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FLINDERS UNIVERSITY—What links a finger bone and some fossil teeth found in a cave in the remote Altai Mountains of Siberia to a single tooth found in a cave in the limestone landscapes of tropical Laos?

The answer to this question has been established by an international team of researchers from Laos, Europe, the US and Australia.

The human tooth was chanced upon during an archaeological survey in a remote area of Laos. The scientists have shown it originated from the same ancient human population first recognized in Denisova Cave (dubbed the Denisovans), in the Altai Mountains of Siberia (Russia).

The research team made the significant discovery during their 2018 excavation campaign in northern Laos. The new cave Tam Ngu Hao 2, also known as Cobra Cave, is located near to the famous Tam Pà Ling Cave where other important 70,000-year-old human (Homo sapiens) fossils had been previously found.

The international researchers are confident the two ancient sites are linked to Denisovan occupations despite being thousands of kilometers apart. 

Their findings* have been published in Nature Communications, led by The University of Copenhagen, the CNRS (France), University of Illinois Urbanna-Champain (USA), the Ministry of Information Culture and Tourism, Laos and supported by microarchaeological work undertaken at Flinders University, and geochronological analyses at Macquarie University and Southern Cross University in Australia. 

Lead Author and Assistant Professor of Palaeoanthropology at the University of Copenhagen, Fabrice Demeter, says the cave sediments contained teeth of giant herbivores, ancient elephants and rhinos that where known to live in woodland environments. 

“After all this work following the many clues written on fossils from very different geographic areas our findings are significant,” Professor Demeter says.

“This fossil represents the first discovery of Denisovans in Southeast Asia and shows that Denisovans were in the south at least as far as Laos. This is in agreement with the genetic evidence found in modern day Southeast Asian populations.” 

Following a very detailed analysis of the shape of this tooth, the research team identified many similarities to Denisovan teeth found on the Tibetan Plateau – the only other location that Denisovan fossils have ever been found. 

This suggested it was most likely a Denisovan who lived between 164,000 -131,000 years ago in the warm tropics of northern Laos. 

Associate Professor Mike Morley from the Microarchaeology Laboratory at Flinders University says the cave site named Tam Ngu Hao 2 (Cobra cave), was found high up in the limestone mountains containing remnants of an old cemented cave sediment packed with fossils.

“We have essentially found the ’smoking gun’ – this Denisovan tooth shows they were once present this far south in the karst landscapes of Laos,” says Associate Professor Morley.

The complexity of the site created a challenge for dating and required two Australian teams. 

The team from Macquarie University, led by Associate Professor Kira Westaway, provided dating of the cave sediments surrounding the fossils; and the team from Southern Cross University led by Associate Professor Renaud Joannes-Boyau conducted the direct dating of unearthed fossil remains. 

“Establishing a sedimentary context for the fossils’ final resting place provides an internal check on the integrity of the find– if the sediments and fossils return a similar age, as seen in Tam Ngu Hao 2, then we know that the fossils were buried not long after the organism died,” says Associate Professor Kira Westaway.

Dating directly the fossil remains is crucial, if we want to understand the succession of events and species in the landscape. 

“The good agreement of the different dating techniques, on both the sediment and fossils, attest of the quality of the chronology for the species in the region. And this has a lot of implication for population mobility in the landscape” says A. Prof Renaud Joannes-Boyau from Southern Cross University

The fossils were likely scattered on the landscape when they were washed into the cave during a flooding event that deposited the sediments and fossils.

Unfortunately, unlike Denisova Cave, the humid conditions in Laos meant the ancient DNA was not preserved. However, the archaeological scientists did find ancient proteins suggesting the fossil was a young, likely female, human likely aged between 3.5 – 8.5 years old

The finding suggests Southeast Asia was a hotspot of diversity for humans with at least five different species setting up camp at different times; H. erectus, the Denisovans/Neanderthals, H. floresiensis, H. luzonensis and H. sapiens. 

Southeast Asian caves could provide the next clue and further hard evidence to understand these complex demographic relationships.

Read the full paper in Nature Communications titled ‘A Middle Pleistocene Denisovan from the Annamite Chain in northern Laos’.

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A close up of the tooth from a ‘birds-eye’ viewpoint. Fabrice Demeter (University of Copenhagen/CNRS Paris)

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Views of the TNH2-1 specimen.  Nature Communications.

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Inside Ngu Hao 2 cave showing the concreted remanent cave sediments adhering to the cave wall. The overlying whitish rock is a flowstone that caps the entire deposit. Fabrice Demeter (University of Copenhagen/CNRS Paris)

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A view from inside Denisova cave in the Altai Mountains of Russia. Note the very different vegetation and climate compared to Laos. Mike Morley, Flinders University.

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Article Source: FLINDERS UNIVERSITY news release.
 

*A Middle Pleistocene Denisovan molar from the Annamite Chain of northern Laos, Nature Communications, 17-May-2022. 10.1038/s41467-022-29923-z 

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BAR-ILAN UNIVERSITY—From the Middle Bronze Age, Egypt played a crucial role in the appearance of calcite-alabaster artifacts in Israel, and the development of the local gypsum-alabaster industry. The absence of ancient calcite-alabaster quarries in the Southern Levant (modern day Israel and Palestine) led to the assumption that all calcite-alabaster vessels found in the Levant originated from Egypt, while poorer quality vessels made of gypsum were local products.

Until now this long-held assumption was never scientifically tested. But the recent identification of a calcite-alabaster quarry in the Te’omim cave, located on the western slopes of the Jerusalem hills (near modern-day Beit Shemesh, Israel), calls this hypothesis into question. A new study*, recently published in the Nature journal Scientific Reports, scientifically refutes the hypothesis and, for the first time, allows the distinction between calcite-alabaster originating in Israel from that originating in Egypt. Furthermore, it confirms that calcite-alabaster objects, such as Herod the Great’s alabaster bathtubs, were quarried in Israel rather than Egypt.

The research was conducted as part of Ayala Amir’s MA thesis at the Martin (Szusz) Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, supervised by Prof. Boaz Zissu and Prof. Aren M. Maeir, of Bar-Ilan University, and Prof. Amos Frumkin, of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Analytical data were first collected from samples of two well-defined sources, from Egypt and modern-day Israel. The Egyptian sources included both ancient and modern calcite-alabaster samples. The ancient samples were obtained courtesy of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, Austria. These ancient vessel remains were collected by the Austrian archaeological expedition to Giza in the nineteenth century CE. The modern Egyptian artifact, made of geological-sourced calcite-alabaster, was bought in a market in Cairo, Egypt in 2013. The calcite-alabaster from Israel included raw material from the Te’omim cave quarry, chips (mining debitage) found in the cave near the quarry, and chips and a stone block (raw material carved to a cube, but not yet used to make a vessel) from Umm el-‘Umdan — an archaeological site near the Te’omim cave. Additional samples were collected from a speleothem in Natuf cave located in Wadi en-Natuf in western Samaria.

Next, through a multidisciplinary approach, the calcite-alabaster samples from Israel and Egypt were analyzed with the assistance of Prof. Gil Goobes and Prof. Amnon Albeck, of the Department of Chemistry at Bar-Ilan University using four analytic methods, most of which have not been previously used, to determine their origin: inductively coupled plasma (ICP) analysis, routine infra-red (IR) spectroscopy, ¹H- and ³¹P- solid state NMR (ssNMR) experiments and C and O stable isotope ratio analysis to determine their composition and their crystalline structure.

“All four analytical methods applied in the study provided consistent results, clearly distinguishing the Israeli from the Egyptian calcite-alabaster for the first time,” said Prof. Albeck of the findings.

The same methods were then applied to two of Herod the Great’s royal bathtubs, which were made of finely worked calcite-alabaster and found in the Kypros fortress and the palace of Herodium, located just south of Jerusalem. The results unequivocally indicated that the bathtubs were quarried in Israel and not in Egypt, the main source of calcite-alabaster in ancient periods.

“The fact that both bathtubs were unequivocally quarried in Israel and not in Egypt, as we would have expected due to the high quality of the stone, was a particular surprise because that means that Herod the Great used local produce, and that the calcite-alabaster industry in Judea in the second half of the first century BC was sufficiently developed and of high enough quality to serve the luxurious standards of Herod, one of the finest builders among the kings of that period,” said Prof. Aren Maeir.

The source of calcite-alabaster artifacts cannot be determined by traditional archaeological methods. Furthermore, petrographic analysis, the main method used to determine the source of Israeli calcite-alabaster, shows wide variability in texture, depending on its depositional environment. Consequently, this method could not be used to identify the source of the bathtubs.

“The multidisciplinary approach adopted in this study provides information concerning both the composition and crystalline structure of calcite-alabaster and is significant for understanding and interpreting archaeological findings,” said researcher Ayala Amir. “Combining analytic methods with archaeological studies may provide new and fascinating information that could not be obtained by traditional archaeological techniques and enable us to determine the origin of other calcite-alabaster artifacts with much greater confidence,” she added.

This study was supported by grants from the Israel Science Foundation and the Israel Ministry of Science and Technology. It is an outgrowth of the research project “Ancient Quarry of Calcite Cave Deposit (‘Bahat’) in the Jerusalem Hills: Archaeological and Environmental Significances” funded by the Israel Science Foundation and directed by Prof. Boaz Zissu, of Bar-Ilan University, and Prof. Amos Frumkin, of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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From the Middle Bronze Age, Egypt played a crucial role in the appearance of calcite-alabaster artifacts in Israel, and the development of the local gypsum-alabaster industry. The absence of ancient calcite-alabaster quarries in the Southern Levant (modern day Israel and Palestine) led to the assumption that all calcite-alabaster vessels found in the Levant originated from Egypt, while poorer quality vessels made of gypsum were local products. Until now this long-held assumption was never scientifically tested. But the recent identification of a calcite-alabaster quarry in the Te’omim cave, located on the western slopes of the Jerusalem hills (near modern-day Beit Shemesh, Israel), calls this hypothesis into question. A new Bar-Ilan University study, recently published in the Nature journal Scientific Reports, scientifically refutes the hypothesis and, for the first time, allows the distinction between calcite-alabaster originating in Israel from that originating in Egypt. Furthermore, it confirms that calcite-alabaster objects, such as Herod the Great’s alabaster bathtubs, were quarried in Israel rather than Egypt. Photo: Herod’s calcite-alabaster bathtub found in Kypros fortress. Prof. Amos Frumkin, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

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Researcher Ayala Amir beside the wall of the quarry, signs of quarrying-scars and cessation of quarrying are visible on the quarry’s walls and floor. Prof. Boaz Zissu, Bar-Ilan University

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Article Source: BAR-ILAN UNIVERSITY news release.

PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES—A study* identifies aromatic compounds associated with incense offered at a Buddhist temple during the Tang Dynasty in China. Incense plays many cultural roles, including a role in religious worship, and was a key product traded between China and other countries via the Silk Road trade network. Texts from the Tang Dynasty in China, dated to between 618 and 907 CE, report the introduction of exotic aromatic substances in China, albeit with rare archaeological evidence. Yimin Yang and colleagues chemically analyzed incense compounds discovered at the underground palace of the Famen Temple near Xi’an, China. The temple was constructed to house a finger bone relic purported to belong to the founder of Buddhism, and multiple containers of incense were discovered during excavation of the temple site. Using Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy and gas chromatography/mass spectrometry analysis, the authors identified elemi resin and highly scented agarwood, respectively, in two of the containers. Another container held a mixture of agarwood and frankincense, providing the earliest known evidence of the aromatics blending practice known as Hexiang. According to the authors, the results show the contemporary knowledge of exotic incense during the Tang Dynasty and demonstrate the Silk Road’s influence on ancient Chinese society.

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The begonia-shaped silver container with the aromatic powder (Hexiang) inside, discovered in the underground palace of Famen Temple. Xinlai Ren and Xinyi Wang

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Article Source: PNAS news release

*“Characterization of the incense sacrificed to the sarira of Sakyamuni from Famen Royal Temple during the ninth century in China,” by Meng Ren, Xinlai Ren, Xinyi Wang, and Yimin Yang, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 16-May-2022. 10.1073/pnas.2112724119 

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UNIVERSITY OF BERN—The genetic origins of the first agriculturalists in the Neolithic period long seemed to lie in the Near East. A new study* published in the journal Cell shows that the first farmers actually represented a mixture of Ice Age hunter-gatherer groups, spread from the Near East all the way to south-eastern Europe. Researchers from the University of Bern and the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics as well as from the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and the University of Fribourg were involved in the study. The method they developed could help reveal other human evolution patterns with unmatched resolution.   

The first signs of agriculture and a sedentary lifestyle are found in the so-called ‘Fertile Crescent’, a region in the Near East where people began to settle down and domesticate animals and plants about 11,000 years ago. The question of the origin of agriculture and sedentism has occupied researchers for over 100 years: did farming spread from the Near East through cultural diffusion or through migration? Genetic analyses of prehistoric skeletons so far supported the idea that Europe’s first farmers were descended from hunter-gatherer populations in Anatolia. While that may well be the case, this new study shows that the Neolithic genetic origins cannot clearly be attributed to a single region. Unexpected and complex population dynamics occurred at the end of the Ice Age, and led to the ancestral genetic makeup of the populations who invented agriculture and a sedentary life-style i.e. the first Neolithic farmers.

First farmers emerged from a mixing process starting 14,000 years ago

Previous analyses had suggested that the first Neolithic people were genetically different from other human groups from that time. Little was known about their origins. Nina Marchi, one of the study’s first authors from the Institute of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Bern and SIB says: “We now find that the first farmers of Anatolia and Europe emerged from a population admixed between hunter-gatherers from Europe and the Near East.” According to the authors, the mixing process started around 14,000 years ago, which was followed by a period of extreme genetic differentiation lasting several thousand years.

A novel approach to model population history from prehistoric skeletons

This research was made possible by combining two techniques: the production of high-quality ancient genomes from prehistoric skeletons, coupled with demographic modeling on the resulting data. The research team coined the term “demogenomic modeling” for this purpose. “It is necessary to have genome data of the best possible quality so that the latest statistical genomic methods can reconstruct the subtle demographic processes of the last 30 thousand years at high resolution”, says Laurent Excoffier, one of the senior authors of the study. Laurent Excoffier is a professor at the Institute of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Bern and group leader at SIB. He initiated the project together with Joachim Burger of the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz and Daniel Wegmann of the University of Fribourg. Nina Marchi adds: “Simply comparing the similarity of different ancient genomes is not enough to understand how they evolved. We had to reconstruct the actual histories of the populations studied as accurately as possible. This is only possible with complex population genetic statistics.”

Interdisciplinarity key to solve such ancient puzzles

Joachim Burger of the University of Mainz and second senior author emphasizes the necessity of interdisciplinarity: “It took close to ten years to gather and analyze the skeletons suitable for such a study. This was only possible by collaborating with numerous archaeologists and anthropologists, who helped us to anchor our models historically”. The historical contextualization was coordinated by Maxime Brami, who works with Burger at Johannes Gutenberg University. The young prehistorian was surprised by some of the study’s findings: “Europe’s first farmers seem to be descended from hunter-gatherer populations that lived all the way from the Near East to the Balkans. This was not foreseeable archaeologically”.

Towards a general model of human population evolution

Genetic data from fossils (skeletons) are badly damaged and must be processed accordingly using bioinformatics, as Daniel Wegmann from the University of Fribourg and group leader at SIB explains: “The high-resolution reconstruction of the prehistory of the Europeans was only possible thanks to methods that we specifically developed to analyze ancient fossil genomes.” Joachim Burger adds: “With these approaches, we have not only elucidated the origins of the world’s first Neolithic populations, but we have established a general model of the evolution of human populations in Southwest Asia and Europe.”

“Of course, spatial and temporal gaps remain, and this does not imply the end of studies on the evolution of humans in this area”, concludes Laurent Excoffier. Thus, the team’s research plan is already set; they want to supplement their demographic model with genomes from the later phases of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages to provide an increasingly detailed picture of human evolution.

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Ancient DNA extraction in Mainz’s lab. Work done in sterile conditions to avoid contamination from modern DNA. Joachim Burger / JGU

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF BERN news release

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN—The movement of herders and livestock into the eastern steppe is of great interest to researchers, but few scholars have linked the introduction of herds and horses to the rise of complex societies.

Now, a new study* in the journal PLOS ONE provides interdisciplinary support for connections between livestock dairying and the rise of social complexity in the eastern steppe. Using proteomic analysis of human dental calculus from sites in the Mongolian Altai, the researchers demonstrate a shift in dairy consumption over the course of the Bronze Age.

By tracking the consumption of dairy among populations in the Altai Mountains in Mongolia, researchers revealed the critical role of domesticated sheep, goats and cattle in ancient economies. The adoption of ruminant livestock eventually led to population growth, the establishment of community cemeteries and the construction of large monuments. While these pronounced changes occurred in tandem with the earliest evidence of horse dairying in Mongolia, the consumption of horse dairy remained a relatively novel practice until later periods.

Thus, the spread of herds into the Mongolian Altai resulted in immediate changes to human diets, with a delay in subsequent social and demographic transformations, said study lead author Alicia Ventresca Miller, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan.

“As we push back the dates of the introduction of livestock, we need to rethink the pace of social change, which may occur on much longer timescales,” she said.

Ventresca Miller and colleagues from U-M and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany extracted proteins from calculus samples to identify caseins and whey associated with ruminant and horse dairy. Results were interpreted in consultation with researchers from the National University of Mongolia and National Museum of Mongolia, in an effort to clarify how ancient societies changed after the adoption of domesticated livestock.

Dramatic social changes and monumental constructions were fueled by a long-term dependence on sheep, goats and cattle, Ventresca Miller says. This is supported by finds of mostly ruminant bones in large monumental Khirgisuurs in the Altai Mountains, while in other areas of Mongolia horse bone deposits have been identified along with ruminants.

“These new results might allow for a shift in our understanding of Bronze Age dynamics,” said Tsagaan Turbat, professor of archaeology and anthropology at the National University of Mongolia.

Turbat believes that Deer Stone-Khirgisuur complexes, the most studied in the region, may have originated from Sagsai groups in the Altai Mountains.

The current study pushes back the earliest date of horse dairying in the eastern steppe associated with Sagsai burials to about 1350 B.C. As initial evidence of horse milk consumption is rare, this may have been a novelty since horses were an important feature of ritual life, the researchers say.

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Horses and Gers near Khoton (Syrgal) Lake near the Altai Mountains of Mongolia. Noost Bayarkhuu, University of Science and Technology of China

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Sagsai burial from the site of Tsagaan Asga in the Altai Mountains of Mongolia. Noost Bayarkhuu, University of Science and Technology of China

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN news release.

* The spread of herds and horses into the Altai: How livestock and dairying drove social complexity in Mongolia, PLoS ONE. 

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UNIVERSITY OF ZURICH—During human birth, the fetus typically navigates a tight, convoluted birth canal by flexing and rotating its head at various stages. This complex process comes with a high risk of birth complications, from prolonged labor to stillbirth or maternal death. These complications were long believed to be the result of a conflict between humans adapting to walking upright and our larger brains.

Dilemma between walking upright and larger brains

Bipedalism developed around seven million years ago and dramatically reshaped the hominin pelvis into a real birth canal. Larger brains, however, didn’t start to develop until two million years ago, when the earliest species of the genus Homo emerged. The evolutionary solution to the dilemma brought about by these two conflicting evolutionary forces was to give birth to neurologically immature and helpless newborns with relatively small brains – a condition known as secondary altriciality.

A research group led by Martin Häusler from the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich (UZH) and a team headed up by Pierre Frémondière from Aix-Marseille University have now found that australopithecines, who lived about four to two million years ago, had a complex birth pattern compared to great apes. “Because australopithecines such as Lucy had relatively small brain sizes but already displayed morphological adaptations to bipedalism, they are ideal to investigate the effects of these two conflicting evolutionary forces,” Häusler says.

Typical ratio of fetal and adult head size

The researchers used three-dimensional computer simulations to develop their findings. Since no fossils of newborn australopithecines are known to exist, they simulated the birth process using different fetal head sizes to take into account the possible range of estimates. Every species has a typical ratio between the brain sizes of its newborns and adults. Based on the ratio of non-human primates and the average brain size of an adult Australopithecus, the researchers calculated a mean neonatal brain size of 180 g. This would correspond to a size of 110 g in humans.

For their 3D simulations, the researchers also took into account the increased pelvic joint mobility during pregnancy and determined a realistic soft tissue thickness. They found that only the 110 g fetal head sizes passed through the pelvic inlet and midplane without difficulty, unlike the 180 g and 145 g sizes. “This means that Australopithecus newborns were neurologically immature and dependent on help, similar to human babies today,” Häusler explains.

Prolonged learning key for cognitive and cultural abilities

The findings* indicate that australopithecines are likely to have practiced a form of cooperative breeding, even before the genus Homo appeared. Compared to great apes, the brains developed for longer outside the uterus, enabling infants to learn from other members of the group. “This prolonged period of learning is generally considered crucial for the cognitive and cultural development of humans,” Häusler says. This conclusion is also supported by the earliest documented stone tools, which date back to 3.3 million years ago – long before the genus Homo appeared.

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Birth simulation of Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) with three different fetal head sizes. Only a brain size of maximum 30 percent of the adult size (right) fits through the birth canal. Martin Häusler, UZH

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF ZURICH news release

*Pierre Frémondière, Lionel Thollon, François Marchal, Cinzia Fornai, Nicole M. Webb, Martin Haeusler. Dynamic finite-element simulations reveal early origin of complex human birth pattern. Communications biology. 19 April 2022. DOI 10.1038/s42003-022-03321-z

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SMITHSONIAN—A new global study of Indigenous oyster fisheries co-led by Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History anthropologist Torben Rick and Temple University anthropologist and former Smithsonian postdoctoral fellow Leslie Reeder-Myers shows that oyster fisheries were hugely productive and sustainably managed on a massive scale over hundreds and even thousands of years of intensive harvest. The study’s broadest finding was that long before European colonizers arrived, the Indigenous groups in these locations harvested and ate immense quantities of oysters in a manner that did not appear to cause the bivalves’ populations to suffer and crash.

The research, published May 3 in Nature Communications, suggests that studying these ancient, sustainable fisheries offers insights to help restore and manage estuaries today. Further, the authors write that these findings make plain that Indigenous peoples in these locations had deep connections to oysters and that their living descendants are long overdue to be involved in decisions about how to manage what is left of this precious coastal resource.

In places like the Chesapeake Bay, San Francisco Bay and Botany Bay near Sydney, oysters exist at tiny fractions of their former numbers. Oyster numbers declined in these places due to boom and bust exploitation—beginning with European colonizers establishing commercial fisheries that quickly raked in huge quantities of oysters, and ending with cratering oyster populations that were also being devastated by habitat alteration, disease and introduced species.

But these parables of ecological collapse wrought by colonization and capitalism often omit evidence of Indigenous fisheries that predated those of European settlers by thousands of years.

Rick said the new paper expands on a seminal 2004 paper that documented the collapses of 28 oyster fisheries located along the east and west coasts of North America and Australia’s east coast. But the 2004 paper’s timeline in each location begins with European colonists’ creation of commercial oyster fisheries.

The new study’s goal was to deepen the historical context of those modern declines by documenting the Indigenous oyster fisheries at the same locales that appeared in the 2004 paper. But stretching this ecological timeline deeper into the past was not the paper’s only aim, Rick said.

“Conservation today can’t just be seen as a biological question and can’t just be about undoing the environmental damage we’ve done in the modern era,” Rick said. “Instead, global conservation efforts should be coupled with undoing the legacies of colonialism which brought about the attempted erasure and displacement of Indigenous people all over the world.”

To document the Indigenous oyster fisheries in the same locations from the 2004 paper, Rick, Reeder-Myers and colleagues turned to the archaeological record, specifically to accumulations of oyster shells that are also known as middens. These middens come in many forms and are much more than trash piles as some archeologists once suggested. Some were small and perhaps only used seasonally, while others were monumental, towering up to 30 feet into the sky, serving as important ceremonial, sacred and symbolic spaces.

Rick and Reeder-Myers assembled a team of 24 other researchers who specialized in the relevant archaeological sites to gather all the data they could on these Indigenous oyster fisheries. These data came from published academic papers, gray literature (research not made readily available for publication) and the team’s own research.

After creating what amounted to a massive spreadsheet for these North American and Australian sites, the researchers assessed which pieces of information were available for the greatest number of locations and realized that the weight of the oyster shells or the number of individual oysters at a site were the two data sets that were most consistent.  

“Oyster harvesting didn’t start 500 years ago with the arrival of Europeans,” said study co-author Bonnie Newsom, an anthropologist at the University of Maine and citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation. “Indigenous peoples had a relationship with and understood this species well enough to use it as part of their subsistence and cultural practices. Indigenous peoples have a lot to offer in terms of how to engage with this natural resource in ways that are sustainable.”

In North America, the highest single site totals come from Florida’s Gulf Coast. The study estimates that an island called Mound Key in Estero Bay contains the shells of some 18.6 billion oysters harvested by the region’s Calusa tribe. About 200 miles north in Cedar Key, Florida, a site known simply as Shell Mound features the remains of an estimated 2.1 billion oysters. On the Atlantic coast of the United States, the midden at South Carolina’s Fig Island boasts just under 75.6 million oysters, and a number of sites in the Chesapeake Bay total around 84 million of the shellfish remains. In Australia, Saint Helena Island near Brisbane is estimated to contain roughly 50 million oyster shells harvested by Indigenous peoples over more than 1,000 years.

“We knew there were big sites in the southern U.S., but when we started to calculate just how many oysters were in these sites we were astonished,” Rick said.

Some of the oldest oyster middens are found in California and Massachusetts and date back more than 6,000 years. The longest-utilized single sites (though not necessarily with perfect continuity) span some 5,000 years. 

In many of these places, prior studies have suggested that Indigenous harvests remained sustainable despite their long tenure and significant numbers. The most common way of determining this, Rick said, is by looking for changes in the oysters’ shell sizes in the middens. If the fishery is overextended, the shells tend to get smaller. But studies of Indigenous oyster fisheries have not found widespread evidence of this shrinking shell pattern, suggesting the shellfish populations were generally healthy.

“The fact that there are so many oysters at archaeological sites in so many different regions is an important lesson,” said Reeder-Myers. “These systems have a ton of potential and huge quantities of oysters can be sustainably harvested over long time periods if the ecosystem is healthy.”

Rick said he hopes that their findings are heeded by biologists and environmental managers and heighten public awareness about the deep connections of Indigenous peoples to coastal ecosystems around the world.

“What this study does is it says we need to start a broader dialogue when we look to restore an ecosystem or make conservation decisions,” Rick said. “In this case, that dialogue needs to include the Indigenous peoples whose ancestors stewarded these ecosystems for millennia. This broadening of perspectives can enhance biological conservation and help restore connections between Indigenous peoples and their ancestral homelands.”

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Eroding archaeological site on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Sites like this contain massive quantities of oysters harvested over 1,000 years ago and were key to forming the foundation for this study. The dense accumulation of oysters are all archaeological oysters dated to over a millennia ago, with intact deposits lying underneath the marsh to the right. A new global study of Indigenous oyster fisheries co-led by Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History anthropologist Torben Rick and Temple University anthropologist and former Smithsonian postdoctoral fellow Leslie Reeder-Myers shows that oyster fisheries were hugely productive and sustainably managed on a massive scale over hundreds and even thousands of years of intensive harvest. The study’s broadest finding was that long before European colonizers arrived, the Indigenous groups in these locations harvested and ate immense quantities of oysters in a manner that did not appear to cause the bivalves’ populations to suffer and crash. Torben Rick

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Dense shell midden deposit spanning the past 1,000 years as exposed during excavation at a Tseshaht First Nation village in the Pacific Northwest. A new global study of Indigenous oyster fisheries co-led by Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History anthropologist Torben Rick and Temple University anthropologist and former Smithsonian postdoctoral fellow Leslie Reeder-Myers shows that oyster fisheries were hugely productive and sustainably managed on a massive scale over hundreds and even thousands of years of intensive harvest. The study’s broadest finding was that long before European colonizers arrived, the Indigenous groups in these locations harvested and ate immense quantities of oysters in a manner that did not appear to cause the bivalves’ populations to suffer and crash. Iain McKechnie

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Crystal River site in Florida with massive shell mounds, dominated by oysters, pictured here during archaeological mapping and showing the modern staircase and platform built on top of one of the mounds. A new global study of Indigenous oyster fisheries co-led by Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History anthropologist Torben Rick and Temple University anthropologist and former Smithsonian postdoctoral fellow Leslie Reeder-Myers shows that oyster fisheries were hugely productive and sustainably managed on a massive scale over hundreds and even thousands of years of intensive harvest. The study’s broadest finding was that long before European colonizers arrived, the Indigenous groups in these locations harvested and ate immense quantities of oysters in a manner that did not appear to cause the bivalves’ populations to suffer and crash. Victor Thompson

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Article Source: Smithsonian Institution news release

PLoS ONE—Hunter-gatherers made use of open woodland conditions in the millennia before Stonehenge monuments were built, according to a study published April 27, 2022 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Samuel Hudson of the University of Southampton, U.K., and colleagues.

Much research has explored Bronze Age and Neolithic history of the region surrounding Stonehenge, but less is known about earlier times in this area. This leaves open questions about how ancient people and wildlife used this region before the famous archaeological monuments were constructed. In this paper, Hudson and colleagues reconstruct environmental conditions at the site of Blick Mead, a pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherer site on the edge of the Stonehenge World Heritage Site.

The authors combine pollen, spores, sedimentary DNA, and animal remains to characterize the pre-Neolithic habitat of the site, inferring partially open woodland conditions, which would have been beneficial to large grazing herbivores like aurochs, as well as hunter-gatherer communities. This study supports previous evidence that the Stonehenge region was not covered in closed canopy forest at this time, as has previously been proposed.

This study also provides date estimates for human activity at Blick Mead. Results indicate that hunter-gatherers used this site for 4,000 years up until the time of the earliest known farmers and monument-builders in the region, who would also have benefited from the space provided in open environments. These results indicate that the first farmers and monument-builders in the Stonehenge area encountered open habitats already maintained and used by large grazers and earlier human populations.

Further study on similar sites will provide important insights into the interactions between hunter-gatherers and early farming communities in the U.K. and elsewhere. Furthermore, this study provides techniques for combining sedimentary DNA, other ecological data, and stratigraphic data to interpret the ancient environment at a site where such information is difficult to assess.

The authors add: “The Stonehenge World Heritage Site is globally recognized for its rich Neolithic and Bronze Age monumental landscape, but little is known of its significance to Mesolithic populations. Environmental research at Blick Mead suggests that hunter-gatherers had already chosen part of this landscape, an alluvial clearing, as a persistent place for hunting and occupation.”

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A) Timeline of the Stonehenge landscape, including radiocarbon dates from Blick Mead and other significant Stonehenge World Heritage Archaeological Sites. B) A representation of the development of vegetation history at Blick Mead based on the palaeoenvironmental data. Hudson et al., 2022, PLOS ONE, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

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The iconic Stonehenge circle on the prehistoric landscape of the Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England. Freesally, Pixabay

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Article Source: PLoS ONE news release

*Hudson SM, Pears B, Jacques D, Fonville T, Hughes P, Alsos I, et al. (2022), Life before Stonehenge: The hunter-gatherer occupation and environment of Blick Mead revealed by sedaDNA, pollen and spores. PLoS ONE 17(4): e0266789. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0266789  

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MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY—Were Neanderthals really as well adapted to a life in the cold as previously assumed, or did they prefer more temperate environmental conditions during the last Ice Age? To answer these questions, it is worthwhile to examine Neanderthal sites on the northern periphery of their range. After all, it was there that environmental fluctuations were most noticeable, especially as a result of repeated ice advances from Scandinavia. A region particularly suitable for such investigations is northern Germany, with its numerous documented Neanderthal sites.

In a recent study, researchers from MPI-EVA, FAU, Leuphana University Lüneburg, LIAG and other partner institutions have now investigated the remains of Neanderthals at a former lakeshore in Lichtenberg in the Wendland region (Lower Saxony). Using an integrative research approach, the team has combined analytical methods from archaeology, luminescence dating, sedimentology, micromorphology with the study of pollen and phytoliths to explore in detail the relationship between human presence in the north and changing environmental conditions.

A window into environmental history

”Archaeological excavations are a window into environmental history”, says Michael Hein, a geographer at MPI-EVA. “Based on sediments and pollen grains they contain, we can reconstruct the vegetation and environmental conditions of the time. For this, the most accurate dating possible is required, which – in the case of Central Europe – is still lacking for many climatic phases of the last Ice Age.” Collecting environmental information and performing independent dating is of great interest to archaeology and paleoenvironmental research alike.

“In Lichtenberg, we have now succeeded in dating quite accurately the end of a pronounced warm phase – the so-called Brörup Interstadial – to 90,000 years”, Hein adds. “Thus, the cooling of the continent would have coincided with the climate change in the Greenland ice and the North Atlantic. A direct coupling had so far only been suspected – but not proven – for northern Germany.”

Settlement of northern areas also during cold phases

The study also found that Neanderthals occupied a lightly wooded lakeshore about 90,000 years ago in a relatively temperate climate. Stone tools found at the former campsite attest to a variety of activities, such as woodworking and plant processing. Already between 1987 and 1994, the Landesmuseum Hannover excavated a site close to Lichtenberg containing bifacial backed knives, so-called “Keilmesser” – specialized cutting tools. In the excavations, the layers of this former campsite are located above the lakeshore campsite, which is associated with a temperate climate period, and date to a time about 70,000 years ago, when the last Ice Age’s first cold maximum began. The researchers were thus able to prove that Neanderthals had indeed inhabited the northern regions even during cold phases.

Flexible adaptation to environmental conditions

”Changes in stone tools indicate that Neanderthals adapted in line with changing environmental conditions”, says Marcel Weiß, an archaeologist at FAU. “In Lichtenberg, we were able to show that they repeatedly visited northern Central Europe – which developed from a heavily forested environment during the last warm period, to sparser forests of a cold-moderate climate period at the beginning of the last Ice Age, to the cold tundra of the first cold maximum.”

In this context, the stone tools, especially knives made of flint, show that the Neanderthals’ lakeshore site may have served a hunting party for a short stay. Evidence from other sites from the same time period indicates that during cold phases Neanderthals likely visited their northern dwelling grounds mainly during the summer months.

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Lake shore (black organic layer) from 90,000 years ago superimposed by cold climatic sediments. © M. Weiss / M. Hein

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Drill core from Lichtenberg with alternating layers representing warm and cold climatic conditions. © M. Weiss / M. Hein

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Article Source: MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY news release.

UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI

Purposeful fragmentation of ornaments

As most archaeological material is found in a fragmented state, the phenomenon has been considered a natural consequence of objects’ having been long buried underground. However, according to Postdoctoral Researcher Marja Ahola from the University of Helsinki, not all objects have necessarily been broken by accident. Instead, it is possible some were fragmented on purpose as part of maintaining social relations, bartering or ritual activities. The research* now completed has demonstrated that a substantial number of ornaments have been found in extensive and central locations. As some of the ornaments originate in Lake Onega region and have been transported to Finland through a widespread exchange network, it is possible that they symbolize the connections established within the network.

By matching pieces of slate ring ornaments, analyzing their geochemical composition and investigating traces of use and manufacture in the objects, a research group at the University of Helsinki and the University of Turku demonstrated that the ornaments had not only been worn, but also intentionally broken. Because fragments from the same ornament were found in two different locations, it is possible that they were worn by two different individuals. Another indication of this is the fact that one of the fragments had been worked on more finely than the other.

“These fragments of the same object may show the handprint and preferences of two individuals. Perhaps they wore the ornaments as a symbol of a connection established,” Ahola muses.

A similar link was found in slate ring ornaments created during the same manufacturing process, one of which was found in a settlement-site context and the other in a burial site investigated near the settlement.

“What we see here may be one way of maintaining connection between the living and the dead. This is also the first clear material connection between a certain place of residence and a burial site. In other words, the people who lived there most likely buried their dead in a site close to them,” Ahola explains.

An X-ray fluorescence analysis (XRF) of a little over 50 slate ring ornaments demonstrated that some of the ornaments or fragments thereof had been imported from Lake Onega region, Russia, hundreds of kilometers from the site where they were found. XRF analyses can be used to determine the element concentrations and raw materials of inorganic archaeological materials with a very high precision. The technique can be applied as an entirely non-invasive surface analysis, which makes it perfectly suited to the study of archaeological objects.

“By comparing the elemental concentrations of the objects under investigation with findings published on the basis of international datasets, we were able to demonstrate that some of the ornaments or the stone material used in them was transported to Finland through an extensive exchange network, primarily from the Lake Onega region. There was also variation in the chemical composition of the objects, which correlates with their design. These factors indicate that the ornaments were produced at Lake Onega region in several batches, most likely in different locations and by a number of makers,” says Docent Elisabeth Holmqvist-Sipilä from the University of Helsinki

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Slate ring ornaments from the Stone Age. Marja Ahola

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Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences—Analysis of ancient DNA brings to light the nature of burials in some of the colossal burial mounds in Neolithic France, according to a study. In Normandy, France, monumental burial mounds from the Cerny culture represent some of the earliest funeral structures in western Europe. The earthen barrows can reach up to 300 meters in length and are often built for a single individual and sometimes for two people. Maïté Rivollat, Aline Thomas, and colleagues analyzed ancient DNA to examine the social organization of 14 of the 19 individuals buried at Fleury-sur-Orne, a cemetery which was mainly used from 4600 to 4300 BCE. Previous research has found that Cerny burials in the Paris Basin contained similar numbers of men and women, but 13 of the 14 individuals analyzed at Fleury-sur-Orne were male. The sole female was buried with arrowheads, a symbol typically associated with elite males in the Cerny culture. Two pairs of individuals—one pair buried together in the same monument and another pair buried in the same tomb—were identified as father and son. The rest of the burials were from genetically independent lineages. All individuals had a higher within-group than regional group affinity and were likely more closely related to each other than to other regional groups. According to the authors, the predominance of males and the symbolism of the female burial indicate the importance of male identity and lineages in this regional expression of Cerny culture. 

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Artistic impression of the Fleury-sur-Orne monuments and surrounding
landscape. Laurent Juhel (artist).

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Article Source: PNAS news release

*“Ancient DNA gives insights into a Norman Neolithic monumental cemetery dedicated to male elites,” bv Maïté Rivollat et al.

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UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE—Very few people in England ate large amounts of meat before the Vikings settled, and there is no evidence that elites ate more meat than other people, a major new bioarchaeological study* suggests. Its sister study also argues that peasants occasionally hosted lavish meat feasts for their rulers. The findings overturn major assumptions about early medieval English history.

• ‘You are what you eat’ isotopic analysis of over 2,000 skeletons by far the largest of its kind.
• Early medieval diets were far more similar across social groups than previously thought.
• Peasants didn’t give kings food as exploitative tax, they hosted feasts suggesting they were granted more respect than previously assumed.
• Surviving food lists are supplies for special feasts not blueprints for everyday elite diets.
• Some feasts served up an estimated 1kg of meat and 4,000 Calories in total, per person.

Picture medieval England and royal feasts involving copious amounts of meat immediately spring to mind. Historians have long assumed that royals and nobles ate far more meat than the rest of the population and that free peasants were forced to hand over food to sustain their rulers throughout the year in an exploitative system known as feorm or food-rent.

But a pair of Cambridge co-authored studies published today in the journal Anglo-Saxon England present a very different picture, one which could transform our understanding of early medieval kingship and society.

While completing a PhD at the University of Cambridge, bioarchaeologist Sam Leggett gave a presentation which intrigued historian Tom Lambert (Sidney Sussex College). Now at the University of Edinburgh, Dr Leggett had analysed chemical signatures of diets preserved in the bones of 2,023 people buried in England from the 5^th – 11^th centuries. She then cross-referenced these isotopic findings with evidence for social status such as grave goods, body position and grave orientation. Leggett’s research revealed no correlation between social status and high protein diets.

That surprised Tom Lambert because so many medieval texts and historical studies suggest that Anglo-Saxon elites did eat large quantities of meat. The pair started to work together to find out what was really going on.

They began by deciphering a food list compiled during the reign of King Ine of Wessex (c. 688-726) to estimate how much food it records and what its calorie content might have been. They estimated that the supplies amounted to 1.24 million kcal, over half of which came from animal protein. The list included 300 bread rolls so the researchers worked on the basis that one bun was served to each diner to calculate overall portions. Each guest would have received 4,140 kcal from 500g of mutton; 500g of beef; another 500g of salmon, eel and poultry; plus cheese, honey and ale.

The researchers studied ten other comparable food lists from southern England and discovered a remarkably similar pattern: a modest amount of bread, a huge amount of meat, a decent but not excessive quantity of ale, and no mention of vegetables (although some probably were served).

Lambert says: “The scale and proportions of these food lists strongly suggests that they were provisions for occasional grand feasts, and not general food supplies sustaining royal households on a daily basis. These were not blueprints for everyday elite diets as historians have assumed.”

“I’ve been to plenty of barbecues where friends have cooked ludicrous amounts of meat so we shouldn’t be too surprised. The guests probably ate the best bits and then leftovers might have been stewed up for later.”

Leggett says: “I’ve found no evidence of people eating anything like this much animal protein on a regular basis. If they were, we would find isotopic evidence of excess protein and signs of diseases like gout from the bones. But we’re just not finding that.”

“The isotopic evidence suggests that diets in this period were much more similar across social groups than we’ve been led to believe. We should imagine a wide range of people livening up bread with small quantities of meat and cheese, or eating pottages of leeks and whole grains with a little meat thrown in.”

The researchers believe that even royals would have eaten a cereal-based diet and that these occasional feasts would have been a treat for them too.

Peasants feeding kings

These feasts would have been lavish outdoor events at which whole oxen were roasted in huge pits, examples of which have been excavated in East Anglia.

Lambert says: “Historians generally assume that medieval feasts were exclusively for elites. But these food lists show that even if you allow for huge appetites, 300 or more people must have attended. That means that a lot of ordinary farmers must have been there, and this has big political implications.”

Kings in this period – including Rædwald, the early seventh-century East Anglian king perhaps buried at Sutton Hoo – are thought to have received renders of food, known in Old English as feorm or food-rent, from the free peasants of their kingdoms. It is often assumed that these were the primary source of food for royal households and that kings’ own lands played a minor supporting role at best. As kingdoms expanded, it has also been assumed that food-rent was redirected by royal grants to sustain a broader elite, making them even more influential over time.

But Lambert studied the use of the word feorm in different contexts, including aristocratic wills, and concludes that the term referred to a single feast and not this primitive form of tax. This is significant because food-rent required no personal involvement from a king or lord, and no show of respect to the peasants who were duty-bound to provide it. When kings and lords attended communal feasts in person, however, the dynamics would have been very different.

Lambert says: “We’re looking at kings travelling to massive barbecues hosted by free peasants, people who owned their own farms and sometimes slaves to work on them. You could compare it to a modern presidential campaign dinner in the US. This was a crucial form of political engagement.”

This rethinking could have far-reaching implications for medieval studies and English political history more generally. Food renders have informed theories about the beginnings of English kingship and land-based patronage politics, and are central to ongoing debates about what led to the subjection of England’s once-free peasantry.

Leggett and Lambert are now eagerly awaiting the publication of isotopic data from the Winchester Mortuary Chests which are thought to contain the remains of Egbert, Canute and other Anglo-Saxon royals. These results should provide unprecedented insights into the period’s most elite eating habits.

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Food list compiled during the reign of King Ine of Wessex (c. 688-726), part of the Textus Roffensis. Chapter of Rochester Cathedral. CC BY-SA

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Article Source: University of Cambridge news release

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References

S. Leggett & T. Lambert, ‘Food and Power in Early Medieval England: a Lack of (Isotopic) Enrichment’; Anglo-Saxon England (2022). DOI: 10.1017/S0263675122000072

S. Leggett & T Lambert, ‘Food and Power in Early Medieval England: Rethinking Feorm’, Anglo-Saxon England (2022). DOI: 10.1017/S0263675122000084

Media contact

Tom Almeroth-Williams, Communications Manager (Research), University of Cambridge: tom.williams@admin.cam.ac.uk

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UNIVERSITY OF YORK—Our early ancestors probably created intricate artwork by firelight, an examination of 50 engraved stones unearthed in France has revealed.

The stones were incised with artistic designs around 15,000 years ago and have patterns of heat damage which suggests they were carved close to the flickering light of a fire, the new study has found.  

The study, by researchers at the Universities of York and Durham, looked at the collection of engraved stones, known as plaquettes, which are now held in the British Museum. They are likely to have been made using stone tools by Magdalenian people, an early hunter-gatherer culture dating from between 23,000 and 14,000 years ago.

The researchers identified patterns of pink heat damage around the edges of some of the stones, providing evidence that they had been placed in close proximity to a fire. 

Following their discovery, the researchers have experimented with replicating the stones themselves and used 3D models and virtual reality software to recreate the plaquettes as prehistoric artists would have seen them: under fireside light conditions and with the fresh white lines engravers would have made as they first cut into the rock thousands of years ago.

Lead author of the study, Dr Andy Needham from the Department of Archaeology at the University of York and Co-Director of the York Experimental Archaeology Research Centre said: “It has previously been assumed that the heat damage visible on some plaquettes was likely to have been caused by accident, but experiments with replica plaquettes showed the damage was more consistent with being purposefully positioned close to a fire.

  “In the modern day, we might think of art as being created on a blank canvas in daylight or with a fixed light source; but we now know that people 15,000 years ago were creating art around a fire at night, with flickering shapes and shadows.”

Working under these conditions would have had a dramatic effect on the way prehistoric people experienced the creation of art, the researchers say. It may have activated an evolutionary capacity designed to protect us from predators called “Pareidolia”, where perception imposes a meaningful interpretation such as the form of an animal, a face or a pattern where there is none.    

Dr Needham added: “Creating art by firelight would have been a very visceral experience, activating different parts of the human brain. We know that flickering shadows and light enhance our evolutionary capacity to see forms and faces in inanimate objects and this might help explain why it’s common to see plaquette designs that have used or integrated natural features in the rock to draw animals or artistic forms.”  

The Magdalenian era saw a flourishing of early art, from cave art and the decoration of tools and weapons to the engraving of stones and bones.

Co-author of the study, PhD student Izzy Wisher from the Department of Archaeology at the University of Durham, said: “During the Magdalenian period conditions were very cold and the landscape was more exposed. While people were well-adapted to the cold, wearing warm clothing made from animal hides and fur, fire was still really important for keeping warm. Our findings reinforce the theory that the warm glow of the fire would have made it the hub of the community for social gatherings, telling stories and making art.

“At a time when huge amounts of time and effort would have gone into finding food, water and shelter, it’s fascinating to think that people still found the time and capacity to create art. It shows how these activities have formed part of what makes us human for thousands of years and demonstrates the cognitive complexity of prehistoric people.”

Art by firelight? Using experimental and digital techniques to explore Magdalenian engraved plaquette use at Montastruc (France) is published in the journal PLOS ONE and is available here. 

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Photograph showing ambient light levels and the position of replica plaquettes in relation to the fire (during experiment E). Needham et al., 2022, PLOS ONE, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

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The study looked at a collection of engraved stones, known as plaquettes, which are now held in the British Museum. Dr Andy Needham, University of York

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Article Source: PLoS ONE news release.

AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE (AAAS)—Scientists have found evidence for the earliest known Mayan calendar notation, according to an investigation of painted mural fragments excavated from the Las Pinturas pyramid complex at San Bartolo, Guatemala. The fragments, which date between 300 and 200 BCE, record the date “7 Deer” in the 260-day divinatory calendar used across Mesoamerica and are about 150 years older than another well-known San Bartolo mural chamber. David Stuart and colleagues suggest that these fragments illustrate a mature art and writing tradition in the region during the third century BCE, indicating that the calendar had already been in use for a long time. “The evidence now suggests that we can no longer single out one region of Mesoamerica such as Oaxaca as ‘the’ point of origin for scripts or calendrical record keeping,” the authors write. “The situation would point to an even earlier origin of the calendar sometime during the Middle Preclassic, if not before, although the evidence remains indirect.” Archaeological excavations at Las Pinturas have previously unearthed murals depicting mythological deities and humans painted near the completion of the complex in about 100 BCE. To further explore the ancient site’s secrets, Stuart et al. analyzed 11 wall fragments (all with hieroglyphic writing) that were recovered between 2002 and 2012. The researchers used radiocarbon dates for 10 samples processed in 2005, as well as 2 new dates run in 2020, to determine the ages of the archaeological contexts of the fragments. The authors note that, during the Classic period that followed, Maya scribes rarely used the deer glyph to represent the seventh day, which consists of the number 7 in bar and dot notation over the outline of a deer head. Stuart et al. suggest that use of the glyph in this fragment may represent an early stage in Maya script development before a phonetic hand sign emerged to replace it.

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Mural fragment in San Bartolo, Guatemala, rediscovered 2003, presented at the Palacio Nacional de La Cultura, May 2006. Pre-Classic Maya art. Authenticmaya~commonswiki, GNU Free Documentation License, Wikimedia Commons

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Summary author: Shannon Kelleher

RADBOUD UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER—After the Neolithic, European populations showed an increase in height and intelligence, reduced skin pigmentation and increased risk of cardiovascular disease due to genetic changes that lowered concentrations of ‘good’ HDL cholesterol. The changes reflect ongoing evolutionary processes in humans and highlight the impact the Neolithic revolution had on our lifestyle and health, write researchers from Nijmegen and Hannover in Frontiers in Genetics. Research of these past events offers interesting starting points for today’s science and health care.

Just like plants, animals and other organisms, humans are dynamic organisms with variable traits. Look at how humans behave and their appearance and you will see differences in skin color, eating habits, susceptibility to diseases, height and so on. Such external features are called ‘phenotype’. This appearance (phenotype) can be influenced by, for example, genetic factors, social and cultural habits, eating behavior and environmental factors.

Nijmegen scientists, in cooperation with colleagues from the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research (HZI, Hannover), have investigated* whether they could trace the development of some complex human traits of modern Europeans from, say, 50,000 years B.C. to the present. These are complex traits such as height and intelligence. In this case, ‘complex’ means this trait is not determined by one gene but by dozens or even hundreds of genes. Each of these genes has only a very small effect on such a trait.

Genetic archaeology

How can you track down all the genes that interfere with height? This can be done with a technique called GWAS: genome-wide association studies. You take all human genes (genome) to see which genes have an effect on height. It’s not a causal relationship (you do not know exactly how those genes influence height), but a statistical relationship (it is always the same genes that show up when height is determined). In a large population study, you can get a list of genes involved in human height and compare this list of genes of modern Europeans with those of our distant ancestors. Archaeological research has unearthed already more than 800 people whose DNA has been mapped. Ultimately, this reference gives you a kind of timeline of European height genes, in which you can search for changes and turning points along the way.

Speeding up evolutionary processes

The researchers analyzed not only height but also other complex features such as skin pigmentation, weight/BMI, lipid metabolism, intelligence and cardiovascular disease. “In general, we see a clear change of some of these traits before and after the Neolithic Revolution, as if there was an acceleration of evolutionary processes then,” says Mihai Netea from Radboudumc. The Neolithic (New Stone Age) is an important period in human development, often referred to as the Neolithic Revolution. Wandering hunter-gatherers slowly disappeared and were replaced by locally settled farmers, resulting in a completely different lifestyle, change of diet, and different socio-cultural customs.

Height, skin color, cholesterol

Yang Li, researcher at the HZI: “During this transitional period, we not only found a clear change in body height, but in skin color as well. Europeans, for example, have retained their dark skin color for a remarkably long time, and it really lightens during this period. This may be due to migration from populations in the Middle East with less pigmented skin. In many genes involved in metabolism and the risk of cardiovascular disease we saw little change, only with one obvious exception: HDL cholesterol – often called ‘good’ cholesterol – shows a clear decrease. It increases the risk of arthrosclerosis, but there’s a link with intelligence as well.”

Intelligence

There’s a change in genetic factors that leads to the development of coronary artery disease by means of a decrease in HDL cholesterol. This raises the question, what is the evolutionary advantage of this lower HDL-cholesterol concentration? Li: “Perhaps it is in the development of cognitive functions, because cholesterol is fundamental to the development and functioning of the brain. Some minimal changes in genes – called polymorphisms – in cholesterol metabolism have been linked to cognitive functions, while variations in levels of HDL and LDL have been linked to changes in intelligence, learning and memory. These are hypotheses, not proofs, but illustrate the importance of this research, in which we are exploring factors that can influence the development of complex human traits.”

Useful for the present

This evolutionary research into the change of human traits in Europeans past can also be useful for the present. Netea: “It helps us to understand the physiology of contemporary humans and we may be able to tailor public health measures better to specific populations. Research has learned, for example, that Asian populations already have an increased risk of metabolic and cardiovascular complications at a lower BMI compared to European populations. We can take that into account in prevention strategies. Look at the mass rural-urban migration, which is accompanied by major changes in social and cultural habits, eating behavior and environmental factors. What will it mean for important human physiological traits, for evolutionary pressures on human traits and genes, and human diseases in modern societies?”

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The Neolithic is characterized by fixed human settlements and the invention of agriculture from c. 10,000 BP. Reconstitution of Pre-Pottery Neolithic B housing in Aşıklı Höyük, modern Turkey. Sarah Murray, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons

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AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE (AAAS)—Scientists have unearthed evidence for a major earthquake that struck the arid Atacama Desert region along the Chilean coast about 3,800 years ago, triggering a tsunami and severely disrupting prehistoric communities. Diego Salazar and colleagues observed that, following the disaster, the hunter-gatherers in the area adapted largely by abandoning their settlements. However, knowledge of these major events seemed to fade with time – residential sites arose near the shoreline once again by about 1,000 years ago. The authors suggest that Atacama residents may not have anticipated the earthquake because events of this scale only occur in the region over large time intervals. “These results should also be used to recalibrate current hazard assessment policies, which, for coastal northern Chile, are mostly based on the historical tsunamigenic earthquakes,” Salazar et al. write. Due to a lack of interdisciplinary research, scientists’ understanding of prehistoric megathrust earthquakes – monstrous quakes that occur in zones where one tectonic plate is forced beneath another – has not been sufficient to assess how humans have responded to these events in the past.  To evaluate the existence of a megathrust earthquake that happened almost 4,000 years ago and to understand its social impact, Salazar et al. gathered a combination of geological and archaeological evidence. They measured 17 radiocarbon ages for littoral deposits – sandy remnants of the ancient sea laced with shells – at 7 sites, determining that the deposits provide evidence for coastal uplift along the northern Chile seismic gap during this period. The researchers also found that buildings at 5 archaeological sites along the coast concurrently became eroded or were destroyed. Salazar et al. discovered that extensive mining at one site ceased following the quake and human occupation throughout the region was reduced to a smaller number of less populated sites.

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Earthquake driven uplifted paleo-beaches at Zapatero archaeological site. Gabriel Easton

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CHINESE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES HEADQUARTERS—Xinjiang, in northwest China, lays at an important junction between east and west Eurasia and has played a historically important role in the exchange of goods and technologies between these two regions along the Silk Road. It is a complex mix of cultures and populations.

However, the interflow and blending of these diverse populations in Xinjiang can be traced further back. Bronze Age mummies discovered in Tarim Basin were purported to have western features and textiles, and the discovery of 5^th century C.E. texts of an extinct Indo-European language group, Tocharian, has spurred great interest in archeologists, linguists, and anthropologists.

Now, a research team led by Prof. FU Qiaomei from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has unraveled the past population history of Xinjiang, China, based on information from 201 ancient genomes from 39 archeological sites.

Their findings were published in Science on March 31.

A mix of local northern Asian and western Steppe ancestry in Bronze Age

The peopling of Bronze Age Xinjiang is key to understanding the later population dynamics of the region. It had been proposed that the Bronze Age settling of the Tarim Basin was originally by people related to either western Steppe Cultures (“Steppe hypothesis”) or Central Asian populations related to the Bactria Margiana Complex (BMAC) (“Bactrian oasis hypothesis”).

FU and her team discovered the earliest inhabitants of Xinjiang showed genomic similarities with both of these groups, but broadly mixed with a unique ancestry found in the local Tarim Basin mummies, who were recently shown to be linked to a population found 25,000 years ago in southern Siberia known as the Ancient North Eurasians (ANE).

“In all, Bronze Age Xinjiang populations were found to contain ancestral components of the ‘local’ Tarim Basin population mixed to varying degrees with those of three groups from the surrounding regions: the Afanasievo, an Indo-European-associated Steppe culture, a group called the Chemurchek, who contained BMAC ancestry from Central Asia, and ancestry from a Northeast Asian population called the Shamanka,” said  Prof. FU, the last corresponding author of this paper.

The appearance of an individual with almost exclusive Northeast Asian ancestry in northern Xinjiang at this time indicated these early populations may have been already highly mobile. This evidence fits a scenario where incoming Steppe, Chemurchek and Northeast Asian populations entered the region and mixed with the existing inhabitants, who are closest to the oldest Tarim Basin mummies.

In the later part of the Bronze Age, they found the existing genomic profiles shifted to include an influx of a newer western Steppe group linked to the Steppe Middle-Late Bronze Age (MLBA) Andronovo culture, as well as an increasing influx of ancestry from East Asia found in southern Siberia. Furthermore, an expansion of ancestry related to Central Asia (BMAC) at this time indicated an increase in interactions with Central Asia across the Inner Asian Mountain Corridor.

Early entry of Indo-European speakers in Bronze Age Xinjiang

Interestingly, they also found ancestry of several Early Bronze Age individuals identified as unmixed Afanasievo ancestry. This finding corroborates an early entry of these Indo-Europeans, who may have played a role in introducing Tocharian languages to Xinjiang, the easternmost Indo-European languages recorded. This early date would make the appearance of Indo-European languages in Xinjiang roughly contemporary with their entrance into Western Europe, clarifying the origin and spread of the language family with the largest number of speakers today.  

Iron Age influx of East and Central Asians established the ancestry still present today

Compared to the Bronze Age, Iron Age populations showed an increased influx of people from East and Central Asia, with the presence of the East Asian component following a West-to-East gradient of increasing East Asian ancestry. Unlike the Northeast Asian ancestry present during the Bronze Age, the East Asian ancestry entering during the Iron Age showed more diverse origins including mainland East Asia.

These Iron Age populations could be linked to populations such as the Xiongnu and Han, which coincided with a historically documented westward expansion of Xiongnu in ~2200 BP after the defeat of Yuezhi in Gansu region. Additional Iron Age movements of people from Central Asia or the Indus periphery region into Xinjiang supported early activity along routes such as the Inner Asian Mountain Corridor.

The Iron Age appearance of ancestry linked to the Sakas, a nomadic confederation derived from the Iranian peoples, helps to date the entrance of Indo-Iranian languages like Khotanese, known to be spoken by the Sakas, into Xinjiang. This Iron Age genetic profile of the region, linking Steppe, East Asian, and Central Asian people, was found to have been maintained into the Historical Era (HE). Despite the cultural shifts of the past millennia, similar ancestries to those established in the Iron Age are still observed in present day Xinjiang populations.

Phenotypic analysis of several remains, the first reported for ancient Xinjiang, gave depth to the genetic results. The majority of individuals investigated had dark brown to black hair and brown eye color throughout Bronze Age, Iron Age, and HE. Corresponded with the appearance of Andronovo Steppe ancestry, a small proportion of the Iron Age individuals are marked blond hair, blue eyes and lighter skin tone in the west and north of Xinjiang. Two Early Bronze Age Tarim Basin mummies in east Xinjiang were found likely to have had dark brown to black hair and darker skin, despite their archeologically-identified “western” features, and a more recent third mummy from the Late Bronze Age was likely to have had a more intermediate skin tone.

“With the widespread population movements documented in the study, it is intriguing to see the degree of genetic continuity that has been maintained in Xinjiang over the past 5000 years.” said Associate Prof. Vikas KUMAR from IVPP, the first author of this study.  

“What is striking about these results is that the demographic history of a cross-roads region as Xinjiang has been marked not by population replacements, but by the genetic incorporation of diverse incoming cultural groups into the existing population, making Xinjiang a true ‘melting-pot’,” said Prof. FU.

This detailed aspect had not been so clear looking only at archeological and cultural evidence. These findings suggest the importance of combining genetic and archaeological evidence to provide a more comprehensive insight into population history.

The current ancient DNA analysis highlights a holistic approach to unravelling the complex history of locations like Xinjiang, where the many interactions between different groups and cultures in the past make detailed demographic studies difficult. Future studies in this area could reveal more about the finer points of Xinjiang’s history.

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Overlook of Tombs in high altitudes. Excavated from Jierzankale site in Tashikuergan, Kashi region.  YAN Xuguang, Kashi Daily

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PLOS—Neanderthal populations in the Iberian Peninsula were experiencing local extinction and replacement even before Homo sapiens arrived, according to a study* published March 30, 2022 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Joseba Rios-Garaizar of the Archaeological Museum of Bilbao, Spain and colleagues.

Neanderthals disappeared around 40,000 years ago, but many details of their extinction remain unclear. To elucidate the situation, it is useful to explore how Neanderthal populations were changing during their final millennia. In this study, researchers examined the distribution of a tool complex known as the Châtelperronian, which is thought to be unique to certain populations of Neanderthals in France and the Iberian Peninsula.

The researchers examined over 5,000 remains of Châtelperronian tools from a site called Aranbaltza II in Barrika, in the Northern Iberian Peninsula, dating to around 45,500 years ago. Comparing this site with other nearby Neanderthal tool sites, they document that the Châtelperronian system does not overlap in time with older Neanderthal technologies in this region, suggesting that Châtelperronian tools were not developed from earlier Iberian technology, but instead originated elsewhere before migrating into the region. They also found that Châtelperronian tools appear earlier than the first Homo sapiens tools in the Iberian Peninsula.

Based on this evidence, the authors suggest that older Iberian Neanderthal populations disappeared, taking their tool styles with them, and were replaced by different Neanderthal groups using Châtelperronian tools, likely migrating from France, and these populations were in turn replaced by Homo sapiens. The researchers propose that these patterns of local Neanderthal extinction and replacement will be an important area of future study, as they might have played a significant role in the decline and ultimate demise of Neanderthals.

The authors add: “Neanderthals with Châtelperronian technology occupied the Northern Iberian Peninsula ca. 43,000 years ago. This territory was unoccupied at the time, following the earlier disappearance of local Neanderthal groups, along with their Mousterian technology.”

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Selected lithic artifacts from the Châtelperronian at Aranbaltza II (Barrika, Spain). Rios-Garaizar et al., 2022, PLOS ONE, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

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Reconstruction: Artist rendition of a Neanderthal. Neanderthal-Museum, Mettmann, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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Article Source: PLoS ONE news release.

*Rios-Garaizar J, Iriarte E, Arnold LJ, Sánchez-Romero L, Marín-Arroyo AB, San Emeterio A, et al. (2022) The intrusive nature of the Châtelperronian in the Iberian Peninsula. PLoS ONE 17(3): e0265219. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265219

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FRONTIERS—A species of giant two-humped camel, Camelus knoblochi, is known to have lived for approximately a quarter of a million years in Central Asia. A new study in Frontiers in Earth Science shows that C. knoblochi’s last refuge was in Mongolia, until approximately 27,000 years ago. In Mongolia, the last of the species coexisted with anatomically modern humans and maybe the extinct Neanderthals or Denisovans. While the main cause of C. knoblochi’s extinction seems to have been climate change, hunting by archaic humans may also have played a role.

“Here we show that the extinct camel, Camelus knoblochi persisted in Mongolia until climatic and environmental changes nudged it into extinction about 27,000 years ago,” said Dr John W Olsen, Regents’ professor emeritus at the School of Anthropology of the University of Arizona, Tucson, US.

Paradoxically, today, southwestern Mongolia hosts one of the last two wild populations of the critically endangered wild Bactrian camel, C. ferus. The new results suggest that C. knoblochi coexisted with C. ferus during the late Pleistocene in Mongolia, so that between-species competition may have been a third cause of C. knoblochi’s extinction. Standing nearly three meters tall and weighing more than a ton, C. knoblochi would have dwarfed C. ferus. The precise taxonomic relationships between these two species, other extinct Camelus, and the ancient Paracamelus aren’t yet resolved.

Olsen said: “C. knoblochi fossil remains from Tsagaan Agui Cave [in the Gobi Altai Mountains of southwestern Mongolia], which also contains a rich, stratified sequence of human Paleolithic cultural material, suggest that archaic people coexisted and interacted there with C. knoblochi and elsewhere, contemporaneously, with the wild Bactrian camel.”

Steppe specialists driven into extinction by desertification

The new study describes five C. knoblochi leg and foot bones found in Tsagaan Agui Cave in 2021, and one from Tugrug Shireet in today’s Gobi Desert of southern Mongolia. They were found in association with bones of wolves, cave hyenas, rhinoceroses, horses, wild donkeys, ibexes, wild sheep, and Mongolian gazelles. This assemblage indicates that C. knoblochi lived in montane and lowland steppe environments, less dry habitats than those of its modern relatives.

The authors conclude that C. knoblochi finally went extinct primarily because it was less tolerant of desertification than today’s camels, C. ferus, the domestic Bactrian camel C. bactrianus, and the domestic Arabian camel C. dromedarius.

In the late Pleistocene, much of Mongolia’s environment became drier and changed from steppe to dry steppe and finally desert.

“Apparently, C. knoblochi was poorly adapted to desert biomes, primarily because such landscapes could not support such large animals, but perhaps there were other reasons as well, related to the availability of fresh water and the ability of camels to store water within the body, poorly adapted mechanisms of thermoregulation, and competition from other members of the faunal community occupying the same trophic niche,” wrote the authors.

Towards the end, the last of the species may have lingered, at least seasonally, in the milder forest steppe – grassland interspersed with woodland – further north in neighboring Siberia. But this habitat probably wasn’t ideal either, which could have sounded the death knell for C. knoblochi. The world would not see giant camels again.

Prey upon or scavenged by humans

What were the relations between archaic humans and C. knoblochi?

Corresponding author Dr Arina M Khatsenovich, senior researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Archeology and Ethnography in Novosibirsk, Russia, said: “A C. knoblochi metacarpal bone from Tsagaan Agui Cave, dated to between 59,000 and 44,000 years ago, exhibits traces of both butchery by humans and hyenas gnawing on it. This suggests that C. knoblochi was a species that Late Pleistocene humans in Mongolia could hunt or scavenge.”

“We don’t yet have sufficient material evidence regarding the interaction between humans and C. ferus in the Late Pleistocene, but it likely did not differ from human relationships with C. knoblochi – as prey, but not a target for domestication.”

First author Dr Alexey Klementiev, a paleobiologist with the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Siberian Branch, said: “We conclude that C. knoblochi became extinct in Mongolia and in Asia, generally, by the end of Marine Isotope Stage 3 (roughly 27,000 years ago) as a result of climate changes that provoked degradation of the steppe ecosystem and intensified the process of aridification.”

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Climate change and archaic humans may have combined to see the demise of an ancient camel species in Mongolia. Hbieser, Pixabay

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Article Source: Frontiers news release.

University of Illinois Chicago, UIC Today—Machu Picchu is among the most recognized archaeological sites in the world. A lasting symbol of the Inca Empire, it’s one of the most visited attractions in Latin America and at the heart of the Peruvian tourist industry.

However, when Hiram Bingham first visited the ruins in 1911 and then brought them to the world’s attention, they were little known — even among those who lived in Peru’s Cusco region. 

More than 110 years after Bingham’s first visit to the site, historian Donato Amado Gonzales from the Ministry of Culture of Peru (Cusco) and archeologist Brian S. Bauer from the University of Illinois Chicago reviewed Bingham’s original field notes, early 20th century maps of the region, and centuries-old land documents from different archives. Their findings suggest that less was known about the site than what was previously thought.

In their paper, published by Ñawpa Pacha: Journal of Andean Archaeology, the researchers conclude that the Incas originally called it Huayna Picchu, for the rocky summit that lies nearest to the site, and not Machu Picchu, which is the name of the highest mountain near the ancient city. 

“We began with the uncertainty of the name of the ruins when Bingham first visited them and then reviewed several maps and atlases printed before Bingham’s visit to the ruins,” said Bauer, UIC professor of anthropology. “There is significant data which suggest that the Inca city actually was called Picchu or more likely, Huayna Picchu.”

The researchers found that the ruins of an Inca town called Huayna Picchu is mentioned in a 1904 atlas that was published seven years before Bingham arrived in Peru. Additionally, they detail that Bingham was told in 1911 of ruins called Huayna Picchu along the Urubamba River before he left Cusco to search for the remains. A landowner’s son later told Bingham in 1912 that the ruins were called Huayna Picchu.

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Machu Picchu. Photo by Trevor Fenwick, Pixabay

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According to Bauer, the most definitive connections to the original name of the Inca city are preserved within accounts written by Spaniards relatively soon after the region came under their control in the late 16th century.

“We end with a stunning, late 16th-century account when the indigenous people of the region were considering returning to reoccupy the site which they called Huayna Picchu,” he said.

By Brian Flood

Article Source: University of Illinois Chicago news release.

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