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Hunter-gatherers experimented with farming in Turkey before migrating to Europe

Posted on August 4, 2016 by No Author -

CELL PRESS—Clusters of hunter-gatherers spent much of the late Stone Age working out the basics of farming on the fertile lands of what is now Turkey before taking this knowledge to Europe. In an analysis of ancient genomes published August 4 in Current Biology, researchers at Stockholm University and Uppsala University in Sweden and Middle East Technical University in Turkey report that at least two waves of early European settlers belonged to the same gene pool as farmers in Central Turkey—genealogy that can be traced back to some of the first people to cultivate crops outside of Mesopotamia.

To help clear up the evolution of farming in the West, the investigators compared genetic information from Europeans living during the Neolithic period (a.k.a. the late Stone Age, 10,000-4,000 years ago; the chronology varies between Europe and the Near East) with that from nine individuals excavated from two ancient settlements in Anatolia (the area between the Black and the Mediterranean Seas).

The earliest of the gene sequences were taken from four people of the Boncuklu community, who lived between 10,300 and 9,500 years ago. The Boncuklu were a group of foragers who had recently adopted small-scale agriculture. The other five samples (dating back 9,500 to 7,800 years ago) came from Tepecik-Çiftlik villagers, who had more sophisticated farming practices.

“In Boncuklu, we find diversity levels more similar to contemporaneous hunter-gatherers, which could be expected because they themselves were foragers a couple of centuries back in time” says co-author Mehmet Somel, an evolutionary biologist at Middle East Technical University. “In fact, they were proto-farmers. Boncuklu people did not have domestic animals, and gathering was also important for the village.”

“Even 1,000 years later in villages like Tepecik-Ciftlik and Catlhoyuk, we still find that gathering and especially hunting are important for the culture; thus, the Neolithic way of life took a long time to be fully established, not only culturally so, but also demographically so,” says Anders Gotherstrom, an archeologist at Stockholm University. “What happened here was most likely an increase in population size, with increasing fecundity, and higher levels of mobility and gene flow so that, over time, Neolithic Near Eastern villages became more cosmopolitan, and this eventually triggered expansion into Europe.”

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Tools from the Tepecik-Ciftlik settlement in Anatolia. Credit: Tepecik-Ciftlik Archive

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While a lot of archeological work had been done on these settlements, this is the first study to examine the genetic properties of the human remains. This type of analysis would have been impossible until just recently due to the degradation of the DNA, which was drawn from inside the bones of the deceased. Somel helped lead the acquisition of the genetic material, and Gotherstrom and his colleague Mattias Jakobsson at Uppsala University did the genome sequencing. The analytical work was then performed by all three parties.

The paper only helps confirm speculations about how farming spread in the West, but “what is going on in the East is still a largely unwritten chapter,” Gotherstrom says. Agricultural revolutions took place in other parts of the world, and this type of analysis could help in the understanding of how they spread, as well. Somel is interested in exploring how people moved and how genetic connections and cultural connections overlap through human history.

Source: A Cell Press news release.

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The authors were supported by the Konya and Nigde Museums, EMBO, the Hacettepe University Scientific Research Projects Coordination Unit, the Istanbul University Scientific Research Projects Coordination, the Australian Research Council, a British Academy Research Development Award, British Institute at Ankara grants, National Geographic, the Wainwright Fund University of Oxford, TUBITAK, TUA, Sci. Acad. Turkey, METU, and ERC.

*Current Biology, Kilinc, Omrak, and Ozer et al.: “The Demographic Development of the First Farmers in Anatolia” http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16)30850-8

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This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Recent findings shedding new light on the whereabouts of the remains of Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great; how an archaeologist-sculptor is bringing bones of the dead back to life; archaeologists uncovering town life at the dawn of civilization; an exclusive interview with internationally acclaimed archaeologist James M. Adovasio about what makes the Meadowcroft Rockshelter prominent in the ongoing search for the first Americans; what archaeologists are finding at the site of the ancient city of Gath, the home town of the biblical Philistine giant, Goliath; and how scientists are redrawing the picture of human evolution in Europe. Find it on Amazon.com.

Digging Irish History

Posted on August 3, 2016 by Dan McLerran -

As Founder and Editor of Popular Archaeology Magazine, Dan is a freelance writer and journalist specializing in archaeology. He studied anthropology and archaeology in undergraduate and graduate school and has been an active participant on archaeological excavations in the U.S. and abroad. He is the creator and administrator of Archaeological Digs, a popular weblog about archaeological excavation and field school opportunities.

Everyone knows it as the Burren. Lush green vegetation pockmarks its otherwise ruggedly beautiful yet curiously desolate grey limestone pavement — a pavement initially laid down as sediments of a tropical sea more than 350 million years ago, but much more recently sculpted by Ice Age glaciation ‘only’ 10,000 years ago. Characterized by criss-crossing cracks known as “grikes”, which also leave isolated rocks called “clints”, it is a unique panorama that marks a distinguishing feature of Ireland’s western geography. Edmund Ludlow, a 17th century English parliamentarian, once described the Burren as “a country where there is not enough water to drown a man, wood enough to hang one, nor earth enough to bury him…… and yet their cattle are very fat; for the grass growing in turfs of earth, of two or three foot square, that lie between the rocks, which are of limestone, is very sweet and nourishing.” And to this day, a healthy and thriving population of cattle and sheep remain prominent players on the Burren landscape.

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Above and below: The Burren countryside. Top image courtesy Kate Leonard. Bottom image HEireann, Wikimedia Commons

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Needless to say, the Burren draws tourists.

And archaeologists.

This is because the Burren is rich with historical and archaeological sites. Archaeologists and historians have documented more than 90 megalithic tombs and approximately 500 ringforts – such as Cahercommaun, a cashel which sits on the edge of an inland cliff, and the astonishingly well-preserved Caherconnell Cashel (Stone Fort). It is a tapestry of human presence extending back before the written word.

At this writing, a team of archaeologists and students are busy at work, methodically digging at the Caherconnell Cashel site. They can be seen crouched on their knees atop grey stone and soil, scraping and slicing carefully down with their trowels to expose stone floor surfaces, wall structures, and other features that testify to a long Medieval period occupation.

“Caherconnell Cashel is a possible royal settlement occupied from 10^th century to the 15^th/16^th century AD,” says Kate Leonard*, a supervising archaeologist who worked at the site during the summer of 2016. “The cashel is a drystone (no mortar) enclosure: a 4m-high limestone wall enclosing a circular area that contained dwellings, the enclosure having an east-facing entrance. Already the excavations in the interior of the cashel have revealed evidence for a series of occupation and building phases that indicate a long period of use.”

The 1200+ Medieval artifacts thus far uncovered include clothes-fastening pins of bone, iron and bronze; iron shears; knives and other tools; whetstones and quernstones; glass and amber beads; a silver finger ring; iron and bronze buckles; a bronze tuning peg from a harp; iron arrowheads; and intricately carved bone hair combs.

And plenty of animal remains.

“The underlying limestone bedrock of the region creates an alkaline condition (non-acidic) that preserves bone wonderfully,” continues Leonard. “As a result, there is a large animal bone assemblage from the site that tells us the cashel’s occupants throughout the Medieval period had a varied diet including pig, sheep/goat and cow milk products and meat, fish, shellfish, domestic poultry and their eggs. The meat in their diet was supplemented with gathered herbs, fruits and nuts, like the ever present hazelnut, and cereal grains like barley, oats, rye and wheat ground by hand into flour and/or meal using heavy stone rotary querns.”

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Above: A view of the Caherconnell Cashel (stone fort). Dabhoireann, Wikimedia Commons. Below, views of the Caherconnell Cashel by Kate Leonard.

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The recent excavations at Caherconnell began in 2007 with a trial excavation. Results were promising, so in 2010 archaeology field school excavations began under the direction of Dr. Michelle Comber. Those excavations have revealed structures and artifacts which include stone walls, animal bone and finely worked metal objects that all together are beginning to tell the story of the Gaelic people who lived and worked here during Medieval times. “It is a story not fully told through written history,” says Leonard. The finds are helping to paint a fuller picture of the day-to-day lifestyle of these people, who lived in a time when, says Leonard, the written narrative has been dominated by the history, politics, archaeology, and documented architecture of the Anglo-Normans who invaded Ireland beginning in the 12^th century AD.

Because the limestone bedrock is close to the topsoil, the team has been able to uncover a large area in a relatively short period of time, exposing much of the interior features of the stone fort, affording a rapidly developing picture of its foundations and layout, including new structures. “I was digging in an area of the site where the foundations of a round structure, and associated internal features, were revealed that likely dates to the earliest occupation of the cashel – the 10^th century AD,” says Leonard. Site director Comber suggests that this structure was ancillary to the centrally located dwelling house within the stone circle of the cashel, and that it may have also functioned later as a place for storage and/or refuse disposal. “The workshop idea relates to the discovery of some metalworking slag inside the structure, and a furnace and metalworking hearth on the north side of the structure,” says Comber. “A stone-lined hearth inside the structure contained more non-industrial charcoal, charred hazelnut shells, and regular small fragments of burned animal bone.” Additionally uncovered features are raising new questions. “Secondary activity relates to the quarrying of a large pit within the structure – with a concentration of charcoal and carbonized material in its lower fill, and frequent large animal bones in the upper fill,” adds Comber. “There is the possibility of a flue leading into this pit, which would suggest its primary use as a cereal-drying kiln.” Comber believes further investigation may shed more light on this.

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Above: Field school team members excavating at the site of the Caherconnell Cashel. Courtesy Kate Leonard

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Above: Because the underlying limestone bedrock is relatively close to the topsoil, field school members can make significant progress uncovering new features within the cashel. Courtesy Kate Leonard

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Archaeologist Kate Leonard on site on a wet day at the Caherconnell Cashel. Courtesy Kate Leonard

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Most significantly, archaeologists hope that the results of the excavation will help unfold a new chapter in the ongoing search for the unwritten history of the Gaelic people who inhabited Ireland. “It is very important that the story of the native population is put back into the narrative of Medieval Ireland,” says Leonard. And given that so many of today’s population can trace their roots to Gaelic ancestry, this is no small statement.

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*Leonard’s time at Caherconnell was brief, as she is engaged in a global year-long journey to work at twelve different archaeological sites in 12 separate countries. She calls her project Global Archaeology: A Year of Digs. Caherconnell now makes the 7th stop on her global trek.

Popular Archaeology will be following and reporting on Leonard’s worldwide experiences periodically throughout 2016 as she hops from one location to another during her global journey. To continue the work, however, Leonard will need ﬁnancial support from donors. Readers interested in reading about and supporting her self-directed Global Archaeology crowdfunded project can learn more at gofundme.com/globalarchaeology.

See more about Leonard’s experience at Caherconnell here, and you may also read more about the site and the project at its website.

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Population boom preceded early farming

Posted on August 2, 2016 by No Author -

UNIVERSITY OF UTAH—University of Utah anthropologists counted the number of carbon-dated artifacts at archaeological sites and concluded that a population boom and scarce food explain why people in eastern North America domesticated plants for the first time on the continent about 5,000 years ago.

“Domesticated plants and animals are part of our everyday lives, so much so that we take them for granted,” says Brian Codding, senior author of the study published online August 2 by the British journal Royal Society Open Science. “But they represent a very unique thing in human history. They allowed for large numbers of people to live in one place. That ultimately set the stage for the emergence of civilization.”

Graduate student Elic Weitzel, the study’s first author, adds: “For most of human history, people lived off wild foods – whatever they could hunt or gather. It’s only relatively recently that people made this switch to a very different method of acquiring their food. It’s important to understand why that transition happened.”

The study dealt not with a full-fledged agricultural economy, but with the earlier step of domestication, when early people in eastern North America first started growing plants they had harvested in the wild, namely, squash, sunflower, marshelder and a chenopod named pitseed goosefoot, a pseudocereal grain closely related to quinoa.

Codding, an assistant professor of anthropology, says at least 11 plant domestication events have been identified in world history, starting with wheat about 11,500 years ago in the Middle East. The eastern North American plant domestication event, which began around 5,000 years ago, was the ninth of those 11 events and came after a population boom 6,900 to 5,200 years ago, he adds.

For many years, two competing theories have sought to explain the cause of plant domestication in eastern North America: First, population growth and resulting food scarcity prompted people to grow foods on which they already foraged. Second, a theory called “niche construction” or “ecosystem engineering” that basically says intentional experimentation and management during times of plenty – and not immediate necessity – led people to manage and manipulate wild plants to increase their food supply.

“We argue that human populations significantly increased prior to plant domestication in eastern North America, suggesting that people are driven to domestication when populations outstrip the supply of wild foods,” Weitzel says.

“The transition to domesticating food allowed human populations to increase drastically around the world and made our modern way of life possible,” he adds. “People start living near the fields. Whenever you’ve got sedentary communities, they start to expand. Villages expand into cities. Once you have that, you have all sorts of social changes. We really don’t see state-level society until domestication occurs.”

When early North Americans first domesticated crops

The region of eastern North America covered by the study includes most of Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Arkansas, and portions of Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi and Louisiana.

“This is the region where these plant foods were domesticated from their wild variants,” Weitzel says. “Everywhere else in North America, crops were imported from elsewhere,” particularly Mexico and Central America.

Four indigenous plant species constitute what scientists call the Eastern Agricultural Complex, which people began to domesticate about 5,000 years ago.

Previous research shows specific domestication dates were 5,025 years ago for squash at an archaeological site named Phillips Spring in Missouri, 4,840 years ago for sunflower seeds domesticated at Hayes in Tennessee, 4,400 years ago for marshelder at the Napoleon Hollow site in Illinois, and 3,800 years ago for pitseed goosefoot found in large quantities at Riverton, Illinois, along with squash, sunflower and marshelder.

Three more recent sites also have been found to contain evidence of domestication of all four species: Kentucky’s Cloudsplitter and Newt Kindigenash rockshelters, dated to 3,700 and 3,640 years ago, respectively, and the 3,400-year-old Marble Bluff site in Arkansas.

Sunflower and squash – including acorn and green and yellow summer squashes – remain important crops today, while marshelder and pitseed goosefoot are not (although the related quinoa is popular).

Deducing population swings from radiocarbon dates

“It’s really difficult to arrive at measures of prehistoric populations. So archaeologists have struggled for a long time coming up with some way of quantifying population levels when we don’t have historical records,” Weitzel says.

“People have looked at the number of sites through time, the number of artifacts through time and some of the best work has looked at the effects of population growth,” such as in the switch from a diet of tortoises to rabbits as population grew in the eastern Mediterranean during the past 50,000 years, he adds.

Codding says that in the past decade, archaeologists have expanded the use of radiocarbon-dates for artifacts to reconstruct prehistoric population histories. Weitzel says radiocarbon dates in the new study came from artifacts such as charcoal, nutshells and animal bones – all recorded in a database maintained by Canadian scientists.

The University of Utah anthropologists used these “summed radiocarbon dates” for 3,750 dated artifacts from eastern North America during the past 15,000 years.

“The assumption is that if you had more people, they left more stuff around that could be dated,” Weitzel says. “So if you have more people, you conceivably should have more radiocarbon dates.”

“We plotted the dates through time,” namely, the number of radiocarbon dates from artifacts in every 100-year period for the past 15,000 years, he adds.

The analysis indicated six periods of significant population increase or decrease during that time, including one during which population nearly doubled in eastern North America starting about 6,900 years ago and continuing apace until 5,200 years ago – not long before plant domestication began, Codding says.

Codding notes that even though plant domestication meant “these people were producing food to feed themselves and their families, they’re still hunting and foraging,” eating turtles, fish, water fowl and deer, among other animals.

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This map shows the area covered by a new University of Utah study that concludes a population boom and resulting scarcity of wild foods are what caused early people in eastern North America to domesticate wild food plants for the first time on the continent starting about 5,000 year ago. The triangles and names represent archaeological sites previously identified as locations where one or more of the these plants first were domesticated: squash, sunflower, marshelder and pitseed goosefoot, a relative of quinoa. The small circles are sites where radiocarbon-dated artifacts have been found, with a single circle often representing many dated artifacts. The study area includes much of eastern North America inland from the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Credit: Elic Weitzel, University of Utah.

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The other theory

Weitzel says the concept of niche construction is that people were harvesting wild plants, and “were able to get more food from certain plants.” By manipulating the environment – such as transplanting wild plants or setting fires to create areas favorable for growth of wild food plants – they began “experimenting with these plants to see if they could grow them to be bigger or easier to collect and consume,” he adds. “That kind of experimentation then leads to domestication.”

Codding says: “The idea is that when times are good and people have plenty of food then they will experiment with plants. We say that doesn’t provide an explanation for plant domestication in eastern North America.” He believes the behavioral ecology explanation: increasing population and-or decreasing wild food resources led to plant domestication.

Source: University of Utah news release.

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St. Paul Island mammoths most accurately dated ‘prehistoric’ extinction ever

Posted on August 1, 2016 by No Author -

PENN STATE, UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa.—While the Minoan culture on Crete was just beginning, woolly mammoths were disappearing from St. Paul Island, Alaska, according to an international team of scientists who have dated this extinction to 5,600 years ago.

“It’s amazing that everything turned out so precisely with dating of extinction at 5,600 plus or minus 100 years,” said Russell Graham, professor of geosciences, Penn State.”

St. Paul Island lies about 400 miles north of the Aleutian Islands and was part of the Bering Land Bridge before sea level rose when the last glacial period ended. Previous researchers radiocarbon-dated remains of five mammoths to about 6,480 years ago, but there was no way to know if these were the last five animals.

The researchers used a variety of proxies to date the demise of the mammoths on the island. Proxies are things in the environment that can be used to independently document the presence of an organism, even though they are not parts of it. In this study, three different spores from fungi that grow on large animal dung were extracted from lake cores and used to determine when the mammoths were no longer on the island. Proxies in sediments from cores from a lake near the cave were used to determine the time of the demise of the mammoth population.

“We see a reduction in the three species of fungus, all of which are associated with the dung of large animals,” said Graham. “These spores are a marker for the presence of large animals like mammoths.”

Beside the mammoths, the only animals appearing on the island in “prehistoric” times were arctic foxes, shrews and polar bears, and there is no evidence of polar bears before 4,000 years ago. Humans did not arrive on the island until 1787 C.E. The only large mammals present were mammoths.

Sediment DNA from the lake cores showed the presence of mammoth DNA until 5,650 years ago, plus or minus 80 years. After that time, there is no mammoth DNA and so no mammoths on the island. The youngest of the newly dated mammoth remains’ dates fall within the mammoth DNA range and the fungal spore dates as well.

Using state-of-the-art methods for radiocarbon dating, the researchers used 14 newly recovered remains from various areas on the island to help document the time of extinction.

“The St. Paul mammoth demise is now one of the best-dated prehistoric extinctions, ” the researchers report today (August 1) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers also used environmental proxies to investigate habitat changes at the time of extinction. The island, which formed between 14,700 and 13,500 years ago rapidly shrank until 9,000 years ago and continued slowly shrinking until 6,000 years ago and now is only 42 square miles in area. While large animals like mammoths became extinct on the continents about 12,000 years ago due to climate change and habitat restructuring, the process was different on the island.

The shrinking of the island concentrated the mammoths in a smaller area and diminished available water. Pollen from the lake cores indicate that the area around the lake was denuded of vegetation by the mammoths. Like elephants today, when the water became cloudy and turgid, the mammoths probably dug holes nearby to obtain cleaner water. Both of these things increased erosion in the area and helped fill in the lake, decreasing the available water even more.

After the extinction of the mammoths, the cores show that erosion stopped and vegetation returned to the area. In essence, the mammoths contributed to their own demise.

The researchers note that this research “highlights freshwater limitation as an overlooked extinction driver and underscores the vulnerability of small island populations to environmental change, even in the absence of human influence,”

Source: Penn State University news release.

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Reconstructed mammoth. Matt Boulton, Wikimedia Commons

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Also working on this project from Penn State were Soumaya Belmecheri, former postdoctoral fellow now at the Laboratory of Tree Ring Research, University of Arizona; Brendan J. Culleton, research associate in anthropology; and Lee Newsom, associate professor of anthropology.

The team also consisted of Kyungcheol Choy, Ruth Rawcliffe, and Émilie Saulnier-Talbot, Alaska Stable Isotope Center; and Matthew J. Wooller, Alaska Stable Isotope Center and School of Fisheries and Ocean Science, University of Alaska, Fairbanks; Lauren J. Davies, Duane Froese, University of Alberta; Peter D. Heintzman, Beth Shapiro and Joshua D. Kapp, University of California, Santa Cruz; Carrie Hritz, AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow; and Yue Wang and John W. Williams, University of Wisconsin, Madison.

The National Science Foundation supported this work.

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Earliest evidence of cancer in human fossil record discovered

Posted on July 28, 2016 by No Author -

Johannesburg, South Africa – An international team of researchers led by scientists from the University of the Witwatersrand’s Evolutionary Studies Institute and the South African Centre for Excellence in PalaeoSciences today announced in two papers, published in the South African Journal of Science, the discovery of the most ancient evidence for cancer and bony tumours yet described in the human fossil record.

The discovery of a foot bone dated to approximately 1.7 million years ago from the site of Swartkrans with definitive evidence of malignant cancer, pushes the oldest date for this disease back from recent times into deep prehistory. Although the exact species to which the foot bone belongs is unknown, it is clearly that of a hominin, or bipedal human relative.

In an accompanying paper appearing in the same journal, a collaborating team of scientists identify the oldest tumour ever found in the human fossil record, a benign neoplasm found in the vertebrae of the well-known Australopithecus sediba child, Karabo from the site of Malapa, and dated to almost two million years in age. The oldest previously demonstrated possible hominin tumour was found in the rib of a Neanderthal and dated to around 120,000 years old.

Edward Odes, a Wits doctoral candidate and lead author of the cancer paper, and co-author on the tumour paper, notes “Modern medicine tends to assume that cancers and tumours in humans are diseases caused by modern lifestyles and environments. Our studies show the origins of these diseases occurred in our ancient relatives millions of years before modern industrial societies existed”.

The cancer in a foot bone, a metatarsal, was identified as an osteosarcoma, an aggressive form of cancer which usually effects younger individuals in modern humans, and, if untreated typically results in early death. “Due to its preservation, we don’t know whether the single cancerous foot bone belongs to an adult or child, nor whether the cancer caused the death of this individual, but we can tell this would have affected the individuals’ ability to walk or run,” says Dr Bernhard Zipfel, a Wits scientist and an expert on the foot and locomotion of early human relatives. “In short, it would have been painful.”

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Metatarsal SK 7923: Volume rendered image of the external morphology of the foot bone, showing the extent of expansion of osteosarcoma (primary bone cancer) beyond the surface of the bone. Volume data derived from micro computed tomography. Image credit: Patrick Randolph Quinney (UCLAN).

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Lead author of the tumour paper and co-author of the cancer paper, Dr Patrick Randolph-Quinney of Wits University and the University of Central Lancashire in the UK, suggests “The presence of a benign tumour in Australopithecus sediba is fascinating not only because it is found in the back, an extremely rare place for such a disease to manifest in modern humans, but also because it is found in a child. This in fact is the first evidence of such a disease in a young individual in the whole of the fossil human record”.

Prof. Lee Berger, an author on both papers and leader of the Malapa project where the fossil vertebra was found, adds “not only has there been an assumption that these sorts of cancers and tumours are diseases of modernity, which these fossils clearly demonstrate they are not, but that we as modern humans exhibit them as a consequence of living longer, yet this rare tumour is found in a young child. The history of these types of tumours and cancers is clearly more complex than previously thought”.

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Vertebra U.W. 88-37: Sixth thoracic vertebra of juvenile Australopithecus sediba (Malapa Hominin 1) Top row shows surface rendered image volume. Bottom row shows partially transparent image volume withe the segmented boundaries of the legion rendered solid pink. Volume data derived from phase contrast x-ray synchrotron microtomography. A: Right lateral view. B: Superior view. C: Posterior view. Image credit: Paul Tafereau (ESRF).

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Both incidences of disease were diagnosed using state of the art imaging technologies including those at the European Synchrotron Research Facility in Grenoble, France, medical CT at the Charlotte Maxeke Hospital in Johannesburg, and the micro-CT facility at the Nuclear Energy Corporation of South Africa at Pelindaba.

“Researchers in South Africa are at the forefront of using various X-Ray modalities to discover new and interesting facts about ancient human relatives,” notes Dr Jacqueline Smilg, a radiologist based at Charlotte Maxeke Hospital, who is an author on both papers and was involved in the clinical diagnoses. “This is another good example of how the modern clinical sciences and the science of palaeoanthropology are working together in South Africa and with international collaborators to advance our understanding of diseases in both the past and the present.”

Source: Press release of the University of the Witwatersrand.

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Voice control in orangutan gives clues to early human speech

Posted on July 27, 2016 by No Author -

DURHAM UNIVERSITY—An adolescent orangutan called Rocky could provide the key to understanding how speech in humans evolved from the time of the ancestral great apes, according to new research.

In an imitation “do-as-I-do” game, eleven-year-old Rocky, who was eight at the time of the research, was able to copy the pitch and tone of sounds made by researchers to make vowel-like calls.

The discovery, led by Dr Adriano Lameira of Durham University, UK, shows that orangutans could have the ability to control their voices.

It might answer the argument about whether or not spoken language stemmed from early human ancestors.

Previously it was thought that great apes – our closest relatives – could not learn to produce new sounds and because speech is a learned behaviour it could not have originated from them.

The findings are published today (Wednesday, July 27) in the journal Scientific Reports.

Rocky was studied at Indianapolis Zoo, Indiana, USA, where he is currently housed, between April and May 2012, and all steps were taken to ensure his routine and environment were not disrupted.

During the study, a researcher made random sounds with variations in the tone or pitch of her voice which Rocky then mimicked.

The research team compared these sounds against the largest available database of orangutan calls collected from over 12,000 hours of observations of more than 120 orangutans from 15 wild and captive populations.

They were able to conclude that the sounds made by Rocky were different compared to the sounds on the database, showing that he was able to learn new sounds and control the action of his voice in a “conversational” context.

Dr Lameira, who was not a member of Durham University staff at the time of the research but joined the Department of Anthropology in 2015, said: “It’s not clear how spoken language evolved from the communication systems of the ancestral great apes.

“Instead of learning new sounds, it has been presumed that sounds made by great apes are driven by arousal over which they have no control, but our research proves that orangutans have the potential capacity to control the action of their voices.

“This indicates that the voice control shown by humans could derive from an evolutionary ancestor with similar voice control capacities as those found in orangutans and in all great apes more generally.

“This opens up the potential for us to learn more about the vocal capacities of early hominids that lived before the split between the orangutan and human lineages to see how the vocal system evolved towards full-blown speech in humans.”

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Image courtesy Zyance, Wikimedia Commons

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The research also involved the Pongo Foundation (Netherlands); Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Germany); Liverpool John Moores University (UK); University of Amsterdam (Netherlands); Indianapolis Zoo (USA); George Mason University (USA); Indiana University (USA).

It builds on a previous study led by Dr Lameira when he was based at the University of Amsterdam.

In that study, published in January 2015, it was reported that a female orangutan called Tilda at Cologne Zoo, in Germany, was able to make sounds comparable to human consonant and vowel-like calls at the same rhythm and pace as human speech.

Source: News release of Durham University

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Early human fire use and tuberculosis

Posted on July 25, 2016 by No Author -

Mathematical modeling suggests that fire use by early humans during the Pleistocene may have allowed tuberculosis to emerge as a transmissible human disease, possibly through increased susceptibility to lung infection due to smoke inhalation and increased opportunities for disease transmission in gatherings around community fires; the recent study* findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that cultural innovation and altered living conditions can influence the emergence of infectious diseases.

More specifically, the study authors suggest that during a time of significant ecological and human social change in the Pleistocene period, expanding range extensions may have led to consumption of new food sources and altered energy requirements, increasing the exposure of early humans to the natural supply of MTBC (Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex) found initially in the soil. The enhanced exposure, combined with increasing human susceptibility to mycobacterial infection because of smoke-induced lung damage and new opportunities for transmission created by the developing social culture catalyzed by the use of fire may have sparked the evolution of MTBC as a specialized human pathogen.

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The Pleistocene cave sit of Zhoukoudian in China, where evidence was found for some of the earliest human uses of fire. Wikimedia Commons

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Source: Adapted and edited from the subject news release of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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*“Controlled fire use in early humans might have triggered the evolutionary emergence of tuberculosis,” by Rebecca H. Chisholm, James M. Trauer, Darren Curnoe, and Mark M. Tanaka, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Ancient DNA Reveals Complex Genetic History of Near East at Dawn of Agriculture

Posted on July 25, 2016 by No Author -

July 25, 2016—The first large-scale, genome-wide analyses of ancient human remains from the Near East have illuminated the genetic identities and population dynamics of the world’s first farmers.

The study, published today in Nature, reveals three genetically distinct farming populations living in the Near East at the dawn of agriculture 12,000 to 8,000 years ago: two newly described groups in Iran and the Levant and a previously reported group in Anatolia, in what is now Turkey.

Together, the results suggested that agriculture spread in the Near East at least in part because existing groups invented or adopted farming technologies, rather than through population replacement.

“Some of the earliest farming was practiced in the Levant, including Israel and Jordan, and in the Zagros mountains of Iran—two edges of the Fertile Crescent,” said Ron Pinhasi, associate professor of archaeology at University College Dublin and co-senior author of the study. “We wanted to find out whether these early farmers were genetically similar to one another or to the hunter-gatherers who lived there before so we could learn more about how the world’s first agricultural transition occurred.”

The team’s analyses alter what is known about the genetic heritage of present-day people in western Eurasia. They now appear to have descended from four major groups: hunter-gatherers in what is now western Europe, hunter-gatherers in eastern Europe and the Russian steppe, the Iran farming group and the Levant farming group.

“We found that the relatively homogeneous population seen across western Eurasia today, including Europe and the Near East, used to be a highly substructured collection of people who were as different from one another as present-day Europeans are from East Asians,” said David Reich, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and co-senior author of the study.

“Near East populations mixed with one another over time and migrated into surrounding regions to mix with the people living there until those initially quite diverse groups became genetically very similar,” added Iosif Lazaridis, HMS research fellow in genetics and first author of the study.

Early adopters

Even as advances in ancient-DNA technology have made it possible to probe population mixing and large-scale migrations that occurred thousands of years ago, researchers have had trouble studying the genetic history of the Near East because the region’s warm climate has degraded much of the DNA in unearthed bones.

An international team led by Pinhasi and Reich overcame the problem of poor-quality DNA in part by extracting genetic material from ear bones that can yield up to 100 times more DNA than other bones in the body. The team also used a technique called in-solution hybridization to enrich for human DNA and filter out contaminant DNA from microbes.

The combined techniques allowed the researchers to gather high-quality genomic information from 44 ancient Near Easterners who lived between 14,000 and 3,400 years ago: hunter-gatherers from before the invention of farming, the first farmers themselves and their successors. The Penn Museum originally contributed the earliest of the Iranian samples—from three individuals, from hunter-gatherer populations in the region—excavated from Hotu Cave in the 1950s. Of the three, DNA was successfully extracted from an ear bone of one individual, dated to about 10,000 years ago.

Below Right: View of the 10,000-year-old crania excavated by the Penn Museum in the 1950s from the Hotu Cave near Behshahr in northern Iran. A DNA sample was successfully drawn from this ancient specimen. Photo: Penn Museum.

By comparing the genomes to one another as well as to those of nearly 240 previously studied ancient people from nearby regions and about 2,600 present-day people, the researchers learned that the first farming cultures in the Levant, Iran and Anatolia were all genetically distinct. Farmers in the Levant and Iran were genetically similar, however, to earlier hunter-gatherers who had lived in the same areas.

“Maybe one group domesticated goats and another began growing wheat, and the practices were shared in some way,” said Lazaridis. “These different populations all invented or adopted some facets of the farming revolution, and they all flourished.”

“The findings tell a different story from what researchers believe happened later in Europe, when the first farmers moved in from Anatolia and largely replaced the hunter-gatherer populations who’d been living there.

Janet Monge, Curator and Keeper of the Penn Museum’s Physical Anthropology collection and a co-contributor to the research, noted: “The integration of ancient DNA samples from archaeological skeletal samples allows us to redefine the parameters of population history at the origin of agriculture. Clearly the transition from hunter-gatherer communities to agricultural ones is not a singular invention and spread, but the result of a series of innovations, aggregations and disseminations on both the cultural and biological sides of human history. This study energizes the decades-long debates on the origin of agriculture.”

Mix and match

Over the following 5,000 years, the Near East farming groups mixed with one another and with hunter-gatherers in Europe.

“All this extraordinary diversity collapsed,” said Reich. “By the Bronze Age, populations had ancestry from many sources and broadly resembled present-day ones.”

The researchers also learned how descendants of each early farming group, even as they began to intermingle, contributed to the genetic ancestry of people in different parts of the world: Farmers related to the Anatolian group spread west into Europe, people related to the Levant group moved south into East Africa, people related to those in Iran or the Caucasus went north into the Russian steppe, and people related to both the farmers in Iran and hunter-gatherers from the steppe spread into South Asia.

“The Near East was the missing link to understanding many human migrations,” said Pinhasi.

Finally, the study provides a few more clues about a hypothetical, even more ancient population called the Basal Eurasians, an early diverging branch of the family tree of humans living outside Africa, whose existence Lazaridis has inferred from DNA analyses but whose physical remains have not yet been found.

“Every single group from the ancient Near East appears to have Basal Eurasian ancestry—up to around fifty percent in the earliest groups,” said Lazaridis.

To the researchers’ surprise, statistical analyses suggested that the Basal Eurasians may have had no Neanderthal DNA. Other non-African groups have at least 2 percent Neanderthal DNA.

The team believes this finding could help explain why West Eurasians have less Neanderthal DNA than East Asians, even though Neanderthals are known to have lived in west Eurasia.

“Admixture with Basal Eurasians may have diluted the Neanderthal ancestry in West Eurasians who have ancient Near Eastern farmer ancestry,” said Reich. “Basal Eurasians may have lived in parts of the Near East that did not come into contact with the Neanderthals.”

Going forward, said Pinhasi, “We’re eager to study remains from the world’s first civilizations, who succeeded the samples analyzed in the study. The people everyone reads about in history books are now within the reach of our genetic technology.”

Primary funding for this research was provided by the National Institutes of Health (grant GM100233), a National Science Foundation HOMINID grant (BCS-1032255) and a European Research Council starting grant ADNABIOARC (263441). Reich is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

Source: Adapted from a Harvard Medical School story by Stephanie Dutchen, Science Writer/Editor for the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

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Some bacteria have lived in the human gut since before we were human

Posted on July 21, 2016 by No Author -

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN—AUSTIN, Texas – Some of the bacteria in our guts were passed down over millions of years, since before we were human, suggesting that evolution plays a larger role than previously known in people’s intestinal-microbe makeup, according to a new study in the journal Science.

The bacteria that the researchers studied guide the early development of our intestines, train our immune systems to fight pathogens and may even affect our moods and behavior.

The research, which included an international team of scientists, was led by Howard Ochman, a professor of integrative biology at The University of Texas at Austin, and Andrew Moeller, a former graduate student at UT Austin, currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.

“It’s surprising that our gut microbes, which we could get from many sources in the environment, have actually been co-evolving inside us for such a long time,” says Ochman, who noted that the microbes were passed down over hundreds of thousands of host generations.

As humans and the African great apes evolved into distinct species from a common ancestor, bacteria present in their common ancestor also evolved into distinct strains associated with each host, the scientists found.

Adding further weight to the analysis, the scientists found genetic evidence that the bacteria split into distinct strains at about the same times as their hosts were splitting into distinct species. One such bacterial split happened about 15.6 million years ago as the gorilla lineage diverged from the other hominids. The other bacterial split happened about 5.3 million years ago as the human lineage separated from the lineage leading to chimps and bonobos.

“We’ve known for a long time that humans and our closest relatives, the great apes, harbor these bacteria in our guts,” says Moeller, “and the biggest question we wanted to answer is, where did these bacteria come from? Did we get them from our environment or from our evolutionary history? And how long have they persisted in host lineages?”

Before this study, scientists disagreed about whether strains of gut microbes have continued within individual hominid lineages over timescales long enough to lead to cospeciation, a process by which two species evolve in parallel. The persistence of some microbes might have been threatened by changes in diet, geography or the use of antibiotics.

The researchers studied fecal samples collected from wild African great apes–chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas–and also from people living in Connecticut. Fossil and genetic evidence have established that all four species, known as hominids, evolved from a common ancestor that lived more than 10 million years ago.

Fecal samples contain microbes shed from a host animal’s gut. The scientists used gene sequencing to analyze all the different versions of one specific bacterial gene present in each fecal sample. From these data, they reconstructed evolutionary trees for three groups of gut bacteria that make up over 20 percent of the human gut microbiome.

For two of those groups, Bacteriodaceae and Bifidobacteriaceae, the bacterial evolutionary trees closely resemble the hominid evolutionary tree. There are some subtle differences, however, such as an individual bacterial strain disappearing from one of the four host species over time.

The third bacterial family tree, for a group known as Lachnospiraceae, was more complicated. There were apparently at least four times when these bacteria were transferred between different host species. The researchers speculate that because these bacteria form spores and can thus survive outside their hosts for long periods, they were easily passed between species.

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An artist’s rendition of bacteria that live in the gut of people and their closest relatives. A new study finds that these microbes have lived—and evolved—with us since before we were human. Credit: The University of Texas at Austin. Illustration by Jenna Luecke.

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The researchers are not certain how these three ancient strains of microbes were passed down from one host generation to the next for millions of years. Prior research shows that we receive our first inoculation of gut microbes from our mothers as we pass through the birth canal. Throughout life, we also receive microbes from social interactions. The researchers suspect both modes of transmission are responsible for maintaining our multigenerational relationship with our bacterial BFFs.

“What’s most exciting to me is the possibility that this codiversification between bacteria and hosts could extend much further back in time,” says Moeller. “Maybe we can trace our gut microbes back to our common ancestors with all mammals, all reptiles, all amphibians, maybe even all vertebrates. If that’s true, it’s amazing.”

Source: University of Texas at Austin news release.

In addition to Ochman and Moeller, the study’s co-authors are: Alejandro Caro-Quintero at Corpoicá C.I Tibaitata (Colombia); Deus Mjungu at the Gombe Stream Research Center (Tanzania); Alexander Georgiev at Northwestern University and Harvard University; Elizabeth Lonsdorf at Franklin & Marshall College; Martin Muller at the University of New Mexico; Anne Pusey at Duke University; Martine Peeters at the University of Montpellier (France); and Beatrice Hahn at the University of Pennsylvania.

This work was supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health, the Agence Nationale de Recherche sur le Sida, the Jane Goodall Institute, the Arthur L. Greene Fund and Harvard University.

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Ancient feces provides earliest evidence of infectious disease carried on Silk Road

Posted on July 21, 2016 by No Author -

UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE—An ancient latrine near a desert in north-western China has revealed the first archaeological evidence that travellers along the Silk Road were responsible for the spread of infectious diseases along huge distances of the route 2,000 years ago.

Cambridge researchers Hui-Yuan Yeh and Piers Mitchell used microscopy to study preserved faeces on ancient ‘personal hygiene sticks’ (used for wiping away faeces from the anus) in the latrine at what was a large Silk Road relay station on the eastern margins of the Tamrin Basin, a region that contains the Taklamakan desert. The latrine is thought to date from 111 BC (Han Dynasty) and was in use until 109 AD.

They found that eggs from four species of parasitic worm (helminths) were present: roundworm (Ascaris lumbricoides), whipworm (Trichuris trichiura), tapeworm (Taenia sp.), and Chinese liver fluke (Clonorchis sinensis).

Chinese liver fluke is a parasitic flatworm that causes abdominal pain, diarrhoea, jaundice and liver cancer. It requires well-watered, marshy areas to complete its life cycle. Xuanquanzhi relay station was located at the eastern end of the arid Tamrin Basin, an area that contains the fearsome Taklamakan Desert. The liver fluke could not have been endemic in this dry region.

In fact, based on the current prevalence of the Chinese liver fluke, its closest endemic area to the latrine’s location in Dunhuang is around 1,500km away, and the species is most common in Guandong Province – some 2,000km from Dunhuang.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, who conducted the study, suggest that the traveller infected with this liver fluke must have journeyed an enormous distance, and suggest the discovery provides the first reliable evidence for long distance travel with an infectious disease along the Silk Road.

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These are 2,000-year-old personal hygiene sticks with remains of cloth, excavated from the latrine at Xuanquanzhi. Credit: Hui-Yuan Yeh. Reproduced from the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

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Egg of Chinese liver fluke discovered in the latrine at Xuanquanzhi, viewed using microscopy. Dimensions 29 x 16 micrometers. Credit: The Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

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The findings are published today in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

“When I first saw the Chinese liver fluke egg down the microscope I knew that we had made a momentous discovery,” said Hui-Yuan Yeh, one of the study’s authors. “Our study is the first to use archaeological evidence from a site on the Silk Road to demonstrate that travellers were taking infectious diseases with them over these huge distances.”

The Silk Road (or Silk Route) came to prominence during the Han Dynasty in China (202 BC – AD 220) as merchants, explorers, soldiers and government officials journeyed between East Asia and the Middle East/Mediterranean region.

Researchers have previously suggested that diseases such as bubonic plague, anthrax and leprosy might have been carried by ancient travellers along the legendary trading route, as similar strains have been found in China and Europe.

“Until now there has been no proof that the Silk Road was responsible for the spread of infectious diseases. They could instead have spread between China and Europe via India to the south, or via Mongolia and Russia to the north,” says study lead Piers Mitchell.

The Cambridge team worked alongside Chinese researchers Ruilin Mao and Hui Wang from the Gansu Institute for Cultural Relics and Archaeology, who originally excavated the ancient latrine and relay station in Ganzu Province.

The stop was a popular one on the Silk Road with travellers staying there and government officials using the facility to change their horses and deliver letters. While excavating the latrine, the Chinese team found the personal hygiene sticks with cloth wrapped round one end.

Added Mitchell: “Finding evidence for this species in the latrine indicates that a traveller had come here from a region of China with plenty of water, where the parasite was endemic. This proves for the first time that travellers along the Silk Road really were responsible for the spread of infectious disease along this route in the past.”

Source: University of Cambridge news release.

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Travel enhances chimps’ tool use

Posted on July 20, 2016 by No Author -

Chimpanzees who travel are more frequent tool users, according to new findings from the University of Neuchâtel and the University of Geneva, Switzerland, to be published in eLife.

Hawa is a wild chimpanzee from the Budongo Forest in Uganda who burns up a lot of energy travelling, which he has learnt to replenish with a dose of honey. His friend Squibs makes less of an effort to roam and has not acquired the skills needed to enjoy this high-energy treat. This pattern was repeated in other members of the study group over seven years of observation.

A low quantity of ripe fruit also increases chimpanzees’ motivation to acquire new foraging skills, but the effect is less pronounced than travel.

“Our results show that travel fosters tool use in wild chimpanzees and it may also have been a driving force in early technological evolution by humans,” says Dr Thibaud Gruber from the University of Geneva.

The team reviewed data from nine other chimpanzee communities to confirm the pattern. Chimpanzees’ closest relative, the Bonobo, travels around the same average distance as the Sonso and other Ugandan chimpanzees and uses a similar set of tools. Gorillas and most orangutans show limited or no feeding-related tool use and spend significantly less time travelling per day on the ground compared to chimpanzees. In contrast, modern human hunter-gatherers walk on average 11.4-14.1 km per day and use many more tools than any of the great apes.

Gruber studied 70 individuals of the Sonso community of chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii, known for its limited tool use behaviour. This made them ideal subjects to study how tool use emerges. The only feeding-related tools they use are folded leaves, usually to collect water, and moss to soak up mineral deposits from a clay pit. 52 of them engaged with the experiment.

“After seven years of field work, I had a massive amount of data and there was clear variation in how chimpanzees engaged with the experiment. I thought it would be interesting to analyse why,” says Gruber.

He deployed the “honey trap experiment”. The Sonso chimpanzees already used their fingers to take honey from bees’ nests, with limited success. In the “honey trap” experiment, a hole is drilled into a log and partially filled with this tempting prize so it can only be accessed with an implement. Most of the individuals who successfully extracted honey employed the community’s habitual tool, a folded leaf sponge, while two used a stick. A total of 21 instances of tool use were observed in 11 individuals.

The team reviewed the data against a whole range of variables including the quantity of ripe fruits eaten and the average daily distance the chimpanzees travelled.

“We didn’t expect travel to be that important, and were surprised that it had an even greater influence than if they fed less on their preferred food of ripe fruits,” says Gruber.

The team conclude that travel created an extra need for high-energy food while the challenge of inaccessible honey created an opportunity for innovation. The team did not analyse the potential influence of social learning to influence it. In 2011, Gruber and a colleague Catherine Hobaiter from the University of St Andrews discovered that the community’s use of moss as a sponge emerged from one individual named Nick, whose behavior was copied by a dominant female and quickly spread.

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Chimpanzees in Kibale National Park. Credit: Andrew Bernard

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The study also reveals the influence of local ecology in the development of tool use. The Budongo Forest has provided a rich environment for chimpanzees, which could explain the previous lack of tool use in the Sonso community. However, in the last few decades, the food supply has steadily decreased.

It has been suggested that the development of tool use and sociality in early humans could likewise have been adaptive responses to heightened habitat instability caused by climate change.

“When times are changing, you have to adapt your behavior and our data illustrate that chimps will pay more attention to the possibilities offered by their environment in more demanding periods,” says Gruber.

Source: News release of eLife.

The paper ‘Travel fosters tool use in wild chimpanzees’ can be freely accessed online at http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.16371.

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Genome of 6,000-year-old barley grains sequenced for first time

Posted on July 19, 2016 by No Author -

BAR-ILAN UNIVERSITY—An international team of researchers has succeeded for the first time in sequencing the genome of Chalcolithic barley grains. This is the oldest plant genome to be reconstructed to date. The 6,000-year-old seeds were retrieved from Yoram Cave in the southern cliff of Masada fortress in the Judean Desert in Israel, close to the Dead Sea. Genetically, the prehistoric barley is very similar to present-day barley grown in the Southern Levant, supporting the existing hypothesis of barley domestication having occurred in the Upper Jordan Valley.

Members of the research team are from the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK) in Gatersleben, Germany; Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel; Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel; the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany; and the University of Haifa, Israel; The James Hutton Institute, UK; University of California, Santa Cruz, USA; University of Minnesota St. Paul, USA; University of Tübingen, Germany.

The analyzed grains, together with tens of thousands of other plant remains, were retrieved during a systematic archaeological excavation headed by Uri Davidovich, from the Institute of Archaeology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Nimrod Marom, from Zinman Institute of Archaeology, University of Haifa, Israel. The archaeobotanical analysis was led by Ehud Weiss, of Bar-Ilan University. The cave is very difficult to access and was used only for a short time by humans, some 6,000 years ago, probably as ephemeral refuge.

Oldest plant genome reconstructed to date

Most examination of archaeobotanical findings has been limited to the comparison of ancient and present-day specimens based on their morphology. Up to now, only prehistoric corn has been genetically reconstructed. In this research, the team succeeded in sequencing the complete genome of the 6,000-year-old barley grains. The results are now published in the online version of the journal Nature Genetics.

“These archaeological remains provided a unique opportunity for us to finally sequence a Chalcolithic plant genome. The genetic material has been well-preserved for several millennia due to the extreme dryness of the region,” explains Ehud Weiss, of Bar-Ilan University. In order to determine the age of the ancient seeds, the researchers split the grains and subjected half of them to radiocarbon dating while the other half was used to extract the ancient DNA. “For us, ancient DNA works like a time capsule that allows us to travel back in history and look into the domestication of crop plants at distinct time points in the past,” explains Johannes Krause, Director of the Department of Archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena. The genome of Chalcolithic barley grains is the oldest plant genome to be reconstructed to date.

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Right: Photograph during excavation exhibiting excellent dry preservation of plant remains Left: A well-preserved, desiccated barley grain found at Yoram Cave Credit: Uri Davidovich

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Domestication of barley completed very early

Wheat and barley were already grown 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, a sickle-shaped region stretching from present-day Iraq and Iran through Turkey and Syria into Lebanon, Jordan and Israel. Up to this day, the wild forms of these two crops persist in the region and are among the major model species studied at the Institute of Evolution in the University of Haifa. “It was from there that grain farming originated and later spread to Europe, Asia and North Africa,” explains Tzion Fahima, of the University of Haifa.

“Our analyses show that the seeds cultivated 6,000 years ago greatly differ genetically from the wild forms we find today in the region. However, they show considerable genetic overlap with present-day domesticated lines from the region,” explains Nils Stein, who directed the comparison of the ancient genome with modern genomes at the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK), Gatersleben, with the support of Robbie Waugh and colleagues at the James Hutton Institute, Dundee, Scotland, and Gary Muehlbauer, University of Minnesota, USA. “This demonstrates that the domestication of barley in the Fertile Crescent was already well advanced very early.”

The comparison of the ancient seeds with wild forms from the region and with so-called ‘landraces’ (i.e., local barley lines grown by farmers in the Near East) enabled to geographically suggest, according to Tzion Fahima and his colleagues at the University of Haifa and Israel’s Tel-Hai College, “the origin of the domestication of barley within the Upper Jordan Valley – a hypothesis that is also supported by two archaeological sites in the surrounding area where the hitherto earliest remains of barley cultivation have been found.

Immigrants “trust” in extant landraces

Also the genetic overlap with present-day domesticated lines from the region is revealing to the researchers. “This similarity is an amazing finding considering to what extent the climate, but also the local flora and fauna, as well as the agricultural methods, have changed over this long period of time,” says Martin Mascher, from the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research, the lead author of the study. The researchers therefore assume that conquerors and immigrants coming to the region did not bring their own crop seeds from their former homelands, but continued cultivating the locally adapted extant landraces.

New insights into the origins of our crop plants

Combining archaeology, archaeobotany, genetics and computational genomics in an interdisciplinary study has produced novel insights into the origins of our crop plants. “This is just the beginning of a new and exciting line of research,” predicts Verena Schuenemann, from Tuebingen University, the second lead author of the study. “DNA-analysis of archaeological remains of prehistoric plants will provide us with novel insights into the origin, domestication and spread of crop plants.”

Source: Bar-Ilan University news release.

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Cave discoveries shed new light on Native and European religious encounters in the Americas

Posted on July 19, 2016 by No Author -

UNIVERSITY OF LEICESTER—A project led by archaeologists from the British Museum and the University of Leicester has discovered remarkable evidence which shows how the first generations of Europeans to arrive in the Americas engaged with indigenous peoples and their spiritual beliefs deep inside the caves of a remote Caribbean island.

Recent fieldwork by a collaborative Anglo-Puerto Rican* team has uncovered new evidence in the Caribbean of an early religious dialogue between Europeans and Native Americans.

A large collection of early colonial inscriptions and commentaries written by named individuals within a cave system of pre-existing indigenous spiritual iconography provides dramatic new insights into the tone and personal context of this momentous time of encounter.

In a paper, published in Antiquity, researchers have provided new understandings about the formation of emergent cultural identities in the Caribbean that challenge historic accounts of indigenous extinction.

The island of Mona, on a key Atlantic route from Europe to the Americas, was at the heart of sixteenth-century Spanish colonial projects and was recorded by Christopher Columbus on his second voyage in AD 1494.

Communities on the island were exposed to the earliest waves of European impact during a critical period of transformation and the forging of new identities.

A team of researchers led by Dr Jago Cooper (British Museum) and Dr Alice Samson (University of Leicester) has been studying the island – which is one of the most cavernous regions, per square kilometre, in the world.

The team, which has just completed its 2016 season, includes students from Puerto Rico and the UK carrying out dissertations in Climate Science, Archaeology, and History.

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Image of the cave discoveries. Credit: University of Leicester

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Since 2013, exploration and survey of around 70 cave systems—part of an interdisciplinary study of past human activity on Mona Island—has revealed that Mona’s caves include the greatest diversity of preserved indigenous iconography in the Caribbean, with thousands of motifs recorded in darkzone chambers far from cave entrances.

In the astonishing cave discussed in this paper more than 30 historic inscriptions include named individuals, phrases in Latin and Spanish, dates and Christian symbols that occur within a series of connecting chambers all within the area of indigenous iconography.

This account of spiritual encounters provides a rare, personalised insight into intercultural religious dynamics in the early Americas.

Dr Alice Samson from the University of Leicester School of Archaeology and Ancient History said: “Increasing use of interdisciplinary approaches and archaeometric analyses have provided new understandings of colonial processes that are more nuanced than mere oppression, domination and, in the case of the Caribbean, indigenous extinction.

“This not only provides a counterpoint to official metropolitan histories, but also tracks the beginnings of new religious engagements and transforming cultural identities in the Americas.”

Dr Jago Cooper from the British Museum added: “This research reveals a new perspective on the personal encounter between indigenous populations and the first generations of Europeans in the Americas.

“This is a unique site that helps us to understand the origins of cultural identity in the Americas, the start of a process that continues right up to the modern day.”

Source: University of Leicester news release.

*The British Museum, the School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester, US Coastal Cave Survey , the Puerto Rican Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, Centre of Advanced Studies of Puerto Rico and the Caribe, and University of Puerto Rico.

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Reading the Unreadable

Posted on July 18, 2016 by No Author -

It was about two thousand years ago when the eruption of southern Italy’s Mount Vesuvius enveloped the ancient Roman cities of Pompei and Herculaneum in a fiery cataclysm, swathing them in a hot ash and mud cocoon that would actually end up ‘freezing’ their remains in what for history has been two of the best-preserved ancient urban centers. It became a gold mine for archaeological investigation in the late 19th century, and continues to reveal more to archaeologists today. In Herculaneum, one of the most significant finds was a library of 1,800 carbonized papyri found within the remains of a Roman villa, known today as the Villa of the Papyri. Because of the scrolls’ charred state and fragility, however, they have been extremely difficut to decipher.

Until now.

Recent analysis of the papyrus scroll fragments using advanced techniques have revealed a number of findings, including the revelation that the ancient Romans used metallic ink in their literary inscriptions centuries earlier than previously thought.* Up to now, it was thought that ancient texts, particularly Greek and Latin literary manuscripts produced until the fourth century AD, were written primarily in carbon-based ink on papyri, the fibrous structure of which allowed the ancient scribes to forego the use of ruling lines. Now, Vito Mocella and colleagues have applied nondestructive synchrotron (particle accelerator) X-ray-based methods to chemically analyze hardly visible inscriptions on two nearly flat, multilayered charred papyrus fragments that were found at the Villa. While it was thought that the introduction of metal in writing materials was generally dated to the fourth-fifth century AD, the fragments of these scrolls showed high lead concentrations—around 84 µg/cm² and 16 µg/cm²—suggesting a purposeful use of lead-containing ink, several centuries before the use of metallic ink was introduced into literary inscription in the Greco-Roman period. Spots of concentrated lead were detected at the beginnings and ends of the scribes’ pen strokes on the scrolls.

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The remains of the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum. Erik Anderson, Wikimedia Commons

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Now, Vito Mocella, who is an expert in condensed matter physics and electromagnetism, and Papyrologist Daniel Delattre, have joined forces to make the scrolls legible again. Using their expertise and the help of the synchrotron particle accelerator, they are slowly on their way to more easily deciphering the scrolls once and for all, using the noninvasive technique (see the video below). The ultimate results may shed much light on Greco-Roman society in the shadow of Vesuvius.

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Would Say Would Fall from MEL Films on Vimeo.

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* “Revealing metallic ink in Herculaneum papyri,” by Emmanuel Brun et al.

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Origin of farming not from a single population

Posted on July 14, 2016 by No Author -

The transition from hunter-gatherer to sedentary farming 10,000 years ago occurred in multiple neighbouring but genetically distinct populations according to research by an international team including UCL.

“It had been widely assumed that these first farmers were from a single, genetically homogeneous population. However, we’ve found that there were deep genetic differences in these early farming populations, indicating very distinct ancestries,” said corresponding author Dr Garrett Hellenthal, UCL Genetics.

Farnaz Broushaki and colleagues sequenced the DNA from four skeletons representing early Neolithic human remains from Iran’s Zagros region, the site of some of the oldest evidence for farming to date. The researchers’ genetic analyses* uncovered a previously uncharacterized population – one highly distinct from ancient Neolithic Anatolians, the population often considered the likely ancestors of European farmers. This suggests these Zagros-based farmers, the genetic sequences of which bear greater resemblance to modern-day Pakistani and Afghan populations, weren’t the ancestors to the first farmers in Europe. Instead, they likely split from ancient Neolithic Anatolian genomes more than 40,000 years ago, the authors say, serving as a separate source of the expansion of agriculture. The results add support to the hypothesis that rather than being the handiwork of one group of farmers, the farming culture was spread to Europe, Africa and Asia by more than one source population from farming’s core zone.

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Map showing the Zagros region. Joshua Doubek, Wikimedia Commons

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“We know that farming technologies, including various domestic plants and animals, arose across the Fertile Crescent, with no particular centre” added co-author Professor Mark Thomas, UCL Genetics, Evolution & Environment.

“But to find that this region was made up of highly genetically distinct farming populations was something of a surprise. We estimated that they separated some 46 to 77,000 years ago, so they would almost certainly have looked different, and spoken different languages. It seems like we should be talking of a federal origin of farming.”

The switch from mobile hunting and gathering to sedentary farming first occurred around 10,000 years ago in southwestern Asia and was one of the most important behavioral transitions since humans first evolved in Africa some 200,000 years ago. It led to profound changes in society, including greater population densities, new diseases, poorer health, social inequality, urban living, and ultimately, the rise of ancient civilizations.

Animals and plants were first domesticated across a region stretching north from modern-day Israel, Palestine and Lebanon to Syria and eastern Turkey, then east into, northern Iraq and north-western Iran, and south into Mesopotamia; a region known as the Fertile Crescent.

“Such was the impact of farming on our species that archaeologists have debated for more than 100 years how it originated and how it was spread into neighbouring regions such as Europe, North Africa and southern Asia,” said co-author Professor Stephen Shennan, UCL Institute of Archaeology.

“We’ve shown for the first time that different populations in different parts of the Fertile Crescent were coming up with similar solutions to finding a successful way of life in the new conditions created by the end of the last Ice Age.”

By looking at how ancient and living people share long sections of DNA, the team showed that early farming populations were highly genetically structured, and that some of that structure was preserved as farming, and farmers, spread into neighbouring regions; Europe to the west and southern Asia to the east.

“Early farmers from across Europe, and to some extent modern-day Europeans, can trace their DNA to early farmers living in the Aegean, whereas people living in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and India share considerably more long chunks of DNA with early farmers in Iran. This genetic legacy of early farmers persists, although of course our genetic make-up subsequently has been reshaped by many millennia of other population movements and intermixing of various groups,” concluded Dr Hellenthal.

Source: Adapted and edited from press releases of the University College London and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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*”Early Neolithic genomes from the eastern Fertile Crescent,” by F. Broushaki; K. Kirsanow; Z. Hofmanová; C. Sell; J. Blöcher; A. Scheu; S. Kreutzer; R. Bollongino; J. Burger at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Mainz, Germany; M.G. Thomas; S. López; L. van Dorp; Y. Diekmann; D. Díez-del-Molino; S. Shennan; G. Hellenthal at University College London in London, UK V. Link; A. Kousathanas; D. Wegmann at University of Fribourg in Fribourg, Switzerland V. Link; A. Kousathanas; D. Wegmann at Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics in Lausanne, Switzerland. Science, 14 July 2016.

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The Ancient Workshop of Naxos

Posted on July 14, 2016 by Dan McLerran -

The island of Naxos, Greece—A small group of human-like creatures ascend a hill that overlooks a grassy plain. The pinnacle of the hill commands an impressive view of the land below, with perhaps a view of the distant ocean along the horizon to the west.

But they’re not climbing for the view.

They’re climbing to get their hands on special rocky outcroppings along the way — outcroppings of chert — perfect for making tools and weapons critical for survival.

Some of these places have been picked over for thousands of years already. Their ancestors knew of this hill and passed that knowledge on to their descendants, who continued a tradition of extracting its seemingly inexhaustible supply of valuable stone that would prove to sustain generations of future groups for many thousands of years.

Fast forward

“The hill itself is basically one big chert source where people came to get raw material for making stone tools since the Paleolithic and through to the Mesolithic,” says archaeologist Kate Leonard. Kate is a young Canadian archaeologist who was excavating with a team of her colleagues at the hill site in June of 2016. “What is being found in the excavations are the leftovers from thousands and thousands of years of removing chert from the outcrops and the roughing out of stone tools.”

First discovered in 1981 as part of a survey by the École Française d’Athènes under the direction of René Treuil, the site, known as Stélida, is a 118m high hill on the west of cape of Aghios Prokopios, located on the northwest coast of the large Cyclades island of Naxos. Today the hill is situated on a promontory that juts out into the Aegean, and if one stands at its pinnacle, one can view a vista of the coastline and the Aegean Sea toward the west, separating Naxos from its neighboring island, Paros, clearly seen in the distance. The initial survey identified the site as a significant source of chert, a raw material that was commonly used by prehistoric humans and hominins for producing stone tools and weapons. Beginning in 2013, an international team led by Dr. Tristan Carter of McMaster University through the Canadian Institute in Greece, and his co-director Dr. Demetris Athanasoulis of the Cycladic Ephorate of Antiquities of the Hellenic Republic’s Ministry of Culture and Sports, conducted a series of ongoing excavations on the hill. Known as the Stélida Naxos Archaeological Project (SNAP), excavations have uncovered thousands of lithic material (mostly stone debitage), that indicate the site was in use for tens of thousands of years as a place to acquire and manufacture simple stone tools. “Identifying the lithic material was initially a challenge for me,” says Leonard. “When you are excavating a very early site that was a raw material source you don’t necessarily find all the lovely (easily identified) stone tools that would be found on a habitation site. What you do find is the leftovers from making these stone tools.”

And the leftovers have been nearly overwhelming. In fact, says Leonard, “there is so much lithic material being found at Stélida that the team struggles to wash it so the lithic specialist can look it over and inform the team about any diagnostic pieces being uncovered.”

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A view of Naxos from the hill site. Courtesy Kate Leonard

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Stone tools in situ at Stélida. Courtesy Kate Leonard

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The implications

According to the scientists, many of the diagnostic pieces, although not an indicator for direct or absolute dating, do suggest a possible date range of hominin occupation or use going back as far as the Middle Paleolithic. Says Leonard, “There is tantalizing evidence for activity at Stélida in the form of possible bifaces that could be interpreted as handaxes; these large heavy tools could have been made by Homo heidelbergensis, the predecessor of the Neanderthals in Europe. The possibility for evidence of these early hominids living on what are now the Cycladic islands has not been seriously investigated before.”

This characteristically Paleolithic material, and the site’s location on an island in the Aegean, also present possible implications for ancient migration of humans and their ancestors in this part of the world.

“Stélida is the earliest known archaeological site in the Cycladic region and when the area was first reached by hominins the landscape would have been much different to now,” says Leonard. “When I looked out from my excavation trench towards the coast I could see the Aegean Sea separating Naxos from its neighbor to the west, the island of Paros. Scientific investigations into the ancient environment suggest that these two islands were joined to a few others as part of one big island known as the ‘Cycladean Island’ during the glacial maximum (the stage of the Ice Age when the maximum amount of sea water was trapped in glaciers). Tens of thousands of years ago when people climbed the hill at Stélida to reach the chert outcrops they would have been looking out over a grassy plain, an estuary or even a lagoon, with the sea many kilometers away. But even still, this ‘mega-island’ was an island and a body of water had to be crossed to reach it from mainland Europe.”

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A view of the trench, where Leonard was excavating. Courtesy Kate Leonard

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Could early humans, or perhaps even their hominin forerunners, have crossed over to the island on boats, or some other natural or contrived device that would float them across from the mainland?

Further research may help answer this question. It could play a significant role in uncovering new pieces to the puzzle of hominin dispersal in colonizing the globe. Leonard feels privileged to have been a part of this effort: “This exciting groundbreaking research is investigating a previously overlooked region of Greece for possible alternative routeways for Homo sapiens and their ancient predecessors’ movements from Asia into Europe.”

Moving on

Leonard’s time with SNAP was brief, as she is engaged in a global year-long journey to work at twelve different archaeological sites in 12 separate countries. She calls her project Global Archaeology: A Year of Digs. Stélida now makes the 6th stop on her global trek.

See more about Leonard’s experience with the Stélida Naxos Archaeological Project here, and you may also read more about the site and the project at its website.

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Archaeologist Kate Leonard, from the top of the chert outcrop. Courtesy Kate Leonard

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Homo erectus walked as we do

Posted on July 13, 2016 by No Author -

MAX-PLANCK-GESELLSCHAFT—Fossil bones and stone tools can tell us a lot about human evolution, but certain dynamic behaviours of our fossil ancestors – things like how they moved and how individuals interacted with one another – are incredibly difficult to deduce from these traditional forms of paleoanthropological data. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, along with an international team of collaborators, have recently discovered multiple assemblages of Homo erectus footprints in northern Kenya that provide unique opportunities to understand locomotor patterns and group structure through a form of data that directly records these dynamic behaviours*. Using novel analytical techniques, they have demonstrated that these H. erectus footprints preserve evidence of a modern human style of walking and a group structure that is consistent with human-like social behaviours.

Habitual bipedal locomotion is a defining feature of modern humans compared with other primates, and the evolution of this behaviour in our clade would have had profound effects on the biologies of our fossil ancestors and relatives. However, there has been much debate over when and how a human-like bipedal gait first emerged in the hominin clade, largely because of disagreements over how to indirectly infer biomechanics from skeletal morphologies. Likewise, certain aspects of group structure and social behaviour distinguish humans from other primates and almost certainly emerged through major evolutionary events, yet there has been no consensus on how to detect aspects of group behaviour in the fossil or archaeological records.

In 2009, a set of 1.5-million-year-old hominin footprints was discovered at a site near the town of Ileret, Kenya. Continued work in this region by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and an international team of collaborators, has revealed a hominin trace fossil discovery of unprecedented scale for this time period – five distinct sites that preserve a total of 97 tracks created by at least 20 different presumed Homo erectus individuals. Using an experimental approach, the researchers have found that the shapes of these footprints are indistinguishable from those of modern habitually barefoot people, most likely reflecting similar foot anatomies and similar foot mechanics. “Our analyses of these footprints provide some of the only direct evidence to support the common assumption that at least one of our fossil relatives at 1.5 million years ago walked in much the same way as we do today,” says Kevin Hatala, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and The George Washington University.

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The shapes of the fossil and modern footprints are nearly indistinguishable. Credit: Kevin Hatala / Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

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Based on experimentally derived estimates of body mass from the Ileret hominin tracks, the researchers have also inferred the sexes of the multiple individuals who walked across footprint surfaces and, for the two most expansive excavated surfaces, developed hypotheses regarding the structure of these H. erectus groups. At each of these sites there is evidence of several adult males, implying some level of tolerance and possibly cooperation between them. Cooperation between males underlies many of the social behaviours that distinguish modern humans from other primates. “It isn’t shocking that we find evidence of mutual tolerance and perhaps cooperation between males in a hominin that lived 1.5 million years ago, especially Homo erectus, but this is our first chance to see what appears to be a direct glimpse of this behavioural dynamic in deep time,” says Hatala.

Source: News release of the Max Planck Gesellshcaft.

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*Kevin G. Hatala, Neil T. Roach, Kelly R. Ostrofsky, Roshna E. Wunderlich, Heather L. Dingwall, Brian A. Villmoare, David J. Green, John W. K. Harris, David R. Braun & Brian G. Richmond, Footprints reveal direct evidence of group behavior and locomotion in Homo erectus. Scientific Reports; 12 July, 2016 (DOI: 10.1038/srep28766)

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The first evidence of Neanderthal cannibalism in northern Europe is discovered

Posted on July 7, 2016 by No Author -

UNIVERSITY OF THE BASQUE COUNTRY—The Neanderthals displayed great variability in their behavior and one of the aspects in which this becomes clear is their relationship with the dead. There is evidence on different sites (e.g. Chapelle-aux-Saints in France, and Sima de las Palomas on the Iberian Peninsula) that the Neanderthals buried the dead. Yet other sites show that the Neanderthals ate the meat and broke the bones of their fellow Neanderthals for food. Evidence of this cannibal behavior has been discovered at various sites in France (e.g., Moula-Guercy, Les Pradelles) and on the Iberian Peninsula (Zafarraya, El Sidrón).

However, there are very few sites with Neanderthal remains north of latitude 50º, as only two of these sites have provided information on possible funerary treatment. Partial skeletons have been found in Feldhofer (Germany) and in Spy (Belgium), and the study of them as well as that of their context allows one to deduce that they were interred. In fact, the excavation notes on the Spy II individual indicate that it was a complete skeleton found in a contracted position.

A new study*, led by Dr Hélène Rougier, and which the Ikerbasque researcher at the UPV/EHU Asier Gómez-Olivencia has participated in, has discovered the largest number of Neanderthal human remains in northern Europe, not only in terms of the number of remains but also in terms of the number of individuals represented, a total of five: 4 adolescents or adults and one child. The site is the “Troisième caverne” in Goyet (Belgium).

A third of the Neanderthal remains on this site display cut marks, and many remains bear percussion marks caused when the bones were crushed to extract the marrow. The comparison of the Neanderthal remains with other remains of fauna recovered on the site (horses and reindeer) suggests that the three species were consumed in a similar way. This discovery enables the range of known Neanderthal behaviour in northern Europe with respect to the dead to be expanded.

What is more, five human Neanderthal remains display signs of having been used as soft percussors to shape stone. The Neanderthals used boulders to shape stone tools and also used bone in some cases to sharpen the cutting edges (one example closer to home can be found in the bone retouchers, mainly belonging to deer, recovered on the Azlor site in Dima, Bizkaia). So far, there have been three sites in which the Neanderthals are known to have used the bones of a fellow Neanderthal to shape stone tools: a femur fragment in the case of Krapina in Croatia and Les Pradelles, and a skull fragment at La Quina in France. Goyet has provided 5 sets of human remains used as retouchers, which almost doubles the record known so far on a single site.

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The different categories of anthropogenic modifications found on Neanderthal bones at Goyet. Femur I (left) displays signs of having been used as a percussor for shaping stone, and femur III (right) bears cut marks indicating the processing of remains during butchery activities. Femur III also bears signs of retouching left behind after being used to retouch the edges of stone tools. Scale = 1 cm. Credit: Asier Gómez-Olivencia et al.

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The highly fragmented Neanderthal collection of the third cave at Goyet represents at least five individuals. Dating indicates that the ones marked with an asterisk go back to between 40,500 and 45,500 years ago. Scale=3cm Credit: Asier Gómez-Olivencia et al.

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It has also been possible to date this collection of Neanderthal remains, revealing that these Neanderthals lived between 40,500 and 45,500 years ago. The exceptional preservation of the collection has also enabled the mitochondrial DNA of these remains to be recovered, which when compared with that of other Neanderthals, reveals that genetically the Neanderthals at Goyet resembled those of Feldhofer (Germany), Vindija (Croatia) and El Sidrón (Asturias, Spain). This great genetic uniformity, notwithstanding the geographical distances, indicates that the Neanderthal population that inhabited Europe was small.

Source: Adapted and edited from a news release of the University of the Basque Country

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*Rougier, H., Crevecoeur, I., Beauval, C., Posth, C., Flas, D., Wissing, C., Furtwängler, A., Germonpré, M., Gómez-Olivencia, A., Semal, P., van der Plicht, J., Bocherens, H., Krause, J., Neanderthal cannibalism and Neanderthal bones used as tools in Northern Europe. Scientific Reports. DOI: 10.1038/srep29005

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Archaeology suggests no direct link between climate change and early human innovation

Posted on July 6, 2016 by No Author -

PLOS—Environmental records obtained from archaeological sites suggest climate may not have been directly linked to cultural and technological innovations of Middle Stone Age humans in southern Africa, according to a study* published July 6, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Patrick Roberts from the University of Oxford, UK, and colleagues.

The Middle Stone Age marked a period of dramatic change amongst early humans in southern Africa, and climate change has been postulated as a primary driver for the appearance of technological and cultural innovations such as bone tools, ochre production, and personal ornamentation. While some researchers suggest that climate instability may have directly inspired technological advances, others postulate that environmental stability may have provided a stable setting that allowed for experimentation. However, the disconnection of palaeoenvironmental records from archaeological sites makes it difficult to test these alternatives.

The authors of this study carried out analyses of animal remains, shellfish taxa and the stable carbon and oxygen isotope measurements in ostrich eggshell, from two archaeological sites, Blombos Cave and Klipdrift Shelter, spanning 98,000 to 73,000 years ago and 72,000 to 59,000 years ago, respectively, to acquire data regarding possible palaeoenvironmental conditions in southern Africa at the time. For instance, ostrich eggshell carbon and oxygen stable isotope levels may reflect vegetation and water consumption, which in turn vary with rainfall seasonality and amount in this region.

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Caves and shelters of South Africa’s southern Cape. Two archaeological sites suggest climate may not have been directly linked to cultural and technological innovations of Middle Stone Age humans in southern Africa, according to a study published July 6, 2016, in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Patrick Roberts from the University of Oxford, UK, and colleagues. Credit: Christopher Henshilwood

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The researchers found that climatic and environmental variation, reflected in ostrich eggshell stable isotope measurements, faunal records, and shellfish indicators, may not have occurred in phase with Middle Stone Age human technological and cultural innovation at these two sites. While acknowledging that climate and environmental shifts may have influenced human subsistence strategies, the researchers suggest climate change may not have been the driving factor behind cultural and technological innovations in these localities and encourage context-specific evaluation of the role of climate change in driving early human experimentation.

Patrick Roberts notes: “Our results suggest that although climate and environmental changes occurred, they were not coincident with cultural innovations, including personal ornamentation, or the appearance of complex tool-types. This suggests that we have to consider that other factors drove human innovation at this stage in our species’ evolution.”

Source: News release of PLoS ONE

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*Roberts P, Henshilwood CS, van Niekerk KL, Keene P, Gledhill A, Reynard J, et al. (2016) Climate, Environment and Early Human Innovation: Stable Isotope and Faunal Proxy Evidence from Archaeological Sites (98-59ka) in the Southern Cape, South Africa. PLoS ONE 11(7): e0157408. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0157408

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Reconstruction of 12,000 year old funeral feast brings ancient burial rituals to life

Posted on July 6, 2016 by No Author -

THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM—The woman was laid on a bed of specially selected materials, including gazelle horn cores, fragments of chalk, fresh clay, limestone blocks and sediment. Tortoise shells were placed under and around her body, 86 in total. Sea shells, an eagle’s wing, a leopard’s pelvis, a forearm of a wild boar and even a human foot were placed on the body of the mysterious 1.5 meter-tall woman. Atop her body, a large stone was laid to seal the burial space.

It was not an ordinary funeral, said the Hebrew University archeologist who discovered the grave in a cave site on the bank of the Hilazon river in the western Galilee region of northern Israel back in 2008 (LINK to PNAS ). Three other grave pits have been found at the site of Hilazon Tachtit since 1995, and most contained bones of several humans. Nevertheless, the unusual objects found inside the grave, measuring approximately 0.70 m x 1.00 m x 0.45 m, point to the uniqueness of the event and the woman at its center.

Eight years after the discovery, Prof. Leore Grosman from the Institute of Archeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Prof. Natalie Munro from the University of Connecticut, have identified the sequence of events of the mysterious funeral ritual that took place 12,000 years ago.

“We’ve assigned the event to stages based on field notes, digitized maps, stones, architecture and artifact frequency distributions and concentrations,” said Prof. Grosman, adding that, “The high quality of preservation and recovery of a well-preserved grave of an unusual woman, probably a shaman, enabled the identification of six stages of a funerary ritual.”

The research, published in the journal Current Anthropology (LINK), details the order of the six-step sequence and its ritual and ideological importance for the people who enacted it.

It began with the excavation of an oval grave pit in the cave floor. Next, a layer of objects was cached between large stones, including seashells, a broken basalt palette, red ochre, chalk, and several complete tortoise shells. These were covered by a layer of sediment containing ashes, and garbage composed of flint and animal bones. About halfway through the ritual, the woman was laid inside the pit in a child-bearing position, and special items including many more tortoise shells were placed on top of and around her. This was followed by another layer of filling and limestones of various sizes that were placed directly on the body. The ritual concluded with the sealing of the grave with a large, heavy stone.

A wide range of activities took place in preparation for the funerary event. This included the collection of materials required for grave construction, and the capture and preparation of animals for the feast, particularly the 86 tortoises, which must have been time-consuming.

“The significant pre-planning implies that there was a defined ‘to do’ list, and a working plan of ritual actions and their order,” said Prof. Grosman.

The study of funerary ritual in the archaeological record becomes possible only after humans began to routinely bury their dead in archaeologically visible locations. The Natufian period (15,000-11,500 years ago) in the southern Levant marks an increase in the frequency and concentration of human burials.

“The remnants of a ritual event at this site provide a rare opportunity to reconstruct the dynamics of ritual performance at a time when funerary ritual was becoming an increasingly important social mediator at a crucial juncture deep in human history,” the researchers said.

This unusual Late Natufian funerary event in Hilazon Tachtit Cave in northern Israel provides strong evidence for community engagement in ritual practice, and its analysis contributes to the growing picture of social complexity in the Natufian period as a predecessor for increasingly public ritual and social transformations in the early Neolithic period that follows.

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This is a vew of Hilazon Tachtit cave in northern Israel. Credit: Leore Grosman

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Hebrew University archaeologists uncover 12,000 year old grave inside a cave in northern Israel. Credit: Naftali Hilger

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Bones of a mysterious 1.5 meter-tall woman lay in burial site, surrounded by tortoise shells and other objects. Credit: Naftali Hilger

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The unprecedented scale and extent of social change in the Natufian, especially in terms of ritual activities, make this period central to current debates regarding the origin and significance of social and ritual processes in the agricultural transition.

Source: News release of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

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Digging Irish History

Population boom preceded early farming

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Genome of 6,000-year-old barley grains sequenced for first time

Cave discoveries shed new light on Native and European religious encounters in the Americas

Reading the Unreadable

Origin of farming not from a single population

The Ancient Workshop of Naxos

Homo erectus walked as we do

The first evidence of Neanderthal cannibalism in northern Europe is discovered

Archaeology suggests no direct link between climate change and early human innovation

Reconstruction of 12,000 year old funeral feast brings ancient burial rituals to life

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