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Studies illuminate human evolutionary past

Posted on November 23, 2015 by No Author -

HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL—The introduction of agriculture into Europe about 8,500 years ago changed the way people lived right down to their DNA.

Until recently, scientists could try to understand the way humans adapted genetically to changes that occurred thousands of years ago only by looking at DNA variation in today’s populations. But our modern genomes contain mere echoes of the past that can’t be connected to specific events.

Now, an international team reports in Nature that researchers can see how natural selection happened by analyzing ancient human DNA.

“It allows us to put a time and date on selection and to directly associate selection with specific environmental changes, in this case the development of agriculture and the expansion of the first farmers into Europe,” said Iain Mathieson, a research fellow in genetics at Harvard Medical School and first author of the study.

By taking advantage of better DNA extraction techniques and amassing what is to date the largest collection of genome-wide datasets from ancient human remains, the team was able to identify specific genes that changed during and after the transition from hunting and gathering to farming.

Many of the variants occurred on or near genes that have been associated with height, the ability to digest lactose in adulthood, fatty acid metabolism, vitamin D levels, light skin pigmentation and blue eye color. Two variants appear on genes that have been linked to higher risk of celiac disease but that may have been important in adapting to an early agricultural diet.

Other variants were located on immune-associated genes, which made sense because “the Neolithic period involved an increase in population density, with people living close to one another and to domesticated animals,” said Wolfgang Haak, one of three senior authors of the study, a research fellow at the University of Adelaide and group leader in molecular anthropology at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.

“Although that finding did not come fully as a surprise,” he added, “it was great to see the selection happening in ‘real time.'”

The work also supports the idea that Europe’s first farmers came from ancient Anatolia, in what is now Turkey, and fills in more details about how ancient groups mixed and migrated.

“It’s a great mystery how present-day populations got to be the way we are today, both in terms of how our ancestors moved around and intermingled and how populations developed the adaptations that help us survive a bit better in the different environments in which we live,” said co-senior author David Reich, professor of genetics at HMS. “Now that ancient DNA is available at the genome-wide scale and in large sample sizes, we have an extraordinary new instrument for studying these questions.”

“From an archaeological perspective, it’s quite amazing,” said co-senior author Ron Pinhasi, associate professor of archaeology at University College Dublin. “The Neolithic revolution is perhaps the most important transition in human prehistory. We now have proof that people did actually go from Anatolia into Europe and brought farming with them. For more than 40 years, people thought it was impossible to answer that question.”

“Second,” he continued, “we now have evidence that genetic selection occurred along with the changes in lifestyle and demography, and that selection continued to happen following the transition.”

Prying more from the past

Members of the current team and others have used ancient DNA in the past few years to learn about Neanderthals and the genes they passed to humans, identify ancestors of present-day Europeans, trace migrations into the Americas and probe the roots of Indo-European languages. Studying natural selection, however, remained out of reach because it required more ancient genomes than were available.

“In the past year, we’ve had a super-exponential rise in the number of ancient samples we can study on a genome scale,” said Reich, who is also an associate member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT and a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator. “In September 2014, we had 10 individuals. In this study, we have 230.”

The DNA came from the remains of people who lived between 3,000 and 8,500 years ago at different sites across what is now Europe, Siberia and Turkey. That time span provided snapshots of genetic variation before, during and after the agricultural revolution in Europe.

Among the 230 ancient individuals were 83 who hadn’t been sequenced before, including the first 26 to be gathered from the eastern Mediterranean, where warm conditions usually cause DNA to degrade.

Members of the team used several technological advances to obtain and analyze the new genetic material. For example, they exploited a method pioneered by Pinhasi’s laboratory to extract DNA from a remarkably rich source: a portion of the dense, pyramid-shaped petrous bone that houses the internal auditory organs. In some cases, the bone yielded 700 times more human DNA than could be obtained from other bones, including teeth.

“That changed everything,” said Pinhasi. “Higher-quality DNA meant we could analyze many more positions on the genome, perform more complex tests and simulations, and start systematically studying allele frequency across populations.”

What made the cut

Although the authors caution that sample size remains the biggest limitation of the study, comparing the ancient genomes to one another and to those of present-day people of European ancestry revealed 12 positions on the genome where natural selection related to the introduction of farming in northern latitudes appears to have happened.

“Some of those specific traits have been studied before,” said Reich. “This work with ancient DNA enriches our understanding of those traits and when they appeared.”

Besides the adaptations that appear to be related to diet, pigmentation, immunity and height, the possible selective pressure on other variants was less clear.

“We can guess by looking at the function of the gene, but our power is limited,” said Mathieson. “It’s quite frustrating.”

It’s too early to tell whether some of the variants were themselves selected for or whether they hitched a ride with a nearby beneficial gene. The question pertains especially to variants that seem to be disadvantageous, like increased disease risk.

Being able to look at numerous positions across the genome also allowed the team to examine complex traits for the first time in ancient DNA.

“We can see the evolution of height across time,” said Mathieson.

Researchers had noticed that people from southern Europe tend to be shorter than those from northern Europe. The new study suggests that the height differential arises both from people in the north having more ancestry from Eurasian steppe populations, who seem to have been taller, and people in the south having more ancestry from Neolithic and Chalcolithic groups from the Iberian peninsula, who seem to have been shorter.

The team wasn’t able to draw conclusions about the other complex traits it investigated: body mass index, waist-hip ratio, type 2 diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease and lipid levels.

Reich, for one, hopes researchers will one day have thousands of ancient genomes to analyze. He would also like to see this type of study applied to non-European populations and even to other species.

“It will be interesting to study selection in domesticated animals and to see if there is coevolution between them and the people who were domesticating them,” said Mathieson.

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The genomic results confirm that agriculture spread to Europe from Anatolia (ancient Turkey) by human migration or dispersal. Credit: Harvard Medical School

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Ancient bone specimen used to obtain samples for genetic testing. Credit: Harvard Medical School

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Human Adaptation through Ancient Infections

STANFORD UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER—In another study, genetic material from ancient viral infections were found to be critical to human development, according to researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

They’ve identified several noncoding RNA molecules of viral origins that are necessary for a fertilized human egg to acquire the ability in early development to become all the cells and tissues of the body. Blocking the production of this RNA molecule stops development in its tracks, they found.

The discovery comes on the heels of a Stanford study earlier this year showing that early human embryos are packed full of what appear to be viral particles arising from similar left-behind genetic material.

“We’re starting to accumulate evidence that these viral sequences, which originally may have threatened the survival of our species, were co-opted by our genomes for their own benefit,” said Vittorio Sebastiano, PhD, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology. “In this manner, they may even have contributed species-specific characteristics and fundamental cell processes, even in humans.”

Sebastiano is a co-lead and co-senior author of the study, which will be published online Nov. 23 in Nature Genetics. Postdoctoral scholar Jens Durruthy-Durruthy, PhD, is the other lead author. The other senior author of the paper is Renee Reijo Pera, PhD, a former professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Stanford who is now on the faculty of Montana State University.

Sebastiano and his colleagues were interested in learning how cells become pluripotent, or able to become any tissue in the body. A human egg becomes pluripotent after fertilization, for example. And scientists have learned how to induce other, fully developed human cells to become pluripotent by exposing them to proteins known to be present in the very early human embryo. But the nitty-gritty molecular details of this transformative process are not well understood in either case.

An ancient infection

The researchers knew that a type of RNA molecules called long-intergenic noncoding, or lincRNAs, have been implicated in many important biological processes, including the acquisition of pluripotency. These molecules are made from DNA in the genome, but they don’t go on to make proteins. Instead they function as RNA molecules to affect the expression of other genes.

Sebastiano and Durruthy-Durruthy used recently developed RNA sequencing techniques to examine which lincRNAs are highly expressed in human embryonic stem cells. Previously, this type of analysis was stymied by the fact that many of the molecules contain highly similar, very repetitive regions that are difficult to sequence accurately.

They identified more than 2,000 previously unknown RNA sequences, and found that 146 are specifically expressed in embryonic stem cells. They homed in on the 23 most highly expressed sequences, which they termed HPAT1-23, for further study. Thirteen of these, they found, were made up almost entirely of genetic material left behind after an eons-ago infection by a virus called HERV-H.

HERV-H is what’s known as a retrovirus. These viruses spread by inserting their genetic material into the genome of an infected cell. In this way, the virus can use the cell’s protein-making machinery to generate viral proteins for assembly into a new viral particle. That particle then goes on to infect other cells. If the infected cell is a sperm or an egg, the retroviral sequence can also be passed to future generations.

HIV is one common retrovirus that currently causes disease in humans. But our genomes are also littered with sequences left behind from long-ago retroviral infections. Unlike HIV, which can go on to infect new cells, these retroviral sequences are thought to be relatively inert; millions of years of evolution and accumulated mutations mean that few maintain the capacity to give instructions for functional proteins.

After identifying HPAT1-23 in embryonic stem cells, Sebastiano and his colleagues studied their expression in human blastocysts — the hollow clump of cells that arises from the egg in the first days after fertilization. They found that HPAT2, HPAT3 and HPAT5 were expressed only in the inner cell mass of the blastocyst, which becomes the developing fetus. Blocking their expression in one cell of a two-celled embryo stopped the affected cell from contributing to the embryo’s inner cell mass. Further studies showed that the expression of the three genes is also required for efficient reprogramming of adult cells into induced pluripotent stem cells.

Sequences found only in primates

“This is the first time that these virally derived RNA molecules have been shown to be directly involved with and necessary for vital steps of human development,” Sebastiano said. “What’s really interesting is that these sequences are found only in primates, raising the possibility that their function may have contributed to unique characteristics that distinguish humans from other animals.”

The researchers are continuing their studies of all the HPAT molecules. They’ve learned that HPAT-5 specifically affects pluripotency by interacting with and sequestering members of another family of RNAs involved in pluripotency called let-7.

“Previously retroviral elements were considered to be a class that all functioned in basically the same way,” said Durruthy-Durruthy. “Now we’re learning that they function as individual elements with very specific and important roles in our cells. It’s fascinating to imagine how, during the course of evolution, primates began to recycle these viral leftovers into something that’s beneficial and necessary to our development.”

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The first study was supported by U.S. National Science Foundation HOMINID grant BCS-1032255, U.S. National Institutes of Health grant GM100233, European Research Council (ERC) starting grants ADNABIOARC (263441) and APGREID, an Irish Research Council ERC support grant, the Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences, the Australian Research Council (DP130102158), the German Research Foundation (DFG) grants KR 4015/1-1 and AL 287/14-1, the Human Frontier Science Program (LT001095/2014-L), the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (5-06-01916), the Russian Foundation for the Humanities (15-11-63008), and a state grant from the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation (#33.1195.2014/k).

In the second study, other Stanford authors are postdoctoral scholars Mark Wossidlo, PhD, Jonathan Davila, PhD, and Moritz Mall, PhD; research associate Diana Cepeda, PhD; former postdoctoral scholar Jun Cui, PhD; graduate student Edward Grow; Wing Wong, PhD, professor of statistics and health research; and Joanna Wysocka, PhD, professor of chemical and systems biology and of developmental biology.

That study was supported by the National Institutes of Health (grants 1U54HD068158 and 1U01HL100397) and the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

Stanford’s Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology also supported the work.

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New clues about the earliest known Americans

Posted on November 19, 2015 by No Author -

VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY—Stone tools, cooked animal and plant remains and fire pits found at the Monte Verde site in southern Chile provide greater interdisciplinary evidence that the earliest known Americans—a nomadic people adapted to a cold, ice-age environment—were established deep in South America more than 15,000 years ago. The research, led by Tom Dillehay, Rebecca Webb Wilson University Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, appears in the Nov. 18 issue of PLOS ONE.

In 2013, at the request of Chile’s National Council of Monuments, Dillehay and an international team of archaeologists, geologists and botanists performed an archaeological and geological survey of Monte Verde to better define the depth and breadth of the site, which is protected by the Chilean government.

It is familiar ground for Dillehay, who has worked there since 1977, and it is there that Dillehay found evidence that fundamentally contributed to a new understanding of how and when humans first arrived in the Americas. His excavations have yielded a wide variety of scientific evidence of a small human settlement, using a different stone tool technology that predated the Clovis people, traditionally considered by many scholars as the earliest human culture in the Americas, by about 1,500 years at a site called MVII. Finds included hearths, the remains of local animals, wooden posts from approximately twelve huts, scraps of clothing made of hide, a portion of meat with preserved DNA of a mastodon, and even a human child’s footprint still preserved in clay. Archaeologists have estimated the population of the site at around 20-30 inhabitants. Dillehay also uncovered possible, though not conclusive, evidence of a much earlier human presence at a nearby site called MVI, dating back to possibly 30,000 years ago.

Dillehay’s findings were initially greeted with skepticism by the archaeological community, as it challenged the broadly accepted paradigm for human entry into the Americas. Until about 40 years ago, the prevailing understanding was that the Americas first began to be populated 13,000 years ago by big-game hunters from Asia who used a distinctive type of fluted stone projectile point called Clovis points. But subsequent excavations by other archaeologists at sites in both North and South America have also yielded evidence supporting an earlier human migration through the Americas.

On this visit, Dillehay’s team explored key areas around MVI and MVII. Though it was not intended to be a comprehensive reexamination of the sites, their findings did yield new insights. “We began to find what appeared to be small features—little heating pits, cooking pits associated with burned and unburned bone, and some stone tools scattered very widely across an area about 500 meters long by about 30 or 40 meters wide,” said Dillehay.

The stone tools discovered by the team were similar to what Dillehay had previously found at Monte Verde. Many were simple unifacial tools—meaning they were worked on only one side of the stone, to create a sharp edge—though some of the younger tools and projectile points indicate bifacial technologies. “One of the curious things about it is unlike what we found before—a significant percentage, about 34 percent, were from non-local materials. Most of them probably come from the coast but some of them probably come from the Andes and maybe even the other side of the Andes,” said Dillehay. Prior research had revealed evidence of Andean plants in the area, providing further support for a highly mobile population.

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Terrain similar to what Monte Verde might have looked like during the late Pleistocene era. The ground is crisscrossed by shallow drainage features, while higher ground has patchy vegetation. Credit: Tom Dillehay

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A very small faceted basalt wedge. Basalt is a local material. This tool, found at MVI, was made 15,000-16,000 years ago. It would have been used for woodworking. Credit: Tom Dillehay

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A pebble tool with a bifacially knapped and retouched edge. The stone, called serpentine, is not a local material but likely comes from the coastal cordillera west of Monte Verde. It was found at the older site, MVI, and was made 17,000-19,000 years ago. Credit: Tom Dillehay

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Stones, bones, plants and fires

The team recovered a total of 39 stone objects and 12 small fire pits associated with bones and some edible plant remains, including nuts and grasses. The bones tended to be small fragments, broken and scorched, indicating that the animals had been cooked. They often came from very large animals, like prehistoric llamas or mastodons, as well as smaller creatures like prehistoric deer and horses. The Monte Verde site was unlikely to have supported the kind of vegetation that those animals needed to eat, so they were likely killed and butchered elsewhere. The objects were radiocarbon dated and most were found to range in age from more than 14,000 to almost 19,000 years old.

The wide scattering suggests that the people who created these features were nomadic hunter-gatherers who might have camped for only a night or two before moving on. “Where they’re going, we don’t know, and where they’re coming from, we don’t know, but this would have been a passageway from the coast to the foothills of the Andes,” Dillehay said. Dillehay believes that they may have come through Monte Verde because the terrain was more walkable than the surrounding bogs and wetlands, and because it provided access to stone to make tools.

Rain, ice, soil and ash

A key goal during this visit was to better understand the geological and environmental context of the site. At the end of the last ice age, Monte Verde was a sandur plain—a runoff area situated about six kilometers away from a glacier, crisscrossed by a network of shallow streams and brooks fed by rain washing off the glacier, as well as melting snow. It was also a time marked by volcanic activity and a gradually warming climate, as the last glaciers began to retreat.

“It appears that these people were there in the summer months,” Dillehay said. “Each one of these [burned] features and the bones and stones associated with them is embedded in thin, oxidized tephra”—a type of geological layer formed by airborne ash particles from nearby volcanoes that only form in rainy, warmer temperatures. But though the glaciers had begun to retreat by 19,000 to 17,000 years ago, it was still an extremely challenging environment, Dillehay said. “We’re looking at people living in some really cold, harsh areas, even in the summer months.” Only later, around 15,000 years ago, did the climate warm enough to support the kind of longer-term settlement found at MVII.

New questions

Put together, these findings support the paradigm shift toward an earlier peopling of the Americas, although questions inevitably remain about how the hemisphere was settled. It also underscores the importance of long-term interdisciplinary research. “We now realize that the geology and the climate and the archaeology are much more complex than we ever calculated,” said Dillehay.

Source: Edited and adapted from the subject press release of Vanderbilt University.

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This research was supported with grants from the National Geographic Society, the National Science Foundation, the Consejo de Monumentos Nacionales de Chile and Vanderbilt University.

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

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Scientists discover new lineage of European ancestry

Posted on November 16, 2015 by No Author -

Trinity College Dublin and University of Cambridge—An international team led by scientists in Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin and Cambridge University, has, for the first time, sequenced ancient genomes from the Late Upper Palaeolithic period. In doing so, the team has discovered a new strand of European hunter-gatherer ancestry.

Where human genomes are concerned the past is indeed a different country. Most modern populations are mixtures of different ancestral strands that are difficult to untangle from examination of thousands of modern human genomes. It is only by retrieving data from our long-dead ancient predecessors that we can unravel the weave and write our genomic genetic history.

DNA from ancient samples is notoriously difficult to work with as it degrades over time and has often vanished before researchers are able to analyze it. The cool, dry environments found in caves can be excellent for DNA preservation and, by targeting cave sites, the researchers were able to recover the genomes of two individuals who lived in Georgia in the Caucasus 13,300 and 9,700 years ago.

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The view from the Satsurblia cave in Western Georgia, where a human right temporal bone dating from over 13,000 years ago was discovered. DNA extracted from this bone was used in the new research. Credit: Eppie Jones

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This new strand or lineage stems from populations of hunter-gatherers that split from western hunter-gatherers shortly after the ‘out of Africa’ expansion some 45,000 years ago and went on to settle in the Caucasus region, where southern Russia meets Georgia today.

Here these hunter-gatherers largely remained for millennia, becoming increasingly isolated as the Ice Age culminated in the last ‘Glacial Maximum’ some 25,000 years ago, which they weathered in the relative shelter of the Caucasus mountains until eventual thawing allowed movement and brought them into contact with other populations, likely from further east.

This led to a genetic mixture that resulted in the Yamnaya culture: horse-borne Steppe herders that swept into Western Europe around 5,000 years ago, arguably heralding the start of the Bronze Age and bringing with them metallurgy and animal herding skills, along with the Caucasus hunter-gatherer strand of ancestral DNA – now present in almost all populations from the European continent.

“The question of where the Yamnaya come from has been something of a mystery up to now,” said one of the lead senior authors Dr Andrea Manica, from Cambridge’s Department of Zoology.

“We can now answer that as we’ve found that their genetic make-up is a mix of Eastern European hunter-gatherers and a population from this pocket of Caucasus hunter-gatherers who weathered much of the last Ice Age in apparent isolation. This Caucasus pocket is the fourth major strand of ancient European ancestry, one that we were unaware of until now,” he said

Professor Daniel Bradley, leader of the Trinity team, said: “This is a major new piece in the human ancestry jigsaw, the influence of which is now present within almost all populations from the European continent and many beyond.”

Previously, ancient Eurasian genomes had revealed three ancestral populations that contributed to contemporary Europeans in varying degrees, says Manica.

Following the ‘out of Africa’ expansion, some hunter-gatherer populations migrated north-west, eventually colonizing much of Europe from Spain to Hungary, while other populations settled around the eastern Mediterranean and Levant, where they would develop agriculture around 10,000 years ago. These early farmers then expanded into and colonized Europe.

Finally, at the start of the Bronze Age around 5,000 years ago, there was a wave of migration from central Eurasia into Western Europe – the Yamnaya.

However, the sequencing of ancient DNA recovered from two separate burials in Western Georgia – one over 13,000 years old, the other almost 10,000 years old – has enabled scientists to reveal that the Yamnaya owed half their ancestry to previously unknown and genetically distinct hunter-gatherer sources: the fourth strand.

By reading the DNA, the researchers were able to show that the lineage of this fourth Caucasus hunter-gatherer strand diverged from the western hunter-gatherers just after the expansion of anatomically modern humans into Europe from Africa.

The Caucasus hunter-gatherer genome showed a continued mixture with the ancestors of the early farmers in the Levant area, which Manica says makes sense given the relative proximity. This ends, however, around 25,000 years ago – just before the time of the last glacial maximum, or peak Ice Age.

At this point, Caucasus hunter-gatherer populations shrink as the genes homogenise, a sign of breeding between those with increasingly similar DNA. This doesn’t change for thousands of years as these populations remain in apparent isolation in the shelter of the mountains – possibly cut off from other major ancestral populations for as long as 15,000 years – until migrations began again as the Glacial Maximum recedes, and the Yamnaya culture ultimately emerges.

“We knew that the Yamnaya had this big genetic component that we couldn’t place, and we can now see it was this ancient lineage hiding in the Caucasus during the last Ice Age,” said Manica.

While the Caucasus hunter-gatherer ancestry would eventually be carried west by the Yamnaya, the researchers found it also had a significant influence further east. A similar population must have migrated into South Asia at some point, says Eppie Jones, a PhD student from Trinity College who is the first author of the paper.

“India is a complete mix of Asian and European genetic components. The Caucasus hunter-gatherer ancestry is the best match we’ve found for the European genetic component found right across modern Indian populations,” Jones said. Researchers say this strand of ancestry may have flowed into the region with the bringers of Indo-Aryan languages.

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DNA was extracted from the molar teeth of this skeleton, dating from almost 10,000 years ago and found in the Kotias Klde rockshelter in Western Georgia. Credit: Eppie Jones

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The widespread nature of the Caucasus hunter-gatherer ancestry following its long isolation makes sense geographically, says Professor Ron Pinhasi, a lead senior author from University College Dublin. “The Caucasus region sits almost at a crossroads of the Eurasian landmass, with arguably the most sensible migration routes both west and east in the vicinity.”

He added: “The sequencing of genomes from this key region will have a major impact on the fields of palaeogeneomics and human evolution in Eurasia, as it bridges a major geographic gap in our knowledge.”

David Lordkipanidze, Director of the Georgian National Museum and co-author of the paper, said: “This is the first sequence from Georgia – I am sure soon we will get more palaeogenetic information from our rich collections of fossils.”

The findings are published today in the journal Nature Communications.

Source: Adapted and edited from press releases of Trinity College Dublin and the University of Cambridge.

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

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Findings on ancient hominin DNA shed new light

Posted on November 16, 2015 by No Author -

Researchers report new DNA sequences of two Denisovan hominin bone specimens recovered from the Denisova Cave in Siberia. In 2010, the nuclear genome sequence of a finger bone, Denisova 3, found in Denisova Cave in Siberia identified the bone as belonging to a previously unknown group of hominins distinct from Neanderthals and modern humans, called Denisovans. Two putative Denisovan molars, Denisova 4 and Denisova 8, have also been found in Denisova Cave. Svante Pääbo and colleagues sequenced the nuclear and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from both molars. Both of the Denisova molars are larger than either Neanderthal or early modern human molars, and lack features typical of Neanderthal or early modern human molars. Analysis of nuclear DNA sequences suggests that all three specimens belonged to the same phylogenetic group, and supports the idea that this group was distinct from Neanderthals and modern humans. The authors used mtDNA from the three Denisova specimens to infer their relative ages. The mtDNA of Denisova 8 has accumulated fewer mutations than the mtDNA of either Denisova 3 or Denisova 4, suggesting that Denisova 8 is significantly older than the other two specimens, possibly by as much as 60,000 years. The age difference between Denisova 8 and the other two specimens suggests that Denisovans inhabited the region around Denisova Cave for an extended period of time, according to the authors.

The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

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Entrance to Denisova Cave, Siberia. Credit: Image courtesy of Bence Viola.

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Denisova 3 finger bone. Credit: Image courtesy of Bence Viola.

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Denisova 3 finger bone next to a penny for scale. Credit: Image courtesy of Bence Viola.

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Denisova 4 molar. Credit: Image courtesy of Bence Viola.

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Denisova 8 molar, top view. Credit: Image courtesy of Bence Viola.

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Denisova 8 molar, side view. Credit: Image courtesy of Bence Viola.

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Source: Edited from the subject press release of the PNAS.

Article: “Nuclear and mitochondrial DNA sequences from two Denisovan individuals,” by Susanna Sawyer et al.

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

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Wailing at the wrong wall?

Posted on November 15, 2015 by No Author -

For hundreds of years, the long-accepted traditional location of the temple of Solomon and the later Second Temple expanded upon by Herod the Great in Jerusalem has placed them within the precinct that now contains the famous Haram al-Sharif (Dome of the Rock), otherwise known as the “Noble Sanctuary”. It has been a sacred space for three major world religions for centuries.

In recent years, however, some scholars have challenged the traditional view. Not without controversy, they have revolved their arguments around what they consider to be a misreading or dismissal of the literature by Josephus and others regarding the size and location of Fortress Antonia, the Roman enclave in 1^st century Roman-occupied central Jerusalem that represented the might of Rome in the otherwise troublesome (for the Romans) province of Judaea.

Most recently, researcher and author Marilyn Sams has advanced the argument that Fortress Antonia, represented by tradition as a monumental or castle-like structure located during Herodian times just north of the Second Temple on the periphery of the large rectangular temple precinct, was actually a much larger complex, more akin to the typical standard Roman fortress layout that existed during the time of 1^st century Jerusalem, the time of Jesus. The actual size and nature of this alternative model for Fortress Antonia, she argues, would have encompassed the area most scholars and historians have identified with the temple precinct. She bases her argument at least in part on the descriptions recorded by Josephus and others.

“Josephus described it [the fortress] as being “erected upon a rock of fifty cubits in height” on a “great precipice,” Sams quotes Josephus. “It had “all kinds of rooms and other conveniences, such as courts, and places for bathing, and broad spaces for camps, such that it had all the conveniences of cities and seemed like it was composed of several cities.” With 60-foot walls, four towers (the southeast being 105 feet high), and smooth stones covering the slope on its east side, it dominated the temple to its south, ready to fend off the most formidable attacks.”

Given this description, according to Sams, tucking Fortress Antonia north of the temple location in the Temple Mount area subscribed to by most scholars would have been impossible. It simply wouldn’t fit.

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The “Temple Mount” precinct as it appears today. Andrew Shiva, Wikimedia Commons

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Moreover, Sams cites the insufficiency or paucity of archaeological evidence for the traditional concept of the Fortress Antonia near the area at the northern periphery location of the Temple Mount, and points to the more abundant evidence unearthed in other locations nearer to the current, traditionally accepted temple location, suggesting that this supports the much larger Roman encampment concept consistent with the standard Roman fortress model of 1^st century times.

“……Roman military structures and artifacts are mostly found near and under the “Temple Mount,” she writes. “Excavations by Benjamin and Eilat Mazar at the southwest corner have revealed a Roman bakery and further north, a Roman bath house………… Excavations to the south and along the western and eastern walls, as well as the sifting project, have yielded column and capital fragments; fragments of Roman marble statues, inscribed stones….. pottery and stone vessels; bullas (Roman amulets); stone seals, several thousand coins, and more.”

Sam’s arguments have been built on the foundations of research by earlier scholars, most notably that of Dr. Ernest L. Martin, whose research and subsequently published book, The Temples that Jerusalem Forgot, also argued that Fortress Antonia actually encompassed the area traditionally ascribed to the Temple Mount and that the temple was more accurately located on the Ophel mound over the area of the Gihon Spring, in the old City of David to the immediate southeast of the traditional Temple Mount precinct. “When Aristeas (the Greek writer) claims there was a natural spring under the temple, this can be compared with the lack of a known spring under the traditionalist “Temple Mount,” states Sams in concurrence with Martin. And “when Eusebius says the temple site became a garbage dump, this can be compared with the lack of such findings under the “Temple Mount,” while many garbage sites have been uncovered on the southeastern hill [near to the Ophel],” continues Sams……and “when Josephus describes the foundations [of the temple] as starting in the Kidron Valley and ending as a four-furlong square 450 feet high, this can be compared with the 922 by 1596 by 1040 by 1556-foot measurements of the [traditionally accepted] “Temple Mount” trapezoid, whose maximum height is 158 feet, upslope from the Kidron Valley.”

In short, argues Sams, Fortress Antonia was much bigger than most scholars have previously thought, and the First and Second Temples, the center of Israelite and Judahite worship in biblical times, were built in the City of David on the Ophel above the Gihon Spring, the area where Jerusalem under King David and the United Monarchy of the biblical account had its beginnings.

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The proposed premise, depicted above by noted biblical illustrator Balage Balough, shows the massive Fortress Antonia looming over the Second Temple, placed over the Gihon Spring in the City of David. To the north of the Fortress is the Birket Israel, the former Struthion Pool. Courtesy Balage Balough and Bob Ellsworth

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To be sure, Sams and Martin’s proposals have drawn criticism from other scholars, particularly those who subscribe to the mainstream view. But Sams remains hopeful that her theory will prevail. “Only time will tell if the existing and growing evidence will be sufficient to overturn the prevailing tradition,” says Sams.

A more detailed article on the subject by Sams will be released as a viewpoints article beginning in the winter (December) 2015 issue of Popular Archaeology magazine in a two-part series.

Cover image, top left: Worshipers at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Plamen Matanski, Wikimedia Commons

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Fossils shed new light on North American mammoths

Posted on November 12, 2015 by No Author -

AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE—A detailed analysis of mammoth teeth from around the globe suggests that the first mammoth species to arrive in North America was much more evolved than previously thought. While the evolutionary origins of Eurasia’s mammoths are established, much less is known of Columbian mammoths, the species that later resided in North America. It’s currently believed the earliest mammoths arrived in North America between 1.5 to 1.3 million years ago (MYA), and that these early settlers were of “primitive” morphology, with a closer relationship to the mammoths found in Europe, M. meridionali, than to their more advanced counterparts from eastern Asia, M. trogontherii. This would suggest that primitive mammoths migrated across the Bering Land Bridge into North America, as well as into Europe, before further evolving into different species within their respective continents. Studies of mammoth evolution often rely on the nature of molar teeth to determine divergence between species. However, Adrian Lister of the Natural History Museum, London, and Andrei Sher of the Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution, Moscow, note that previous studies do not account for the wear and tear that occurs over the mammoth’s lifetime, and weakening of the teeth as the molars shift from the back of the mouth to the front. After adjusting for these factors, the authors believe that the more evolved M. trogontherii first crossed the Bering Land Bridge 2 to 1.5 MYA and later evolved into the species of Columbian mammoths. The Eurasian woolly mammoth followed suit later, residing in an area north of the Columbian mammoths for some time before the two animals’ ranges overlapped, perhaps leading to interbreeding, the authors suggest.

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Columbian mammoths and the Eurasian wooly mammoths may have interbred to form a uniquely North American mammoth.

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Archaeological evidence obtained through research and excavation have shown that North American mammoths were hunted by humans during the latter millenia of the mammoths’ presence on the continent, perhaps contributing to the mammal’s eventual extinction.

The detailed paper by Lister and Sher appears in the 13 November 2015 issue of Science.

Source: Edited and adapted from a AAAS press release

Mammoth image: American Museum of Natural History, Internet Archive Book Images, Wikimedia Commons

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Early farmers exploited the honeybee at least 8,500 years ago

Posted on November 11, 2015 by No Author -

UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL —Humans have been exploiting bees as far back as the Stone Age, according to new research from the University of Bristol published in Nature today.

Previous evidence from prehistoric rock art is inferred to show honey hunters and Pharaonic Egyptian murals show early scenes of beekeeping. However, the close association between early farmers and the honeybee remained uncertain.

This study has gathered together evidence for the presence of beeswax in the pottery vessels of the first farmers of Europe by investigating chemical components trapped in the clay fabric of more than 6,000 potsherds from over 150 Old World archaeological sites.

The distinctive chemical ‘fingerprint’ of beeswax was detected at multiple Neolithic sites across Europe indicating just how widespread the association between humans and honeybees was in prehistoric times. For example, beeswax was detected in cooking pots from an archaeological site in Turkey, dating to the seventh millennium BC – the oldest evidence yet for the use of bee products by Neolithic farmers.

The paper* brings together over 20 years of research carried out at Bristol’s Organic Geochemistry Unit (School of Chemistry) led by Professor Richard Evershed. Co-authors of the paper include archaeologists involved in the large scale investigation of sites across Europe, the Near East and Northern Africa.

Dr Mélanie Roffet-Salque, lead author of the paper, said: “The most obvious reason for exploiting the honeybee would be for honey, as this would have been a rare sweetener for prehistoric people. However, beeswax could have been used in its own right for various technological, ritual, cosmetic and medicinal purposes, for example, to waterproof porous ceramic vessels.”

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The exploitation of honeybees for their products is known from the ancient Egyptian record, but association with early farmers during Neolithic times has been uncertain. Waugsberg, Wikimedia Commons

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The lack of evidence for beeswax use at Neolithic sites above the 57th parallel North as in Scotland and Fennoscandia points to an ecological limit to the natural occurrence of honeybees at that time.

Professor Evershed said: “The lack of a fossil record of the honeybee means it’s ecologically invisible for most of the past 10,000 years. Although evidence from ancient Egyptian murals and prehistoric rock art suggests mankind’s association with the honeybee dates back over thousands of years, when and where this association emerged has been unknown – until now.

“Our study is the first to provide unequivocal evidence, based solely on a chemical ‘fingerprint’, for the palaeoecological distribution of an economically and culturally important animal. It shows widespread exploitation of the honeybee by early farmers and pushes back the chronology of human-honeybee association to substantially earlier dates.”

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*’Widespread Exploitation of the Honeybee by Early Neolithic Farmers’ by Roffet-Salque et al in Nature

Source: University of Bristol news release.

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Plague infected humans much earlier than previously thought

Posted on November 9, 2015 by No Author -

CELL PRESS—Plague infections were common in humans 3,300 years earlier than the historical record suggests, reports a study published in Cell. By sequencing the DNA of tooth samples from Bronze Age individuals from Europe and Asia, the researchers discovered evidence of plague infections roughly 4,800 years ago. But it was at least another thousand years until the bacterium that causes the disease, Yersinia pestis, acquired key changes in virulence genes, allowing it to spread via fleas and evade the host immune system.

“We found that the Y. pestis lineage originated and was widespread much earlier than previously thought, and we narrowed the time window as to when it developed,” says senior study author Eske Willerslev of the Center for GeoGenetics, University of Copenhagen. “This study changes our view of when and how plaque influenced human populations and opens new avenues for studying the evolution of diseases.”

Y. pestis was the notorious culprit behind the sixth century’s Plague of Justinian, the Black Death, which killed 30%-50% of the European population in the mid-1300s, and the Third Pandemic, which emerged in China in the 1850s. Earlier putative plagues, such as the Plague of Athens nearly 2,500 years ago and the second century’s Antonine Plague, have been linked to the decline of Classical Greece and the undermining of the Roman army. However, it has been unclear whether Y. pestis could have been responsible for these early epidemics because direct molecular evidence for this bacterium has not been obtained from skeletal material older than 1,500 years.

Based on their recent work, Willerslev, Kristian Kristiansen of the University of Gothenburg, and their collaborators suspected that the plague could have shaped human populations much earlier than previously thought. A few months ago, they published a high-profile population genomics study of Eurasian individuals from the Bronze Age (c. 3000 BC to 1500 BC), which they showed was a highly dynamic period involving large-scale migrations and population replacements that were responsible for shaping major parts of present-day demographic structure in both Europe and Asia.

But the reason for these migrations was not clear. “One of the scenarios we discussed was the idea that large epidemics could have facilitated such dynamics,” says study co-first author Morten Allentoft of the Center for GeoGenetics, University of Copenhagen. “Perhaps people were migrating to get away from epidemics or re-colonizing new areas where epidemics had decimated the local populations. Could it be, for example, that plague was present in humans already in these prehistoric times?”

To answer this question, the researchers screened 89 billion raw DNA sequence reads obtained from the teeth of 101 Bronze Age individuals from Europe and Asia. These teeth were obtained from various museums and archaeological excavations. They discovered Y. pestis DNA in seven of these individuals, whose teeth were dated between 2794 BC and 951 BC (early Iron Age). Evolutionary analysis revealed that the most recent common ancestor of all known Y. pestis strains is 5,783 years old–thousands of years older than previous estimates.

Moreover, Y. pestis genomes from the Bronze Age lacked a gene called Yersinia murine toxin (ymt), which is known to protect the pathogen inside the flea gut and thereby enable the spread of plague to humans via an insect vector. However, this gene was present in the Y. pestis genome from the Iron Age individual, suggesting that plague became transmissible by fleas between approximately 3,700 and 3,000 years ago. This new finding conflicts with previous studies suggesting that the ymt gene was acquired early in Y. pestis evolution due to its importance in the pathogen’s life cycle.

Besides widespread transmission through fleas, another secret to Y. pestis‘ success has been its stealthy evasion of the host immune system. In mammals, the immune system has evolved to recognize and mount protective responses against a protein called flagellin, which is the principal component of the flagella–the whip-like appendage that helps bacteria move around. In all previously known Y. pestis strains, a mutation in the flhD gene has prevented the expression of the flagellin protein.

However, this mutation was not present in the two oldest Bronze Age individuals, and the flagella system was still in the process of devolving in the youngest Bronze Age individual. Taken together, the findings suggest that Y. pestis did not fully adapt as a flea-borne mammalian pathogen until the beginning of the first millennium BC, giving rise to the historically recorded plagues.

“The underlying evolutionary mechanisms that facilitated the evolution of Y. pestis are still present today, and learning from this will help us understand how future pathogens may arise or develop increased virulence,” says co-first study author Simon Rasmussen of the Technical University of Denmark. “Additionally, our study changes the historical understanding of this extremely important human pathogen and makes it possible that other so-called plagues, such as the Plague of Athens and the Antonine Plague, could have been caused by Y. pestis.”

The photo shows a Bronze Age human skull from the Yamnaya culture painted with red ochre. Yamnaya later developed into the Afanasievo culture of Central Asia, one of the cultures that carried the early strains of Y. pestis. Credit: Rasmussen et al./Cell 2015

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In future studies, the researchers will look for evidence of plague in other geographic regions and time periods to get a better grasp of the history of this disease. They will also search for ancient DNA remains of other blood-borne bacteria and viruses. “Our findings reveal that one can find ancient pathogenic microbes in ancient human material showing no obvious morphological signs of disease,” Willerslev says. “So plague is just one disease to look at, and one could explore all kinds of diseases like this in the future.”

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This project was funded by the European Research Council, the Marie Curie Actions of the European Union, the Villum Foundation, the University of Copenhagen, the Danish National Research Foundation, and The Lundbeck Foundation.

Cell, Rasmussen and Allentoft et al.: “Early Divergent Strains of Yersinia pestis in Eurasia 5,000 Years Ago” http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2015.10.009

Source: Cell Press news release

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Earliest church in the tropics unearthed in former heart of Atlantic slave trade

Posted on November 9, 2015 by No Author -

UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE —Archaeologists from the University of Cambridge have unearthed the earliest known European Christian church in the tropics on one of the Cabo Verde islands, 500km off the coast of West Africa, where the Portuguese established a stronghold to start the first commerce with Africa south of the Sahara. This turned into a global trade in African slaves from the 16th century, in which Cabo Verde played a central part as a major trans-shipment centre.

The earliest remains of the church of Nossa Senhora da Conceição date from around 1470, with a further larger construction dating from 1500. Extensions and a re-cladding of the church with tiles imported from Lisbon have also been documented.

This church is the oldest formal European colonial building yet discovered in sub-Saharan Africa, say researchers. It was found amongst the ruins of Cidade Velha, the former capital of Cabo Verde, which at its height was the second richest city in the Portuguese empire; a city that channelled slavery for almost 300 years.

“It’s a profound social and political story to which these new archaeological investigations are making an invaluable contribution,” said Cambridge’s Professor Marie Louise Stig Sørensen.

Archaeologists from the University and the Cambridge Archaeological Unit (CAU) have just completed the excavation and conservation of this building for public display, and have been working with the Cabo Verde government and local partners on the town’s archaeology since 2007.

“We’ve managed to recover the entire footprint-plan of the church, including its vestry, side-chapel and porch, and it now presents a really striking monument,” said Christopher Evans, Director of the CAU.

“Evidently constructed around 1500, the most complicated portion is the east-end’s chancel where the main altar stood, and which has seen much rebuilding due to seasonal flash-flood damage. Though the chancel’s sequence proved complicated to disentangle, under it all we exposed a gothic-style chapel,” he said.

“This had been built as a free-standing structure prior to the church itself and is now the earliest known building on the islands – the whole exercise has been a tremendous success.”

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The site of the excavation of the earliest church yet discovered in sub-Saharan Africa, with some of the structure dating back to the late 15th century. Credit: Cambridge Archaeological Unit

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During the excavation several tombstones of local dignitaries were recovered. One enormous stone found in the side chapel belonged to Fernão Fiel de Lugo, a slaver and the town’s ‘treasure holder’ between 1542 and 1557. “This is a place of immense cultural and heritage value. This excavation has revealed the tombs and graves of people that we only know from history books and always felt could be fiction,” Cidade Velha’s Mayor, Dr Manuel Monteiro de Pina, said.

The research team discovered a densely packed cemetery dug into the floor of the church, which they say will be of great importance for future academic investigations. It is estimated that more than 1,000 people were buried here before 1525, providing a capsule of the first 50 years of colonial life on the island.

Preliminary analysis of samples shows that about half the bodies are African, with the rest from various parts of Europe. An excavation is being planned to collect data for isotope analysis of more bodies to learn more about the country’s founding population and its early slave history.

“From historical texts we have learned about the development of a ‘Creole’ society at an early date with land inherited by people of mixed race who could also hold official positions. The human remains give us the opportunity to test this representation of the first people in Cabo Verde,” said Evans.

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These are some of the tombstones of Portuguese slavers revealed by the excavation. Credit: Cambridge Archaeological Unit

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The significance of the discovery, a central feature of the Cidade Velha UNESCO World Heritage Site, has been widely acknowledged. Hundreds of people have visited the site since work began, and school groups have frequently been brought out to see the church. On his visit, the President Jorge Carlos Fonseca endorsed the contribution made by this project. “I can see the importance the site has for Cabo Verde to understand our history and our identity,” he said.

“The hope is that the work will both encourage much-needed cultural tourism, and help the nation build a more nuanced sense of its notable past,” said Sørensen.

The ten small islands that make up Cabo Verde are harsh volcanic rock, and were barren of people, mammals and trees until the Portuguese arrived in 1456. The Portuguese transformed the islands into one of the major hubs for the transatlantic slave trade, bringing with them crops, livestock and people in the form of traders, missionaries and thousands upon thousands of slaves. The slaves were funnelled through the islands where they were ‘sorted’ and sold before being shipped off to plantations across the Atlantic World.

The discovery of Brazil, in particular, and the establishment of plantations there, caused trade through Cabo Verde to explode. “The islands were a focal point for the initial wave of globalisation, all built on the back of the slave trade,” said Sørensen. “The excavation reveals these global connections as the finds include fine ware and faience from Portugal, German stoneware, Chinese porcelain and pottery from different parts of West Africa.”

In addition to the excavated church, there were around 22 other churches in the small river valley where the old town of Cidade Velha sits, including a large cathedral built with imported Portuguese stones. It is clear the church had huge influence here – a mere 15 degrees north of the equator – from the late medieval period onwards, say the researchers.

Centuries later, pirate attacks plagued the islands. French privateer Jacques Cassard launched a devastating attack on Cidade Velha in 1712, from which it would never recover, and, as slavery began to be outlawed during the 19th century, the islands lost their financial basis and were neglected by the Portuguese. The islanders were left to the mercy of an inhospitable landscape with erratic rainfall that undermined agricultural activities and caused drinking water to be scarce.

Cabo Verde became a republic in 1975, and as an independent nation it is coming to terms with a heritage and identity rooted in slavery. The research team believe the new archaeological discoveries will prove integral to this process.

“Cabo Verde is a young nation in many ways, and it needs its history to be unearthed and accessed so it can continue to build its national identity,” said Sørensen.

Evans added: “The finds so far clearly demonstrate the fantastic potentials of Cabo Verde’s archaeology and the contribution they can make to the future of these Atlantic islands.”

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This image shows Christopher Evans from the Cambridge Archaeological Unit on site with members of the excavation team. Credit: Cambridge Archaeological Unit

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Source: University of Cambridge news release.

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A Sneak Peek at What’s Ahead

Posted on November 8, 2015 by No Author -

Stay tuned for the upcoming Winter 2015 issue of Popular Archaeology, to be released in December. Among the exciting premium feature topics for this issue:

1. Archaeologists are unearthing the unwritten story of America’s first English colony. New evidence for the whereabouts of at least some of its lost colonists may be emerging.

2. The tomb of a Mycenaean warrior and its sensational contents open a window on Mycenaean Greece before the sack of Troy.

3. The incredibly preserved finds of the “Pompeii of the Ancient Maya” provide an unprecedented glimpse into the lives of the other 90 percent.

4. Wailing at the wrong wall? The strange case of the incredible shrinking Fortress Antonia: A new interpretation of the Temple Mount area in Jerusalem may give clues to the Roman fortress that was downsized by tradition and the true location of the Jerusalem temple of Jesus’ time.

5. The intrepid journeys of an archaeologist reveal the face of ancient Tibet’s first great civilization.

6. And more to come……….

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New map shows how drought affected 1,000 years of history

Posted on November 6, 2015 by No Author -

The long history of severe droughts across Europe and the Mediterranean has largely been told through historical documents and ancient journals, each chronicling the impact in a geographically restricted area. Now, for the first time, an atlas based on scientific evidence provides the big picture, using tree rings to map the reach and severity of dry and wet periods across Europe, and parts of North Africa and the Middle East, year to year over the past 2,000 years.

Together with two previous drought atlases covering North America and Asia, the Old World Drought Atlas significantly adds to the historical picture of long-term climate variability over the Northern Hemisphere. In so doing, it should help climate scientists pinpoint causes of drought and extreme rainfall in the past, and identify patterns that could lead to better climate model projections for the future. A paper describing the new atlas, coauthored by scientists from 40 institutions, appears today in the journal Science Advances.

“The Old World Drought Atlas fills a major geographic gap in the data that’s important to determine patterns of climate variability back in time,” said Edward Cook, cofounder of the Tree Ring Lab at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and leader of all three drought-atlas projects. “That’s important for understanding causes of megadroughts, and it’s important for climate modelers to test hypotheses of climate forcing and change.”

For example, if Europe had a wet year north of the Alps and a dry year to the south, that provides clues to circulation patterns and suggests influence from the North Atlantic Oscillation, one of the primary sources of climate variability affecting patterns in Europe. “You can’t get that from one spot on a map,” Cook said. “That’s the differentiator between the atlas and all these wonderful historic records – the records don’t give you the broad-scale patterns.”

The new atlas could also improve understanding of climate phenomena like the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation, a variation in North Atlantic sea-surface temperatures that hasn’t been tracked long enough to tell if it is a transitory event, forced by human intervention in the climate system, or a natural long-term oscillation. By combining the Old World Drought Atlas with the Asia and North America atlases, climatologists and climate modelers may also discover other sources of internal climate variability that are leading to drought and wetness across the Northern Hemisphere, Cook said.

In the Science Advances paper, Cook and his coauthors compare results from the new atlas and its counterparts across three time spans: the generally warm Medieval Climate Anomaly (1000-1200); the Little Ice Age (1550-1750); and the modern period (1850-2012).

The atlases together show persistently drier-than-average conditions across north-central Europe over the past 1,000 years, and a history of megadroughts in the Northern Hemisphere that lasted longer during the Medieval Climate Anomaly than they did during the 20th century. But there is little understanding as to why, the authors write. Climate models have had difficulty reproducing megadroughts of the past, indicating something may be missing in their representation of the climate system, Cook said.

The drought atlases provide a much deeper understanding of natural climate processes than scientists have had to date, said Richard Seager, a coauthor of the paper and a climate modeler at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

“Climate variability tends to occur within patterns that span the globe, creating wet conditions somewhere and dry conditions somewhere else,” said Seager. “By having tree ring-based hydroclimate reconstructions for three northern hemisphere continents, we can now easily see these patterns and identify the responsible modes of variability.”

The hemispheric scale adds to the potential uses of what was already the gold standard of paleo-hydroclimate research, said Sloan Coats, a climate dynamicist at the University of Colorado who studies megadroughts using the atlases. “The fact that the drought atlases provide a nearly hemispheric view of hydroclimate variability provides an incredible amount of information that can be used to better understand what was happening in the atmosphere and ocean,” Coats said.

In Europe and the Mediterranean, the new drought atlas expands scientists’ understanding of climate conditions during historic famines.

For instance, an unusually cold winter and spring are often blamed for a 1740-1741 famine in Ireland. The Old World Drought Atlas points to another contributor: rainfall well below normal during the spring and summer of 1741, the authors write in the paper. The atlas shows how the drought spread across Ireland, England and Wales.

The atlas also tracks the reach of the great European famine of 1315-1317, when historical documents describe how excessive precipitation across much of the continent made growing food nearly impossible. The atlas tracks the hydroclimate across Europe and shows its yearly progressions from 1314 to 1317 in detail, including highlighting drier conditions in southern Italy, which largely escaped the crisis.

The atlas may also help shed light on more recent phenomena, including a record 2006-2010 drought in the Levant that a recent Lamont study suggests may have helped spark the ongoing Syrian civil war.

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Maps from a new 2,000-year drought atlas show rainfall conditions over the whole continent, and much of the Mediterranean. A chart for 1741 shows severe drought (brown areas) running from Ireland into central Europe and beyond. A chart for the year 1315 shows the opposite problem — too much rain (dark green areas), which made farming almost impossible. Credit: Cook et al., Science Advances, 2015

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The North America atlas, published in 2004, has been used by other researchers to suggest that a series of droughts starting around 900 years ago may have contributed to the eventual collapse of native cultures. Likewise, the Asia atlas, published in 2010, has led researchers to connect droughts, at least in part, to the fall of Cambodia’s Angkor culture in the 1300s, and China’s Ming dynasty in the 1600s.

The tree ring data used to create the new atlas included cores from both living trees and timbers found in ancient construction reaching back more than 2,000 years. They come from 106 regional tree ring chronologies, each with dozens to thousands of trees, and were contributed to the project by the International Tree Ring Data Bank and European tree-ring scientists.

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The paper, “Old World Megadroughts and pluvials during the Common Era,” is published in Science Advances: 202-326-6440

Cover image, top left: Numerous droughts have hit European agriculture over the ages, but their overall extent has been known mainly only from scattered historical documents. Here, an English calendar page, circa 1310, shows men harvesting wheat. Credit: Queen Mary’s Psalter, Wikimedia commons

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Remarkably preserved ancient Maya village reveals daily life

Posted on November 4, 2015 by No Author -

University of Colorado, Boulder and National Science Foundation—Continuing research at a Maya village in El Salvador—frozen in time by a blanket of volcanic ash from 1,400 years ago—shows farming families who lived there went about their daily lives with virtually no strong-arming by the elite royalty lording over the valley.

Instead, archaeological evidence indicates significant interactions at the village of Ceren took place among families, village elders, craftspeople and specialty maintenance workers. This research comes from a new University of Colorado Boulder (CU-Boulder) study, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Ceren is the best-preserved ancient Maya village in all of Latin America. In A.D. 660, the village was blasted by toxic gas, pummeled by lava bombs and then choked by a 17-foot layer of ash falling over several days after the Loma Caldera volcano, less than half a mile away, erupted.

Discovered in 1978 by CU-Boulder anthropology Professor Payson Sheets, Ceren has been called the “New World Pompeii.” The degree of preservation is so great researchers can see marks of finger swipes in ceramic bowls, and human footprints in gardens that host ghostly ash casts of corn stalks. Researchers have also uncovered thatched roofs, woven blankets and bean-filled pots.

Some Maya archaeological records document “top-down” societies, where the elite class made most political and economic decisions, at times exacting tribute or labor from villages, said Sheets. But at Ceren, the villagers appear to have had free reign regarding their architecture, crop choices, religious activities and economics.

“This is the first clear window anyone has had on the daily activities and the quality of life of Maya commoners back then,” said Sheets, who is directing the excavation. “At Ceren we found virtually no influence and certainly no control by the elites.”

A paper on the subject appears in the current issue of Latin American Antiquity published by the Society for American Archaeology. The 10-acre Ceren research area was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993.

Ceren is believed to have been home to about 200 people. Researchers have excavated 12 buildings, including living quarters, storehouses, workshops, kitchens, religious buildings and a community sauna. There are dozens of unexcavated structures, and perhaps even another settlement or two under the Loma Caldera volcanic ash, which covers an area of roughly two square miles, Sheets said. Thus far, no bodies have been found, an indication a precursor earthquake may have given residents a running start just before the eruption.

The only relationship Ceren commoners had with Maya elite was indirect, through public marketplace transactions in El Salvador’s Zapotitan Valley. There, Ceren farmers likely swapped surplus crops or crafts for coveted specialty items like jade axes, obsidian knives and colorfully decorated polychrome pots, all of which elites arranged to have brought to market from a distance. Virtually every Ceren household had a jade axe–which is harder than steel–used for tree cutting, building and woodworking.

“The Ceren people could have chosen to do business at about a dozen different marketplaces in the region,” said Sheets. “If they thought the elites were charging too much at one marketplace, they were free to vote with their feet and go to another.”

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Professor Payson Sheets points to the imprint of several toes from a footprint left on the Ceren sacbe. Footprints pointed away from the village and may have been made by Mayans fleeing the volcanic eruption. Credit Rachel Egan, University of Colorado.

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One of the excavated community buildings has two large benches in the front room, which Sheets believes were used by village elders when making decisions. One decision would have involved organizing the annual crop harvest festival, a celebratory eating and drinking ritual that appears to have been underway at Ceren when the Loma Caldera volcano abruptly blew just north of the village, said Sheets.

He believes the villagers fled south, perhaps along a white road leading away from the village discovered under 15 feet of ash in 2011. The elevated road, known as a sacbe (SOCK-bay), is about 2 meters wide and made from white tightly packed volcanic ash, with drainage ditches along each edge. The sacbe appears to split in the village and lead toward the plaza and two religious structures: the large ceremonial building and a second, smaller structure used by a female shaman.

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Structures at Ceren were buried in up to 17 feet of ash over a period of several days, freezing the 1,400-year-old village in time. Credit: University of Colorado

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Unique research

“There are two aspects that make this project unique,” said John Yellen, NSF program manager for the Ceren excavations. “The first is the incredible degree of preservation at Ceren, which captures in such detail a moment in time. The second is the perseverance and ingenuity of Dr. Sheets, who devised effective techniques to address a broad range of questions involving Ceren’s agricultural practices and its social organization.”

Prior to the discovery of Ceren’s sacbe, such “white way” roads—which often connected temples, plazas and towns and had strong practical, political and spiritual connotations—were known only from Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and all were lined on each side with paving stones, unlike the Ceren sacbe, said Sheets. (A portion is pictured above right, buried under about 16 feet of ash. The trench on the left side was a drainage canal to catch excess rainwater).

Measurements with an instrument known as a penetrometer indicated the sacbe was extraordinarily hard. This was, in part, because villagers must have vigorously pounded sections of the sacbe with heavy objects over a period of days, he said. In addition, tiny, angular grains of the ash, or tephra used to build the sacbe lock together in a tight matrix when packed down under moist conditions. The center of the sacbe was slightly grooved, an indication people walked single file as they headed to their crop fields or perhaps traveled to and from the nearby town of San Andres.

“The western canal of the sacbe was crisp and well formed and had apparently been worked on just days before the eruption,” said Sheets. “But it looks like the workers hadn’t gotten around to maintaining the eastern canal before the volcanic event.”

The team, which has dug 10 test pits so far in an attempt to trace the path of the sacbe from Ceren south, found several dozen footprints on its outer, softer edges. “More than half of the footprints were headed south away from the village, away from the danger,” Sheets said. “I think at least some of them were left by people fleeing the eruption.”

Who built and maintained the sacbe—now known to stretch at least 150 meters from the village and may well go all the way to San Andres—is still a mystery. “We think the work was done on the household level with multiple families involved, perhaps supervised by village elders,” said Sheets.

There also is evidence that residents of particular households at Ceren were responsible for the upkeep of certain community structures, said Sheets. One household, for example, contained an inordinate amount of pots and firewood that the researchers speculated were used during activities in the domed community sauna building. That sweat bath, which could comfortably seat about a dozen people, had a central firebox where water was poured to create the desired steam and heat, Sheets said.

In 2009, Sheets and his team discovered intensively cultivated manioc (cassava) fields at Ceren. It was the first and only evidence of intense manioc cultivation at any New World archaeology site. Sheets and others believe such large manioc crops could have played a vital role in feeding indigenous societies living throughout tropical Latin America. Today, dried manioc powder is used in the region to make tortillas and tamales, and fermented manioc is used to make alcoholic beverages.

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Co-authors on the new study included doctoral students Rachel Egan and Alexandria Halmbalcher of CU-Boulder, former CU-Boulder doctoral student Christine Dixon (now a faculty member at Green River College in Auburn, Washington); professor David Lentz and doctoral student Venecia Slotten from the University of Cincinnati; Rocio Herrera of National Museum of Anthropology in San Salvador; and doctoral student Celine Lamb of the University of Kentucky.

CU-Boulder undergraduates and graduate students have been involved in all aspects of the Ceren excavation, which likely will continue for decades. The first vestiges of the site were inadvertently uncovered in 1976 by a bulldozer, leveling ground for a government agricultural project. Sheets began research on the site two years later after radiocarbon dates led him to conclude the buried village was ancient.

In addition to NSF, Sheets and his colleagues have collaborated with the National Geographic Society, the Smithsonian Institution, the Getty Conservation Institute and a number of universities.

Source: National Science Foundation and University of Colorado, Boulder. All images courtesy University of Colorado.

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Paleolithic humans in Europe dealt with saber-toothed cats, study shows

Posted on November 3, 2015 by No Author -

Any artist-created images you may have seen depicting prehistoric humans hunting or fighting with saber-toothed cats may not represent a scene very far from reality about 300,000 years ago when Lower Paleolithic humans actually did share the same environment with the big cats in what is present-day Europe.

According to scientists who have studied remains unearthed at the archaeological site of Schöningen in north-central Germany, the wooden spear-making humans who lived in the region of the site had up-close-and-personal contact with the European saber-toothed cat (Homotherium latidens) about 300,000 years ago. Whether they interacted with the big cats as their predators (hunter) or as defenders (the hunted), is still open to question and debate.

The clues come from their examination of five fossil teeth and one fossil humerus identified as representing two saber-toothed cats, found within the context of the finds unearthed at the famous Schöningen site, where, in addition to other items, archaeologists recovered a number of wooden spears, one lance, a double pointed stick, and a burnt stick dating to the Holsteinian, c. 300 kyr.

“The humerus is a unique specimen; it shows evidence of hominin impacts and use as a percussor,” reported the researchers in their report abstract, the full study of which is now published and available online as an article in press in the Journal of Human Evolution. “The Homotherium remains from Schöningen are the best documented finds of this species in an archaeological setting and they are amongst the youngest specimens of Homotherium in Europe,” the researchers added.*

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Spear no. 8 at Schöningen in situ. P. Pfarr NLD, Wikimedia Commons

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The study of the finds has implications for understanding the relationship between these Paleolithic humans and the carnivores who lived within the same ecological context. “The presence of this species as a carnivore competitor would certainly have impacted the lives of late Middle Pleistocene hominins,” the researchers concluded. “The discovery illustrates the possible day-to-day challenges that the Schöningen hominins would have faced and suggests that the wooden spears were not necessarily only used for hunting, but possibly also as a weapon for self-defense.”*

The Paleolithic site of Schöningen is best known for the earliest known, completely preserved wooden weapons or artifacts uncovered there by archaeologists under the direction of Dr. Hartmut Thieme between 1994 and 1998 at an open-cast lignite mine. Deposited in organic sediments at a former lakeshore, they were found in combination with the remains of about 16,000 animal bones, including 20 wild horses, whose bones featured numerous butchery marks, including one pelvis that still had a spear protruding from it. The finds are considered evidence that early humans were active hunters with specialized tool kits as early as 300,000 or more years ago.

The saber-toothed cat fossil study was conducted by Jordi Serangeli of the Institute for Archaeological Sciences, University of Tübingen, and colleagues from other institutions, who also authored the recently published paper.

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*Jordi Serangeli, et al., The European saber-toothed cat (Homotherium latidens) found in the “Spear Horizon” at Schöningen (Germany), Journal of Human Evolution, 23 October 2015.

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Beyond the temples, ancient bones reveal the lives of the Mayan working class

Posted on October 30, 2015 by No Author -

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA—Most of what we know about Mayan civilization relates to kings, queens and their elaborate temples. To understand what life was like for the 99 percent, one researcher turned to ancient animal bones stored at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

Ashley Sharpe, a doctoral student at the museum on the UF campus, says the picture researchers have painted of the Maya people isn’t broad enough.

“When you think about the Romans and the Greeks, we know a lot about all of the different social classes — from the Caesars down to the commoners — but although there were tens of thousands of middle-class and lower-income Maya in big cities, we still don’t know much about the everyday lives of most people.”

For the first time in Maya archaeology research, 22,000 animal remains at the museum, one of the largest collections of its kind outside of Central America, were used as clues about life in the Maya lower classes. The bones revealed that the civilization known for its art and astronomy also had political and economic systems that were more complex than previously thought – systems similar to modern societies. The details are described in a new study appearing online this month in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.

“We looked at how the Maya acquired and distributed animal resources in order to learn more about the economy and how the royal, elite and lower classes interacted,” said Sharpe, who has either lived in or made frequent trips to the Maya region since 2008. “It turns out, the Maya states and classes were not all homogenous. They had complicated systems in place for trade relations, distribution of food and access to species, which varied among the cities and social classes much like they do today.”

Sharpe and co-author Kitty Emery, Florida Museum associate curator of environmental archaeology, examined the animal remains recovered from the ruins of three Maya city-states in Guatemala, including the famous site of Aguateca that was burned after a surprise enemy attack which resulted in a level of preservation similar to the Roman ruins of Pompeii.

Sharpe traced the movement of animals and their resources from trade partners to Aguateca and the capitals of Piedras Negras and Yaxchilan. She also followed the flow of resources between royalty, the rich and the poor at the capital cities and to the less powerful surrounding villages.

“The Maya used animals for things like hides, tools, jewelry and musical instruments, but they were also vitally important as emblems of status, royalty and the symbolic world of the gods, and thus often were prime resources jealously guarded by the rich and powerful,” Emery said.

Surprisingly, however, study researchers found that middle-ranking elites used the widest variety of animals. Royalty and other high-ranking elites focused on a select group of symbolic and prestigious animals like jaguars and crocodiles, Sharpe said.

“We had expected that the elites would have the highest diversity but that was not the case,” she said. “The elites ate animals that were considered delicacies, sort of the way people in our own upper class eat things like caviar, but the rest of us think it’s kind of gross.”

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Temple Seigeur, Aguateca. Wikimedia Commons

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Sharpe said poor villagers mostly ate fish and shellfish from rivers near their homes. However, both the poor and middle-elite classes living at the capitals kept a wider variety of animals for themselves than they shared with the surrounding villages, particularly more species from deep inside forests and from the ocean, which was 50 to 100 miles away. At Aguateca, more than 100 miles from the nearest coast, thousands of marine shells were found covering the floors of ancient households and craft workshops.

“These people didn’t have pack animals like in the Old World where they had horses and donkeys to carry goods,” Sharpe said. “They were literally carrying things on their backs from the sea. They did have rivers to help with transportation, but not a lot of rivers, and on land they also had the jungle to contend with.”

At Yaxchilan, more than half of the skeletons found were deer, suggesting residents primarily relied on nearby forests, including the deer that fed on their corn fields. However, much like in medieval Britain, there is evidence the Maya may have regulated hunting and fishing, creating more of a divide in access to animal resources among the classes, Sharpe said. At each of the three cities, elites, middle and lower classes all had access to different types of species, both imported marine resources as well as animals that could be obtained from nearby forests and rivers, she said.

The differences in predominate species, such as marine animals and deer, show the city-states likely had different trade partners, which Sharpe said makes sense because we know there were, at times, hostilities between the cities. The differences could also point to unique cultural identities, she said. For example, the residents of Aguateca were known for their jewelry made from shells.

“This is the first time we’re seeing this sort of evidence for what the middle and lower classes were doing,” Sharpe said.

Archaeologists have been working amid dense jungle to understand how the many Maya city-states functioned since the early 20th century. They have raised questions about how states cooperated, or didn’t, with one another, how much control and interaction state capitals had with their subordinate villages, and how the various social classes differed, Sharpe said.

Sharpe and Emery decided to analyze animal bones to begin answering these questions because animal resources played such a vital role in the politics and economy of the Late Classic Maya civilization (A.D. 500-900), Emery said. But buried beneath the jungle floor in Guatemala are enough mysteries to fill Sharpe’s entire career.

“It almost doesn’t matter where you dig in the jungle near these centers, you hit paved limestone floor. It gives you the sense that at one time, the entire place was deforested and it was a massive city,” she said. “When you travel to these capitals, you drive over unexcavated mounds that were once people’s houses — people we know little or nothing about.”

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Source: University of Florida press release.

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Early humans linked to ancient Australian extinction

Posted on October 29, 2015 by No Author -

SOCIETY OF VERTEBRATE PALEONTOLOGY—While the anthropogenic impact on global species diversity is clear, the role of ancient human populations in causing extinctions is more controversial. New data presented at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meetings in Dallas, Texas, implicates early humans in the extinction of large mammals, birds and lizards in Australia. More precise dating of these extinction events places them 10 thousand years after the first arrival of humans in Australia, suggesting human predation was the most likely cause.

Australia was once home to a plethora of large-bodied animals, including a huge monitor lizard, large terrestrial birds, a giant wombat, the marsupial lion, and giant kangaroos. Sometime during the last ice age this once-abundant ‘megafauna’ disappeared. Though this extinction roughly coincides with the first arrival of humans to Australia, their direct role has been hotly debated, as some research has claimed that humans arrived after some of the animals were already extinct.

To shed light on this controversial issue, paleontologist John Alroy, of Macquarie University, New South Wales, and colleagues, set out to more precisely estimate the timing of the Australian megafaunal extinctions. Alroy explains “There’s been a lengthy, sometimes heated debate about whether human hunting or other impacts caused the huge mass extinction of large terrestrial vertebrates in Australia during the last glacial period.”

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Reconstruction of an extinct marsupial lion within the Victoria Cave in Australia. Wikimedia Commons

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Alroy dated over 200 fossils by measuring the levels of radioactive carbon in their bones. Precisely estimating when a species went extinct is difficult because there are gaps in the fossil record. To overcome this problem, Alroy estimated the likely time-range during which the extinction occurred based on the age of the most recent fossil. He found that the megafauna disappeared between 27 and 40 thousand years ago. Using a similar method, he estimated that the first humans arrived between 50 and 61 thousand years ago. This confidently puts humans on Australia when the megafaunal extinctions occurred.

The timings also suggest that there was a ten thousand year lag between the first appearance of humans and their impact on the megafauna. Alroy and colleagues suggest that this delay could relate to the time taken for humans to spread across Australia, or for the technology of early populations to advance enough to hunt large prey.

These findings not only highlight the long-term impact of humans in Australia, but also support patterns seen elsewhere, explains Alroy, “The results are also important because they’re consistent with evidence that human hunting caused major extinctions later on in North and South America, in addition to relatively recent extinctions on many islands (such as the loss of moas in New Zealand).”

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Source: Press release of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology

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Pre-contact Amazonian natives had little impact on land, new research finds

Posted on October 28, 2015 by No Author -

FLORIDA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY—New research led by Florida Institute of Technology shows that the impacts of indigenous people prior to European contact impacted riverside forests, but that such impacts were largely limited to an area within a day’s walk from a river.

The findings by the international team of archaeobotanists, paleoecologists and ecologists will be published online in the paper “Anthropogenic influence on Amazonian forests in prehistory: An ecological perspective” on Oct. 28 in the Journal of Biogeography.

The new research, conducted using plant fossils, estimates of mammal density, remote sensing and human population modeling, reinforces that Amazonian forests may be very vulnerable to disturbance by logging , mining and other large enterprises. The study refutes an emerging theory from some archaeologists and anthropologists that Amazonian rain forests are the result of ancient managed landscapes – a notion that undermines the ecological view of these forests as fragile ecosystems.

“Nobody doubts the importance of human actions along the major waterways,” said Mark Bush, professor of biological sciences at the Florida Institute of Technology and the lead author of the paper. “But whether humans had a greater impact on the ecosystem than any other large mammal has yet to be established in much of western Amazonia.”

Dolores Piperno, curator of archaeobotany and South American archaeology at the American Museum of Natural History and co-author of the study, said the recent emphasis on Amazonia as a manufactured and domesticated landscape overstates the facts.

“At nearly the size of the continental United States, Amazonia is a vast landscape with considerable biotic and abiotic heterogeneity. Extrapolations being made from relatively few archaeological sites mainly located along water courses as to the overall effect of prehistoric human occupation must be tempered in the face of available and yet-to-be-accumulated empirical data.”

“This is not a debate solely about what happened over 500 years ago,” Bush added. “The implications are very relevant to modern society and conservation.”

He said if the forests were heavily modified prior to European arrival and have regrown in just over one tree generation to such a vast level of biodiversity, this rapid recovery could be used as a justification to log forests aggressively. If, however, humans had a very limited influence, as their findings have shown, then logging and other major disturbances would have long-lasting, possibly irreversible, consequences on the forest.

“This distinction becomes increasingly important as policy makers decide whether to enforce or relax protections of areas already designated as parks, including the Yasuni of Ecuador and protected areas in Brazil,” said Bush, who has spent almost 30 years conducting research in the Amazon.

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This is a false-color satellite image of a western Amazonian river showing abandoned ox-bow channels and ox-bow lakes where the river has meandered in its floodplain. Beyond the limit of the ox-bows is the terra firme forest. A new study finds the impact of people living near rivers on the surrounding land is less than earlier theories had suggested. Credit: Florida Institute of Technology

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The study is also relevant in shaping our understanding of the extent to which the Amazon Basin might offset carbon dioxide produced in industrialized areas. The young forest implied by the man-made-disturbance scenario leads to a large potential for further uptake of carbon, helping to offset carbon emissions from other regions. Bush and colleagues, however, project that very little of Amazonia will behave this way, suggesting that the massive amount of carbon held in Amazonian forest is most likely already close to a maximum capacity.

The researchers conclude that pre-European land-use by native peoples in Amazonia was highly variable, with dense settlements and profound forest disturbance over a relatively small proportion of the basin, leaving large areas little affected by human activity.

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The data used in the study were gathered with support from the National Science Foundation, the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and National Museum of Natural History.

Source: Press release of the Florida Institute of Technology.

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UC team discovers rare warrior tomb filled with Bronze Age wealth and weapons

Posted on October 27, 2015 by No Author -

UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI—On the floor of the grave lay the skeleton of an adult male, stretched out on his back. Weapons lay to his left, and jewelry to his right.

Near the head and chest was a bronze sword, its ivory hilt covered in gold. A gold-hilted dagger lay beneath it. Still more weapons were found by the man’s legs and feet.

Gold cups rested on his chest and stomach, and near his neck was a perfectly preserved gold necklace with two pendants. By his right side and spread around his head were over one thousand beads of carnelian, amethyst, jasper, agate and gold. Nearby were four gold rings, and silver cups as well as bronze bowls, cups, jugs and basins.

The above describes what a University of Cincinnati-led international research team found this summer when excavating what was initially thought to be a Bronze Age house.

Instead, the team made a rich and rare discovery of an intact, Bronze Age warrior’s tomb dating back to about 1500 B.C., and that discovery is featured in The New York Times, in an article titled: A Warrior’s Grave at Pylos, Greece, Could Be a Gateway to Civilizations.

The find is so extraordinary that UC’s Shari Stocker, senior research associate in the Department of Classics, McMicken College of Arts and Sciences, states: “This previously unopened shaft grave of a wealthy Mycenaean warrior, dating back 3,500 years, is one of the most magnificent displays of prehistoric wealth discovered in mainland Greece in the past 65 years.”

Stocker co-leads the team that unearthed the undisturbed shaft tomb, along with Jack Davis, UC’s Carl W. Blegen Chair in Greek Archaeology. Other team members include UC faculty, staff specialists and students, some of whom have worked in the area around the present-day city of Pylos on the southwest coast of Greece for the last quarter century as part of the Pylos Regional Archaeological Project. That UC-based effort is dedicated to uncovering the pre-history and history of the Bronze Age center known as the Palace of Nestor, an extensive complex and a site linked to Homeric legend. Though the palace was destroyed by fire sometime around 1200 B.C., it is nevertheless the best-preserved Bronze Age palace on the Greek mainland.

It was UC archaeologist Carl Blegen, along with Konstantinos Kourouniotis, director of the National Archaeological Museum, who initially uncovered the remains of the famed Palace of Nestor in an olive grove in 1939. Located near the present-day city of Pylos, the palace was a destination in Homer’s “Odyssey,” where sacrifices were said to be offered on its beaches. The king who ruled at the Palace of Nestor controlled a vast territory that was divided into more than 20 districts with capital towns and numerous small settlements.

Explains Stocker, “This latest find is not the grave of the legendary King Nestor, who headed a contingent of Greek forces at Troy in Homer’s ‘Iliad.’ Nor is it the grave of his father, Neleus. This find may be even more important because the warrior pre-dates the time of Nestor and Neleus by, perhaps, 200 or 300 years. That means he was likely an important figure at a time when this part of Greece was being indelibly shaped by close contact with Crete, Europe’s first advanced civilization.”

Thus, the tomb may have held a powerful warrior or king – or even a trader or a raider – who died at about 30 to 35 years of age but who helped to lay the foundations of the Mycenaean culture that later flourished in the region.

Davis speculates, “Whoever he was, he seems to have been celebrated for his trading or fighting in nearby island of Crete and for his appreciation of the more-sophisticated and delicate are of the Minoan civilization (found on Crete), with which he was buried.”

POTENTIAL WEALTH OF INFORMATION

The team found the tomb while working in the area of the Palace of Nestor, seeking clues as to how the palace and its rulers came to control an area encompassing all of modern Messenia in western Greece and supporting more than 50,000 inhabitants during the Bronze Age.

Davis says that researchers were there to try and figure out how the Palace of Nestor became a center of power and when this rise in power began, questions they now think the tomb may help answer.

Given the magnitude of this find, it may be necessary to rethink when Plyos and the wider area around it began to flourish. It may have been earlier than previously thought since, somehow, whether via trade or force (e.g., raiding), its inhabitants had acquired the valuable objects found within the tomb.

Many of the tomb’s objects were made in nearby Crete and show a strong Minoan style and technique unknown in mainland Greece in the 15th century BC.

The same would likely have been true of the warrior’s dwelling during this lifetime. He would have lived on the hilltop citadel of nearby Englianos at a time when great mansions were first being built with walls of cut-stone blocks (vs. uncut rock and stones) in the style then associated with nearby Mediterranean Island of Crete and its Minoan culture, their walls decorated with paintings influenced by earlier Minoan wall paintings.

The weapons of bronze found within the tomb included a meter-long slashing sword with an ivory handle covered with gold.

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Sharon Stocker, left, and Jack Davis, right, have worked in the Pylos region of Greece for 25 years. They led a team of 45 archaeologists and experts in various specialties as well as students during this summer’s excavations. Stocker stands in the shaft tomb the team uncovered. Credit: University of Cincinnati, Pylos Excavations

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WEALTH OF JEWELS AND WEAPONRY

A remarkable store of riches was deposited in the tomb with the warrior at the time of his death. The mere fact that the vessels in the tomb are of metal (vs. ceramic pottery) is a strong indication of his great wealth.

“It is truly amazing that no ceramic vessels were included among the grave gifts. All the cups, pitchers and basins we found were of metal: bronze, silver and gold. He clearly could afford to hold regular pots of ceramic in disdain,” according to Stocker.

This member of the elite was accompanied in the afterlife by about 50 seal-stones carved with intricate Minoan designs of goddesses as well as depictions of bulls and human bull jumpers soaring over their horns. Four gold rings in the tomb contain fine Minoan carvings. A plaque of carved ivory with a representation of a griffon with huge wings lay between the man’s legs. Nearby was a bronze mirror with an ivory handle. Archaeological conservator Alexandros Zokos was essential partner in the removal, cleaning and preservation of the finds from the grave.

The weapons of bronze within the tomb include a meter-long slashing sword with an ivory handle, several daggers, a spearhead, along with the already-mentioned sword and dagger with gold pommels.

Other grave gifts originally rested above the dead warrior atop a coffin of wood which later collapsed, spilling a crushing load of objects down on the skeleton – and making the job of excavation difficult and slow.

The gifts atop the coffin included bronze jugs; a large, bronze basin; thin bands of bronze, probably from the warrior’s suit of body armor; many wild boar’s teeth from the warrior’s helmet.

In combination with this weaponry, the discovery of so much jewelry with a male burial challenges the commonly held belief that these apparently “feminine” adornments and offerings accompanied only wealthy women to the hereafter.

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This gold ring with a Cretan bull-jumping scene was one of four solid-gold rings found in the tomb. This number is more than found with any other single burial elsewhere in Greece. Credit Jennifer Stephens

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The weapons of bronze found within the tomb included a meter-long slashing sword with an ivory handle covered with gold. Credit: University of Cincinnati, Pylos Excavations

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PREVIOUSLY UNEXPLORED FIELD

What would eventually become the successful excavation of the tomb began on the team’s very first day of its field work in May 2015, conducted in a previously unexplored field near the Palace of Nestor. They immediately found one of the four walls of the warrior’s grave.

“We put a trench in this one spot because three stones were visible on the surface,” says Davis, adding, “At first, we expected to find the remains of a house. We expected that this was the corner of a room of a house, but quickly realized that it was the tops of the walls of a stone-lined grave shaft.”

In the end, the shaft measured about 5 feet deep, 4 feet wide and 8 feet long. It took the team about two weeks to clear the shaft before “we hit bronze,” says Stocker. At that point, they realized they might have an exceptional prize: an undisturbed grave shaft, never stripped by looters. She explains, “The fact that we had not encountered any objects for almost a meter indicated that whatever was at the bottom had been sealed for a long time.”

Stocker and Alison Fields, a UC graduate student of classics, did most of the actual excavation because their smaller size allowed them to work more easily and carefully around the tomb and its many precious objects.

WHAT COMES NEXT

Both Stocker and Davis say it was good luck to discover this intact grave. Given the rarity of the find, it’s unlikely to be repeated. “It’s almost as if the occupant wants his story to be told,” Davis says.

And that story will continue to unfold. The UC team and others are studying the artifacts in detail, with all artifacts remaining in Greece and their final disposition determined by the Greek Archaeological Service. Former UC anthropologist Lynne Schepartz, now of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, will study the skeletal remains.

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RESEARCH PARTNERS AND SUPPORT

The excavation was organized through the Department of Classics, University of Cincinnati, with sponsorship from the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, and with permits from the Greek Ministry of Culture. Research at Pylos by the University of Cincinnati in 2013 was supported by the Institute for Aegean Prehistory, the Louise Taft Semple Fund of UC’s Department of Classics and private donors including Phocion Potamianos, a Greek-American; James H. Ottaway, Jr., trustee of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens; and Robert McCabe, president of the Board of Trustees of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, and his wife, Dina McCabe.

Davis and Stocker also give credit and thanks to their team, the “very helpful local office of the Ministry of Culture of Greece and guards who provided security; Evangelia Militsi, director of antiquities for the Messenia office of the Ministry of Culture, and Evangelia Malapani, curator of antiquities.”

CATALOGUE OF OBJECTS FOUND WITHIN THE WARRIOR TOMB

GOLD

Four complete solid-gold seal rings to be worn on a human finger. This number is more than found with any single burial elsewhere in Greece.
Two squashed gold cups and a silver cup with a gold rim
One unique necklace of square box-shaped golden wires, more than 30 inches long with two gold pendants decorated with ivy leaves.
Numerous gold beads, all in perfect condition.

SILVER

Six silver cups.

BRONZE

One three-foot long sword, with an ivory hilt overlaid with gold in a rare technique imitating embroidery (found at warrior’s left chest).
Under this sword was a smaller dagger with a gold hilt employing the same technique.
Other bronze weapons by his legs and feet.
Bronze cups, bowls, amphora, jugs and a basin, some with gold, some with silver trim.

SEAL STONES

More than 50 seal stones, with intricate carvings in Minoan style showing goddesses, altars, reeds, lions and bulls, some with bull-jumpers soaring over the bull’s horns – all in Minoan style and probably made in Crete.

IVORY

Several pieces of carved ivory, one with a griffon with large wings and another depicting a lion attacking a griffon.
Six decorated ivory combs.

PRECIOUS STONE BEADS

An astonishing hoard of over 1000 beads, most with drill holes for stringing together. The beads are of carnelian, amethyst, jasper and agate. Some beads appear to be decorations from a burial shroud of woven fabric, suggested by several square inches of cross woven threads which survived in the grave for 3,500 years.

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Research backs human role in extinction of mammoths, other mammals

Posted on October 26, 2015 by No Author -

UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING—Radiocarbon analysis of the decline and extinction of large mammals in the Americas lends support to the idea that hunting by humans led to the animals’ demise—and backs the generally accepted understanding of when humans arrived in, and how they colonized, the Western Hemisphere.

Those findings by University of Wyoming researchers are reported this week in an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a major scientific journal. The study was conducted by Professor Todd Surovell and graduate student Spencer Pelton in UW’s Department of Anthropology; Professor Richard Anderson-Sprecher in the Department of Statistics; and Assistant Professor Adam Myers in the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

Their work supports a hypothesis forwarded in 1973 by well-known geoscientist Paul Martin that the chronology of the extinction of animals such as mammoths, mastodons, camels, horses and ground sloths in the Americas could be used to map the spread of humans through the New World.

“The heavy ecological footprint of human societies throughout prehistory is becoming increasingly apparent through a variety of environmental (indicators) independent of the archeological record,” the researchers wrote. “Past human societies have disrupted ecological communities in dramatic ways for many tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of years.”

The study involved compiling radiocarbon dates from fossils of now-extinct animals from North and South America, and looking at how those dates correspond with initial evidence of human colonization. The researchers found that, as Martin predicted, decline and extinction of the large mammals began between 13,300-15,000 years ago in Alaska and areas near the Bering Strait; between 12,900-13,200 years ago in the contiguous United States; and between 12,600-13,900 years ago in South America.

That supports the generally accepted understanding of how humans colonized the Americas: first, that they crossed from Siberia to Alaska across a Bering Strait land bridge; and then that they moved southward across North America and into South America. Hunting of the native large mammals is thought to have fueled rapid human population growth and expansion.

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Participants in the University of Wyoming’s Archaeological Field School work at the site of a mammoth kill near LaPrele Creek in Converse County, Wyo., during the past summer. A new study by UW researchers supports the hypothesis that hunting by humans led to the extinction of mammoths and other large mammals in the Americas between 12,600 and 15,000 years ago. Credit: UW Photo

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A number of hypotheses have been forwarded to explain the extinction of those animals. The “overkill hypothesis” connects their demise directly to overhunting by humans, and that is supported by the north-to-south extinction trend observed in the new study.

“… (T)he north to south time-transgressive pattern is striking, and, barring significant new data, it would be difficult to reconcile this pattern with extinction hypotheses that invoke a single climatic, ecological or catastrophic extinction mechanism across the entirety of the Americas,” the researchers wrote.

Still, they acknowledge that the issue isn’t completely settled. They note that the radiocarbon results show that the initial decline of large mammals in the far north began earlier than has been estimated by Martin and others, pointing to human colonization earlier than the current archeological record suggests; and that there is some evidence of isolated human populations in North America as early as 15,500 years ago, before significant declines in large mammal populations. Further study is needed to resolve those issues, the researchers say.

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DNA from ancient baby remains in Alaska supports Bering land bridge layover

Posted on October 26, 2015 by No Author -

SALT LAKE CITY, Oct. 26, 2015 – University of Utah scientists deciphered maternal genetic material from two babies buried together at an Alaskan campsite 11,500 years ago. They found the infants had different mothers and were the northernmost known kin to two lineages of Native Americans found farther south throughout North and South America.

By showing that both genetic lineages lived so far north so long ago, the study supports the “Beringian standstill model.” It says that Native Americans descended from people who migrated from Asia to Beringia – the vast Bering land bridge that once linked Siberia and Alaska – and then spent up to 10,000 years in Beringia before moving rapidly into the Americas beginning at least 15,000 years ago.

“These infants are the earliest human remains in northern North America, and they carry distinctly Native American lineages,” says University of Utah anthropology professor Dennis O’Rourke, senior author of the paper set for online publication the week of Oct. 26 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We see diversity that is not present in modern Native American populations of the north and we see it at a fairly early date. This is evidence there was substantial genetic variation in the Beringian population before any of them moved south.”

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This is the Upward Sun River archaeological site in Alaska. Credit Ben Potter, University of Alaska Fairbanks

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Another theory was that the two Native Americans lineages evolved as the people moved south and dispersed, not while they still were in Beringia, says Justin Tackney, the new study’s first author and a University of Utah anthropology doctoral student. But finding those lineages in the infants only a few thousand years after the migration south began indicates those lineages already were present before the migration started.

“It supports the Beringian standstill theory in that if they [the infants] represent a population that descended from the earlier Beringian population, it helps confirm the extent of genetic diversity in that source population,” O’Rourke says. “You don’t see any of these lineages that are distinctly Native American in Asia, even Siberia, so there had to be a period of isolation for these distinctive Native American lineages to have evolved away from their Asian ancestors. We believe that was in Beringia.”

The burial of ancient infants is rare. One was a 6- to 12-week-old baby; the other a stillborn or preterm 30-week fetus. The discovery of the infant burials first was reported in the same journal this past November. They are among human remains at only eight sites in North America older than 8,000 years and from which researchers obtained mitochondrial DNA – genetic information inherited only from mothers. The infants are the northernmost of all those remains and of the two lineages they represent.

In the eight sites, “we find all five of the major lineages of Native Americans,” Tackney says. “That indicates that all were present in the early population in Beringia that gave rise to all modern Native Americans.”

Sequencing DNA from the burials of Upward Sun River

The Upward Sun River ancient campsite was discovered in 2006 in the Tanana River valley about 50 miles southeast of Fairbanks. The area once was part of Beringia. The land bridge between Asia and Alaska existed when sea levels were low during the last Ice Age from 28,000 years ago to at least 18,000 years ago.

In 2010, a team led by University of Alaska Fairbanks anthropologist Ben Potter discovered the remains of a cremated 3-year-old child buried near the hearth of a residential structure. The child’s DNA couldn’t be recovered from the charred remains.

In 2013, Potter’s team found the remains of two more buried infants beneath the first. They had’t been cremated. Potter says it’s hard to tell how the infants died. Potter, who co-authored the new study, asked O’Rourke to analyze their mitochondrial DNA.

O’Rourke and Tackney worked with University of Utah geneticists to sequence the mitochondrial DNA of the two infants – known as USR1 and USR2 for Upward Sun River. Mitochondrial DNA is located in mitochondria, or the power plants of cells.

From fragments of skull bone, the researchers read 58.7 million DNA sequences from USR1 and 55.8 million from USR2. From those, the Utah scientists obtained 20,004 high-quality mitochondrial DNA sequences for USR1 and 32,979 for USR2.

“We were able to obtain the entire mitochondrial genome [genetic blueprint] sequence for each of them, as opposed to just a partial sequence,” O’Rourke says.

Infants related to two native lineages throughout the Americas

Potter says the new findings help in “understanding the genetic diversity among very early Beringian populations that connects them in many ways to Native Americans in both North and South America.”

The researchers identified infant USR1 as belonging to Native American lineage C1b, while infant USR2 is part of a more common native lineage known as B2. (Native American lineages begin with the letters A, B, C, D or X.)

“It’s not common to find infants buried together that are not related maternally,” O’Rourke says. “It raises questions about the social structure and mortuary practices of these early people,” including whether the babies had a common father.

Lineage C1 (most remains aren’t identified to the subgroup C1b level) is found most often among the Pima and Hualapai Indians of Arizona, the Delta Yuman of California, and six other tribes, including the Ignaciano in Bolivia, the extinct Tainos in Puerto Rico and a group represented by 700-year-old bones at Norris Farms in Illinois.

Lineage B2 is found most often in 37 tribes throughout the Americas, including the Yakama, Wishram, Northern Paiute-Shoshoni, Navajo, Hualapai (which also carries C1 genes), Zuni and Jemez in North America and the Quecha and Aymara in Peru. The B2 lineage also was common among the U.S. Southwest’s ancient Fremont and Anasazi.

The genetic data indicate that the most recent common ancestor of the C1b lineage existed at least 12,854 years ago, and the most recent common ancestor of the B2 lineage existed at least 12,024 years ago. O’Rourke suspects the real times were even earlier, but that nonetheless both 11,500-year-old infants were at or near the root of their respective genealogical trees.

“It may well be that the population represented by Upward Sun River is indicative of many such isolated populations distributed across Beringia, each of which may have contributed migrants to that early American Indian dispersal, and each may have been slightly genetically different from the others,” O’Rourke says.

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This map shows the location of the Upward Sun River site in Alaska where the remains of two infants, Upward Sun River individuals 1 and 2, were found in an 11,500-year-old burial. A new University of Utah analysis shows the infants belong to two genetic groups or lineages known as B2 and C1. The maps shows other Native American groups throughout the Americas that are part of the same lineages. Credit Ben Potter, University of Alaska Fairbanks

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Native lineages spread unevenly in the Americas

Modern tribal populations in northern North America show little mitochondrial DNA diversity, O’Rourke says. Why did lineages that once occupied the subarctic vanish there but show elsewhere in the Americas? And why aren’t the five major lineages spread evenly across the Americas?

“The reason is changes in population size and rates of population migration,” O’Rourke says. “In small populations, some lineages just get lost and don’t get passed on, and in others they become established and more common.”

“Studying the DNA of ancient individuals is important in researching how the Western Hemisphere was populated,” Tackney says. “Studying the genetics of these infants who died 11,500 years ago in what is now central Alaska helps answer questions of who these people were and how they are related to modern native populations.”

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The study was funded by the National Science Foundation and University of Utah, and supported by representatives of two native groups in the Upward Sun River area: the Healy Lake Tribal Council and Tanana Chiefs Conference.

O’Rourke, Tackney and Potter conducted the study with University of Utah senior lab specialists Michael Powers of the DNA sequencing core facility and W. Scott Watkins, in human genetics, and Derek Warner, sequencing facility director. Other co-authors were University of Kansas anthropologist Jennifer Raff, a former Utah postdoctoral fellow; archaeologist Joshua Reuther, of the University of Alaska Fairbanks; and bioarchaeologist Joel Irish, of Liverpool John Moores University.

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

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New insights on the wooden weapons from the Paleolithic site of Schöningen

Posted on October 23, 2015 by No Author -

The Paleolithic site of Schöningen in north-central Germany is famous for the earliest known, completely preserved wooden weapons or artifacts uncovered there by archaeologists under the direction of Dr. Hartmut Thieme between 1994 and 1998 at an open-cast lignite mine. Deposited in organic sediments at a former lakeshore, they were found in combination with the remains of about 16,000 animal bones, including 20 wild horses, whose bones featured numerous butchery marks, including one pelvis that still had a spear protruding from it. The finds are considered evidence that early humans were active hunters with specialized tool kits as early as 300,000 or more years ago. In a recent study, a team of scientists from Germany and Switzerland document results of an ongoing analysis of the nine spears, one lance, a double pointed stick, and a burnt stick dating to the Holsteinian, c. 300 kyr. Macroscopic and microscopic analyses, as well as studies of thin sections, have now contributed to a better understanding of the manufacture of the wooden weapons.

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The Schöningen excavation site. Tangelnfoto, Wikimedia Commons

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Spear 6 in situ. P. Pfarr NLD, Wikimedia Commons

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Spear 8 in situ. P. Pfarr NLD, Wikimedia Commons

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In general, the researchers report that the spears are extremely well-preserved and show no or little sign of taphonomic alteration, although some of the weapons are broken and parts were slightly moved, likely through water action. Most significantly, the excellent preservation conditions have provided considerable information on the operational sequence of production. Specifically, the hunters selected thin trunks of spruce or pine and initially stripped off the bark. Traces of cutting, scraping, and smoothing can be observed on the spear surfaces in detail. In the case of one of the artifacts, designated ‘spear X’, repeated use of the weapon is implied by apparent re-sharpening of the tip.

The researchers also suggest that analyses of the wood anatomy provides information on climatic conditions at the time of production, and contribute to a better understanding of the development of the site.

The detailed study report is published as an article in press in the Journal of Human Evolution.

Source: Edited and adapted from the subject abstract and other information sources.

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