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Research proves Aboriginal Australians were first inhabitants

Posted on June 7, 2016 by No Author -

GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY—Griffith University researchers have found evidence that demonstrates Aboriginal people were the first to inhabit Australia, as reported in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal this week.

The work refutes an earlier landmark study that claimed to recover DNA sequences from the oldest known Australian, Mungo Man.

This earlier study was interpreted as evidence that Aboriginal people were not the first Australians, and that Mungo Man represented an extinct lineage of modern humans that occupied the continent before Aboriginal Australians.

Scientists from Griffith University’s Research Centre for Human Evolution (RCHE), recently used new DNA sequencing methods to re-analyse the remains of Mungo Man from the World Heritage listed landscape of the Willandra Lakes region, in far western New South Wales.

Professor Lambert, from RCHE, said it was clear that incorrect conclusions had been drawn in relation to Mungo Man in the original study.

“The sample from Mungo Man which we retested contained sequences from five different European people suggesting that these all represent contamination,” he said.

“At the same time we re-analysed more than 20 of the other ancient people from Willandra. We were successful in recovering the genomic sequence of one of the early inhabitants of Lake Mungo, a man buried very close to the location where Mungo Man was originally interred.

“By going back and reanalysing the samples with more advanced technology, we have found compelling support for the argument that Aboriginal Australians were the first inhabitants of Australia.”

Professor Lambert explained that the results proved that the more advanced genomic technology was capable of unlocking further secrets from Australia’s human past.

“We now know that meaningful genetic information can be recovered from ancient Aboriginal Australian remains,” he said.

“This represents the first time researchers have recovered an ancient mitochondrial genome sequence from an Aboriginal person who lived before the arrival of the Europeans.”

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South Australian, Moroya Tribe. Wikimedia Commons

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The research, which has just been published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, was planned and conducted with the support of the Barkindjii, Ngiyampaa and Muthi Muthi indigenous people.

There has been considerable debate in Australia and around the world about the origins of the first Australians since the publication in 1863 of Thomas Henry Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature.

Source: Griffith University 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.

Yale researchers map 6,000 years of urban settlements

Posted on June 7, 2016 by No Author -

YALE SCHOOL OF FORESTRY & ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES—As the growth of cities worldwide transforms humans into an “urban species,” many scholars question the sustainability of modern urbanization. But in reality there aren’t much data on long-term historical urbanization trends and patterns.

Now, a new Yale-led study offers fresh clarity on these historical trends, providing the first spatially explicit dataset of the location and size of urban settlements globally over the past 6,000 years.

By creating maps through digitizing, transcribing, and geocoding a deep trove of historical, archaeological, and census-based urban population data previously available only in tabular form, the authors have produced accessible information on urban centers from 3700 B.C. to 2000 C.E.

They have also created a “reliability ranking” for each geocoded location to assess the geographic uncertainty of each data point.

Their findings were published in the journal Scientific Data.

“To better understand urbanization today it is helpful to know what urbanization looked like through history,” said Meredith Reba, a Research Associate at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (F&ES) and lead author of the paper. “By understanding how cities have grown and changed over time, throughout history, it might tell us something useful about how they are changing today.”

Other contributors were Karen Seto, a Professor of Geography and Urbanization Science at F&ES, and Femke Reitsma, a Senior Lecturer in Geographical Information Systems at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.

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The figure shows the year of the first recorded population value for each city in the dataset. Cities recording the earliest first population data point are pictured in red and are centered near Mesopotamia, while cities with the most recent first population data point are pictured in dark blue. Credit: Esri, HERE, DeLorme, MapmyIndia, ©OpenStreetMap contributors, and the GIS user community

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The findings have broad applications. The dataset offers an important first step toward understanding the geographic distribution of urban populations throughout history and across the world. Currently the only spatially explicit data available at a global scale is the United Nations World Urbanization Prospects, which provides population values, latitudes, and longitudes for places with populations of 300,000 or more. However, this resource goes back only to 1950.

For their dataset, the authors have drawn on two principle sources: Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth: A Historical Census (1987), by historian Tertius Chandler, which estimated the city-level populations from 2250 B.C. to 1975; and World Cities: -3,000 to 2,000 (2003), by political scientist George Modelski, which documents the world’s most important cities during three eras of history (ancient, classical, and modern). Modelski was able to extend Chandler’s work by 1,475 years by using archaeological site assessments and population-density estimates.

Although both books are cited regularly by scholars, they are neither widely accessible nor easy to use since the data are not available in digital format. The new dataset, which is digitized and easily accessible, makes the historical information available for examination by other researchers, including geographers, historians, archaeologists, and ecologists.

The dataset allows researchers to map and visualize city level population changes through time. For example, Istanbul, Turkey (previously known as Constantinople) underwent a major period of population decline between AD 1057 and AD 1453. During this time the population dropped from approximately 300,000 to 45,000 due to a series of events including a city sacking by the Crusaders and a bout with the plague.

According to the authors, the ability to pinpoint the size and location of human populations over time will help researchers understand the evolving characteristics of the human species—particularly human interactions with the environment.

“We see this as just a starting point onto which others can add and develop into a larger record on historical population trends,” Reba said.

Source: Edited from the news release of Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

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Ancestry of early European farmers traced

Posted on June 6, 2016 by No Author -

A study suggests that the first European farmers migrated from modern-day Greece and Turkey. Farming was introduced to Europe from Anatolia in modern-day Turkey. The extent to which this process was mediated by migration of Anatolian farmers versus cultural diffusion has been a subject of debate. Joachim Burger and colleagues obtained DNA sequences from five individuals from early agricultural sites in northwestern Turkey and northern Greece. These sites date from the time of initial spread of farming to Europe, and lie along the proposed route of this spread. The authors observed considerable similarity between the genomes they obtained and those of individuals from early farming societies in central and southern Europe. By modeling ancient and modern genomes as mixtures of DNA from other ancient genomes, the authors could trace most of the ancestry of individuals from ancient farming societies in Germany and Hungary to the ancient Anatolian and Greek genomes. Ancient Greek and Anatolian genomes contributed to all modern day European populations, and are particularly similar to modern Mediterranean populations as well as to Ötzi, the ice mummy from the Alps. According to the authors, the results suggest a continuous chain of ancestry from Europe to Greece and Anatolia, indicative of migration from the latter to the former.

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8,500-year-old human burials from the Early Neolithic site of Revenia, Northern Greece. Image courstesy of Fotini Adaktylou and Ephorate of Antiquities of Pieria

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6,200-year-old human burial from the Late Neolithic site of Kleitos, Northern Greece. Image courtesy of Christina Ziota and Ephorate of Antiquities of Kozani, Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports

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Source: News release of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)

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Ice age bison fossils shed light on early human migrations in North America

Posted on June 6, 2016 by No Author -

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA – SANTA CRUZ—Scientists using evidence from bison fossils have determined when an ice-free corridor opened up along the Rocky Mountains during the late Pleistocene. The corridor has been considered a potential route for human and animal migrations between the far north (Alaska and Yukon) and the rest of North America, but when and how it was used has long been uncertain.

The researchers combined radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis to track the movements of bison into the corridor, showing that it was fully open by about 13,000 years ago. Their findings, published June 6 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, indicate that the corridor could not account for the initial dispersal of humans south of the ice sheets, but could have been used for later movements of people and animals, both northward and southward.

In the 1970s, geological studies suggested that the corridor might have been the pathway for the first movement of humans southward from Alaska to colonize the rest of the Americas. More recent evidence, however, indicated that the Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets coalesced at the height of the last ice age, around 21,000 years ago, closing the corridor much earlier than any evidence of humans south of the ice sheets. The initial southward movement of people into the Americas more than 15,000 years ago now seems likely to have been via a Pacific coastal route, but the Rocky Mountains corridor has remained of interest as a potential route for later migrations.

“The opening of the corridor provided new opportunities for migration and the exchange of ideas between people living north and south of the ice sheets,” said first author Peter Heintzman, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Santa Cruz who led the DNA analysis.

Previous work by coauthor Beth Shapiro, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz, had shown that the bison populations north and south of the ice sheets were genetically distinct by the time the corridor opened. By analyzing bison fossils from within the corridor region, the researchers were able track the movement of northern bison southward into the corridor and southern bison northward.

“The radiocarbon dates told us how old the fossils were, but the key thing was the genetic analysis, because that told us when bison from the northern and southern populations were able to meet within the corridor,” Heintzman said.

The results showed that the southern part of the corridor opened first, allowing southern bison moving northward as early as 13,400 years ago, before the corridor fully opened. Later, there was some movement of northern bison southward, with the two populations overlapping in the corridor by 13,000 years ago.

“Bison fossils are the most widespread Quaternary mammal in western North America and of interest because they survived the extinctions at the end of the Pleistocene, unlike most other North American large mammals,” said coauthor Duane Froese of the University of Alberta. “We were able to sample bison fossils, largely from museum collections, including critical ones from central Alberta that dated to the initial opening of the corridor.”

According to Shapiro, archeological evidence suggests that human migration within the corridor was mostly from south to north. Sites associated with the Clovis hunting culture and its distinctive fluted point technology were widespread south of the corridor around 13,000 years ago and decline in abundance from south to north within the corridor region. A Clovis site in Alaska has been dated to no earlier than 12,400 years ago.

“When the corridor opened, people were already living south of there. And because those people were bison hunters, we can assume they would have followed the bison as they moved north into the corridor,” Shapiro said.

The steppe bison of the Pleistocene (Bison priscus) were much bigger than modern bison (Bison bison), she said. Before the corridor closed, prior to the last glacial maximum, they moved freely up and down between the ice-free regions in the north and grasslands south of the ice sheets. After the ice sheets coalesced, the population that was cut off to the south contracted, leaving one genetically distinct southern lineage.

The DNA analysis used in this study focused on mitochondrial DNA, which is easier to recover from fossils than the DNA in chromosomes, because each cell has thousands of copies of the relatively short mitochondrial DNA sequence. While Shapiro’s lab led the DNA analyses, Froese’s lab led the radiocarbon dating work.

Many of the fossils they analyzed came from collections at the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton and other institutions. “Thousands of steppe bison fossils are recovered in northern Canada every year,” said coauthor Grant Zazula of the Government of Yukon Palaeontology Program in Whitehorse. “Most of these fossils are uncovered by mining or gravel pit operators and later made available to scientists for study. These results speak to the importance of collecting and preserving fossils in order to better understand our history.”

Source: News release of the University of California, Santa Cruz

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The steppe bison had much larger horns than modern bison. Radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis of bison fossils enabled researchers to track the migration of Pleistocene steppe bison into an ice-free corridor that opened along the Rocky Mountains about 13,000 years ago. Credit: Government of Yukon

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Grant Zazula of the Yukon Paleontology Program with the skull of a Pleistocene steppe bison. Credit: Government of Yukon

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New support for human evolution in grasslands

Posted on June 6, 2016 by No Author -

THE EARTH INSTITUTE AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY—Buried deep in seabed sediments off east Africa, scientists have uncovered a 24-million-year record of vegetation trends in the region where humans evolved. The authors say the record lends weight to the idea that we developed key traits—flexible diets, large brains, complex social structures and the ability to walk and run on two legs—while adapting to the spread of open grasslands. The study appears today in a special human-evolution issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Based on genetic evidence, the earliest hominins, or human ancestors, are thought to have split off from chimpanzees some 6 million to 7 million years ago. Many scientists have argued that they were set on the path to become modern humans as east Africa’s vegetation gradually shifted from dense forest to savanna—open grasslands punctuated by woodland patches and rivers. This would have forced our ancestors to descend from the trees, move rapidly over open ground, and develop social skills needed for survival. In recent years, the long-held notion that humans evolved in grasslands alone has given way to a more nuanced view: that it was the increasing diversity of such landscapes including the grasses that led to the success of the hominins who were smartest and most flexible at adapting to a changing world.

The new study supplies by far the longest and most complete record of ancient plant life in much of what is now Ethiopia and Kenya, the assumed birthplace of humanity. It strongly suggests that between 24 million and 10 million years ago—long before any direct human ancestors appeared—there were few grasses, and woodlands thus presumably dominated. Then, with an apparent shift in climate, grasses began to appear. The study shows that the trend continued through all known human evolution, leading to a dominance of grasses by a few million years ago.

“The entire evolution of our lineage has involved us living and working in or near grasslands,” said lead author Kevin Uno, a postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “This now gives us a timeline for the development of those grasses, and tells us they were part of our evolution from the very beginning.” Uno says the grasslands were probably small and patchy at first, and thus were not the only factor. Rather, he, said, it “probably led to a more diverse set of niches we could occupy and compete in successfully.” For instance, he said, one could imagine that in a more open landscape, hominins “would learn how to team up. Some could hunt or scavenge prey. Some could throw stones at the hyenas to keep them away, while someone else would run in and grab the meat.”

Scientists have previously collected plant pollen, chemical isotopes and other evidence from land-based sediments suggesting that grasslands became dominant around the time humans evolved. But these records come only from scattered finds in highly eroded outcrops, and most go back only about 4 million years.

In the new study, the researchers examined a series of sediment cores drilled by a research ship in the Red Sea and the western Indian Ocean, off northeast Africa. The cores contain chemicals created by vegetation on land that were later washed or blown out to sea and laid down in layers for tens of millions of years. “The deep ocean might seem like a funny place to look for signs of vegetation, but it’s one of the best, because everything is buried and preserved. It’s like a bank vault,” said Uno. Using a fairly new technique, Uno and his colleagues analyzed carbon-based chemicals called alkanes, which make up the waxy outer parts of leaves, and contain the fingerprints of different plant types.

Sediments older than 10 million years had alkanes signaling a form of photosynthesis used mainly by woody plants, the so-called C3 pathway. But starting 10 million years ago, a different form linked mainly to grasses—the C4 pathway—began showing up. The area covered by grass seemed to grow 7 or 8 percent every million years, until it apparently dominated by 2 million or 3 million years ago. This kind of vegetation is still the main plant life in east Africa today. Other scientists have shown that grasslands spread also in south Asia, the Americas and southern Africa somewhat later.

Uno says the study data matches chemical analyses of tooth enamel from ancient elephants and other large herbivores showing that some east African animals began switching to more grass-based diets around 10 million years ago. The earliest known hominins appeared several million years later. By 3.8 million years ago, tooth enamel shows they developed a flexible diet, including foods based on grasses—if not the grass itself, presumably meat of creatures that ate grass. A study last year coauthored by Lamont scientist Christopher Lepre showed that hominins were making stone tools in northwest Kenya by 3.3 million years ago. Pronounced elongation of the legs, larger brains and other traits followed, until the emergence of recognizable Homo sapiens—our own species—by about 200,000 years ago.

“Lots of people have conjectured that grasslands had a central role in human evolution,” said study coauthor Peter deMenocal, a climate scientist at Lamont-Doherty. “But everyone has been waffling about when those grasslands emerged and how widespread they were. This really helps answer the question.”

Thure Cerling, a geologist at the University of Utah who has assembled some of the most important land-based African vegetation records, said the study gives an unprecedented “long-term view of the regional vegetation,” and thus the environments in which humans evolved. But, he said, “it will always be hard to associate a cause with an effect.”

Smithsonian Institution anthropologist Richard Potts, another authority in the field, said that the paper “is the very best examination and most compelling demonstration” of long-term grassland expansion.” But he said, “the broad-brush time scale of the analysis appears to miss the details of environmental dynamics on time scales that influence gene pools.” Potts says there is ample evidence from finer-scale studies that even as grasses spread, east Africa’s climate swung from wet to dry over much shorter time periods. These swings became most intense over the last few million years, and he argues that this is the perhaps the real key. Potts says that grasses spread because they were flexible enough to adapt to such swings—as were humans. “Bipedality emerged as a way of combining walking on the ground and climbing trees; toolmaking expanded the adjustments to a much wider range of foods; brains are the quintessential organ of flexibility,” he said. “Geographic expansion requires adaptability to change.”

The other authors of the study are Pratigya Polissar, also of Lamont-Doherty; and Kevin Jackson of Lafayette College.

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Humans are believed to have evolved in east Africa, as the landscape changed from forest to grassland. Here, children cross the Turkwel River in northern Kenya, where many key fossils have been found. Credit: Kevin Krajick/Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory

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Key human traits including the ability to plan, work together and make tools, emerged as human ancestors adapted to a changing landscape. Here, a projectile point, age and makers unknown, lying on the ground in the Lake Turkana region of Kenya. Credit: Kevin Krajick/Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory

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Source: News release of the The Earth Institute at Columbia University

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‘Pristine’ landscapes haven’t existed for thousands of years due to human activity

Posted on June 6, 2016 by No Author -

UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD—‘Pristine’ landscapes simply do not exist anywhere in the world today and, in most cases, have not existed for at least several thousand years, says a new study* in the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). An exhaustive review of archaeological data from the last 30 years provides details of how the world’s landscapes have been shaped by repeated human activity over many thousands of years. It reveals a pattern of significant, long-term, human influence on the distribution of species across all of the earth’s major occupied continents and islands.

The paper by lead author Dr Nicole Boivin from the University of Oxford and Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, with researchers from the UK, US, and Australia, suggests that archaeological evidence has been missing from current debates about conservation priorities. To say that societies before the Industrial Revolution had little effect on the environment or diversity of species is mistaken, argues the paper. It draws on new datasets using ancient DNA, stable isotopes, and microfossils, as well as the application of new statistical and computational methods. It shows that many living species of plants, trees and animals that thrive today are those that were favored by our ancestors; and that large-scale extinctions started thousands of years ago due to overhunting or change of land use by humans. The paper concludes that in light of this and other evidence of long-term anthropogenic change, we need to be more pragmatic in our conservation efforts rather than aiming for impossible ‘natural’ states.

The paper identifies four major phases when humans shaped the world around them with broad effects on natural ecosystems: global human expansion during the Late Pleistocene; the Neolithic spread of agriculture; the era of humans colonising islands; and the emergence of early urbanised societies and trade.

It draws on fossil evidence showing Homo sapiens was present in East Africa around 195,000 years ago and that our species had dispersed to the far corners of Eurasia, Australia, and the Americas by 12,000 years ago. This increase in global human populations is linked with a variety of species extinctions, one of the most significant being the reduction by around two-thirds of 150 species of ‘megafauna’ or big beasts between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago, says the paper, with their disappearance having ‘dramatic effects’ on the structure of the ecosystem and seed dispersal.

The second phase, the advent of agriculture worldwide, placed new evolutionary pressures on plants and animals that had ‘unprecedented and enduring’ effects on the distribution of species, according to the paper. The data highlighted shows that domesticated sheep, goats and cattle were first in the Near East 10,500 years ago, and arrived in Europe, Africa and South Asia within a few millennia. Chickens, originally domesticated in East Asia, reached Britain by the second half of the last millennium and now outnumber people by more than three to one globally, says the paper. Meanwhile, it also highlights research showing that the domestication of dogs happened before the emergence of agricultural societies, with around 700 million to one billion dogs in the world today. By contrast with domesticated animals, the percentage of truly wild vertebrates left today as a result of these long-term processes is described as ‘vanishingly small’.

Thirdly, the paper outlines the impact of the human colonisation of islands. It observes that the resulting movement of species was so common that archaeologists speak of ‘transported landscapes’. With the humans came new species, fire, deforestation and predatory threats to indigenous animals and birds.

Finally, the paper outlines the effects of an expansion in trade from the Bronze Age onwards, with a period of intense farming in response to growing human populations and emerging markets across the Old World. In the Near East, deciduous trees were turned over to evergreen oak, and indigenous forest became cultivated with the introduction of crops like olive, grape and fig. Around 80-85% of areas suited to agriculture were cultivated in the Near East 3,000 years ago, says one study highlighted in the paper. It also shows plants in ‘ancient’ forests in France are strongly linked with what would have once grown in Roman sites, and cites a recent estimate that at least 50 new plant foods – mainly fruits, herbs and vegetables – were introduced to Britons in the Roman period alone.

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Archaeological research has shown that the human presence has profoundly impacted and changed the planet since as far back as the end of the Late Pleistocene.

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Lead author Dr Nicole Boivin, from the School of Archaeology at the University of Oxford, and Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, says: ‘Archaeological evidence is critical to identifying and understanding the deep history of human effects. If we want to improve our understanding of how we manage our environment and conserve species today, maybe we have to shift our perspective, by thinking more about how we safeguard clean air and fresh water for future generations and rather less about returning planet Earth to its original condition.’

She also emphasises the importance of the study to current debates about a human role in climate warming: ‘Cumulative archaeological data clearly demonstrates that humans are more than capable of reshaping and dramatically transforming ecosystems. Now the question is what kind of ecosystems we will create for the future. Will they support the wellbeing of our own and other species or will they provide a context for further large-scale extinctions and irreversible climate change?’

Source: Edited and adapted from the University of Oxford news release

Image by Olivier Bresmal

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*The paper, ‘Ecological consequences of human niche construction: Examining long-term anthropogenic shaping of global species distributions’, is by Nicole Boivin, Melinda Zeder, Dorian Fuller, Alison Crowther, Greger Larson, Jon Erlandson, Tim Denham, and Michael Petraglia. The authors are from the University of Oxford; the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Germany; Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; Santa Fe Institute, USA; University College London; University of Queensland, Australia; University of Oregon, USA; and Australian National University.

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Scientists develop new insights on dog domestication

Posted on June 2, 2016 by No Author -

UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD—The question, ‘Where do domestic dogs come from?’, has vexed scholars for a very long time. Some argue that humans first domesticated wolves in Europe, while others claim this happened in Central Asia or China. A new paper, published in Science, suggests that all these claims may be right. Supported by funding from the European Research Council and the Natural Environment Research Council, a large international team of scientists compared genetic data with existing archaeological evidence and show that man’s best friend may have emerged independently from two separate (possibly now extinct) wolf populations that lived on opposite sides of the Eurasian continent. This means that dogs may have been domesticated not once, as widely believed, but twice.

Dogs are the earliest domestic animal. Based on what we know from past research, they are thought to have appeared at least 15,000 years ago with mobile bands of human hunter-gatherers and about 5,000 years before the advent of the agriculture and its associated domestic crops and farmyard animals (sheep, goats, cattle and pigs).

Now, a major international research project on dog domestication, led by the University of Oxford, has reconstructed the evolutionary history of dogs by first sequencing the genome (at Trinity College Dublin) of a 4,800-year old medium-sized dog from bone excavated at the Neolithic Passage Tomb of Newgrange, Ireland. The team (including French researchers based in Lyon and at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris*) also obtained mitochondrial DNA from 59 ancient dogs living between 14,000 to 3,000 years ago and then compared them with the genetic signatures of more than 2,500 previously studied modern dogs.

The results of their analyses demonstrate a genetic separation between modern dog populations currently living in East Asia and Europe. Curiously, this population split seems to have taken place after the earliest archaeological evidence for dogs in Europe. The new genetic evidence also shows a population turnover in Europe that appears to have mostly replaced the earliest domestic dog population there, which supports the evidence that there was a later arrival of dogs from elsewhere. Lastly, a review of the archaeological record shows that early dogs appear in both the East and West more than 12,000 years ago, but in Central Asia no earlier than 8,000 years ago.

Combined, these new findings suggest that dogs were first domesticated from geographically separated wolf populations on opposite sides of the Eurasian continent. At some point after their domestication, the eastern dogs dispersed with migrating humans into Europe where they mixed with and mostly replaced the earliest European dogs. Most dogs today are a mixture of both Eastern and Western dogs—one reason why previous genetic studies have been difficult to interpret.

The international project (which is combining ancient and modern genetic data with detailed morphological and archaeological research) is currently analyzing thousands of ancient dogs and wolves to test this new perspective, and to establish the timing and location of the origins of our oldest pet.

Senior author and Director of Palaeo-BARN (the Wellcome Trust Palaeogenomics & Bio-Archaeology Research Network) at Oxford University, Professor Greger Larson, said: ‘Animal domestication is a rare thing and a lot of evidence is required to overturn the assumption that it happened just once in any species. Our ancient DNA evidence, combined with the archaeological record of early dogs, suggests that we need to reconsider the number of times dogs were domesticated independently. Maybe the reason there hasn’t yet been a consensus about where dogs were domesticated is because everyone has been a little bit right.’

Lead author Dr Laurent Frantz, from the Palaeo-BARN, commented: ‘Reconstructing the past from modern DNA is a bit like looking into the history books: you never know whether crucial parts have been erased. Ancient DNA, on the other hand, is like a time machine, and allows us to observe the past directly.’

Senior author Professor Dan Bradley, from Trinity College Dublin, commented: ‘The Newgrange dog bone had the best preserved ancient DNA we have ever encountered, giving us prehistoric genome of rare high quality. It is not just a postcard from the past, rather a full package special delivery.’

Professor Keith Dobney, co-author and co-director of the dog domestication project from Liverpool University’s Department of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology, is heartened by these first significant results. “With the generous collaboration of many colleagues from across the world—sharing ideas, key specimens and their own data—the genetic and archaeological evidence are now beginning to tell a new, coherent story. With so much new and exciting data to come, we will finally be able to uncover the true history of man’s best friend.”

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Cover photo: A European wolf. Gunnar Ries, Wikimedia Commons

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Source: Adapted and edited from a University of Oxford subject news release.

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How southeastern Mayan people overcame the catastrophic eruption of Ilpango?

Posted on June 2, 2016 by No Author -

NAGOYA UNIVERSITY—Nagoya, Japan—Across the centuries, forming cooperative networks beyond cultural boundaries has been a way to overcome natural disasters.

A Nagoya University researcher and his leading international research group discovered a Great Platform built with different kinds of stone at the archeological site of San Andrés, El Salvador, and challenged the prevailing theory regarding the sociocultural development of Southeastern Maya frontier.

San Andrés is located in the Zapotitan Valley, El Salvador, known as the Southeastern Maya zone. Archaeological investigation conducted during the 40’s and 90’s has shown that San Andrés had long human occupation beginning from the Middle Preclassic (ca. 600 BC) until the Early Postclassic (ca. AD 1200), in which it had a role as a political, economic and religious center during the Late Classic period (AD 600-900). As San Andrés has been affected by numerous explosive eruptions—at least three or four—during the past two millennia, archaeologists have been interested in understanding the role of volcanic eruptions in human history.

Between February and May of 2016, the research group led by Assistant Prof. Akira Ichikawa of the Institute for Advanced Research and at the Graduate School of Letters, Nagoya University, made a new discovery that allowed them to reconsider the recovery process from the volcanic eruption of Ilopango (ca. AD 400-450), which was one of the greatest Holocene eruptions in Central America. “We have discovered a masonry platform just above the ash caused by the Ilopango eruption in San Andrés, which could prove that people reoccupied in such a devastated area even immediately after the enormous disaster occurred,” said Ichikawa.

He noted that the discovery of masonry architecture (a 4-tiered platform, measuring probably ca. 70 m north-south, 60 m east-west, and ca. 6 m) was conclusive in this study. In the Southeastern Maya periphery, especially present western El Salvador, monumental architecture had been principally constructed by earthen material during the Preclassic to Classic period (ca. 800 BC to AD 900). The type of platform mentioned above is very similar to that of Quelepa located in present-day eastern El Salvador and had other cultural affiliations in the Precolumbian era. This evidence indicates that San Andrés’s new construction technology was introduced by an external cultural connection.

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Mayan pyramid at La Acropolis, San Andres, El Salvador (structure 1) Mariordo, Wikimedia Commons

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Topographic map of the Structure-5 of San Andrés site showing the excavation area with pictures of masonry architecture under the earthen architecture. Credit: Akira Ichikawa and Juan Manuel Guerra

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Ichikawa speculated that the social group that lived in the Quelepa may have given a hand to help the people in the fully devastated Zapotitan Valley soon after a volcanic eruption occurred. Since the Great Platform found in this study could be considered monumental architecture to commemorate the people in the affected area, people in these areas must have had some cooperative relations beyond their cultural boundaries.

San Andrés has been investigated in terms of its relations mainly with Copán, the representative Classic Maya center located in western Honduras. “In this study we opened the gate by broadening our perspectives to the peripheral border beyond the cultural boundaries,” Ichikawa added. He expects that an understanding of the cultural development in peripheral areas will reveal the historical dynamism across multicultural societies.

Source: Edited from the subject Nagoya University news release.

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Ancient Wari Empire may have spread by diffusion, suggests research

Posted on June 1, 2016 by No Author -

PLOS ONE—The imperial dominance of the ancient Wari Empire at the Huaca Pucllana site in Lima, Peru, was likely not achieved through population replacement, according to a study* published June 1, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Guido Valverde from the University of Adelaide, Australia, and colleagues.

Successive pre-Columbian civilizations existed in the central Andes of South America since the pre-ceramic period 5.5 kya, and ancient empires such as the Wari Empire (600 – 1100 AD) may have been important in shaping the region’s demographic and cultural profiles. To investigate whether Wari dominance in the Peruvian Central Coast was based on population replacement or cultural diffusion, the authors of the present study sequenced the complete mitochondrial genomes of 34 individuals from the Huaca Pucllana archaeological site in Lima, Peru—a location where individuals who lived before, during, and after the Wari Empire—and assessed how this site’s population genetic diversity changed over time.

The researchers found that genetic diversity may only have changed subtly over this period, indicating population continuity over time with only minor genetic impact from Wari imperialism. The subtle genetic diversity shift found at this site may not be representative for the entire Wari territory, and more research is needed to characterize the overall influence of the Wari Empire. Nonetheless, the authors suggest that the Wari Empire may have exerted influence in this area through cultural diffusion rather than by replacement of the pre-existing population.

Guido Valverde adds: “The Huaca Pucllana archaeological site in Peru’s Central Coast represents a unique transect of three successive cultures – Lima, Wari and Ychsma. The site provides the exceptional opportunity to study 1000 years of pre-Inca history, including the impact of the Wari imperialist expansion on Peru’s Central Coast cities.”

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(A-B) This is the view of the Huaca Pucllana archaeological site in Lima, Peru. (C) Shows Wari funerary fardo ‘La Dama de la Máscara’ Credit: Huaca Pucllana research. Conservation and revalorization project

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Source: Edited from a PLOS ONE news release

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*Valverde G, Barreto Romero MI, Flores Espinoza I, Cooper A, Fehren-Schmitz L, Llamas B, et al. (2016) Ancient DNA Analysis Suggests Negligible Impact of the Wari Empire Expansion in Peru’s Central Coast during the Middle Horizon. PLoS ONE 11(6): e0155508. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0155508

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George Washington’s Mount Vernon to Open New Slavery Exhibition

Posted on May 31, 2016 by No Author -

MOUNT VERNON, VA – George Washington’s Mount Vernon is taking a significant step to share new knowledge about the lives of the enslaved people who lived and worked at the estate during Washington’s time by mounting a ground-breaking new exhibition. Opening October 1, 2016, Lives Bound Together: Slavery at George Washington’s Mount Vernon explores the personal stories of these men and women while providing insight into George Washington’s evolving opposition to slavery.

Through household furnishings, art works, archaeological discoveries, documents, and interactive displays, the exhibition, which will span 4,400 square feet throughout all seven galleries of the Donald W. Reynolds Museum, demonstrates how closely intertwined the lives of the Washingtons were with those of the enslaved. Nineteen enslaved individuals are featured throughout the exhibit, represented with life-sized silhouettes and interactive touchscreens providing biographical details.

“Mount Vernon is the best documented estate of its kind because George Washington was a meticulous record keeper,” said Mount Vernon president Curt Viebranz. “As he made notes about activities at his home and on his farm, he was, in a way, writing biographies for these men and women who left no written records behind.”

“Slavery has been an important focus of our research and interpretation for more than 150 years. What is new is that we now have the will and the way to bring to life the stories of specific individuals, so that they are forgotten no more,” said Viebranz.

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Above: The new exhibit will open October 1, 2016 at George Washington’s Mount Vernon. Image courtesy George Washington’s Mount Vernon

To prepare for this exhibition, which was developed over the course of two years at a cost of $750,000, the Donald W. Reynolds Museum, which opened to visitors in 2006, will undergo extensive updating. When the museum reopens with the exhibition installed, guests will see how the enslaved people played a role in nearly every aspect of daily life at Mount Vernon. More than 150 artifacts will be on view—seeds and animal bones, ceramic fragments and metal buttons unearthed from archaeological excavations around the estate, as well as fine tablewares and furniture from the Washington household, providing insights into the enslaved community’s daily lives and work.

Through the exhibition, guests will gain a better understanding of Washington’s changing views toward slavery, culminating in his landmark decision to include in his will a provision freeing the slaves that he owned. Washington’s writings reveal how he grappled with the issue of slavery over the course of his life. As a boy, he had inherited 10 slaves, and as an adult he purchased additional slaves to maintain and operate his home, as well as the thousands of acres of land that generated cash crops. During and after the Revolution, his opinion of slavery began to change and he struggled to extricate himself from reliance on slave labor.

During the first five months of Lives Bound Together, visitors will have an opportunity to view original manuscript pages from George Washington’s will, written in July 1799, showing his decision to free the slaves he owned. This bold act came with heart-wrenching side effects: slaves owned by the estate of Martha Washington’s first husband could not be freed by Washington. Granting these men and women freedom also tore apart families.

Although the development of this exhibition is a significant step in Mount Vernon’s ongoing effort to tell authentic stories of George Washington and his life and times, slavery interpretation has long been an important focus for research. Given George Washington’s extraordinary record keeping, Mount Vernon is arguably the best-documented plantation in eighteenth-century America. Currently Mount Vernon interprets slavery as part of its guided mansion tours, at its slave quarters, reconstructed slave cabin, slave memorial, and through a regularly-scheduled walking tour. Slavery is also the focus of the J. Hap and Geren Fauth Gallery in the Donald W. Reynolds Education Center.

Source: Press release of George Washington’s Mount Vernon by Melissa Wood, Director of Media Relations

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The Lives Bound Together exhibition could not have been made possible without the contributions from individuals and foundations in addition to three special donors: Ambassador and Mrs. Nicholas F. Taubman, Dr. Scholl Foundation, and The Coca-Cola Company. To prepare for the opening of this significant exhibition, the Donald W. Reynolds Museum will be closed beginning May 31 while its permanent galleries undergo a complete transformation. The exhibition will remain on view for at least two years. For more information, please visit: www.mountvernon.org/slavery.

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Space-age exploration for prehistoric bones in South Africa

Posted on May 30, 2016 by No Author -

In 2013, after the discovery of an unprecedented hominin assemblage in South Africa, the University of the Witwatersrand’s (Wits) Professor Lee Berger extended a worldwide call for “skinny” explorers to join him on the expedition to excavate what became known as the Dinaledi Chamber, located within a cave system known as Rising Star near the Sterkfontein Caves, about 40km North West of Johannesburg. An all-female team of six “underground astronauts” were selected to undertake the underground excavation, due to the challenge of navigating a 12-meter vertical chute and passing through an 18-centimeter gap. Over 1500 fossils were found, representing a new species designated by the examining scientists as Homo naledi.

Berger himself was unable to go down into the chamber, and the extremely difficult conditions in which Berger’s Rising Star team was forced to work thus gave rise to the use of space-age technology to bring the high resolution digital images to Berger and team members on an almost real-time basis in order to make vital decisions regarding the underground excavations. Ashley Kruger, a PhD candidate in Palaeoanthropology at the Evolutionary Studies Institute at Wits, who was part of Berger’s initial Rising Star Expedition team, roped in the use of high-tech laser scanning, photogrammetry and 3D mapping technology to make this possible.

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The fossils of Homo naledi. Courtesy John Hawks, Wits University

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“This is the first time ever, where multiple digital data imaging collection has been used on such a sale, during a hominin excavation,” says Kruger.

Kruger and colleagues have now mapped the entire path of the Rising Star Cave, including the Dinaledi Chamber, both on the surface and underground, using a combination of aerial drone photography, high-resolution 3D laser scanning, a technique called white-light source photogrammetry, and conventional surveying techniques. The research paper, Multimodal spatial mapping and visualisation of Dinaledi Chamber and Rising Star Cave was published in the scientific journal, the South African Journal of Science, on Friday (see link to the paper below).

“The 3D scans of the cave and excavation area helped scientists above ground immensely in making decisions about the next step to take with regards to excavations,” says Dr. Marina Elliot, Rising Star excavation manager, and co-author of the paper.

“These methods provided researchers with a digital representation of the site from landscape level right down to individual bones,” says Kruger.

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A scaled graphical representation of the Dinaledi cave system using 3D scanning. Courtesy Wits University

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Dinaledi infographic: How to map the Rising Star Cave system. Courtesy Wits University

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The precise digital reconstruction of the Rising Star Cave provides new insights into the Dinaledi Chamber’s structure and location, as well as the exact location of the fossil site. It also paints a detailed picture of the challenges that the underground astronauts had to deal with in navigating the caves on a daily basis for over five weeks in November 2013 and March 2014.

“We realise now, through the use of high-resolution scanning that the Dinaledi chamber is about 10 meters deeper than we originally thought,” says Kruger. This is important in understanding the processes which may have aided the site’s formation.

Kruger’s paper is the first of a number of papers due to be published on the spatial understanding of the Homo naledi site within the Dinaledi chamber. The rest of his research aims to provide answers about how the site formed, what the position of the fossils can tell researchers, as well as to paint a more detailed picture on how the hominin bodies came to be in the cave.

(See the video below for more information.)

Source: Adapted and edited from the Wits University subject news release.

The published paper can be accessed here.

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Ancient crops provide a window into Madagascar’s settlement by Southeast Asians

Posted on May 30, 2016 by No Author -

MAX-PLANCK-GESELLSCHAFT—The colonization of Madagascar remains one of the enduring mysteries of the ancient world. Situated off the East African coast, and many thousands of kilometers from Southeast Asia, Madagascar is nonetheless home to people who speak a language that is closely related to those spoken in the Pacific Area. While genetic research has confirmed that the inhabitants of Madagascar do indeed share close ancestry with Malaysians and Polynesians, archaeologists have struggled for decades to find any evidence for their early presence on the island. By analyzing the remains of ancient crops preserved in archaeological sediments, an international research team, including Max Planck director Nicole Boivin, has provided the first on-the-ground clues for this missing component of Madagascar’s past.

Examining residues obtained from a process called flotation, which uses a system of sieves and water to remove ancient preserved plant remains from sediments, the researchers identified 2443 individual crop remains to species level under the microscope. The remains were obtained through archaeological excavations at 18 ancient settlement sites in Madagascar, the Comoros and coastal eastern Africa.

“What was amazing to us was the stark contrast that emerged between the crops on the Eastern African coast versus those on Madagascar,” says Alison Crowther, of The University Queensland, lead author of the study, “and the more we looked, the starker the contrast became.” The ancient crop findings on the eastern African coast and nearest islands were heavily dominated by African crops – species like sorghum, pearl millet and baobab that had been present on the east African coast already for some centuries, brought by farmers across the continent. In contrast, samples taken from sites on Madagascar contained few or no African crops. Instead, they were dominated by Asian species like Asian rice, mung bean and Asian cotton.

The team examined where else in the Indian Ocean these crops were grown and also drew on historical and linguistic data. On this basis, the researchers were able to make a strong case that the crops reached Madagascar from Island Southeast Asia. “There are a lot of things we still don’t understand about Madagascar’s past, it remains one of our big enigmas” says Nicole Boivin, Director of the new Department of Archaeology at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena and senior author on the study. “But what is exciting is that we finally have a way of providing a window into the island’s highly mysterious Southeast Asian settlement, and distinguishing it from settlement by mainland Africans that we know also happened. Southeast Asians clearly brought crops from their homeland and grew them and subsisted on them when they reached Madagascar. This means that archaeologists can use those remains to finally start to provide real, material insights into the colonization process.”

One such insight is that it was not only Madagascar that was settled by Southeast Asians, but also the nearby archipelago of the Comoros, which sits between Madagascar and the northern Mozambique coast. “This took us by surprise,” notes Crowther “after all, people in the Comoros speak African languages, and they don’t look like they have Southeast Asian ancestry the way that populations on Madagascar do.” Linguistic evidence, however, does provide some support for the researchers’ idea. “When we started looking more closely into research that has been carried out on Comorian languages,” pointed out Boivin “we were able to find numerous esteemed linguists who had argued for the exact thing we seemed to be seeing in the Comorian archaeological record – a settlement by people from Southeast Asia”.

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Even today, there are still many rice fields in the highlands of Madagascar. Settlers from Southeast Asia brought the grain to the island more than 1,000 years ago. Credit: Mark Horton/University of Bristol

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Much work remains to be done. “We are keen to understand who these people were and what impact they had”, says Crowther. “Amongst events that possibly coincide with the arrival of Austronesian speakers is the disappearance of Madagascar’s famous megafauna, which include giant species of birds, lemur, and tortoises.” The team plans to return to Madagascar to continue their research. Boivin and Crowther are setting up new laboratories at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and University of Queensland that will collaborate closely in coming years.

The results of the research* has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Source: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft news release.

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*Alison Crowther, Leilani Lucas, Richard Helm, Mark Horton, Ceri Shipton, Henry T. Wright, Sarah Walshaw, Matthew Pawlowicz, Chantal Radimilahy, Katerina Douka, Llorenç Picornell-Gelaber, Dorian Q Fuller, and Nicole Boivin, Ancient crops provide first archaeological signature of the westward Austronesian expansion, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Migration back to Africa took place during the Paleolithic

Posted on May 26, 2016 by No Author -

UNIVERSITY OF THE BASQUE COUNTRY—A palaeogenomics study* conducted by the Human Evolutionary Biology group of the Faculty of Science and Technology, led by Concepción de la Rua, in collaboration with researchers in Sweden, the Netherlands and Romania, has made it possible to retrieve the complete sequence of the mitogenome of the Pestera Muierii woman (PM1) using two teeth. This mitochondrial genome corresponds to the now disappeared U6 basal lineage, and it is from this lineage that the U6 lineages, now existing mainly in the populations of the north of Africa, descend from.

The study has not only made it possible to confirm the Eurasian origin of the U6 lineage but also to support the hypothesis that some populations embarked on a back-migration to Africa from Eurasia at the start of the Upper Palaeolithic, about 40-45,000 years ago. The Pestera Muierii individual represents one branch of this return journey to Africa of which there is no direct evidence owing to the lack of Palaeolithic fossil remains in the north of Africa.

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The complete mitogenome of Pestera Muierii woman has been retrieved. Credit: E. Trinkaus and A. Soficaru

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“Right now, the research group is analysing the nuclear genome, the results of which could provide us with information about its relationship with the Neanderthals and about the existence of genomic variations associated with the immune system that accounts for the evolutionary success of Homo sapiens over other human species with whom it co-existed. What is more, we will be able to see what the phenotypic features of early Homo sapiens were like, and also see how population movements in the past influence the understanding of our evolutionary history,” explained Prof Concepción de la Rúa.

Source: Edited from the press release of the University of the Basque Country.

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*M. Hervella, E.M. Svensson, A. Alberdi, T. Günther, N. Izagirre, A.R. Munters, S. Alonso, M. Ioana, 5, F. Ridiche, A. Soficaru, M. Jakobsson, M.G. Netea & C. de-la-Rua, The mitogenome of a 35,000-year-old Homo sapiens from Europe supports a Palaeolithic back-migration to Africa. Scientific Reports DOI: 10.1038/srep25501

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High altitude archaeology: Prehistoric paintings revealed

Posted on May 26, 2016 by No Author -

UNIVERSITY OF YORK—Archaeologists at the University of York have undertaken pioneering scans of the highest prehistoric paintings of animals in Europe.

Studying the rock paintings of Abri Faravel, a rock shelter in the Southern French Alps 2,133m above sea level, archaeologists used car batteries to power laser and white-light scanners in a logistically complex operation.

Producing virtual models of the archaeological landscape, researchers have now published the scans in Internet Archaeology – an online, open-access journal.

Abri Faravel was discovered fortuitously in 2010. The rock shelter has seen phases of human activity from the Mesolithic to the medieval period, with its prehistoric rock paintings known to be the highest painted representations of animals (quadrupeds) in Europe.

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Location map (Image: C. Defrasne, from the published Internet Archaeology article)

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View and situation of the Abri Faravel from the south-east – – location of the Abri Faravel indicated with an arrow (Photo: Loïc Damelet, CNRS/Centre Camille Jullian, from the published Internet Archaeology article)

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The study* of Abri Faravel and its paintings is part of a wider collaborative project between the University of York and the Centre Camille Jullian, Aix-en-Provence, France. Undertaking research in the Parc National des Ecrins, the long-running study investigates the development of human activity over the last 8,000 years at high altitude in the Southern Alps.

Research conducted so far includes the excavation of a series of stone animal enclosures and human dwellings considered some of the most complex high altitude Bronze Age structures. Artefacts found in Abri Faravel also include Mesolithic and Neolithic flint tools, Iron Age hand-thrown pottery, a Roman fibula and some medieval metalwork.

However, the paintings are the most unique feature of the site, revealing a story of human occupation and activity in one of the world’s most challenging environments from the Mesolithic to Post-Medieval period.

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View of the paintings from the interior of the rock shelter with the rock art colours enhanced with DStretch (Photo: Loïc Damelet, CNRS/Centre Camille Jullian; enhancement: C. Defrasne, from the published article in Internet Archaeology)

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Dr Kevin Walsh, Senior Lecturer in York’s Department of Archaeology and project lead, said: “After years of research in this valley, the day we discovered these paintings was undeniably the highlight of the research programme.

“Whilst we thought that we might discover engravings, such as in the Vallée des Merveilles to the south-east, we never expected to find prehistoric paintings in this exposed area that affords so few natural shelters.

“As this site is so unusual, we made the decision to carry out a laser-scan of the rock shelter and the surrounding landscape, plus a white-light scan of the actual paintings. The scanning was logistically complex as our only source of electricity was car batteries, which, along with all of the scanning equipment, had to be carried up to the site.

“This is the only example of virtual models, including a scan of the art, done at high altitude in the Alps and probably the highest virtual model of an archaeological landscape in Europe.”

Source: University of York press release.

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The execution of the laser scan of the rock shelter and its landscape (Photo: K. Walsh, from the published Internet Archaeology article)

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The execution of the white light scan of the paintings (Photo: K. Walsh,from the published Internet Archaeology article)

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The paintings at the Abri Faravel. Two groups of roughly parallel lines, and two animals facing one another. (a) Normal light image; (b) Zoom of paintings – colours enhanced with DStretch with the YBR matrix (Photo and enhancement: C. Defrasne, from published Internet Archaeology article)

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* Walsh, K. et al. (2016) Interpreting the Rock Paintings of Abri Faravel: laser and white-light scanning at 2,133m in the southern French Alps, Internet Archaeology 42. http://dx.doi.org/10.11141/ia.42.1

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Women in southern Germany Corded Ware culture may have been highly mobile

Posted on May 25, 2016 by No Author -

PLOS—Women in the Corded Ware Culture may have been highly mobile and may have married outside their social group, according to a study* published May 25, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Karl-Göran Sjögren from Göteborg University, Sweden, and colleagues.

The Corded Ware Culture is archaeologically defined by material traits, such as the burial of the dead under barrows alongside characteristic cord-ornamented pottery, and existed in much of Europe from ca. 2800-2200 cal. B.C. To better understand this culture, the authors of the present study examined human bones and teeth from seven sites in Southern Germany dating from different periods of Corded Ware culture, including two large cemeteries. They used carbon dating and additional dietary isotope analysis to assess the diet and mobility of the population during this period.

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Location of sampled sites and other Corded Ware sites. Credit: Map by K-G Sjögren, using public domain data.

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The Corded Ware culture (also Battle-axe culture) is an enormous Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age archaeological grouping, flourishing ca. 3200 – 2300 BC. It encompasses most of continental northern Europe from the Rhine River on the west, to the Volga River in the east, including most of modern-day Germany, Denmark, Poland, the Baltic States, Belarus, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, northern Ukraine, and western Russia, as well as southern Sweden and Finland. It receives its name from the characteristic pottery of the era; wet clay was decoratively incised with cordage, i.e., string. It is known mostly from its burials. Note that this map does not reproduce the information accurately; it loses the depiction of culture areas as overlapping, and the indication of the core territory of Yamna. “Globular amphora” is to be understood as a predecessor and/or subgroup of Corded Ware and not as a distinct “neighboring” culture. Text and image: Wikimedia Commons

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Examples of Corded Ware Culture pottery. Einsamer Schütze, Wikimedia Commons

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The researchers found great dietary variation both between and within sites, indicating that the people of the Corded Ware culture subsisted in a variety of ways. Like humans in earlier cultures, they consumed both animal and plant matter. However, it is likely that at least some sites practiced more intense dairy and arable farming than in previous periods. Around 42% of individuals buried in one of the large cemetery sites were found to be non-local, with many females likely to have originated from elsewhere. This result may indicate that women across generations in this culture were very mobile.

The authors suggest that their evidence of varied diet and mobility supports the possibility of a stable system of female exogamy, where women married outside of their social group and moved to their husbands’ settlements, in Corded Ware Culture.

Karl-Göran Sjögren notes: “Our results suggest that Corded Ware groups in southern Germany were highly mobile, especially the women. We interpret this as indicating a pattern of female exogamy, involving different groups with differing economic strategies, and suggesting a complex pattern of social exchange and economic diversity in Late Neolithic Europe.”

Source: Edited from the subject PLOS news release.

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*Sjögren K-G, Price TD, Kristiansen K (2016) Diet and Mobility in the Corded Ware of Central Europe. PLoS ONE 11(5): e0155083. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0155083

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Ancient DNA study finds Phoenician from Carthage had European ancestry

Posted on May 25, 2016 by No Author -

UNIVERSITY OF OTAGO—A research team co-led by a scientist at New Zealand’s University of Otago has sequenced the first complete mitochondrial genome of a 2500-year-old Phoenician dubbed the “Young Man of Byrsa” or “Ariche”.

The Phoenician’s remains were recovered previously by a team excavating at the site of Byrsa, the ancient citadel of Carthage in northern Africa, under the direction of Jean-Paul Morel. Upon examination, scientists determined the remains to be those of a young man between 19 and 24 years old with a robust physique and 1.7 (five feet six inches) meters tall. He was buried with gems, amulets, scarabs and other items that suggested he belonged to the elite class of the Carthaginian citizenry. Scientists have not determined the cause of his death.

Byrsa was considered the major military facility guarding the city of Carthage. It is known historically as the monumental city besieged by the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus ‘Africanus’ in the Third Punic War, eventually destroyed by the Romans in 146 BCE.

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Excavated remains of Byrsa. Pradigue, Wikimedia Commons

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Reconstruction of Ariche by Elisabeth Daynès. Credit: M. Rais, Wikimedia Commons.

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This is the first ancient DNA to be obtained from Phoenician remains and the team’s analysis shows that the man belonged to a rare European haplogroup—a genetic group with a common ancestor—that likely links his maternal ancestry to locations somewhere on the North Mediterranean coast, most probably on the Iberian Peninsula.

The findings are newly published in the international journal PLOS ONE.

Study co-leader Professor Lisa Matisoo-Smith of the Department of Anatomy says the findings provide the earliest evidence of the European mitochondrial haplogroup ‘U5b2cl’ in North Africa and date its arrival to at least the late sixth century BC.

“U5b2cl is considered to be one of the most ancient haplogroups in Europe and is associated with hunter-gatherer populations there. It is remarkably rare in modern populations today, found in Europe at levels of less than one per cent. Interestingly, our analysis showed that Ariche’s mitochondrial genetic make-up most closely matches that of the sequence of a particular modern day individual from Portugal,” Professor Matisoo-Smith says.

While the Phoenicians are thought to have originated from the area that is now Lebanon, their influence expanded across the Mediterranean and west to the Iberian Peninsula where they established settlements and trading posts. The city of Carthage in Tunisia, North Africa, was established as a Phoenician port by colonists from Lebanon and became the center for later Phoenician (Punic) trade.

The researchers analysed the mitochondrial DNA of 47 modern Lebanese people and found none were of the U5b2cl lineage.

Previous research has found that U5b2cl was present in two ancient hunter-gatherers recovered from an archaeological site in north-western Spain, she says.

“While a wave of farming peoples from the Near East replaced these hunter-gatherers, some of their lineages may have persisted longer in the far south of the Iberian peninsula and on off-shore islands and were then transported to the melting pot of Carthage in North Africa via Phoenician and Punic trade networks.”

Professor Matisoo-Smith says Phoenician culture and trade had a significant impact on Western civilisation. For example, they introduced the first alphabetic writing system.

“However, we still know little about the Phoenicians themselves, except for the likely biased accounts by their Roman and Greek rivals—hopefully our findings and other continuing research will cast further light on the origins and impact of Phoenician peoples and their culture,” she says.

Source: Adapted and edited from a University of Otago subject news release.

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Skeletal differences between Neanderthal and modern human infants

Posted on May 23, 2016 by No Author -

A study* suggests that Neanderthal infants were born with many skeletal features of adult Neanderthals. While it is known that many differences between Neanderthal and modern human skulls are present at birth, it is not clear if the same is true of differences in the rest of the body. Tim Weaver of the University of California, Davis, and other colleagues measured the lengths and widths of the arm, leg, and pelvic bones from the two most complete Neanderthal neonate skeletons: one from Russia (‘Mezmaiskaya 1’ from the Mezmaiskaya Cave) and one from France (‘Le Moustier 2’ from the Le Moustier rock shelter). The authors compared the skeletons’ features to those from a sample of recent African-American and European-American fetal skeletons from the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. Compared with the recent human specimens, the Neanderthal specimens had large hips relative to the length of the thigh bones, indicative of a wide body. The Neanderthal from Russia had a longer pubis relative to the size of the hips, compared with modern humans, and the ends of the Neanderthals’ long bones were wider relative to their length than in modern humans. The differences between Neanderthal and modern human neonate skeletons are similar to the differences between Neanderthal and modern human adults. These results suggest that most skeletal differences between Neanderthals and humans are established at birth, according to the authors.

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Neanderthal child bones. Leo Fyllnet, Wikimedia Commons

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Source: Adapted and edited from the subject Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) press release.

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*“Neonatal postcrania from Mezmaiskaya, Russia, and Le Moustier, France, and the development of Neandertal body form,” by Timothy D. Weaver et al.

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Beer brewing in ancient China

Posted on May 23, 2016 by No Author -

Archaeological artifacts from a site in northern China suggest a 5,000-year-old recipe for beer, according to a study*. The time of onset of beer brewing in ancient China remains unclear. Jiajing Wang and colleagues report the discovery of brewing artifacts in two pits dated to around 3400-2900 BC and unearthed at Mijiaya, an archaeological site near a tributary of the Wei River in northern China. Yellowish remnants found in wide-mouthed pots, funnels, and amphorae suggest that the vessels were used for beer brewing, filtration, and storage. Stoves found in the pits likely provided heat for mashing grains. Morphological analysis of starch grains and phytoliths found inside the artifacts revealed broomcorn millets, barley, Job’s tears, and tubers; some starch grains bore marks reminiscent of malting and mashing. The presence of oxalate, a byproduct of beer brewing that was identified using ion chromatography, in some of the artifacts further supported their use as brewing vessels. Together, the lines of evidence suggest that the Yangshao people may have concocted a 5,000-year-old beer recipe that ushered the cultural practice of beer brewing into ancient China. According to the authors, the identification of barley residues in the Mijiaya artifacts represents the earliest known occurrence of barley in China, pushing back the crop’s advent in the country by approximately 1,000 years and suggesting that the crop may have been used as a beer-making ingredient long before it became an agricultural staple.

Source: Adapted and edited from the subject Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences press release.

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Funnel for beer making from Mijiaya. Image courtesy Jiajing Wang.

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*“Revealing a 5000-year-old beer recipe in China,” by Jiajing Wang et al.

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Burial sites show how Nubians, Egyptians integrated communities thousands of years ago

Posted on May 18, 2016 by No Author -

PURDUE UNIVERSITY—New bioarchaeological evidence shows that Nubians and Egyptians integrated into a community, and even married, in ancient Sudan, according to new research from a Purdue University anthropologist.

“There are not many archaeological sites that date to this time period, so we have not known what people were doing or what happened to these communities when the Egyptians withdrew,” said Michele Buzon, an associate professor of anthropology, who is excavating Nubian burial sites in the Nile River Valley to better understand the relationship between Nubians and Egyptians during the New Kingdom Empire.

The findings are published in American Anthropologist, and this work has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society’s Committee for Research and Exploration. Buzon also collaborated with Stuart Tyson Smith from the University of California, Santa Barbara, on this UCSB-Purdue led project. Antonio Simonetti from the University of Notre Dame also is a study co-author.

Egyptians colonized the area in 1500 BCE to gain access to trade routes on the Nile River. This is known as the New Kingdom Empire, and most research focuses on the Egyptians and their legacy.

“It’s been presumed that Nubians absorbed Egyptian cultural features because they had to, but we found cultural entanglement ? that there was a new identity that combined aspects of their Nubian and Egyptian heritages. And based on biological and isotopic features, we believe they were interacting, intermarrying and eventually becoming a community of Egyptians and Nubians,” said Buzon, who just returned from the excavation site.

During the New Kingdom Period, from about 1400-1050 BCE, Egyptians ruled Tombos in the Nile River Valley’s Nubian Desert in the far north of Sudan. In about 1050 BCE, the Egyptians lost power during the Third Intermediate Period. At the end of this period, Nubia gained power again and defeated Egypt to rule as the 25th dynasty.

“We now have a sense of what happened when the New Kingdom Empire fell apart, and while there had been assumptions that Nubia didn’t function very well without the Egyptian administration, the evidence from our site says otherwise,” said Buzon, who has been working at this site since 2000, focusing on the burial features and skeletal health analysis. “We found that Tombos continued to be a prosperous community. We have the continuation of an Egyptian Nubian community that is successful even when Egypt is playing no political role there anymore.”

Human remains and burial practices from 24 units were analyzed for this study.

The tombs, known as tumulus graves, show how the cultures merged. The tombs’ physical structure, which are mounded, round graves with stones and a shaft underneath, reflect Nubian culture.

“They are Nubian in superstructure, but inside the tombs reflect Egyptian cultural features, such as the way the body is positioned,” Buzon said. “Egyptians are buried in an extended position; on their back with their arms and legs extended. Nubians are generally on their side with their arms and legs flexed. We found some that combine a mixture of traditions. For instance, bodies were placed on a wooden bed, a Nubian tradition, and then placed in an Egyptian pose in an Egyptian coffin.”

Skeletal markers also supported that the two cultures merged.

“This community developed over a few hundred years and people living there were the descendants of that community that started with Egyptian immigrants and local Nubians,” Buzon said. “They weren’t living separately at same site, but living together in the community.”

Source: Purdue University news release.

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Michele Buzon, a Purdue University associate professor of anthropology, is excavating pyramid tombs in Tombos, Sudan to study Egyptian and Nubian cultures from thousands of years ago in the Nile River Valley. Credit: Purdue University photo/Charles Jischke

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Study sheds light on ancient Roman water system in Naples

Posted on May 16, 2016 by No Author -

A study* suggests that lead isotopes can reveal the history of ancient Roman water distribution systems. The impact of the Vesuvius volcanic eruption in AD 79 on the water supply of Naples and other nearby cities has been a matter of debate. Hugo Delile and colleagues measured lead isotopic compositions of a well-dated sedimentary sequence from the excavated ancient harbor of Naples. The isotopic composition of leachates from the harbor sediments differed from those of lead native to the region, suggesting contamination from imported lead used in the ancient plumbing. The authors observed an abrupt change in isotopic composition in a sediment layer above that associated with the AD 79 eruption. This shift was estimated to postdate the eruption by approximately 15 years and suggests a switch to different pipes. The authors report that the Vesuvius eruption likely damaged the Neapolitan water supply network; nevertheless, the network continued to be used for another decade and a half while a new network was being constructed. Lead isotopes from later sediments suggested the steady expansion of the city’s water supply system until the early fifth century AD, when multiple factors, such as invasions, natural disasters, and local administrative and economic collapse, led to its overall decline. The isotopic record further shows the ebb and flow of Neapolitan urban sprawl throughout the fifth and sixth centuries AD, according to the authors.

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Painting by Joseph Mallord William Turner (between 1817 and 1820) Vesuvius in Eruption, watercolor. Image courtesy of Yale Center for British Art.

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Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) press release.

*“A lead isotope perspective on urban development in ancient Naples,” by Hugo Delile et al

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