Ancient Egyptian manual reveals new details about mummification

UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN - FACULTY OF HUMANITIES

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IMAGE: THE PAPYRUS CONTAINS NEW EVIDENCE OF THE PROCEDURE FOR EMBALMING THE DECEASED'S FACE, WHERE THE FACE IS COVERED WITH A PIECE OF RED LINEN AND AROMATIC SUBSTANCES. view more 

CREDIT: IDA CHRISTENSEN, UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN

Based on a manual recently discovered in a 3,500-year-old medical papyrus, University of Copenhagen Egyptologist Sofie Schiødt has been able to help reconstruct the embalming process used to prepare ancient Egyptians for the afterlife. It is the oldest surviving manual on mummification yet discovered.

In ancient Egypt, embalming was considered a sacred art, and knowledge of the process was the preserve of very few individuals. Most secrets of the art were probably passed on orally from one embalmer to the other, Egyptologists believe, so written evidence is scarce; until recently, only two texts on mummification had been identified.

Egyptologists were therefore surprised to find a short manual on embalming in a medical text that is primarily concerned with herbal medicine and swellings of the skin. The manual has recently been edited by University of Copenhagen Egyptologist Sofie Schiødt:

- Many descriptions of embalming techniques that we find in this papyrus have been left out of the two later manuals, and the descriptions are extremely detailed. The text reads like a memory aid, so the intended readers must have been specialists who needed to be reminded of these details, such as unguent recipes and uses of various types of bandages. Some of the simpler processes, e.g. the drying of the body with natron, have been omitted from the text, Sofie Schiødt explains. She adds:

- One of the exciting new pieces of information the text provides us with concerns the procedure for embalming the dead person's face. We get a list of ingredients for a remedy consisting largely of plant-based aromatic substances and binders that are cooked into a liquid, with which the embalmers coat a piece of red linen. The red linen is then applied to the dead person's face in order to encase it in a protective cocoon of fragrant and anti-bacterial matter. This process was repeated at four-day intervals.

Although this procedure has not been identified before, Egyptologists have previously examined several mummies from the same period as this manual whose faces were covered in cloth and resin. According to Sofie Schiødt, this would fit well with the red linen procedure described in this manuscript.

Four was the key number

The importance of the Papyrus Louvre-Carlsberg manual in reconstructing the embalming process lies in its specification of the process being divided into intervals of four, with the embalmers actively working on the mummy every four days.

- A ritual procession of the mummy marked these days, celebrating the progress of restoring the deceased's corporeal integrity, amounting to 17 processions over the course of the embalming period. In between the four-day intervals, the body was covered with cloth and overlaid with straw infused with aromatics to keep away insects and scavengers, Sofie Schiødt says.

The Papyrus Louvre-Carlsberg

The manuscript, which Sofie Schiødt has been working on for her PhD thesis, is the Papyrus Louvre-Carlsberg - so called because one half of the papyrus belongs to the Louvre Museum in Paris and the other half is part of the University of Copenhagen's Papyrus Carlsberg Collection. The two parts of the papyrus originally belonged to two private collectors, and several sections of it are still missing. Based on the palaeography, that is, the sign forms, the six metre long papyrus is dated to approximately 1450 BC, which means that it predates the only two other examples of embalming texts by more than a thousand years.

The bulk of the papyrus, which is the second-longest medical papyrus surviving from ancient Egypt, deals with herbal medicine and skin illnesses. Specifically, it contains the earliest-known herbal treatise, which provides descriptions of the appearance, habitat, uses, and religious significance of a divine plant and its seed as well as a lengthy treatise on swellings of the skin, which are seen as illnesses sent forth by the lunar god Khonsu.

The papyrus is planned for publication in 2022 as a collaboration between the Louvre Museum and the Papyrus Carlsberg Collection. If you are interested in a copy of Sofie Schiødt's PhD thesis "Medical Science in Ancient Egypt: A translation and interpretation of Papyrus Louvre-Carlsberg (PLouvre E 32847 + PCarlsberg 917)", which she defended 8 February 2021, please contact her at zcq348@hum.ku.dk.

The embalming process

The embalming, which was performed in a purpose-built workshop erected near the grave, took place over 70 days that were divided into two main periods - a 35-day drying period and a 35-day wrapping period.

During the drying period, the body was treated with dry natron both inside and outside. The natron treatment began on the fourth day of embalming after the purification of the body, the removal of the organs and the brain, and the collapsing of the eyes.

The second 35-day period was dedicated to the encasing of the deceased in bandages and aromatic substances. The embalming of the face described in the Papyrus Louvre-Carlsberg belonged to this period.

The entire 70-day embalming process was divided into intervals of 4 days, with the mummy being finished on day 68 and then placed in the coffin, after which the final days were spent on ritual activities allowing the deceased to live on in the afterlife.

Research highlights importance of social resilience in Bronze Age China

WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS

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Climate alone is not a driver for human behavior. The choices that people make in the face of changing conditions take place in a larger human context. And studies that combine insights from archaeologists and environmental scientists can offer more nuanced lessons about how people have responded -- sometimes successfully -- to long-term environmental changes.

One such study, from researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, shows that aridification in the central plains of China during the early Bronze Age did not cause population collapse, a result that highlights the importance of social resilience to climate change.

Instead of a collapse amid dry conditions, development of agriculture and increasingly complex human social structures set the stage for a dramatic increase in human population around 3,900 to 3,500 years ago.

"In China, especially, there has been a relatively simplistic view of the effects of climate," said Tristram R. "T.R." Kidder, the Edward S. and Tedi Macias Professor of Anthropology in Arts & Sciences. The new study was posted online in Environmental Research Letters.

"Our work shows that we need to have a nuanced appreciation of human resilience as we consider the effects of climate and its effects on human societies," Kidder said. "We have remarkable capacity to adapt. But part of the lesson here is that our social, political and technological systems have to be flexible.

"People in the past were able to overcome climate adversity because they were willing to change," he said.

The new study is one of the first attempts to quantify the types and rates of demographic and subsistence changes over the course of thousands of years in the central plains of China.

By combining information about climate, archaeology and vegetation, the authors mapped out an ambitious story about what changed, when it changed and how those changes were related to human social structures at the time.

Researchers used pollen data from a lake sediment core collected in Henan Province to interpret historical climate conditions. In this area, they found that a warm and wet climate about 9,000 to 4,000 years ago shifted to a cool and dry climate during the Neolithic-Bronze Age transition (about 4,000 to 3,700 years ago). The researchers then used radiocarbon dating and other archaeological data to determine what people were growing and eating during periods of significant population surges and declines in this timeframe.

Confronted with the fluctuation and limitation of resources caused by episodes of climatic aridification, people expanded the number of plants they cultivated for food, the researchers found. They embraced new diversity in agriculture -- including foxtail millet, broomcorn millet, wheat, soybean and rice -- all of which reduced the risks of food production.

This also was a time marked by innovations in water management approaches for irrigation, as well as new metal tools. Social structures also shifted to accommodate and accelerate these examples of human adaptive ingenuity.

"Certainly, by 4,000 years ago, which is when we see this change in the overall environmental condition, this is a society with complicated political, social and economic institutions," Kidder said. "And what I think we are seeing is the capacity of these institutions to buffer and to deal with the climatic variation. When we talk about changes in subsistence strategies, these changes didn't happen automatically. These are human choices."

With this and other related research work, Kidder has argued that early Chinese cities provide an important context that closely resembles modern cities, where high-density urbanism is supported by intensive agriculture. They provide a better historical analog than the Maya world or those in southeast Asia, notably Angkor Wat and the Khmer Kingdom. Those were cities where lower density and food production did not put the same sorts of demands on the physical environment.

Lead author Ren Xiaolin, assistant professor at the Institute for the History of Natural Sciences at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, worked closely with Kidder and others in his laboratory to develop the theory and framework for how to think about environmental changes and urbanism in China.

"Climate change does not always equal collapse -- and this is an important point in both a prehistoric and modern context," said Michael Storozum, another co-author and research fellow at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Storozum is a PhD graduate of Washington University, where he studied under Kidder.

"Humans have been heavily modifying their environments for thousands of years, often in the pursuit of increasing food production which grants societies a higher degree of social resilience," Storozum said.

He draws connections between the findings from this paper and his current research as part of The Wall project, a study of people and ecology in medieval Mongolia and China.

"As more environmental scientists and archaeologists work together, I expect that our understanding of what makes a society resilient to climate change in prehistoric and historical times will grow as well," Storozum said.

Kidder added: "We need to think carefully about how we understand the capacity of people to change their world."

How did dogs get to the Americas? An ancient bone fragment holds clues

 

Sled dog team under northern lights (stock image).

Credit: © PiLensPhoto / stock.adobe.com

The history of dogs has been intertwined, since ancient times, with that of the humans who domesticated them.

But how far back does that history go in the Americas, and which route did dogs use to enter this part of the world?

A new study led by the University at Buffalo provides insight into these questions. The research reports that a bone fragment found in Southeast Alaska belongs to a dog that lived in the region about 10,150 years ago. Scientists say the remains -- a piece of a femur -- represent the oldest confirmed remains of a domestic dog in the Americas.

DNA from the bone fragment holds clues about early canine history in this part of the world.

Researchers analyzed the dog's mitochondrial genome, and concluded that the animal belonged to a lineage of dogs whose evolutionary history diverged from that of Siberian dogs as early as 16,700 years ago. The timing of that split coincides with a period when humans may have been migrating into North America along a coastal route that included Southeast Alaska.

The research will be published on Feb. 24 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Charlotte Lindqvist, an evolutionary biologist from UB, was senior author of the study, which included scientists from UB and the University of South Dakota. The findings add to a growing body of knowledge about the migration of dogs into the Americas.

"We now have genetic evidence from an ancient dog found along the Alaskan coast. Because dogs are a proxy for human occupation, our data help provide not only a timing but also a location for the entry of dogs and people into the Americas. Our study supports the theory that this migration occurred just as coastal glaciers retreated during the last Ice Age," says Lindqvist, PhD, associate professor of biological sciences in the UB College of Arts and Sciences. "There have been multiple waves of dogs migrating into the Americas, but one question has been, when did the first dogs arrive? And did they follow an interior ice-free corridor between the massive ice sheets that covered the North American continent, or was their first migration along the coast?"

"The fossil record of ancient dogs in the Americas is incomplete, so any new remains that are found provide important clues," says Flavio Augusto da Silva Coelho, a UB PhD student in biological sciences, and one of the paper's first authors. "Before our study, the earliest ancient American dog bones that had their DNA sequenced were found in the U.S. Midwest."

A surprise finding from a large collection of bones

Lindqvist's team did not set out to study dogs. The scientists came across the femur fragment while sequencing DNA from a collection of hundreds of bones excavated years before in Southeast Alaska by researchers including Timothy Heaton, PhD, professor of earth sciences at the University of South Dakota.

"This all started out with our interest in how Ice Age climatic changes impacted animals' survival and movements in this region," Lindqvist says. "Southeast Alaska might have served as an ice-free stopping point of sorts, and now -- with our dog -- we think that early human migration through the region might be much more important than some previously suspected."

The bone fragment, originally thought to come from a bear, was quite small, but when the DNA was studied, the team realized it was from a dog, Lindqvist says.

After this surprise discovery, the scientists compared the bone's mitochondrial genome to those of other ancient and modern dogs. This analysis showed that the Southeast Alaskan dog shared a common ancestor about 16,000 years ago with American canines that lived before the arrival of European colonizers, Lindqvist says. (Mitochondrial DNA, inherited from the mother, represents a small fraction of an organism's complete DNA, so sequencing a complete nuclear genome could provide further details if that material can be extracted.)

Of interest, carbon isotope analysis on the bone fragment indicates that the ancient Southeast Alaskan dog likely had a marine diet, which may have consisted of foods such as fish and scraps from seals and whales.

The research adds depth to the layered history of how dogs came to populate the Americas. As Lindqvist notes, canines did not arrive all at once. For example, some Arctic dogs arrived later from East Asia with the Thule culture, while Siberian huskies were imported to Alaska during the Gold Rush. Other dogs were brought to the Americas by European colonizers.

The new study sharpens the debate on dog and human migration into the Americas.

"Our early dog from Southeast Alaska supports the hypothesis that the first dog and human migration occurred through the Northwest Pacific coastal route instead of the central continental corridor, which is thought to have become viable only about 13,000 years ago," Coelho notes.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation. In addition to Lindqvist, Coelho and Heaton, authors of the new paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B included Stephanie Gill and Crystal Tomlin.

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Ancient skeletal hand could reveal evolutionary secrets

A 4.4 million-year-old skeleton could show how early humans moved and began to walk upright, according to new research led by a Texas A&M anthropology professor

TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY

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Evolutionary expert Charles Darwin and others recognized a close evolutionary relationship between humans, chimps and gorillas based on their shared anatomies, raising some big questions: how are humans related to other primates, and exactly how did early humans move around? Research by a Texas A&M University professor may provide some answers.

Thomas Cody Prang, assistant professor of anthropology, and colleagues examined the skeletal remains of Ardipithecus ramidus ("Ardi"), dated to 4.4 million years old and found in Ethiopia. One of Ardi's hands was exceptionally well-preserved.

The researchers compared the shape of Ardi's hand to hundreds of other hand specimens representing recent humans, apes and monkeys (measured from bones in museum collections around the world) to make comparisons about the kind of locomotor behavior used by the earliest hominins (fossil human relatives).

The results provide clues about how early humans began to walk upright and make similar movements that all humans perform today.

This discovery is described in a study published in the current issue of Science Advances.

"Bone shape reflects adaptation to particular habits or lifestyles - for example the movement of primates - and by drawing connections between bone shape and behavior among living forms, we can make inferences about the behavior of extinct species, such as Ardi, that we can't directly observe, Prang said.

"Additionally, we found evidence for a big evolutionary 'jump' between the kind of hand represented by Ardi and all later hominin hands, including that of Lucy's species (a famous 3.2 million-year-old well-preserved skeleton found in the same area in the 1970s). This 'evolutionary jump' happens at a critical time when hominins are evolving adaptations to a more human-like form of upright walking, and the earliest evidence for hominin stone-tool manufacture and stone-tool use, such as cut-marks on animal fossils, are discovered."

Prang said the fact that Ardi represents an earlier phase of human evolutionary history is important because it potentially shines light on the kind of ancestor from which humans and chimpanzees evolved.

"Our study supports a classic idea first proposed by Charles Darwin in 1871, when he had no fossils or understanding of genetics, that the use of the hands and upper limbs for manipulation appeared in early human relatives in connection with upright walking," he said. "The evolution of human hands and feet probably happened in a correlated fashion."

Since Ardi is such an ancient species, it might retain skeletal features that were present in the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees. If this is true, it could help researchers place the origin of the human lineage - in addition to upright walking - into a clearer light.

"It potentially brings us one step closer to an explanation for how and why humans evolved our form of upright walking," Prang said.

He added that the big change in hand anatomy between Ardi and all later hominins occurs at a time, roughly between 4.4 and 3.3 million years ago, coinciding with the earliest evidence of the loss of a grasping big toe in human evolution. This also coincides with the earliest known stone tools and stone cut-marked animal fossils.

He said it appears to mark a major change in the lifestyle and behavior of human relatives within this timeframe.

"We propose that it involves the evolution of more advanced upright walking, which enabled human hands to be modified by the evolutionary process for enhanced manual manipulation, possibly involving stone tools," Prang said

Medieval containers hint at thriving wine trade in Islamic Sicily

UNIVERSITY OF YORK

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IMAGE: A 9-11TH CENTURY AMPHORAE view more 

CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF YORK

Researchers at the University of York have found chemical residues of grapes in medieval containers indicating a prosperous wine trade in Islamic Sicily.

They found that a type of container from the 9-11th century, called amphorae, traditionally used for transporting wine contained chemical traces of grapes and were found as far away as Sardinia and Pisa, suggesting that the wine was exported across the Mediterranean.

Working with researchers from the University of Rome Tor Vergata, the research team from the University of York's BioArch facility analysed the content of the amphorae by identifying chemical traces trapped in the body of the container, and found compounds comparable to those found in ceramic jars used by some producers today for maturing wine.

Together with a comparison of wine-soaked sherds degraded in the ground, the team concluded that the fruit trapped in the vessel was indeed grapes implying wine production.

The Islamic empire expanded into the Mediterranean regions during the 7-9th century AD into regions of the world that produced and consumed wine on a large scale.

Professor Martin Carver, from the University of York's Department of Archaeology, said: "Alcohol did not - and still does not - play a major role in the cultural life of Islamic society, so we were very interested in the question of how this medieval community had thrived in a wine-dominated region.

"Not only did they thrive, but built a solid economic foundation that gave them a very promising future, with the wine industry one of the core elements of their success."

A wine trade existed in Sicily prior to Islamic occupation, but it appears to have mostly been imported wine, with the emphasis on consumption rather than production. This new archaeological evidence suggests that the Islamic community had seen the opportunity of this, and turned their attention to production and export.

There is no evidence, however, to suggest that members of the community actually drank the wine they were trading. Direct evidence for the consumption of alcohol is difficult to demonstrate in the archaeological record, and there are no historic sources in Sicily at this time to determine what the community was drinking.

Dr Léa Drieu, a postdoctoral research assistant at the University of York's Department of Archaeology, who carried out the analysis, said: "We had to develop some new chemical analysis techniques in order to determine that it was grape traces we were seeing and not some other type of fruit, but the tell-tale organic residues found in the amphorae in Sicily, Palermo and elsewhere showed the content was almost certainly wine."

Islamic wine merchants appear to have given Sicilian wine a new 'branding' by using a particular type of amphorae that researchers can now trace around the country and beyond to identify their trade routes.

The team's wider research in this area shows great prosperity during this period, powered not only by the wine trade, but new crops, exchange of salted fish, cheese, spices and sugar. The trade routes show increased production and commercial links between the Christian and Islamic worlds, bringing in a new era of prosperity, which worked alongside the existing 'old' industries of Sicily.

Professor Oliver Craig, who directs the BioArCh centre where the research was carried out, said: "Now that we have a quick and reliable test for grape products in ceramic containers, it will be interesting to investigate the deeper history, and even prehistory, of wine production and trade in the Mediterranean."

New dating techniques reveal Australia's oldest known rock painting

Two-meter kangaroo painting thought to be 17,300 years old

UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE

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A two-metre-long painting of a kangaroo in Western Australia's Kimberley region has been identified as Australia's oldest intact rock painting.

Using the radiocarbon dating of 27 mud wasp nests, collected from over and under 16 similar paintings, a University of Melbourne collaboration has put the painting at 17,500 and 17,100 years old.

"This makes the painting Australia's oldest known in-situ painting," said Postdoctoral Researcher Dr Damien Finch who pioneered the exciting new radiocarbon technique.

"This is a significant find as through these initial estimates, we can understand something of the world these ancient artists lived in. We can never know what was in the mind of the artist when he/she painted this piece of work more than 600 generations ago, but we do know that the Naturalistic period extended back into the Last Ice Age, so the environment was cooler and dryer than today."

The Kimberley-based research is part of Australia's largest rock art dating project, led by Professor Andy Gleadow from the University of Melbourne. It involves the Balanggarra Aboriginal Corporation, the Universities of Western Australia, Wollongong, and Manchester, the Australian National Science and Technology Organisation, and partners Rock Art Australia and Dunkeld Pastoral.

Published today in Nature Human Behaviour, Dr Finch and his colleagues detail how rock shelters have preserved the Kimberley galleries of rock paintings, many of them painted over by younger artists, for millennia - and how they managed to date the kangaroo rock painting as Australia's oldest known in-situ painting.

The kangaroo is painted on the sloping ceiling of a rock shelter on the Unghango clan estate in Balanggarra country, above the Drysdale River in the north-eastern Kimberley region of Western Australia.

Earlier researchers looked at the stylistic features of the paintings and the order in which they were painted when they overlapped, and were able to work out from there that the oldest style of painting is what's known as the Irregular Infill Animal or the Naturalistic period, which often features life-size animals. This kangaroo is a typical example of paintings in this style.

Dr Finch said it was rare to find mud wasp nests both overlying and underlying a single painting. For this painting they were able to sample both types to establish the minimum and maximum age for the artwork.

"We radiocarbon dated three wasp nests underlying the painting and three nests built over it to determine, confidently, that the painting is between 17,500 and 17,100 years old; most likely 17,300 years old."

Dr Sven Ouzman, from University Western Australia's School of Social Sciences and one of the project's chief investigators, said the rock painting would unlock further understanding of Indigenous cultural history.

"This iconic kangaroo image is visually similar to rock paintings from islands in South East Asia dated to more than 40,000 years ago, suggesting a cultural link - and hinting at still older rock art in Australia," Dr Ouzman said.

Cissy Gore-Birch, Chair of the Balanggarra Aboriginal Corporation, said partnerships were important to integrate traditional knowledge with western science, to preserve Australia's history and cultural identity.

"It's important that Indigenous knowledge and stories are not lost and continue to be shared for generations to come," Ms Gore-Birch said. "The dating of this oldest known painting in an Australian rock shelter holds a great deal of significance for Aboriginal people and Australians and is an important part of Australia's history."

The next step for the researchers, who are aiming to develop a time scale for Aboriginal rock art in the Kimberley, is to date further wasp nests in contact with this and other styles of Kimberley rock art to establish, more accurately, when each art period began and ended.

Genomic insights into the origin of pre-historic populations in East Asia

 

Integrating evidence from genetics and archaeology resarchers shed light into East Asia's population history

MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY

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IMAGE: MONGOLIAN YURT IN A LANDSCAPE ON NORTHERN MONGOLIA. view more 

CREDIT: © KAIRI AUN | 123RF.COM

Diverse East Asians derive ancestry from a coastal expansion tens of thousands of years ago

Researchers have long debated whether the peopling of East Asia by modern humans occurred mainly via a coastal or interior route. The answer is probably both. "Indigenous Andaman islanders of the Bay of Bengal, Indigenous Tibetans, ancient Taiwanese, and ancient and modern Japanese all derive ancestry from a deep shared lineage that split from other East Asian lineages more than 40,000 years ago," says David Reich, co-senior author of the study, who is a Professor of Genetics and Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. "The simplest way to explain this is if some of the earliest modern humans in East Asia spread along a coastal route linking southeast Asia, coastal China, and the Japanese Archipelago." In contrast, the 40,000 year old Tianyuan individual--along with present-day and early Holocene people from Mongolia and the Amur River Basin--derive almost all their ancestry from a different early splitting lineage. This lineage plausibly expanded by an interior route and contributed in the highest proportion to ancient Mongolians, people of the Amur River Basin, and early farmers from the West Liao and Yellow River regions.

How East Asian populations got to be how they are today

Today there is a fairly high degree of genetic homogeneity in East Asia, reflecting mixtures of deeply splitting lineages that occurred especially in the last ten thousand years. To connect the population structure of present-day East Asians to ancient lineages, co-first author Chuan-Chao Wang, Director of the Institute of Anthropology at Xiamen University, led a collection of genome-scale data from 383 people from 46 diverse populations from East Asia. The study team also generated genome-scale ancient DNA data from 166 individuals from mainland China, Taiwan, Mongolia, Japan and Russia, ranging in age up to about 8,000 years ago. Wang led the statistical analysis of these data, along with previously published data from other research groups, to understand how the ancient and modern people were connected with each other. Say Wang: "With high resolution modern and ancient data, we can connect the dots between ancient and modern East Asians."

Testing the extent to which present-day language distributions reflect ancient farming expansions

Increases of population densities in and around centers of domestication created demographic expansions that in principle could have spread people and languages. The authors tested several hypotheses about whether particular farming expansions were connected to language spreads.

The first is the "Transeurasian hypothesis": the theory that languages of the Mongolic, Turkic, Tungusic, Koreanic, and Japonic families may descend from a proto-language associated with the expansion of early millet farmers around the West Liao River in northeast China. The study confirms a shared genetic link between present-day people speaking Transeurasian languages: they all have large proportions of ancestry from the deeply splitting Tianyuan-related lineage. However, this link dates to before farming expansions, as Mongolic, Turkic, and Tungusic speakers do not have the characteristic mixture of ancient lineages that is a signature of West Liao River farmers. However, West Liao River farmers do appear to be an excellent candidate for the primary source population for present-day Korean and Japanese people.

A second hypothesis concerns the origins of Sino-Tibetan languages. The authors show that most of the ancestry of both Tibetans and Han Chinese comes from a population closely related to Yellow River farmers who lived around 3,000 BCE. "The findings show that Neolithic farmers cultivating foxtail millet in the Upper and Middle Yellow River Basin expanded southwest toward the Tibetan Plateau to spread present-day Tibeto-Burman languages, and east and south towards the Central Plains and eastern coast to spread Sinitic languages including the linguistic ancestor of Han Chinese," says co-first author Huqin Zhang, a professor at Xi'an Jiaotong University, China.

A third hypothesis concerns the spread of languages and rice farming. Previous ancient DNA analysis correlates the spread of rice farming across Southeast and South Asia with Austroasiatic, Tai-Kadai, and Austronesian languages. Through modelling of diverse Indigenous groups from southern China, this study strengthens the connections to these diverse language groups.

How West and East Eurasian peoples met and mixed

Mongolia falls near the eastern extreme of the Eurasian Steppe, and archaeological evidence shows that throughout the last ten thousand years the region was a conduit for cultural exchanges between East and West Eurasia. For example, the Afanasievo culture, an eastward extension of the Yamnaya steppe pastoralist culture, impacted Mongolia around the turn of the third millennium BCE, although in contrast to Europe, where Yamnaya ancestry became permanently established after it first arrived, a near-complete displacement of the ancestry brought by these migrants occurred in Mongolia following the decline of the Afanasievo culture. Strikingly, ancestry from the initial Yamnaya expansion survived in northwest China at least into the Iron Age. "This increases the plausibility of the theory that the Yamnaya expansion was a vector of spread, not only of the ancestors of all spoken Indo-European languages, but also of the early-branching Tocharian languages attested from written records in Iron Age western China," says co-senior author Johannes Krause, professor and director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

"Our analysis also documents subsequent ancestry impacts from the west on Mongolia," says co-senior author Ron Pinhasi of the University of Vienna. "One of these brought Yamnaya ancestry back to Mongolia more than a millennium after it first appeared, this time mixed with about a third ancestry from European farmers." Pinhasi adds: "The other impact from the west began about 4,500 years ago, bringing ancestry along the Inner Asian Mountain Corridor related to the people of Iran and Central Asia. However, this ancestry made only transient early contributions to populations in Mongolia and western China, and does not appear again in our ancient DNA time for two millennia."

CT scans of Egyptian mummy reveal new details about the death of a pivotal pharaoh

 

New interpretations based on medical imaging suggest Seqenenre-Taa-II was executed by multiple attackers and embalmers had skillfully concealed some head wounds

FRONTIERS

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IMAGE: DR SAHAR SALEEM PLACING THE MUMMY IN THE CT SCANNER view more 

CREDIT: SAHAR SALEEM

Modern medical technology is helping scholars tell a more nuanced story about the fate of an ancient king whose violent death indirectly led to the reunification of Egypt in the 16th century BC. The research was published in Frontiers in Medicine.

Pharaoh Seqenenre-Taa-II, the Brave, briefly ruled over Southern Egypt during the country's occupation by the Hyksos, a foriegn dynasty that held power across the kingdom for about a century (c. 1650-1550 BCE). In his attempt to oust the Hyskos, Seqenenre-Taa-II was killed. Scholars have debated the exact nature of the pharaoh's death since his mummy was first discovered and studied in the 1880s.

These and subsequent examinations -- including an X-ray study in the 1960s -- noted the dead king had suffered several severe head injuries but no other wounds to his body. The prevailing theory, based on the evidence, was that the king had been captured in battle and then executed afterward, possibly by the Hyksos king himself. Others have suggested he was murdered in his sleep by a palace conspiracy.

In addition, the poor condition of the mummy suggested the embalming had been done hastily, away from the royal mummification workshop.

But computed tomography (CT) scans of the mummified remains of Seqenenre revealed new details about his head injuries, including previously undetected lesions that embalmers had skillfully concealed.

The authors of the new paper offer a novel interpretation of the events before and after the king's death based on the computer-processed X-ray images: Seqenenre had indeed been captured on the battlefield, but his hands had been tied behind his back, preventing him from defending against the attack.

"This suggests that Seqenenre was really on the front line with his soldiers risking his life to liberate Egypt," said lead author Dr. Sahar Saleem, a professor of radiology at Cairo University who specialises in paleoradiology. This investigative technique employs medical imaging technologies to non-invasively study a cross section of archaeological remains, including bodies. It can help determine age at death, sex and even how the person died.

For example, the CT scans, combined with other evidence, suggest the execution had been carried out by multiple attackers, which the scientists confirmed by studying five different Hyksos weapons that matched the king's wounds.

"In a normal execution on a bound prisoner, it could be assumed that only one assailant strikes, possibly from different angles but not with different weapons," Saleem explained. "Seqenenre's death was rather a ceremonial execution."

The CT study also determined that Seqenenre was about 40 when he died, based on the detailed morphology revealed in the images, providing the most precise estimate to date.

Saleem and co-author Zahi Hawass, an archaeologist and former Egyptian minister of antiquities, have pioneered the use of CT scans to study the New Kingdom pharaohs and warriors, including well-known names such as Hatshepsut, Tutankhamun, Ramesses III, Thutmose III and Rameses II. Yet Seqenenre, based on the available evidence, appears to be the only one among this illustrious group to have been on the frontline of the battlefield.

In addition, the CT study revealed important details about the mummification of Seqenenre's body. For instance, the embalmers used a sophisticated method to hide the king's head wounds under a layer of embalming material that functioned similarly to the fillers used in modern plastic surgery. This would imply that mummification took place in a real mummification laboratory rather than in a poorly equipped place, as previously interpreted.

Saleem said the CT scan study provides important new details about a pivotal point in Egypt's long history. "Seqenenre's death motivated his successors to continue the fight to unify Egypt and start the New Kingdom," she said.