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Prehistory is a modern idea. The word was “coined” only in the 1830s. Before the 19th century, we didn’t know much about dinosaurs or cavemen, and fossils remained a scientific curiosity. When French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon published his notorious Histoire naturelle (1749–1788), suggesting that nature had a history and proposing the first reproduction theory, the faculty of theology at the Sorbonne University in France condemned it and threatened him with repercussions. He eventually had to publish a retraction.

Similarly, when Charles Darwin (1809–1882) published his On the Origin of Species (1859), his compatriots in the United Kingdom and Europe still believed that God made man “in his own image,” as stated in the Bible (Genesis 1:27). Anyone claiming that all animals came from the same origin, and apes were somehow our distant cousins, was considered a fool or a heretic.

Then the first caves were excavated revealing extensive and intricate artwork on their walls. In 1879, archeologist Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola explored a new cave in Altamira, northern Spain, and brought his young daughter, Maria, with him. She spotted vivid depictions of bison and masterfully painted scenes on the cave’s ceiling. These cave paintings were initially dismissed as forgeries, as scholars of the time, with the positivist mindset, could not imagine that people from the Paleolithic were sophisticated enough to produce such complex artworks. By the early 20th century, however, as archaeologists uncovered more ancient skeletons, bones, fossils, and early human art in caves and other sites, their discoveries started to raise curiosity beyond the scientific community. Writers, intellectuals, and the public were captivated by these glimpses into our distant past.

Artists were intrigued, sometimes amazed by the mind-blowing quality of parietal art, indecipherable, complex abstract shapes and objects, and what was perceived as scenes depicting animals and humans in rituals or sacrifices. The drawings, paintings, and etchings that endlessly decorated the walls, ceilings, and floors of caves in subtle colors were often mesmerizing. Picasso was particularly inspired by various prehistoric elements, as the 2023 exhibition No Past in Art: How Prehistory Inspired Picasso’s Work at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris showed. Gauguin, Cézanne, and later the symbolists and primitivists, also dedicated various paintings and sculptures to what they perceived as representations of our origins, rituals, and myths.

Prehistory has never stopped inspiring artists since then, captivating the most important modern art figures like Jean Arp, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Paul Klee, Joan Miró; Joseph Beuys, Louise Bourgeois, Jean Dubuffet, Marguerite Duras, Barbara Hepworth, Yves Klein, and Robert Smithson. It continues to be an inspiration among our contemporaries, including Dove Allouche, Miquel Barceló, Tacita Dean, Marguerite Humeau, Pierre Huyghe, and Giuseppe Penone, to name just a few, whose works were showcased during the 2019 exhibition, Préhistoire, une énigme moderne (Prehistory, a Modern Enigma).

This landmark exhibition, which took place at the Pompidou Center in Paris, inspired me and initiated my interest in prehistory. It is not the first museum show dedicated to the topic: fossils, artifacts, and artworks discovered in caves, as well as tools, ornaments, and sculptures made from natural rocks, have been exhibited in major art institutions since the end of the 19th century.

Most of these exhibitions have already created fruitful dialogues between the past and present and parietal art and its representation by contemporary artists. When it opened its Gallery of Comparative Anatomy and Paleontology in 1898, the National Museum of Natural History in Paris commissioned the sculptor Emmanuel Frémiet and the painter Fernand Cormon to create a vast decorative program. Prehistoric Rock Pictures in Europe and Africa at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, New York, 1937) showed monumental surveys of cave paintings with a selection of contemporary works by Miró, Klee, and Ernst, among others, in echo. “That an institution devoted to the most recent in the art should concern itself with the most ancient may seem something of a paradox,” MoMA’s founding director Alfred H. Barr Jr. wrote in his preface to the exhibition catalogue. “Yet, for Barr, this past had already influenced modern art, and could potentially offer museum visitors a prehistoric pedigree for it,” states the MoMA website. Another major exhibition, 40,000 Years of Modern Art, organized by Herbert Read and Roland Penrose at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1948, mixed prehistory and non-Western art with surrealist, expressionist, and abstract works.

But there is a major problem, particularly, concerning the so-called “primitive art,”—a highly contested term now. The clichés and stereotypes that this notion implies were also abundant in the early “scientific” literature dedicated to our ancestors. The first paleontologists were poisoned by plain racist prejudices, explains paleo artist and author Mark P. Witton in his 2020 blog. George Cuvier (1769–1832), the father of vertebrate paleontology whose famous taxonomy incorporated both fossils and living species, “viewed whites as the pinnacle of creation, but Blacks as ugly, barbaric persons of monkey-like appearance,” writes Witton. “His work on dividing humans into ‘scientifically validated’ races was instrumental in later attempts at biological justifications of racism.”

In the United States, the influential president of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857–1935) was a supporter of Hitler. He exploited his research to promote racist and eugenicist ideas, points out Witton. Osborn commissioned one of the earliest depictions of prehistoric life, Charles Knight’s mural “Neanderthal Flintworkers” (1924), hung in AMNH’s Hall of the Age of Man. Many of Osborn’s contemporaries, including Margaret Mead, were troubled by the racist character of the imagery. The faces and looks of the Neanderthal men and women depicted in this iconic—though controversial and scientifically incorrect work—were inspired by features of non-white peoples, instead of being deduced from their bones.

A Eurocentric mindset has continued to characterize the collective representation of prehistory until recently, sometimes reducing it to a more subtle form of “primitive art.” In 1984, MoMA dedicated a survey exhibition to “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art. MoMA bragged about being the first institution to “juxtapose modern and tribal objects in the light of informed art history.” But the exhibition omitted dates of the Indigenous works and explanations of their functions, as art historian Thomas McEvilly remarked in his Artforum review of the show. He criticized Primitivism in 20th Century Art as expressing “Western egotism still as unbridled as in the centuries of colonialism and souvenirism.” Since then, the museum has made its mea culpa, addressing the controversy on its website.

The Pompidou exhibition’s three curators, Cécile Debray, Rémi Labrusse, and Maria Stavrinaki, write on the museum website that Primitivism in the 20th Century Art did not include prehistory “which, in fact, is fundamentally different from it. For the modern Western world, the ‘primitive’ is generally rooted in specific cultures, usually described as exotic; the question of temporality is secondary to its geographical and cultural otherness. Prehistory, on the other hand, is seen above all as an indefinitely stretched time span, and thus largely indecipherable (whether in terms of nature or the first human cultures).” Labrusse dedicated a book to this paradoxical situation. “Prehistory is precisely what is pre, meaning out of history,” he told me in an interview in October 2024. It “radically overturned our dream of mastering linear time, as 19th-century historicism chose to formulate it.” Here lies the paradox that attracts so many artists to prehistory, according to Labrusse: “Because it is largely indecipherable (whether in terms of nature or the first human cultures), it remains fascinating.”

From Prehistory, a Modern Enigma, I remember the scenography. Tall walls, obscure corridors, grandiose frescos, and a prehistoric cave reconstituted at the center of it. In this spectacular setting, amid fossils, Cro-Magnon skulls, tools, and Paleolithic carvings, there were more than 300 works of art by modern and contemporary artists. Plus elements of popular culture: surveys of archaeological excavations, advertisements, and extracts from books (The Quest for Fire, a hugely popular Belgian 1911 fantasy novel) and cult films such as The Lost World (1925), King Kong (1933), or 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). This undertone in the exhibitions shows what the curators of the Pompidou exhibition describe as the “invention of the concept of prehistory.” How artists and society have succumbed to the appeal of origins in the modern era, “yielding to a fantasized vision of what came before history.”

The exhibition opened with Odilon Redon and Paul Cézanne, at the turn of the 20th century. Cézanne was an amateur student of geology and paleontology. He visited prehistoric caves and painted the rocks on the Mediterranean coast with his close friend Antoine-Fortuné Marion (1846–1900), who later became a noted geologist and paleontologist. The show also exposed the Venus of Lespugue, the famous prehistoric ivory statuette, dated around 23,000 years ago, which inspired Picasso and Giacometti (both owned plaster casts of it). She stands there, in an exhibition room at the Musée de l’Homme, surrounded by bronzes from Matisse, Miró, and other modern artists who were equally fascinated by her and other statues from that time.

“Préhistoire, une énigme moderne” brilliantly demonstrated how prehistory inspired modernity, an artistic movement that was, paradoxically, about the future. Photos of the 1889 Paris World’s Fair show how the Eiffel Tower and various cutting-edge technologies were exhibited alongside Neanderthal skeletons. A Max Ernst painting of “petrified forests, glacialized landscapes, and sedimented earth,” created after World War I, raised questions about whether these were depictions “from after humanity, or before it?” as modernism developed toward “a prehistoric vision of time before humankind,” according to a 2019 New York Times article.

This feeling got stronger with the tragedies of World War II when many intellectuals and artists turned their back on the notion of progress, digging in reverse into the beginning of life, extinct species, the first hominids, the lost cultures of the Paleolithic era, and the Neolithic revolution to grapple with the possibility of extinction, of earth without humankind. “Nourished by archaeological discoveries, but far from simply reflecting on them,… prehistory…[functioning] as a powerful machine for stirring up time,” write the curators. “This time machine constantly shapes the mental boundaries of modernity and provides concrete models for all sorts of experiments.”

The exhibition also explores the mysteries of shaped rocks and tools, an intimate relationship to animals, ecological issues, and apocalyptic wonder in chronological and thematic parcourse. These themes are part of the collective representation, the idea of what prehistory is and how the inspired artists, whose works were exhibited, felt from Louise Bourgeois, Joseph Beuys, Lucio Fontana, Max Penck, Robert Morris, Robert Smithson in the 1980s, the Chapman brothers, Pierre Huyghe, Tacita Dean, Marguerite Humeau, Dove Allouche, Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Jean-Pascal Flavien, and Bertrand Lavier in the last few years. “Prehistory is not an object given to artists to interpret; it is created by them” states Labrusse.

“I think artists are either Paleolithic or Neolithic. I am decidedly the latter said minimalist artist Carl Andre, according to the previously mentioned NYT article. His Stone Field Sculpture in Hartford, Connecticut, could have belonged to the Neolithic times. Painters and sculptors sometimes like to experiment with the artistic canons and the tradition of “getting back to our roots,” to the “early man,” as a 2024 exhibition at the Hole Gallery shows. “Based around an out-of-print anthology devoted to prehistoric collections unearthed by archaeological expeditions in Algeria, French artist Camille Henrot’s… [Prehistoric Collections] treats this ethnographic material as motifs of a contemporary grotesque,” states the Perimeter Books’s website.

Meanwhile, Mark Dion’s immersive, uncanny installation at La Brea Tar Pits and Museum in September 2024, Excavations, displayed new work alongside “early museum murals, dioramas, and maquettes of Ice Age mammals in a playful… presentation,” the museum website states.

Labrusse recalls feeling “powerless” when he started applying his scientific skills and methods to prehistoric art (he is a professor of art history at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales). “History requires context, facts, and elements to narrate it. These things are almost nonexistent when one looks back so far behind in time,” he explains. Many social scientists who study prehistoric history testify to a similar challenge. There is little evidence from prehistoric times and huge gaps of time for which the evidence is completely missing. “Prehistorians have the scientific honesty to recognize an irreducible ignorance, an impossibility of bringing out meaning,” notes Labrusse. “It is impossible to give a social, political, or aesthetic meaning to these societies.” During a podcast interview in 2019, he explained feeling first “like falling into a hole, caught up in an abyss of darkness. Then, as in Alice in Wonderland, you start to see through the looking glass.”

For him, the turning point came while exploring a prehistoric cave, a “very intimate, life-changing experience,” he says during the interview with me. Discovering parietal scenes in the cave of Roucadour, Labrusse felt “as if they were contemporary. There is no context there, and things seem to float outside of any attributable meaning, so their appropriation is immediate, easy.” I learned this way to “let go of the burden of history,” which “dissolved like a soap bubble.” He recalls being tempted to touch these walls, reproducing these same gestures that the first men did back then. “Science now tells us that Homos sapiens has been the same for 100,000 years, even 300,000 years. Individuals have the same capacities, even possibly the same feelings as us today.”

The limits of science, when confronted with prehistory, are also an opportunity that artists have often seized to contribute to the field in their own way. It gives them a chance to tell this story differently. Aware of this, contemporary prehistorians sometimes invite painters or sculptors to work with them to create interdisciplinary meaning, an epistemology articulating a subjective point of view (art) with an objective approach (science).

The French government invited artists Ernest Pignon-Ernest, Giuseppe Penone, and Miquel Barceló, among others, to bring “Other Perspectives” to the Chauvet-Pont d’Arc cave. To understand how a howl decorating the cave had been originally drawn, Barceló recreated first the same wet surface that was used by his predecessor as a canvas 35,5000 years ago. He then drew a few lines like a graffiti artist in less than 10 seconds. His audacious and instinctive gesture was brilliant: the resulting drawing looked remarkably similar to the original one. “Only an artist can do this with his subjective impulsivity,” comments Labrusse. “A historian would not have dared to do it, keeping a rigorous mindset in his attempt to reproduce the drawing and, ultimately, failing to do so.”

In another style, the notorious Adrie and Alfons Kennis, twin brothers who are “paleo artists,” are creating lifelike figures of early man that are touring museums and galleries around the world. Their hominids are fascinating and are another example of what art and science can do when working hand in hand.

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This article was produced by Human Bridges.

Cover Image, Top Left: Cave painting detail replica from Altamira Cave in Spain. Jose-Manuel Benito, Locutus Borg, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

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Somma Vesuviana, Italy

By any measure, this appeared to be the most massive ancient villa I had ever seen. Walls towered over me. Peering upward, I stretched my neck to observe their height — at least what was left of their full dimension after their destruction 1600 years ago. Metal scaffolding enveloped them and an enormous metal roof occupied space far above them, shielding them from the sun, wind, rain and other elements of the world outside. I was looking up from deep below ground surface. In contrast to the warmth of the sun’s radiation at ground level above me, the air was cool within this gargantuan, carefully and painstakingly excavated pit and I needed no hat to shield my head and face from the sun’s rays above. 

Located near the small town of Somma Vesuviana at the foot of the northern slope of Vesuvius (opposite and invisible from ancient Pompeii and Herculaneum and referenced by some as the ‘dark side’ of Vesuvius), this site was initially discovered in the 1930’s with limited excavation. But the most extensive investigation began in 2002 through a multidisciplinary project with the University of Tokyo. Those excavations, now ongoing, have revealed the walls preserved to a remarkable height, doorways decorated with Dionysiac motifs, a pilastered arcade, apses and interior room walls decorated with frescoes, cisterns, terraces, colonnades — emblematic of spaces created to impress large public audiences — and a large wine cellar with dolia (large earthenware jars), some of which can be seen still buried to their lips in the ground. Scholars have determined that they still contained fermenting grape juice when the eruption occurred. For a time, this was clearly more than a wealthy person’s villa — it was also a production facility for wine, the principal product of the region. Many artifacts, including a marble statue of Dionysus, the god of wine himself, were also recovered in the process. But what we see today is but a fraction of the entire complex that once existed……

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Washington University in St. Louis—The first-ever use of cutting-edge drone-based lidar in Central Asia allowed archaeologists to capture stunning details of two newly documented trade cities high in the mountains of Uzbekistan.

A team of researchers led by Michael Frachetti, professor of archaeology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, and Farhod Maksudov, director of the National Center of Archaeology in Uzbekistan, used drone-based lidar to map the archaeological scale and layout of two recently discovered high-elevation sites in Uzbekistan.  The medieval cities are among the largest ever documented in the mountainous parts of the Silk Road, the vast network of ancient trade routes that connected Europe and Eastern Asia. 

Images and details of the discovery were recently published in Nature*. Co-authors include Jack Berner, a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at WashU; Edward Henry, an assistant professor of anthropology and geography at Colorado State University and WashU alum (PhD ’18);  Tao Ju, a professor of computer science and engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering at WashU; and Xiaoyi Liu, an undergraduate student in the McKelvey School of Engineering at WashU. The expedition was supported by the National Geographic Society.

The drone-lidar scans provided remarkably detailed views of the plazas, fortifications, roads, and habitations that shaped the lives and economies of highland communities, traders, and travelers from the sixth through 11th centuries in Central Asia. The two cities are located in rugged terrain 2,000 to 2,200 meters above sea level (roughly comparable to Machu Picchu in Peru), making them unusual examples of thriving mountain urbanism.

The smaller city, today called Tashbulak, covered about 12 hectares, while the larger city of Tugunbulak reached 120 hectares, “making it one of the largest regional cities of its time,” Frachetti said.

“These would have been important urban hubs in central Asia, especially as you moved out of lowland oases and into more challenging high-altitude settings,” he said. “While typically seen as barriers to Silk Road trade and movement, the mountains actually were host to major centers for interaction. Animals, ores, and other precious resources likely drove their prosperity.”

“This site had an elaborate urban structure with specific material culture that greatly varied from the lowland sedentary culture,” Maksudov said. “It’s clear that the people inhabiting Tugunbulak for more than a thousand years ago were nomadic pastoralists who maintained their own distinct, independent culture and political economy.”

Lidar technology is commonly used to map archaeological landscapes blocked by dense vegetation, but it has additional value where vegetation is sparse, such as the mountains of Uzbekistan. “Drone operation is strictly regulated in Uzbekistan, so this discovery is also thanks to the political support and permissions we received through local partners and government,” Frachetti said.

The centimeter-level scans allowed for advanced computer analysis of the ancient archaeological surfaces, providing an unprecedented view of the cities’ architecture and organization. “These are some of the highest-resolution lidar images of archeological sites ever published,” Frachetti said. “They were made possible, in part, because of the unique erosion dynamics in this mountain setting.”

Frachetti, Maksudov, and their team first discovered the highland cities using predictive computer models and old-fashioned foot surveys between 2011 and 2015, tracing presumed routes of the Silk Road in southeastern Uzbekistan. The project took years to materialize. The extra time ultimately proved to be a blessing, allowing the researchers to make the most of the latest advances in drone-based lidar. “The final high-res maps were a composite of more than 17 drone flights over three weeks,” Frachetti said. “It would have taken us a decade to map such large sites manually.” 

A drone captured images of Tugunbulak in 2018. (Credit: M. Frachetti)

Frachetti and graduate students in his Spatial Analysis, Interpretation, and Exploration (SAIE) Lab compiled the drone-lidar data into 3D models, which were passed to Liu and Ju, who applied computational algorithms to analyze the archaeological surfaces and auto-trace millions of lines to predict likely architectural alignments. The final step was to match the digital output with comparable architectural cases, revealing a huge ancient city otherwise invisible to the naked eye. “The project reflects a truly interdisciplinary effort,” Ju said. “The analysis techniques have potential applications in many domains that utilize lidar scans.”

Both cities warrant much closer inspection, Frachetti said. Preliminary digging at one of the fortified structures at Tugunbulak suggests that the fortress — a building protected by three-meter-thick rammed earth walls — might have been a factory where local metalsmiths turned rich deposits of iron ore into steel. Such industry would have been a key feature of the city and its economy.

It’s already clear that Tashbulak and Tugunbulak weren’t just remote outposts or rest stops. “The Silk Road wasn’t just about the endpoints of China and the West,” Frachetti said. “Major political forces were at play in Central Asia. The complex heart of the network was also a driver of innovation.”

Frachetti hopes to use the same combination of on-the-ground detective work and drone-based lidar to get pictures of other high-altitude settlements along the Silk Road and beyond. “We could really change the map of urban development in medieval Asia,” he said.

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A drone captured images of Tugunbulak in 2018. (Credit: M. Frachetti)

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Composite lidar view of Tugunbulak. (Credit: SAIElab/J.Berner/M.Frachetti)

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Article Source: Washington University in St. Louis news release.

*Large-scale medieval urbanism traced by UAV–lidar in highland Central Asia, Nature, 23-Oct-2024. 10.1038/s41586-024-08086-5  

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Recently, a published scholarly study reported findings supporting a remarkable observation about the famous megalithic pillars of a nearly 12,000-year-old Neolithic site in southern Türkiye. In that study, the author suggests that certain symbols carved onto the faces of pillars at the site were made to track time and mark the changes of seasons by recording observations of the sun, moon and stars through a lunisolar calendar system. Moreover, the study posited that the markings also record the date when comet fragments impacted the Earth almost 13,000 years ago – or 10,850 BC.

The suggestion is remarkable because, if true, it would be the oldest such calendar ever discovered. It would also add to the implication that a Neolithic group of people were astute observers of their astronomical environment and that they were able to apply this knowledge in a sophisticated way to manage and work with their environment — capabilities not thought to have been developed for another few thousand years.

This discovery, if confirmed, exemplifies the game-changing revelations that have emerged from a group of sites in present-day Turkey, illuminating our understanding of the meaning and significance of the otherwise sketchy Neolithic peoples who inhabited this part of the world thousands of years before the florescence of the great agriculturally-based civilizations such as Mesopotamia and Egypt. These new insights are opening a window on societies that provided the foundation for the development of Old World civilization. One of these sites, known as Göbekli Tepe, has captured the imagination of the world….

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The Site

Göbekli Tepe is a prehistoric settlement inhabited from about 9500 BCE to at least 8000 BCE, during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic in the Southeastern Region of ancient Anatolia (modern day Türkiye). Most notable at this site are the large circular structures or enclosures that contain massive carved and shaped megaliths featuring carved anthropomorphic figures, clothing, and wild animals. These finds have been the subject of interpretation by archaeologists regarding the iconography and religious beliefs of the mysterious prehistoric people who inhabited and visited the site. The site also features a rich representation of domestic structures, other small buildings, cisterns, and quarries. Although the site’s original excavator, Klaus Schmidt, interpreted the site as a religious sanctuary established and visited by hunter-gatherers, more recent findings of domestic structures, the cisterns and evidence of water management, as well as tools associated with domestic activity, point to a relatively permanent, continuously inhabited settlement.

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Map showing location of Göbekli Tepe. Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

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Research History

Long before archaeological work began on the site, the rocky hill on which it is located was considered by local tradition to be a sacred place, although it was also under agricultural cultivation. Archaeologically speaking, the site was originally identified through a survey conducted by the Istanbul University and the University of Chicago in 1963.

It was not until October 1994 when German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt, having already worked at the site of Nevalı Çori, another ancient site in the area, began searching for other ancient sites, including the site identified by the survey in 1963. The Yıldız family, who owned the land where the site was located, directed him to the site. They had previously discovered finds (reported to the local museum) while ploughing. Schmidt recognized the finds as similar to those of Nevalı Çori, suggesting they were fragments of prehistoric megaliths. The following year he began official excavations, uncovering the first of the now-famous T-shaped pillars.

Schmidt directed ongoing excavations at Göbekli Tepe under the auspices of the Şanlıurfa Museum and the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) until he died in 2014. The DAI has continued at the site under the direction of Lee Clare and since 2021 work has been a joint operation of Istanbul University, the Şanlıurfa Museum, and the DAI, under the direction of Necmi Karul.

Although it appears to the casual visitor that much of the site has been excavated, what we know from surveys incicate that less than 5% of the site had been excavated as of 2021. There is therefore much more to be revealed about Göbekli Tepe.

Excavation Results

Structural Remains

The earliest of the structures that have been excavated thus far indicate that they were built between 9500 and 9000 BCE, based on radiocarbon dating. Evidence suggests the site was greatly expanded during the early 9th millennium BCE. The settlement shows activity until about 8000 BCE. Excavation and research have revealed eight phases of development spanning at least 1,500 years.

The major structural finds were defined by large circular enclosures or compounds, the earliest of which date to the second half of the 10th millennium BCE. Floors of the enclosures were made of burnt lime or simply left as bedrock. Their most prominent characteristic features massive T-shaped limestone pillars, some standing over five meters tall and weighing several tons, spaced evenly apart within surrounding stone walls. massive Two taller pillars were placed in the center of each circle. The pillars are considered to be the oldest known megaliths in the world. The enclosures also featured benches defining their interior perimeters, thought to have been designed for sitting. It is not known if the enclosures were roofed. Although four of these enclosures have thus far been excavated, surveys suggest the presence of 16 more, each containing eight possibly similar pillars. Investigation of the site indicates that the material for the pillars were transported as slabs from a point about 100 meters (330 feet) away from the site. After their transfer, they were worked with flint tools to create the carved features we see on them today.

Although the carved decorations on the pillars remain largely enigmatic, most of them appear to be symbolically abstract pictograms and animal reliefs. Archaeologists theorize that the pictograms represent sacred symbols, similar to what have been found as Neolithic cave paintings in other locations. The animal reliefs have been interpreted to include boars, foxes, donkeys, gazelle, bulls, birds — most prominently vultures — snakes, other reptiles, insects and arachnids. Some pillars feature human arm symbols and others appear to show loincloths. One recent study and analysis of a pillar suggests that its markings may represent the world’s oldest solar calendar, and even posits that it was created as a memorial to a comet strike.

Also uncovered were small carved stones, depicting mostly animals, and some humans.

Later-dated enclosures, in contrast to the earliest enclosures, were rectangular in shape, though they continued to feature T-shaped pillars, with several tall pillars occupying the centers of the rooms. One of the enclosures has been designated the “lion pillar building” because of a pair of central pillars that featured carved, fierce lions.

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The archaeological site of Göbekli Tepe: main excavation area with four monumental circular buildings and adjacent rectangular buildings (German Archaeological Institute, photo E. Kücük). Text and image CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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Göbekli Tepe circular enclosure with monumental pillars. TaylanOzgurUksal, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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Broad view of central excavation. Radosław Botev, CC BY 3.0 PL, Wikimedia Commons

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Above and below: Details of Building B, located in the Southeast-Hollow (Main Excavation Area) of Göbekli Tepe.
It has a round ground plan and measures roughly 10 metres in diameter. A total of seven T-shaped limestone pillars have so far been discovered set into its circular wall. The two central T-pillars brings the total number of monoliths in this building to nine. However, as the building is not yet excavated in its entirety, further pillars may still be found. The floor of the building was excavated over several square metres in the area between the two central pillars. The floor of this building is made of a lime mortar (terrazzo floor). The inner-facing broad sides of the two central pillars carry depictions of life-size foxes (in low relief). It dates from the 10th-9th mill. BC. Dosseman, Image and text CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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Vulture Stone, Gobekli Tepe. The Vulture Stone is thought to be the world’s first pictograph. It depicts a human head in the wing of a vulture and a headless human body under the stela. There are various figures like cranes and scorpions around this figure. Sue Fleckney, Image and text CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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Above and below: Animal stones uncovered at the site. Dosseman, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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Göbekli Tepe animal statuettes, Şanlıurfa Museum, Turkey. Radosław Botev, CC BY 3.0 PL, Wikimedia Commons

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Stone Tools

Excavations at Göbekli Tepe have yielded a prolific assemblage of flint artifacts, most of which are similar to artifacts found at other sites in the northern Levant dated to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic.

In the first year of full excavation alone (1963) more than 3,000 stone tools were discovered, mostly made of flint but a few from obsidian. The assemblage consisted of a variety of tool types, including cores, flakes, choppers, blades, burins, scrapers, and projectile points, offering insights on the human activities at the site.

Of particular note are the results of excavations in a part of the site designated as Space 16, identified as a building construction near enclosure D. This space yielded nearly 700 tool artifacts, consisting of scrapers, glossy objects, perforators, and many retouched tools.

Significant to the activity of food production and processing, more than 7000 grinding stones were recovered across the site. Evidence from phytoliths found in the associated soil suggests that the grinding stones were used to process cereal grains. Archaeologists have yet to affirmatively conclude that the cereals were wild or cultivated.

What excavations have revealed about the evolution of the site

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Cover Image, Top Left: TaylanOzgurUksal, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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Florida Museum of Natural History—During the late middle Pleistocene, between 300 and 400 thousand years ago, at least three ancient elephant relatives died near a river in the Kashmir Valley of South Asia. Not long after, they were covered in sediment and preserved along with 87 stone tools made by the ancestors of modern humans.

The remains of these elephants were first discovered in 2000 near the town of Pampore, but the identity of the fossils, cause of death and evidence of human intervention remained unknown until now.

A team of researchers including Advait Jukar, a curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History, published two new papers* on fossils from the Pampore site. In one, researchers describe their discovery of elephant bone flakes which suggests that early humans struck the bones to extract marrow, an energy-dense fatty tissue. The findings are the earliest evidence of animal butchery in India.

The fossils themselves are also rare. In a second study the researchers described the bones, which belong to an extinct genus of elephants called Palaeoloxodon, whose members were more than twice the weight of today’s African elephants. Only one set of Palaeoloxodon bones for this species had been discovered previously, and the fossils from this study are by far the most complete.

To date, only one fossil hominin — the Narmada human — has ever been found on the Indian subcontinent. Its mix of features from older and more recent hominin species indicate the Indian subcontinent must have played an important role in early human dispersal. Prior to the fossil’s discovery in 1982, paleontologists only had stone tool artifacts to give a rough sketch of our ancestors’ presence on the subcontinent.

“So, the question is, who are these hominins? What are they doing on the landscape and are they going after big game or not?” Jukar asked. “Now we know for sure, at least in the Kashmir Valley, these hominins are eating elephants.”

The stone tools likely used for marrow extraction at the Pampore site were made with basalt, a type of rock not found in the local area. Paleontologists believe the raw materials were brought from elsewhere before being fully knapped, or shaped, at the site. Based on the method of construction, they concluded that the site and the tools were 300,000 to 400,000 years old.

Previously, the earliest evidence of butchery in India dated back less than ten thousand years.

“It might just be that people haven’t looked closely enough or are sampling in the wrong place,” Jukar said. “But up until now, there hasn’t been any direct evidence of humans feeding on large animals in India.”

Most of the Pampore site’s elephant remains came from one mature male Palaeoloxodon. The inside of its skull showed abnormal bone growth that likely resulted from a chronic sinus infection.

While it was clear that early humans exploited the carcass, there was no direct evidence of hunting, such as spear points lodged in the bones. The hominins could have killed the elephant or simply found the carcass after it died of natural causes — weakened by its chronic sinus infection, the elephant could possibly have gotten stuck in the soft sediments near the Jhelum River, where paleontologists eventually found it.

The Palaeoloxodon skull is the most complete specimen of its genus found on the Indian subcontinent. Researchers identified it as belonging to the extinct elephant Palaeoloxodon turkmenicus, fossils of which have only been found on one other occasion, in 1955. This earliest fossil was of a partial skull fragment from Turkmenistan. While it looked different from other members of the genus Palaeoloxodon, there wasn’t enough material to determine with certainty whether it was, in fact, a separate species.

“The problem with Palaeoloxodon is that their teeth are largely indistinguishable between species. So, if you find an isolated tooth, you really can’t tell what species of Palaeoloxodon it belongs to,” Jukar said. “You have to look at their skulls.”

Fortunately, the Pampore specimen’s hyoids — bones at the back of the throat that attach to the tongue — were still intact. Hyoids are fragile but distinctive between species, providing a special tool for taxonomizing.

Palaeoloxodon originated in Africa about a million years ago before dispersing into Eurasia. Many species in the genus are known for having an unusually large forehead unlike that of any living elephant species, with a crest that that bulges out over their nostrils. Earlier species of Palaeoloxodon from Africa, however, do not have the bulge. Meanwhile, P. turkmenicus is somewhere in between, with an expanded forehead with no crest.

“It shows this kind of intermediate stage in Palaeoloxodon evolution,” Jukar said. “The specimen could help paleontologists fill in the story of how the genus migrated and evolved.”

Given that hominins have been eating meat for millions of years, Jukar suspects that a lot more evidence of butchery is simply waiting to be found.

“The thing I’ve come to realize after many years is that you just need a lot more effort to go and find the sites, and you need to essentially survey and collect everything,” he said. “Back in the day when people collected fossils, they only collected the good skulls or limb bones. They didn’t collect all the shattered bone, which might be more indicative of flakes or breakage made by people.”

The stone tool and elephant butchery study was published in Quaternary Science Reviews.

The taxonomy study was published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

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Scientists studied stone tools, bone flakes and rare elephant remains at a middle Pleistocene site. Their findings shed light on the evolution of giant elephants and humans alike. Illustration by Chen Yu

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Article Source: Florida Museum of Natural History news release.

*Human exploitation of a straight-tusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon) in Middle Pleistocene deposits at Pampore, Kashmir, India, Quaternary Science Reviews, 15-Oct-2024. 10.1016/j.quascirev.2024.108894 

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When one thinks of ancient Aegean civilizations, especially during the Bronze Age, it is easy to visualize the great palaces, art, and other monumental achievements of the Minoans and Mycenaeans, the people who built the iconic architectural remains we see today at Knossos on Crete and Mycenae in mainland Greece. The magnificent early fresco wall paintings of the Cycladic people at ancient Akrotiri on the island of Santorini bear images of a sophisticated community of artists, agriculturalists, maritime traders, religion, and other elements of a highly developed society. Those frescoes also reveal a rich example of clothing style and fashion, unique to the people who inhabited the island over 3500 years ago. One sees it in the stylistic depictions of beautifully adorned young women, such as those illustrated on the excavated walls of the House of the Ladies at Akrotiri.

In the latest released episode of Dr. Ester Salgarella’s podcast series, Aegean Connections, Dr. Sophia Vakirtzi of Greece’s Hellenic Ministry of Culture shares her knowledge and discusses her research related to the artifacts and other evidence for the extensive and sophisticated textile industry of the Aegean peoples. She relates how the study of the tools, such as weaving equipment, spindle whorls, loom weights, imprints of threads and strings, and other objects or evidence have shed light on the ancient Aegean Bronze Age manufacture of clothing and other fiber/fabric objects and elements.

It is a fascinating window on a topic where the evidence, though perhaps not as robust and ‘flashy’ as other material forms of evidence for other aspects of ancient society, reflects the significance of the industry’s importance and presence among these ancient peoples.

The podcast is free and available for your listening ear here. 

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Agate spindle whorl. Minoan, ca. 2200–1450 BCE. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Public Domain

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Cover Image, Top Left: Minoan spindle whorl, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Public Domain

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The province of Granada in southeastern Spain is perhaps best known for its namesake capital city, Granada, which draws thousands of tourists every year to see the iconic Alhambra World Heritage site, among the many other spectacular Moorish architectural wonders of the city. The province also features mountain areas such as the Sierra Nevada with Europe’s most southerly ski resort, as well as the popular beach resorts of the Costa Granadina.

Less known to the general public and the tourist crowd, however, is a geological wonder called the Guadix-Baza Basin. It is a wonder because, through erosion and other natural activity over geologic time, it has revealed a rich and complete series of sediments with a fossil record dated from the Miocene to the Pleistocene. The paleontological faunal remains have drawn scientists to the area for decades. Within this semi-arid Basin, extraordinary events began to unfold in the 1970’s that really placed the Basin’s little village of Orce on the world’s map…….

Orce Man

It was in 1976 and 1979 when the late Josep Gibert i Clols, a paleontologist and geologist, conducted the first field surveys of the region surrounding Orce. Here, he found a remarkable series of fossil-bearing sediments. His son, Luis Gibert, who accompanied him at only 10 years old, described the experience. “As a geologist he [my father] knew that the Baza basin, where Orce is located, was a good target for new early Pleistocene discoveries because this region used to have an extensive lake and the shores of the lakes are good places to preserve fossils and evidences of human activities.”

What Josep was exploring near Orce were the shores of an ancient Pleistocene paleo-lake.

“I explored the region with my father looking for new sites,” continued Luis, “We had lunch with Tomas and his wife, Mariana [local residents and friends], at their house-cave, and we sieved sediments to collect small mammals [fossils] to give an approximate age to the sites in the Salar Valley near Tomas cave. That was a productive trip and new paleontological levels along the Vélez Valley were found.” Luis, following in the professional footsteps of his father, eventually became an active explorer of the region and now holds a professorship at the University of Barcelona.

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The Orce landscape. Northwards view from Barranco de los Conejos of the Early Pleistocene succession at Orce. The bottom of the valley is about 2 million years old and the top is about 1 million years old. Courtesy Luis Gibert

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Josep and his son Luis. Courtesy Luis Gibert

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Luis Gibert today. Courtesy Luis Gibert

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But it was in 1982 when the most extraordinary finds emerged in the same region at a site near the village of Venta Micena. Josep had organized and conducted the first of succeeding excavations of the sediments here with a team of high school students. Among the fossil finds were what he identified as cranial fragments of an infant hominin species of the Homo genus, the genus to which humans belonged. The fragments included two parietal bones and an occipital bone with an endocranial crest, all found within the context of sediments containing early Pleistocene fossilized fauna initially dated to more than 1 million years ago. This would make the hominin find, in association with the faunal finds, the oldest such human ancestral remains in Western Europe.

“I remembered that my father was skeptical while other colleagues were very enthusiastic,” said Luis. “He was skeptical because if this was confirmed it would break a scientific paradigm, which proposed that humans left Africa and reached Europe very late, at around 0.6Ma. The preliminary chronology based on the fauna for this skull suggested an age older than 1 Million years, which represented a much older age than accepted [by most scholars] in 1982. So human remains in Europe older than 1Ma for sure would be controversial, as usually happens in paleoanthropology each time there is a new important discovery”.

The remains were henceforth nick-named in the popular literature as ‘Orce Man’.

But Orce Man was too old and the fossil identification too sketchy for many scholars’ taste.

Until 1995….

The Conference and More

Scholars disputed the finds at Venta Micena as hominin, including the suggested dating at over 1 million years ago. According to Luis, changing this environment became much easier after the presentations and deliberations at a major meeting of the minds in late 1995.

“The first challenge was to convince the administrative and scientific community that there was human presence at Orce older that 1Ma,” said Luis. “This was achieved during the international conference in 1995 where more than 300 scientists from 18 countries met at the small town of Orce. Participants were very excited about the sites and the finds. After that event, Orce appeared in National Geographic Magazine, Orce was named the Spanish Olduvai (Zihlman, A.L. & Lowenstein 1996), and scientists that attended the meeting, including Prof. Phillip V. Tobias from South Africa, Nobel Award nominated for his description of Homo habilis, supported the human presence at Venta Micena”.

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The conference. Courtesy Luis Gibert

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The finding of two hominin humeral shafts, a limited lithic assemblage, and evidence for the processing of animal tissues with stone tools added to the story of Venta Micena. Additionally, finds at two other nearby sites within the same approximate geologic horizon expanded upon the picture that was slowly emerging for the region. The sites of Barranco León-5 and Fuente Nueva 3 yielded what were identified as two deciduous human molars, thousands of stone tools characterized as belonging to the Oldowan industry (similar to those found at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania), and cut marks on animal bones. Oldowan tools are considered the second oldest stone tool industry produced and used by hominins in the archaeological record, beginning around 2.9 million years ago in Africa.

To help confirm the human presence and the legitimacy of the Homo descriptor for the fossils, two separate laboratories carried out immunological testing on residual protein samples extracted from the fossils. Their results showed that the fossils did indeed belong to the hominin Homo genus.

Finally, as remarked by the famous British archaeologist Derek Roe about the finds, as stated in a 1996 article published in Current Anthropology:

“….whether or not the disputed bones were those of Homo, the finds of undoubted artifacts in situ at Fuente Nueva 3 and Barranco Leon made it perfectly clear that humans had been present in the area during the Lower Pleistocene….”*

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The Heritage Management Organization (HERITΛGE)  is pleased to announce the launch of a new project contributing to the protection of Ukraine’s cultural heritage. Architectural Heritage Preservation in Times of War: The Ukrainian Model is a two-year project that will train architecture students in 3D documentation, architectural documentation, heritage analysis, conservation assessment, international conservation standards, and local regulations. 

Implemented by HERITΛGE, the Kharkiv School of Architecture (evacuated to Lviv), and Skeiron, the project is generously supported by the Public Diplomacy Section of the U.S. Embassy to Ukraine. *

The teaching will combine theoretical and practical components, including on-the-job training that will result in datasets usable in conservation. In the first year, 20 students from the Kharkiv School of Architecture will be trained as well as 10 students from Kherson, Odessa, Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia, Kyiv, Lviv, and Chernivtsi.

The initiative will also provide training to two cohorts of academics from architectural schools across Ukraine, supporting them in establishing architectural conservation curricula in their institutions. 

Dr Iryna Matsevko, Chancellor of the Kharkiv School of Architecture said:

“Heritage studies is a relatively new field for Ukrainian universities. The current war has highlighted a lack of modern restoration and documentation experts. Through participation in this project, our university aims to address the needs of future architects and the broader Ukrainian society by training specialists who can preserve, document, and integrate heritage into sustainable urban and community development. We are excited to collaborate with Skeiron, Ukrainian experts in digital documentation, and the HERITAGE team, whose international expertise is vital to the success of this initiative.”

Project Launch 

On 27th September the project was launched in Lviv with a discussion on ‘Planning for the Post-War Rehabilitation of Ukraine’s Architectural Heritage’. Hosted by the Kharkiv School of Architecture and moderated by Dr Maja Kominko, Director of Projects at HERITΛGE,  the panel brought together Ukrainian and international experts. Liliya Onyshchenko, Advisor to the Mayor of Lviv on the protection of the historical environment and former Head of the Department of Historic Environment Protection of Lviv City Council, and Ihor Poshyvaylo, co-founder of the Heritage Emergency Response Initiative (HERI) and a member of the National Council for the Recovery of Ukraine from the War, spoke about their experience protecting heritage protection during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Yuriy Prepodobnyi, co-founder of Skeiron and the #SaveUkrainianHeritage initiative discussed the urgency of documentation. Dr. Iryna Matsevko, the Chancellor of the Kharkiv School of Architecture and a historian, outlined the challenges of forming a new generation of architects who can meet the challenges of post-war rehabilitation of the heritage of Ukraine.  Saleem Al-Mennan, a conservation architect, complemented the discussion by speaking about his extensive experience with post-war rehabilitation projects in Iraq, including projects supported by the American Ambassadors’ Fund for Cultural Preservation.

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Image courtesy Heritage Management Organization

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Article Source: Heritage Management Organization news release.

Cover Image, Top Left:  Courtesy Heritage Management Organization

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*Views expressed do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government.

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PHILADELPHIA, October 8, 2024—The Penn Museum has launched its first-ever mobile guide via the free Bloomberg Connects app and expanded access to its collections through the Google Arts & Culture platform. Free for all to use, both digital resources amplify the Museum’s ability to deepen engagement with its regional, national, and international visitors—both in person and virtually, from anywhere.

With nearly four million users, Bloomberg Connects, the arts and culture app, provides an easy-to-navigate guide, placing the Penn Museum’s world-renowned collections and stories in the palm of one’s hand—on a mobile device.

Joining nearly 600 cultural institutions worldwide on Bloomberg Connects, the Penn Museum’s digital guide offers video highlights of its history and commitment to cultural heritage; audio tours showcasing fascinating stories behind objects on display; and dynamic wayfinding maps with pinch-and-zoom capability for an enhanced on-site experience. It is accessible in 42 languages and provides centralized resources for users interested in exploring the 10,000 years of history and living cultural traditions represented throughout the Penn Museum.

The Bloomberg Connects app is available for free download here.

“It is a vital part of the Museum’s mission to make the collections in our care accessible to the widest possible audience,” explains Dr. Christopher Woods, Williams Director at the Penn Museum and Avalon Professor for the Humanities in the Penn School of Arts and Sciences. “These free digital resources will expand access for online visitors around the world and ensure that those who do visit us in person deepen their connection to the stories our galleries tell.”

To mark its first weekend, visitors who present their Bloomberg Connects app at the Museum Café will receive 20% off their purchase from Friday, October 11 through Sunday October 13.

In addition, more than 280 objects from the Penn Museum’s collections are now available through the web- and mobile-based platform Google Arts & Culture—sharing art, culture, and histories from more than 3,000 cultural institutions in 85 countries. With features such as zoom views of high-resolution images and intuitive search functions to navigate related content, every object connects to similar collections, creating a rich, accessible global resource of cultural heritage. For its online exhibit, the Penn Museum’s “Collections from Across the Globe,” offers virtual visitors an avenue to examine the stunning jewelry of a Mesopotamian queen, a statue of a wrathful deity from Japanese Esoteric Buddhism, and other objects that tell the stories of diverse peoples and cultures.

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ABOUT BLOOMBERG PHILANTHROPIES

Bloomberg Philanthropies invests in 700 cities and 150 countries around the world to ensure better, longer lives for the greatest number of people. The organization focuses on creating lasting change in five key areas: the Arts, Education, Environment, Government Innovation, and Public Health. Bloomberg Philanthropies encompasses all of Michael R. Bloomberg’s giving, including his foundation, corporate, and personal philanthropy, as well as Bloomberg Associates, a philanthropic consultancy that advises cities around the world. In 2023, Bloomberg Philanthropies distributed $3 billion. For more information, please visit bloomberg.org, sign up for its newsletter, or follow on Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Threads, Facebook, and X.

ABOUT GOOGLE ARTS & CULTURE

Google Arts & Culture puts the collections of more than 2,000 museums at your fingertips. It’s an immersive way to explore art, history, and the wonders of the world, from Van Gogh’s bedroom paintings to the women’s rights movement and the Taj Mahal. The Google Arts & Culture app is free and available online for iOS and Android. Its team has been an innovation partner for cultural institutions since 2011. They develop technologies that help preserve and share culture and allow curators to create engaging exhibitions online and offline, inside museums.

ABOUT THE PENN MUSEUM

The Penn Museum’s mission is to be a center for inquiry and the ongoing exploration of humanity for our University of Pennsylvania, regional, national, and global communities, following ethical standards and practices.

Through conducting research, stewarding collections, creating learning opportunities, sharing stories, and creating experiences that expand access to archaeology and anthropology, the Museum builds empathy and connections across diverse cultures.

The Penn Museum is open Tuesday–Sunday, 10:00 am–5:00 pm. On first Wednesdays of the month, it is open until 8:00 pm. The Café is open Tuesday–Thursday, 9:00 am–3:00 pm and Friday and Saturday, 10:00 am–2:00 pm. On Sundays, the Café is open 10:30 am–2:30 pm. For information, visit www.penn.museum, call 215.898.4000, or follow @PennMuseum on social media.

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Article Source: Penn Museum news release.

Cover Image, Top Left: The Bloomberg Connects app helps guide on-site guests during their exploration of the Penn Museum. Credit: Bloomberg Connects for the Penn Museum. 

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Washington University in St. Louis—Archaeological surveys led by scientists at Washington University in St. Louis suggest that coastal and underwater cave sites in southern Sicily contain important new clues about the path and fate of early human migrants to the island.

A new study* in PLOS ONE reports and assesses the contents of 25 caves and rock shelters, most of them first identified between 1870 and the 1990s but essentially lost to science over time. Study authors also conducted new land and underwater surveys in previously unexplored coastal areas and uncovered three new sites that contain potentially important archaeological sediments.

“What we are looking for is not just the first person who arrived, but the first community,” said Ilaria Patania, an assistant professor of archaeology in Arts & Sciences. “Understanding the timing of the initial colonization of Sicily provides key data for the pattern and mode of the early expansion of Homo sapiens into the Mediterranean.”

Sicily is considered by many scholars to be the earliest island in the region to be permanently occupied by human ancestors, but when and how the early migrants accomplished this feat remains unknown. Sicily is less than two miles from mainland Italy, but the water crossing would have been extremely difficult for early humans.

Other studies have primarily focused on possible entry points on the island’s northern side.

“This research shows that new ways of thinking and looking can reveal patterns that weren’t visible before,” said T.R. Kidder, the Edward S. and Tedi Macias Professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at WashU, a co-author of the new study.

“Previous scholars assumed that sites on the southern coast of Sicily would be eroded or too damaged to yield useful information,” Kidder said. “But finding underwater sites opens up a whole new terrain to study. It allows us to reconsider routes of migration of these earliest modern human ancestors.”

Dangerous water crossing

Sicily, the largest Mediterranean island, is located just off the “toe” of Italy’s boot.

In the ancient Greek poem the “Odyssey,” Homer describes how Odysseus sailed his ship past the mythical sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis as he crossed the Sicily strait. The strait was well known to sailors of the past; they attributed the deadly forces of its waves and whirlpools to powerful monsters.

In modern times, thousands of migrants from North Africa attempt to cross the strait each year. Many don’t make it, some capsizing just a few hundred meters from landing.

Patania, a native of the island of Sicily, has a deep respect for the power of the sea. Her grandfather was a fisherman who worked on the same shores she now studies.

“Very early on, I was taught that the sea can be a great resource,” she said. “At the same time, you never turn your back on the sea. The sea can be very dangerous.”

This idea plays out in her research. “I’m very interested in how humans occupy marginal environments,” Patania said. “These are environments where if everything goes well, we are in perfect harmony with nature. But if something changes — and this could be something like global climate change, or something smaller, like the arrival of a new animal — it could be a catastrophe.”

Scholars of the region agree that humans had made it to Sicily by 16,000 years after the last glacial maximum. But that established date is puzzlingly late, given that humans are known to have dispersed by land into Siberia about 30,000 years earlier. The discrepancy has led some to wonder if humans actually arrived on Sicily much before the currently accepted dates.

Also, no one yet knows whether humans arrived on Sicily by seafaring, or by foot over a land bridge — or even what direction they came from.

“A challenge for understanding the spread of early modern human ancestors is that we don’t fully understand how they spread and colonized the world at a very early stage,” Kidder said. “As Ilaria says, this is a very marginal environment. Did folks come down from Italy and cross the Straits of Messina, or did they come from the south along the African coast? Or, is it possible that they were island hopping across the Mediterranean? Locating sites on the south coast helps us consider pathways and thus modes of behavior.”

Eyes on the sea

Patania leads a long-term research project focused on the early occupation of Sicily. “In southeast Sicily, very few Upper Paleolithic sites have been excavated and analyzed using scientific methods,” she said.

“Our project is still in its early stages, but already we have identified and assessed over 40 sites of interest, of which about 17 are sites that have been relocated with greater precision based on older identifications,” Patania said.

She and her team prepared for their recent cave explorations by poring through the archives of local town libraries in Sicily, reading historical bulletins and news articles as far back as the 19th century.

The researchers identified potential sites and reviewed records and photographs of materials recovered by local avocational archaeologists. When possible, they interviewed workers that had been involved in earlier excavations, and they also talked with local recreational divers and fishermen.

For example, one of the co-authors on the new study is a retired tugboat captain. He has no formal scientific training, but he spent decades working on the decks of boats in and around the Port of Augusta.

“The moment I said that I was looking for paleosols, and that paleosols look like clay dirt that could be red or gray underwater, he said, ‘I know exactly what you are looking for,’” Patania said.

Patania also partnered with the superintendent of cultural and natural heritage of Siracusa and Ragusa (two provinces of Sicily) and the superintendent of the sea of Sicily to locate and recruit other local experts and stakeholders.

As the research has progressed, Patania also has spoken with officers in the Italian navy about training members of their specialized dive team to help identify underwater archaeological features. These divers spend a lot of time in local waters completing their regular tasks related to clearing ordnance and other debris from World War II.

“We’ve started with the area close to the coast, and we’re slowly going to move further out in the years to come,” Patania said.

Excavations continue

Two of the new sites in the PLOS ONE study may contain Upper Paleolithic human occupation traces, including fossil fauna, study authors said.

Corruggi is located at the southernmost tip of Sicily. The site was originally identified by other researchers in the 1940s.

“This site is where a second land bridge would have connected this island with the island of Malta,” Patania said.

“When we inspected this site, we found teeth from a European wild ass and stone tools,” she said. “Analyzing the remains from this site might give us insight on the very last leg of the human journey south into the southernmost coast of Sicily and off toward Malta.”

During summer 2024, project team members worked on excavating the second site, a cave called Campolato.

“Here we have discovered evidence for sea-level changes caused by the last glaciation and a localized earthquake that we are still investigating,” Patania said.

“We hope to reconstruct not only the timing of human occupation, but also the environment these people lived in and how they negotiated with natural events like earthquakes, climatic and environmental changes and maybe even volcanic eruptions,” she said.

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WashU archaeologists are investigating coastal and underwater caves in southeastern Sicily, tracing early human dispersal onto the island. (Photo: Ilaria Patania). Credit: Ilaria Patania

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Coastal and underwater cave sites in southern Sicily contain important new clues about the path and fate of early human migrants to the island, according to a new study in PLOS ONE.
Some of the sites are above ground, while others are submerged caves and hidden grottos accessible only by sea. Credi: Ilaria Patania

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WashU archaeologists have recovered and analyzed stone tools and other items of interest from underwater caves and other coastal sites in southern Sicily. Credit: Ilaria Patania

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Article Source: PLoS ONE news release.

*PLoS ONE, 9-Oct-2024. 10.1371/journal.pone.0299118 

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Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences—An AI-assisted analysis nearly doubles the number of known Nazca geoglyphs, revealing the forms, locations, and potential uses of the geoglyphs, according to a study. Nazca geoglyphs are figures on the ground created by moving stones or gravel. Field surveys that began in the 1940s have identified 430 figurative geoglyphs of motifs such as animals and humans. Masato Sakai, Marcus Freitag, and colleagues applied AI image analysis to high-resolution images of the entire Nazca region of Peru to accelerate the rate of geoglyph discovery. The authors identified an additional 303 geoglyphs within six months of field survey. The AI-based system was skillful in identifying relief-type geoglyphs, which are smaller and more difficult to identify than large, line-type geoglyphs. Next, the authors analyzed the geoglyphs’ form, location, and probable use. Among relief-type geoglyphs, 81.6% depicted domestic animals or humans, whereas 64% of line-type geoglyphs depicted wild animals. Relief-type geoglyphs were built within viewing distance—on average 43 meters—from foot trails. Line-type geoglyphs were built an average of 34 meters from a linear network of geoglyphs. According to the authors, relief-type geoglyphs may have been used to convey cultural concepts, including those related to domesticated animals or human sacrifice, to individuals or small groups walking along trails, whereas line-type geoglyphs may have been part of community-level ritual activities.

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A 22-meter-long relief-type geoglyph depicting a killer whale holding a knife. Masato Sakai

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A 18-meter-long relief-type geoglyph depicting a human. Masato Sakai

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Article Source: PNAS news release.

*“AI-accelerated Nazca survey nearly doubles number of known figurative geoglyphs and sheds light on their purpose,” by Masato Sakai et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 23-Sep-2024. https://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.2407652121

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American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)—A new Review contextualizes findings from a 2023 Science Advances study that presented what was possibly the earliest documented evidence of horseback riding by humans. The study described signs of “horsemanship syndrome” – or physical skeletal deformities in the lower body associated with biomechanical stress from prolonged horseback riding – in remains from Yamnaya pastoralists in Western Eurasia dating back to the early Bronze Age 4,500 to 5,000 years ago. Now, Lauren Hosek and colleagues question these results. They argue that horseback riding syndrome should be defined more holistically, looking for asymmetries and traces of inflammation-induced scarring across the whole skeleton instead of defining specific injuries as “smoking guns.” They note that no archaeozoological signs of riding in Yamnaya horse skeletal remains. Moreover, recent genomic analyses show little-to-no connection between Yamnaya horses and ancestors of modern domestic horses. For all investigations into early horse domestication, Hosek et al. underscore the importance of comparative datasets that help differentiate whether skeletal deformities come from horseback riding, chariot use, or other stressors.

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The posture and position of a human rider. Body areas of interest from Table 1 are highlighted in red for (A) horseback riding without stirrups, (B) horseback riding with saddle and stirrups; (C) horse, donkey, or hemione-driven chariot; and (D) cattle-drawn wagon (figure drawings produced by D. Chechushkova). Hosek et al., Sci. Adv. 10, eado9774 (2024)

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Article Source: AAAS news release.

*Tracing horseback riding and transport in the human skeleton, Science Advances, 20-Sep-2024. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ado9774

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It rises as the most massive, modern edifice near the great Acropolis of Athens. Located only 280 meters from the Parthenon itself, near the southeastern slope of the iconic rock, it strikes an imposing and contrasting contemporary presence among surrounding structures that represent an earlier time in Athen’s history. Opened to the public in 2009, the Acropolis Museum houses more than 4,250 artifacts and other objects, many of which are exhibited across an internal area of 14,000 square meters. Entering and walking throughout this magnificent space, what profoundly strikes most visitors is the statuary, removed from their original Acropolis locations through time as archaeologists, conservationists and others have worked at the famous summit and the associated ancient remains that still grace much of its slope. 

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The Acropolis Museum as seen from the top of the Acropolis hill. Louis Dalibard, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International, Wikimedia Commons

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The Acropolis as seen from the Acropolis Museum.

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As exhibited in the Acropolis Museum: Original caryatids from the Acropolis hill.

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Above and below: Original statuary from the frieze that once graced the front of the Parthenon, as exhibited in the Acropolis Museum.

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But there is a ‘secret’ to this museum that most visitors don’t know or think about until they actually step upon the museum floors. It lies below the surface. Like viewing through a looking glass, you can see it by peering down through filmy, transparent rectangular sections embedded into the floor, interspersed throughout the museum’s ground floor space. Here you see the remains of ancient structures unearthed through a series of excavations in the area at a site designated by archaeologists as the “Makrygiannis plot”, an urban neighborhood that flourished for centuries in the shadow of the Acropolis.

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The archaeological remains as seen through the floor of the Acropolis Museum.

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A Slice of Urban Life in Antiquity

From the 4th century BC to the 12th century AD, people carried out their daily lives in this place. They constructed streets, residences, baths, workshops and tombs. Today, visitors can see only a small part of the entire settlement, the segment that has been exposed intact beneath the new Acropolis Museum construction and the Acropolis Metro Station. The rest has been covered with earth during investigations and excavations, preserved and protected for the future.

What the observer sees today are mostly the better-preserved remains dating from Late Antiquity. Prominent among them are the remains of a luxurious residential mansion complex that included colonnaded courtyards, mosaic floors, a private bath system and latrines. Archaeologists and historians suggest that the residence belonged to a wealthy high-ranking official or local patron with ties to Rome’s imperial court. Other elements of the excavated area include public latrines and private baths, such as the West Bath, of other wealthy citizens.

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Remains of the ancient community beneath the museum can today be freely viewed with admission to the Acropolis Museum.

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Map of the ancient community. As exhibited at the Acropolis Museum.

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Above and below: The remains of a magnificent residence of a wealthy individual, as shown among the remains of the excavated community.

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Above and below (drawing), the remains of a private bath house as part of a wealthy residence. Both photos are details of exhibits displayed at the Acropolis Museum.

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Below: Remains of one of the oldest elite houses of the excavation. This residence was founded in the late 5th century B.C., and was in use until the 6th century A.D. Seen here (below) are mostly the remains of the 5th and 3rd centuries B.C., as well as some remains representing the 6th century A.D.
Notable are remains from the 3rd century B.C., showing a house courtyard where later a workshop was constructed. It features three cisterns, with a terracotta cylindrical pipeline providing fresh water and another pipeline diverting water to the street’s sewer. It is hypothesized that the workshop was a fullonica, where dirty clothes were washed and processed/whitened before being colored. The above illustration detail of artist’s rendition of the house is shown as exhibited at the Acropolis Museum.

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Not the least in terms of significance, the excavations have yielded numerous artifacts, including sculptures, various types of vessels, and coins, among other finds. These artifacts have helped to shed great light on our knowledge of the life-ways of the inhabitants over centuries of occupation. 

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For interested readers, this site and many more are best visited in person. See the website to get your journey started.

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University of Victoria—Landmark new research shows Ice Age teens from 25,000 years ago went through similar puberty stages as modern-day adolescents. In a study* published today in the Journal of Human Evolution of the timing of puberty in Pleistocene teens, researchers are addressing a knowledge gap about how early humans grew up.

Found in the bones of 13 ancient humans between 10 and 20 years old is evidence of puberty stages. Co-led by University of Victoria (UVic) paleoanthropologist April Nowell, researchers found specific markers in the bones that allowed them to assess the progress of adolescence.

“By analyzing specific areas of the skeleton, we inferred things like menstruation and someone’s voice breaking,” says Nowell.

The technique was developed by lead author Mary Lewis from the University of Reading. Lewis’s technique evaluates the mineralization of the canines and maturation of the bones of the hand, elbow, wrist, neck and pelvis to identify the stage of puberty reached by the individual at their time of death.

“This is the first time my puberty stage estimation method has been applied to Paleolithic fossils and it is also the oldest application of another method—peptide analysis—for biological sex estimation,” says Lewis.

Life during prehistory was believed to be as Thomas Hobbes described: “nasty, brutish and short.” However, this new study shows these teens were actually quite healthy. Most individuals in the study sample entered puberty by 13.5, reaching full adulthood between 17 and 22 years old. This indicates these Ice Age adolescents started puberty at a similar time to teens in modern, wealthy countries.

“It can sometimes be difficult for us to connect with the remote past, but we all went through puberty even if we experienced it differently,” says Nowell. “Our research helps to humanize these teens in a way that simply studying stone tools cannot.”

One of the 13 skeletons examined was “Romito 2,” an adolescent estimated to be male and the earliest known individual with a form of dwarfism. This new research on puberty assessment provides further information about Romito 2’s likely physical appearance and his social role.

Since he was mid-way through puberty, his voice would be deeper much like an adult male and he would have been able to father children; however, he may still have appeared quite youthful with fine facial hair. Due to his short height, his appearance would have been closer to that of a child, which may have had implications for how he was perceived by his community.

“The specific information about the physical appearance and developmental stage of these Ice Age adolescents derived from our puberty study provides a new lens through which to interpret their burials and treatment in death,” says archaeologist Jennifer French of the University of Liverpool, one of the co-authors of the study.

Researchers from six institutions collaborated internationally to develop this body of knowledge: UVic (Canada), University of Reading and University of Liverpool (UK), Museum of Prehistoric Anthropology of Monaco (Monaco), University of Cagliari (Italy) and University of Siena (Italy). The collaboration continues with research into the lives of Ice Age teenagers and their social roles.

This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, in addition to Nowell’s Lansdowne Fellowship Award.

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Dr. Mary Lewis from the University of Reading (UK) inspects the skeletal remains of Romito 2 found in southern Italy. University of Reading

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Reconstruction of Romito 2, a 16-year-old teenager with a form of dwarfism who lived 11,000 years ago in southern Italy. Illustration: Olivier Graveleau

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Article Source: University of Victoria news release.

*An assessment of puberty status in adolescents from the European Upper Paleolithic, Journal of Human Evolution, 12-Sep-2024. 10.1016/j.jhevol.2024.103577 

Cell Press—A fossilized Neanderthal discovered in a cave system in the Rhône Valley, France, represents an ancient and previously undescribed lineage that diverged from other currently known Neanderthals around 100,000 years ago and remained genetically isolated for more than 50,000 years. Genomic analysis indicates that the Neanderthal, nicknamed “Thorin” in reference to the Tolkien character, lived between 42,000–50,000 years ago in a small, isolated community. The discovery, publishing September 11 in the Cell Press journal Cell Genomics, could shed light on the still-enigmatic reasons for the species’ extinction and suggests that late Neanderthals had more population structure than previously thought.

“Until now, the story has been that at the time of the extinction there was just one Neanderthal population that was genetically homogeneous, but now we know that there were at least two populations present at that time,” says first author and population geneticist Tharsika Vimala (@tharsikavimala) of the University of Copenhagen.

“The Thorin population spent 50,000 years without exchanging genes with other Neanderthal populations,” says co-first author and discoverer of Thorin, Ludovic Slimak, CNRS researcher of Université Toulouse Paul Sabatier. “We thus have 50 millennia during which two Neanderthal populations, living about ten days’ walk from each other, coexisted while completely ignoring each other. This would be unimaginable for a Sapiens and reveals that Neanderthals must have biologically conceived our world very differently from us Sapiens.”

Thorin’s fossilized remains were first discovered in 2015 in Grotte Mandrin—a well-studied cave system that also housed early Homo sapiens, though not at the same time—and he is still being slowly excavated.

Based on Thorin’s location within the cave’s sediment, the team’s archeologists suspected that he lived around 40–45,000 years ago, making him a “late Neanderthal.” To determine his age and relationships with other Neanderthals, the team extracted DNA from his teeth and jaw and compared his full genome sequence to previously sequenced Neanderthal genomes.

 Surprisingly, the initial genomic analysis suggested that Thorin was much older than the archeological age estimate because his genome was very distinct from other late Neanderthals and much more closely resembled the genomes of Neanderthals who lived more than 100,000 years ago.

“We worked for seven years to find out who was wrong—archeologists or genomicists,” says Slimak.

To solve this riddle, the researchers analyzed isotopes from Thorin’s bones and teeth to gain insight into what type of climate he lived in—late Neanderthals lived during the Ice Age, while early Neanderthals enjoyed a much warmer climate. The isotopic analysis showed that Thorin lived in a very cold climate, making him a late Neanderthal.

“This genome is a remnant of some of the earliest Neanderthal populations in Europe,” says population geneticist and senior author Martin Sikora of the University of Copenhagen. “The lineage leading to Thorin would have separated from the lineage leading to the other late Neanderthals around 105,000 years ago.”

Compared to previously sequenced Neanderthal genomes, Thorin’s genome most closely resembled an individual excavated in Gibraltar, and Slimak speculates that Thorin’s population migrated to France from Gibraltar.

“This means there was an unknown mediterranean population of Neanderthals whose population spanned from the most western tip of Europe all the way to the Rhône Valley in France,” says Slimak.

Knowing that Neanderthal communities were small and insular could be key to understanding their extinction because isolation is generally considered to be a disadvantage for population fitness.

“It’s always a good thing for a population to be in contact with other populations,” says Vimala. “When you are isolated for a long time, you limit the genetic variation that you have, which means you have less ability to adapt to changing climates and pathogens, and it also limits you socially because you’re not sharing knowledge or evolving as a population.”

However, to really understand how Neanderthal populations were structured and why they went extinct, the researchers say that more Neanderthal genomes need to be sequenced.

“I would guess that if we had more genomes from other regions during this similar time period, we would probably find other deeply structured populations,” says Sikora.

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Fossilized Neanderthal Thorin. Ludovik Slimak

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This research was supported by the Service Regional de l’Archeologie Auvergne Rhone-Alpes, the French CNRS, the city of Malataverne, the Lundbeck Foundation and the Danish National Research Foundation, the European Research Council, and the Australian Research Council.

Cell Genomics, Slimak, Vimala, and Seguin-Orlando et al., “Long genetic and social isolation in Neanderthals before their extinction” https://cell.com/cell-genomics/fulltext/S2666-979X(24)00177-0

Cell Genomics (@CellGenomics) is a new gold open access journal from Cell Press publishing multidisciplinary research at the forefront of genetics and genomics. The journal aims to bring together diverse communities to advance genomics and its impact on biomedical science, precision medicine, and global and ecological health. Visit https://www.cell.com/cell-genomics/home. To receive Cell Press media alerts, please contact press@cell.com.

Article Source: Cell Press news release

*Long genetic and social isolation in Neanderthals before their extinction, Cell Genomics, 11-Sep-2024. 10.1016/j.xgen.2024.100593  

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University of Copenhagen – The Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences—Rapa Nui or Te Pito o Te Henua (the navel of the world), also known as Easter Island, is one of the most isolated inhabited places in the world. Located in the Pacific, it lies over 1,900 km east of the closest inhabited Polynesian island and 3,700 km west of South America. Although the island, its inhabitants and their rich culture have been extensively studied by archaeologists, anthropologists and geneticists, two key elements of Rapanui history remain very controversial to this day. One of these is the theory of population collapse through “ecocide” or “ecological suicide” in the 1600s, thought to be the result of overpopulation and resource mismanagement. The other major contention is whether the Polynesian ancestors of the Rapanui interacted with Indigenous Americans before contact with Europeans in 1722.

This week’s issue of Nature features a genetic study that sheds light on these two debates related to Rapanui history by examining the genomes of 15 Rapanui individuals who lived between 1670 and 1950. The remains of these 15 individuals are currently hosted at the Musée de l’Homme, in Paris. The new study was carried out by an international team of scientists and was spearheaded by Assistant Professor Víctor Moreno-Mayar from the Globe Institute at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark), and PhD student Bárbara Sousa da Mota and Associate Prof. Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas from the Faculty of Biology and Medicine at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland), in close collaboration with colleagues in Rapa Nui as well as in Austria, France, Chile, Australia and U.S.A.

The collapse that never happened

The story of the Rapanui has often been presented as a warning tale against humanity’s over-exploitation of resources. After Polynesians from the west peopled the island by 1250, the landscape on Rapa Nui changed drastically. Towering stone statues—the moai—were carved and placed in all corners of the island, while its original forest of millions of palm trees dwindled and, by the 1600s, was all but gone. According to the “ecocide” theory, a population of over 15,000 Rapanui individuals triggered these changes that led to a period of resource scarcity, famine, warfare and even cannibalism culminating in a catastrophic population collapse.

“While it is well established that the environment of Rapa Nui was affected by anthropogenic activity, such as deforestation, we did not know if or how these changes led to a population collapse,” comments Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas, Assoc. Professor at the University of Lausanne and group leader at the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Switzerland, last author of the study.

The researchers looked into the genomes of the Ancient Rapanui individuals expecting to find a genetic signature of a population collapse such as a sudden drop in genetic diversity. But surprisingly, the data did not contain any evidence of a population collapse in the 1600s. 

“Our genetic analysis shows a stably growing population from the 13th century through to European contact in the 18th century. This stability is critical because it directly contradicts the idea of a dramatic pre-contact population collapse,” says Bárbara Sousa da Mota, a researcher at the Faculty of Biology and Medicine at University of Lausanne and first author of the study.

Through their genetic analysis, Moreno-Mayar, Sousa da Mota, Malaspinas and their colleagues have not only provided evidence against the collapse theory, but also stress the resilience of the Rapanui population facing environmental challenges over several centuries until the colonial disruptions that European contact brought after 1722.

Did Polynesians reach the Americas?

Another debate that has tantalized researchers for decades is whether Polynesians ever reached the Americas. Although long-distance maritime navigation using wooden watercraft likely halted after the Rapa Nui forest disappeared, archaeological and genetic evidence from contemporary individuals hints that voyages to the Americas did occur. However, previous studies looking at small amounts of DNA from ancient Polynesians had rejected the hypothesis that transpacific voyages took place. Thus, these findings have put into question whether Polynesians reached the Americas and have suggested that the inferred contact based on present-day genetic data was mediated by European colonial activity after 1722.

By generating high-quality ancient genomes from the 15 Rapanui individuals, the team substantially increased the amount of genomic data from the island and found that about ten percent of the Rapanui gene pool has an Indigenous American origin. But more importantly, they were able to infer both populations met before Europeans arrived in the island and in the Americas.

“We looked into how the Indigenous American DNA was distributed across the Polynesian genetic background of the Rapanui. This distribution is consistent with a contact occurring between the 13th and the 15th centuries, ” says first author Víctor Moreno-Mayar, Asst. Professor at the Globe Institute’s Section for Geogenetics, University of Copenhagen.

“While our study cannot tell us where this contact occurred, this might mean that the Rapanui ancestors reached the Americas before Christopher Columbus,” says Malaspinas.

Altogether, the results from the new study help settle longstanding debates that have led to years of speculation surrounding Rapanui history.

“Personally, I believe the idea of the ecocide is put together as part of a colonial narrative. That is this idea that these supposedly primitive people could not manage their culture or resources, and that almost destroyed them. But the genetic evidence shows the opposite. Although we have to acknowledge that the arrival of humans dramatically changed the ecosystem, there is no evidence of a population collapse before the Europeans arrived on the island. So we can put those ideas to rest now,” says Moreno-Mayar.

“Many thought that present-day Rapanui carry Indigenous American genetic ancestry due to European colonial activity. But instead, the data strongly suggests that Rapanui and Indigenous Americans met and admixed centuries before Europeans made it to Rapa Nui or the Americas. We believe this means that Rapanui were capable of even more formidable voyages across the Pacific than previously established, ” adds Sousa da Mota.

Future repatriation efforts

Importantly, the scientists held face-to-face discussions with members of the Rapanui community and the “Comisión Asesora de Monumentos Nacionales” in Rapa Nui (CAMN). These discussions allowed to steer the research and to define a set of research questions that were equally of high interest to the scientists and the community. For instance, the team was able to show that the populations closest to the ancient Rapanui are indeed those currently living on the island.

“We have seen that museum archives contain mistakes and mislabels. Now that we have established that these 15 individuals were in fact Rapanui we know that they belong back in the island,” says Moana Gorman Edmunds, an archaeologist in Rapa Nui and co-author of the study.

Furthermore, when ongoing results were presented to representatives of the Rapanui community, the need to repatriate their ancestors was discussed as a central goal for immediate future efforts.

“We now have a strong fact-based argument to start an important discussion about how and when these remains should be returned to the island. Furthermore, through the CAMN, the Rapanui community will stay in control of who gets the genetic data of our ancestors and what they use it for,” adds Gorman Edmunds.

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Article Source: University of Copenhagen – The Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences news release.

*Ancient Rapanui genomes reveal resilience and pre-European contact with the Americas, Nature, 11-Sep-2024. 10.1038/s41586-024-07881-4 

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Scientific breakthroughs about human origins have captured the curiosity of audiences eager to learn more about the past. We are entering a new phase, thanks to the accumulation of evidence and new research technologies, in which experts and audiences are increasingly asking bigger questions about who we are and where we came from—and are teasing out some valuable answers.

This development has come at a time when there is a growing sense that linking the past with the present can support the attempt to build a more sustainable future.

Groundbreaking technologies are being applied to archeology. Modern archeologists are taking advantage of digital tools to share knowledge about human origins on a widening spectrum of platforms, including museum exhibits, virtual settings, and on-site experiences.

There is, however, a choke point in this process. The academic findings are described in a highly technical language that requires familiarity with the jargon of many research disciplines and testing methods, making the wider public adoption of research from human evolutionary science and archeology difficult. And most experts from these fields are not sufficiently trained to translate their findings to the array of audiences that can use them. But a growing number of initiatives are providing new ways to bridge the gap separating academia from global public awareness, emerging often from leading research institutions in Australia, East Africa, Western Europe, and the U.S. These centers and the educational efforts emerging from them nurture the evolutionary consciousness people need to appreciate what it means to be human.

Fostering knowledge about chains of events that affected the human evolutionary pathway thousands and even millions of years ago allows us to fit them into a coherent, multilevel chronological, and cultural framework. We can train our minds to reflect over long periods and find useful ways to compare chapters of human history. This fundamental viewpoint will permit the kind of planning necessary for solving long-term human challenges, from social to environmental.

A fuller spatial and temporal sense of human history produces logic that chimes with the best of our humanitarian impulses—by applying what we have learned, human history can be understood as a single global dataset—providing an authentic framework of connection to a universal evolutionary lineage.

We know that territorialism in other mammals and primates is a standard behavior, but there is a unique human overlay underwriting the inequalities of today.

I have pointed out that inventing and nurturing symbolic differences is an adaptive strategy that emerged hundreds of thousands of years ago, during the Acheulian cultural period, and that evolved intoas a cultural mechanism to create and maintain unequal access to rights and resources.

Conventional descriptions associated with archeology often evoke portrayals of adventurous treasure hunters seeking fame and fortune in faraway countries. In the collective mindset, “archeology” conjures idealized visions of the great civilizations of classical antiquity and the first urbanized societies that flourished only a few thousand years ago. However great they were, the rise and fall of these cultural entities marks the commencement of a perpetual war-faring sequence that continues to be the hallmark of modern civilization.

But the human story extends much further back in time and no matter how prodigious they were, these societies were consolidated by modern humans who had already fully integrated the keystones of contemporary civilization.

Thanks to a new impulse launched by the digital revolution that our civilization is undergoing, prehistory invites us to gaze further back in time: deep into the Paleolithic—to discover and understand the foundations upon which organized urban societies were constructed. Compared with classical archeology, ancient Paleolithic records rely on a relatively sparse repertory, consisting mainly of fossilized bones and stone tools shaped by humans who were physically and cognitively very different from us.

While at first glance such objects may appear unremarkable, understanding their significance is essential to complete the picture of the human evolutionary trajectory. In fact, by limiting our inquiry to the sub-modern civilizations that emerged only over the last 5,000 years or so, we are ignoring 98 percent of human evolution that began in Africa at least 2.8 million years ago, when our genus joined other hominins already thriving in Africa to systematically create the first complex technologies made from stone.

The emergence and evolution of these early techno-systems would alter the course of human evolution so significantly that we are still speculating where they will lead us in the future.

In that sense, these early stages of the hominization process that led our genus to adapt culturally, rather than biologically, by creating extrasomatic solutions to evolutionary challenges, are arguably the most important influences that shaped human origins. These solutions were initially made by transforming available materials into tools using specific sets of acquired skills that were systematized into culture.

Through this cumulative process, our ancestors increased the assortment of objects that were to become essential to their survival. OverThrough time, the know-how required to obtain the skills to manufacture these tools also increased exponentially, eventually requiring composite modes of communication to transmit the knowledge from generation to generation.

By incorporating an ever-increasing array of disciplines, both classical and new, archeologists continue to learn more about the different phases of the fascinating journey that led our species to unprecedented techno-dependence. The unfolding of humanity can only be ascertained by unearthing and interpreting the fragmentary remnants left behind in the archeological record by the thousands of generations preceding the 8 billion souls presently living on Earth.

Today, the keys to understanding human origins are becoming more accessible thanks to technologies used to share the exciting discoveries that form the totality of human prehistory and offer scientifically viable reconstructions to inspire even the most reticent of audiences.

Applying advanced scientific methodologies enables specialists to progressively build theories and attitudes that develop into sensibilities based on current states of knowledge. As a first step, it is important to understand that science is in a constant state of flux and premises must be constantly adjusted to keep pace with the latest discoveries. Meanwhile, the development of modern technologies continues to open doors to new ways to source information.

Modern technologies are not only creating new strategies to study the past but they are also transforming the methodologies traditionally used in prehistoric archeology. Some of the techniques are co-opted from other fields of science, like medicine, chemistry, ecology, and biotechnology, thus building up a mesh of collaboration among researchers working in vastly different fields of knowledge. This strategy further contributes to the exponential intellectual revolution underway in research on human origins.

Traditional disciplines, like paleontology and paleoanthropology, for example, are being reshaped by advances in genetic research that are filling in the gaps in the archeological record by shedding new light on interrelationships between different species through time at a lightning pace. Digital 3D reproductions of all kinds of archeological finds and even of the sites themselves provide astoundingly accurate imagery that can be analyzed and shared instantaneously. Non-invasive geoarchaeological methods are being used to locate and study all kinds of settings and the artifacts they yield, and drones equipped with digital cameras allow surveys of hard-to-access areas to locate new archeological sites. High-powered microscopes linked to image processing software serve to determine how stone tools were used for archeobotany, sedimentary analysis, and more. Meanwhile, radiometric and other dating methods are improving our capacity to obtain increasingly precise age evaluations for the archeological sites under study.

Progress is being achieved in sharing data from prehistory at a quickening pace in many high-income countries in Eurasia and North America, where broad-minded insights and international collaborations are stimulating public interest to take advantage of communication technologies to discover and explore universal patrimony relating to all periods of the Paleolithic.

In academia, scientific journals now often require scientists to share their data in online repositories with access to digital platforms that can be built upon by contemporaries and new generations who are encouraged to apply alternative technologies to glean new kinds of information from the same datasets. Online platforms sharing archeological information are easily available to those who wish to consult them. However, much remains to be done for many lower-income countries that still do not have access to the same technologies for exploiting their Paleolithic records on an equal footing, because they lack basic infrastructure and educational facilities, or they are struggling due to poverty, political turmoil, or even lengthy periods of warfare.

Today, the digital revolution has transformed how archeological data from all stages of human evolution can be transmitted to the public. Prehistorians have entered the arena of public awareness on all levels of social interplay, demonstrating the importance of applying long-term insights to tackle such pressing issues as ecological collapse, human migration, war, and gender inequality. By creating evolutionary awareness, Paleolithic archeology is helping society recognize the value of studying the distant past to overcome the myopia of our own historical moment.

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This article was produced by Human Bridges.

Cover Image, Top Left: IAEA Imagebank. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Wikimedia Commons

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Tel-Aviv University—Researchers from the Sonia & Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University used a range of modern technologies, including drones, remote sensing, and 3D digital modeling, to generate the first objective, quantified analysis of the Roman siege system at Masada. Findings indicate that contrary to the widespread myth, the Roman army’s siege of Masada in 73 CE lasted no more than a few weeks.

The study* was conducted by the Neustadter expedition from TAU’s Sonia & Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology, headed by Dr. Guy Stiebel, together with Dr. Hai Ashkenazi (today Head of Geoinformatics at the Israel Antiquities Authority), and PhD candidates Boaz Gross (from Tel Aviv University and the Israeli Institute of Archaeology) and Omer Ze’evi-Berger (today at the University of Bonn). The study is part of the expedition’s extensive mission, implementing advanced tools and posing fresh questions, to attempt a new understanding of what really happened at Masada. The paper was published in the Journal of Roman Archaeology.

Dr. Stiebel: “In 2017 my expedition renewed, on behalf of TAU’s Sonia & Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology, excavations at Masada – a world-famous site explored extensively since the early 19^th century and throughout the 20^th century. Our expedition sets forward several new questions and implements many novel research tools that were not available to previous generations of archaeologists. In this way we intend to obtain fresh insights into what actually happened there before, during, and after the Great Jewish Revolt. As part of this extensive project we devote much scholarly attention to the site’s surroundings. We use drones, remote sensing, and aerial photography to collect accurate high-resolution data from Masada and its environs, with special emphasis on three aspects: the water systems, the trails leading to and from the palatial fortress, and the Roman siege system. The collected information is used to build 3D digital models that provide us with a clear and precise image of the relevant terrains. In the current study we focused on the siege system, which, thanks to the remote location and desert climate, is the best-preserved Roman siege system in the world.”

Dr. Stiebel adds: “For many years, the prevailing theory that became a modern myth asserted that the Roman siege of Masada was a grueling three-year affair. In recent decades researchers have begun to challenge this notion, for various reasons. In this first-of-its kind study we examined the issue with modern technologies enabling precise objective measurements.”

The researchers used drones carrying remote sensors that provided precise, high-resolution measurements of the height, width, and length of all features of the siege system. This data was used to build an accurate 3D digital model, enabling exact calculation of the structures’ volume and how long it took to build them.

Dr. Ashkenazi: “Reliable estimates are available of the quantity of earth and stones a Roman soldier was able to move in one day. We also know that approximately 6,000-8,000 soldiers participated in the siege of Masada. Thus, we were able to objectively calculate how long it took them to build the entire siege system – eight camps and a stone wall surrounding most of the site. We found that construction took merely about two weeks. Based on the ancient historical testimony it is clear that once the assault ramp was completed, the Romans launched a brutal attack, ultimately capturing the fortress within a few weeks at the most. This leads us to the conclusion that the entire siege of Masada lasted no more than several weeks.” 

Dr. Stiebel: “The narrative of Masada, the Great Jewish Revolt, the siege, and the tragic end as related by Flavius Josephus, have all become part of Israeli DNA and the Zionist ethos, and are well known around the world. The duration of the siege is a major element in this narrative, suggesting that the glorious Roman army found it very difficult to take the fortress and crush its defenders. For many years it was assumed that the siege took three long years, but in recent decades researchers have begun to challenge this unfounded belief. In our first-of-its-kind study we used objective measurements and advanced technologies to clarify this issue with the first data-driven scientific answer. Based on our findings we argue that the Roman siege of Masada took a few weeks at the most. As empires throughout history have done, the Romans came, saw, and conquered, quickly and brutally quelling the uprising in this remote location. Our conclusion, however, detracts nothing from the importance of this historical event, and many baffling questions remain to be investigated. For example: Why did the Romans put so much effort into seizing this remote and seemingly unimportant fortress?  To answer this and many other intriguing questions we have initiated a vast, innovative project in and around Masada – collecting data and analyzing it thoroughly in the labs of TAU’s Sonia & Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology, in collaboration with other researchers, to ultimately shed new light on the old enigma: What really happened at Masada?”

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3D model of Tower 7 and the circular feature to its left (view to the west). The Neustadter Masada Expedition (Taken from the Journal of Roman Archaeology

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3D model of the ramp/staircase (view to the southwest). The Neustadter Masada Expedition (Taken from the Journal of Roman Archaeology)

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Tower 10 and the wall abutting it. The Neustadter Masada Expedition (Taken from the Journal of Roman Archaeology

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Masada National Park. Omer Ze’evi-Berger.

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Article Source: Tel-Aviv University news release.

Link to the research Video
Caption: A view from a drone of the excavation site at the center of the mountain platform of Masada.

Credit: The Neustadter Masada Expedition

Link to the article:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-roman-archaeology/article/roman-siege-system-of-masada-a-3d-computerized-analysis-of-a-conflict-landscape/32C59BE59ACD3E9A91C95F947DFD271E

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