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DEPAUL UNIVERSITY—CHICAGO—The use of unmanned aerial vehicles—drones—to document and monitor a ravaged landscape on the Dead Sea Plain in Jordan for the past three years reveals that looting continues at the site, though at a measurably reduced pace, according to a DePaul University archaeologist.

“Drones are proving to be powerful new tools to archaeologists for documenting excavation, mapping landscapes and identifying buried features. They also can be applied to monitor site destruction and looting in the present,” said Morag M. Kersel, an assistant professor of anthropology at DePaul.

Kersel, whose research focus is on trade and antiquities, discussed how drones are an emerging tool for archeology during a presentation Feb. 14, 2016 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Kersel’s presentation, “UAVs for Site Documentation and Monitoring,” is part of a session that examines the protection of cultural heritage sites and artifacts.

“Three seasons of monitoring at Fifa have demonstrated that UAVs can provide quantifiable evidence for the rate of ongoing site damage, even in contexts where other remote sensing systems would provide insufficient data,” said Kersel.

“Between 2013-14, we had 34 new looting episodes—holes—clearly people were still looting. In the next year, there’s very little or no evidence of looting. Why?” Kersel said. “Is it because there is no demand Early Bronze Age ceramics?

“An element of the ongoing research is the examination of why looting has abated? Are there no more graves to loot? Have looters found more lucrative financial resources? Are the Department of Antiquities and NGO initiatives working?” she asked.

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Austin “Chad” Hill, a research scientist at the University of Connecticut, prepares a fixed wing drone for a flight over the landscape at Fifa in Jordan. Hill works with archaeologist Morag M. Kersel, an assistant professor at DePaul University, using drones for site documentation and monitoring at the site with the support of the Jordanian Department of Antiquities. Credit:  Photo by Morag M. Kersel, courtesy of the Follow the Pots Project

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 An image of looting episodes—holes—at Fifa in Jordan, taken by a fixed wing drone in 2013 as part of site documentation and monitoring by archaeologist Morag M. Kersel, an assistant professor at DePaul University. Credit: Image by Austin “Chad” Hill, courtesy of the Follow the Pots Project

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Combining clues from the air and on the ground

Kersel is co-director of the Galilee Prehistory Project and the Follow the Pots Project, tracing the movement of Early Bronze Age pots from the Dead Sea Plain in Jordan.

“Part of what we do is the drone flyovers. But another part of this project is ethnographies with people on the ground. We treat all stakeholders with a vested interest in the site with the same intellectual curiosity, which means we interact with and learn from local populations, dealers, collectors, looters, government employees, archaeologists, museum professionals, tourists, and customs agents.

“Ours is a holistic approach to the landscape, which combines archaeology, ethnography and the drones,” Kersel said.

Archaeologists for years have been using satellite images to quantify the number of looted graves. “Comparing satellite images with the lunar-like landscape of Fifa led us to the revolutionary idea of using drones to gather data with higher resolution from areas of our own choosing,” Kersel explained.

Today, she and colleague Austin Hill of the University of Connecticut use a small fixed wing plane equipped with a Canon camera inside the belly and a GoPro mounted on the front, and a DJI rotary wing hexacopter or quadcopter, which provide the platforms for stable, low elevation aerial photography, making it possible to both document looting and destruction at Fifa as well as generate spatial data for digital mapping.

“Our comprehensive approach to the landscape, which includes groundtruthing, ethnographic interviews, cooperative efforts with the Jordanian Department of Antiquities, and drones are key to safeguarding and recording what remains of this Early Bronze Age mortuary site,” said Kersel. “This research reinforces the power of drones in site monitoring and documentation as part of future protection strategies.”

Source: DePaul University news release.

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Archaeologist Morag M. Kersel is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at DePaul University, Chicago. She has a doctorate from the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge where she studied the legal trade in antiquities in Israel, and a master’s degree in historic preservation from the University of Georgia.

Kersel’s research interests include the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age of the eastern Mediterranean and Levant, cultural heritage protection, the built environment, object biographies, museums and archaeological tourism. Her work combines archaeological, archival and oral history research in order to understand the efficacy of cultural heritage law in protecting archaeological landscapes from looting.

Kersel is co-director of the Galilee Prehistory Project and the Follow the Pots Project, tracing the movement of Early Bronze Age pots from the Dead Sea Plain in Jordan.

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 This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Two remarkable discoveries that are shedding light on human beginnings in Africa; a traveling exhibit and an archaeological site that show how knowledge is more valuable than gold; a Spanish cave and a unique burial that are offering a tantalizing glimpse on the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe; the stunning visual reconstruction of an ancient Roman town; enlightening new finds at a remarkably well-preserved site of ancient Hellenistic-Roman culture overlooking the Sea of Galilee; rare finds that are shedding light on occult practices among ancient Greeks in Sicily; and an overview of the overwhelmingly rich archaeological heritage of Britain. Find it on Amazon.com.

Two new hominin fossils have been found in a previously uninvestigated chamber in the Sterkfontein Caves, just North West of Johannesburg in South Africa. 

The two new specimens, a finger bone and a molar, are part of a set of four specimens, which seem to be from early hominins that can be associated with early stone tool-bearing sediments that entered the cave more than two million years ago. During a second phase of excavation in the Milner Hall—a component of the Sterkfontein Caves—which was started early in 2015 with student Kelita Shadrach, four hominin fossils were excavated from the upper layers of a long sequence of deposits that document the long history of fossil deposition in the caves, starting over 3.67 million years ago. 

“The [two] specimens are exciting not only because they are associated with early stone tools, but also because they possess a mixture of intriguing features that raise many more questions than they give answers,” says lead researcher Dr Dominic Stratford, a lecturer at the Wits School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental studies, and research coordinator at the Sterkfontein Caves. 

The first fossil specimen, which is a very large proximal finger bone, is significantly larger and more robust than any other hand bone of any hominin yet found in South African plio-pleistocene sites. 

“It is almost complete and shows a really interesting mix of modern and archaic features. For example, the specimen is markedly curved – more curved than Homo naledi and is similarly curved to the much older species Australopithecus afarensis,” says Stratford. 

The level of curvature is often linked to arborealism, but it lacks the strong muscle attachments that are expected to be present. 

“The finger is similar in shape to the partial specimen from Olduvai Gorge that has been called Homo habilis, but is much larger. Overall, this specimen is unique in the South African plio-pleistocene fossil hominin record and deserves more studies,” says Stratford. 

The other fossil is a relatively small, nearly complete adult 1st molar tooth that also has striking similarities to species Homo habilis. 

“In size and shape it also bears a resemblance to two of the 10 1st molars of the H.naledi specimens, although further and more detailed comparisons are needed to verify this.” 

The shape of the tooth and particularly the shape and relative sizes of the cones on the surface of the tooth suggest this specimen belonged to an early member of the Homo genus and can be associated with early stone tools dated recently to 2.18 million years ago. 

“The two other hominin fossils found are still being studied and further excavations are planned to hopefully find more pieces and expand our understanding of who these intriguing bones belonged to and how they lived and died on the Sterkfontein hill more than two million years ago,” says Stratford. 

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 Researchers exploring Milner Hall in the Sterkfontein Cave for fossils. Courtesy Dominic Stratford

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 New hominin finger bone found at the Sterkfontein Cave. Courtesy Jason Heaton

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 New hominin molar found at the Sterkfontein Cave. Courtesy Jason Heaton

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The Sterkfontein Legacy

The Sterkfontein Caves have been one of the most prolific palaeoanthropological sites in the world, since the discovery of the first ever adult Australopithecus by Robert Broom, 80 years ago this year. Since this incredible discovery, some of palaeoanthropology’s most famous finds have come from the Sterkfontein Caves, including Ms. Ples and Little Foot. 

Sterkfontein remains the richest Australopithecus-bearing locality in the world and continues to yield remarkable specimens. The underground network of caves at the site extends over 5kms and the caves are filled with fossiliferous sediments that have been deposited underground over a period of more than 3.67 million years. 

However, very few of these deep deposits have been systematically excavated and so remain largely unknown. The Milner Hall, where the four new hominin fossils were found, is one such chamber where several large deposits have been identified but never excavated. 

The excavations that yielded these new hominin fossils were being conducted as part of a series of exploratory excavations away from the known hominin-bearing areas. Excavations in the Jacovec Cavern, Name Chamber and Milner Hall have been started under Dr Stratford’s direction. Each has yielded exciting new fossils that shed further light on the story of our evolution and life on the Sterkfontein hill more than two million years ago. 

Source: Edited and adapted from the University of the Witwatersrand press release. Find the study at here.

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 This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Two remarkable discoveries that are shedding light on human beginnings in Africa; a traveling exhibit and an archaeological site that show how knowledge is more valuable than gold; a Spanish cave and a unique burial that are offering a tantalizing glimpse on the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe; the stunning visual reconstruction of an ancient Roman town; enlightening new finds at a remarkably well-preserved site of ancient Hellenistic-Roman culture overlooking the Sea of Galilee; rare finds that are shedding light on occult practices among ancient Greeks in Sicily; and an overview of the overwhelmingly rich archaeological heritage of Britain. Find it on Amazon.com.

VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY—Since 2010 scientists have known that people of Eurasian origin have inherited anywhere from 1 to 4 percent of their DNA from Neanderthals.

The discovery spawned a number of hypotheses about the effects these genetic variants may have on the physical characteristics or behavior of modern humans, ranging from skin color to heightened allergies to fat metabolism…generating dozens of colorful headlines including “What your Neanderthal DNA is doing for you” and “Neanderthals are to blame for our allergies” and “Did Europeans Get Fat From Neanderthals?”

Now, the first study* that directly compares Neanderthal DNA in the genomes of a significant population of adults of European ancestry with their clinical records confirms that this archaic genetic legacy has a subtle but significant impact on modern human biology.

“Our main finding is that Neanderthal DNA does influence clinical traits in modern humans: We discovered associations between Neanderthal DNA and a wide range of traits, including immunological, dermatological, neurological, psychiatric and reproductive diseases,” said John Capra, senior author of the paper “The phenotypic legacy of admixture between modern humans and Neanderthals” published in the Feb. 12 issue of the journal Science. The evolutionary geneticist is an assistant professor of biological sciences at Vanderbilt University.

Some of the associations that Capra and his colleagues found confirm previous hypotheses. One example is the proposal that Neanderthal DNA affects cells called keratinocytes that help protect the skin from environmental damage such as ultraviolet radiation and pathogens. The new analysis found Neanderthal DNA variants influence skin biology in modern humans, in particular the risk of developing sun-induced skin lesions called keratosis, which are caused by abnormal keratinocytes.

In addition, there were a number of surprises. For example, they found that a specific bit of Neanderthal DNA significantly increases risk for nicotine addiction. They also found a number of variants that influence the risk for depression: some positively and some negatively. In fact, a surprising number of snippets of Neanderthal DNA were associated with psychiatric and neurological effects, the study found.

“The brain is incredibly complex, so it’s reasonable to expect that introducing changes from a different evolutionary path might have negative consequences,” said Vanderbilt doctoral student Corinne Simonti, the paper’s first author.

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According to the researchers, the pattern of associations that they discovered suggest that today’s population retains Neanderthal DNA that may have provided modern humans with adaptive advantages 40,000 years ago as they migrated into new non-African environments with different pathogens and levels of sun exposure. However, many of these traits may no longer be advantageous in modern environments.

One example is a Neanderthal variant that increases blood coagulation. It could have helped our ancestors cope with new pathogens encountered in new environments by sealing wounds more quickly and preventing pathogens from entering the body. In modern environments this variant has become detrimental, because hypercoagulation increases risk for stroke, pulmonary embolism and pregnancy complications.

In order to discover these associations, the researchers used a database containing 28,000 patients whose biological samples have been linked to anonymized versions of their electronic health records. The data came from eMERGE – the Electronic Medical Records and Genomics Network funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute – which links digitized records from Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s BioVU databank and eight other hospitals around the country.

This data allowed the researchers to determine if each individual had ever been treated for a specific set of medical conditions, such as heart disease, arthritis or depression. Next they analyzed the genomes of each individual to identify the unique set of Neanderthal DNA that each person carried. By comparing the two sets of data, they could test whether each bit of Neanderthal DNA individually and in aggregate influences risk for the traits derived from the medical records.

“Vanderbilt’s BioVU and the network of similar databanks from hospitals across the country were built to enable discoveries about the genetic basis of disease,” said Capra. “We realized that we could use them to answer important questions about human evolution.”

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 Neanderthal DNA influences many physical traits in people of Eurasian heritage. Credit: Michael Smeltzer, Vanderbilt University

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According to the evolutionary geneticist, this work establishes a new way to investigate questions about the effects of events in recent human evolution.

The current study was limited to associating Neanderthal DNA variants with physical traits (phenotypes) included in hospital billing codes, but there is a lot of other information contained in the medical records, such as lab tests, doctors’ notes, and medical images, that Capra is working on analyzing in a similar fashion.

Source: Vanderbilt University news release

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*”The phenotypic legacy of admixture between modern humans and Neandertals,” by C.N. Simonti; L. Bastarache; D.M. Roden; J.D. Prato; J.C. Denny; J.A. Capra at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN; B. Vernot; D.R. Crosslin; G.P. Jarvik; J.M. Akey at University of Washington in Seattle, WA; E. Bottinge at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, NY; D.S. Carrell; D.R. Crosslin; G.P. Jarvik at University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle, WA; R.L. Chisholm at Northwestern University in Chicago, IL.  All authors include: Lisa Bastarache, Dan Roden, Jeffrey Prato and Joshua Denny from Vanderbilt; Benjamin Vernot, David Carrell, David Crosslin, Gail Jarvik and Joshua Akey from the University of Washington; Erwin Bottinger from Mount Sinai School of Medicine; Rex Chisholm from Northwestern University; Scott Hebbring from the Marshfield Clinic; Iftikhar Kullo and Jyotishman Pathak from the Mayo Clinic; Rongling Li from the National Human Genome Research Institute; Marylynn Ritchie and Shefali Verma from Pennsylvania State University; Gerard Tromp from the Geisinger Health System; and William Bush from Case Western Reserve University.

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 This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Two remarkable discoveries that are shedding light on human beginnings in Africa; a traveling exhibit and an archaeological site that show how knowledge is more valuable than gold; a Spanish cave and a unique burial that are offering a tantalizing glimpse on the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe; the stunning visual reconstruction of an ancient Roman town; enlightening new finds at a remarkably well-preserved site of ancient Hellenistic-Roman culture overlooking the Sea of Galilee; rare finds that are shedding light on occult practices among ancient Greeks in Sicily; and an overview of the overwhelmingly rich archaeological heritage of Britain. Find it on Amazon.com.

GHENT UNIVERSITY—The team of mining archaeologists was supervised by Prof. Dr Denis Morin of the University of Lorraine, connected with the UMR CNRS 5608 (UMR National Center for Scientific Research 5608) of Toulouse. The scientists employed a drone to locate above-ground installations connected to the mining. It is the first time that such complex mining infrastructure is studied.

These subterranean investigations are part of a larger archaeological research program on the site of Thorikos directed by Prof. Roald Docter of Ghent University under the auspices of the Belgian School at Athens, the University of Utrecht and the Ephorate of Eastern Attica.

Denis Morin on this discovery: “today, it is difficult to imagine the extreme conditions in which the miners had to work in this maze of galleries. A smothering heat reigns in this mineral environment. The progress of the underground survey requires a constant vigilance in this stuffy space where the rate of oxygen must be permanently watched. Tool marks on the walls, graffiti, oil lamps, and crushing areas give evidence of the omnipresent activity of these underground workers. The hardness of the bedrock and the mineralizations show the extreme working conditions of these workers, for the greater part slaves, sentenced to the darkness and the extraction of the lead-silver ore … Mapping these cramped, complex and braided underground networks, the ramifications of which are sometimes located at several levels, represent a real challenge in scientific terms”. Underground, the morphology and the organization of the mining infrastructure allow to distinguish several phases of activity.

The archaeological data gathered and observed during the latest phase of the 2015 campaign: pottery, stone hammers made of a volcano-sedimentary rock quarry, point towards a high dating for the earliest phase of mining activities in the area (Late Neolithic / Early Helladic: around 3200 BC). If future research confirms this hypothesis, the chronological framework of mining in the region of Attica and the Aegean world would be profoundly modified. The Classical phase is by far the most perceptible; omnipresent, it is remarkable by the regularity of the sections of divided galleries that cover the whole space. Fragments of pottery and oil lamps, and even a Greek inscription engraved on a wall, testify to the activities in this period. Conduits cut with pointed tools, of quadrangular shape, cutting of the rock in successive stages, such are the characteristics of these particularly well organized mining works.

This resumption of the works at the end of Classical period (4th century BC) is dated by the tool marks in the galleries and the ceramic remains. Shafts discovered inside this network connect two main levels of mineralization’s, and hence of extraction. Of perfect geometrical architecture, executed to the millimeter, their technique of construction is still investigated by the archaeologists.

Today, these shafts are only accessible using techniques of alpine caving. A certain number of these abandoned galleries has remained untouched over the last 5000 years. Others, which are now inaccessible, had been entirely banked up during successive phases of mining. Progressing in these galleries remains difficult for the experienced archaeologists, wearing high-tech equipment, in a stifling atmosphere with temperatures up to 21°C.

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 A mining archaeologist is at work in a 5,000 year old silver mine in Thorikos, Greece. Credit: Ghent University

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The mine that has been discovered in Thorikos is exceptional in its lay-out and extension. Up to now mining archaeologists working in the Laurion area did not explore such a complex network of galleries and mining infrastructure. They show the physical capacities and skills of the ancient miners to exploit these complex ore deposits and to assure ore dressing activities outside the mine from the Prehistory on. It testifies to a deliberate strategy and to perfect technological and spatial control over the process: an exceptional concentration of means to extract silver and a sophisticated technical system that in its scale is unique within the ancient world.

Already exploited since the 4th / 3rd millennium BC, by the 5th and 4th centuries BC these silver mines constituted the most important mining district of Greece, laying at the basis of Athens’ domination of the Aegean world.

The 2015 underground survey campaign brought new information on the mining techniques developed since the first metal ages in this strategic zone of the eastern Mediterranean. The ongoing research not only aims to survey these subterranean remains, but it will also allow to understand the mining technologies of these early periods, the management of mineral resources, their extraction and processing as well as the circulation of the end products… These achievements of human ingenuity already foreshadow the technological advances of the Middle Ages.

Source: Ghent University news release.

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 This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Two remarkable discoveries that are shedding light on human beginnings in Africa; a traveling exhibit and an archaeological site that show how knowledge is more valuable than gold; a Spanish cave and a unique burial that are offering a tantalizing glimpse on the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe; the stunning visual reconstruction of an ancient Roman town; enlightening new finds at a remarkably well-preserved site of ancient Hellenistic-Roman culture overlooking the Sea of Galilee; rare finds that are shedding light on occult practices among ancient Greeks in Sicily; and an overview of the overwhelmingly rich archaeological heritage of Britain. Find it on Amazon.com.

PLOS—Isotope analysis of 2000-year-old skeletons buried in Imperial Rome reveal some were migrants from the Alps or North Africa, according to a study* published February 10, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONEby Kristina Killgrove from University of West Florida, USA, and Janet Montgomery from Durham University, UK.

Previous work has focused on the overall human migration patterns within the Roman Empire. To understand human migration on a more granular level, the authors of this study examined 105 skeletons buried at two Roman cemeteries during the 1st through 3rd centuries AD. They analyzed the oxygen, strontium, and carbon isotope ratios in the skeletons’ teeth to determine their geographical origin and diet.

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 Skull of skeleton T15, a 35- to 50-year-old male who was buried in a cemetery in the modern neighborhood of Casal Bertone, Rome, Italy. Isotope ratios suggest he may have been born near the Alps. Credit: Kristina Killgrove

They found up to eight individuals who were likely migrants from outside Rome, possibly from North Africa and the Alps. The individuals were mostly children and men, and the authors suggest their burial in a necropolis indicates that they may have been poor or even slaves. They also found that their diet probably changed significantly when they moved to Rome, possibly adapting to the local cuisine, comprising mostly wheat and some legumes, meat and fish. The authors note that further isotope and DNA analysis is needed to provide more context for their findings. Nonetheless, they state that their study provides the first physical evidence of individual migrants to Rome during this period.

Source: PLOS news release.

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*Killgrove K, Montgomery J (2016) All Roads Lead to Rome: Exploring Human Migration to the Eternal City through Biochemistry of Skeletons from Two Imperial-Era Cemeteries (1st-3rd c AD). PLoS ONE 11(2): e0147585. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0147585

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 This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Two remarkable discoveries that are shedding light on human beginnings in Africa; a traveling exhibit and an archaeological site that show how knowledge is more valuable than gold; a Spanish cave and a unique burial that are offering a tantalizing glimpse on the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe; the stunning visual reconstruction of an ancient Roman town; enlightening new finds at a remarkably well-preserved site of ancient Hellenistic-Roman culture overlooking the Sea of Galilee; rare finds that are shedding light on occult practices among ancient Greeks in Sicily; and an overview of the overwhelmingly rich archaeological heritage of Britain. Find it on Amazon.com.

Read more in-depth articles about archaeology with a premium subscription to Popular Archaeology Magazine. 

In addition, the latest Popular Archaeology ebook is now available.

 ______________________________________________

Travel and learn with Far Horizons.

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 This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Two remarkable discoveries that are shedding light on human beginnings in Africa; a traveling exhibit and an archaeological site that show how knowledge is more valuable than gold; a Spanish cave and a unique burial that are offering a tantalizing glimpse on the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe; the stunning visual reconstruction of an ancient Roman town; enlightening new finds at a remarkably well-preserved site of ancient Hellenistic-Roman culture overlooking the Sea of Galilee; rare finds that are shedding light on occult practices among ancient Greeks in Sicily; and an overview of the overwhelmingly rich archaeological heritage of Britain. Find it on Amazon.com.

FUTURE EARTH—Researchers from the international Past Global Changes (PAGES) project write in the journal Nature Geoscience that they have identified an unprecedented, long-lasting cooling in the northern hemisphere 1500 years ago. The drop in temperature immediately followed three large volcanic eruptions in quick succession in the years 536, 540 and 547 AD. Volcanoes can cause climate cooling by ejecting large volumes of small particles – sulfate aerosols – that enter the atmosphere blocking sunlight.

Within five years of the onset of the “Late Antique Little Ice Age”, as the researchers have dubbed it, the Justinian plague pandemic swept through the Mediterranean between 541 and 543 AD, striking Constantinople and killing millions of people in the following centuries. The authors suggest these events may have contributed to the decline of the eastern Roman Empire.

Lead author, dendroclimatologist Ulf Büntgen from the Swiss Federal Research Institute said, “This was the most dramatic cooling in the Northern Hemisphere in the past 2000 years.”

A later “Little Ice Age” between 14th and 19th centuries has been well documented and linked to political upheavals and plague pandemics in Europe, but the new study is the first to provide a comprehensive climate analysis across both Central Asia and Europe during this earlier period.

“With so many variables, we must remain cautious about environmental cause and political effect, but it is striking how closely this climate change aligns with major upheavals across several regions,” added Büntgen.

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The multidisciplinary research team made up of climatologists, naturalists, historians and linguists mapped the new climate information against a particularly turbulent period in history in Europe and central Asia. The volcanic eruptions probably affected food supplies – a major famine struck the region at precisely this time followed immediately by the pandemic.

Further south, the Arabian Peninsula received more rain allowing more vegetation to grow. The researchers speculate this may have driven expansion of the Arab Empire in the Middle East because the vegetation would have sustained larger herds of camels used by the Arab armies for their campaigns.

In cooler areas, several tribes migrated east towards China, possibly driven away by a lack of pastureland in central Asia. This led to hostilities between nomadic groups and the local ruling powers in the steppe regions of northern China. An alliance between these steppe populations and the Eastern Romans brought down the Sasanian Empire in Persia, the final empire in the region before the rise of the Arab Empire.

The researchers write, “The Late Antique Little Ice Age fits in well with the main transformative events that occurred in Eurasia during that time.”

Large volcanic eruptions can affect global temperature for decades. The researchers suggest that the spate of eruptions combined with a solar minimum, and ocean and sea-ice responses to the effects of the volcanoes, extended the grip of the freezing climate for over a century.

Büntgen points out that their study serves as an example of how sudden climatological shifts can change existing political systems. “We can learn something from the speed and scale of the transformations that took place at that time,” he said.

The temperature reconstruction, based on new tree-ring measurements from the Altai mountains where Russia, China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan meet, corresponds remarkably well with temperatures in the Alps in the last two millennia. The width of tree rings is a reliable way to estimate summer temperatures.

The research is part of the Euro-Med2k working group of the international Past Global Changes (PAGES) project. Last week, (29 January 2016) members of the group published a comprehensive analysis of summer temperatures in Europe in the last 2000 years, concluding that current summer temperatures are unprecedented during this period. The Euro-Med2k Working Group reconstructs and models past climate in the Europe and Mediterranean regions (including southern Europe, the Middle East and northern Africa) over the last 2,000 years. PAGES is part of Future Earth – a major international research program to study global sustainability.

Source: Future Earth news release.

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 This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Two remarkable discoveries that are shedding light on human beginnings in Africa; a traveling exhibit and an archaeological site that show how knowledge is more valuable than gold; a Spanish cave and a unique burial that are offering a tantalizing glimpse on the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe; the stunning visual reconstruction of an ancient Roman town; enlightening new finds at a remarkably well-preserved site of ancient Hellenistic-Roman culture overlooking the Sea of Galilee; rare finds that are shedding light on occult practices among ancient Greeks in Sicily; and an overview of the overwhelmingly rich archaeological heritage of Britain. Find it on Amazon.com.

LUND UNIVERSITY—The discovery of the world’s oldest storage of fermented fish in southern Sweden could rewrite the Nordic prehistory with findings indicating a far more complex society than previously thought. The unique find by osteologist Adam Boethius from Lund University was made when excavating a 9,200 year-old settlement at what was once a lake near an outlet of the Baltic Sea in Sölvesborg, located in the county of Blekinge, Sweden.

The team found both bark and enormous amounts of fish, about 30,000 fish bones per square metre. After removing this layer the team discovered a facility, an oblong pit, dug into the clay underneath and surrounded by both pole holes and smaller pin holes. After analysing the remains and with the help of ethnographic comparisons with circumpolar peoples, the team realised that large quantities of fish had been fermented in that location—an early precursor to today’s Swedish dish, fermented herring. The discovery of this type of facility required a fine mesh sieve and calculations made from the fish bones collected from the excavation. The analysis also showed that at least 60 tons of freshwater fish must have been caught in this location.

“Our findings of large-scale fish fermentation, a traditional way of preserving fish, indicate that not only was this area in Sweden settled at that time, it was also able to support a large community”, says Adam Boethius, whose findings are now being published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

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 Adam Boethius, doctoral student in Osteology at Lund University together with other archaeologists in Blekinge, Sweden (Adam is the fourth person from the left). Credit: Lund University

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The discovery is also an indication that Nordic societies were far more developed 9,200 years ago than what was previously believed. The findings are important as it is usually argued that people in the north lived relatively mobile lives, while people in the Levant—a large area in the Middle East—became settled and began to farm and raise cattle much earlier.

“These findings indicate a different time line, with Nordic foragers settling much earlier and starting to take advantage of the lakes and sea to harvest and process fish. From a global perspective, the development in the Nordic region could correspond to that of the Middle East at the time,” says Adam Boethius.

“The discovery is quite unique as a find like this has never been made before. That is partly because fish bones are so fragile and disappear more easily than, for example, bones of land animals. In this case, the conditions were quite favourable, which helped preserve the remains”, says Adam Boethius.

The fermentation process is also complex in itself. Because people did not have access to salt or the ability to make ceramic containers, they acidified the fish using, for example, pine bark and seal fat, and then wrapped the entire content in seal and wild boar skins and buried it in a pit covered with muddy soil. This type of fermentation requires a cold climate.

Source: Lund University press release.

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 This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Two remarkable discoveries that are shedding light on human beginnings in Africa; a traveling exhibit and an archaeological site that show how knowledge is more valuable than gold; a Spanish cave and a unique burial that are offering a tantalizing glimpse on the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe; the stunning visual reconstruction of an ancient Roman town; enlightening new finds at a remarkably well-preserved site of ancient Hellenistic-Roman culture overlooking the Sea of Galilee; rare finds that are shedding light on occult practices among ancient Greeks in Sicily; and an overview of the overwhelmingly rich archaeological heritage of Britain. Find it on Amazon.com.

AMERICAN FRIENDS OF TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY—Grilled, boiled or salted? Turtles, or tortoises, are rarely consumed today, but a select few cultures, primarily those in East Asia, still consider turtle soup, made from the flesh of the turtle, a delicacy.

According to a new discovery at Qesem Cave near Tel Aviv, the site of many major findings from the late Lower Paleolithic period, they are not alone in their penchant for tortoise. Tel Aviv University researchers, in collaboration with scholars from Spain and Germany, have uncovered evidence of turtle specimens at the 400,000-year-old site, indicating that early man enjoyed eating turtles in addition to large game and vegetal material. The research provides direct evidence of the relatively broad diet of early Paleolithic people—and of the “modern” tools and skills employed to prepare it.

The study was led by Dr. Ruth Blasco of the Centro Nacional de Investigacion Sobre la Evolucion Humana (CENIEH), Spain, and TAU’s Institute of Archaeology, together with Prof. Ran Barkai and Prof. Avi Gopher of TAU’s Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations. Other collaborators include: Dr. Jordi Rosell and Dr. Pablo Sanudo of Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV) and Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social (IPHES), Spain; and Dr. Krister T. Smith and Dr. Lutz Christian Maul of the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum, Germany. The research was published on February 1, 2016, in Quaternary Science Reviews.

“Culinary and cultural depth” to the Paleolithic diet

“Until now, it was believed that Paleolithic humans hunted and ate mostly large game and vegetal material,” said Prof. Barkai. “Our discovery adds a really rich human dimension—a culinary and therefore cultural depth to what we already know about these people.”

The research team discovered tortoise specimens strewn all over the cave at different levels, indicating that they were consumed over the entire course of the early human 200,000-year inhabitation. Once exhumed, the bones revealed striking marks that reflected the methods the early humans used to process and eat the turtles.

“We know by the dental evidence we discovered earlier that the Qesem inhabitants ate vegetal food,” said Prof. Barkai. “Now we can say they also ate tortoises, which were collected, butchered and roasted, even though they don’t provide as many calories as fallow deer, for example.”

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 Excavation site of Qesem Cave. 66Avi, Wikimedia Commons

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According to the study, Qesem inhabitants hunted mainly medium and large game such as wild horses, fallow deer and cattle. This diet provided large quantities of fat and meat, which supplied the calories necessary for human survival. Until recently, it was believed that only the later Homo sapiens enjoyed a broad diet of vegetables and large and small animals. But evidence found at the cave of the exploitation of small animals over time, this discovery included, suggests otherwise.

Open questions remain

“In some cases in history, we know that slow-moving animals like tortoises were used as a ‘preserved’ or ‘canned’ food,” said Dr. Blasco. “Maybe the inhabitants of Qesem were simply maximizing their local resources. In any case, this discovery adds an important new dimension to the knowhow, capabilities and perhaps taste preferences of these people.”

According to Prof. Gopher, the new evidence also raises possibilities concerning the division of labor at Qesem Cave. “Which part of the group found and collected the tortoises?” Prof. Gopher said. “Maybe members who were not otherwise involved in hunting large game, who could manage the low effort required to collect these reptiles—perhaps the elderly or children.”

“According to the marks, most of the turtles were roasted in the shell,” Prof. Barkai added. “In other cases, their shells were broken and then butchered using flint tools. The humans clearly used fire to roast the turtles. Of course they were focused on larger game, but they also used supplementary sources of food — tortoises — which were in the vicinity.”

The researchers are now examining bird bones that were recently discovered at Qesem Cave.

Source: News release of the American Friends of Tel Aviv University

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THE UNIVERSITY OF BERGEN—Blombos Cave in South Africa has given us vast knowledge about our early ancestors. In 2015, four open access articles, with research finds from Blombos as a starting point, have been published in the journal PLOS ONE.

“We are looking mainly at the part of South Africa where Blombos Cave is situated. We sought to find out how groups moved across the landscape and how they interacted,” says Christopher S. Henshilwood, Professor at the University of Bergen (UiB) and University of the Witwatersrand and one of the authors of the articles.

The technology of our ancestors

Since its discovery in the early 1990s, Blombos Cave, about 300 kilometres east of Cape Town, South Africa, has yielded important new information on the behavioural evolution of the human species. The cave site was first excavated in 1991 and field work has been conducted there on a regular basis since 1997 – and is on-going. Blombos contains Middle Stone Age deposits currently dated at between 100,000 and 70,000 years, and a Later Stone Age sequence dated at between 2,000 and 300 years.

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 This image shows Blombos Cave, South Africa. Credit: University of Bergen.

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The researchers from UiB and Witswatersrand have now been looking closer at technology used by different groups in this and other regions in South Africa, such as spear points made of stone, as well as decorated ostrich eggshells, to determine whether there was an overlap and contact across groups of Middle Stone Age humans. How did they make contact with each other? How would contact across groups affect one group? How did the exchange of symbolic material culture affect the group or groups?

Adapting and evolving

“The pattern we are seeing is that when demographics change, people interact more. For example, we have found similar patterns engraved on ostrich eggshells in different sites. This shows that people were probably sharing symbolic material culture at certain times but not at others” says Dr Karen van Niekerk, a UiB researcher and co-author.

This sharing of symbolic material culture and technology also tells us more about Homo sapiens‘ journey from Africa to Arabia and Europe. Contact between cultures has been vital to the survival and development of our common ancestors Homo sapiens. The more contact the groups had, the stronger their technology and culture became.

“Contact across groups, and population dynamics, makes it possible to adopt and adapt new technologies and culture and is what describes Homo sapiens. What we are seeing is the same pattern that shaped the people in Europe who created cave art many years later,” Henshilwood says.

Source: University of Bergen news release.

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A study* published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) suggests how Neanderthals could have been driven to extinction by competition with modern humans. Archaeologists have hypothesized that competition between Neanderthals and modern humans led to the former’s extinction because modern humans had a more advanced culture than Neanderthals, giving modern humans a competitive edge. Marcus Feldman and colleagues tested the plausibility of this hypothesis using a model of interspecies competition that incorporates differences in the competing species’ levels of cultural development. According to the model, an initially small modern human population could completely displace a larger Neanderthal population, provided that the modern humans had a sufficiently large cultural advantage over the Neanderthals. The minimum modern human population that could displace the Neanderthals decreased with increasing cultural advantage and with a decrease in the rate of cultural change relative to population growth. This minimum population threshold also decreased when the authors introduced a positive feedback loop into the model, such that increasing the size of modern humans’ cultural advantage increased the size of their competitive advantage, which in turn further increased their cultural advantage. The results support the hypothesis that competition with modern humans drove Neanderthals to extinction, due to modern humans’ culture-associated competitive advantage over the Neanderthals.

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 Neanderthal skull replica. Original recovered in St. Michael’s Cave, Gibraltar. Nathan Harig, Wikimedia Commons

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Article Source: Adapted and edited from the subject PNAS press release.

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*“An eco-cultural model predicts Neanderthal extinction through competition with modern humans,” by William Gilpin, Marcus W. Feldman, and Kenichi Aoki.

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UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT BOULDER—The first direct evidence that humans played a substantial role in the extinction of the huge, wondrous beasts inhabiting Australia some 50,000 years ago—in this case a 500-pound bird—has been discovered by a University of Colorado Boulder-led team.

The flightless bird, known as Genyornis newtoni, was nearly 7 feet tall and appears to have lived in much of Australia prior to the establishment of humans on the continent 50,000 years ago, said CU-Boulder Professor Gifford Miller. The evidence consists of diagnostic burn patterns on Genyornis eggshell fragments that indicate humans were collecting and cooking its eggs, thereby reducing the birds’ reproductive success.

“We consider this the first and only secure evidence that humans were directly preying on now-extinct Australian megafauna,” said Miller, associate director of CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. “We have documented these characteristically burned Genyornis eggshells at more than 200 sites across the continent.”

A paper on the subject appears online Jan. 29, 2016 in Nature Communications.

In analyzing unburned Genyornis eggshells from more than 2,000 localities across Australia, primarily from sand dunes where the ancient birds nested, several dating methods helped researchers determine that none were younger than about 45,000 years old. Burned eggshell fragments from more than 200 of those sites, some only partially blackened, suggest pieces were exposed to a wide range of temperatures, said Miller, a professor in CU-Boulder’s Department of Geological Sciences.

Optically stimulated luminescence dating, a method used to determine when quartz grains enclosing the eggshells were last exposed to sunlight, limits the time range of burned Genyornis eggshell to between 54,000 and 44,000 years ago. Radiocarbon dating indicated the burnt eggshell was no younger than about 47,000 years old.

The blackened fragments were likely burned in transient, human fires—presumably to cook the eggs—rather than in wildfires, he said.

Amino acids—the building blocks of proteins—decompose in a predictable fashion inside eggshells over time. In eggshell fragments burned at one end but not the other, there is a tell-tale “gradient” from total amino acid decomposition to minimal amino acid decomposition, he said. Such a gradient could only be produced by a localized heat source, likely an ember, and not from the sustained high heat produced regularly by wildfires on the continent both in the distant past and today.

Miller also said the researchers found many of the burnt Genyornis eggshell fragments in tight clusters less than 10 feet in diameter, with no other eggshell fragments nearby. Some individual fragments from the same clusters had heat gradient differences of nearly 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, conditions virtually impossible to reproduce with natural wildfires there, he said.

“We can’t come up with a scenario that a wildfire could produce those tremendous gradients in heat,” Miller said. “We instead argue that the conditions are consistent with early humans harvesting Genyornis eggs, cooking them over fires, and then randomly discarding the eggshell fragments in and around their cooking fires.”

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An illustration of a giant flightless bird known as Genyornis newtoni, surprised on her nest by a 1 ton, predatory lizard named Megalania prisca in Australia roughly 50,000 thousand years ago. Illustration by Peter Trusler, Monash University

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Another line of evidence for early human predation on Genyornis eggs is the presence of ancient, burned eggshells of emus—flightless birds weighing only about 100 pounds and which still exist in Australia today—in the sand dunes. Emu eggshells exhibiting burn patterns similar to Genyornis eggshells first appear on the landscape about 50,000 years ago, signaling they most likely were scorched after humans arrived in Australia, and are found fairly consistently to modern times, Miller said.

The Genyornis eggs are thought to have been roughly the size of a cantaloupe and weighed about 3.5 pounds, Miller said.

Genyornis roamed the Australian outback with an astonishing menagerie of other now-extinct megafauna that included a 1,000-pound kangaroo, a 2-ton wombat, a 25-foot-long-lizard, a 300-pound marsupial lion and a Volkswagen-sized tortoise. More than 85 percent of Australia’s mammals, birds and reptiles weighing over 100 pounds went extinct shortly after the arrival of the first humans.

The demise of the ancient megafauna in Australia (and on other continents, including North America) has been hotly debated for more than a century, swaying between human predation, climate change and a combination of both, said Miller. While some still hold fast to the climate change scenario—specifically the continental drying in Australia from about 60,000 to 40,000 years ago—neither the rate nor magnitude of that change was as severe as earlier climate shifts in Australia during the Pleistocene epoch, which lacked the punch required to knock off the megafauna, said Miller.

Miller and others suspect Australia’s first inhabitants traveled to the northern coast of the continent on rafts launched from Indonesian islands several hundred miles away. “We will never know the exact time window humans arrived on the continent,” he said. “But there is reliable evidence they were widely dispersed across the continent before 47,000 years ago.”

Evidence of Australia megafauna hunting is very difficult to find, in part because the megafauna there are so much older than New World megafauna and in part because fossil bones are easily destroyed by the chemistry of Australian soils. said Miller.

“In the Americas, early human predation on the giant animals in clear—stone spear heads are found embedded in mammoth bones, for example,” said Miller. “The lack of clear evidence regarding human predation on the Australia megafauna had, until now, been used to suggest no human-megafauna interactions occurred, despite evidence that most of the giant animals still roamed Australia when humans colonized the continent.”

Source: University of Colorado at Boulder news release.

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Co-authors on the new study include Research Professor Scott Lehman, doctoral student Christopher Florian and researcher Stephen DeVogel of CU-Boulder; Research Fellow John Magee of the Australian National University; and researchers from seven other Australian institutions. The study was funded in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Australian Research Council.

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Analysis of ancient Babylonian tablets reveals that, to calculate the position of Jupiter, the tablets’ makers used geometry, a technique scientists previously believed humans had not developed until at least 1,400 years later, in 14th century Europe. These tablets are the earliest known examples of using geometry to calculate positions in time-space and suggest that ancient Babylonian astronomers may have influenced the emergence of such techniques in Western science.

In the report* published in Science, Mathieu Ossendrijver discusses the translation of four almost completely intact tablets that were most likely written in Babylon between 350 and 50 BCE. They depict two intervals from when Jupiter first appears along the horizon, calculating the planet’s position at 60 and 120 days. The texts contain geometrical calculations based on a trapezoid’s area, and its “long” and “short” sides; previously, it was thought that Babylonian astronomers operated exclusively with arithmetical concepts. The ancient astronomers also computed the time when Jupiter covers half of this 60-day distance by partitioning the trapezoid into two smaller ones of equal area.

While ancient Greeks used geometrical figures to describe configurations in physical space, these Babylonian tablets use geometry in an abstract sense to define time and velocity, Ossendrijver notes. These tablets redefine our history books, revealing that European scholars in Oxford and Paris in the 14th century, who were previously credited with developing such calculations, were in fact centuries behind their ancient Babylonian counterparts.

Historically, the origin of Western astronomy has been attributed to Mesopotamia, with later work in the exact sciences evolving from the work of the late Babylonian astronomers. Moreover, the earliest astronomy is thought to have been developed by the Sumerians going as far back as the Early Bronze Age, reflected later in the earliest Babylonian star catalogues dating from about 1200 BCE. Only fragments of Babylonian astronomy have survived, documented on clay tablets with ephemerides and procedure texts. But these surviving fragments show that, according to the historian A. Aaboe, Babylonian astronomy was “the first and highly successful attempt at giving a refined mathematical description of astronomical phenomena” and that “all subsequent varieties of scientific astronomy, in the Hellenistic world, in India, in Islam, and in the West—if not indeed all subsequent endeavour in the exact sciences—depend upon Babylonian astronomy in decisive and fundamental ways.”**

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 A Babylonian tablet recording Halley’s comet during an appearance in 164 BC. At the British Museum in London

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This article adapted and edited in part from the subject Science news release.

*”Ancient Babylonian astronomers calculated Jupiter’s position from the area under a time-velocity graph,” by M. Ossendrijver at Excellence Cluster TOPOI in Berlin, Germany; M. Ossendrijver at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany.

**A. Aaboe (May 2, 1974). “Scientific Astronomy in Antiquity”. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 276 (1257): 21–42.

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A study* published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) explores the genetic history of present-day Indians and the peopling of the Indian subcontinent. Researchers have previously suggested that mainland India’s current population largely descended from two ancient groups, namely ancestral north and south Indians. Partha Majumder and colleagues analyzed genome-wide variations from 367 unrelated Indians belonging to 20 ethnic groups, including two tribal groups from the outlying Andaman and Nicobar Islands, as well as data from the Human Genome Diversity Panel, a repository of genomic data representing hundreds of people worldwide. The authors discerned four major ancestral populations in mainland India. In addition to ancestral north and south Indians, the authors discovered Austro-Asiatic and Tibeto-Burman ancestries. Unlike mainland Indians, the hunter-gatherers of the Andaman archipelago likely share ancestry with present-day Pacific Islanders, representing a fifth ancestry in India. Gene exchange was widespread among ancestral groups but replaced by strict endogamy, particularly among upper-caste Indo-European speakers, around 70 generations, or 1,575 years ago; the timing coincides with the reign of the Guptas, whose ruling Hindu elite espoused and enforced the Vedic Brahminism religion. In contrast to a previous analysis that concluded that only two ancestral lineages contributed to Indian ethnic groups, the current study includes a more geographically and culturally representative sample to furnish a granular view of India’s current genomic diversity and of the peopling of the subcontinent, according to the authors.

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The Indian subcontinent. Onef9Day, Wikimedia Commons 

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Source: PNAS subject press release

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*“Genomic reconstruction of the history of extant populations of India reveals five distinct ancestral components and a complex structure,” by Analabha Basu, Neeta Sarkar-Roy, and Partha Pratim Majumder.

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HARVARD UNIVERSITY—There is little dispute that in the wake of European colonists’ arrival in the New World, Native American populations were decimated by disease and conflict. But when it comes to the timing, magnitude, and effects of this depopulation—it depends on who you ask.

Many scholars claim that disease struck the native population shortly after their first contact with Europeans, and spread with such ferocity that it left tell-tale fingerprints on the global climate. Others, however, argue that—though still devastating—the process was far more gradual, and took place over many years.

A new Harvard study*, however, suggests both theories are wrong.

Led by Matt Liebmann, the John and Ruth Hazel Associate Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Anthropology, a team of researchers was able to show that, in what is now northern New Mexico, disease didn’t break out until nearly a century after the first European contact with Native Americans, coinciding with the establishment of mission churches.

But when it did finally strike, the study shows, the effects of disease were devastating. In just 60 years, native populations dropped from approximately 6,500 to fewer than 900 among the 18 villages they investigated. The study is described in a Jan. 25, 2016 paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“In the Southwest, first contact between native people and Europeans occurred in 1539,” Liebmann said. “We found that disease didn’t really start to take effect until after 1620, but we then see a very rapid depopulation from 1620 to 1680. (The death rate) was staggeringly high—about 87 percent of the Native population died in that short period.

“Think about what that would mean if you have a room full of people and nine out of 10 die,” he continued. “Think of what that means for their social structure, if they’re losing the people who know the traditional medicine, their social and religious leaders, think of the huge impact it would have on their culture and history.”

The fallout from that depopulation, however, wasn’t merely cultural.

“Forest fires also take off during this period,” Liebmann said. “When people are living in these villages, they need timber for their roofs, and for heating and cooking. In addition, they’re clearing the land for farming, so trees weren’t growing there when these archaeological sites were inhabited. But as people died off, the forests started re-growing and we start to see more forest fires.”

That finding, he said, also links the study with ongoing debates about whether the world has entered a new geological era—dubbed the Anthropocene—marked by the fact that humans have affected the climate on a global scale.

Though there is still wide debate about when this new epoch started, a number of researchers have pointed to 1610, when—ice core records show—global CO2 levels dropped dramatically.

“one of the ‘Early Anthropocene’ theories suggests that because Native Americans were being removed from the landscape on a massive scale, especially in the Amazon, they were no longer burning the forest for agriculture, and as the forest re-grew it sequestered carbon,” Liebmann said. “The argument hinges on the notion that the depopulation of the Americas was so extreme that it left its mark on the atmosphere and climate at global scales.

“Our data speaks to a period a little bit later than the dates of low CO2 from the ice cores, but depopulation in the Southwest could have intensified that dip,” he added. “The important thing, from my perspective, is that the Southwest was one of the earliest points of contact between Europeans and Native Americans in what later became the U.S., and it hadn’t yet experienced a catastrophic depopulation by 1610, so it’s hard to argue for it happening anywhere in the rest of North America at that early date.”

Mapping nearly 20 Native American villages, however, is no easy feat—many researchers might spend years examining a single site. To pull it off, Liebmann and colleagues turned to a technology known as LiDAR, which uses lasers to penetrate the dense forest cover and create a map of the region that, in some cases, is accurate down to the centimeter.

“I thought my career would be standing on these sites with a (surveying tool called a) total station,” Liebmann said. “I’ve mapped a couple of archaeological sites like this before, and it can take years, but with LiDAR I have the ability to calculate the architecture of 18 villages in an instant. This new technology is what made this study possible.”

Armed with that data, Harvard Anthropology graduate student Adam Stack and undergraduate student Sarah Martini were able to calculate the volume of each building and develop an equation to estimate how many people lived in the area.

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The Jemez Valley of New Mexico, home to 6,500 Pueblo Indians in 1620. Image courtesy of Matthew Liebmann.

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Dating the sites—and in particular when villages may have been abandoned as the population dwindled—is far trickier.

“Usually, we use tree rings to date architecture in the Southwest,” Liebmann said. “If someone cuts down a tree to use as a roof beam, archaeologists can look at the tree rings to date it. But for this project we didn’t excavate the sites, so we couldn’t recover the roof beams. Instead, the dendrochronologists on our team looked at the inner rings of trees that are still growing on these sites to establish when they germinated. They found that tree growth took off between 1630 and 1650. When we get a cluster of dates in the same 20-year period, that tells us that something happened at these villages to start these trees growing there.”

What that something was, Liebmann said, was the removal of the native population from the landscape. Without humans in the region to clear trees for building materials, heating, cooking, and agriculture, the forest began to reclaim that territory, providing, literally, more fuel for fires.

“When we looked at the patterns of fires in the tree rings, we could see that up until about 1620, fires were small and sporadic,” Liebmann said. “Native American fields were acting as literal fire breaks. But as the forest started re-growing, much more widespread fires occurred. That continued until almost exactly 1900, when a combination of increased livestock grazing and a change in federal forest management policies began to suppress all fires.”

Ultimately, Liebmann said, the study shows that understanding how and when depopulation happened, and the ecological fallout from it, is far more complex than researchers have previously thought.

“Our findings support the notion that there was a massive depopulation, but it’s not quite as simple as many people have thought before,” Liebmann said. “This research also speaks to…current debates in the American West about how we should manage fire risk. What our study shows is that forest fires were being managed by Native people living in dense concentrations on the landscape—not unlike the situation today in many parts of the Southwest. So there may be some lessons here for contemporary fire management.”

Source: Harvard University subject news release.

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*“Native American depopulation, reforestation, and fire regimes in the Southwest United States, 1492–1900 CE,” by Matthew J. Liebmann et al.  In addition to Liebmann, the study was co-authored by Joshua Farella and Thomas Swetnam from the University of Arizona and Christopher Roos from Southern Methodist University.

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Long gone are the days when scientists asserted that ancient humans could not possibly cross through and inhabit the harsh world of what has historically been referred to as the Arabian Desert, including the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Peninsula. Traditional theories depicted groups of early modern humans first dispersing out of northeastern Africa north and east through the Levant and then northward into present-day Europe and through northern routes into India and then the Far East. Additional dispersals took them along routes hopping the coasts of Arabia and then coastal across India, then further northward and eastward. These models of early human dispersal avoided the Arabian interior, as few could imagine humans making their way directly and deeply into this desert no-man’s land.

But remote sensing technology, including satellite imagery, has now placed Arabia squarely on the map of early human dispersal paradigms. Recent studies using this new technology have reported ancient systems of lakes (‘paleolakes’) and rivers—green zones—deep within the Arabian desert regions as much as 100,000 or more years ago. Archaeological investigations at some of the ancient lakeshore sites have yielded human stone tools, some of them dated back even earlier than 100,000 years ago.  

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Dr Huw Groucutt (University of Oxford) systematically collecting a dense scatter of artifacts on the shore of an ancient lake dating to around 85,000 years ago at Mundafan, southwestern Saudi Arabia. (credit: Richard Jennings/Palaeodeserts Project) From the article, The First Arabians, published in the June 2014 issue of Popular Archaeology Magazine.

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Were the makers of these tools anatomically modern humans (AMH), or were they other species of humans, such as Neanderthals? The absence of fossil evidence at these sites leaves this critical question unanswered. But research continues, and scientists hope that one day field investigators will come across the fossils that will provide the tantalizing ‘smoking gun’. Meanwhile, researchers are busy refining and expanding their knowledge of the ancient green environments that provided the livable backdrops for the migrating animals and the humans that followed them on the hunting trail. The lithic (stone tool) evidence has been mounting, as well.  

Popular Archaeology has just released the summer 2014 article on this topic, entitled The First Arabians, as a free article now available to the general public. It contains detailed, in-depth interviews of some of the key players in the ongoing research of the sites on the Arabian Peninsula.  

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UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE—The fossilised bones of a group of prehistoric hunter-gatherers who were massacred around 10,000 years ago have been unearthed 30km west of Lake Turkana, Kenya, at a place called Nataruk.

Researchers from Cambridge University’s Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies found the partial remains of 27 individuals, including at least eight women and six children.

Twelve skeletons were in a relatively complete state, and ten of these showed clear signs of a violent death: including extreme blunt-force trauma to crania and cheekbones, broken hands, knees and ribs, arrow lesions to the neck, and stone projectile tips lodged in the skull and thorax of two men.

Several of the skeletons were found face down; most had severe cranial fractures. Among the in situ skeletons, at least five showed “sharp-force trauma”, some suggestive of arrow wounds. Four were discovered in a position indicating their hands had probably been bound, including a woman in the last stages of pregnancy. Foetal bones were uncovered.

The bodies were not buried. Some had fallen into a lagoon that has long since dried; the bones preserved in sediment.

The findings suggest these hunter-gatherers, perhaps members of an extended family, were attacked and killed by a rival group of prehistoric foragers. Researchers believe it is the earliest scientifically-dated historical evidence of human conflict – an ancient precursor to what we call warfare.

The origins of warfare are controversial: whether the capacity for organised violence occurs deep in the evolutionary history of our species, or is a symptom of the idea of ownership that came with the settling of land and agriculture.

The Nataruk massacre is the earliest record of inter-group violence among prehistoric hunter-gatherers who remained largely nomadic.

“The deaths at Nataruk are testimony to the antiquity of inter-group violence and war,” said Dr Marta Mirazon Lahr, from Cambridge’s LCHES, who directs the IN-AFRICA Project and led the Nataruk study, published today in the journal Nature.

“These human remains record the intentional killing of a small band of foragers with no deliberate burial, and provide unique evidence that warfare was part of the repertoire of inter-group relations among some prehistoric hunter-gatherers,” she said.

The site was first discovered in 2012. Following careful excavation, the researchers used radiocarbon and other dating techniques on the skeletons – as well as on samples of shell and sediment surrounding the remains – to place Nataruk in time. They estimate the event occurred between 9,500 to 10,500 years ago, around the start of the Holocene: the geological epoch that followed the last Ice Age.

Now scrubland, 10,000 years ago the area around Nataruk was a fertile lakeshore sustaining a substantial population of hunter-gatherers. The site would have been the edge of a lagoon near the shores of a much larger Lake Turkana, likely covered in marshland and bordered by forest and wooded corridors.

This lagoon-side location may have been an ideal place for prehistoric foragers to inhabit, with easy access to drinking water and fishing – and consequently, perhaps, a location coveted by others. The presence of pottery suggests the storage of foraged food occurred.

“The Nataruk massacre may have resulted from an attempt to seize resources – territory, women, children, food stored in pots – whose value was similar to those of later food-producing agricultural societies, among whom violent attacks on settlements became part of life,” said Mirazon Lahr.

“This would extend the history of the same underlying socio-economic conditions that characterise other instances of early warfare: a more settled, materially richer way of life. However, Nataruk may simply be evidence of a standard antagonistic response to an encounter between two social groups at that time.”

Antagonism between hunter-gatherer groups in recent history often resulted in men being killed, with women and children subsumed into the victorious group. At Nataruk, however, it seems few, if any, were spared.

Of the 27 individuals recorded, 21 were adults: eight males, eight females, and five unknown. Partial remains of six children were found co-mingled or in close proximity to the remains of four adult women and of two fragmentary adults of unknown sex.

No children were found near or with any of the men. All except one of the juvenile remains are children under the age of six; the exception is a young teenager, aged 12-15 years dentally, but whose bones are noticeably small for his or her age.

Ten skeletons show evidence of major lesions likely to have been immediately lethal. As well as five – possibly six – cases of trauma associated with arrow wounds, five cases of extreme blunt-force to the head can be seen, possibly caused by a wooden club. Other recorded traumas include fractured knees, hands and ribs.

Three artefacts were found within two of the bodies, likely the remains of arrow or spear tips. Two of these are made from obsidian: a black volcanic rock easily worked to razor-like sharpness. “Obsidian is rare in other late Stone Age sites of this area in West Turkana, which may suggest that the two groups confronted at Nataruk had different home ranges,” said Mirazon Lahr.

One adult male skeleton had an obsidian ‘bladelet’ still embedded in his skull. It didn’t perforate the bone, but another lesion suggests a second weapon did, crushing the entire right-front part of the head and face. “The man appears to have been hit in the head by at least two projectiles and in the knees by a blunt instrument, falling face down into the lagoon’s shallow water,” said Mirazon Lahr.

Another adult male took two blows to the head – one above the right eye, the other on the left side of the skull – both crushing his skull at the point of impact, causing it to crack in different directions.

The remains of a six-to-nine month-old fetus were recovered from within the abdominal cavity of one of the women, who was discovered in an unusual sitting position – her broken knees protruding from the earth were all Mirazon Lahr and colleagues could see when they found her. The position of the body suggests that her hands and feet may have been bound.

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This skeleton was that of a man, found lying prone in the lagoon’s sediments. The skull has multiple lesions on the front and on the left side, consistent with wounds from a blunt implement, such as a club. Credit: Marta Mirazon Lahr

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This skeleton was that of a young woman, who was pregnant at the time of her death. She was found in a sitting position, with the hands crossed between her legs. The position of the body suggests that the hands and feet may have been bound. Credit: Illustration by Marta Mirazon Lahr

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 Skeleton KNM-WT 71255 after excavation. This skeleton was that of a man, found lying prone in the lagoon’s sediments. The skull has multiple lesions on the front and on the left side, consistent with wounds from a blunt implement, such as a club. Image by Marta Mirazon Lahr, enhanced by Fabio Lahr

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Photograph of Dr Marta Mirazon Lahr and Justus Edung at the end of the excavation of the skeleton KNM-WT 71259. This skeleton was that of a woman, found reclining on her left elbow, with fractures on the knees and possibly the left foot. The position of the hands suggests her wrists may have been bound. She was found surrounded by fish. Image by Robert Foley

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While we will never know why these people were so violently killed, Nataruk is one of the clearest cases of inter-group violence among prehistoric hunter-gatherers, says Mirazon Lahr, and evidence for the presence of small-scale warfare among foraging societies.

For study co-author Professor Robert Foley, also from Cambridge’s LCHES, the findings at Nataruk are an echo of human violence as ancient, perhaps, as the altruism that has led us to be the most cooperative species on the planet.

“I’ve no doubt it is in our biology to be aggressive and lethal, just as it is to be deeply caring and loving. A lot of what we understand about human evolutionary biology suggests these are two sides of the same coin,” Foley said.

Source: University of Cambridge news release.

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PLOS ONE—A Neolithic Spanish burial site contains remains of a closely-related local community from 6000 years ago, according to a study* published January 20th, 2015 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Kurt W. Alt from Danube Private University, Austria, and colleagues.

The Neolithic people are thought to have introduced new burial rituals in Europe. This included building megalithic tombs, which were used over an extended period of time as collective burial sites and venues for ritual acts. The authors of this study examined a megalithic tomb at Alto de Reinoso in Northern Spain to build a comprehensive picture of this community using archaeological analysis, genetics, isotope analysis, and bone analysis.

The researchers identified at least 47 adults and adolescents that had been buried in the tomb over a hundred-year period. Based on DNA and isotope analysis, the authors suggest that the tomb contained a series of families from a local close-knit group. The individuals likely farmed cereal crops, and possibly sheep and goats. The tomb comprised three distinct layers. The individuals at the bottom of the tomb were more closely related and on occasion, family members appeared to have been buried side-by-side. Above them, almost all the skeletons exhibited signs of manipulation such as missing skeletal parts, especially skulls, suggesting a shift in the use of the tomb. Although the author’s conclusions rely on certain underlying assumptions about the Neolithic society at the time, the authors state that this may be the first study to provide such an in-depth picture of this community in life and death.

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This image shows the superposition of different layers of the Neolithic ossuary indicating the individuals with the same genetic profile. Graphic by Héctor Arcusa Magallón.

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Kurt W. Alt notes: “All the extensive data collected, including information on life style, demographics, health status, diet and subsistence, mobility patterns as well as the genetic profile of the group fit in with the typical way of life of sedentary farming populations at this time period. The embracement of a collective burial chamber for the community members rather than individual graves indicates significant shifts in social identity.”

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*Alt KW, Zesch S, Garrido-Pena R, Knipper C, Szécsényi-Nagy A, Roth C, et al. (2016) A Community in Life and Death: The Late Neolithic Megalithic Tomb at Alto de Reinoso (Burgos, Spain). PLoS ONE 11(1): e0146176. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0146176

Source: Subject PLOS ONE news release.

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In addition, the latest Popular Archaeology ebook is now available.

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____________________________________________

 This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Two remarkable discoveries that are shedding light on human beginnings in Africa; a traveling exhibit and an archaeological site that show how knowledge is more valuable than gold; a Spanish cave and a unique burial that are offering a tantalizing glimpse on the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe; the stunning visual reconstruction of an ancient Roman town; enlightening new finds at a remarkably well-preserved site of ancient Hellenistic-Roman culture overlooking the Sea of Galilee; rare finds that are shedding light on occult practices among ancient Greeks in Sicily; and an overview of the overwhelmingly rich archaeological heritage of Britain. Find it on Amazon.com.

Read more in-depth articles about archaeology with a premium subscription to Popular Archaeology Magazine. 

In addition, the latest Popular Archaeology ebook is now available.

 ______________________________________________

Travel and learn with Far Horizons.

____________________________________________

 This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Two remarkable discoveries that are shedding light on human beginnings in Africa; a traveling exhibit and an archaeological site that show how knowledge is more valuable than gold; a Spanish cave and a unique burial that are offering a tantalizing glimpse on the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe; the stunning visual reconstruction of an ancient Roman town; enlightening new finds at a remarkably well-preserved site of ancient Hellenistic-Roman culture overlooking the Sea of Galilee; rare finds that are shedding light on occult practices among ancient Greeks in Sicily; and an overview of the overwhelmingly rich archaeological heritage of Britain. Find it on Amazon.com.