 2 million years ago at key locations across this landscape.  

One of the first “eureka moments” of these discoveries emerged at a place on the northwestern shore of the peninsula.

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View of Mount Homa and surrounding landscape where investigations have taken place. Chip Clark (Smithsonian Institution), Public Domain

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Toolmaking and Butchery at Kanjera South

Early on, Plummer and a team of scientist specialists and excavators began investigating a site designated as Kanjera South, located near the margins of what was, at one time, an ancient lake. Digging methodically through fossil-bearing silts and fine sands, they penetrated several meters of sediment. In the process, they encountered stone artifacts and associated fauna, all revealed within three major beds. (A “bed” being a layer with a defined sequence of related or associated geologic events and fossil occurrences, such as what were initially described in excavations at Olduvai Gorge.) One 169-square meter excavation area alone yielded about 3,700 animal fossils and 2,900 artifacts in a sequence measured 1 meter in depth. Stone artifacts found during the excavation represented, according to Plummer, “one of the largest collections of Oldowan artifacts”* found to date, from anywhere in the world. The first Oldowan stone tools were discovered by archaeologist Louis Leakey in the 1930s at Olduvai Gorge. This very early technology usually consisted of simple cores, choppers, scrapers, awls and burins made of quartz, quartzitebasaltobsidianflint and chert. Early humans produced them by striking a core stone on the edge with a hammerstone to produce a conchoidal fracture with sharp edges and flakes that could be used for a variety of functions, such as cutting meat. Unmodified pieces, called manuports — stones transported from other locations —  have also been found at some sites. Though the quantity and concentration of the Kanjera South finds at this location was significant, it was not altogether precedent-setting, because the Oldowan stone tool industry is considered, Plummer saya, “the oldest geographically widespread and long-lasting technology.”  

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Location of Kanjera along the modern shoreline of Lake Victoria, East Africa. Joseph V. Ferraro, Thomas W. Plummer, Briana L. Pobiner, James S. Oliver, Laura C. Bishop, David R. Braun, Peter W. Ditchfield, John W. Seaman III, Katie M. Binetti, John W. Seaman Jr, Fritz Hertel, Richard Potts,  Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, Wikimedia Commons

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Artifacts made from a representative sample of raw materials from Kanjera. Photo credit: Tom Plummer. See The Hard Stuff of Culture: Oldowan Archaeology at Kanjera South, Kenya, by Tom Plummer, Popular Archaeology, May 30, 2016.

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But there was more. 

Notable from their analysis of the Oldowan artifacts, Plummer and colleagues observed that they had been fashioned from a great variety of raw material sources, including not only local sources of carbonate, limestone, iolite, nephelinite, and fenitized stone, but also from non-local, more remote sources for the quartzite, rhyolite, granite, basalt, and schistose stone. This led to an interesting implication. As stated by Plummer in a 2012 article published in Popular Archaeology Magazine:  

“What we found is that approximately 30% of the artifacts recovered from Kanjera were made from rocks that were transported to the site from conglomerates at least 10-13 km away (Braun et al., 2008)…The finding that there are not nearly enough cores to account for all of the flakes at the site further hints that the artifact sample at Kanjera was part of a larger transport system. It appears that cores were being carried by hominins, for use to dispense flakes…”*

In this sense, the Kanjera site is unusual compared to other Oldowan sites in East Africa and elsewhere. 

“The fact that hominins were investing energy in the transport of hard raw materials, and more efficiently reducing them, suggests that artifact manufacture was of great importance in their day-to-day lives,” wrote Plummer in The Hard Stuff of Culture.* 

But why?

Analysis of the faunal remains at the site has given some clues. The site investigators recorded a comparatively significant number of associated bones of small antelopes about the size of or slightly larger than today’s Grants Gazelles. Bone type representation accumulated at the location suggested complete carcasses were brought to the site. Moreover, use-wear analysis of the associated artifacts, as well as damage analysis of the bones, indicated intentional cut-marks using the stone tools.

“Damage to the fossils indicates that hominins were using stone tools to slice meat off of bones, and to break bones open for their fatty marrow,” wrote Plummer.* Carnivore toothmarks were also found on the bones but most of those marks were made after the cut marks, suggesting carnivore scavenging after the hominins had completed processing the carcasses.

“The overall pattern of hominin access to the complete carcasses of small antelopes may be the signal of hominin hunting,” suggests Plummer. “If so, this would be the oldest evidence of hunting to date in the archaeological record.”[statement made based on fossil and artifact discoveries made as documented in the record by 2015]*

Moreover, use-wear analysis of the artifacts also suggested that these hominins were not limited to a carnivorous diet. They were processing a variety of plant tissues, including tubers and wood. 

A new window on early hominin behavior was beginning to emerge.

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A small bovid metatarsal, bearing cut marks; from bed KS-2 of Kanjera, an archaeological and paleoanthropological site on the southern shores of the Winam Gulf of Lake Victoria, Homa Bay County, Kenya (scale: 1 cm). Joseph V. Ferraro, Thomas W. Plummer, Briana L. Pobiner, James S. Oliver, Laura C. Bishop, David R. Braun, Peter W. Ditchfield, John W. Seaman III, Katie M. Binetti, John W. Seaman Jr, Fritz Hertel, Richard Potts. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, Wikimedia Commons

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A small bovid femur with numerous cut marks. From bed KS-2 of Kanjera. Joseph V. Ferraro, Thomas W. Plummer, Briana L. Pobiner, James S. Oliver, Laura C. Bishop, David R. Braun, Peter W. Ditchfield, John W. Seaman III, Katie M. Binetti, John W. Seaman Jr, Fritz Hertel, Richard Potts. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, Wikimedia Commons

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A shaft fragment from an ungulate leg bone showing a single, deep stone tool cutmark and carnivore toothmarks. One toothmark overlays the cutmark, indicating that the hominins had stripped meat off the bone prior to carnivore gnawing. Photo credit: Tom Plummer. See The Hard Stuff of Culture: Oldowan Archaeology at Kanjera South, Kenya, by Tom Plummer, Popular Archaeology, May 30, 2016.

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Retiming the Horizon at Nyayanga

While the discoveries and implications of Kanjera South were remarkable enough, Plummer and his colleagues soon found that there was much more to add to the story when they turned their attention to other sites west and south of Kanjera. Those efforts included a site known as Nyayanga (named after a nearby beach), located in the foothills of Mount Homa, a few hundred meters from the Lake Victoria shoreline. 

It came on a personal referral. “Peter Onyango, one of the excavators working with us [at Kanjera South], told us that there were tools and fossils like we were finding at Kanjera near his home at a place called Nyayanga,” said Plummer. “So he showed us the place, and we began to research the exposures there.”

Plummer knew he faced a few given complications with the site location. “Because the area is densely populated with people and livestock, trampling can damage and disperse bones and stone tools as they erode out of the outcrop,” he explained. “Also, heavy rain during the wet season(s) can rapidly erode sediments of interest and wash away important fossils and artifacts.”

With these challenges, excavations began in earnest in 2015. Digging in 1 meter squares, they recorded and mapped all objects and fossils measuring greater than 2 centimeters with a laser theodolite. “All of the artifacts from the most ancient sediments at Nyayanga (Nyayanga Beds 1-4) were Oldowan tools,” said Plummer. The team recovered a total of 330 identifiable Oldowan artifacts, 195 from the surface and 135 in situ within the stratigraphic context. Although the assemblage was generally similar to those found at other locations, this one was distinctly characterized with a high frequency (20.6 %) of cores and a comparatively larger percentage of artifacts showing signs of percussive activity. The tools were manufactured from a variety of different raw materials, including quartz, quartzite and rhyolite. 

A total of 1,776 bones were recovered and recorded, combined from two excavations (excavations 3 and 5). A large percentage of the bone remains were attributed to hippopotamids (hippos) at 57.1% and 61.9 %, respectively. Most significantly, Plummer’s team detected clear evidence of butchery among these large fauna. At least two hippos were recovered from excavation 3, the bones of one individual hippo associated with as many as 42 stone tools, including several in direct physical contact with the bones. One rib fragment featured a clear cut-mark with characteristics typically made by a stone tool, and three stone flakes exhibited use-wear patterns identifiable to butchery activity. In excavation 5, another array of bones attributable to a single individual hippo were recovered in association with 14 stone tool artifacts. Faunal remains of other animals were also found showing clear damage attributable to stone tools. Evidence pointed to hominin consumption of both meat and bone marrow. 

But stone tool use was not confined to butchery activity at the site. “Our team’s analyses of stone tool butchery marks on fossils, and microscopic wear formed on stone tools used to cut and pound things, indicate that a diverse array of plant and animal foods was acquired and processed by the Nyayanga toolmakers,” says Plummer. The hominins who occupied the site, in other words, did not subsist entirely on megafauna. They had a diverse diet. 

Moreover, analysis of soil carbonates, tooth enamel isotopes, and taxon in the area indicated that these hominins subsisted in a grassy woodland consisting of warm-season grasses along a stream channel and fresh-water springs within an overall savannah-like environment, a setting not unlike those found at other Oldowan sites such as Ledi-Geraru and Mille-Logya in Ethiopia. Such a habitat would have provided the hominins at this location with a diverse range of potable water, animal and plant food sources, and shelter.

What stood out most from the finds at Nyayanga, however, revolved around three eye-brow raising discoveries — the date range of the finds, the hominin fossil evidence, and the location of the finds… 

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Cover Image, Top Left: Examples of an Oldowan percussive tool, core and flakes from Nyayanga. T.W. Plummer, J.S. Oliver, and E. M. Finestone, Homa Peninsula Paleoanthropology Project

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Humans are born to run.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA – DAVIS—The 2024 Summer Olympics are in full swing. One of the marquee events is of course the marathon, a grueling test of fitness and athleticism. 

When it comes to endurance running, humans are among the very top mammals in their athletic prowess. While we may not be the best sprinters in the animal kingdom, we can run steadily for long distances, even in hot weather. Our locomotor muscles are dominated by slow-twitch, fatigue-resistant fibers and our unique ability to sweat allows our bodies to effectively dissipate heat.

Humans are so good at endurance running, it seems we were born to do it. But why?

A theory of endurance

In 1984, biologist David Carrier proposed the endurance pursuit hypothesis to explain why humans are such good long-distance runners. According to the theory, endurance running traits in humans evolved to allow us to run down large game animals through persistence hunting.

Twenty years later, Carrier’s theory was expanded upon by scientists Dennis Bramble and Daniel Lieberman, who highlighted the physiological traits conducive to endurance running. They proposed that such traits first appeared in the Homo genus nearly 2 million years ago and “may have been instrumental in the evolution of the human body form.”

The endurance pursuit hypothesis, however, isn’t without its skeptics.

“There are two reservations that have always clung to this hypothesis,” said Bruce Winterhalder, professor emeritus in the UC Davis Department of Anthropology and Graduate Group in Ecology. “One is that running is more costly than walking, so based on a simple cost-benefit analysis, it doesn’t look like an efficient way of hunting.”

“And then secondly, we have some examples of contemporary hunter-gatherers practicing endurance pursuits but probably less than a dozen cases,” he said. “For the skeptics, endurance pursuits can’t have been that important to hunting evolution in the Paleolithic if it’s not that important to hunter-gatherers now.”

But in a recent study* appearing in Nature Human Behaviour, Winterhalder and paleoanthropologist Eugène Morin, of Trent University, combine mathematical modeling and a multi-year, ethnohistoric investigation of first-hand accounts of endurance pursuits to bolster support for Carrier’s hypothesis.

Sifting through history

According to Winterhalder, the recent availability of thousands of digitized accounts written by explorers, missionaries and officials combined with analytical software capable of sifting through them was key to uncovering examples of endurance pursuits throughout history.

“We have software that allows us to search for information that dwarfs what we could do if we were trying to read through all the possible sources ourselves,” Winterhalder said.

Thanks to this technology, Winterhalder and Morin uncovered 391 descriptions of hunts, dating from 1527 through the early 20th century, that matched endurance pursuit tactics. Accounts originated from 272 locations around the world, which suggests that endurance pursuit hunting was widely practiced and occurred in diverse environments.

Analyzing the data

Across the historical data, endurance pursuits followed a similar trajectory: hunters encounter a prey animal; a pursuit occurs (with the prey animal rapidly outdistancing the hunters); the prey animal pauses to recuperate after exhausting themselves (allowing the slower-paced hunters to catch up); the prey animal flees again; and the cycle repeats until the animal is completely exhausted and overtaken.

Within that common pattern, tactics differed.   

“There are a fair number of cases in which these pursuits are done by teams, by relay. We also have cases where there’s an individual who will climb a hill nearby and use hand signals to indicate where the animal is going, so the person following can take shortcuts and save energy,” Winterhalder said.

This cooperation during endurance pursuit hunting hints at a social element related to running in humans. According to Winterhalder, exhibiting such athletic prowess could have been a way for males to showcase their value among the community, elevating their social status or chances of finding mates.  

In a follow-up study, Winterhalder and Morin plan to further examine female participation in endurance running. While instances of female participation only occurred in about 3-4% of the accounts in the study’s dataset, Winterhalder said that doesn’t necessarily mean females were not good runners.

“In a fair number of cases, we did find that there are festivals, feasts and ritual events that involve running contests,” Winterhalder said. “In cases where we find mentions of rituals or games, the participants generally are women, men and children.”   

It also doesn’t mean that women weren’t involved in hunts as recent research shows “evidence that early women were also hunting.”  

Backing it up with math

Since his graduate student days at Cornell University, Winterhalder has specialized in adapting mathematical models devised by biologists for calculating the value of pursuing game versus the time and energy costs.

For this latest study, Winterhalder and Morin used the models to account for increasing velocity during game pursuits. He and Morin then compared return rates from endurance pursuit hunts to other common foraging methods.

“We found that in contexts like high heat or a substrate that impedes the animal, such as crusted snow, the net return rate of food acquisition from endurance pursuits can match or exceed that of other methods of prey acquisition. The chance of pursuit failure appears to diminish, and exhausted prey are safer to approach. For early humans without ballistic weaponry, these are significant advantages,” Winterhalder said.

Winterhalder hopes the research will generate more interest in the scientific community about the origins of our running gait and, possibly, why some people find the activity to be incredibly satisfying, à la the proverbial “runner’s high.”

“To run long distances, to have an evolved gait that’s uniquely imbued with stamina is unusual in the animal world,” Winterhalder said. “If that inspires you to go for a run, great.”

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA – DAVIS news release.

The Great Maya Tombstone

Freelance writer, researcher and photographer, Georges Fery (georgefery.com) addresses topics from history, culture, and beliefs to daily living of ancient and today’s indigenous societies of Mesoamerica and South America. His articles are published online at travelthruhistory.com, ancient-origins.net and popular-archaeology.com, and in the quarterly magazine Ancient American (ancientamerican.com). In the U.K. his articles are found in mexicolore.co.uk.

The author is a fellow of the Institute of Maya Studies instituteofmayastudies.org, Miami, FL and The Royal Geographical Society, London, U.K. (rgs.org). He is a member in good standing with the Maya Exploration Center, Austin, TX (mayaexploration.org) the Archaeological Institute of America, Boston, MA (archaeological.org), NFAA-Non Fiction Authors Association (nonfictionauthrosassociation.com) and the National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC. (americanindian.si.edu).

The iconography of the Maya tombstone in the Temple of the Inscriptions has raised more questions than well-founded answers. A close look at the tombstone, its setting and history, may help understand the Maya timeless message about life and death. The Temple is the final resting place of K’inich Janahb’ Pakal Ahaw, Lord of the B’aakal kingdom at Lakamha’, near today’s Palenque in Chiapas, Mexico, where he was born on March 13, 603. From the end of the fifth to the late ninth century, Lakamha’ was an important metropolis and a major regional player in politics, trade, and architecture. Pakal ruled the kingdom from 615 to 682, making him one of the longest-reigning Maya monarchs in history………..

 

As holy lord of the B’aakal kingdom, Pakal was supreme in secular and religious matters, superseding the high priest and priestess, for the prefix K’inich means Lord, while Ahaw connotes Holy. The Maya called their kings ch’ul ahaw or “lords of the life force,” for the universal power vested in them by the gods. He, and he alone, was anointed by the gods of the unifying forces of light of the Otherworld and those of darkness of the Underworld. In the Maya cosmology, these “worlds” were understood as “complementary opposites” for, paradoxically, both were in turn friendly and hostile over humans and nature. For these reasons, they needed to be pacified through rituals at dedicated times such as, among others, planting and harvesting and important communal milestones. 

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Temple of the Inscriptions  @georgefery.com

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In the last decade of his life, Pakal and his architects worked on his funerary monument, the Temple of the Inscriptions, facing the ancient city’s central plaza.

The temple is the most remarkable sanctuary ever built in Mesoamerica. The eight-level funerary pyramid, and the temple at its summit making up its ninth level, was designed by Pakal and his architects, who started its construction around 675, when Pakal was seventy-two years old. The structure was completed about five years before his death on August 8, 683. The temple at its top was dedicated on December 23, 688, by his son and heir, K’inich K’an B’ahlam (635-702), in time for his father’s funeral. The stepped pyramid’s foundations reach over ten feet below the central plaza’s grounds. The structure was originally covered with plaster that may have been painted red, for remains of pigment were found; of note is the absence of carvings on its stones. The name Temple of the Inscriptions comes from three large limestone panels found on the walls of the temple’s front corridor. In the past, the stepped pyramid was known as “Temple of the Laws” because on those panels are 617-glyphs that narrate Pakal’s achievements and proclaim his place in eternity. 

The six piers atop the pyramid are adorned with stucco scenes. As noted by scholars, “we may never know what Pakal intended to display on the piers, for K’an B’ahlam, who completed the temple after his father’s death, took this public location to show the rituals in which he became heir to the throne and proved his divine nature.” In ancient Maya cosmology “the pyramid replicates the“First-True-Mountain of the World Rising out of the Primordial Waters of Creation” (Schele, Matthews, 1993, 1998). The crypt, located in the deepest recess of the pyramid, is associated with caves perceived as portals to the water world, for water is integral to the belief in the beginning of life in Maya cosmology, where the “Otherworld” points to a mythic world “above” the human plane, abode of the sun, beneficent gods, and life. Its opposite, the “Underworld” or world “below” is associated with sunset, the moon, malevolent gods, and death. The world of the living, between these two man-made worlds, is the “Middle World.” As Bassie-Sweet point out, “One of the most important structuring principles in Maya worldview was complementary or contrasting opposites, such as male/female, right/left, east/west, day/night, up/down or north/south” (2008). 

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Temple of the Inscriptions, Cutaway  @pueblosoriginarios.com

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To build the pyramid, not only did architects, master stonemasons and carvers answer Pakal’s architectural requirements, they also followed a sacred allegorical pattern that was beyond their professional expertise, helped in their tasks by calendar priests, knowledge keepers and wizards. For the burial ceremony, Pakal and his chu’lel – his “divine life force” or “blessed substance of the living universe” – were first brought from the palace up the pyramid’s front stairs. The stairs of the pyramid follow, as does the pyramid’s architecture, the four sacred directions of the Maya equilateral cross, the wacah chan or “world tree.” Each arm of the cross is associated with colors, deities, and functions. The pyramid faces northward onto Palenque’s main plaza. Climbing the stairway up to the temple, Pakal and his retinue faced South>yellow-Nohol (K’an Xib’Chac, germ of life, origin of the winds). After prayers, rituals, and invocations in the temple, Pakal’s body and his chu’lel’ were carried down the three sets of the intramural stairways leading down to the crypt. The first flight of stairs followed the path of the Sun, so Pakal and his retinue walked down heading East>redLakin (Chac Xib’Chac, sunrise, dawn). At mid-level, the second set of stairs sharply turns West>black-Ek (Ek Xib’Chac, sunset, dusk). Pakal’s last short five steps stairway into the crypt led him North>whiteXaman (Zac Xib’Chac, the resting place of the winds). 

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First Flight of Stairs  @georgefery.com

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When Pakal was placed in his coffin, his head pointing north, he transitioned from a divine king to a celestial ancestor. As the last rituals and invocations were completed, the crypt’s massive triangular stone door was closed. In his coffin, however, Pakal was never far from the living and, for this purpose, had a narrow conduit called the Tz’at Na Kan, or “Serpent of the Wise Ones,” built to fit the stairwells. It was called a psychoduct by the renowned Mexican archaeologist Alberto Ruz Lhuillier (1906-1979), who discovered the stairwells in 1950 and the crypt in 1952. The serpent’s head is made of a mix of limestone plaster and was attached to the bottom of the sarcophagus which connected with the “psychoduct,” a rectangular limestone molding outside the door, matching each stair with a hollow round tubelike center that ended below the floor of the temple. It was the Tzat Na Kan, through which Pakal and the priests established soul-to-soul contact, not soul-to-mind, at dedicated times. This feature is found in other structures at Palenque such as in Temples XIII and XVIII, albeit not so elaborate. They each have a tube-like conduit that runs vertically from the crypt to below the temple floor, and a small hole on the sarcophagus lid was drilled at the level of the face to let the ch’ulel’ pass. These funnels bolstered the belief that the individual in the grave was still socially alive after death, with prerogatives attached to his spiritual powers, for ch’ulel’ never dies. It was then accepted, as it is today in most beliefs and religions, that a person has a body, and a soul. It was, however, the deified chu’lel’ that was the object of veneration. Upon death, while the body’s soft tissues decayed, its chu’lel remained within the skeletal bones for the duration of the person’s past life and was then reunited with the ancestors to be assigned to another life. 

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Cover Image, Top Left: Pakal.  Jebulon, Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, Wikimedia Commons

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Arrival of agriculture in western Europe

PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES—A study* finds favorable climate and grain conditions at the dawn of agriculture in western Europe. The spread of agriculture throughout early civilizations is a landmark event in human history, but the details of early agricultural conditions and practices remain unclear. José L. Araus and colleagues examined the La Draga archaeological site in Girona, Spain; the site represents early agriculture between 5300 and 4800 BC. Carbon isotope analysis of oak samples from the site suggested relatively wet climate conditions. The authors also analyzed the carbon and nitrogen isotopes, as well as the reconstructed weight, of wheat and barley grains. Next, the authors compared the findings on the La Draga grains with those from multiple other Neolithic sites from the western Mediterranean region. The analysis suggested that the inhabitants of La Draga operated extensive agricultural operations, rather than small gardens, under a wet climate and with moderate use of manure as fertilizer. Analysis of grain size and spike morphology suggested that the ancient plant characteristics were likely similar to those of modern-day crops. According to the authors, the favorable climate conditions, along with the well-developed crop traits, suggest that agriculture was likely consolidated when it arrived in western Europe.

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Pictured are sickles, digging sticks, and an adze recovered from La Draga (Banyoles, Spain). Salvador Comalat, Archaeological Museum of Banyoles

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Pictured is the excavation process at La Draga (Banyoles, Spain). Antonio Palomo

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Article Source: PNAS news release.

*“Isotope and morphometrical evidence reveals the technological package associated with agriculture adoption in western Europe,” by José L. Araus et al., https://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.2401065121

Cover Image, Top Left: The early grain/crops evidenced at the site were similar to that of today. Nickype, Pixabay

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Rock art and archaeological record reveal man’s complex relationship with Amazonian animals

UNIVERSITY OF EXETER—Rock art explored by archaeologists in the Colombian Amazon has provided an insight into the complex relationship between the earliest settlers on the continent and the animals they encountered.

Spectacular ochre paintings of a wide variety of animal species, including depictions of animals and humans transforming into one another, indicate the rich mythology that guided generations of indigenous Amazonians.

And while the images found adorning the rocky outcrop of Cerro Azul in the Serranía de la Lindosa have yet to be accurately dated, associated evidence of human activity suggests they are likely to have served as galleries for thousands of years, as far back as 10,500BC.

The research, led by an international team from the University of Exeter, Universidad de Antioquia, Medellín and the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, and published in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, integrated zooarchaeological analysis of animal remains recovered from nearby excavations with analysis of the artistic depictions. The animal remains revealed a diverse diet, including fish, a range of small to large mammals, and reptiles, including turtle, snake, and crocodile. However, the proportions of animal bones do not match the proportional representation of animals, suggesting the artists did not just paint what they ate. 

“These rock art sites include the earliest evidence of humans in western Amazonia, dating back 12,500 years ago,” says Dr Mark Robinson, Associate Professor of Archaeology in Exeter’s Department of Archaeology and History. “As such, the art is an amazing insight into how these first settlers understood their place in the world and how they formed relationships with animals. The context demonstrates the complexity of Amazonian relationships with animals, both as a food source but also as revered beings, which had supernatural connections and demanded complex negotiations from ritual specialists.” 

Archaeologists have documented several significant rock art sites in the region since a peace agreement between the Colombian government and FARC in 2016 paved the way for a safe resumption of scientific investigations. Cerro Azul, a free-standing table-top hill located close to the Guayabero River in the northwest of the Department of Guaviare, was among them. There, 16 ‘panels’ of ochre drawings were found, several of which could only be accessed via strenuous climbing and the use of ropes.

The research team, which included academics from the UK, Colombia, and Germany, chose to focus on six panels in detail. These ranged from the 40m-by-10m El Más Largo, which contained more than 1,000 images, to the much smaller, 10m-by-6m panel called Principal, many of whose 244 images are extremely well-preserved in vibrant red. 

A total of 3,223 images were catalogued using drone photogrammetry and traditional photography. The images were categorised by their form, with figurative images being the most commonly occurring, contributing 58% of the total. More than half of these related to animals. At least 22 different animals were identified, including deer, birds, peccary, lizards, turtles, and tapir. 

Although fish remains are abundant in the archaeological remains, their appearance in the art is limited to just two panels, in what appear to be fishing scenes. Notable by their absence were big cats, despite their position as apex predators and the evidence of artwork at other Colombian sites. The researchers speculate that the artists were potentially restricted from depicting powerful beasts, such as the jaguar. While images of figures combining human and animal characteristics reveal a complex mythology of transformation between animal and human states that is still present within modern Amazonian communities. 

The diverse array of animals represented in the art and the archaeological remains demonstrates a broad understanding and exploitation of a multitude of environments in the region, including savannah, flooded forests and rivers. 

“The Indigenous people of Cerro Azul and the surrounding lands hunted and depicted a diverse array of animals from different ecologies – from aquatic fish to arboreal monkeys; terrestrial deer to aerial birds, both nocturnal and diurnal,” says Dr Javier Aceituno, of Universidad de Antioquia, Medellín. “They had intimate knowledge of the various habitats in the region and possessed the relevant skills to track and hunt animals and harvest plants from each, as part of a broad subsistence strategy.”

“Our approach reveals differences between what indigenous communities exploited for food and what is conceptually important to represent – and not represent – in art,” concludes Professor Jose Iriarte, also of Exeter. “Though we cannot be certain what meaning these images have, they certainly do offer greater nuance to our understanding of the power of myths in indigenous communities. They are particularly revealing when it comes to more cosmological aspects of Amazonian life, such as what is considered taboo, where power resides, and how negotiations with the supernatural were conducted.” 

Animals of the Serranía de la Lindosa: Exploring representation and categorisation in the rock art and zooarchaeological remains of the Colombian Amazon, has been published in the latest edition of the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. 10.1016/j.jaa.2024.101613 

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Cerro Azul with the location of the rock art panels and the excavation site analyzed in this study. University of Exeter

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Images of potential a) fishing; b, c, e) hunting; d) monkey leaping/transforming sequence; f) and an unknown animal with circular feet and curved head elements. University of Exeter

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Potential therianthropic images, as suggested by Indigenous informants: a) avian/human at Las Dantas, b) lizard with round, human-like head at Currunchos, c) bird/plant/human with penis at Principal, d) sloth/human at Demoledores, e) Unknown quadruped with tail and penis at Reserva, f) Deer/human at Principal. University of Exeter

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Principal – one of the panels studied as part of the project. University of Exeter

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF EXETER news release.

The emergence of humans coincides with an extinction rate surge for proboscideans, the group that includes wooly mammoths

AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE (AAAS)—Proboscidean species – animals including modern elephants and extinct wooly mammoths – experienced a five-fold increase in extinction rates when early humans appeared, according to a new model-based study* involving fossil data. The work also ties the subsequent rise of modern Homo sapiens with a 17-fold increase in proboscidean extinction rates. Fossil records hold clues about how speciation and extinction have influenced ecosystem turnover throughout millennia. Yet, these impacts have proven hard to model. Most attempts to do so have only incorporated single predictors, such as one environmental change or the acquisition of a single trait, which does not reflect the multi-faceted nature of evolution. Here, Torsten Hauffe and colleagues present a new neural network-based statistical approach that can use fossil records to yield a more nuanced portrayal of species diversification. They fed the model pre-existing information about 2,118 fossils belonging to 175 proboscidean species that lived from 35 million years ago to 10,000 years ago. The neural network assessed 17 environmental and morphological factors, such as tusk characteristics and body size, and incorporated data about relevant paleotemperatures and paleo-environments. It also considered human interactions, including the arrival of early humans in the Pleistocene roughly 1.8 million years ago and the emergence of modern humans around 129,000 years ago. The findings pointed towards dietary adaptation and flexibility as a driver of speciation, particularly at the end of the Neogene a little under 3 million years ago. Most notably, results showed that proboscidean extinctions were very strongly affected by human activity and secondarily influenced by geographic distribution and dental morphologies. “We found that while humans exhibit the greatest impact in the past ca. 120,000 years, our results also point to a weaker yet significant influence of the human lineage at earlier times, thus supporting other studies suggesting a long-lasting detrimental anthropogenic effect on biodiversity,” the authors conclude.

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Many scientists suggest that the wooly mammoth went extinct at least in part due to overhunting by prehistoric humans. Kyraxys, Pixabay

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Cook like a Neanderthal: Scientists try to replicate ancient butchering methods to learn how Neanderthals ate birds

FRONTIERS—It’s hard to know what Neanderthals ate: food preparation, especially when it comes to smaller items like birds, can leave few archaeological traces. But understanding their diets is critical to understanding these incredibly adaptable hominins, who thrived for hundreds of thousands of years in wildly varied environments. To learn what food preparation could look like in the archaeological record, scientists tried cooking like Neanderthals.

“Using a flint flake for butchering required significant precision and effort, which we had not fully valued before this experiment,” said Dr Mariana Nabais of the Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social in Spain, lead author of the article in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology. “The flakes were sharper than we initially thought, requiring careful handling to make precise cuts without injuring our own fingers. These hands-on experiments emphasized the practical challenges involved in Neanderthal food processing and cooking, providing a tangible connection to their daily life and survival strategies.”

You are what you eat

Although the big game hunting practiced by Neanderthals is well known, we know less about the birds that some Neanderthals hunted. But recent discoveries and new techniques allow us to investigate this more deeply. By testing food preparation methods that Neanderthals could have used, to see what traces these might leave on bones and how those traces compare to damage caused by natural processes or the actions of other animals, the scientists created an experimental database that can be compared to real archaeological sites.

The scientists collected five wild birds that had died of natural causes from the Wildlife Ecology, Rehabilitation and Surveillance Centre (CERVAS) in Gouveia, Portugal. They chose two carrion crows, two collared doves, and a wood pigeon, which are similar to species that Neanderthals ate, and selected cooking methods using archaeological evidence and ethnographic data.

All the birds were de-feathered by hand. A carrion crow and a collared dove were then butchered raw, using a flint flake. The remaining three were roasted over hot coals until cooked, then butchered, which the scientists found much easier than butchering the raw birds.

“Roasting the birds over the coals required maintaining a consistent temperature and carefully monitoring the cooking duration to avoid overcooking the meat,” said Nabais. “Maybe because we de-feathered the birds before cooking, the roasting process was much quicker than we anticipated. In fact, we spent more time preparing the coals than on the actual cooking, which took less than ten minutes.”

Putting flesh on prehistoric bones

The scientists cleaned and dried the bones, then examined them microscopically for cutmarks, breaks, and burns. They also examined the flint flake they had used for evidence of wear and tear. Although they had used their hands for most of the butchery, the raw birds required considerable use of the flint flake, which now had small half-moon scars on the edge. While the cuts used to remove meat from the raw birds did not leave traces on the bones, the cuts aimed at tendons left marks similar to those on birds found at archaeological sites.

The bones from the roasted birds were more brittle: some had shattered and couldn’t be recovered. Nearly all of them had brown or black burns consistent with controlled exposure to heat. Black stains inside some bones suggested that the contents of the inner cavity had also burned. This evidence sheds light not just on how Neanderthal food preparation could have worked, but also how visible that preparation might be in the archaeological record. Although roasting makes it easier to access meat, the increased fragility of the bones means the leftovers might not be found by archaeologists.

However, the scientists cautioned that this research should be expanded to gain a fuller understanding of Neanderthal diets. Future studies should include more species of small prey, as well as processing birds for non-food products, like talons or feathers.

“The sample size is relatively small, consisting of only five bird specimens, which may not fully represent the diversity of bird species that Neanderthals might have used,” noted Nabais. “Secondly, the experimental conditions, although carefully controlled, cannot completely replicate the exact environmental and cultural contexts of Neanderthal life. Further research with larger samples, varied species, and more diverse experimental conditions is necessary to expand upon these results.”

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A scientist defeathers one of the birds. Image by Dr Mariana Nabais. Dr Mariana Nabais.

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Bones recovered from the birds. Image by Dr Mariana Nabais. Dr Mariana Nabais.

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Usewear on the flake used for butchery. Image by Dr Marina Igreja. Dr Marina Igreja.

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Article Source: Frontiers news release.

Hunter-gatherers kept an ‘orderly home’ in the earliest known British dwelling, study shows

UNIVERSITY OF YORK—Archaeological evidence from the world-famous Mesolithic site of Star Carr in North Yorkshire has shown that hunter-gatherers likely kept an orderly home by creating ‘zones’ for particular domestic activities.

Discoveries in the Shadow of the Step Pyramid

Zahi Abass Hawass is an Egyptian archaeologist, Egyptologist, and former Minister of State for Antiquities Affairs, serving twice. He has also worked at archaeological sites in the Nile Delta, the Western Desert, and the Upper Nile Valley.

Editor’s Note: Here, Dr. Zahi Hawass, arguably Egypt’s most famous and celebrated archaeologist and egyptologist, recounts his recent discoveries at Gisr el-Mudir, also known as the Great Enclosure, one of the oldest stone structures known to date in Egypt, located at Saqqara and only a few hundred meters west of the Step Pyramid. Leading an excavation team, he uncovered evidence of  a large cemetery consisting of tombs dated to the 5th and 6th Dynasties of Egypt’s Old Kingdom. What follows is his narrative in his own words:

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Our recent excavation at Gisr el-Mudir in the shadow of the Step Pyramid of Djoser, Saqqara, has revealed many amazing new discoveries, including:  The recovery of nine beautiful statues of Messi, three statues and a false door of Fetek, another triad statue, a sealed sarcophagus containing a mummy covered with gold, and two more false doors and two additional tombs dated to the Old Kingdom.

 

A History of Discovery

The most important archaeologist who worked at this site was Zakaria Ghoniem, who discovered the pyramid complex of Skhem-Khet of the 3rd dynasty. This pyramid complex has been dated back to about 4800 years ago. While investigating in 1954, he explored the burial chamber of the pyramid, and found a completely sealed sarcophagus made of calcite alabaster. This was contemporaneous with a discovery made at Giza by Kamal El-Mallakh south of the great pyramid of Khufu — solar boats, found in two sealed pits with intact wood. (Kamal El-Mallakh was the architect who worked at Giza before he moved to work as a reporter in akhbar newspaper.) One of the boats was restored by the famous restorer, Hag Ahmed Youssef.  Egypt’s then president Gamal Abdel-Nasser came to see the discovery of the boat based on a request from the famous writer and newspaper editor Mohamed Hussanien Heikal. Then, the delegation requested Nasser to go to Gisr El-Modier at Saqqara for the opening of the sarcophagus live in front of the press. Upon opening the sarcophagus, they found it empty. 

This incident taught me a good lesson that I employed at Abousir. Here, Mirsolque Verner of the Czech Republic found an intact tomb of iuf-aa, who was anciently the director of the palace at the site, dated back to about 500 B.C. I called the Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni and told him about the discovery. He said that he would come with the press to open it live. I went to Verner and we brought the workmen and moved the tomb’s first sarcophagus, which weighed about 20 tons, and found under it another inscribed sarcophagus weighing about 10 tons. After moving the second one we found the third one, weighing 5 tons, which was inscribed, and then moved it, finding a beautiful mummy covered in green beads within a coffin. Then we placed everything back and asked the minister to come with the press and we officially opened all the sarcophagi, never having told him that we had already opened all the sarcophagi previously. 

I began excavations at Gisr el-Mudir and found many Old Kingdom tombs, the most important of which was the tomb of the physician Qar. This tomb was small but beautifully decorated.  Inside we found a group of surgical tools and outside about 30 Late Period statues, one of them belonging to Imhotep and the others for gods and goddesses. All of these objects are now inside the Imhotep museum in Saqqara. We stopped the excavation in 2011.  

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Excavations west of the Step Pyramid in Saqarra are revealing remarkable new finds. Pinzino, Pixabay

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Map of the location of Gisr el-Mudir, the Great Enclosure, relative to the other major structures at Saqarra. Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

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New Excavations

The most recent excavations began with funding from Clovis Rossillon, who hails from a wealthy french family. Beginning in 2021 until January 2023, important major new discoveries were made. The first was a cache of nine beautiful statues, found southeast of Mastaba 4. 

All images courtesy Zahi Hawass, unless otherwise noted.

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Yin, The Lost City of Kings

Anyang, located in China’s great North Plain, is a modern industrial city of almost 5.5 million people. It is known economically for the production of iron and steelcoal coking, and clothing production. But long before the modern city arose, the city landscape hosted an ancient urban presence that in time ranked among the world’s great Bronze Age centers. Clues to its remains first began to emerge over a hundred years ago….. 

Written on Bone

For hundreds of years, farmers dug them up in their fields near the village of Xiaotun, a small village near Anyang and about 500 kilometers south of Beijing. They were fragments of ox scapula and turtle shell. The farmers sold them to apothecaries, where they were ground into powder for use as tonics or medicines for curing malaria and treating wounds.

But there was another peculiar thing about these bone fragments.

Many of them featured mysterious inscribed markings. In 1899, several of them fell into the hands of Wang Yirong, who was the chancellor of the Imperial Academy in Beijing at the time. Wang collected Chinese bronzes, some of which were Zhou dynasty bronzes inscribed with what he believed to be ancient Chinese writing. The markings on the bone fragments were tantalizingly similar. So similar, in fact, that it wasn’t long before the bone artifacts hit the antiquities trade with a storm and eventually came to the attention of James Mellon Menzies, who conducted the first scientific excavations of the bones, including decipherment. He published the first scientific study of the bones in 1917, which included 2,369 drawings and inscriptions, and eventually amassed a collection of as many as 35,000 objects related to what became known as the “oracle bones”. 

Excavation and Discovery of the Lost City

More important than the oracle bones was the drive to find answers to the questions of who made them and why. Scholars were keen to know their context, so in 1928 an excavation team led by Li Ji of China’s Academia Sinica began work near the village of Xiaotun close to modern Anyang, with the initial financial backing and support of the Freer Gallery of Art of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Excavations under Li Ji’s directorship continued with seasons over a 9-year period, recovering more oracle bone artifacts, the decipherment of which showed that the bone inscriptions represented divinations performed by an ancient royal household. Further excavation revealed the remains of a major Bronze Age city, eventually identified by archaeologists as Yinxu, the last capital city of the Shang Dynasty. It was a remarkable discovery, as before the excavation, even the very existence of the Shang Dynasty was in question. Clues to the Shang Dynasty were known only through historical documents. This dynasty was more than a myth.

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Pompeii skeleton discovery shows another natural disaster may have made Vesuvius eruption even more deadly

FRONTIERS—Almost 2,000 years ago, Pliny the Younger wrote letters describing a shaking ground as Vesuvius erupted. Now, a collaborative study* led by researchers from the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV) and Pompeii Archaeological Park has shed light on the effects of seismicity associated with the 79CE eruption.

The study is the first to tackle the complex task of reporting on the effects of co-occurring earthquakes. This is tricky due to the possibility of volcanic and seismic effects happening concurrently or in quick succession, meaning volcanic effects can overshadow effects caused by earthquakes and vice versa.

“These complexities are like a jigsaw puzzle in which all the pieces must fit together to unravel the complete picture,” said Dr Domenico Sparice, a volcanologist at INGV-Osservatorio Vesuviano and first author of the Frontiers in Earth Science study. “We proved that seismicity during the eruption played a significant role in the destruction of Pompeii and, possibly, influenced the choices of the Pompeiians who faced an inevitable death.”

Clues to a deadly collapse

“Correctly recognizing the cause-effect relationship is essential to reconstruct the interplay between volcanic and seismic phenomena, and their effects on buildings and humans,” added co-author Dr Fabrizio Galadini, a geologist and senior researcher at INGV.

During excavations in the ‘Casa dei Pittori al Lavoro’, the researchers noticed something off about the collapsed buildings. “We found peculiar characteristics that were inconsistent with the effects of volcanic phenomena described in the volcanological literature devoted to Pompeii. There had to be a different explanation,” said co-author Dr Mauro Di Vito, a volcanologist and director of INGV-Osservatorio Vesuviano.

When the researchers found two skeletons with severe fracture and trauma injuries, they were even more motivated to figure out the reason.

Painters at work

The eruption caught Pompeiians in the midst of daily life. For about 18 hours, pumice lapilli – small rock and ash particles– fell on the city, causing people to seek shelter. When the eruption paused, inhabitants who’d survived may have thought themselves safe – until strong earthquakes started.

“The people who did not flee their shelters were possibly overwhelmed by earthquake-induced collapses of already overburdened buildings. This was the fate of the two individuals we recovered,” said co-author Dr Valeria Amoretti, an anthropologist who heads the Applied Research Laboratory of Pompeii Archaeological Park.

The researchers found two male skeletons, both around 50 years of age. Their positioning suggests that ‘individual 1’ was suddenly crushed by the collapse of a large wall fragment, resulting in severe traumas causing immediate death. ‘Individual 2’, however, may have been aware of the danger and tried to protect himself with a round wooden object of which the researchers found faint traces in the volcanic deposits.

There are several hints that these individuals did not die from inhaling ash or extreme heat, such as their positioning on the pumice lapilli, rather than under it. This suggests both survived to first phase of the eruption and then were overwhelmed by collapsing walls during the temporary decline of the eruptive phenomena and before the arrival of the pyroclastic currents, the researchers said.

Difficult choices

While not everybody could make it into temporary safety, the numbers of victims recovered in the ash deposits makes people fleeing to the outside a plausible, albeit hopeless, scenario, the researchers said. There are no reliable estimations about how many people died from volcanic-related causes or due to damage caused by earthquakes.

“New insight into the destruction of Pompeii gets us very close to the experience of the people who lived here 2,000 years ago. The choices they made as well as the dynamics of the events, which remain a focus of our research, decided over life and death in the last hours of the city’s existence,” concluded co-author Dr Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of the Pompeii Archaeological Park.

The AlUla Approach to Archaeology

Dr Abdulrahman Alsuhaibani is the Vice President of Culture at the Royal Commission for AlUla, where he works on executing in-depth archeological studies, unique in both geographic size and scale, and assessing the rich and complex past of the AlUla region of Northwest Saudi Arabia. He is also Associate Professor at King Saud University in the Archeology Department.

Our past is at risk. Its tangible remains are fragile, a non-renewable resource that, globally, is disappearing daily at the hands of urban development, natural disasters, climate change, and illicit trade in antiquities.

The risk to our past makes preservation work all the more critical. That’s why AlUla is proud to have documented 30,000 archaeological sites in the region, including Hegra, the Nabataean’s ancient southern capital in modern-day Saudi Arabia. The archaeological wonder sits among AlUla’s breathtaking landscape, rich history, and local hospitality, making it an attractive destination for visitors. But the importance of preservation means that, in reality, beyond Hegra, only seven of those 30,000 sites are open to the public. Protecting our past means we must keep a laser focus on balancing visitor accessibility with preservation.

My life’s work is dedicated to archaeological preservation of sites like Hegra because protecting our past is the key to securing our shared future. Only by understanding the past— by understanding who we are and where we came from —and applying this knowledge to our present——can we effectively shape our future.

The continued relevance of archaeology was a prominent theme at the inaugural AlUla World Archaeology in September 2023. The global archaeological community agrees that we must, with urgency and focus, re-double our efforts to ensure the preservation of our past and, thereby, secure our shared future. The question is: How?

Local communities are the answer. Local communities are the frontlines of preserving the past and the most critical factor in determining the sustainable success of an archaeological site. As Vice President of Culture at the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU), it is my privilege to work toward the RCU’s top priority: that the people of AlUla—those who first created and now preserve its rich cultural heritage—remain at the heart of AlUla’s development. If any archaeology project in AlUla is not oriented towards the local community, it is not a project for us.

With local community empowerment and development as our North Star, three supporting principles drive AlUla’s approach to archaeology.

First, we will not undertake any projects without the participation of Saudi archaeological students. In Saudi Arabia, archaeology is still an emerging field. At Dadan, for example, one of the earliest kingdoms on the Arabian Peninsula, we have excavated only 6% of the entire site because we lack the human resources to move forward at a faster pace while ensuring proper preservation. We need to train a new generation of Saudi archaeologists to manage excavations—a task only accomplished by giving them hands-on experience with ongoing work. With greater local expertise, we will be able to discover the depths of the rich cultural heritage of AlUla and beyond.

Second, we facilitate local students to visit the sites. Students ranging from 6 to 12 years old come from local schools to learn about the history of their land. With that comes heightened self-understanding and a deepened sense of pride. These students carry themselves differently when they leave. But we also have greater hopes for our students in AlUla: We want to expose them to the field of archaeology. As they watch the excavations, learn about their history, and experience the richness of the landscape, we hope to inspire the next generation of archaeological students.

Finally, we prioritize training and working with local guides—or Rawis, as we call them. The Rawi, or storyteller, has a special place in Arabic culture. Historically, Rawis were entrusted with preserving the past through oral traditions—recounting history, poems, and literature—that were passed down over generations. Today, AlUla is working with local Rawis—tapping into their cultural expertise as guides, translators, and cultural ambassadors for visitors to AlUla—to ensure that the local people remain in control of their own narrative as they pass on the history of their community.

We work closely with Rawis each season to update their site knowledge based on the latest discoveries and to enhance their skills—from communication, planning, and logistics to actual archaeological preservation—all while further equipping them for intercultural dialogue with visitors from around the world. As our local Rawis gain a deeper understanding of the archaeological process, local ownership of the site increases exponentially, driving sustainable preservation efforts by and for the local community. 

What happens ultimately when we successfully integrate the local community and these three principles into every dimension of our work? Our local communities gain much more than jobs. While economic opportunity is important, our people also gain an awareness of the historic value of their land and culture; they swell with pride about the people they come from and those they’ve become; and they develop a sense of ownership in their cultural assets. They become the frontline advocates of archaeology, the first protectors of their history.

The people of AlUla themselves are those who guarantee that the rich cultural heritage of AlUla will be around to the thousandth generation. They have served as guardians of their cultural heritage already for millennia, and the RCU remains committed to ensuring that the people of AlUla remain at the heart of its preservation. After all, the past doesn’t belong to academics, historians, or archaeologists. It belongs instead to the people whose past it is—and to their children’s children. Only by engaging them in the past and entrusting them in the present can we ensure the preservation of their heritage into the future.

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Khaybar is a major oasis in northwest Arabia, characterised by fertile spring-fed wadis, filled with date gardens, cutting through the basalt geology, with ongoing archaeological investigations of its Islamic past. Credit Royal Commission for AlUla

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Laser Graffiti Removal Workshop programme training for Royal Commission for AlUla personnel at Hegra, in collaboration with Centro Conservazione e Restauro La Ventaria Reale. Credit Royal Commission for AlUla

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School children visit the active archaeological site at Dadan, the ancient Kingdom of the Lihyanite and Dadanite civilisations. Credit Royal Commission for AlUla

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The largest tomb at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Hegra, the monolithic Tomb of Lihyan Son of Kuza. Credit Royal Commission for AlUla

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Dadan is one of the most active archaeological sites in AlUla, with excavations ongoing in several key areas. Credit Royal Commission for AlUla

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Student award ceremony for completion of the Conservation Science Workshops programme run by the Centro Conservazione e Restauro La Ventaria Reale in collaboration with the Royal Commission for AlUla. Credit Royal Commission for AlUla

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Article Source: Royal Commission for AlUla news release

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Evidence for butchery of giant armadillo-like mammals in Argentina 21,000 years ago

PLOS—Cut marks on fossils could be evidence of humans exploiting large mammals in Argentina more than 20,000 years ago, according to a study* published July 17, 2024 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Mariano Del Papa of National University of La Plata, Argentina and colleagues.

The timing of early human occupation of South America is a topic of intense debate, highly relevant to a study of early human dispersal across the Americas and of humans’ potential role in the extinction of large mammals at the end of the Pleistocene Epoch. This discussion is hampered by a general scarcity of direct archaeological evidence of early human presence and human-animal interactions.

In this study, researchers present evidence of butchery on Pleistocene mammal fossils from the banks of the Reconquista River, northeast of the Pampean region in Argentina. The fossils are those of a glyptodont, a giant relative of armadillos, named Neosclerocalyptus. Statistical analysis finds that cut marks on parts of the pelvis, tail, and body armor are consistent with known marks made by stone tools, and the placement of these marks is consistent with a butchering sequence targeting areas of dense flesh. Radiocarbon dating indicates these fossils are around 21,000 years old, nearly six thousand years older than other known archaeological evidence in southern South America.

These results fit with other recent findings that indicate early human presence in the Americas over 20,000 years ago. These fossils are also among the oldest evidence of human interaction with large mammals shortly before many of those mammals became extinct. The authors suggest that these findings might be further supported by additional excavation at this site, further analysis of the cut marks, and more extensive radiocarbon dating of the fossils.

Miguel Delgado, the corresponding author, adds: “The study’s evidence puts into question the time frame for the first human peopling of the Americas 16,000 years ago”

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3D rendering of the probable butchery event according to a paleoartistic reconstruction. The illustration was made by modeling three-dimensional meshes, 3D digital scanning, and texturing by projection, based on the proportions of the excavated fossil materials and the results obtained in the study. Damián Voglino, Museo de Ciencias Naturales A. Scasso (Colegio Don Bosco), San Nicolás de los Arroyos, Provincia de Buenos Aires, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

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Drawing of a Neosclerocalyptus skeleton highlighting cut-marked skeletal elements in light blue found at the CRS-10 specimen. Del Papa et al., 2024, PLOS ONE, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

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Article Source: PLOS news release

*Del Papa M, De Los Reyes M, Poiré DG, Rascovan N, Jofré G, Delgado M (2024) Anthropic cut marks in extinct megafauna bones from the Pampean region (Argentina) at the last glacial maximum. PLoS ONE 19(7): e0304956. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0304956

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Traveling Upright: Humanity’s First Global Ancestor

For most people, the Turkana Basin in northwestern Kenya is a fiercely inhospitable place. It is hot and dry — an arid, desert-like scrubland. At its center lies Lake Turkana, an enormous, expansive, alkaline body of water that has gained the apt description as the world’s largest permanent desert lake. There are no major resorts along its shores. Though rich as a source of fishing for the local economy, it’s flats team with Nile crocodiles and its shores are abundant with scorpions and carpet vipers. But this lake lies front-and-center within a region the geology of which has yielded one of the world’s great treasure-house landscapes of exposed beds teaming with fossils extending as far back as the Cretaceous period. The unforgiving environment was thus no barrier to the teams of paleontologists, geologists and paleoanthropologists that found their way here over the decades to explore and survey the landscape. And it was along the dried up Nariokotome river bed not far from the lake when, in 1984, eagle-eyed goat herder and fossil hunter, Kamoya Kimeu, spied a peculiar skull fragment. Kamoya honed his skills and reputation over the years in the employ of the renowned fossil hunting paleoanthropologist team of Mary and Richard Leakey. Kimeu knew what he was doing.

In time, through survey and careful excavation, the skull fragment turned out to be just one of 107 other bones, all members of the skeletal remains of a single individual animal….

A hominin.

Turkana Boy

The remains represented an almost complete skeleton. Once pieced together, it revealed what for its time was a startling new hominin discovery. The cranium was small, indicating a brain that was only two thirds the capacity of modern humans. The interior of the cranium featured asymmetry of a longer left brain over the right, suggesting the possible beginnings of the physiological capacity for speech.

Full Turkana Boy skeleton, as exhibited at the American Museum of Natural History, New York. Mike Peel , CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

The post-cranial skeletal features featured shoulders, arms, torso with a barrel-shaped chest, a tucked-in pelvis, and legs that more closely resembled those of modern humans, as opposed to modern apes, though the feet were missing. Assembled and stretched lengthwise, the body frame and skull measured about 5’3”, with a breadth that suggested about 103 pounds at the time the individual was alive. Analysis of the bones indicated that this was a male youth around 8 or 9 years old. Perhaps most significant about the boy was that he likely moved with an erect gate — he was fully bipedal. The body structure and full bipedality contrasted sharply with most hominin fossil discoveries previously discovered, such as the famous ‘Lucy’ australopithecine fossil skeleton unearthed at Hadar, Ethiopia by Donald Johnson 10 years earlier in 1974. The discovery team named him, for ease of popular reference, Nariokotome Boy, after the location of the discovery. Alternatively, he was nicknamed Turkana Boy, and this has been the name most used by the popular media.

The Significance of the Discovery

All in all, it was a remarkable discovery. Now scientists had unearthed an almost complete individual (the most complete early human skeleton ever found) that was clearly not like the more ape-like front-page-making australopithecine discoveries recovered previously from various sites in East Africa and South Africa. This was, according to the discoverers, a member of the genus Homo, and more specifically, a Homo erectus — a hominin species generally thought to exhibit characteristics more closely resembling those of, and suggesting a functionality more like, Homo sapiens.

Perhaps most significant was the date of the find. At 1.5 millions ago, it was among the oldest Homo erectus discoveries. Moreover, this was important in developing paradigms for human evolution because Lucy, as a partially complete specimen discovered at Hadar, Ethiopia and dated to 3.2 million years ago, was an australopithecine ( a different and more ancient genus) that exhibited a starkly different morphology. Though much smaller than Turkana Boy, she sported longer (relative to the body) arms, curved fingers, suggesting the adaptation to climbing trees like other primates, and a funnel-shaped chest much like a chimpanzee’s. However, her feet, knees, hips, and the position of her head upon her neck were, like Turkana Boy, adapted for at least some bipedal movement. In contrast to Turkana Boy, her brain case was only one-third the size of the modern human brain.

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Turkana Boy skull. BAHN, Paul G, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

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View of Lake Turkana. wfeiden, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The landscape around Lake Turkana at the time of Turkana Boy was much wetter than it is today. A larger ancient paleolake existed instead of the current lake, surrounded by a savannah-like landscape of grasslands and scattered trees. Many scientists suggest that it was the transition from an environment thick with vegetation to that of a savannah that presented new challenges and impacted, in part, the course of human evolution, from the more ape-like ancestral predecessors to the bipedal, tool-making-and-using hominins that adopted a more varied diet of meat-eating, selective plant foraging, and more sophisticated scavenging and hunting strategies.

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Other Finds

Astonishing as the Turkana Boy discovery was, it was certainly not the only Homo erectus fossil find emerging from East Africa. Most notable historically among the discoveries were three specimens; one, a nearly complete cranium designated with catalogue number KNM ER 3733; another, a partially complete cranium, designated KNM ER 3883, and the third, KNM ER 42700, also a partial cranium.  KNM ER 3733 was discovered in 1975 at Koobi Fora, just east of Lake Turkana by Richard Leakey and his field worker Bernard Ngeneo. This cranium, dated to 1.78–1.48 million years ago, was determined to be an adult female based on the comparatively less robustness, the extensive teeth-wear, the presence of third molars, and fused cranial sutures — all tell-tale signs of adulthood. The KNM ER 3733 cranium is considered among the oldest Homo erectus fossils ever found. KNM ER 3883, discovered in 1976 also by Richard Leakey at Koobi Fora, has been dated to 1.6 million years ago. Larger and more robust than KNMR 3773, it is thought to represent an adult male. Notably, it shows a cranial capacity greater than 804 ml, suggesting a brain comparatively larger than most Homo erectus finds. Finally, KNM ER 42700, a cranium of a young adult individual, was discovered in northern Kenya, notably not far from where fossils of late-dated Homo habilis were found. Dated to about 1.55 million years ago, this fossil find has shifted thinking about hominins among scientists, suggesting that individuals or groups of Homo erectus and Homo habilis coexisted or overlapped in the same region at the same time.

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KNM-ER 3733 discovered by Bernard Ngeneo in 1975. CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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Homo erectus KNM-ER 3883 (replica, Senckenberg Museum, Frankfurt am Main, Germany). Gerbil, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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KNM-ER 42700. Cast exhibited at the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. Ryan Somma, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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East Africa has long been thought to be the exclusive African domain for the earliest emergence of Homo erectus. But a remarkable discovery made in 2016 suggested otherwise….

[See the full article with a premium subscription to Popular Archaeology.]

Cover Image, Top Left: Facial reconstruction of Homo erectusWerner UstorfCC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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New geological datings place the first European hominids in the south of the Iberian Peninsula 1.3 million years ago

UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA—One of the most important controversies about human evolution and expansion is when and by what route the first hominids arrived in Europe from the African continent. Now, geological dating techniques at the Orce sites (Baza basin, Granada, Spain) place the human remains found in this area as the oldest in Europe, at approximately 1.3 million years old. These results reinforce the hypothesis that humans arrived in Europe through the south of the Iberian Peninsula, through the Strait of Gibraltar, instead of returning to the Mediterranean via the Asian route. The study*, led by Lluís Gibert, researcher and lecturer at the University of Barcelona’s Faculty of Earth Sciences, has involved the participation of researchers from the Berkeley Geochronology Centre and Murray State University (United States).

Analysis of a new sampling area

The new dating has been based on the analysis of the paleomagnetism of an area of the Orce region, which has never been sampled before and which has been protected from the erosion that this basin has suffered over the years. This technique is a relative dating method based on the study of the inversion of the magnetic poles of the planet due to the internal dynamics of the Earth. These changes do not have a specific periodicity, but they are recorded in the minerals and make it possible to establish time periods from the different magnetic events.

These new data are very precise thanks to the long sedimentary sequence that outcrops in Orce. “The uniqueness of these sites is that they are stratified and within a very long sedimentary sequence, more than eighty metres long. Normally, the sites are found in caves or within very short stratigraphic sequences, which do not allow you to develop long palaeomagnetic sequences in which you can find different magnetic reversals”, says Lluís Gibert.

The researchers have been able to identify a magnetic polarity sequence “with five magnetic events that allow them to place the three Orce sites with human presence between the Olduvai and Jaramillo subchron, that is, between 1.77 and 1.07 million years ago (Ma)”, says the researcher. Subsequently, they have applied a statistical age model to accurately refine the chronology of the different stratigraphic levels with a margin of error of only 70,000 years. The result of this innovative methodology is that the oldest site with human presence in Europe would be Venta Micena with an age of 1.32 Ma, followed by Barranco León, with an age of 1.28 and finally Fuente Nueva 3, with an age of 1.23 Ma. “With these data, the other major site on the peninsula, the Sima del Elefante in Atapuerca, would be relegated to second place, far behind Orce, between 0.2 and 0.4 Ma more modern”, adds the researcher.

Fauna underpins the antiquity of the site

To complete the dating, the study has also analyzed the fauna found at the different sites in Orce, as this is different depending on the period, and compared it with that found at other Early Pleistocene sites in other parts of Europe.

In this sense, the paper presents a detailed analysis of the micromammals and large mammals from all the Orce sites, carried out by the expert Robert Martin, based on the palaeontological collections stored at the Museum of the Catalan Institute of Palaeontology Miguel Crusafont (IPS) in Sabadell. “The results indicate that the small and large fauna of Orce is more primitive than, for example, that of the Sima del Elefante, where the evidence shows that the rodent Allophaiomys lavocati is more evolved than the Allophaiomys recovered from the Orce sites”, Gibert explains.

Another relevant indicator of the age of the Orce sites is the absence of the ancestors of the pigs. “These animals are considered to be Asian immigrants and have not been found in any European site between 1 and 1.5 Ma, while they have been found in the Sima del Elefante, supporting that the Orce fauna is older”, explains the researcher.

Evidence pointing to passage through Gibraltar

This new dating would be added, according to the researcher, to other evidence that would tip the balance in favor of the colonization of Europe through the Strait of Gibraltar, rather than the alternative route: the return to the Mediterranean via Asia, such as “the existence of a lithic industry with similarities to that found in the north of the African continent and also the presence of remains of African fauna in the south of the peninsula, such as those of Hippopotamus, found in the sites of Orce, and those of Theropithecus oswaldi, an African primate similar to a baboon, found in the Victoria cave, a site near Cartagena (Murcia), non-existent anywhere else in Europe”.

“We also defend the hypothesis — adds the researcher — that they arrived from Gibraltar because no older evidence has been found at any other site along the alternative route”.

These new data are very precise thanks to the long sedimentary sequence that outcrops in Orce.

Similarity with hominids from the island of Flores

With these results, the researchers point to a “diachronism” between the oldest occupation of Asia, measuring 1.8 Ma, and the oldest occupation of Europe, which would be 1.3 Ma ago, so that African hominids would have arrived in southwestern Europe more than 0.5 Ma after leaving Africa for the first time about 2 Ma ago. “These differences in human expansion can be explained by the fact that Europe is isolated from Asia and Africa by biogeographical barriers that are difficult to overcome, both to the east (Bosphorus Strait, Dardanelles, Sea of Marmara) and to the west (Strait of Gibraltar). Humanity arrived in Europe when it had the necessary technology to cross maritime barriers, as happened before a million years ago on the island of Flores (Indonesia)”, says Gibert. In this sense, the researcher adds that the Gibraltar route currently requires crossing up to fourteen kilometers of sea route, but “perhaps in the past this distance was shorter at certain times due to the high tectonic activity in this region and the fluctuations in sea level that favored migrations”.

“As cited in the paper [he adds], we have identified other migrations of African fauna through Gibraltar at earlier times, 6.2 and 5.5 Ma ago when the Strait of Gibraltar was very narrow”.

Human remains in Orce

A total of five human remains were found at the Orce sites since excavations began in 1982 by the palaeoanthropologist Josep Gibert. Firstly, two fragments of humerus bitten by hyenas were found at Venta Micena, as well as parts of a cranial fragment consisting of two parietals and an occipital, associated with an abundant Early Pleistocene fauna. The human provenance of these remains generated great controversy for years, although independent palaeoproteomic studies by the universities of Granada and San Francisco identified human proteins in the remains.

The subsequent discovery at the nearby sites of Barranco León and Fuente Nueva 3 of two human molar teeth and thousands of Olduvayan lithic tools — one of the first human lithic industries — as well as cut marks on bones “served to consolidate the evidence of the presence of hominids in the Early Pleistocene at Orce”, concludes Lluís Gibert.

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Image of the last excavation carried out in the site of Venta Micena 3 in Orce (Granada, Spain), where the first human remains were discovered. LLUÍS GIBERT – UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA

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This new dating would be added to other evidence that would tip the balance in favour of the colonization of Europe through the Strait of Gibraltar. Earth-Science Reviews

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA news release.

Traveling Upright: Humanity’s First Global Ancestor

For most people, the Turkana Basin in northwestern Kenya is a fiercely inhospitable place. It is hot and dry — an arid, desert-like scrubland. At its center lies Lake Turkana, an enormous, expansive, alkaline body of water that has gained the apt description as the world’s largest permanent desert lake. There are no major resorts along its shores. Though rich as a source of fishing for the local economy, it’s flats team with Nile crocodiles and its shores are abundant with scorpions and carpet vipers. But this lake lies front-and-center within a region the geology of which has yielded one of the world’s great treasure-house landscapes of exposed beds teaming with fossils extending as far back as the Cretaceous period. The unforgiving environment was thus no barrier to the teams of paleontologists, geologists and paleoanthropologists that found their way here over the decades to explore and survey the landscape. And it was along the dried up Nariokotome river bed not far from the lake when, in 1984, eagle-eyed goat herder and fossil hunter, Kamoya Kimeu, spied a peculiar skull fragment. Kamoya honed his skills and reputation over the years in the employ of the renowned fossil hunting paleoanthropologist team of Mary and Richard Leakey. Kimeu knew what he was doing.

In time, through survey and careful excavation, the skull fragment turned out to be just one of 107 other bones, all members of the skeletal remains of a single individual animal….

A hominin.

Turkana Boy

The remains represented an almost complete skeleton. Once pieced together, it revealed what for its time was a startling new hominin discovery. The cranium was small, indicating a brain that was only two thirds the capacity of modern humans. The interior of the cranium featured asymmetry of a longer left brain over the right, suggesting the possible beginnings of the physiological capacity for speech.

Full Turkana Boy skeleton, as exhibited at the American Museum of Natural History, New York. Mike Peel , CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

The post-cranial skeletal features featured shoulders, arms, torso with a barrel-shaped chest, a tucked-in pelvis, and legs that more closely resembled those of modern humans, as opposed to modern apes, though the feet were missing. Assembled and stretched lengthwise, the body frame and skull measured about 5’3”, with a breadth that suggested about 103 pounds at the time the individual was alive. Analysis of the bones indicated that this was a male youth around 8 or 9 years old. Perhaps most significant about the boy was that he likely moved with an erect gate — he was fully bipedal. The body structure and full bipedality contrasted sharply with most hominin fossil discoveries previously discovered, such as the famous ‘Lucy’ australopithecine fossil skeleton unearthed at Hadar, Ethiopia by Donald Johnson 10 years earlier in 1974. The discovery team named him, for ease of popular reference, Nariokotome Boy, after the location of the discovery. Alternatively, he was nicknamed Turkana Boy, and this has been the name most used by the popular media.

The Significance of the Discovery

All in all, it was a remarkable discovery. Now scientists had unearthed an almost complete individual (the most complete early human skeleton ever found) that was clearly not like the more ape-like front-page-making australopithecine discoveries recovered previously from various sites in East Africa and South Africa. This was, according to the discoverers, a member of the genus Homo, and more specifically, a Homo erectus — a hominin species generally thought to exhibit characteristics more closely resembling those of, and suggesting a functionality more like, Homo sapiens.

Perhaps most significant was the date of the find. At 1.5 millions ago, it was among the oldest Homo erectus discoveries. Moreover, this was important in developing paradigms for human evolution because Lucy, as a partially complete specimen discovered at Hadar, Ethiopia and dated to 3.2 million years ago, was an australopithecine ( a different and more ancient genus) that exhibited a starkly different morphology. Though much smaller than Turkana Boy, she sported longer (relative to the body) arms, curved fingers, suggesting the adaptation to climbing trees like other primates, and a funnel-shaped chest much like a chimpanzee’s. However, her feet, knees, hips, and the position of her head upon her neck were, like Turkana Boy, adapted for at least some bipedal movement. In contrast to Turkana Boy, her brain case was only one-third the size of the modern human brain.

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Turkana Boy skull. BAHN, Paul G, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

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View of Lake Turkana. wfeiden, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The landscape around Lake Turkana at the time of Turkana Boy was much wetter than it is today. A larger ancient paleolake existed instead of the current lake, surrounded by a savannah-like landscape of grasslands and scattered trees. Many scientists suggest that it was the transition from an environment thick with vegetation to that of a savannah that presented new challenges and impacted, in part, the course of human evolution, from the more ape-like ancestral predecessors to the bipedal, tool-making-and-using hominins that adopted a more varied diet of meat-eating, selective plant foraging, and more sophisticated scavenging and hunting strategies.

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Other Finds

Astonishing as the Turkana Boy discovery was, it was certainly not the only Homo erectus fossil find emerging from East Africa. Most notable historically among the discoveries were three specimens; one, a nearly complete cranium designated with catalogue number KNM ER 3733; another, a partially complete cranium, designated KNM ER 3883, and the third, KNM ER 42700, also a partial cranium.  KNM ER 3733 was discovered in 1975 at Koobi Fora, just east of Lake Turkana by Richard Leakey and his field worker Bernard Ngeneo. This cranium, dated to 1.78–1.48 million years ago, was determined to be an adult female based on the comparatively less robustness, the extensive teeth-wear, the presence of third molars, and fused cranial sutures — all tell-tale signs of adulthood. The KNM ER 3733 cranium is considered among the oldest Homo erectus fossils ever found. KNM ER 3883, discovered in 1976 also by Richard Leakey at Koobi Fora, has been dated to 1.6 million years ago. Larger and more robust than KNMR 3773, it is thought to represent an adult male. Notably, it shows a cranial capacity greater than 804 ml, suggesting a brain comparatively larger than most Homo erectus finds. Finally, KNM ER 42700, a cranium of a young adult individual, was discovered in northern Kenya, notably not far from where fossils of late-dated Homo habilis were found. Dated to about 1.55 million years ago, this fossil find has shifted thinking about hominins among scientists, suggesting that individuals or groups of Homo erectus and Homo habilis coexisted or overlapped in the same region at the same time.

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KNM-ER 3733 discovered by Bernard Ngeneo in 1975. CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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Homo erectus KNM-ER 3883 (replica, Senckenberg Museum, Frankfurt am Main, Germany). Gerbil, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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KNM-ER 42700. Cast exhibited at the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. Ryan Somma, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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East Africa has long been thought to be the exclusive African domain for the earliest emergence of Homo erectus. But a remarkable discovery made in 2016 suggested otherwise….

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DNH 134

Piece by piece, they carefully and meticulously secured the fragments from their surrounding breccia sediment, where they had rested for millennia. These were clearly bone fossils — likely, they thought, to be the remains of an ancient baboon. Fossil baboon bones were long known to be plentiful in this cave.

The excavators were members of a field school under a joint project of La Trobe University in Australia and Washington University in St. Louis in the United States. They were excavating at the Drimolen Main Quarry site, a paleocave site located within what is today called the Cradle of Humankind, an area north of Johannesburg, South Africa in the rolling grasslands of the Gauteng Province. The Cradle of Humankind is famous for the iconic fossils and countless artifact discoveries that have historically produced some of the earliest evidence of our human ancestry. But of all the ancient animal and plant remains that are recovered by archaeologists and other scientists in this region, actually finding fossils and artifacts that evidence the presence of humans or hominins in deep time is actually relatively rare. So it was very exciting when over the course of at least two field seasons, most notably from 2015 through 2016, the Drimolen team had recovered fragments that added to an eventual total of 150 individual fragments defining the skullcap portion of a primate cranium.

Another baboon?

Or could it be a hominin?

The first confirmation was made by Stephanie Baker, a researcher at the Palaeo-Research Institute and director of excavations and research at Drimolen. She had been working at the site since 2011, but this moment of discovery was one of the most exciting events of her life. It came one evening while she was sitting with a group of field school students while piecing together the cranium fragments during a lecture by one of her colleagues.

“I sat in back,” she explained, “not listening but rather focusing on the fossil fragments. By this stage I had reconstructed two large portions but couldn’t yet articulate them. I was looking through the fragments that had been excavated earlier that day and found one very small piece that was that ‘missing link’ between the frontal [forehead bone] and the occipital [lower back of the skull bone]. As soon as the two large portions fit together I gasped, louder than I had planned.”

The primate represented by this cranium was not what the initial observers had previously presumed it to be. She knew this for several reasons. First, the cranial fragments were relatively thin, a typical characteristic of cranial specimens identified in the fossil record as Homo — direct human ancestors. Secondly, the cranium featured an expanded occipital region, also typical of hominins. Thirdly, the foramen magnum (the hole in the bottom of the cranium that connects the head to the spinal cord) was anteriorly positioned (anatomically placed more forward toward the front of the skull as compared to other primates, such as gorillas and chimpanzees). Finally, the cranium was generally teardrop-shaped when viewed from above — also typical of a hominin.

This was not a baboon.

It was a hominin.

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The savannah area that includes the Drimolen cave site. Therese van Wyk, University of Johannesburg.

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The Drimolen cave site as viewed from above. Therese van Wyk, University of Johannesburg.

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Excavating at Drimolen required careful, systematic, tedious digging. Therese van Wyk, University of Johannesburg.

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A South African First

Notwithstanding the thrill of having found a hominin fossil, Baker proceeded to do what any self-respecting paleoanthropologist would do — find out what kind of hominin she had.

For three million years, South Africa has been host to two genera and at least several different species of hominins. At Drimolen back in 1994, South African paleontologist Andre Keyser discovered the most complete skull ever found of Paranthropus robustus, a species of the australopithecine genus. Although Paranthropus robustus is a hominin, it does not fall within the Homo, or human, evolutionary tree. Paranthropus fossil crania fragments are typically very thick (a morphology that would have accommodated large teeth, adapted for heavy chewing), and the skull features a distinctive sagittal crest (see image, below). Baker knew the fossil fragments she was examining now were not those of another Paranthropus. For one thing, they were much too thin. She assigned the delicate and detailed task of further cranium reconstruction and identification to Jesse Martin, an a talented student at the field school. Martin, who showed early promise at reconstructing fossils in the field, enthusiastically took her up on the task.

“When I was a kid I loved putting jigsaws together, and reconstructing fossils is rather like completing a jigsaw puzzle without knowing what the end product is supposed to look like and with half of the pieces missing,” said Martin. But this assignment meant Martin had to leave Drimolen and go to a different location.

“The field is not the ideal place to undertake very fragile reconstructions, so we shelved further work on the cranium until after the excavations had been completed,” continued Martin. “After the excavations, my colleague Angeline Leece and I worked on the cranium over a two week period both at the University of Johannesburg and the University of the Witwatersrand where we had access to clean lab areas, materials, and comparative fossils. Once we had completed the final stages of the reconstruction in 2015, we began to compare the DNH 134 cranium [the designation assigned by researchers to the specimen] to other fossils housed at the University of the Witwatersrand to ascertain to which species it belonged.”

Key features of the cranium cap provided clear-cut clues.  “There are a suite of derived neurocranial features that align the DNH 134 cranium with Homo erectus to the exclusion of other Homo species,” Martin elaborated. “Perhaps most striking, the long and low ‘teardrop’ shape of the neurocranium is a very distinctive Homo erectus trait. The cranial capacity of the DNH 134 cranium, remembering that it was only about two years old when it died and so still would have had some growing to do, is already pushing into the range for adult Homo erectus specimens.”

Martin and Leece thus already suspected that the specimen was Homo erectus, but they conducted an exhaustive comparative analysis. Then they arrived at their true eureka moment.

“When Angeline and I placed the completed reconstructions side by side with a cast of the KNM-ER 42700 Homo erectus cranium from eastern Africa, and started to sum the morphological traits that aligned DNH 134 with Homo erectus, it dawned on us that we had indeed found a very important early member of that species,” said Martin. “[We] spent a good couple of days convincing ourselves that our preliminary assignment to Homo erectus was warranted before we called our colleagues to share the news. As is often said in science, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and we wanted to be sure that the DNH 134 cranium provided the requisite evidence to partially rewrite the story of human evolution before we made that claim!”

After making the call to break the news, the reaction from Baker and her team colleagues was predictable. Homo erectus fossils were not known to exist anywhere in South Africa, and the earliest specimens of the species belonged to East Africa, where conventional scholarship assigned its birthplace.

“Initially we laughed, but after we went through his arguments, we were floored, then elated.,” said Baker.

Homo erectus walked South Africa. 

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The Paranthropus robustus skull discovered at Drimolen is the most complete skull of this species ever discovered. Dr Herries, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, Wikimedia Commons

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Above and Below: Detailed views of the DNH 134 Drimolen Homo erectus cranium. Dr. Matthew Caruana

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View of the DNH 134 cranium skull cap from above. Therese van Wyk, University of Johannesburg.

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The DNH 134 Homo erectus cranium from Drimolen, South Africa produced from an Artec Space Spider 3D scanner. Image shows cranium skullcap in relation to estimated configuration of the rest of the skull. Andypithecus, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, Wikimedia Commons

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For scale: Stephanie Baker with the DNH 134. Dr. Matthew Caruana

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How Old?

The new finding was significant because Homo erectus, in contrast to the other hominins that traversed the South African landscape before the emergence of modern humans, was much more like us — they were among the first identifiable members of the genus Homo, the genus to which modern humans belong. They exhibited more human-like body proportions with shorter arms and longer legs, a more human-like gait, a larger brain, flatter face, and a more prominent nose. As makers of the Acheulean stone tool industry (which included the large, bifaced stone axes usually associated with Homo erectus from the archaeological record), they were perhaps also the first hominin to use fire and to journey out of Africa across the Old World with these technical capabilities, with a fossil presence from the Iberian peninsula in the west to Java in the Far East.

It was no wonder, then, that Baker and her colleagues hailed this as a spectacular find. The Homo erectus geographic range just got bigger.

Equally critical, however, was the question of age. To determine this, project researchers employed several different, state-of-the-art techniques. First, Dr Robyn Pickering of the University of Cape Town, South Africa, was called upon to direct the application of Uranium-Series (U-Pb) dating on samples taken from flowstone layers within the cave. The flowstone layers (sheet-like deposits of calcite or other carbonate minerals, formed where water flows down the walls or along the floors of a cave over time) acted as natural beginning and ending brackets for the key fossil-bearing sediments sandwiched between them. By measuring the trace amounts of uranium to lead (uranium decays at a known rate through time into lead) within the flowstone samples, the researchers were able to measure the age of the overlying and underlying flowstone layers. Second, Dr Renaud Joannes-Boyau of Southern Cross University, Australia, directly dated other fauna fossil teeth found in the same layers associated with the Homo erectus cranium by using Uranium-series Electron Spin Resonance (ESR). After being deposited in sediment, the teeth absorbed cosmic radiation, causing electrons in the teeth to reconfigure. Measuring this trapped energy within the teeth indicated how long the teeth had been in the ground. Finally, Prof Andy Herries of La Trobe University, Australia, oversaw the application of Palaeomagnetism to measure the global magnetic polarity of the grains of sediment samples. When sediments were deposited into the Drimolen cave anciently, they contained the effects of magnetic polarity (changes in the earth’s magnetic field) of the earth at the time they were deposited. A polarity log was created and correlated with an established polarity scale that is related to geologic time frames.

Combining all three methodologies effectively produced one of the most accurate and reliable dating episodes in paleoanthropological research. “Each of these techniques was used in combination to complement one another to provide as narrow a time range as possible,” explained Baker.

The results of this effort?

The Homo erectus cranium cap, and the other fossils found with it, were 1.95 to 2.04 million years old. This was older than most previous Homo erectus fossils in the fossil record. Now they knew that some of the earliest members of Homo erectus existed 150,000 to 200,000 years earlier than the age of many of the oldest known Homo erectus fossils to date, found in East Africa. The Homo erectus represented by the Drimolen fossil, however, lived in South Africa.

Hominin Diversity

For Baker and her colleagues, the DNH-134 finding is not the end of the story at Drimolen.

“The Drimolen Main Quarry still has many aspects to be explored,” Baker explained. “While the site is a relatively simple geological infill, the bulk of the excavation that has taken place prior to 2017 was focused on the central excavation area. This area is mostly decalcified, but also disturbed, by lime miners at the turn of the century.” Baker’s team has shifted to the western parts of the targeted excavation area where she says they will likely be working with better preserved specimens and better spatial data for analysis. Moreover, Baker’s research will extend beyond individual fossil finds. The fossils and dating revealed that Paranthropus robustus and Homo erectus lived in the Drimolen area simultaneously. Based on the paleoenvironmental research, at 2 million years BP both hominins were eking out a living in a changing environment, where a wetter, warmer climate was transitioning to a dryer, cooler climate with a more open, grassland landscape. But in this transition, Homo is thought to have had a better adaptive advantage. “Paranthropus and Australopithecus [the other hominin genus that shared the same South African landscape at the same time] evolved in warm and humid climates and were used to that,” said Baker in a news report from the University of Johannesburg.* “But then the weather began to shift from warm and humid, to cool and dry.” Baker hopes to continue research revolving around the dynamics of how this diversified population of hominins thrived and interrelated.

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Homo erectus across time and space

As scientists have known for decades, however, that Homo erectus did not confine itself to the African continent. Incredible discoveries outside of Africa have shed light on the astonishing geographic diversity of the species. The first geographic clue, though unrecognized by scientists and scholars at the time, came with the historic discovery made by Eugène Dubois in Indonesia (Trinil in East Java) in 1891 with the finding of the skullcap and femur, which he initially assigned to a new species, Pithecanthropus (later changed to Homo erectus). Following this were the famous “Peking Man” (Homo erectus pekinensis) fossil discoveries at the Zhoukoudian cave site in northern China. Since the very first fossil tooth find unearthed there in 1921, the Zhoukoudian cave became the world’s most prolific Homo erectus site. About 13 years later, in 1934, scientists began uncovering numerous hominin fossils, including those of Homo erectus, at the site of Sangiran in Java in Indonesia, including the famous Sangiran 2 Homo erectus upper cranium dated to between .7 and 1.6 million years ago.  

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The Peking Man skullcap. Gunnar Creutz, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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Sangiran 2. collection Koenigswald, Senckenberg-Museum, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Gerbil, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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But perhaps equally spectacular was the stand-out discovery more recently made in a country of the Caucasus, bordering southeastern Europe….

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The Revelation of Dmanisi 

While excavating among Medieval period ruins in 1983 near the town of Dmanisi in the Republic of Georgia, archaeologists encountered a jaw-dropping find. They had uncovered a partial set of fossilized teeth belonging to a rhinoceros — an ancient type that made its home thousands of miles away in places like present-day Tanzania, Kenya and South Africa. 

The scientists were scratching their heads.

It just didn’t fit.

More fossils followed — mammoth, giraffe, saber-toothed cat. Clearly they had opened a door to a time long before anything they had come to expect from their excavations at Dmanisi. They were suddenly digging into a slice of the Early Pleistocene, between 1 million and 2 million years ago—when Europe’s environment was like that seen today in east and southern Africa.

But the excavators’ surprising encounters didn’t stop with animal fossils. Next came stones. Thousands of them. They were clearly shaped with intent, and not by nature. These bits of stone resembled in remarkable detail the kinds of simple stone tools first uncovered by Louis and Mary Leakey during the 1930’s at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. This was the very first human tool industry, known as the Oldowan, the advent of which is now generally accepted by scientists to have occurred about 2.6 million years ago.

So, here was the smoking gun. There must have been some form of human here contemporaneous with these ancient animals.

Shaking Up the Old Guard

It wasn’t until 1991 that workers at Dmanisi discovered the first direct evidence of a human presence within the Pleistocene layers. It was a fossilized mandible (the lower jaw), and it appeared to be human—but quite different from a modern human mandible. It was more like what scientists had been finding for decades in East and South Africafossils of what paleoanthropologists know to be some of the earliest members of our kind—genus Homo—human ancestors that lived between 1 million and 2 million years ago. Geographically, this fossil appeared to be several thousands of miles off course. 

Even more remarkable finds were uncovered in 1999 — two similar skulls emerged. Two years later, a third. Then a fourth. One of the skulls had no teeth, only gums. Further examination showed that the individual had suffered an illness and had been toothless for about two years prior to death. How could such an individual survive in the comparatively harsher life conditions that must have existed almost 2 million years ago? Was this person cared for in sickness, as we do our fellow humans today?

These new finds were turning some widely accepted theories of human evolution on their heads. 

“The prevailing view was that humans did not leave Africa until about 1 million years ago,” said David Lordkipanidze, paleoanthropologist and Director of the Georgian National Museum.* He had directed the excavations at Dmanisi for decades. He and his colleagues dated the new Homo fossils to about 1.8 million years ago using the latest dating technologies. Moreover, the morphology of the Dmanisi fossils seemed to be clearly ancestral to the later Homo erectus human species that had long been thought the first global colonizers. The Dmanisi specimens exhibited affinities to the earlier Homo habilis and Homo ergaster finds uncovered at African locations. And the stone tools were Oldowan — the simplest industry — not the more sophisticated Acheulean handaxe technology that at least some scientists contended was required to enable early humans to exit their African environment and survive as a global species. 

In the time-honored fashion, Lordkipanidze’s discoveries were immediately met with controversy. “One group of scientists accepted [our interpretation], but mostly people were skeptical,” he said.* 

With time, however, his discoveries at Dmanisi have joined the “who’s who” of fossil humans, and the research he and his team are doing today stands at the cutting edge of work in human evolution. Dmanisi is widely regarded as one of the world’s earliest early Homo sites outside of Africa.

But, Lordkipanidze and his colleagues were not through shaking things up in the world of human evolution.

Skull 5

While excavating at Dmanisi in 2005, Lordkipanidze and his team uncovered yet another remarkably well-preserved early Homo fossil. Designated as specimen ‘D4500′, it turned out to be the matching cranium to another fossil find uncovered 5 years earlier — a complete mandible they designated ‘D2600’. These two fossils were discovered alongside the remains of the four other early Homo fossil skulls, animal fossils, and simple stone tools. Designated Skull 5, the new cranium together with its mandible display a relatively small braincase with a long face and large teeth. Other similar early Homo fossils, all found in African contexts, are either incomplete, or adolescent or younger individuals. According to Lordkipanidze and his associates, this new find constituted “the most complete adult skull known from Early Pleistocene Homo.** Moreover, like some of the other finds, it was associated with other parts of the body that exhibited characteristics akin to Homo erectus body engineering, which closely approximates that of modern human morphology. In other words, this species had a very human-like body.

Skull 5 was another first. But the biggest revelation came not with the latest fossil, but with what the fossils collectively had to say about human evolution.

Now, with fossil finds that represented five distinct individuals, it was the first time that such an assembly of Early Homo fossils were found together within the same time and space context. No other site, in Africa or elsewhere, could boast of such a collection. The Dmanisi discoveries meant that scientists could study a range of variation in human species within the context of one place and time range, a relative mother lode of information that could potentially clarify, and perhaps even revolutionize, how we see these earliest of Homo human ancestors. 

The researchers set to work. And the result of their study was startling. Lordkipanidze and his colleagues summarize it well in the following words in their recent report published in Science

Geometric morphometric analysis and re-sampling statistics show that craniomandibular shape variation among the Dmanisi hominids is congruent with patterns and ranges of variation in chimpanzee and bonobo demes [a population of one species](Pan troglodytes troglodytes, P. t. verus, P. t. schweinfurthii, and P. paniscus) and in a global sample of H. sapiens. Within all groups, variation in cranial shape is mainly due to interindividual differences in size and orientation of the face relative to the braincase. The Dmanisi sample, including skull 5, thus represents normal within-deme variation, ranging from small-faced relatively orthognathic (typically female and/or subadult) individuals to large-faced relatively prognathic (typically male) individuals.**

In other words, after examining the remains, the research team concluded that the differences among these fossils vary no more than the differences between five modern humans or five chimpanzees. 

“Thanks to the relatively large Dmanisi sample, we see a lot of variation,” said Christoph Zollikofer from the Anthropological Institute and Museum in Zurich, Switzerland—a co-author of the Science report. “Had the braincase and the face of Skull 5 been found as separate fossils at different sites in Africa, they might have been attributed to different species.”

Historically, variations among Homo fossil finds in Africa and Asia have also been found, but these differences have never been found within the same spatial and time period context, and thus scientists have classified the various finds as belonging to separate species. But now, according to Lordkipanidze and his colleagues, what has previously been thought to be separate ancient human species — Homo erectusHomo habilisHomo rudolfensis, and Homo ergaster, for example — may actually be variations or sub-species of one and the same species.

The upshot: Researchers need to re-adjust their thinking when determining how early Homo fossils are classified. 

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The Dmanisi early Homo cranium (D4500) in situ. Courtesy Georgian National Museum

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The Dmanisi D4500 early Homo cranium and a large rodent tooth in situ. Associated fauna, such as the tooth from a rodent species that lived 1.8 million years ago, helped to date the find. Courtesy Georgian National Museum

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The complete Skull 5. Courtesy Guram Bumbiashvili, Georgian National Museum

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The Erectus Ascendancy

The findings at Dmanisi compelled the researchers to propose a major overhaul of how these early Homo fossils fit into the larger scheme of human evolution, including the emergence of human ancestors from their African homelands. As Lordkipanidze et al. report:

When seen from the Dmanisi perspective, morphological diversity in the African fossil Homo record around 1.8 Ma probably reflects variation between demes of a single evolving lineage [emphasis added], which is appropriately named H. erectus……Specimens previously attributed to H. ergaster are thus sensibly classified as a chronosubspecies, H. erectus ergaster. The Dmanisi population probably originated from an Early Pleistocene expansion of the H. erectus lineage from Africa, so it is sensibly placed within H. e. ergaster and formally designated as H. e. e. georgicus to denote the geographic location of this deme.**

By this thinking, what Louis and Mary Leakey first uncovered at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania in 1960 would not be Homo habilis, but Homo erectus habilis, what Kamoya Kimeu and Alan Walker discovered at Lake Turkana, Kenya in 1984 would not simply be Homo ergaster (the famous “Turkana Boy”), but Homo erectus ergaster, and what Bernard Ngeneo found at Koobi Fora on the east side of Lake Turkana in 1972 was not Homo rudolfensis, it was Homo erectus rudolfensis 

Most significantly, the evidence at Dmanisi, given its location and place in time, also implies something that challenges a long-standing paradigm in a big way: It was not the bigger-brained, bigger-bodied Homo erectus, with the more sophisticated Acheulean stone tools, that first ventured out of their native African comfort zone — it was the smaller-brained, smaller-bodied ones with the simple tools. And the exit out of Africa happened significantly earlier than previously thought. Scientists, these researchers suggest, will need to reconsider the elements required for early humans to become a global species.    

Paleoanthropology, however, like many other scientific fields, has proven to be a science where theories come and go. Lordkipanidze and his research colleagues would likely be among the first to admit that their conclusions from Dmanisi are wide open to debate and further testing through future finds and research, at Dmanisi and elsewhere. 

“Every year we are finding more and more,” says Lordkipanidze, “and we have excavated only 7 percent of the site.”*

That statement was made years ago. The percentage has gone up since then.

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Dmanisi skulls 1-5 (left to right), showing the individual variations, and a Dmanisi landscape. Courtesy M. Ponce de León and Ch. Zollikofer, University of Zurich, Switzerland

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Article Supplement

Homo erectus and the Anatomical Elements of Success

Homo erectus persisted over 6 times the currently known duration of Homo sapiens on the planet, with a global presence extending from South Africa to Indonesia. What accounts for the incredible success of this now extinct hominin species?

Arguably, some clues can be found in their morphology. The fossil evidence has shown that they were generally taller, sported longer arms, larger brains, a more humanlike bipedal gate, and more humanlike hands than other earlier hominins:

Larger, Smarter Brains

No characteristic has figured more prominently among scientists than the size of the human brain as an indicator for cognitive ability and thus the ability to survive and thrive as a species that otherwise would have been more vulnerable than other predatory mammals in their environment.

In general, hominin fossil evidence has revealed that, as the post-cranial part of the body (all anatomical elements below the head or skull) has increased in size, so too has the associated brain size. Data accumulated thus far shows that the smallest Homo erectus fossil examples indicated brain sizes only slightly larger than the earlier hominins, such as the australopithecines, whereas other examples, such as Turkana Boy, had brain volumes more than 50% larger than that of australopithecines. That translates to about 60% of the average modern human brain size. Most significant, however, is the proportional increase, or encephalization. The record shows that the cranial capacities of most later varieties of Homo erectus exhibited a volume of more than 1000 cm3, well within the lower recorded capacities of modern humans. This, even as the overall body sizes of the later varieties have not differed much from the earlier, more ancient specimens. 

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Endocast of an adult Homo erectus, on display in the Hall of Human Origins in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. An endocast is produced when the inside of the cranium is filled with a substance that creates a mold of the cranium interior. The brain and its blood vessels leave imprints on the inside of the skull. Because more advanced brains have smaller veins and many more folds and lobes, an endocast is very useful in determing how intelligent a human ancestor might have been, and what portions of its brain were more developed. Tim Evanson, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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Walking Like Us

The structural interpretation and analysis of Homo erectus fossil remains have led scientists to suggest very conclusively that this species was bipedal, a characteristic essential to higher energy efficiency for traveling across the landscape, enabling a greater ability to explore and inhabit spaces across the surface at greater distances.  Earlier hominins, such as Lucy the australopithecine, however, have also been determined to be bipedal, although with a less modern human-like gait and a more prevalent tree-climbing lifestyle. An operative consideration, therefore, may revolve equally around the gait of movement as much as being erect and moving on two limbs. The discoveries at the site of Ilert on the northeastern shore of Lake Turkana in Kenya have a story to tell about this. 

Ileret

It was in 2012 and 2013 when a scientific team discovered hominin fossils representing three individuals. The finds included two partial skeletons and one mandible. The mandible and one of the partial skeletons was dated to 2.02 to 2.03 million years ago and one partial skeleton was dated to approximately 1.82 to 1.86 million years ago. The partial skeletons have been classified as belonging to Homo erectus, and the mandible was assigned to Homo habilis, suggesting that Homo habilis and Homo erectus occupied or traversed the region at the same time.

Ileret is perhaps most significant in the popular literature, however, for the rare discovery of two trails of fossilized footprints, thought by scientists to have been made by a striding group of Homo erectus individuals about 1.5 million years ago. The footprints have provided a rare glimpse of Homo erectus foot anatomy and stride, providing more detailed information about how this species traveled and confirming the long-held suggestion that they walked much like modern humans, more so than any other earlier hominin species.

With this, Homo erectus was well-equipped to more efficiently travel the globe.

Hands Like Us

It was again within the scrubland environment of Lake Turkana where a team of scientists spied what appeared to be a fossil hand bone eroding out of the surface in 2011. After excavation, the team sent a cast of the fossil to Carol Ward, professor of pathology and anatomical sciences at the University of Missouri, for detailed analysis. She concluded that the fossil hand appeared to be almost as developed as that of a modern human. She based this at least in part on the fact that the styloid process feature of the hand, otherwise described as a projection of bone at the base of the third metacarpal, was anatomically key to making it possible for much greater strength of the gripping and articulation of the thumb and fingers of the hand necessary for the creation of complex tools. This feature and function was lacking in other early hominins and most certainly other primates.

The age of the fossil?

It was dated to 1.42 million years ago. Time and context of the find suggested it belonged to a Homo erectus individual. 

“With this discovery, we are closing the gap on the evolutionary history of the human hand,” said Ward, as published in the subject University of Missouri news release in 2014.  And “toolmaking was critical to the survival of these animals”.***

Homo erectus is known for creating the Acheulean stone tool industry. These tools were found in association with or in the context of sediments in which Homo erectus fossils were discovered. This industry is more complex and sophisticated than the earlier stone tool industry known as Oldowan, which has been identified with early hominins such as Homo habilis. Acheulean is typically characterized by lithic flakes larger than 10 cm (3.9 in), and bifacial hand axes, including other bifacial tools such as picks, knives, and cleavers. The handaxes are thought to be multi-purpose tools that were used for such activities as cutting meat, wood, and plants.

For Homo erectus, cutting meat was crucial, as their diet was likely dominated, based on archaeological evidence, on the consumption of large animals. Scientists have suggested that the high-protein consumption resulting from meat-eating was a key to human brain development.

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Acheulean Handaxe. José-Manuel Benito Álvarez, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

 

Manipulating the Environment

All of these morphological factors are postulated by scientists as playing a salient role in the superior ability of Homo erectus, as compared to their hominin predecessors, to manipulate their environment to enhance their ability to survive and thrive. The production and use of Acheulean stone tools as well as the controlled use of fire (as evidenced by the findings at Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa, for example) are considered milestones in the evolutionary progression and definition of this species’ existence.

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Return to Ngandong

Sites like those of the Turkana Basin, Dmanisi, and Trinil have stood for years among the earliest sites evidencing a Homo erectus presence. Eventually, more sites across Central and East Java have also emerged with fossils (200 in all) and artifacts testifying to a long chronology for the hominid’s existence on the island, from Sangiran, where the oldest fossil specimens have been found, dating to at least 1.5 million years ago, to Ngandong, where the last known presence of the species has been documented. The dating at Ngandong, however, has been a subject of scholarly debate for decades.

Enter paleoanthropologist Russell Ciochon from the University of Iowa in Iowa City, who for years has been conducting fieldwork on Java to explore evidence for the initial migration of early human ancestors into the region.  “I conducted fieldwork at Sangiran, the oldest known Homo erectus site on Java, from 1998 to 2006,” wrote Cionchon to Popular Archaeology. “After studying the arrival of Homo erectus on Java, we decided that it would be interesting to examine the extinction of Homo erectus. During our 2006 field season, we took a trip to Ngandong to determine the potential for re-excavation. We were able to successfully obtain funding for new excavations at Ngandong.”

With that, Ciochon co-led an international team from the University of Iowa, Macquarie University, and the Institute of Technology Bandung, Indonesia, to the banks of Java’s Solo river, beginning in 2008. The team was tasked to re-excavate and investigate Ngandong’s original bone bed, where in the early 1930’s German-Dutch paleontologist and geologist Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald excavated 25,000 fossils, 14 of which belonged to the hominid species identified as Homo erectus.

The team’s mission was clear. “There were very few methods to date a site in the 1930s,” explained Ciochon. “At that time, sites were dated based on relative dating methods such as comparing fauna to other sites on Java and across Asia. From the relative dating, they were able to determine that Ngandong was the youngest site, but not how much younger.” The re-investigation, which included fieldwork at the site in both 2008 and 2010, would afford the opportunity to employ the latest state-of-the-art techniques to find answers. “Previous attempts had always focused on the fossils themselves, and that was always problematic,” said Kira Westaway, associate professor at Macquarie University and a member of the team and joint-lead author on the project study paper published in Nature. “So we tried a different approach. We looked at trying to date the sediments that the fossils were actually buried in. These sediments are river sediments and they deposited within a river terrace, which is a former level of the flood plane surface. Our attempt was to date how these fossils sit within the bigger puzzle of the landscape system.”

The initial challenge required the excavators to first re-locate the original bone bed layer that contained the 14 Homo erectus fossils. Beginning with a 1934 site map created by the original excavators, the site researchers explored the site using landmarks, the application of geological horizons, excavation pits, and applying a total data station (TDS) to accurately record the precise locations of all fossil finds throughout the excavation process. They were able to locate the bone bed in two different locations, taking samples of the strata for later dating. Using surface height measurements, they also created a topographic reconstruction of the site, generating a 3D model for analysis.  In addition, the researchers studied the broader landscape context of the site, determining the course of the Solo river relative to the site through time and developing the geologic river terrace sequence.

Once the excavations were completed, the team submitted the soil samples from the bone bed to labs for dating using uranium-series, luminescence (OSL), argon, and uranium series electron-spin-resonance (US-ESR) testing. By combining the results from the different methods using Bayesian modeling, the team was able to finally produce a more reliable date range for the bone bed.

The results became worldwide news.The Homo erectus fossils were dated to between 108,000 and 117,000 years ago. These fossils were even younger than previously thought, and younger than any Homo erectus fossils found anywhere in the world. 

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Above and below: Excavations underway at Ngandong in 2010. Russell L. Ciochon, University of Iowa

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Exposed bonebed from 2010 excavations at Ngandong. Russell L. Ciochon, University of Iowa

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Above and below: Homo erectus fossil replica from Ngandong. “None of the skull caps from Ngandong are fully intact, but several of them are complete enough to provide estimates of cranial capacity which is used as a proxy for brain size,” explains Ciochon. “The Ngandong Homo erectus fossils have the largest cranial capacity of any Homo erectus fossils. But without additional evidence for behavior, we are unable to say that they were smarter than other Homo erectus groups. The cranial capacity of Homo erectus at Sangiran, Java (the oldest, or earliest, site on Java) is 840 to 1050 cubic centimeters, and the Ngandong range is 1,035 to 1,255 cubic centimeters. The cranial capacity of Ngandong Homo erectus overlaps with the lower end of the modern human range. There are [also] some changes in the shape of the Homo erectus skull caps that make them distinct from other earlier Homo erectus fossils including a higher forehead. Due to the large brain size, Ngandong Homo erectus is referred to as the most derived, advanced, Homo erectus. Image credit: Kiran Patel, University of Iowa

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The Last Stand?

One could argue that, on the island of Java, our Homo erectus ancestors made their last stand — that they were the last of the Homo erectus species. But while it is true that, to date, there is no evidence anywhere in the world of a Homo erectus presence any later than Ngandong, Ciochon and his colleagues caution against the conclusion that Ngandong marks the time just before the species extinction.

“Our work provides the age of the last known appearance of Homo erectus, but this does not mean that it is the age of extinction,” said Ciochon. “Small groups of Homo erectus may have lived longer [at other locations] without leaving fossil evidence.”

But even if the Ngandong fossils represent some of the last Homo erectus to persist on the planet, assuming that no similar fossils of the species of equivalent or later dates are found on Java, what caused their decline and extinction on the island?  Ciochon and his colleagues point to major environmental changes that were in the works at the time.

“Humidity and moisture levels on Java vary between glacial and interglacial periods,” explained Ciochon. “When the area became wetter, the rainforest expanded east across Java replacing the open woodland environment associated with Homo erectus. The demise of Homo erectus on Java coincides with this rainforest expansion, and the changing environment likely contributed to the demise of Homo erectus.”

But, here again, Ciochon qualifies his statements. “We can only speculate on why Homo erectus was unable to adapt to a rainforest environment. They might not have been able to find food sources they normally ate, or they might have been more vulnerable to the predators in the rainforest.” Or there could have been possible causes that have never been fully considered or studied: Such as ecosystem changes that can introduce new flora and fauna, which in turn could introduce new micro-organisms causing diseases that could decimate or wipe out entire groups or populations of animals, including Home erectus.

In any case, the Ngandong finds have served to buttress two major implications. First, Ciochon asserts, “we have ended a long controversy over the age of this important site in human evolution”; and second, “Homo erectus was an incredibly long-lived species with a massive geographic distribution which makes it one of the most successful hominins that ever lived.”

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Palaeoanthropological site of Trinil, Java, Indonesia, where Eugène Dubois first discovered Pithecanthropus (now Homo) erectus in the 1890s. Selenka and Blanckenhorn 1911: Tafel III, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

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* Lordkipanidze, David, “The First Humans Out of Africa”. Posted March 2012. TEDvideo, 15:27. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dC0gdpVS4uM 

** David Lordkipanidze, et al., A Complete Skull from Dmanisi, Georgia, and the Evolutionary Biology of Early Homo, Science 342:326-331, 2013.

***Hominid bone indicates that human hand evolution mostly complete by 1.42 million years ago, University of Missouri, January 23, 2014, Volume 35, No. 16. https://mizzouweekly.missouri.edu/archive/2014/35-16/bone/index.php.html

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This article combines content from three previously published premium articles with new, additional content.

Cover Image, Top Left: Facial reconstruction of Homo erectus. Werner Ustorf, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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The Olympics: Origins, Events & Modern Reinvention

Editor’s Note: The Olympics is considered the world’s most famous and important sports competition. More than 200 teams representing countries throughout the world participate, entering their finest athletes. The event was first inspired by the ancient Olympic Games, held in Olympia, Greece from the 8th century BC to the 4th century AD. What follows is an interview with Dr. Paul Cartledge by interviewer Richard Marranca about the origins, some of the individual events, and the archaeology of the famous games….

 

Richard Marranca (RM): Could you give us an overview of the Olympics? Did it have religious origins? Was a truce in effect during the Olympics? Where and when did it begin? And at what time in history did it emerge?

Paul Cartledge (PC):  The ancient Olympics were traditionally founded in what we call 776 BC or BCE. They were a quadrennial (held every four years) religious festival dedicated to the worship of Zeus of Mt Olympus, open at first to all Greeks but only to Greeks. I emphasise ‘Greeks’ (or as they called themselves, Hellenes), since the Olympics was one of the – very few – ‘panhellenic’ festivals: until the Romans started conquering Greece in the 2nd century BCE, and began demanding to be allowed to compete, the Olympics were open only to Greeks. Mainly male Greeks competed, though women of a certain profession who were also Greeks would have been present to provide ‘comfort’ services to athletes and spectators alike. Religious worship at the site has been documented archaeologically for several centuries before the 8th century BCE (700s). But not before the 8th century could anything like a supra-local festival have been imagined or implemented. That was the era when Greeks both within old Greece (the Aegean world) and in the diaspora world began to be in regular contact with each other. Greeks had then started settling permanently both in the West – south Italy, Sicily, south of France, east coast of Spain, north African coast – and in the East and north-East around the Black Sea. Probably quite small-scale and mainly Peloponnesian to begin with, the Olympic festival had become a truly international affair by the beginning of the 6th century, when the Olympics became locked into a 4-event cycle, the premier athletic circuit of the ancient Greek world. The Olympic ‘truce’ is a separate and very special subject. The ancient Greek term for it meant literally armistice – a holding back of hands. It came into force before and after the 5-day Games – not, as often thought, because the Games were in an important sense sacred, but because Greek cities were often at war with each other, and the summer months were the active campaigning season. So, the truce – reinforced by sanctions of impiety against would-be transgressors – was a practical necessity: to enable competitors and spectators to get to and back home from Olympia in safety and security.

RM: What about archaeology over the last centuries or at present in Olympia?

PC:  The site of ancient Olympia, which had been submerged beneath layers of mud in the centuries after the ancient Games were shut down by a Christian Roman emperor in c. 400, was rediscovered in the 1760s by a British antiquarian. Six decades or so later, a French-led expedition showed signs of interest in excavating it, but it was not until 1875 that serious archaeology on the site was first undertaken – with the full permission of the Greek government – by the German Archaeological Institute. Their controlled excavations have continued to the present day, interrupted only by two World Wars. It was these German excavations which gave strong encouragement to a French aristocrat, Pierre Baron de Coubertin, to conceive of the idea of staging or re-staging a ‘modern’ Olympics – an idea first realized in 1896, though not at Olympia but in Athens. German excavators have been responsible for a stunning series of publications as well as for unearthing the vast majority of the objects to be found in Olympia’s two museums (one specifically dedicated to the history of the site and Games, both Ancient and Modern). A recent publication – Olympia (2021) by the British-based American archaeologist Judith Barringer – heroically attempts to provide a chronologically ordered account of the site and the finds. There are numerous other accounts of the Games, often very well illustrated. The site is of course owned by the Greek state, but the German Institute dig house and the ever-presence of German scholars give the site a distinctly teutonic feel. But even the best laid plans cannot be totally, 100 percent proof against the ravages of both nature (earthquakes) or man (theft) or a combination of both (wild fires).

RM: Is it true that in the early Olympics, athletes were naked? Why?

PC:  Yes, and not only in the ‘early’ iterations of Games, which traditionally by modern reckoning originated in 776 BCE, with just the one ‘event’, a roughly 200-meter dash. For (naked) men only. In the 5th century BCE the managers of the Games (below) doubled down on nudity, when the mother of a competitor, from a famous athletic family of Rhodes (below), sought to gain entry to a men-only space by dressing as a man but fell over and revealed the anatomical female truth. Thereafter trainers too and not just competitors were required to disrobe completely in the most sacred area. (Just one woman at any one time was ever permitted into the otherwise men-only space: a local priestess of Demeter.)

As the Games were held around the time of the second full moon after the summer solstice, there was no danger of anyone dying of cold (peak temperatures would normally have reached the high 30s C or low 40s). But why nudity? A question often asked and usually answered rather lamely by saying that, as the Games were a form of worship of Zeus of Mt Olympus, the nudity must have some ‘ritual’ significance, possibly to do with fertility. However, it’s worth adding that the ancient Greek word for totally naked was (masculine form) gumnos – from which came the ancient Greek word for the carefully demarcated space where athletes competed (boxing, wrestling) in fun or deadly seriousness, namely gumnasion, whence the English word ‘gymnasium’. Strict rules were observed regarding eligibility for exercising in a gumnasion: male citizens only were allowed, subadult boys had to be accompanied/watched over by a slave attendant, and trainers and supervisors of a gymnasium were forbidden to indulge in homosexual courting let alone full-on action.

RM: What were some of the earliest events? Could some of them be dangerous?

PC:  By the early 5th century BCE (470s on) the Games athletics program had settled down to nine events, most divided by age category between Men (18 plus) and Boys (roughly 14-18): the stade (200-meter dash, 776-), diaulos (roughly 400 meters, 724), dolichos (‘long’ race, 24 laps of the Olympic stadium, up and down 12 times, roughly 5000 meters), pentathlon ‘5 contests’ (200-meter dash, javelin-throwing, discus-throwing, long jump, and wrestling, 708), boxing (bare-knuckle, 688), 4-horse chariot-race (staged in a separate, specially built stadium, the Hippodrome or ‘Horse-Race Course’, 680), pankration or ‘all-strength contest’ (a combination of wrestling and judo, biting and gouging forbidden, otherwise no-holds-barred, 648), horse-race  (648), race in armor, roughly 400 metres (520), mule-cart race (500-448), calpê (race involving dismounting and remounting horses, 496-448), and sunoris (2-horse race, 408). Dangerous? The thrills and spills of horse-racing and especially chariot-racing are well known from movie re-creations such as that in Ben Hur. But the seriously dangerous, i.e. life-threatening, events were those sometimes lumped together as the ‘heavy’ events: boxing, wrestling, and above all the pankration.

RM: Can you give a brief portrait of Olympia in terms of what it looked like, what went on there, the spectators and so on?

PC:  The site of Olympia in the northwest Peloponnese of southern Greece was chosen not least for the availability of a reliable water-supply, even at the height of summer. It was not a single space but three spaces: most sacred was the Altis, a grove at the heart of the site within which the athletics events were staged, and where the temples of the chief divinities being worshipped, Zeus and his sister-wife Hera, were built. Besides those two temples (one of which, the Zeus temple, housed a statue destined to be accounted one of the 7 ‘Wonders’ of the ancient world) the single most important religious structure was a huge and ever-growing ash-altar, composed of the remains from sacrificing – ritually slaughtering and then roasting – bulls in honor of Zeus. Outside the Altis but integral to the Games was the Hippodrome (above). Then there were all those spaces and structures open for religious worship all year round, when the Games were not being held. We don’t know how many competitors there were present at any one Game – several hundreds probably. But they were massively outnumbered by the spectators, who were also pilgrims, and of course they needed food and shelter. The  noise, the smell, the er mess – it doesn’t bear thinking about too closely, if there really were on the order of 40,000 of them gathered at Olympia every four years, the largest single gathering of Greeks anywhere at any time.

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Above and below: Plan of the Sanctuary of Olympia. Bibi Saint-Pol, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons.

Legend:

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Model of Olympia, as exhibited at the British Museum. Carole, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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RM: How did athletes prepare in terms of diet, exercise, coaching, travel, rituals, and so on?

PC:  Late sources such as Philostratus (2nd c. AD) go into the details of athletes’ training regimes and diets. Meat and fish, both expensive, were recommended by some, while others favored figs, moist cheese and wheat. Specialist coaches there certainly were, such as Pythagoras (not the philosopher-mathematician). One essential feature of the ancient Olympics was the absolutely obligatory period of pre-Games training, actually at Olympia, during which the judges inspected the would-be competitors and decided on the eventual list of those who would actually do the business in and around the stadium in the Altis. Part of these preparatory training exercises took place in the Palaestra, literally the wrestling arena. Travel to Olympia – at first by boat if coming from, say, France, Spain or the Black Sea – would be mainly on foot, possibly by mule or donkey. Equestrian competitors of course had to get their horses and teams laboriously to Olympia. Sportsmen tend to be superstitious, so one can imagine that in the run-up to a Games there would be a lot of attendance at shrines of gods, goddesses, heroes and heroines, much offering up of prayers and animal or vegetable sacrifices, and plentiful making of vows, in general promising that in return for supernatural assistance the athlete or equestrian competitor would shower the appropriate supernatural power with return gifts in the event of success.

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The “Exedra”: stone seats reserved for the judges at the games. NeilEvans at English Wikipedia, Public domain, Wikimedia Commons

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RM: Were there other games too? In which games were women allowed to compete? Were Spartan women especially successful in sports?

PC:  From the 570s BCE the Olympics had been enfolded in what the Greeks called a ‘Circuit’ (periodos) of ‘crown’ (symbolic prizes only) games, as its numero uno.  The other three were the – also quadrennial – Pythian Games held at Delphi in central Greece (in honor of Apollo), and the biennial Isthmian Games (held at the Isthmus in honor of Poseidon) and Nemean Games (at Nemea in north-east Peloponnese in honor of Zeus). ‘Crown’ games were so called because the (first-only) prizes on offer were crowns made from natural produce – olive or bay leaves, or wild celery. Most Greek games, however, were not ‘crown’ games but value-prize games: the material prizes awarded were worth something, such as the amphorae filled with sacred olive oil on offer at Athens’s quadrennial Panathenaic Games, or the large bronze vessel that winners at the Heraea (games in honor of Hera) took home from Argos. Young girls and young women, it comes as something of a surprise to learn, did compete in public, though not stark naked, at Olympia, in a race in honor of Zeus’s sister-wife Hera. But not at the same festival as the men, and in only one running race, a shortened stade (about 160 meters as opposed to the men’s 192.24). One can well imagine Spartan females taking part in such a race, though we don’t happen to know whether any ever did, and it’s possible that Spartan women’s bulkier-than-normal physique (due to a superior diet) was not best suited to track events. On the other hand, the first woman in all Greece to win an Olympic victory was indeed a Spartan, though she was no ordinary woman but a princess royal, Cynisca. She won first in 396 and then again in 392, with the same team of mares in the four-horse chariot-race (tethrippos).

RM: What are some differences between the Paris Olympics 2024 and the ancient Olympics? Yes, that would take a book, but if you can say a few things. And what inventions from the 1936 “Nazi” Olympics are still part of today’s Olympics?

PC:  Where to start….!

i. The ancient Games, despite their religious framework (more below), were a kind of paramilitary exercise, ‘War minus the shooting’, as George Orwell called international professional football (soccer) matches, which are euphemistically called ‘friendlies’ today. Competitors competed as individuals – but the (literal) song and dance that the cities of winners indulged in, and the material and symbolic super benefits they conferred on their triumphant citizens, demonstrate that Olympic competition was seen by them as being significantly the continuation of war by other means. In 364 BCE sacrilegiously warfare actually broke out within the Altis itself.

ii. The ancient Olympic ‘truce’ is regularly misunderstood, not least by de Coubertin. Its original name is a giveaway: literally an armistice (ekekheiria). It was introduced and had to be introduced as a way to enable competitors and pilgrims to get to and from the Games unharmed, even if their states happened to be at war with each other, often enough the case. The truce in other words was not in itself an expression of a pacific or pacifist ideal.

iii. Gentleman amateur? An American scholar in 1984 exploded the ‘amateur’ notion. By no means all competitive conduct was gentlemanly (see iv). And of course de Coubertin’s Victorian prudishness ruled out male nudity. On the other hand, in his ‘gender-critical’ stance de Coubertin was on the money. There were women’s athletics in ancient Greece, including at Olympia (above), but … not at the same time or on the same scale as the (men-only) Olympics.

iv. Fair Play? Were the ancient Olympics ‘sport’?? What I’m getting at here is twofold: first, the use in English of the adjective ‘sporting’: sporting behavior is behavior that not only falls within a strict and narrow interpretation of the rules but also interprets those laws generously, and especially in relation to one’s own opponent, in such a way as to minimize one’s own advantage. Not many if any instances of such ‘sporting’ behavior are on offer from the ancient Olympics. Rather the reverse, for, as two Canadian scholars have written, ‘The ancient Greek rule books seem to have passed over many tactics we would consider the worst sort of dirty fighting’. Consider only the ancient equivalent of today’s terrifying MMA (Mixed Martial Arts), that is the pankration. No gouging of eyes, no biting – those were the rules. But a famous 5th-century Athenian drinking cup shows precisely both of those illegal moves in graphic action.

v. Next, I move on to the spirit of contest: you might think that contest or competition was something universally human – not so! Our English word ‘agony’, meaning extreme pain, is derived from the ancient Greek noun agônia, which meant competitiveness, in its specifically Hellenic form – zero-sum, winner takes all; in the ancient Olympics there was just one ‘prize’, a symbolic olive wreath, no silver let alone bronze medals – both of which were part of de Coubertin’s soppy idea that taking part in the Games was as important if not more important than winning.

vi. Religion: from agonia I move penultimately to Agôn, capital A. The ancient Greeks did not only practice an extreme form of ultra-competitiveness but they also, literally, worshipped, paid cult to, a personified ‘Agon’. He (the Greek noun is masculine) had a statue at Olympia mentioned in the 2nd c. CE by Pausanias (5.20.3, 26.3), and he was related, not surprisingly, to two other abstractions of personifications, Zelos (Emulation) and Nike (Victory). But most important of all is that this particular form of competition was especially associated with religious festivals, so that any religious festival involving competition and prize-giving could be labelled an agôn. This is yet another reminder that the ancient Olympics were staged within an essentially religious framework, a henotheistic, polytheistic framework deeply alien to our ways of thinking and doing.

Finally, to ram the point of difference home, I bring to you a

vii. Legacy that is no legacy: the Marathon

The universally popular marathon race of today was first invented, introduced and run in and around Athens in the first Modern Olympics of 1896, ‘after an idea’ (as they say in the movies) by French classicist Michel Bréal, proposed and accepted at the 1894 congress. At first, of course, it was men-only. Indeed, not just at first: there was no women’s Olympics marathon race until 1984 (L.A.). Since then, a mere marathon is considered relatively tame and everyday – a question of breaking the 2-hour time barrier, an entirely modern notion. The real agonists of our day go in for ultra-marathons, runners such as my good friend Greek-American Dean Karnazes, who’s acquired the nickname ‘Mr Ultramarathon Man’. He’s run ultramarathons all over the world, including the Spartathlon, which was first staged in 1982 and has a far better ancient pedigree (Herodotus…) than the marathon. Why ‘marathon’, anyway? It took its name and length (some 40 km) from its route, from Marathon on the east coast of Atttiki to central Athens, and its inspiration/legitimation from an alleged original run in 490 BCE, following the Battle of Marathon – though even the ancient Greeks themselves couldn’t agree on the name of that runner. However, and this is my final, clinching point: at the original Olympics the ‘long’ race, the dolichos, was a mere 24 laps of the roughly 200-meter course or, in our terms, something like a 5000 meters or middle-distance event. No ‘marathons’ for the ancient Greeks, thank you very much.

Finally, an invention of the Hitler Games of 1936 that has stood the test of time? The torch-relay. The Olympic flame was an invention of 1928. It was in keeping with de Coubertin’s Olympic ideal that it should be lit at Olympia and then transported to the – movable – site of each modern Olympiad.

RM: Did Alexander the Great like sports? Did his father enter horse races at Olympia? Any word about Plato or other philosophers enjoying the Olympics? Did or could any of the Ptolemies, including Cleopatra VII, sponsor any events or horse racing participants?

PC:  Philosophers tended to be sniffy about athletics and athletes – far too preoccupied with their bodies (bulking up, etc), and not nearly interested enough in the things of the mind. King Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander III (the Great), won a horse race at Olympia in 356, the year of Alexander’s birth. Alexander is credited (or debited) with saying that he would compete at Olympia – but only if all his fellow-contestants were also kings. That was probably a cop-out: he would not have been interested in taking part in any contest he might not win. A homonymous ancestor, King Alexander I, had taken part in the Olympics – but for him it really was the taking part and not the winning that mattered, since being allowed to compete proved his (challenged) status as a true-blue Hellene. So far as we know, no Ptolemy competed in person in any Olympic event, partly because Ptolemy II founded in 279 BC  games named after his family, the Ptolemaia, and celebrated at Alexandria, which were an Olympics equivalent for Egyptian Greeks. But several of the Ptolemies, not least the women, emulated Philip II by competing in and winning equestrian events at Olympia, Arsinoe II (sister-wife of Ptolemy II) not the least.

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Remains of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. Pan.stathopoulos, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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Pedimental sculptures of the Temple of Zeus, in the Archaeological Museum of Olympia. Made by Numbers, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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The Palaestra at Olympia, where wrestlers and other athletes were trained. Bgabel, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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About Paul Cartledge

Paul Cartledge is a British historian and scholar. From 2008 to 2014 he was the A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge, and previously held a personal chair in Greek History at Cambridge. (Text CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikipedia Commons)

 

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Cover Image, Top Left: Temple in Olympia, Chrisi1964, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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The Architectural and Archaeological Legacy of the Christian Persecution

Professor Frank J. Korn has retired from his teaching position on the Classical Studies faculty at Seton Hall University.  He is a Fulbright Scholar at the American Academy in Rome and the author of nine books on various aspects of the Eternal City.  He is listed in Marquis Who’s Who as “a notable classical educator and writer.”  Recipient of the Princeton Prize for Distinguished Teaching, he resides with his wife Camille in Scotch Plains, N.J.  The couple’s three sons –  Frank, Ronald, and John and their families live nearby.  His latest book    Below Rome, the Story of the Catacombs    which he co-authored with his wife, is available on Amazon or from the publisher, St. Johann Press, Haworth, N.J.

Around the mid-first century of our era the volatile Emperor Nero    for reasons we shall see in due course    resolved to eradicate the new religion from the east which was fast taking root in Rome.  Across the next two hundred years many    but not all    of his successors continued the effort with varying degrees of intensity, but, as the historian Tertullian informs us, the blood of the martyrs became the very elixir of life for the infant Church of Rome.  As one writer expressed it, “Surely it is not easy to discount a story for which the witnesses are willing to be slain.”  Indeed hundreds, maybe thousands, of pagan or agnostic Romans were drawn to the Gospel message by the unforgettable sight of the serenity of the believers as they were being led to slaughter.  Today, Christianity marches on in its third millennium. The mighty Roman Empire did not survive a half of one.

Today, all over Rome, signs of Christianity’s ultimate triumph abound.  Today, its monuments and shrines rise, literally, over or next to, or even within the ruins and rubble of old Rome and have forever altered the city’s skyline.  Where once upon a time the tympanums of temples to Jupiter, Mars, Venus, and other ancient deities were silhouetted against the Italian firmament, one now sees campaniles and cupolas, each surmounted by a cross.  And floating high above them all    like a gigantic white hot-air balloon    is the dome of St. Peter’s on the opposite side of the Tiber.

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The dome of St. Peters figures prominently on the urban landscape of the city of Rome. Emphyrio, Pixabay

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On the summit of the Capitoline Hill, for example, the fallen stones of the Temple of Juno provide a bedrock foundation for the medieval church of Santa Maria in AraCoeli, whose cascading one hundred and twenty four marble steps were transferred here from the nearby Temple of Apollo.

Far below, in the Great Forum, three temples ultimately were converted into houses of Christian worship.  Within the walls and colonnade of the sanctuary to the deified Emperor Antoninous and Empress Faustina the early believers erected a church to San Lorenzo.  What was left of the sacred edifice honoring the divinities, Venus and Roma, was incorporated into a church named Santa Francesca Romana.  And, lastly, the circular shrine of Romulus, son of the Emperor Maxentius, became the apse of a church honoring Saints Cosmas and Damian.

On the nearby island in the Tiber, from the year 292 B.C.,when Rome was struck by a deadly plague, there stood the Temple of Aesculapius, the Greek god of medicine.  In the tenth century, the city’s Christians built on this site a church to the apostle Bartholomew, whose bones are said to repose beneath the main altar.  This holy place remains to this day a focal point of pilgrimage.

The Aventine Hill in antiquity was graced by seven majestic temples.  On the site of the one named for the goddess Diana, now stands the quaint little church of Santa Prisca.  At the highest point of this same hill where there rose in the imperial age a shrine to Bona Dea i.e. the “Good Goddess,” now exists the baroque Piranesi masterpiece of Santa Maria del Priiorato.

Down in the valley along the bank of the Tiber the ancient citizenry put up a beautiful Corinthian–colonnaded round temple to the demi-god Hercules, and a rectangular one to Portunus, god of the harbor.  Both date to the second century before Christ and survive in a remarkable state of preservation due to their use as Christian churches throughout the Middle Ages, which resulted in careful, constant maintenance.  Just across the cobblestoned street is the romanesque sixth century edifice of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, which stands above an intact small Mithraic temple.

Not far from here, in the Campus Martius district, above the remains of the once splendid Temple of Minerva, the war goddess and protectress of old Rome, we come upon a Gothic structure honoring the Virgin Mary.  The church bears the poetic name:  Santa Maria Sopra Minerva. (Sopra is Italian for “above.”).

Lest the reader, at this juncture, get the impression that it was only pagan temples that got this Christian makeover, let us here point out the many secular, civic facilities and public grounds that underwent a similar conversion.

For example, the still intact Curia or Senate House    whose walls once rang with fiery orations during tumultuous legislative sessions    was transformed into the church of Saint Adrian of Nicomedia in the year 630.  From then on, the old chamber softly echoed the solemn Gregorian Chant of Christian clergy and worshippers.  (The building was deconsecrated in the late nineteenth century and reclassified as a historic site.}  Even the city’s maximum security jail, the Mamertine Prison, did not escape the Christianization of both Republican and Imperial Rome’s historic sites.  Peter and Paul were incarcerated here    by order of Nero    in the Mamertine’s dreaded subterranean dungeon, the Tullianum, to await their execution nine months later.  Sometime after the Church’s liberation by Constantine’s Edict of Milan in 313, the local disciples fashioned out of the prison a chapel which still goes by the fitting name, San Pietro in Carcere. (On certain feast days Mass is still celebrated on the marble altar in this notorious old lockup.)

A few blocks away, on the site of the outdoor shopping mecca which the ancients knew as the Forum Holitorium (Produce Market), an influx of sixth century Greek Christian migrants erected the massive church of San Giorgio in Velabro. (Velabrum is the Latin name for this former commercial district.)

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The San Giorgio in Velabro Church. Fallaner, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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In this same neighborhood today’s visitor –  pilgrim or tourist    may also pay a visit to Sant Angelo in Pescheria, where the local fishmongers of a bygone age carried on a bustling business, or to Santa Maria in Via Lata (Saint Mary’s on the Wide Street) which was built on the ruins of the Saepta Julia, a large, porticoed enclave which was used as the main polling precinct for elections by the General Assembly. This public project    conceived by Julius Caesar and completed by his successor Augustus    was designed with many aisles to keep the long lines of voters orderly.

On a part of the remainder of the grandstands of the oval Stadium of Domitian, the Christian flock honored, with a small shrine, the lovely teenaged Agnes who was martyred here.  The grand baroque church, which has replaced the original tribute since 1635, is the work of the prolific architect Borromini and is named for the poor innocent:  Sant Agnese in Agone.  What was left of the emperor’s arena evolved into the ever popular Piazza Navona (“Navona” being a corruption of “in Agone”).

From here a twenty five minute stroll through the heart of Rome will take you to the huge square called Piazza del Popolo where, as you enter from the Via del Corso, you will see identical twin churches:  Santa Maria di Monte Santo to your right and Santa Maria dei Miracoli on the left.  The latter occupies the site of what remained of the extravagant mausoleum of the dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla.  (Note:  Of Rome’s more than four hundred churches, incidentally, some seventy or so are named for the mother of Christ, patroness of the Eternal City.)

The Emperor Hadrian (A.D. 117-138), who was vehemently opposed to the cult but did not hunt down its practitioners, would be aghast if one day he were to return to life only to learn that his proud Pantheon is now the Church of Saint Mary and the Martyrs; that his massive tomb on the left bank of the Tiber has long been used as a papal refuge; that the Pons Aelius, which he built to span the river as an access to his final resting place is now celebrated as The Bridge of the Angels and features at the far end the two most venerated Christian leaders:  St. Peter and St. Paul.

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The Pantheon, or the Church of St. Mary and the Martyrs, as it appears today in Rome. Krystianwin, Pixabay

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A later ruler, Diocletian (284-305), who launched a bloody persecution resulting in the slaughter of multitudes of the flock of Christ, would be dismayed to find that the tepidarium of his lavish bath complex was transformed into a house of worship, called Santa Maria degli Angeli, by the giant of the Renaissance, Michelangelo. (Because of the great hall’s peculiar dimensions, the moody architect created a transept longer than the nave.)  Diocletian’s sprawling spa was surrounded by a rectangle of lofty walls sporting a large round tower at each of the four corners.  One of the three towers still extant was destined to become the church of San Bernardo alle Terme (St. Bernard at the Baths).

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Santa Maria degli Angeli (Rome) – Facade. NikonZ7II, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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Across the length and breadth of Eternal Rome the present-day visitor will see  — and hear    yet more evidence of Christianity’s centuries-long architectural response to its early tormentors.  Crowning each of the two dozen or so soaring obelisks, brought back from Egypt by the swaggering Roman legions as tall, slender trophies of war, is a cross.  The still standing second-century monumental hundred-foot-high bas reliefed column of Trajan, which once supported a marble statue of him on its summit, now holds aloft an effigy of Peter the Apostle.  Down the street from here (the Via del Corso) rises a similar column, atop which stood a sculpture of Marcus Aurelius, which has long since given way to one of the Apostle Paul.  The iconic Colosseum is marked at the fifty yard line with a huge black cross commemorating the countless Christians said to have been martyred here.

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The Column of Trajan (right). AlekseyMyagky, Pixabay

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The Column of Trajan still shows the immaculate, detailed bas relief telling stories and events of pagan Rome. Gary Todd, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

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Four of the ancient eleven waterworks, the amazing aqueducts, having been restored by the Renaissance popes. Each terminate in a spectacular monumental fountain, the marble facade of which bears the name of the pontiff who commissioned the work.

And providing a melodious touch to Christianitiy’s survival, an integral part of the city’s soundtrack, colossal church bells ring out the hours all day long over the rooftops of Rome.

…..

Christian pilgrims to Rome, hoping to be swept back across a million yesterdays to apostolic times, often list a visit to one church in particular as a major priority.  More so than St. Peters, this site enables one to tangibly peel away the centuries:  The Church of San Clemente.  Just a stone’s throw from the Colosseum, it is actually three churches superimposed one upon the other, with massive stonework and piles of masonry from three distinct Roman epochs.  On the property, Christians have gathered for worship across two thousand years of Church history.  When Peter was serving as bishop of Rome, there dwelled here a pious priest named Clement, who allowed his residence to be used as a clandestine domus ecclesia, i.e. house church.

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The Basilica of San Clemente. Labicanense, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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Everything seems to indicate that Clement belonged to the aristocratic Flavian family, which gave Rome three emperors:  Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian.  In the year 88 Clement was elected to the Throne of St. Peter, thereby becoming the fourth pope of the infant Church that was at the time struggling to survive the bloodbaths of the persecutions.

Soon after Domitian was elevated to the purple, he brought the full might and fury of Imperial Rome crashing down on the city’s small but growing Christian community.  Even family ties counted for naught as he issued the order to have his cousin Pope Clement and the consul Flavius, a recent convert, executed.  Sometime in the fourth century after Constantine had put an end to the onslaught against Christianity, the faithful filled the ground floor of Clement’s home with rubble and mortar to provide a solid foundation for the basilica they were soon to raise on that hallowed ground.  From early writers, such as St. Jerome, we learn that this basilica was given the Latin name Sanctus Clemens (in Italian – San Clemente as we know it today), in honor of the martyred pontiff.

Throughout the early Middle ages, Saint Clement’s remained one of the most prominent of all the city’s Christian shrines.  Then in the year 1084 came the infamous Norman sack of Rome.  Beautiful, historic Saint Clemens was severely damaged.  In 1108 Pope Paschal II began construction of a new basilica atop the remains of the fourth century structure.  The half-hidden older edifice was filled in completely and vanished from human sight for seven hundred and fifty years. 

It wasn’t until 1857 that the amazing stratification of the property was discovered.  Doing some restoration work under the supervision of the Dominican, Father Mullooly, workmen came upon the church beneath.  (Since 1667, San Clemente has been in the care of an order of Irish Dominican priests.)  The priest solicited funds from all over the globe to have the lower church completely cleared.  These excavations revealed an imposing three-aisled basilica with its graceful apse and canopied altar still intact.  Well-preserved, too, were numerous eighth, ninth, and tenth century paintings and mosaics depicting events in the life of Pope St. Clement.  Continued digging deeper underground led Father Mulooly into the very rooms of Clement’s home, which in imperial times stood at what was then ground level.  Further probing brought yet more antiquity to light.  Just across a narrow back alley from this house-church was another pink-brick residence whose owner had carved out a room for purposes of worship in another popular religion of the age    Mithraism.

In the mithraeum one sees a vaulted ceiling, stone benches for the worshippers, and a small altar with fine bas-reliefs showing the Persian deity Mithras sacrificing a bull to the sun-god.  (Plutarch tells us that the Mithraic mysteries were first bought to Rome by soldiers of Pompey the Great.)

Having visited the lower basilica, one can readily notice that Pope Paschal was extremely faithful to its architectural plan in his design of the upper church.  That plan included a colonnaded courtyard  — out front.  In this area    called the atrium    there remained, whenever the sacred rites were going on inside, those taking instructions in the faith prior to being baptized, along with those doing penance for various trespasses, and the more curious among non-believers.

The interior of the upper basilica features all the aspects of a typical medieval church, including a mosaic-adoned apse, a marble baldacchino over the main altar, and a marble-enclosed Schola Cantorum or Choir area.  There are also two highly ornamental pulpits    one for the reading of the epistle, the other for the gospel.  High upon the soaring triumphal archway framing the sanctuary are mosaics of Peter and his third successor, Clement.

Even the very pavement of Saint Clement’s is a masterpiece of art and a perfect example of a cosmatesque marble floor laid out in striking geometric patterns.  And so it is then, that in visiting the Basilica of San Clemente on the Via San Giovanni in Rome, one can step out of a twenty-first century vehicle and roll back nine centuries by entering the church built by Paschal; roll back eight more by descending a staircase into the church mentioned by St. Jerome; and yet four more by picking one’s way down another set of stairs into Clement’s house-church of apostolic times    and while down there, stealing a glance into the dark, damp house of worship of a cult that has long since entered oblivion.

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Interior of Basilica of San Clemente al Laterano in Rome (1863), by Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Oil on canvas. Fries Museum, Leeuwarden, Netherlands. Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

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The Mithraem. kevingessner, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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Only in Rome is it possible to enjoy an experience so archaeologically unique.

…..

Now, as for the ruthless Nero, who had sought to crush the Church in its infancy, the irony    or karma if you will    seems never to end.  In July of A.D. 64 a suspicious fire broke out in the wooden bleachers of the Circus Maximus and raged out of control into a city-wide conflagration, devastating eleven of the fourteen precincts established by Augustus.  The egotistic Nero, long known to be unhappy with his capital and wanting to level it to pave the way for a glittering new city which he would name for himself, Neronia, was widely thought to be responsible for the arson.  But he found a convenient scapegoat in the Christian sect, which he quickly subjected to a relentless savage persecution.  He also issued an edict forever forbidding the existence of the cult, with the penalty of death for those discovered practicing it.  His enormous, state-of-the-art circular meat market on the Coelian Hill    the Macellum Magnum    was to become in the early sixth century the church of San Stefano Rotondo, St. Stephen in the Round.  Upon the wreckage of the tyrant’s impressive hippodrome over in the Ager Vaticanus (the Vatican Meadows) stands the greatest church in all Christendom:  the Basilica of St. Peter, prince of the apostles and the first Bishop of Rome.  Nero’s custom of addressing    or ought we say haranguing    his suffering subjects, from the balcony of his shamefully sumptuous palace, has been replaced by the tradition of the Pope imparting his apostolic blessing  Urbi et Orbi    from the central loggia of his baroque Basilica upon the throngs of pilgrims in the gargantuan square below.

One final irony:  Though condemned to death by the Roman Senate, Nero, when he ended his reign of terror via suicide, was nonetheless given a full state funeral.  His ashes were entombed at the foot of the Pinciana Hill, in a huge magnificent altar of precious porphyry enclosed by a marble balustrade.  Over the ensuing centuries the people of Rome were spooked by a persistent legend maintaining that Nero’s ghost haunted the area.  When Paschal II (1099-1118) ascended the Chair of St. Peter one of his first acts was to purge the city of “Nero’s curse” by destroying the shrine and scattering the ashes to the winds.  Paschal then soon established on the site a church to the Virgin. In the following century the structure was enlarged with funds from the Romans themselves and renamed Santa Maria del Popolo …  Saint Mary of the People.

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Basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo. Jakub Hałun, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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Thus it is that for contemporary archeologists hoping to come upon the leftovers of the Rome of the Caesars, they must often search beneath the ubiquitous layers of the Rome of the Popes.

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