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SCIENTIFIC REPORTS—The transition from tribal to feudal living, which occurred throughout the 14th century in Lagow, Poland had a significant impact on the local ecosystem, according to a study* published in Scientific Reports. The findings demonstrate how historical changes to human society and economies may have changed local environments.

Mariusz Lamentowicz and colleagues analysed changes in the composition of plants and pollen in different layers of peat in Pawski Lug, a nature reserve in Western Poland near the village of Lagow. Lagow was founded in the early 13th century and was settled by the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, Knights Hospitaller in 1350 CE.

By analyzing the composition of different peat layers, the authors were able to draw conclusions about the conditions that were present when each layer was formed. Based on the presence of beech and hornbeam trees, and water lilies in older, deeper layers, the authors concluded that prior to settlement by the Knights Hospitaller, Pawski Lug consisted of waterlogged land surrounded by pristine forest. The authors suggest that small amounts of charcoal present in the peat indicate that the forest was regularly burned on a small scale by the Slavic tribes that inhabited the area at the time.

Under the Knights Hospitaller, the majority of the land was given to agricultural labourers for farming. The authors found that the prevalence of hornbeam in peat from this era decreased as the abundance of cereals increased, indicating deforestation in favor of the establishment of croplands and meadows around the waterlogged land. The authors propose that deforestation may have affected the groundwater levels of Pawski Lug. Increased abundances of Scots pine trees indicate that this species recolonized the area. As a result, the soil became increasingly acidic, supporting the growth of peat moss which both acidified the habitat and aided peat formation.

The findings illustrate the direct and significant impact the economic transformation of Lagow from a tribal to a feudal society had on the local ecosystem.

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Amadis, Pixabay

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Article Source: Scientific Reports news release

*https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-75692-4

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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH FLORIDA (USF INNOVATION), TAMPA, Fla. (Nov. 18, 2020)—For more than 10,000 years, the people who lived on the arid landscape of modern-day western New Mexico were renowned for their complex societies, unique architecture and early economic and political systems. But surviving in what Spanish explorers would later name El Malpais, or the “bad lands,” required ingenuity now being explained for the first time by an international geosciences team led by the University of South Florida.

Exploring an ice-laden lava tube of the El Malpais National Monument and using precisely radiocarbon- dated charcoal found preserved deep in an ice deposit in a lava tube, USF geosciences Professor Bogdan Onac and his team discovered that Ancestral Puebloans survived devastating droughts by traveling deep into the caves to melt ancient ice as a water resource.

Dating back as far as AD 150 to 950, the water gatherers left behind charred material in the cave indicating they started small fires to melt the ice to collect as drinking water or perhaps for religious rituals. Working in collaboration with colleagues from the National Park Service, the University of Minnesota and a research institute from Romania, the team published its discovery in “Scientific Reports.”

The droughts are believed to have influenced settlement and subsistence strategies, agricultural intensification, demographic trends and migration of the complex Ancestral Puebloan societies that once inhabited the American Southwest. Researchers claim the discovery from ice deposits presents “unambiguous evidence” of five drought events that impacted Ancestral Puebloan society during those centuries.

“This discovery sheds light on one of the many human-environment interactions in the Southwest at a time when climate change forced people to find water resources in unexpected places,” Onac said, noting that the geological conditions that supported the discovery are now threatened by modern climate change.

“The melting cave ice under current climate conditions is both uncovering and threatening a fragile source of paleoenvironmental and archaeological evidence,” he added.

Onac specializes in exploring the depths of caves around the world where ice and other geological formations and features provide a window to past sea level and climate conditions and help add important context to today’s climate challenges.

Their study focused on a single lava tube amid a 40-mile swatch of treacherous ancient lava flows that host numerous lava tubes, many with significant ice deposits. While archaeologists have suspected that some of the surface trails crisscrossing the lava flows were left by ancient inhabitants searching for water, the research team said their work is the earliest, directly dated proof of water harvesting within the lava tubes of the Southwest.

The study characterizes five drought periods over an 800-year period during which Ancestral Puebloans accessed the cave, whose entrance sits more than 2,200 meters above sea level and has been surveyed at a length of 171 meters long and about 14 meters in depth. The cave contains an ice block that appears to be a remnant of a much larger ice deposit that once filled most of the cave’s deepest section. For safety and conservation reasons, the National Park Service is identifying the site only as Cave 29.

In years with normal temperatures, the melting of seasonal ice near cave entrances would leave temporary shallow pools of water that would have been accessible to the Ancestral Puebloans. But when the ice was absent or retreated in warmer and dryer periods, the researchers documented evidence showing that the Ancestral Puebloans repeatedly worked their way to the back of the cave to light small fires to melt the ice block and capture the water.

They left behind charcoal and ash deposits, as well as a Cibola Gray Ware pottery shard that researchers found as they harvested a core of ancient ice from the block. The team believes the Ancestral Puebloans were able to manage smoke within the cave with its natural air circulation system by keeping the fires small.

The discovery was an unexpected one, Onac said. The team’s original goal in its journey into the lava tube was to gather samples to reconstruct the paleoclimate using ice deposits, which are slowly but steadily melting.

“I have entered many lava tubes, but this one was special because of the amount of charcoal present on the floor in the deeper part of the cave,” he said. “I thought it was an interesting topic, but only once we found charcoal and soot in the ice core that the idea to connect the use of ice as a water resource came to my mind.”

Unfortunately, researchers are now racing against the clock as modern climate conditions are causing the cave ice to melt, resulting in the loss of ancient climate data. Onac said he recently received support from the National Science Foundation to continue the research in the lava tubes before the geological evidence disappears.

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Entrance of the collapsed lava tube. University of South Florida

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Researchers descend into one of the lava tubes. University of South Florida

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Fragment of a Cibola Gray Ware. University of South Florida

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Joining in the exploration and research were Dylan S. Parmenter, whose master’s degree at USF was on the topic and is now a doctoral student at the University of Minnesota, Steven M. Baumann and Eric Weaver of the National Park Service, and Tiberiu B. Sava of the Horia Hulubei National Institute for Physics and Nuclear Engineering in Romania. The research was funded by the National Park Service and the National Science Foundation.

Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH FLORIDA news release

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UNIVERSITY OF EXETER—The human ability to teach and our use of complex tools may have evolved together, according to new research.

The improvement of technologies across generations, known as “cumulative cultural evolution”, is central to our success as a species – but its origins are a mystery.

The new study, led by the University of Exeter, tested the power of teaching on the development of simple and more complex tools – and found teaching stands out when tackling complicated problems.

This suggests that, as early humans developed more complex tools, natural selection began to favour those who could teach.

“Humans have an unrivalled ability to pass knowledge down the generations,” said senior author Dr Alex Thornton, of the Centre for Ecology and Conservation on Exeter’s Penryn Campus in Cornwall.

“Traditional theories assumed that cumulative cultural evolution requires specialised processes, like teaching, to transmit information accurately, but this cannot explain why these processes evolved in the first place.

“Our aim in this study was to test the hypothesis that these processes gradually ‘co-evolved’ with an increasing reliance on complex tools.”

More than 600 people took part in the study, forming “chains” to develop a simple tool (a boat made of waterproof paper) or a more complex tool (a basket made of pipe cleaners).

All tools were used to carry marbles, with success measured by number of marbles carried.

The development chain involved ten “generations” – ten versions of the tool being made.

Each participant either saw the tool made by the previous person in the chain, watched the previous person make the tool (and could thus imitate and learn from them) or spoke to the previous participant – allowing teaching to take place.

“Simple and complex tools generally improved down the ‘generations’, and for simple tools this improvement was about the same in all three study conditions,” said Dr Amanda Lucas, of the University of Exeter.

“With complex tools, teaching consistently led to more improvement compared to other conditions.

“Teaching seemed to be particularly useful in allowing new, high-performing designs to be transmitted.”

Dr Lucas added: “We are incredibly grateful to local community groups across Cornwall who took part in the research, including Women’s Institutes, sports clubs, craft societies, museums, theatres, galleries, libraries and community gardeners.

“This meant that our study represented a diversity of ages, backgrounds and skills, which is important as many of these types of experiments, that intend to investigate something essential about being human, recruit a narrower sample of university students only.”

Dr Alex Thornton continued: “The effects we found were gradual – but the idea here was to look at the origins of cumulative cultural evolution, and over many generations these gradual improvements would add up.

“Our findings point to an evolutionary feedback loop between tool-making and teaching.

“This suggests that our ancestors could have started to make modest cumulative improvements to simple tools without the need for teaching, but as tools became more complex, teaching started to become advantageous.

“The evolution of improved teaching skills would in turn allow the production of even more complex and effective tools.”

The study also found that simple tools tended to “converge” towards a common design, while complex tools remained diverse and different – reflecting the diversity of technologies across human societies today.

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A tool to carry marbles, made by a participant in the study. University of Exeter

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF EXETER news release

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While prehistoric hunters were following big game like bison and mammoth across ancient Eurasia during the peak of the last Ice Age, it seems there may have been contemporaries doing much the same thing thousands of miles and an entire ocean away in the Americas. In what is today called Europe, these ancient hunters represented defined cultures described in the archaeological literature as Aurignacian and Gravettian, leaving behind stone implements that included objects like worked bone and antler, fine blades and bladelets of flint, pointed blades and even the bow and arrow. In the Americas, however, contemporaneous stone tool technologies and other representative artifacts are yet ill-defined, as the number of sites that contain evidence of the American hunters’ presence during this very early time period are still few by comparison and have only been discovered in recent years, with other potential sites and locations still under exploration and investigation.

Who were these ancient Ice Age contemporaries in the Americas? Though the artifacts and other clues they left behind can arguably be dated back to at least 20,000 years ago, and perhaps even deeper into prehistory, scientists have yet to determine from whence they originally came, though many scholars hypothesize they originally migrated from points far to the north and east, on and across ancient Beringia and perhaps ultimately into Siberia and northeast Eurasia, if DNA studies of later Native Americans have any bearing.

Certainly there are far more questions than answers, but in coming years, archaeologists will continue to survey for new potential sites and return to old sites to re-explore and re-investigate with new tools, approaches and research objectives. 

Recent discoveries in the Yukon of Canada, Mexico, and other locations in South America are now emerging to tell the story of these American Ice Age hunter populations. In the article, America’s Ice Age Hunters, Popular Archaeology author James Kensington relates a narrative that details findings that may be up-ending long-held thoughts and assumptions about when the earliest humans arrived and thrived on the American continents.* 

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Northern Hemisphere glaciation during the last Ice Age (26,000 to 13,300 years ago). Hannes Grobe, Creative Commons  Attribution 2.5 Generic license, Wikimedia Commons

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*See the recently published subject article, available to Popular Archaeology premium subscribers.

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WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS—Males of the extinct human species Paranthropus robustus were thought to be substantially larger than females—much like the size differences seen in modern-day primates such as gorillas, orangutans and baboons. But a new fossil discovery in South Africa instead suggests that P. robustus evolved rapidly during a turbulent period of local climate change about 2 million years ago, resulting in anatomical changes that previously were attributed to sex.

An international research team including anthropologists at Washington University in St. Louis reported their discovery from the fossil-rich Drimolen cave system northwest of Johannesburg in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution on Nov. 9*.

“This is the type of phenomenon that can be hard to document in the fossil record, especially with respect to early human evolution,” said David Strait, professor of biological anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University.

The remarkably well-preserved fossil described in the paper was discovered by a student, Samantha Good, who participated in the Drimolen Cave Field School co-led by Strait.

Researchers already knew that the appearance of P. robustus in South Africa roughly coincided with the disappearance of Australopithecus, a somewhat more primitive early human, and the emergence in the region of early representatives of Homo, the genus to which modern people belong. This transition took place very rapidly, perhaps within only a few tens of thousands of years.

“The working hypothesis has been that climate change created stress in populations of Australopithecus leading eventually to their demise, but that environmental conditions were more favorable for Homo and Paranthropus, who may have dispersed into the region from elsewhere,” Strait said. “We now see that environmental conditions were probably stressful for Paranthropus as well, and that they needed to adapt to survive.”

The new specimen discovered at Drimolen, identified as DNH 155, is clearly a male but differs in important ways from other P. robustus previously discovered at the nearby site of Swartkrans—where most of the fossils of this species have been found.

Evolution within a species can be difficult to see in the fossil record. Changes may be subtle, and the fossil record is notoriously incomplete.

Usually, the fossil record reveals larger-scale patterns, such as when species or groups of species either appear in the fossil record or go extinct. So this Drimolen discovery provides a rarely seen window into early human evolution.

The new specimen is larger than a well-studied member of the species previously discovered at Drimolen—an individual known as DNH 7, and presumed to be female—but is measurably smaller than presumed males from Swartkrans.

“It now looks as if the difference between the two sites cannot simply be explained as differences between males and females, but rather as population-level differences between the sites,” said Jesse Martin, a doctoral student at La Trobe University and the co-first author of the study. “Our recent work has shown that Drimolen predates Swartkrans by about 200,000 years, so we believe that P. robustus evolved over time, with Drimolen representing an early population and Swartkrans representing a later, more anatomically derived population.”

“One can use the fossil record to help reconstruct the evolutionary relationships between species, and that pattern can provide all sorts of insights into the processes that shaped the evolution of particular groups,” Martin said. “But in the case of P. robustus, we can see discrete samples of the species drawn from the same geographic region but slightly different times exhibiting subtle anatomical differences, and that is consistent with change within a species.”

“It’s very important to be able to document evolutionary change within a lineage,” said Angeline Leece of La Trobe University, the other first author of the study. “It allows us to ask very focused questions about evolutionary processes. For example, we now know that tooth size changes over time in the species, which begs the question of why. There are reasons to believe that environmental changes placed these populations under dietary stress, and that points to future research that will let us test this possibility.”

Co-director of the Drimolen project, La Trobe University’s Andy Herries said, “Like all other creatures on earth, our ancestors adapted and evolved in accordance with the landscape and environment around them. For the first time in South Africa, we have the dating resolution and morphological evidence that allows us to see such changes in an ancient hominin lineage through a short window of time.”

The evidence of rapid but significant climate change during this period in South Africa comes from a variety of sources. Critically, fossils indicate that certain mammals associated with woodland or bushland environments went extinct or became less prevalent—while other species associated with drier, more open environments appeared locally for the first time.

“P. robustus is remarkable in that it possesses a number of features in its cranium, jaws and teeth indicating that it was adapted to eat a diet consisting of either very hard or very tough foods,” Strait said. “We think that these adaptations allowed it to survive on foods that were mechanically difficult to eat as the environment changed to be cooler and drier, leading to changes in local vegetation.

“But the specimens from Drimolen exhibit skeletal features suggesting that their chewing muscles were positioned in such a way as to make them less able to bite and chew with as much force as the later P. robustus population from Swartkrans,” he said. “Over the course of 200,000 years, a dry climate likely led to natural selection favoring the evolution of a more efficient and powerful feeding apparatus in the species.”

Leece said it was notable that P. robustus appeared at roughly the same time as our direct ancestor Homo erectus, as documented by an infant H. erectus cranium that the team discovered at the same Drimolen site in 2015.

“These two vastly different species, H. erectus with their relatively large brains and small teeth, and P. robustus with their relatively large teeth and small brains, represent divergent evolutionary experiments,” Leece said. “While we were the lineage that won out in the end, the fossil record suggests that P. robustus was much more common than H. erectus on the landscape two million years ago.”

More broadly, the researchers think that this discovery serves as a cautionary tale for recognizing species in the fossil record.

A large number of fossil human species have been discovered over the past quarter century, and many of these new species designations are based on a small number of fossils from only one or a few sites in small geographic areas and narrow time ranges.

“We think that paleoanthropology needs to be a bit more critical about interpreting variation in anatomy as evidence for the presence of multiple species,” Strait said. “Depending on the ages of fossil samples, differences in bony anatomy might represent changes within lineages rather than evidence of multiple species.”

Project Co-Director Stephanie Baker of the University of Johannesburg added, “Drimolen is fast becoming a hotspot for early hominin discoveries, which is a testament to the current team’s dedication to holistic excavation and post-field analysis. The DNH 155 cranium is one of the best-preserved P. robustus specimens known to science. This is an example of what careful, fine-scale research can tell us about our distant ancestors.”

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The discovery of a remarkably well-preserved fossil from the extinct human species Paranthropus robustus suggests rapid evolution during a turbulent period of local climate change, resulting in anatomical changes that previously were attributed to sex. Jesse Martin and David Strait

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Article Source: WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS news release

*’Drimolen cranium DNH 155 documents microevolution in an early hominin species’, is published in Nature Ecology & Evolution on 09 November 2020. 

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If you liked this news, you may like Human Evolution’s Dustiest Jewel, The Remarkable Skulls of Drimolen, and Homo Erectus: The First Super Hominin, all in-depth, premium feature articles published at Popular Archaeology.

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MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY—From the late Bronze Age until the Middle Ages, the eastern Eurasian Steppe was home to a series of organized and highly influential nomadic empires. The Xiongnu (209 BCE – 98 CE) and Mongol (916-1125 CE) empires that bookend this period had especially large impacts on the demographics and geopolitics of Eurasia, but due to a lack of large-scale genetic studies, the origins, interactions, and relationships of the people who formed these states remains largely unknown.

To understand the population dynamics that gave rise to the Steppe’s historic empires, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPI-SHH), the National University of Mongolia, and partner institutions in Mongolia, Russia, Korea and the United States generated and analyzed genome-wide data for 214 individuals from 85 Mongolian and 3 Russian sites. Spanning the period of 4600 BCE to 1400 CE, it is among the largest studies of ancient Eastern and Inner Asian genomes to date.

During the mid-Holocene, the eastern Eurasian Steppe was populated by hunter-gatherers of Ancient Northeast Asian (ANA) and Ancient Northern Eurasian (ANE) ancestry, but around 3000 BCE, dairy pastoralism was introduced through the expansion of the Afanasievo culture of the Altai mountains, whose origins can be traced to the Yamnaya steppe herders of the Black Sea region more than 3,000 km to the west. Although these migrants left little genetic impact, they had an outsized cultural effect and by the Mid- to Late Bronze Age, dairy pastoralism was practiced by populations throughout the Eastern Steppe.

In the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, populations in west, north and south-central Mongolia formed three distinct, geographically structured gene pools. These populations remained discrete for more than a millennium, until increased mobility, likely facilitated by the rise of horseback riding, began to break down this structure. The formation of the Xiongnu in north-central Mongolia, the first nomadic empire in Asia, is contemporaneous with this population mixture and with the influx of new gene pools originating from across Eurasia, from the Black Sea to China.

“Rather than a simple genetic turnover or replacement, the rise of the Xiongnu is linked to the sudden mixture of distinct populations that had been genetically separated for millennia. As a result, the Xiongnu of Mongolia show a spectacular level of genetic diversity that reflects much of Eurasia,” says Dr. Choongwon Jeong, lead author of the study and a professor of Biological Sciences at Seoul National University.

A thousand years later, individuals from the Mongol Empire, one of largest contiguous empires in history, showed a marked increase in Eastern Eurasian ancestry compared to individuals from the earlier Xiongnu, Turkic and Uyghur periods, accompanied by a near complete loss of the ancient ANE ancestry that had been present since before the Xiongnu Empire. By the end of the Mongol Empire, the genetic makeup of the Eastern Steppe had changed dramatically, ultimately stabilizing into the genetic profile observed among present-day Mongolians.

“Our study of ancient Mongolia reveals not only early genetic contributions from populations on the Western Steppe, but also a marked genetic shift towards eastern Eurasian ancestry during the Mongol Empire. The region has a remarkably dynamic genetic history, and ancient DNA is beginning to reveal the complexity of population events that have shaped the Eurasian Steppe,” says Ke Wang, co-first author of the study and a PhD student at the MPI-SHH.

In addition to the impacts of genetic events on political structures, the researchers also investigated the relationship between genetics and subsistence strategies. Despite more than 5,000 years of dairy pastoralism in the region and the continued importance of dairy in the average Mongolian diet today, researchers found no evidence for the selection of lactase persistence, a genetic trait that allows lactose digestion.

“The absence of lactase persistence in Mongolian populations both today and in the past challenges current medical models of lactose intolerance, and suggests a much more complicated prehistory of dairying. We are now turning to the gut microbiome to understand how populations adapt to dairy-based diets,” says Dr. Christina Warinner, senior author of the study, a professor of Anthropology at Harvard University and a research group leader at the MPI-SHH.

“Reconstructing a 6,000-year genetic history of Mongolia has had a transformative effect on our understanding of the archaeology of the region. While answering some long-standing questions, it has also generated new questions and revealed several surprises. We hope that this research will energize future work on the rich and complex relationships between ancestry, culture, technology, and politics in the rise of Asia’s nomadic empires,” adds Dr. Erdene Myagmar, co-senior author of the study and professor of Anthropology and Archaeology at the National University of Mongolia.

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A leaning Deer Stone placed in front of dozens of small stone mounds containing ritually-sacrificed horse burials at the Bronze Age monument site of Ikh Tsagaanii Am, Bayankhongor Province, central Mongolia. William Taylor

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Present-day home in the Mongolian countryside, known as a ger (Mongolian) or yurt (Russian). Christina Warinner

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

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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA – DAVIS—For centuries, historians and scientists mostly agreed that when early human groups sought food, men hunted and women gathered. However, a 9,000-year-old female hunter burial in the Andes Mountains of South America reveals a different story, according to new research* conducted at the University of California, Davis.

“An archaeological discovery and analysis of early burial practices overturns the long-held ‘man-the-hunter’ hypothesis,” said Randy Haas, assistant professor of anthropology and the lead author of the study, “Female Hunters of the Early Americas.” It was published today (Nov. 4) in Science Advances.

“We believe that these findings are particularly timely in light of contemporary conversations surrounding gendered labor practices and inequality,” he added. “Labor practices among recent hunter-gatherer societies are highly gendered, which might lead some to believe that sexist inequalities in things like pay or rank are somehow ‘natural.’ But it’s now clear that sexual division of labor was fundamentally different — likely more equitable — in our species’ deep hunter-gatherer past.”

In 2018, during archaeological excavations at a high-altitude site called Wilamaya Patjxa in what is now Peru, researchers found an early burial that contained a hunting toolkit with projectile points and animal-processing tools. The objects accompanying people in death tend to be those that accompanied them in life, researchers said. It was determined that the hunter was likely female based on findings by the team’s osteologist, James Watson of The University of Arizona. Watson’s sex estimate was later confirmed by dental protein analysis conducted by UC Davis postdoctoral researcher Tammy Buonasera and Glendon Parker, an adjunct associate professor.

Revealing a broader pattern

The surprising discovery of an early female hunter burial led the team to ask whether she was part of a broader pattern of female hunters or merely a one-off. Looking at published records of late Pleistocene and early Holocene burials throughout North and South America, the researchers identified 429 individuals from 107 sites. Of those, 27 individuals were associated with big-game hunting tools — 11 were female and 15 were male. The sample was sufficient to “warrant the conclusion that female participation in early big-game hunting was likely nontrivial,” researchers said. Moreover, the analysis identified the Wilamaya Patjxa female hunter as the earliest hunter burial in the Americas.

Statistical analysis shows that somewhere between 30 to 50 percent of hunters in these populations were female, the study said. This level of participation stands in stark contrast to recent hunter-gatherers, and even farming and capitalist societies, where hunting is a decidedly male activity with low levels of female participation, certainly under 30 percent, Haas explained.

The study was conducted in collaboration with multiple UC Davis labs. Parker, a forensic expert in the Department of Environmental Toxicology, helped determine sex through a proteomic technique he recently developed. In Professor Jelmer Eerkens’ lab, Jenny Chen, an undergraduate researcher at the time of the study, discovered the distinct isotopic signature of meat consumption in the bones, further supporting the conclusion that the Wilamaya Patjxa female was a hunter.

While the research answers an old question about sexual division of labor in human societies, it also raises some new ones. The team now wishes to understand how sexual division of labor and its consequences in different times and places changed among hunter-gatherer populations in the Americas.

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Illustration of female hunter depicting hunters who may have appeared in the Andes 9,000 years ago. Matthew Verdolivo, UC Davis IET Academic Technology Services

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This illustration from the study shows tools recovered from the burial pit floor including projectile points (1 to 7), unmodified flakes (8 to 10), retouched flakes (11 to 13), a possible backed knife (14), thumbnail scrapers (15 and 16), scrapers/choppers (17 to 19), burnishing stones (17, 20, and 21), and red ocher nodules (22 to 24). Randy Haas/UC Davis

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A National Science Foundation grant contributed to this study.

Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA – DAVIS, news release

*https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abd0310

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UNIVERSITÀ DI BOLOGNA—Neanderthals behaved not so differently from us in raising their children, whose pace of growth was similar to Homo sapiens.

Thanks to the combination of geochemical and histological analyses of three Neanderthal milk teeth, researchers were able to determine their pace of growth and the weaning onset time. These teeth belonged to three different Neanderthal children who have lived between 70,000 and 45,000 years ago in a small area of Northeastern Italy.

Teeth grow and register information in form of growth lines – akin to tree rings – that can be read through histological techniques. Combining such information with chemical data obtained with a laser-mass spectrometer – in particular strontium concentrations – the scientists were able to show that these Neanderthals introduced solid food in their children’s diet at around 5-6 months of age.

NOT CULTURAL BUT PHYSIOLOGICAL

Alessia Nava (University of Kent, UK), co-first author of the work, says: “The beginning of weaning relates to physiology rather than to cultural factors. In modern humans, in fact, the first introduction of solid food occurs at around 6 months of age when the child needs a more energetic food supply, and it is shared by very different cultures and societies. Now, we know that also Neanderthals started to wean their children when modern humans do”.

“In particular, compared to other primates – says Federico Lugli (University of Bologna), co-first author of the work – it is highly conceivable that the high energy demand of the growing human brain triggers the early introduction of solid foods in child diet”.

Neanderthals are our closest cousins within the human evolutionary tree. However, their pace of growth and early life metabolic constraints are still highly debated within the scientific literature.

Stefano Benazzi (University of Bologna), co-senior author, says: “This work’s results imply similar energy demands during early infancy and a close pace of growth between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. Taken together, these factors possibly suggest that Neanderthal newborns were of similar weight to modern human neonates, pointing to a likely similar gestational history and early-life ontogeny, and potentially shorter inter-birth interval”.

HOME SWEET HOME

The three milk teeth analyzed in this study were found in a limited area of Northeastern Italy, between the current provinces of Vicenza and Verona: in the Broion Cave, in the Fumane Cave and in the De Nadale Cave. Other than their early diet and growth, scientists also collected data on the regional mobility of these Neanderthals using time-resolved strontium isotope analyses.

“They were less mobile than previously suggested by other scholars”, says Wolfgang Müller (Goethe University Frankfurt), co-senior author. “The strontium isotope signature registered in their teeth indicates in fact that they have spent most of the time close to their home: this reflects a very modern mental template and a likely thoughtful use of local resources”.

“Despite the general cooling during the period of interest, Northeastern Italy has almost always been a place rich in food, ecological variability and caves, ultimately explaining the survival of Neanderthals in this region till about 45,000 years ago”, says Marco Peresani (University of Ferrara), co-senior author and responsible for findings from archaeological excavations at sites of De Nadale and Fumane.

This research adds a new piece in the puzzling pictures of Neanderthal, a human species so close to us but still so enigmatic. Specifically, researchers exclude that the Neanderthal small population size, derived in earlier genetic analyses, was driven by differences in weaning age and that other biocultural factors led to their demise.

This will be further investigated within the framework of the ERC project SUCCESS (The Earliest Migration of Homo sapiens in Southern Europe – Understanding the biocultural processes that define our uniqueness), led by Stefano Benazzi at the University of Bologna.

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Thanks to the combination of geochemical and histological analyses of these three Neanderthal milk teeth, researchers were able to determine their pace of growth and the weaning onset time. Federico Lugli

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Article Source: UNIVERSITÀ DI BOLOGNA news release

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American Association for the Advancement of Science, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Arizona State University—In two studies, researchers provide evidence that expands our understanding of modern humans in Eurasia and their interactions with their most elusive cousins, the Denisovans. While admixture between humans and Denisovans is widely recognized, physical remains of the archaic hominin species are exceedingly rare. What’s more, ancient genomic evidence from early modern humans in eastern Asia, which would capture the nature of admixture events between the two species and inform on humans’ timing and movement into and across Asia, is lacking. Research conducted by separate teams has provided additional insight into early human population history in Eurasia.

Denisovan DNA in the Genome of Early East Asians

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology—In 2006, miners discovered a hominin skullcap with peculiar morphological features in the Salkhit Valley of the Norovlin county in eastern Mongolia. It was initially referred to as Mongolanthropus and thought to be a Neanderthal or even a Homo erectus. The remains of the “Salkhit” individual represent the only Pleistocene hominin fossil found in the country.

Ancient DNA extracted from the skullcap shows that it belonged to a female modern human who lived 34,000 ago and was more related to Asians than to Europeans. Comparisons to the only other early East Asian individual genetically studied to date, a 40,000-year-old male from Tianyuan Cave outside Beijing (China), show that the two individuals are related to each other. However, they differ insofar that a quarter of the ancestry of the Salkhit individual derived from western Eurasians, probably via admixture with ancient Siberians.

Migration and interaction

“This is direct evidence that modern human communities in East Asia were already quite cosmopolitan earlier than 34,000 years ago”, says Diyendo Massilani, lead author of the study and researcher at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “This rare specimen shows that migration and interactions among populations across Eurasia happened frequently already some 35,000 years ago”.

The researchers used a new method developed at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology to find segments of DNA from extinct hominins in the Salkhit and Tianyuan genomes. They found that the two genomes contain not only Neanderthal DNA but also DNA from Denisovans, an elusive Asian relative of Neanderthals. “It is fascinating to see that the ancestors of the oldest humans in East Asia from whom we have been able to obtain genetic data had already mixed with Denisovans, an extinct form of hominins that has contributed ancestry to present-day populations in Asia and Oceania”, says Byambaa Gunchinsuren, a researcher at the Institute of Archaeology of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences. “This is direct evidence that Denisovans and modern humans had met and mixed more than 40,000 years ago”.

“Interestingly, the Denisovan DNA fragments in these very old East Asians overlap with Denisovan DNA fragments in the genomes of present-day populations in East Asia but not with Denisovan DNA fragments in Oceanians. This supports a model of multiple independent mixture events between Denisovans and modern humans”, says Massilani.

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The skullcap found in the Salkhit Valley in eastern Mongolia belonged to a woman who lived 34,000 years ago. Analyses showed: She had inherited about 25 percent of her DNA from Western Eurasian. Institute of Archaeology, Mongolian Academy of Sciences

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New Denisovan DNA expands diversity, history of species

Arizona State University—While the continents of Africa and Europe have been obvious and fruitful treasure troves for exploration and discovery of our modern human origins, Asia has been somewhat overlooked. Scientists have thought that modern humans left Africa about 60,000 years ago and, as they colonized Western Eurasia, found a world empty of any other archaic hominin species. This assumption stemmed in part from the fact that the prehistory of Asia is poorly known compared to that of Africa and Europe.

But research* published this week in the journal Science adds more evidence to the record that Denisovans, a group of extinct hominins that diverged from Neanderthals about 400,000 years ago, may have more widely inhabited northeast central Asia. Ancient Denisovan mitochondrial DNA has been recovered in sediments from Baishiya Karst Cave, a limestone cave at the northeast margin of the Tibetan Plateau, 3280 meters above sea level. Samples of sediments were analyzed by an international team including ASU researcher Charles Perreault. Denisovan mitochondrial DNA was recovered that have been dated from around 100,000 to 60,000 years ago, and also possibly as recently as 45,000. If true, this last date may overlap with the presence of modern humans in northeast central Asia.

Perreault is a research affiliate with the Arizona State University Institute of Human Origins and an associate professor with the School of Human Evolution and Social Change.

“When we started developing this project about 10 years ago,” said Perreault, “none of us expected Baishya Cave to be such a rich site. We’ve barely scratched the surface — three small excavation units have yielded hundreds of stone tools, fauna and ancient DNA. There’s a lot that remains to be done.”

A mandible fossil (the “Xiahe mandible”) from the same cave and dated to 160,000, had been previously identified, tenuously, as Denisovan, based on a single amino acid position. This current study dispels any doubt left that the Denisovans occupied the cave.

This discovery in Baishiya Karst Cave is the first time Denisovan DNA has been recovered from a location that is outside Denisova Cave in Siberia, Russia — previously the single location in the world where a handful of DNA-bearing Denisovan fossil bones have been discovered. In 2010, a fingerbone belonging to a previously unknown hominin species was found buried in Denisova Cave in the Russian Altai Mountains. Evidence of this new species forced anthropologists to revise their model of human evolution outside of Africa.

Finding Denisovan DNA on the Tibetan Plateau itself is surprising. Evidence of archaic hominins 2000 meters above sea level is unusual. Life this high on the plateau is harsh for many reasons, including its thin air, and humans can develop altitude sickness anywhere above 2500 meters above sea level. This suggests that the Denisovans may have evolved adaptations to high altitude, much like modern Tibetans. The dates of the sediments with mitochondrial DNA, along with the older 160,000-year-old Xiahe mandible, suggest that the Denisovans have been on the Plateau perhaps continuously for tens of thousands of years — more than enough for genetic adaptations to emerge.

Getting DNA samples from geographic locations outside of Siberia is also important to understand the genetic diversity and the population structure and history of the Denisovan group as a whole. Researchers suspected that Denisovans were widespread in Asia, based on the widespread Denisovan genomic signal among present-day Asians.

The Denisovan fossil and the DNA it contained, indicate that early modern humans coexisted in Asia with other archaic hominin species, but, unexpectedly, that they interbred with them. Like Neanderthals, Denisovan population intermixed with modern humans as they dispersed into Asia. In fact, there’s evidence that the genetic adaptations to high altitude in present-day Tibetans come from Denisovans. If confirmed, this is a great example of how intermixing with local archaic populations has shaped, and helped, the spread of modern humans around the world. In this case, it allowed humans to colonize the Tibetan Plateau perhaps faster than they would otherwise have been able to.

“Baishiya Cave is an extraordinary site that hold tremendous potential to understand human origins in Asia,” said Charles Perreault. “Future work in Baishiya Cave may give us a truly unique access to Denisovan behavior and solidifies the picture that is emerging, which is that Denisovans, like Neanderthals, were not mere offshoots of the human family tree — they were part of a web of now-extinct populations that contributed to the current human gene pool and shaped the evolution of our species in ways that we are only beginning to understand.”

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Tibet cave site. Charles Perreault

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*”Denisovana DNA in Late Pleistocene sediments from Baishiya Kartst Cave on the Tibetan Plateau,” Science. Dongju Zhang et al.

Article Sources: American Association for the Advancement of Science, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and Arizona State University news releases

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For well over four centuries, early American colonists, historians, and archaeologists have wondered and opined about one of America’s most enduring historic cold case mysteries — the mysterious fate of the first British colonists on American soil — the famous “lost colony” of Roanoke. Now, archaeologists have uncovered some tantalizing new evidence that could pave the way to finally solving the age-old mystery.

The story began over 430 years ago, when Queen Elizabeth’s Sir Walter Raleigh chartered and financed several initial voyages bearing British subjects to the shores of what is today North Carolina, more than two decades before the establishment of James Fort in 1607, the start of the first successful British colony in the Americas. Of the several voyages chartered by Raleigh, only the third one consisted of a mix of men and women with the mandate to establish a true permanent colony with a start-up group of 118 men, women, and children. Explorer John White was commissioned as the expedition’s leader and colony governor. Along with him came his daughter Ellinor and son-in-law Ananias Dare. They established their initial presence on Roanoke Island, but as it turned out, the effort was short-lived. After six weeks, White left the colony to return to England for much-needed supplies and reinforcements, leaving behind the bulk of the group, including his daughter, son-in-law, and new granddaughter Virginia, the first English person to be born on American soil, to thrive as best they could until his return.

He could not return for another three years. When he finally did arrive at the site of the settlement, not a single settler could be found. In a subsequent letter to a friend and colleague, he summed up the mystery and misfortune with the words “as luckless to many, as sinister to myself”. 

For decades, archaeologists have been surveying and excavating on Roanoke Island and other locations to find clues to the fate of colony, as well as insights to their presence and activities on the island. Beginning with archaeologist Jean “Pinky” Harrington in 1947 and 1948 in the area now marked by the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, teams have uncovered a series of artifacts and features at several locations that have testified to the presence of colonists. But other sites further into the mainland and south along the coast have recently yielded intriguing new finds that could tell a story of movement and re-settlement of the original colonists away from the first settlement site on Roanoke. One such location is the Salmon Creek site (now popularly referred to as “Site X”, located inland and adjacent to the western Albemarle Sound), where from 2012 through 2017 archaeologists of the First Colony Foundation recovered 40 sherds representing perhaps 6 or 7 vessels of 16th century Surrey-Hampshire Border ware; 8 sherds representing a North Devon plain baluster jar—both types of ceramic ware commonly used during the 16th and 17th centuries, the baluster jar having been typically used as a provisioning jar on sea voyages; and two tenter hooks, among other artifacts. Most recently, First Colony Foundation archaeologists recovered more 16th century pottery sherds at a site designated Site Y (near the Chowan River, north of Site X). This collection of sherds exceeded that found at Site X. According to archaeologist Nicholas Luccketti, director of the excavations, the finds suggest there was a small contingent of colonists for a short time period at these locations. More compelling still, a significant collection of 16th century European artifacts have been unearthed at sites on Hatteras Island (known in the late 16th century as Croatoan Island after the name of its Native American inhabitants of the time), beginning in the late 1990’s under excavations conducted by David Phelps of East Carolina University, and then from 2012 through 2013 under excavations conducted by the University of Bristol’s Dr. Mark Horton with help from volunteers of the island’s Croatoan Archaeologicl Society. Finds from these two investigations included a late 16th century snaphouse gunlock; a well-preserved 16th century style bronze signet ring; a silver ring—likely once belonging to a woman, given its finger size; an Elizabethan period copper aiglet (likely used at one time to secure the end of a shoe lace); a 16th century Nuremberg token; a 16th century lead pencil and writing slate fragment featuring drawing and other clearly human-made markings; and a fragment of a 16th century swept hilt rapier. These artifacts are but a partial list of the 16th century finds recovered on Hatteras.

Archaeologists plan to continue their investigations both inland from Roanoke Island and south along the coast on Hatteras Island. A more in-depth account of the archaeological explorations can be found in the article, The Case for Hatteras: Unearthing New Clues to America’s Historic “Lost” Colony, published as a major feature premium article in Popular Archaeology Magazine.

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The excavation team at work at two of the Hatteras Island excavation units. Courtesy Croatoan Archaeological Society

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PLOS—Recently discovered rock art from caves in Northern Spain represents an artistic cultural style common across ancient Europe, but previously unknown from the Iberian Peninsula, according to a study* published October 28, 2020 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Diego Garate of the Instituto Internacional de Investigaciones Prehistóricas de Cantabria, Spain, and colleagues.

The history of ancient human art includes various cultural complexes characterized by different artistic styles and conventions. In 2015, new instances of rock art were discovered in three caves in Aitzbitarte Hill in northern Spain, representing an artistic style previously unknown from the Iberian Peninsula. In this study, Garate and colleagues compare this artistic style to others from across Europe.

The artwork in the Aitzbitarte caves consists mostly of engravings of bison, complete with the animals’ characteristic horns and humps. The authors note the particular style in which the animals’ horns and legs are drawn, typically without proper perspective. Pairs of limbs are consistently depicted as a “double Y” with both legs visible, and the horns are similarly draw side-by-side with a series of lines in between.

This is consistent with the artistic style of the Gravettian cultural complex, characterized by specific customs in art, tools, and burial practices between about 34,000 and 24,000 years ago. This culture is known from across Europe but has not been seen before on the Iberian Peninsula. The authors combine this new discovery with data from around Europe to show that the Gravettian culture was more widespread and varied than previously appreciated.

The authors add: “The study analyses the particularities of Palaeolithic animal engravings found in the Aitzbitarte Caves (Basque Country, Spain) in 2016. These prehistoric images, mainly depicting bison, were drawn in a way that has never before been seen in northern Spain; in a kind of fashion in the way of drawing the engravings that is more characteristic of southern France and some parts of the Mediterranean. The study has shown the close regional relationships in Western Europe cave art since very early times, at least, 25,000 years ago.”

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Photograph and tracing of horse B.II.1, engraved on the right-hand wall in Aitzbitarte Cave III (O. Rivero and D. Garate). Garate et al, 2020 (PLOS ONE, CC BY)

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Article Source: PLOS news release

*Garate D, Rivero O, Rios-Garaizar J, Arriolabengoa M, Intxaurbe I, Salazar S (2020) Redefining shared symbolic networks during the Gravettian in Western Europe: New data from the rock art findings in Aitzbitarte caves (Northern Spain). PLoS ONE 15(10): e0240481. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0240481

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EUROPEAN SYNCHROTRON RADIATION FACILITY—Scientists led by the ESRF, the European Synchrotron, Grenoble, France and the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, have discovered the composition of red and black inks in ancient Egyptian papyri from circa 100-200 AD, leading to different hypotheses about writing practices. The analysis, based on synchrotron techniques, shows that lead was probably used as a dryer rather than as a pigment, similar to its usage in 15th century Europe during the development of oil paintings. They publish their results today in PNAS.

In ancient Egypt, Egyptians used black ink for writing the main body of text, while red ink was often used to highlight headings, instructions or keywords. During the last decade, many scientific studies have been conducted to elucidate the invention and history of ink in ancient Egypt and in the Mediterranean cultures, for instance ancient Greece and Rome.

A team of scientists led by the ESRF, the European Synchrotron, and the University of Copenhagen used the powerful X-rays of the ESRF to study the red and black ink in papyri from the only large-scale institutional library known to have survived from ancient Egypt: the Tebtunis temple library. The samples studied in this research project are exceptional, not only because they derive from the famous Tebtunis temple library, but also because the analysis includes as many as 12 ancient Egyptian papyrus fragments, all inscribed with red and black inks.

“By applying 21st century, state-of-the-art technology to reveal the hidden secrets of ancient ink technology, we are contributing to unveiling the origin of writing practices.”, explains Marine Cotte, scientist at the ESRF and co-corresponding author of the paper.

“Something very striking was that we found that lead was added to the ink mixture, not as a dye, but as a dryer of the ink, so that the ink would stay on the papyrus”, says Cotte. The researchers came to this conclusion because they did not find any other type of lead, like lead white or minium, which should be present if lead was used as a pigment. “The fact that the lead was not added as a pigment but as a dryer infers that the ink had quite a complex recipe and could not be made by just anyone.”, adds Thomas Christiansen, Egyptologist from the University of Copenhagen and co-corresponding author .

A surprising fact is that the ink recipe can be related to paint practices developed many centuries later during the Renaissance. “In the XV Century, when artists rediscovered the oil painting in Europe, the challenge was to dry the oil in a reasonable amount of time”, says Marine Cotte. “Painters realized that some lead compounds could be used as efficient dryers”, she explains.

This finding was only possible thanks to the different techniques the team used at the ESRF’s beamline ID21 to study the fragments of papyri. They combined several synchrotron techniques (micro X-ray fluorescence, micro X-ray diffraction and micro-infrared spectroscopy) to probe the chemical composition from the millimeter to the sub-micrometer scale to provide information not only on the elemental, but also on the molecular and structural composition of the inks. The scientists discovered that lead was associated to different elements: a complex mixture of lead phosphates, potassium lead sulphates, lead carboxylates and lead chlorides.

Expectedly, the scientists found that the red color in the ink is given by the ochre. More surprisingly, they discovered that this red pigment is present as coarse particles while the lead compounds are diffused into papyrus cells, at the micrometer scale, wrapping the cell walls, and creating, at the letter scale, a coffee-ring effect around the iron particles, as if the letters were outlined. “We think that lead must have been present in a finely ground and maybe in a soluble state and that when applied, big particles stayed in place, whilst the smaller ones ‘diffused’ around them”, explains Cotte. In these halos, lead is associated with sulphur and phosphorus. The origin of these lead sulphates and phosphates, i.e. were they initially present in ink or did they form during ink alteration, remains an open question. If they were part of the original ink, understanding their role in the writing process is also puzzling and the motivation of on-going research.

The team that came to the ESRF brings together chemists, physicists and Egyptologists. Sine Larsen, former director of research at the ESRF and currently Emerita professor at the Department of Chemistry, University of Copenhagen, was the mastermind that put the group together, back in 2016, and has coordinated it ever since. Several publications later, the collaboration keeps going strong. “I am fascinated by this subject of research, but also by the very diverse profiles that make up this truly interdisciplinary and successful collaboration”, she says.

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Detail of a medical treatise (inv. P. Carlsberg 930) from the Tebtunis temple library with headings marked in red ink. Image credit: The Papyrus Carlsberg Collection.
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A papyrus fragment from a long astrological treatise (inv. P. Carlsberg 89) from the Tebtunis temple library and the ESRF X-ray fluorescence maps showing the distribution of iron (red) and lead (blue) in the red letters that write out the ancient Egyptian word for “star”. Image credit: The Papyrus Carlsberg Collection and the ESRF. The Papyrus Carlsberg Collection and the ESRF.

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Aerial view of the ESRF, the European Synchrotron, the world’s most brightest synchrotron, producing X-rays 10 trillion times brighter than medical X-rays. ESRF/Stef Candé

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Article Source: EUROPEAN SYNCHROTRON RADIATION FACILITY news release

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TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY—There is much debate surrounding the age of the Clovis — a prehistoric culture named for stone tools found near Clovis, New Mexico in the early 1930s — who once occupied North America during the end of the last Ice Age. New testing of bones and artifacts show that Clovis tools were made only during a brief, 300-year period from 13,050 to 12,750 years ago.

Michael Waters, distinguished professor of anthropology and director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans, along with Texas A&M anthropologist David Carlson and Thomas Stafford of Stafford Research in Colorado, have had their new work published in the current issue of Science Advances.

The team used the radiocarbon method to date bone, charcoal and carbonized plant remains from 10 known Clovis sites in South Dakota, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, Montana and two sites in Oklahoma and Wyoming. An analysis of the dates showed that people made and used the iconic Clovis spear-point and other distinctive tools for only 300 years.

“We still do not know how or why Clovis technology emerged and why it disappeared so quickly,” Waters said.

“It is intriguing to note that Clovis people first appears 300 years before the demise of the last of the megafauna that once roamed North America during a time of great climatic and environmental change,” he said. “The disappearance of Clovis from the archaeological record at 12,750 years ago is coincident with the extinction of mammoth and mastodon, the last of the megafauna. Perhaps Clovis weaponry was developed to hunt the last of these large beasts.”

Waters said that until recently, Clovis was thought to represent the initial group of indigenous people to enter the Americas and that people carrying Clovis weapons and tools spread quickly across the continent and then moved swiftly all the way to the southern tip of South America. However, a short age range for Clovis does not provide sufficient time for people to colonize both North and South America. Furthermore, strong archaeological evidence “amassed over the last few decades shows that people were in the Americas thousands of years before Clovis, but Clovis still remains important because it is so distinctive and widespread across North America,” he said.

Waters said the revised age for Clovis tools reveals that, “Clovis with its distinctive fluted lanceolate spear point, typically found in the Plains and eastern United States, is contemporaneous with stemmed point-making people in the Western United States and the earliest spear points, called Fishtail points, in South America.

“Having an accurate age for Clovis shows that people using different toolkits were well settled into multiple areas of North and South America by 13,000 years ago and had developed their own adaptation to these various environments.”

Waters noted that a new accurate and precise age for Clovis and their tools provides a baseline to try to understand the mystery surrounding the origin and demise of these people.

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Clovis spear points from the Gault site in Texas. Center for the Study of the First Americans, Texas A&M University

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Article Source: TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY news release

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See the current new issue of Popular Archaeology, which includes a major feature article about humans in America more than 20,000 years ago.

UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI—Ancient Maya in the once-bustling city of Tikal built sophisticated water filters using natural materials they imported from miles away, according to the University of Cincinnati.

UC researchers discovered evidence of a filter system at the Corriental reservoir, an important source of drinking water for the ancient Maya in what is now northern Guatemala.

A multidisciplinary team of UC anthropologists, geographers and biologists identified crystalline quartz and zeolite imported miles from the city. The quartz found in the coarse sand along with zeolite, a crystalline compound consisting of silicon and aluminum, create a natural molecular sieve. Both minerals are used in modern water filtration.

The filters would have removed harmful microbes, nitrogen-rich compounds, heavy metals such as mercury and other toxins from the water, said Kenneth Barnett Tankersley, associate professor of anthropology and lead author of the study.

“What’s interesting is this system would still be effective today and the Maya discovered it more than 2,000 years ago,” Tankersley said.

UC’s discovery was published in the journal Scientific Reports.

The Maya created this water filtration system nearly 2,000 years before similar systems were used in Europe, making it one of the oldest water treatment systems of its kind in the world, Tankersley said.

Researchers from UC’s College of Arts and Sciences traced the zeolite and quartz to steep ridges around the Bajo de Azúcar about 18 miles northeast of Tikal. They used X-ray diffraction analysis to identify zeolite and crystalline quartz in the reservoir sediments.

At Tikal, zeolite was found exclusively in the Corriental reservoir. 

For the ancient Maya, finding ways to collect and store clean water was of critical importance. Tikal and other Maya cities were built atop porous limestone that made ready access to drinking water difficult to obtain for much of the year during seasonal droughts.

UC geography professor and co-author Nicholas Dunning, who has studied ancient civilizations most of his career, found a likely source of the quartz and zeolite about 10 years ago while conducting fieldwork in Guatemala.

“It was an exposed, weathered volcanic tuff of quartz grains and zeolite. It was bleeding water at a good rate,” he said. “Workers refilled their water bottles with it. It was locally famous for how clean and sweet the water was.”

Dunning took samples of the material. UC researchers later determined the quartz and zeolite closely matched the minerals found at Tikal. 

UC assistant research professor Christopher Carr, an expert in geographic information system mapping, also conducted work on the UC projects at Bajo de Azúcar and Corriental.

“It was probably through very clever empirical observation that the ancient Maya saw this particular material was associated with clean water and made some effort to carry it back,” Dunning said.

UC anthropology professor emeritus Vernon Scarborough, another co-author, said most research on ancient water management has tried to explain how civilizations conserved, collected or diverted water. 

“The quality of water put to potable ends has remained difficult to address,” Scarborough said. “This study by our UC team has opened the research agenda by way of identifying the quality of a water source and how that might have been established and maintained.”

Of course, reconstructing the lives, habits and motivations of a civilization 1,000 years ago is tricky.

“We don’t have absolute proof, but we have strong circumstantial evidence,” Dunning said. “Our explanation makes logical sense.”

“This is what you have to do as an archaeologist,” UC biologist and co-author David Lentz said. “You have to put together a puzzle with some of the pieces missing.”

Lentz said the filtration system would have protected the ancient Maya from harmful cyanobacteria and other toxins that might otherwise have made people who drank from the reservoir sick.

“The ancient Maya figured out that this material produced pools of clear water,” he said.

Complex water filtration systems have been observed in other ancient civilizations from Greece to Egypt to South Asia, but this is the first observed in the ancient New World, Tankersley said.

“The ancient Maya lived in a tropical environment and had to be innovators. This is a remarkable innovation,” Tankersley said. “A lot of people look at Native Americans in the Western Hemisphere as not having the same engineering or technological muscle of places like Greece, Rome, India or China. But when it comes to water management, the Maya were millennia ahead.”

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A temple rises above the rainforest at the ancient Maya city of Tikal. David Lentz

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UC researchers Nicholas Dunning, left, Vernon Scarborough and David Lentz set up equipment to take sediment samples during their field research at Tikal. Liwy Grazioso Sierra

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI news release

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Analysis of a 139-meter long drill core taken from a site in the Koora basin, Kenya, shows an environmental record of the past 1 million years in the East African Rift Valley, indicating an ancient fluctuation of the climate, landscape and ecosystem that precipitated a major transitional period in the course of human evolution in the region.

Richard Potts, director of the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, along with a research team and collaborators from the National Museums of Kenya, have been conducting investigations and excavations in the Olorgesailie Basin, Kenya, for decades. Here, they have uncovered artifacts and other evidence of a hominin (human and human biological ancestor) presence spanning more than 1 million years. Olorgesailie is perhaps best known for its numerous Acheulean stone handaxes—a stone tool type produced by hominins and typically associated with the Homo erectus species. The form and prevalence of these artifacts remained remarkably consistent in the area for about 700,000 years. Beginning in 2002, Potts and colleagues from the Smithsonian Institution, the George Washington University and the National Museums of Kenya began encountering artifacts that differed markedly from the Acheulean. Dated to as early as 320,000 years ago, they were smaller, more elaborate, and included projectiles. Many of them were made from materials that had to be acquired from relatively distant locations. Coloring materials were also uncovered. These discoveries suggested a different behavioral lifestyle and more advanced technology. Classified as Middle Stone Age materials, it seemed clear that a very different kind of hominin created them. The findings suggested an evolutionary transition had occurred.

In their effort to investigate more about this transition, however, Potts and his team were stymied by the discovery of a significant 180,000-year ‘gap’ in the environmental history, created by the geological erosion of layers corresponding to this time period. The ‘gap’ would have represented a record of the evolutionary transition. This led them to seek elsewhere for this missing time period. 

Moving to a different location about 15 miles from their Olorgesailie excavations at Koora basin, they obtained services from a Nairobi company to drill a 139-meter core into the surface, obtaining a record of 1 million years of environmental history. Their subsequent analysis revealed a history of tectonic activity and ecological changes that showed the environment began to become much more variable at around 400,000 years ago, presenting new survival challenges to the animals, including the hominins, in the region. The changes coincided with the transitional period that featured the Middle Stone Age artifacts.

Pots and his team found the missing gap, and combined with analysis of the archaeological and fossil record in the area, they were able to reconstruct a time when early hominin adaptability to change, an important hallmark of humans, and particularly Home sapiens—the lone survivor of the genus Homo—opens a window on human evolution.

More detail can be read in the Oct. 21, 2020 issue of the journal Science Advances and the subject Smithsonian news release.

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Map of Kenya, showing location of Olorgesailie. Human Origins Program, Smithsonian

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Aerial photo of Olorgesailie. Human Origins Program, Smithsonian

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Olorgesailie Acheulean handaxes compared to Olorgesailie MSA points and pigments. Potts and colleagues documented a major behavioral and cultural shift among humans in 2018 based on artifacts recovered at the Olorgesailie archaeological site  in modern day Kenya. Decades of study at Olorgesailie by Potts’ team and collaborators at the National Museums of Kenya have determined that early humans at Olorgesailie relied on the same tools, stone handaxes, for 700,000 years. Then, beginning around 320,000 years ago, people living there entered the Middle Stone Age, crafting smaller, more sophisticated weapons, including projectiles. At the same time, they began to trade resources with distant groups and to use coloring materials, suggesting symbolic communication. Human Origins Program, Smithsonian

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Topographic map of the drill site based on the TanDEM X Science DEM (DLR 2017). Courtesy of R. Dommain, University of Potsdam. Human Origins Program, Smithsonian

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View of the drill site, with apparatus in place. Human Origins Program, Smithsonian

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The LaCore Workshop. Drill cores were shipped to the National Lacustrine Core Facility (La Core) at the University of Minnesota. Colleagues in the National Museum of Natural History’s Human Origins Program and Department of Paleobiology and dozens of collaborators at institutions worldwide worked to analyze the environmental record they had obtained, which is now the most precisely dated African environmental record of the past 1 million years. Charting radioisotope ages and changes in chemical composition and deposits left by plants and microscopic organisms through the different layers of the core, the team reconstructed key features of the ancient landscape and climate across time.
They found that after a long period of stability, the environment in this part of Africa became more variable around 400,000 years ago, when tectonic activity fragmented the landscape. By integrating information from the drill core with knowledge gleaned from fossils and archaeological artifacts, they determined that the entire ecosystem evolved in response. Human Origins Program, Smithsonian

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Drill Core detail. The team’s analysis suggests that as parts of the grassy plains in the region were fragmented along fault lines due to tectonic activity, small basins formed. These areas were more sensitive to changes in rainfall than the larger lake basins that had been there before. Elevated terrain also allowed water runoff from high ground to contribute to the formation and drying out of lakes. These changes occurred during a period when precipitation had become more variable, leading to frequent and dramatic fluctuations in water supply.
With the fluctuations, a broader set of ecological changes took place. The team found that vegetation in the region also changed repeatedly, shifting between grassy plains and wooded areas. Meanwhile, large grazing herbivores, which no longer had large tracts of land to feed on, began to die out and were replaced by smaller mammals with more diverse diets.
The findings suggest that instability in their surrounding climate, land and ecosystem was a key driver in the development of new traits and behaviors underpinning human adaptability. Human Origins Program, Smithsonian; Core image courtesy of LaCore, University of Minnesota

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See also Olorgesailie, a free premium article published in the summer 2018 issue of Popular Archaeology Magazine.   

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SMITHSONIAN TROPICAL RESEARCH INSTITUTE—Sweat baths have a long history of use in Mesoamerica. Commonly used by midwives in postpartum and perinatal care in contemporary Maya communities, these structures are viewed as grandmother figures, a pattern that can also be traced to earlier periods of history. At the site of Xultun, Guatemala, a Classic Maya sweat bath with an unusual collection of artifacts led archaeologists from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI), the Archaeology Program at Boston University and other collaborating institutions to gather new evidence of these beliefs and an early example of the related ritual practices.

Indigenous people of Mesoamerica see the natural world as a place populated by ancestors and supernatural beings, many of whom live within natural features and ancient buildings. This was certainly the case for the Classic Maya. Dating to the Early Classic period (250-550 A.D.), the sweat bath at Xultun, named Los Sapos, appears to have been embodied by an amphibian goddess. Outside the sweat bath, the scientists encountered a representation of this little-known Classic Maya deity, possibly “ix.tzutz.sak.” The goddess is depicted squatting in a toad-like position with legs ornamented with iguanas and cane toads (Rhinella marina).

“No other structure in Mesoamerica–sweat bath or otherwise–looks like this building,” said STRI archaeologist Ashley Sharpe, co-author of the study. “It would seem that when someone enters the front of the structure, they are entering the amphibian goddess who personified the sweat bath.”

“Although this goddess’ name remains undeciphered, proposed readings suggest she was responsible for gestation cycles, both of time and human life,” said Boston University archaeologist Mary Clarke, main author of the study. “Linking notions of birth to reptilian figures, however, is not uncommon among the Classic Maya as they express the verb ‘to birth’ as an upended reptilian mouth glyph. What we see at Xultun is an example where this reptilian goddess, as well as the ideas and myths she embodied, are expressed as a physical place.”

The Los Sapos sweat bath was an active part of the Xultun community for about 300 years. Around 600 A.D. an adult individual was interred within the doorway, after which the entire building was buried, even though the Maya continued living at Xultun for several more centuries. About 300 years later, the buried building was revisited, the majority of human remains removed and a new and unusual offering was presented to the structure, including a human child, juvenile animals including a puppy and birds, several complete cane toads and iguanas, and numerous stone tools and ceramic sherds.

The deposited items had varying degrees of heat damage. The Maya built a fire within the vacated tomb, where they began placing their offerings. For the authors, the selection of artifacts may have been associated with the sweat bath’s identity as a grandmother figure and the early understanding of the structure as a place of birth and human creation.

“Maya archaeologists often find artifact concentrations like these that were likely dedications to structures, but there is rarely an obvious link between the objects and the structure,” Sharpe said. “Because of the iconography on the outside of Los Sapos and because we know it was a sweat bath, we have a rare case where we can associate the offerings–an infant, figurines of women, and frogs and iguanas–with the role the structure played in the community.”

The Los Sapos deposit suggests that the sweat bath’s historical role in Xultun continued centuries after the building had been buried. As the goddesses related to sweat baths throughout Mesoamerican history are described as holding sway over the conditions for life on Earth, the offering was likely an attempt at requesting assistance from the goddess embodying the Los Sapos structure. This could have been a last effort to please the supernatural entity and prevent losing hold of their lands, which were abandoned soon after, around the Maya Collapse of 900 A.D.

“This supernatural figure is a ferocious embodiment of the Earth,” Clarke said. “When displeased, she may take revenge or withhold the things people need to survive. The offering at Los Sapos was both an attempt to appease this goddess and an act of resilience. Rather than seeing a population succumbing to collapse, we see them trying to negotiate with this goddess for their survival.”

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An assortment of toad bones was placed in the Los Sapos sweat bath offering.
San Bartolo-Xultun Regional Archaeological Project

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The remains of a juvenile skeleton were recovered from the sweat bath offering, suggesting an early understanding of the structure as a place of birth and human creation.
David Del Cid

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Article Source: SMITHSONIAN TROPICAL RESEARCH INSTITUTE news release

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FIELD MUSEUM—All good things must come to an end. Whether societies are ruled by ruthless dictators or more well-meaning representatives, they fall apart in time, with different degrees of severity. In a new paper, anthropologists examined a broad, global sample of 30 pre-modern societies. They found that when “good” governments–ones that provided goods and services for their people and did not starkly concentrate wealth and power–fell apart, they broke down more intensely than collapsing despotic regimes. And the researchers found a common thread in the collapse of good governments: leaders who undermined and broke from upholding core societal principles, morals, and ideals.

“Pre-modern states were not that different from modern ones. Some pre-modern states had good governance and weren’t that different from what we see in some democratic countries today,” says Gary Feinman, the MacArthur curator of anthropology at Chicago’s Field Museum and one of the authors of a new study in Frontiers in Political Science. “The states that had good governance, although they may have been able to sustain themselves slightly longer than autocratic-run ones, tended to collapse more thoroughly, more severely.”

“We noted the potential for failure caused by an internal factor that might have been manageable if properly anticipated,” says Richard Blanton, a professor emeritus of anthropology at Purdue University and the study’s lead author. “We refer to an inexplicable failure of the principal leadership to uphold values and norms that had long guided the actions of previous leaders, followed by a subsequent loss of citizen confidence in the leadership and government and collapse.”

In their study, Blanton, Feinman, and their colleagues took an in-depth look at the governments of four societies: the Roman Empire, China’s Ming Dynasty, India’s Mughal Empire, and the Venetian Republic. These societies flourished hundreds (or in ancient Rome’s case, thousands) of years ago, and they had comparatively more equitable distributions of power and wealth than many of the other cases examined, although they looked different from what we consider “good governments” today as they did not have popular elections.

“There were basically no electoral democracies before modern times, so if you want to compare good governance in the present with good governance in the past, you can’t really measure it by the role of elections, so important in contemporary democracies. You have to come up with some other yardsticks, and the core features of the good governance concept serve as a suitable measure of that,” says Feinman. “They didn’t have elections, but they had other checks and balances on the concentration of personal power and wealth by a few individuals. They all had means to enhance social well-being, provision goods and services beyond just a narrow few, and means for commoners to express their voices.”

In societies that meet the academic definition of “good governance,” the government meets the needs of the people, in large part because the government depends on those people for the taxes and resources that keep the state afloat. “These systems depended heavily on the local population for a good chunk of their resources. Even if you don’t have elections, the government has to be at least somewhat responsive to the local population, because that’s what funds the government,” explains Feinman. “There are often checks on both the power and the economic selfishness of leaders, so they can’t hoard all the wealth.”

Societies with good governance tend to last a bit longer than autocratic governments that keep power concentrated to one person or small group. But the flip side of that coin is that when a “good” government collapses, things tend to be harder for the citizens, because they’d come to rely on the infrastructure of that government in their day-to-day life. “With good governance, you have infrastructures for communication and bureaucracies to collect taxes, sustain services, and distribute public goods. You have an economy that jointly sustains the people and funds the government,” says Feinman. “And so social networks and institutions become highly connected, economically, socially, and politically. Whereas if an autocratic regime collapses, you might see a different leader or you might see a different capital, but it doesn’t permeate all the way down into people’s lives, as such rulers generally monopolize resources and fund their regimes in ways less dependent on local production or broad-based taxation.”

The researchers also examined a common factor in the collapse of societies with good governance: leaders who abandoned the society’s founding principles and ignored their roles as moral guides for their people. “In a good governance society, a moral leader is one who upholds the core principles and ethos and creeds and values of the overall society,” says Feinman. “Most societies have some kind of social contract, whether that’s written out or not, and if you have a leader who breaks those principles, then people lose trust, diminish their willingness to pay taxes, move away, or take other steps that undercut the fiscal health of the polity.”

This pattern of amoral leaders destabilizing their societies goes way back–the paper uses the Roman Empire as an example. The Roman emperor Commodus inherited a state with economic and military instability, and he didn’t rise to the occasion; instead, he was more interested in performing as a gladiator and identifying himself with Hercules. He was eventually assassinated, and the empire descended into a period of crisis and corruption. These patterns can be seen today, as corrupt or inept leaders threaten the core principles and, hence, the stability of the places they govern. Mounting inequality, concentration of political power, evasion of taxation, hollowing out of bureaucratic institutions, diminishment of infrastructure, and declining public services are all evidenced in democratic nations today.

“What I see around me feels like what I’ve observed in studying the deep histories of other world regions, and now I’m living it in my own life,” says Feinman. “It’s sort of like Groundhog Day for archaeologists and historians.”

“Our findings provide insights that should be of value in the present, most notably that societies, even ones that are well governed, prosperous, and highly regarded by most citizens, are fragile human constructs that can fail,” says Blanton. “In the cases we address, calamity could very likely have been avoided, yet, citizens and state-builders too willingly assumed that their leadership will feel an obligation to do as expected for the benefit of society. Given the failure to anticipate, the kinds of institutional guardrails required to minimize the consequences of moral failure were inadequate.”

But, notes Feinman, learning about what led to societies collapsing in the past can help us make better choices now: “History has a chance to tell us something. That doesn’t mean it’s going to repeat exactly, but it tends to rhyme. And so that means there are lessons in these situations.”

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The ruins of the Roman Forum, once a site of a representational government. Linda Nicholas, Field Museum

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Article Source: Field Museum news release

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CELL PRESS—Of the six or more different species of early humans, all belonging to the genus Homo, only we Homo sapiens have managed to survive. Now, a study reported* in the journal One Earth on October 15 combining climate modeling and the fossil record in search of clues to what led to all those earlier extinctions of our ancient ancestors suggests that climate change–the inability to adapt to either warming or cooling temperatures–likely played a major role in sealing their fate.

“Our findings show that despite technological innovations including the use of fire and refined stone tools, the formation of complex social networks, and–in the case of Neanderthals–even the production of glued spear points, fitted clothes, and a good amount of cultural and genetic exchange with Homo sapiens, past Homo species could not survive intense climate change,” says Pasquale Raia of Università di Napoli Federico II in Napoli, Italy. “They tried hard; they made for the warmest places in reach as the climate got cold, but at the end of the day, that wasn’t enough.”

To shed light on past extinctions of Homo species including H. habilis, H. ergaster, H. erectus, H. heidelbergensis, H. neanderthalensis, and H. sapiens, the researchers relied on a high-resolution past climate emulator, which provides temperature, rainfall, and other data over the last 5 million years. They also looked to an extensive fossil database spanning more than 2,750 archaeological records to model the evolution of Homo species’ climatic niche over time. The goal was to understand the climate preferences of those early humans and how they reacted to changes in climate.

Their studies offer robust evidence that three Homo species–H. erectus, H. heidelbergensis, and H. neanderthalensis–lost a significant portion of their climatic niche just before going extinct. They report that this reduction coincided with sharp, unfavorable changes in the global climate. In the case of Neanderthals, things were likely made even worse by competition with H. sapiens.

“We were surprised by the regularity of the effect of climate change,” Raia says. “It was crystal clear, for the extinct species and for them only, that climatic conditions were just too extreme just before extinction and only in that particular moment.”

Raia notes that there is uncertainty in paleoclimatic reconstruction, the identification of fossil remains at the level of species, and the aging of fossil sites. But, he says, the main insights “hold true under all assumptions.” The findings may serve as a kind of warning to humans today as we face unprecedented changes in the climate, Raia says.

“It is worrisome to discover that our ancestors, which were no less impressive in terms of mental power as compared to any other species on Earth, could not resist climate change,” he said. “And we found that just when our own species is sawing the branch we’re sitting on by causing climate change. I personally take this as a thunderous warning message. Climate change made Homo vulnerable and hapless in the past, and this may just be happening again.”

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Courtesy Caniceus, Pixabay

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Article Source: CELL PRESS news release

This work was supported by MCTIC/CNPq/FAPEG.

*One Earth, Raia et al.: “Past extinctions of Homo species coincided with increased vulnerability to climatic change” https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322(20)30476-0

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UNIVERSITY OF COLOGNE—Favorable climatic conditions influenced the sequence of settlement movements of Homo sapiens in the Levant on their way from Africa to Europe. In a first step, modern humans settled along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Only then did they spread out into the Sinai desert and the eastern Jordanian Rift Valley. This is the result of archaeological research conducted by Collaborative Research Centre ‘Our Way to Europe’ (CRC 806) at the universities of Cologne, Bonn, and Aachen. The article ‘Al-Ansab and the Dead Sea: mid-MIS 3 Archaeology and Environment of the Early Ahmarian Population of the Levantine Corridor’ was published in PLOS ONE.

For more than ten years, the team has been analyzing sediments, pollen, and archaeological artifacts around the site of Al-Ansab 1 near the ancient ruin-city of Petra (Jordan). The goal was to gain an understanding of the environmental conditions that prevailed at the time of human expansion. ‘Human presence consolidated in the region under favorable climate conditions’, said Professor Dr Jürgen Richter, lead author of the study.

The success story of anatomically modern humans outside of Africa began about 100,000 years ago with well-known sites such as Qafzeh and Skhul in Israel. However, these early records only reveal a brief, temporary expansion of the territory into the Levant. Permanent settlement of the region only dates back to about 43,000 years ago, scientists believe. During the epoch of the so-called ‘Early Ahmarian’, modern humans gradually had been spreading throughout the Levant – a first step on their way to Asia and Europe.

Favorable climatic conditions were preconditions for permanent human settlement. On a large scale, this is illustrated by the presence of the so-called Lake Lisan. This freshwater lake was located where the Dead Sea is today. However, it was of a much larger extent and carried greater water volume. Most of the water evaporated only with the end of the last ice age, leaving behind the hypersaline Dead Sea known today.

Even on a small scale, the scientists were able to recognize the favorable environmental conditions: geo-archaeological teams from the University of Cologne and RWTH Aachen University examined the site of Al-Ansab 1. Whereas today, the Wadi Sabra, in which the site is located, is strongly shaped by seasonal flash floods, geomorphological and archaeological investigations showed that at the time of settlement, the conditions were less erosive and continuously wet, permitting the presence of humans.

‘This enabled the spread of humans from the coastal Mediterranean area to the formerly drier regions of the Negev desert and the eastern slopes of the Jordan Rift Valley. They hunted gazelles in the open landscape – a prey we found in many sites in the region from this period’, says Richter. ‘Humans did not come by steady expansion out of Africa through the Levant and further to Europe and Asia. Rather, they first settled in a coastal strip along the Mediterranean Sea.’

The region around the site of Al-Ansab 1 therefore was a stepping stone on Homo sapiens’ way – a journey that did not take a straight path to the European continent, but was guided by complex interactions between humans and their environment.

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The region near Petra, as it appears today. Fulpez, Pixabay

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF COLOGNE news release

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UNIVERSITY OF ZURICH—Today, ball games are one of the most popular leisure activities in the world, an important form of mass entertainment and big business. But who invented balls, where and when? The oldest balls that are currently known about were made in Egypt about 4,500 years ago using linen. Central Americans have been playing ball games for at least 3,700 years, as evidenced through monumental ball courts made of stone and depictions of ball players. Their oldest balls were made of rubber. Until now, it was believed that ball games in Europe and Asia followed much later: In Greece about 2,500 years ago and in China about 300 years after that.

Eurasia’s oldest known balls

Researchers from the University of Zurich, together with German and Chinese researchers, have now examined in more detail three leather balls found in graves in the old Yanghai cemetery near the city of Turfan in northwest China. The balls, measuring between 7.4 and 9.2cm in diameter, have been dated at around 2,900 to 3,200 years old. “This makes these balls about five centuries older than the previously known ancient balls and depictions of ball games in Eurasia,” says first author Patrick Wertmann of the Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies of the University of Zurich. “Unfortunately, however, the associated archaeological information is not sufficient to answer the question of exactly how these balls were played.”

The earliest illustrations from Greece show ball players running, and depictions from China show riders using sticks. Comparable curved sticks were also found in Yanghai, but there was no apparent direct connection with the balls. Moreover, they are dated to a more recent period. “Therefore, the leather balls from Yanghai are not connected to early forms of field hockey or polo, even though two of the balls were found in the graves of horsemen,” says Wertmann.

New era of Central Asian equestrian warfare

In one of the riders’ graves, the preserved remains of a composite bow and a pair of trousers (1) were found, which were made in the region at that time and are among the oldest in the world. Both are signs of a new era of horse riding, equestrian warfare and fundamental societal transformations which accompanied increasing environmental changes and a rising mobility in eastern Central Asia. The current study shows that balls and ball games were part of physical exercise and military training from the very beginning. In addition, just like today, sport also played a central role in society and was a widespread leisure activity. The study’s findings once again highlight that this region was a center of innovation within Eurasia several millennia ago.

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The area near the city of Turfan in northwest China. (Picture: UZH)

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The three leather balls with diameters between 7.4 and 9.2 cm are between 3200 and 2900 years old.(Picture: UZH)

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF ZURICH news release

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