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Discovery shows prehistoric man consumed tortoises

Posted on February 2, 2016 by No Author -

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

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

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

“Culinary and cultural depth” to the Paleolithic diet

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

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

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

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Excavation site of Qesem Cave. 66Avi, Wikimedia Commons

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

Open questions remain

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

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

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

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

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

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

Humans evolved by sharing technology and culture

Posted on February 2, 2016 by No Author -

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

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

The technology of our ancestors

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

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

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

Adapting and evolving

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

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

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

Source: University of Bergen news release.

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Study suggests how modern humans drove Neanderthals to extinction

Posted on February 1, 2016 by No Author -

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

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

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

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

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Ancient Australian bird extinction points to humans

Posted on January 29, 2016 by No Author -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: University of Colorado at Boulder news release.

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

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Ancient Babylonians Used Geometry to Track Jupiter

Posted on January 28, 2016 by No Author -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Genetic history of present-day Indians

Posted on January 25, 2016 by No Author -

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

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The Indian subcontinent. Onef9Day, Wikimedia Commons

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Source: PNAS subject press release

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

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The aftermath of 1492

Posted on January 25, 2016 by No Author -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Harvard University subject news release.

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

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Ancient humans dispersed through Arabia during greener times

Posted on January 24, 2016 by No Author -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Evidence of a prehistoric massacre extends the history of warfare

Posted on January 21, 2016 by No Author -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: University of Cambridge news release.

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Neolithic tomb reveals community stayed together, even in death

Posted on January 20, 2016 by No Author -

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Subject PLOS ONE news release.

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New discoveries concerning Ötzi’s genetic history

Posted on January 14, 2016 by No Author -

EUROPEAN ACADEMY OF BOZEN/BOLZANO (EURAC)—A study was published last week on the DNA of Helicobacter pylori, the pathogen extracted from the stomach of Ötzi, the ice mummy who has provided valuable information on the life of Homo Sapiens. New research at the European Academy of Bolzano/Bozen (EURAC) further clarifies the genetic history of the man who lived in the Eastern Alps over 5,300 years ago. In 2012 a complete analysis of the Y chromosome (transmitted from fathers to their sons) showed that Ötzi’s paternal genetic line is still present in modern-day populations. In contrast, studies of mitochondrial DNA (transmitted solely via the mother to her offspring) left many questions still open. To clarify whether the genetic maternal line of the Iceman, who lived in the eastern Alps over 5,300 years ago, has left its mark in current populations, researchers at the European Academy of Bolzano/Bozen (EURAC) have now compared his mitochondrial DNA with 1,077 modern samples. The study concluded that the Iceman’s maternal line—named K1f—is now extinct. A second part of the study, a comparison of genetic data of the mummy with data from other European Neolithic samples, provided information regarding the origin of K1f: researchers postulate that the mitochondrial lineage of the Iceman originated locally in the Alps, in a population that did not grow demographically. The study, which also clarifies Ötzi’s genetic history in the context of European demographic changes from Neolithic times onwards, was published in Scientific Reports, an open access journal of the Nature group.

“The mummy’s mitochondrial DNA was the first to be analysed, in 1994.” says Valentina Coia, a biologist at EURAC and first author of the study. “It was relatively easy to analyse and—along with the Y chromosome—allows us to go back in time, telling us about the genetic history of an individual. Despite this, the genetic relationship between the Iceman’s maternal lineage and lineages found in modern populations was not yet clear.” The most recent study regarding the analysis of Ötzi’s complete mitochondrial DNA, conducted in 2008 by other research teams showed that the Iceman’s maternal lineage—named K1f—was no longer traceable in modern populations. The study did not make clear, however, whether this was due to an insufficient number of comparison samples or whether K1f was indeed extinct. Valentina Coia explains further: “The first hypothesis could not be ruled out given that the study considered only 85 modern comparison samples from the K1 lineage—the genetic lineage that also includes that of Ötzi—which comprised few samples from Europe and especially none from the eastern Alps, which are home to populations that presumably have a genetic continuity with the Iceman. To test the two hypotheses, we needed to compare Ötzi’s mitochondrial DNA with a larger number of modern samples.” The EURAC research team, in collaboration with the Sapienza University of Rome and the University of Santiago de Compostela, thus compared the mitochondrial DNA of the Iceman with that from 1,077 individuals belonging to the K1 lineage, of which 42 samples originated from the eastern Alps and were for the first time analysed in this study. The new comparison showed that neither the Iceman’s lineage nor any other evolutionarily close lineages are present in modern populations: the researchers therefore lean towards the hypothesis that Ötzi’s maternal genetic branch has died out.

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The Iceman’s hand. Credit: South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology/EURAC/M.Lafogler

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It remains to be explained why Ötzi’s maternal lineage has disappeared, while his paternal lineage—named G2a—still exists in Europe. To clarify this point, researchers at EURAC compared Ötzi’s mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome with available data from numerous ancient samples found at 14 different archaeological sites throughout Europe. The results showed that the paternal lineage of Ötzi was very common in different regions in Europe during the Neolithic age, while his maternal lineage probably existed only in the Alps. Putting together the genetic data on the ancient and modern samples, namely those already present in the literature and those analysed in this study, researchers have now proposed the following scenario to explain the Iceman’s genetic history: Ötzi’s paternal lineage, G2a, is part of an ancient genetic substrate that arrived in Europe from the Near East with the migrations of the first Neolithic peoples some 8,000 years ago. Additional migrations and other demographic events occurring after the Neolithic Age in Europe then partially replaced G2a with other lineages, except in geographically isolated areas such as Sardinia. In contrast, the Iceman’s maternal branch originated locally in the eastern Alps at least 5,300 years ago. The same migrations that have replaced only in part his paternal lineage caused the extinction of his maternal lineage that was inherited in a small and demographic stationary population. The groups from the eastern Alps in fact significantly increased in size only from the Bronze Age onwards, as evidenced by archaeological studies conducted in the territory inhabited by the Iceman.

The article is published in Scientific Reports, an online open access journal of the Nature group.

Source: News release of the EUROPEAN ACADEMY OF BOZEN/BOLZANO (EURAC)

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Evidence Indicates Humans Occupied Arctic by 45,000 Years Ago

Posted on January 14, 2016 by No Author -

Recently excavated remains of a Siberian Arctic mammoth show signs of weapon-inflicted injuries by humans, say scientists, suggesting a human presence in the Eurasian Arctic ten millennia earlier than previously thought. It provides perhaps the oldest known story of human survival in the Arctic region, radiocarbon dating a human presence there to roughly 45,000 years ago, instead of 30 – 35,000 years ago, as previously thought.

Led by Alexei Tikhonov of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, Russia, a team excavated a carcass of a woolly mammoth in 2012 from the frozen sediments of a coastal bluff near Sopochnaya Karga (SK), on the eastern shore of Yenisei Bay in the central Siberian Arctic. The find came to Tikhonov’s attention after it was initially stumbled upon by Evgeniy Solinder, a school-boy who was spending his summer with his parents who were working at a nearby weather station. Excavations quickly followed in September/October of 2012, after which the excavated remains were sent for cold storage in nearby Dudinks and then shipped to St Petersburg in early May of 2013.

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SK mammoth unearthed. Sergey Gorbunov is excavating the left side of the carcass in the head area. Photo by Aleksei Tikhonov

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Paleolithic records of humans in the Eurasian Arctic are relatively scarce. Only a few sites in this region have yielded clues to an early human presence. In mainland arctic Siberia, the site of Berelekh, discovered by Nikolay Vereschagin in the early 70s, was for years the location yielding the oldest evidence for human migration into the arctic regions. It dated to about 13,000 years ago. But in 2001 another site in the region, known as Yana, produced evidence of a human presence dating back to about 27,000 -30,000 years. Excavated by archaeologist Vladimir Pitulko, also of the Russian Academy of Sciences, it yielded tools made from rhinoceros horn and mammoth tusk, as well as hundreds of other stone artifacts including choppers, scrapers and other biface implements. “But I never thought that even this was the final age estimate for human migrations into the arctic,” said Pitulko. “Now we have much older evidence which goes back at least 45 thousand years. The [new Yenisei Bay] site is much older than everything known before in the arctic regions, and it is clearly located farther north from the areas where sites of that age have been found. It is about 20 degrees north (about 1900 km, or 1300 miles) of any site of comparable age…… and this is a big change.”

Using radiocarbon dating and other techniques, Pitulko and other colleagues closely examined the SK mammoth bones, which included the mammoth’s tibia bone, ribs, right tusk, and mandible. The mammoth’s bones exhibited a number of unusual injuries on the ribs, right tusk and mandible, all showing clear signs that they were inflicted with human-made implements. “The bones retain a number of damages resulting from human contact, both peri-mortem and post-mortem,” says Pitulko. “Most of them resulted from a hunting and/or butchering event. These damages are located on the left scapula, several ribs, and jugal bone. They are clearly related to the death of the animal which was killed and then partly butchered. They probably used a part of the prey, but most of the mammoth body was left on the ground.”

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Cut mark on the SK mammoth 5th left rib. Photo by Pavel Ivanov

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Aleksei Tikhonov (left) and Vladimir Pitulko discussing injury on the jugal bone of SK mammoth at Zoological Museum (RAS), St Petersburg. Photo by Pavel Ivanov

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These findings leave no doubt, say the study’s authors, that people were present in the central Siberian Arctic by about 45,000 years ago. At this time, according to Pitulko, mammoth hunting by modern humans became a critical element in human survival in the harsh environment and lanscape of what is today Siberia, similar to the role buffalo played for Native Americans in North America. Removed from the hunted dead carcasses of their mammoth prey, “ivory became a substitution for materials used for shafts and points long and strong enough for killing large animals, not necessarily the mammoth,” said Pitulko. “Such tools are found elsewhere in the Upper Paleolithic, and this includes even full-size spears of ivory which are known from [the sites of] Sunghir, European Russia or from Berelekh, Siberia. This innovation became a really important discovery for humans and finally helped them in surviving and settling these landscapes.”

Thus, according to the study report authors, advancements in mammoth hunting likely allowed humans to survive and spread widely across northernmost Arctic Siberia at this time, representing an important cultural shift – one that likely facilitated the arrival of humans in the area close to the Bering land bridge, providing them an opportunity to enter the New World before the Last Glacial Maximum.

“This is especially important for questions related to the peopling of the New World, because now we know that the eastern Siberia up to its arctic limits was populated starting at roughly 50,000 years ago,” says Pitulko. “Until 15,000 years ago, sea-level (though changing) still remained low, which is clear from appropriate dates on terrestrial animals in the New Siberian islands. This presumes that the Bering land Bridge existed probably most or part of this time, so the New World gate remained open.”

Could modern humans have crossed over to the New World from here in these early times?

“Probably yes,” says Pitulko.

Future archaeological finds may provide additional clues to answering questions within this widely debated topic.

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An in-depth, full feature article about the Siberian mammoth findings will be published in the upcoming spring issue of Popular Archaeology magazine.

Some parts of this article were adapted and edited from the subject Science magazine press release.

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“Early human presence in the Arctic: Evidence from 45,000-year-old mammoth remains,” by V.V. Pitulko; A.N. Tikhonov; P.A. Nikolskiy; and K.E. Kuper at the Russian Academy of Sciences inSt. Petersburg, Russia; E.Y. Pavlova at the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia; and R.N. Polozov at the St. Petersburg Pediatric Medical University in St. Petersburg, Russia. Published in Science, the publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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Behind the Myth of King Midas

Posted on January 13, 2016 by No Author -

PHILADELPHIA, PA January 2016—What was behind the legendary story of King Midas and his golden touch?

That is the question to be answered—not with chests full of gold, but with a spectacular array of 150 objects, including more than 120 specially-loaned ancient artifacts from four museums in the Republic of Turkey, keys to telling the true story of a very real and powerful ruler of the Phrygian kingdom. The Golden Age of King Midas is an exclusive, world premiere exhibition developed by the Penn Museum, 3260 South Street in Philadelphia, in partnership with the Republic of Turkey. A special Opening Celebration on Saturday, February 13 kicks off the exhibition, which runs through November 27, 2016.

King Midas lived in the prosperous city of Gordion, a site in what is now central Turkey, circa 750–700 BCE, ruling Phrygia and influencing the neighboring kingdoms. He likely reigned during the time in which Homer’s Iliad was first written down. It was indeed a golden age.

Archaeologists from the Penn Museum (the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology) have been excavating at Gordion—and making international headlines with their discoveries—since 1950. The crossroads of many cultures over time, Gordion offers insight into thousands of years of history, but it is best known as the political and cultural capital of the Phrygians, a people who dominated much of what is now Turkey nearly 3,000 years ago. With its monumental architecture and a series of wealthy tombs belonging to Phrygian royalty and elites, Gordion has supplied the most important archaeological evidence for the unique material achievements of the once great Phrygian civilization.

From Myth to Man

Nearly 3,000 years after his death, we know King Midas by unforgettable stories told by ancient Greeks long after he was dead, stories like King Midas and the Golden Touch and King Midas and the Donkey Ears. An interactive “myth book” invites guests to explore the stories, while artifacts and excavation discoveries detailed throughout the exhibition begin to reveal the man behind the myths. The most extensive record of Midas’ activities comes from the annual records of the Assyrian kings, who referred to him as Mita, ruler of Mushku (Phrygia), on a clay tablet, ca. 713 BCE, on loan from the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago for the exhibition.

A detailed timeline draws guests into the exhibition and back in time. It is at Gordion, where the story of Midas’ actual life and times truly emerges. One object from Greece takes center stage: an ivory lion tamer figurine on loan from the Delphi Archaeological Museum; it probably formed part of a throne dedicated by Midas to Apollo in the late 8th century BCE.

A Unique Opportunity

In 1957, the Penn Museum excavated a spectacular tomb, referred to as Tumulus MM, for Midas Mound. This was the largest of about 120 man-made mounds of earth, clay, and stone used to mark important burials at Gordion. Dated to ca. 740 BCE, it is believed to be the final resting place of King Midas’ father Gordios—a son’s spectacular tribute. The archaeologists entered the tomb, the oldest standing wooden building in the world, and beheld an extraordinary sight: the skeleton of a king in what was left of a cedar coffin, surrounded by the bronze bowls, serving vessels, wooden tables, and food remains from an extensive funeral banquet. The details of the banquet we now know thanks to the analysis of the sediment at the bottom of the vessels: a hearty lamb and lentil stew, and ample quantities of a drink containing wine, beer, and honey mead.

The discovery of an intact royal tomb nearly 3,000 years old is highly unusual, as is the excellent state of preservation of the associated artifacts.

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A partial view inside Tumulus MM—the burial chamber of a Phrygian ruler, probably the father of King Midas. Tumulus MM is the oldest known intact wooden building in the world. Exhibited: One of the three cauldrons found inside the tomb, probably all used for beer, features two siren attachments and two bearded demon attachments. Bronze drinking bowls are scattered across the floor of the tomb chamber, dated to circa 740 BCE, and excavated by the Penn Museum in 1957. Photo: 1957, Penn Museum Gordion Archive, G-2390.

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Exhibited: Detail of one of the three massive bronze cauldrons from Tumulus MM, tomb of a Phrygian ruler, probably the father of King Midas. The figure of a siren and the associated ring handle form one of four attachments on the cauldron. The cauldron probably once held an alcoholic beverage made of barley beer, grape wine, and honey mead, part of an elaborate funeral banquet for the deceased ruler. The cauldron dates to circa 740 BCE. It was excavated by the Penn Museum at Gordion in 1957. Dimensions—Height: 20.2 inches. Diameter: 30.7 inches (diameter at rim: 23 inches). Capacity: about 40 gallons [=150 liters]. Photo: Penn Museum Gordion Archive, 2014_4080.

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Exhibited: A bronze double-pinned fibula (clothing attachment) with shield, from Tumulus MM. Excavated 1957. Middle Phrygian period, ca. 740 BCE. Photo: Penn Museum Gordion Archive, G-2561.

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Guests to The Golden Age of King Midas meet a life-sized photograph of archaeologist Rodney Young at the entrance of a space designed to resemble the wooden tomb and featuring many of the very objects the excavators first encountered. Inside this space, a video experience lets visitors explore the tomb as if they were in the tomb itself when it was sealed nearly 3,000 years ago. Now housed in Turkish Museums in Ankara, Istanbul, Antalya, and Gordion, most of these extraordinary artifacts have never before traveled to the United States. Site videos, including scenes taken during the world-famous excavation in 1957, bring guests into the moment of discovery.

There are no known visual records of what King Midas looked like, but if he resembled his father, there is some intriguing evidence. In 1988, the Penn Museum worked with Dr. John Prag and Richard Neave of Manchester University to develop a reconstructed plaster head of Gordios based on his skeletal remains; a plaster cast will be on display in the exhibition. With it is a selection from an assortment of 189 large bronze fibulae, used for pinning garments, that were found in King Midas’ father’s tomb and in others; they may have been used as calling cards at the elaborate funerals.

Objects from five smaller tombs excavated at Gordion—including a child’s tomb that contained an elegant and distinctive goat-shaped jug—provide more information about the site and the people who lived and died there. While no gold was found in the largest tomb, jewelry from a later tomb, ca. 530 BCE, is featured, including a distinctive gold acorn necklace.

Midas on the World Stage

Gordion is immense, about 2.5 miles wide. Penn Museum continues excavations and conservation projects on and around the citadel, a high fortress at the heart of Phrygia’s capital city, where hundreds of people lived and worked. A 3-D model of the citadel, enlivened by light and sound projections, offers guests a bird’s eye view. In the 1950s, archaeologists uncovered the oldest colored pebble mosaic floor known in the world in a large citadel building. Dated to the late 9th century BCE, it measures 35 by 31 feet; a recently conserved section of that floor, roughly five feet long, will be on display in the exhibition.

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This watercolor is of a colored pebble mosaic floor in a large building—the earliest known pebble mosaic floor in the world—excavated inside the citadel at Gordion in central Turkey in 1956. The mosaic, which measures 35 x 31 feet, is dated to the late 9th century BCE. Photo of watercolor by Joseph Last, 1956, Penn Museum Gordion Archive, 400833, Plan1956-17.

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Part of the colored pebble mosaic floor, the oldest known in the world, found in a large hall excavated inside the citadel at Gordion in 1956. One of 33 panels removed for conservation and display in 1963, this piece was newly conserved in the summer of 2015 by the team at Gordion. It dates to the late 9th century BCE. Photo: Penn Museum Gordion Archive, 2015_04663.

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The story of King Midas is the story of influence and power on an international stage with neighboring kingdoms on all sides. Here, the Penn Museum’s own collections shine: visitors are introduced to the spectacular gold work of the nomadic Scythians and the Lydians; distinctive metalwork of the Urartian Empire; monumental stone and ivory reliefs of the Assyrians; and stone sculpture of powerful Persia, which conquered Gordion in the 6th century BCE. An animated map provides a flyover of the region during and just after Midas’ time.

Gordion After Midas

While the Phrygian period at Gordion is the most renowned, this strategically situated site contains thousands of years of history, and the exhibition sheds light on what happened in Gordion in the centuries after King Midas ruled.

Guests will see fragments—and remarkable watercolor recreations by renowned archaeological illustrator Piet De Jong—of the famous “Painted House” built about 500 BCE, and excavated in Gordion’s citadel during the 1950s. The Painted House murals provide a rare glimpse into the religious rituals of the citadel’s residents, and the lives of its women, 200 years after the death of King Midas.

One of the most important historical accounts involves Alexander the Great’s 333 BCE visit to Gordion, where he purportedly cut the “Gordian Knot.”

The Exhibition Team

Dr. C. Brian Rose, Penn Museum’s Gordion Archaeological Project Director, is the exhibition curator, and worked with Turkish colleagues to select the loaned artifacts. Kate Quinn, Exhibition and Public Programs Director, led the exhibition team that included in-house interpretive planner Jessica Bicknell, and a team of in-house designers, as well as outside collaborators including Night Kitchen Interactive and Wish Design, Painting and Sculpture.

The Golden Age of King Midas is made possible with support from the 1984 Foundation; the Selz Foundation; Frederick J. Manning, W69, and the Manning Family; the Susan Drossman Sokoloff and Adam D. Sokoloff Exhibitions Fund; the Turkish Cultural Foundation, and Joan Bachman in honor of Mary Bert Gutman.

Source: Penn Museum press release.

Does this interest you? See the in-depth free premium article, Uncovering the City of King Midas,for more about the news-making excavations at Gordion.

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Admission to the special exhibition The Golden Age of King Midas (includes general admission) is $20 adults; $18 senior citizens (65 and above); $15 for children and full-time students with ID; $5 for active military. Admission is free for Penn Museum members, PennCard holders, and children 5 and younger. For more information about membership, including exclusive membership Midas programs, call 215.898.5093.

The Penn Museum has developed a wide range of special events, from scholarly symposia to children’s and family programs for the exhibition. Visit www.penn.museum/midas beginning January 12 for event and Midas Touch hotel package details. For information on group tours and group rates, call Visitor Services at 215.746.8183.

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Plague may have persisted in Europe during 300-year period, including ‘Black Death’

Posted on January 13, 2016 by No Author -

The bacteria that causes plague, Y. pestis, may have persisted long-term in Europe from the 14th to 17th century in an unknown reservoir, according to a study published January 13, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Lisa Seifert from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany, and colleagues.

Not all researchers agree about the role Yersinia pestis played in the second plague pandemic which occurred from the 14th to 17th century. Some suggest it may have been a result of a viral disease; however, most recent research on ancient plague demonstrates that the deadly disease existed thousands of years earlier than previously thought. In this study researchers recovered and analyzed ancient DNA from 30 plague victims of the second plague pandemic. They were excavated from two different burial sites in Germany, and spanning more than 300 years.

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Above: Original photograph of the triple-inhumation regarding the three male soldiers (Brandenburg, Germany), is dated to the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648). Credit: Seifert et al.

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Of 30 skeletons tested, eight were positive for Yersinia pestis-specific nucleic acid. All positive individuals genetic material were highly similar to previously investigated plague victims from other European countries and had identical Y. pestis genotype. The author suggest that in addition to the assumed continuous reintroduction of Y. pestis from central Asia in multiple waves during the second pandemic, it’s also possible that Y. pestis persisted long-term in Europe in a yet unknown reservoir host.

Source: PLOS ONE press release.

Seifert L, Wiechmann I, Harbeck M, Thomas A, Grupe G, Projahn M, et al. (2016) Genotyping Yersinia pestis in Historical Plague: Evidence for Long-Term Persistence of Y. pestis in Europe from the 14th to the 17th Century. PLoS ONE 11(1): e0145194. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0145194

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What pre-Roman burials in Italy are telling us

Posted on January 12, 2016 by No Author -

UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI—Death is inevitable, but what death shows us about the social behaviors of the living is not.

And recent University of Cincinnati research examining the ancient bereavement practices from the the Central Apulian region in pre-Roman Italy helps shed light on economic and social mobility, military service and even drinking customs in a culture that left no written history.

For instance, by focusing on the logistics of burials, treatment of deceased bodies and grave contents dating from about 525-200 BC, UC Classics doctoral student Bice Peruzzi found indications of strong social stratification and hierarchy. She also found indications of the commonality of military service since men’s tombs of the era routinely contained metal weaponry lying across or near the skeletal remains.

Another example: in the second half of the 4th century, an impressive increase in the number of tombs over a 50-year period indicates newer social groups gaining access to ceremonial burials that included use of the space by the living for a brief period of dancing and banqueting.

“After going through volumes of collected material, I realized that there was so much more that could be said about what was happening in the development of this particular culture,” says Peruzzi. “In spite of having no written history, I was able to distinguish three different periods and then connect them to the larger Mediterranean history to see how their society changed.”

She just presented her findings on these funerary practices in their broader historical context at the 2016 Archaeological Institute of America/Society for Classical Studies Annual Meeting in San Francisco.

WINE, WOMEN, AND WAR

Because a major Greek influence on this region had already existed, Preuzzi was not surprised to find valuable Greek vases and artifacts among the Apulian tomb contents from the 1st period (525-350). The finely detailed imagery on these vases often focused on women engaged in everyday activities such as courting, processions and wine offerings, which opened interesting questions about the role of women in those communities.

Other tomb contents ranged from wine cups and feasting sets to metal weaponry among the male tombs. And according to Peruzzi, the objects were chosen intentionally and purposefully placed during funerary rituals to project a personal message about the deceased’s role in the community.

Peruzzi also found remarkable evidence for tomb reuse. In a curious and calculated fashion, several tombs had been reopened showing older bones and artifacts pushed to the side to make way for a newer body and its contents, possibly creating a link between the present funeral and the memory of the past one.

“The care in displaying the artifacts in these tombs is striking, especially considering that the objects could have been visible only during the brief period when the tomb was open,” says Peruzzi. “This gives the impression that during Period 1 the tomb was conceived not only as the final resting place of the deceased, but almost as the stage for dancing and a burial performance.”

A WIDENING WORLD

Throughout Period 2 (350-300), Peruzzi found that general trends in burial ceremony continued to focus around themes of banquet, war and women. But the increase in the number of tombs by this time strongly indicated that newer social groups were gaining access to this banquet-type funeral.

But much like in modern society, the elite now showed signs of breaking away from former trends to distinguish themselves from the general population. Items inside their tombs now included many new large Apulian red figure vases with generic iconography and repetitive designs.

“In this period we also find occasional assemblages containing very large vases with sophisticated iconographies that portray Greek tragedies,” says Peruzzi. “Scholars attribute this shift in taste to Greek influence, in particular the fascination with the military victories of Alexander the Great.

“The new growth of specific burial sites to the detriment of others in addition to newly constructed walls surrounding the communities also indicates a general movement toward urbanization in Period 2.”

NEW NEIGHBORHOODS

Now entering into an era of great transformation, Period 3 (300-200) began to shift from large numbers of individual tombs to larger chamber tombs—often containing whole families—with a new emphasis on elaborate funerary architecture around the tombs.

And as for grave site partying, not so much. The iconography of female beauty, happiness in the afterlife and piety toward the dead formerly found on vase designs had changed.

Instead, grave goods now contained bottomless, undecorated ceramics were created simply to be symbolic of the older communal feasting. And metal weaponry was now replaced by a small number of fibulae, hairpins and other personal ornaments.

With new defensive walls now surrounding larger communities and more sophisticated governmental systems developing, Peruzzi found the new class of elites shifting away from elaborate burial ceremonies to using different arenas to negotiate their status.

“By looking at artifacts in their archaeological and social context, I was able to illustrate changes never before recognized,” says Peruzzi. ” From the emergence of new social groups at the end of the 6th century B.C. to the gradual urbanization and separation of “ethnic” groups during the 3rd century B.C., the evolution of funerary practices can be successfully used to highlight major transformations in the social organization of Central Apulia communities.”

Source: University of Cincinnati subject news release.

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For this project and dissertation, Peruzzi utilized published excavation reports, archaeological monographs, exhibit catalogues, academic journals and bulletins. Also, libraries and museums in Taranto, Egnaza, Gioia del Colle, Matera and Polenza, Ruvo, Rutigliano, Gravina, Bitonto and Ginosa, as well as the University of Foggia and the University of Bari in Italy and the University of Cincinnati.

Support for the dissertation research came from the Louise Semple Taft Fellowship, the Cedric Boulter Memorial Felllowship and the URC Graduate Student Research Fellowship. This paper was also possible thanks to the Grand Valley State University Center for Scholarly and Creative Excellence Dissemination Grant.

Image: Top Left: A 19th century watercolor of the Tomb of the Dancers. Credit: Source/Sena Chiesa and Arslan 2004

Image: Center Right: A 4th century assemblage with fine Greek vases, banquet implements and metal weapons. Credit: Source/Riccardi 2003

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New findings on prehistoric stone tool industry in Italy

Posted on January 11, 2016 by No Author -

A newly released study published ‘in press’ in the Journal of Human Evolution suggests that the Uluzzian stone tool industry, generally regarded by scholars to be associated with anatomically modern humans, has its roots in the Mousterian industry, a stone tool tradition that has usually been associated with Neanderthals.

In the study, Marco Peresani of the Universitá di Ferrara, Italy, and colleagues conducted an extensive examination of the lithic and bone technologies from assemblages recovered from the Fumane Cave in northern Italy. The Uluzzian is characterized as a lithic flake-dominated industry that exhibits various technological innovations, most of which are associated with the kinds of lithic technology that anatomically modern humans brought to Europe during the Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition, or arguably sometime between 40,000 and 50,000 years BP. They found that the Levallois production technique was the most used method used in the initial stage of the Uluzzian, and that Mousterian-style side scrapers and points were a clear feature in the initial phase. The Levallois, a production technique that was used to produce simple tools such as scrapers and knives by striking flakes from a prepared lithic core, has typically been associated with Neanderthals, as is the Mousterian industry. The authors of the study thus suggest that the Uluzzian cannot be conclusively viewed as one proxy indicator of the first presence of anatomically modern humans in Europe, who are thought to be the carriers of the cultural changes related to the Aurignacian, the first Eurasian stone tool industry clearly associated with modern humans.

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The Grotta di Fumane, or Fumane Cave. Thilo Parg, Wikimedia Commons

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The Uluzzian was first discovered in the early 1960s at the site of Grotta del Cavallo in southern Italy. This cave yielded about 7 meters of archaeological deposits representing the period during which scientists have suggested that Neanderthals were replaced by modern humans. Two milk teeth, attributed at the time to Neanderthals, were unearthed in 1964 by Arturo Palma di Cesnola (emeritus of the University of Siena) from the Uluzzian layers. The Uluzzian culture has been identified at more than 20 separate sites across Italy, and is characterised as consisting of an array of denticulates, sidescrapers, retouched pieces and splintered pieces, distinguished by a production process that differed from that of the earlier Mousterian (associated with Neanderthals) and the proto-Aurignacian (associated with anatomically modern humans).* Finds have also included what has been interpreted as personal ornaments, bone tools and colorants —- items typically associated with modern human symbolic behavior. Because the teeth from Cavallo were identified as belonging to Neanderthals who lived around 200,000 to 40,000 years ago, it was suggested that the Uluzzian and the complex ornaments and tools within it were also produced by Neanderthals.* But in a study published in 2011 in the journal Nature, Stefano Benazzi of the University of Vienna and his colleagues were able to compare digital models derived from micro-computed tomography scans of the human remains from Grotta del Cavallo with those of a large modern human and Neanderthal dental sample: “We worked with two independent methods: for the one, we measured the thickness of the tooth enamel, and for the other, the general outline of the crown. By means of micro-computed tomography it was possible to compare the internal and external features of the dental crown. The results clearly show that the specimens from Grotta del Cavallo were modern humans, not Neanderthals as originally thought.”**

The latest study results from Fumane Cave led by Peresani, however, add more complexity to the debate.

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*http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2013.12.007

** The Early dispersal of modern humans in Europe and implications for Neanderthal behaviour. Benazzi, S., Douka, K., Fornai, C., Bauer, C.C., Kullmer, O., Svoboda, J., Pap, I., Mallegni, F., Bayle, P., Coquerelle, M., Condemi, S., Ronchitelli, A., Harvati, K., Weber, G.W. In. Nature, Nov. 3, 2011. DOI 10.1038/nature10617

The study: “Early human presence in the Arctic: Evidence from 45,000-year-old mammoth remains,” by V.V. Pitulko; A.N. Tikhonov; P.A. Nikolskiy; K.E. Kuper at Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, Russia; E.Y. Pavlova at Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia; R.N. Polozov at St. Petersburg Pediatric Medical University in St. Petersburg, Russia.

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Neanderthal genes gave modern humans an immunity boost and allergies

Posted on January 7, 2016 by No Author -

CELL PRESS—When modern humans met Neanderthals in Europe and the two species began interbreeding many thousands of years ago, the exchange left humans with gene variations that have increased the ability of those who carry them to ward off infection. This inheritance from Neanderthals may have also left some people more prone to allergies.

The discoveries reported in two independent studies in the American Journal of Human Genetics on January 7 add to evidence for an important role for interspecies relations in human evolution and specifically in the evolution of the innate immune system, which serves as the body’s first line of defense against infection.

“We found that interbreeding with archaic humans—the Neanderthals and Denisovans—has influenced the genetic diversity in present-day genomes at three innate immunity genes belonging to the human Toll-like-receptor family,” says Janet Kelso of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

“These, and other, innate immunity genes present higher levels of Neanderthal ancestry than the remainder of the coding genome,” adds Lluis Quintana-Murci of the Institut Pasteur and the CNRS in Paris. “This highlights how important introgression events [the movement of genes across species] may have been in the evolution of the innate immunity system in humans.”

Earlier studies have shown that one to six percent of modern Eurasian genomes were inherited from ancient hominins, such as Neanderthal or Denisovans. Both new studies highlight the functional importance of this inheritance on Toll-like receptor (TLR) genes—TLR1, TLR6, and TLR10. These TLR genes are expressed on the cell surface, where they detect and respond to components of bacteria, fungi, and parasites. These immune receptors are essential for eliciting inflammatory and anti-microbial responses and for activating an adaptive immune response.

Quintana-Murci and his colleagues set out to explore the evolution of the innate immune system over time. They relied on vast amounts of data available on present-day people from the 1000 Genomes Project together with the genome sequences of ancient hominins. Quintana-Murci’s team focused on a list of 1,500 genes known to play a role in the innate immune system. They then examined patterns of genetic variation and evolutionary change in those regions relative to the rest of the genome at an unprecedented level of detail. Finally, they estimated the timing of the changes in innate immunity and the extent to which variation in those genes had been passed down from Neanderthals.

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An artist’s model depiction of a Neanderthal, at the Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn, Germany. Celldex, Wikimedia Commons

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This world map shows the frequencies of Neandertal-like TLR DNA in a 1000 Genomes dataset. The size of each pie is proportional to the number of individuals within a population. Credit: Dannemann et al./American Journal of Human Genetics 2016

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These investigations revealed little change over long periods of time for some innate-immunity genes, providing evidence of strong constraints. Other genes have undergone selective sweeps in which a new variant came along and quickly rose to prominence, perhaps because of a shift in the environment or as a result of a disease epidemic. Most adaptations in protein-coding genes occurred in the last 6,000 to 13,000 years, as human populations shifted from hunting and gathering to farming, they report.

But, Quintana-Murci says, the biggest surprise for them “was to find that the TLR1-6-10 cluster is among the genes presenting the highest Neanderthal ancestry in both Europeans and Asians.”

Kelso and her colleagues came to the same conclusion, but they didn’t set out to study the immune system. Their interest was in understanding the functional importance of genes inherited from archaic humans more broadly. They screened present-day human genomes for evidence of extended regions with high similarity to the Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes,then examined the prevalence of those regions in people from around the world. Those analyses led them to the same three TLR genes.

Two of those gene variants are most similar to the Neanderthal genome, whereas the third is most similar to the Denisovan genome, Kelso’s group reports. Her team also provides evidence that these gene variants offered a selective advantage. The archaic-like variants are associated with an increase in the activity of the TLR genes and with greater reactivity to pathogens. Although this greater sensitivity might protect against infection, it might also increase the susceptibility of modern-day people to allergies.

“What has emerged from our study as well as from other work on introgression is that interbreeding with archaic humans does indeed have functional implications for modern humans, and that the most obvious consequences have been in shaping our adaptation to our environment – improving how we resist pathogens and metabolize novel foods,” Kelso says.

As surprising as it may seem, it does make a lot of sense, she adds. “Neanderthals, for example, had lived in Europe and Western Asia for around 200,000 years before the arrival of modern humans. They were likely well adapted to the local climate, foods, and pathogens. By interbreeding with these archaic humans, we modern humans gained these advantageous adaptations.”

Source: Cell Press subject news release

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Paper 1: American Journal of Human Genetics, Deschamps et al.: “Genomic Signatures of Selective Pressures and Introgression from Archaic Hominins at Human Innate Immunity Genes” http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2015.11.014

This work was primarily supported by the Institut Pasteur, the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), and the Agence Nationale de la Recherche.

Paper 2: American Journal of Human Genetics, Dannemann et al.: “Introgression of Neandertal- and Denisovan-like Haplotypes Contributes to Adaptive Variation in Human Toll-like Receptors” http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2015.11.015

Funding was provided by the Max Planck Society and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

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Pathogens found in Iceman’s stomach

Posted on January 7, 2016 by No Author -

EUROPEAN ACADEMY OF BOZEN/BOLZANO (EURAC)—Scientists are continually unearthing new facts about Homo sapiens from the mummified remains of “Ötzi”, the Copper Age man, who was discovered in a glacier in 1991. Five years ago, after Ötzi’s genome was completely deciphered, it seemed that the wellspring of spectacular discoveries about the past would soon dry up. An international team of scientists working with paleopathologist Albert Zink and microbiologist Frank Maixner from the European Academy (EURAC) in Bozen/Bolzano have now succeeded in demonstrating the presence of Helicobacter pylori in Ötzi’s stomach contents, a bacterium found in half of all humans today. The theory that humans were already infected with this stomach bacterium at the very beginning of their history could well be true. The scientists succeeded in decoding the complete genome of the bacterium.

When EURAC’s Zink and Maixner first placed samples from the Iceman’s stomach under the microscope in their ancient DNA Lab at EURAC, almost three years ago, they were initially sceptical.

“Evidence for the presence of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori is found in the stomach tissue of patients today, so we thought it was extremely unlikely that we would find anything because Ötzi’s stomach mucosa is no longer there,” explains Zink. Together with colleagues from the Universities of Kiel, Vienna and Venda in South Africa as well as the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, the scientists tried to find a new way to proceed. “We were able to solve the problem once we hit upon the idea of extracting the entire DNA of the stomach contents,” reports Maixner. “After this was successfully done, we were able to tease out the individual Helicobacter sequences and reconstruct a 5,300 year old Helicobacter pylori genome.”

The scientists found a potentially virulent strain of bacteria, to which Ötzi’s immune system had already reacted. “We showed the presence of marker proteins which we see today in patients infected with Helicobacter,” said the microbiologist.

A tenth of infected people develop further clinical complications, such as gastritis or stomach ulcers, mostly in old age. “Whether Ötzi suffered from stomach problems cannot be said with any degree of certainty,” says Zink, “because his stomach tissue has not survived and it is in this tissue that such diseases can be discerned first. Nonetheless, the preconditions for such a disease did in fact exist in Ötzi.”

After completing their stomach biopsy, the two EURAC scientists transferred the genome data for analysis by their colleague Thomas Rattei from the University of Vienna. Rattei, in collaboration with geneticists from the USA, South Africa and Germany, came to a surprising conclusion: “We had assumed that we would find the same strain of Helicobacter in Ötzi as is found in Europeans today,” explains the computational biologist. “It turned out to be a strain that is mainly observed in Central and South Asia today.”

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Eduard Egarter-Vigl (left) and Albert Zink (right) taking a sample from the Iceman in November 2010. Credit: EURAC/Marion Lafogler

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Closeup view of Iceman hand. Credit: EURAC/Marion Lafogler

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The Iceman (reconstruction by Adrie and Alfons Kennis). Credit: South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology, Foto Ochsenreiter

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X-ray imaging of the Iceman’s stomach and intestine. Credit: Central Hospital Bolzano

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Helicobacter pylori concentrations in the Iceman’s stomach and intestine. Credit: Südtiroler Archäologiemuseum/EURAC/Marco Samadelli-Gregor Staschitz-Central Hospital Bolzano

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The scientists assume that there were originally two strain types of the bacterium, an African and an Asian one, which at some point recombined into today’s European version. Since bacteria are usually transmitted within the family, the history of the world’s population is closely linked to the history of bacteria. Up till now, it had been assumed that Neolithic humans were already carrying this European strain by the time they stopped their nomadic life and took up agriculture. Research on Ötzi, however, demonstrates that this was not the case.

“The recombination of the two types of Helicobacter may have only occurred at some point after Ötzi’s era, and this shows that the history of settlements in Europe is much more complex than previously assumed,” says Maixner.

Further studies will be needed to show to what extent these bacteria living inside the human body can help us understand how humans developed. The current investigations, the results of which have just been published in Science magazine, invite further research.

“Now that we are aware of how it works,” says Zink, “we are keen to continue.” Several research projects to take place in South America and Asia are currently at the planning stage.

Source: News release of the European Academy of Bozen/Bolzano (EURAC)

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The Anthropocene: Hard evidence for a human-driven Earth

Posted on January 7, 2016 by No Author -

UNIVERSITY OF LEICESTER—The evidence for a new geological epoch which marks the impact of human activity on the Earth is now overwhelming, according to a recent paper by an international group of geoscientists. The Anthropocene, which is argued to start in the mid-20th Century, is marked by the spread of materials such as aluminium, concrete, plastic, fly ash and fallout from nuclear testing across the planet, coincident with elevated greenhouse gas emissions and unprecedented trans-global species invasions.

An international group of scientists is studying whether human activity has driven the Earth into a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene. They ask: to what extent are human actions recorded as measurable signals in geological strata, and is the Anthropocene world markedly different from the stable Holocene Epoch of the last 11,700 years that allowed human civilization to develop?

The Holocene Epoch has been a time during which human societies advanced by gradually domesticating the land to increase food production, built urban settlements and became proficient at developing the water, mineral and energy resources of the planet. The proposed Anthropocene Epoch, however, is marked as a time of rapid environmental change brought on by the impact of a surge in human population and increased consumption during the ‘Great Acceleration’ of the mid-20th century.

Dr Colin Waters of the British Geological Survey said: “Humans have long affected the environment, but recently there has been a rapid global spread of novel materials including aluminium, concrete and plastics, which are leaving their mark in sediments. Fossil-fuel combustion has dispersed fly ash particles worldwide, pretty well coincident with the peak distribution of the ‘bomb spike’ of radionuclides generated by atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons.” “All of this shows that there is an underlying reality to the Anthropocene concept”, commented Jan Zalasiewicz of the University of Leicester, a co-author and working group Chair.

The study, co-authored by 24 members of the Anthropocene Working Group, shows that humans have changed the Earth system sufficiently to produce a range of signals in sediments and ice, and these are sufficiently distinctive to justify recognition of an Anthropocene Epoch in the Geological Time Scale. In 2016 the Anthropocene Working Group will gather more evidence on the Anthropocene, which will help inform recommendations on whether this new time unit should be formalized and, if so, how it might be defined and characterized.

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Composite image satellite view of earth at night, one visual indicator of how humans have changed the earth. Wikimedia Commons

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A number of UK members of the group have contributed to this study, Colin Waters (lead author and Secretary of the group) and Michael Ellis, both from the British Geological Survey, Jan Zalasiewicz, Mark Williams and Matt Edgeworth from Leicester University and Colin Summerhayes from Cambridge University have provided significant input to this study and maintain the UK’s strong involvement in research into the Anthropocene concept.

Source: University of Leicester subject news releaseComposite image satellite view of earth at night, one visual indicator of how humans have changed the earth. Wikimedia Commons

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*Colin Waters et al. (2016), The Anthropocene is functionally and stratigraphically distinct from the Holocene. Science.

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Ancient Roman toilets did not improve sanitation

Posted on January 7, 2016 by No Author -

UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE—The Romans are well known for introducing sanitation technology to Europe around 2,000 years ago, including public multi-seat latrines with washing facilities, sewerage systems, piped drinking water from aqueducts, and heated public baths for washing. Romans also developed laws designed to keep their towns free of excrement and rubbish.

However, new archaeological research has revealed that—for all their apparently hygienic innovations—intestinal parasites such as whipworm, roundworm and Entamoeba histolytica dysentery did not decrease as expected in Roman times compared with the preceding Iron Age, they gradually increased.

The latest research was conducted by Dr Piers Mitchell from Cambridge’s Archaeology and Anthropology Department and is published today in the journal Parasitology. The study is the first to use the archaeological evidence for parasites in Roman times to assess “the health consequences of conquering an empire”.

Dr Piers Mitchell brought together evidence of parasites in ancient latrines, human burials and ‘coprolites’—or fossilised faeces—as well as in combs and textiles from numerous Roman Period excavations across the Roman Empire.

Not only did certain intestinal parasites appear to increase in prevalence with the coming of the Romans, but Mitchell also found that, despite their famous culture of regular bathing, ‘ectoparasites’ such as lice and fleas were just as widespread among Romans as in Viking and medieval populations, where bathing was not widely practiced.

Some excavations revealed evidence for special combs to strip lice from hair, and delousing may have been a daily routine for many people living across the Roman Empire

Piers Mitchell said: “Modern research has shown that toilets, clean drinking water and removing faeces from the streets all decrease risk of infectious disease and parasites. So we might expect the prevalence of faecal oral parasites such as whipworm and roundworm to drop in Roman times—yet we find a gradual increase. The question is why?”

One possibility Mitchell offers is that it may have actually been the warm communal waters of the bathhouses that helped spread the parasitic worms. Water was infrequently changed in some baths, and a scum would build on the surface from human dirt and cosmetics. “Clearly, not all Roman baths were as clean as they might have been,” said Mitchell.

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Roman latrines at Lepcis Magna in Libya. Credit: Craig Taylor

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A Roman whipworm egg from Turkey. Credit: Piers Mitchell

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Another possible explanation raised in the study is the Roman use of human excrement as a crop fertilizer. While modern research has shown this does increase crop yields, unless the faeces are composted for many months before being added to the fields, it can result in the spread of parasite eggs that can survive in the grown plants.

“It is possible that sanitation laws requiring the removal of faeces from the streets actually led to reinfection of the population as the waste was often used to fertilise crops planted in farms surrounding the towns,” said Mitchell.

The study found fish tapeworm eggs to be surprisingly widespread in the Roman Period compared to Bronze and Iron Age Europe. One possibility Mitchell suggests for the rise in fish tapeworm is the Roman love of a sauce called garum.

Made from pieces of fish, herbs, salt and flavourings, garum was used as both a culinary ingredient and a medicine. This sauce was not cooked, but allowed to ferment in the sun. Garum was traded right across the empire, and may have acted as the “vector” for fish tapeworm, says Mitchell.

“The manufacture of fish sauce and its trade across the empire in sealed jars would have allowed the spread of the fish tapeworm parasite from endemic areas of northern Europe to all people across the empire. This appears to be a good example of the negative health consequences of conquering an empire,” he said.

The study shows a range of parasites infected people living in the Roman Empire, but did they try to treat these infections medically? While Mitchell says care must be taken when relating ancient texts to modern disease diagnoses, some researchers have suggested that intestinal worms described by Roman medical practitioner Galen (130AD – 210AD) may include roundworm, pinworm and a species of tapeworm.

Galen believed these parasites were formed from spontaneous generation in putrefied matter under the effect of heat. He recommended treatment through modified diet, bloodletting, and medicines believed to have a cooling and drying effect, in an effort to restore balance to the ‘four humours’: black bile, yellow bile, blood and phlegm.

Added Mitchell: “This latest research on the prevalence of ancient parasites suggests that Roman toilets, sewers and sanitation laws had no clear benefit to public health. The widespread nature of both intestinal parasites and ectoparasites such as lice also suggests that Roman public baths surprisingly gave no clear health benefit either.”

“It seems likely that while Roman sanitation may not have made people any healthier, they would probably have smelt better.”

Source: University of Cambridge subject news release.

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Archives: Articles

Discovery shows prehistoric man consumed tortoises

Humans evolved by sharing technology and culture

Study suggests how modern humans drove Neanderthals to extinction

Ancient Australian bird extinction points to humans

Ancient Babylonians Used Geometry to Track Jupiter

Genetic history of present-day Indians

The aftermath of 1492

Ancient humans dispersed through Arabia during greener times

Evidence of a prehistoric massacre extends the history of warfare

Neolithic tomb reveals community stayed together, even in death

New discoveries concerning Ötzi’s genetic history

Evidence Indicates Humans Occupied Arctic by 45,000 Years Ago

Behind the Myth of King Midas

Plague may have persisted in Europe during 300-year period, including ‘Black Death’

What pre-Roman burials in Italy are telling us

New findings on prehistoric stone tool industry in Italy

Neanderthal genes gave modern humans an immunity boost and allergies

Pathogens found in Iceman’s stomach

The Anthropocene: Hard evidence for a human-driven Earth

Ancient Roman toilets did not improve sanitation

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