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PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES—Excavations in Middle Pleistocene cave deposits in southeastern China yielded a skull that exhibits morphological similarities to other East Asian Middle and Late Pleistocene archaic human remains but foreshadows later modern human forms, according to a study*. Fossil evidence for human evolution in East Asia during the Pleistocene is often fragmentary and scattered, complicating efforts to evaluate the pattern of archaic human evolution and modern human emergence in the region. Xiu-Jie Wu and colleagues report the discovery of most of a skull and associated remains, dating to around 300,000 years ago, in Middle Pleistocene cave deposits of Hualong Cave in southeastern China. The features of the Hualong fossils complement those of other East Asian fossil remains, indicating a continuity of form through the Middle Pleistocene and into the Late Pleistocene. In particular, the skull features a low and wide braincase with a projecting brow but a relatively flat midface, as well as an incipient chin. The teeth are simple in form, contrasting with other archaic East Asian fossils, and its third molars are either reduced in size or absent. According to the authors, the fossil remains add to the expected variation of these Middle Pleistocene humans, recombining features present in other individuals from the same time-period, and foreshadow developments in modern humans, providing evidence for regional continuity.

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The Hualongdong Middle Pleistocene human skull and the collapsed cave site, with the fossil-bearing breccia in beige around the limestone blocks. Xiu-Jie Wu and Erik Trinkhaus

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This is the virtual reconstruction of the Hualongdong 6 human skull, with mirror-imaged portions in gray, plus two of the few stone tools from the site. Xiu-Jie Wu and Erik Trinkhaus

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*”Archaic human remains from Hualongdong, China, and Middle Pleistocene human continuity and variation,” by Xiu-Jie Wu et al.

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

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MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY—An international team of researchers has combined archaeological, historical and linguistic data with genetic information from over 700 newly analyzed individuals to construct a more detailed picture of the history of inner Eurasia than ever before available. In a study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, they found that the indigenous populations of inner Eurasia are very diverse in their genes, culture and languages, but divide into three groups that stretch across the area in east-west geographic bands.

Inner Eurasia, including areas of modern-day Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Mongolia, Russia, Tajikistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan, was once the cross-roads connecting Asia and Europe, and a major intersection for the exchange of culture, trade goods and genes in prehistory and historical periods, including the era of the famous Silk Road.

This vast area can also be divided into several distinct ecological regions that stretch in largely east-west bands across Inner Eurasia, consisting of the deserts at the southern edge of the region, the steppe in the central part, taiga forests further north, and tundra towards the Arctic region. The subsistence strategies used by indigenous groups in these regions largely correlate with the ecological zones, for example reindeer herding and hunting in the tundra region and nomadic pastoralism on the steppe.

Despite the long and important history of inner Eurasia, details about past migrations and interactions between groups are not always clear, especially in prehistory. “Inner Eurasia is a perfect place to investigate the relationship between environmental conditions and the pattern of human migration and mixture, as well as changes driven by cultural innovations such as the introduction of dairy pastoralism into the steppe,” states Choongwon Jeong of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, co-first and senior author of the paper. In order to clarify our understanding of some of the nuances of the history of the region, an international team of researchers undertook an ambitious project to use modern and ancient DNA from a broad geographic range and time period, in concert with archaeological, linguistic and historical information, to clarify the relationships between the different populations. “A few ethnic groups were studied previously,” comments Oleg Balanovsky from the Vavilov Institute of General Genetics in Moscow, also co-first author, “but we conducted more than a hundred field trips to study this vast region systematically, and reached communities speaking almost all of the Inner Eurasian languages”.

Three distinct east-west groupings

For this study, the researchers analyzed DNA from 763 individuals from across the region as well as reanalyzed the genome-wide data from two ancient individuals from the Botai culture, and compared those results with previously published data from modern and ancient individuals. They found three distinct genetic groupings, which geographically are arranged in east-west bands stretching across the region and correlating generally to ecological zones, where populations within each band share a distinct combination of ancestries in varying proportions.

The northernmost grouping, which they term “forest-tundra”, includes Russians, all Uralic language-speakers, which includes Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian, and Yeniseian-language speakers, of which only one remains today and is spoken in central Siberia. The middle grouping, which they term “steppe-forest”, includes Turkic- and Mongolic-speaking populations from the Volga and the region around the Altai and Sayan mountains, near to where Russia, China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan meet. The southernmost grouping, “southern-steppe”, includes the rest of Turkic- and Mongolic-speaking populations living further south, such as Kazakhs, Kyrgyzs and Uzbeks, as well as Indo-European-speaking Tajiks.

Previously unknown genetic connections revealed

Because the study includes data from a broad time period, it is able to show shifts in ancestry in the past that reveal previously unknown interactions. For example, the researchers found that the southern-steppe populations had a larger genetic component from West and South Asia than the other two groupings. This component is also widespread in the ancient populations of the region since the second half of the first millennium BC, but not found in Central Kazakhstan in earlier periods. This hints at a population movement from the southern-steppe region to the steppe-forest region that was previously unknown.

“Inner Eurasia has functioned as a conduit for human migration and cultural transfer since the first appearance of modern humans in this region. As a result, we observe deep sharing of genes between Western and Eastern Eurasian populations in multiple layers,” explains Jeong. “The opportunity to find direct evidence for the hidden old layers of admixture, which is often difficult to appreciate from present-day populations, is very exciting.”

“We found not only corridors, but also barriers for migrations,” adds Balanovsky. “Some of them separate the historical groups of populations, while others, like the distinct barrier following the Great Caucasus mountain ridge, were obviously shaped by the geographic landscape.”

Two ancient individuals resequenced in this study originated from the Botai culture in Kazakhstan where the horse was initially domesticated. Analysis of the Y-chromosome (inherited along the paternal genealogical lines) revealed a genetic lineage which is typical in the Kazakh steppe up to the present day. But analysis of the autosomes, which both parents contribute to their children, show no trace of Botai ancestry left in present-day people, likely due to repeated migrations into the region both from the west and the east since the Bronze Age.

The researchers emphasize that their model of three groupings does not perfectly explain all known populations and that there are examples of both outliers and intermediate groups. “It is important to organize a future study for further sampling of sparsely populated regions between the clines, for example, Central Kazakhstan or East Siberia,” states Johannes Krause, also of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, and senior author of the paper.

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Children from one of the Tajikistan communities included in the study. Elena Balanovska

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Geographic locations of the Eneolithic Botai, groups including newly sampled individuals, and nearby groups with published data. The map is overlayed with ecoregional information, divided into 14 biomes Downloaded from https://ecoregions2017.appspot.com/ (credited to Ecoregions 2017 © Resolve). Jeong & Balanovsky et. al. 2019. The genetic history of admixture across inner Eurasia. Nature Ecology & Evolution, http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41559-019-0878-2.

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

PENN STATE, UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa.—Humans settled in southwestern Amazonia and even experimented with agriculture much earlier than previously thought, according to an international team of researchers. Read more…

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS JOURNALS—In “A New Historical Inscription of Sargon II from Karkemish,” published in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Gianni Marchesi translates a recently discovered inscription of the Assyrian King Sargon II found at the ruins of the ancient city of Karkemish. The inscription, which dates to around 713 B.C., details Sargon’s conquest, occupation, and reorganization of Karkemish, including his rebuilding the city with ritual ceremonies usually reserved for royal palaces in capital cities. The text implies that Sargon may have been planning to make Karkemish a western capital of Assyria, from which he could administer and control his empire’s western territories.

The cuneiform inscription was found on fragments from three different clay cylinders in 2015 as part of the Nicolò Marchetti-led Turco-Italian Archaeological Expedition at Karkemish. Now in ruins, the site is located on the Euphrates river on the border between present day Syria and Turkey.

Marchesi analyzed and translated the total of thirty-eight lines of partially broken Akkadian text, using reference material, academic literature and other inscribed Assyrian artifacts as reference points for filling in the gaps. The lines of text ranged from two-thirds complete to much less, and no line of text was completely intact.

“Even so, we can grasp much of the original text, which turns out to be very informative,” Marchesi writes. “In fact, unlike other Sargon cylinders, which contain relatively standard ‘summary’ inscriptions or annalistic accounts of the events of Sargon’s reign, the Karkemish Cylinder provides us with a completely new inscription, dealing almost exclusively with the newly conquered city on the Euphrates in a highly-elaborated, literary style.”

In the inscription, Sargon tells of the “betrayal” of Pirisi, the Hittite King of Karkemish who exchanged hostile words about Assyria with its enemy, King Midas of Phrygia. Sargon invades Karkemish, deports Pisiri and his supporters, destroys his palace, seizes his riches as booty and incorporates Pisiri’s army into his own. He resettles the city with Assyrians. Having previously blocked the water supply to Karkemish, the meadows “let go fallow, like a wasteland,” Marchesi translates, he now reactivates the irrigation system, planting orchards and botanical gardens. “I made the scent of the city sweeter than the scent of a cedar forest.”

He also details an inauguration ceremony where he received gifts from Assyrian provinces and sacrifices them to deities. “My lords the gods Karhuha and Kubaba, who dwell in Karkemish, I invited them into my palace,” Marchesi translates. “Strong rams of the stable, geese, ducks and flying birds of the sky I offered before them.”

Marchesi was struck by the attention that Sargon paid to Karkemish, in particular the elaborate inauguration ceremony and construction of botanical gardens, both indicative not of a typical provincial capital but of a royal palace.

“Because of its glorious past and strategic position, Karkemish was fully entitled to become a sort of western capital of the Assyrian Empire: a perfect place in which to display the grandeur of Assyria, and from which to control the western and north-western territories of the empire,” Marchesi writes.

This vision of Karkemish was short-lived, however. Though much care was taken to detail the city’s rise in these texts, the city is not mentioned in any known inscriptions of Sargon’s successors.

“The unthinkable, ominous death of Sargon on the battlefield in Tabal probably prevented this project from being accomplished, and negatively marked the destiny of Karkemish itself, which no longer attracted the interest of Assyrian kings who followed after him,” Marchesi writes.

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Sargon II and dignitary. Low-relief from the L wall of the palace of Sargon II at Dur Sharrukin in Assyria (now Khorsabad in Iraq), c. 716–713 BC. Jastrow, Wikimedia Commons

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS JOURNALS news release

If you liked this article, you may like End of Empire: The Archaeological Excavations at Ziyaret Tepe, a premium article previously published in Popular Archaeology about the end of the Assyrian Empire.

WELLCOME TRUST SANGER INSTITUTE—The first genetic study of ancient human remains believed to be Crusaders confirms that warriors travelled from western Europe to the near East, where they mixed and had families with local people, and died together in battle. Researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute and their collaborators analyzed ancient DNA extracted from nine skeletons dating back to the 13th century, which were discovered in a burial pit in Sidon, Lebanon.

The results, published today (18 April) in the American Journal of Human Genetics, confirm that while the Crusaders mixed with local people and recruited them to their cause, their genetic presence in the region was short-lived.

The Crusades were a series of religious wars fought between 1095 and 1291, in which Christian invaders tried to claim the near East. It’s known that nobility led the Crusades, but historical records lack details of the ordinary soldiers who travelled to, lived and died in the near East.

In recent years, archaeologists uncovered 25 skeletons dating back to the 13th century within a burial pit in Sidon, Lebanon. All of those found in the pit were male and had been violently killed during battle, as seen by the blunt force injuries to their skulls and other bones. Their bodies had been disposed of in the pit and burned.

Nearby, an isolated skull was found. The head may have been used as a projectile that was catapulted into the opposition’s camp to spread disease and slash morale, illustrating the brutality of the battles.

Clues found alongside the skeletons in the pit, such as European shoe buckles, a coin and carbon-14 dating analysis, led archaeologists to believe the human remains were Crusaders.

In a new study, researchers at the Wellcome Sanger Institute produced whole-genome sequences of the ancient skeletons’ DNA and confirm they were in fact Crusaders.

The team report that three individuals were Europeans of diverse origins, including Spain and Sardinia, four were near Easterners who had been recruited to the fight, and two individuals had mixed genetic ancestry, suggesting they were the descendants of mixed relationships between Crusaders and near Easterners.

Dr Chris Tyler-Smith, from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, said: “Historical documents tell us the names of the nobility who led the Crusades, but the identities of the soldiers remained a mystery. Genomics gives an unprecedented view of the past and shows the Crusaders originated from western Europe and recruited local people of the near East to join them in battle. The Crusaders and near Easterners lived, fought and died side by side.”

However, the researchers believe the Crusaders’ influence in the region was short-lived as European genetic traces are insignificant in people living in Lebanon today.

When the researchers sequenced the DNA of people living in Lebanon 2,000 years ago during the Roman period, long before the Crusades, they found that today’s Lebanese population is genetically similar to the Roman Lebanese, suggesting the Crusades had no lasting impact on Lebanese genetics.

Dr Marc Haber, from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, said: “The Crusaders travelled to the near East and had relationships with the local people, with their sons later joining to fight their cause. However, after the fighting had finished, the mixed generation married into the local population and the genetic traces of the Crusaders were quickly lost.”

In the study, the team worked with archaeologists at the Sidon Excavation site to transfer bones of the nine skeletons from Lebanon to a laboratory in Cambridge dedicated to ancient DNA. Here, small portions of the surviving 800 year-old DNA were extracted from the temporal bone in the skulls by DNA extraction experts. An ultra-sterile working environment was set up by the scientists to prevent contamination of the samples with their own DNA, which would render them useless.

The ancient DNA samples were particularly difficult to extract and sequence as the bodies had been burned and buried in a warm and humid climate, where DNA degrades quickly. Recent advances in DNA extraction and sequencing technology made studying the ancient and damaged DNA possible.

Dr Claude Doumet-Serhal, Director of the Sidon excavation site in Lebanon, said: “I was thrilled to discover the genetic identities of the people who lived in the near East during the Crusades. Only five years ago, studies like this would not have been possible. The uniting of archaeologists and geneticists creates an incredible opportunity to interpret significant events throughout history.”

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Miniature of the Siege of Acre (1291). Wikimedia Commons

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Article Source: Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute news release

The transition from hunting and gathering to farming and herding around 10,000 B.C. is thought by many scholars to have helped to establish the foundation for civilization as we know it.

At the ancient Neolithic settlement of Asikli Höyuk in central Turkey, archaeological evidence suggests that humans began domesticating sheep and goats around 8450 BC. This evolved over the ensuing 1,000 years, until the settlement became heavily dependent on domesticated animals for resources.

Among the techniques and evidence used to reveal this scenario of life at Asikli Höyuk was an approach recently employed by Jordan Abell, a graduate student at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and his colleagues. The team measured the scale and pace of early animal domestication and herding evolution at the site. By examining midden soil layers, they could see that they were highly enriched with sodium, chlorine, and nitrate salts — elements commonly found in human, goat and sheep urine. Working with Turkish archaeologists, including Istanbul University’s Mihriban Özbaşaran, who directs the Asikli Höyuk excavation, the team collected 113 samples from across the site — from middens (trash piles) to bricks and hearths, spanning different time periods — which revealed patterns in the sodium, nitrate and chlorine salt levels. They found a five to 10 times increase in salts between about 10,400 BP to 10,000 BP, and a 10 to 1000 times increase between 10,400 and 9,700 BP. This suggested an increasing reliance upon and eventual domestication of sheep and goats over this time. Based on these salt concentrations, Abell et al. estimate that about 1,790 humans and animals lived and urinated on the site per day for roughly 1,000 years of occupation. The researchers state that the high soluble nitrogen levels at the site are also very similar to that seen in modern feedlots. The researchers qualify their analysis by noting that it is not currently possible to distinguish between human and livestock urine salts, but the total estimated number of inhabitants in each time period, whether they were humans or other animals, were considerably higher than the number of people that archaeologists think the settlement’s buildings would have housed, based on the archaeological evidence.

Abell notes that the findings are consistent with other evidence found at the site that suggests the Neolithic settlement evolved from mostly hunting the sheep and goats to corralling them, to larger-scale management, and finally to corralling on a large scale at the periphery of the site. Moreover, the sharp change in the pattern around 10,000 years ago “may be new evidence for a more rapid transition” toward domestication than previously thought, says Abell. They calculated that around 10,000 years ago, the density of people and animals occupying the settlement jumped from near zero to approximately one person or animal for every 10 square meters. By comparison, modern-day semi-intensive feedlots have densities of about one sheep for every 5 square meters.

The study’s results also help shed light on the geographic spread of the Neolithic Revolution. It was once thought that farming and herding originated in the Fertile Crescent, which spans parts of modern-day Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian Territories, then spread outward from there. But mounting evidence, including today’s study, indicates that domestication and the transition to Neolithic lifestyles took place concurrently over a broad and diffuse swath of the region.

Anthropologist and co-author Mary Stiner from the University of Arizona said that the new method could help to clarify the larger picture of humanity’s relationship to animals during this transitional period. “We might find similar trends in other archaeological sites of the period in the Middle East,” she said, “but it is also possible that only a handful of long-lasting communities were forums for the evolving human-caprine relationships in any given region of the Middle East.”

Asikli Höyuk is one of a number of Neolithic sites, such as Çatalhöyük and Göbekli Tepe, in present-day Turkey where archaeologists have uncovered evidence of early settlements or structures that are now shedding new light on the transition from hunter-gathering to a settled lifestyle and the beginnings of civilization.

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Excavations on western mound face. Mary Stiner, Asikli Hoyuk project photo archive

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Quade (left) and Abell (right) looking for optimal samples. Güneş Duru & Aşıklı Research Project

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Drone photo of Aşıklı Höyük: The site originally would have measured around 7 hectares before it was cut and eroded by the Melendiz River. It stands higher than 16 meters above the modern river terrace. No other site this large and spanning a single period exists in the region – similar to the subsequent site of Çatalhöyük in the Konya Plain. Aşıklı contains multiple developmental stages of humans establishing a new way of life, showing how the community modified their environment and themselves. Güneş Duru & Aşıklı Research Project

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From the roof top of the reconstructed Aşıklı houses, with Mount Hasan in the background. Güneş Duru & Aşıklı Research Project

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Adapted and edited from the subject EARTH INSTITUTE AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY and Science Advances news releases.

Read much more about the various remarkable archaeological discoveries at ancient Asikli Höyuk in the article, Before Kings and Palaces, an in-depth premium article published by Popular Archaeology.

SANTA FE INSTITUTE—The narratives we tell about the past often feature a cast of familiar main characters: kings and rulers, warriors and diplomats — men who made laws and fought wars, who held power over others in their own lands and beyond. When women enter our stories, we rarely afford them much agency. But across the globe in a variety of societies, royal women found ways to advance the issues they cared about and advocate for the people important to them.

In a recent paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Research, anthropologist Paula Sabloff analyzes the archeological and written records of eight premodern states separated by both time and space, detailing ways that queen rulers and main wives took political action. Her comparative analysis reveals similar patterns in the societies despite the fact that they were isolated from one another.

Sabloff’s analysis includes three types of regions: independent states or city-states (including the Mari Kingdom of Old Babylonia, 2000-1600 BC, and Protohistoric Hawai’i, AD 1570-1788); empires (Old Kingdom Egypt, 2686-2181 BC, Late Shang China, 1250-1046 BC, the Aztec Empire, AD 1440-1520, and the Inca Empire, AD 1460-1532); and states in regions that contained both states and empires (Late Classic Maya, AD 600-800, and Postclassic Zapotec, AD 1050-1500).

As Sabloff described in another recent paper, women were often used as bargaining chips, used to form strategic alliances between states through marriage. “Here are examples of, even when women were pawns in marriage, they still ended up with a lot of power,” she says. She found remarkable similarities in the types of power that royal women used.

“Queen rulers held nearly the same political power as kings,” she explains. “Main wives were active players in determining succession, governing the polity, building inter- and intrapolity alliances, and expanding or defending territory.” These women also exerted influence by obligating courtiers and tradesmen through patron-client relationships, interceded on behalf of their relatives, and sometimes spied on or conspired against their royal husbands.

“Political agency wasn’t just about waging war,” says Sabloff. “It was about being able to influence policy, to influence who is on the throne. There were levels of agency, but hers was right behind his.”

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Princess Nefertiabet of Old Kingdom Egypt, stela. Rama, Wikimedia Commons

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Article Source: Santa Fe Institute news release

UPPSALA UNIVERSITY—In a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an international research team, led from Uppsala University, discovered kin relationships among Stone Age individuals buried in megalithic tombs on Ireland and in Sweden. The kin relations can be traced for more than ten generations and suggests that megaliths were graves for kindred groups in Stone Age northwestern Europe.

Agriculture spread with migrants from the Fertile Crescent into Europe around 9,000 BCE, reaching northwestern Europe by 4,000 BCE. Starting around 4,500 BCE, a new phenomenon of constructing megalithic monuments, particularly for funerary practices, emerged along the Atlantic façade. These constructions have been enigmatic to the scientific community, and the origin and social structure of the groups that erected them has remained largely unknown. The international team sequenced and analyzed the genomes from the human remains of 24 individuals from five megalithic burial sites, encompassing the widespread tradition of megalithic construction in northern and western Europe.

The team collected human remains of 24 individuals from megaliths on Ireland, in Scotland and the Baltic island of Gotland, Sweden. The remains were radiocarbon-dated to between 3,800 and 2,600 BCE. DNA was extracted from bones and teeth for genome sequencing. The team compared the genomic data to the genetic variation of Stone Age groups and individuals from other parts of Europe. The individuals in the megaliths were closely related to Neolithic farmers in northern and western Europe, and also to some groups in Iberia, but less related to farmer groups in central Europe.

The team found an overrepresentation of males compared to females in the megalith tombs on the British Isles.

“We found paternal continuity through time, including the same Y-chromosome haplotypes reoccurring over and over again,” says archaeogeneticist Helena Malmström of Uppsala University and co-first author. “However, female kindred members were not excluded from the megalith burials as three of the six kinship relationships in these megaliths involved females.”

The genetic data show close kin relationships among the individuals buried within the megaliths. A likely parent-offspring relation was discovered for individuals in the Listhogil Tomb at the Carrowmore site and Tomb 1 at Primrose Grange, about 2 km distance away from each other. “This came as a surprise. It appears as these Neolithic societies were tightly knit with very close kin relations across burial sites,” says population-geneticist Federico Sanchez-Quinto of Uppsala University and co-first author.

The Ansarve site on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea is embedded in an area with mostly hunter-gathers at the time. “The people buried in the Ansarve tomb are remarkably different on a genetic level compared to the contemporaneous individuals excavated from hunter-gather-contexts, showing that the burial tradition in this megalithic tomb, which lasted for over 700 years, was performed by distinct groups with roots in the European Neolithic expansion,” says archaeogeneticist Magdalena Fraser of Uppsala University and co-first author.

“That we find distinct paternal lineages among the people in the megaliths, an overrepresentation of males in some tombs, and the clear kindred relationships point to towards the individuals being part of a patrilineal segment of the society rather than representing a random sample from a larger Neolithic farmer community,” says Mattias Jakobsson, population-geneticist at Uppsala University and senior author of the study.

“Our study demonstrates the potential in archaeogenetics to not only reveal large-scale migrations, but also inform about Stone Age societies and the role of particular phenomena in those times such as the megalith phenomena,” says Federico Sanchez-Quinto.

“The patterns that we observe could be unique to the Primrose, Carrowmore, and Ansarve burials, and future studies of other megaliths are needed to tell whether this is a general pattern for megalith burials,” says osteoarchaeologist Jan Storå of Stockholm University.

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The Ansarve site on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea is embedded in an area with mostly hunter-gatherers at the time. Magdalena Fraser

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The team found an overrepresentation of males compared to females in the megalith tombs on the British Isles. Göran Burenhult

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A likely parent-offspring relation was discovered for individuals in the Listhogil Tomb at the Carrowmore site and Tomb 1 at Primrose Grange, about 2 km distance away from each other. Göran Burenhult

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Article Source: Uppsala University news release

UNIVERSITY OF YORK—The modern human face is distinctively different to that of our near relatives and now researchers believe its evolution may have been partly driven by our need for good social skills.

As large-brained, short-faced hominins, our faces are different from other, now extinct hominins (such as the Neanderthals) and our closest living relatives (bonobos and chimpanzees), but how and why did the modern human face evolve this way?

A new review published in Nature Ecology and Evolution and authored by a team of international experts, including researchers from the University of York, traces changes in the evolution of the face from the early African hominins to the appearance of modern human anatomy.

They conclude that social communication has been somewhat overlooked as a factor underlying the modern human facial form. Our faces should be seen as the result of a combination of biomechanical, physiological and social influences, the authors of the study say.

The researchers suggest that our faces evolved not only due to factors such as diet and climate, but possibly also to provide more opportunities for gesture and nonverbal communication – vital skills for establishing the large social networks which are believed to have helped Homo sapiens to survive.

“We can now use our faces to signal more than 20 different categories of emotion via the contraction or relaxation of muscles”, says Paul O’Higgins, Professor of Anatomy at the Hull York Medical School and the Department of Archaeology at the University of York. “It’s unlikely that our early human ancestors had the same facial dexterity as the overall shape of the face and the positions of the muscles were different.”

Instead of the pronounced brow ridge of other hominins, humans developed a smooth forehead with more visible, hairy eyebrows capable of a greater range of movement. This, alongside our faces becoming more slender, allows us to express a wide range of subtle emotions – including recognition and sympathy.

“We know that other factors such as diet, respiratory physiology and climate have contributed to the shape of the modern human face, but to interpret its evolution solely in terms of these factors would be an oversimplification,” Professor O’Higgins adds.

The human face has been partly shaped by the mechanical demands of feeding and over the past 100,000 years our faces have been getting smaller as our developing ability to cook and process food led to a reduced need for chewing.

This facial shrinking process has become particularly marked since the agricultural revolution, as we switched from being hunter gatherers to agriculturalists and then to living in cities – lifestyles that led to increasingly pre-processed foods and less physical effort.

“Softer modern diets and industrialized societies may mean that the human face continues to decrease in size”, says Professor O’Higgins. “There are limits on how much the human face can change however, for example breathing requires a sufficiently large nasal cavity.”

“However, within these limits, the evolution of the human face is likely to continue as long as our species survives, migrates and encounters new environmental, social and cultural conditions.”

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Skulls of hominins over the last 4.4 million years. Rodrigo Lacruz

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF YORK news release

A team of archaeologists have identified the remains of what they suggest may be Barara, Ethiopia’s largest lost medieval city.

The city was thought to be a powerful center of trade and commerce during medieval times, and some medieval chroniclers identified Barara as the capital and governing seat of the legendary Prestor John, a Christian patriarch and king who was popular in European chronicles and tradition from the 7th through the 19th centuries. But after hundreds of years of prosperity, the city was thought to have been destroyed, possibly by the forces of Ahmad Gran the “left-handed” during the Religious Wars.

“Accounts of the destruction of Barara and other cities and churches accurately depict that demolition was total,” writes Samuel Walker, a lead archaeologist for the search, in his article recently published in Popular Archaeology. “Even grindstones were smashed to ensure populations had nothing to return to. During the religious wars, most associated religious structures, on both sides, along with their treasures of relics and manuscripts, perished, usually via fire.”

Walker and his team employed a variety of tools and approaches in their investigation, including historical documents research, interviews, mapping, remote sensing, and archaeological survey.  Cooperating with Ethiopia’s government and community authorities, they were able to uncover or re-interpret already existing data, utilize remote sensing information, as well as geographic and material evidence on the ground, to draw conclusions with what they believe to be a high degree of confidence. The initial key to their research was intense study of a famous map of the world made around 1450 by the Italian cartographer Fra Mauro.

“The 1450 Fra Mauro map indicates that there are substantial medieval cities across Ethiopia [with] the largest, in the vicinity of Addis Ababa, called Barara,” wrote Walker in correspondence with Popular Archaeology. “Medieval Europe was mesmerized by the stories coming up from Africa into Jerusalem, and into Italy, Byzantium, and Alexandria, Egypt, the head of the Coptic Church. These cities were for centuries thought to be myth, but our research indicates that each of the geographical features can be identified and we now have candidates for every named city in Ethiopia at the time. This will substantially rewrite the history of Ethiopia and Africa as, for the first time, we have glimpses of various unknown civilizations across the landscape, in addition to putting evidence forth that these “myths” are in fact, substantial ruins with centuries of hidden history.”

Regarding Barara itself, Walker’s research led him and his team to a site that featured remains matching the characteristics that archaeologists would likely find for the medieval city. “Our initial assessment indicates the site covers more than 2 square kms, with large quantities of period-specific cultural material along with wheel-made and imported pottery sherds throughout,” Walker writes. “True occupational soils over a meter thick, large architectural features including foundations for towers, a water system 80 m across, five cemeteries identified thus far from different periods and cultures, one containing hundreds of tombs, prove this is a substantial site fitting all the criteria for a city the size and importance of Barara.”

Walker hopes that the new findings will open up more study and research on Ethiopia’s deep and complex history, shedding light on a region that has played a more significant role within the narrative of Old World civilization than previously realized or recognized in the popular literature. 

Walker relates a more detailed account of the new discoveries in the article, Revealing Barara: The Long-Lost African Medieval City, a premium article published in the Spring 2019 issue of Popular Archaeology.

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Single-line 100 m field transect – Only diagnostics were collected and returned – Wheel-thrown and imported pottery, glass, and porcelain indicate outside influences and trade. Typical of an Imam Ahmed destruction, millstones and grinders have been shattered. Similar ceramic styles to early medieval vessels found at the Christian capital of Soba, Sudan (south of Khartoum) point to commerce and contacts.

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One of the hundreds of tombs identified among five cemeteries at the Barara site discovered thus far.

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CELL PRESS—It’s widely accepted that anatomically modern humans interbred with their close relatives, the Neanderthals and Denisovans, as they dispersed out of Africa. But a study* examining DNA fragments passed down from these ancient hominins to modern people living in Island Southeast Asia and New Guinea now suggests that the ancestry of Papuans includes not just one but two distinct Denisovan lineages, which had been separated from each other for hundreds of thousands of years. In fact, the researchers suggest, one of those Denisovan lineages is so different from the other that they really should be considered as an entirely new archaic hominin species.

The findings, based on a new collection of genome data made possible by study co-authors from Eijkman Institute for Molecular Biology in Jakarta, Indonesia, appear April 11 in the journal Cell. Taken together with previous work–which has pointed to a third Denisovan lineage in the genomes of modern Siberians, Native Americans, and East Asians–the evidence “suggests that modern humans interbred with multiple Denisovan populations, which were geographically isolated from each other over deep evolutionary time,” the researchers write.

The new findings show that modern humans making their way out of Africa for the first time were entering a new world that looked entirely different from the one we see today. “We used to think it was just us–modern humans–and Neanderthals,” says senior author Murray Cox of Massey University in New Zealand. “We now know that there was a huge diversity of human-like groups found all over the planet. Our ancestors came into contact with them all the time.”

The new evidence also unexpectedly shows extra mixing between Papuans and one of the two Denisovan groups, suggesting that this group actually lived in New Guinea or its adjacent islands. “People used to think that Denisovans lived on the Asian mainland and far to the north,” says Cox. “Our work instead shows that the center of archaic diversity was not in Europe or the frozen north, but instead in tropical Asia.”

It had already been clear that Island Southeast Asia and New Guinea was a special place, with individuals there carrying more archaic hominin DNA than anywhere else on Earth. The region also was recognized as key to the early evolution of Homo sapiens outside Africa. But there were gaps in the story.

To help fill those gaps, Cox’s team excavated archaic haplotypes from 161 new genomes spanning 14 island groups in Island Southeast Asia and New Guinea. Their analyses uncovered large stretches of DNA that didn’t jibe with a single introgression of genes from Denisovans into humans in the region. Instead, they report, modern Papuans carry hundreds of gene variants from two deeply divergent Denisovan lineages. In fact, they estimate that those two groups of Denisovans had been separated from one another for 350,000 years.

The new findings highlight how “incredibly understudied” this part of the world has been, the researchers say. To put it in context, many of the study’s participants live in Indonesia, a country the size of Europe that is the 4th largest country based on the size of its population. And yet, apart from a couple of genomes reported in a global survey of genomic diversity in 2016, the new paper reports the first Indonesian genome sequences. There also has been a strong bias in studies of archaic hominins to Europe and northern Eurasia because DNA collected from ancient bones survives best in the cold north.

This lack of global representation in both ancient and modern genome data is well noted, the researchers say. “However, we don’t think that people have really grasped just how much of a bias this puts on scientific interpretations–such as, here, the geographical distribution of archaic hominin populations,” Cox says.

As fascinating as these new findings are, the researchers say their primary aim is to use this new genomic data to help improve healthcare for people in Island Southeast Asia. They say this first genome survey in the region now offers the baseline information needed to set that work in motion.

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Map showing spread of Denisovans. John D. Croft

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Article Source: Cell Press news release

*Cell, Jacobs et al.: “Multiple deeply divergent Denisovan ancestries in Papuans” https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(19)30218-1

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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON—An international team, led by an archaeologist from the University of Southampton and the University of Bordeaux, has revealed the first example of Palaeolithic figurative cave art found in the Balkan Peninsula.

Dr Aitor Ruiz-Redondo worked with researchers from the universities of Cantabria (Spain), Newfoundland (Canada), Zagreb (Croatia) and the Archaeological Museum of Istria (Croatia) to study the paintings, which could be up to 34,000 years old.

The cave art was first discovered in 2010 in Romualdova Pe?ina (‘Romuald’s cave’) at Istria in Croatia, when Darko Komšo, Director of the Archaeological Museum of Istria, noticed the existence of the remains of a red color in a deep part of the cave.

Following his discovery, the team led by Dr Ruiz-Redondo and funded by the French State and the Archaeological Museum of Istria, with the support of Natura Histrica, undertook a detailed analysis of the paintings and their archaeological context.

This led to the identification of several figurative paintings, including a bison, an ibex and two possible anthropomorphic figures, confirming the Palaeolithic age of the artworks. Furthermore, an excavation made in the ground below these paintings led to the discovery of a number of Palaeolithic age remains; a flint tool, an ochre crayon and several fragments of charcoal.

Radiocarbon dating of these objects show an estimated age of around 17,000 years and other indirect data suggest the paintings date to an even earlier period – at around 34,000-31,000 years ago. Further research will be conducted in order to establish the precise age of the rock art.

Findings are published in the journal Antiquity.

This discovery expands the so far sparse register of Palaeolithic art in south east Europe. It makes Romualdova Peina the first site where figurative Palaeolithic rock art has been discovered in this area. Together with Badanj in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the two are the only examples of rock art from the Palaeolithic period in the Balkans.

Dr Aitor Ruiz-Redondo, a British Academy-funded Newton International Fellow at the University of Southampton and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bordeaux, said: “The importance of this finding is remarkable and sheds a new light on the understanding of Palaeolithic art in the territory of Croatia and the Balkan Peninsula, as well as its relationship with simultaneous phenomena throughout Europe.”

A new project started by Dr Ruiz-Redondo and his team, funded by the British Academy, will develop further research at these two sites during the next few years.

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Digital tracing of Bison featured in rock art. Aitor Ruiz-Redondo

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Digital tracing of Ibex featured in rock art. Aitor Ruiz-Redondo

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Composite of digital tracings of 1, Bison 2, Ibex and 3, possible anthropomorphic figures, from cave art. Aitor Ruiz-Redondo

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Article Source: University of Southampton news release 

AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY—An international team of researchers have uncovered the remains of a new species of human in the Philippines, proving the region played a key role in hominin evolutionary history. The new species, Homo luzonensis is named after Luzon Island, where the more than 50,000 year old fossils were found during excavations at Callao Cave.

Co-author and a lead member of the team, Professor Philip Piper from The Australian National University (ANU) says the findings represent a major breakthrough in our understanding of human evolution across Southeast Asia.

The researchers uncovered the remains of at least two adults and one juvenile within the same archaeological deposits.

“The fossil remains included adult finger and toe bones, as well as teeth. We also recovered a child’s femur. There are some really interesting features – for example, the teeth are really small,” Professor Piper said.

“The size of the teeth generally, though not always, reflect the overall body-size of a mammal, so we think Homo luzonensis was probably relatively small. Exactly how small we don’t know yet. We would need to find some skeletal elements from which we could measure body-size more precisely” Professor Piper said.

“It’s quite incredible, the extremities, that is the hand and feet bones are remarkably Australopithecine-like. The Australopithecines last walked the earth in Africa about 2 million years ago and are considered to be the ancestors of the Homo group, which includes modern humans.

“So, the question is whether some of these features evolved as adaptations to island life, or whether they are anatomical traits passed down to Homo luzonensis from their ancestors over the preceding 2 million years.”

While there are still plenty of questions around the origins of Homo luzonensis, and their longevity on the island of Luzon, recent excavations near Callao Cave produced evidence of a butchered rhinoceros and stone tools dating to around 700,000 years ago.

“No hominin fossils were recovered, but this does provide a timeframe for a hominin presence on Luzon. Whether it was Homo luzonensis butchering and eating the rhinoceros remains to be seen,” Professor Piper said.

“It makes the whole region really significant. The Philippines is made up of a group of large islands that have been separated long enough to have potentially facilitated archipelago speciation. There is no reason why archaeological research in the Philippines couldn’t discover several species of hominin. It’s probably just a matter of time.”

Homo luzonensis shares some unique skeletal features with the famous Homo floresiensis or ‘the hobbit’, discovered on the island of Flores to the south east of the Philippine archipelago.

In addition, stone tools dating to around 200,000 years ago have been found on the island of Sulawesi, meaning that ancient hominins potentially inhabited many of the large islands of Southeast Asia.

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Professor Philip Piper from the ANU School of Archaeology and Anthropology inspects the cast of a hominin third metatarsal discovered in 2007. The bone is from a new species of hominin. Lannon Harley, ANU

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Article Source: Australian National University news release

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AMERICAN FRIENDS OF TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY—A new Tel Aviv University study suggests that the genetic profiles of two extinct mammals with African ancestry—woolly mammoths, elephant-like animals that evolved in the arctic peninsula of Eurasia around 600,000 years ago, and Neanderthals, highly skilled early humans who evolved in Europe around 400,000 years ago—shared molecular characteristics of adaptation to cold environments.

The research attributes the human-elephant relationship during the Pleistocene epoch to their mutual ecology and shared living environments, in addition to other possible interactions between the two species. The study was led by Prof. Ran Barkai and Meidad Kislev of TAU’s Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures and published on April 8 in Human Biology.

“Neanderthals and mammoths lived together in Europe during the Ice Age. The evidence suggests that Neanderthals hunted and ate mammoths for tens of thousands of years and were actually physically dependent on calories extracted from mammoths for their successful adaptation,” says Prof. Barkai. “Neanderthals depended on mammoths for their very existence.

“They say you are what you eat. This was especially true of Neanderthals; they ate mammoths but were apparently also genetically similar to mammoths.”

To assess the degree of resemblance between mammoth and Neanderthal genetic components, the archaeologists reviewed three case studies of relevant gene variants and alleles — alternative forms of a gene that arise by mutation and are found at the same place on a chromosome — associated with cold-climate adaptation found in the genomes of both woolly mammoths and Neanderthals.

The first case study outlined the mutual appearance of the LEPR gene, related to thermogenesis and the regulation of adipose tissue and fat storage throughout the body. The second case study engaged genes related to keratin protein activity in both species. The third case study focused on skin and hair pigmentation variants in the genes MC1R and SLC7A11.

“Our observations present the likelihood of resemblance between numerous molecular variants that resulted in similar cold-adapted epigenetic traits of two species, both of which evolved in Eurasia from an African ancestor,” Kislev explains. “These remarkable findings offer supporting evidence for the contention regarding the nature of convergent evolution through molecular resemblance, in which similarities in genetic variants between adapted species are present.

“We believe these types of connections can be valuable for future evolutionary research. They’re especially interesting when they involve other large-brained mammals, with long life spans, complex social behavior and their interactions in shared habitats with early humans.”

According to the study, both species likely hailed from ancestors that came to Europe from Africa and adapted to living conditions in Ice Age Europe. The species also both became extinct more or less at the same time.

“It is now possible to try to answer a question no one has asked before: Are there genetic similarities between evolutionary adaptation paths in Neanderthals and mammoths?” Prof. Barkai says. “The answer seems to be yes. This idea alone opens endless avenues for new research in evolution, archaeology and other disciplines.

“At a time when proboscideans are under threat of disappearance from the world due to the ugly human greed for ivory, highlighting our shared history and similarities with elephants and mammoths might be a point worth taking into consideration.”

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Neanderthals and mammoths shared the same environments, impacting their respective biologies.

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Article Source: AMERICAN FRIENDS OF TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY news release

UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT—The reason that humans shifted away from hunting and gathering, and to agriculture—a much more labor-intensive process—has always been a riddle. It is only more confusing because the shift happened independently in about a dozen areas across the globe.

“A lot of evidence suggests domestication and agriculture doesn’t make much sense,” says Elic Weitzel, a Ph.D. student in UConn’s department of anthropology. “Hunter-gatherers are sometimes working fewer hours a day, their health is better, and their diets are more varied, so why would anyone switch over and start farming?”

Weitzel sought to get to the root of the shift in his new paper in American Antiquity, by looking at one area of the world, the Eastern United States.In a nutshell, he looked for evidence to support either of two popular theories.

One theory posits that in times of plenty there may have been more time to start dabbling in the domestication of plants like squash and sunflowers, the latter of which were domesticated by the native peoples of Tennessee around 4,500 years ago.

The other theory argues that domestication may have happened out of need to supplement diets when times were not as good. As the human population grew, perhaps resources shifted due to reasons such as over-exploitation of resources or a changing climate. “Was there some imbalance between resources and the human populations that lead to domestication?”

Weitzel tested both hypotheses. He did this by analyzing animal bones from the last 13,000 years and taken from a half-dozen archeological sites in northern Alabama and the Tennessee River valley, where human settlements and their detritus give clues about how they lived, including what they ate.He coupled the findings with pollen data taken from sediment cores collected from lakes and wetlands, cores that serve as a record about the types of plants present at different points in time.The findings are … mixed.

Weitzel found pollen from oak and hickory, leading to the conclusion that forests composed of those species began to dominate the region as the climate warmed, but also led to decreasing water levels in lakes and wetlands. Along with the decreasing lakes, the bone records showed a shift from diets rich in water fowl and large fishes to subsistence on smaller shellfish.

Taken together, that data provides evidence for the second hypothesis: There was some kind of imbalance between the growing human population and their resource base, effected perhaps by exploitation and also by climate change.

But Weitzel also saw support for the first hypothesis in that an abundance of oak and hickory forest supported an equally prevalent game species population. “That is what we see in the animal bone data,” says Weitzel.”Fundamentally, when times are good and there are lots of animals present, you’d expect people to hunt the prey that is most efficient,” says Weitzel. “Deer are much more efficient than squirrels for example, which are smaller, with less meat, and more difficult to catch.”

A single deer or goose can feed several people, but if over-hunted, or if the landscape changes to one less favorable for the animal population, humans must subsist on other smaller, less efficient food sources. Agriculture, despite being hard work, may have become a necessary option to supplement diet when imbalances like these occurred.

Despite the mixed results, the findings supporting domestication happening in times when there was less than an ideal amount of food is significant, says Weitzel.

“I think that the existence of declining efficiency in even one habitat type is enough to show that … domestication happening in times of plenty isn’t the best way to understand initial domestication.”The broader context of this research is important, says Weitzel, because looking to the past and seeing how these populations coped and adapted to change can help inform what we should do as today’s climate warms in the coming decades.

“Having an archaeological voice backed by this deep-time perspective in policy making is very important.”

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Wheat Field. Myrabella, Wikimedia Commons

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Article Source: University of Connecticut news release

UNIVERSITY OF EXETER—Artifacts such as bows and arrows do not necessarily prove our ancestors had sophisticated reasoning and understanding of how these tools worked, new research suggests.

Instead, such items could have emerged from an “accumulation of improvements made across generations” – with each generation understanding no more than the last.

The new study, by the University of Exeter and the Catholic University of Lille, does not question humanity’s capacity for “enhanced causal reasoning” – but argues this did not necessarily drive the development of technologies such as bows, boats and houses.

Researchers used “chains” of volunteers to tackle an engineering problem, with each volunteer able to learn from the last. Solutions improved with each “generation” – but those at the end of the chain had no more understanding of key concepts than their predecessors.

“We tend to explain the existence of complex technologies by saying humans have big brains and superior causal reasoning abilities,” said Dr Maxime Derex, of the University of Exeter and the Catholic University of Lille.

“But – as our study shows – you don’t have to understand how something works in order to improve it.

“Artifacts from hundreds or thousands of years ago do not necessarily show that their makers had a plan or a theory about how something would work.”

The study used 14 chains of five French university students, each aiming to optimize a wheel that rolled down a track – moving faster or slower depending on the adjustment of moveable weights on its four spokes.

Each participant had five attempts to minimize the time it took for the wheel to reach the end of the track, and all but the first participant in each chain got details of the last two configurations used by the previous person.

Afterwards, researchers tested each participant’s understanding by asking them to predict which of two wheels would cover the distance faster.

The study found: “The average wheel speed increased across generations while participants’ understanding did not.”

A further 14 chains of students completed the same process, but this time they could write down a theory to pass to the next participant.

Wheel speed rose at a similar rate as that seen in groups who passed on no written instructions, but once again understanding “barely changed across generations”.

The researchers said: “Most participants actually produced incorrect or incomplete theories despite the relative simplicity of the physical system.”

The findings prove the power of “cultural transmission, without the need for an accurate causal understanding of the system”, they said.

“Our experiment indicates that one should be cautious when interpreting complex archaeological materials as evidence for sophisticated cognitive abilities such as reasoning, problem solving or planning, since these abilities are not the sole driver of technological sophistication,” said Dr Alex Mesoudi, of the University of Exeter.

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Above and below: Artifacts such as bows and arrows do not necessarily prove our ancestors had sophisticated reasoning and understanding of how these tools worked, new research suggests. University of Exeter

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Article Source: University of Exeter news release

The project received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under a Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant.

The paper, published in Nature Human Behaviour, is entitled: “Causal understanding is not necessary for the improvement of culturally evolving technology.”

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