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TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY—”King Solomon made for himself the carriage; he made it of wood from Lebanon. Its posts he made of silver, its base of gold. Its seat was upholstered with purple, its interior inlaid with love.” (Song of Songs 3:9-10)

For the first time, rare evidence has been found of fabric dyed with royal purple dating from the time of King David and King Solomon.

While examining the colored textiles from Timna Valley – an ancient copper production district in southern Israel – in a study that has lasted several years, the researchers were surprised to find remnants of woven fabric, a tassel and fibers of wool dyed with royal purple. Direct radiocarbon dating confirms that the finds date from approximately 1000 BCE, corresponding to the biblical monarchies of David and Solomon in Jerusalem. The dye, which is produced from species of mollusk found in the Mediterranean, over 300 km from Timna, is often mentioned in the Bible and appears in various Jewish and Christian contexts. This is the first time that purple-dyed Iron Age textiles have been found in Israel, or indeed throughout the Southern Levant. The research was carried out by Dr. Naama Sukenik from the Israel Antiquities Authority and Prof. Erez Ben-Yosef, from the Jacob M. Alkow Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures at Tel Aviv University, in collaboration with Prof. Zohar Amar, Dr. David Iluz and Dr. Alexander Varvak from Bar-Ilan University and Dr. Orit Shamir from the Israel Antiquities Authority. The unexpected finds are being published today in the prestigious PLOS ONE journal.

“This is a very exciting and important discovery,” explains Dr. Naama Sukenik, curator of organic finds at the Israel Antiquities Authority. “This is the first piece of textile ever found from the time of David and Solomon that is dyed with the prestigious purple dye. In antiquity, purple attire was associated with the nobility, with priests, and of course with royalty. The gorgeous shade of the purple, the fact that it does not fade, and the difficulty in producing the dye, which is found in minute quantities in the body of mollusks, all made it the most highly valued of the dyes, which often cost more than gold. Until the current discovery, we had only encountered mollusk-shell waste and potsherds with patches of dye, which provided evidence of the purple industry in the Iron Age. Now, for the first time, we have direct evidence of the dyed fabrics themselves, preserved for some 3000 years”.

Prof. Erez Ben-Yosef from Tel Aviv University’s Archaeology Department says, “Our archaeological expedition has been excavating continuously at Timna since 2013. As a result of the region’s extremely dry climate, we are also able to recover organic materials such as textile, cords and leather from the Iron Age, from the time of David and Solomon, providing us with a unique glimpse into life in biblical times. If we excavated for another hundred years in Jerusalem, we would not discover textiles from 3000 years ago. The state of preservation at Timna is exceptional and it is paralleled only by that at much later sites such as Masada and the Judean Desert Caves. In recent years, we have been excavating a new site inside Timna known as ‘Slaves’ Hill’. The name may be misleading, since far from being slaves, the laborers were highly skilled metalworkers. Timna was a production center for copper, the Iron Age equivalent of modern-day oil. Copper smelting required advanced metallurgical understanding that was a guarded secret, and those who held this knowledge were the ‘Hi-Tech’ experts of the time. Slaves’ Hill is the largest copper-smelting site in the valley and it is filled with piles of industrial waste such as slag from the smelting furnaces. One of these heaps yielded three scraps of colored cloth. The color immediately attracted our attention, but we found it hard to believe that we had found true purple from such an ancient period”.

According to the researchers, true purple [argaman] was produced from three species of mollusk indigenous to the Mediterranean Sea: The Banded Dye-Murex (Hexaplex trunculus), the Spiny Dye-Murex (Bolinus brandaris) and the Red-Mouthed Rock-Shell (Stramonita haemastoma). The dye was produced from a gland located within the body of the mollusk by means of a complex chemical process that lasted several days. Today, most scholars agree that the two precious dyes, purple [argaman] and light blue, or azure [tekhelet] were produced from the purple dye mollusk under different conditions of exposure to light. When exposed to light, azure is obtained whereas without light exposure, a purple hue is obtained. These colors are often mentioned together in the ancient sources, and both have symbolic and religious significance to this day. The Temple priests, David and Solomon, and Jesus of Nazareth are all described as having worn clothing colored with purple.

The analytical tests conducted at Bar Ilan University’s laboratories, together with dyes that were reconstructed by Prof. Zohar Amar and Dr. Naama Sukenik, can identify the species used to dye the Timna textiles and the desired hues. In order to reconstruct the mollusk dyeing process, Prof. Amar traveled to Italy where he cracked thousands of mollusks (which the Italians eat) and produced raw material from their dye glands that was used in hundreds of attempts to reconstruct ancient dyeing. “The practical work took us back thousands of years,” says Prof. Amar, “and it has allowed us to better understand obscure historical sources associated with the precious colors of azure and purple.”

The dye was identified with an advanced analytical instrument (HPLC) that indicated the presence of unique dye molecules, originating only in certain species of mollusk. According to Dr. Naama Sukenik, “Most of the colored textiles found at Timna, and in archaeological research in general, were dyed using various plant-based dyes that were readily available and easier to dye with. The use of animal-based dyes is regarded as much more prestigious, and served as an important indicator for the wearer’s high economic and social status. The remnants of the purple-dyed cloth that we found are not only the most ancient in Israel, but in the Southern Levant in general. We also believe that we have succeeded in identifying the double-dyeing method in one of the fragments, in which two species of mollusk were used in a sophisticated way, to enrich the dye. This technology is described by the Roman historian Pliny the Elder, from the first century CE, and the dye it produced was considered the most prestigious.”

Prof. Ben-Yosef identifies the copper-production center at Timna as part of the biblical Kingdom of Edom, which bordered the kingdom of Israel to the south. According to him, the dramatic finds should revolutionize our concepts of nomadic societies in the Iron Age. “The new finds reinforce our assumption that there was an elite at Timna, attesting to a stratified society. In addition, since the mollusks are indigenous to the Mediterranean, this society obviously maintained trade relations with other peoples who lived on the coastal plain. However, we do not have evidence of any permanent settlements in the Edomite territory. The Edomite Kingdom was a kingdom of nomads in the early Iron Age. When we think of nomads, it is difficult for us to free ourselves from comparisons with contemporary Bedouins, and we therefore find it hard to imagine kings without magnificent stone palaces and walled cities. Yet in certain circumstances, nomads can also create a complex socio-political structure, one that the biblical writers could identify as a kingdom. Of course, this whole debate has repercussions for our understanding of Jerusalem in the same period. We know that the Tribes of Israel were originally nomadic and that the process of settlement was gradual and prolonged. Archaeologists are looking for King David’s palace. However, David may not have expressed his wealth in splendid buildings, but with objects more suited to a nomadic heritage such as textiles and artifacts.” According to Ben-Yosef, “It is wrong to assume that if no grand buildings and fortresses have been found, then biblical descriptions of the United Monarchy in Jerusalem must be literary fiction. Our new research at Timna has showed us that even without such buildings, there were kings in our region who ruled over complex societies, formed alliances and trade relations, and waged war on each other. The wealth of a nomadic society was not measured in palaces and monuments made of stone, but in things that were no less valued in the ancient world – such as the copper produced at Timna and the purple dye that was traded with its copper smelters.”

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Wool fibers dyed with Royal Purple,~1000 BCE, Timna Valley, Israel. Dafna Gazit, courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority

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Wool textile fragment decorated by threads dyed with Royal Purple, ~1000 BCE, Timna Valley, Israel. Dafna Gazit, courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority

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Excavating Slaves’ Hill. Sagi Bornstein, courtesy of the Central Timna Valley Project.

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Article Source: TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY news release

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SOUTHERN METHODIST UNIVERSITY, DALLAS—Wildfires are the enemy when they threaten homes in California and elsewhere. But a new study led by SMU suggests that people living in fire-prone places can learn to manage fire as an ally to prevent dangerous blazes, just like people who lived nearly 1,000 years ago.

“We shouldn’t be asking how to avoid fire and smoke,” said SMU anthropologist and lead author Christopher Roos. “We should ask ourselves what kind of fire and smoke do we want to coexist with.”

An interdisciplinary team of scientists published a study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences documenting centuries of fire management by Native American farmers. The team included scientists from SMU, the University of Arizona, Harvard University, Simon Fraser University, the US Geological Survey, Baylor University, the University of Illinois, and the University of South Florida.

Jemez people learned how to live with and manage fire long ago

Ancestors of the Native American community in the Jemez Mountains of northern New Mexico lived continuously in fire-prone forests for more than five centuries. Similar to today’s communities in the western U.S. forests, Pueblos of the Jemez people had relatively high population densities, and the forested landscape they managed was an area larger than the city of Chicago.

Starting in the 1100s, the Jemez people limited fire spread and improved forest resilience to climate variability by creating purposeful burning of small patches of the forest around their community, researchers found.

“The area around each village would have been a fire-free zone,” Roos said. “There were no living trees within two football fields of each village, and the hundreds or thousands of trampling feet mean that fine fuels, such as grasses, herbs, and shrubs, to carry surface fires would have been rare too. The agricultural areas would have seen targeted applications of fire to clean fields after harvest, to recycle plant nutrients as fertilizer, and to clear new fields.”

Roos calls those controlled burns “the right kind of fire and smoke.” The Jemez practice of burning wood for heat, light, and cooking in their homes also removed much of the fuel that could burn in wildfires, he said.

Roos said the ancient Jemez model could work today. Many communities in the western United States, including those of Native Americans, still rely on wood-burning to generate heat during the winter, he said. Regularly setting small, low-intensity fires in a patchwork around where people live to clear out flammable material would also follow the Jemez model, he said.

“Some sort of public-private tribal partnership might do a lot of good, empowering tribal communities to oversee the removal of the small trees that have overstocked the forests and made them vulnerable to dangerous fires, while also providing wood fuel for people who need it,” Roos said.

Since 2018, wildfires have destroyed more than 50,000 structures in California alone. Global warming is only expected to make the amount and severity of wildfires worse.

Almost every major study of fire activity over the last 10,000 years indicates that climate drives fire activity, particular larger fires. Yet, many examples from traditional societies suggest the role of climate can be blunted or buffered by a patchwork of small, purposeful burns before the peak natural fire season. In the Jemez Mountains, the climate influence was weakened and large fires were rare when Jemez farmers used fire preemptively in many small patches, effectively clearing out the materials that fuel today’s megafires.

In contrast, today’s forests are filled with these young trees, increasing the chances they can generate huge flames and waves of flaming embers that can catch homes on fire.

The scientists used a variety of methods to document how Jemez people handled smoke and fire centuries ago, including interviewing tribal elders at Jemez Pueblo. The team also compared tree-ring fire records with paleoclimate records, which indicated that fire activity was disconnected from climate during the time when Jemez’s population was at a peak. In addition, charcoal and pollen records show that Jemez people began using fire to establish an agricultural landscape and to promote habitats for large animals, such as mule deer and elk.

Roos noted that tolerance of fire and smoke hazards probably went hand-in-hand with recognition of the benefits of fire and smoke.

“Paul Tosa, former governor of Jemez Pueblo, said ‘Fire brings richness to the land,'” Roos noted. “We could do very well to learn from the wisdom of Jemez peoples and change our relationship to fire and smoke at the wildland-urban interface.”

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Christopher Roos, professor of anthropology at SMU (Southern Methodist University). Christopher Roos

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Article Source: SOUTHERN METHODIST UNIVERSITY news release

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The American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE) announces the relaunch of the Theban Mapping Project (TMP) website, providing a new resource for educators, students, and researchers by showcasing and detailing what is currently known about the tombs of New Kingdom Egypt’s ancient pharaohs and their families. 

“With the launch of the redesigned Theban Mapping Project website, ARCE is pleased to make available once again to the world this important data set,” said Dr. David A. Anderson, Associate Professor of Archaeology, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. “With something for both school children and academics alike, the TMP is a wealth of information about the burial places of some of Egypt’s most famous ancient rulers.” 

The TMP website is not an entirely new creation. It was first developed in response to the massive outpouring of worldwide public interest in 1989 with the rediscovery and excavation by the TMP team of the entrance to KV5, the family mausoleum for the sons of Rameses II. The excavation revealed that KV5 was the largest known tomb in the Valley of the Kings, and the website, then known as KV5.com, was established to provide worldwide access to information about TMP’s work. The website, however, crashed in 2010 and could not be restored—until now.   

“The American University in Cairo, long home of the Theban Mapping Project, is delighted that ARCE has resurrected and improved the TMP website, and is providing a permanent home for it,” says Dr. Salima Ikram, Distinguished University Professor at the American University in Cairo. “This is a wonderful opportunity for the TMP, ARCE, and the American University in Cairo to collaborate in the promotion of the study of ancient Egypt worldwide, with the new, accessible website providing fresh generations of students, scholars, and lovers of ancient Egypt with a unique way in which to learn about ancient Egypt.” 

The Theban Mapping Project was established in 1978 by Egyptologist Dr. Kent R. Weeks at the University of California, Berkeley, with the original mandate to create an archaeological map of the Valley of the Kings.  In 1985, it was moved to the American University in Cairo. 

The TMP team initiated work in Luxor’s West Bank in 1979, mapping the terrain and creating resulting architectural plans of the ancient tombs it contained, beginning with the Valley of the Kings. In March and June 1978, the project commenced its first season with a team of eight consisting of Dr. Weeks, a chief surveyor, a cartographer, three assistant surveyors and architects, an inspector of antiquities from the Egyptian Antiquities Organization (the predecessor of the Supreme Council of Antiquities) and an Egyptologist. During the first season, the survey grid was laid out, upon which all future work has been built. This grid was constructed on the existing grid created at the Temple of Karnak. Eight tombs in the Valley of the Kings were surveyed during this season (KV1, KV2, KV3, KV4, KV5, KV6, KV46 and KV55). In 1979, the second season of work was carried out on the Berkeley Map of the Theban Necropolis which focused on obtaining complete aerial photographic coverage of the entire necropolis. Another ten tombs in the Valley of the Kings were surveyed, planned and the survey grid network was extended north and south to the limits of the Theban necropolis. It was in 1989 when the TMP team rediscovered the entrance to KV5 and began excavating. 

The work in the Valley of the Kings has been ongoing, with seasonal and daily activity largely unseen by the world. But the new website will change that.

“On the new TMP website, individuals of all ages, from elementary school to retirement, can explore the wonder of the Valley of the Kings from anywhere in the world,” promises Anderson. “Through rich visual content, accessible articles, and future updates, the new website will be a resource for everything Valley of the Kings for years to come.” 

The Theban Mapping Project website can be accessed here.

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Valley of the Kings with pyramid-shaped Qurn above. Photographed by Francis Dzikowski.

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Article Source: American Research Center in Egypt press release

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UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE—Social inequality was “recorded on the bones” of Cambridge’s medieval residents, according to a new study of hundreds of human remains excavated from three very different burial sites within the historic city centre.

University of Cambridge researchers examined the remains of 314 individuals dating from the 10th to the 14th century and collected evidence of “skeletal trauma” – a barometer for levels of hardship endured in life.

Bones were recovered from across the social spectrum: a parish graveyard for ordinary working people, a charitable “hospital” where the infirm and destitute were interred, and an Augustinian friary that buried wealthy donors alongside clergy.

Researchers carefully catalogued the nature of every break and fracture to build a picture of the physical distress visited upon the city’s inhabitants by accident, occupational injury or violence during their daily lives.

Using x-ray analysis, the team found that 44% of working people had bone fractures, compared to 32% of those in the friary and 27% of those buried by the hospital. Fractures were more common in male remains (40%) than female (26%) across all burials.

The team also uncovered noteworthy cases, such as a friar who resembles a modern hit-and-run victim, and bones that hint at lives blighted by violence. The findings are published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

“By comparing the skeletal trauma of remains buried in various locations within a town like Cambridge, we can gauge the hazards of daily life experienced by different spheres of medieval society,” said Dr Jenna Dittmar, study lead author from the After the Plague project at the University’s Department of Archaeology.

“We can see that ordinary working folk had a higher risk of injury compared to the friars and their benefactors or the more sheltered hospital inmates,” she said.

“These were people who spent their days working long hours doing heavy manual labour. In town, people worked in trades and crafts such as stonemasonry and blacksmithing, or as general laborers. Outside town, many spent dawn to dusk doing bone-crushing work in the fields or tending livestock.”

The University was embryonic at this time – the first stirrings of academia occurring around 1209 – and Cambridge was primarily a provincial town of artisans, merchants and farmhands, with a population of 2500-4000 by the mid-13th century.

While the working poor may have borne the brunt of physical labour compared to better-off people and those in religious institutions, medieval life was tough in general. In fact, the most extreme injury was found on a friar, identified as such by his burial place and belt buckle.

“The friar had complete fractures halfway up both his femurs,” said Dittmar. The femur [thigh bone] is the largest bone in the body. “Whatever caused both bones to break in this way must have been traumatic, and was possibly the cause of death.”

Dittmar points out that today’s clinicians would be familiar with such injuries from those hit by automobiles – it’s the right height. “Our best guess is a cart accident. Perhaps a horse got spooked and he was struck by the wagon.”

Injury was also inflicted by others. Another friar had lived with defensive fractures on his arm and signs of blunt force trauma to his skull. Such violence-related skeletal injuries were found in about 4% of the population, including women and people from all social groups.

One older woman buried in the parish grounds appeared to bear the marks of lifelong domestic abuse. “She had a lot of fractures, all of them healed well before her death. Several of her ribs had been broken as well as multiple vertebrae, her jaw and her foot,” said Dittmar.

“It would be very uncommon for all these injuries to occur as the result of a fall, for example. Today, the vast majority of broken jaws seen in women are caused by intimate partner violence.”

Of the three sites, the Hospital of St John the Evangelist contained the fewest fractures. Established at the end of the 12th century, it housed select needy Cambridge residents, providing food and spiritual care. Many had skeletal evidence of chronic illnesses such as tuberculosis, and would have been unable to work.

While most remains were “inmates”, the site also included “corrodians”: retired locals who paid for the privilege of living at the hospital, much like a modern old-age care home.

The Hospital was dissolved to create St John’s College in 1511, and excavated by the Cambridge Archaeological Unit (CAU), part of the University, in 2010 during a renovation of the College’s Divinity School building.

CAU excavated the Augustinian Friary in 2016 as part of building works on the University’s New Museums Site. According to records, the friary acquired rights to bury members of the Augustinian order in 1290, and non-members in 1302 – allowing rich benefactors to take a plot in the friary grounds.

The friary functioned until 1538, when King Henry VIII stripped the nation’s monasteries of their income and assets to fortify the Crown’s coffers.

The parish of All Saints by the Castle, north of the River Cam, was likely founded in the 10th century and in use until 1365, when it merged with a neighboring parish after local populations fell in the wake of the Black Death bubonic plague pandemic.

While the church itself has never been found, the graveyard – next to what is still called Castle Hill – was first excavated in the 1970s. Remains were housed within the University’s Duckworth Collection, allowing researchers to revisit these finds for the latest study.

“Those buried in All Saints were among the poorest in town, and clearly more exposed to incidental injury,” said Dittmar. “At the time, the graveyard was in the hinterland where urban met rural. Men may have worked in the fields with heavy ploughs pulled by horses or oxen, or lugged stone blocks and wooden beams in the town.

“Many of the women in All Saints probably undertook hard physical labours such as tending livestock and helping with harvest alongside their domestic duties.

“We can see this inequality recorded on the bones of medieval Cambridge residents. However, severe trauma was prevalent across the social spectrum. Life was toughest at the bottom – but life was tough all over.”

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The remains of an individual buried in the Augustinian friary, taken during the 2016 excavation on the University of Cambridge’s New Museums site. Nick Saffell

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The remains of numerous individuals unearthed on the former site of the Hospital of St. John the Evangelist, taken during the 2010 excavation on the site of the Divinity School building, St John’s College, University of Cambridge. Cambridge Archaeological Unit

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X-rays of butterfly fractures to both femora of an adult male buried in the Augustinian friary. Dr Jenna Dittmar

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE news release

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DURHAM UNIVERSITY—The first people to settle in the Americas likely brought their own canine companions with them, according to new research which sheds more light on the origin of dogs.

An international team of researchers led by archaeologist Dr Angela Perri, of Durham University, UK, looked at the archaeological and genetic records of ancient people and dogs.

They found that the first people to cross into the Americas before 15,000 years ago, who were of northeast Asian descent, were accompanied by their dogs.

The researchers say this discovery suggests that dog domestication likely took place in Siberia before 23,000 years ago. People and their dogs then eventually travelled both west into the rest of Eurasia, and east into the Americas.

The findings are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).

The Americas were one of the last regions in the world to be settled by people. By this same time, dogs had been domesticated from their wolf ancestors and were likely playing a variety of roles within human societies.

Research lead author Dr Angela Perri, in the Department of Archaeology at Durham University, said: “When and where have long been questions in dog domestication research, but here we also explored the how and why, which have often been overlooked.

“Dog domestication occurring in Siberia answers many of the questions we’ve always had about the origins of the human-dog relationship.

“By putting together the puzzle pieces of archaeology, genetics and time we see a much clearer picture where dogs are being domesticated in Siberia, then disperse from there into the Americas and around the world.”

Geneticist and co-author Laurent Frantz (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich) said: “The only thing we knew for sure is that dog domestication did not take place in the Americas.

“From the genetic signatures of ancient dogs, we now know that they must have been present somewhere in Siberia before people migrated to the Americas.”

Co-author Professor Greger Larson, Oxford University, said: “Researchers have previously suggested that dogs were domesticated across Eurasia from Europe to China, and many places in between.

“The combined evidence from ancient humans and dogs is helping to refine our understanding of the deep history of dogs, and now points toward Siberia and Northeast Asia as a likely region where dog domestication was initiated.”

During the Last Glacial Maximum (from ~23,000-19,000 years ago) Beringia (the land and maritime area between Canada and Russia), and most of Siberia, was extremely cold, dry, and largely unglaciated.

The harsh climatic conditions leading up to, and during this period may have served to bring human and wolf populations into close proximity given their attraction to the same prey.

This increasing interaction, through mutual scavenging of kills from wolves drawn to human campsites, may have began a relationship between the species that eventually led to dog domestication, and a vital role in the populating of the Americas.

As co-author and archaeologist David Meltzer of Southern Methodist University (Dallas, TX) notes, “We have long known that the first Americans must have possessed well-honed hunting skills, the geological know-how to find stone and other necessary materials and been ready for new challenges.

“The dogs that accompanied them as they entered this completely new world may have been as much a part of their cultural repertoire as the stone tools they carried.”

Since their domestication from wolves, dogs have played a wide variety of roles in human societies, many of which are tied to the history of cultures worldwide.

Future archaeological and genetic research will reveal how the emerging mutual relationship between people and dogs led to their successful dispersal across the globe.

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Early settlers in the Americas were accompanied by their dogs. Ettore Mazza

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Article Source: DURHAM UNIVERSITY news release

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St. John’s College, University of Cambridge—Huge strides have been made towards deciphering a ‘mysterious’ Greek script that could transform our knowledge of a Bronze Age civilization.

Known as Linear A, the ancient script from Crete appears on some 1,400 inscriptions, most of which are on clay tablets dating back to c1800-1450 BC, during the island’s flourishing Minoan era. A later prehistoric Greek script called Linear B was cracked in the 1950s – but Linear A has continued to elude scholars.

The Minoans were a Bronze Age civilization based on Crete and other islands in the Aegean Sea. Named after the legendary King Minos, this lost civilization was one of Europe’s first urban societies. Ruled from vast palaces, its people were accomplished artists and maritime traders, but their civilization fell into decline after a devastating volcanic eruption on the nearby island of Thera.

Now Dr Ester Salgarella, Junior Research Fellow in Classics at St John’s College, Cambridge, has shed fresh light on the Minoan Linear A script and proved a close genetic link to Linear B, which appeared 50-150 years later in mainland Greece and Crete, c1400-1200 BC. Her research, which has been hailed as ‘an extraordinary piece of detective work,’ could provide the key for linguists to unlock the secrets of the Minoan language – and learn more about its society and culture.

Taking an interdisciplinary approach using evidence from linguistics, inscriptions, archaeology and palaeography (the study of the handwriting of ancient scripts), Dr Salgarella examined the two scripts in socio-historical context. To compare them more easily, she has created an online resource of individual signs and inscriptions called SigLA – The Signs of Linear A: a paleographic database. 

She said: “At the moment there is a lot of confusion about Linear A. We don’t really know how many signs are to be taken as core signs, there’s even been a partial misclassification of signs in the past. This database tries to clear up the situation and give scholars a basis for advancement. 

“We don’t have a Rosetta Stone to crack the code of Linear A, and more linguistic analysis is required, but this structural analysis is a foundation stone.”

The discovery of the Rosetta Stone, which was inscribed with writing in ancient Egyptian and Greek, helped linguists to understand Egyptian hieroglyphics in the 19th century.

Parallels between signs in Linear A and B have been identified before, but Dr Salgarella has shown that a great many graphic variants of signs in the Minoan script were carried onto Linear B. “This combined palaeographical and structural examination – using sign typology and associations – has led me to revise the current script classification and to argue that these two scripts are actually two sides of the same coin,” said Dr Salgarella. “Most scholars have assumed that because the two languages are different the scripts must be distinct, but the relationship is more subtle than this.”

Following the fall of the Minoan civilization, there is a gap of about 50 years with no archaeological evidence of either script on Crete. Dr Salgarella, who has revealed her findings in her newly published book, Aegean Linear Script(s): Rethinking the Relationship between Linear A and Linear B, said: “There is sufficient evidence that Linear B is a derivative from Linear A, so the question is, how did this transmission process happen? I wanted to find out how we can account for the similarities and, more importantly, the differences, and fill in these gaps.”

The Minoans used Linear A primarily, but not exclusively, for administrative purposes. Small clay ‘labels’ found on Crete bear short Minoan inscriptions on one side and imprints of fibres or string on the other. These suggest the labels were used to secure information written on folded or rolled perishable material, such as papyrus. 

Natural disasters caused fires, which destroyed any writing materials and baked the inscriptions into the clay labels and tablets. It’s possible, said Dr Salgarella, that in the two generations between the periods when Linear A ended and Linear B appeared, writing may not have been used widely, but her findings show parts of the earlier script did survive and was adapted by the Greeks into Linear B.

The open access SigLA database of inscriptions has been developed in collaboration with computer scientist Dr Simon Castellan, from the University of Rennes, France. It features a list of 300 standard signs and 400 inscriptions copied by hand. It is still under construction but more than 3,000 individual signs found within the inscriptions are currently searchable.

To form words, the scripts use syllabaries, which means that one written sign or symbol is not a single sound but a syllable. “Other signs are more like Chinese ideograms, or picture words,” said Dr Salgarella. Structural analysis involved looking at how the signs function, the direction they read, and whether they represent syllables, words or punctuation. 

Composite signs fall into ‘configurational categories’. “I could see that there is some kind of rationale on how to put them together,” said Dr Salgarella. By examining the patterns, she was able to come to a better understanding of how to read the composite signs, and make sense of some of the combinations.

Dr Salgarella hopes her findings will be a stepping stone to further research by linguists, paleographers and archaeologists working together. She said: “Collecting the Linear A inscriptions in a unified database is of paramount importance to be able to answer sophisticated paleographical and linguistic questions about the Linear A script as well as the Minoan language it encodes, which will help us reconstruct the socio-historical context of the Minoan civilization.”

Professor Tim Whitmarsh, A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture and Fellow of St John’s, said: “Cracking Linear B was a huge post-war triumph for Classics, but Linear A has remained elusive. Dr Salgarella has demonstrated that Linear B is closely related to its mysterious and previously illegible predecessor. She has brought us one step closer to understanding it. It’s an extraordinary piece of detective work.”

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A Minoan clay tablet inscribed with Linear A, on display in Crete’s Archaeological Museum of Heraklion. Dr Ester Salgarella

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Linear B clay tablet. Dr Ester Salgarella

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One of the hand-drawn tablets from the SigLA database featuring different Linear A signs. Dr Ester Salgarella.

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Dr Ester Salgarella began studying Linear A and B during her PhD. Her findings are revealed in her book, Aegean Linear Script(s) (Cambridge University Press) Dr Ester Salgarella.

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Article Source: St. John’s College, University of Cambridge news release

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MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY—Chimpanzees, one of the closest relatives of humans, cooperate on a group level – in combative disputes, they even cooperate with group members to whom they are not related. Those involved in fights with neighboring groups put themselves at risk of serious injury or even death.

Within the context of the Tai Chimpanzee Project researchers observed three chimpanzee communities in Tai National Park in Cote d’Ivoire documenting social relationships, territory range and intergroup encounters amongst others. “We have been able to analyze almost 500 vocal and physical battles from the last 25 years with participation of at least one of the three habituated communities, some of which have caused severe injury or death”, says Liran Samuni, the first author of the study.

The study* showed that males, as well as females participate in the battles and that three factors increased the likelihood of participation in the intergroup encounter when there were many individuals participating, when maternal kin joined and when non-kin social bond partners were present. “It seems chimpanzees not only consider the sheer number in their sub-group when moving into battle, but they consider the presence of a trusted group member, who will support them in case of an attack”, adds Catherine Crockford, senior author of the study. “These results suggest”, Liran Samuni continues, “that the link between strong, enduring social relationships and costly collective acts is not uniquely human, but is present in one of our closest living relatives, the chimpanzee.”

“This study is part of a series of several investigations linking in-group cooperation with out-group competition”, explains Roman Wittig, director of the Tai Chimpanzee Project and senior author of the studies. “We were able to show that out-group competition reduces chimpanzees’ reproduction and their territory size. On the other hand, out-group competition increases in-group cohesion and, likely facilitated by the neurohormone oxytocin, reduces the likelihood of defection in battle.”

Data from the Tai Chimpanzee Project, with four neighboring communities observed on a daily basis, will be a key source for scientific investigations into the ultimate and proximate causes of group-level cooperation. “The Tai chimpanzees can teach us”, Roman Wittig points out, “what social tools enable human’s unique capacity for large-scale cooperation with non-kin”.

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Chimpanzees join their close bond partners – related group members and friends – to battle rivals. Liran Samuni, Taï Chimpanzee Project

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Article Sources: MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY news release

*Liran Samuni, Catherine Crockford, Roman Wittig, Group-level cooperation in chimpanzees is shaped by strong social ties, Nature Communications, 22 January 2021

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TEL-AVIV UNIVERSITY—Researchers from the Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University unraveled the function of flint tools known as ‘chopping tools’, found at the prehistoric site of Revadim, east of Ashdod. Applying advanced research methods, they examined use-wear traces on 53 chopping tools, as well as organic residues found on some of the tools. They also made and used replicas of the tools, with methods of experimental archaeology. The researchers concluded that tools of this type, found at numerous sites in Africa, Europe and Asia, were used by prehistoric humans at Revadim to neatly break open bones of medium-size animals such as fallow deer, gazelles and possibly also cattle, in order to extract the nutritious high-calory bone marrow.

The study was conducted by Dr. Flavia Venditti of the University of Tübingen and Prof. Ran Barkai and Dr. Aviad Agam of the Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, in collaboration with the Laboratory of Technological and Functional Analyses of Prehistoric Artefacts (Sapienza, University of Rome) and researchers from Sapienza, University of Rome. The paper was published in January 2021 in the PLOS One Journal.

Prof. Ran Barkai: “For years we have been studying stone tools from prehistoric sites in Israel, in order to understand their functions. One important source of tools is Revadim, an open-air site (as opposed to a cave) dating back to 500,000-300,000 years before our time, and rich with remarkably well-preserved findings. Over the years we have discovered that Revadim was a highly favored site, reinhabited over and over again by humans, most probably of the late Homo Erectus species. Bones of many types of game, including elephants, cattle, deer, gazelles and others, were found at the site.”

The researchers add that the prehistoric inhabitants of Revadim developed an effective multipurpose toolkit – not unlike the toolkits of today’s tradesmen. After discovering the functions of some stone tools found at the site, the researchers now focused on chopping tools – flint pebbles with one flaked, sharp and massive edge. Prof. Barkai: “The chopping tool was invented in Africa about 2.6 million years ago, and then migrated with humans wherever they went over the next two million years. Large quantities of these tools have been found at almost every prehistoric site throughout the Old World – in Africa, Europe, the Middle East and even China – evidence for their great importance. However, until now, they had never been subjected to methodical lab testing to find out what they were actually used for.”

The researchers analyzed a sample of 53 chopping tools from Revadim, looking for use-wear traces and organic residues. Many specimens were found to exhibit substantial edge damage as a result of chopping hard materials, and some also showed residues of animal bones, preserved for almost half a million years! Following these findings, experimental archaeology was also applied: The researchers collected flint pebbles from the vicinity of Revadim, manufactured replicas of prehistoric chopping tools and used them to break open bones of dead medium-size animals. Comparisons between the use-wear traces and organic residues on the replicated tools and those on the prehistoric originals significantly substantiated the study’s conclusions.

Prof. Barkai: “Early humans broke animal bones in two to extract bone marrow. This requires great skill and precision, because shattering the bone would damage the bone marrow. The chopping tool, which we examined in this study, was evidently outstandingly popular, because it was easy to make, and highly effective for this purpose. This is apparently the reason for its enormous distribution over such a long period of time. The present study has expanded our knowledge of the toolkit of early humans – one more step toward understanding their way of life, tracking their migrations, and unraveling the secrets of human evolution.”

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A chopping tool from late Acheulian Revadim. Prof. Ran Barkai

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Article Source: TEL-AVIV UNIVERSITY news release

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PLOS—In the Early Bronze Age of Europe, ancient people used bronze objects as an early form of money, even going so far as to standardize the shape and weight of their currency, according to a study* published January 20, 2020 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Maikel H. G. Kuijpers and C?t?lin N. Popa of Leiden University, Netherlands.

Money is an important feature of modern human society. One key feature of money is standardization, but this can be difficult to identify in the archaeological record since ancient people had inexact forms of measurement compared with today. In this study, the authors assessed possible money from the Early Bronze Age of Central Europe, comparing the objects based on their perceived – if not precise – similarity.

The objects studied were made of bronze in shapes described as rings, ribs, and axe blades. The authors examined more than 5,000 such objects from more than 100 ancient hoards. They statistically compared the objects’ weights using a psychology principle known as the Weber fraction, which quantifies the concept that, if objects are similar enough in mass, a human being weighing them by hand can’t tell the difference.

They found that even though the objects’ weights varied, around 70% of the rings were similar enough to have been indistinguishable by hand (averaging about 195 grams), as were subsets of the ribs and axe blades.

The authors suggest that this consistent similarity in shape and weight, along with the fact that these objects often occurred in hoards, are signs of their use as an early form of standardized currency. Later, in the Middle Bronze Age of Europe, more precise weighing tools appear in the archaeological record along with an increase in scrap bronze, pointing to a developed system of weighing.

The authors add: “The euros of Prehistory came in the form of bronze rings, ribs and axes. These Early Bronze Age artefacts were standardized in shape and weight and used as an early form of money.”

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Ribs (Spangenbarren). M.H.G. Kuijpers, author photo (CC-BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

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Rings (Osenringen). M.H.G. Kuijpers, author photo (CC-BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

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Article Source: PLOS news release

*Kuijpers MHG, Popa CN (2021) The origins of money: Calculation of similarity indexes demonstrates the earliest development of commodity money in prehistoric Central Europe. PLoS ONE 16(1): e0240462. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0240462

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PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES—A recent study* of an ancient wildland-urban interface managed by ancestors of Jemez Pueblo in northern New Mexico could provide an alternate model for modern fire management. As communities expand into fire-prone wildland regions, the threat of wildfire hazards such as property loss increase. Christopher I. Roos and colleagues worked with the Pueblo of Jemez and three other tribes to reconstruct fire use and human impact near settlements in the dry ponderosa pine forests of the Jemez Mountains across centuries. The authors analyzed charcoal and pollen from six sites to look at patterns of fire activity, vegetation change, and herbivore abundance over a 2,000 year period. The authors modeled fire behavior over time by factoring in population size, agricultural land use, fuelwood harvest, and human ignition. Initial settlement from 1100-1300 CE increased fire frequency in the landscape. Wood harvesting and frequent, patchy fires led to landscape that burned often but not extensively. Population collapse following the Spanish invasion brought the return of frequent, widely spreading fires. According to the authors, the landscape avoided extreme fire behavior even given large fires or conducive conditions like drought, and the experiences could inform local management of fire and fuels at modern wildland-urban interfaces.

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Archaeological remains of a “fieldhouse” in Jemez ponderosa pine forests. More than 3,000 similar structures surround more than two dozen villages and towns occupied by Jemez people from 1100-1700 CE. Kacy Hollenback 

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Article Source: PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES news release

*”Native American fire management at an ancient wildland-urban interface in the Southwest United States,” by Christopher I. Roos et al.

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If you think archaeology is much like the popular depictions we often experience through the entertainment industry, you need to think again. 

In a report published in the scientific journal, Nature Ecology and Evolution, researchers of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History relate how real archaeology, the archaeology practiced today by researchers and scholars throughout the world, is actually radically different than the classical archaeology performed by explorers a century or more ago, exemplified typically by scenes of people digging within controlled earthen square units, unearthing remarkably preserved, sensational artifacts—a stereotype often projected to the public by the media. But, as the researchers relate in the paper, much ‘archaeology’ as we know it today is actually more often conducted in the labs behind the scenes, where new techniques and technology is applied to analyze the finds brought from the field, employing a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding not only the artifacts themselves but the contextual landscapes of the finds, human settlement patterns and behavior, and how it all relates to other subject matter and disciplines. As noted in the subject Max Planck Institute press release by Nicole Boivin, lead author of the study and Director of the Institute’s Department of Archaeology: “Archaeology today is a dramatically different discipline to what it was a century ago. While the tomb raiding we see portrayed in movies is over the top, the archaeology of the past was probably closer to this than to present-day archaeology. Much archaeology today is in contrast highly scientific in orientation, and aimed at addressing modern-day issues.”*

“Addressing modern-day issues” is an operative phrase here. Key to understanding the evolution of the discipline today, say the study authors, is recognizing how archaeological research is now bing applied to studying and developing solutions to present-day issues. “It is clear that the past offers a vast repertoire of cultural knowledge that we cannot ignore,” states Professor Boivin in the Max Planck Institute press release.* Recognizing this, researchers are examining the way people in past societies enriched their agricultural land, mitigated or prevented devastating fires, moved and distributed water and made their settlements ‘greener’  without using fossil fuel energy sources. 

The study authors emphasize that today’s advancements in the application of technological and social solutions to global present-day problems, such as climate change, must work in tandem with archaeology. 

“It’s not about glorifying the past, or vilifying progress,” states Boivin in the press release. “Instead, it’s about bringing together the best of the past, present and future to steer a responsible and constructive course for humanity.”

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Around the world today, we can find many examples of how past cultural and technological practices and solutions are being revived to address pressing environmental and land management challenges. Examples include (left to right) mobilization of ancient terra preta (anthropogenic dark earth) technology, revitalization of landesque capital (long-term landscape investments) and adoption of traditional fire management regimes. Michelle O’Reilly

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Archaeological studies of low-density, agrarian-based cities such as ancient Angkor Wat in Cambodia are increasingly being used to inform the development of more sustainable urban centers in the future. Alison Crowther

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*Article Source: A new archaeology for the Anthropocene era, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History

If you liked this article, see Beyond Monuments: Ancient Maya Landscapes Revealed Through Technology for an example of modern archaeology at its best.

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Walking through this lush, tropical forest, visitors may not realize at first that they are among the monumental remains of a large ancient Maya center. Where are all the great stone pyramids, ball-courts, temples, and other monuments so often attributed to great ancient Maya centers? Yet, one sees a tropical landscape that is anything but flat. There is a jungle-shrouded mound here, another one over there. A well-planned walking path winds through what a visitor might describe as the Maya version of the Garden of Eden. Like the very first 18th and 19th century explorers of the Maya world, one sees what could be ancient structures still hidden beneath their canopy shroud. Some of them here have now been partially exposed, betraying what might lie beneath and leaving the rest to the imagination. Visitors soon acquire the impression that this place is very different than any other encountered in the Maya world. Straddling the border between Guatemala and Belize, it is known as El Pilar. It has been explored and studied by archaeologist Dr. Anabel Ford of the University of California, Santa Barbara for decades.

“Based on excavations exposures, several key locales at El Pilar have been consolidated for viewing under the forest canopy, while most have been preserved under a mantel of earth for later consideration,” wrote Ford and co-author Maggie Knapp in a previous article about the site*. “Partial exposures offer examples of the monumental architecture, while the covered temples can be compared with those exposed at other sites. The objective of Archaeology under the Canopy [the program plan for excavating and researching El Pilar] is to maintain architectural harmony and integrity and to give priority to the monuments at risk.” With this approach, Ford hopes to better preserve the site’s monumental features, sustaining the stability of the structures that otherwise would deteriorate due to environmental temperature, humidity, and precipitation effects — all factors that erode plaster walls and the delicate, elaborate facades that characterize ancient Maya works.

Thus, most of the monumental features of this ancient city remain ‘hidden’ beneath its tropical forest shroud. But now, teams of researchers, led by Ford, have recently undertaken a new way of “seeing” the ancient settlement and its surrounding context with high-tech eyes, significantly expanding their understanding of the true complexity and size of its otherwise ‘invisible’ human-modified landscape.

“We have integrated LiDAR imagery into settlement surveys for seven years to examine the landscape beyond  “downtown” El Pilar,” writes Ford and her team of researchers about their recent research**. LiDAR is a method for measuring distances in the topography of an area by directing laser light from aerial positions to the surface and then measuring its reflection with a sensor. The differences in laser return times and wavelengths are then applied to mapping technology to create digital 3-D and other images of the landscape, as well as creating new data sets about the landscape.

“We have documented over 1,862 structures over the 14 square kilometers surveyed to date, with more to be added by future work,” says Ford and her colleagues**.

Much more than this, Ford and her team of researchers have also identified a variety of other features related to how the ancient inhabitants managed or modified their environment within El Pilar’s landscape ‘footprint’, including aguadas (small reservoirs), chultuns (storage pits), berms, depressions, terraces and quarries — all features that would otherwise elude the casual eye as one traverses the area on foot, but which signal site investigators where to look on the ground for evidence of the ancient peoples’ presence and activities.

Additionally, by consulting and cooperating with the indigenous people of today’s El Pilar area — the ‘citizen scientists’ — the researchers have greatly enhanced their ability to accurately interpret what they are finding. Altogether, combining the LiDAR surveys and analysis with the input and knowledge of the indigenous participants have provided a gold mine of information for analysis, promising a fuller and more detailed understanding of the settlement, agricultural activity, and clues to the lifestyle of these ancient people.

Ford believes this overall approach has important implications and significance for the study of the ancient Maya across all of Mesoamerica.

Says Ford and her colleagues: “The combination of these different ways of knowing has a synergistic effect, which deepens mutual understanding across cultures and creates a more holistic framework for conducting research, and we are excited about the direction we are headed.”**

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Map of the El Pilar core, or “city center”, made possible by LiDAR. Courtesy BRASS/El Pilar

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For more about this, see the article, Modeling Ancient Maya Landscapes, in the Winter 2021 issue of Popular Archaeology Magazine. 

*El Pilar: Archaeology under the Canopy, by Anabel Ford and Maggie Knapp, Popular Archaeology Magazine, September 6, 2011. 

**Modeling Ancient Maya Landscapes, by Sherman Horn, Anabel Ford, Thomas Crimmel, Justin Tran, and Jason Woo, Popular Archaeology, Jan. 10, 2021.

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Join Anabel Ford on this unique mega-trip to Mesoamerica!

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ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY—It is at the confluence of different experiences that new theories come into being. Writing in this week’s “Perspectives” in the journal Science, ASU researchers Kim Hill and Rob Boyd comment on new science by Barsbai et al analyzing human behavior in traditional societies and advocate for a new fully integrated evolutionary theory of human behavior.*

A collaboration of these two particular researchers is not unexpected but reflects how the practical and theoretical combine to create new ideas. Hill has spent most of the last 30 years in the jungles of South and Central America, South Africa, and the Philippines living and working with indigenous hunter-gatherer communities to understand the unique aspects of our own species. Boyd is a forerunner in the field of cultural evolution, focusing on the evolutionary psychology of the mechanisms that give rise to — and influence — human culture, and how these mechanisms interact with population dynamic processes to shape human cultural variation. They are two of 17 scientists with the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University who work on the cutting edge of evolutionary science to provide a better understanding of “how humans became human” and how and why we are in some ways so different from all other life forms on the planet. Both researchers are professors with the ASU School of Human Evolution and Social Change.

In their commentary, Hill and Boyd support an analysis of 339 hunter-gatherer societies that shows that “not only are hunter-gatherers behaviorally similar in similar ecologies, but even mammals and birds in those ecologies tend to exhibit the same behavioral regularities as do human populations,” validating the evolutionary perspective called “human behavioral ecology.”

However, shifting to a new paradigm that began in the 1980s, they add that social learning, cultural history, and cultural evolution are also important prime determinants of human behavioral variation. Humans cooperate more than any other primate. Because of the role of cultural and cooperation, our species has seen spectacular ecological success.

Hill and Boyd also cite Institute of Human Origins researchers Sarah Mathew and Charles Perreault’s recent paper on the causes of variations among 172 North American Native American communities that found that “the effect of cultural history seems to persist for hundred or even thousands of years.”

Together, Hill and Boyd see a need to synthesize both adaptive behavioral ecology and cultural evolution approaches into a singular, integrated, evolutionary approach to understanding human behavioral variation.

They state that “culture and genes are linked in a tight coevolutionary embrace, and this leads to complex patterns of genetic and cultural coadaptation.” Hill and Boyd hope that these recent studies, their observations, and new research currently being done will help elucidate the complex nature of human behavior and why explanations of human behavioral patterns will not simply be extensions of animal behavior models.

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Samal man from Mindanao, Philippines, fixing a fishing net. Kim Hill image

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Article Source: Arizona State University news release

*”Perspectives” in Science, “Behavioral convergence in humans and animals,” by Kim Hill and Rob Boyd.

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Science Advances—Scientists have uncovered a pig painting in an Indonesian cave that dates back more than 45,000 years, representing perhaps the world’s oldest surviving animal depiction and the most ancient known figurative artwork. The cave painting may also provide the earliest evidence for anatomically modern humans on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, supporting the view that the first populations to settle the Wallacea islands created artistic depictions of animals and narrative scenes as part of their culture. Indonesia has been known to harbor some of the world’s oldest surviving cave art, including previously discovered paintings on its largest island, Sulawesi. In 2017 and 2018, Adam Brumm and colleagues discovered two previously unknown depictions of the Sulawesi warty pig – characterized by its facial warts – painted in red or dark purplish mineral pigments in two Sulawesi limestone caves. A 136-by-54 centimeter pig painted in the Leang Tedongnge cave appeared to be part of a narrative scene with two less complete pigs that appeared to be confronting each other, while four hand stencils superimposed a 187-by-110 centimeter pig in the Leang Balangajia 1 cave, which was accompanied by several other poorly preserved animal paintings. Uranium-series isotope dating analyses conducted with small cave mineral deposits that overlie the images indicated that the Leang Tedongnge painting is at least 45,500 years old and the Leang Balangajia 1 painting is at least 32,000 years old. While Brumm et al. are unable to definitively determine that the pigs were painted by modern humans, they conclude that this is most likely the case, since other figurative depictions around the world have been exclusively attributed to modern humans.

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Leang Tedongnge cave mouth. AA Oktaviana

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Leang Tedongnge cave. AA Oktaviana

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Dated pig painting at Leang Tedongnge. AA Oktaviana

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Dated pig painting at Leang Tedongnge. Above, AA Oktaviana, below, Maxime Aubert

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Article Source: Science Advances news release. Science Advances is published by AAAS, the nonprofit science society.

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MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY—Fieldwork led by Dr Eleanor Scerri, head of the Pan-African Evolution Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany and Dr Khady Niang of the University of Cheikh Anta Diop in Senegal, has documented the youngest known occurrence of the Middle Stone Age. This repertoire of stone flaking methods and the resulting tools includes distinctive ways of producing sharp flakes by carefully preparing nodules of rock, some of which were sometimes further shaped into tool forms known as ‘scrapers’ and ‘points.’ Middle Stone Age finds most commonly occur in the African record between around 300 thousand and 30 thousand years ago, after which point they largely vanish.

It was long thought that these tool types were replaced after 30 thousand years ago by a radically different, miniaturized toolkit better suited to diversified subsistence strategies and patterns of mobility across Africa. In a paper published in Scientific Reports this week, Scerri and colleagues show that groups of hunter-gatherers in what is today Senegal continued to use Middle Stone Age technologies associated with our species’ earliest prehistory as late as 11 thousand years ago. This contrasts with the long-held view that humanity’s major prehistoric cultural phases occurred in a neat and universal sequence.

The ‘Last Eden’?

“West Africa is a real frontier for human evolutionary studies – we know almost nothing about what happened here in deep prehistory. Almost everything we know about human origins is extrapolated from discoveries in small parts of eastern and southern Africa,” says Dr Eleanor Scerri, the lead author of the study.

To redress this gap in the data, Scerri and Niang put together a research program to explore different regions of Senegal. The program ranges from Senegal’s desert edges to its forests and along different stretches of its major river systems: the Senegal and the Gambia, where they found multiple Middle Stone Age sites, all with surprisingly young dates.

“These discoveries demonstrate the importance of investigating the whole of the African continent, if we are to really get a handle on the deep human past.” says Dr Khady Niang. “Prior to our work, the story from the rest of Africa suggested that well before 11 thousand years ago, the last traces of the Middle Stone Age – and the lifeways it reflects – were long gone.”

Explaining why this region of West Africa was home to such a late persistence of Middle Stone Age culture is not straightforward.

“To the north, the region meets the Sahara Desert,” explains Dr Jimbob Blinkhorn, one of the paper’s authors. “To the east, there are the Central African rainforests, which were often cut off from the West African rainforests during periods of drought and fragmentation. Even the river systems in West Africa form a self-contained and isolated group.”

“It is also possible that this region of Africa was less affected by the extremes of repeated cycles of climate change,” adds Scerri. “If this was the case, the relative isolation and habitat stability may simply have resulted in little need for radical changes in subsistence, as reflected in the successful use of these traditional toolkits.”

“All we can be sure about is that this persistence is not simply about a lack of capacity to invest in the development of new technologies. These people were intelligent, they knew how to select good stone for their tool making and exploit the landscape they lived in,” says Niang.

An ecological, biological and cultural patchwork

The results fit in with a wider, emerging view that for most of humanity’s deep prehistory, populations were relatively isolated from each other, living in subdivided groups in different regions.

Accompanying this striking finding is the fact that in West Africa, the major cultural shift to more miniaturized toolkits also occurs extremely late compared to the rest of the continent. For a relatively short time, Middle Stone Age using populations lived alongside others using the more recently developed miniaturized tool kits, referred to as the ‘Later Stone Age’.

“This matches genetic studies suggesting that African people living in the last ten thousand years lived in very subdivided populations,” says Dr Niang. “We aren’t sure why, but apart from physical distance, it may be the case that some cultural boundaries also existed. Perhaps the populations using these different material cultures also lived in slightly different ecological niches.”

Around 15 thousand years ago, there was a major increase in humidity and forest growth in central and western Africa, that perhaps linked different areas and provided corridors for dispersal. This may have spelled the final end for humanity’s first and earliest cultural repertoire and initiated a new period of genetic and cultural mixing.

“These findings do not fit a simple unilinear model of cultural change towards ‘modernity’,” explains Scerri. ” Groups of hunter-gatherers embedded in radically different technological traditions occupied neighbouring regions of Africa for thousands of years, and sometimes shared the same regions. Long isolated regions, on the other hand, may have been important reservoirs of cultural and genetic diversity,” she adds. “This may have been a defining factor in the success of our species.”

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Freshly found artifact from Laminia, Senegal. Eleanor Scerri

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Lithics from Laminia (A-D) and Saxomununya (E-H). (A) unretouched flake; (B) bifacially retouched flake; (C) Levallois core evidencing a step fracture; (D) side retouched flake/scraper; (E, F) Levallois cores; (G) bifacial foliate point; (H) bifacial foliate. Jacopo Cerasoni. Figure licensed under CC-BY-4.0.

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Team fieldwalking along the Gambia River, Senegal. Eleanor Scerri

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

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SCIENTIFIC REPORTS—Humans feeding leftover lean meat to wolves during harsh winters may have had a role in the early domestication of dogs, towards the end of the last ice age (14,000 to 29,000 years ago), according to a study* published in Scientific Reports.

Maria Lahtinen and colleagues used simple energy content calculations to estimate how much energy would have been left over by humans from the meat of species they may have hunted 14,000 to 29,000 years that were also typical wolf prey species, such as horses, moose and deer. The authors hypothesized that if wolves and humans had hunted the same animals during harsh winters, humans would have killed wolves to reduce competition rather than domesticate them. With the exception of Mustelids such as weasels, the authors found that all prey species would have supplied more protein than humans could consume, resulting in excess lean meat that could be fed to wolves, thus reducing the competition for prey.

Although humans may have relied on an animal-based diet during winters when plant-based foods were limited, they were probably not adapted to an entirely protein-based diet and may have favoured meat rich in fat and grease over lean, protein-rich meat. As wolves can survive on a solely protein-based diet for months, humans may have fed excess lean meat to pet wolves, which may have enabled companionship even during harsh winter months. Feeding excess meat to wolves may have facilitated co-living with captured wolves and the use of pet wolves as hunting aids and guards may have further facilitated the domestication process, eventually to full dog domestication.

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Wolves and prehistoric humans may have lived symbiotically when it came to surviving on scarce food resources during the winters. Photo: Comfreak, Pixabay

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Article Source: Scientific Reports news release

*Excess protein enabled dog domestication during severe Ice Age winters

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MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY—Olduvai (now Oldupai) Gorge, known as the Cradle of Humankind, is a UNESCO World Heritage site in Tanzania, made famous by Louis and Mary Leakey. New interdisciplinary field work has led to the discovery of the oldest archaeological site in Oldupai Gorge as reported in Nature Communications, which shows that early human used a wide diversity of habitats amidst environmental changes across a 200,000 year-long period.

Located in the heart of eastern Africa, the Rift System is a prime region for human origins research, boasting extraordinary records of extinct human species and environmental records spanning several million years. For more than a century, archaeologists and human palaeontologists have been exploring the East African Rift outcrops and unearthing hominin fossils in surveys and excavations. However, understanding of the environmental contexts in which these hominins lived has remained elusive due to a dearth of ecological studies in direct association with the cultural remains.

In the new study, published in Nature Communications, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for for the Science of Human History teamed up with lead partners from the University of Calgary, Canada, and the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, to excavate the site of ‘Ewass Oldupa’ (meaning on ‘the way to the Gorge’ in the local Maa language, as the site straddles the path that links the canyon’s rim with its bottom). The excavations uncovered the oldest Oldowan stone tools ever found at Oldupai Gorge, dating to ~2 million years ago. Excavations in long sequences of stratified sediments and dated volcanic horizons indicated hominin presence at Ewass Oldupai from 2.0 to 1.8 million years ago.

Fossils of mammals (wild cattle and pigs, hippos, panthers, lions, hyena, primates), reptiles and birds, together with a range of multidisciplinary scientific studies, revealed habitat changes over 200,000 years in riverine and lake systems, including fern meadows, woodland mosaics, naturally burned landscapes, lakeside palm groves and dry steppe habitats. The uncovered evidence shows periodic but recurrent land use across a subset of environments, punctuated with times when there is an absence of hominin activity.

Dr. Pastory Bushozi of Dar es Salaam University, Tanzania, notes, “the occupation of varied and unstable environments, including after volcanic activity, is one of the earliest examples of adaptation to major ecological transformations.”

Hominin occupation of fluctuating and disturbed environments is unique for this early time period and shows complex behavioral adaptations among early human groups. In the face of changing habitats, early humans did not substantially alter their toolkits, but instead their technology remained stable over time. Indicative of their versatility, typical Oldowan stone tools, consisting of pebble and cobble cores and sharp-edged flakes and polyhedral cobbles, continued to be used even as habitats changed. The implication is that by two million years ago, early humans had the behavioral capacity to continually and consistently exploit a multitude of habitats, using reliable stone toolkits, to likely process plants and butcher animals over the long term.

Though no hominin fossils have yet been recovered from Ewass Oldupa, hominin fossils of Homo habilis were found just 350 meters away, in deposits dating to 1.82 million years ago. While it is difficult to know if Homo habilis was present at Ewass Oldupa, Professor Julio Mercader of the University of Calgary asserts that “these early humans were surely ranging widely over the landscape and along shores of the ancient lake.” Mercader further notes that this does not discount the possibility that other hominin species, such as the australopithecines, were also using and making stone tools at Ewass Oldupa, as we know that the genus Paranthropus was present in Oldupai Gorge at this time.

The findings uncovered at Oldupai Gorge and across eastern Africa indicate that early human movements across and out of Africa were possible by 2 million years ago, as hominins possessed the behavioral ability to expand into novel ecosystems. Professor Michael Petraglia of the Max Planck Institute notes, “This behavioral flexibility arose in the context of the dawn of the evolution of our own genus, Homo, and it set the stage for the eventual global, invasive spread of Homo sapiens.”

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Olduvai (now Oldupai) Gorge, known as the Cradle of Humankind, is a UNESCO World Heritage site in Tanzania. New interdisciplinary field work has led to the discovery of the oldest archaeological site in Oldupai Gorge, which shows that early human used a wide diversity of habitats amidst environmental changes across a 200,000 year-long period. Michael Petraglia

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Above and below: The excavations uncovered the oldest Oldowan stone tools ever found at Oldupai Gorge, dating to ~2 million years ago. Excavations in long sequences of stratified sediments and dated volcanic horizons indicated hominin presence at Ewass Oldupai from 2.0 to 1.8 million years ago. Michael Petraglia

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

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Science Advances, AAAS—Through genetic analyses of remains from 40 individuals spanning the Stone Age to the Medieval era, scientists traced shifts in ancient northeast Asian populations over thousands of years and identified ancestors of early Arctic inhabitants.* The researchers also uncovered genetic evidence for the most northeastern occurrence of ancient Yersinia pestis, a bacterium that causes the plague, in individuals from two Siberian regions. Gülşah Kılınç and colleagues suggest this bacterium may have played a role in shaping human population dynamics in regions around Siberia’s massive Lake Baikal, noting that its presence coincided with a reduction in population size and genetic diversity about 4400 years ago. With its infamously harsh winters, Siberia is one of the least-populated regions on Earth. However, its inhabitants may have been instrumental to human history, giving rise to populations that eventually spread to the Americas. To better understand how northeast Asian populations shifted over time, Kılınç et al. sequenced genetic data from the remains of ancient individuals dating back 16,900 to 550 years in the Yakutia, Trans-Baikal, Cis-Baikal, Krasnoyarsk Krai, and Amur Oblast regions. The findings suggest that populations east of Lake Baikal remained virtually unchanged from the middle of the Stone Age to the Bronze Age, while populations west of the lake underwent transformations beginning in the Late Stone Age. Using statistical modeling, the researchers identified the Belkachi people from Yakutia as the ancestors of the ancient Saqqaq Arctic inhabitants. The researchers also discovered that the oldest individual sequenced, an almost 17,000-year-old female excavated from the Khaiyrgas Cave, represents one of the first known human groups to have settled the Central Siberian Plateau after the Last Glacial Maximum. This group marks the region’s first major genetic shift after this interval and left a genetic legacy visible in the region 6,000 years later.

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Lake Baikal, Siberia. Fill1970, Pixabay

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Article Source: The open-access journal Science Advances  AAAS news release

*“Human population dynamics and Yersinia pestis in ancient northeast Asia,” by G.M. Kılınç; R. Rodríguez-Varela; N. Kashuba; M. Krzewińska; A. Götherström; L. Dalén; N. Bergfeldt; J. Storå at Stockholm University in Stockholm, Sweden; G.M. Kılınç at Hacettepe University in Ankara, Turkey; N. Kashuba; T. Günther; M. Jakobsson at Uppsala University in Uppsala, Sweden; D. Koptekin; M. Somel at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey; L. Dalén; N. Bergfeldt; R. Rodríguez-Varela; M. Krzewińska; A. Götherström; E. Kırdök at The Centre for Palaeogenetics (CPG) in Stockholm, Sweden; H.M. Dönertaş at European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge, UK; D. Shergin; E. Ineshin at Irkutsk State University in Irkutsk, Russia; G. Ivanov at Irkutsk Museum of Regional Studies in Irkutsk, Russia; D. Kichigin; A. Kharinskii at Irkutsk National Research Technical University in Irkutsk, Russia; K. Pestereva; A. Stepanov at M.K. Ammosov North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk, Russia; D. Volkov at The Center for Preservation of Historical and Cultural Heritage of the Amur Region in Blagoveshchensk, Russia; P. Mandryka at Siberian Federal University in Krasnoyarsk, Russia; A. Tishkin at Altai State University in Barnaul, Russia; E. Kovychev at Transbaikal State University in Chita, Russia; E. Kırdök at Mersin University in Mersin, Turkey.

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PLOS—Underwater excavation, borehole drilling, and modeling suggests a massive paleo-tsunami struck near the ancient settlement of Tel Dor between 9,910 to 9,290 years ago, according to a study* published December 23, 2020 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Gilad Shtienberg, Richard Norris and Thomas Levy from the Scripps Center for Marine Archaeology, University of California, San Diego, USA, and colleagues from Utah State University and the University of Haifa.

Tsunamis are a relatively common event along the eastern Mediterranean coastline, with historical records and geographic data showing one tsunami occurring per century for the last six thousand years. The record for earlier tsunami events, however, is less defined. In this study, Shtienberg and colleagues describe a large early Holocene tsunami deposit (between 9,910 to 9,290 years ago) in coastal sediments at Tel Dor in northwest Israel, a maritime city-mound occupied from the Middle Bronze II period (2000-1550 BCE) through the Crusader period.

To conduct their analysis, the authors used photogrammetric remote sensing techniques to create a digital model of the Tel Dor site, combined with underwater excavation and terrestrial borehole drilling to a depth of nine meters.

Along the coast of the study area, the authors found an abrupt marine shell and sand layer with an age of constraint 9,910 to 9,290 years ago, in the middle of a large ancient wetland layer spanning from 15,000 to 7,800 years ago. The authors estimate the wave capable of depositing seashells and sand in the middle of what was at the time fresh to brackish wetland must have travelled 1.5 to 3.5 km, with a coastal wave height of 16 to 40 m. For comparison, previously documented tsunami events in the eastern Mediterranean have travelled inland only around 300 m–suggesting the tsunami at Dor was generated by a far stronger mechanism. Local tsunamis tend to arise due to earthquakes in the Dead Sea Fault system and submarine landslides; the authors note that an earthquake contemporary to the Dor paleo-tsunami (dating to around 10,000 years ago) has already been identified using cave damage in the nearby Carmel ridge, suggesting this specific earthquake could have triggered an underwater landslide causing the massive tsunami at Dor.

This paleo-tsunami would have occurred during the Early to Middle Pre-Pottery Neolithic B cultural period of the region (10,700-9,250 years ago 11,700-10,500 cal BP), and potentially wiped out evidence of previous Natufian (12,500-12,000 years ago) and Pre-Pottery Neolithic coastal villages (previous surveys and excavations show a near absence of low-lying coastal villages in this region). The re-appearance of abundant Late Neolithic archaeological sites (ca. 6,000 BCE) along the coast in the years after the Dor tsunami coincides with the resumption of wetland deposition in the Dor core samples and indicates resettlement followed the event–highlighting residents’ resilience in the face of massive disruption.

According to Gilad Shtienberg, a postdoc at the Scripps Center for Marine Archaeology at UC San Diego who is studying the sediment cores, “Our project focuses on reconstructing ancient climate and environmental change over the past 12,000 years along the Israeli coast; and we never dreamed of finding evidence of a prehistoric tsunami in Israel. Scholars know that at the beginning of the Neolithic, around 10,000 years ago, the seashore was 4 kilometers from where it is today. When we cut the cores open in San Diego and started seeing a marine shell layer embedded in the dry Neolithic landscape, we knew we hit the jackpot.”

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Geoprobe drilling rig extraction of a sediment core with evidence of a tsunami from South Bay, Tel Dor, Israel. Photo by T. E. Levy

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Video credit: The Qualcomm Institute, CC-BY”

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Article Source: PLOS news release

*Study: Shtienberg G, Yasur-Landau A, Norris RD, Lazar M, Rittenour TM, Tamberino A, et al. (2020) A Neolithic mega-tsunami event in the eastern Mediterranean: Prehistoric settlement vulnerability along the Carmel coast, Israel. PLoS ONE 15(12): e0243619. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0243619

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FLORIDA MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY, GAINESVILLE, Fla.—The history of the Caribbean’s original islanders comes into sharper focus in a new Nature study that combines decades of archaeological work with advancements in genetic technology.

An international team led by Harvard Medical School’s David Reich analyzed the genomes of 263 individuals in the largest study of ancient human DNA in the Americas to date. The genetics trace two major migratory waves in the Caribbean by two distinct groups, thousands of years apart, revealing an archipelago settled by highly mobile people, with distant relatives often living on different islands.

Reich’s lab also developed a new genetic technique for estimating past population size, showing the number of people living in the Caribbean when Europeans arrived was far smaller than previously thought – likely in the tens of thousands, rather than the million or more reported by Columbus and his successors.

For archaeologist William Keegan, whose work in the Caribbean spans more than 40 years, ancient DNA offers a powerful new tool to help resolve longstanding debates, confirm hypotheses and spotlight remaining mysteries.

This “moves our understanding of the Caribbean forward dramatically in one fell swoop,” said Keegan, curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History and co-senior author of the study. “The methods David’s team developed helped address questions I didn’t even know we could address.”

Archaeologists often rely on the remnants of domestic life – pottery, tools, bone and shell discards – to piece together the past. Now, technological breakthroughs in the study of ancient DNA are shedding new light on the movement of animals and humans, particularly in the Caribbean where each island can be a unique microcosm of life.

While the heat and humidity of the tropics can quickly break down organic matter, the human body contains a lockbox of genetic material: a small, unusually dense part of the bone protecting the inner ear. Primarily using this structure, researchers extracted and analyzed DNA from 174 people who lived in the Caribbean and Venezuela between 400 and 3,100 years ago, combining the data with 89 previously sequenced individuals.

The team, which includes Caribbean-based scholars, received permission to carry out the genetic analysis from local governments and cultural institutions that acted as caretakers for the human remains. The authors also engaged representatives of Caribbean Indigenous communities in a discussion of their findings.

The genetic evidence offers new insights into the peopling of the Caribbean. The islands’ first inhabitants, a group of stone tool-users, boated to Cuba about 6,000 years ago, gradually expanding eastward to other islands during the region’s Archaic Age. Where they came from remains unclear – while they are more closely related to Central and South Americans than to North Americans, their genetics do not match any particular Indigenous group. However, similar artifacts found in Belize and Cuba may suggest a Central American origin, Keegan said.

About 2,500-3,000 years ago, farmers and potters related to the Arawak-speakers of northeast South America established a second pathway into the Caribbean. Using the fingers of South America’s Orinoco River Basin like highways, they travelled from the interior to coastal Venezuela and pushed north into the Caribbean Sea, settling Puerto Rico and eventually moving westward. Their arrival ushered in the region’s Ceramic Age, marked by agriculture and the widespread production and use of pottery.

Over time, nearly all genetic traces of Archaic Age people vanished, except for a holdout community in western Cuba that persisted as late as European arrival. Intermarriage between the two groups was rare, with only three individuals in the study showing mixed ancestry.

Many present-day Cubans, Dominicans and Puerto Ricans are the descendants of Ceramic Age people, as well as European immigrants and enslaved Africans. But researchers noted only marginal evidence of Archaic Age ancestry in modern individuals.

“That’s a big mystery,” Keegan said. “For Cuba, it’s especially curious that we don’t see more Archaic ancestry.”

During the Ceramic Age, Caribbean pottery underwent at least five marked shifts in style over 2,000 years. Ornate red pottery decorated with white painted designs gave way to simple, buff-colored vessels, while other pots were punctuated with tiny dots and incisions or bore sculpted animal faces that likely doubled as handles. Some archaeologists pointed to these transitions as evidence for new migrations to the islands. But DNA tells a different story, suggesting all of the styles were developed by descendants of the people who arrived in the Caribbean 2,500-3,000 years ago, though they may have interacted with and took inspiration from outsiders.

“That was a question we might not have known to ask had we not had an archaeological expert on our team,” said co-first author Kendra Sirak, a postdoctoral fellow in the Reich Lab. “We document this remarkable genetic continuity across changes in ceramic style. We talk about ‘pots vs. people,’ and to our knowledge, it’s just pots.”

Highlighting the region’s interconnectivity, a study of male X chromosomes uncovered 19 pairs of “genetic cousins” living on different islands – people who share the same amount of DNA as biological cousins but may be separated by generations. In the most striking example, one man was buried in the Bahamas while his relative was laid to rest about 600 miles away in the Dominican Republic.

“Showing relationships across different islands is really an amazing step forward,” said Keegan, who added that shifting winds and currents can make passage between islands difficult. “I was really surprised to see these cousin pairings between islands.”

Uncovering such a high proportion of genetic cousins in a sample of fewer than 100 men is another indicator that the region’s total population size was small, said Reich, professor of genetics in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS and professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard.

“When you sample two modern individuals, you don’t often find that they’re close relatives,” he said. “Here, we’re finding relatives all over the place.”

A technique developed by study co-author Harald Ringbauer, a postdoctoral fellow in the Reich Lab, used shared segments of DNA to estimate past population size, a method that could also be applied to future studies of ancient people. Ringbauer’s technique showed about 10,000 to 50,000 people were living on two of the Caribbean’s largest islands, Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, shortly before European arrival. This falls far short of the million inhabitants Columbus described to his patrons, likely to impress them, Keegan said.

Later, 16th-century historian Bartolomé de las Casas claimed the region had been home to 3 million people before being decimated by European enslavement and disease. While this, too, was an exaggeration, the number of people who died as a result of colonization remains an atrocity, Reich said.

“This was a systematic program of cultural erasure. The fact that the number was not 1 million or millions of people, but rather tens of thousands, does not make that erasure any less significant,” he said.

For Keegan, collaborating with geneticists gave him the ability to prove some hypotheses he had argued for years – while upending others.

“At this point, I don’t care if I’m wrong or right,” he said. “It’s just exciting to have a firmer basis for reevaluating how we look at the past in the Caribbean. One of the most significant outcomes of this study is that it demonstrates just how important culture is in understanding human societies. Genes may be discrete, measurable units, but the human genome is culturally created.”

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Archaeological research and ancient DNA technology can work hand in hand to illuminate past history. This vessel, made between AD 1200-1500 in present-day Dominican Republic, shows a frog figure, associated with the goddess of fertility in Taino culture. Kristen Grace/Florida Museum

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Some archaeologists pointed to dramatic shifts in Caribbean pottery styles as evidence of new migrations. But genetics show all of the styles were created by one group of people over time. These effigy vessels belong to the Saladoid pottery type, ornate and difficult to shape. Corinne Hofman and Menno Hoogland

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Article Source: FLORIDA MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY news release. Writer: Natalie van Hoose

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