Fires in Iceland: Human interference even 1,100 years ago

 For the first time, the analysis of an ice core taken from the east coast of Greenland, in Renland, has allowed researchers to recreate the trend of the fires that have scourged the Icelandic forests over the last five thousand years. The discovery was made by an international team led by Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and the Institute of Polar Sciences of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR-ISP). The results, which were published in the journal Climate of the Past, are a crucial contribution to the understanding of the links between fires, climate and human action.

Ice has always been the backbone of the climatic and environmental history of our planet and it allows tracing back information from past centuries and millennia about temperatures, volcanic eruptions and even fires. “The analysis of the chemical compounds found in ice cores collected in polar areas helps to recreate climate-related aspects and weather events of the past'', confirms  Andrea Spolaor, researcher at the CNR-ISP. “In this case we are talking about compounds such as black carbon, ammonium and levoglucosan, produced during biomass burning. By measuring these tracers, we found that in the high North Atlantic, which encompasses the north-east, south-east and south-west coasts of Greenland and Iceland, more than 4,500 years ago the number of fires decreased thanks to weaker summer insolation, resulting in the expansion of glaciers and and sparser vegetation”.

The researchers examined the Recap ice core (Renland ice cap) at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, the CNR Institute of Polar Sciences and the Centre for Ice and Climate in Copenhagen. “The climate factors that most affect fires are temperatures, summer insolation, rainfall and humidity, along with quantity and type of vegetation”, Delia Segato, researcher from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, explains. “In the presence of dense vegetation, fires typically last longer due to greater availability of flammable material”.

In addition to the climatic factors, the study also revealed that another reason why more than 1,100 years ago the number of fires decreased in the North Atlantic was due to human interference. The researchers explain that “The decrease recorded in this period is due to the loss of vegetation in the Icelandic area”. “The Viking colonisation of Iceland caused one of the first environmental disasters in history and even today, after a millennium, the Icelandic forests have not fully recovered. The Vikings deforested extensively, causing the loss of more than 25% of vegetation in less than a century. The settlers, following the customs of their native lands, used to cut down birch tree forests to collect wood and to remove the shrubs to open grazing lands”.

The human impact in the high North Atlantic continued over the centuries. The researchers conclude by stating that “In the two most recent centuries, we have found that fires have increased due to climate change and emissions caused by human activity''. “The results of the study show that regions at extreme latitudes represent one of the first places on Earth where climate change is having the most catastrophic effects. At the end of summer 2020 alone, fires in the Arctic Circle caused the emission of 244 megatons of CO2, exceeding by 35% those recorded in 2019. In these areas it is therefore essential to improve the understanding of climate trends and the history of fires”.

Jawbone of 16,000-25,000-year-old human represents first Pleistocene remains from Sulawesi; shows surprising dental wear pattern

Major gaps remain in our knowledge of the early history of Homo sapiens in Wallacea. By 70–60 thousand years ago (ka), modern humans appear to have entered this distinct biogeographical zone between continental Asia and Australia. Despite this, there are relatively few Late Pleistocene sites attributed to our species in Wallacea. H. sapiens fossil remains are also rare. Previously, only one island in Wallacea (Alor in the southeastern part of the archipelago) had yielded skeletal evidence for pre-Holocene modern humans. Here we report on the first Pleistocene human skeletal remains from the largest Wallacean island, Sulawesi. The recovered elements consist of a nearly complete palate and frontal process of a modern human right maxilla excavated from Leang Bulu Bettue in the southwestern peninsula of the island. Dated by several different methods to between 25 and 16 ka, the maxilla belongs to an elderly individual of unknown age and sex, with small teeth (only M1 to M3 are extant) that exhibit severe occlusal wear and related dental pathologies. The dental wear pattern is unusual. This fragmentary specimen, though largely undiagnostic with regards to morphological affinity, provides the only direct insight we currently have from the fossil record into the identity of the Late Pleistocene people of Sulawesi.

 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0257273

What the fate of ancient cities can teach us about surviving climate change

 Cities and their hinterlands must build resilience to survive climate stress; this is the grave warning emanating from a studyof ancient civilisations and climate change.

From 900 to 1500CE, Khmer cities in mainland Southeast Asia (including Angkor) and Maya cities in Mesoamerica collapsed, coinciding with periods of intense climate variability. While the ceremonial and administrative urban cores of many cities were abandoned, the surrounding communities may have endured because of long-term investment in resilient landscapes.

“They created extensive landscapes of terraced and bunded (embanked to control water flow) agricultural fields that acted as massive sinks for water, sediment and nutrients,” said lead author Associate Professor Daniel Penny, from the University of Sydney School of Geosciences. “This long-term investment in soil fertility and the capture and storage of water resources may have allowed some communities to persist long after the urban cores had been abandoned.” He and his colleague at the University of Texas at Austin, Professor Timothy Beach, came to this conclusion via a review of relevant archaeological and environmental information from Southeast Asia and Mesoamerica.

The ruins of a temple at Angkor (IMAGE)

UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY

 

CAPTION

The 12th century CE temple of Preah Khan, one of hundreds of ritual and administrative spaces in the urban core of Angkor in modern Cambodia that were progressively abandoned during the 14th and 15th centuries, coincident with period of intense drought.

CREDIT

Daniel Penny.

At the ancient city of Angkor in modern Cambodia, for example, the administrative and ceremonial core was progressively abandoned over several decades, culminating in a series of catastrophic droughts in the 14th and 15th century, but the surrounding agricultural landscapes may have persisted through these episodes of climatic stress. 

Published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, their study provides a rough roadmap for resilience in the face of climate change.

Lessons for modern-day rural and urban areas

These historical cases of urban collapse emphasise that long-term and large-scale investment in landscape resilience – such as improving water storage and retention, improving soil fertility, and securing biodiversity – can better enable both urban and rural communities to tolerate periods of climatic stress. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change believes this will become more frequent and more intense in many parts of the world over the coming century.

“We often think of these historic events as disasters, but they also have much to teach us about persistence, resilience and continuity in the face of climate variability,” said Associate Professor Penny.

The indigenous population of ancient Sicily were active traders

 

IMAGE: MONTE POLIZZO. view more 

CREDIT: FOTOGRAF: J.L. BERRY

How should we relate to the traditional historiography on ancient Sicily? The prevailing view has been that the indigenous population had neither territory, power nor economic resources. But with the aid of interdisciplinary methods, a new thesis shows that trade was a big part of the economy for the inhabitants of the settlement of Monte Polizzo.

In general, historiography concerning ancient Sicily is overwhelmingly Greco-centric, i.e. focused on its Greek immigrants. Because the indigenous population’s architectonic remains are relatively invisible, whilst those of the Greek immigrants are monumental, the accepted historiography has been that the indigenous population had neither territory, power nor economic resources. It was instead accepted that as soon as the Greeks had established themselves on the island (on the western side in 628 BCE) they colonised and controlled the majority of the Sicilian lowlands, the economy and thus also the indigenous population.

This outlook has contributed to an imbalance and a distorted picture of the role of the indigenous population – the people that Greek historian Thukydides called the Elymians – in the natural, cultural and economic landscapes of western Sicily during the Archaic period (700-500 BCE), according to Cecilia Sandström, a doctoral student in classical archaeology and ancient history at the University of Gothenburg.

“My aim with the thesis was to shift the focus. The indigenous population should not be viewed as a homogeneous group but as independent actors with their own agendas, tastes and preferences.”

Monte Polizzo abandoned after a fire

The site of her study is the Elymian settlement of Monte Polizzo, situated in western Sicily and strategically positioned on a mountain, about 700 metres above sea level and around 20 km from the west coast – midway between the Phoenician settlement of Motya, the Greek settlement of Selinunte and the bigger Elymian settlement of Segesta.

“Monte Polizzo was only inhabited for 75 years, between 625 and 550 BCE. The roughly 20 hectare settlement was abandoned after a major fire that destroyed every building except the religious temple at the acropolis.”

Interdisciplinary methods

Cecilia Sandström has used interdisciplinary methods in her study. In addition to the archaeological material, which clearly shows trade contacts with the various peoples of the Mediterranean, she used palynological, macrobotanical and geomorphological analyses of the neighbouring landscape, and charted the conditions for trade at the site. A further important factor was her investigation of whether the rivers were navigable and could be used as transport routes.

“The inhabitants of Monte Polizzo were themselves active traders,” says Cecilia Sandström.

Large number of amphorae

The large number of imported transport amphorae (the two-handled vessels that were common in ancient times) deviate from the fairly modest amphorae material found at other indigenous settlements in the area. 

“A common idea in the research tradition is that the content of these imported amphorae was only for the elite, who often received them as gifts from Greeks and Phoenicians, but there is no evidence for this gift-giving system at Monte Polizzo. The findings instead show that trading was an important part of the settlement’s economy.”

A very unusual factor in comparison with Greek, Phoenician and other Elymian settlements in western Sicily is the fact that a very large number of amphorae (mostly Etruscan) are scattered across the whole settlement – not just in temples and ‘wealthy’ houses.

“The variation in the origins of the amphorae also shows that the people there had access to different networks that could be indirectly reached through the Greek and Phoenician settlements. But the study also shows that there were many opportunities for direct contacts via the rivers’ estuaries.”

Ecological and economic conditions

Studies of the ecological and economic conditions in the area investigated reveal unique findings.

“The fact that the local economy at Monte Polizzo comprised animal husbandry and agricultural products, which were possibly exported together with timber, is not surprising per se. River sediment analyses, however, show that in fact they totally deforested their surrounding area, and that they farmed the land so intensively that the fertile, humus-rich soil was completed eroded away in less than 75 years.”

Furthermore, the geomorphological studies show that large parts of the area between the west coast and the interior where Monte Polizzo was situated started to turn into marshes.

“But whether diseases such as ‘Mal’aria’, which is documented in Sicily during the 5th century BCE, were already rife as early as in the 6th century BCE cannot yet be proven. In combination with the deforestation and the less fertile soil left behind by the Elymians, this was perhaps reason enough to leave the site, and meant that it was never settled again.”

Researchers present evidence that a cosmic impact destroyed a biblical city in the Jordan Valley

In the Middle Bronze Age (about 3600 years ago or roughly 1650 BCE), the city of Tall el-Hammam was ascendant. Located on high ground in the southern Jordan Valley, northeast of the Dead Sea, the settlement in its time had become the largest continuously occupied Bronze Age city in the southern Levant, having hosted early civilization for a few thousand years. At that time, it was 10 times larger than Jerusalem and 5 times larger than Jericho.

“It’s an incredibly culturally important area,” said James Kennett, emeritus professor of earth science at the UC Santa Barbara. “Much of where the early cultural complexity of humans developed is in this general area.”

A favorite site for archaeologists and biblical scholars, the mound hosts evidence of culture all the way from the Chalcolithic, or Copper Age, all compacted into layers as the highly strategic settlement was built, destroyed, and rebuilt over millennia.

But there is a 1.5-meter interval in the Middle Bronze Age II stratum that caught the interest of some researchers, for its “highly unusual” materials. In addition to the debris one would expect from destruction via warfare and earthquakes, they found pottery shards with outer surfaces melted into glass, “bubbled” mudbrick, and partially melted building material, all indications of an anomalously high-temperature event, much hotter than anything the technology of the time could produce.

“We saw evidence for temperatures greater than 2,000 degrees Celsius,” said Kennett, whose research group at the time happened to have been building the case for an older cosmic airburst about 12,800 years ago that triggered major widespread burning, climatic changes and animal extinctions. The charred and melted materials at Tall el-Hammam looked familiar, and a group of researchers including impact scientist Allen West and Kennett joined Trinity Southwest University biblical scholar Philip J. Silvia’s research effort to determine what happened at this city 3,650 years ago.

Their results are published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports.

Salt and Bone
“There’s evidence of a large cosmic airburst, close to this city called Tall el-Hammam,” Kennett said, of an explosion similar to the Tunguska Event, a roughly 12-megaton airburst that occurred in 1908, when a 56-60-meter meteor pierced the Earth’s atmosphere over the Eastern Siberian Taiga.

The shock of the explosion over Tall el-Hammam was enough to level the city, flattening the palace and surrounding walls and mudbrick structures, according to the paper, and the distribution of bones indicated “extreme disarticulation and skeletal fragmentation in nearby humans.”

For Kennett, further proof of the airburst was found by conducting many different kinds of analyses on soil and sediments from the critical layer. Tiny iron- and silica-rich spherules turned up in their analysis, as did melted metals.

“I think one of the main discoveries is shocked quartz. These are sand grains containing cracks that form only under very high pressure” Kennett said of one of many lines of evidence that point to a large airburst near Tall el-Hammam. “We have shocked quartz from this layer, and that means there were incredible pressures involved to shock the quartz crystals— quartz is one of the hardest minerals; it’s very hard to shock.”

The airburst, according to the paper, may also explain the “anomalously high concentrations of salt” found in the destruction layer — an average of 4% in the sediment and as high as 25% in some samples.

“The salt was thrown up due to the high impact pressures,” Kennett said, of the meteor that likely fragmented upon contact with the Earth’s atmosphere. “And it may be that the impact partially hit the Dead Sea, which is rich in salt.” The local shores of the Dead Sea are also salt-rich so the impact may have redistributed those salt crystals far and wide — not just at Tall el-Hammam, but also nearby Tell es-Sultan (proposed as the biblical Jericho, which also underwent violent destruction at the same time) and Tall-Nimrin (also then destroyed).

The high-salinity soil could have been responsible for the so-called “Late Bronze Age Gap,” the researchers say, in which cities along the lower Jordan Valley were abandoned, dropping the population from tens of thousands to maybe a few hundred nomads. Nothing could grow in these formerly fertile grounds, forcing people to leave the area for centuries. Evidence for resettlement of Tall el-Hammam and nearby communities appears again in the Iron Age, roughly 600 years after the cities’ sudden devastation in the Bronze Age.

Fire and Brimstone
Tall el-Hamman has been the focus of an ongoing debate as to whether it could be the biblical city of Sodom, one of the two cities in the Old Testament Book of Genesis that were destroyed by God for how wicked they and their inhabitants had become. One denizen, Lot, is saved by two angels who instruct him not to look behind as they flee. Lot’s wife, however, lingers and is turned into a pillar of salt. Meanwhile, fire and brimstone fell from the sky; multiple cities were destroyed; thick smoke rose from the fires; city inhabitants were killed and area crops were destroyed in what sounds like an eyewitness account of a cosmic impact event. It’s a satisfying connection to make.

“All the observations stated in Genesis are consistent with a cosmic airburst,” Kennett said, “but there’s no scientific proof that this destroyed city is indeed the Sodom of the Old Testament.” However, the researchers said, the disaster could have generated an oral tradition that may have served as the inspiration for the written account in the book of Genesis, as well as the biblical account of the burning of Jericho in the Old Testament Book of Joshua.

Archaeologist helps to uncover hidden neighborhood in ancient Maya city

 Scientists have been excavating the ruins of Tikal, an ancient Maya city in modern-day Guatemala, since the 1950s — and thanks to those many decades spent documenting details of every structure and cataloguing each excavated item, Tikal has become one of the best understood and most thoroughly studied archaeological sites in the world. 

But a startling recent discovery by the Pacunam Lidar Initiative, a research consortium involving a Brown University anthropologist, has ancient Mesoamerican scholars across the globe wondering whether they know Tikal as well as they think.

Using light detection and ranging software, or lidar, Stephen Houston, a professor of anthropology at Brown University, and Thomas Garrison, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Texas at Austin, discovered that what was long assumed to be an area of natural hills a short walk away from Tikal’s center was actually a neighborhood of ruined buildings that had been designed to look like those in Teotihuacan, the largest and most powerful city in the ancient Americas.

Houston said their lidar analysis, coupled with a subsequent excavation by a team of Guatemalan archaeologists led by Edwin Román Ramírez, has prompted new insights on, and big questions about, Teotihuacan’s influence on the Maya civilization. 

“What we had taken to be natural hills actually were shown to be modified and conformed to the shape of the citadel — the area that was possibly the imperial palace — at Teotihuacan,” Houston said. “Regardless of who built this smaller-scale replica and why, it shows without a doubt that there was a different level of interaction between Tikal and Teotihuacan than previously believed.”

The results, including lidar images and a summary of excavation findings, were published on Tuesday, Sept. 28 in Antiquity.

Tikal and Teotihuacan were radically different cities, Houston said. Tikal, a Maya city, was fairly populous but relatively small in scale — “you could have walked from one end of the kingdom to the other in a day, maybe two” — while Teotihuacan had all the marks of an empire. Though little is known about the people who founded and governed Teotihuacan, it’s clear that, like the Romans, their influence extended far beyond their metropolitan center: Evidence shows they shaped and colonized countless communities hundreds of miles away.

Houston said anthropologists have known for decades that inhabitants of the two cities were in contact and often traded with one another for centuries before Teotihuacan conquered Tikal around the year 378 A.D. There’s also ample evidence suggesting that between the second and sixth centuries A.D., Maya elites and scribes lived in Teotihuacan, some bringing elements of the empire’s culture and materials — including its unique funerary rituals, slope-and-panel architectural style and green obsidian — back home to Tikal. Another Maya expert, David Stuart of U.T. Austin, has translated inscriptions that described the era when Teotihuacan generals, including one named Born from Fire, traveled to Tikal and unseated the local Maya king. 

But the research consortium’s latest lidar findings and excavations prove that the imperial power in modern-day Mexico did more than just trade with and culturally influence the smaller city of Tikal before conquering it. 

“The architectural complex we found very much appears to have been built for people from Teotihuacan or those under their control,” Houston said. “Perhaps it was something like an embassy complex, but when we combine previous research with our latest findings, it suggests something more heavy-handed, like occupation or surveillance. At the very least, it shows an attempt to implant part of a foreign city plan on Tikal.”

Houston said that excavations following the lidar work, led by Román Ramírez, confirmed that some buildings were constructed with mud plaster rather than the traditional Maya limestone. The structures were designed to be smaller replicas of the buildings that make up Teotihuacan’s citadel, down to the intricate cornices and terraces and the specific 15.5-degree east-of-north orientation of the complex’s platforms.

“It almost suggests that local builders were told to use an entirely non-local building technology while constructing this sprawling new building complex,” Houston said. “We’ve rarely seen evidence of anything but two-way interaction between the two civilizations, but here, we seem to be looking at foreigners who are moving aggressively into the area.”

At an adjacent, newly uncovered complex of residential buildings, archaeologists found projectile points crafted with flint, a material commonly used by the Maya, and green obsidian, a material used by residents of Teotihuacan — providing seeming evidence of conflict.

And near the replica citadel, archaeologists also recovered the remains of a body surrounded by carefully placed vessels, ceramic fragments, animal bones and projectile points. The site was dotted with charcoal, suggesting it had been set ablaze. Houston said the scene bears little resemblance to other burials or sacrifices at Tikal but is strikingly similar to the remains of warriors found years ago in Teotihuacan’s center.

“Excavations in the middle of the citadel at Teotihuacan have found the burials of many individuals dressed as warriors, and they appear to have been sacrificed and placed in mass graves,” Houston said. “We have possibly found a vestige of one of those burials at Tikal itself.”

Houston and his international colleagues still have much more to uncover and analyze. Andrew Scherer, an associate professor of anthropology at Brown and a bone specialist, will study the human remains to determine their origins, potentially revealing more about Teotihuacan’s relationship with Tikal. This summer, as COVID-19-related travel restrictions began to ease, Houston joined Garrison, Román Ramírez and Morgan Clark, a Brown graduate student in anthropology, in Guatemala to uncover buildings, fortifications and storage tanks in related fortresses nearby. Excavations will resume this fall at Tikal, under the leadership of Román Ramírez.

The more they find out, Houston said, the more he hopes they understand about Teotihuacan’s presence in Tikal — and, more broadly, how its imperial power changed the diverse cultural and political landscape in Mesoamerica.

“At this time, people are quite interested in the process of colonization and its aftermath, and in how our views of the world are informed or distorted by the expansion of economic and political systems around the globe,” Houston said. “Before European colonization of the Americas, there were empires and kingdoms of disproportionate influence and strength interacting with smaller civilizations in a way that left a large impact. Exploring Teotihuacan’s influence on Mesoamerica could be a way to explore the beginnings of colonialism and its oppressions and local collusions.”

Late Pleistocene humans may have hatched and raised cassowary chicks

 

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Modern-day cassowary (stock image).

Credit: © Andrea Izzotti / stock.adobe.com

As early as 18,000 years ago, humans in New Guinea may have collected cassowary eggs near maturity and then raised the birds to adulthood, according to an international team of scientists, who used eggshells to determine the developmental stage of the ancient embryos/chicks when the eggs cracked.

"This behavior that we are seeing is coming thousands of years before domestication of the chicken," said Kristina Douglass, assistant professor of anthropology and African studies, Penn State. "And this is not some small fowl, it is a huge, ornery, flightless bird that can eviscerate you. Most likely the dwarf variety that weighs 20 kilos (44 pounds)."

The researchers report today (Sept. 27) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that "the data presented here may represent the earliest indication of human management of the breeding of an avian taxon anywhere in the world, preceding the early domestication of chicken and geese by several millennia."

Cassowaries are not chickens; in fact, they bear more resemblance to velociraptors than most domesticated birds. "However, cassowary chicks imprint readily to humans and are easy to maintain and raise up to adult size," the researchers report. Imprinting occurs when a newly hatched bird decides that the first thing it sees is its mother. If that first glance happens to catch sight of a human, the bird will follow the human anywhere.

According to the researchers, cassowary chicks are still traded as a commodity in New Guinea.

Importance of eggshells

Eggshells are part of the assemblage of many archeological sites, but according to Douglass, archaeologists do not often study them. The researchers developed a new method to determine how old a chick embryo was when an egg was harvested. They reported this work in a recent issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science.

"I've worked on eggshells from archaeological sites for many years," said Douglass. "I discovered research on turkey eggshells that showed changes in the eggshells over the course of development that were an indication of age. I decided this would be a useful approach."

The age assignment of the embryos/chicks depends on the 3-dimensional features of the inside of the shell. To develop the method needed to determine the eggs' developmental age when the shells broke, the researchers used ostrich eggs from a study done to improve ostrich reproduction. Researchers at the Oudtshoorn Research Farm, part of the Western Cape Government of South Africa, harvested three eggs every day of incubation for 42 days for their study and supplied Douglass and her team with samples from 126 ostrich eggs.

They took four samples from each of these eggs for a total of 504 shell samples, each having a specific age. They created high-resolution, 3D images of the shell samples. By inspecting the inside of these eggs, the researcher created a statistical assessment of what the eggs looked like during stages of incubation. The researchers then tested their model with modern ostrich and emu eggs of known age.

The insides of the eggshells change through development because the developing chicks get calcium from the eggshell. Pits begin to appear in the middle of development.

"It is time dependent, but a little more complicated," said Douglass. "We used a combination of 3D imaging, modeling and morphological descriptions."

The researchers then turned to legacy shell collections from two sites in New Guinea -- Yuku and Kiowa. They applied their approach to more than 1,000 fragments of these 18,000- to 6,000-year-old eggs.

"What we found was that a large majority of the eggshells were harvested during late stages," said Douglass. "The eggshells look very late; the pattern is not random. They were either into eating baluts or they are hatching chicks."

A balut is a nearly developed embryo chick usually boiled and eaten as street food in parts of Asia.

The original archaeologists found no indication of penning for the cassowaries. The few cassowary bones found at sites are only those of the meaty portions -- leg and thigh -- suggesting these were hunted birds, processed in the wild and only the meatiest parts got hauled home.

"We also looked at burning on the eggshells," said Douglass. "There are enough samples of late stage eggshells that do not show burning that we can say they were hatching and not eating them."

To successfully hatch and raise cassowary chicks, the people would need to know where the nests were, know when the eggs were laid and remove them from the nest just before hatching. Back in the late Pleistocene, according to Douglass, humans were purposefully collecting these eggs and this study suggests people were not just harvesting eggs to eat the contents.

Also working on this project from Penn State were Priyangi Bulathsinhala, assistant teaching professor of statistics; Tim Tighe, assistant research professor, Materials Research Institute; and Andrew L. Mack, grants and contract coordinator, Penn State Altoona.

Others working on the project include Dylan Gaffney, graduate student, University of Cambridge, U.K.; Theresa J. Feo, senior science officer, California Council of Science and Technology; and Megan Spitzer, research assistant; Scott Whittaker, manager, scientific imaging; Helen James, research zoologist and curator of birds; and Torben Rick, curator of North American Archaeology, all at the Natural Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. Glenn R. Summerhayes, professor of archaeology, University of Otago, New Zealand; and Zanell Brand, production scientist, Oudtshoorn Research Farm, Elsenburg, Department of Agriculture, Western Cape Government, South Africa, also worked on the project.

The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, the National Science Foundation and Penn State's College of the Liberal Arts supported this work.

The origin and legacy of the Etruscans

A new study reports genome-wide data of ancient Italian individuals to trace the origins of the Etruscans and their contribution to later populations

Peer-Reviewed Publication

MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY

 

IMAGE: SLEEP AND DEATH CARRYING OFF THE SLAIN SARPEDON (CISTA HANDLE), 400-380 BC, ETRUSCAN, BRONZE - CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART view more 

CREDIT: DADEROT, CC0, VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

The Etruscan civilization, which flourished during the Iron Age in central Italy, has intrigued scholars for millennia. With remarkable metallurgical skills and a now-extinct, non-Indo-European language, the Etruscans stood out from their contemporary neighbors, leading to intense debate from the likes of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus on their geographical origins.

Now, a new study by a team of scholars from Germany, Italy, USA, Denmark and the UK, sheds light on the origin and legacy of the enigmatic Etruscans with genome-wide data from 82 ancient individuals from central and southern Italy, spanning 800 BCE to 1000 CE. Their results show that the Etruscans, despite their unique cultural expressions, were closely related to their italic neighbors, and reveal major genetic transformations associated with historical events.

An intriguing phenomenon

With an extinct language that is only partly understood, much of what was initially known about Etruscan civilization comes from the commentary of later Greek and Roman writers. One hypothesis about their origins, the one favored by Herodotus, points to the influence of ancient Greek cultural elements to argue that the Etruscans descended from migrating Anatolian or Aegean groups. Another, championed by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, proposes that the Etruscans originated and developed locally from the Bronze Age Villanovan culture and were therefore an autochthonous population.

Although the current consensus among archaeologists supports a local origin for the Etruscans, a lack of ancient DNA from the region has made genetic investigations inconsistent. The current study, with a time transect of ancient genomic information spanning almost 2000 years collected from 12 archaeological sites, resolves lingering questions about Etruscan origins, showing no evidence for a recent population movement from Anatolia. In fact, the Etruscans shared the genetic profile of the Latins living in nearby Rome, with a large proportion of their genetic profiles coming from steppe-related ancestry that arrived in the region during the Bronze Age.

Considering that steppe-related groups were likely responsible for the spread of Indo-European languages, now spoken around the world by billions of people, the persistence of a non-Indo-European Etruscan language is an intriguing and still unexplained phenomenon that will require further archaeological, historical, linguistic and genetic investigation.

“This linguistic persistence, combined with a genetic turnover, challenges simple assumptions that genes equal languages and suggests a more complex scenario that may have involved the assimilation of early Italic speakers by the Etruscan speech community, possibly during a prolonged period of admixture over the second millennium BCE,” says David Caramelli, Professor at the University of Florence.

Periods of change

Despite a few individuals of eastern Mediterranean, northern African, and central Europeanorigins, the Etruscan-related gene pool remained stable for at least 800 years, spanning the Iron Age and Roman Republic period. The study finds, however, that during the subsequent Roman Imperial period, central Italy experienced a large scale genetic shift, resulting from admixture with eastern Mediterranean populations, which likely included slaves and soldiers relocated across the Roman Empire.

“This genetic shift clearly depicts the role of the Roman Empire in the large-scale displacement of people in a time of enhanced upward or downward socioeconomic and geographic mobility,” says Johannes Krause, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Looking at the more recent Early Middle Ages, the researchers identified northern European ancestries spreading across the Italian peninsula following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. These results suggest that Germanic migrants, including individuals associated with the newly established Longobard Kingdom, might have left a traceable impact on the genetic landscape of central Italy.

In the regions of Tuscany, Lazio, and Basilicata the population’s ancestry remained largely continuous between the Early Medieval times and today, suggesting that the main gene pool of present-day people from central and southern Italy was largely formed at least 1000 years ago.

Although more ancient DNA from across Italy is needed to support the above conclusions, ancestry shifts in Tuscany and northern Lazio similar to those reported for the city of Rome and its surroundings suggests that historical events during the first millennium CE had a major impact on the genetic transformations over much of the Italian peninsula.

“The Roman Empire appears to have left a long-lasting contribution to the genetic profile of southern Europeans, bridging the gap between European and eastern Mediterranean populations on the genetic map of western Eurasia,” says Cosimo Posth, Professor at the University of Tübingen and Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment.

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Ancient DNA analysis sheds light on dark event in medieval Spain

 

 

IMAGE: AN INTERNATIONAL TEAM OF RESEARCHERS LED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF HUDDERSFIELD’S ARCHAEOGENETICS RESEARCH GROUP, INCLUDING GENETICISTS, ARCHAEOLOGICAL SCIENTISTS, AND ARCHAEOLOGISTS, HAS PUBLISHED THE GENOME SEQUENCE OF A UNIQUE INDIVIDUAL FROM ISLAMIC MEDIEVAL SPAIN – AL-ANDALUS - THE RESULTS OF WHICH HAVE SHED LIGHT ON A BRUTAL EVENT THAT TOOK PLACE IN MEDIEVAL SPAIN. view more 

CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF HUDDERSFIELD

An international research team led by the University of Huddersfield's Archaeogenetics Research Group, including geneticists, archaeological scientists, and archaeologists, has published the genome sequence of a unique individual from Islamic medieval Spain – al-Andalus - the results of which have shed light on a brutal event that took place in medieval Spain.

The individual, who was discovered in an eleventh century Islamic necropolis from the city of Segorbe, near Valencia in Spain, is known to local archaeologists as the ‘Segorbe Giant’ because of his unusual height.

His skeleton had suggested that he might have some African ancestry.  Most of Spain had been progressively conquered by Arabs and Berbers from Northwest Africa from the eighth century onwards, creating one of the major centres of medieval European civilisation.

“What was especially striking was that he was very unlike modern people from Valencia, who carry little or none of his Berber genetic heritage.” 

Professor Martin Richards, Director of the Evolutionary Genomics Research Centre

The ancient DNA analysis was carried out by Dr Marina Silva and Dr Gonzalo Oteo-Garcia, who had been working on the University’s Leverhulme Trust doctoral scholarship programme in evolutionary genomics. 

They found that the “Giant” carried highly specific North African genetic lineages on both his male and female lines of descent – the Y-chromosome and the mitochondrial DNA – the oldest individual known to have this particular pattern of ancestry. This suggested that his recent ancestry was indeed amongst the newly Islamicised Berber populations of medieval Northwest Africa.

But a more detailed examination revealed a more complex situation. The male and female lines of descent account for only a small fraction of our overall ancestry – that from our father’s father’s father and our mother’s mother’s mother, and so on.

His genome-wide ancestry showed that he also carried a significant amount – likely more than half – of local Spanish ancestry in his chromosomes. Moreover, stable isotope analyses suggested that he most likely grew up locally meaning the “Giant’s” Berber ancestry was in fact due to migration from an earlier generation. He therefore belonged to a settled community that had thoroughly intermixed local Spanish and immigrant North African ancestry.

What was especially striking revealed Professor Martin Richards, Director of the University’s Evolutionary Genomics Research Centre, was that he was very unlike modern people from Valencia, who carry little or none of his Berber genetic heritage.

This can be explained by the changing political situation following the Christian reconquest of Spain as Dr Oteo-Garcia, who recently commenced work at the University of Parma, explained: “The decree of expulsion of Moriscos ­from the Valencia region, that is, Muslims who had already been forcibly converted to Christianity, was followed by the resettlement by people from further north, who had little North African ancestry, thereby transforming the genetic variation in the region.”

Dr Silva, who now works at London’s Francis Crick Institute, said: “The impact of this dramatic change in population, resulting from a brutal political decision hundreds of years ago, can finally be witnessed directly using ancient DNA, as seen here in the ancestry of the ‘Segorbe Giant’ and his contemporaries.”

An article detailing the research and its findings has been published in the journal Scientific Reports entitled, ‘Biomolecular insights into North African-related ancestry, mobility and diet in eleventh-century Al-Andalus’.

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The promise and perils of tree-ring dating musical instruments

In a Perspective, Paolo Cherubini highlights the value of dendrochronology – an objective and nondestructive method – in assessing the authenticity of musical string instruments. Stringed instruments, particularly those created by the luthiers of northern Italy during the 17th and 18th centuries, notably the Stradivari family, are among the most valued and appreciated works of art in the world. 

Widely regarded as superior in tonal qualities, these instruments have been the preferred choice of musicians for centuries. However, it can be difficult to verify the authenticity of these musical instruments – a simple examination of their style and design, both of which are prone to forgery, is often insufficient to confirm the makers. Thus, the authenticity of some instruments has been long disputed. Here, Cherubini discusses the use of dendrochronological methods in establishing the age and provenance of these highly valuable works of art. Dendrochronology uses the characteristic patterns of annual growth rings of trees – features prominently displayed on the wooden fronts of stringed instruments – to determine the age of the wood used in its construction and the potential region from which it was sourced. 

Unlike carbon dating and isotope analysis, dendrochronology is the only objective nondestructive method that can provide a date after which an instrument could have been made. While the approach is useful, Cherubini emphasizes that it is important that musicians and art collectors understand limitations of dendroecological authentication. The method does not provide an exact date of construction but rather a date before which it was certainly not made; it can be further limited by the availability of reference tree ring chronologies. “Dendrochronology enables the objective verification of date attributions made on the basis of art history and stylistic criteria and offers a distinctive nondestructive, scientifically sound analytical technique when correctly applied,” writes the author.

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Fossil footprints reveal human occupation in North America during Last Glacial Maximum

 

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Newly discovered fossil human footprints embedded in an ancient lakebed show that humans inhabited North America during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), occupying the region of what is now White Sands National Park in New Mexico, United States, between 23 and 21 thousand years ago. Not only do the findings provide definitive evidence on the early antiquity of the colonization of the New World, they also indicate that humans were present in southern North America before the glacial advances of the LGM prevented human migration from Asia. Despite nearly a century of research, the details concerning the migration of the first humans into the Americas and their impact on the Pleistocene landscape remain poorly understood, and the earliest archaeological evidence for the settlement of the region is often highly controversial. 

Current estimates for the timing of these first occupants range from ~13,000 years ago to more than 20,000 years ago. However, in most cases, the timeline of human expansion into North America is largely constrained by the viability of the currently recognized migration routes from Asia – an inland ice-free corridor through western Canada and/or a Pacific coastal route – which would have likely been closed or difficult to traverse during the LGM. 

Matthew Bennett and colleagues report the discovery of a sequence of in situ human footprints on surfaces dating to between ~23,000 and 21,000 years ago and reveal nearly 2,000 years of human occupation in North America during the height of the LGM. Unlike cultural artifacts or other evidence of human activity, which can have uncertain provenance, footprints have a primary depositional context, fixed on the imprinted surface, and represent a discrete moment in time. According to Bennett et al., further analyses of the tracks suggest that most were made by teenagers and children; larger adult footprints are much less frequent.

Recording roman resource exploitation and urban collapse

Overexploitation of resources leads to collapse of socioeconomic system

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS JOURNALS

 

IMAGE: CO-DIRECTOR OF THE STUDY HANS BARNARD LEADS SURVEY AND EXCAVATIONS OF THE NEO-PUNIC RITUAL PRECINCT AT ZITA (PHOTO CREDIT BRETT KAUFMAN). view more 

CREDIT: BRETT KAUFMAN

For hundreds of years, Carthage—the Phoenician city-state in North Africa—flourished, establishing itself as a robust trade empire with widespread colonies. As the Carthaginian and Roman empires expanded their reach across Mediterranean Europe and North Africa, escalating tensions over political dominance and trade culminated in the Three Punic Wars.

The conflict’s conclusion marked the beginning of the Neo-Punic period and Rome’s occupation of Carthage. After the dissolution of the Carthaginian state, administrative regions were obligated to provide the Roman state with goods and natural resources. While Neo-Punic citizens were expected to embrace Roman customs and rule, the Romans allowed them to retain certain aspects of their own culture. By employing this strategic tolerance, the Romans were able to take advantage of the knowledge and skillsets of Punic craftspeople as well as the region’s environment.

This political transition ushered in a period of environmental exploitation and industrial overproduction, and Kaufman et. al argue that archaeological evidence indicates Roman colonial dynamics of overproduction played a role in the degradation and eventual desertion of the city of Zita in the administrative region of Tripolitania.

Kaufman et. al, in “Quantifying Surplus and Sustainability in the Archaeological Record at the Carthaginian-Roman Urban Mound of Zita, Tripolitania,” published in Current Anthropology, utilize cultural ecological theory to analyze a dataset collected from excavations at two zones at the urban mound. Structures characteristic of both empires—such as kilns, metallurgical workshops, a tophet, and a Roman forum—are present at the mound, making the site conducive to studying the transition from Carthaginian to Roman control.

Ceramic evidence collected from excavations and survey suggests that before residents began abandoning Zita in AD 200, the region underwent a period of significant industrialization and prosperity, followed by economic collapse. As indicated by stratigraphic analysis of an ecological core from one of the zones, Zita’s economy was initially reliant on agricultural goods, like olive oil. During the Roman occupation, however, evidence indicates a shift toward producing and refining metals, like iron.

Focusing on correlations between the raw materials needed to facilitate industrial processes, the authors use archaeological modeling to discern whether production expanded beyond sustainable levels. To gauge Zita’s ecological metabolism, the authors compare levels of olive timber to the amount of metallurgical byproduct, or slag, found at the site. Higher layers of the core contained the orange and black waste products, which were indicative of and could be used as a measure of metal production. Since olive wood served as fuel for metallurgical work, Kaufman et. al designate olive pits as a proxy for measuring the degree of olive tree consumption required to support production. The authors detail an inverse correlation between olive pits and metal production. Data indicate a reduction in olive pits over time, which suggests olive wood was increasingly allotted for metallurgical purposes. Charcoal analysis points to the unsustainability of this economic shift. While olive wood was used predominantly, the authors assert that scarcity may have led to the utilization of alternative fuels in later years preceding urban collapse.

Early Homo sapiens groups in Europe faced subarctic climates

 

New insights into the climatic backdrop for an early wave of dispersal of our species into Europe during the last glacial period

Peer-Reviewed Publication

MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGYp

 

IMAGE: CURRENT EXCAVATIONS AT BACHO KIRO CAVE OF THE 2021 SEASON ARE UNEARTHING NEW ARTIFACTS FROM THE MIDDLE PALAEOLITHIC NEANDERTHAL OCCUPATIONS. THE INITIAL UPPER PALAEOLITHIC LAYER I CAN BE SEEN AS A DARK BAND IN THE SEDIMENT PROFILE. EXCAVATORS ARE WEARING MASKS AND GLOVES TO MINIMIZE CONTAMINATION OF SAMPLES THAT ARE REGULARLY TAKEN FOR MOLECULAR ANALYSES. view more 

CREDIT: MPI-EVA/ TSENKA TSANOVA

The process how our species dispersed into new environments at that time represents an important evolutionary turning point that ultimately led to Homo sapienspopulating all continents and a large diversity of climate zones and environments. The mechanisms that facilitated initial waves of expansion remain debated, but a majority of models based on the correlation of archaeological sites with spatially distant climatic archives has so far indicated that human groups relied on warmer climatic conditions to spread into new, more northern, environments.

Using evidence directly from the archaeological layers of Bacho Kiro Cave the Max Planck team was now able to show that humans have been enduring very cold climatic conditions, similar to the ones typical for present-day northern Scandinavia, for several thousand years. "Our evidence shows that these human groups were more flexible with regard to the environments they used and more adaptable to different climatic conditions than previously thought", says lead author Sarah Pederzani, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the University of Aberdeen. Jean-Jacques Hublin, director of the Department of Human Evolution at the Max Planck Institute, adds: "Using these new insights, new models of the spread of our species across Eurasia will now need to be constructed, taking into account their higher degree of climatic flexibility."

Archaeological materials from Bacho Kiro Cave in Bulgaria

By directly using archaeological materials, such as the remains of herbivores butchered by humans, to generate climatic data the palaeoclimate research team – led by Pederzani and Kate Britton, also a researcher at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the University of Aberdeen – was able to establish a very robust record of local climatic conditions that specifically relates to the times when humans were inhabiting Bacho Kiro Cave.

"This technique enables a more confident assignment of local climatic context compared to the more commonly used chronological correlation between archaeological data and climatic archives from different localities that formed the basis of much of the existing research on human climatic adaptability – it really gives us insight into what life was like 'on the ground'", says Britton. "However, due to the time consuming nature of the analysis and the reliance on the availability of particular animal remains, oxygen isotope studies or other ways of generating climatic data directly from archaeological sites remain scarce for the time period when Homo sapiens first spread across Eurasia", adds Pederzani. Indeed, this Max Planck study is the first study conducted in the context of the Initial Upper Palaeolithic and could therefore yield such surprising results.

Highly resolved record of past temperatures spanning more than 7,000 years

Pederzani spent one year conducting lab work from drilling series of small samples from the animal teeth through wet chemistry preparation and stable isotope ratio mass spectrometry to obtain all the necessary data. "Through this time intensive analysis that included a total of 179 samples, it was possible to obtain a very highly resolved record of past temperatures, including summer, winter and mean annual temperature estimates for human occupations spanning more than 7,000 years", says Pederzani.

Renewed excavations at Bacho Kiro Cave conducted by an international team led by Max Planck researchers Jean-Jacques Hublin, Tsenka Tsanova and Shannon McPherron, and Nikolay Sirakov of the National Institute of Archaeology with Museum at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in Sofia, Bulgaria, started in 2015 and have yielded a rich archaeological record of human activity at the cave including the remnants of occupations that represent the earliest known occurrence of Upper Palaeolithic Homo sapiens in Europe. Deposits in the lower portion of the site contained a large number of animal bones, stone tools, pendants and even human fossils and formed the basis of the climatic study to investigate the environmental conditions that humans experienced when they first spread into Southeast Europe from the Levant.