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WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY, PULLMAN, Wash.—Climate problems alone were not enough to end periods of ancient Pueblo development in the southwestern United States.

Drought is often blamed for the periodic disruptions of these Pueblo societies, but in a study with potential implications for the modern world, archaeologists have found evidence that slowly accumulating social tension likely played a substantial role in three dramatic upheavals in Pueblo development.

The findings, detailed in an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that Pueblo farmers often persevered through droughts, but when social tensions were increasing, even modest droughts could spell the end of an era of development.

“Societies that are cohesive can often find ways to overcome climate challenges,” said Tim Kohler, a Washington State University archeologist and corresponding author on the study. “But societies that are riven by internal social dynamics of any sort – which could be wealth differences, racial disparities or other divisions – are fragile because of those factors. Then climate challenges can easily become very serious.”

Archeologists have long speculated about the causes of occasional upheavals in the pre-Spanish societies created by the ancestors of contemporary Pueblo peoples. These Ancestral Pueblo communities once occupied the Four Corners area of the U.S. from 500 to 1300 where today Colorado borders Utah, Arizona and New Mexico.

While these communities were often stable for many decades, they experienced several disruptive social transformations before leaving the area in the late 1200s. When more precise measurements indicated that droughts coincided with these transformations, many archeologists decided that these climate challenges were their primary cause.

In this study, Kohler collaborated with complexity scientists from Wageningen University in The Netherlands, led by Marten Scheffer, who have shown that loss of resilience in a system approaching a tipping point can be detected through subtle changes in fluctuation patterns.

“Those warning signals turn out to be strikingly universal,” said Scheffer, first author on the study. “They are based on the fact that slowing down of recovery from small perturbations signals loss of resilience.”

Other research has found signs of such “critical slowing down” in systems as diverse as the human brain, tropical rainforests and ice caps as they approach critical transitions.

“When we saw the amazingly detailed data assembled by Kohler’s team, we thought this would be the ideal case to see if our indicators might detect when societies become unstable–something quite relevant in the current social context,” Scheffer said.

The research used tree-ring analyses of wood beams used for construction, which provided a time series of estimated tree-cutting activity spanning many centuries.

“This record is like a social thermometer,” said Kohler, who is also affiliated with the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Colorado and the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. “Tree cutting and construction are vital components of these societies. Any deviation from normal tells you something is going on.”

They found that weakened recovery from interruptions in construction activity preceded three major transformations of Pueblo societies. These slow-downs were different than other interruptions, which showed quick returns to normal in the following years. The archeologists also noted increased signs of violence at the same time, confirming that tension had likely increased and that societies were nearing a tipping point.

This happened at the end of the period known as the Basketmaker III, around the year 700, as well as near the ends of the periods called Pueblo I and Pueblo II, around 900 and 1140 respectively. Near the end of each period, there was also evidence of drought. The findings indicate that it was the two factors together – social fragility and drought – that spelled trouble for these societies.

Social fragility was not at play, however, at the end of the Pueblo III period in the late 1200s when Pueblo farmers left the Four Corners with most moving far south. This study supports the theory that it was a combination of drought and conflict with outside groups that spurred the Pueblo peoples to leave.

Kohler said we can still learn from what happens when climate challenges and social problems coincide.

“Today we face multiple social problems including rising wealth inequality along with deep political and racial divisions, just as climate change is no longer theoretical,” Kohler said. “If we’re not ready to face the challenges of changing climate as a cohesive society, there will be real trouble.”

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Drought is often blamed for the periodic disruptions of ancient Pueblo societies of the U.S. Southwest, but in a study with potential implications for the modern world, archaeologists found evidence that slowly accumulating social tension likely played a substantial role in three dramatic upheavals in Pueblo development. The findings show that Pueblo farmers often persevered through droughts, but when social tensions were increasing, even modest droughts could spell the end of an era of development. Mesa Verde National Park, MEVE 11084

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Article Source: WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY news release

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CNRS Presse—The Chauvet Cave, which lies by the entrance to the Gorges of the Ardèche, is home to the world’s oldest cave paintings, dating back 36,000 years. Their state of preservation and aesthetic qualities earned them a spot on the World Heritage List in 2014, 20 years after their discovery. The location of the cavern – surrounded by a remarkable landscape, next to the Pont d’Arc natural archway – raises the question of whether the people who executed these artworks looked and walked out upon the same landscape as today. Did they see the same natural archway? Scientists from the CNRS, Université Savoie Mont Blanc, and the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle1 now know the answer. By studying the landform of the area and making novel use of applied mathematics to date sand transported by the Ardèche River, they determined that the Pont d’Arc was formed about 124,000 years ago. This study published on April 26 in Scientific reports these past communities were therefore familiar with the same landmarks we know today: the gorge entrance, a natural archway, and a ledge leading directly to the cave entrance, which was then wide open.

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The Cirque d’Estre shapes the natural setting of the Chauvet Cave and the Pont d’Arc. The upper photograph shows the Combe d’Arc, an old meander later cutoff by the Ardèche River. © Jean-Jacques Delannoy and Stéphane Jaillet

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Reconstructing the history of the Combe d’Arc landscape. The Combe d’Arc was greatly impacted by the gradual entrenchment of the Ardèche River. © Kim Génuite

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Article Source: A CNRS news release. Elie Stecyna, CNRS press officer

Above, Top Left: View toward Chauvet showing landscape around the cave location. Thilo Parg,  Lizenz CC-BY-SA-4.0  Wikimedia Commons

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ESTONIAN RESEARCH COUNCIL—A study that appeared today on Current Biology sheds new light on the continental migrations which shaped the genetic background of all present Europeans. The research generates new ancient DNA evidence and direct dating from a fragmentary fossil mandible belonging to an individual who lived ~17,000 years ago in northeastern Italy (Riparo Tagliente, Verona). The results backdate by about 3,000 years the diffusion in Southern Europe of a genetic component linked to Eastern Europe/Western Asia previously believed to have spread westwards during later major warming shifts.

“By looking into the past of this particular individual, who was one of the first settlers of the southern Alps after the Last Glacial peak, we found evidence that the previously documented genetic replacement which changed the makeup of Southern European Hunter Gatherers started at least 17,000 years ago,” said lead author Eugenio Bortolini (University of Bologna), “much earlier than we previously thought, and in a very different scenario”.

The ancient genome obtained at Riparo Tagliente is in fact of particular importance, “since it supports the persistence of exchange networks and the movement of people across southern Europe immediately after the Last Glacial Maximum, well before the onset of much warmer climatic shifts,” said Luca Pagani (University of Padova and Institute of Genomics of the University of Tartu), co-first author of the work.

This individual, whose half-mandible had been found at Riparo Tagliente in 1963, shares genetic affinities with an Iberian individual who lived up to 19,000 years ago, and maternal and paternal genetic affinities with southern Italian and European individuals who lived around 14,000 years ago, suggesting that population movements may have spread these genetic variants in Southern Europe even before the occupation of Riparo Tagliente, and may have been intermittent but persisting during colder phases. “Direct dating of human fossils is once again critical to disentangle and interpret complex archaeological contexts”, adds Sahra Talamo, coauthor of the study.

The analysis of the mandible also allowed the authors to unveil some details concerning this particular settler of Riparo Tagliente: “The fragment belongs to a young male affected by cementoma, a quite rare anomaly in the development of dental tissue” adds Gregorio Oxilia, co-first author of the study, “and might shed light on the distribution of such conditions in pre-Neolithic societies”.

The research was coordinated by the University of Bologna (Italy) in close collaboration with a vast international network including the University of Padova (Italy), the Institute of Genomics of the University of Tartu (Estonia), the University of Tubingen (Germany), the University of Ferrara (Italy), the Institute of Genetics and Biophysics of the National Research Council of Italy, KU Leuven (Belgium), Institució Milà i Fontanals of the Spanish National Research Council, Sequentia Biotech (Spain), University of Venice Ca’ Foscari (Italy), The “Abdus Salam” International Centre for Theoretical Physics (Trieste, Italy), Monash University (Melbourne , Australia), University of Florence (Italy), and several professional dentist surgeons. Excavations at Riparo Tagliente which made this study possible are led and supervised by Federica Fontana and coordinated by the University of Ferrara.

“This finding opens important questions concerning the role and impact of population movements on the major cultural transitions documented by archaeologists in Southern Europe” concludes Stefano Benazzi, senior author of the study, “some of which temporally coincide with the date emerged for the individual found at Riparo Tagliente. Future research will dig more into these new hypotheses concerning the ancestry of modern Europeans”.

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Virtual model of the hemimandible Tagliente2. In the latter, the presenceo of cementoma is visible (in red). G. Oxilia

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Picture (1) of the hemimandible Tagliente2. G. Oxilia

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Article Source: Estonian Research Council news release.

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UNIVERSITY OF GRONINGEN—The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered some seventy years ago, are famous for containing the oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and many hitherto unknown ancient Jewish texts. But the individual people behind the scrolls have eluded scientists, because the scribes are anonymous. Now, by combining the sciences and the humanities, University of Groningen researchers have cracked the code, which enables them to discover the scribes behind the scrolls. They presented their results in the journal PLOS ONE on 21 April.

The scribes who created the scrolls did not sign their work. Scholars suggested some manuscripts should be attributed to a single scribe based on handwriting. ‘They would try to find a “smoking gun” in the handwriting, for example, a very specific trait in a letter which would identify a scribe’, explains Mladen Popović, professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Judaism at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Groningen. He is also director of the university’s Qumran Institute, dedicated to studying the Dead Sea Scrolls. However, these identifications are somewhat subjective and often hotly debated.

Scribes

That is why Popović, in his project The Hands that Wrote the Bible which was funded by the European Research Council, teamed up with his colleague Lambert Schomaker, professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the Faculty of Science and Engineering. Schomaker has long worked on techniques to allow computers to read handwriting, often from historical materials. He also performed studies to investigate how biomechanical traits, like the way in which someone holds a pen or stylus, would affect handwriting.

In this study, together with PhD candidate Maruf Dhali, they focused on one scroll in particular: the famous Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsa^a) from Qumran Cave 1. The handwriting in this scroll seems near-uniform, yet it has been suggested it was made by two scribes sharing a similar writing style. So how could this be decided? Schomaker: ‘This scroll contains the letter aleph, or “a”, at least five thousand times. It is impossible to compare them all just by eye.’ Computers are well suited to analyze large datasets, like 5,000 handwritten a’s. Digital imaging makes all sorts of computer calculations possible, at the microlevel of characters, such as measuring curvature (called textural), as well as whole characters (called allographic).

Neural network

‘The human eye is amazing and presumably takes these levels into account too. This allows experts to “see” the hands of different authors, but that decision is often not reached by a transparent process,’ Popović says. ‘Furthermore, it is virtually impossible for these experts to process the large amounts of data the scrolls provide.’ That is why their results are often not conclusive.

The first hurdle was to train an algorithm to separate the text (ink) from its background (the leather or the papyrus). For this separation, or ‘binarization’, Dhali developed a state-of-the-art artificial neural network that can be trained using deep learning. This neural network keeps the original ink traces made by the scribe more than 2,000 years ago intact as they appear on the digital images. ‘This is important because the ancient ink traces relate directly to a person’s muscle movement and are person-specific’, Schomaker explains.

Similarities

Dhali performed the first analytical test of this study. His analysis of textural and allographic features showed that the 54 columns of text in the Great Isaiah Scroll fell into two different groups that were not distributed randomly through the scroll, but were clustered, with a transition around the halfway mark.

With the remark that there might be more than one writer, Dhali then handed the data to Schomaker who then recomputed the similarities between the columns, now using the patterns of letter fragments. This second analytical step confirmed the presence of two differences. Several further checks and controls were performed. According to Schomaker: ‘When we added extra noise to the data, the result didn’t change. We also succeeded in demonstrating that the second scribe shows more variation within his writing than the first, although their writing is very similar.’

Handwriting

In the third step, Popović, Dhali, and Schomaker produced a visual analysis. They created ‘heat maps’ that incorporate all the variants of a character across the scroll. Then they produced an averaged version of this character for the first 27 columns and the last 27 columns. Comparing these two average letters by eye shows that they are different. This links the computerized and statistical analysis to human interpretation of the data by approximation, because the heat maps are neither dependent nor produced from the primary and secondary analyses.

Certain aspects of the scroll and the positioning of the text led some scholars to suggest that after column 27 a new scribe had started, but this was not generally accepted. Popović: ‘Now, we can confirm this with a quantitative analysis of the handwriting as well as with robust statistical analyses. Instead of basing judgment on more-or-less impressionistic evidence, with the intelligent assistance of the computer, we can demonstrate that the separation is statistically significant.’

New window

In addition to transforming the palaeography of the scrolls – and potentially other ancient manuscript corpora – this study of the Great Isaiah Scroll opens up a totally new way to analyze the Qumran texts based on physical characteristics. Now, researchers can access the microlevel of individual scribes and carefully observe how they worked on these manuscripts.

Popović: ‘This is very exciting, because this opens a new window on the ancient world that can reveal much more intricate connections between the scribes that produced the scrolls. In this study, we found evidence for a very similar writing style shared by the two Great Isaiah Scroll scribes, which suggests a common training or origin. Our next step is to investigate other scrolls, where we may find different origins or training for the scribes.’

In this way, it will be possible to learn more about the communities that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls. ‘We are now able to identify different scribes’, Popović concludes. ‘We will never know their names. But after seventy years of study, this feels as if we can finally shake hands with them through their handwriting.’

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A portion of a photographic reproduction of the Great Isaiah Scroll. Photography by Ardon Bar Hama, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

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Two 12×12 Kohonen maps (blue colourmaps) of full character aleph and bet from the Dead Sea Scroll collection. Each of the characters in the Kohonen maps is formed from multiple instances of similar characters (shown with a zoomed box with red lines). These maps are useful for chronological style development analysis. In the current study of writer identification, Fraglets (fragmented character shapes) were used instead of full character shapes to achieve more precise (robust) results. Maruf A. Dhali, University of Groningen

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(from left to right) Greyscale image of column 15 of the Great Isaiah Scroll, the corresponding binarized image using BiNet, and the cleaned-corrected image. From the red boxes of the last two images, one can see how the rotation and the geometric transformation is corrected to yield a better image for further processing. Reprinted from Lim TH, Alexander PS. Volume 1. In: The Dead Sea Scrolls Electronic Library. Brill; 1995 under a CC BY license, with permission from Brill Publishers, original copyright 1995.

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An illustration of how heat maps of normalized average character shapes are generated for individual letters (in this example: aleph). Maruf A. Dhali, University of Groningen

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF GRONINGEN news release.

Additional information:

Digital images of the Dead Sea Scrolls and of the Great Isaiah Scroll were kindly provided by Brill Publishers and the Israel Antiquities Authority (the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library).

From 6-8 April 2021 an international online conference took place, Digital Palaeography and Hebrew/Aramaic Scribal Culture, organized by the University of Groningen. A link to presentations will appear soon on this page: https://www.rug.nl/ggw/news/events/2021/digital-palaeography-and-hebrew-aramaic-scribal-culture

*Mladen Popović, Maruf A. Dhali, and Lambert Schomaker, Artificial Intelligence Based Writer Identification Generates New Evidence for the Unknown Scribes of the Dead Sea Scrolls Exemplified by the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsa^a)

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UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND BALTIMORE COUNTY—New research published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) shows that land use by human societies has reshaped ecology across most of Earth’s land for at least 12,000 years. The research team, from over ten institutions around the world, revealed that the main cause of the current biodiversity crisis is not human destruction of uninhabited wildlands, but rather the appropriation, colonization, and intensified use of lands previously managed sustainably.

The new data overturn earlier reconstructions of global land use history, some of which indicated that most of Earth’s land was uninhabited even as recently as 1500 CE. Further, this new PNAS study supports the argument that an essential way to end Earth’s current biodiversity crisis is to empower the environmental stewardship of Indigenous peoples and local communities across the planet.

“Our work shows that most areas depicted as ‘untouched,’ ‘wild,’ and ‘natural’ are actually areas with long histories of human inhabitation and use,” says UMBC’s Erle Ellis, professor of geography and environmental systems and lead author. He notes that they might be interpreted like this because in these areas, “societies used their landscapes in ways that sustained most of their native biodiversity and even increased their biodiversity, productivity, and resilience.”

Mapping 12,000 years of land use

The interdisciplinary research team includes geographers, archaeologists, anthropologists, ecologists, and conservation scientists. They represent the U.S., the Netherlands, China, Germany, Australia, and Argentina, pooling their knowledge and expertise into a large-scale study that required a highly collaborative approach. They tested the degree to which global patterns of land use and population over 12,000 years were associated statistically with contemporary global patterns of high biodiversity value within areas prioritized for conservation.

“Our global maps show that even 12,000 years ago, nearly three-quarters of terrestrial nature was inhabited, used, and shaped by people,” says Ellis. “Areas untouched by people were almost as rare 12,000 years ago as they are today.”

The maps created for the study are available to view interactively online:

https://anthroecology.org/anthromes/12kdggv1/maps/ge/

The cultural practices of early land users did have some impact on extinctions. However, by and large, land use by Indigenous and traditional communities sustained the vast majority of Earth’s biodiversity for millennia. This finding comes at a critical time of heightened need to develop long-term, sustainable answers to our biggest environmental problems.

“The problem is not human use per se,” explains professor and co-author Nicole Boivin, of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany. “The problem is the kind of land use we see in industrialized societies–characterized by unsustainable agricultural practices and unmitigated extraction and appropriation.”

To truly understand terrestrial nature today, it is necessary to understand the deep human history of that nature. Outside of a few remote areas, “nature as we know it was shaped by human societies over thousands of years,” says Ellis. He believes that efforts to conserve and restore “won’t be successful without empowering the Indigenous, traditional, and local people who know their natures in ways that scientists are only beginning to understand.”

Supporting Indigenous land use practices

The authors argue that their findings confirm that biodiversity conservation and restoration will benefit by shifting focus from preserving land in a form imagined as “untouched” to supporting traditional and Indigenous peoples whose land use practices have helped sustain biodiversity over the long term.

“This study confirms on a scale not previously understood that Indigenous peoples have managed and impacted ecosystems for thousands of years, primarily in positive ways,” says Darren J. Ranco, associate professor of anthropology and coordinator of Native American research at the University of Maine. “These findings have particular salience for contemporary Indigenous rights and self-determination.”

Ranco, a citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation, notes that Indigenous people currently exercise some level of management of about 5% of the world’s lands, upon which 80% of the world’s biodiversity exists. Even so, Indigenous people have been excluded from management, access, and habitation of protected lands in places such as the U.S. National Parks.

“We must also assure that new attempts to protect lands and biodiversity are not just a green-grab of Indigenous lands,” says Ranco. “We cannot re-create the worst of colonial policies meant to exclude Indigenous people, which would undoubtedly make the situation much worse for the environment and humanity.”

A sustainable future

“Our research demonstrates the connections between people and nature that span thousands of years,” says Torben Rick, study co-author and curator of North American Archaeology at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. “These connections are essential for understanding how we arrived at the present and how to achieve a more sustainable future.”

This research represents a new form of collaboration across archaeology, global change science, conservation, and scholars of Indigenous knowledge. The co-authors hope this work will open the door to increasing the use of global land use history data by natural scientists, policymakers, activists, and others. Leaders in a range of fields can use these data, they note, to better understand and collaborate with Indigenous, traditional, and local peoples to conserve biodiversity and ecosystems over the long term.

“It is clear that the perspectives of Indigenous and local peoples should be at the forefront of global negotiations to reduce biodiversity loss,” says Rebecca Shaw, chief scientist at World Wildlife Fund and another study co-author. “There is a global crisis in the way traditionally-used land has been transformed by the scale and magnitude of intensive human development. We have to change course if we are to sustain humanity over the next 12,000 years.”

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Ancient Gateway, Angkor, Cambodia. New research published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) shows that land use by human societies has reshaped ecology across most of Earth’s land for at least 12,000 years. The research team, from more than a dozen institutions around the world, compared the history of global land use with current patterns of biodiversity and conservation. Their work revealed that the main cause of the current biodiversity crisis is not human destruction of uninhabited wildlands, but rather the appropriation, colonization, and intensified use of lands previously managed sustainably. Erle Ellis, Professor of Geography and Environmental Systems at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC).

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The five maps illustrate global changes in anthromes and populations from 10,000 BCE to 2017 CE. Erle Ellis, Professor of Geography and Environmental Systems at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC).

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND BALTIMORE COUNTY news release

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MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY—The field of ancient DNA has revealed important aspects of our evolutionary past, including our relationships with our distant cousins, Denisovans and Neanderthals. These studies have relied on DNA from bones and teeth, which store DNA and protect it from the environment. But such skeletal remains are exceedingly rare, leaving large parts of human history inaccessible to genetic analysis.

To fill these gaps, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology developed new methods for enriching and analyzing human nuclear DNA from sediments, which are abundant at almost every archaeological site. Until now, only mitochondrial DNA has been recovered from archaeological sediments, but this is of limited value for studying population relationships. The advent of nuclear DNA analyses of sediments provides new opportunities to investigate the deep human past.

Sediments may contain genetic material from other mammals

When extracting ancient human DNA from the sediments, the scientists had to be careful to avoid the considerable amount of DNA from other mammals, such as bears and hyenas. “There are lots of places in the human genome that are very similar to a bear’s DNA, for example,” said Benjamin Vernot, the first author of the study. The researchers specifically targeted regions in the genome where they could be confident of isolating only human DNA, and they also designed methods to measure their success in removing non-human DNA. “We wanted to be confident that we weren’t accidentally looking at some unknown species of hyena,” said Vernot.

The scientists applied their techniques to study more than 150 sediment samples from three caves. At two of these—Chagyrskaya and Denisova Caves in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia—previous studies had analyzed DNA from bones. So the authors were able to compare the DNA from sediments to the DNA from bones. “The techniques we developed are very new, and we wanted to be able to test them in places where we knew what to expect,” said Matthias Meyer, the senior author on the study. The researchers found that DNA from the sediments was most closely related to genomes retrieved from bones from those sites, giving them confidence in the robustness of their methods.

Nuclear DNA retrieved from cave deposits in northern Spain

Excavations at the third site, Galería de las Estatuas in northern Spain, led by Juan Luís Arsuaga from Universidad Complutense de Madrid, had uncovered stone tools spanning a period between 70 and 115 thousand years ago. But only a single Neanderthal toe bone had been found, and it was too small to sample for DNA. “There was no way of studying the genetics of the Neanderthals who lived in Estatuas,” said Asier Gómez-Olivencia, a scientist on the Estatuas team from Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea. The nuclear DNA extracted from the sediments revealed that not one, but two Neanderthal populations had lived in the cave, with the original group replaced by a later group approximately 100 thousand years ago.

When the scientists compared the sediment DNA to other skeletal samples, they noticed a striking trend—there seemed to have been two “radiations” of Neanderthals, with the older Estatuas population stemming from one radiation, and the younger population from a second event. “We wondered if these radiations, along with the population replacement in Estatuas, might have been tied to climate changes, or to changes in Neanderthal morphology that occurred around this time period – although we will need more data to say for sure,” said Juan Luís Arsuaga.

New insights into the deep human past

Even for sites where studies have previously analyzed DNA from bones, it is possible to glean new insights from the sediments. At Chagyrskaya Cave, earlier archaeological studies had suggested that the Neanderthal occupants belonged to a single population, and lived there for only a short time. But as previous work had only recovered a single genome from one of the bones found at the site, there was no way to tell if it was representative of the whole population that lived around Chagyrskaya Cave. The sediment DNA was able to confirm this hypothesis. “We took sediment samples from throughout the stratigraphy, and they all looked very similar to the DNA from the bone, even though the sediment DNA came from multiple individuals,” said Kseniya Kolobova at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, Russian Academy of Sciences, the lead archaeologist at Chagyrskaya Cave.

“The dawn of nuclear DNA analysis of sediments massively extends the range of options to tease out the evolutionary history of ancient humans,” said Vernot. By freeing the field of ancient DNA from the constraints of finding human remains and expanding the number of sites potentially suitable for investigation, “we can now study the DNA from many more human populations, and from many more places, than has previously been thought possible,” said Meyer.

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Galería de las Estatuas cave site in northern Spain. Javier Trueba – Madrid Scientific Films

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Chagyrskaya cave in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia. Richard G. Roberts

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Article Source: MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY news release

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PLOS—A new investigation of stone tools buried in graves provides evidence supporting the existence of a division of different types of labor between people of male and female biological sex at the start of the Neolithic. Alba Masclans of Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas in Barcelona, Spain, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on April 14, 2021.

Previous research has suggested that a sexual division of labor existed in Europe during the transition to the Neolithic period, when farming practices spread across the continent. However, many questions remain as to how different tasks became culturally associated with women, men, and perhaps other genders at this time.

To provide further insights, Masclans and colleagues analyzed over 400 stone tools buried in graves in various cemeteries in central Europe about 5,000 years ago during the Early Neolithic. They examined the tools’ physical characteristics, including microscopic patterns of wear, in order to determine how the tools were used. Then, they analyzed these clues in the context of isotopic and osteological data from the graves.

The analysis showed that people of male biological sex were buried with stone tools that had previously been used for woodwork, butchery, hunting, or interpersonal violence. Meanwhile, those of female biological sex were buried with stone tools used on animal hides or leather.

The researchers also found geographic variations in these results, hinting that as agricultural practices spread westwards, sexual division of labor may have shifted. The authors note that the analyzed tools were not necessarily used by the specific people they were buried with, but could have been chosen to represent activities typically carried out by different genders.

These findings provide new support for the existence of sexual division of labor in the early Neolithic in Europe. The authors hope their study will contribute to better understanding of the complex factors involved in the rise of gender inequalities in the Neolithic, which may be heavily rooted in the division of labor during the transition to farming.

The authors add: “Our study points towards a complex and dynamic gendered social organization rooted in a sexed division of labour from the earliest Neolithic.”

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Neolithic agriculturalists. Illustration by L.P. Repiso

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Article Source: PLOS news release

*Masclans A, Hamon C, Jeunesse C, Bickle P (2021) A sexual division of labour at the start of agriculture? A multi-proxy comparison through grave good stone tool technological and use-wear analysis. PLOS ONE 16(4): e0249130. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249130

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INSTITUT PASTEUR—Describing the genetic diversity of human populations is essential to improve our understanding of human diseases and their geographical distribution. However, the vast majority of genetic studies have been focused on populations of European ancestry, which represent only 16% of the global population. Scientists at the Institut Pasteur, Collège de France, and CNRS have looked at understudied human populations from the South Pacific, which are severely affected by a variety of diseases, including vector-borne infectious diseases such as Zika virus, dengue, and chikungunya, and metabolic diseases such as obesity and diabetes. Using genome sequencing of 320 individuals, the scientists have investigated how human populations have biologically adapted to the environments of the Pacific islands and how this has affected their current state of health. This study has also revealed hitherto unsuspected aspects of the history of human settlement in this region. This work is published in the April 14th, 2021 issue of Nature.

An international consortium of scientists organized by Etienne Patin (CNRS/Institut Pasteur) and Lluis Quintana-Murci (Collège de France/Institut Pasteur) was set up to characterize the genetic diversity of populations in the South Pacific, a region full of contrasts with its myriad islands that have been settled at very different time periods.

Indeed, shortly after humans left Africa, they settled Near Oceania (Papua-New-Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the Solomon Islands) approximately 45,000 years ago, while the rest of the Pacific, known as Remote Oceania (Vanuatu, the Wallis and Futuna Islands, Polynesia, etc.), remained uninhabited. It was only approximately 40,000 years later that Remote Oceania was peopled: it is currently accepted that a group of humans left Taiwan 5,000 years ago – a migration known as the ‘Austronesian expansion’ – passed through the Philippines, Indonesia, and the already-inhabited Near Oceanian islands to eventually settle Remote Oceania for the first time.

En route to these remote lands, the ancestors of South Pacific populations met with groups of archaic humans, with whom they interbred. While 2-3% of modern-day Oceanian populations’ genetic material is inherited from Neanderthals (which all populations outside Africa also possess), up to 3% of their genomes is also inherited from Denisovans (relatives of Neanderthals thought to have originated in Asia). It was already known that modern humans inherited beneficial mutations from Neanderthals via admixture, which improved their ability to adapt to their environment, including resistance to viral infections (Cell, 2016 ). In this study published today, scientists from the Human Evolutionary Genetics Unit (Institut Pasteur/CNRS ) in collaboration with various laboratories in France , Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, China, and Taiwan have sought to shed light on how ancient admixture helped Pacific populations to adapt to their specific island environments, including any pathogens encountered.

Historical events traced using genetics

Based on whole-genome-sequencing of over 320 individuals from Taiwan, the Philippines, the Bismarck Archipelago, the Solomon Islands, Santa Cruz Islands, and Vanuatu, this work published in the Nature journal has helped tracing the history of the human settlement of Oceania. First, the scientists have dated the settlement of the various islands of Near Oceania back to approximately 40,000 years, thus confirming archaeological records. They have also demonstrated that this initial settlement was followed by a period of genetic isolation between islands. “Our results confirm that humans were able to cross the seas to reach new lands from an early stage. However, they also suggest that these voyages were relatively infrequent at this distant period in history,” explains Etienne Patin, a CNRS scientist within the Human Evolutionary Genetics Unit at the Institut Pasteur. Moreover, the results of the study reveal a major reduction in the size of these populations just before the settlement.

Second, the study challenges the theory, known as the Out-of-Taiwan model, that a population left Taiwan approximately 5,000 years ago to rapidly settle Near and Remote Oceania. “Our analyses suggest that humans left Taiwan more than 5,000 years ago, and that admixture between the Austronesian incomers and the populations of Near Oceania started only 2,000 years later. The expansions from Taiwan therefore took some time, and may have involved a maturation phase in the Philippines or Indonesia,” comments Etienne Patin.

The heritage of Neanderthals and Denisovans in South Pacific populations

Through this work, it has been possible to estimate the proportions of Neanderthal and Denisovan material in the genomes of South Pacific populations. “We were surprised to note that, contrary to the Neanderthal heritage, which is very similar among the twenty populations studied (approximately 2.5%), the Denisovan legacy varies considerably between populations, from virtually 0% in Taiwan and the Philippines to up to 3.2% in Papua-New-Guinea and Vanuatu” comments Lluis Quintana-Murci, Professor at the Collège de France, holder of the Chair in Human Genomics and Evolution, and Head of the Human Evolutionary Genetics Unit (Institut Pasteur/CNRS).

But this was not the only surprise. The study confirms that Neanderthals provided modern human populations with beneficial mutations associated with numerous phenotypes: skin pigmentation, metabolism, neuronal development, etc. However, the most surprising finding is that admixture with Denisovans has almost exclusively brought beneficial mutations related to immune response regulation. This suggests that the Denisovan heritage has been a reservoir of advantageous mutations, which have improved the Pacific populations’ ability to survive local pathogens. Therefore, it appears that these populations have benefited from the advantages bestowed through admixture with both forms of archaic humans.

Furthermore, the study demonstrates that admixture with Denisovans did not occur at once, but over the course of at least four independent events. It shows that the Denisovans with whom the Pacific populations interbred were in fact highly diverse populations. This conclusion was impossible to deduce from the single genome of a Denisovan specimen found in Siberia: “One of the strengths of these analyses is that, by studying the 3% of archaic heritage present in the genomes of modern humans, one can ‘resurrect’ Denisovans’ genomes, and thus show that they presented high levels of genetic diversity,” comments Lluis Quintana-Murci.

Finally, besides the biological adaptation enabled by archaic admixture, the scientists have found that lipid metabolism, cholesterol in particular, was also a target of natural selection among Oceanian peoples. This insight will potentially improve our understanding of why recent changes in these populations’ lifestyle may be associated with metabolic disorders.

By taking an evolutionary genetics approach, it is possible to shed light on the history of populations’ biological adaptation to their environment, and provide the scientific community with valuable information on specific human traits. These large-scale genomic studies will eventually help us better understand the genetic causes of diseases affecting some regions of the globe, where medical research has hitherto been scarce.

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Genetic admixture in the South Pacific: from Denisovans to the human immune response. © Institut Pasteur

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Article Source: INSTITUT PASTEUR news release

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PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES—A method for dating ostrich eggshells in a Middle Stone Age shell midden reveals a more intensely settled and older site than previously known. The stratified layers of shell middens formed from cast-off mussel and limpet shells and other artifacts can offer a window into early cultures. However, radiocarbon dating is accurate to only around 50,000 years. Elizabeth M. Niespolo and colleagues report* a method for dating ostrich eggshells in a Middle Stone Age shell midden and reveal an older site than previously known. The authors explored a method to precisely date older shell middens and thus allow comparisons among midden sites using debris from a common food source. The authors analyzed 17 eggshell samples from five strata of a midden at Ysterfontein 1, a collapsed rock shelter on the western coast of South Africa. Next, the authors measured the concentration of uranium and thorium, accounted for the secondary uptake of uranium upon burial, and estimated that the midden was formed 119,900- 113,100 years ago. Analysis of stable carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen isotopes within the eggshells offered insight into the paleoenvironment, indicating a cooling and drying climate. According to the authors, the accumulation rates of debris within the midden are more akin to those from the Later Stone Age, indicating that humans were intensively foraging marine resources.

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Ancient ostrich eggshells from Ysterfontein 1, a Middle Stone Age midden in South Africa. Shown are selected eggshells from the top layer of the midden dated by Uranium- Thorium (U-Th, or 230 Th/U) geochronology, with their outer surfaces facing up. Scale bar is 1 cm. Elizabeth M. Niespolo

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A. Thin section photomicrograph of a modern ostrich eggshell in cross section, and corresponding eggshell structures denoted by V (vertical layer), P (palisade or prismatic layer), and C (cone layer). Pores serving as oxygen pathways for incubating chicks are visible as open holes penetrating through the eggshell. B. Epoxy-mounted fragment of an ancient eggshell from Ysterfontein 1 in cross section, showing the same eggshell structures are well preserved in deep time. Analyses from laser ablation are evident along pitted lines and track concentrations of U and Th. A pore is apparent in the center of the mounted fragment. Scale bars are 1 mm. Elizabeth M. Niespolo

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Article Source: PNAS news release

*”Early, intensive marine resource exploitation by Middle Stone Age humans at Ysterfontein 1 rockshelter, South Africa,” by Elizabeth M. Niespolo, Warren D. Sharp, Graham Avery, and Todd E. Dawson

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WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS—Whatever ultimately caused inhabitants to abandon Cahokia, it was not because they cut down too many trees, according to new research from Washington University in St. Louis.

Archaeologists from Arts & Sciences excavated around earthen mounds and analyzed sediment cores to test a persistent theory about the collapse of Cahokia, the pre-Columbian Native American city in southwestern Illinois that was once home to more than 15,000 people.

No one knows for sure why people left Cahokia, though many environmental and social explanations have been proposed. One oft-repeated theory is tied to resource exploitation: specifically, that Native Americans from densely populated Cahokia deforested the area, an environmental misstep that could have resulted in erosion and localized flooding.

But such musings about self-inflicted disaster are outdated—and they’re not supported by physical evidence of flooding issues, Washington University scientists said.

“There’s a really common narrative about land use practices that lead to erosion and sedimentation and contribute to all of these environmental consequences,” said Caitlin Rankin, an assistant research scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who conducted this work as part of her graduate studies at Washington University.

“When we actually revisit this, we’re not seeing evidence of the flooding,” Rankin said.

“The notion of looming ecocide is embedded in a lot of thinking about current and future environmental trajectories,” said Tristram R. “T.R.” Kidder, the Edward S. and Tedi Macias Professor of Anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University. “With a growing population and more mouths to feed, overconsumption of all resources is a real risk.

“Inevitably, people turn to the past for models of what has happened. If we are to understand what caused changes at sites like Cahokia, and if we are to use these as models for understanding current possibilities, we need to do the hard slogging that critically evaluates different ideas,” added Kidder, who leads an ongoing archaeological research program at the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site. “Such work allows us to sift through possibilities so we can aim for those variables that do help us to explain what happened in the past—and explore if this has a lesson to tell us about the future.”

No indications of self-inflicted harm

Writing in the journal Geoarchaeology, Rankin and colleagues at Bryn Mawr University and Northern Illinois University described their recent excavations around a Mississippian Period (AD 1050-1400) earthen mound in the Cahokia Creek floodplain.

Their new archaeological work, completed while Rankin was at Washington University, shows that the ground surface on which the mound was constructed remained stable until industrial development.

The presence of a stable ground surface from Mississippian occupation to the mid-1800s does not support the expectations of the so-called “wood-overuse” hypothesis, the researchers said.

This hypothesis, first proposed in 1993, suggests that tree clearance in the uplands surrounding Cahokia led to erosion, causing increasingly frequent and unpredictable floods of the local creek drainages in the floodplain where Cahokia was constructed.

Rankin noted that archaeologists have broadly applied narratives of ecocide—the idea that societies fail because people overuse or irrevocably damage the natural resources that their people rely on—to help to explain the collapse of past civilizations around the world.

Although many researchers have moved beyond classic narratives of ecocide made popular in the 1990s and early 2000s, Cahokia is one such major archaeological site where untested hypotheses have persisted.

“We need to be careful about the assumptions that we build into these narratives,” Rankin said.

“In this case, there was evidence of heavy wood use,” she said. “But that doesn’t factor in the fact that people can reuse materials—much as you might recycle. We should not automatically assume that deforestation was happening, or that deforestation caused this event.”

Kidder said: “This research demonstrates conclusively that the over-exploitation hypothesis simply isn’t tenable. This conclusion is important because the hypothesis at Cahokia—and elsewhere—is sensible on its face. The people who constructed this remarkable site had an effect on their environment. We know they cut down tens of thousands of trees to make the palisades—and this isn’t a wild estimate, because we can count the number of trees used to build and re-build this feature. Wood depletion could have been an issue.”

“The hypothesis came to be accepted as truth without any testing,” Kidder said. “Caitlin’s study is important because she did the hard work—and I do mean hard, and I do mean work—to test the hypothesis, and in doing so has falsified the claim. I’d argue that this is the exciting part; it’s basic and fundamental science. By eliminating this possibility, it moves us toward other explanations and requires we pursue other avenues of research.”

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Cahokia mound remains at Cahokia State Park. Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

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Archaeologists at Washington University in St. Louis found scant evidence that ‘wood overuse’ at Cahokia caused local flooding and subsequent collapse. Joe Angeles / Washington University

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Article Source: WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS news release

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American Association for the Advancement of Science—Modern human-like brains evolved comparatively late in the genus Homo and long after the earliest humans first dispersed from Africa, according to a new study. By analyzing the impressions left behind by the ancient brains that once sat inside now fossilized skulls, the authors discovered that the brains of the earliest Homo retained a primitive, great ape-like organization of the frontal lobe. The findings challenge the long-standing assumption that human-like brain organization is a hallmark of early Homo and suggest that the evolutionary history of the human brain is more complex than previously thought. Our modern brains are larger and structurally different than those of our closest living relatives, the great apes, particularly in frontal lobe areas involved with complex cognitive tasks like toolmaking and language. However, when these key differences arose during human evolution remains poorly understood. One of the major challenges in tracking brain evolution in early hominid species is that brain tissues rarely fossilize. As a result, much of what is known is derived from shape and structures on the surface of the brain cases of rare, fossilized skulls. Representations of these surfaces – or endocasts – can reveal patterned imprints representing the folds and indentations of the brain and its surrounding vasculature. Using a collection of well-preserved fossil Homo crania from the Dmanisi site in the modern-day nation of Georgia and a comparative sample of others from Africa and Southeast Asia, Marcia Ponce De León and colleagues tracked key changes in brain organization of early Homo from roughly 1.8 million years ago (Ma). They found that the structural innovations in the cerebral regions thought to allow for many of humans’ unique behaviors and abilities emerged later in the evolution of Homo. According to Ponce De León et al., the findings suggest that modern human-like brain reorganization – which was probably in place by 1.7-1.5 Ma – was neither a requisite trait for genus Homo, nor a prerequisite for early Homo’s dispersals into Europe and Asia. In a related Perspective, Amélie Beaudet discusses the study in greater detail.

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Skull of early Homo from Dmanisi (specimen D4500) showing internal structure of the brain
case, and inferred brain morphology. M. Ponce de León and Ch. Zollikofer, University of Zurich

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Skulls of early Homo from Dmanisi, Georgia (specimen D4500, left) and Sangiran, Indonesia
(specimen S17, right). Virtual fillings of their braincases permit inferences on brain organization
(blue). Brains of Homo evolved from ape-like (D4500) to human-like (S17) in the time between
1.7 – 1.5 million years ago. M. Ponce de León and Ch. Zollikofer, University of Zurich

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Article Source: AAAS news release

This research appears in the 9 April 2021 issue of Science. Science is published by AAAS, the nonprofit science society.

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MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY—Ancient DNA from Neanderthals and early modern humans has recently shown that the groups likely interbred somewhere in the Near East after modern humans left Africa some 50,000 years ago. As a result, all people outside Africa carry around 2% to 3% Neanderthal DNA. In modern human genomes, those Neanderthal DNA segments became increasingly shorter over time and their length can be used to estimate when an individual lived. Archaeological data published last year furthermore suggests that modern humans were already present in southeastern Europe 47-43,000 years ago, but due to a scarcity of fairly complete human fossils and the lack of genomic DNA, there is little understanding of who these early human colonists were – or of their relationships to ancient and present-day human groups.

In a new study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, an international team of researchers reports what is likely the oldest reconstructed modern human genome to date. First discovered in Czechia, the woman known to researchers as Zlatý k (golden horse in Czech) displayed longer stretches of Neanderthal DNA than the 45,000-year-old Ust’-Ishim individual from Siberia, the so-far oldest modern human genome. Analysis suggests that she was part of a population that formed before the populations that gave rise to present-day Europeans and Asians split apart.

A recent anthropological study based on the shape of Zlatý’s skull showed similarities with people who lived in Europe before the Last Glacial Maximum – at least 30,000 years ago – but radiocarbon dating produced sporadic results, some as recent as 15,000 years ago. It wasn’t until Jaroslav Brek from the Faculty of Science, Prague and Petr Velemínský of Prague’s National Museum collaborated with the genetics laboratories of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History that a clearer picture came into view.

“We found evidence of cow DNA contamination in the analyzed bone, which suggests that a bovine-based glue used in the past to consolidate the skull was returning radiocarbon dates younger than the fossil’s true age,” says Cosimo Posth, co-lead author of the study. Posth was formerly a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and is currently Professor of Archaeo- and Palaeogenetics at the University of Tübingen.

However, it was the Neanderthal DNA that led the team to their major conclusions about the age of the fossil. Zlatý k carried about the same amount Neanderthal DNA in her genome, as Ust Ishim or other modern humans outside Africa, but the segments with Neanderthal ancestry were on average much longer.

“The results of our DNA analysis show that Zlatý k lived closer in time to the admixture event with Neanderthals,” says Kay Prüfer, co-lead author of the study.

The scientists were able to estimate that Zlatý k lived approximately 2,000 years after the last admixture. Based on these findings, the team argues that Zlatý k represents the oldest human genome to date, roughly the same age as – if not a few hundred years older than – Ust’-Ishim.

“It is quite intriguing that the earliest modern humans in Europe ultimately didn’t succeed! Just as with Ust’-Ishim and the so far oldest European skull from Oase 1, Zlatý k shows no genetic continuity with modern humans that lived in Europe after 40,000 years ago,” says Johannes Krause, senior author of the study and director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

One possible explanation for the discontinuity is the Campanian Ignimbrite volcanic eruption roughly 39,000 years ago, which severely affected climate in the northern hemisphere and may have reduced the survival chances of Neanderthals and early modern humans in large parts of Ice Age Europe.

As advances in ancient DNA reveal more about the story of our species, future genetic studies of other early European individuals will help to reconstruct the history and decline of the first modern humans to expand out of Africa and into Eurasia before the formation of modern-day non-African populations.

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Initial attempts to date Zlatý based on the shape of her skull suggested she was at least 30,000 years old. Researchers now believe she lived more than 45,000 years ago. Martin Frouz

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Lateral view of the mostly-complete skull of Zlatý k. Martin Frouz

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Micro-sampling the petrous bone of Zlatý from the base of the skull in the clean room at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena. Cosimo Posth

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Article Source: MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY news release

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TEL-AVIV UNIVERSITY—Researchers at Tel Aviv University were able to reconstruct the nutrition of stone age humans. In a paper published in the Yearbook of the American Physical Anthropology Association, Dr. Miki Ben-Dor and Prof. Ran Barkai of the Jacob M. Alkov Department of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, together with Raphael Sirtoli of Portugal, show that humans were an apex predator for about two million years. Only the extinction of larger animals (megafauna) in various parts of the world, and the decline of animal food sources toward the end of the stone age, led humans to gradually increase the vegetable element in their nutrition, until finally they had no choice but to domesticate both plants and animals – and became farmers.

“So far, attempts to reconstruct the diet of stone-age humans were mostly based on comparisons to 20th century hunter-gatherer societies,” explains Dr. Ben-Dor. “This comparison is futile, however, because two million years ago hunter-gatherer societies could hunt and consume elephants and other large animals – while today’s hunter gatherers do not have access to such bounty. The entire ecosystem has changed, and conditions cannot be compared. We decided to use other methods to reconstruct the diet of stone-age humans: to examine the memory preserved in our own bodies, our metabolism, genetics and physical build. Human behavior changes rapidly, but evolution is slow. The body remembers.”

In a process unprecedented in its extent, Dr. Ben-Dor and his colleagues collected about 25 lines of evidence from about 400 scientific papers from different scientific disciplines, dealing with the focal question: Were stone-age humans specialized carnivores or were they generalist omnivores? Most evidence was found in research on current biology, namely genetics, metabolism, physiology and morphology.

“One prominent example is the acidity of the human stomach,” says Dr. Ben-Dor. “The acidity in our stomach is high when compared to omnivores and even to other predators. Producing and maintaining strong acidity require large amounts of energy, and its existence is evidence for consuming animal products. Strong acidity provides protection from harmful bacteria found in meat, and prehistoric humans, hunting large animals whose meat sufficed for days or even weeks, often consumed old meat containing large quantities of bacteria, and thus needed to maintain a high level of acidity. Another indication of being predators is the structure of the fat cells in our bodies. In the bodies of omnivores, fat is stored in a relatively small number of large fat cells, while in predators, including humans, it’s the other way around: we have a much larger number of smaller fat cells. Significant evidence for the evolution of humans as predators has also been found in our genome. For example, geneticists have concluded that “areas of the human genome were closed off to enable a fat-rich diet, while in chimpanzees, areas of the genome were opened to enable a sugar-rich diet.”

Evidence from human biology was supplemented by archaeological evidence. For instance, research on stable isotopes in the bones of prehistoric humans, as well as hunting practices unique to humans, show that humans specialized in hunting large and medium-sized animals with high fat content. Comparing humans to large social predators of today, all of whom hunt large animals and obtain more than 70% of their energy from animal sources, reinforced the conclusion that humans specialized in hunting large animals and were in fact hypercarnivores.

“Hunting large animals is not an afternoon hobby,” says Dr. Ben-Dor. “It requires a great deal of knowledge, and lions and hyenas attain these abilities after long years of learning. Clearly, the remains of large animals found in countless archaeological sites are the result of humans’ high expertise as hunters of large animals. Many researchers who study the extinction of the large animals agree that hunting by humans played a major role in this extinction – and there is no better proof of humans’ specialization in hunting large animals. Most probably, like in current-day predators, hunting itself was a focal human activity throughout most of human evolution. Other archaeological evidence – like the fact that specialized tools for obtaining and processing vegetable foods only appeared in the later stages of human evolution – also supports the centrality of large animals in the human diet, throughout most of human history.”

The multidisciplinary reconstruction conducted by TAU researchers for almost a decade proposes a complete change of paradigm in the understanding of human evolution. Contrary to the widespread hypothesis that humans owe their evolution and survival to their dietary flexibility, which allowed them to combine the hunting of animals with vegetable foods, the picture emerging here is of humans evolving mostly as predators of large animals.

“Archaeological evidence does not overlook the fact that stone-age humans also consumed plants,” adds Dr. Ben-Dor. “But according to the findings of this study plants only became a major component of the human diet toward the end of the era.”

Evidence of genetic changes and the appearance of unique stone tools for processing plants led the researchers to conclude that, starting about 85,000 years ago in Africa, and about 40,000 years ago in Europe and Asia, a gradual rise occurred in the consumption of plant foods as well as dietary diversity – in accordance with varying ecological conditions. This rise was accompanied by an increase in the local uniqueness of the stone tool culture, which is similar to the diversity of material cultures in 20th-century hunter-gatherer societies. In contrast, during the two million years when, according to the researchers, humans were apex predators, long periods of similarity and continuity were observed in stone tools, regardless of local ecological conditions.

“Our study addresses a very great current controversy – both scientific and non-scientific,” says Prof. Barkai. “For many people today, the Paleolithic diet is a critical issue, not only with regard to the past, but also concerning the present and future. It is hard to convince a devout vegetarian that his/her ancestors were not vegetarians, and people tend to confuse personal beliefs with scientific reality. Our study is both multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary. We propose a picture that is unprecedented in its inclusiveness and breadth, which clearly shows that humans were initially apex predators, who specialized in hunting large animals. As Darwin discovered, the adaptation of species to obtaining and digesting their food is the main source of evolutionary changes, and thus the claim that humans were apex predators throughout most of their development may provide a broad basis for fundamental insights on the biological and cultural evolution of humans.”

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Human Brain. Dr. Miki Ben Dor

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The evolution of the HTL during the Pleistocene as we interpret it, based on the totality of the evidence. Dr. Miki Ben Dor

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Article Source: TEL-AVIV UNIVERSITY news release

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UNIVERSITY OF INNSBRUCK—”Our findings from this rockshelter show that overly simplified models for the origins of our species are no longer acceptable. Evidence suggests many regions across the African continent were involved, the Kalahari being just one,” Dr Wilkins said.

“Archaeological evidence for early Homo sapiens has been largely discovered at coastal sites in South Africa, supporting the idea that our origins were linked to coastal environments. There have been very few well-preserved, datable archaeological sites in the interior of southern Africa that can tell us about Homo sapiens’ origins away from the coast.

“A rockshelter on Ga-Mohana Hill that stands above an expansive savannah in the Kalahari is one such site.”

Used as a place of spiritual activities today by some of the local community, archaeological research in the rockshelter has revealed a long history as a place of spiritual significance.

The researchers excavated 22 white calcite crystals and fragments of ostrich eggshell, thought to be used as water containers, from deposits dated to 105,000 years ago at Ga-Mohana Hill North Rockshelter when the environment was much wetter than today. The researchers were delighted to discover that the assemblage of human-collected crystals and ostrich eggshell fragments at Ga-Mohana Hill were significantly older than that reported in interior environments elsewhere.

“Our analysis indicates that the crystals were not introduced into the deposits via natural processes, but were deliberately collected objects likely linked to spiritual beliefs and ritual,” Dr Wilkins said.

“The crystals point towards spiritual or cultural use of the shelter 105,000 years ago,” said Dr Sechaba Maape from the University of the Witwatersrand. “This is remarkable considering that site continues to be used to practice ritual activities today.”

The age of the archaeological layers was constrained via Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) dating in the OSL laboratory at the Department of Geology at the University Innsbruck, Austria.

“This technique measures natural light signals that accumulate over time in sedimentary quartz and feldspar grains,” said Dr Michael Meyer, head of the OSL Laboratory. “You can think about each grain as a miniaturized clock, from which we can read out this natural light or luminescence signal, giving us the age of the archaeological sediment layers.”

The name Kalahari is derived from the Tswana word Kgala, meaning ‘great thirst’. And today the climate at Ga-Mohana is semi-arid, with little, very seasonal rainfall. However, ancient proof of abundant water on the landscape is evident from the abundant tufa formations around the shelter. These were aged using the uranium-thorium dating method to between 110,000 and 100,000 years ago – exactly the same time period as the people who were living there.

“This is a story of water in what we know now as a dry landscape, and of adaptable people who exploited the landscape to not only survive but to thrive,” says Dr Robyn Pickering, who is director of the Human Evolution Research Institute (HERI) at the University of Cape Town.

Due to the ongoing spiritual significance of Ga-Mohana Hill, the researchers are conscious to minimize their impact on the local communities’ use of the rockshelter after each season.

“Leaving no visible trace and working with the local community is critical for the sustainability of the project,” Dr Wilkins said. “So that Ga-Mohana Hill can continue to provide new insights about the origins and evolution of Homo sapiens in the Kalahari.”

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The archaeological site at a rock shelter in South Africa’s Kalahari Desert: More than 100,000 years ago, people used the so-called Ga-Mohana Hill North Rockshelter for spiritual activities. Jayne Wilkins

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The Kalahari Desert is a large semi-arid sandy savannah in Southern Africa extending for 900,000 square kilometres (350,000 sq mi), covering much of Botswana, and parts of Namibia and South Africa. Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF INNSBRUCK news release

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MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY—Because of their interactions and conflicts with the major contemporaneous civilizations of Eurasia, the Scythians enjoy a legendary status in historiography and popular culture. The Scythians had major influences on the cultures of their powerful neighbors, spreading new technologies such as saddles and other improvements for horse riding. The ancient Greek, Roman, Persian and Chinese empires all left a multitude of sources describing, from their perspectives, the customs and practices of the feared horse warriors that came from the interior lands of Eurasia.

Still, despite evidence from external sources, little is known about Scythian history. Without a written language or direct sources, the language or languages they spoke, where they came from and the extent to which the various cultures spread across such a huge area were in fact related to one another, remain unclear.

The Iron Age transition and the formation of the genetic profile of the Scythians

A new study published in Science Advances by an international team of geneticists, anthropologists and archaeologists lead by scientists from the Archaeogenetics Department of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, helps illuminate the history of the Scythians with 111 ancient genomes from key Scythian and non-Scythian archaeological cultures of the Central Asian steppe. The results of this study reveal that substantial genetic turnovers were associated with the decline of the long-lasting Bronze Age sedentary groups and the rise of Scythian nomad cultures in the Iron Age. Their findings show that, following the relatively homogenous ancestry of the late Bronze Age herders, at the turn of the first millennium BCE, influxes from the east, west and south into the steppe formed new admixed gene pools.

The diverse peoples of the Central Asian Steppe

The study goes even further, identifying at least two main sources of origin for the nomadic Iron Age groups. An eastern source likely originated from populations in the Altai Mountains that, during the course of the Iron Age, spread west and south, admixing as they moved. These genetic results match with the timing and locations found in the archaeological record and suggest an expansion of populations from the Altai area, where the earliest Scythian burials are found, connecting different renowned cultures such as the Saka, the Tasmola and the Pazyryk found in southern, central and eastern Kazakhstan respectively. Surprisingly, the groups located in the western Ural Mountains descend from a second separate, but simultaneous source. Contrary to the eastern case, this western gene pool, characteristic of the early Sauromatian-Sarmatian cultures, remained largely consistent through the westward spread of the Sarmatian cultures from the Urals into the Pontic-Caspian steppe.

The decline of the Scythian cultures associated with new genetic turnovers

The study also covers the transition period after the Iron Age, revealing new genetic turnovers and admixture events. These events intensified at the turn of the first millennium CE, concurrent with the decline and then disappearance of the Scythian cultures in the Central Steppe. In this case, the new far eastern Eurasian influx is plausibly associated with the spread of the nomad empires of the Eastern steppe in the first centuries CE, such as the Xiongnu and Xianbei confederations, as well as minor influxes from Iranian sources likely linked to the expansion of Persian-related civilization from the south.

Although many of the open questions on the history of the Scythians cannot be solved by ancient DNA alone, this study demonstrates how much the populations of Eurasia have changed and intermixed through time. Future studies should continue to explore the dynamics of these trans-Eurasian connections by covering different periods and geographic regions, revealing the history of connections between west, central and east Eurasia in the remote past and their genetic legacy in present day Eurasian populations.

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Mound 4 of the Eleke Sazy necropolis in eastern Kazakhstan. Zainolla Samashev

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The burial of a social elite known as ‘Golden Man’ from the Eleke Sazy necropolis. Zainolla Samashev

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An aerial view of Hun-Xianbi culture burials. Both horses and warriors can be identified. Zainolla Samashev

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Article Source: MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY news release

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UNIVERSITY OF KENT—A new study from the University of Kent’s School of Anthropology and Conservation has found that Oldowan and Acheulean stone tool technologies are likely to be tens of thousands of years older than current evidence suggests.

They are currently the two oldest, well-documented stone tool technologies known to archaeologists.

These findings, published by the Journal of Human Evolution, provide a new chronological foundation from which to understand the production of stone tool technologies by our early ancestors. They also widen the time frame within which to discuss the evolution of human technological capabilities and associated dietary and behavioral shifts.

For the study, a team led by Kent’s Dr Alastair Key and Dr David Roberts, alongside Dr Ivan Jaric from the Biology Centre of the Czech Academy of Sciences, used statistical modeling techniques only recently introduced to archaeological science. The models estimated that Oldowan stone tools originated 2.617-2.644 million years ago, 36,000 to 63,000 years earlier than current evidence. The Acheulean’s origin was pushed back further by at least 55,000 years to 1.815-1.823 million years ago.

Early stone tool technologies, such as the Oldowan and Acheulean, allowed early human ancestors to access new food types, and increased the ease of producing wooden tools or processing animal carcasses.

Dr Key, a Palaeolithic Archaeologist and the lead author of the study, said: ‘Our research provides the best possible estimates for understanding when hominins first produced these stone tool types. This is important for multiple reasons, but for me at least, it is most exciting because it highlights that there are likely to be substantial portions of the artifact record waiting to be discovered.’

Dr Roberts, a conservation scientist and co-author of the study, said: ‘The optimal linear estimation (OLE) modeling technique was originally developed by myself and a colleague to date extinctions. It has proved to be a reliable method of inferring the timing of species extinction and is based on the timings of last sightings, and so to apply it to the first sightings of archaeological artifacts was another exciting breakthrough. It is our hope that the technique will be used more widely within archaeology.’

Although it is widely assumed that older stone tool sites do exist and are waiting to be discovered, this study provides the first quantitative data predicting just how old these yet-to-be-discovered sites may be.

The research paper ‘Statistical inference of earlier origins for the first flaked stone technologies’ is published by the Journal of Human Evolution. doi: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2021.102976

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Oldowan chopper tool. Didier Descouens, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, Wikimedia Commons

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF KENT news release

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FIELD MUSEUM—Every society has some degree of wealth inequality–over history, across continents, there always seem to be some people who have more than others. But the amount of inequality differs–in some civilizations, a few powerful people have nearly all the wealth, whereas in others, it’s more spread out. In a new study in PLOS ONE, archaeologists examined the remains of houses in ancient Maya cities and compared them with other Mesoamerican societies; they found that the societies with the most wealth inequality were also the ones that had governments that concentrated power with a smaller number of people.

“Differences in house size are a reflection of wealth inequality,” says Amy Thompson, a postdoctoral researcher at Chicago’s Field Museum and corresponding author of the PLOS ONE study. “By looking at how house size varies within different neighborhoods within ancient cities, we can learn about wealth inequality in Classic Maya cities.”

There are millions of Maya people alive today, but the period that archaeologists refer to as the Classic Maya civilization dates to 250-900 CE. Classic Maya society stretched across what’s now eastern Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, Guatemala, Belize, and western El Salvador and Honduras, and it was composed of a network of independent cities. “Rather than being like the United States today where we have one central government overseeing all the states, Classic Maya civilization was a series of cities that each had its own independent ruler,” says Thompson.

Across Mesoamerica, these political systems varied–some shared power more collectively, while others were more autocratic and concentrated power in a smaller group of individuals. Archaeologists use a variety of clues to infer how autocratic a state was. “We look at the way they represented their leadership. In burials, are certain individuals treated completely differently from everyone else, or are the differences more muted?” says Keith Prufer, an author of the study from the University of New Mexico. “Another key is to look at palaces. When you have very centralized palace buildings or funerary temples dedicated to a ruling lineage , the government tends to be more autocratic. In societies that were less autocratic, it’s harder to determine where rulers lived or even who they were.”

In this study, the researchers wanted to know how the governmental structure affected the distribution of wealth among the people. They note that in more autocratic societies wealth inequality is pronounced between different social groups, and also between people living in the same neighborhoods who were previously assumed by archaeologists to be economic equals. Much of this inequality is linked to access to market goods or trade networks. To learn about how wealth was dispersed across the community, they analyzed the remains of ancient houses.

Factors like house size don’t give an absolute picture of wealth–for instance, a one-bedroom apartment off Central Park might be worth more than a two-bedroom in Queens, or a whole house in rural Kansas. “Everything is looked at in a relative sense,” says Gary Feinman, the Field Museum’s MacArthur curator of anthropology and a co-author of the paper. “We’re comparing houses within a neighborhood to each other, and it still reveals a pattern. It would be like if you compared all the houses in Kansas, some might be bigger than the houses in Manhattan, but that relative pattern of wealth distribution in Kansas, as compared to Manhattan, would still tell you something about wealth differentials in both areas.”

To study Maya houses, the researchers looked at a number of variables beyond just size. “Using household archaeology, we can get at the interactions and relationships between the people,” says Thompson. “We document where these houses are on the landscape, how big they are, where they’re located in relationship to each other, and which resources–like water and good agricultural land–are nearby.” For further clues about the distribution of wealth, the researchers also excavated houses to learn about the types of ceramics and stone tools that the people used.

The researchers found that patterns of wealth inequality were fairly consistent in different neighborhoods within two Classic Maya cities in southern Belize–even if one neighborhood was richer overall than another. Nevertheless, at both sites distinctions in wealth were most magnified in neighborhoods with access to exchange routes. “People have known for decades, if not centuries, that the Classic Maya were unequal,” says Prufer. “But the real thing we can add is that this inequality trickled down, even to neighborhoods. That hasn’t really been well documented before.”

The link between wealth inequality and autocracy isn’t exclusive to the Classic Maya, the researchers note. “We’re really trying to get at some of these very real issues of how inequality forms, how it’s perpetuated, and how it manifests in early cities,” says Prufer. “One of the larger goals within archaeology is to try to show that modern societies and ancient societies are, in their fundamental elements, not that much different from each other. There’s a lot of similarities that reflect human behavior and human ingenuity and also manifestations of human inequality and cruelty on different levels. This comes through from these types of studies, and we feel really good to be able to contribute our work to these broader discussions of social inequality, which are so, so important today.”

And while inequality has plagued humanity for millennia, Feinman says that we’re not doomed as a species. “There’s a tight interconnection between how power is funded and how power is wielded and monopolized,” he says. “People can and do establish institutions that try to check power, but it takes work, and it takes interpersonal interdependence and the recognition that we cooperate with communities of people beyond just one’s self and one’s family.”

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Local community members sharing archaeological finds during excavations at a Classic Maya house mound at Uxbenká. KM Prufer

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Uxbenká Archaeological Project member and lead author AE Thompson photographing an excavation of a Classic Maya house mound. KM Prufer

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Article Source: FIELD MUSEUM news release

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UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE—An international group of researchers led by the University of Adelaide has conducted a comprehensive genetic analysis and found no evidence of interbreeding between modern humans and the ancient humans known from fossil records in Island Southeast Asia. They did find further DNA evidence of our mysterious ancient cousins, the Denisovans, which could mean there are major discoveries to come in the region.

In the study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, the researchers examined the genomes of more than 400 modern humans to investigate the interbreeding events between ancient humans and modern human populations who arrived at Island Southeast Asia 50,000-60,000 years ago.

In particular, they focused on detecting signatures that suggest interbreeding from deeply divergent species known from the fossil record of the area.

The region contains one of the richest fossil records (from at least 1.6 million years) documenting human evolution in the world. Currently there are three distinct ancient humans recognized from the fossil record in the area: Homo erectus, Homo floresiensis (known as Flores Island hobbits) and Homo luzonensis.

These species are known to have survived until approximately 50,000-60,000 years ago in the cases of Homo floresiensis and Homo luzonensis, and approximately 108,000 years for Homo erectus, which means they may have overlapped with the arrival of modern human populations.

The results of the study showed no evidence of interbreeding. Nevertheless, the team were able to confirm previous results showing high levels of Denisovan ancestry in the region.

Lead author and ARC Research Associate from the University of Adelaide Dr João Teixeira, said: “In contrast to our other cousins the Neanderthals, which have an extensive fossil record in Europe, the Denisovans are known almost solely from the DNA record. The only physical evidence of Denisovan existence has been a finger bone and some other fragments found in a cave in Siberia and, more recently, a piece of jaw found in the Tibetan Plateau.”

“We know from our own genetic records that the Denisovans mixed with modern humans who came out of Africa 50,000-60,000 years ago both in Asia, and as the modern humans moved through Island Southeast Asia on their way to Australia.

“The levels of Denisovan DNA in contemporary populations indicates that significant interbreeding happened in Island Southeast Asia.

“The mystery then remains, why haven’t we found their fossils alongside the other ancient humans in the region? Do we need to re-examine the existing fossil record to consider other possibilities?”

Co-author Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London added:

“While the known fossils of Homo erectus, Homo floresiensis and Homo luzonensis might seem to be in the right place and time to represent the mysterious ‘southern Denisovans’, their ancestors were likely to have been in Island Southeast Asia at least 700,000 years ago. Meaning their lineages are too ancient to represent the Denisovans who, from their DNA, were more closely related to the Neanderthals and modern humans.”

Co-author Prof Kris Helgen, Chief Scientist and Director of the Australian Museum Research Institute, said: “These analyses provide an important window into human evolution in a fascinating region, and demonstrate the need for more archaeological research in the region between mainland Asia and Australia.”

Helgen added: “This research also illuminates a pattern of ‘megafaunal’ survival which coincides with known areas of pre-modern human occupation in this part of the world. Large animals that survive today in the region include the Komodo Dragon, the Babirusa (a pig with remarkable upturned tusks), and the Tamaraw and Anoas (small wild buffalos).

“This hints that long-term exposure to hunting pressure by ancient humans might have facilitated the survival of the megafaunal species in subsequent contacts with modern humans. Areas without documented pre-modern human occurrence, like Australia and New Guinea, saw complete extinction of land animals larger than humans over the past 50,000 years.”

Dr Teixeira said: “The research corroborates previous studies that the Denisovans were in Island Southeast Asia, and that modern humans did not interbreed with more divergent human groups in the region. This opens two equally exciting possibilities: either a major discovery is on the way, or we need to re-evaluate the current fossil record of Island Southeast Asia.”

“Whichever way you choose to look at it, exciting times lie ahead in palaeoanthropology.”

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Replica of the Sangiran 17 Homo erectus cranium from Java. Photo supplied by the Trustees of the Natural History Museum.

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE news release

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FLINDERS UNIVERSITY—The excavation of shell middens off two sites in the Gulf of Mexico and Northern Europe dating back to when the seabed was dry land thousands of years ago, reveal how they can offer new ground-breaking insights into the hidden history of submerged landscapes.

An international team of archaeologists from Moesgaard Museum (Denmark), the University of Georgia (USA), the University of York (UK) Flinders University and James Cook University partnered to excavate two sites containing shell middens in the Gulf of Mexico and Eastern Jutland in Denmark in 2018, showing that middens can be clearly differentiated from natural shells on the seabed to reveal a coastline’s inhabitation past.

The research, published in two companion papers in Quaternary Science Reviews, shows they are culturally significant underwater sites which challenge the current understanding of coastal life in the Gulf of Mexico and Northern Europe, by pushing back the inhabitation timeframe by hundreds of years.

The shell middens also represent deep connections with the underwater environments and seascapes to many First Nations people, and the new evidence will support policy changes towards the adequate management and cultural heritage of their ancestral land.

“Shell middens are a classic, world-wide marker for the intensive use of marine resources, but archaeologist have always assumed that these sites would have been destroyed by sea-level rise”, says Professor Geoff Bailey of the University of York and Visiting Professor at Flinders University.

In Denmark, the discovery of these shell middens, which are rare in the south, hints that this type of site was more common than previously thought, shifting understandings of how intensive coastal use was 5000-7300 years ago.

“Importantly, both studies show that as more of these sites are found, our histories of past coastal use may have to be rewritten. The underwater archaeological aspect to shell midden studies is extremely important moving forward,” says Dr Peter Moe Astrup, Lead Author and Curator of the Maritime Archaeology division at the Moesgaard Museum in Denmark.

“The team of archaeologists used cutting-edge techniques, including microscopy, geological and geophysical techniques, 3D reconstructions, and biological and ecological studies to tease out evidence that offers new insights into midden sites, particularly on how to locate other sites in watery depths around the globe.”

“For a large portion of humanity’s existence, sea levels have been significantly lower, up to 130 meters than what they are today, exposing millions of square kilometers of land. And the archaeological record clearly demonstrates that people in the past lived on these coastal plains before they were drowned by past sea-level rise” says Associate Professor Jonathan Benjamin who is the Director of the Deep History of Sea Country Project and Maritime Archaeology Program Coordinator at Flinders University’s College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.

“Within archaeological shell middens, we can find old food remains, discarded tools and ornaments, old living surfaces, and in some cultures, human burials,” says Dr Katherine Woo at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, James Cook University in Australia.

“These in turn provide us with fundamental information about past food choices, tool technology, and trade practices. More importantly, these different types of information allow us to understand how people adapted their cultures over time, and how they interacted with their surrounding environments including during times of sea level rise and climate change.”

The excavation of these sites emphasizes the need for stronger recognition and rights to protect and manage the cultural heritage of underwater ancestral lands around the globe, which hold significant insights into human history and deep connections to marine environments.

“The discovery of these underwater sites, and the promise of more to be found, means that industry, developers, archaeologists, and government bodies must reassess how we classify and handle Indigenous heritage on the continental shelf,” says Dr Jessica Cook Hale from the University of Georgia. “This is especially critical because offshore development is accelerating; here in North America the big push for offshore windfarms is underway, but Indigenous voices must remain foremost. These new findings support ongoing work to ensure that Indigenous and First Nations have a critical seat at the table, so to speak, in managing the offshore cultural heritage of their ancestral lands by documenting these relationships into the deep past.”

“They are real, they are important, and we must all engage with them in a rigorous and serious fashion.”

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Excavation of shell middens off submerged landscape in Jutland in Denmark in 2018, showing that middens can reveal a coastline’s hidden past. Deep History Of Sea Country project.

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Article Source: FLINDERS UNIVERSITY news release

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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA – RIVERSIDE—An important Maya man buried nearly 1,300 years ago led a privileged yet difficult life. The man, a diplomat named Ajpach’ Waal, suffered malnutrition or illness as a child, but as an adult he helped negotiate an alliance between two powerful dynasties that ultimately failed. The ensuing political instability left him in reduced economic circumstances, and he probably died in relative obscurity.

During excavations at El Palmar, a small plaza compound in Mexico near the borders of Belize and Guatemala, archaeologists led by Kenichiro Tsukamoto, an assistant professor of anthropology at UC Riverside, discovered a hieroglyph-adorned stairway leading up to a ceremonial platform. When deciphered, the hieroglyphs revealed that in June, 726 CE, Ajpach’ Waal traveled and met the king of Copán, 350 miles away in Honduras, to forge an alliance with the king of Calakmul, near El Palmar.

The findings, published in the journal Latin American Antiquity, shed light on the role communities peripheral to major centers played in cementing connections between royal families during the Late Classic period (600-800 CE), and the ways they might suffer when something shattered those alliances.

The inscriptions identified Ajpach’ Waal as a “lakam,” or standard-bearer, an ambassador that carried a banner as they walked on diplomatic missions between cities. He inherited this lofty position through his father’s lineage, and his mother also came from an elite family. Ajpach’ Waal must have considered this his crowning achievement because the hieroglyphs indicate he was not given the platform by El Palmar’s ruler, but had it built for himself a few months after the mission in September, 726 CE. The platform served as a sort of theatrical stage where spectacular rituals were performed for an audience, with only influential people able to build their own.

Beneath the floor of a temple next to the platform, Tsukamoto discovered the undisturbed burial of a male skeleton in a small chamber. Though interred in a location that suggested ownership of the platform and temple, unlike other elite Maya burials, only two colorfully decorated clay pots — no jewelry or other grave goods — had accompanied this individual into the underworld.

In the new paper, Tsukamoto and Jessica I. Cerezo-Roman, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Oklahoma, study the bones of the person buried in this puzzling tomb to tell his story.

“His life is not like we expected based on the hieroglyphics,” Tsukamoto said. “Many people say that the elite enjoyed their lives, but the story is usually more complex.”

The man was between 35 and 50 years old when he died. Several dating methods, including radiocarbon, stratigraphy, and ceramic typology, suggest the burial occurred around 726, when the stairway was constructed. The high status of the individual combined with proximity to the stairway lead the authors to believe that this was probably Ajpach’ Waal himself, or possibly his father.

All his upper front teeth, from right canine to left, had been drilled to hold decorative implants of pyrite and jade, which was valuable and highly regulated. Maya living in geographic areas associated with ruling elites underwent this painful procedure during puberty as a rite of passage to mark their inclusion within a high office or social group. Ajpach’ Waal might have received such implants when he inherited his father’s title.

The skull had been mildly flattened in back from prolonged contact with something flat during infancy, which the Maya believed made a person more attractive. Because the front of the cranium was not preserved, the archaeologists could not tell if the forehead had been similarly flattened, a beautification practice limited to royalty.

Other aspects of the bones belied the privilege displayed by the dental and cranial modifications. Some of his arm bones had healed periostitis, caused by bacterial infections, trauma, scurvy, or rickets, which would have made his arm ache until the condition improved. Both sides of the skull had slightly porous, spongy areas known as porotic hyperostosis, caused by childhood nutritional deficiencies or illnesses. The condition is relatively common in burials throughout the Maya world, suggesting Ajpach’ Waal’s high status couldn’t shield him from malnutrition and disease.

A healed fracture on his right tibia, or shinbone, resembles fractures seen in modern athletes who play contact sports such as football, rugby, or soccer. This could indicate he played some of the ballgames depicted on the stairway, strengthening the case that this was Ajpach’ Waal.

Long before he died, the individual had lost many teeth on the left side of his lower jaw due to gum disease and might have had a painful abscess on his lower right premolar, all of which would have restricted his diet to soft foods. One inlaid tooth had thickened near the root in response to the injury of drilling and could have ached.

He also developed arthritis in his hands, right elbow, left knee, left ankle, and feet as he aged, which would have caused stiffness and pain, especially in the morning. Tsukamoto and Cerezo-Roman suggest that his arthritis might have been caused by carrying a banner on a pole for long distances over rugged terrain and walking and up and down stairways. He would have also been required to kneel on the platforms of Maya rulers.

As if these maladies weren’t enough, fate conspired to change Ajpach’ Waal’s fortunes.

“The ruler of a subordinate dynasty decapitated Copán’s king 10 years after his alliance with Calakmul, which was also defeated by a rival dynasty around the same time,” Tsukamoto said. “We see the political and economic instability that followed both these events in the sparse burial and in one of the inlaid teeth.”

The archaeologists determined that the inlay in Ajpach’ Waal’s right canine tooth had fallen out and was not replaced before his death because dental plaque had hardened into calculus in the cavity. The hole, easily visible when the man smiled or spoke, would have been an embarrassing, public admission of hardship or El Palmar’s reduced significance. This also would have made him a less useful emissary if he still occupied the role.

Though people continued living at El Palmar for some time after Ajpach’ Waal’s death, it was eventually abandoned and reclaimed by the jungle.

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Teeth with dental inlays from a nonroyal elite Maya tomb. Kenichiro Tsukamoto

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA – RIVERSIDE news release

The paper, “The Life Course of a Standard-Bearer: A Nonroyal Elite Burial at the Maya Archaeological Site of El Palmar, Mexico,” is available here.

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