Friday, March 29, 2019

Researchers find ancient Maya farms in Mexican wetlands


University of Cincinnati archaeologists say these farms likely produced cotton and other goods to support Yucatan trade routes
University of Cincinnati
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IMAGE: UC assistant professor Christopher Carr examines an ancient quarry in Yaxnohcah, Mexico. view more 
Credit: Nicholas Dunning/UC
Archaeologists with the University of Cincinnati used the latest technology to find evidence suggesting ancient Maya people grew surplus crops to support an active trade with neighbors up and down the Yucatan Peninsula.
They will present their findings at the annual American Association of Geographers conference in Washington, D.C.
The Mayan civilization stretched across portions of Mesoamerica, a region spanning Mexico and Central America. The oldest evidence of Maya civilization dates back to 1800 B.C., but most cities flourished between 250 and 900 A.D. By the time Spanish ships arrived in the 1500s, some of the biggest cities were deserted. Researchers at UC are trying to piece together the life history of the Maya before the Spanish conquest.
Nicholas Dunning, a professor of geography in UC's McMicken College of Arts and Sciences, was part of a research team that found evidence of cultivation along irregular-shaped fields in Mexico that followed the paths of canals and natural water channels at a place called Laguna de Terminos on the Gulf of Mexico. The archaeologists expect to find evidence of habitation when they begin excavations.
The extensive croplands suggest the ancient Maya could grow surplus crops, especially the cotton responsible for the renowned textiles that were traded throughout Mesoamerica.
"It was a much more complex market economy than the Maya are often given credit for," Dunning said.
Local workers brought the Laguna de Terminos site to the attention of researchers about seven years ago.
"A forester working in the area said there seemed to be a network of ancient fields," Dunning said. "I looked on Google Earth and was like, 'Whoa!' It was an area in the Maya Lowlands that I'd never paid any attention to. And obviously not a lot of other people had, either, from the perspective of looking at ancient agriculture."
Satellite images revealed a patchwork quilt of blocks along drainage ditches that suggested they were built. Archaeologist also studied imagery NASA created of the region using a tool called Light Detection and Ranging, or LIDAR, that can depict the contours of the ground beneath the leafy canopy of trees and vegetation. Their review confirmed Dunning's suspicions: the area was covered in ancient farm fields.
"It appears they developed fairly simply from modifications of existing drainage along the eastern edge of the wetlands," Dunning said. "They probably deepened and straightened some channels or connected them in places, but then further expanded the fields with more sophisticated hydro-engineering."
LIDAR gives scientists a never-before-seen picture of the Earth's surface even after centuries of unchecked jungle growth conceals the remains of ancient structures. Researchers look for telltale signs of human activity: squares and rectangles indicating old foundations and circular pits from man-made reservoirs and quarries where the chert used in stone tools was mined. On the LIDAR maps, any hidden structures pop out, including ancient roads and former villages.
"That's the magic of LIDAR," UC assistant research professor Christopher Carr said.??Carr spent a career practicing engineering before returning to UC to study and eventually teach in the geography department. He approaches questions about the ancient Maya from an engineer's perspective.
Carr pointed to a map of Yaxnohcah, Mexico, showing a small reservoir the ancient Maya apparently dug in a wetland far from cultivated fields or known settlements.
"What were my ancient counterparts thinking when they built that water reservoir? What did they want to accomplish?" he asked.
Carr also used the LIDAR imagery in the project to follow an ancient Maya road that perhaps hasn't been traveled in more than 1,000 years. The road is perfectly visible on the LIDAR map but is virtually impossible to discern when you are standing right on it, Carr said.
"There's vegetation everywhere. But when you've been doing this for a while, you notice little things," Carr said. "I'll have a LIDAR image on my smartphone that shows me where I am, but I don't see anything but rainforest. You just walk back and forth until you can feel something underfoot and follow it."
Identifying possible roads is important for another interest of the UC researchers: ancient Maya marketplaces. Dunning and Carr are working at Yaxnohcah with researchers such as Kathryn Reese-Taylor from the University of Calgary and Armando Anaya Hernandez from Universidad Autónoma de Campeche to unlock the mysteries of the ancient Maya economy. Additionally, they and graduate student Thomas Ruhl have been analyzing NASA's LIDAR imagery across the Yucatan Peninsula to identify more ancient marketplaces.
Unlike pyramids or even many homes, marketplaces had no foundations or permanent structures, researchers said. They were built on low platforms or cleared areas, perhaps like a seasonal fair or flea market. But they were an important part of life in Maya culture
Dunning said the presence of roads between Maya cities would lend credence to the value the ancient Maya placed on trade with their neighbors. He thinks some of the larger squares identified on the LIDAR maps represent these open markets.
"In some areas, they have this very distinct physical signature," Dunning said. "So far, we've identified several possible marketplaces. We don't know for sure that they're marketplaces, but they have an architectural layout that is suggestive of one."
Soil analysis at other locations identified evidence of ancient butcher shops and stone masons. Dunning solicited the help of UC's botanists who are conducting analyses that might shed light on his marketplace hypothesis. But the LIDAR maps themselves are instructive.
"I look at spatial patterns. If you look at these big structures and small pyramids, you can tell they're important structures," Carr said. "And then you have this 'lightweight' thing next to it. That's what a marketplace looks like to me."
Dunning said the ancient Maya likely sold perishable goods such as maize and a starchy tuber called manioc. And they traded "mantas," or bolts of the ornate and richly patterned textiles made from the cotton they grew. These were prized by the Spaniards who arrived in the 1600s.
"We don't have direct evidence of what the textiles look like in this area. But if you look at ancient paintings and sculptures, people were wearing very elaborate garments," Dunning said.
Dunning first explored the historic sites of the Yucatan Peninsula at age 14 when he and his older brother drove down to Mexico from Illinois.
"We took a train to the Yucatan and used public transportation to get around to the sites," Dunning said.
He applied to the University of Chicago partly because it offered a Mayan language class. Dunning returned to Mexico while in college to conduct his first field research. He's been back many times since.
"My interest in archaeology is in human-environment interactions, including agriculture," Dunning said.
Dunning is learning more about how ancient Maya people shaped their world to overcome challenges and take advantage of natural opportunities. Dunning's work also took him to a place called Acalan near the Gulf of Mexico.
"Roughly translated, Acalan means 'place of canoes' because it's very watery," Dunning said. "And getting around by water is far easier than any other means in that area."
Then as now the region is covered in thick tropical rainforest. Researchers have to be wary of cheeky monkeys that will throw fruit or worse from the treetops. Carr said one encounter left him sore for days.
"There was this aggressive spider monkey. He'd seen me a couple days earlier. And he's back shaking the trees," Carr said. "And all of a sudden, I'm lying flat on the ground. A branch hit me in the shoulder and knocked me to the ground."
Visiting archaeologists at Yaxnohcah stay at a former Army outpost that was converted into a staffed research station.
"Living conditions are actually luxurious by camping standards. You're in the field all day and you're dirty and tired. But you can take a shower. And when you're finished, someone has cooked you a meal," Carr said.
At Laguna de Terminos, UC researchers are working to collect clues about the ancient Maya before they are lost to development. Many of the wetlands are being drained or plowed up for grazing pasture.?
Dunning said ironically these low-yield pastures provide far less economic value to today's farmers than the seeming bounty of crops the ancient Maya derived from them more than 1,000 years ago. Their study warns the land-use practices are causing environmental damage to some of these valuable wetlands.
"It's a shame because the grazing isn't particularly good. The economic production from that land use is minuscule compared to what was produced by the Maya," Dunning said.

Thursday, March 28, 2019

Fur discoveries in Iron Age graves testify to respect for animals


University of Helsinki
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IMAGE: A microscopic image of deer fur found in a burial site used at the end of the Iron Age (800-1200 CE) in Vilusenharju, Tampere, central Finland. Photo: Tuija Kirkinen view more 
Credit: Tuija Kirkinen
The doctoral dissertation of Tuija Kirkinen, MA, examines the use and significance of furs in Finland and the region of Karelia surrendered to the Soviet Union. Furs were commonly used in burials in southern Finland until the 14th and 15th century, and in northern Finland as late as the 17th century. The most prevalent group of skins are those of large mammals, which were wrapped around the deceased. In cremation, bear skins were particularly popular, while Finnish forest reindeer and elk skin were commonly used in burials.
Clothes and objects were also manufactured from fur; a knife sheath could be covered or lined with fur.
Finland's oldest goat observation dates back to the Stone Age As research material, Kirkinen used hair and fur remains found in burial sites, as well as predator claws which had been attached to the skins.
"Contrary to initial assumptions, quite a lot of fur remains have been preserved in graves."
Animal hairs have been identified by their structure with the help of a microscope. Exceptionally, microscopically small hairs have been preserved in connection with other objects and even in the soil of a burial site dating back to the Stone Age (2800-2300 BCE). This finding, made in Perttulanmäki, Kauhava, western Finland, turned out to be Finland's oldest goat finding. As a result, Kirkinen's research provides recommendations for the handling of potential fibre material at archaeological excavations.
According to Kirkinen, Finland has presumably been situated at the intersection of two fur and bear traditions, one based in the west, the other in the east and north. Deer hunted for their meat stand out from the dataset, an aspect where Finnish data clearly differs from material found across Scandinavia. Fewer products made of mustelids and other more typical fur animals have been found, which makes Kirkinen think that fur use related to status was not very common in Finland and the Karelian Peninsula.
The treatment of prey speaks of respect Archaeological basic research increases our understanding of the past. The research carried out by Tuija Kirkinen opens perspectives on the relationship between humans and animals, particularly animals that serve as the origin of products used by humans.
"Wrapping bodies in fur is a tradition born already among hunting cultures. The continuation of this tradition all the way to early recorded history and, in Lapland, up to the 17th century, speaks of the preservation of a spiritual culture connected with hunting."
Wrapping the deceased in fur made it possible for them to join their ancestors, making the boundary between humans and animals less clear-cut than today. Ethnographic datasets also contain examples of narratives on how fur had to be handled with respect when sewing, or the animals would no longer give their skins up for humans to use.
"This is a distinct difference from modern fur farming," Kirkinen points out.
Grave archaeology has proven that traditions relating to hunting maintained a central role in communities otherwise dominated by agriculture. This is proof of the continued significance of hunting, both in terms of economics and culture.

Wednesday, March 27, 2019

Ancient Caribbean children helped with grocery shopping in AD 400


Florida Museum of Natural History
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IMAGE: Archaeologists concluded that thousands of discarded shells at a site in downtown St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands are evidence of ancient Saladoid children foraging for shellfish. West Indian... view more 
Credit: Florida Museum of Natural History
GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- Researchers have long thought that snail and clam shells found at Caribbean archaeological sites were evidence of "starvation food" eaten in times when other resources were lacking. Now, a University of Florida study suggests these shells may be evidence of children helping with the grocery shopping - A.D. 400 style.
Researchers found thousands of discarded shells at a site in downtown St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, likely evidence of ancient Saladoid children foraging for shellfish. Adult foragers typically would discard shells immediately after extracting the meat, meaning few shells made it back to archaeological sites, said William Keegan, curator of Caribbean archaeology at the Florida Museum of Natural History. This site, however, was littered with them.
"It's not that people were starving. It's that children were contributing to their own subsistence in a meaningful and very efficient way," Keegan said. "We need to think of children as active members that influence site materials and their distribution. It changes the whole attitude about the collection in the archaeological site."
For the most part, children have remained invisible to archaeologists until now, Keegan said. This study, the first to document child labor in an archaeological context, provides an important model for identifying children in the past and their contributions to their communities.
"Children are really the last group to receive any attention because to archaeology, they sort of look like little adults," he said. "Efforts to identify children so far have emphasized badly made objects, miniatures and things that look like toys - it isn't a complete perspective."
Children may have had a role in foraging, which for the Saladoid people meant collecting mollusks for food.
"If your parent needs to go to the grocery store, you have to go with them," Keegan said. "If you can do more than pull candy off the shelf, then you're that much more helpful."
Shells deposited in middens - mounds of shells and sediment that were once ancient garbage dumps - led Keegan's research team to believe that shellfish had been intentionally brought to the site, eaten and the shells then thrown away. The team also developed seven criteria to help determine if shellfish at archaeological sites were collected by children.
Shellfish collected by children are most easily identified by variety and size, Keegan said. Child foragers tend to be generalists, meaning that they're more likely to collect small shells indiscriminately. This research suggests that small, easy to transport and low-yield mollusks found in high amounts on a site indicate the presence of child foragers, he said.
"It looked like someone had sent a biology student with a one meter square and told them, 'Collect everything,'" Keegan said. "You can certainly collect a whole bucket of these things and you've got a good meal, but it's a waste of time for an adult to focus on those really small resources when they could be out collecting specific snails and clams that they know they can get a certain nutritional return on."
Recent construction has disturbed much of the site, and researchers were only able to excavate a snapshot of what was once there, Keegan said.
Because the Caribbean is a largely understudied area in archaeology, Keegan and his team had few ethnographic descriptions of the Saladoid's lifestyles to draw from. They chose to compare their findings with current research in the Pacific Islands, where foraging habits and available resources have remained virtually unchanged for millennia.
"It's not a direct application," Keegan said. "It's an analogy that shows what we're seeing in the living population is consistent with what we see in an archaeological population."
Evidence suggests that foraging together was a way Saladoid people built kinship, a practice still seen today in the Pacific Islands. The Saladoid people were a matrilocal society, meaning familial lineage was traced through women and men were frequently absent from day-to-day life.
"The women would often go on trips with children to collect things farther away," Keegan said. "The community functions holistically. By about age 15, children are involved in fully adult activities."
Keegan's work suggests that in some respects, children could actually outperform adults at certain tasks. Whereas adults focused on collecting larger shellfish from deeper waters, children were able to scour shallow areas for smaller shellfish that would be difficult for adult fingers to grasp.
"Children like being included. The same sorts of things children need in traditional societies are basically what we still need today to grow up to be healthy, useful adults," Keegan said. "In fact, it wasn't uncommon for children to collect small animals as pets."
Because the site is located on St. Thomas' main street, Keegan and his team were able to engage bystanders in their discoveries.
"What I think is unusual is that the road caps the site. Below the pipes, everything was completely intact," Keegan said. "The archaeologists were fenced in - all day long people were coming up to the fence, and we were showing them what we had, but that's all part of it. We want people to get excited about what we're doing."
Excavation was a collaborative effort that included several experts from different disciplines, lending a broader perspective to the team's findings, Keegan said. The team was assembled by David Hayes, a founding member of the St. Croix Archaeological Society and project collaborator.
"For us, it's always a new puzzle, trying to get the pieces to fit together. One of the real joys of this project was that even though there were specialists for each area, we were all together in the field," Keegan said. "We were all working on the issues together, talking about things and getting a broad picture of what was going on rather than just a narrow focus of one archaeological material."

Thursday, March 21, 2019

Latest Archaeology News

Near East

 

First Anatolian farmers were local hunter-gatherers that adopted agriculture

Jonathan KantrowitzatArchaeology News Report - 22 hours ago
An international team, led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and in collaboration with scientists from the United Kingdom, Turkey and Israel, has analyzed 8 pre-historic individuals, including the first genome-wide data from a 15,000-year-old Anatolian hunter-gatherer, and found that the first Anatolian farmers were direct descendants of local hunter-gatherers. These findings provide support for archaeological evidence that farming was adopted and developed by local hunter-gatherers who changed their subsistence strategy, rather than being ... more »
 
Africa

North Africans were among the first to colonize the Canary Islands

Jonathan KantrowitzatArchaeology News Report - 22 hours ago
People from North Africa are likely the main group that founded the indigenous population on the Canary Islands, arriving by 1000 CE, reports a new study by Rosa Fregel of Stanford University, USA and Universidad de La Laguna, Spain, and colleagues, published March 20, 2019 in the open-access journal *PLOS ONE*. Numerous studies of the culture and genetics of indigenous people living in the Canary Islands, an archipelago off the coast of Morocco, point to North African Berbers as the founders, but more recent human activities - such as the Spanish conquest, the start of sugarcane pl... more »
 

New light on the origins of modern humans

Jonathan KantrowitzatArchaeology News Report - 23 hours ago
[image: IMAGE] *IMAGE: *This is a map showing early African archaeological sites with evidence for symbolic material and microlithic stone tools view more Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Image by Reto Stöckli RESEARCHERS from the University of Huddersfield, with colleagues from the University of Cambridge and the University of Minho in Braga, have been using a genetic approach to tackle one of the most intractable questions of all - how and when we became truly human. Modern *Homo sapiens* first arose in Africa more than 300,000 years ago, but there is great controversy amon... more »

How tiny tools may have made us human

Jonathan KantrowitzatArchaeology News Report - 1 week ago
[image: IMAGE] *IMAGE: *The iconic, tear-drop shaped hand axe, which filled a human palm, required a large toolkit to produce (left), in contrast to a toolkit for tiny flakes. view more Credit: Emory University Anthropologists have long made the case that tool-making is one of the key behaviors that separated our human ancestors from other primates. A new paper, however, argues that it was not tool-making that set hominins apart -- it was the miniaturization of tools. Just as tiny transistors transformed telecommunications a few decades ago, and scientists are now challenged to ma... more »
 
 

Earlier emergence of malaria in Africa

Jonathan KantrowitzatArchaeology News Report - 2 weeks ago
Institut Pasteur [image: IMAGE] *IMAGE: *New research suggests an earlier emergence of malaria in Africa. view more Credit: © Institut Pasteur Malaria, which claims hundreds of thousands of lives each year - mainly children and especially in Africa -, is one of the leading causes of death by an infectious agent, the Plasmodium falciparum parasite. In research on malaria, the genetic mutation that causes sickle cell anemia (also known as drepanocytosis), a chronic disease that is often fatal in children under five, caught the attention of the scientific community very early on becau... more »
 

A shared past for East Africa's hunter-gatherers

Jonathan KantrowitzatArchaeology News Report - 4 weeks ago
A genomic analysis suggests African hunting and gathering groups diverged from a common ancestry, and underscores the role of infectious disease and diet as drivers of local adaptation University of Pennsylvania [image: IMAGE] *IMAGE: *With the help of a local translator, Simon Thompson from Sarah Tishkoff's lab (University of Pennsylvania) and Dawit Wolde-Meskel (collaborator from Addis Ababa University) explain the research project on African... view more Credit: Tishkoff lab Languages that involve "clicks" are relatively rare worldwide but are spoken by several groups in Africa.... more »
 
Worldwide

Complex societies gave birth to big gods, not the other way around

Jonathan KantrowitzatArchaeology News Report - 23 hours ago
[image: IMAGE] *IMAGE: *Locations of the 30 sampled regions labelled according to precolonial evidence of moralizing gods. The area of each circle is proportional to social complexity of the earliest polity with moralizing... view more Credit: (c) the authors of the paper (Vienna, March 20, 2019) An international research team, including a member of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna, investigated the role of "big gods" in the rise of complex large-scale societies. Big gods are defined as moralizing deities who punish ethical transgressions. Contrary to prevailing theories, the te... more »

Diet-related changes in human bite spread new speech sounds

Jonathan KantrowitzatArchaeology News Report - 6 days ago
Diet-induced changes favor innovation in speech sounds University of Zurich Diet-induced changes in the human bite resulted in new sounds such as "f" in languages all over the world, a study by an international team led by researchers at the University of Zurich has shown. The findings contradict the theory that the range of human sounds has remained fixed throughout human history. Human speech is incredibly diverse, ranging from ubiquitous sounds like "m" and "a" to the rare click consonants in some languages of Southern Africa. This range of sounds is generally thought to have be... more »
 
Europe

Earliest known Mariner's Astrolabe

Jonathan KantrowitzatArchaeology News Report - 2 days ago
[image: IMAGE] *IMAGE: *Guinness World Records have independently certified an astrolabe excavated from the wreck site of a Portuguese Armada Ship that was part of Vasco da Gama's second voyage to India in... view more Credit: David Mearns Guinness World Records have independently certified an astrolabe excavated from the wreck site of a Portuguese Armada Ship that was part of Vasco da Gama's second voyage to India in 1502-1503 as the oldest in the world, and have separately certified a ship's bell (dated 1498) recovered from the same wreck site also as the oldest in the world. The... more »

Genetic history of the Iberian Peninsula revealed by dual studies

Jonathan KantrowitzatArchaeology News Report - 6 days ago
i [image: IMAGE] *IMAGE: *Excavation work in progress at the site of Balma Guilanyà. view more Credit: CEPAP-UAB An international team of researchers have analyzed ancient DNA from almost 300 individuals from the Iberian Peninsula, spanning more than 12,000 years, in two studies published today in *Current Biology* and *Science*. The first study looked at hunter-gatherers and early farmers living in Iberia between 13,000 and 6000 years ago. The second looked at individuals from the region during all time periods over the last 8000 years. Together, the two papers greatly increase our... more »

Ancient DNA from the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) suggests that the Iberian male lineages were almost completely replaced between 4,500 and 4,000 years ago by newcomers originating on the Russian steppe

Jonathan KantrowitzatArchaeology News Report - 6 days ago
[image: IMAGE] *IMAGE: *The University of Huddersfield's Archaeogenetics Research Group joined an international team conducting the study which spanned an 8,000-year period. view more Credit: University of Huddersfield THE University of Huddersfield's Archaeogenetics Research Group has been involved in a major international collaboration documenting the settlement of Iberia over the last eight thousand years, published on 14 March in the journal *Science*. The work, which involved 111 researchers from Harvard Medical School in the United States, the Max-Planck Institute for the Sci... more »

Thanks to pig remains, scientists uncover extensive human mobility to sites near Stonehenge

Jonathan KantrowitzatArchaeology News Report - 1 week ago
A mutli-isotope analysis of pigs remains found around henge complexes near Stonehenge has revealed the large extent and scale of movements of human communities in Britain during the Late Neolithic. The findings "demonstrate a level of interaction and social complexity not previously appreciated," the authors say, and provide insight into more than a century of debate surrounding the origins of people and animals in the Stonehenge landscape. Neolithic henge complexes, located in southern Britain, have long been studied for their role as ceremonial centers. Feasts that were unpreced... more »
 

'Ibiza is different', genetically

Jonathan KantrowitzatArchaeology News Report - 3 weeks ago
An investigation reveals that Ibizans are genetically different from the rest of Spain inhabitants. The genetic difference is comparable to that between Basques and the rest of peninsular inhabitants, considered a genetic anomaly to date. Universitat Pompeu Fabra - Barcelona [image: IMAGE] *IMAGE: *These are remains of the Phoenician settlement of Sa Caleta (Ibiza). view more Credit: UPF Ibiza is different." That is what the hundreds of standard-bearers of the "hippie" movement who visited the Pitiusan Island during the 60s thought, fascinated by its climate and its unexplored na... more »
 

Researchers find a piece of Palaeolithic art featuring birds and humans

Jonathan KantrowitzatArchaeology News Report - 1 week ago
An exceptional milestone in European Palaeolithic rock art University of Barcelona [image: IMAGE] *IMAGE: *Image of the findings with a tracing of the engraved figures on the piece. view more Credit: UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA It is not very common to find representations of scenes instead of individual figures in Palaeolithic art, but it is even harder for these figures to be birds instead of mammals such as goats, deer or horses. So far, historians have only found three scenes of Palaeolithic art featuring humans and birds in Europe. Now, an article published in the journal *L'Anthro... more »
 

Foxes were domesticated by humans in the Bronze Age

Jonathan KantrowitzatArchaeology News Report - 3 weeks ago
[image: IMAGE] *IMAGE: *Artistic representation of a woman of the Bronze Age accompanied by a dog and a fox. view more Credit: J. A. Peñas In the northeast of the Iberian Peninsula, between the third and second millennium BC, a widespread funeral practice consisted in burying humans with animals. Scientists have discovered that both foxes and dogs were domesticated, as their diet was similar to that of their owners. The discovery of four foxes and a large number of dogs at the Can Roqueta (Barcelona) and Minferri (Lleida) sites stands out among the many examples of tombs in differen... more »
 

Quarrying of Stonehenge 'bluestones' dated to 3000 BC

Jonathan KantrowitzatArchaeology News Report - 4 weeks ago
[image: IMAGE] *IMAGE: *This is the Stonehenge quarry. view more Credit: UCL Excavations at two quarries in Wales, known to be the source of the Stonehenge 'bluestones', provide new evidence of megalith quarrying 5,000 years ago, according to a new UCL-led study. Geologists have long known that 42 of Stonehenge's smaller stones, known as 'bluestones', came from the Preseli hills in Pembrokeshire, west Wales. Now a new study published in *Antiquity* pinpoints the exact locations of two of these quarries and reveals when and how the stones were quarried. The discovery has been made b... more »
 

Dog burial as common ritual in Neolithic populations of north-eastern Iberian Peninsula

Jonathan KantrowitzatArchaeology News Report - 4 weeks ago
[image: IMAGE] *IMAGE: *Top: remains of adult dog in partial anatomical connection in La Serreta. Bottom: dog in anatomical connection between human skeletons, in the necropolis Bòbila Madurell. view more Credit: UB-UAB Coinciding with the Pit Grave culture (4200-3600 years before our era), coming from Southern Europe, the Neolithic communities of the north-eastern Iberian Peninsula started a ceremonial activity related to the sacrifice and burial of dogs. The high amount of cases that are recorded in Catalonia suggests it was a general practice and it proves the tight relationship ... more »
 
Americas

Hundreds of children and llamas sacrificed in a ritual event in 15th century Peru

Jonathan KantrowitzatArchaeology News Report - 2 weeks ago
The largest sacrifice of its kind known from the Americas was associated with heavy rainfall and flooding [image: IMAGE] *IMAGE: *Mummified children view more Credit: John Verano (2019) A mass sacrifice at a 15th century archaeological site in Peru saw the ritual killing of over 140 children and over 200 llamas, according to a study released March 6, 2019 in the open access journal *PLOS ONE* by Gabriel Prieto of the National University of Trujillo, Peru and colleagues. This is the largest known mass sacrifice of children - and of llamas - in the New World. Human and animal sacrif... more »

Oldest tattoo tool in western North America

Jonathan KantrowitzatArchaeology News Report - 2 weeks ago
[image: IMAGE] *IMAGE: *This is a close up of a 2,000-year-old cactus spine tattoo tool discovered by WSU archaeologist Andrew Gillreath-Brown. view more Credit: Bob Hubner/WSU PULLMAN, Wash. - Washington State University archaeologists have discovered the oldest tattooing artifact in western North America. With a handle of skunkbush and a cactus-spine business end, the tool was made around 2,000 years ago by the Ancestral Pueblo people of the Basketmaker II period in what is now southeastern Utah. Andrew Gillreath-Brown, an anthropology PhD candidate, chanced upon the pen-sized in... more »

Northwest Coast clam gardens nearly 2,000 years older than previously thought

Jonathan KantrowitzatArchaeology News Report - 3 weeks ago
[image: IMAGE] *IMAGE: *A study led by SFU archaeology professor Dana Lepofsky and Hakai Institute researcher Nicole Smith reveals that clam gardens, ancient Indigenous food security systems located along B.C.'s coast, date back... view more Credit: Nicole Smith A study led by SFU archaeology professor Dana Lepofsky and Hakai Institute researcher Nicole Smith reveals that clam gardens, ancient Indigenous food security systems located along B.C.'s coast, date back at least 3,500 years--almost 2,000 years older than previously thought. These human-built beach terraces continue to ... more »

Ancient poop helps show climate change contributed to fall of Cahokia

Jonathan KantrowitzatArchaeology News Report - 3 weeks ago
A new study shows climate change may have contributed to the decline of Cahokia, a famed prehistoric city near present-day St. Louis. And it involves ancient human poop. Published today [Feb. 25, 2019] in the *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences*, the study provides a direct link between changes in Cahokia's population size as measured through a unique fecal record and environmental data showing evidence of drought and flood. "The way of building population reconstructions usually involves archaeological data, which is separate from the data studied by climate scientists... more »
 

Pottery reveals America's first social media networks

Jonathan KantrowitzatArchaeology News Report - 4 weeks ago
Ancient Indigenous societies, including Mississippian Mound cultures, were built through social networks, PNAS study suggests Washington University in St. Louis [image: IMAGE] *IMAGE: *Examples of the kinds of pottery produced by people living across southern Appalachia between AD 800 and 1650. The unique symbols were stamped onto the pottery when the clay was... view more Credit: Jacob Lulewicz Long before Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and even MySpace, early Mississippian Mound cultures in America's southern Appalachian Mountains shared artistic trends and technologies across regio... more »
 

Safe harbor for Native residents during the Mission era and beyond

Jonathan KantrowitzatArchaeology News Report - 4 weeks ago
* Latest findings will be discussed during the Society for California Archaeology annual meeting March 7-10 in Sacramento University of California - Santa Cruz [image: IMAGE] *IMAGE: *This obsidian point was recovered from the site of a 19th-century Coast Miwok village. view more Credit: Carolyn Lagattuta Contrary to the dominant narrative of cultural extinction, indigenous residents of Marin County survived colonization, preserving and passing on their traditions and cultural practices, says a UC Santa Cruz anthropologist who will present his latest research during a conference in M.
 

Biocolonizer species are putting the conservation of the granite at Machu Picchu at risk

Jonathan KantrowitzatArchaeology News Report - 4 weeks ago
[image: IMAGE] *IMAGE: *There is a wide variety of biocolonizer species that are putting the conservation of the granite at Machu Picchu at risk. view more Credit: Héctor Morillas / UPV/EHU The Sacred Rock is one of the most important monuments at the Inca sanctuary Machu Picchu, located in the Cusco region in Peru. It is a granitic rock that the Inca culture used for religious worship as it was regarded as the gateway between earth and heaven. Owing to the location and climate conditions of the site, many rocks in the archaeological city are affected by biocolonization. And at the... more »
 
Neanderthals

Neanderthals walked upright just like the humans of today U

Jonathan KantrowitzatArchaeology News Report - 3 weeks ago
[image: IMAGE] *IMAGE: *Virtual reconstruction of the skeleton found in La Chapelle-aux-Saints, based on high-resolution 3D surface scans of the spine and pelvis. view more Credit: Martin Häusler, UZH. Neanderthals are often depicted as having straight spines and poor posture. However, these prehistoric humans were more similar to us than many assume. University of Zurich researchers have shown that Neanderthals walked upright just like modern humans - thanks to a virtual reconstruction of the pelvis and spine of a very well-preserved Neanderthal skeleton found in France. An upright... more »

Neandertals' main food source was definitely meat

Jonathan KantrowitzatArchaeology News Report - 4 weeks ago
[image: IMAGE] *IMAGE: *Tooth of an adult Neandertal from Les Cottés in France. Her diet consisted mainly of the meat of large herbivore mammals. view more Credit: © MPI f. Evolutionary Anthropology/ A. Le Cabec Neandertals' diets are highly debated: they are traditionally considered carnivores and hunters of large mammals, but this hypothesis has recently been challenged by numerous pieces of evidence of plant consumption. Ancient diets are often reconstructed using nitrogen isotope ratios, a tracer of the trophic level, the position an organism occupies in a food chain. Neandertal... more »

First Neanderthal footprints found in Gibraltar

Jonathan KantrowitzatArchaeology News Report - 5 weeks ago
[image: IMAGE] *IMAGE: *The place where the footprint was found. view more Credit: Universdad de Sevilla The prestigious international journal *Quaternary Science Reviews* has just published a paper which has involved the participation of Gibraltarian scientists from The Gibraltar National Museum alongside colleagues from Spain, Portugal and Japan. The results which have been published come from an area of the Catalan Bay Sand Dune. This work started ten years ago, when the first dates using the OSL method were obtained. It is then that the first traces of footprints left by verte... more »
 
Asia

New research casts doubt on cause of Angkor's collapse

Jonathan KantrowitzatArchaeology News Report - 3 weeks ago
University of Sydney [image: IMAGE] *IMAGE: *The ancient city of Angkor, Cambodia. view more Credit: The University of Sydney New University of Sydney research has revealed the ancient Cambodian city of Angkor underwent a gradual decline in occupation rather than an abrupt collapse. Researchers have long debated the causes of Angkor's demise in the 15th century. Historical explanations have emphasised the role of aggressive neighbouring states, and the abandonment of Angkor in 1431 A.D. has been portrayed as a catastrophic demographic collapse. However, new scientific evidence shows... more »

The monkey hunters: Humans colonize South Asian rainforest by hunting primates

Jonathan KantrowitzatArchaeology News Report - 4 weeks ago
[image: IMAGE] *IMAGE: *This is an exterior view of the entrance of Fa-Hien Lena cave in Sri Lanka. view more Credit: O. Wedage A multidisciplinary study has found evidence for humans hunting small mammals in the forests of Sri Lanka at least 45,000 years ago. The researchers discovered the remains of small mammals, including primates, with evidence of cut-marks and burning at the oldest archaeological site occupied by humans in Sri Lanka, alongside sophisticated bone and stone tools. The hunting of such animals is an example of the uniquely human adaptability that allowed *H. sapi... more »

Wednesday, March 20, 2019

First Anatolian farmers were local hunter-gatherers that adopted agriculture

An international team, led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and in collaboration with scientists from the United Kingdom, Turkey and Israel, has analyzed 8 pre-historic individuals, including the first genome-wide data from a 15,000-year-old Anatolian hunter-gatherer, and found that the first Anatolian farmers were direct descendants of local hunter-gatherers. These findings provide support for archaeological evidence that farming was adopted and developed by local hunter-gatherers who changed their subsistence strategy, rather than being introduced by a large movement of people from another area. Interestingly, while the study shows the long-term persistence of the Anatolian hunter-gatherer gene pool over 7,000 years, it also indicates a pattern of genetic interactions with neighboring groups.
Farming was developed approximately 11,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, a region that includes present-day Iraq, Syria, Israel, Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan as well as the fringes of southern Anatolia and western Iran. By about 8,300 BCE it had spread to central Anatolia, in present-day Turkey. These early Anatolian farmers subsequently migrated throughout Europe, bringing this new subsistence strategy and their genes. Today, the single largest component of the ancestry of modern-day Europeans comes from these Anatolian farmers. It has long been debated, however, whether farming was brought to Anatolia similarly by a group of migrating farmers from the Fertile Crescent, or whether the local hunter-gatherers of Anatolia adopted farming practices from their neighbors.
A new study by an international team of scientists led by the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and in collaboration with scientists from the United Kingdom, Turkey and Israel, published in Nature Communications, confirms existing archaeological evidence that shows that Anatolian hunter-gatherers did indeed adopt farming themselves, and the later Anatolian farmers were direct descendants of a gene-pool that remained relatively stable for over 7,000 years.
Local hunter-gatherers adopted an agricultural lifestyle
For this study, the researchers newly analyzed ancient DNA from 8 individuals, and succeeded in recovering for the first time whole-genome data from a 15,000-year-old Anatolian hunter-gatherer. This allowed the team to compare that individual's DNA to later Anatolian farmers, as well as individuals from neighboring regions, to determine how they were related. They also compared the individuals newly analyzed in the study to existing data from 587 ancient individuals and 254 present-day populations.
The researchers found that the early Anatolian farmers derived the vast majority of their ancestry (~90%) from a population related to the Anatolian hunter-gatherer in the study. "This suggests a long-term genetic stability in central Anatolia over five millennia, despite changes in climate and subsistence strategy," explains Michal Feldman of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
"Our results provide additional, genetic support for previous archaeological evidence that suggests that Anatolia was not merely a stepping stone in a movement of early farmers from the Fertile Crescent into Europe," states Choongwon Jeong of the Max Planck Institute of the Science of Human History, co-senior author of the study. "Rather, it was a place where local hunter-gatherers adopted ideas, plants and technology that led to agricultural subsistence."
Genetic interactions with neighbors warrant further study
In addition to the long-term stability of the major component of the Anatolian ancestry, the researchers also found a pattern of interactions with their neighbors. By the time that farming had taken hold in Anatolia between 8,300-7,800 BCE, the researchers found that the local population had about a 10% genetic contribution from populations related to those living in what is today Iran and the neighboring Caucasus, with almost the entire remaining 90% coming from Anatolian hunter-gatherers. By about 7000-6000 BCE, however, the Anatolian farmers derived about 20% of their ancestry from populations related to those living in the Levant region.
"There are some large gaps, both in time and geography, in the genomes we currently have available for study," explains Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, senior author on the study. "This makes it difficult to say how these more subtle genetic interactions took place - whether it was through short-term large movements of people, or more frequent but low-level interactions." The researchers hope that further research in this and neighboring regions could help to answer these questions.

North Africans were among the first to colonize the Canary Islands


People from North Africa are likely the main group that founded the indigenous population on the Canary Islands, arriving by 1000 CE, reports a new study by Rosa Fregel of Stanford University, USA and Universidad de La Laguna, Spain, and colleagues, published March 20, 2019 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.
Numerous studies of the culture and genetics of indigenous people living in the Canary Islands, an archipelago off the coast of Morocco, point to North African Berbers as the founders, but more recent human activities - such as the Spanish conquest, the start of sugarcane plantations and the slave trade - have changed the indigenous population's genetic makeup. To shed light on who first colonized the archipelago, researchers analyzed 48 ancient mitochondrial genomes from 25 archaeological sites across the seven main islands. They selected mitochondrial genomes because, since they are inherited directly from the mother, they are especially consistent and useful for tracking human migrations.
The researchers discovered lineages that have only been observed in Central North Africa, and others that have a wider distribution including both West and Central North Africa, and, in some cases, Europe and the Near East. They also identified four new lineages specific to the Canary Islands, which, when analyzed together, are consistent with radiocarbon dating evidence showing that people reached the islands by 1000 CE. Additionally, the researchers found that the distribution of the different lineages on each island varies depending on the island's distance from the continent, which supports previous studies finding that the islands experienced at least two distinct early migration events.
The Canary Islands lineages discovered in this study fit into a larger pattern of Mediterranean migration through North Africa, as part of the Neolithic expansion of humans from the Middle East to Europe and Africa. The presence of these Mediterranean lineages suggests that the Berbers had already mixed with Mediterranean groups at the time that they colonized the islands.
The authors add: "Using next-generation techniques, we have been able to obtain ancient DNA of the indigenous population of all the seven Canary Islands for the first time. Our results indicate that mitochondrial DNA diversity is variable within the archipelago, suggesting that the colonization of the islands was a heterogeneous process and that the different islands had different evolutionary histories."

Complex societies gave birth to big gods, not the other way around




(Vienna, March 20, 2019) An international research team, including a member of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna, investigated the role of "big gods" in the rise of complex large-scale societies. Big gods are defined as moralizing deities who punish ethical transgressions. Contrary to prevailing theories, the team found that beliefs in big gods are a consequence, not a cause, of the evolution of complex societies. The results are published in the current issue of the journal Nature.
For their statistical analyses the researchers used the Seshat: Global History Databank, the most comprehensive, and constantly growing collection of historical and prehistorical data. Currently Seshat contains about 300,000 records on social complexity, religion, and other characteristics of 500 past societies, spanning 10,000 years of human history.
"It has been a debate for centuries why humans, unlike other animals, cooperate in large groups of genetically unrelated individuals," says Seshat director and co-author Peter Turchin from the University of Connecticut and the Complexity Science Hub Vienna. Factors such as agriculture, warfare, or religion have been proposed as main driving forces.
One prominent theory, the big or moralizing gods hypothesis, assumes that religious beliefs were key. According to this theory people are more likely to cooperate fairly if they believe in gods who will punish them if they don't. "To our surprise, our data strongly contradict this hypothesis," says lead author Harvey Whitehouse. "In almost every world region for which we have data, moralizing gods tended to follow, not precede, increases in social complexity." Even more so, standardized rituals tended on average to appear hundreds of years before gods who cared about human morality.
Such rituals create a collective identity and feelings of belonging that act as social glue, making people to behave more cooperatively. "Our results suggest that collective identities are more important to facilitate cooperation in societies than religious beliefs," says Harvey Whitehouse.
Big data: a new approach to social theories Until recently it has been impossible to distinguish between cause and effect in social theories and history, as standardized quantitative data from throughout world history were missing. To address this problem, data and social scientist Peter Turchin, together with Harvey Whitehouse and Pieter François from the University of Oxford, founded Seshat in 2011. The multidisciplinary project integrates the expertise of historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, social scientists as well as data scientists into a state-of-the-art, open-access database. Dozens of experts throughout the world helped to assemble detailed data on social complexity and religious beliefs and practices from hundreds of independent political units ("polities"), beginning with Neolithic Anatolians (today Turkey) in 9600 BCE.
The complexity of a society can be estimated by social characteristics such as population, territory, and sophistication of government institutions and information systems. Religious data include the presence of beliefs in supernatural enforcement of reciprocity, fairness, and loyalty, and the frequency and standardization of religious rituals.
"Seshat allows researchers to analyze hundreds of variables relating to social complexity, religion, warfare, agriculture and other features of human culture and society that vary over time and space," explains Pieter François. "Now that the database is ready for analysis, we are poised to test a long list of theories about human history." This includes competing theories of how and why humans evolved to cooperate in large-scale societies of millions and more people.
"Seshat is an unprecedented collaboration between anthropologists, historians, archaeologists, mathematicians, computer scientists, and evolutionary scientists", says Patrick Savage, corresponding author of the article. "It shows how big data can revolutionize the study of human history."
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Harvey Whitehouse, Pieter François, Patrick E. Savage, [...] Peter Turchin. (2019) "Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history", Nature http://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1043-4
The published Seshat data are available at http://seshatdatabank.info/data

New light on the origins of modern humans

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IMAGE: This is a map showing early African archaeological sites with evidence for symbolic material and microlithic stone tools view more 
Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Image by Reto Stöckli
RESEARCHERS from the University of Huddersfield, with colleagues from the University of Cambridge and the University of Minho in Braga, have been using a genetic approach to tackle one of the most intractable questions of all - how and when we became truly human.
Modern Homo sapiens first arose in Africa more than 300,000 years ago, but there is great controversy amongst scholars about whether the earliest such people would have been 'just like us' in their mental capacities - in the sense that, if they were brought up in a family from Yorkshire today, for example, would they be indistinguishable from the rest of the population? Nevertheless, archaeologists believe that people very like us were living in small communities in an Ice Age refuge on the South African coast by at least 100,000 years ago.
Between around 100,000 and 70,000 years ago, these people left plentiful evidence that they were thinking and behaving like modern humans - evidence for symbolism, such as the use of pigments (probably for body painting), drawings and engravings, shell beads, and tiny stone tools called microliths that might have been part of bows and arrows. Some of this evidence for what some archaeologists call "modern human behaviour" goes back even further, to more than 150,000 years.
But if these achievements somehow made these people special, suggesting a direct line to the people of today, the genetics of their modern "Khoi-San" descendants in southern Africa doesn't seem to bear this out. Our genomes imply that almost all modern non-Africans from all over the world - and indeed most Africans too - are derived from a small group of people living not in South Africa but in East Africa, around 60,000-70,000 years ago. There's been no sign so far that southern Africans contributed to the huge expansion of Homo sapiens out of Africa and across the world that took place around that time.
That is, until now. The Huddersfield-Minho team of geneticists, led by Professor Martin Richards at Huddersfield and Dr Pedro Soares in Braga, along with the eminent Cambridge archaeologist Professor Sir Paul Mellars, have studied the maternally-inherited mitochondrial DNA from Africans in unprecedented detail, and have identified a clear signal of a small-scale migration from South Africa to East Africa that took place at just that time, around 65,000 years ago. The signal is only evident today in the mitochondrial DNA. In the rest of the genome, it seems to have been eroded away to nothing by recombination - the reshuffling of chromosomal genes between parents every generation, which doesn't affect the mitochondrial DNA - in the intervening millennia.
The migration signal makes good sense in terms of climate. For most of the last few hundred years, different parts of Africa have been out of step with each other in terms of the aridity of the climate. Only for a brief period at 60,000-70,000 years ago was there a window during which the continent as a whole experienced sufficient moisture to open up a corridor between the south and the east. And intriguingly, it was around 65,000 years ago that some of the signs of symbolism and technological complexity seen earlier in South Africa start to appear in the east.
The identification of this signal opens up the possibility that a migration of a small group of people from South Africa towards the east around 65,000 years ago transmitted aspects of their sophisticated modern human culture to people in East Africa. Those East African people were biologically little different from the South Africans - they were all modern Homo sapiens, their brains were just as advanced and they were undoubtedly cognitively ready to receive the benefits of the new ideas and upgrade. But the way it happened might not have been so very different from a modern isolated stone-age culture encountering and embracing western civilization today.
In any case, it looks as if something happened when the groups from the South encountered the East, with the upshot being the greatest diaspora of Homo sapiens ever known - both throughout Africa and out of Africa to settle much of Eurasia and as far as Australia within the space of only a few thousand years.
Professor Mellars commented: "This work shows that the combination of genetics and archaeology working together can lead to significant advances in our understanding of the origins of Homo sapiens."

Monday, March 18, 2019

Earliest known Mariner's Astrolabe



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IMAGE: Guinness World Records have independently certified an astrolabe excavated from the wreck site of a Portuguese Armada Ship that was part of Vasco da Gama's second voyage to India in... view more 
Credit: David Mearns
Guinness World Records have independently certified an astrolabe excavated from the wreck site of a Portuguese Armada Ship that was part of Vasco da Gama's second voyage to India in 1502-1503 as the oldest in the world, and have separately certified a ship's bell (dated 1498) recovered from the same wreck site also as the oldest in the world.
The scientific process of verifying the disc as an astrolabe by laser imaging is described in a paper published today by Mearns and Jason Warnett and Mark Williams of WMG at the University of Warwick in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology.
The Sodré astrolabe has made it into the Guinness Book of world records is believed to have been made between 1496 and 1501 and is unique in comparison to all other mariner's astrolabes.
Mariner's Astrolabes were used for navigating at sea by early explorers, most notably the Portuguese and Spanish.
They are considered to be the rarest and most prized of artefacts to be found on ancient shipwrecks and only 104 examples are known to exist in the world.
They were first used at sea on a Portuguese voyage down the west coast of Africa in 1481. Thereafter, astrolabes were relied on for navigation during the most important explorations of the late 15th century, including those led by Bartolomeu Dias, Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama.
It is the only solid disk type astrolabe with a verifiable provenance and the only specimen decorated with a national symbol: the royal coat of arms of Portugal.
As the earliest verifiable mariner's astrolabe it fills a chronological gap in the development of these iconic instruments and is believed to be a transitional instrument between the classic planispheric astrolabe and the open-wheel type astrolabe that came into use sometime before 1517.
The thin 175 mm diameter disk weighing 344 grams was analysed by a team from WMG who travelled to Muscat, Oman in November 2016 to collect laser scans of a selection of the most important artefacts recovered from the wreck site.
Using a portable 7-axis Nikon laser scanner, capable of collecting over 50,000 points per second at an accuracy of 60 microns, a 3D virtual model of the artefact was created.
Analysis of the results revealed a series of 18 scale marks spaced at uniform intervals along the limb of the disk.
Further analysis by WMG engineers showed that the spacing of the scale marks was equivalent to 5-degree intervals. This was critical evidence that allowed independent experts at Texas A&M University to include the disk in their global inventory as the earliest known mariner's astrolabe discovered to date.
Prof Mark Williams from WMG, University of Warwick comments:
"Using this 3D scanning technology has enabled us to confirm the identity of the earliest known astrolabe, from this historians and scientists can determine more about history and how ships navigated.
Technology like this betters our understanding of how the disc would have worked back in the 15th century. Using technology normally applied within engineering projects to help shed insight into such a valuable artefact was a real privilege"
David Mearns of Blue Water Recoveries Ltd comments:
"Without the laser scanning work performed by WMG we would never have known that the scale marks, which were invisible to the naked eye, existed. Their analysis proved beyond doubt that the disk was a mariner's astrolabe. This has allowed us to confidently place the Sodré astrolabe in its correct chronological position and propose it to be an important transitional instrument."

Thursday, March 14, 2019

Diet-related changes in human bite spread new speech sounds




Diet-induced changes in the human bite resulted in new sounds such as "f" in languages all over the world, a study by an international team led by researchers at the University of Zurich has shown. The findings contradict the theory that the range of human sounds has remained fixed throughout human history.


Human speech is incredibly diverse, ranging from ubiquitous sounds like "m" and "a" to the rare click consonants in some languages of Southern Africa. This range of sounds is generally thought to have been established with the emergence of the Homo sapiens around 300,000 years ago. A study by an international group headed up by scientists at the University of Zurich and involving researchers at two Max Planck Institutes, the University of Lyon and Nanyang Technological University Singapore now sheds new light on the evolution of spoken language. The study shows that sounds such as "f" and "v", both common in many modern languages, are a relatively recent development that was brought about by diet-induced changes in the human bite.

Dental changes allow new sounds

While the teeth of humans used to meet in an edge-to-edge bite due to their harder and tougher diet at the time, more recent softer foods allowed modern humans to retain the juvenile overbite that had previously disappeared by adulthood, with the upper teeth slightly more in front than the lower teeth. This shift led to the rise of a new class of speech sounds now found in half of the world's languages: labiodentals, or sounds made by touching the lower lip to the upper teeth, for example when pronouncing the letter "f".
"In Europe, our data suggests that the use of labiodentals has increased dramatically only in the last couple of millennia, correlated with the rise of food processing technology such as industrial milling," explains Steven Moran, one of the two co-first authors of the study. "The influence of biological conditions on the development of sounds has so far been underestimated."
Interdisciplinary approach to verify hypothesis
The project was inspired by an observation made by linguist Charles Hockett back in 1985. Hockett noticed that languages that foster labiodentals are often found in societies with access to softer foods. "But there are dozens of superficial correlations involving language which are spurious, and linguistic behavior, such as pronunciation, doesn't fossilize," says co-first author Damián Blasi.
In order to unravel the mechanisms underlying the observed correlations, the scientists combined insights, data and methods from across the sciences, including biological anthropology, phonetics and historical linguistics. "It was a rare case of consilience across disciplines," says Blasi. What made the project possible was the availability of newly developed, large datasets, detailed biomechanical simulation models, and computationally intensive methods of data analysis, according to the researchers.
Listening in on the past
"Our results shed light on complex causal links between cultural practices, human biology and language," says Balthasar Bickel, project leader and UZH professor. "They also challenge the common assumption that, when it comes to language, the past sounds just like the present." Based on the findings of the study and the new methods it developed, linguists can now tackle a host of unsolved questions, such as how languages actually sounded thousands of years ago. Did Caesar say "veni, vidi, vici" - or was it more like "weni, widi, wici'"?