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2.9-million-year-old butchery site reopens case of who made first stone tools

Posted on February 9, 2023 by Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History -

SMITHSONIAN—Along the shores of Africa’s Lake Victoria in Kenya roughly 2.9 million years ago, early human ancestors used some of the oldest stone tools ever found to butcher hippos and pound plant material, according to new research led by scientists with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and Queens College, CUNY, as well as the National Museums of Kenya, Liverpool John Moores University and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

The study*, published today, Feb. 9, in the journal Science, presents what are likely to be the oldest examples of a hugely important stone-age innovation known to scientists as the Oldowan toolkit, as well as the oldest evidence of hominins consuming very large animals. Though multiple lines of evidence suggest the artifacts are likely to be about 2.9 million years old, the artifacts can be more conservatively dated to between 2.6 and 3 million years old, said lead study author Thomas Plummer of Queens College, research associate in the scientific team of the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program.

Excavations at the site, named Nyayanga and located on the Homa Peninsula in western Kenya, also produced a pair of massive molars belonging to the human species’ close evolutionary relative Paranthropus. The teeth are the oldest fossilized Paranthropus remains yet found, and their presence at a site loaded with stone tools raises intriguing questions about which human ancestor made those tools, said Rick Potts, senior author of the study and the National Museum of Natural History’s Peter Buck Chair of Human Origins.

“The assumption among researchers has long been that only the genus Homo, to which humans belong, was capable of making stone tools,” Potts said. “But finding Paranthropus alongside these stone tools opens up a fascinating whodunnit.”

Whichever hominin lineage was responsible for the tools, they were found more than 800 miles from the previously known oldest examples of Oldowan stone tools—2.6-million-year-old tools unearthed in Ledi-Geraru, Ethiopia. This greatly expands the area associated with Oldowan technology’s earliest origins. Further, the stone tools from the site in Ethiopia could not be tied to any particular function or use, leading to speculation about what the Oldowan toolkit’s earliest uses might have been.

Through analysis of the wear patterns on the stone tools and animal bones discovered at Nyayanga, Kenya, the team behind this latest discovery shows that these stone tools were used by early human ancestors to process a wide range of materials and foods, including plants, meat and even bone marrow.

The Oldowan toolkit includes three types of stone tools: hammerstones, cores and flakes. Hammerstones can be used for hitting other rocks to create tools or for pounding other materials. Cores typically have an angular or oval shape, and when struck at an angle with a hammerstone, the core splits off a piece, or flake, that can be used as a cutting or scraping edge or further refined using a hammerstone.

“With these tools you can crush better than an elephant’s molar can and cut better than a lion’s canine can,” Potts said. “Oldowan technology was like suddenly evolving a brand-new set of teeth outside your body, and it opened up a new variety of foods on the African savannah to our ancestors.”

Potts and Plummer were first drawn to the Homa Peninsula in Kenya by reports of large numbers of fossilized baboon-like monkeys named Theropithecus oswaldi, which are often found alongside evidence of human ancestors. After many visits to the peninsula, a local man named Peter Onyango working with the team suggested they check out fossils and stone tools eroding from a nearby site that was ultimately named Nyayanga after an adjacent beach.

Beginning in 2015, a series of excavations at Nyayanga returned a trove of 330 artifacts, 1,776 animal bones and the two hominin molars identified as belonging to Paranthropus. The artifacts, Plummer said, were clearly part of the stone-age technological breakthrough that was the Oldowan toolkit.

Compared to the only other stone tools known to have preceded them—a set of 3.3-million-year-old artifacts unearthed at a site called Lomekwi 3, just west of Lake Turkana in Kenya—Oldowan tools were a significant upgrade in sophistication. Oldowan tools were systematically produced and often fashioned using what is known as “freehand percussion,” meaning the core was held in one hand and then struck with a hammerstone being wielded by the opposing hand at just the right angle to produce a flake—a technique that requires significant dexterity and skill.

By contrast, most of the artifacts from Lomekwi 3 were created by using large stationary rocks as anvils, with the toolmaker either banging a core against the flat anvil stone to create flakes or by setting the core down on the anvil and striking it with a hammerstone. These more rudimentary modes of fabrication resulted in larger, cruder and more haphazard-looking tools.

Over time, the Oldowan toolkit spread all the way across Africa and even as far as modern-day Georgia and China, and it was not meaningfully replaced or amended until some 1.7 million years ago when the hand-axes of the Acheulean first appeared.

As part of their study, the researchers conducted microscopic analysis of wear patterns on the stone tools to determine how they were used, and they examined any bones seen to exhibit potential cut marks or other kinds of damage that might have come from stone tools.

The site featured at least three individual hippos. Two of these incomplete skeletons included bones that showed signs of butchery. The team found a deep cut mark on one hippo’s rib fragment and a series of four short, parallel cuts on the shin bone of another. Plummer said they also found antelope bones that showed evidence of hominins slicing away flesh with stone flakes or of having been crushed by hammerstones to extract marrow.

The analysis of wear patterns on 30 of the stone tools found at the site showed that they had been used to cut, scrape and pound both animals and plants. Because fire would not be harnessed by hominins for another 2 million years or so, these stone toolmakers would have eaten everything raw, perhaps pounding the meat into something like a hippo tartare to make it easier to chew.

Using a combination of dating techniques, including the rate of decay of radioactive elements, reversals of Earth’s magnetic field and the presence of certain fossil animals whose timing in the fossil record is well established, the research team was able to date the items recovered from Nyayanga to between 2.58 and 3 million years old.

“This is one of the oldest if not the oldest example of Oldowan technology,” Plummer said. “This shows the toolkit was more widely distributed at an earlier date than people realized, and that it was used to process a wide variety of plant and animal tissues. We don’t know for sure what the adaptive significance was but the variety of uses suggests it was important to these hominins.”

The discovery of teeth from the muscular-jawed Paranthropus alongside these stone tools begs the question of whether it might have been that lineage rather than the Homo genus that was the architect of the earliest Oldowan stone tools, or perhaps even that multiple lineages were making these tools at roughly the same time.

The excavations behind this study offer a snapshot of the world humans’ ancestors inhabited and help illustrate the ways that stone technology allowed these early hominins to adapt to different environments and, ultimately, give rise to the human species.

“East Africa wasn’t a stable cradle for our species’ ancestors,” Potts said. “It was more of a boiling cauldron of environmental change, with downpours and droughts and a diverse, ever-changing menu of foods. Oldowan stone tools could have cut and pounded through it all and helped early toolmakers adapt to new places and new opportunities, whether it’s a dead hippo or a starchy root.”

This research was supported by funding from the Smithsonian, the Leakey Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the City University of New York, the Donner Foundation and the Peter Buck Fund for Human Origins Research.

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Nyayanga site in July 2014 prior to excavation. Tan and reddish brown sediments are late Pliocene deposits where Oldowan tools and fossils were later excavated. T.W.Plummer, Homa Peninsula Paleoanthropology Project

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Index map showing location of Nyayanga Oldowan site on the Homa Peninsula in southwestern Kenya. J.S. Oliver, Homa Peninsula Paleoanthropology Project

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Nyayanga site being excavated in July 2016. J.S. Oliver, Homa Peninsula Paleoanthropology Project

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Fossil hippo skeleton and associated Oldowan artifacts at the Nyayanga site in July 2016. T.W. Plummer, Homa Peninsula Paleoanthropology Project

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Oldowan flake lying directly on a hippo shoulder blade fossil at the Nyayanga site. T.W. Plummer, Homa Peninsula Paleoanthropology Project

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Examples of an Oldowan percussive tool, core and flakes from the Nyayanga site. (Top row) Percussive tool found in 2016. (Second row from top) Oldowan core found in 2017. (Bottom rows) Oldowan flakes found in 2016 and 2017. T.W.
Plummer, J.S. Oliver, and E. M. Finestone, Homa Peninsula Paleoanthropology Project

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Paranthropus molars recovered from Nyayanga site. Left upper molar (top) was found on the surface at the site, and the left lower molar (bottom) was excavated. S. E. Bailey, Homa Peninsula Paleoanthropology Project

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The skull of Paranthropus boisei, known as KNM ER 406, photographed at the Nairobi National Museum in August 2012. Bjørn Christian Tørrissen, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, Wikimedia Commons

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Paranthropus – forensic facial reconstruction. Drawing made by Cicero Moraes and 3D scanning of the skull by Dr. Moacir Elias Santos. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International, Wikimedia Commons

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Article Source: Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History news release

*Expanded geographic distribution and dietary strategies of the earliest Oldowan hominins and Paranthropus, Science, 9-Feb-2023. 10.1126/science.abo7452

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Don’t miss out on this unforgettable evening as Dr. Hawass reveals the most closely guarded secrets of ancient Egypt and presents his groundbreaking new discoveries and latest research live on stage. As the man behind all major discoveries in Egypt over the last few decades and director of several ongoing archaeological projects, Dr. Hawass may yet surprise you with unexpected revelations that will make news across the world.

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AlUla exhibits the first known reconstruction of a Nabataean woman from the UNESCO World Heritage Site, Hegra

Posted on February 6, 2023 by Royal Commission for AlUla -

AlUla, Saudi Arabia, 6 February 2023: A team of archaeologists, academics and specialists in the fields of forensic science and modelmaking has completed the first known digital and physical reconstruction of a Nabataean woman discovered at Hegra, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that was once a vibrant city for this North Arabian kingdom which dominated the historic Incense Road. The Nabataean woman is known as Hinat, and is thought to have been a prominent woman who died around the first century BCE and lay for over 2,000 years in a Hegra tomb.

The reconstruction is now being displayed at the Hegra Welcome Centre in AlUla. Hinat’s return comes in the 15^thyear since Hegra was inscribed as the first UNESCO World Heritage Site in Saudi Arabia. UNESCO’s citation at the time said the site “bears outstanding witness to important cultural exchanges in architecture, decoration, language use and the caravan trade”¹.

Thanks to the Hinat reconstruction, Hegra continues to bear witness to important cultural moments. And the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU) expects many more important advances in coming years as the painstaking work of archaeology across the AlUla area diligently uncovers the secrets of the past.

AlUla has at its heart an oasis and valley that has hosted successive communities and civilizations from its earliest occupants to its residents today. An important hub on epic routes of trade – including in valuable incense, spices and other luxury commodities – it has vestiges from virtually every major period from prehistory to the present day including the site of Hegra, a significant city of the Nabataean Kingdom.

By the first century BCE, Hegra under the Nabataeans had eclipsed nearby Dadan as the key stopping point on trade routes linking southern Arabia to Egypt and the Mediterranean. The Mada’in Salih Archaeological Project began its archaeological work at the Hegra site in 2002.

Hinat, as she is affectionately known by the archaeologists who discovered her, was excavated from one of Hegra’s monumental tombs in 2008. Excavations of the tomb revealed around 80 individuals interred there, and the pathology suggests at least some were blood relations. The majority were disarticulated but Hinat’s skeleton was near complete. The inscription on the tomb reads: “This is the tomb that Hinat daughter of Wahbu made for herself and her children and descendants forever”. This inscription emphasises the importance of women in Nabataean Hegra society, who owned property and had the financial means to commission their own tombs.

Mada’in Salih Archaeological Project Co-Director Laïla Nehmé and project anthropologist Nathalie Delhopital led the selection of an appropriate skull, with sufficient preservation to ensure adequate information for successful reconstruction.

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A one-day scientific roundtable event, drawing together leading experts on Hegra, the Nabataeans and the archaeology of AlUla, saw a lively discussion around the likely appearance of Hinat, her potential status in society, and what she may have worn. This established the scientific boundaries and guidance for the accuracy and character of the reconstruction and resulted in the writing of a profile with reference imagery for clothing, hair and jewelry. They were joined by a multidisciplinary production team, bringing together expertise in forensic anthropology and reconstruction, and physical modelmaking.

Dr Helen McGauran, Heritage Curatorial Expert at RCU, who led the RCU-facilitated initiative, said: “Through pioneering efforts such as this, which bring together professional rigor and careful artistic interpretation, we are able to deepen our understanding of the lives and culture of the Nabataeans – a civilization that has gifted the world the extraordinary site of Hegra, and continues to be a source of knowledge and inspiration.”

Leila Chapman, Narrative Experience Expert at RCU, added: “The opportunity for our visitors to come face to face with a Nabataean woman at the actual site of Hegra – where she lived, and was honored by her family – is hugely exciting. We are especially excited that AlUla’s people will see this recreation of their ancient ancestor.”

RCU-supported archaeological research and conservation teams continue to shed new light on the history of the region and lay the intellectual foundation of the Kingdoms Institute, a hub of archaeological knowledge being established at AlUla. The ‘Living Museum’ of these discoveries can be explored in person in AlUla and online at livingmuseum.com.

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Hinat at the Welcome Center. Courtesy Royal Commission for AlUla

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Tombs af Hegra (Mada’in Saleh). Tom and Linda Anderson, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

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Article Source: Royal Commission for AlUla news release

About the Royal Commission for AlUla

The Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU) was established by royal decree in July 2017 to preserve and develop AlUla, a region of outstanding natural and cultural significance in north-west Saudi Arabia. RCU’s long-term plan outlines a responsible, sustainable, and sensitive approach to urban and economic development, that preserves the area’s natural and historic heritage, while establishing AlUla as a desirable location to live, work, and visit. This encompasses a broad range of initiatives across archaeology, tourism, culture, education, and the arts, reflecting a commitment to meeting the economic diversification, local community empowerment, and heritage preservation priorities of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 program.

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Early human migration into North America along Pacific coast

Posted on February 6, 2023 by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences -

PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES—Models and paleoceanographic data reveal climatically favorable intervals when humans could have traversed the Cordilleran coastal corridor during the terminal Pleistocene Epoch, according to a study. Human dispersal pathways from Beringia into North America continue to be debated. Summer Praetorius and colleagues analyzed new records of sea ice variations and synthesized previously published reconstructions of sea ice, sea surface temperature, salinity, and ice-rafted debris from marine sediment cores in the North Pacific Ocean. The model results showed that the average strength of the Alaska Current more than doubled along the Southeast Alaska margin during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), compared with modern conditions. The accelerated currents might have impeded southward seafaring migration. In addition, Gulf of Alaska shorelines had extensive seasonal sea ice during the LGM, which was the most recent time during the Last Glacial Period that ice sheets were at their greatest extent. The results suggest that environmentally favorable time periods for coastal migration after glacial retreat events include two spans: from 24,500 to 22,000 years ago and between 16,400 and 14,800 years ago. During these periods, regional climate conditions may have provided both winter sea ice and summer kelp ecosystems for year-round marine resource diversity, which may have facilitated human dispersal along the Cordilleran coastal corridor. Together, the data help discern major climate and oceanographic changes that may have facilitated and impeded human migration during the terminal Pleistocene Epoch.

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Pacific northwest coast. Mrs. Brown, Pixabay

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Article Source: PNAS news release

*“Ice and ocean constraints on early human migrations into North America along the Pacific coast,” by Summer Praetorius et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 6-Feb-2023. https://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208738120

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The chemistry of mummification – Traces of a global network

Posted on February 2, 2023 by LUDWIG-MAXIMILIANS-UNIVERSITÄT MÜNCHEN -

LUDWIG-MAXIMILIANS-UNIVERSITÄT MÜNCHEN, Munich/Tübingen, 01.02.2022 —Exactly100 years ago, the tomb of Tutankhamun was discovered, complete with his world-famous mummy. Since then, researchers have learned a lot about how the ancient Egyptians prepared bodies for mummification. Until now, however, too little was known about how they ultimately made the bodies of the deceased immortal by embalming them. A German-Egyptian team of researchers has now been able to gain completely new insights into the chemistry of embalming. Their findings* were published in Nature.

In collaboration with the National Research Center in Cairo, a team of researchers from LMU Munich and the University of Tübingen has analyzed chemical residues in vessels from an embalming workshop in Saqqara – not far from the pyramid of Unas – that was not discovered until 2016. “We were able to do all the scientific analyses ourselves in Egypt,” says LMU archeologist Philipp Stockhammer. And Maxime Rageot from the University of Tübingen adds: “For that we must thank Ramadan Hussein, who discovered and led the excavation for the DFG Saqqara Saite Tombs Projects, and who sadly died unexpectedly in the spring.”

In the newly discovered workshop, experts mummified the dead in the seventh and sixth century BC. For the Egyptologists, being able to recover numerous vessels used so long ago by skilled craftsmen was a tremendous stroke of luck. Better still, the vessels were labeled with their previous contents, and some even had instructions for use. “We have known the names of many of these embalming ingredients since ancient Egyptian writings were deciphered,” says Susanne Beck from the University of Tübingen, who is leading the excavation. “But until now, we could only guess at what substances were behind each name.”

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Embalming – Specific substances for certain parts of the body

Analyzing the chemical residue in the vessels has now allowed the molecular remains of those substances that were once used in a given vessel to be isolated and identified. As the mystery unraveled, there were a number of surprises. Maxime Rageot, archeologist at the University of Tübingen and head of the analysis project, reveals one of them: “The substance labeled by the ancient Egyptians as antiu has long been translated as myrrh or frankincense. But we have now been able to show that it is actually a mixture of widely differing ingredients that we were able to pick apart with the aid of gas chromatography/mass spectrometry.” The antiu used in Saqqara was a blend of cedar oil, juniper/cypress oil and animal fats.

These insights facilitate a re-reading of familiar texts about ancient Egyptian embalming. Comparing the identified substances with the labels on the vessels has now, for the first time, enabled the team of researchers to determine exactly what substances were used to embalm certain parts of the body. Pistachio resin and castor oil, for example, were used only for the head. “What really surprised us was that the bulk of the substances used for embalming were not from Egypt itself. Some of them were imported from the Mediterranean region and even from tropical Africa and Southeast Asia,” says LMU archeologist Philipp Stockhammer, who funded the research with his ERC Starting Grant.

Besides pistachio resin, cedar oil and bitumen – all probably from the Levant – the researchers also found residues of dammar gum and elemi resin. These two substances in particular show how globalized trade relationships had already become nearly 3,000 years ago. While the resin of the elemi tree came to Egypt from tropical Africa or Southeast Asia, the dammar tree to this day still grows solely in tropical Southeast Asia. Tremendous effort thus evidently went into sourcing very specific chemical substances for the embalming process. “Ultimately, Egyptian mummification probably played an important role in the early emergence of global networks,” Rageot says. “Large quantities of these exotic resins were needed.” Stockhammer agrees: “Thanks to all the inscriptions on the vessels, we will in the future be able to further decipher the vocabulary of ancient Egyptian chemistry that we did not sufficiently understand to date.”

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Egyptian mummy. Meelimello, Pixabay

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Article Source: LUDWIG-MAXIMILIANS-UNIVERSITÄT MÜNCHEN news release

*Biomolecular analyses enable new insights into ancient Egyptian embalming, Nature, 1-Feb-2023.10.1038/s41586-022-05663-4

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First solid scientific evidence that Vikings brought animals to Britain

Posted on February 1, 2023 by Durham University -

Durham University—Archaeologists have found what they say is the first solid scientific evidence suggesting that Vikings crossed the North Sea to Britain with dogs and horses.

Research led by Durham University, UK, and the Vrije Universiteit Brussels, Belgium, examined human and animal remains from Britain’s only known Viking cremation cemetery at Heath Wood, in Derbyshire.

Scientists looked at strontium isotopes contained within the remains. Strontium is a natural element found in different ratios across the world and provides a geographical fingerprint for human and animal movements.

Their analysis showed that within the context of the archaeology, one human adult and several animals almost certainly came from the Baltic Shield area of Scandinavia, covering Norway and central and northern Sweden, and died soon after arrival in Britain.

The researchers say this suggests that Vikings were not only stealing animals when they arrived in Britain, as accounts from the time describe, but were also transporting animals from Scandinavia, too.

As the human and animal remains were found in the remnants of the same cremation pyre, the researchers believe the adult from the Baltic Shield region may have been someone important who was able to bring a horse and dog to Britain.

The analysed remains are associated with the Viking Great Army, a combined force of Scandinavian warriors that invaded Britain in AD 865.

The findings are published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE.

Lead author Tessi Löffelmann, a doctoral researcher jointly working in the Department of Archaeology, Durham University, and the Department of Chemistry, Vrije Universiteit Brussels, said: “This is the first solid scientific evidence that Scandinavians almost certainly crossed the North Sea with horses, dogs and possibly other animals as early as the ninth century AD and could deepen our knowledge of the Viking Great Army.

“Our most important primary source, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, states that the Vikings were taking horses from the locals in East Anglia when they first arrived, but this was clearly not the whole story, and they most likely transported animals alongside people on ships.

“This also raises questions about the importance of specific animals to the Vikings.”

The researchers analyzed strontium ratios in the remains of two adults, one child and three animals from the Heath Wood site.

Strontium occurs naturally in the environment in rocks, soil and water before making its way into plants. When humans and animals eat those plants, strontium replaces calcium in their bones and teeth.

As strontium ratios vary in different parts of world the geographical fingerprint of the element found in human or animal remains can help show where they came from or settled.

Strontium ratios in one of the adults and the child showed that they could have been from the area local to the Heath Wood cremation site, southern or eastern England or from Europe, including Denmark and south-west Sweden which were outside of the Baltic Shield region.

But the remains of the other adult and all three animals – a horse, a dog and what the archaeologists say was possibly a pig – had strontium ratios normally found in the Baltic Shield area.

While the researchers say their findings suggest the horse and dog were transported to Britain, it may be that the pig fragment was a piece from a game or another talisman or token brought from Scandinavia, rather than a live pig. The remains had also been cremated and buried under a mound, which the researchers say could be a link back to Scandinavian rituals at a time when cremation was absent in Britain.

Research co-author Professor Janet Montgomery, in the Department of Archaeology, Durham University, said: “Our study suggests that there are people and animals with different mobility histories buried at Heath Wood, and that, if they belonged to the Viking Great Army, it was made up of people from different parts of Scandinavia or the British Isles.

“This is also the first published strontium analysis on early medieval cremated remains from Britain and shows the potential that this scientific method has to shed further light on this period in history.”

The research team also included archaeologists from the University of York, UK, who excavated the Heath Wood cemetery between 1998 and 2000, and the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.

Professor Julian Richards, of the Department of Archaeology, University of York, who co-directed the excavations at the Heath Wood Viking cemetery, said: “The Bayeux Tapestry depicts Norman cavalry disembarking horses from their fleet before the Battle of Hastings, but this is the first scientific demonstration that Viking warriors were transporting horses to England two hundred years earlier.

“It shows how much Viking leaders valued their personal horses and hounds that they brought them from Scandinavia, and that the animals were sacrificed to be buried with their owners.”

The research was funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council (Northern Bridge) funding, the Vrije Universiteit Brussels, and The Rosemary Cramp Fund and the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, both Durham University.

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Viking burial mound at Heath Wood being excavated. Credit: Julian Richards, University of York.

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Cremated animal and human bone from the Heath Wood Viking cemetery. Credit: Julian Richards, University of York

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Fragment of a sampled cremated horse radius/ulna from burial mound 50 at Heath Wood. Credit: Jeff Veitch, Durham University.

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Clasp from the Viking warrior’s shield found during the original excavations in 1998-2000. The clasp was found in the same grave as the human and animal remains analysed during the latest research. Credit: Julian Richards, University of York.

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Decorated hilt guard from the Viking warrior’s sword. The sword was found in the same grave as the human and animal remains analysed during the latest research. Credit: Julian Richards, University of York.

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Article Source: Durham University news release

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About the Arts and Humanities Research Council

The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), part of UK Research and Innovation, funds internationally outstanding research across all arts and humanities. This includes research which supports important UK economic sectors such as the creative and digital industries, creative practice and arts in all its forms. Our research also explores complex social and cultural issues that underpin our understanding of our interaction with society, ourselves and the natural world. We invest in research which places humanity at the heart of today’s biggest questions and their answers.

About Durham University       

Durham University is a globally outstanding centre of teaching and research based in historic Durham City in the UK.   

We are a collegiate university committed to inspiring our people to do outstanding things at Durham and in the world.   

We conduct boundary-breaking research that improves lives globally and we are ranked as a world top 100 university with an international reputation in research and education (QS World University Rankings 2023).    

We are a member of the Russell Group of leading research-intensive UK universities and we are consistently ranked as a top 10 university in national league tables (Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide, Guardian University Guide and The Complete University Guide).   

For more information about Durham University visit: www.durham.ac.uk/about-us/

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Straight-tusked elephant bones hint at routine hunting and butchering by Neanderthals

Posted on February 1, 2023 by American Association for the Advancement of Science -

AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE (AAAS)—New evidence* suggests that straight-tusked elephants, the largest terrestrial mammals of their time, were hunted and butchered by Neanderthal groups that were larger and less mobile than previously thought. Sabine Gaudzinski-Windheuser and colleagues discovered telltale signs via cutmarks on 125,000-year-old skeletal remains excavated from central Germany more than 25 years ago. From 1985 to 1996, a team of researchers uncovered the remains of more than 70 of these elephants (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) from a site near Halle, Germany called Neumark-Nord 1, which constitutes the largest known assemblage of P. antiquus. Although these remains have been studied extensively, researchers have so far been unable to confirm speculations that Neanderthals – who also inhabited Eurasia during that period – may have hunted or scavenged the giant creatures. Now, Gaudzinski-Windheuser et al. have identified cutmarks on skeletal remains from the Last Interglacial that suggest these elephants were routinely hunted and butchered by Neanderthals. By evaluating bone surfaces under a microscope and reviewing what was already known about the remains, the researchers inferred that Neanderthals methodically cut, hacked, and extracted parts of the animal, leaving distinct markings on the bone surfaces. With male elephants weighing as much as 12 tons, butchering an animal of this size must have involved multiple tools and butchers, taken days to complete, and yielded copious amounts of meat that could have lasted for up to 3 months for as many as 25 people, the researchers say. They speculate that Neanderthals must have lived more stationary lifestyles in larger units than commonly supposed. In a related Focus, Britt Starkovich notes that “It is increasingly clear that Neanderthals were not a monolith and, unsurprisingly, had a full arsenal of adaptive behaviors that allowed them to succeed in the diverse ecosystems of Eurasia for over 200,000 years.”

Summary author: Nyla Husain

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Deep cut marks on the heel bone of a male elephant (Individual E24), ~50 years of age at death. Easily visible with the naked eye, the longest cut mark in the center of the picture is c. 4 cm. Disarticulation of foot bones enabled access to the rich fat deposits in the elephant’s foot cushions. Wil Roebroeks, Leiden

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Cut marks on a foot bone of an elephant (Individual E30), made by stone tools during disarticulation of the foot (Scale bar = 5 mm). Sabine Gaudzinski-Windheuser/Lutz Kindler, MONREPOS

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Dr. Sabine Gaudzinski-Windheuser (height 160 cm) next to a life-sized reconstruction of an adult male straight-tusked elephant (P. antiquus), in the Landesmuseum für Vorgeschichte, Halle, Germany. Lutz Kindler, MONREPOS

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Article Source: AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE (AAAS) news release

*Hunting and processing of straight-tusked elephants, 125.000 years ago – implications for Neanderthal behaviour, Science Advances, 1-Feb-2023. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adg6072

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Mastodons were hunted in pre-Clovis times with bone projectile points

Posted on February 1, 2023 by American Association for the Advancement of Science -

AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE (AAAS)—Bone fragments recovered from the rib of an American mastodon found in present-day Washington state suggest that this extinct Ice Age megafauna was hunted by Paleo-Americans using bone projectile points 13,900 years ago – some 900 years before the well-known Clovis point emerged. Michael Waters and colleagues have identified a thin, smooth, pointed object through a digital reconstruction of the bone fragments – a finding consistent with a human-made projectile point. The discovery follows a 2011 study published in Science, co-authored by members of the same research group, that described the original discovery of the bone fragments: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1207663

Summary author: Nyla Husain

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Manis site. Mastodon rib with embedded point to the left. Center for the Study of the First Americans, Texas A&M University

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Manis site. CT scan of bone point fragments embedded in the rib. Center for the Study of the First Americans, Texas A&M University

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Manis site. CT scan of bone point fragments embedded in the rib. Center for the Study of the First Americans, Texas A&M University

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Manis site. Arrow points to the trajectory of the spear. Center for the Study of the First Americans, Texas A&M University

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Article Source: AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE (AAAS) news release

Cover Photo, Top Left: Close up of the bone point embedded in the rib. Center for the Study of the First Americans, Texas A&M University

*Late Pleistocene osseous projectile point from the Manis site, Washington—Mastodon hunting in the Pacific Northwest 13,900 years ago, Science Advances, 1-Feb-2023. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1207663

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Penn Museum Researchers Uncover Ancient Tavern in Southern Iraq, Complete with 5,000-Year-Old Fridge

Posted on January 27, 2023 by Penn Museum -

PHILADELPHIA—Archaeologists from the Penn Museum, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Pisa, have uncovered a large tavern dating back to 2,700 BCE in the city of Lagash, located in southern Iraq. With an open-air dining area and a partial kitchen, the researchers found the ancient pub was complete with benches, a refrigerator, an oven, and the remains of old food—shedding light on the people who lived there, including a historically overlooked “middle class.”

Rather than digging straight down vertically in one spot, the team used a phased excavation approach—thanks to Field Director Dr. Sara Pizzimenti from the University of Pisa, who immediately identified the context as similar to those she had excavated years ago in Rome. By digging horizontally—layer by layer—they uncovered the tavern only 19 inches under the surface.

“Recovering a site like this almost 5,000-year-old public eatery so close to the surface is remarkable,” Dr. Holly Pittman, the Lagash Archaeological Project (LAP) Director, and Curator of the Penn Museum’s Near East Section, says. “Only a meticulous, multi-phased horizontal excavation can expose what remains.”

Lagash (modern Al-Hiba) was one of the oldest and largest cities in southern Mesopotamia during the 3rd millennium (3,000-2,001 BCE). It encompassed nearly two square miles. Surrounded by marshes, it was a major population and production center—an industrial hub with access to fertile land that focused on agriculture, together with marsh-related resources, like fishing, reeds, birds, and netting.

This year marks the fourth season that Dr. Pittman and the international team of researchers involved in the Lagash Archaeological Project have continued their work at this ancient site, where they are studying what role craft production played in this ancient city’s enormous economic success. They hope to continue to explore ceramic production in another area and see if the production practices in various sectors differentiate from one another.

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Since 2019, the archaeologists have found two houses, roads, alleyways, countless pottery pieces, and seven ceramic kilns that remained intact for thousands of years.

By incorporating state-of-the-art technology, such as remote sensing, including magnetometry and drone photography, together with strategic testing, researchers can “see” beneath the surface to carefully select areas that will help to answer research questions.

Dr. Pittman and her team are examining Mesopotamia with a completely different perspective from earlier researchers. Archaeologists of the past restricted ancient peoples to one of two categories—elite or enslaved. These views are outdated, Dr. Pittman says, as Lagash’s residents were independent people thriving in urban neighborhoods.

“Probably what we have—and especially in an environment as precarious as southern Mesopotamia—is that you have a broad band of people that we might consider ‘middle class’ during the 3rd millennium,” Dr. Pittman explains. “They had agency; they made decisions. They didn’t have wealth necessarily, but they were largely independent and had mobility.”

Embracing meaningful community engagement, the Lagash Archaeological Project works with nearby residents to employ them during excavations, as well as the documentation and processing of the excavated materials. Its researchers teach school children and their families about archaeology, while informing them about what the retrieved materials say about the people who lived there in the past.

The Lagash Archaeological Project has also worked to improve infrastructure across the region. Through its collaboration with the regional and national archaeological communities, LAP researchers are training the next generation of archaeologists in a variety of techniques, including GIS survey, remote sensing through drone photography, and magnetometry. In the future, the team is hoping to secure funding to bring three Iraqi archaeology students onto the project.

Dr. Pittman, along with Reed C. Goodman, a Ph.D. candidate in the Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World, will be the speakers for the Great Lecture, “Marshland of Cities: Lagash and its Neighbors ca. 2,500 BCE” on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 6:00 pm inside Harrison Auditorium at the Penn Museum. They will discuss their work and how recent finds help to reconstruct the ancient environment of southern Iraq, using remote sensing, geological coring, and excavation. Cost: $15. A live streaming option is available for $5. Tickets are available here.

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In Fall 2022, Penn Museum researchers uncover a 5,000 year old tavern at Lagash. Photo-Lagash Archaeology Project

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Drone photo of Trench 6 with clay pits, street and alley. Photo-Lagash Archaeological Project

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An international team of researchers, including archaeologists from the Penn Museum, planning the next steps at Lagash. Photo: Lagash Archaeological Project.

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About the Penn Museum

Home to over a million extraordinary objects, the Penn Museum has been highlighting our shared humanity across continents and millennia since 1887. In expanding access to archaeology and anthropology, the Penn Museum builds empathy and connections between cultures through experiences online and onsite in our galleries.

The Penn Museum is open Tuesday–Sunday, 10:00 am–5:00 pm. The Café is open Tuesday–Thursday, 9:00 am–3:00 pm and Friday and Saturday, 10:00 am–2:00 pm. For updated information, visit www.penn.museum, call 215.898.4000, or follow @PennMuseum on social media.

Article Source: Penn Museum news release.

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‘Golden boy’ mummy was protected by 49 precious amulets, CT scans reveal

Posted on January 24, 2023 by Frontiers -

FRONTIERS—Scientists used CT scans to ‘digitally unwrap’ the approximately 2,300-year-old undisturbed mummy of a teenage boy of high socioeconomic status. The body was equipped with 49 amulets of 21 different types, many of which were made of gold, which had been carefully placed on or inside the body. These included a two-finger amulet next to the uncircumcised penis, a golden heart scarab placed inside the thoracic cavity, and a golden tongue inside the mouth. He was clad in sandals and garlanded with ferns, with ritual significance. This mummy is a showcase of Egyptian beliefs about death and the afterlife during the Ptolemaic period.

Main text: The ancient Egyptians believed that when we died, our spiritual body sought out an afterlife similar to this world. But entry into this afterlife wasn’t guaranteed: it first required a perilous journey through the underworld, followed by an individual last judgment. For this reason, relatives and embalmers did everything they could to ensure that their loved one might reach a happy destination.

The mummy’s coffin. SN Saleem, SA Seddik, M el-Halwagy

Here, scientists from Egypt used computerized tomography (CT) to ‘digitally unwrap’ the intact, never-opened mummy of a 2,300-year-old teenage boy of high socioeconomic status. They found that this ‘Golden boy’ is an undisturbed showcase of ancient Egyptian beliefs about life after death. For example, he was sent on his way with no fewer than 49 amulets of 21 types to promote his bodily resurrection. He wore sandals and was garlanded with ferns, rich in ritual meaning. These results provide a unique insight into mummification procedures and beliefs about the importance of grave ornaments during the Ptolemaic period. They are published in Frontiers in Medicine.

“Here we show that this mummy’s body was extensively decorated with 49 amulets, beautifully stylized in a unique arrangement of three columns between the folds of the wrappings and inside the mummy’s body cavity. These include the Eye of Horus, the scarab, the akhet amulet of the horizon, the placenta, the Knot of Isis, and others. Many were made of gold, while some were made of semiprecious stones, fired clay, or faience. Their purpose was to protect the body and give it vitality in the afterlife,” said Dr Sahar Saleem, the study’s first author and a professor at the Faculty of Medicine of Cairo University, Egypt.

Sandals to walk to the afterlife

The ’Golden boy’ mummy had been found in 1916 at a cemetery used between approximately 332 and 30 BCE in Nag el-Hassay in southern Egypt. It has been stored unexamined in the basement of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo until the present study.

The mummy was laid inside two coffins, an outer coffin with a Greek inscription and an inner wooden sarcophagus. Within, he wore a gilded head mask, a pectoral cartonnage that covered the front of the torso, and a pair of sandals. Apart from the heart, the viscera had been removed through an incision, while the brain had been removed through the nose and replaced with resin.

“The sandals were probably meant to enable the boy to walk out of the coffin. According to the ancient Egyptians’ ritual Book of The Dead, the deceased had to wear white sandals to be pious and clean before reciting its verses,” said Saleem.

No wisdom teeth

Amulets were placed on or inside the mummy in three columns. SN Saleem, SA Seddik, M el-Halwagy

The CT scans showed that the boy was 128 cm tall, not circumcised, and without any known cause of death other than natural causes. From the degree of bone fusion and the non-erupted wisdom teeth, the authors estimate that the boy was between 14 and 15 years old. His teeth were good, with no evidence of caries, tooth loss, or periodontal disease.

Ferns were garlanded around the mummy’s outer surface. “Ancient Egyptians were fascinated by plants and flowers and believed they possessed sacred and symbolic effects. Bouquets of plants and flowers were placed beside the deceased at the time of burial: this was done for example with the mummies of the New Kingdom kings Ahmose, Amenhotep I, and Ramesses the Great. The deceased was also offered plants in each visit to the dead during feasts,” said Saleem.

The amulets are a testament to a wide range of Egyptian beliefs. For example, a golden tongue leaf was placed inside the mouth to ensure the boy could speak in the afterlife, while a two-finger amulet was placed beside his penis to protect the embalming incision. An Isis Knot enlisted the power of Isis in the protection of the body, a right-angle amulet was meant to bring balance and leveling, and double falcon and ostrich plumes represented the duality of spiritual and material life. A golden scarab beetle was found placed inside the thoracic cavity, of which a copy was 3D printed by the researchers.

Scarab to silence the heart

“The heart scarab is mentioned in chapter 30 of the Book of the Dead: it was important in the afterlife during judging the deceased and weighing of the heart against the feather of the goddess Maat. The heart scarab silenced the heart on Judgement Day, so as not to bear witness against the deceased. It was placed inside the torso cavity during mummification to substitute for the heart if the body was ever deprived of this organ,” explained Saleem.

Based on these exciting results, the management of the Egyptian Museum decided to move the mummy to the main exhibition hall under the nickname ‘Golden boy’. In its new location, visitors can admire the mummy next to CT images and a 3D printed version of the heart scarab amulet, to get as close as possible to the glories of ancient Egyptian civilization.

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The mummy digitally unwrapped in four stages. SN Saleem, SA Seddik, M el-Halwagy

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Article Source: FRONTIERS news release.

*Scanning and 3D-printing using Computed Tomography (CT) of the ‘Golden boy’ mummy, Frontiers in Medicine, 24-Jan-2023. 10.3389/fmed.2022.1028377

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Changing Paradigms for Sustainability

Posted on January 24, 2023 by Dan McLerran -

Most of the heroes on this planet go unsung and unrecognized. They represent a number that cannot be possibly counted.

That is because their acts, contributions and knowledge often get lost in the bigger picture of world-over events and actions of the few who, for a variety of reasons, capture the notice of the media and those who have the power to move and shape what the world sees as valuable and important.

Occasionally, however, the cloud of obscurity hiding some of these untold heroes is lifted. Such was the case when, on January 13, 2023, a small delegation of representatives from Belize were invited to attend a special event hosted by the University of California, Santa Barbara, to highlight the environment-sustaining principles of a practice called Maya Forest Gardening, and to recognize the achievement of Master Gardener Narciso Torres with the highest award that UC Chancellor Henry Yang can bestow: the Chancellor’s Medal.

Dr. Anabel Ford, an archaeologist who has directed decades of research at the archaeological site of El Pilar on the Belize-Guatemala border and who is President of Exploring Solutions Past ~ The Maya Forest Alliance and Director of ISBER/MesoAmerican Research Center at UC Santa Barbara, explains why.

Chancellor Henry Yang (left) with Narciso Torres (right) holding the Chancellor’s Medal. Image courtesy Macduff Everton

“We have had delegations in the past and were able to collaborate to showcase the importance of local ecological knowledge,” said Ford. “Master Forest Gardener Narciso Torres has worked with our team in the Maya forest for 40 years—ka’ katun in Mayan—and has helped us at El Pilar understand the nature of ancient Maya settlement patterns and land use. He sustains his family and conserves natural resources at his forest garden, Chak Ha Kol, in Belize.”

“This was a great way to frame this citizen scientist’s honor,” she continues, “and the promotion of principles critical to sustainability and resilience that apply everywhere in actions for environmental justice that build fertility in biochar and organic matter; reduce erosion through plant diversity holding soil and water; lower temperature through plants shading the landscape; conserve water by shade to reduce evapotranspiration; increase biodiversity of plants that serve multiple human uses; and generally care for people and our planet.” All of these things are supported and promoted with the Maya Forest Garden, a practice that underwrote the ancient Maya civilization and has been sustained by indigenous Maya people for centuries, with a tradition that has been carried down to experts today like Narciso Torres.

Ford and others like her believe that this practice holds solutions that can be applied to modern-day environmental problems and generate a new way of thinking about our environment.

For more details about Narciso, the Maya Forest Garden and the ancient site of El Pilar, see the article, The Milpa Way, a major feature article previously published in Popular Archaeology Magazine.

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Narciso and Anabel at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden. Image courtesy Macduff Everton

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A Maya house site at El Pilar (Belize side). The El Pilar story has shown that even the process of discovering the ancient Maya can be done sustainably. Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, Wikimedia Commons

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Violence was widespread in early farming society, study says

Posted on January 19, 2023 by University of Edinburgh -

UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH—Violence and warfare were widespread in many Neolithic communities across Northwest Europe, a period associated with the adoption of farming, new research* suggests.

Of the skeletal remains of more than 2300 early farmers from 180 sites dating from around 8000 – 4000 years ago to, more than one in ten displayed weapon injuries, bioarchaeologists found.

Contrary to the view that the Neolithic era was marked by peaceful cooperation, the team of international researchers say that in some regions the period from 6000 BC to 2000 BC may be a high point in conflict and violence with the destruction of entire communities.

The findings also suggest the rise of growing crops and herding animals as a way of life, replacing hunting and gathering, may have laid the foundations for formalized warfare.

Researchers used bioarchaeological techniques to study human skeletal remains from sites in Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Spain and Sweden.

The team collated the findings to map, for the first time, evidence of violence across Neolithic Northwestern Europe, which has the greatest concentration of excavated Neolithic sites in the world.

The team from the Universities of Edinburgh, Bournemouth and Lund in Sweden, and the OsteoArchaeological Research Centre in Germany examined the remains for evidence of injuries caused predominantly by blunt force to the skull.

More than ten per cent showed damage potentially caused by frequent blows to the head by blunt instruments or stone axes. Several examples of penetrative injuries, thought to be from arrows, were also found.

Some of the injuries were linked to mass burials, which could suggest the destruction of entire communities, the researchers say.

Dr Linda Fibiger, of the University of Edinburgh’s School of History, Classics and Archaeology, said: “Human bones are the most direct and least biased form of evidence for past hostilities and our abilities to distinguish between fatal injuries as opposed to post-mortem breakage have improved drastically in recent years, in addition to differentiating accidental injuries from weapon based assaults.”

Dr Martin Smith, of Bournemouth University’s Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, said: “The study raises the question to why violence seems to have been so prevalent during this period. The most plausible explanation may be that the economic base of society had changed. With farming came inequality and those who fared less successfully appear at times to have engaged in raiding and collective violence as an alternative strategy for success, with the results now increasingly being recognized archaeologically.”

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Neolithic burial, La Chapelle-Saint-Mesmin, Loiret, France. Roulex, GNU Free Documentation License, Wikimedia Commons

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH news release

The study is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper is available here: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2209481119

*Conflict, violence, and warfare among early farmers in Northwestern Europe, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 16-Jan-2023. 10.1073/pnas.2209481119

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Marriage in Minoan Crete

Posted on January 16, 2023 by Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology -

MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY—When Heinrich Schliemann discovered the gold-rich shaft tombs of Mycenae with their famous gold masks over 100 years ago, he could only speculate about the relationship of the people buried in them. Now, with the help of the analysis of ancient genomes, it has been possible for the first time to gain insights into kinship and marriage rules in Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece. The results were published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

A research team from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA), together with an international team of partners, analyzed over 100 genomes of Bronze Age people from the Aegean. “Without the great cooperation with our partners in Greece and worldwide, this would not have been possible,” says archaeologist Philipp Stockhammer, one of the study’s* lead authors.

First biological family tree of a Mycenaean family

Thanks to recent methodological advances in the production and evaluation of ancient genetic datasets, it has now been possible to produce extensive data even in regions with problematic DNA preservation due to climate conditions, such as Greece. For a Mycenaean hamlet of the 16th century BC, it has even been possible to reconstruct the kinship of the house’s inhabitants – the first family tree that has so far been genetically reconstructed for the entire ancient Mediterranean region.

Apparently, some of the sons still lived in their parents’ hamlet in adulthood. At least their children were buried in a tomb under the courtyard of the estate. One of the wives who married into the house brought her sister into the family, as her child was also buried in the same grave.

Customary to marry one’s first cousin

However, another finding was completely unexpected: on Crete and the other Greek islands, as well as on the mainland, it was very common to marry one’s first cousin 4000 years ago. “More than a thousand ancient genomes from different regions of the world have now been published, but it seems that such a strict system of kin marriage did not exist anywhere else in the ancient world,” says Eirini Skourtanioti, the lead author of the study who conducted the analyses. “This came as a complete surprise to all of us and raises many questions.”

How this particular marriage rule can be explained, the research team can only speculate. “Maybe this was a way to prevent the inherited farmland from being divided up more and more? In any case, it guaranteed a certain continuity of the family in one place, which is an important prerequisite for the cultivation of olives and wine, for example,” Stockhammer suspects. “What is certain is that the analysis of ancient genomes will continue to provide us with fantastic, new insights into ancient family structures in the future,” adds Skourtanioti.

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Life picture: olive harvesting in the Aegean Bronze Age. © Nikola Nevenov

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Article Source: MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY news release

*Ancient DNA reveals admixture history and endogamy in the prehistoric Aegean, Nature Ecology & Evolution, 16-Jan-2023. 10.1038/s41559-022-01952-3

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Human evolution in the Holocene Epoch

Posted on January 16, 2023 by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences -

PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES—A collection of articles from “The Past 12,000 Years of Behavior, Adaptation, and Evolution Shaped Who We Are Today” Special Feature highlights bioarchaeological research on how human evolution in the Holocene Epoch has shaped the biology and behavior of modern humans. In the collection, a Perspective explores the effects of past rapid climate change on human health through a review of published case studies. The review revealed that climate change had diverse effects on patterns of epidemics, violence, and migration in past societies that were contingent on historical, sociocultural, and biological dynamics. Another Perspective reviews published genomic evidence to explore links between human dispersals and the spread of agriculture and language families across the world. The analysis revealed a complex history with highly variable genetic and linguistic outcomes when expanding groups encountered resident groups. In one study, researchers measured strontium and oxygen isotopes in the tooth enamel of 99 individuals buried at archaeological sites in Turkey spanning the 14th-6th millennium BCE, documenting reduced mobility, varied kinship practices, and arrival of nonlocals during the transition to large villages. A study of the variation and societal context of healed and unhealed violent injuries in skeletal remains from the Neolithic period of Northwestern Europe finds that violence was widespread and included intergroup conflicts that resulted in the destruction of communities, possibly motivated by increasing competition and inequality. Another study of trends in human body size over the past 35,000 years involving 3,507 skeletons from 366 archaeological sites finds that body sizes decreased before the adoption of agriculture, remained stable in regions where domestication originated, and increased in some regions coincident with the spread of dairying and lactose tolerance. Together, the collection explores trends and transitions in human health, nutrition, demography, and interpersonal conflict over the past 12,000 years.

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Skeletal sampling has provided data for Holocene Epoch human study. Niner09, Pixabay

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Article Source: PNAS news release

*“The past 12,000 years of behavior, adaptation, population, and evolution shaped who we are today,” by Clark Spencer Larsen, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 17-Jan-2023.10.1073/pnas.2209613120

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Ancient Siberian genomes reveal genetic backflow from North America across the Bering Sea

Posted on January 12, 2023 by Cell Press -

CELL PRESS—The movement of people across the Bering Sea from North Asia to North America is a well-known phenomenon in early human history. Nevertheless, the genetic makeup of the people who lived in North Asia during this time has remained mysterious due to a limited number of ancient genomes analyzed from this region. Now, researchers reporting* in Current Biology on January 12 describe genomes from ten individuals up to 7,500 years old that help to fill the gap and show geneflow from people moving in the opposite direction from North America to North Asia.

Their analysis reveals a previously undescribed group of early Holocene Siberian people that lived in the Neolithic Altai-Sayan region, near to where Russia, China, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan come together. The genetic data show they were descendants of both paleo-Siberian and Ancient North Eurasian (ANE) people.

“We describe a previously unknown hunter-gatherer population in the Altai as early as 7,500 years old, which is a mixture between two distinct groups that lived in Siberia during the last Ice Age,” says Cosimo Posth at the University of Tübingen, Germany, and senior author of the study. “The Altai hunter-gatherer group contributed to many contemporaneous and subsequent populations across North Asia, showing how great the mobility of those foraging communities was.”

Posth notes that the Altai region is known in the media as the location where a new archaic hominin group, the Denisovans, was discovered. But the region also has importance in human history as a crossroad for population movements between northern Siberia, Central Asia, and East Asia over millennia.

Posth and colleagues report that the unique gene pool they uncovered may represent an optimal source for the inferred ANE-related population that contributed to Bronze Age groups from North and Inner Asia, such as Lake Baikal hunter-gatherers, Okunevo-associated pastoralists, and Tarim Basin mummies. They uncovered Ancient Northeast Asian (ANA) ancestry as well—which had initially been described in Neolithic hunter-gatherers from the Russian Far East—in another Neolithic Altai-Sayan individual associated with distinct cultural features.

The findings reveal the spread of ANA ancestry about 1,500 kilometers farther to the west than previously observed. In the Russian Far East, they also identified 7,000-year-old individuals with Jomon-associated ancestry, indicating links with hunter-gatherer groups from the Japanese Archipelago.

The data also are consistent with multiple phases of gene flow from North America to northeastern Asia over the last 5,000 years, reaching the Kamchatka Peninsula and central Siberia. The researchers note that the findings highlight a largely interconnected population throughout North Asia from the early Holocene onwards.

“The finding that surprised me the most is from an individual dated to a similar period as the other Altai hunter-gatherers but with a completely different genetic profile, showing genetic affinities to populations located in the Russian Far East,” says Ke Wang at Fudan University, China, and lead author of the study. “Interestingly, the Nizhnetytkesken individual was found in a cave containing rich burial goods with a religious costume and objects interpreted as possible representation of shamanism.”

Wang says the finding implies that individuals with very different profiles and backgrounds were living in the same region around the same time.

“It is not clear if the Nizhnetytkesken individual came from far away or the population from which he derived was located close by,” she says. “However, his grave goods appear different than other local archeological contexts implying mobility of both culturally and genetically diverse individuals into the Altai region.”

The genetic data from the Altai show that North Asia harbored highly connected groups as early as 10,000 years ago, across long geographic distances. “This suggests that human migrations and admixtures were the norm and not the exception also for ancient hunter-gatherer societies,” Posth says.

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Skull Sergey V. Semenov

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Photo of grave. Nadezhda F. Stepanova

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Article Source: Cell Press news release

This work is supported by the Max Planck Society, Alon Fellowship, Russian Science Foundation, Russian Foundation for Basic Research, National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF), Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation, and Altai State University.

*Current Biology, Wang et al.: “Middle Holocene Siberian genomes reveal highly connected gene pools throughout North Asia” https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(22)01892-9

Current Biology (@CurrentBiology), published by Cell Press, is a bimonthly journal that features papers across all areas of biology. Current Biology strives to foster communication across fields of biology, both by publishing important findings of general interest and through highly accessible front matter for non-specialists. Visit http://www.cell.com/current-biology. To receive Cell Press media alerts, contact press@cell.com.

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Caribbean breadfruit traced back to Capt. Bligh’s 1791-93 journey

Posted on January 5, 2023 by Northwestern University -

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, EVANSTON, Ill. — In 1793, Capt. William Bligh docked the HMS Providence in Kingstown in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, a small island nation in the Caribbean Sea, with cargo filled with several hundred sapling breadfruit trees. His goal was singular: To introduce the long-lived trees with their carbohydrate-rich fruits to cheaply feed Britain’s slaves, who labored on the islands’ sugar plantations.

Now, 230 years later, a plant biology team led by Northwestern University, the Chicago Botanic Garden and the St. Vincent Botanical Gardens has, for the first time, traced five major lineages of Caribbean breadfruit back to that single introduction from Bligh’s voyage.

Not only have the original breadfruit tree cultivars (or varieties produced by selective breeding) survived for centuries, they also are thriving, the researchers found.

The study* will be published on Jan. 5, 2023 — the 230th anniversary of Bligh’s arrival in the Caribbean — in the journal Current Biology.

“Breadfruit is an underutilized crop, and it doesn’t get nearly as much attention as the major crops,” said Nyree Zerega, the study’s senior author. “However, interest in breadfruit is increasing globally, and we thought this would be a fascinating puzzle to solve.”

“Outside of Oceania, the Caribbean is one of the largest producers of breadfruit worldwide,” added Lauren Audi, the study’s first author. “And we really don’t know much about the genetic diversity of the fruit in the Caribbean. Because this is an important crop for food security — especially for island nations that are highly susceptible to climate change — we wanted to characterize the genetic diversity of breadfruit crops in order to conserve them. The first step for that is to characterize the diversity of what we already have.”

A breadfruit expert, Zerega is director of the Program in Plant Biology and Conservation, a partnership between Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and the Chicago Botanic Garden, and a conservation scientist with the Negaunee Institute for Plant Conservation Science and Action at the Chicago Botanic Garden. Audi was a graduate student in Zerega’s laboratory at the time of the research. Now, she is a lab manager at the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and a Ph.D. candidate at New York University.

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Breadfruit on the ‘Bounty’

Many people might be familiar with Capt. Bligh from “Mutiny on the Bounty,” a classic book series and film starring Clark Gable that fictionalized the arduous journey and mission’s ultimate failure. (The film was later remade twice — with Marlon Brando in 1962 and Anthony Hopkins in 1984.)

Aboard a British Royal Navy vessel called the HMS Bounty, Capt. Bligh and his crew stopped in Tahiti, where they worked with locals to collect breadfruit. The goal was to introduce breadfruit as a cheap food for slave populations forced to work on British plantations in the Caribbean islands. But these plans were abruptly abandoned in April 1789 when the Bounty’s crew seized control of the ship, throwing Bligh and his 18 loyalists overboard.

Yet Bligh survived — and remained dedicated to the original goal of collecting and transporting breadfruit. Just two years later, he set sail again — this time on the HMS Providence with an accompanying vessel, the HMS Assistant. Although Bligh recorded names of eight types of breadfruit in his log for the Bounty, the Providence’s logs are curiously missing these crucial details.

“When you look at the logs from the Bounty, Bligh carefully documented what was collected,” Zerega said. “But on his second voyage, the time spent in Tahiti was shorter, and there weren’t any notes about the names of the breadfruit cultivars they actually collected. He did indicate that five kinds of seedless breadfruit were collected, but subsequent historical texts have suggested different numbers. Wanting to know this is partly curiosity, but it’s also useful because it links cross-cultural knowledge about the plants.”

Genetic challenges

The lack of historical records from the Providence is not the only reason why characterizing breadfruit genetic diversity in the Caribbean has been challenging. There are several genetic challenges. First, seedless breadfruit trees are triploid. In other words, they have three copies of chromosomes, instead of two (diploid), which is more common. There are not as many genetic tools designed to analyze triploids, compared to diploids.

Triploid breadfruit trees also are unable to reproduce sexually and can only survive if humans clonally propagate them. This is done with many cultivated fruit trees — even those that can sexually reproduce — to ensure quality control.

“When you bite into a Honey Crisp apple, you expect a different taste and texture than a McIntosh,” Zerega explained. “Clonal propagation ensures that you get what you expect. When plants develop seeds through sexual reproduction, they give rise to variation in offspring — just like the variation among human siblings.”

Over thousands of years of clonal propagation, however, variation can still arise due to somatic mutations, which are mutations in the tree’s non-reproductive cells. Somatic mutations can occur spontaneously, due to stress or errors in DNA repair. In search of the best fruits, humans sometimes select the part of the plant where the somatic mutation occurred and propagate it. So, if the mutation gives rise to a desirable new leaf or fruit type, people can cut the branch where the mutation occurred, propagate it and essentially clone that new mutation to grow a tree with the desirable fruit again.

Whatever mutation gave rise to the change can be extremely tiny and difficult to pinpoint genetically. Detecting DNA differences across different clonal lines (that is, lineages that arose from different historical “mother” trees) is much easier than detecting differences due to mutations within the same clonal line. Nonetheless, all seedless breadfruit cultivars are quite similar, making it challenging to genetically characterize different cultivars.

Finally, both within and across island groups in the Pacific and the Caribbean, people use many different names for what sometimes appear to be the same cultivars. This adds to the confusion when characterizing diversity.

Connecting the pieces

To overcome these challenges, the researchers employed a variety of tools. They integrated local knowledge with historical documents and specimens, morphological data (observations about the fruits’ size, shape and texture) and targeted genome sequencing.

Partnering with the St. Vincent Botanical Gardens, the St. Vincent Ministry of Tourism and the St. Vincent National Parks, Rivers and Beaches Authority, members of the research team traveled throughout St. Vincent. They collected leaves and took measurements, such as leaf size, fruit size and shape. Then, they supplemented these samples with historical dried, pressed specimens stored in herbaria in museums and botanic gardens around the world — including a specimen collected in 1769 from the HMS Endeavor Voyage led by Captain James Cook.

Back in the lab at the Chicago Botanic Garden, the researchers analyzed more than 200 individual breadfruit specimens, focusing predominantly on seedless breadfruit from St. Vincent and Tahiti as well as samples from around the world. The process involved extracting and sequencing DNA from leaf samples. Among these samples, the researchers ultimately identified eight major global breadfruit lineages — five of which are found in the Caribbean and likely represent the original 1793 introduction by the HMS Providence.

“This is an exciting project,” said Diane Ragone, director emeritus of the Breadfruit Institute at the National Tropical Botanical Garden in Hawaii, study co-author and Zerega’s former adviser. “Through laboratory, herbarium and library research and fieldwork in Tahiti and the Caribbean and by studying breadfruit trees conserved at the National Tropical Botanical Garden in Hawaii, three generations of women scientists were able to provide answers to a centuries-old mystery: ‘Which varieties of breadfruit did Captain Bligh introduce into the Caribbean?’”

Based on previous work by Zerega and others, there are many more global breadfruit lineages when the great diversity of seeded cultivars from Oceania are included. The current study focused mostly on seedless breadfruit.

“We identified five genetic lineages in the Caribbean, which matches what we found in some historical texts,” Audi said. “It was exciting to tease apart this history and characterize breadfruit’s diversity in the Caribbean genomically for the first time.”

“Still, there may be more types of breadfruit in St. Vincent than our genetic methods could identify because they are so closely related,” Zerega said. “Even if we don’t find genetic differences among plants that people assign different names to, those names still have significance and value.”

Breadfruit’s importance

Although breadfruit began with a dark history in the Caribbean as slave food, the nutritious fruit eventually became an important part of island diet and culture. Despite having “fruit” in its name, breadfruit is starchy and seedless, playing a culinary role more like a potato. Closely related to jackfruit, the nutrient-rich food is high in fiber, vitamins and minerals. In its native Oceania where breadfruit was domesticated, people have been eating breadfruit for thousands of years — whether steamed, roasted, fried or fermented. Breadfruit also can be turned into flour, in order to lengthen its shelf life.

Once established, a single breadfruit tree can live for decades, producing a large number of fruits each year. And, because it’s a perennial crop, it also requires less energy input (water and fertilizer) than annual crops that must be replanted each year. Like other trees, it also sequesters carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

“Food security and food sovereignty for the next millennium lies in the endless untapped possibility of breadfruit,” said Gordon J.P. Shallow, study co-author, who was curator of the St. Vincent Botanical Garden at the time of the research.

Earlier this year, Zerega and Northwestern climate scientists authored another study (published in PLOS Climate), which found that breadfruit is particularly resilient in the face of human-caused climate change. Although other staple crops struggle in hot conditions, the researchers predict that changing conditions will have less effect on breadfruit. That means it could play an important role in fighting climate-driven hunger.

The study, “Linking breadfruit cultivar names across the globe connects histories after 230 years of separation,” was supported by the Garden Club of America, Botanical Society of America, the Institute for Sustainability and Energy at Northwestern Resnick Social Impact Fund and the Northwestern University Alumnae Research Award.

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Breadfruit. Breadfruit tree in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Nyree Zerega/Northwestern University/Chicago Botanic Garden

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Article Source: NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY news release

*Linking breadfruit cultivar names across the globe connects histories after 230 years of separation, Current Biology, 5-Jan-2023. 10.1016/j.cub.2022.12.001

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New study reveals meaning of Ice Age markings for first time and finds evidence of early ‘proto-writing’ dating back 20,000 years

Posted on January 5, 2023 by Durham University -

Durham University—A new study claims to have conclusively decoded the meaning of markings seen in Ice Age drawings and found evidence of early writing dating back at least 14,000 years earlier than previously thought.

The study reveals that Ice Age hunter-gatherers were using markings combined with drawings of their animal prey to store and communicate sophisticated information about the behavior of those animals crucial to their survival, such as wild horses, deer, cattle, and mammoths, at least 20,000 years ago.

As the marks, found in over 600 Ice Age images on cave walls and portable objects across Europe, record information numerically and reference a calendar rather than recording speech, they cannot be called ‘writing’ in the sense of the pictographic and cuneiform systems of early writing that emerged in Sumer from 3,400 BC onwards.

Instead, the team refers to them as a proto-writing system, pre-dating other token-based systems that are thought to have emerged during the Near Eastern Neolithic by at least 10,000 years.

The study, published today [Thursday 5 January 2022] in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, was led by independent researcher, Ben Bacon and involved a small team including two senior academics from Durham University, and one from University College London, both in the UK.

Until now archaeologists have known that these sequences of lines, dots, and other marks – found on cave walls and portable objects from the last Ice Age were storing some kind of information but did not know their specific meaning.

Mr Bacon was keen to decode these, and in particular the inclusion of a ‘Y’ sign – formed by adding a diverging line to another.

By using the birth cycles of equivalent animals today as a reference point, the team was able to work out that the number of marks associated with Ice Age animals were a record, by lunar month, of when they were mating.

Mr Bacon had hypothesized that the ‘Y’ sign stood for ‘giving birth’ and the work of the wider team including Professors Paul Pettitt (Professor of Palaeolithic Archaeology) and Robert Kentridge (Professor of Visual Psychology) at Durham University enabled this to be confirmed.

Their work demonstrated that these sequences record mating and birthing seasons and found a statistically significant correlation between the numbers of marks the position of the ‘Y’ sign and the months in which modern animals’ mate and birth respectively.

Speaking about the discovery, Ben Bacon said: “The meaning of the markings within these drawings has always intrigued me so I set about trying to decode them, using a similar approach that others took to understanding an early form of Greek text.

“Using information and imagery of cave art available via the British Library and on the internet, I amassed as much data as possible and began looking for repeating patterns.

“As the study progressed, I reached out to friends and senior university academics, whose expertise were critical to proving my theory.

“It was surreal to sit in the British Library and slowly work out what people 20,000 years ago were saying but the hours of hard work were certainly worth it!”

Professors Paul Pettitt and Robert Kentridge, both of Durham University, have worked together developing the field of visual palaeopsychology, the scientific investigation of the psychology that underpins the earliest development of human visual culture.

Speaking about the discovery, Professor Pettitt, of the Department of Archaeology, Durham University, said: “To say that when Ben contacted us about his discovery was exciting is an understatement. I am glad I took it seriously.

“This is a fascinating study that has brought together independent and professional researchers with expertise in archaeology and visual psychology, to decode information first recorded thousands of years ago.

“The results show that Ice Age hunter-gatherers were the first to use a systematic calendar and marks to record information about major ecological events within that calendar.

“In turn we’re able to show that these people – who left a legacy of spectacular art in the caves of Lascaux and Altamira – also left a record of early timekeeping that would eventually become commonplace among our species.”

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Robert Kentridge, Professor of the Psychology of Vision, Durham University, said: “The implications are that Ice Age hunter-gatherers didn’t simply live in their present, but recorded memories of the time when past events had occurred and used these to anticipate when similar events would occur in the future, an ability that memory researchers call mental time-travel.”

Also, part of the research team was Tony Freeth, Honorary Professor at University College London, who led research that enabled the function of the ancient Greek astronomical clock Antikithera mechanism to be deciphered.

Professor Freeth said; “I was stunned when Ben came to me with his underlying idea that the numbers of spots or lines on the animals represented the lunar month of key events in the animals’ life cycles.

“Lunar calendars are difficult because there are just under twelve and a half lunar months in a year, so they do not fit neatly into a year. As a result, our own modern calendar has all but lost any link to actual lunar months.

“In the Antikythera Mechanism, they used a sophisticated 19-year mathematical calendar to resolve the incompatibility of the year and the lunar month—impossible for Palaeolithic peoples. Their calendar had to be much simpler. It also had to be a ‘meteorological calendar’, tied to changes in temperature, not astronomical events such as the equinoxes.

“With these principles in mind, Ben and I slowly devised a calendar which helped to explain why the system that Ben had uncovered was so universal across wide geography and extraordinary time-scales.”

The team, which also included independent researchers Dr Azadeh Khatiri, a work-place and personal coach, ex-science journalist and scientist, and Clive James Palmer, a retired school teacher specializing in History, hope this is just the beginning of the story.

The team have demonstrated that despite the difficulties, researchers can crack the meaning of at least some of these symbols.

Mr Bacon said: “That’s encouraged us to continue our work and to attempt to understand more of the symbols, and their cognitive bases.

“What we are hoping, and the initial work is promising, is that unlocking more parts of the proto-writing system will allow us to gain an understanding of what information our ancestors valued.”

“As we probe deeper into their world what we are discovering is that these ancient ancestors are a lot more like us than we had previously thought—these people, separated from us by many millennia, are suddenly a lot closer.”

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Lascaux cave wall painting. Prof Saxx, GNU Free Documentation License, Wikimedia Commons

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Altamira cave wall painting.José-Manuel Benito, Locutus Borg, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

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Article Source: Durham University news release

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Analysis identifies stemmed point tools 2,300 years older than others excavated at Paleoamerican settlement

Posted on December 23, 2022 by American Association for the Advancement of Science -

AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE (AAAS)—Radiocarbon dating indicates that 13 projectile point stone tools found at the Cooper’s Ferry site in present-day western Idaho are 2,300 years older than others previously unearthed at the site, expanding the time frame for tool use in this community. The work also refines the inhabitancy time frame for Paleoamericans in an archaeological settlement in the Columbia River basin. “This discovery significantly expands both the radiocarbon chronology of human occupation in the Americas and our knowledge of the technological traditions employed by its early inhabitants,” Loren Davis and colleagues write. Before the Clovis people – who are famed for using specialized stone tools with fluted points – there were other Paleoamericans who also used stemmed point technology. Past work by members of the same research group established the presence of one such community at Cooper’s Ferry that consistently inhabited the settlement beginning sometime between 16,560 and 15,280 B.P. Now, Davis et al.* has used radiocarbon dating on 13 stemmed points gathered from an excavation site called Area B within Cooper’s Ferry to glean new insights about this community, their tool use, and their possible origins. In addition to confirming the period during which Cooper’s Ferry was inhabited, an examination of artifacts from Area B also revealed novel stemmed point tools dated to be 2,300 years older than those found in an excavation site in the settlement known as Area A. The identification of older projectile point tools shows that these techniques were in use at Cooper’s Ferry before there was an ice-free corridor in the Americas. The absence of a land route through which this technology could have spread suggested to the authors that such knowledge may have come from across the Pacific. Hence, the team compared Cooper’s Ferry stemmed point technology with that found in paleo-communities in Japan. “These bifacial stemmed point technologies occur well before the appearance of different lithic and ceramic technologies associated with incipient Jomon occupations in Hokkaido,” the authors write, noting that the Jomon settlement emerged around 14,700 B.P. “We hypothesize this shared similarity in pre-Jomon stemmed point technology may point to the general location along the northwest Pacific Rim from which some of the earliest peoples in the Americas may have originated between ~22,000-16,000 years ago.”

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Cooper’s Ferry Site 2013 Area A looking east. Loren Davis, Oregon State University

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Article Source: AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE (AAAS) news release. The text of the news release summary author was written by Abigail Eisenstadt.

*Dating of a Large Tool Assemblage at the Cooper’s Ferry Site (Idaho, USA) Dated ~15,785 cal yr B.P. Extends Age of Stemmed Points in the Americas, Science Advances, 23-Dec-2022. 10.1126/sciadv.ade1248

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Drought encouraged Attila’s Huns to attack the Roman empire, tree rings suggest

Posted on December 15, 2022 by University of Cambridge -

UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE—Hungary has just experienced its driest summer since meteorological measurements began, devastating the country’s usually productive farmland. Archaeologists now suggest that similar conditions in the 5^th century may have encouraged animal herders to become raiders, with devastating consequences for the Roman empire.

The study*, published today in the Journal of Roman Archaeology, argues that extreme drought spells from the 430s – 450s CE disrupted ways of life in the Danube frontier provinces of the eastern Roman empire, forcing Hunnic peoples to adopt new strategies to ‘buffer against severe economic challenges’.

[The research paper can be accessed here]

The authors, Associate Professor Susanne Hakenbeck from Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology and Professor Ulf Büntgen from the University’s Department of Geography, came to their conclusions after assessing a new tree ring-based hydroclimate reconstruction, as well as archaeological and historical evidence.

The Hunnic incursions into eastern and central Europe in the 4th and 5th centuries CE have long been viewed as the initial crisis that triggered the so-called ‘Great Migrations’ of ‘Barbarian Tribes’, leading to the fall of the Roman empire. But where the Huns came from and what their impact on the late Roman provinces actually was has been unclear.

New climate data reconstructed from tree rings by Prof Büntgen and colleagues provides information about yearly changes in climate over the last 2000 years. It shows that Hungary experienced episodes of unusually dry summers in the 4th and 5th centuries. Hakenbeck and Büntgen point out that climatic fluctuations, in particular drought spells from 420 to 450 CE, would have reduced crop yields and pasture for animals beyond the floodplains of the Danube and Tisza.

Büntgen said: “Tree ring data gives us an amazing opportunity to link climatic conditions to human activity on a year-by-year basis. We found that periods of drought recorded in biochemical signals in tree-rings coincided with an intensification of raiding activity in the region.”

Recent isotopic analysis of skeletons from the region, including by Dr Hakenbeck, suggests that Hunnic peoples responded to climate stress by migrating and by mixing agricultural and pastoral diets.

Hakenbeck said: “If resource scarcity became too extreme, settled populations may have been forced to move, diversify their subsistence practices and switch between farming and mobile animal herding. These could have been important insurance strategies during a climatic downturn.”

But the study also argues that some Hunnic peoples dramatically changed their social and political organization to become violent raiders.

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From herders to raiders

Hunnic attacks on the Roman frontier intensified after Attila came to power in the late 430s. The Huns increasingly demanded gold payments and eventually a strip of Roman territory along the Danube. In 451 CE, the Huns invaded Gaul and a year later they invaded northern Italy.

Traditionally, the Huns have been cast as violent barbarians driven by an “infinite thirst for gold”. But, as this study points out, the historical sources documenting these events were primarily written by elite Romans who had little direct experience of the peoples and events they described.

“Historical sources tell us that Roman and Hun diplomacy was extremely complex,” Dr Hakenbeck said. “Initially it involved mutually beneficial arrangements, resulting in Hun elites gaining access to vast amounts of gold. This system of collaboration broke down in the 440s, leading to regular raids of Roman lands and increasing demands for gold.”

The study argues that if current dating of events is correct, the most devastating Hunnic incursions of 447, 451 and 452 CE coincided with extremely dry summers in the Carpathian Basin.

Hakenbeck said: “Climate-induced economic disruption may have required Attila and others of high rank to extract gold from the Roman provinces to keep war bands and maintain inter-elite loyalties. Former horse-riding animal herders appear to have become raiders.”

Historical sources describe the Huns at this time as a highly stratified group with a military organization that was difficult to counter, even for the Roman armies.

The study suggests that one reason why the Huns attacked the provinces of Thrace and Illyricum in 422, 442, and 447 CE was to acquire food and livestock, rather than gold, but accepts that concrete evidence is needed to confirm this. The authors also suggest that Attila demanded a strip of land ‘five days’ journey wide’ along the Danube because this could have offered better grazing in a time of drought.

Hakenbeck said: “Climate alters what environments can provide and this can lead people to make decisions that affect their economy, and their social and political organization. Such decisions are not straightforwardly rational, nor are their consequences necessarily successful in the long term.”

“This example from history shows that people respond to climate stress in complex and unpredictable ways, and that short-term solutions can have negative consequences in the long term.”

By the 450s CE, just a few decades of their appearance in central Europe, the Huns had disappeared. Attila himself died in 453 CE.

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Huns went from herders to raiders before the raids on ancient Roman northern Italy. Pixabay

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE news release

*S.E. Hakenbeck & U. Büntgen, ‘The role of drought during the Hunnic incursions into central-east Europe in the 4^th and 5^th centuries CE’, Journal of Roman Archaeology (2022). DOI: 10.1017/S1047759422000332

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Early humans may have first walked upright in the trees

Posted on December 14, 2022 by University College London -

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON—Human bipedalism – walking upright on two legs – may have evolved in trees, and not on the ground as previously thought, according to a new study involving UCL researchers.

In the study, published today in the journal Science Advances, researchers from UCL, the University of Kent, and Duke University, USA, explored the behaviors of wild chimpanzees – our closest living relative – living in the Issa Valley of western Tanzania, within the region of the East African Rift Valley. Known as ‘savanna-mosaic’ – a mix of dry open land with few trees and patches of dense forest – the chimpanzees’ habitat is very similar to that of our earliest human ancestors and was chosen to enable the scientists to explore whether the openness of this type of landscape could have encouraged bipedalism in hominins.

The study is the first of its kind to explore if savanna-mosaic habitats would account for increased time spent on the ground by the Issa chimpanzees, and compares their behavior to other studies on their solely forest-dwelling cousins in other parts of Africa.

Overall, the study found that the Issa chimpanzees spent as much time in the trees as other chimpanzees living in dense forests, despite their more open habitat, and were not more terrestrial (land-based) as expected.

Furthermore, although the researchers expected the Issa chimpanzees to walk upright more in open savanna vegetation, where they cannot easily travel via the tree canopy, more than 85% of occurrences of bipedalism took place in the trees.

The authors say that their findings contradict widely accepted theories that suggest that it was an open, dry savanna environment that encouraged our prehistoric human relatives to walk upright – and instead suggests that they may have evolved to walk on two feet to move around the trees.

Study co-author Dr Alex Piel (UCL Anthropology) said: “We naturally assumed that because Issa has fewer trees than typical tropical forests, where most chimpanzees live, we would see individuals more often on the ground than in the trees. Moreover, because so many of the traditional drivers of bipedalism (such as carrying objects or seeing over tall grass, for example) are associated with being on the ground, we thought we’d naturally see more bipedalism here as well. However, this is not what we found.

“Our study suggests that the retreat of forests in the late Miocene-Pliocene era around five million years ago and the more open savanna habitats were in fact not a catalyst for the evolution of bipedalism. Instead, trees probably remained essential to its evolution – with the search for food-producing trees a likely driver of this trait.”

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To establish their findings, the researchers recorded more than 13,700 instantaneous observations of positional behavior from 13 chimpanzee adults (six females and seven males), including almost 2,850 observations of individual locomotor events (e.g., climbing, walking, hanging, etc.), over the course of the 15-month study. They then used the relationship between tree/land-based behavior and vegetation (forest vs woodland) to investigate patterns of association. Similarly, they noted each instance of bipedalism and whether it was associated with being on the ground or in the trees.

The authors note that walking on two feet is a defining feature of humans when compared to other great apes, who “knuckle walk”. Yet, despite their study, researchers say why humans alone amongst the apes first began to walk on two feet still remains a mystery.

Study co-author Dr Fiona Stewart (UCL Anthropology) said: “To date, the numerous hypotheses for the evolution of bipedalism share the idea that hominins (human ancestors) came down from the trees and walked upright on the ground, especially in more arid, open habitats that lacked tree cover. Our data do not support that at all.

“Unfortunately, the traditional idea of fewer trees equals more terrestriality (land dwelling) just isn’t borne out with the Issa data. What we need to focus on now is how and why these chimpanzees spend so much time in the trees – and that is what we’ll focus on next on our way to piecing together this complex evolutionary puzzle.”

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An adult male chimpanzee walks upright to navigate flexible branches in the open canopy, characteristic of the Issa Valley savanna-mosaic habitat.Despite their open and dry habitat, chimpanzees at Issa remained highly arboreal and did not walk on the ground more than chimpanzees living in tropical forest, findings which support upright walking evolving in the trees, not on the ground in our early ancestors Rhiana Drummond-Clarke

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Article Source: University College London news releas

*Wild chimpanzee behavior suggests that a savanna-mosaic habitat did not support the emergence of hominin terrestrial bipedalism, Science Advances, 14-Dec-2022. 10.1126/sciadv.add9752

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Rare Half-Shekel Coin from the Great Revolt Found in Jerusalem’s Ophel Excavations

Posted on December 13, 2022 by The Hebrew University of Jerusalem -

Tuesday, December 13—Recent excavations in the Ophel area south of the Temple Mount uncovered the remains of a monumental public building from the Second Temple period, which was destroyed in 70 CE.

In the destruction layer, dozens of Jewish coins were found from the period of the Great Revolt (66–70 CE), most of them of bronze. This assemblage also included a particularly rare and unusual find – a silver coin in a half-shekel denomination originating from 69/70 CE.

The dig was carried out by a team from the Hebrew University, led by Prof. Uzi Leibner of the Institute of Archaeology, in partnership with the Herbert W. Armstrong College in Edmond, Oklahoma, and with the support of the East Jerusalem Development Company, the Israel Antiquities Authority, and the Israel Nature and Parks Authority. The rare coin was cleaned at the conservation laboratory of the Institute of Archaeology and identified by Dr. Yoav Farhi, the team’s numismatic expert and curator of the Kadman Numismatic Pavilion at the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv.

“This is the third coin of this type found in excavations in Jerusalem, and one of the few ever found in archeological excavations,” said the researchers.

During the Great Revolt against Rome, the Jews in Jerusalem minted bronze and silver coins. Most of the silver coins featured a goblet on one side, with ancient Hebrew script above it noting the year of the Revolt. Depending on its denomination, the coins also included an inscription around the border noting either, “Israel Shekel,” “Half-Shekel,” or “Quarter-Shekel.” The other side of these coins showcased a branch with three pomegranates, surrounded by an inscription in ancient Hebrew script, “Holy Jerusalem.”

Throughout the Roman era the authority to produce silver coins was reserved solely for the emperor. During the Revolt, the minting of coins, especially those made of silver, was a political statement and an expression of national liberation from Roman rule by the Jewish rebels. Indeed, throughout the Roman period leading up to the Great Revolt, no silver coins were minted by Jews, not even during the rule of King Herod the Great.

According to the researchers, half-shekel coins (which had an average weight of 7 grams) were also used to pay the “half-shekel” tax to the Temple, contributed annually by every Jewish adult male to help cover the costs of worship.

Dr. Farhi explained, “Until the revolt, it was customary to pay the half-shekel tax using good-quality silver coins minted in Tyre in Lebanon, known as ‘Tyrean shekels’ or ‘Tyrean half-shekels.’ These coins held the image of Herakles-Melqart, the principal deity of Tyre, and on the reverse they featured an eagle surrounded by a Greek inscription, ‘Tyre the holy and city of refuge.’ Thus, the silver coins produced by the rebels were intended to also serve as a replacement for the Tyrean coins, by using more appropriate inscriptions and replacing images (forbidden by the Second Commandment) with symbols. The silver coins from the Great Revolt were the first and the last in ancient times to bear the title ‘shekel.’ The next time this name was used was in 1980, on Israeli Shekel coins produced by the Bank of Israel.”

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Half-shekel coin from the third year of the Great Revolt (Photo: Tal Rogovski)

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Article Source: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem news release.

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Archives

2.9-million-year-old butchery site reopens case of who made first stone tools

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Ancient Siberian genomes reveal genetic backflow from North America across the Bering Sea

Caribbean breadfruit traced back to Capt. Bligh’s 1791-93 journey

*Linking breadfruit cultivar names across the globe connects histories after 230 years of separation, Current Biology, 5-Jan-2023. 10.1016/j.cub.2022.12.001

New study reveals meaning of Ice Age markings for first time and finds evidence of early ‘proto-writing’ dating back 20,000 years

Analysis identifies stemmed point tools 2,300 years older than others excavated at Paleoamerican settlement

Drought encouraged Attila’s Huns to attack the Roman empire, tree rings suggest

Early humans may have first walked upright in the trees

Rare Half-Shekel Coin from the Great Revolt Found in Jerusalem’s Ophel Excavations

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