Making thread in Bronze Age Britain

IMAGE: A micrograph of the spliced textile from Over barrow, Cambridgeshire. view more 

Credit: M. Gleba, S. Harris, with permission of Cambridge Archaeological Unit

A new study published this week in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences has identified that the earliest plant fibre technology for making thread in Early Bronze Age Britain and across Europe and the Near East was splicing not spinning.

In splicing, strips of plant fibres (flax, nettle, lime tree and other species) are joined in individually, often after being stripped from the plant stalk directly and without or with only minimal retting - the process of introducing moisture to soften the fibres.

According to lead author Dr Margarita Gleba, researcher at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, "Splicing technology is fundamentally different from draft spinning. The identification of splicing in these Early Bronze Age and later textiles marks a major turning point in scholarship. The switch from splicing - the original plant bast fibre technology - to draft spinning took place much later than previously assumed."

Splicing has previously been identified in pre-Dynastic Egyptian and Neolithic Swiss textiles, but the new study shows that this particular type of thread making technology may have been ubiquitous across the Old World during prehistory.

"The technological innovation of draft spinning plant bast fibres - a process in which retted and well processed fibres are drawn out from a mass of fluffed up fibres usually arranged on a distaff, and twisted continuously using a rotating spindle - appears to coincide with urbanisation and population growth, as well as increased human mobility across the Mediterranean during the first half of the 1st millennium BC."

"Such movements required many more and larger and faster ships, all of which largely relied on wind power and therefore sails. Retting and draft spinning technology would have allowed faster processing of larger quantities of plant materials and the production of sail cloth."

Among the finds analysed for this study are charred textile fragments from Over Barrow in Cambridgeshire, dated to the Early Bronze Age (c. 1887-1696 BC). The site was excavated by the Cambridge Archaeological Unit.

Dr. Susanna Harris of the University of Glasgow, co-author of the paper and expert in British Bronze Age textiles notes: "We can now demonstrate that this technology was also present in Britain. It's exciting because we think the past is familiar, but this shows life was quite different in the Bronze Age."

"Sites like Over Barrow in Cambridgeshire contained a burial with remains of stacked textiles, which were prepared using strips of plant fibre, spliced into yarns, then woven into textiles".

"It had always been assumed that textiles were made following well-known historical practices of fibre processing and draft spinning but we can now show people were dealing with plants rather differently, possibly using nettles or flax plants, to make these beautiful woven textiles."

Archaeological finds at Sidon in Lebanon include the rare remains of a Canaanite child and its funerary jar,

Newly revealed archaeological finds at Sidon in Lebanon include the rare remains of a Canaanite child and its funerary jar, the British Museum excavation team revealed on Monday.

Alabaster jar from Egypt found in the Phoenician temple by a British Museum team in Sidon AFP

By the time of the Canaanites, burial in jars had been the local practice for thousands of years throughout the region. The burial jars archaeologists found in copper-age Sidon had all contained adults. However, the burial presented Monday was a child. 

The child was interred with a necklace around its neck, said the team, headed by Dr. Claude Doumet-Serhal. 

The fact of the child's burial, with a funerary vessel and jewelry, could be indicative of status, or of the value attributed to children. Prehistoric burials had been confined to adults, indicating that children were held to be of little importance.

Canaanite child's necklace from burial in Sidon Mahmoud Zayyat, AFP

Lebanon, like Israel, is on the Mediterranean Sea and is smack on the route – or at least one route - by which humans and their predecessors left Africa for the rest of the world. Throughout the region and in Sidon too, archaeologists have found stone axes, chisels, and bifacial tools from the Stone Age.

Neandertal fire-making technology inferred from microwear analysis

Scientific Reports complete article

 

Fire use appears to have been relatively common among Neandertals in the Middle Palaeolithic. However, the means by which Neandertals procured their fire—either through the collection of natural fire, or by producing it themselves using tools—is still a matter of debate. We present here the first direct artefactual evidence for regular, systematic fire production by Neandertals. From archaeological layers attributed to late Mousterian industries at multiple sites throughout France, primarily to the Mousterian of Acheulean Tradition (MTA) technoculture (ca. 50,000 years BP), we identify using microwear analysis dozens of late Middle Palaeolithic bifacial tools that exhibit macroscopic and microscopic traces suggesting repeated percussion and/or forceful abrasion with a hard mineral material. Both the locations and nature of the polish and associated striations are comparable to those obtained experimentally by obliquely percussing fragments of pyrite (FeS₂) against the flat/convex sides of a biface to make fire. The striations within these discrete use zones are always oriented roughly parallel to the longitudinal axis of the tool, allowing us to rule out taphonomic origins for these traces. We therefore suggest that the occasional use of bifaces as ‘strike-a-lights’ was a technocultural feature shared among the late Neandertals in France.

Introduction

Most people today are familiar with the concept of striking steel against flint to produce a shower of sparks that fall onto tinder, which begins to smoulder, and when placed into a bundle of dried grass, can be gently blown into flame. Prior to cigarette lighters and wooden matches, the flint-and-steel method was among the most common fire making systems in modern times, originating in the Iron Age^1,2,3. Prior to their introduction to metal products by Western colonialists, numerous hunter-gatherer, pastoralist and horticulturalist societies employed the minerals pyrite or marcasite—two very similar species of iron disulphide (FeS₂) that are virtually indistinguishable from one another in their nodular or crystal aggregate forms, referred to hereafter simply as pyrite—in place of steel for their fire making needs. Ethnographic accounts describe the flint-and-pyrite (and in some cases, pyrite-on-pyrite) fire making system being employed from Alaska and Canada to Tierra del Fuego in the Americas, and from Australia and Melanesia to Siberia, and only a few instances noted in Africa^1,4,5. However, the earliest known instances of percussive fire making extend much deeper into the prehistoric past.

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Acknowledgements

Funding was provided by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (Grant# PGW-13-42) and the Stichting Nederlands Museum voor Anthropologie en Praehistorie (SNMAP). Thanks to J. Airvaux, J. Jaubert, J.-J. Hublin, S. McPherron, E. Ihuel, D. Colonge, M. Brenet, J.-M. Geneste and A. Turq for providing access to the studied materials. Some of the bifaces used in the experiments were produced by D. Pomstra and B. Ginelli. Earlier versions of this article benefitted greatly from revisions provided by W. Roebroeks. A.C.S. and M.S. are grateful for the insightful discussions held with various members of the Leiden Human Origins Group and Material Culture Studies Group.

Author information

Affiliations

1. Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

   • A. C. Sorensen
   •  & M. Soressi

2. INRAP, GSO, Bègles, France

   • E. Claud

3. UMR 5199 PACEA, Université de Bordeaux, Pessac, France

   • E. Claud

Contributions

A.C.S. conceived/designed the study in collaboration with M.S. and E.C., A.C.S. conceptualised and conducted the experiments, A.C.S. and E.C. analysed the results, M.S. provided and analysed archaeological materials, A.C.S. wrote the manuscript with input from E.C. and M.S., A.C.S. prepared the figures, tables and supplementary information, all photographs appearing in the article and the Supplementary Information were taken by A.C.S.

Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to A. C. Sorensen.

Electronic supplementary material

1. Supplementary Information

2. Supplementary Video S1

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Received

03 January 2018

Accepted

21 June 2018

Published

19 July 2018

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https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-28342-9

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1. Abstract
2. Introduction
3. Archaeological evidence for fire making
4. Where are the Middle Palaeolithic strike-a-lights? The biface hypothesis
5. Results
6. Discussion
7. Conclusion
8. Methods
9. Additional information
10. References
11. Acknowledgements
12. Author information
13. Electronic supplementary material
14. Rights and permissions
15. About this article
16. Comments

Gault site research pushes back date of earliest North Americans

IMAGE: Stone tool assemblage recovered from the Gault Site. view more 

Credit: Credit: Produced by N Velchoff, The Gault School of Archaeological Research.

For decades, researchers believed the Western Hemisphere was settled by humans roughly 13,500 years ago, a theory based largely upon the widespread distribution of Clovis artifacts dated to that time. Clovis artifacts are distinctive prehistoric stone tools so named because they were initially found near Clovis, New Mexico, in the 1920s but have since been identified throughout North and South America.

In recent years, though, archaeological evidence has increasingly called into question the idea of "Clovis First." Now, a study published by a team including DRI's Kathleen Rodrigues, Ph.D. student, and Amanda Keen-Zebert, Ph.D., associate research professor, has dated a significant assemblage of stone artifacts to 16-20,000 years of age, pushing back the timeline of the first human inhabitants of North America before Clovis by at least 2,500 years.

Significantly, this research identifies a previously unknown, early projectile point technology unrelated to Clovis, which suggests that Clovis technology spread across an already well-established, indigenous population.

"These projectile points are unique. We haven't found anything else like them," said Tom Williams, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology at Texas State University and lead author of the study. "Combine that with the ages and the fact that it underlies a Clovis component, and the Gault site provides a fantastic opportunity to study the earliest human occupants in the Americas."

The research team identified the artifacts at the Gault Site in Central Texas, an extensive archaeological site with evidence of continuous human occupation. The presence of Clovis technology at the site is well-documented, but excavations below the deposits containing Clovis artifacts revealed well-stratified sediments containing artifacts distinctly different from Clovis.

To determine the ages of these artifacts, Rodrigues, Keen-Zebert, and colleagues used a process called optically simulated luminescence (OSL) dating to the ages of the surrounding sedimentary material. In OSL, researchers expose minerals that have long been buried under sediment layers to light or heat, which causes the minerals to release trapped potassium, uranium, and thorium electrons that have accumulated over time due to ambient, naturally occurring radiation. When the trapped electrons are released, they emit light which can be measured to determine the amount of time that has elapsed since the materials were last exposed to heat or sunlight.

"The fluvial nature of the sediments deposited at the Gault Site have created a poor environment for preservation of organic materials, so radiocarbon dating has not been a useful technique to apply in this region," said Kathleen Rodrigues, graduate research assistant in DRI's Division of Earth and Ecosystem Sciences. "This made luminescence dating a natural choice for dating the archaeological materials here. We are really pleased with the quality of the results that we have achieved."

Archaeologists identify ancient North American mounds using new image analysis technique

Researchers at Binghamton University, State University at New York have used a new image-based analysis technique to identify once-hidden North American mounds, which could reveal valuable information about pre-contact Native Americans.

"Across the East Coast of the United States, some of the most visible forms for pre-contact Native American material culture can be found in the form of large earthen and shell mounds," said Binghamton University anthropologist Carl Lipo. "Mounds and shell rings contain valuable information about the way in which past people lived in North America. As habitation sites, they can show us the kinds of foods that were eaten, the way in which the community lived, and how the community interacted with neighbors and their local environments.

In areas that are deeply wooded or consist of bayous and swamps, there exist mounds that have eluded more than 150 years of archaeological survey and research. Due to vegetation, these kinds of environments make seeing more than a couple of dozen feet difficult, and even large mounds can be hidden from view, even when one systematically walks on the terrain.

The use of satellites and new kinds of aerial sensors such as LiDAR (light detection and ranging) have transformed the way archaeologists can gather data about the archaeological record, said Lipo.

Now scientists can study landscapes from images and peer through the forest canopy to look at the ground. LiDAR has been particularly effective at showing the characteristic rises in topography that mark the presence of mounds. The challenge to archaeologists, however, is to manage such a vast array of new data that are available for study. Object based image analysis (OBIA) allows archaeologists to configure a program to automatically detect features of interest. OBIA is a computer-based approach to use data from satellite images and aerial sensors to look for shapes and combinations of features that match objects of interest. Unlike traditional satellite image analyses that looks at combinations of light wavelengths, OBIA adds characteristics of shape to the search algorithm, allowing archaeologists to more easily distinguish cultural from natural phenomena.

Lipo's team systematically identified over 160 previously undetected mound features using LiDAR data from Beaufort County, S.C., and an OBIA approach. The result improves the overall knowledge of settlement patterns by providing systematic knowledge about past landscapes, said Lipo.

"Through the use of OBIA, archaeologists can now repeatedly generate data about the archaeological record and find historic and pre-contact sites over massive areas that would be cost-prohibitive using pedestrian survey. We can now also peer beneath the dense canopy of trees to see things that are otherwise obscured. In areas like coast South Carolina, with large swaths of shallow bays, inlets and bayous that are covered in forest, OBIA offers us our first look at this hidden landscape."

Having demonstrated the effectiveness for using OBIA in conditions of dense vegetation and after optimizing our processing, Lipo and his team are expanding their efforts to include much-larger areas.

"Fortunately, satellite and LiDAR data are now available for much of the eastern seaboard, so undertaking a large-scale project is now a task that is achievable," said Lipo. "Due to climate change and sea-level rise, many major mounds and middens on the East Coast are threatened by erosion and inundation. It is urgent we document this pre-contact landscape as soon as possible, in order to learn as much as we can about the past before it is gone forever."

Old Theban port of Chalcis: A medieval maritime crossroads in Greece

IMAGE: Medieval ceramic article from Chalcis typical of main Middle Byzantine Production (MBP), in the collection of the Musée National de Céramique and the Manufacture de Sèvres (Cité de la Céramique).... view more 

Credit: S. Y. Waksman

In the 12th century, the Byzantine Empire was flourishing and the city of Thebes--between Corinth and Athens--was a bustling center of commercial and cultural exchange. Its outlet to the sea was the port of Chalcis, part of a vast maritime trade network. In addition to agricultural products and silk, ceramic tableware was shipped from Chalcis throughout the Mediterranean. Most of this tableware has been assigned to the main Middle Byzantine Production (MBP) ceramic type.
The research team examined one lot of MBP ceramics salvaged from a wreck discovered by the island of Kavalliani, near Chalcis, in the Southern Euboean Gulf. Analyses performed at the Archéologie et Archéométrie research unit revealed their chemical composition, which the scientists then compared with that of ceramics known to have been produced at Chalcis. The chemical profiles were a match, leading them to conclude that MBP ceramics were indeed manufactured in Chalcis. This was followed up with a study of pieces from the collections of the Cité de la Céramique in Sèvres, in collaboration with the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France (French Ministry of Culture).
These findings provide a new perspective on medieval Mediterranean trade and reveal that Chalcis was an epicenter of maritime commerce, exporting goods across a vast territory. They also pinpoint the place of manufacture of a large number of Byzantine ceramics currently on display in museums around the world.

Archaeologists discover bread that predates agriculture by 4,000 years

At an archaeological site in northeastern Jordan, researchers have discovered the charred remains of a flatbread baked by hunter-gatherers 14,400 years ago. It is the oldest direct evidence of bread found to date, predating the advent of agriculture by at least 4,000 years. The findings suggest that bread production based on wild cereals may have encouraged hunter-gatherers to cultivate cereals, and thus contributed to the agricultural revolution in the Neolithic period.

A team of researchers from the University of Copenhagen, University College London and University of Cambridge have analysed charred food remains from a 14,400-year-old Natufian hunter-gatherer site - a site known as Shubayqa 1 located in the Black Desert in northeastern Jordan. The results, which are published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provide the earliest empirical evidence for the production of bread:

"The presence of hundreds of charred food remains in the fireplaces from Shubayqa 1 is an exceptional find, and it has given us the chance to characterize 14,000-year-old food practices. The 24 remains analysed in this study show that wild ancestors of domesticated cereals such as barley, einkorn, and oat had been ground, sieved and kneaded prior to cooking. The remains are very similar to unleavened flatbreads identified at several Neolithic and Roman sites in Europe and Turkey. So we now know that bread-like products were produced long before the development of farming. The next step is to evaluate if the production and consumption of bread influenced the emergence of plant cultivation and domestication at all," said University of Copenhagen archaeobotanist Amaia Arranz Otaegui, who is the first author of the study.

University of Copenhagen archaeologist Tobias Richter, who led the excavations at Shubayqa 1 in Jordan, explained:
"Natufian hunter-gatherers are of particular interest to us because they lived through a transitional period when people became more sedentary and their diet began to change. Flint sickle blades as well as ground stone tools found at Natufian sites in the Levant have long led archaeologists to suspect that people had begun to exploit plants in a different and perhaps more effective way. But the flat bread found at Shubayqa 1 is the earliest evidence of bread making recovered so far, and it shows that baking was invented before we had plant cultivation. So this evidence confirms some of our ideas. Indeed, it may be that the early and extremely time-consuming production of bread based on wild cereals may have been one of the key driving forces behind the later agricultural revolution where wild cereals were cultivated to provide more convenient sources of food."
Charred remains under the microscope
The charred food remains were analysed with electronic microscopy at a University College London lab by PhD candidate Lara Gonzalez Carratero (UCL Institute of Archaeology), who is an expert on prehistoric bread:
"The identification of 'bread' or other cereal-based products in archaeology is not straightforward. There has been a tendency to simplify classification without really testing it against an identification criteria. We have established a new set of criteria to identify flat bread, dough and porridge like products in the archaeological record. Using Scanning Electron Microscopy we identified the microstructures and particles of each charred food remain," said Gonzalez Carratero.
"Bread involves labour intensive processing which includes dehusking, grinding of cereals and kneading and baking. That it was produced before farming methods suggests it was seen as special, and the desire to make more of this special food probably contributed to the decision to begin to cultivate cereals. All of this relies on new methodological developments that allow us to identify the remains of bread from very small charred fragments using high magnification," said Professor Dorian Fuller (UCL Institute of Archaeology).
Research into prehistoric food practices continues
A grant recently awarded to the University of Copenhagen team will ensure that research into food making during the transition to the Neolithic will continue:
"The Danish Council for Independent Research has recently approved further funding for our work, which will allow us to investigate how people consumed different plants and animals in greater detail. Building on our research into early bread, this will in the future give us a better idea why certain ingredients were favoured over others and were eventually selected for cultivation," said Tobias Richter.

The origins of pottery linked with intensified fishing in the post-glacial period

IMAGE: This is incipient J?mon pottery from Hanamiyama site, Yokohama-shi, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. view more 

Credit: Nara National Research Institute for Cultural Properties

A study into some of the earliest known pottery remains has suggested that the rise of ceramic production was closely linked with intensified fishing at the end of the last Ice Age.
Scientists examined 800 pottery vessels in one of the largest studies ever undertaken, focussing mainly on Japan- a country recognised as being one of the earliest centres for ceramic innovation.
A three year study led by researchers at BioArCh, the University of York, concluded that the ceramic vessels were used by our hunter-gatherer ancestors to store and process fish, initially salmon, but then a wider range including shellfish, freshwater and marine fish and mammals as fishing intensified.
Scientists say this association with fish remained stable even after the onset of climate warming, including in more southerly areas, where expanding forests provided new opportunities for hunting game and gathering plants.
The research team were able to determine the use of a range of ceramic vessels through chemical analysis of organic food compounds that remained trapped in the pots despite ca. 10,000 years of burial.
The samples analysed are some of the earliest found and date from the end of the Late Pleistocene - a time when our ancestors were living in glacial conditions - to the post-glacial period when the climate warmed close to its current temperature and when pottery began to be produced in much greater quantity.
The study has shed new light on how prehistoric hunter-gatherers processed and consumed foods over this period - until now virtually nothing was known of how or for what early pots were used.
As part of the study, researchers recovered diagnostic lipids from the charred surface deposits of the pottery with most of the compounds deriving from the processing of freshwater or marine organisms.
Lead author, Dr Alex Lucquin, from BioArCh, Department of Archaeology, University of York, said: "Thanks to the exceptional preservation of traces of animal fat, we now know that pottery changed from a rare and special object to an every-day tool for preparing fish.
"I think that our study not only reveals the subsistence of the ancient Jomon people of Japan but also its resilience to a dramatic change in climate.
Professor Oliver Craig, from the Department of Archaeology and Director of the BioArCh research centre at York, who led the study, said: "Our results demonstrate that pottery had a strong association with the processing of fish, irrespective of the ecological setting.
"Contrary to expectations, this association remained stable even after the onset of warming, including in more southerly areas, where expanding forests provided new opportunities for hunting and gathering.
"The results indicate that a broad array of fish was processed in the pottery after the end of the last Ice Age, corresponding to a period when hunter-gatherers began to settle in one place for longer periods and develop more intensive fishing strategies"
"We suggest this marks a significant change in the role of pottery of hunter-gatherers, corresponding massively increased volume of production, greater variation in forms and sizes and the onset of shellfish exploitation."
Dr Simon Kaner, from the University of East Anglia, who was involved in the study, added: "The research highlights the benefits of this kind of international collaboration for unlocking some of the big questions about the human past, and the potential of engaging with established research networks as created by the Sainsbury Institute over the years."
The findings are published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the study was funded by the AHRC. It was an international collaboration including researchers in Japan, Sweden and the Netherlands.

5,300-year-old Iceman's last meal reveals remarkably high-fat diet

In 1991, German tourists discovered, in the Eastern Italian Alps, a human body that was later determined to be the oldest naturally preserved ice mummy, known as Otzi or the Iceman. Now, researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology on July 12 who have conducted the first in-depth analysis of the Iceman's stomach contents offer a rare glimpse of our ancestor's ancient dietary habits. Among other things, their findings show that the Iceman's last meal was heavy on the fat.
The findings offer important insights into the nutritional habits of European individuals, going back more than 5,000 years to the Copper Age. They also offer clues as to how our ancient ancestors handled food preparation.
"By using a complementary multi-omics approach combined with microscopy, we reconstructed the Iceman's last meal, showing that he has had a remarkably high proportion of fat in his diet, supplemented with wild meat from ibex and red deer, cereals from einkorn, and with traces of toxic bracken," says Frank Maixner of the Eurac Research Institute for Mummy Studies in Bolzano, Italy. Bracken is a genus of large ferns.
Maixner and colleagues, including Albert Zink, explains that the analysis hadn't happened earlier because scientists were initially unable to identify the Iceman's stomach. That's because it had moved up during the mummification process. In 2009, his stomach was spotted during a re-investigation of CT scans, and an effort to analyze its contents was launched.
"The stomach material was, compared to previously analyzed lower intestine samples, extraordinarily well preserved, and it also contained large amounts of unique biomolecules such as lipids, which opened new methodological opportunities to address our questions about Otzi's diet," Maixner says.
The researchers combined classical microscopic and modern molecular approaches to determine the exact composition of the Iceman's diet prior to his death. The broad-spectrum approach allowed them to make inferences based on ancient DNA, proteins, metabolites, and lipids.
The analysis identified ibex adipose tissue as the most likely fat source. In fact, about half of the stomach contents were composed of adipose fat. While the high-fat diet was unexpected, the researchers say it "totally makes sense" given the extreme alpine environment in which the Iceman lived and where he was found.
"The high and cold environment is particularly challenging for the human physiology and requires optimal nutrient supply to avoid rapid starvation and energy loss," says Albert Zink, also at the Eurac Research Institute for Mummy Studies. "The Iceman seemed to have been fully aware that fat represents an excellent energy source."
The analysis indicated that the wild meat was eaten fresh or perhaps dried. While the presence of toxic bracken particles is more difficult to explain, the researchers say it's possible that the Iceman suffered from intestinal problems related to parasites found earlier in his gut and took the bracken as a medicine. On the other hand, he may have used the fern's leaves to wrap food and ingested toxic spores unintentionally.
Their analysis also revealed traces of the original gut bacterial community present in the Iceman's intestinal contents. The researchers say they plan to conduct further studies aimed to reconstruct the ancient gut microbiomes of the Iceman and other mummified human remains.

Mystery of the Basel papyrus solved

IMAGE: After conservation: cleaned, smoothed and consolidated. A specialized papyrus conservator was brought to Basel to make this 2,000-year-old document legible again. view more 

Credit: University of Basel

Since the 16th century, Basel has been home to a mysterious papyrus. With mirror writing on both sides, it has puzzled generations of researchers. A research team from the University of Basel has now discovered that it is an unknown medical document from late antiquity. The text was likely written by the famous Roman physician Galen.
The Basel papyrus collection comprises 65 papers in five languages, which were purchased by the university in 1900 for the purpose of teaching classical studies - with the exception of two papyri. These arrived in Basel back in the 16th century, and likely formed part of Basilius Amerbach's art collection.
One of these Amerbach papyri was regarded until now as unique in the world of papyrology. With mirror writing on both sides, it has puzzled generations of researchers. It was only through ultraviolet and infrared images produced by the Basel Digital Humanities Lab that it was possible to determine that this 2,000-year-old document was not a single papyrus at all, but rather several layers of papyrus glued together. A specialist papyrus restorer was brought to Basel to separate the sheets, enabling the Greek document to be decoded for the first time.
A literary papyrus "This is a sensational discovery," says Sabine Huebner, Professor of Ancient History at the University of Basel. "The majority of papyri are documents such as letters, contracts and receipts. This is a literary text, however, and they are vastly more valuable."
What's more, it contains a previously unknown text from antiquity. "We can now say that it's a medical text from late antiquity that describes the phenomenon of 'hysterical apnea'," says Huebner. "We therefore assume that it is either a text from the Roman physician Galen, or an unknown commentary on his work." After Hippocrates, Galen is regarded as the most important physician of antiquity.
The decisive evidence came from Italy - an expert saw parallels to the famous Ravenna papyri from the chancery of the Archdiocese of Ravenna. These include many antique manuscripts from Galen, which were later used as palimpsests and written over. The Basel papyrus could be a similar case of medieval recycling, as it consists of multiple sheets glued together and was probably used as a book binding. The other Basel Amerbach papyrus in Latin script is also thought to have come from the Archdiocese of Ravenna. At the end of the 15th century, it was then stolen from the archive and traded by art collectors as a curiosity.
Utilizing digital opportunities in research Huebner made the discovery in the course of an editing project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. For three years, she has been working with an interdisciplinary team in collaboration with the University of Basel's Digital Humanities Lab to examine the papyrus collection, which in the meantime has been digitalized, transcribed, annotated and translated. The project team has already presented the history of the papyrus collection through an exhibition in the University Library last year. They plan to publish all their findings at the start of 2019.
With the end of the editing project, the research on the Basel papyri will enter into a new phase. Huebner hopes to provide additional impetus to papyrus research, particularly through sharing the digitalized collection with international databases. As papyri frequently only survive in fragments or pieces, exchanges with other papyrus collections are essential. "The papyri are all part of a larger context. People mentioned in a Basel papyrus text may appear again in other papyri, housed for example in Strasbourg, London, Berlin or other locations. It is digital opportunities that enable us to put these mosaic pieces together again to form a larger picture."
The Basel Papyrus Collection In 1900, the University of Basel was one of the first German-speaking universities and the first in German-speaking Switzerland to procure a papyrus collection. At that time, papyrology was booming - people hoped to discover more about the development of early Christendom and to rediscover works of ancient authors believed to be lost. The Voluntary Museum Association of Basel provided CHF 500 to purchase the papyri, an amount equivalent to around CHF 5,000 today.
The current value of such a papyrus collection, however, would be in the hundreds of thousands. The Basel collection contains 65 documents in five languages from the Ptolemaic and Roman periods and late antiquity. Most of the collection is made up of documentary papyri, which are primarily of social, cultural and religious historical interest as they record the daily life of ordinary people 2,000 years ago. Most of the Basel papyri have not been published and remained largely ignored by research until now.

Caesar in the Low Countries

The world-renowned general Julius Caesar may have been rather less heroic than we imagine, in terms of victories as well as physique. Caesar was largely bald and had a deformed skull, resulting from difficulties during his birth.

As for military campaigns, he suffered his greatest defeat in the Low Countries, possibly near the Dutch city of Maastricht, according to new research suggesting that he fought a substantial proportion of the Gallic Wars in the northern part of Gaul.

These findings emerged from the research conducted by the archaeologist and author Tom Buijtendorp on Caesar’s activities in the Low Countries, in response to the mounting pile of clues for his presence here. Buijtendorp’s research was recently published in the book Caesar in de Lage Landen (Caesar in the Low Countries)

Caesar’s own statistics on killed Roman soldiers, suggest that roughly half of these deaths took place in the north, in Gallia Belgica. In this harsh northern region Caesar encountered his largest defeat ever, and faced a second defeat at the same place the year after. The northern military effort was so burdensome that Caesar had to limit his British ambition. Caesar’s idea of the Rhine as natural border, would impact the strategy of the Roman Empire for a long time.

Buijtendorp’s research for his book ‘Caesar in de Lage Landen’ (Caesar in the Low Countries) was based in part on recently-excavated Caesarian camps, an analysis of indigenous gold coins, geographical analyses, and a renewed assessment of Caesar’s own statistics. The findings for example suggests that a hilltop stronghold near Maastricht may have served in 54 and 53 BC as the camp and logistics centre of Caesar’s army, site of his largest loss. This is indicated, for instance, by a detailed analysis of gold coins and the camp’s size, which was recently established. Caesars description of the battle site fits quite well with the environment.

In addition, the site becomes a logical choice when looking at the reconstruction of Caesars northern campaign. And new insights in the possible location of other camps, also provide a possible match. Like in more cases, this new perspective generates a working hypothesis that may help to actually discovery archaeological remains and protect sites. The recently recognized unique shape of the hobnails in the boots of Caesar’s soldiers, since 2010 enabled researchers to link three northern camps to Caesar.

New discoveries may follow, for which the book – which is written in the manner of a travel guide – identifies several possible sites. This remains challenging for marching camps. A large excavation at Limburg-Eschhofen only revealed three hobnails, while at Hermeskeil a gate probably used for several months was a special hobnail find spot. Mauchamp with clear old traces of Caesars’ large camp, did not provide related finds lacking sizeable modern excavations.

Our fractured African roots

IMAGE: Middle Stone Age cultural artefacts from northern and southern Africa. view more 

Credit: Eleanor Scerri/Francesco d'Errico/Christopher Henshilwood

A scientific consortium led by Dr. Eleanor Scerri, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford and researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, has found that human ancestors were scattered across Africa, and largely kept apart by a combination of diverse habitats and shifting environmental boundaries, such as forests and deserts. Millennia of separation gave rise to a staggering diversity of human forms, whose mixing ultimately shaped our species.
While it is widely accepted that our species originated in Africa, less attention has been paid to how we evolved within the continent. Many had assumed that early human ancestors originated as a single, relatively large ancestral population, and exchanged genes and technologies like stone tools in a more or less random fashion.
In a paper published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution this week, this view is challenged, not only by the usual study of bones (anthropology), stones (archaeology) and genes (population genomics), but also by new and more detailed reconstructions of Africa's climates and habitats over the last 300,000 years.
One species, many origins
"Stone tools and other artifacts - usually referred to as material culture - have remarkably clustered distributions in space and through time," said Dr. Eleanor Scerri, researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and the University of Oxford, and lead author of the study. "While there is a continental-wide trend towards more sophisticated material culture, this 'modernization' clearly doesn't originate in one region or occur at one time period."
Human fossils tell a similar story. "When we look at the morphology of human bones over the last 300,000 years, we see a complex mix of archaic and modern features in different places and at different times," said Prof. Chris Stringer, researcher at the London Natural History Museum and co-author on the study. "As with the material culture, we do see a continental-wide trend towards the modern human form, but different modern features appear in different places at different times, and some archaic features are present until remarkably recently."
The genes concur. "It is difficult to reconcile the genetic patterns we see in living Africans, and in the DNA extracted from the bones of Africans who lived over the last 10,000 years, with there being one ancestral human population," said Prof. Mark Thomas, geneticist at University College London and co-author on the study. "We see indications of reduced connectivity very deep in the past, some very old genetic lineages, and levels of overall diversity that a single population would struggle to maintain."
An ecological, biological and cultural patchwork
To understand why human populations were so subdivided, and how these divisions changed through time, the researchers looked at the past climates and environments of Africa, which give a picture of shifting and often isolated habitable zones. Many of the most inhospitable regions in Africa today, such as the Sahara, were once wet and green, with interwoven networks of lakes and rivers, and abundant wildlife. Similarly, some tropical regions that are humid and green today were once arid. These shifting environments drove subdivisions within animal communities and numerous sub-Saharan species exhibit similar phylogenetic patterns in their distribution.
The shifting nature of these habitable zones means that human populations would have gone through many cycles of isolation - leading to local adaptation and the development of unique material culture and biological makeup - followed by genetic and cultural mixing.
"Convergent evidence from these different fields stresses the importance of considering population structure in our models of human evolution," says co-author Dr. Lounes Chikhi of the CNRS in Toulouse and Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência in Lisbon."This complex history of population subdivision should thus lead us to question current models of ancient population size changes, and perhaps re-interpret some of the old bottlenecks as changes in connectivity," he added.
"The evolution of human populations in Africa was multi-regional. Our ancestry was multi-ethnic. And the evolution of our material culture was, well, multi-cultural," said Dr Scerri. "We need to look at all regions of Africa to understand human evolution."

Humans evolved in partially isolated populations scattered across Africa

The textbook narrative of human evolution casts Homo sapiens as evolving from a single ancestral population in one region of Africa around 300,000 years ago. However, in a commentary published July 11 in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution, an interdisciplinary group of researchers concludes that early humans comprised a subdivided, shifting, pan-African meta-population with physical and cultural diversity. This framework better explains existing genetic, fossil, and cultural patterns and clarifies our shared ancestry.

"In the fossil record, we see a mosaic-like, continental-wide trend toward the modern human form, and the fact that these features appear at different places at different times tells us that these populations were not well connected," says Eleanor Scerri, a British Academy postdoctoral fellow in archaeology at the University of Oxford and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. "This fits with a subdivided population model in which genetic exchanges are neither random nor frequent. This allows us to start detailing the processes that shaped our evolutionary history."
Explaining this poor connectivity was a series of shifting rivers, deserts, forests, and other physical barriers separating these subpopulations, as highlighted in the ecological record. "These barriers created migration and contact opportunities for groups that may previously have been separated, and later fluctuation might have meant populations that mixed for a short while became isolated again," says Scerri.

The theory that there was mingling and isolation of subpopulations from the southern tip to the northern coasts of Africa is a much better fit with the fossil and genetic data than is a single population model. Examination of H. sapiens fossils paired with inferences made from contemporary DNA samples suggested levels of early human diversity that supported the researchers' shifting subdivided population model.
"For the first time, we've examined all the relevant archaeological, fossil, genetic, and environmental data together to eliminate field-specific biases and assumptions and confirm that a mosaic, pan-African origin view is a much better fit with the data that we have," says Scerri. "To understand our genetic and cultural diversity or where being human comes from - our behavioral flexibility and biological plasticity - we have to look at an ancient history of population subdivision and diverse ecologies across Africa."
Moving forward, this research will allow our models of human evolutionary history to reject the simple linear progression from what might be termed "archaic morphology" toward a recognizably human form in favor of a more accurate account of the complexity and irregularity involved in our evolution and an acknowledgment of a pan-African origin of our species.
"In bringing together people from such diverse fields, we've arrived at a place where we can begin to address some key questions about our shared ancestry and even emerge with new questions we haven't known to ask before," Scerri says. "We are an evolving lineage with deep African roots, so to understand this history, we must re-examine evidence from diverse sources without a priori conceptions."