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A first-ever find in Egypt: A funeral garden

Posted on May 5, 2017 by No Author -

SPANISH NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL (CSIC)—The Djehuty Project, led by research professor, José Manuel Galán, from the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), has discovered a 4,000-year-old funerary garden- the first such garden ever to be found- on the Dra Abu el-Naga hill in Luxor, Egypt. The discovery comes during the 16th year of archaeological excavations which are sponsored this year by Técnicas Reunidas and Indra.

The discoveries made by this project shed light on a key epoch when, for the first time, Thebes (now Luxor) became the capital of the unified kingdom of Upper and Lower Egypt about 4,000 years ago.

Dr. Jose Galán explains, “We knew of the possible existence of these gardens since they appear in illustrations both at the entrances to tombs as well as on tomb walls, where Egyptians would depict how they wanted their funerals to be. The garden itself consisted of a small rectangular area, raised half a meter off the ground and divided into 30 cm2 beds. In addition, next to the garden, two trees were planted. This is the first time that a physical garden has ever been found, and it is therefore the first time that archaeology can confirm what had been deduced from iconography. The discovery and thorough analysis of the garden will provide valuable information about both the botany and the environmental conditions of ancient Thebes, of Luxor 4,000 years ago”.

Galán continues, “The plants grown there would have had a symbolic meaning and may have played a role in funerary rituals. Therefore, the garden will also provide information about religious beliefs and practices as well as the culture and society at the time of the Twelfth Dynasty when Thebes became the capital of the unified kingdom of Upper and Lower Egypt for the first time. We know that palm, sycamore and Persea trees were associated with the deceased’s power of resurrection. Similarly, plants such as the lettuce had connotations with fertility and therefore a return to life. Now we must wait to see what plants we can identify by analysing the seeds we have collected. It is a spectacular and quite unique find which opens up multiple avenues of research”.

“Digging in a necropolis not only allows us to discover details about the world of funerals, religious beliefs and funerary practices, it also helps us discover details about daily life, about society and about the physical environment, both plant and animal. The necropolis thus becomes, as the ancient Egyptians themselves believed, the best way to understand and embrace life”, concludes the CSIC researcher.

The garden, or funeral garden, was unearthed in an open courtyard at the entrance of a Middle Kingdom rock-cut tomb very probably from the Twelfth Dynasty, circa 2000 BCE. The garden, measuring 3m x 2m, is raised and is divided into a grid arrangement of 30 cm2 beds distributed in rows of five or seven beds.

According to experts, these small beds may have contained different types of plants and flowers. In addition, at the center of the raised garden there are two beds which are set higher than the others where small trees or shrubs probably grew.

In one corner, the researchers recovered a still upright tamarisk shrub complete with its roots and 30cm-long trunk, beside which was a bowl containing dates and other fruit which may have been given as an offering.

In addition, attached to the facade of the tomb, which the garden is related to for the time being, a small mud-brick chapel (46cm high x 70cm wide x 55cm deep) with three stelae, or stone tombstones, in its interior was also uncovered. These are dated later than the tomb and the garden, coming from the Thirteenth Dynasty, around the year 1800 BCE. One of them belongs to Renef-seneb, and the other to “the soldier (“citizen”) Khememi, the son of the lady of the house, Satidenu.” On each, reference is made to Montu, a local god from ancient Thebes, and to the funerary gods Ptah, Sokar and Osiris.

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Aerial view of the funerary garden discovered by CSIC’s research team. Credit: CSIC Communications

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“These finds highlight the importance of the area around the Dra Abu el-Naga hill as a sacred centre for a wide range of worship activities during the Middle Kingdom. This helps us understand the high density of tombs in later times as well as the religious symbolism that this area of the necropolis holds”, concludes the CSIC researcher.

Article Source: Spanish National Research Council news release

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This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Recent findings shedding new light on the whereabouts of the remains of Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great; how an archaeologist-sculptor is bringing bones of the dead back to life; archaeologists uncovering town life at the dawn of civilization; an exclusive interview with internationally acclaimed archaeologist James M. Adovasio about what makes the Meadowcroft Rockshelter prominent in the ongoing search for the first Americans; what archaeologists are finding at the site of the ancient city of Gath, the home town of the biblical Philistine giant, Goliath; and how scientists are redrawing the picture of human evolution in Europe. Find it on Amazon.com.

How migrations and other population dynamics could have shaped early human culture

Posted on May 4, 2017 by No Author -

STANFORD UNIVERSITY—Something odd happened in the transition from the Middle to the Upper Paleolithic, around 50,000 years ago. Modern humans and their immediate ancestors had been using tools for a few million years prior, but the repertoire was limited. Then, all of sudden, there was an explosion of new tools, art and other cultural artifacts.

What caused that change has been the subject of much debate. Maybe brainpower reached a critical threshold. Maybe climate change forced our prehistoric kin to innovate or die. Maybe it was aliens.

Or maybe it was the result of populations growing and spreading throughout the land, Stanford researchers write in Royal Society Interface. That certainly could explain some other curious features of Paleolithic culture—and it could mean that a number of paleontologists’ inferences about our genetic and environmental past are, if not wrong, not as well supported as they had thought.

Cultural bursts

“One captivating observation is if you look at the archaeological record, it seems to be highly punctuated” leading up to the Upper Paleolithic, said Oren Kolodny, a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Marcus Feldman, a professor of biology. In other words, Kolodny said, the Paleolithic was a time marked by periods of slow change separated by bursts of cultural innovation.

“Those cultural bursts have been taken as evidence of an external change,” such as genetic or environmental shifts, said Nicole Creanza, who led the study with Kolodny while a postdoctoral fellow in Feldman’s lab. “But to some extent, Oren, Marc and I felt that the simplest explanation could be that culture itself is capable of behaving in a punctuated fashion,” said Creanza, who is now an assistant professor of biological sciences at Vanderbilt University.

A search for something simpler

The researchers wondered, how could culture create these bursts of innovation?

In a 2015 paper, Kolodny, Creanza and Feldman, who is also co-director of Stanford’s Center for Computational, Evolutionary and Human Genomics, argued that human culture could have evolved through several distinct kinds of advance. First, some ideas emerge as “lucky leaps,” Kolodny said—perhaps an early human witnessed a mouse get trapped in a tangle of grass, and the hunting net was born. Other ideas could emerge either as extensions of those leaps or as combinations of other ideas or technologies. Finally, groups can also lose ideas, as prehistoric Tasmanians did when they lost, incredibly, the knowledge of how to fish, Kolodny said.

Aided by computer simulations, the team showed that combining the three kinds of advance could have led directly to bursts of innovation, as seen in the archaeological record. They also found that at the point where new ideas balance out with lost ones, the number of ideas a population can support increases dramatically with population size. A population twice the size, Kolodny, Creanza and Feldman’s model predicted, could support much more than twice the number of ideas.

Migration and other game changers

In their latest paper, Creanza, Kolodny and Feldman, who is also the Burnet C. and Mildred Finley Wohlford Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, combined those conclusions with two new components. First, they considered migrations between otherwise distinct populations and assumed that such travel is more likely in larger populations. Second, they studied what would happen if certain major innovations, such as domesticating plants or developing hunting knives, helped grow the population.

The updated model made a number of predictions that at least qualitatively resemble what archaeologists know about cultural evolution in the Paleolithic.

First, when population sizes are small and migration is relatively rare, a pattern of cultural booms and busts is likely. Essentially, the occasional travel may bring a new idea, setting off a boom. Then, without a steady stream of new ideas or population growth – that is, a steady stream of new brains to contain all those new ideas – some ideas will be lost to time.

Innovations that encouraged population growth, however, can have lasting effects, since even slight increases in population size can support a disproportionate increase in innovation.

Migration can do something similar. As travel increases, it bridges societies, allowing for an exchange of ideas that creates a complex of interrelated cultures. And as travel becomes common, smaller groups effectively merge into one large population, with vastly more capacity for innovation. In fact, that can create a feedback loop: populations grow, contact with others increases, innovation results and populations grow even more.

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Prehistoric arrowheads and other knapped stones showing a variety of styles and types, many of them a far cry from the earliest, simple stone tools of over a million years ago. Linda Spashett, Wikimedia Commons

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Were Neanderthals less fit, or just fewer in number?

Those theoretical conclusions could help explain a number of puzzles in human history, such as the disappearance of Neanderthals long ago. “People tend to assume modern humans were better and replaced them,” Kolodny said, but how they were better remains unclear. A simpler explanation may lie in two observations: Neanderthals had roughly a third the population of other early humans, and migration was always out of Africa, not into it.

In that case, modern humans migrating from Africa might have brought with them a more advanced repertoire of technologies, due in part to their larger population, and Neanderthals just could not keep up.

“We don’t think that whenever we get a qualitative pattern that looks like the archaeological record, this is what necessarily happened,” Kolodny said. “But it is a proof of concept that it could have happened this way.”

Just as important, Creanza says, the results show that researchers cannot use cultural bursts as evidence of external changes—that is, just because our culture advanced 50,000 years ago, that does not imply our brains got bigger, the landscape changed or anything else. It might just be the way culture is.

Article Source: Stanford University news release

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Bonobos may be better representation of last common ancestor with humans

Posted on April 29, 2017 by No Author -

GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY—WASHINGTON (April 28, 2017)—A new study examining the muscular system of bonobos provides firsthand evidence that the rare great ape species may be more closely linked, anatomically, to human ancestors than common chimpanzees. Previous research suggested this theory at the molecular level, but this is the first study to compare in detail the anatomy of the three species.

“Bonobo muscles have changed least, which means they are the closest we can get to having a ‘living’ ancestor,” said Bernard Wood, professor of human origins at the GW Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology.

Scientists believe that modern human and common chimpanzee/bonobo lineages split about 8 million years ago with the two great ape species splitting about 2 million years ago. As common chimpanzees and bonobos evolved after their split, they developed different traits and physical characteristics, even though they remained geographically relatively close, with their main division being the Congo River. Because of this, researchers have been curious as to what those differences are and how they compare to humans. By studying the muscles of bonobos (which indicates how they physically function), the team was able to discover that they are more closely related to human anatomy than common chimpanzees, in the sense that their muscles have changed less than they have in common chimpanzees.

Earlier studies examined the DNA similarities and differences between bonobos and common chimpanzees, but this was the first study to compare the muscles of the three species.

“In addition, our study has shown that there is a mosaic evolution of the three species, in the sense that some features are shared by humans and bonobos, others by humans and common chimpanzees, and still others by the two ape species,” said Rui Diogo, lead author of the paper and associate professor of anatomy at Howard University. “Such a mosaic anatomical evolution may well be related to the somewhat similar molecular mosaic evolution between the three species revealed by previous genetic studies: each of the chimpanzees species share about 3 percent of genetic traits with humans that are not present in the other chimpanzee species.”

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A new study examining the muscular system of bonobos provides firsthand evidence that the rare great ape species may be more closely linked to human ancestors than common chimpanzees. Credit: iStock photo

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Illustrated here are differences between head muscles of common chimpanzees, bonobos and modern humans. There are no major consistent differences concerning the presence/absence of muscles in adult common chimpanzees (left) and bonobos (center), the only minor difference (shown in grey in the common chimpanzee scheme) being that the omohyoideus has no intermediate tendon in bonobos, contrary to common chimpanzees (and modern humans). In contrast, there are many differences between bonobos and modern humans (right) concerning the presence/absence of muscles in the normal phenotype (shown in colors and/or with labels in the human scheme). Credit: Julia Molnar

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The researchers led a team that examined seven bonobos from the Antwerp Zoo that had died and were being preserved. Researchers said this was an extremely rare opportunity given bonobos’ status as an endangered species.

The scientists note that having a clear understanding of what makes humans different from our closest living relatives might lead to new breakthroughs or understandings of human health.

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The paper, “Bonobo anatomy reveals stasis and mosaicism in chimpanzee evolution, and supports bonobos as the most appropriate extant model for the common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans,” published in Scientific Reports, a Nature publication, this month.

Article Source: George Washington University news release

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DNA from extinct humans discovered in cave sediments

Posted on April 27, 2017 by No Author -

MAX-PLANCK-GESELLSCHAFT—While there are numerous prehistoric sites in Europe and Asia that contain tools and other human-made artifacts, skeletal remains of ancient humans are scarce. Researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have therefore looked into new ways to get hold of ancient human DNA. From sediment samples collected at seven archaeological sites, the researchers “fished out” tiny DNA fragments that had once belonged to a variety of mammals, including our extinct human relatives. They retrieved DNA from Neandertals in cave sediments of four archaeological sites, also in layers where no hominin skeletal remains have been discovered. In addition, they found Denisovan DNA in sediments from Denisova Cave in Russia. These new developments now enable researchers to uncover the genetic affiliations of the former inhabitants of many archaeological sites which do not yield human remains.

By looking into the genetic composition of our extinct relatives, the Neandertals, and their cousins from Asia, the Denisovans, researchers can shed light on our own evolutionary history. However, fossils of ancient humans are rare, and they are not always available or suitable for genetic analyses. “We know that several components of sediments can bind DNA”, says Matthias Meyer of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “We therefore decided to investigate whether hominin DNA may survive in sediments at archaeological sites known to have been occupied by ancient hominins.”

To this aim Meyer and his team collaborated with a large network of researchers excavating at seven archaeological sites in Belgium, Croatia, France, Russia and Spain. Overall, they collected sediment samples covering a time span from 14,000 to over 550,000 years ago. Using tiny amounts of material the researchers recovered and analyzed fragments of mitochondrial DNA – genetic material from the mitochondria, the “energy factories” of the cell – and identified them as belonging to twelve different mammalian families that include extinct species such as the woolly mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, the cave bear and the cave hyena.

The researchers then looked specifically for ancient hominin DNA in the samples. “From the preliminary results, we suspected that in most of our samples, DNA from other mammals was too abundant to detect small traces of human DNA”, says Viviane Slon, Ph.D. student at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig and first author of the study. “We then switched strategies and started targeting specifically DNA fragments of human origin.” Nine samples from four archaeological sites contained enough ancient hominin DNA for further analyses: Eight sediment samples contained Neandertal mitochondrial DNA from either one or multiple individuals, while one sample contained Denisovan DNA. Most of these samples originated from archaeological layers or sites where no Neandertal bones or teeth were previously found.

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Entrance to the archaeological site of Vindija Cave, Croatia. Credit: MPI f. Evolutionary Anthropology/ J. Krause

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Excavations at the site of El Sidrón, Spain. Credit: El Sidrón research team

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A sediment sample is prepared for DNA extraction. Credit: MPI f. Evolutionary Anthropology/ S. Tüpke

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A new tool for archaeology

“By retrieving hominin DNA from sediments, we can detect the presence of hominin groups at sites and in areas where this cannot be achieved with other methods”, says Svante Pääbo, director of the Evolutionary Genetics department at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and co-author of the study. “This shows that DNA analyses of sediments are a very useful archaeological procedure, which may become routine in the future”.

Even sediment samples that were stored at room temperature for years still yielded DNA. Analyses of these and of freshly-excavated sediment samples recovered from archaeological sites where no human remains are found will shed light on these sites’ former occupants and our joint genetic history.

Article Source: Max Planck Gesellschaft news release

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Tibetan people have multiple adaptations for life at high altitudes

Posted on April 27, 2017 by No Author -

PLOS—The Tibetan people have inherited variants of five different genes that help them live at high altitudes, with one gene originating in the extinct human subspecies, the Denisovans. Hao Hu and Chad Huff of the University of Texas, Houston, and colleagues report these findings in a new study published April 27th, 2017 in PLOS Genetics.

The people of Tibet have survived on an extremely high and arid plateau for thousands of years, due to their amazing natural ability to withstand low levels of oxygen, extreme cold, exposure to UV light and very limited food sources. Researchers sequenced the whole genomes of 27 Tibetans and searched for advantageous genes. The analysis identified two genes already known to be involved in adaptation to high altitude, EPAS1 and EGLN1, as well as two genes related to low oxygen levels, PTGIS and KCTD12. They also picked out a variant of VDR, which plays a role in vitamin D metabolism and may help compensate for vitamin D deficiency, which commonly affects Tibetan nomads. The Tibetan variant of the EPAS1 gene originally came from the archaic Denisovan people, but the researchers found no other genes related to high altitude with Denisovan roots. Further analysis showed that Han Chinese and Tibetan subpopulations split as early as 44 to 58 thousand years ago, but that gene flow between the groups continued until approximately 9 thousand years ago.

The study represents a comprehensive analysis of the demographic history of the Tibetan population and its adaptations to the challenges of living at high altitudes. The results also provide a rich genomic resource of the Tibetan population, which will aid future genetic studies.

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The Tibetan Plateau in Qinghai. Credit: DaiLuo, Flickr, CC BY

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Tatum Simonson adds: “The comprehensive analysis of whole-genome sequence data from Tibetans provides valuable insights into the genetic factors underlying this population’s unique history and adaptive physiology at high altitude. This study provides further context for analyses of other permanent high-altitude populations, who exhibit characteristics distinct from Tibetans despite similar chronic stresses, as well as lowland populations, in whom hypoxia-related challenges, such those inherent to cardiopulmonary disease or sleep apnea, elicit a wide-range of unique physiological responses. Future research efforts will focus on identifying the interplay between various adaptive versus non-adaptive genetic pathways and environmental factors (e.g., hypoxia, diet, cold, UV) in these informative populations to reveal the biological underpinnings of individualized physiological responses.”

Article Source: PLOS ONE news release

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*Hu H, Petousi N, Glusman G, Yu Y, Bohlender R, Tashi T, et al. (2017) Evolutionary history of Tibetans inferred from whole-genome sequencing. PLoS Genet 13(4): e1006675. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1006675

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Early evidence of Middle Stone Age projectiles found in South Africa’s Sibudu Cave

Posted on April 26, 2017 by No Author -

PLOS—Innovations in stone knapping technology during the South African Middle Stone Age enabled the creation of early projectile weapons, according to a study* published April 26, 2017 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Veerle Rots from University of Liège, Belgium, and colleagues.

The South African Middle Stone Age (MSA) is considered a period of major technological advancement, with hunter-gatherers introducing new manipulative techniques using heat and pressure to create stone projectile weapons. However, the timing and location of these developments is a topic of much debate.

The authors of the present study examined 25 weapon point fragments excavated from the Sibudu Cave site, analyzing their technological and functional differences and comparing them with reference samples produced for the purpose by an experienced knapper. Some of the points had two faces, a likely result of applying pressure to both sides. Some had serrations, or jagged edges, that were likely produced by a technique known as pressure flaking.

The researchers found that 14 of the 25 point fragments bore evidence of impact-related damage, animal residues, and wear features that strongly indicated that these points may have been used for hunting. Examination of the impact-related fractures and the distribution of the points indicated that these points may have been attached to handles to form projectile weapons and that these weapons were projected from a distance, most likely with a flexible spear-thrower or a bow.

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Sibudu Cave is a rock shelter in a sandstone cliff in northern KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. It is an important Middle Stone Age site occupied, with some gaps, from 77,000 years ago to 38,000 years ago. Text and image credit: DarkaRolandStark, Wikimedia Commons

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Analyzed serrated pieces from Sibudu Cave. Credit: Rots et al (2017)

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While further research would help to confirm the timeline and development of stone knapping techniques, the new Sibudu Cave site data may push back the evidence for the use of pressure flaking during the MSA to 77,000 years ago. The authors note that these findings highlight the diversity of technical innovations adopted by southern African MSA humans.

Article Source: PLOS ONE news release

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*Rots V, Lentfer C, Schmid VC, Porraz G, Conard NJ (2017) Pressure flaking to serrate bifacial points for the hunt during the MIS5 at Sibudu Cave (South Africa). PLoS ONE 12(4): e0175151. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0175151

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Origins of Indonesian hobbits finally revealed?

Posted on April 21, 2017 by No Author -

AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY—The most comprehensive study on the bones of Homo floresiensis, a species of tiny human discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003, has found that they most likely evolved from an ancestor in Africa and not from Homo erectus as has been widely believed.

The study by The Australian National University (ANU) found Homo floresiensis, dubbed “the hobbits” due to their small stature, were most likely a sister species of Homo habilis — one of the earliest known species of human found in Africa 1.75 million years ago.

Data from the study concluded there was no evidence for the popular theory that Homo floresiensis evolved from the much larger Homo erectus, the only other early hominid known to have lived in the region with fossils discovered on the Indonesian mainland of Java.

Study leader Dr Debbie Argue of the ANU School of Archaeology & Anthropology, said the results should help put to rest a debate that has been hotly contested ever since Homo floresiensis was discovered.

“The analyses show that on the family tree, Homo floresiensis was likely a sister species of Homo habilis. It means these two shared a common ancestor,” Dr Argue said.

“It’s possible that Homo floresiensis evolved in Africa and migrated, or the common ancestor moved from Africa then evolved into Homo floresiensis somewhere.”

Homo floresiensis is known to have lived on Flores until as recently as 54,000 years ago.

The study was the result of an Australian Research Council grant in 2010 that enabled the researchers to explore where the newly-found species fits in the human evolutionary tree.

Where previous research had focused mostly on the skull and lower jaw, this study used 133 data points ranging across the skull, jaws, teeth, arms, legs and shoulders.

Dr Argue said none of the data supported the theory that Homo floresiensis evolved from Homo erectus.

“We looked at whether Homo floresiensis could be descended from Homo erectus,” she said.

“We found that if you try and link them on the family tree, you get a very unsupported result. All the tests say it doesn’t fit — it’s just not a viable theory.”

Dr Argue said this was supported by the fact that in many features, such as the structure of the jaw, Homo floresiensis was more primitive than Homo erectus.

“Logically, it would be hard to understand how you could have that regression — why would the jaw of Homo erectus evolve back to the primitive condition we see in Homo floresiensis?”

Dr Argue said the analyses could also support the theory that Homo floresiensis could have branched off earlier in the timeline, more than 1.75 million years ago.

“If this was the case Homo floresiensis would have evolved before the earliest Homo habilis, which would make it very archaic indeed,” she said.

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Homo floresiensis skull 1 Credit: Stuart Hay – ANU

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Homo floresiensis skull 2 Credit: Stuart Hay – ANU

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Dr Debbie Argue holds reconstructed Homo floresiensis Credit: Stuart Hay – ANU

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Artist’s reconstruction of the face of Homo floresiensis Credit: Katrina Kenny

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Artist’s full body reconstruction of Homo floresiensis Credit: Katrina Kerry

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Professor Mike Lee of Flinders University and the South Australian Museum, used statistical modeling to analyse the data.

“When we did the analysis there was really clear support for the relationship with Homo habilis. Homo floresiensis occupied a very primitive position on the human evolutionary tree,” Professor Lee said.

“We can be 99 per cent sure it’s not related to Homo erectus and nearly 100 per cent chance it isn’t a malformed Homo sapiens,” Professor Lee said.

Article Source: Australian National University news release

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Megafaunal extinctions driven by too much moisture

Posted on April 17, 2017 by No Author -

UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE—Studies of bones from Ice Age megafaunal animals across Eurasia and the Americas have revealed that major increases in environmental moisture occurred just before many species suddenly became extinct around 11-15,000 years ago. The persistent moisture resulting from melting permafrost and glaciers caused widespread glacial-age grasslands to be rapidly replaced by peatlands and bogs, fragmenting populations of large herbivore grazers.

Research led by the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD) at the University of Adelaide, published today in Nature Ecology and Evolution, has revealed that the ancient bones preserve direct biochemical evidence of the environmental upheavals, which can be traced through time.

Using 511 radiocarbon dated bones from animals such as bison, horse, and llamas the team was able to investigate the role of environmental change in the mysterious megafaunal extinctions, which claimed the vast majority of existing large land animals such as giant sloths and sabre-toothed cats.

“We didn’t expect to find such clear signals of moisture increases occurring so widely across all of Europe, Siberia and the Americas,” says study leader Professor Alan Cooper, ACAD Director. “The timing varied between regions, but matches the collapse of glaciers and permafrost and occurs just before most species go extinct.

The international team of researchers, including the University of Alaska Fairbanks, University of Oslo, the Yukon Government, and palaeontologists across Russia and Canada, measured nitrogen isotopes preserved in dated ancient animal bones and teeth recovered from permafrost areas and caves across Europe, Siberia, North and South America. They found distinctive biochemical signals reflecting massive increases of moisture on the landscape.

“Grassland megafauna were critical to the food chains. They acted like giant pumps that shifted nutrients around the landscape”, says lead author Dr Tim Rabanus-Wallace, from the University of Adelaide. “When the moisture influx pushed forests and tundras to replace the grasslands, the ecosystem collapsed and took many of the megafauna with it.”

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Extinct megafauna, scene from La Brea Tar Pits. Wikimedia Commons

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“The idea of moisture-driven extinctions is really exciting because it can also explain why Africa is so different, with a much lower rate of megafaunal extinctions and many species surviving to this day,” says Professor Cooper. “Africa’s position across the equator means that grassland zones have always surrounded the central monsoon region. The stable grasslands are what has allowed large herbivores to persist – rather than any special wariness of hunters learned from humans evolving there.”

Professor Matthew Wooller, of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, says: “We find that on different continents the climate changes happened at different times, but they all showed that moisture increased massively just prior to extinction. The really elegant feature of this study is that it produces direct evidence from the fossils themselves – these extinct creatures are informing us about the climate they experienced leading up to their own extinctions.”

Article Source: University of Adelaide news release

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Precision chronology sheds new light on the origins of Mongolia’s nomadic horse culture

Posted on April 11, 2017 by No Author -

MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY—According to new research, nomadic horse culture—famously associated with Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes—can trace its roots back more than 3,000 years in the eastern Eurasian Steppes, in the territory of modern Mongolia.

The study, published online March 31 in Journal of Archaeological Science, produces scientific estimates of the age of horse bones found from archaeological sites belonging to a culture known as the Deer Stone-Khirigsuur Complex. This culture, named for the beautiful carved standing stones (“deer stones”) and burial mounds (khirigsuurs) it built across the Mongolian Steppe, is linked with some of the oldest evidence for nomadic herding and domestic livestock use in eastern Eurasia. At both deer stones and khirigsuurs, stone mounds containing ritual burials of domestic horses – sometimes numbering in the hundreds or thousands – are found buried around the edge of each monument.

A team of researchers from several academic institutions – including the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Yale University, University of Chicago, the American Center for Mongolian Studies, and the National Museum of Mongolia – used radiocarbon dating to estimate the spread of domestic horse ritual at deer stones and khirigsuurs.

When an organism dies, an unstable radioactive molecule present in living tissues, known as radiocarbon, begins to decay at a known rate. By measuring the remaining concentration of radiocarbon in organic materials, such as horse bone, archaeologists can estimate how many years ago an animal took its final step. Many previous archaeological projects in Mongolia produced radiocarbon date estimates from horse remains found at these Bronze Age archaeological sites. However, because each of these measurements must be calibrated to account for natural variation in the environment over time, individual dates have large amounts of error and uncertainty, making them difficult to aggregate or interpret in groups.

By using a statistical technique known as Bayesian analysis – which combines probability with archaeological information to improve precision for groups of radiocarbon dates – the study authors were able to produce a high-precision chronology model for early domestic horse use in Mongolia. Lead author William Taylor, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, says that this model “enables us for the first time to link horse use with other important cultural developments in ancient Mongolia and eastern Eurasia, and evaluate the role of climate and environmental change in the local origins of horse riding.”

According to the study, domestic horse ritual spread rapidly across the Mongol Steppe at around 1200 BC – several hundred years before mounted horsemen are clearly documented in historical records. When considered alongside other evidence for horse transport in the Deer Stone-Khirigsuur Complex these results suggest that Mongolia was an epicenter for early horse culture – and probably early mounted horseback riding.

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“Deer stone” stela in Bayankhongor province, central Mongolia, surrounded by small stone mounds containing domestic horse remains. Credit: Photo: William Taylor

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Precision Chronology: According to new research, nomadic horse culture—famously associated with Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes—can trace its roots back more than 3,000 years in the eastern Eurasian Steppes, in the territory of modern Mongolia. Photo: William Taylor

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The study has important consequences for our understanding of human responses to climate change. For example, one particularly influential hypothesis argues that horse riding and nomadic herding societies developed during the late second millennium BCE, as a response to drought and a worsening climate. Taylor and colleagues’ results indicate instead that early horsemanship took place during a wetter, more productive climate period – which may have given herders more room to experiment with horse breeding and transport.

In recent years, scholars have become increasingly aware of the role played by Inner Asian nomads in early waves of globalization. A key article by Dr. Michael Frachetti and colleagues, published this month in Nature argues that nomadic movement patterns shaped the early trans-Eurasian trade networks that would eventually move goods, people, and information across the continent. The development of horsemanship by Mongolian cultures might have been one of the most influential changes in Eurasian prehistory – laying the groundwork for the economic and ecological exchange networks that defined the Old World for centuries to come.

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

If you liked this article, you may like The Battle Axe Culture, a premium article published in the Spring 2017 issue of Popular Archaeology.

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Food webs entangle humans in complex relationships with animals, crops and the environment

Posted on April 10, 2017 by No Author -

PENN STATE—Reconstructed food webs from the Ancestral Puebloan southwestern United States show the complexity and interconnectedness of humans, other animals, crops and the environment, in an area of uncertain climate and resources, according to researchers, who think climate change and human decisions then, may shed light on future human choices.

“As southwestern archaeologists, we know that Ancestral Puebloan people were intrinsically connected to the environment,” said Stefani Crabtree, postdoctoral fellow in human behavioral ecology in the Department of Anthropology, Penn State. “But, most food webs have omitted humans.”

Traditionally, food webs, while they map the interaction of all the animals and plants in an area, usually do not emphasize the human component. Crabtree and colleagues created a digital food web that captures all categories of consumers and consumed, can be defined for specific time periods and can also represent food webs after major food sources or predators disappear from the area. If an area suddenly becomes devoid of deer or humans or corn, for example, a food web of that situation can show where predators went to find prey, or which prey thrived for lack of a predator.

These knockout food webs—webs missing a specific predator or prey—show the changes and pressures on the food sources substituted for the missing ones, or the changes that occur when pressure is removed by removing a major consumer. The researchers report the results of their study today (Apr. 10) in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

“When people show up in the area around A.D. 600 they bring corn,” said Crabtree. “It takes a while for critters to get used to it, but eventually, everything that eats vegetation, eats corn and prefers it.”

Humans bringing corn into an area is a major disruption of the existing food web. Planting corn means clearing fields to displace whatever plants and animals were there, creating a high-energy plant source of food and switching plant eaters to the preferred higher-calorie food source.

In the American Southwest, the Ancestral Puebloan people eventually preyed on their deer population enough so that they deer were no longer a reliable source of food. To compensate for this, they began to domesticate turkeys for food. Turkeys need to be fed corn if they are captive and that competes with corn for human consumption. At this time, corn made up 70 to 80 percent of Ancestral Puebloans’ food and so feeding turkeys altered the food web.

To create the food web, the team identified all the common, noninvasive species in the area. They then added species that were found in archaeological sites, but were absent from the modern lists. In some food webs, components are identified by their function, so all humming birds are considered flying pollinators, but in this case each type of humming bird received its own place in the web, linked to what it ate and what, if anything, ate it. This produced a very complicated web, but supplied exceptional redundancy.

“In the insect world it is harder to get at the data,” said Crabtree. “We have not been able to get at good databases so we aggregate at the functional level—pollinators or bloodsuckers for example.”

The exception to individual web entries then are invertebrates—insects, spiders, snails, etc.—that were classified by their function. Invertebrates are organized to the level of order and then grouped by function. With insects, for example, the researchers would group butterflies and moths that pollinated and sipped nectar, together in one group.

The overall food web had 334 nodes representing species or order-level functional groups with 11,344 links between predator and prey.

The researchers realize that there are differences in the environment between now and the Ancestral Puebloan period, but many things, such as pinon-juniper woodlands and sage flats are the same. Enough similarity exists for this approach to work.

The team did not produce just one overall food web, but also food webs corresponding to three archaeological locations and three time periods of Ancestral Pueblo occupation in the area —Grass Mesa Pueblo for Pueblo I, Albert Porter Pueblo for Pueblo II and Sand Canyon Pueblo for Pueblo III. They began with using archaeological assemblages from these sites incorporating all human prey and all human predators into the food web. Then they included the prey of the primary prey of humans and then predators of these human-prey species. Prey, in this case, includes animals, insects and plants.

When creating knockout food webs, the researchers included only those species that were found in reasonable quantities in the archaeological assemblages at those times.

“Knockout food webs are one of the best ways to understand how people interact with the environment,” said Crabtree. “Because we can remove something, predator or prey, and see what would happen.”

When major changes in climate variables such as drought, heat and lack of snowpack are factored in, the balance in the food web may become unstable. When food becomes scarce, most mobile creatures, animals and insects move to another location. During the time of the Ancestral Puebloans, this was possible and eventually, these people moved to the area of the Rio Grande in New Mexico and other places in New Mexico and Arizona.

“We didn’t have a long-term plan during the 600 years of Ancestral Pueblo habitation in the Mesa Verde region,” said Crabtree. “We don’t have a long-term plan today either. We don’t even have a four-year plan. Some people are pushing us to look closely at climate change.”

In the past, people migrated, said Crabtree. Unless we figure out better strategies, where are we going to migrate out to? We do not have a place to go, she said.

What people plant and eat has a great effect on the environment and on ecosystems. In the end, those choices will impact human survival, according to the researchers.

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This is a sample food web with red nodes representing primary producers, orange nodes primary consumers, yellow-orange nodes omnivores, true-yellow nodes are true carnivores. This draft food web was created with the program Network3D from foodwebs.org Credit: Stefani Crabtree, Penn State

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This is Square Tower House in Mesa Verde National Park. Credit: Nate Crabtree

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This work is part of a collaboration of researchers creating resolved food webs from a variety of places. Crabtree believes that she can compare this project to others that include humans in other geographical areas to help understand ecosystems with humans in them.

Article Source: Penn State news release.

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New DNA research shows true migration route of early farming in Europe 8,000 years ago

Posted on April 7, 2017 by No Author -

UNIVERSITY OF HUDDERSFIELD—A new article co-authored by experts at the University of Huddersfield bolsters a theory that the spread of agriculture throughout Europe followed migration into the Mediterranean from the Near East more than 13,000 years ago – thousands of years earlier than widely believed.

This was during the Late Glacial period and initially the migrants were hunter-gatherers. But they later developed a knowledge of agriculture from further newly-arrived populations from the Near East – where farming began – and during the Neolithic, approximately 8,000 years ago, they began to colonise other parts of Europe, taking their farming practices with them.

The University of Huddersfield is home to the Archaeogenetics Research Group, which uses DNA analysis to solve questions from archaeology, anthropology and history. It is headed by Professor Martin Richards, and the issue of the genetic ancestry of Europeans has been one of his major research areas for many years.

Now he is a principal contributor to the article that appears in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. It describes how the researchers used almost 1,500 mitochondrial genome lineages to date the arrival of people in different regions of Europe.

It was found that in central Europe and Iberia, these could mainly be traced to the Neolithic. However, in the central and eastern Mediterranean, they predominantly dated to the much earlier Late Glacial period.

The authors write that: “This supports a scenario in which the genetic pool of Mediterranean Europe was partly a result of Late Glacial expansions from a Near Eastern refuge, and that this formed an important source pool for subsequent Neolithic expansions into the rest of Europe”.

Professor Richards explained that he and his co-researchers carried out their latest investigations using modern DNA samples because in Italy and Greece there is an acute shortage of pre-Neolithic skeletal remains from which ancient samples can be taken. The warmth of the climate has resulted in low levels of preservation.

“We haven’t been able to fill the gap with ancient DNA, so we found a way to get round that by looking at modern samples. Instead of dating the lineages across Europe as a whole we have dated them firstly in the Mediterranean area and then we have looked at what happens if you assume that they have arrived in that area and then moved on,” said Professor Richards.

Now he hopes that new sources of ancient DNA in Italy and Greece will be discovered, so that his migration scenario can be tested more directly.

“In the past, it’s been difficult to recover DNA from these kinds of environments but there have been so many technical developments in the recovery of ancient DNA in the last few years that I think it will happen soon.” In fact, another team of researchers has already confirmed one of the paper’s main predictions, by looking at pre-Neolithic DNA from Sardinia, just one week ago.

The research was carried out primarily by Dr Joana Pereira as part of her PhD project, supervised jointly by Professor Richards and Dr Luisa Pereira of the Institute of Molecular Pathology and Immunology at the University of Porto, alongside Dr Pedro Soares of the University of Minho, in Portugal. The authors of the new article – titled Reconciling evidence from ancient and contemporary genomes: a major source for the European Neolithic within Mediterranean Europe – also include Dr Maria Pala, who is Senior Lecturer at the University of Huddersfield and a key member of the archaeogenetics group.

Article Source: University of Huddersfield

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Image, top left: Professor Martin Richards. Credit: University of Huddersfield

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Like people, great apes may distinguish between true and false beliefs in others

Posted on April 6, 2017 by No Author -

PLOS—Great apes help a person access an object when that person thinks they knows where it is but is mistaken, according to a study* published April 5, 2017 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by David Buttelmann from Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany, and colleagues.

Understanding when someone else has a false belief is a mark of advanced social cognition in people, and researchers had believed that great apes lacked this capacity. Using a test that was developed for 1.5-year-old human infants, Buttelmann and colleagues evaluated understanding of others’ beliefs in 34 great apes (chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans) at the Leipzig Zoo in Germany.

The test involved a person placing an object in one of two boxes. Another person then took this object out of this box, put it into another box, and locked both boxes. For the true belief condition, the first person stayed in the room—so this person knew where the object was and thus had a true belief. For the false belief condition, however, the first person was out of the room during the switch—so while he thought he knew where the object was, he was mistaken and thus had a false belief. In both conditions, the first person tried to open the box he originally had put his object in. The apes knew how to unlock the boxes, and could decide which box to open for the first person during the test.

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Right before the response phase, the experimenter tries to open the box which he believes contains his object (false-belief condition) or which he knows is empty (true-belief condition). In both conditions this is the same empty box; all that differs is the experimenter’s belief about what is in it. Credit: Buttelmann et al (2017)

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The researchers found that, like human infants, great apes were more likely to help the person find the object when he had a false belief about which box the object was in. This suggests that great apes used their understanding of the person’s beliefs about reality to decide how to help him. If true, say the researchers, great apes, like people, may have the capacity to “read” the minds of others in social interactions.

“This study shows for the first time that great apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans) can use an understanding of false beliefs to help others appropriately,” says David Buttelmann.

Article Source: PLOS One news release

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*Buttelmann D, Buttelmann F, Carpenter M, Call J, Tomasello M (2017) Great apes distinguish true from false beliefs in an interactive helping task. PLoS ONE 12(4): e0173793. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0173793

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Kent State archaeologist explains innovation of ‘fluting’ ancient stone weaponry

Posted on April 5, 2017 by No Author -

KENT STATE UNIVERSITY—Approximately 13,500 years after nomadic Clovis hunters crossed the frozen land bridge from Asia to North America, researchers are still asking questions and putting together clues as to how they not only survived in a new landscape with unique new challenges but adapted with stone tools and weapons to thrive for thousands of years.

Kent State University’s Metin Eren, Ph.D., director of archaeology and assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences, and his colleagues are not only asking these questions but testing their unique new theories. They want to better understand the engineering, techniques and purposes of Clovis weapon technologies. Specifically, they study stone projectile points, such as arrowheads and spear points, made by flint knapping, the ancient practice of chipping away at the edges of rocks to shape them into weapons and tools.

In their most recent article published online in the Journal of Archaeological Science, Eren and his co-authors from Southern Methodist University (Brett A. Story, David J. Meltzer and Kaitlyn A. Thomas), University of Tulsa (Briggs Buchanan), Rogers State University (Brian N. Andrews), Texas A&M University and the University of Missouri (Michael J. O’Brien) explain the flint knapping technique of “fluting” the Clovis points, which could be considered the first truly American invention. This singular technological attribute, the flake removal or “flute,” is absent from the stone-tool repertoire of Pleistocene Northeast Asia, where the Clovis ancestors came from.

Archaeologists have debated for years as to why the Clovis added this flute feature to their points. Basically, it is a thin groove chipped off at the base on both sides, perhaps first made by accident, which logically makes it very thin and brittle. However, after several types of testing, the researchers have reported that this thinning of the base can make it better able to withstand and absorb the shock of colliding with a hard object, such as the bone of a mastodon or bison.

This fluted point turned out to be an invention that allowed these colonizers to travel great distances with some confidence that their weaponry would hold up at least long enough until they could find the next rock quarry to make new points.

“It was risky and couldn’t have been easy to learn how to do this effectively,” Eren explained. “Archaeological evidence suggests that up to one out of five points break when you try to chip this fluted base, and it takes at least 30 minutes to produce a finished specimen. So, though it was a time-consuming process and risky technique, successfully fluted Clovis points would have been extremely reliable, especially while traveling great distances into unknown regions on a new continent. They needed points that would hold up and be used over and over again.”

In their article, the researchers compared standardized computer models of fluted and unfluted points, as well as experimental “real-world” test specimens, and found that the fluted-point base does in fact act as a “shock absorber,” increasing point robustness and ability to withstand physical stress via stress redistribution and damage relocation. In other words, upon impact, the brittle base of the spearhead crumples and absorbs some energy, which prevents fatal breaks elsewhere on the point so it could be reused.

“It’s amazing to think that people 12,000 years ago were flaking shock absorbers and engineering stone weapons in a way that it took 21st century modern engineering to figure out,” Eren said.

“As engineers, we don’t typically get to work with archaeologists, but this project has allowed us the exciting opportunity to provide additional tools from engineering mechanics to explore how fluting affects the behavior of Clovis points,” Story said.

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Pictured is a collection of Clovis point replicas and casts in the archaeology lab at Kent State University. Credit: Kent State University

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Metin Eren, director of archaeology and an assistant professor of anthropology in Kent State University’s College of Arts and Sciences, demonstrates the ancient weapon-making technique of flint knapping a point in his laboratory on the Kent Campus. Credit: Kent State University

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Article Source: Kent State University news release

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Genetic study reveals Pleistocene epoch ancestry of Pacific Northwest Native Americans

Posted on April 4, 2017 by No Author -

Researchers report the genetic ancestry of indigenous Pacific Northwest populations based on ancient genome sequences. The Pacific Northwest Coast of North America played a potentially significant role in the initial peopling of the Americas. Research on the demographic history of this region has been hindered by the limited availability of ancient genomic data. Ripen Malhi and colleagues sequenced the genome of an ancient individual from southeastern Alaska from remains dated to approximately 10,300 years ago, as well as the genomes of two individuals from coastal British Columbia dated to 2,500 and 1,750 years ago. Comparison of the genome sequences with previously published ancient genomes from the Pacific Northwest and modern indigenous genomic data suggest that all three newly sequenced individuals share a common ancestry with the modern indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest. Two other ancient individuals from the northwestern United States, dated to the same time period, appeared to belong to a separate lineage ancestral to modern Central and South American populations. According to the authors, the indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest might belong to a genetic lineage dating back to at least 10,000 years, possibly stemming from the initial peopling of the region, and population structure may have existed in North America as far back as the late Pleistocene. State the researchers in the report, “we conclude from individuals sampled through time that people of the northern Northwest Coast belong to an early genetic lineage that may stem from a late Pleistocene coastal migration into the Americas”*.

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A smoky day at the Sugar Bowl—A Hupa Pacific Northwest Native American. By Edward S. Curtis, Photographer 1868-1952

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Article Source: PNAS news release

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*“Ancient individuals from the North American Northwest Coast reveal 10,000 years of regional genetic continuity,” by John Lindo et al.

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Steppe migrant thugs pacified by Stone Age farming women

Posted on April 4, 2017 by No Author -

FACULTY OF SCIENCE – UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN—In an earlier study Professor Kristian Kristiansen from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and Lundbeck Foundation Professor Eske Willerslev from the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen, and their research teams, showed that the large demographic changes during the first part of the Bronze Age happened as a result of massive migrations of Yamnaya people from the Pontic-Caspian steppes into Neolithic Europe. They were also able to show that plague was widespread in both Europe and Central Asia at this time.

Now Professor Kristiansen and Professor Willerslev with co-authors reveal a more detailed view of the mechanism behind the emerging culture known as the Corded Ware Culture—the result of the encounter between the Yamnaya and the Neolithic people. Professor Kristian Kristiansen says: “We are now for the first time able to combine results from genetics, strontium isotopes on mobility and diet, and historical linguistics on language change, to demonstrate how the integration process unfolded on the ground after the Yamnaya migrations from the steppe. In our grand synthesis we argue that Yamnaya migrants were predominantly males, who married women who came from neighbouring Stone Age farming societies.” These Stone Age Neolithic societies were based on large farming communities reflected in their collective burial ritual often in big stone chambers, so called megaliths—very different from the traditions of the incoming migrants.

The origin of the Yamnaya

The Yamnaya people originated on the Caspian steppes where they lived as pastoralists and herders, using wagons as mobile homes. From burial pits archaeologists have found extensive use of thick plant mats and felt covers. Their economy was based on meat, dairy products and fish, they were tall and rather healthy with little caries in their teeth. No agriculture is documented. Barrows were aligned in groups forming lines in the landscape to mark seasonal routes and after death diseased people were put into individual graves under small family barrows. Their burial ritual thus embodied a new perception of the individual and of small monogamous family groups as the foundation of society. The continent encountered by the Yamnaya people around 3000 BC had seen a decline in the agrarian Stone Age societies, thereby allowing space for incoming migrants. This decline was probably the result of a widespread plague from Siberia to the Baltic.

“The disease dynamic here may have been comparable to the European colonization process in America after Christopher Columbus”, says Kristiansen. “Perhaps Yamnaya brought plague to Europe and caused a massive collapse in the population”.

“Black Youth” as migrating males and their marriage to Neolithic women

In the new synthesis article, Kristiansen and colleagues argue for a dominance of males during the early phase after the migrations, and correspond to the old Indo-European mythology of later times. These sources talk about war-bands of youths—called “Black Youth”—who were employed in pioneer migrations as a dynamic force. Evidence from strontium isotopic analyses, published in 2016 by Kristiansen together with Douglas Price and Karl Goran Sjogren, showed that a majority of the women in Corded Ware burials in south Germany were non-locals who had married in from Neolithic societies, since they had a Neolithic diet in their childhood. These results now form part of the new synthesis. Professor Kristian Kristiansen says: “Existing archaeological evidence of a strong 90% male dominance in the early phase of the Corded Ware/Single Grave Culture settlement in Jutland, Denmark, and elsewhere can now be explained by the old Indo-European tradition of war bands of young males who did not have any inheritance to look forward to. Therefore they were probably more willing to make a career as migrating war bands.”

These Neolithic women also brought new knowledge of pottery production, and started to imitate pottery containers made of wood from the Yamnaya migrants. In this way a new pottery culture was created called Corded Ware, because of the cord impressions around the neck of the pots. They were made for beer drinking, and the new migrants also learned how to grow barley from the in-married Neolithic women in order to produce beer.

Rapid genetic changeover from Neolithic to Corded Ware cultures after 3000 BC

Eske Willerslev undertook the ancient DNA analyses together with Morten Allentoft and Martin Sikora. Professor Willerslev says:

“In our big Bronze Age study, published in 2015, we were astonished to see how strong and fast the genetic changeover was from the Neolithic to the Corded Ware. There was a heavy reduction of Neolithic DNA in temperate Europe, and a dramatic increase of the new Yamnaya genomic component that was only marginally present in Europe prior to 3000 BC. Moreover, the apparent abruptness with which this change occurred indicates that it was a large-scale migration event, rather than a slow periodic inflow of people”.

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Corded ware vessel, an axe and two discs made of amber from an early male grave. Credit: Danish National Museum

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New words and new Proto-Germanic dialect

The Yamnaya brought the Indo-European languages into Bronze Age Europe, but as herders, they did not have words for crops or cultivation, unlike the Neolithic farmers. As the Corded Ware Culture developed it adopted words related to farming from the indigenous Neolithic people, which they were admixing with. Guus Kroonen, a historical linguist, was able to demonstrate that these new words did not belong to the original Indo-European languages. Therefore it was possible to conclude that the Neolithic people were not speaking an Indo-European language, as did the Yamnaya migrants. Thus, the process of genetic and cultural admixture was accompanied by a process of language admixture, creating the foundations for later Germanic languages, termed Proto-Germanic.

The birth of the Bronze Age

The Yamnaya migrations from the Pontic-Caspian steppe into temperate Europe changed the course of history: they brought not only a new language, but also new ideas about how society was organized around small monogamous families with individual ownership to animals and land. This new society became the foundation for the Bronze Age, and for the way European societies continued to develop to the present.

Article Source: University of Copenhagen Faculty of Science

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The paper “Re-theorising mobility and the formation of culture and language among the Corded Ware Culture in Europe” by Kristiansen, Allentoft, Frei, Iversen, Johannsen, Kroonen, Pospiezny, Price, Rasmussen, Sjögren, Sikora and Willerslev is published in the journal Antiquity ,4 April 2017.

For more about Indo-Europeans, see the premium article, The Battle-Axe Culture, published in the Spring 2017 issue of Popular Archaeology.

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Ice age art and ornamentation findings in Indonesia

Posted on April 3, 2017 by No Author -

Researchers report* evidence of ancient human symbolic culture in the Wallacea zone of eastern Indonesia. Anatomically modern humans (AMHs) had colonized Wallacea by 47,000 years ago, but evidence of the cultural complexity associated with AMHs from the same period elsewhere in the world has been sparse. Adam Brumm and colleagues describe artifacts recovered from a cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi dated from 30,000-22,000 years ago. Some of the artifacts were bones and teeth of endemic animals modified into ornaments, including a bear cuscus bone likely to have been worn as a pendant and previously undocumented disc-shaped beads manufactured from the teeth of babirusas, also known as “pig-deer.” Several stone flakes were incised with various geometric patterns, possibly representing a form of portable art. The authors also found evidence for the use of pigment, such as ochre pieces with traces from scraping and grinding, ochre residues on stone artifacts, and a hollow long bone with traces of red and black pigment that may have been used as a kind of airbrush for creating rock art. According to the authors, the artifacts suggest the existence of a distinct symbolic culture in Wallacea that incorporated animals unique to the region.

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Map showing Wallacea. Altaileopard, Wikimedia Commons

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Article Source: PNAS news release.

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*“Early human symbolic behavior in the Late Pleistocene of Wallacea,” by Adam Brumm et al.

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New archaeological evidence throws light on efforts to resist ‘the living dead’

Posted on April 3, 2017 by No Author -

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON—A new scientific study of medieval human bones, excavated from a deserted English village, suggests the corpses they came from were burnt and mutilated. Researchers from the University of Southampton and Historic England believe this was carried out by villagers who believed that it would stop the corpses rising from their graves and menacing the living.

The team found that many of the bones from Wharram Percy in North Yorkshire showed knife-marks—suggesting the bodies had been decapitated and dismembered. There was also evidence of the burning of body parts and deliberate breaking of some bones after death.

The findings are published in an article in the Journal of Archaeological Science Reports. The research was led by Simon Mays, Human Skeletal Biologist at Historic England, working in collaboration with Alistair Pike, Professor of Archaeological Sciences at the University of Southampton.

In medieval times, there was a folk-belief that corpses could rise from their graves and roam the local area, spreading disease and violently assaulting those unlucky enough to encounter them. Restless corpses were usually thought to be caused by a lingering malevolent life-force in individuals who had committed evil deeds or created animosity when living.

Medieval writers describe a number of ways of dealing with revenants, one of which was to dig up the offending corpse, decapitate and dismember it, and burn the pieces in a fire. Perhaps the bones from Wharram Percy were parts of bodies that were mutilated and burnt because of medieval fears of corpses rising from their graves. The researchers considered other theories, but this explanation appears to be the most consistent with the alterations observed on the bones.

In some societies, people may be treated in unusual ways after death because they are viewed as outsiders. However, analysis of strontium isotopes in the teeth showed this was not the reason in this case. Professor Alistair Pike, who directed the isotopic analysis, explains: “Strontium isotopes in teeth reflect the geology on which an individual was living as their teeth formed in childhood. A match between the isotopes in the teeth and the geology around Wharram Percy suggests they grew up in an area close to where they were buried, possibly in the village. This was surprising to us, as we first wondered if the unusual treatment of the bodies might relate to their being from further afield, rather than local.”

Famines were quite common in medieval times, so another possibility might be that the remains were of corpses that had been cannibalised by starving villagers. However, the evidence did not seem to fit. For example, in cannibalism, knife marks on bone tend to cluster around major muscle attachments or large joints, but at Wharram Percy the knife marks were not at these locations but mainly in the head and neck area.

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This is the Wharram Percy Medieval village, North Yorkshire, UK. Credit: Historic England

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Knife marks on external surfaces of two rib bone fragments. Credit: Historic England

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Simon Mays concludes: “The idea that the Wharram Percy bones are the remains of corpses burnt and dismembered to stop them walking from their graves seems to fit the evidence best. If we are right, then this is the first good archaeological evidence we have for this practice. It shows us a dark side of medieval beliefs and provides a graphic reminder of how different the medieval view of the world was from our own.”

The bones come from the deserted medieval village of Wharram Percy, North Yorkshire, a site managed by English Heritage. There was a total of 137 bones representing the mixed remains of at least ten individuals. They were buried in a pit in the settlement part of the site. They date from the 11th-14th centuries AD.

Article Source: University of Southampton news release.

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New evidence may provide insight into Neanderthal cognition

Posted on March 30, 2017 by No Author -

PLOS—The cognitive abilities of Neanderthals are debated, but a raven bone fragment found at the Zaskalnaya VI (ZSK) site in Crimea features two notches that may have been made by Neanderthals intentionally to display a visually consistent pattern, according to a study* by Ana Majkic at the Universite de Bordeaux and colleagues, published in the open access journal, PLOS ONE on March 29, 2017.

Majkic and colleagues conducted a mixed-methods study to assess whether the two extra notches on the ZSK raven bone were made by Neanderthals with the intention of making the final series of notches appear to be evenly spaced. First, researchers conducted a multi-phase experiment where recruited volunteers were asked to create evenly spaced notches in domestic turkey bones, which are similar in size to the ZSK raven bone. Morphometric analyses reveal that the equal spacing of the experimental notches was comparable to the spacing of notches in the ZSK raven bone, even when adjusted for errors in human perception. Archaeological specimens featuring aligned notches from different sites were also analyzed and compared with the ZSK raven bone specimen.

Researchers concluded that the two extra notches on the ZSK raven bone may have been made by Neanderthals intentionally to create a visually consistent, and perhaps symbolic, pattern.

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Left: notched raven bone from Zaskalnaya VI Neanderthal site, Crimea. center: experimental notching of a bird bone; right: sequences of experimentally made notches compared to those from Zaskalnaya VI. Credit: Francesco d’Errico

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A series of recent discoveries of altered bird bones across Neanderthal sites has caused many researchers to argue that the objects were used for personal ornaments, as opposed to butchery tools or activities. But this study is the first that provides direct evidence to support a symbolic argument for intentional modifications on a bird bone.

Article Source: PLOS news release

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*Majki A, Evans S, Stepanchuk V, Tsvelykh A, d’Errico F (2017) A decorated raven bone from the Zaskalnaya VI (Kolosovskaya) Neanderthal site, Crimea. PLoS ONE 12(3): e0173435. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0173435

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The unsolved case of Little Foot’s age

Posted on March 29, 2017 by No Author -

The famous Australopithecus fossilized skeleton known as “Little Foot“, the nearly complete articulated skeletal remains of a possible human ancestor, cannot be more than 2.8 million years old, according to a recent research study. This individual has previously been dated to approximatley 3.67 million years old. But based on research conducted by Jan D. Kramers of the University of Johannesburg and Paul H.G.M. Dirks of James Cook University, Little Foot may actually be over 800,000 years younger.

Interpreting the ages of hominin fossils is very important for understanding the timeline of human evolution. Little Foot, a complete Australopithecus skeleton found in 1997/1998 in sediments of the Silberberg Grotto in the Sterkfontein Caves, has played into this. But the age of the find has been beset by scholarly debate for years. Based on the abundance in quartz of the radioactive isotopes ²⁶Al and ¹⁰Be, which accumulate at the surface due to cosmic rays, Granger et al. (Nature 2015;522:85–88) previously determined that the sediments surrounding Little Foot had been underground for 3.67±0.16 million years, and thus concluded this age for the fossil. Kramers and Dirks, however, recently re-examined the data in detail and found that the breccia deposit encasing Little Foot, and therefore the fossil itself, cannot be older than about 2.8 million years based on dating of chert fragments within the breccia mix encasing the skeleton. So why the inconsistent mix of dates? To resolve the paradox of the two ages, they propose that Little Foot, when alive, may have fallen from a higher-level cave chamber, shown to have once existed immediately above the Silberberg Grotto. Sediments older than 2.8 million years may have flowed into and were deposited in the lower chamber over time, encasing Little Foot. Subsequently, the older sediments characterizing the upper chamber were eroded away over time in the upper chamber, but remained preserved in the lower chamber. The case of Little Foot’s age is therefore not yet closed.

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General view of Little Foot skeleton in its original position in Sterkfontein cave, November 2006. 120 / V. Mourre, Wikimedia Commons

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The Little Foot skull, removed from its breccia context. Courtesy Wits University, Wikimedia Commons

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Prominent surface feature at Sterkfontein and its relation to the Silberberg Grotto. (a) Cave map showing the position of surface workings, entry chambers and (b) relative to the Silberberg Grotto. (b) View from the east of a large tilted dolomite block on the south side of the open excavation, adjoining breccia of Member 4. (a) Source: Adapted from Martini et al.41; (b) Photo: Paul Dirks

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The recent study has been published in the South African Journal of Science, Academy of Science of South Africa.

Article Source: Adapted and edited from the South African Journal of Science press release.

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Archaeologists uncover early state society palace in Mexico

Posted on March 27, 2017 by No Author -

Researchers report* an ancient royal palace complex in Mexico. The emergence of early state societies is a major focus of anthropological studies, and a key characteristic of state societies is the royal palace, the ruler’s residence and seat of government. Elsa Redmond and Charles Spencer report on the well-preserved remains of a royal palace at the archaeological site of El Palenque in the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico. Excavation data from the site indicate that the palace complex was built according to a preconceived design in a single large-scale construction effort and exhibits architectural and organizational features similar to later, historically documented royal palaces in Mesoamerica. Covering a maximum estimated area of 2,790 m², the palace exhibits a ground plan differentiated into governmental and residential components, reflecting a centralized, hierarchical, and specialized state administration. Analysis of ceramic samples and radiocarbon dating of charcoal samples from the site suggest that the El Palenque palace complex was in use during 300-100 BC, a time of archaic state emergence in the region. The authors suggest that the palace complex at El Palenque represents the oldest multifunctional palace in Mexico’s Valley of Oaxaca, and provides evidence of early state society in the region.

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El Palenque royal palace. Image courtesy Elsa M. Redmond and Charles Spencer

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Water shrine, where a stone-lined drain descending from ruler’s residence supplied rainwater to cistern. Image courtesy Elsa M. Redmond and Charles Spencer

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Article Source: A PNAS press release.

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*“Ancient palace complex (300–100 BC) discovered in the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico,” by Elsa M. Redmond and Charles Spencer.

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