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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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UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI—Archaeologists with the University of Cincinnati used the latest technology to find evidence suggesting ancient Maya people grew surplus crops to support an active trade with neighbors up and down the Yucatan Peninsula.

They will present their findings at the annual American Association of Geographers conference in Washington, D.C.

The Mayan civilization stretched across portions of Mesoamerica, a region spanning Mexico and Central America. The oldest evidence of Maya civilization dates back to 1800 B.C., but most cities flourished between 250 and 900 A.D. By the time Spanish ships arrived in the 1500s, some of the biggest cities were deserted. Researchers at UC are trying to piece together the life history of the Maya before the Spanish conquest.

Nicholas Dunning, a professor of geography in UC’s McMicken College of Arts and Sciences, was part of a research team that found evidence of cultivation along irregular-shaped fields in Mexico that followed the paths of canals and natural water channels at a place called Laguna de Terminos on the Gulf of Mexico. The archaeologists expect to find evidence of habitation when they begin excavations.

The extensive croplands suggest the ancient Maya could grow surplus crops, especially the cotton responsible for the renowned textiles that were traded throughout Mesoamerica.

“It was a much more complex market economy than the Maya are often given credit for,” Dunning said.

Local workers brought the Laguna de Terminos site to the attention of researchers about seven years ago.

“A forester working in the area said there seemed to be a network of ancient fields,” Dunning said. “I looked on Google Earth and was like, ‘Whoa!’ It was an area in the Maya Lowlands that I’d never paid any attention to. And obviously not a lot of other people had, either, from the perspective of looking at ancient agriculture.”

Satellite images revealed a patchwork quilt of blocks along drainage ditches that suggested they were built. Archaeologist also studied imagery NASA created of the region using a tool called Light Detection and Ranging, or LIDAR, that can depict the contours of the ground beneath the leafy canopy of trees and vegetation. Their review confirmed Dunning’s suspicions: the area was covered in ancient farm fields.

“It appears they developed fairly simply from modifications of existing drainage along the eastern edge of the wetlands,” Dunning said. “They probably deepened and straightened some channels or connected them in places, but then further expanded the fields with more sophisticated hydro-engineering.”

LIDAR gives scientists a never-before-seen picture of the Earth’s surface even after centuries of unchecked jungle growth conceals the remains of ancient structures. Researchers look for telltale signs of human activity: squares and rectangles indicating old foundations and circular pits from man-made reservoirs and quarries where the chert used in stone tools was mined. On the LIDAR maps, any hidden structures pop out, including ancient roads and former villages.

“That’s the magic of LIDAR,” UC assistant research professor Christopher Carr said. Carr spent a career practicing engineering before returning to UC to study and eventually teach in the geography department. He approaches questions about the ancient Maya from an engineer’s perspective.

Carr pointed to a map of Yaxnohcah, Mexico, showing a small reservoir the ancient Maya apparently dug in a wetland far from cultivated fields or known settlements.

“What were my ancient counterparts thinking when they built that water reservoir? What did they want to accomplish?” he asked.

Carr also used the LIDAR imagery in the project to follow an ancient Maya road that perhaps hasn’t been traveled in more than 1,000 years. The road is perfectly visible on the LIDAR map but is virtually impossible to discern when you are standing right on it, Carr said.

“There’s vegetation everywhere. But when you’ve been doing this for a while, you notice little things,” Carr said. “I’ll have a LIDAR image on my smartphone that shows me where I am, but I don’t see anything but rainforest. You just walk back and forth until you can feel something underfoot and follow it.”

Identifying possible roads is important for another interest of the UC researchers: ancient Maya marketplaces. Dunning and Carr are working at Yaxnohcah with researchers such as Kathryn Reese-Taylor from the University of Calgary and Armando Anaya Hernandez from Universidad Autónoma de Campeche to unlock the mysteries of the ancient Maya economy. Additionally, they and graduate student Thomas Ruhl have been analyzing NASA’s LIDAR imagery across the Yucatan Peninsula to identify more ancient marketplaces.

Unlike pyramids or even many homes, marketplaces had no foundations or permanent structures, researchers said. They were built on low platforms or cleared areas, perhaps like a seasonal fair or flea market. But they were an important part of life in Maya culture

Dunning said the presence of roads between Maya cities would lend credence to the value the ancient Maya placed on trade with their neighbors. He thinks some of the larger squares identified on the LIDAR maps represent these open markets.

“In some areas, they have this very distinct physical signature,” Dunning said. “So far, we’ve identified several possible marketplaces. We don’t know for sure that they’re marketplaces, but they have an architectural layout that is suggestive of one.”

Soil analysis at other locations identified evidence of ancient butcher shops and stone masons. Dunning solicited the help of UC’s botanists who are conducting analyses that might shed light on his marketplace hypothesis. But the LIDAR maps themselves are instructive.

“I look at spatial patterns. If you look at these big structures and small pyramids, you can tell they’re important structures,” Carr said. “And then you have this ‘lightweight’ thing next to it. That’s what a marketplace looks like to me.”

Dunning said the ancient Maya likely sold perishable goods such as maize and a starchy tuber called manioc. And they traded “mantas,” or bolts of the ornate and richly patterned textiles made from the cotton they grew. These were prized by the Spaniards who arrived in the 1600s.

“We don’t have direct evidence of what the textiles look like in this area. But if you look at ancient paintings and sculptures, people were wearing very elaborate garments,” Dunning said.

Dunning first explored the historic sites of the Yucatan Peninsula at age 14 when he and his older brother drove down to Mexico from Illinois.

“We took a train to the Yucatan and used public transportation to get around to the sites,” Dunning said.

He applied to the University of Chicago partly because it offered a Mayan language class. Dunning returned to Mexico while in college to conduct his first field research. He’s been back many times since.

“My interest in archaeology is in human-environment interactions, including agriculture,” Dunning said.

Dunning is learning more about how ancient Maya people shaped their world to overcome challenges and take advantage of natural opportunities. Dunning’s work also took him to a place called Acalan near the Gulf of Mexico.

“Roughly translated, Acalan means ‘place of canoes’ because it’s very watery,” Dunning said. “And getting around by water is far easier than any other means in that area.”

Then as now the region is covered in thick tropical rainforest. Researchers have to be wary of cheeky monkeys that will throw fruit or worse from the treetops. Carr said one encounter left him sore for days.

“There was this aggressive spider monkey. He’d seen me a couple days earlier. And he’s back shaking the trees,” Carr said. “And all of a sudden, I’m lying flat on the ground. A branch hit me in the shoulder and knocked me to the ground.”

Visiting archaeologists at Yaxnohcah stay at a former Army outpost that was converted into a staffed research station.

“Living conditions are actually luxurious by camping standards. You’re in the field all day and you’re dirty and tired. But you can take a shower. And when you’re finished, someone has cooked you a meal,” Carr said.

At Laguna de Terminos, UC researchers are working to collect clues about the ancient Maya before they are lost to development. Many of the wetlands are being drained or plowed up for grazing pasture.

Dunning said ironically these low-yield pastures provide far less economic value to today’s farmers than the seeming bounty of crops the ancient Maya derived from them more than 1,000 years ago. Their study warns the land-use practices are causing environmental damage to some of these valuable wetlands.

“It’s a shame because the grazing isn’t particularly good. The economic production from that land use is minuscule compared to what was produced by the Maya,” Dunning said.

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UC assistant professor Christopher Carr examines an ancient quarry in Yaxnohcah, Mexico. Nicholas Dunning/UC

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University of Cincinnati student Jeff Brewer stands above UC geography professor Nicholas Dunning at an archaeological site in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Nicholas Dunning/UC

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Article Source: University of Cincinnati news release

RAS Institute of Archaeology—Researchers from the RAS Institute of Archaeology have found a burial site from 4,500 years ago, just 80 kilometers from Moscow. The find was made during building work for a new private school. Experts identified rare items such as battle-axes, spear-tips, arrows and knife blades, alongside ceramic burial vessels. Scientists believe the site had been a settlement of Fatyanovo culture, as evidenced by the eastern origins of the battle-axes and corded-ware ceramics. The find is a significant event for Russian archaeology, since no similar site has been uncovered for the past quarter-century.

“What’s special about these finds are their extreme rarity” said Dr Asya Engovatova, Deputy Director of the RAS Institute of Archaeology. “We could never hope to predict such finds. The last time a site of this kind was uncovered was twenty-five years ago – a huge interval, in scientific terms. Over the intervening period new research technologies have become available – meaning that we can analyze these artifacts at an entirely new level.”

The Fatyanovo culture is identified by archaeologists as a period of the Middle Bronze Age, whose sites are widely spread over the modern-day area of Western Russia, Poland, the Baltic States, Finland, Poland, Belarus. snd Germany. It takes its name from excavations at the village of Fatyanovo, conducted in 1873 by archaeologist Alexei Uvarov — who found the first such cemetery.

Fatyanovo sites are characterized by finds of ceramics with ‘corded’ ornamentation, and of weaponry such as battle-axes. It seems to have been a funeral tradition to inter a battle-axe in men’s burials. During the mid-3rd millenium BC, tribes of this ‘battle-axe’ culture began migrating eastwards along river valleys – either conflicting, or living peaceably with local tribes – hunters, fishermen, and gatherers – who had lived there previously, such as tribes of the Volovo culture. The Fatyanovo people were the first to first to raise cattle in the forest zones of the Russian plains, and to practice slash-and-burn agriculture, or to engage in metal-working with copper and bronze. Later, three millennia ago, the Fatyanovo people disappeared – dispersed among the tribes of the Volga & Oka intersection.

The Fatyanovo people had their own distinctive burial traditions, which depended on the gender of the deceased. Men were buried with their bodies curled on their right side, and their heads facing west – whereas women were placed on their left side, with their heads facing east. The funeral pit was strengthened with wooden planking or birch bark, or intertwisted sticks. Above, the pit was sealed with

timber planks. The burial site in Moscow County Region contained the typical funerary attributes which the Fatyanovo people chose to accompany them in the ‘afterlife’. A wedge-shaped axe of polished flint – not merely a funerary ornament, but a working tool that had practical applications. Flint arrowheads were also found in the grave, along with long sharp flint blades, apparently for use as knives. The deceased were seen off into the afterlife with ornamental vessels, decorated with the characteristic cord-pattern ornamentation of the Fatyanovo people. These vessels were not cleaned during the excavation – in case some traces of food had been left inside them.

The battle-axes found at the Moscow County Region site are fashioned from Diorite stone (Greenstone), and are a representation of bronze axes – they have the protruding rib, which, on metal blades, would be their point of contact with the mold. This kind of axe was used in battle, mostly for splitting heads – a blow from such a weapon would have been a fatal wound.

The finds retrieved from this Fatyanovo culture cemetery will form the basis for a study of the sources of this culture. “We do not have a full picture of who the Fatyanovo people were”, said Dr Asya Engovatova. “In Russia, their DNA has never been analyzed. This means that every new Fatyanovo site uncovered is a unique opportunity for researchers. If we could only recover some bone material, we could use modern DNA-extraction techniques, to find out what their origins had been”.

As the scientists carrying out the excavations admitted, the problem with researching Fatyanovo culture burials is that they are most often found in sandy soil – an environment in which bone material is poorly preserved. From the dozens of fresh samples of decayed wood and coal from the roof of the funeral chamber, radiocarbon analysis may be able to put an accurate date, for the first time, on a Fatyanovo burial site. This will bring new scientific data into play, and such a dating would enable comparisons to be made with similar Cordware Culture sites in other locations in Europe – and make a reliable basis for determining the locations of the Fatyanovo people in this wider community.

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Stone Battle-Axe, Fatyanov Culture,Bronze Age (one of the Battle-Axe and Corded Ceramics cultures), Material from a burial site at Pavlovskaya Sloboda, Moscow County Region. 535 grams. length 16 cm, made from diorite. RAS Institute of Archaeology

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Flint Spear-Heads. Lengths: 9, 9,5 cm and 13 cm. Fatyanov Culture,Bronze Age (one of the Battle-Axe and Corded Ceramics cultures), Material from a burial site at Pavlovskaya Sloboda, Moscow County Region. RAS Institute of Archaeology

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Flint Axe-Heads. Lengths: 11,14cm and 14,5cm. The taper on these axe-heads shows that they saw significant practical use. Fatyanov Culture,Bronze Age (one of the Battle-Axe and Corded Ceramics cultures), Material from a burial site at Pavlovskaya Sloboda, Moscow County Region. RAS Institute of Archaeology

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Flint Arrow-Heads, Lengths from 3.5cm to 6.7cm. It’s interesting to note the range of different kinds of arrow-head found at a single burial site. Fatyanov Culture,Bronze Age (one of the Battle-Axe and Corded Ceramics cultures), Material from a burial site at Pavlovskaya Sloboda, Moscow County Region. RAS Institute of Archaeology

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Article Source: RAS Institute of Archaeology news release

UNIVERSITY OF HUDDERSFIELD—Researchers from the University of Huddersfield, with colleagues from the University of Cambridge and the University of Minho in Braga, have been using a genetic approach to tackle one of the most intractable questions of all – how and when we became truly human.

Modern Homo sapiens first arose in Africa more than 300,000 years ago, but there is great controversy amongst scholars about whether the earliest such people would have been ‘just like us’ in their mental capacities – in the sense that, if they were brought up in a family from Yorkshire today, for example, would they be indistinguishable from the rest of the population? Nevertheless, archaeologists believe that people very like us were living in small communities in an Ice Age refuge on the South African coast by at least 100,000 years ago.

Between around 100,000 and 70,000 years ago, these people left plentiful evidence that they were thinking and behaving like modern humans – evidence for symbolism, such as the use of pigments (probably for body painting), drawings and engravings, shell beads, and tiny stone tools called microliths that might have been part of bows and arrows. Some of this evidence for what some archaeologists call “modern human behaviour” goes back even further, to more than 150,000 years.

But if these achievements somehow made these people special, suggesting a direct line to the people of today, the genetics of their modern “Khoi-San” descendants in southern Africa doesn’t seem to bear this out. Our genomes imply that almost all modern non-Africans from all over the world – and indeed most Africans too – are derived from a small group of people living not in South Africa but in East Africa, around 60,000-70,000 years ago. There’s been no sign so far that southern Africans contributed to the huge expansion of Homo sapiens out of Africa and across the world that took place around that time.

That is, until now. The Huddersfield-Minho team of geneticists, led by Professor Martin Richards at Huddersfield and Dr Pedro Soares in Braga, along with the eminent Cambridge archaeologist Professor Sir Paul Mellars, have studied the maternally-inherited mitochondrial DNA from Africans in unprecedented detail, and have identified a clear signal of a small-scale migration from South Africa to East Africa that took place at just that time, around 65,000 years ago. The signal is only evident today in the mitochondrial DNA. In the rest of the genome, it seems to have been eroded away to nothing by recombination – the reshuffling of chromosomal genes between parents every generation, which doesn’t affect the mitochondrial DNA – in the intervening millennia.

The migration signal makes good sense in terms of climate. For most of the last few hundred years, different parts of Africa have been out of step with each other in terms of the aridity of the climate. Only for a brief period at 60,000-70,000 years ago was there a window during which the continent as a whole experienced sufficient moisture to open up a corridor between the south and the east. And intriguingly, it was around 65,000 years ago that some of the signs of symbolism and technological complexity seen earlier in South Africa start to appear in the east.

The identification of this signal opens up the possibility that a migration of a small group of people from South Africa towards the east around 65,000 years ago transmitted aspects of their sophisticated modern human culture to people in East Africa. Those East African people were biologically little different from the South Africans – they were all modern Homo sapiens, their brains were just as advanced and they were undoubtedly cognitively ready to receive the benefits of the new ideas and upgrade. But the way it happened might not have been so very different from a modern isolated stone-age culture encountering and embracing western civilization today.

In any case, it looks as if something happened when the groups from the South encountered the East, with the upshot being the greatest diaspora of Homo sapiens ever known – both throughout Africa and out of Africa to settle much of Eurasia and as far as Australia within the space of only a few thousand years.

Professor Mellars commented: “This work shows that the combination of genetics and archaeology working together can lead to significant advances in our understanding of the origins of Homo sapiens.”

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Map showing early African archaeological sites with evidence for symbolic material and microlithic stone tools. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Image by Reto Stöckli

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Article Source: University of Huddersfield news release

* The article, A dispersal of Homo sapiens from southern to eastern Africa immediately preceded the out-of-Africa migration, can be found online in Scientific Reports.

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PLOS—People from North Africa are likely the main group that founded the indigenous population on the Canary Islands, arriving by 1000 CE, reports a new study by Rosa Fregel of Stanford University, USA and Universidad de La Laguna, Spain, and colleagues, published March 20, 2019 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

Numerous studies of the culture and genetics of indigenous people living in the Canary Islands, an archipelago off the coast of Morocco, point to North African Berbers as the founders, but more recent human activities – such as the Spanish conquest, the start of sugarcane plantations and the slave trade – have changed the indigenous population’s genetic makeup. To shed light on who first colonized the archipelago, researchers analyzed 48 ancient mitochondrial genomes from 25 archaeological sites across the seven main islands. They selected mitochondrial genomes because, since they are inherited directly from the mother, they are especially consistent and useful for tracking human migrations.

The researchers discovered lineages that have only been observed in Central North Africa, and others that have a wider distribution including both West and Central North Africa, and, in some cases, Europe and the Near East. They also identified four new lineages specific to the Canary Islands, which, when analyzed together, are consistent with radiocarbon dating evidence showing that people reached the islands by 1000 CE. Additionally, the researchers found that the distribution of the different lineages on each island varies depending on the island’s distance from the continent, which supports previous studies finding that the islands experienced at least two distinct early migration events.

The Canary Islands lineages discovered in this study fit into a larger pattern of Mediterranean migration through North Africa, as part of the Neolithic expansion of humans from the Middle East to Europe and Africa. The presence of these Mediterranean lineages suggests that the Berbers had already mixed with Mediterranean groups at the time that they colonized the islands.

The authors add: “Using next-generation techniques, we have been able to obtain ancient DNA of the indigenous population of all the seven Canary Islands for the first time. Our results indicate that mitochondrial DNA diversity is variable within the archipelago, suggesting that the colonization of the islands was a heterogeneous process and that the different islands had different evolutionary histories.”

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Guanche mummy of a woman (830 AD). Museo de la Naturaleza y el Hombre, Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Wofgang Sauber

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Article Source: PLOS news release

*Fregel R, Ordóñez AC, Santana-Cabrera J, Cabrera VM, Velasco-Vázquez J, Alberto V, et al. (2019) Mitogenomes illuminate the origin and migration patterns of the indigenous people of the Canary Islands. PLoS ONE 14(3): e0209125. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0209125

WILLIAMSBURG, Va. (March 19, 2019) – This winter the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation launches a multi-year archaeological investigation at the site of John Custis IV’s city home and gardens, known as Custis Square, promising new findings about the life of the eccentric politician, planter and first father-in-law to Martha Washington, the enslaved people living on the site, and early 18th-century horticulture.

The Custis Square project is expected to create 10 multi-year archaeology positions in the foundation. A generous lead gift from the Jacqueline Badger Mars Landmark Investments 8, LLC Charitable Lead Trust is helping to make the Custis archaeology project possible.

“More than 90 years after its establishment, Colonial Williamsburg continues to pursue a fuller understanding of 18th-century America, its people and their culture in order to tell our shared American story more fully,” said Colonial Williamsburg President and CEO Mitchell B. Reiss. “We are enormously grateful for the generous gift that has launched the Custis Square project, and we look forward to sharing both our work and our findings with visitors of all ages.”

Custis lived from 1678 until 1749, leading a prosperous family that first settled on Virginia’s Eastern Shore in the mid-17th century. After his turbulent marriage to Frances Parke Custis ended with her death of smallpox in 1715, he moved to the colony’s capital of Williamsburg. There, he served as a member of the royal Governor’s Council, immersed himself in horticulture and constructed an elaborate garden on his four-acre property. Custis Square was maintained by some of his enslaved laborers, who at the time of his death numbered nearly 200, most of whom worked on his four plantations outside the city.

“The shared history we interpret at Colonial Williamsburg is not static. It grows daily, enhanced by the research of our team and our peers,” said Colonial Williamsburg Director of Archaeology Jack Gary. “Our new investigation of Custis Square is thrilling both in scale and subject matter, given all we stand to learn about the people who lived and worked on this ground early in an era of political and scientific enlightenment.”

As a young man, John Custis IV studied trade in England and likely observed formal gardens that fostered his hobby. Back in Virginia, records show that he ordered a range of plants through agents in England and corresponded with prominent naturalists including Peter Collinson, Mark Catesby and Jon Bartram, who placed his garden among the finest in the colony.

Frances Parke and John Custis IV’s son, Daniel Parke Custis, married Martha Dandridge in 1750 and died suddenly in 1757. Martha Dandridge Custis may have lived at the family’s Williamsburg home after his death and until her remarriage in 1759 to George Washington.

Like other prominent Virginians, John Custis IV lamented slavery but did not free his own enslaved. With one of them, Alice, as a 61-year-old widower he fathered a son named John whom he affectionately called “my boy Jack.” John Custis IV successfully petitioned the colony’s governor and council for Jack’s freedom, deeded him land in York County and enslaved persons including his own mother and her other children, and willed him construction of a furnished home. Jack, however, died in 1751 just two years after his father.

Often combative, John Custis IV fell out with Lt. Gov. Alexander Spotswood after Spotswood cut down trees on his property to enhance his view from the new Governor’s Palace. John Custis IV’s volatile relationship with his wife – and his personality – are memorialized on his Eastern Shore grave, which reads, “Yet lived but Seven years which was the Space of time he kept a Batchelors House at Arlington on the Eastern Shoar of Virginia.”

In the decades immediately following John Custis IV’s death, Custis Square housed residential and trade tenants. The structure that stands on the site, though known as the “Custis Kitchen,” was built in the early 19th century during the property’s ownership by Dr. James McClurg. The property was purchased in 1851 and partially built upon by the current Eastern State Hospital, later used as a park and purchased by Colonial Williamsburg in 1966.

Partial site excavation in 1964. Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

Partial excavations in the 1960s uncovered the foundations of the property’s residence, which is believed to have been a six-chimney building in the Jacobean style of Bacon’s Castle in Surry County, as well as an older kitchen, a smokehouse, a brick drain, two wells and a road extending south from the structures. The new investigation is broader in scope and will benefit from advancements in methodology and technology, including remote sensing and materials analysis.

The Custis Square project’s areas of investigation include:

• The flora and aesthetic of John Custis IV’s gardens
• Evidence of residential structures that housed the enslaved
• Identification of John Custis IV’s enslaved and their descendants
• The appearance of John Custis IV’s residence
• Evidence of pre-historic occupation
• Activity on the site through the 20th century

Custis Square on Francis Street between S. Nassau Street and the Colonial Parkway with investigation area highlighted in red. Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

The project’s phases include:

• Site mapping and surveying; excavation of the McClurg Kitchen (2019)
• Open excavation of garden areas, materials analysis and research of John Custis IV’s enslaved to identify potential descendants (2020-21)
• Open excavation of outbuildings focused on the lives and work of the enslaved (2022-23)
• Cataloging and reporting (2024-25)

Custis Square currently serves as a grazing pasture for Colonial Williamsburg Coach and Livestock Department animals, opposite S. Nassau Street from the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg, which remain open during a $41.7-million expansion scheduled for completion in spring 2020 with a new, dedicated entrance on S. Nassau Street. Colonial Williamsburg also plans construction of a new, public archaeological collections building to house the more than 60 million archaeological artifacts in its collection – a project possible thanks to a generous gift by Mars’ late brother, Forrest Mars Jr.

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John Custis IV, attributed to Charles Bridges, oil on canvas, ca. 1740. Courtesy of Washington and Lee University, University Collections of Art and History, Lexington, Virginia

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Article Source: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation news release

Colonial Williamsburg will share updates and findings on its Making History blog at colonialwilliamsburg.com/archaeology. Information is also available by following Colonial Williamsburg on Facebook and @colonialwmsburg on Twitter and Instagram.

Admission tickets and additional information about Colonial Williamsburg sites and programming are available atcolonialwilliamsburg.com or by calling 855-296-6627 toll-free. Information is also available via the free Colonial Williamsburg Explorer app, which can be downloaded from the Apple App Store and Google Play.