Tag: Archaeology and Anthropology

Earliest Levantine wind instruments found
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Newswise — Although the prehistoric site of Eynan-Mallaha in northern Israel has been thoroughly examined since 1955, it still holds some surprises for scientists. Seven prehistoric wind instruments known as flutes, recently identified by a Franco-Israeli team¹, are the subject of an article published on 9 June in Nature Scientific Reports. The discovery of these 12,000 -year-old aerophones is extremely rare – in fact, they are the first to be discovered in the Near East. The “flutes”, made from the bones of a small waterfowl, produce a sound similar to certain birds of prey (Eurasian sparrowhawk and common kestrel) when air is blown into them. The choice of bones used to make these instruments was no accident – larger birds, with bigger bones that produce deeper sounds, have also been found at the site. The Natufians, the Near Eastern civilisation that occupied this village between 13,000 and 9,700 BC, deliberately selected smaller bones in order to obtain the high-pitched sound needed to imitate these particular raptors. The instruments may have been used for hunting, music or to communicate with the birds themselves. Indeed, it is clear that the Natufians attributed birds with a special symbolic value, as attested by the many ornaments made of talons found at Eynan-Mallaha. The village, located on the shores of Lake Hula, was home to this civilisation throughout its 3,000 years of existence. It is therefore of vital importance in revealing the practices and habits of a culture at the crossroads between mobile and sedentary lifestyles, and the transition from a predatory economy to agriculture. This work² was supported by the Fyssen Fondation and the ministère des Affaires étrangères.

Notes
1. The team is co-directed by Laurent Davin (post-doctoral researcher at the Fyssen Fondation) and José-Miguel Tejero (University of Vienna, University of Barcelona) and includes scientists from the Centre de recherche français à Jérusalem (CNRS/Aix-Marseille Université/ministère de la Culture), the laboratoire Technologie et ethnologie des mondes préhistoriques (CNRS/Université Panthéon-Sorbonne/Université Paris Nanterre), The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Institute of Archaeology), Israel Antiquities Authority, Virginia Commonwealth University (Department of Forensic Science), École Nationale Vétérinaire (Laboratoire d’Anatomie comparée, Nantes), the laboratoire Archéologies et sciences de l’Antiquité (CNRS/ministère de la Culture/Université Panthéon-Sorbonne/Université Paris Nanterre) and the l’Institut d’ethnologie méditerranéenne, européenne et comparative (CNRS/Université Aix-Marseille).
2. Excavation of the Eynan-Mallaha site is still ongoing, under the direction of CNRS researcher Fanny Bocquentin and Israel Antiquities Authority researcher Lior Weisbrod.
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CNRS (Centre National de Recherche Scientifique / National Center of Scientific Research)

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June 9, 2023
Earliest Human Kiss Recorded in Mesopotamia 4,500 Years Ago

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Newswise — Recent research has hypothesised that the earliest evidence of human lip kissing originated in a very specific geographical location in South Asia 3,500 years ago, from where it may have spread to other regions, simultaneously accelerating the spread of the herpes simplex virus 1.

But according to Dr Troels Pank Arbøll and Dr Sophie Lund Rasmussen, who in a new article in the journal Science draw on a range of written sources from the earliest Mesopotamian societies, kissing was already a well-established practice 4,500 years ago in the Middle East. And probably much earlier, moving the earliest documentation for kissing back 1,000 years compared to what was previously acknowledged in the scientific community.

“In ancient Mesopotamia, which is the name for the early human cultures that existed between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in present-day Iraq and Syria, people wrote in cuneiform script on clay tablets. Many thousands of these clay tablets have survived to this day, and they contain clear examples that kissing was considered a part of romantic intimacy in ancient times, just as kissing could be part of friendships and family members’ relations,” says Dr Troels Pank Arbøll, an expert on the history of medicine in Mesopotamia.

He continues:

“Therefore, kissing should not be regarded as a custom that originated exclusively in any single region and spread from there but rather appears to have been practiced in multiple ancient cultures over several millennia.”

Dr Sophie Lund Rasmussen adds:

“In fact, research into bonobos and chimpanzees, the closest living relatives to humans, has shown that both species engage in kissing, which may suggest that the practice of kissing is a fundamental behaviour in humans, explaining why it can be found across cultures.”

Kissing as potential transmitter of disease

In addition to its importance for social and sexual behaviour, the practice of kissing may have played an unintentional role in the transmission of microorganisms, potentially causing viruses to spread among humans.

However, the suggestion that the kiss may be regarded as a sudden biological trigger behind the spread of particular pathogens is more doubtful. The spread of the herpes simplex virus 1, which researchers have suggested could have been accelerated by the introduction of the kiss, is a case in point:

“There is a substantial corpus of medical texts from Mesopotamia, some of which mention a disease with symptoms reminiscent of the herpes simplex virus 1,” Dr Arbøll remarks.

He adds that the ancient medical texts were influenced by a variety of cultural and religious concepts, and it therefore must be emphasized that they cannot be read at face value.

“It is nevertheless interesting to note some similarities between the disease known as buʾshanu in ancient medical texts from Mesopotamia and the symptoms caused by herpes simplex infections. The bu’shanu disease was located primarily in or around the mouth and throat, and symptoms included vesicles in or around the mouth, which is one of the dominant signs of herpes infection.”

“If the practice of kissing was widespread and well-established in a range of ancient societies, the effects of kissing in terms of pathogen transmission must likely have been more or less constant”, says Dr Rasmussen.

Dr Arbøll and Dr Rasmussen conclude that future results emerging from research into ancient DNA, inevitably leading to discussions about complex historical developments and social interactions – such as kissing as a driver of early disease transmission – will benefit from an interdisciplinary approach.

Read the article “The ancient history of kissing” in Science.

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University of Copenhagen

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May 19, 2023
Unveiling the secrets of sealed animal coffins in ancient Egypt

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Newswise — The contents of six sealed ancient Egyptian animal coffins — which were imaged using a non-invasive technique — are described in a study published in Scientific Reports.

The mummification of animals was a widespread practice in ancient Egypt and previous research has suggested that some mummified animals were believed to be physical incarnations of deities, while others may have represented offerings to deities or have been used in ritual performances.

Daniel O’Flynn and colleagues imaged the contents of six sealed animal coffins using neutron tomography — a technique that creates images of objects based on the extent to which neutrons emitted by a source can pass through them — after previous attempts to study the coffins with x-rays were unsuccessful. All six of the coffins are made of copper compounds. The authors note that it is rare for such coffins to still be sealed. Three of the coffins, topped with lizard and eel figures as well as loops, have been dated to between 500 and 300 BCE and were discovered in the ancient city of Naukratis. A fourth coffin, topped by a lizard figure, has been dated to between 664 and 332 BCE and was discovered in the ancient city of Tell el-Yehudiyeh. The two other coffins, topped with part-eel, part-cobra figures with human heads, have been dated to between approximately 650 and 250 BCE and are of unknown origin.

The authors identified bones in three of the coffins, including an intact skull with dimensions similar to those of a group of wall lizards containing species that are endemic to North Africa, as well as evidence of broken-down bones in a further two coffins. They also identified textile fragments within three coffins that were possibly made from linen, which was commonly used in Ancient Egyptian mummification. They propose that linen may have been wrapped around the animals before they were placed in the coffins. The authors found lead within the three coffins without loops, which they suggest may have been used to aid weight distribution within two of them and to repair a hole found in the other. They speculate that lead may have been selected due to its status in ancient Egypt as a magical material, as previous research has proposed that lead was used in love charms and curses. The authors did not identify additional lead within the three coffins topped with loops. They suggest that the loops may have been used to suspend these lighter coffins from shrine or temple walls or from statues or boats used during religious processions, while the heavier lead-containing coffins without loops may have been used for different purposes.

The findings provide further insight into the manufacture and use of animal coffins in ancient Egypt.

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Scientific Reports

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April 20, 2023
Africa: Open Habitats 10M Yrs Older Than Thought – New Studies
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Newswise — The story of human evolution has long been a tale of a forested Africa that gradually became drier, giving rise to open grasslands and causing our forest-loving ape ancestors to abandon the trees and become bipedal. Even though ecological and fossil evidence suggested this narrative was too simplistic, the theory remains prominent in many evolutionary scenarios.

Two new studies recently published in Science led by researchers at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities put this idea to rest. The findings outline paleoecological reconstructions of early ape fossil sites in eastern Africa dated to the Early Miocene — between 23 and 16 million years ago — showing early apes lived in a wide variety of habitats, including open habitats like scrublands and wooded grasslands that existed 10 million years earlier than previously known.

Research findings include:
- Some of these habitats included substantial C₄ plant biomass, grasses that today characterize tropical savannas, but were thought previously to have become dominant only 10 million years ago.
- Modern ape anatomy may have evolved in open woodlands among leaf-eating apes rather than in forest-dwelling fruit-eating apes.
- The combination of open habitats with significant C₄ biomass in the Early Miocene suggests that traditional scenarios regarding the evolution of animal and plant communities in Africa, including the origin of hominins, need to be reconsidered.
Researchers across nine fossil site complexes — which included 30 experts from African, North American and European institutions — conducted paleontological and geological fieldwork, collecting thousands of fossil plant and animal remains and sampling fossil deposits for multiple lines of evidence to reconstruct the ancient habitats.

“None of us could have reached these conclusions working in isolation at our individual fossil sites,” said Kieran McNulty, a professor of Anthropology in the College of Liberal Arts, lead author and organizer of the decade-long Research on East African Catarrhine and Hominoid Evolution (REACHE) project. “Working in the fossil record is challenging. We discover hints about past life and need to assemble and interpret them across space and time. It’s like a 4D puzzle, where each team member can only see some of the pieces.”

“You go into a project like this not knowing for sure what you will find out, which is exciting. In this case, we realized we were looking at a picture of Early Miocene communities in eastern Africa that is quite different than what we had expected,” said David Fox, a professor in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Department in the College of Science and Engineering. “There was no single ‘ah ha moment’ but over years of field seasons and the steady accumulation of new fossils and new data, we realized that the environments of the earliest apes varied significantly from the traditional picture of forested habitats.”

“The findings have transformed what we thought we knew about early apes, and the origin for where, when and why they navigate through the trees and on the ground in multiple different ways,” said Robin Bernstein, program director for biological anthropology at the National Science Foundation. “For the first time, by combining diverse lines of evidence, this collaborative research team tied specific aspects of early ape anatomy to nuanced environmental changes in their habitat in eastern Africa, now revealed as more open and less forested than previously thought. The effort outlines a new framework for future studies regarding ape evolutionary origins.”

Continued research at these fossil sites will enhance our understanding of these habitats, especially of finer-grained changes in space and time. Likewise, similar collaborations focused on earlier and later time periods are needed to fully understand the interactions between fossil species and their environments.

“This level of cooperation among different teams is unique in paleoanthropology,” said McNulty. “These two studies highlight the importance of extending collaboration and dialog beyond our immediate research partners.”

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, Leakey Foundation, McKnight Land-Grant Fellowship, and Leverhulme Trust Fellowship.
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University of Minnesota

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April 13, 2023
The untold history of the horse in the American Plains, a new future for the world

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Newswise — “Horses have been part of us since long before other cultures came to our lands, and we are a part of them,” states Chief Joe American Horse, a leader of the Oglala Lakota Oyate, traditional knowledge keeper, and co-author of the study. In 2018, at the instruction of her elder knowledge keepers and traditional leaders, Dr. Yvette Running Horse Collin contacted Prof Ludovic Orlando, French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) scientist. She had completed her PhD, which focused on deconstructing the history of horses in the Americas. Up until that point, the field had been dominated by western academics, and Indigenous voices had been largely dismissed. She sought an opportunity to develop a research programme in which traditional Indigenous sciences could be brought forward and considered on equal footing with western science. For the Lakota, scientifically investigating the history of the Horse Nation in the Americas was a perfect starting point, as it would highlight the places of connection and disconnection between Western and Indigenous approaches. The elders were clear: working on the horse would provide a roadmap for learning how to combine the power of all scientific systems, traditional and western alike. And by doing so, eventually provide new solutions to the many challenges affecting people, communities and biodiversity around the globe. For now, as her ancestors before her, Dr. Running Horse Collin would follow the lead of the Horse Nation.

Part of the programme was to test a narrative that features in almost every single textbook on the history of the Americas: whether European historic records accurately captured the story of Indigenous people and horses across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains. This narrative reflects the most popular chronicles of the Europeans who first established contact with Indigenous groups and contend a recent adoption of horses following the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.

Archaeological science has emerged as a powerful tool to understand the past, and, if done collaboratively, a strong technique for countering biases built into historical narratives. Over the last decade, Prof. Orlando and his team of geneticists have extracted the ancient DNA molecules still preserved in archeological remains to rewrite the history of the domestic horse. They have sequenced the genomes of several hundred horses that lived on the planet thousands of years ago, up to even 700,000 years ago. This technology could, thus, be reasonably expected to reveal the genetic makeup of horses that lived in the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains post-European contact.

To tackle this question, Prof. William Taylor, Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado and a large team of partners including archaeologists from the University of New Mexico and University of Oklahoma set out to track down archaeological horse bones from across the American West together with his Lakota, Comanche, Pawnee and Pueblo collaborators. Using both new and established practices from the archaeological sciences, the team identified evidence that horses were raised, fed, cared for, and ridden by Indigenous Peoples. An early date from a horse specimen from Paa’ko Pueblo in New Mexico provides evidence of Indigenous control of horses at the turn of the 17th century, and possibly earlier. Direct radiocarbon dating of discoveries ranging from southern Idaho to southwestern Wyoming and northern Kansas showed that horses were present across much of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains by the early 17th century, and conclusively before the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Clearly, the most common narrative for the origin of the American horse needed correction.

The genome evidence demonstrated that the horses surveyed in this study for many Plains Nations were primarily of Iberian ancestry, but not directly related with those horses that inhabited the Americas in the Late Pleistocene more than 12,000 years ago. Likewise, they were not the descendants of Viking horses, despite Viking establishing settlements on the American continent by 1021. Archaeological data show that these domestic horses were no longer in exclusive Spanish control by at least the early 1600s, and were integrated into Indigenous lifeways. Importantly, this earlier dispersal validates many traditional perspectives on the origin of the horse from project partners like the Comanche and Pawnee, who recognize the link between archaeological findings and oral traditions. Comanche Tribal Historian and study coauthor Jimmy Arterberry states: “These findings support and concur with Comanche oral tradition. Archaeological traces of our horse culture are invaluable assets that reveal a chronology in North American history, and are important to the survival of Indigenous cultures. They are our heritage, and merit honor through protection. They are sacred to the Comanche.”

Further work involving new archaeological excavations at sites dating to or even predating the 16th century, and additional sequencing, will help shed new light on other chapters of the human-horse story in the Americas. Pawnee archaeologist and study coauthor Carlton Shield Chief Gover says: “The archaeological science presented in our research further illustrates the necessity for meaningful and genuine collaborative partnerships with Indigenous communities.”

The genome analyses did not just address the development of horsemanship within First Nations during the first stages of the American colonization. These analyses demonstrated that the once dominant ancestry found in the horse genome became increasingly diluted through time, gaining ancestry native from British bloodlines. Therefore, the changing landscape of colonial America was recorded in the horse genome: first mainly from Spanish sources, then primarily from British settlers.

In the future, this team is committed to continue working on the history of the Horse Nation in the Americas to include the scientific methodologies inherent in Indigenous scientific systems, as well as a greater contribution regarding migratory patterns and the effects on the genome due to climate change. This study was critical in helping to bring Western and Indigenous scientists together so that authentic dialogue and exchange may begin.

The challenges that our modern world faces are immense. In these times of massive biodiversity crisis and global climate warming, the future of the planet is threatened. Indigenous Peoples have survived the chaos and destruction brought about by colonization, assimilation policies and genocide, and carry important knowledge and scientific approaches centered around sustainability. It is now, more than ever, time to repair history and create more inclusive conditions for co-designing strategies for a more sustainable future. Importantly, this study created a collaboration between western scientists and many Native Nations across the United States, from the Pueblo to the Pawnee, Wichita, Comanche, and Lakota. We expect to be joined by many more soon. “Our Horse Nation relatives have always brought us together and will continue to do so. Our horse societies are organized and ready. As this collaboration develops, we invite all Peoples of the Horse to join us. We call to you.” (Dr. Antonia Loretta Afraid of Bear-Cook, traditional knowledge keeper for the Oglala Lakota, a study co-author).

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation Collaborative Research Award (#1949305, #1949304, #1949305, and #1949283), Marie Sklodowska Curie Actions (programmes HOPE and MethylRIDE), the CNRS and Université Paul Sabatier (International Research Program AnimalFarm), the French Government “Investissement d’Avenir” France Génomique (ANR-10-INBS-09), and the European Research Council (PEGASUS). All protocols for the transmission of sacred and traditional knowledge were followed, and research activities and results were endorsed by an Internal Review Board involving 10 Lakota Elder Knowledge Keepers, who now serve as the Board of Directors of Taku Škaŋ Škaŋ Wasakliyapi: Global Institute for Traditional Sciences (GIFTS).

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CNRS (Centre National de Recherche Scientifique / National Center of Scientific Research)

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March 30, 2023
The world’s first horse riders

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Newswise — The researchers discovered evidence of horse riding by studying the remains of human skeletons found in burial mounds called kurgans, which were between 4500-5000 years old. The earthen burial mounds belonged to the Yamnaya culture. The Yamnayans had migrated from the Pontic-Caspian steppes to find greener pastures in today´s countries of Romania and Bulgaria up to Hungary and Serbia.

Yamnayans were mobile cattle and sheep herders, now believed to be on horseback.

“Horseback-riding seems to have evolved not long after the presumed domestication of horses in the western Eurasian steppes during the fourth millennium BCE. It was already rather common in members of the Yamnaya culture between 3000 and 2500 BCE”, says Volker Heyd, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Helsinki and a member of the international team, which made the discovery.

These regions west of the Black Sea constitute a contact zone where mobile groups of herdsmen from the Yamnaya culture first encountered the long-established farmer communities of Late Neolithic and Chalcolithic traditions. For decades, the Early Bronze Age expansion of steppe people into southeastern Europe was explained as a violent invasion.

With the advent of ancient DNA research, the differences between these migrants from the east and members of local societies became even more pronounced.

“Our research is now beginning to provide a more nuanced picture of their interactions. For example, findings of physical violence as were expected are practically non-existent in the skeletal record so far. We also start understanding the complex exchange processes in material culture and burial customs between newcomers and locals in the 200 years after their first contact”, explains Bianca Preda-Bălănică, another team member from the University of Helsinki.

Horse riding is a pivotal moment in human history

The use of animals for transport, in particular the horse, marked a turning point in human history. The considerable gain in mobility and distance had profound effects on land use, trade, and warfare. Current research has mostly focused on the horses themselves. However, horse-riding is an interaction of two components – the mount and its rider – and human remains are available in larger numbers and more complete condition than early horse remains. Since horseback riding is possible without specialized equipment, the absence of archaeological finds with regard to earliest horsemanship does not come unexpected.

Traces of horsemanship can be found in the skeletons

“We studied over 217 skeletons from 39 sites of which about 150 found in the burial mounds belong to the Yamnayans. Diagnosing activity patterns in human skeletons is not unambiguously. There are no singular traits that indicate a certain occupation or behavior. Only in their combination, as a syndrome, symptoms provide reliable insights to understand habitual activities of the past.”, explains Martin Trautmann, Bioanthropologist in Helsinki and the lead author of the study.

The international team decided to use a set of six diagnostic criteria established as indicators of riding activity (the so-called “horsemanship syndrome”):

1. Muscle attachment sites on pelvis and thigh bone (femur);

2. Changes in the normally round shape of the hip sockets;

3. Imprint marks caused by pressure of the acetabular rim on the neck of the femur;

4. The diameter and form of the femur shaft;

5. Vertebral degeneration caused by repeated vertical impact;

6. Traumata that typically can be caused by falls, kicks or bites from horses.

To increase the diagnostic reliability, the team also used a stricter filtering method and developed a scoring system that takes into account the diagnostic value, distinctiveness and reliability of each symptom. Altogether, out of the 156 adult individuals of the total sample at least 24 (15.4%) can be classified as ‘possible riders’, while five Yamnaya and two later as well as two possibly earlier individuals qualify as ‘highly probable riders’. “The rather high prevalence of these traits in the skeleton record, especially with respect to the overall limited completeness, show that these people were horse riding regularly”, Trautmann states.

If the primary use of horseback riding was as a convenience in a mobile pastoral lifestyle, in allowing a more effective herding of cattle, as means of swift and far-ranging raids or just as symbol of status needs further research.

Could it all have happened even earlier?

“We have one intriguing burial in the series” remarks David Anthony, emeritus Professor of Hartwick College USA and also senior co-author in the study.

“A grave dated about 4300 BCE at Csongrad-Kettöshalom in Hungary, long suspected from its pose and artifacts to have been an immigrant from the steppes, surprisingly showed four of the six riding pathologies, possibly indicating riding a millennium earlier than Yamnaya. An isolated case cannot support a firm conclusion, but in Neolithic cemeteries of this era in the steppes, horse remains were occasionally placed in human graves with those of cattle and sheep, and stone maces were carved into the shape of horse heads. Clearly, we need to apply this method to even older collections.”

Short fact box: Who were the Yamnayans?

The Yamnayans were a population and culture that evolved in the Pontic-Caspian steppes at the end of the fourth millennium BCE.

By adopting the key innovation wheel and wagon, they were able to greatly enhance their mobility and exploit a huge energy resource otherwise out of reach, the sea of steppe grass away from the rivers, enabling them to keep large herds of cattle and sheep. Thus committing to a new way-of-life, these pastoralists if not first true nomads in the world expanded dramatically within the next two centuries to cover more than 5000 kilometers between Hungary in west and, in form of the so-called Afanasievo culture, Mongolia and western China in the east. Having buried their dead in grave pits under big mounds, called kurgans, the Yamnayans are said to be the first having spread proto-Indo-European languages.

More information on the research:

https://www.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/the-yamnaya-impact-on-prehistoric-europe

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University of Helsinki

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March 3, 2023
Archaeological study of 24 ancient Mexican cities reveals that collective forms of governance, infrastructural investments, and collaboration all help societies last longer

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Newswise — Some cities only last a century or two, while others last for a thousand years or more. Often, there aren’t clear records left behind to explain why. Instead, archaeologists piece together clues from the cities’ remains to search for patterns that help account for why certain places retained their importance longer than others. In a new study published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, researchers examined 24 ancient cities in what’s now Mexico and found that the cities that lasted the longest showed indications of collective forms of governance, infrastructural investments, and cooperation between households.

“For years, my colleagues and I have investigated why and how certain cities maintain their importance or collapse,” says Gary Feinman, the study’s lead author and MacArthur Curator of Anthropology at the Field Museum in Chicago.

In previous studies, Feinman and his colleagues cast a wide net in terms of the cities they looked at, ranging across Mesoamerica over thousands of years. They found a broad pattern of societies with good governance that fostered the well-being of their people lasting longer than ones with autocratic leaders and big disparities in wealth. This new study tightens the focus on cities from similar places and times: all 24 of the cities analyzed were in the western half of Mesoamerica and were founded between 1000 and 300 BCE.

To a non-archaeologist, looking at ancient ruins and trying to extrapolate what its government was like might seem like an impossible task. But remnants of the cities’ buildings, ground plans, plazas, and monuments contain clues.

“We looked at public architecture, we looked at the nature of the economy and what sustained the cities. We looked at the signs of rulership, whether they seem to be heavily personalized or not,” said Feinman. Art and architecture celebrating larger-than-life rulers point to more autocratic or despotic societies, whereas the depiction of leaders in groups, often masked, is more indicative of shared power arrangements.

Feinman and his co-authors, David Carballo of Boston University, Linda Nicholas of the Field Museum, and Stephen Kowalewski of the University of Georgia, found that among the 24 ancient cities they analyzed, the ones with more collective forms of governance tended to remain in power longer than the autocratically ruled cities, sometimes by a thousand years. However, even among places that likely had good governance, some cities outlasted others.

To get at why these similarly governed cities fared differently, the researchers examined other aspects of their makeup including infrastructure and indications of household interdependence. “We looked for evidence of path dependence, which basically means the actions or investments that people make that later end up constraining or fostering how they respond to subsequent hazards or challenges,” says Feinman.

Early efforts to construct dense, interconnected residential spaces and the construction of large, central, open plazas were two of the factors that the authors found contributed to greater sustainability and importance of the early cities.

To examine sustainability in the past, most research looks for correlations between specific climatic or environmental events and the human responses. This approach may make sense, but it is hard to know whether the timing is reliable. Such studies often emphasize a correlation between environmental crisis and collapse without also considering how other cities successfully navigated the challenges and continued as major population centers.

The authors use a different tack. Knowing residents faced hazards, including drought, earthquakes, periodic hurricanes/heavy rains, challenges from competing centers and groups, they examined the durational history of the 24 centers and what factors fostered their sustainability. The finding that governance had an important role in sustainability shows that “responses to crises and disasters are to a degree political,” says Linda Nicholas, an adjunct curator at the Field Museum and co-author of the study.

The cities that lasted the longest had a combination of infrastructural investments and collective governance. It’s a lesson still relevant today. “You cannot evaluate responses to catastrophes like earthquakes, or threats like climatic change, without considering governance,” says Feinman. “The past is an incredible resource to understand how to address contemporary issues.”

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Field Museum

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March 3, 2023
Bow-and-arrow, technology of the first modern humans in Europe 54,000 years ago at Mandrin, France

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Newswise — If the emergence of mechanically propelled weapons in prehistory is commonly perceived as one of the hallmarks of the advance of modern human populations into the European continent, the existence of archery has always been more difficult to trace. The recognition of these technologies in the European Upper Paleolithic has been hampered by ballistic overlaps between weapons projected with a thruster or a bow. Archery technologies are essentially based on the use of perishable materials; wood, fibers, leather, resins, and sinew, which are rarely preserved in European Paleolithic sites and make archaeological recognition of these technologies difficult. It is the flint armatures that constitute the main evidence of these weapon technologies. Based on the analysis of these stone armatures, the recognition of archery is now well documented in Africa dating back some 70,000 years. Some flint or deer antler armatures suggest the existence of archery from the early phases of the Upper Paleolithic in Europe more than 35,000 years ago, but the morphology and the hafting modes of these ancient armatures do not allow them to be linked to a distinct mode of propulsion, making the possible existence of archery during the European Paleolithic nearly invisible. The demonstration of Paleolithic archery has been established only on the basis of the discovery of the oldest bows and arrows found in peat bogs of Northern Europe (at the Stellmoor site in Germany, for example) and dated from the 10 to 12 millennium.

The data from Mandrin cave in Mediterranean France, presented in an article published Wednesday, February 22, 2023 in the journal Science Advances, profoundly enriches our knowledge of these technologies in Europe and now allows us to push back the age of archery in Europe by more than… 40 millennia! The study is based on the functional analysis of thousands of flint artifacts from the same archaeological level that revealed in February 2022 the oldest occupation of modern humans on the European continent. This very rich level, attributed to the Neronian culture, testifies to Homo sapiens occupations dating back to the 54th millennium and is interposed between numerous Neanderthal occupations occupying the cave before and after the modern human installations. The excavation of the Neronian settlement phases has revealed no less than 1500 flint points. Their analysis shows that a significant number of them were used as armatures for arrows propelled with a bow. It is the very small size and more precisely the small width of these armatures, of which some 30% weigh hardly more than a few grams, which allows us to exclude any other mode of ballistic propulsion for these very small weapons. If thanks to this study, archery in Europe, and more broadly throughout Eurasia, makes a remarkable leap back in time, it also sheds light on the weaponry of Neanderthal populations. The study shows that Neanderthals, contemporaries of Neronian modern humans, did not develop mechanically propelled weapons (like technologies using bows or thrusters) and continued to use their traditional weapons based on the use of massive spear-shaped points that were thrusted or thrown by hand, and thus requiring close contact with their game. The traditions and technologies mastered by these two populations were thus profoundly distinct, illustrating a remarkable objective technological advantage to modern populations during their expansion into the European continent. However, in their article, the authors place this debate in a much broader context in which technical choices cannot be limited solely to the cognitive capacities of differing human populations, referring us to the weight of traditions within these Neanderthal and modern human populations as well as to ethologies that may have been profoundly divergent between them.

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University of Connecticut

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February 22, 2023
2.9-million-year-old butchery site reopens case of who made first stone tools

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Newswise — Along the shores of Africa’s Lake Victoria in Kenya roughly 2.9 million years ago, early human ancestors used some of the oldest stone tools ever found to butcher hippos and pound plant material, according to new research led by scientists with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and Queens College, CUNY, as well as the National Museums of Kenya, Liverpool John Moores University and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

The study, published today, Feb. 9, in the journal Science, presents what are likely to be the oldest examples of a hugely important stone-age innovation known to scientists as the Oldowan toolkit, as well as the oldest evidence of hominins consuming very large animals. Though multiple lines of evidence suggest the artifacts are likely to be about 2.9 million years old, the artifacts can be more conservatively dated to between 2.6 and 3 million years old, said lead study author Thomas Plummer of Queens College, research associate in the scientific team of the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program.

Excavations at the site, named Nyayanga and located on the Homa Peninsula in western Kenya, also produced a pair of massive molars belonging to the human species’ close evolutionary relative Paranthropus. The teeth are the oldest fossilized Paranthropus remains yet found, and their presence at a site loaded with stone tools raises intriguing questions about which human ancestor made those tools, said Rick Potts, senior author of the study and the National Museum of Natural History’s Peter Buck Chair of Human Origins.

“The assumption among researchers has long been that only the genus Homo, to which humans belong, was capable of making stone tools,” Potts said. “But finding Paranthropus alongside these stone tools opens up a fascinating whodunnit.”

Whichever hominin lineage was responsible for the tools, they were found more than 800 miles from the previously known oldest examples of Oldowan stone tools—2.6-million-year-old tools unearthed in Ledi-Geraru, Ethiopia. This greatly expands the area associated with Oldowan technology’s earliest origins. Further, the stone tools from the site in Ethiopia could not be tied to any particular function or use, leading to speculation about what the Oldowan toolkit’s earliest uses might have been.

Through analysis of the wear patterns on the stone tools and animal bones discovered at Nyayanga, Kenya, the team behind this latest discovery shows that these stone tools were used by early human ancestors to process a wide range of materials and foods, including plants, meat and even bone marrow.

The Oldowan toolkit includes three types of stone tools: hammerstones, cores and flakes. Hammerstones can be used for hitting other rocks to create tools or for pounding other materials. Cores typically have an angular or oval shape, and when struck at an angle with a hammerstone, the core splits off a piece, or flake, that can be used as a cutting or scraping edge or further refined using a hammerstone.

“With these tools you can crush better than an elephant’s molar can and cut better than a lion’s canine can,” Potts said. “Oldowan technology was like suddenly evolving a brand-new set of teeth outside your body, and it opened up a new variety of foods on the African savannah to our ancestors.”

Potts and Plummer were first drawn to the Homa Peninsula in Kenya by reports of large numbers of fossilized baboon-like monkeys named Theropithecus oswaldi, which are often found alongside evidence of human ancestors. After many visits to the peninsula, a local man named Peter Onyango working with the team suggested they check out fossils and stone tools eroding from a nearby site that was ultimately named Nyayanga after an adjacent beach.

Beginning in 2015, a series of excavations at Nyayanga returned a trove of 330 artifacts, 1,776 animal bones and the two hominin molars identified as belonging to Paranthropus. The artifacts, Plummer said, were clearly part of the stone-age technological breakthrough that was the Oldowan toolkit.

Compared to the only other stone tools known to have preceded them—a set of 3.3-million-year-old artifacts unearthed at a site called Lomekwi 3, just west of Lake Turkana in Kenya—Oldowan tools were a significant upgrade in sophistication. Oldowan tools were systematically produced and often fashioned using what is known as “freehand percussion,” meaning the core was held in one hand and then struck with a hammerstone being wielded by the opposing hand at just the right angle to produce a flake—a technique that requires significant dexterity and skill.

By contrast, most of the artifacts from Lomekwi 3 were created by using large stationary rocks as anvils, with the toolmaker either banging a core against the flat anvil stone to create flakes or by setting the core down on the anvil and striking it with a hammerstone. These more rudimentary modes of fabrication resulted in larger, cruder and more haphazard-looking tools.

Over time, the Oldowan toolkit spread all the way across Africa and even as far as modern-day Georgia and China, and it was not meaningfully replaced or amended until some 1.7 million years ago when the hand-axes of the Acheulean first appeared.

As part of their study, the researchers conducted microscopic analysis of wear patterns on the stone tools to determine how they were used, and they examined any bones seen to exhibit potential cut marks or other kinds of damage that might have come from stone tools.

The site featured at least three individual hippos. Two of these incomplete skeletons included bones that showed signs of butchery. The team found a deep cut mark on one hippo’s rib fragment and a series of four short, parallel cuts on the shin bone of another. Plummer said they also found antelope bones that showed evidence of hominins slicing away flesh with stone flakes or of having been crushed by hammerstones to extract marrow.

The analysis of wear patterns on 30 of the stone tools found at the site showed that they had been used to cut, scrape and pound both animals and plants. Because fire would not be harnessed by hominins for another 2 million years or so, these stone toolmakers would have eaten everything raw, perhaps pounding the meat into something like a hippo tartare to make it easier to chew.

Using a combination of dating techniques, including the rate of decay of radioactive elements, reversals of Earth’s magnetic field and the presence of certain fossil animals whose timing in the fossil record is well established, the research team was able to date the items recovered from Nyayanga to between 2.58 and 3 million years old.

“This is one of the oldest if not the oldest example of Oldowan technology,” Plummer said. “This shows the toolkit was more widely distributed at an earlier date than people realized, and that it was used to process a wide variety of plant and animal tissues. We don’t know for sure what the adaptive significance was but the variety of uses suggests it was important to these hominins.”

The discovery of teeth from the muscular-jawed Paranthropus alongside these stone tools begs the question of whether it might have been that lineage rather than the Homo genus that was the architect of the earliest Oldowan stone tools, or perhaps even that multiple lineages were making these tools at roughly the same time.

The excavations behind this study offer a snapshot of the world humans’ ancestors inhabited and help illustrate the ways that stone technology allowed these early hominins to adapt to different environments and, ultimately, give rise to the human species.

“East Africa wasn’t a stable cradle for our species’ ancestors,” Potts said. “It was more of a boiling cauldron of environmental change, with downpours and droughts and a diverse, ever-changing menu of foods. Oldowan stone tools could have cut and pounded through it all and helped early toolmakers adapt to new places and new opportunities, whether it’s a dead hippo or a starchy root.”

This research was supported by funding from the Smithsonian, the Leakey Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the City University of New York, the Donner Foundation and the Peter Buck Fund for Human Origins Research.

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February 9, 2023
Echoes of ancient curse tablets identified in the Book of Revelation

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Descriptions and phrases used in the Revelation of John are similar in terminology to those appearing on curse tablets produced in antiquity and the associated sorcery rituals

Curse tablets were popular and widely used in the ancient world. The corresponding incantations were often inscribed or carved on thin sheets of lead – with the intention that these would then cause harm to an opponent or rival. The use of curse tablets and the associated rituals spread as the Roman Empire expanded and have been found at sites all the way from Egypt to Britain. They were used by both the uneducated and those of higher status. A research project headed by Dr. Michael Hölscher of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) is investigating curse tablets and the role they play in the Book of Revelation, the final book of the New Testament. “There are aspects of curse tablet-related inscriptions and practices in Revelation. This may well have been an indirect expression of the need for segregation and the attempt at self-preservation of an often threatened early Christian community,” explained Hölscher, a researcher at the JGU Faculty of Catholic Theology. The research project entitled “Disenchanted Rituals. Traces of the Curse Tablets and Their Function in the Revelation of John” is being sponsored by the German Research Foundation (DFG) over the period 2022 to 2025.

Curse rituals were part of everyday life in wide areas of the Roman Empire over a period of 1,000 years

Curse tablets began to be systematically compiled and investigated in the 19th century. However, previously unknown versions of these spells on little lead sheets are continually being uncovered and deciphered. Some 1,700 of these have to date been collated and provide insights into the culture and language of those ancient people who placed their reliance on them. The archaeological finds originate from an era dating from roughly 500 BCE to 500 CE. In other words, the rituals were being performed over about 1,000 years in a region stretching from the Mediterranean to the far north of Europe. Those curse tablets were targeted at opposing litigants in court cases, sporting adversaries in the hippodrome, or rivals in amorous affairs. The lead tablets with their inscribed curses were often deposited in specific places, such as graves or in the vicinity of sacred locations, the assumed abodes of spirits of the underworld, who would ensure the effectiveness of the curse. “The curse ritual as a whole was not simply restricted to the wording of the spell as such, but would have also involved the act of writing it down, the piercing of the tablets, or their burial in deliberately selected places,” said Hölscher describing aspects of the tabella defixionis practice. The ancients considered it a form of witchcraft or black magic, which were prescribed under Roman law.

Parallels between curse tablets and the text of Revelation

Aided by his insights into the phrasing used by those employing curse tablets and their expectations as to how their curses were supposed to work, Hölscher has been looking at how these have left their traces in the text of the Revelation of John. This was written in the 1st century CE and was addressed to the Christians on the western coast of Asia Minor. “In Revelation, we find wording and phrases that are very similar to those that appeared on curse tablets, although no actual verbatim quotations from the latter appear,” Hölscher pointed out. As an example, he cites the description of an angel that casts a vast stone into the sea with the words: “Thus with violence shall that great city Babylon be thrown down, and shall be found no more at all.” According to Hölscher, this can be read as a kind of curse ritual. Those confronted with these words at the time could well have directly associated them with the routine use of curse tablets with which they would have been familiar.

In the seven letters of the Book of Revelation, Roman rule and the cult of the emperor are portrayed as demonic, satanic phenomena, from which the Christian minority was striving to isolate itself. “The Book of Revelation contributes to the process of self-discovery, the seeking of a distinctive identity by a Christian minority in a world dominated by a pagan Roman majority that rendered routine homage not only to the emperor but also to the main Roman gods”, explained Hölscher.

The DFG-funded project “Disenchanted Rituals” looks for analogies between the Book of Revelation and curse tablets and analyzes the way that readers of the late first century CE might have interpreted the Bible text. “It is possible that those who read or listened to the words of the Apocalypse of John could readily have seen whole passages, single phrases, or concepts in the light of curse spells,” said Hölscher, emphasizing the influence of the curse tablet culture. The project will investigate the overlap of the two sources against the background of how magic on the one hand and religion on the other were perceived in antiquity.

Research project within JGU’s Human Challenges top-level research area

The “Disenchanted Rituals” project is being conducted under the aegis of the JGU Top-Level Research Area “40,000 Years of Human Challenges”. This research network investigates how humankind perceives challenges and the strategies and practices that are developed to cope with these.

Related links:

https://press.uni-mainz.de/echoes-of-ancient-curse-tablets-identified-in-the-book-of-revelation/

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Johannes Gutenberg-Universitat Mainz

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February 8, 2023
Remapping the superhighways travelled by the first Australians reveals a 10,000-year journey through the continent

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Newswise — New research has revealed that the process of ‘peopling’ the entire continent of Sahul — the combined mega continent that joined Australia with New Guinea when sea levels were much lower than today — took 10,000 years.

New, sophisticated models combined recent improvements in demography and models of wayfinding based on geographic inference to show the scale of the challenges faced by the ancestors of Indigenous people making their mass migration across the supercontinent more than 60,000 years ago.

The ancestors of Aboriginal people likely first entered the continent 75,000–50,000 years ago from what is today the island of Timor, followed by later migrations through the western regions of New Guinea.

According to the new research, this pattern led to a rapid expansion both southward toward the Great Australian Bight, and northward from the Kimberley region to settle all parts of New Guinea and, later, the southwest and southeast of Australia.

The research was led by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH) and saw international experts in Australia and the United States collaborate to investigate the most likely pathways and the timeframe needed to reach population sizes able to withstand the rigours of their new environment.

By combining two existing models predicting the routes they took – ‘superhighways’ – and the demographic structure of these first populations, the researchers were able to estimate the time for continental saturation more precisely. The new research has just been published in the international journal Quaternary Science Reviews.

Based on detailed reconstructions of the topography of the ancient continent and models of past climate, the researchers developed a virtual continent and programmed populations to survive in and move successfully through their new territory.

Navigating by following landscape features like mountains and hills and knowing where to find water led to successful navigation strategies. The first people of Australia soon passed along cultural knowledge to subsequent generations facilitating the peopling of the whole continent.

Yet the challenges put forth by the topography of Sahul led to a slower pace of migration. Previous models did not take into account the topographic constraints that this sophisticated model does, allowing for a more realistic estimation of the peopling of the continent. This new work also explains the slower progress Indigenous ancestors made in reaching Tasmania, which was only made possible when seawaters across Bass Straight receded — a finding only possible by combining these model results.

The study’s lead author, Corey Bradshaw, Matthew Flinders Professor of Global Ecology at Flinders University and CABAH Models Theme Leader, says together these combined models allow for a better understanding of the archaeological and genetic data explaining the great migrations of Indigenous people in Sahul.

‘The ways that people interact with terrain, ecology, and potentially other people alter our model outcomes, providing more realistic results. Therefore, models that incorporate only demographic information without considering the resources and needs of travellers, as well as the opportunities and constraints to their travel, are likely to underestimate the timing of expansion into new regions. So, we now have a good prediction of the patterns and processes of how people first settled these lands tens of thousands of years ago.’

‘Our updated modelling shows that New Guinea was populated gradually over 5000 to 6000 years, with a focus initially on the Central Highlands and Arafura Sea area before reaching the Bismarck Archipelago in the east. The peopling of the far southeast and Tasmania is predicted to have occurred between 9000 and 10,000 years following initial arrival in Sahul.’

Professor Bradshaw says the innovative model developed by the researchers could be modified for other parts of the world to investigate the timing and patterns of initial peopling by humans.

‘Examining comparable patterns in regions of the Middle East as humans left north-eastern Africa, entry and spread into Europe, expansion across southern Asia, and movements from Alaska to South America, are all now possible using the same modelling approach.’

‘Because our model incorporates local conditions, including the spatial and temporal patterns of the land’s ability to provide food, the distribution of water sources, and topography, our migration patterns would be highly relevant when applied to other parts of the world.’

‘These results are surprising and very compelling,’ says Dr Stefani Crabtree, co-author of the study and Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute and Assistant Professor at Utah State University.

‘Our work shows that we need to keep in mind the constraints placed on travellers by the underlying geography as well as likely demographic scenarios. And as this work is based on our understanding of human movement globally, it can have massive implications for understanding migration in other places and other times. This also goes to show the power of combining computational models with archaeology and anthropology for refining our understanding of humanity.’

‘This type of work is a game changer.’

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Flinders University

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February 3, 2023
Evolution of wheat spikes since the Neolithic revolution

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Newswise — Around 12,000 years ago, the Neolithic revolution radically changed the economy, diet and structure of the first human societies in the Fertile Crescent of the Near East. With the beginning of the cultivation of cereals —such as wheat and barley— and the domestication of animals, the first cities emerged in a new social context marked by a productive economy. Now, a study published in the journal Trends in Plant Science and co-led by the University of Barcelona, the Agrotecnio centre and the University of Lleida, analyses the evolution of wheat spikes since its cultivation began by the inhabitants of ancient Mesopotamia —the cradle of agriculture in the world— between the Tigris and the Euphrates.

The authors of the study are Rut Sánchez-Bragado and Josep Lluís Araus-Ortega, from the UB Faculty of Biology and Agrotecnio-UdL; Gustavo A. Slafer, ICREA researcher at the UdL School of Agrifood and Forestry Science and Engineering, and Gemma Molero, from the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico, currently a researcher at KWS Seeds Inc.

A cereal that changed human history

The cultivation of wheat —a grass that became basic food— represented a turning point in the progress of human civilisation. Today it is the world’s most important crop in terms of food security, but EU data warn that the impact of climate change could significantly increase its price and modify its production process in certain areas of the world.

Throughout the domestication process of wheat, the plant phenotype has undergone both rapid (within a few hundred years) and slow (thousands of years) changes, such as the weakening of the rachis, the increase in seed size, and the reduction or disappearance of the awns. In particular, awned and awnless wheat varieties are found all over the world, although the latter tend to be abundant in regions with arid climates, especially during the final stages of cultivation in late spring, a condition typical of Mediterranean environments.

“It is important to conduct studies that show which wheat varieties are best adapted to different environmental growing conditions, especially in a context of climate change. Studying the past retrospectively can give us an idea of the evolution of wheat cultivation over the millennia since agriculture appeared in ancient Mesopotamia”, says Rut Sánchez-Bragado, first author of the study, who got a PhD at the UB.

“Awns are organs of the spike that have traditionally been associated with the plant’s adaptations to drought conditions”, says Josep Lluís Araus, professor at the Department of Evolutionary Biology, Ecology and Environmental Sciences of the Faculty of Biology.

“However, archaeological and historical records show that the wheat spike has existed predominantly with awns for more than ten millennia after the domestication of wheat. It is not until the last millennium that evidence shows in many cases the absence of awns, indicating a selection by farmers —probably in an undirected way— against this organ”, stresses Araus, one of the most cited authors in the world according to Clarivate Analytics’ Highly Cited Researchers (2022).

“The role of wheat awns in their performance remains controversial despite decades of studies”, says researcher Gustavo A. Slafer, corresponding author of the study.

Spike awns: beneficial for the plant?

Is the presence of awns on the spike beneficial for the plant and the crops? Although there is no scientific consensus, “everything suggests that in conditions where the plant does not suffer from water stress, the extra photosynthetic capacity of the awns does not compensate for other potential negative effects (reduced susceptibility to fungal diseases, limitation in the total number of large ones that an ear supports, etc.)”, says Araus.

“However, in wetter climates the awns accumulate moisture and can promote the spread of diseases”, says Rut Sánchez-Bragado. “So, as the world’s population is continuously growing, it is necessary to investigate the role of the awned spikes in the changing conditions of our climate in order to meet the world’s demand for a primary food commodity such as wheat”.

In arid conditions, the spikes —including the awns— “have better physiological characteristics than the leaves. In addition, the awns allow the light captured by the crop to be more diffused, which facilitates a better distribution of light energy and allows the crop to photosynthesise more. Therefore, in arid conditions, the awns can still be beneficial for the crop, or at most, neutral”, concludes Professor Josep Lluís Araus.

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Universidad De Barcelona

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February 2, 2023
New biography of famous palaeontologist Mary Anning unearthed from University of Bristol archives

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Newswise — A short biography of pioneering scientist Mary Anning, written in the final ten years of her life, has been made public for the very first time.

Penned by George Roberts (1804–1860), who ran a private school opposite Anning’s fossil shop in Lyme Regis, and preserved in the Special Collections of the University of Bristol Library, the work has been published by Dr Michael Taylor of National Museums Scotland and University of Leicester and Professor Michael Benton of Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences.

Mary Anning (1799–1847) of Lyme Regis has been the subject of recent books and films, such as Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures, and Ammonite, in which she was portrayed by Kate Winslet, because of her importance in the early days of palaeontology. She collected some of the first marine reptiles – ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs – from the Jurassic period of the Dorset coast. Noted professors relied on her work to provide insights into the life of the past.

Mary Anning has become an icon of the often-forgotten contributions of women to science, and the campaign to get children, especially girls, interested in geology. But, in her day, she was a curiosity, another poor person in the Regency seaside resort of Lyme Regis.

“When the Library sent me a copy of the four-page manuscript, I found that it was based partly on a passage in Roberts’s history of Lyme Regis,” said Dr Taylor. “Roberts wrote books like ‘The Beauties of Lyme Regis’ for tourists, and he collected interesting pieces of information. We were able to confirm Anning expert Hugh Torrens’s suggestion that it was by Roberts, by identifying Roberts’s handwriting, and comparing the corrections and even a mistake with a particular date which Roberts had handwritten into his own copy of his history. So, it wasn’t just someone else copying from his book. It looks as if it was written as a dictionary entry or a section for a future book.”

“This memoir is valuable,” said Prof Benton. “One or two visitors to Lyme Regis mentioned Mary Anning and her little fossil shop, and she was obviously widely known to natural scientists in London, Bristol, Oxford, and Cambridge. But normally they would not enquire into her life in any detail. Admittedly though, when she died at the relatively young age of 48, she had obituaries in various papers and scientific journals.”

Dr Taylor said: “These short obituaries were often copied from one written by George Roberts. George Roberts lived in Lyme Regis and met her many times. He describes how she was struck by lightning as a baby, and then how at the age of about ten she began collecting fossils, and how she sold her first find, an ammonite to a passing lady in the street for half a crown.”

There are further details of her discoveries of fossil reptiles, including the first ichthyosaur fossil studied by scientists. It was described by Sir Everard Home in 1818. Mary Anning was granted a government annuity of £25 per year in 1836 thanks to an intervention by Fellows of the Geological Society of London, and she died of breast cancer in 1847.

“We dated the manuscript as written some time in 1837–47,” added Dr Taylor, “because there is an ‘1837’ watermark in the paper, and Anning was described as a ‘living worthy’. Later, Roberts took the manuscript, deleted mention of Anning as alive, and added information on her death to make it into an obituary, presumably just after she died. But it seems never to have been published at its full length.”

Prof Benton concluded: “We are very pleased that we are able to publish the document in full.

“In the paper, we show detailed photographs of all four pages of the document, as well as our reading of the various versions and modifications. George Roberts was the locally-based author who reported the news from Lyme Regis to various newspapers and wrote his own books, so it makes complete sense that he would have written about Mary Anning as a well-known celebrity of the town.”

Paper:

‘The life of Mary Anning, fossil collector of Lyme Regis: a contemporary biographical memoir by George Roberts’ by Michael A. Taylor and Michael J. Benton in Journal of the Geological Society.

Notes to Editors

The memoir (DM Ref SCUBL DM1186/5/1) is in the collection of books and manuscripts in the history of geology made by Joan M. Eyles (1907–1986) and Victor A. Eyles (1895–1978) and donated by Joan Eyles to the University of Bristol Library.

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University of Bristol

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January 11, 2023
Study reveals average age at conception for men versus women over past 250,000 years

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Newswise — BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — The length of a specific generation can tell us a lot about the biology and social organization of humans. Now, researchers at Indiana University can determine the average age that women and men had children throughout human evolutionary history with a new method they developed using DNA mutations.

The researchers said this work can help us understand the environmental challenges experienced by our ancestors and may also help us in predicting the effects of future environmental change on human societies.

“Through our research on modern humans, we noticed that we could predict the age at which people had children from the types of DNA mutations they left to their children,” said study co-author Matthew Hahn, Distinguished Professor of biology in the College of Arts and Sciences and of computer science in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering at IU Bloomington. “We then applied this model to our human ancestors to determine what age our ancestors procreated.”

According to the study, published today in Science Advances and co-authored by IU post-doctoral researcher Richard Wang, the average age that humans had children throughout the past 250,000 years is 26.9. Furthermore, fathers were consistently older, at 30.7 years on average, than mothers, at 23.2 years on average, but the age gap has shrunk in the past 5,000 years, with the study’s most recent estimates of maternal age averaging 26.4 years. The shrinking gap seems to largely be due to mothers having children at older ages.

Other than the recent uptick in maternal age at childbirth, the researchers found that parental age has not increased steadily from the past and may have dipped around 10,000 years ago because of population growth coinciding with the rise of civilization.

“These mutations from the past accumulate with every generation and exist in humans today,” Wang said. “We can now identify these mutations, see how they differ between male and female parents, and how they change as a function of parental age.”

Children’s DNA inherited from their parents contains roughly 25 to 75 new mutations, which allows scientists to compare the parents and offspring, and then to classify the kind of mutation that occurred. When looking at mutations in thousands of children, IU researchers noticed a pattern: The kinds of mutations that children get depend on the ages of the mother and the father.

Previous genetic approaches to determining historical generation times relied on the compounding effects of either recombination or mutation of modern human DNA sequence divergence from ancient samples. But the results were averaged across both males and females and across the past 40,000 to 45,000 years.

Hahn, Wang and their co-authors built a model that uses de novo mutations — a genetic alteration that is present for the first time in one family member as a result of a variant or mutation in a germ cell of one of the parents or that arises in the fertilized egg during early embryogenesis — to separately estimate the male and female generation times at many different points throughout the past 250,000 years.

The researchers were not originally seeking to understand the relationship of gender and age at conception over time; they were conducting a broader investigation about the number of mutations passed from parents to children. They only noticed the age-based mutation patterns while seeking to understand differences and similarities between these pattens in humans versus other mammals, such as cats, bears and macaques.

“The story of human history is pieced together from a diverse set of sources: written records, archaeological findings, fossils, etc.,” Wang said. “Our genomes, the DNA found in every one of our cells, offer a kind of manuscript of human evolutionary history. The findings from our genetic analysis confirm some things we knew from other sources (such as the recent rise in parental age), but also offer a richer understanding of the demography of ancient humans. These findings contribute to a better understanding of our shared history.”

Additional contributors to this research were Samer I. Al-Saffar, a graduate student at IU at the time of the study, and Jeffrey Rogers of the Baylor College of Medicine.

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Indiana University

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January 6, 2023
New study suggests Mayas utilized market-based economics

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Newswise — More than 500 years ago in the midwestern Guatemalan highlands, Maya people bought and sold goods with far less oversight from their rulers than many archeologists previously thought.

That’s according to a new study in Latin American Antiquity that shows the ruling K’iche’ elite took a hands-off approach when it came to managing the procurement and trade of obsidian by people outside their region of central control.

In these areas, access to nearby sources of obsidian, a glasslike rock used to make tools and weapons, was managed by local people through independent and diverse acquisition networks. Overtime, the availability of obsidian resources and the prevalence of craftsmen to shape it resulted in a system that is in many ways suggestive of contemporary market-based economies.

“Scholars have generally assumed that the obsidian trade was managed by Maya rulers, but our research shows that this wasn’t the case at least in this area,” said Rachel Horowitz, lead author of the study and an assistant professor of anthropology at Washington State University. “People seem to have had a good deal of economic freedom including being able to go to places similar to the supermarkets we have today to buy and sell goods from craftsmen.”

While there are extensive written records from the Maya Postclassic Period (1200-1524 AD) on political organization, much less is known about how societal elites wielded economic power. Horowitz set out to address this knowledge gap for the K’iche’ by examining the production and distribution of obsidian artifacts, which are used as a proxy by archeologists to determine the level of economic development in a region.

She performed geochemical and technological analysis on obsidian artifacts excavated from 50 sites around the K’iche’ capital of Q’umarkaj and surrounding region to determine where the raw material originally came from and techniques of its manufacture.

He results showed that the K’iche’ acquired their obsidian from similar sources in the Central K’iche’ region and Q’umarkaj, indicating a high degree of centralized control. The ruling elite also seemed to manage the trade of more valuable forms of nonlocal obsidian, particularly Pachua obsidian from Mexico, based off its abundance in these central sites.

Outside this core region though, in areas conquered by the K’iche, there was less similarity in obsidian economic networks. Horowitz’s analysis suggests these sites had access to their own sources of obsidian and developed specialized places where people could go to buy blades and other useful implements made from the rock by experts.

“For a long time, there has been this idea that people in the past didn’t have market economies, which when you think about it is kind of weird. Why wouldn’t these people have had markets in the past?” she said. “The more we look into it, the more we realize there were a lot of different ways in which these peoples’ lives were similar to ours.”

The Middle American Research Institute at Tulane University loaned Horowitz the obsidian blades and other artifacts she used for her study. The artifacts were excavated in the 1970s.

Moving forward, Horowitz said she plans to examine more of the collection, the rest of which is housed in Guatemala, to discover further details about how the Maya conducted trade, managed their economic systems, and generally went about their lives.

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Washington State University

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January 5, 2023
Bering Land Bridge formed surprisingly late during last ice age

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Newswise — A new study shows that the Bering Land Bridge, the strip of land that once connected Asia to Alaska, emerged far later during the last ice age than previously thought.

The unexpected findings shorten the window of time that humans could have first migrated from Asia to the Americas across the Bering Land Bridge.

The findings also indicate that there may be a less direct relationship between climate and global ice volume than scientists had thought, casting into doubt some explanations for the chain of events that causes ice age cycles. The study was published on December 27 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“This result came totally out of left field,” said Jesse Farmer, postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University and co-lead author on the study. “As it turns out, our research into sediments from the bottom of the Arctic Ocean told us not only about past climate change but also one of the great migrations in human history.”

Insight into ice age cycles

During the periodic ice ages over Earth’s history, global sea levels drop as more and more of Earth’s water becomes locked up in massive ice sheets. At the end of each ice age, as temperatures increase, ice sheets melt and sea levels rise. These ice age cycles repeat throughout the last 3 million years of Earth’s history, but their causes have been hard to pin down.

By reconstructing the history of the Arctic Ocean over the last 50,000 years, the researchers revealed that the growth of the ice sheets — and the resulting drop in sea level — occurred surprisingly quickly and much later in the last glacial cycle than previous studies had suggested.

“One implication is that ice sheets can change more rapidly than previously thought,” Farmer said.

During the last ice age’s peak of the last ice age, known as the Last Glacial Maximum, the low sea levels exposed a vast land area that extended between Siberia and Alaska known as Beringia, which included the Bering Land Bridge. In its place today is a passage of water known as the Bering Strait, which connects the Pacific and Arctic Oceans.

Based on records of estimated global temperature and sea level, scientists thought the Bering Land Bridge emerged around 70,000 years ago, long before the Last Glacial Maximum.

But the new data show that sea levels became low enough for the land bridge to appear only 35,700 years ago. This finding was particularly surprising because global temperatures were relatively stable at the time of the fall in sea level, raising questions about the correlation between temperature, sea level and ice volume.

“Remarkably, the data suggest that the ice sheets can change in response to more than just global climate,” Farmer said. For example, the change in ice volume may have been the direct result of changes in the intensity of sunlight that struck the ice surface over the summer.

“These findings appear to poke a hole in our current understanding of how past ice sheets interacted with the rest of the climate system, including the greenhouse effect,” said Daniel Sigman, Dusenbury Professor of Geological and Geophysical Sciences at Princeton University and Farmer’s postdoctoral advisor. “Our next goal is to extend this record further back in time to see if the same tendencies apply to other major ice sheet changes. The scientific community will be hungry for confirmation.”

New context for human migration

The timing of human migration into North America from Asia remains unresolved, but genetic studies tell us that ancestral Native American populations diverged from Asian populations about 36,000 years ago, the same time that Farmer and colleagues found that the Bering Land Bridge emerged.

“It’s generally believed that the land bridge was open for a while, and then humans crossed it at some point,” Sigman said. “But our new data suggest that the land bridge was not open, and as soon as it opened up, human populations made their way into North America.”

The finding raises questions about why humans decided to migrate as soon as the land bridge opened, and how humans made their way across the land bridge with no previous knowledge of the landscape.

The researchers noted that they need to be cautious when considering these implications, as the interpretation requires combining very different types of information, including the new data and the information of human geneticists and paleoanthropologists. They look forward to seeing how their results are built upon by these other scientific communities.

A window to the past

To reconstruct the history of the Bering Strait, Farmer and Sigman sought an ocean chemical fingerprint.

Pacific waters carry high concentrations of nitrogen molecules that have a distinct chemical composition, known as an isotope ratio. Today, waters from the Pacific Ocean travel northwards across the Bering Strait into the Arctic Ocean, carrying a traceable nitrogen isotope ratio.

By measuring nitrogen isotopes in sediments at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, Farmer found that the fingerprint of Pacific Ocean nitrogen disappeared when the Bering Strait was closed during the peak of the last ice age, as expected.

But when Farmer continued his analyses further back in time – to about 50,000 years ago – he found that the Pacific nitrogen fingerprint returned far more recently than researchers had thought possible.

“When Jesse showed me his data, he didn’t need to explain to me what had happened,” Sigman said. “It was too large of a change to be anything other than a previous opening of the Bering Strait.”

To understand the implications for global sea level, Farmer and Sigman collaborated with Tamara Pico, a sea level expert and professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UC Santa Cruz, Princeton undergraduate Class of 2014, and co-lead author on the paper. Pico compared Farmer’s results with sea level models based on different scenarios for the growth of the ice sheets.

“When Jesse contacted me I was so excited,” Pico said. “A large part of my PhD thesis was focused on how fast global ice sheets grew leading into the Last Glacial Maximum, and much of my work suggests that they might have grown faster than previously thought.”

Farmer’s nitrogen analyses provided a new set of evidence to back up Pico’s research about sea levels during the last ice age.

“The exciting thing to me is that this provides a completely independent constraint on global sea level during this time period,” Pico said. “Some of the ice sheet histories that have been proposed differ by quite a lot, and we were able to look at what the predicted sea level would be at the Bering Strait and see which ones are consistent with the nitrogen data.”

“This study brought together experts in the Arctic Ocean, nitrogen cycling and global sea level. And the outcome has consequences not only for climate and sea level but also for human prehistory,” Farmer said. “One of the thrilling aspects of paleoclimate research is the opportunity to collaborate across such a broad range of subjects.”

“The Bering Strait was flooded 10,000 years before the Last Glacial Maximum,” by Jesse R. Farmer, Tamara Pico, Ona M. Underwood, Rebecca Cleveland Stout, Julie Granger, Thomas M. Cronin, François Fripiat, Alfredo Martínez-García, Gerald H. Haug, and Daniel M. Sigman appears in the current issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2206742119). The research was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (OCE-2054780 and OCE-2054757), the Tuttle and Phillips Funds of the Department of Geosciences, the Max Planck Society, and the USGS Climate Research and Development Program.

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December 28, 2022
Hunter-gatherer social ties spread pottery-making far and wide

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Newswise — Analysis of more than 1,200 vessels from hunter-gatherer sites has shown that pottery-making techniques spread vast distances over a short period of time through social traditions being passed on.

The team, which includes researchers from the University of York and the British Museum, analysed the remains of 1,226 pottery vessels from 156 hunter-gatherer sites across nine countries in Northern and Eastern Europe. They combined radiocarbon dating, together with data on the production and decoration of ceramic vessels, and analysis of the remains of food found inside the pots.

Their findings, published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, suggest that pottery-making spread rapidly westwards from 5,900 BCE onwards and took only 300–400 years to advance over 3,000 km, equivalent to 250 km in a single generation.

Professor Oliver Craig, from the University of York’s Department of Archaeology, said: “Our analysis of the ways pots were designed and decorated as well as new radiocarbon dates suggests that knowledge of pottery spread through a process of cultural transmission.

“By this we mean that the activity spread by the exchange of ideas between groups of hunter-gatherers living nearby, rather than through migration of people or an expanding population as we see for other key changes in human history such as the introduction of agriculture.”

“That methods of pottery-making spread so far and so fast through the passing on of ideas is quite surprising. Specific knowledge may have been shared through marriages or at centres of aggregation, specific points in the landscape where groups of hunter-gatherers came together perhaps at certain times of the year.”

By studying traces of organic materials left in the pots, the team demonstrated that the pottery was used for cooking, so the ideas of pottery-making may have been spread through shared culinary traditions.

Carl Heron, from the British Museum, said: “We found evidence that the vessels were used for cooking a wide range of animals, fish and plants, and this variety suggests that the drivers for making the pottery were not in response to a particular need, such as detoxifying plants or processing fish, as has previously been suggested.

“We also found patterns suggesting that pottery use was transmitted along with knowledge of their manufacture and decoration. These can be seen as culinary traditions that were rapidly transmitted with the artefacts themselves.”

The world’s earliest pottery containers come from East Asia and may have spread rapidly eastwards through Siberia, before being taken up by hunter-gatherer societies across Northern Europe, long before the arrival of farming.

This research is funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.

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University of York

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December 22, 2022
Humans continue to evolve with the emergence of new genes

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Newswise — Modern humans evolutionarily split from our chimpanzee ancestors nearly 7 million years ago, yet we are continuing to evolve. 155 new genes have been identified within the human lineage that spontaneously arose from tiny sections of our DNA. Some of these new genes date back to the ancient origin of mammals, with a few of these “microgenes” predicted to be associated with human-specific diseases. This work is publishing on December 20^th in the journal Cell Reports.

“This project started back in 2017 because I was interested in novel gene evolution and figuring out how these genes originate,” says first author Nikolaos Vakirlis (@vakirlis), a scientist at the Biomedical Sciences Research Center “Alexander Fleming” in Vari, Greece. “It was put on ice for a few years, until another study got published that had some very interesting data, allowing us to get started on this work.”

Taking the previously published dataset of functionally relevant new genes, the researchers created an ancestral tree comparing humans to other vertebrate species. They tracked the relationship of these genes across evolution and found 155 that popped up from regions of unique DNA. New genes can arise from duplication events that already exist in the genome; however, these genes arose from scratch.

“It was quite exciting to be working in something so new,” says senior author Aoife McLysaght (@aoifemcl), a scientist at Trinity College Dublin. “When you start getting into these small sizes of DNA, they’re really on the edge of what is interpretable from a genome sequence, and they’re in that zone where it’s hard to know if it is biologically meaningful.”

Of these 155 new genes, 44 of them are associated with growth defects in cell cultures, demonstrating the importance of these genes in maintaining a healthy, living system. Since these genes are human specific, it makes direct testing difficult. Researchers must seek another way to explore what effects these new genes may have on the body. Vakirlis and his team examined patterns found within the DNA that can hint at if these genes play a role in specific diseases.

Three of these 155 new genes have disease-associated DNA markers that point to connections with ailments such as muscular dystrophy, retinitis pigmentosa, and Alazami syndrome. Apart from disease, the researchers also found a new gene that is associated with human heart tissue. This gene emerged in human and chimp right after the split from gorilla and shows just how fast a gene can evolve to become essential for the body.

“It will be very interesting in future studies to understand what these microgenes might do and whether they might be directly involved in any kind of disease,” says Vakirlis.

“These genes are convenient to ignore because they’re so difficult to study, but I think it’ll be increasingly recognized that they need to be looked at and considered,” says McLysaght. “If we’re right in what we think we have here, there’s a lot more functionally relevant stuff hidden in the human genome.”

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Financial support provided by the European Research Council and by Greece and the European Union. Aoife McLysaght was a member of the journal’s Advisory Board at the time of this article’s initial submission.

Cell Reports, Vakirlis et al., “De novo birth of functional microproteins in the human lineage.” https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(22)01696-5

Cell Reports (@CellReports), published by Cell Press, is a weekly open access journal that publishes high-quality papers across the entire life sciences spectrum. The journal features reports, articles, and resources that provide new biological insights, are thought-provoking, and/or are examples of cutting-edge research. Visit: http://www.cell.com/cell-reports. To receive Cell Press media alerts, contact [email protected].

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December 20, 2022
SLU Researcher Receives NEH Grant to Create Platform to Share Medieval Interpretations of Culture-Shaping Text

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Newswise — ST. LOUIS – Atria Larson, Ph.D., associate professor of Medieval Christianity at Saint Louis University, has been awarded a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant through the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The two-year grant totals $149,835 and will fund the prototyping and testing of a web platform for sharing medieval interpretations of culture-shaping texts.

The “Gallery of Glosses” project will allow users to identify and transcribe annotations and marginalia in medieval manuscripts. A gloss is a word, phrase, or extended commentary inserted in a text’s margin to explain a part of the original text.

“A gloss can include a legal or cultural interpretation of the original text,” Larson said.

Typically, medieval scholars must study the original manuscripts in the libraries where they are currently housed when working with annotations. The web application Larson is creating will allow that work to be done by various scholars from anywhere in the world.

“This will allow a broader approach to medieval studies,” Larson said.

Original texts authored during the Middle Ages (generally defined as the time between the collapse of the western Roman Empire in the 5th century to the 15th century) are held in libraries and museums across Europe. Studying the glosses provides a deeper understanding of the text and the meaning it held for people when they read it.

“Glosses aren’t just scribbling in a margin – these are updates and interpretations of the text,” Larson said. “We continue to uncover voices that we have not heard for centuries as we unearth and share these glosses.”

She likened working in medieval glosses to detective work.

“By reading the glosses in these works, we are not just getting the historical context of the work and the value given to it at the time of its writing,” she said. “By seeing which glosses are copied where, we can see how the original written works traveled across Europe, who worked on them and how they formed their interpretations. There are clues in the manuscripts if we can find them.”

Larson said writings by Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle in addition to the Bible and major law collections contain glosses by many different readers of their works.

“By connecting the dots on how the work traveled, you can see learned culture move throughout Europe,” she said.

Larson’s project is one of 226 humanities projects funded in the NEH’s third round of grants for the fiscal year 2022. The NEH supports vital humanities research, education, preservation, and public programs.

The Digital Humanities Advancement Grants program (DHAG) supports innovative, experimental, and/or computationally challenging digital projects, leading to work that can scale to enhance scholarly research, teaching, and public programming in the humanities. The program also supports research that examines the history, criticism, ethics, and philosophy of digital culture or technology and its impact on society.

National Endowment for the Humanities

Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at www.neh.gov.

Saint Louis University

Founded in 1818, Saint Louis University is one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious Catholic institutions. Rooted in Jesuit values and its pioneering history as the first university west of the Mississippi River, SLU offers more than 13,500 students a rigorous, transformative education of the whole person. At the core of the University’s diverse community of scholars is SLU’s service-focused mission, which challenges and prepares students to make the world a better, more just place.

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December 14, 2022
Archaeology: Owl-shaped plaques may have been on Copper Age children’s wish list

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Newswise — Ancient owl-shaped slate engraved plaques, dating from around 5,000 years ago in the Iberian Peninsula, may have been created by children as toys, suggests a paper published in Scientific Reports. These findings may provide insights into how children used artefacts in ancient European societies.

Around 4,000 engraved slate plaques resembling owls – with two engraved circles for eyes and a body outlined below – and dating from the Copper Age between 5,500 and 4,750 years ago have been found in tombs and pits across the Iberian Peninsula. It has been speculated that these owl plaques may have had ritualistic significance and represented deities or the dead.

Now, Juan Negro and colleagues re-examined this interpretation and suggest instead that these owl plaques may have been crafted by young people based on regional owl species, and may have been used as dolls, toys, or amulets. The authors assessed 100 plaques and rated them (on a scale of one to six) based on how many of six owl traits they displayed including two eyes, feathery tufts, patterned feathers, a flat facial disk, a beak, and wings. The authors compared these plaques to 100 modern images of owls drawn by children aged 4 to 13 years old, and observed many similarities between the depictions of owls. Owl drawings more closely resembled owls as children aged and became more skilful.

The authors observe the presence of two small holes at the top of many plaques. These holes appear impractical to pass a cord through in order to hang the plaque, and lack the expected lack wear-marks if this was their use. Instead they speculate that feathers could be inserted through the holes in order to resemble the tufts on the heads of some regional owl species, such as the long-eared owl (Asio otus).

The authors propose that, rather than being carved by skilled artisans for use in rituals, many of the owl plaques were created by children, and more closely resembled owls as the children’s carving skills increased. They may represent a glimpse into childhood behaviours in Copper Age societies.

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Scientific Reports

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December 1, 2022