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UPPSALA UNIVERSITY—In an interdisciplinary study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, an international research team has combined archaeological, genetic and stable isotope data to understand the demographic processes associated with the iconic Battle Axe Culture and its introduction in Scandinavia.

In 1953, a significant burial site belonging to the Battle Axe Culture was found when constructing a roundabout in Linköping. 4,500 years ago, a man and a woman were buried together with a child, a dog and a rich set of grave goods including one of the eponymous battle axes. “Today, we call this site ‘Bergsgraven’. I have been curious about this particular burial for a long time. The collaboration of archaeologists with geneticists allows us to understand more about these people as individuals as well as where their ancestors came from,” says archaeogeneticist Helena Malmström of Uppsala University, lead author of the study.

The Scandinavian Battle Axe Culture appears in the archaeological record about 5,000 years ago and archaeologically it resembles the continental European Corded Ware Culture. “The appearance and development of the culture complex has been debated for a long time, especially whether it was a regional phenomenon or whether it was associated with migratory processes of human groups, and – if the latter – from where,” says osteoarchaeologist Jan Storå of Stockholm University, one of the senior authors of the study.

By sequencing the genomes of prehistoric individuals from present-day Sweden, Estonia and Poland, the research team showed that the Scandinavian Battle Axe Culture and continental Corded Ware Culture share a common genetic ancestry, which had not been present in Scandinavia or central Europe before 5,000 years ago. “This suggests that the introduction of this new cultural manifestation was associated with movements of people. These groups have a history which we ultimately can trace back to the Pontic Steppe north of the Black Sea,” says population geneticist Torsten Günther of Uppsala University, co-lead author of the study.

In previous studies, the research team had been able to show that other cultural changes during the Stone Age, such as the introduction of farming practices, were also associated with movements of people. Torsten Günther: “Again, archaeogenomic analyses reveal new and surprising results concerning demographic processes in the Stone Age.” Jan Storå adds: “Prehistoric movements of people have played a major role in spreading innovations. But there is also some integration and reconnection of previous elements. For example, we find that people sharing the genetic signal of the Battle Axe sites were re-using megalithic tombs for their burials.”

Comparisons between these individuals and other prehistoric Scandinavians provided further valuable insights. Mattias Jakobsson, population geneticist at Uppsala University and one of the senior authors of this study, notes: “It is also interesting that the herders from the Battle Axe Culture differed from other contemporary farmer and hunter-gatherer groups in Scandinavia. At least three genetically and culturally different groups lived side-by-side for centuries and did not mix a lot.”

There is some evidence for low levels of genetic admixture between the incoming herders and other farming cultures. The research team was not able to determine whether this took place before or after their arrival in Scandinavia. “That remains an open question and still leaves room for future studies as more data from additional individuals as well as other geographic regions should provide a more detailed resolution,” concludes Helena Malmström.

The Bergsgraven burial as well as a reconstruction of the individuals is usually on exhibition at Östergötlands Museum in Linköping. “Östergötlands Museum is currently closed for renovation and renewal. Therefore, the display of the Bergsgraven grave has been temporarily removed, but it will be a central part of the upcoming exhibition, in which we aim to integrate current archaeological and historical research. This is a rare opportunity to build a new exhibition, and of course we want to tell the audience about the new analyses and interpretations made of the material,” says Per Nilsson, archaeologist at Östergötlands Museum.

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A skeleton of a male individual associated with the Neolithic Age Battle Axe culture on exhibition in Linköping, Sweden. Genomic DNA extracted from this individual was analyzed in the study. Jonas Karlsson, Östergötlands museum

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Article Source: UPPSALA UNIVERSITY news release

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AMERICAN FRIENDS OF TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY—Tel Aviv University researchers, in collaboration with scholars from Spain, have uncovered evidence of the storage and delayed consumption of animal bone marrow at Qesem Cave near Tel Aviv, the site of many major discoveries from the late Lower Paleolithic period some 400,000 years ago.

The research provides direct evidence that early Paleolithic people saved animal bones for up to nine weeks before feasting on them inside Qesem Cave.

The study, which was published in the October 9 issue of Science Advances, was led by Dr. Ruth Blasco of TAU’s Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations and Centro Nacional de Investigación Sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH) and her TAU colleagues Prof. Ran Barkai and Prof. Avi Gopher. It was conducted in collaboration with Profs. Jordi Rosell and Maite Arilla of Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV) and Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social (IPHES); Prof. Antoni Margalida of University of Lleida, University of Bern, and the Institute for Game and Wildlife Research (IREC); and Prof. Daniel Villalba of University of Lleida.

“Bone marrow constitutes a significant source of nutrition and as such was long featured in the prehistoric diet,” explains Prof. Barkai. “Until now, evidence has pointed to immediate consumption of marrow following the procurement and removal of soft tissues. In our paper, we present evidence of storage and delayed consumption of bone marrow at Qesem Cave.”

“This is the earliest evidence of such behavior and offers insight into the socioeconomics of the humans who lived at Qesem,” adds Dr. Blasco. “It also marks a threshold for new modes of Paleolithic human adaptation.”

“Prehistoric humans brought to the cave selected body parts of the hunted animal carcasses,” explains Prof. Rosell. “The most common prey was fallow deer, and limbs and skulls were brought to the cave while the rest of the carcass was stripped of meat and fat at the hunting scene and left there. We found that the deer leg bones, specifically the metapodials, exhibited unique chopping marks on the shafts, which are not characteristic of the marks left from stripping fresh skin to fracture the bone and extract the marrow.”

The researchers contend that the deer metapodials were kept at the cave covered in skin to facilitate the preservation of marrow for consumption in time of need.

The researchers evaluated the preservation of bone marrow using an experimental series on deer, controlling exposure time and environmental parameters, combined with chemical analyses. The combination of archaeological and experimental results allowed them to isolate the specific marks linked to dry skin removal and determine a low rate of marrow fat degradation of up to nine weeks of exposure.

“We discovered that preserving the bone along with the skin, for a period that could last for many weeks, enabled early humans to break the bone when necessary and eat the still nutritious bone marrow,” adds Dr. Blasco.

“The bones were used as ‘cans’ that preserved the bone marrow for a long period until it was time to take off the dry skin, shatter the bone and eat the marrow,” Prof. Barkai emphasizes.

Until recently, it was believed that the Paleolithic people were hunter gatherers who lived hand-to-mouth (the Stone Age version of farm-to-table), consuming whatever they caught that day and enduring long periods of hunger when food sources were scarce.

“We show for the first time in our study that 420,000 to 200,000 years ago, prehistoric humans at Qesem Cave were sophisticated enough, intelligent enough and talented enough to know that it was possible to preserve particular bones of animals under specific conditions, and, when necessary, remove the skin, crack the bone and eat the bone marrow,” Prof. Gopher explains.

According to the research, this is the earliest evidence in the world of food preservation and delayed consumption of food. This discovery joins other evidence of innovative behaviors found in Qesem Cave including recycling, the regular use of fire, and cooking and roasting meat.

“We assume that all this was because elephants, previously a major source of food for humans, were no longer available, so the prehistoric humans in our region had to develop and invent new ways of living,” concludes Prof. Barkai. “This kind of behavior allowed humans to evolve and enter into a far more sophisticated kind of socioeconomic existence.”

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Marrow inside a metapodial bone after six weeks of storage. Dr. Ruth Blasco/AFTAU

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Article Source: AMERICAN FRIENDS OF TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY news release

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BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY, BINGHAMTON, NY – A nearly 4,000-year-old burial site found off the coast of Georgia hints at ties between hunter-gatherers on opposite sides of North America, according to research led by faculty at Binghamton University, State University of New York.

A research team led by Matthew Sanger, assistant professor of anthropology at Binghamton University, analyzed human remains, stone tools and a copper band found in an ancient burial pit in the McQueen shell ring on St. Catherine’s Island, Georgia. The burial at the shell ring closely resembles similar graves found in the Great Lakes region, suggesting an exchange network between the Great Lakes and the coastal southeast United States. Similarities in mortuary practices suggest that the movement of objects between these two regions was more direct and unmediated than archaeologists previously assumed.

“Our excavations revealed remarkable parallels between the shell ring in the coastal Southeast and in broadly contemporaneous sites in the Great Lakes including: the use of cremation to handle the dead, cremating the dead in an area separate from where the bones were eventually buried, the use of copper as a burial item, the burial of multiple people at the same time, and the use of ocher in the burial,” said Sanger. “Not only are these practices very similar, our analyses clearly show that the copper found at the shell ring originated in the Great Lakes and was therefore traded between the two regions. Notably, all of these practices are rare, or entirely absent, from the regions between the Great Lakes and the southeast, which suggests that there was not some sort of general diffusion of traditions, but rather a direct “transplant.”

According to the researchers, these findings challenge prevalent notions that view preagricultural Native American communities as relatively isolated from one another and suggest instead that wide social networks spanned much of North America thousands of years before the advent of domestication.

“These findings strongly suggest that Native Americans living in the Eastern Woodlands more than 3,000 years ago were far more interconnected than we have ever thought,” said Sanger. “Rather than living in small groups with limited contacts, Native American communities were cosmopolitan; they traded with distant peoples, they engaged in complex social and economic relationships, and they had direct and indirect knowledge spanning hundreds if not thousands of kilometers. Amazingly, all of this occurred thousands of years before Native Americans invented agricultural practices – the point at which “social complexity” is thought to emerge by many archaeologists.”

The discovery of long-distance exchange of prestige goods among Archaic period communities living in the U.S. Southeast challenges traditional notions of hunter-gatherers as living in relative isolation and instead suggests nonagrarian groups created and maintained vast social networks thousands of years earlier than typically assumed.

“Traditionally, archaeologists have thought that agriculture played a key role in the creation of long-distance interactions as domesticated food sources can produce massive surpluses, which can then be used to establish more complex social and political power structures and relations,” said Sanger. “Increasingly though, archaeologists from around the world are finding that non-agricultural people engaged in activities long thought reserved for farmers. Our findings at the shell ring are part of a much broader revolution in archaeology where non-agricultural people are viewed as living far more complex, interconnected and interesting lives than previously assumed.

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Native Americans had long-distance networks before agriculture.

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Article Source: Binghamton University news release

The paper, “Great Lakes Copper and Shared Mortuary Practices on the Atlantic Coast: Implications for Long-Distance Exchange during the Late Archaic,” was published in American Antiquity. 

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PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES—A study* explores how ancient Maya cultivated wetlands in Belize. Wetlands can function as farming fields during times of extreme weather events and provide evidence of environmental changes. However, current knowledge of how the Maya used wetlands for farming is limited. Timothy Beach and colleagues used airborne lidar surveys and radiocarbon dating to determine the chronology and ancient uses of 4 Maya wetland complexes in Belize’s Rio Bravo watershed. The area of wetland complexes totaled 14.08 km2. Although some field systems within the complexes dated between approximately 1,800 to 900 years ago, most dated to approximately 1,400 to 1,000 years ago. The wetlands served as large-scale, polycultural, agricultural systems for growing Maya crops, such as avocado, maize, and squash, and were active during extreme weather events, such as droughts, and times of population expansion in the Late Classic. The authors also determined that the Birds of Paradise complex is 5 times larger than initially thought, and the authors found an even larger complex. The findings suggest that wetland fields may have been adaptations to major shifts in Maya civilization as the demand for food increased, according to the authors.

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Pictured is the Birds of Paradise ancient Maya wetland field system and parts of the nearby Maya sites of Gran Cacao (bottom-left) and Akab Muclil (top-left) in northwestern Belize. Image courtesy of Timothy Beach, Sara Eshleman, Samantha Krause, Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach, and Colin Doyle

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Article Source: PNAS news release

*”Ancient Maya wetland fields revealed under tropical forest canopy from laser scanning and multiproxy evidence,” by Timothy Beach et al

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Diamond Light Source—Researchers led by the renowned ancient artifacts decoder, Professor Brent Seales, will be using Diamond, the UK’s national synchrotron science facility in the heart of Oxfordshire, to examine a collection of world-famous ancient artifacts owned by the Institut de France. Using this powerful light source and special techniques the team has developed, the researchers are working to virtually unwrap two complete scrolls and four fragments from the damaged Herculaneum scrolls. After decades of effort, Seales thinks the scans from Diamond represent his team’s best chance yet to reveal the elusive contents of these 2,000-year-old papyri.

Prof Seales is director of the Digital Restoration Initiative at the University of Kentucky (US), a research program dedicated to the development of software tools that enable the recovery of fragile, unreadable texts. According to Seales, “Diamond Light Source is an absolutely crucial element in our long-term plan to reveal the writing from damaged materials, as it offers unparalleled brightness and control for the images we can create, plus access to a brain trust of scientists who understand our challenges and are eager to help us succeed.?Texts from the ancient world are rare and precious, and they simply cannot be revealed through any other known process. Thanks to the opportunity to study the scrolls at Diamond Light Source, which has been made possible by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew Mellon Foundation, we are poised to take a tremendous step forward in our ability to read and visualize this material. The scan session promises to be a key moment in our quest for a reliable pathway to reading the invisible library.”

Over the past two decades, Prof Seales and his team have worked to digitally restore and read the vast amount of material in the “invisible library” of irreparably damaged manuscripts. In 2015 they achieved singular success when they visualized the never-before and never-to-be-seen writing trapped inside five complete wraps of the ancient Hebrew scroll from En Gedi (see Science Advances). For the first time ever, a complete text from an object so severely damaged that it could never be opened physically was digitally retrieved and recreated, representing a true technical breakthrough (see Virtually Unwrapping the En Gedi Scroll). It is this technology that Seales’ team plans to deploy on the data collected at Diamond.

A long-term goal of Prof Seales has been to reveal the contents of the most iconic items in the invisible library, the Herculaneum scrolls. Buried and carbonized by the deadly eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, the scrolls are too fragile to be opened and represent the perfect storm of important content, massive damage, extreme fragility, and difficult-to-detect ink.

These famous papyri were discovered in 1752 in an ancient Roman villa near the Bay of Naples believed to belong to the family of Julius Caesar. As such, they represent the only surviving library from antiquity. The majority of the 1,800 scrolls reside at the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, although a few were offered as gifts to dignitaries by the King of Naples and wound up at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, the British Library, and the Institut de France.

Last May, Prof Seales headed a small team of undergraduate students in Paris to survey the Institut de France’s Herculaneum collection. They examined two completely intact scrolls, along with four small fragments from scrolls unrolled in the late 1800s. All six items will be scanned at Diamond. Because the four fragments contain many layers and feature visible, exposed writing on the top, they will provide the key data needed to develop the next iteration of the team’s “virtual unwrapping” software pipeline, a machine learning algorithm that will enable the visualization of carbon ink.

The use of carbon ink is one of the main reasons these scrolls have evaded deciphering, according to Prof Seales. Unlike metal-based inks, such as the iron gall used to write medieval documents, carbon ink has a density similar to that of the carbonized papyrus on which it sits. Therefore, it appears invisible in X-ray scans.

“We do not expect to immediately see the text from the upcoming scans, but they will provide the crucial building blocks for enabling that visualization. First, we will immediately see the internal structure of the scrolls in more definition than has ever been possible, and we need that level of detail to ferret out the highly compressed layers on which the text sits. In addition, we believe strongly–and contrary to conventional wisdom–that tomography does indeed capture subtle, non-density-based evidence of ink, even when it is invisible to the naked eye in the scan data. The machine learning tool we are developing will amplify that ink signal by training a computer algorithm to recognize it-pixel by pixel-from photographs of opened fragments that show exactly where the ink is–voxel by voxel–in the corresponding tomographic data of the fragments. The tool can then be deployed on data from the still-rolled scrolls, identify the hidden ink, and make it more prominently visible to any reader.”

The scanning of these delicate items at the leading science facility, Diamond, will be a mammoth undertaking, for all involved. Because of their extreme fragility, the Seales team fabricated custom-fit cases for the scrolls that enable as little handling as possible. Only highly trained conservators are allowed to handle the samples. The Director of the Bibliothèque at the Institut de France, Mme Françoise Bérard will personally pack the scrolls into their special cases for travel to the UK, and after arrival they will be inserted into the I12 beamline at Diamond. The I12 beamline or JEEP (Joint Engineering, Environmental, and Processing) beamline is a high energy X-ray beamline for imaging, diffraction and scattering, which operates at photon energies of?53-150 keV.

While a handful of the scrolls from Herculaneum have been subjected to physical (and largely disastrous) efforts to open them, no one as yet has managed to reveal complete texts from the hundreds that remain tightly closed. Principle Beamline Scientist on the Diamond I12 Beamline where the experiment will take place, Dr. Thomas Connolley, adds; “This is the first time an intact scroll has been scanned in such detail at Diamond Light Source. We are very excited to work with the research team, playing our part in what we hope will be a major step forward in unlocking the secrets that the scrolls contain.”

“It’s ironic, and somewhat poetic,” concludes Seales, “that the scrolls sacrificed during the past era of disastrous physical methods will serve as the key to retrieving the text from those survive but are unreadable. And by digitally restoring and reading these texts, which are arguably the most challenging and prestigious to decipher, we will forge a pathway for revealing any type of ink on any type of substrate in any type of damaged cultural artifact.”

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End view of one of the two Herculaneum scrolls from L’Institut de France being scanned at Diamond Light Source by the University of Kentucky, Digital Restoration Initiative team. Diamond Light Source

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Science Advances, AAAS:  “Seeing” the Writing Hidden on the Reverse Side of an Ancient Text—Using the shortwave-infrared hyperspectral imaging— scientists have revealed portions of Greek text hidden on the back of an ancient scroll discovered in the 18^th century. The findings confirm the value of this imaging technique both for reading text on the reverse side of the Herculaneum papyri scrolls, which have been mounted to a support, and for reading the writing on the front of the scrolls. While 18^th-century drawings suggested the existence of writing on the back of the papyri, scholars have been unable to remove the scrolls from the paperboard to which they are permanently glued because this would involve painstaking work and could cause them to disintegrate. A. Tournié et al. applied the shortwave-infrared hyperspectral imaging to the most famous scroll, which contains text from the philosophical work History of the Academy by Philodemus, demonstrating its superior usefulness compared with previous imaging conducted at 950 nanometers. The researchers selected a passage in which scholars had identified the word “charmed” or “bewitched,” showing clearly with their improved resolution that the word was actually “enslaved.” However, while the technique produces better contrast than imaging at 950 nanometers, Tournié and colleagues note that it does enable holes and thin fractures or wrinkles to be mistaken for ink. They note that this issue could be resolved in the future by using a lens that leads to a spatial resolution of about 100 micrometers.

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Conventional picture of PHerc. 16911021. K. Fleischer, University of Würzburg

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Scanning the scroll samples. A. Tournié, Centre de Recherche sur la Conservation

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Article Source: Diamond Light Source and Science Advances news releases

MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY—Microliths – small stone tools – are often interpreted as being part of composite tools, including projectile weapons, and essential to efficient hunting strategies of Homo sapiens. In Europe and Africa, the earliest appearance of these lithic toolkits are linked to hunting medium and large-sized animals in grassland or woodland settings, or as adaptations to risky environments during periods of climatic change. Yet the presence of small, quartz stone tools in Sri Lanka suggests the existence of more diverse ecological contexts for the development and use of these technologies by some of the earliest members of our species migrating out of Africa.

The paper*, published in PLOS One and led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History alongside colleagues from Sri Lankan and other international institutions, reports microliths from the cave site of Fa-Hien Lena in the tropical evergreen rainforests of Sri Lanka, which have been dated to between 48,000 and 45,000 years ago. This is as early, or earlier, than the well-known ‘Upper Palaeolithic’ technologies of Europe associated with Homo sapiens, and highlights that these sophisticated toolkits were a key part of our species’ ecological flexibility as it colonized the Eurasian continent.

Tropical rainforests: a unique challenge

In the last decade, growing archaeological evidence has documented the use of tropical rainforest resources by Homo sapiens in several locations in South Asia, South East Asia, and Melanesia between 45,000 and 36,000 years ago. This is much earlier than previously considered, especially given stereotypes that these environments were ‘barriers’ to human migration, with disease, dangerous animals, and limited resources all posing challenges. Instead, research on human dispersal in Asia has focused on potential human use of coastal and savanna environments.

The island of Sri Lanka, at the southern tip of South Asia, has emerged as a particularly important area for investigating the adaptations of prehistoric hunter-gatherers to tropical rainforests. The earliest South Asian human fossils are found in Sri Lankan caves and rockshelters, in levels dated to about 45,000-36,000 years ago, and scientific analyses of these remains has highlighted human reliance on closed forest resources. Early microliths, commonly associated with efficient hunting strategies by our species, have also been found, yet more detailed analyses have been lacking. Finding such artifacts in this context is significant given that microliths have commonly been linked to hunting medium to large game in grassland settings.

‘Microliths’: why care?

Traditionally, the miniaturization of stone tool technology has been seen as a major step in the development of novel, projectile technologies such as the bow and arrow. While definitions are variable, the focus of human stone tool producers on the creation of small, sharp lithics is something that has been witnessed in Africa, Europe, and India from around 60,000-45,000 years ago. Early occurrences of this strategy have also been documented in Sri Lanka since the 1980s, by Siran Deraniyagala, but were frequently neglected due to a Eurocentric belief that such tools could not have been produced in this part of the world prior to similar technologies in Europe (at the time dated to only ~20,000 years ago).

Microlithic toolkits may also denote how fast and along which routes our species migrated through Asia. For example, a prominent argument states that microlith technologies emerged in Africa, and then rapidly dispersed along the Indian Ocean rim, acting as a proxy for the supposedly first, rapid movement of Homo sapiens through coastal settings. However, significant, local differences have been noted for microlith stone tools in Asia and Africa, alongside regional technological continuity, and a clear ‘coming and going’ of these type of tools as situations demanded them or not. Investigation of these tools and their adaptive context in different parts of the world is therefore crucial to discussions of human evolution and the archaeology of the last 100,000 years.

A Sri Lankan specialty

Sri Lanka has been a prominent part of discussions of early human adaptations to tropical rainforests, though there has been a lack of systematic, detailed analysis of the technological strategies associated with clear geochemical evidence or animal remains that demonstrate a clearly specialized adaptation. “We undertook detailed measurements of stone tools and reconstructed their production patterns at the site of Fa-Hien Lena Cave, the site with the earliest evidence for human occupation in Sri Lanka,” says PhD student Oshan Wedage of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, lead author of the study.

“We found clear evidence for the production of ‘miniaturized’ stone tools or ‘microliths’ at Fa-Hien Lena, dating to the earliest period of human occupation,” Wedage continues. “Interestingly, our evidence also shows that stone tool technology changed little over the long span of human occupation, from 48,000 to 4,000 years ago,” says Andrea Picin, also of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, co-author of the study. This would imply that the technological adaptation practiced by the earliest rainforest foragers on the island proved to be remarkably successful over the course of millennia.

Dedicated ‘plasticity’

“While we suspect that these small stone tools were used as part of projectile technologies, as we have also found for bone tools at the same site, residue analysis and impact fracture analysis is ongoing,” says Michael Petraglia, co-corresponding author of the paper. “Whatever the results, these miniaturized stone tools place Sri Lanka in a central position in terms of discussing technological sophistication among our species. We have essentially uncovered the ‘Upper Palaeolithic’ of the rainforest.”

Patrick Roberts, another co-corresponding author, continues, “It is evident that these microliths were part of a flexible human toolkit that enabled Homo sapiens to spread into all of the world’s environments, demonstrating unparalleled ecological ‘plasticity’ when compared to other hominin species.” The data from Sri Lanka is just one example of human populations demonstrating a remarkable ability to specialize their technological and cultural approaches to novel ecological situations during their movement across the majority of the Earth’s continents by 12,000 years ago.

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Fa Hien Cave in rainforests of Sri Lanka. Max Planck Institute

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Fa Hien Cave overlooking rainforest. Max Planck Institute

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Oldest microlithic artifacts from Fa Hien Cave. Max Planck Institute

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

*Oshan Wedage, Andrea Picin, James Blinkhorn, Katerina Douka, Siran Deraniyagala, Nikos Kourampas, Nimal Perera, Ian Simpson, Nicole Boivin, Michael Petraglia, Patrick Roberts, Microliths in the South Asian rainforest ~45-4 ka: new insights from Fa-Hien Lena Cave, Sri Lanka  https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0222606

FLINDERS UNIVERSITY—Fossil animal droppings, charcoal from ancient fires and bone fragments litter the ground of one of the world’s most important human evolution sites, new research reveals.

The latest evidence from southern Siberia shows that large cave-dwelling carnivores once dominated the landscape, competing for more than 300,000 years with ancient tribes for prime space in cave shelters.

A team of Russian and Australian scientists have used modern geoarchaeological techniques to unearth new details of day-to-day life in the famous Denisova Cave complex in Siberia’s Altai Mountains.

Large carnivores such hyena, wolves and even bears and at least three early nomadic human groups (hominins) – Denisovans, Neanderthals, and early Homo sapiens – used this famous archaeological site, the researchers say in a new Scientific Reports study* examining the dirt deposited in the cave complex over thousands of years.

“These hominin groups and large carnivores such as hyenas and wolves left a wealth of microscopic traces that illuminate the use of the cave over the last three glacial-interglacial cycles,” says lead author, Flinders University ARC Future Fellow Dr Mike Morley.

“Our results complement previous work by some of our colleagues at the site that has identified ancient DNA in the same dirt, belonging to Neanderthals and a previously unknown human group, the Denisovans, as well as a wide range of other animals”.

But it now seems that it was the animals that mostly ruled the cave space back then.

Microscopic studies of 3-4 meters of sediment left in the cave network includes fossil droppings left by predatory animals such as cave hyenas, wolves and possibly bears, many of their kind made immortal in ancient rock art before going extinct across much of Eurasia.

From their ‘micromorphology’ examination of the dirt found in Denisova Cave, the team discovered clues about the use of the cave, including fire-use by ancient humans and the presence of other animals.

The study of intact sediment blocks collected from the cave has yielded information not evident to the naked eye or gleaned from previous studies of ancient DNA, stone tools or animal and plant remains.

Co-author of the new research, University of Wollongong Distinguished Professor Richard (Bert) Roberts, says the study is very significant because it shows how much can be achieved by sifting through sedimentary material using advanced microscopy and other archaeological science methods to find critical new evidence about human and non-human life on Earth.

“Using microscopic analyses, our latest study shows sporadic hominin visits, illustrated by traces of the use of fire such as miniscule fragments, but with continuous use of the site by cave-dwelling carnivores such as hyenas and wolves,” says Professor Roberts.

“Fossil droppings (coprolites) indicate the persistent presence of non-human cave dwellers, which are very unlikely to have co-habited with humans using the cave for shelter.”

This implies that ancient groups probably came and went for short-lived episodes, and at all other times the cave was occupied by these large predators.

The Siberian site came to prominence more than a decade ago with the discovery of the fossil remains of a previously unknown human group, dubbed the Denisovans after the local name for the cave.

In a surprising twist, the recent discovery of a bone fragment in the cave sediments showed that a teenage girl was born of a Neanderthal mother and Denisovan father more than 90,000 years ago.

Denisovans and Neanderthals inhabited parts of Eurasia until perhaps 50,000 to 40,000 years ago, when they were replaced by modern humans (Homo sapiens).

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Flinders University researcher Dr Mike Morley taking samples from Denisova Cave complex. Dr. Paul Goldbert, University of Wollongong

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Microscopic studies of sediment left in the cave includes fossil droppings left by predatory animals such as hyenas and wolves. Dr Mike Morley, Flinders University

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profiles of sediment showing a Denisova fossil poo gallery, including hyena, wolf and other unidentified. Dr. Mike Morley, Flinders University

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Article Source: Flinders University news release

*’Hominin and animal activities in the microstratigraphic record from Denisova Cave (Altai Mountains, Russia)’ 2019 (9:13785) by MW Morley, P Goldberg, VA Uliyanov, MB Kozlikin, MV Shunkov, AP Derevianko, Z Jacobs and RG Roberts has been published in Scientific Reports DOI: 10.1038/s41598-019-49930-3

UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL—A team of scientists, led by the University of Bristol, has found the first evidence that prehistoric babies were fed animal milk using the equivalent of modern-day baby bottles.

Possible infant feeding vessels, made from clay, first appear in Europe in the Neolithic (at around 5,000 BC), becoming more commonplace throughout the Bronze and Iron Ages.

The vessels are usually small enough to fit within a baby’s hands and have a spout through which liquid could be suckled. Sometimes they have feet and are shaped like imaginary animals. Despite this, in the lack of any direct evidence for their function, it has been suggested they may also be feeding vessels for the sick or infirm.

The researchers wanted to investigate whether these were in fact infant feeding vessels (baby bottles) so they selected three examples found in very rare child graves in Bavaria. These were small (about 5 – 10 cm across) with an extremely narrow spout.

The team used a combined chemical and isotopic approach to identify and quantify the food residues found within the vessels. Their findings, published today in the journal Nature, showed that the bottles contained ruminant milk from domesticated cattle, sheep or goat.

The presence of these three obviously specialized vessels in child graves combined with the chemical evidence confirms that these vessels were used to feed animal milk to babies either in the place of human milk and/or during weaning onto supplementary foods.

Prior to this study, the only evidence for weaning came from isotopic analysis of infant skeletons, but this could only give rough guidelines of when children were weaned, not what they were eating/drinking. The study thus provides important information on breastfeeding and weaning practices, and infant and maternal health, in prehistory.

This is the first study that has applied this direct method of identification of weaning foods to infants in the past and opens the way for investigations of feeding vessels from other ancient cultures worldwide.

Lead author, Dr Julie Dunne from the University of Bristol’s School of Chemistry, said: “These very small, evocative, vessels give us valuable information on how and what babies were fed thousands of years ago, providing a real connection to mothers and infants in the past.”

She continued: “Similar vessels, although rare, do appear in other prehistoric cultures (such as Rome and ancient Greece) across the world. Ideally, we’d like to carry out a larger geographic study and investigate whether they served the same purpose.”

Project partner, Dr Katharina Rebay-Salisbury from the Institute for Oriental and European Archaeology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, who directs an ERC-funded project on motherhood in prehistory, added: “Bringing up babies in prehistory was not an easy task. We are interested in researching cultural practices of mothering, which had profound implications for the survival of babies. It is fascinating to be able to see, for the first time, which foods these vessels contained.”

Professor Richard Evershed FRS who heads up Bristol’s Organic Geochemistry Unit and is a co-author of the study, added: “This is a striking example of how robust biomolecular information, properly integrated with the archaeology of these rare objects, has provided a fascinating insight into an aspect of prehistoric human life so familiar to us today.”

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Modern-day baby feeding from reconstructed infant feeding vessel of the type investigated here. Helena Seidl da Fonseca

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Late Bronze Age feeding vessels from Vösendorf, Austria. Enver-Hirsch © Wien Museum

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL news release

PLOS—During the late 10th century BCE, the emerging Edomite Kingdom of the southern Levant experienced a “leap” in technological advancement, according to a study released September 18, 2019 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Erez Ben-Yosef of Tel Aviv University, Israel and colleagues. This finding supports the use of a “punctuated equilibrium” model for the development of ancient technology.

Punctuated equilibrium was originally proposed as a model for evolutionary change characterized by long-term stasis punctuated by short-lived episodes of rapid change, in contrast to a “gradualistic” model of slow and consistent change over time. In this study, Ben-Yosef and colleagues propose that the same theoretical model might be a useful tool for understanding the advancement of ancient technologies.

To test this hypothesis, the authors compiled an unparalleled dataset of over 150 samples of slag leftover from metallurgical technology in the Wadi Arabah region of the Levant in the Middle East, dating from 1300 to 800 BCE. Using copper content as a proxy for the efficiency of smelting techniques, they established a timeline of metallurgical advancement. The analysis revealed a long period of relatively gradual development across the region followed by a rapid “leap” to more efficient technology in the late 10th century BCE.

This case study provides support for the idea that ancient technologies could, in some cases, have developed through occasional “leaps” of rapid change. In this circumstance, the technological leap was an important part of the emergence of the Biblical Edomite Kingdom and the transition of this region from the Bronze Age into the Iron Age.

“Our study sheds new light on the emergence of the archaeologically-elusive biblical kingdom of Edom, indicating that the process started much earlier than previously thought” says Ben-Yosef. “That said, the study’s contribution goes beyond the Edomite case, as it provides significant insights on ancient technological evolution and the intricate interconnections between technology and society. The results demonstrate that the punctuated equilibrium evolutionary model is applicable to ancient technological developments, and that in turn, these developments are proxies for social processes”.

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Excavations of ancient copper mines as part of Tel Aviv University’s Central Timna Valley Project. Copper production technologies and the organization of the industry reflect the society responsible for this enterprise. E. Ben-Yosef and the Central Timna Valley Project

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Article Source: PLOS news release

*Ben-Yosef E, Liss B, Yagel OA, Tirosh O, Najjar M, Levy TE (2019) Ancient technology and punctuated change: Detecting the emergence of the Edomite Kingdom in the Southern Levant. PLoS ONE 14(9): e0221967. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0221967

GARVAN INSTITUTE OF MEDICAL RESEARCH—Findings from the Garvan Institute of Medical Research show modern humans acquired a gene variant from Denisovans that heightened their immune reactions, indicating adaptation of the immune system to a changing environment.

The breakthrough study, published in Nature Immunology, is the first to demonstrate a single DNA sequence variant from an extinct human species that changes the activity of the modern human immune system.

The Denisovans – an extinct human species related to Neanderthals – interbred with modern humans ~50,000 years ago during the migrations of modern humans from Africa to what is now Papua New Guinea and Australia. Today, up to 5% of the genome of people indigenous to Papua New Guinea is derived from Denisovans.

The Garvan study reveals that modern humans acquired a gene variant from Denisovans that increases a range of immune reactions and inflammatory responses – including reactions that protect humans from disease-causing microbes.

“Our study indicates that the Denisovan gene variant heightens the inflammatory response in humans,” says co-senior author Associate Professor Shane Grey, who heads the Transplantation Immunology Laboratory at Garvan.

“Previous research has found collections of gene variants from extinct human species that appear to have provided an advantage to humans living at high altitudes or to resist viruses, but have been unable to pinpoint which if any were actually functional,” he adds. “This study is the first to identify a single, functional variant, and suggests that it also had an evolutionary benefit on the human immune system.”

Discovering an immune switch

Harmful versions of a gene called TNFAIP3 have long been associated with the overactive immunity in autoimmune conditions, including inflammatory bowel diseases, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, lupus, psoriasis and type 1 diabetes. The TNFAIP3 gene codes for a protein called A20 that helps ‘cool’ the immune system by reducing immune reactions to foreign molecules and microbes.

As part of a collaboration between Garvan, the Sydney Children’s Hospital, Randwick, the Children’s Hospital at Westmead, and the Clinical Immunogenomics Research Consortium of Australasia (CIRCA), the researchers analysed the genomes of families in which one child presented with a severe and unusual autoimmune or inflammatory condition.

“Four separate families had the same DNA variant in the TNFAIP3 gene, changing one amino acid in the A20 protein from an isoleucine to a leucine (I207L)”, says Professor Goodnow, Executive Director of the Garvan Institute and co-senior author of the study. “However, the presence of this variant in healthy family members indicated it was not sufficient to cause inflammatory disease on its own.”

The researchers extracted immune cells from the families’ blood samples, and found that, in cell culture, they produced a stronger inflammatory response than the immune cells of other individuals.

Tracing back immunity

Using datasets made available through the Simons Genome Diversity Project, the Indonesian Genome Diversity Project, Massey University, and the Telethon Kids Institute, which includes genome sequence data on hundreds of diverse human populations, co-first author and Flinders University senior researcher Dr Owen Siggs investigated the worldwide distribution of the TNFAIP3 variant.

The I207L variant carried by the Sydney families was absent from most populations but common in indigenous populations east of the Wallace Line, a deep ocean trench passing between Bali and Lombok and separating Asian fauna to the west from Australian fauna to the east. The I207L variant was common in people throughout Oceania, including people with Indigenous Australian, Melanesian, Maori and Polynesian ancestry.

“The fact that this rare version of the gene was enriched in these populations, and displayed genetic signatures of positive selection, means it was almost certainly beneficial for human health,” says Associate Professor Grey.

The team also discovered the I207L variant in the genome sequence of an extinct human species, extracted from a 50,000-year-old finger bone of a Denisovan girl, found inside the Denisova cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia. “Making that connection was extremely exciting,” says Dr Siggs.

The I207L variant was present in two copies in the Denisovan girl but absent from Neanderthal remains from the same cave, indicating that the immunity-enhancing gene variant arose after the divergence of the Denisovan and Neanderthal lineages ~400,000 years ago.

Dialling up the immune system

To investigate the Denisovan gene variant’s effects on the immune system, co-first author Dr Nathan Zammit replicated the I207L variant in a mouse model. “When exposed to a pathogenic Coxsackie virus strain – a virus which was originally isolated from a fatal case of human infant infection – mice with the Denisovan variant had stronger immune reactions and resisted the infection better than mice without the Denisovan gene,” Dr Zammit explains.

“Our study indicates that the Denisovan variant, and others like it, act on a ‘temperature control’ dial in the immune system, turning up the temperature to change how we respond to different microbes,” says Professor Goodnow.

“It was previously thought that A20, a gene that’s central to the immune system, is binary – either it’s switched on or off,” adds Associate Professor Grey. “We’ve found it in fact tunes us as individuals to optimal ‘Goldilocks points’ in between – where immune reactions are neither too hot nor too cold – and that blows the field wide open.”

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Map shows the frequency of the Denisovan TNFAIP3 gene variant in modern human populations of Island South East Asia and Oceania, it is found to be common east of the Wallace Line. Owen Siggs

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Article Source: GARVAN INSTITUTE OF MEDICAL RESEARCH news release

CNRS—The first evidence of human occupation in northern France has been put back by 150,000 years, thanks to the findings of a team of scientists from the CNRS and the Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle at the emblematic site of Moulin Quignon in the department of the Somme. The site, now located in the gardens of a housing estate in Abbeville, was rediscovered in 2017 after falling into oblivion for over 150 years.

More than 260 flint objects, including 5 bifaces or hand axes, dating from 650,000 to 670,000 years ago, have been uncovered in sands and gravel deposited by the river Somme about 30 metres above the current valley.

This also makes Moulin Quignon the oldest site in north-western Europe where bifaces have been found. The discovery confirms the central position of the Somme Valley in current debates about Europe’s oldest settlements.

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Acheulean handaxe discovered at a Paleolithic site in the Somme region of France. Didier Descouens, Wikimedia Commons

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Article Source: CNRS news release

The study was published on 11 September 2019 in the online journal Scientific Reports http://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-49400-w

AMERICAN FRIENDS OF TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY—The Acheulian culture endured in the Levant for over a million years during the Lower Paleolithic period (1.4 million to 400,000 years ago). Its use of bifaces or large cutting tools like hand axes and cleavers is considered a hallmark of its sophistication — or, some researchers would argue, the lack thereof.

A new Tel Aviv University-led study published in Nature‘s Scientific Reports on September 10 reveals that these early humans also crafted tiny flint tools out of recycled larger discarded instruments as part of a comprehensive animal-butchery tool kit. This suggests that the Acheulians were, in fact, far more sophisticated than previously believed.

The international team of researchers, led by Dr. Flavia Venditti and Prof. Ran Barkai of TAU’s Department of Archeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures together with colleagues from La Sapienza Rome University, discovered tiny flint flakes in the Lower Paleolithic Late Acheulian site of Revadim. In the past, this site yielded various stone assemblages, including dozens of hand axes, as well as animal remains, primarily of elephants.

The new research is based on expert analyses of 283 tiny flint items some 300,000-500,000 years old.

“The analysis included microscopic observations of use-wear as well as organic and inorganic residues,” explains Dr. Venditti. “We were looking for signs of edge damage, striations, polishes, and organic residue trapped in depressions in the tiny flint flakes, all to understand what the flakes were used for.”

According to the microscopic use signs and organic residue found on the tiny flakes, these flint specimens were not merely industrial waste left over from the production of larger tools. In addition, they were the deliberate product of recycled discarded artifacts and intended for a specific use.

“For decades, archaeologists did not pay attention to these tiny flakes. Emphasis was instead focused on large, elaborate hand axes and other impressive stone tools,” says Prof. Barkai. “But we now have solid evidence proving the vital use of the two-inch flakes.”

“We show here for the first time that the tiny tools were deliberately manufactured from recycled material and played an important role in the ancient human toolbox and survival strategies,” adds Dr. Venditti.

The Acheulian culture, which was also prevalent in Africa, Europe, and Asia at the time, was characterized by the standard production of large impressive stone tools, mainly used in the butchery of the enormous animals that walked the earth.

“Ancient humans depended on the meat and especially the fat of animals for their existence and well-being. So the quality butchery of the large animals and the extraction of every possible calorie was of paramount importance to them,” Prof. Barkai says.

According to the study, which was conducted over the course of three years, the tiny tools were used at stages of the butchery process that required precise cutting, such as tendon separation, meat carving and periosteum removal for marrow acquisition. Some 107 tiny flakes showed signs of processing animal carcasses. Eleven flakes also revealed organic and inorganic residues, mainly of bone but also of soft tissue. Experiments carried out with reproductions of the tools showed that the small flakes must have been used for delicate tasks, performed in tandem with larger butchery tools.

“We have an image of ancient humans as bulky, large creatures who attacked elephants with large stone weapons. They then gobbled as much of these elephants as they could and went to sleep,” Prof. Barkai says. “In fact, they were much more sophisticated than that. The tiny flakes acted as surgical tools created and used for delicate cutting of exact parts of elephants’ as well as other animals’ carcasses to extract every possible calorie.

“Nothing was wasted. Discarded stone tools were recycled to produce new tiny cutting implements. This reflects a refined, accurate, thoughtful, and environmentally conscious culture. This ecological awareness allowed ancient humans to thrive for thousands of years.”

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Tiny flake from Revadim site: Reconstruction of hand grip during use. Prof. Ran Barkai, Tel Aviv University

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The removal of meat from a bone using a replica of the Revadim tiny flake. Prof. Ran Barkai, Tel Aviv University

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Skin cutting using a replica of the Revadim tiny flake. Prof. Ran Barkai, Tel Aviv University

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Article Source: AMERICAN FRIENDS OF TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY news release

UNIVERSITY OF BRADFORD—Researchers at the University of Bradford have shown a link between the diet of Roman Britons and their mortality rates for the first time, overturning a previously-held belief about the quality of the Roman diet.

Using a new method of analysis, the researchers examined stable isotope data (the ratios of particular chemicals in human tissue) from the bone collagen of hundreds of Roman Britons, together with the individuals’ age-of-death estimates and an established mortality model.

The data sample included over 650 individuals from various published archaeological sites throughout England.

The researchers – from institutions including the Museum of London, Durham University and the University of South Carolina – found that higher nitrogen isotope ratios in the bones were associated with a higher risk of mortality, while higher carbon isotope ratios were associated with a lower risk of mortality.

Romano-British urban archaeological populations are characterised by higher nitrogen isotope ratios, which have been thought previously to indicate a better, or high-status, diet. But taking carbon isotope ratios, as well as death rates, into account showed that the nitrogen could also be recording long-term nutritional stress, such as deprivation or starvation.

Differences in sex were also identified by the researchers, with the data showing that men typically had higher ratios of both isotopes, indicating a generally higher status diet compared to women.

Dr Julia Beaumont of the University of Bradford said: “Normally nitrogen and carbon stable isotopes change in the same direction, with higher ratios of both indicating a better diet such as the consumption of more meat or marine foods. But if the isotope ratios go in opposite directions it can indicate that the individual was under long-term nutritional stress. This was corroborated in our study by the carbon isotope ratios which went down, rather than up, where higher mortality was seen.”

During nutritional stress, if there is insufficient intake of protein and calories, nitrogen within the body is recycled to make new proteins, with a resulting rise in the ratio of nitrogen isotopes in the body’s tissues.

Dr Beaumont added: “Not all people in Roman Britain were high-status; there was considerable enslavement too and we know slaves were fed a restricted diet. Our research shows that combining the carbon and nitrogen isotope data with other information such as mortality risk is crucial to an accurate understanding of archaeological dietary studies, and it may be useful to look at existing research with fresh eyes.”

The paper, A new method for investigating the relationship between diet and mortality: hazard analysis using dietary isotopes is published in Annals of Human Biology.

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A soldier’s tombstone from Roman-era London. Museum of London

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Article Source: University of Bradford news release

The paper, A new method for investigating the relationship between diet and mortality: hazard analysis using dietary isotopes is published in Annals of Human Biology. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03014460.2019.1662484

Our species, Homo sapiens,arose in Africa roughly 300,000 years ago. But how and where exactly? Because few African fossils less than 500,000 years old have been discovered to date, we’re missing pieces to complete the puzzle of the history of our species. In this new study, the researchers wanted to expand the pool of available fossils … by creating virtual ones.

Accordingly, they took exhaustive measurements of 263 skulls of fossil and modern hominins [1] from 29 different populations, [2] to prepare 3D models.

Mounier and Mirazón Lahr demonstrated there was a close connection between the average cranial dimensions for each of the 29 populations and the respective positions of these populations in a phylogenetic tree largely constructed using genetic data. [3] This relationship allowed the researchers to calculate the likely skull dimensions of the most recent ancestor of all Homo sapiens groups. The virtual 300,000-year-old fossil has relatively modern features: its round cranium, relatively high forehead, and slight brow ridges and facial projection make it similar in morphology to some fossils that are only 100,000 years old.

The researchers compared their virtual fossil skull to five real fossil skulls from African members of the genus Homo who lived 130,000 to 350,000 years ago and are occasionally thought to have been our ancestors. Their analysis suggests our species arose through the hybridization of populations from South and East Africa. On the other hand, North African populations—possibly represented by the Jebel Shroud fossil—are believed to have interbred with Neanderthals after migration into Europe, accounting to a lesser extent for the makeup of our species.

This study also sheds light on the history of our species outside of Africa. It supports the hypothesis, advanced by others on the basis of genetic evidence,[4] that after an initial exodus from Africa that only left its mark in Oceania, a second migration allowed Homo sapiens to successively populate Europe, Asia, and finally, the Americas.

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Phylogenetic tree of 29 fossil and modern human species considered in study
The grey skulls were drawn from the sample used to model the skull of the virtual ancestor, shown in red.
From left to right: KNM-ER 3733 (H. ergaster), La Ferrassie (H. neanderthalensis), Qafzeh 6 (fossil H. sapiens), Kh-1739 (South Africa, Khoikhoi), AUS001 (Australia), Eu.34.4.1 (Hungary), EAS-ORSA0427 (China) and NA82 (Huron, Canada). © Aurélien Mounier – CNRS/MNHN

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Virtual model of ancestor shared by all members of Homo sapiens. © Aurélien Mounier – CNRS/MNHN

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Notes

1. 1. Subgroup of great apes including the human genus (Homo) and related extinct genera like Australopithecus and Paranthropus, but not chimpanzees.
2. 2. Twenty-one modern populations from various parts of the world and eight fossil populations.
3. 3. Excluding the earliest species of the genus Homo (i.e. H. habilis, H. ergaster, and H. georgicus), for which no DNA—only morphological data—is available.
4. 4. Genomic analyses inform on migration events during the peopling of Eurasia, Luca Pagani et al. Nature, 21 September 2016.https://doi.org/10.1038/nature19792

Article Source: CNRS news release

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See, first-hand, the original fossils. See original artifacts. See the actual sites. Talk with the famous scientists. Join us on this unique specialized study tour.

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CELL PRESS—Researchers have successfully sequenced the first genome of an individual from the Harappan civilization, also called the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC). The DNA, which belongs to an individual who lived four to five millennia ago, suggests that modern people in India are likely to be largely descended from people of this ancient culture. It also offers a surprising insight into how farming began in South Asia, showing that it was not brought by large-scale movement of people from the Fertile Crescent where farming first arose. Instead, farming started in South Asia through local hunter-gatherers adopting farming. The findings appear September 5 in the journal Cell*.

“The Harappans were one of the earliest civilizations of the ancient world and a major source of Indian culture and traditions, and yet it has been a mystery how they related both to later people as well as to their contemporaries,” says Vasant Shinde, an archaeologist at Deccan College, Deemed University in Pune, India, and the chief excavator of the site of Rakhigarhi, who is first author of the study.

The IVC, which at its height from 2600 to 1900 BCE covered a large swath of northwestern South Asia, was one of the world’s first large-scale urban societies. Roughly contemporary to ancient Egypt and the ancient civilizations of China and Mesopotamia, it traded across long distances and developed systematic town planning, elaborate drainage systems, granaries, and standardization of weights and measures.

Hot, fluctuating climates like those found in many parts of lowland South Asia are detrimental to the preservation of DNA. So despite the importance of the IVC, it has been impossible until now to sequence DNA of individuals recovered in archaeological sites located in the region. “Even though there has been success with ancient DNA from many other places, the difficult preservation conditions mean that studies in South Asia have been a challenge,” says senior author David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, the Broad Institute, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Answering questions about the ancient people of the Indus Valley was in fact the primary reason Reich founded his own ancient DNA laboratory in 2013.

In this study, Reich, post-doctoral scientist Vagheesh Narasimhan, and Niraj Rai, who established a new ancient DNA laboratory at the Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences in Lucknow, India, and led the preparation of the samples, screened 61 skeletal samples from a site in Rakhigarhi, the largest city of the IVC. A single sample showed promise: it contained a very small amount of authentic ancient DNA. The team made over 100 attempts to sequence the sample. Reich says: “While each of the individual datasets did not produce enough DNA, pooling them resulted in sufficient genetic data to learn about population history.”

There were many theories about the genetic origins of the people of the IVC. “They could resemble Southeast Asian hunter-gatherers or they could resemble Iranians, or they could even resemble Steppe pastoralists–all were plausible prior to the ancient DNA findings,” he says.

The individual sequenced here fits with a set of 11 individuals from sites across Iran and Central Asia known to be in cultural contact with the IVC, discovered in a manuscript being published simultaneously (also led by Reich and Narasimhan) in the journal Science. Those individuals were genetic outliers among the people at the sites in which they were found. They represent a unique mixture of ancestry related to ancient Iranians and ancestry related to Southeast Asian hunter-gatherers. Their genetic similarity to the Rakhigarhi individual makes it likely that these were migrants from the IVC.

It’s a mix of ancestry that is also present in modern South Asians, leading the researchers to believe that people from the IVC like the Rakhigarhi individuals were the single largest source population for the modern-day people of India. “Ancestry like that in the IVC individuals is the primary ancestry source in South Asia today,” says Reich. “This finding ties people in South Asia today directly to the Indus Valley Civilization.”

The findings also offer a surprising insight into how agriculture reached South Asia. A mainstream view in archaeology has been that people from the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East–home to the earliest evidence of farming–spread across the Iranian plateau and from there into South Asia, bringing with them a new and transformative economic system.

Genetic studies to date seemed to add weight to this theory by showing that Iranian-related ancestry was the single biggest contributor to the ancestry in South Asians.

But this new study shows that the lineage of Iranian-related ancestry in modern South Asians split from ancient Iranian farmers, herders, and hunter-gatherers before they separated from each other–that is, even before the invention of farming in the Fertile Crescent. Thus, farming was either reinvented locally in South Asia or reached it through the cultural transmission of ideas rather than through substantial movement of western Iranian farmers.

For Reich, Shinde, and their team, these findings are just the beginning. “The Harappans built a complex and cosmopolitan ancient civilization, and there was undoubtedly variation in it that we cannot detect by analyzing a single individual,” Shinde says. “The insights that emerge from just this single individual demonstrate the enormous promise of ancient DNA studies of South Asia. They make it clear that future studies of much larger numbers of individuals from a variety of archaeological sites and locations have the potential to transform our understanding of the deep history of the subcontinent.”

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Map depicting the geographical span of the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC), showing the location of Rakhigarhi (blue), other significant IVC sites (red), and sites to the north and west from other archaeological cultures (other colors). The yellow labels indicate two sites where a minority of buried individuals yielded ancient DNA matched that of the Rakhigarhi individuals. Vasant Shinde / Deccan College Post Graduate and Research Institute

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Photograph of the skeleton analyzed in this study, shown associated with typical Indus Valley Civilization grave goods and illustrating the typical North-South orientation of IVC burials. Vasant Shinde / Deccan College Post Graduate and Research Institute

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Photograph of a red slipped ware globular pot placed near the head of the skeleton that yielded ancient DNA. There are lines as well as indentations on the upper right side, just below the rim. The indentations on the body of the pot could be examples of ancient graffiti and/or “Indus script”. Vasant Shinde / Deccan College Post Graduate and Research Institute

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Article Source: Cell Press news release

*“An Ancient Harappan Genome Lacks Ancestry from Steppe Pastoralists or Iranian Farmers” https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(19)30967-5

CNRS—The genomic sequencing of exceptionally well preserved DNA in a phalangeal fragment from Denisova Cave (Siberia) in 2010 revealed it belonged to the member of a previously unknown human population, the Denisovans, who were closely related to the Neanderthals. However, because few Denisovan bones have been found, the morphology of these hominins remains uncertain. Now a team of scientists from the Institut Jacques Monod (CNRS / Université de Paris) has measured and photographed another fragment found in Denisova Cave. Genomic analysis reveals it is the missing piece of the same phalanx whose proximal fragment enabled initial sequencing of the Denisovan genome. Together with colleagues from the PACEA laboratory (CNRS / University of Bordeaux / French Ministry of Culture) and the University of Toronto (Canada), the scientists compared the new fragment to the phalanges of Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans. Their analysis indicates it is very close to the latter, and less like the former. Yet this structural similarity does not extend to the molars and mandible found on the Tibetan plateau, which feature more archaic characteristics. The researchers are intrigued by the Denisovan morphological mosaic and are seeking new skeletal remains to better characterize this “third” human group. Their findings* are published in Science Advances (4 September 2019).

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Virtual reconstruction of fifth distal phalanx from Denisova Cave. © Photo of distal fragment of phalanx: Eva-Maria Geigl, Institut Jacques Monod (CNRS / Université de Paris). Micro-CT scan and virtual reconstruction: Bence Viola, Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto (Canada).

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Denisova Cave, where the phalangeal fragment was found. Демин Алексей Барнаул, Wikimedia Commons

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Article Source: CNRS press release

*Morphology of the Denisovan phalanx closer to modern humans than to Neandertals. E. Andrew Bennett, Isabelle Crevecoeur, Bence Viola, Anatoly P. Derevianko, Michael V. Shunkov, Thierry Grange, Bruno Maureille, and Eva-Maria Geigl. Science Advances, September 4, 2019.

UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH—The DNA of Scottish people still contains signs of the country’s ancient kingdoms, with many apparently living in the same areas as their ancestors did more than a millennium ago, a study shows.

Experts have constructed Scotland’s first comprehensive genetic map, which reveals that the country is divided into six main clusters of genetically similar individuals: the Borders, the south-west, the north-east, the Hebrides, Orkney and Shetland.

These groupings are in similar locations to Dark Age kingdoms such as Strathclyde in the south-west, Pictland in the north-east, and Gododdin in the south-east. The Dark Ages are widely considered to be from the end of the Roman Empire in 476 AD to around 1000 AD.

In addition to showcasing Scotland’s genetic continuity, experts believe this type of population analysis could aid the discovery of rare DNA differences that might play major roles in human disease.

The new data from Scotland means this is the first time the genetic map of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland can be seen in its entirety, researchers say.

The study also discovered that some of the founders of Iceland may have originated from north-west Scotland and Ireland and that the Isle of Man is genetically predominantly Scottish.

The study looked at the genetic makeup of more than 2500 people from Britain and Ireland – including almost 1000 from Scotland – whose grandparents or great grandparents were born within 50 miles of each other.

Researchers from the University of Edinburgh and RCSI (Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland) then compared this with the DNA of people who lived thousands of years ago.

Experts found that Orkney and Shetland had the highest levels of Norwegian ancestry outside Scandinavia and that many islands within the archipelagos had their own unique genetic identity.

The islands also contained subtle, but notable genetic differences between people living only a few miles apart, with no obvious physical barriers.

The study was funded by the Medical Research Council, the Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Executive and Science Foundation Ireland.

It is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Professor Jim Wilson, from the University of Edinburgh’s Usher Institute and MRC Human Genetics Unit, said: “It is remarkable how long the shadows of Scotland’s Dark Age kingdoms are, given the massive increase in movement from the industrial revolution to the modern era. We believe this is largely due to the majority of people marrying locally and preserving their genetic identity.”

Dr Edmund Gilbert, from RCSI, added: “This work is important not only from the historical perspective, but also for helping understand the role of genetic variation in human disease. Understanding the fine-scale genetic structure of a population helps researchers better separate disease-causing genetic variation from that which occurs naturally in the British and Irish populations, but has little or no impact on disease risk.”

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Genetic map of the British Isles, based on work by Professor Jim Wilson from the University of Edinburgh’s Usher Institute and MRC Human Genetics Unit. The University of Edinburgh

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Article Source: University of Edinburgh news release