Ancient human relative, Australopithecus sediba, 'walked like a human, but climbed like an ape'

 An international team of scientists from New York University, the University of the Witwatersrand and 15 other institutions announced today in the open access journal e-Life, the discovery of two-million-year-old fossil vertebrae from an extinct species of ancient human relative.

The recovery of new lumbar vertebrae from the lower back of a single individual of the human relative, Australopithecus sediba, and portions of other vertebrae of the same female from Malapa, South Africa, together with previously discovered vertebrae, form one of the most complete lower backs ever discovered in the early hominid record and give insight into how this ancient human relative walked and climbed.

The fossils were discovered in 2015 during excavations of a mining trackway running next to the site of Malapa in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site, just Northwest of Johannesburg South Africa.

Malapa is the site where, in 2008 Professor Lee Berger from the University of the Witwatersrand and his then nine-year old son, Matthew, discovered the first remains of what would be a new species of ancient human relative named Australopithecus sediba.

Fossils from the site have been dated to approximately two million years before present. The vertebrae described in the present study were recovered in a consolidated cement-like rock, known as breccia, in near articulation.

Rather than risking damaging the fossils, they were prepared virtually after scanning with a Micro-CT scanner at the University of the Witwatersrand, thus removing the risk of damaging the closely positioned, delicate bones during manual preparation. Once virtually prepared, the vertebrae were reunited with fossils recovered during earlier work at the site and found to articulate perfectly with the spine of the fossil skeleton, part of the original Type specimens of Australopithecus sediba first described in 2010. The skeleton's catalogue number is MH 2, but the researchers have nicknamed the female skeleton "Issa," meaning protector in Swahili. The discovery also established that like humans, sediba had only five lumbar vertebrae.

"The lumbar region is critical to understanding the nature of bipedalism in our earliest ancestors, and to understanding how well adapted they were to walking on two legs," says Professor Scott Williams of New York University and Wits University and lead author on the paper.

"Associated series of lumbar vertebrae are extraordinarily rare in the hominin fossil record, with really only three comparable lower spines being known from the whole of the early African record."

The discovery of the new specimens means that Issa now becomes one of only two early hominin skeletons to preserve both a relatively complete lower spine and dentition from the same individual, allowing certainty as to what species the spine belongs to.

"While Issa was already one of the most complete skeletons of an ancient hominin ever discovered, these vertebrae practically complete the lower back and make Issa's lumbar region a contender for not only the best-preserved hominin lower back ever discovered, but also probably the best preserved," says Berger, who is an author on the study and leader of the Malapa project. He adds that this combination of completeness and preservation gave the team an unprecedented look at the anatomy of the lower back of the species.

Previous studies of the incomplete lower spine by authors not involved in the present study hypothesised that sediba would have had a relatively straight spine, without the curvature, or lordosis, typically seen in modern humans. They further hypothesised Issa's spine was more like that of the extinct species Neandertals and other more primitive species of ancient hominins older than two million years.

Lordosis is the inward curve of the lumbar spine and is typically used to demonstrate strong adaptations to bipedalism.

However, with the more complete spine, and excellent preservation of the fossils, the present study found the lordosis of sediba was in fact more extreme than any other australopithecines yet discovered, and the amount of curvature of the spine observed was only exceeded by that seen in the spine of the 1.6-million-year-old Turkana boy (Homo erectus) from Kenya, and some modern humans.

"While the presence of lordosis and other features of the spine represent clear adaptations to walking on two legs, there are other features, such as the large and upward oriented transverse processes, that suggest powerful trunk musculature, perhaps for arboreal behaviors," says Professor Gabrielle Russo of Stony Brook University and an author on the study.

Strong upward oriented transverse spines are typically indicative of powerful trunk muscles, as observed in apes. Professor Shahed Nalla of the University of Johannesburg and Wits who is an expert on ribs and a researcher on the present study says: "When combined with other parts of torso anatomy, this indicates that sediba retained clear adaptations to climbing."

Previous studies of this ancient species have highlighted the mixed adaptations across the skeleton in sediba that have indicated its transitional nature between walking like a human and climbing adaptations. These include features studied in the upper limbs, pelvis and lower limbs.

"The spine ties this all together," says Professor Cody Prang of Texas A&M, who studies how ancient hominins walked and climbed. "In what manner these combinations of traits persisted in our ancient ancestors, including potential adaptations to both walking on the ground on two legs and climbing trees effectively, is perhaps one of the major outstanding questions in human origins."

The study concludes that sediba is a transitional form of ancient human relative and its spine is clearly intermediate in shape between those of modern humans (and Neandertals) and great apes.

"Issa walked somewhat like a human but could climb like an ape," says Berger.

Prehistoric mums may have cared for kids better than we thought

 A new study from The Australian National University (ANU) has revealed the death rate of babies in ancient societies is not a reflection of poor healthcare, disease and other factors, but instead is an indication of the number of babies born in that era.

The findings shed new light on the history of our ancestors and debunk old assumptions that infant mortality rates were consistently high in ancient populations.

The study also opens up the possibility mothers from early human societies may have been much more capable of caring for their children than previously thought.

"It has long been assumed that if there are a lot of deceased babies in a burial sample, then infant mortality must have been high," lead author Dr Clare McFadden, from the ANU School of Archaeology and Anthropology, said.

"Many have assumed that infant mortality was very high in the past in the absence of modern healthcare.

"When we look at these burial samples, it actually tells us more about the number of babies that were born and tells us very little about the number of babies that were dying, which is counterintuitive to past perceptions."

The researchers examined United Nations (UN) data from the past decade for 97 countries that looked at infant mortality, fertility and the number of deaths that occurred during infancy. The analysis revealed that fertility had a much greater influence on the proportion of deceased infants than the infant mortality rate.

Because there is very little known about early human societies, the UN data helped the researchers make interpretations about humans from the past 10,000 years.

"Archaeology has often looked at the proportion of deceased infants to learn something about infant mortality. There was an assumption that nearly half, 40 per cent, of all babies born in prehistoric populations died within the first year of their lives," Dr McFadden said.

After analysing the UN data, Dr McFadden found no evidence to support this assumption.

"Burial samples show no proof that a lot of babies were dying, but they do tell us a lot of babies were being born," she said.

"If mothers during that time were having a lot of babies, then it seems reasonable to suggest they were capable of caring for their young children."

The ANU findings could help researchers understand more about humans that inhabited the Earth tens of thousands of years ago and in particular, how mothers in ancient societies cared for and interacted with their children.

Dr McFadden said as we piece together more clues about the history of humans, it's important we "bring some humanity" back to our ancestors.

"Artistic representations and popular culture tend to view our ancestors as these archaic and incapable people, and we forget their emotional experience and responses such as the desire to provide care and feelings of grief date back tens of thousands of years, so adding this emotional and empathetic aspect to the human narrative is really important," she said.

The researchers would also like to see greater emphasis placed on the stories of women in past populations, which they say have long been neglected in favour of male stories.

"We hear a lot of stories about conflict involving males and even narratives around colonisation and expansion of populations tend to have a focus on men and I think it's really important to be telling these stories of women in the past and what the female experience was like, including the roles they played in the community and as a mother," Dr McFadden said.

"We hope that further research, applied with the lens of our findings, will add to our understanding of infant care and motherhood in the past."

Collapse of ancient Liangzhu culture caused by climate change

Referred to as "China's Venice of the Stone Age", the Liangzhu excavation site in eastern China is considered one of the most significant testimonies of early Chinese advanced civilisation. More than 5000 years ago, the city already had an elaborate water management system. Until now, it has been controversial what led to the sudden collapse. Massive flooding triggered by anomalously intense monsoon rains caused the collapse, as an international team with Innsbruck geologist and climate researcher Christoph Spötl has now shown in the journal Science Advances.

In the Yangtze Delta, about 160 kilometres southwest of Shanghai, the archeological ruins of Liangzhu City are located. There, a highly advanced culture blossomed about 5300 years ago, which is considered to be one of the earliest proofs of monumental water culture. The oldest evidence of large hydraulic engineering structures in China originates from this late Neolithic cultural site. The walled city had a complex system of navigable canals, dams and water reservoirs. This system made it possible to cultivate very large agricultural areas throughout the year. In the history of human civilisation, this is one of the first examples of highly developed communities based on a water infrastructure. Metals, however, were still unknown in this culture. Thousands of elaborately crafted jade burial objects were found during excavations. Long undiscovered and underestimated in its historical significance, the archaeological site is now considered a well-preserved record of Chinese civilisation dating back more than 5000 years. Liangzhu was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2019. However, the advanced civilisation of this city, which was inhabited for almost 1000 years, came to an abrupt end. Until today, it remains controversial what caused it. "A thin layer of clay was found on the preserved ruins, which points to a possible connection between the demise of the advanced civilisation and floods of the Yangtze River or floods from the East China Sea. No evidence could be found for human causes such as warlike conflicts," explains Christoph Spötl, head of the Quaternary Research Group at the Department of Geology. "However, no clear conclusions on the cause were possible from the mud layer itself."

Dripstones store the answer

Caves and their deposits, such as dripstones, are among the most important climate archives that exist. They allow the reconstruction of climatic conditions above the caves up to several 100,000 years into the past. Since it is still not clear what caused the sudden collapse of the Liangzhu culture, the research team searched for suitable archives in order to investigate a possible climatic cause of this collapse. Geologist Haiwei Zhang from Xi'an Jiaotong University in Xi'an, who spent a year at the University of Innsbruck as a visiting researcher in 2017, took samples of stalagmites from the two caves Shennong and Jiulong, which are located southwest of the excavation site. "These caves have been well explored for years. They are located in the same area affected by the Southeast Asian monsoon as the Yangtze delta and their stalagmites provide a precise insight into the time of the collapse of the Liangzhu culture, which, according to archaeological findings, happened about 4300 years ago," Spötl explains. Data from the stalagmites show that between 4345 and 4324 years ago there was a period of extremely high precipitation. Evidence for this was provided by the isotope records of carbon, which were measured at the University of Innsbruck. The precise dating was done by uranium-thorium analyses at Xi'an Jiaotong University, whose measurement accuracy is ± 30 years. "This is amazingly precise in light of the temporal dimension," says the geologist. "The massive monsoon rains probably led to such severe flooding of the Yangtze and its branches that even the sophisticated dams and canals could no longer withstand these masses of water, destroying Liangzhu City and forcing people to flee." The very humid climatic conditions continued intermittently for another 300 years, as the geologists show from the cave data.

Archaeologists discover salt workers’ residences at underwater Maya site

The ancient Maya had stone temples and palaces in the rainforest of Central America, along with dynastic records of royal leaders carved in stone, but they lacked a basic commodity essential to daily life: salt. The sources of salt are mainly along the coast, including salt flats on the Yucatan coast and brine-boiling along the coast of Belize, where it rains a lot. But how did the inland Maya maintain a supply of salt?

 

CAPTION

Archaeologist Heather McKillop and her team at Louisiana State University have discovered new findings on the organization of the salt industry to supply this basic dietary commodity to inland cities during the Classic Maya civilization.

CREDIT

LSU

LSU Maya archaeologist Heather McKillop and her team have excavated salt kitchens where brine was boiled in clay pots over fires in pole and thatch buildings preserved in oxygen-free sediment below the sea floor in Belize. But where these salt workers lived has been elusive, leaving possible interpretations of daily or seasonal workers from the coast or even inland. This gap left nagging questions about the organization of production and distribution.

New findings on the organization of the salt industry to supply this basic dietary commodity to inland cities during the Classic Maya civilization are reported in a recent article by McKillop and LSU alumna Cory Sills, who is an associate professor at University Texas-Tyler. The article “Briquetage and brine: Living and Working at the Ek Way Nal Salt Works, Belize” was published in the journal Ancient Mesoamerica.

McKillop and Sills began this new project in search of residences where the salt workers lived and to understand the energetics of production of salt with funding from the National Science Foundation. Although field work at Ek Way Nal, where the Paynes Creek Saltworks is located, has been postponed since March 2020 due to the pandemic, the researchers turned to material previously exported for study in the LSU Archaeology lab, including hundreds of wood samples from pole and thatch buildings, as well as pottery sherds.

“The Archaeology lab looks like a Tupperware party, with hundreds of plastic containers of water, but they are keeping the wood samples wet so they don’t dry out and deteriorate,” said McKillop, who is the Thomas & Lillian Landrum Alumni Professor in the LSU Department of Geography and Anthropology.

She explained the strategy to continue research in the lab: “I decided to submit a wood post sample for radiocarbon dating from each building at Ek Way Nal to see if they all dated to the same time, which was suggested by the visibility of artifacts and buildings on the sea floor.”

When the dates started coming in, two at a time, McKillop identified a building construction sequence that began in the Late Classic at the height of Maya civilization and continued through the Terminal Classic when the dynastic leaders of inland city states were losing control and eventually the cities were abandoned by A.D. 900.

According to McKillop, “Using the well-studied site, Sacapulas, Guatemala, as a model, worked well to develop archaeological expectations for different activities for brine boiling in a salt kitchen, a residence and other activities, including salting fish.”

In the Ancient Mesoamerica article, they report a 3-part building construction sequence with salt kitchens, at least one residence and an outdoor area where fish were salted and dried. The archeologists’ strategy of radiocarbon dating each building had produced a finer grain chronology for Ek Way Nal that they are using for more sites.

The new analysis verifies McKillop’s estimate that 10 salt kitchens were in production at a time at the Paynes Creek Salt Works, which she reported in her book “Maya Salt Works” (2019, University Press of Florida).

“The research underscores the importance of radiocarbon dating each pole and thatch building at the salt works in order to evaluate production capacity of this dietary necessity. The research also shows the value of individually mapping artifacts and posts on the sea floor at the underwater sites in order to interpret building use. Using Sacapulas salt works as a model from which to develop archaeological correlates fits with Ek Way Nal and suggests the Maya living permanently at the community were engaged in surplus household production of salt that was well integrated in the regional economy, allowing them to acquire a variety of nonlocal goods,” she said.

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JOURNAL

Ancient Mesoamerica

DOI

10.1017/S0956536121000341 

Justinianic Plague was nothing like flu and may have struck England before it reached Constantinople

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‘Plague sceptics’ are wrong to underestimate the devastating impact that bubonic plague had in the 6th– 8th centuries CE, argues a new study based on ancient texts and recent genetic discoveries.

The same study suggests that bubonic plague may have reached England before its first recorded case in the Mediterranean via a currently unknown route, possibly involving the Baltic and Scandinavia.

The Justinianic Plague is the first known outbreak of bubonic plague in west Eurasian history and struck the Mediterranean world at a pivotal moment in its historical development, when the Emperor Justinian was trying to restore Roman imperial power.

For decades, historians have argued about the lethality of the disease; its social and economic impact; and the routes by which it spread. In 2019-20, several studies, widely publicised in the media, argued that historians had massively exaggerated the impact of the Justinianic Plague and described it as an ‘inconsequential pandemic’. In a subsequent piece of journalism, written just before COVID-19 took hold in the West, two researchers suggested that the Justinianic Plague was ‘not unlike our flu outbreaks’.

In a new study, published in Past & Present, Cambridge historian Professor Peter Sarris argues that these studies ignored or downplayed new genetic findings, offered misleading statistical analysis and misrepresented the evidence provided by ancient texts.

Sarris says: “Some historians remain deeply hostile to regarding external factors such as disease as having a major impact on the development of human society, and ‘plague scepticism’ has had a lot of attention in recent years.”

Sarris, a Fellow of Trinity College, is critical of the way that some studies have used search engines to calculate that only a small percentage of ancient literature discusses the plague and then crudely argue that this proves the disease was considered insignificant at the time.

Sarris says: “Witnessing the plague first-hand obliged the contemporary historian Procopius to break away from his vast military narrative to write a harrowing account of the arrival of the plague in Constantinople that would leave a deep impression on subsequent generations of Byzantine readers. That is far more telling than the number of plague-related words he wrote. Different authors, writing different types of text, concentrated on different themes, and their works must be read accordingly.”

Sarris also refutes the suggestion that laws, coins and papyri provide little evidence that the plague had a significant impact on the early Byzantine state or society. He points to a major reduction in imperial law-making between the year 546, by which point the plague had taken hold, and the end of Justinian’s reign in 565. But he also argues that the flurry of significant legislation that was made between 542 and 545 reveals a series of crisis-driven measures issued in the face of plague-induced depopulation, and to limit the damage inflicted by the plague on landowning institutions.

In March 542, in a law that Justinian described as having been written amid the ‘encircling presence of death’, which had ‘spread to every region’, the emperor attempted to prop up the banking sector of the imperial economy.

In another law of 544, the emperor attempted to impose price and wage controls, as workers tried to take advantage of labour shortages. Alluding to the plague, Justinian declared that the ‘chastening which has been sent by God’s goodness’ should have made workers ‘better people’ but instead ‘they have turned to avarice’.

That bubonic plague exacerbated the East Roman Empire’s existing fiscal and administrative difficulties is also reflected in changes to coinage in this period, Sarris argues. A series of light-weight gold coins were issued, the first such reduction in the gold currency since its introduction in the 4th century and the weight of the heavy copper coinage of Constantinople was also reduced significantly around the same time as the emperor’s emergency banking legislation.

Sarris says: “The significance of a historical pandemic should never be judged primarily on the basis of whether it leads to the ‘collapse’ of the societies concerned. Equally, the resilience of the East Roman state in the face of the plague does not signify that the challenge posed by the plague was not real.”

 “What is most striking about the governmental response to the Justinianic Plague in the Byzantine or Roman world is how rational and carefully targeted it was, despite the bewilderingly unfamiliar circumstances in which the authorities found themselves.

“We have a lot to learn from how our forebears responded to epidemic disease, and how pandemics impacted on social structures, the distribution of wealth, and modes of thought.”

Bubonic plague in England

Until the early 2000s, the identification of the Justinianic Plague as ‘bubonic’ rested entirely upon ancient texts which described the appearance of buboes or swellings in the groins or armpits of victims. But then rapid advances in genomics enabled archaeologists and genetic scientists to discover traces of the ancient DNA of Yersinia pestis in Early Medieval skeletal remains. Such finds have been made in Germany, Spain, France and England.

In 2018, a study of DNA preserved in remains found in an early Anglo-Saxon burial site known as Edix Hill in Cambridgeshire revealed that many of the interred had died carrying the disease. Further analysis revealed that the strain of Y. pestis found was the earliest identified lineage of the bacterium involved in the 6th-century pandemic.

Sarris says: “We have tended to start with the literary sources, which describe the plague arriving at Pelusium in Egypt before spreading out from there, and then fitted the archaeological and genetic evidence into a framework and narrative based on those sources. That approach will no longer do. The arrival of bubonic plague in the Mediterranean around 541 and its initial arrival in England possibly somewhat earlier may have been the result of two separate but related routes, occurring some time apart."

The study suggests that the plague may have reached the Mediterranean via the Red Sea, and reached England perhaps via the Baltic and Scandanavia, and from there onto parts of the continent.

The study emphasises that despite being called the ‘Justinianic Plague’, it was “never a purely or even primarily Roman phenomenon” and as recent genetic discoveries have proven, it reached remote and rural sites such as Edix Hill, as well as heavily populated cities.

It is widely accepted that the lethal and virulent strain of bubonic plague from which the Justinianic Plague and later the Black Death would descend had emerged in Central Asia by the Bronze Age before evolving further there in antiquity.

Sarris suggests that it may be significant that the advent of both the Justinianic Plague and the Black Death were preceded by the expansion of nomadic empires across Eurasia: the Huns in the 4th and 5th centuries, and the Mongols in the 13th.

Sarris says: “Increasing genetic evidence will lead in directions we can scarcely yet anticipate, and historians need to be able to respond positively and imaginatively, rather than with a defensive shrug.”

Reference

P. Sarris, ‘New Approaches to the ‘Plague of Justinian’, Past & Present (2021); DOI: 10.1093/pastj/gtab024. https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab024

Genetic changes in Bronze Age Southern Iberia

DNA from 136 ancient Iberians reveals genomic and social transformations during the Copper Age to Bronze Age transition in southwestern Europe

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITAT AUTONOMA DE BARCELONA

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IMAGE: THE FORTIFIED SETTLEMENT OF LA BASTIDA (TOTANA, MURCIA). THIS IS ONE OF THE LARGEST AND BEST EXCAVATED SETTLEMENTS OF EL ARGAR. view more 

CREDIT: ASOME-UAB

The third millennium BCE is a highly dynamic period in the prehistory of Europe and western Asia, characterized by large-scale social and political changes. In the Iberian Peninsula, the Copper Age was in full swing in around 2500 years BCE with substantial demographic growth, attested by a large diversity of settlements and fortifications, monumental funerary structures, as well as ditched mega-sites larger than 100 hectares. For reasons that are still unclear, the latter half of the millennium experienced depopulation and the abandonment of the mega-sites, fortified settlements and necropolis.

In southeastern Iberia, one of the most outstanding archaeological entities of the European Bronze Age emerged around 2200 BCE. Known as the ‘El Argar’ culture, one of the first state-level societies on the European continent, it was characterised by large, central hilltop settlements, distinct pottery, specialized weapons and bronze, silver and gold artefacts, alongside an intramural burial rite.

A new study led by researchers from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the Max Planck Institutes for the Science of Human History (Jena) and Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig) and published in Science Advances, explores the relation between dynamic shifts at population scale and the major social and political changes of the third and second millennia BCE by analysing the genomes of 136 ancient Iberians, ranging from 3000 to 1500 BCE.

Genetic turnover and melting pot

Including published genomes from Iberia, the new study encompasses data from nearly 300 ancient individuals and focuses specifically on the Copper to Bronze Age transition around 2200 BCE.

“While we knew that the so-called ‘steppe’-related ancestry, which had spread across Europe during the third millennium BCE, eventually reached the northern Iberian Peninsula around 2400 BCE, we were surprised to see that all prehistoric individuals from the El Argar period carried a portion of this ancestry, while the Chalcolithic individuals did not,” says Max Planck researcher Wolfgang Haak, senior author and principal investigator of the study. 

The genomic data reveals some of the processes underlying this genetic shift. While the bulk of the genome shows that Bronze Age individuals are a mix of local Iberian Chalcolithic ancestry and a smaller part of incoming ancestry from the European mainland, the paternally inherited Y chromosome lineages show a complete turnover, linked to the movement of steppe-related ancestry that is also visible in other parts of Europe.

The rich new data from the El Argar sites also show that these two components do not fully account for the genetic make-up of the early Bronze Age societies. "The causes of this disappearance of the previous diversity of the Y chromosome are still very difficult to explain," says Cristina Rihuete Herrada, UAB researcher and co-author of the study.

“We also found signals of ancestry that we traced to the central and eastern Mediterranean and western Asia. We cannot say exactly whether these influences arrived at the same time as the steppe-related ancestry, but it shows that it formed an integrative part of the rising El Argar societies, attesting to continued contacts to these regions,” adds Vanessa Villalba-Mouco, postdoctoral researcher and lead author of the study.

UAB researchers already pointed to possible Mediterranean connections when they discovered in 2013 the monumental fortification of the Argaric settlement of La Bastida, in Murcia, to explain the originality of some architectural elements. "The genetic study argues in favour of this hypothesis: the data show that this unknown Mediterranean connection would have been sustained over time until the end of the period of El Argar, around 1500 BCE," says Rafael Micó, UAB researcher and co-author of the study.

Social implications

“Whether the genetic shift was brought about by migrating groups from North and Central Iberia or by climatic deteriorations that affected the eastern Mediterranean around 2200 BCE is the million-dollar question,” says co-principal investigator and senior author Prof Roberto Risch from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. “It would be foolish to think that it can all be explained by a simple, one-factor model. While the temporal coincidence is striking, it is likely that many factors played a role.”

One of these factors could be pandemics, such as an early form of the Plague, which has been attested to in other regions of Europe around that time. While not found directly among the tested individuals in southern Iberia, it could be a cause or driver for the movement or disappearance of other groups in the region.

“In any case, we can now conclude that the population movement starting in the eastern European steppe zones around 3000 BCE was not a single migratory event, but required over four centuries to reach the Iberian Peninsula and another 200 years to appear in present-day Murcia and Alicante,” adds Risch.

The archaeological record of the El Argar group shows a clear break with previous Chalcolithic traditions. Burial rites, for example, changed from communal to single and double burials within the building complexes. Elite burials also indicate the formation of strong social hierarchies. Testing for biological relatedness, the researchers found that males are on average more closely related to other people at the site, indicating that the group was likely patrilineally structured. Such a social organization could explain the stark reduction of the Y-lineage diversity.

“We observe similar patterns of social organization and increasing stratification also in other parts of Early Bronze Age Europe, in fact broadly around the same time and with similar characteristics of early state-like formations. This suggests a structured restart or resetting following some form of crisis or unstable, highly dynamic times,” summarises Haak.

In the research have participated, among others, these institutions: Adelaide University, Danube Private University, Basel University, Fundación Vasca para la Ciencia, Universidad de Valencia, Cape Town University, Universidad de Alicante, Museo Arqueológico de Alicante, Museo Arqueológico Municipal de Lorca, Universidad de Murcia, Harvard Medical School, Harvard University, Howard Hughes Medical Institute y Universidad de Sevilla.

Easternmost Roman aqueduct discovered in Armenia

Archaeologists find evidence of failed Roman imperialism 

 

IMAGE: THE EXCAVATION TRENCH SHOWS A PILLAR OF THE UNFINISHED AQUEDUCT. view more 

CREDIT: ARTAXATA PROJECT

Archaeologists from the University of Münster and the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia have discovered remains of a Roman arched aqueduct during excavation work on the Hellenistic royal city of Artashat-Artaxata in ancient Armenia. It is the easternmost arched aqueduct in the Roman Empire. Excavation work took place back in 2019, and an evaluation of the find has now been published in the Archäologischer Anzeiger journal.

“The monumental foundations are evidence of an unfinished aqueduct bridge built by the Roman army between 114 and 117 CE,” explains author Prof. Achim Lichtenberger from the Institute of Classical Archaeology and Christian Archaeology at the University of Münster. “At that time, Artaxata was destined to become the capital of a Roman province in Armenia.” It was during this time that the Roman Empire reached its greatest extent – if only for a short while – because it was under Trajan, who was Emperor of Rome from 98 to 117 CE – that the Romans attempted to incorporate the province of Armenia into the Roman Empire. “The planned, and partially completed, construction of the aqueduct in Artaxata shows just how much effort was made, in a very short space of time, to integrate the infrastructure of the capital of the province into the Empire,” says co-author Torben Schreiber from the Institute of Classical Archaeology and Christian Archaeology at the University of Münster. “The aqueduct remained unfinished because after Trajan’s death, in 117 CE, his successor Hadrian relinquished the province of Armenia before the aqueduct was completed.” The archaeologists therefore see their find as furnishing evidence for the failure of Roman imperialism in Armenia.

Methods

In their excavation campaign, the team used a multidisciplinary combination of methods from the fields of archaeology, geophysics, geochemistry and archaeoinformatics. The area of the Hellenistic metropolis of Artaxata in the Ararat Plain was first examined geomagnetically. At this stage of their work, the experts surveyed and charted any anomalies. The geomagnetic image showed a conspicuous dotted line, which they analysed with so-called sondages. The results were documented by the archaeologists three-dimensionally. Additional drillings provided evidence of further unfinished or destroyed pillars of the aqueduct. “We used satellite pictures and infrared images from a drone to visualise the course of the aqueduct’s pillars,” says co-author Dr. Mkrtich Zardaryan from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography at the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia. “We reconstructed the planned course of the aqueduct by means of a computer-assisted path analysis between the possible sources of the water and its destination.” A scientific analysis of the lime mortar used showed that it was a typical Roman recipe. An analysis of soil samples dated the construction of the aqueduct to between 60 and 460 CE, and in the opinion of the researchers this makes the reign of Emperor Trajan the most likely dating for it.

Project: “Artaxata in Armenia – Fieldwork in a Hellenistic Metropolis in the Ararat Plain”

Since 2018 a team of German and Armenian scientists – headed by Achim Lichtenberger (Münster University), Mkrtich Zardaryan (Armenian Academy of Sciences) and Torben Schreiber (Münster University) – have been carrying out research into the Hellenistic metropolis of Artaxata in the Ararat Plain in Armenia. Their aim is to examine both a newly established Hellenistic royal city and the many-faceted cultural imprint between Central Asia, Iran and the Mediterranean region.

DNA analysis confirms 2,000-year-old sustainable fishing practices of Tsleil-Waututh Nation

Ancient Indigenous fishing practices can be used to inform sustainable management and conservation today, according to a new study from Simon Fraser University.

Working with the Tsleil-Waututh Nation and using new palaeogenetic analytical techniques developed in SFU Archaeology’s ancient DNA lab, directed by professor Dongya Yang, the results of a new collaborative study featured in Scientific Reports provides strong evidence that prior to European colonization, Coast Salish people were managing chum salmon by selectively harvesting males.

Selectively harvesting male salmon increases the overall size of the harvest, as male salmon are bigger than female salmon. It also helps ensure successful spawning as one male can mate with several females. This allows fisheries to maximize the size of their harvest without negatively impacting future returns.

“This management practice is also described in Coast Salish knowledge and, through archaeology, we were able to extend the time depth of this practice by 2,000 years,” says Thomas Royle, a postdoctoral fellow working in the lab.

The research team applied the new palaeogenetic methods to archaeological salmon vertebrae to identify the sex of each sample, finding evidence to corroborate Coast Salish traditional knowledge that has been shared for centuries.

The Tsleil-Waututh ancestors worked to keep salmon populations plentiful for millennia, passing their knowledge on from one generation to the next.  With current declines and collapses in many commercial fisheries, these traditional Tsleil-Waututh practices can potentially inform current management and conservation.

This research collaboration included the Tsleil-Waututh Nation (Michael George, Michelle George), SFU (Thomas C.A. Royle, Hua Zhang, Miguel Alcaide, Ryan Morin, Dongya Yang), University of British Columbia (Jesse Morin, Camilla Speller, Morgan Ritchie), and McMaster University (Aubrey Cannon) as part of a Tsleil-Waututh Nation project to establish the state of pre-contact ecosystems in Burrard Inlet.

The leadership of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation was an integral piece of the success of the collaboration and allowed cutting-edge science methods to be used to understand the traditional ecological knowledge of Tsleil-Waututh ancestors.

Researchers find repeated link between volcanic eruptions and dynastic collapse in China’s Imperial Era

Volcanic eruptions may have triggered abrupt climate changes contributing to the repeated collapse of Chinese dynasties over the past 2,000 years, according to new research published today [Thursday, 11 November 2021]. 

The study also illustrates how volcanic eruptions can profoundly impact vulnerable or unstable regions and highlights the need to prepare for future eruptions.  

The research, which combines historical evidence with polar ice-core records of volcanic eruptions, was led jointly by historians and environmental scientists from Trinity College Dublin and Zhejiang University, China. It will be published today in Communications Earth & Environment, a new high-profile journal from Nature Portfolio.

Scientists have identified explosive volcanic eruptions as one of the most important drivers of dramatic changes in climate, often triggering sudden cooling and drying that can cause livestock death and crop damage. However, our understanding of the role played by such abrupt climate shocks in state or societal collapse has been limited by the precision and accuracy of dating of available historical and climate evidence. 

Dr Francis Ludlow, Associate Professor of Medieval Environmental History at Trinity, who jointly led the study, commented: 

“China has a remarkably long and richly documented history of multiple ruling dynasties, including major world powers like the Tang Dynasty, which collapsed in 907 CE, or the Ming Dynasty, which collapsed in 1644. With so many precisely dated collapses, we can look not just at individual cases of collapse that may or may not have followed a change in climate, but rather look simultaneously at many collapses to see whether there is a repeated pattern where a change in climate was followed by collapse. This can tell us whether climatic change played a very minor role in dynastic collapse, or whether it posed a systematic threat to these powerful and sophisticated societies.” 

The study compared the dates of volcanic eruptions gleaned from ice-core measurements of sulphate deposited on the polar icesheets with the dates known from historical records of Chinese dynastic collapse across the first two millennia of the Common Era. This exercise found that 62 of the 68 dynastic collapses were closely preceded by at least one volcanic eruption.

John Matthews, postdoctoral fellow at the Trinity Centre for Environmental Humanities and co-author on the paper, explained:  

“Researchers have identified a lot of historical eruptions through sulphate deposits in the polar ice, so we expect that some collapses will have been preceded by eruptions purely by chance. To convince ourselves we were seeing something significant, we ran the numbers and found there would be just a 0.05% chance of seeing so many collapses preceded by so many eruptions if that had actually happened randomly. This study shows a repeated link between volcanic eruptions and dynastic collapse.”  

Some dynasties, the authors note, withstood numerous large eruptions before eventually succumbing, suggesting that the role of volcanism in collapse is far from straightforward and that dynasties were often resilient to sudden, volcanically triggered, climate shocks. 

To gain further insight, the researchers assessed the role of explosive volcanism in tandem with other sources of stress or instability that a dynasty might experience by examining levels of warfare prevailing in the decades before collapse. Warfare was found to be elevated before most collapses, but the study also revealed a strong link between the magnitude of a volcanic climatic shock and the level of pre-existing stress. 

“We found that even a small volcanic eruption might help trigger a collapse when pre-existing instability was high. Larger eruptions, however, could trigger a collapse even when pre-existing instability was minimal. So as ever, historical context is key to understanding how climate can impact a society. It is also clear that we should be preparing for the impacts of the next big eruption – so far in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the eruptions we’ve experienced have been minnows compared to some that these dynasties had to deal with.”

Chaochao Gao, Associate Professor, Zhejiang University, China, who co-led the research concluded: “This study tells us how important it is to build a resilient society to cope with the natural hazards that we face, be they volcanically-induced or otherwise.” 

Humans hastened the extinction of the woolly mammoth

 

IMAGE: WOOLLY MAMMOTHS PERSISTED IN SIBERIA UNTIL THE MID-HOLOCENE. view more 

CREDIT: CREDIT MAURICIO ANTON (HTTPS://MAURICIOANTON.WORDPRESS.COM/)

New research shows that humans had a significant role in the extinction of woolly mammoths in Eurasia, occurring thousands of years later than previously thought.

An international team of scientists led by researchers from the University of Adelaide and University of Copenhagen, has revealed a 20,000-year pathway to extinction for the woolly mammoth.

“Our research shows that humans were a crucial and chronic driver of population declines of woolly mammoths, having an essential role in the timing and location of their extinction,” said lead author Associate Professor Damien Fordham from the University of Adelaide’s Environment Institute.

“Using computer models, fossils and ancient DNA we have identified the very mechanisms and threats that were integral in the initial decline and later extinction of the woolly mammoth.”

Signatures of past changes in the distribution and demography of woolly mammoths identified from fossils and ancient DNA show that people hastened the extinction of woolly mammoths by up to 4,000 years in some regions.

“We know that humans exploited woolly mammoths for meat, skins, bones and ivory. However, until now it has been difficult to disentangle the exact roles that climate warming and human hunting had on its extinction,” said Associate Professor Fordham.

The study also shows that woolly mammoths are likely to have survived in the Arctic for thousands of years longer than previously thought, existing in small areas of habitat with suitable climatic conditions and low densities of humans.

“Our finding of long-term persistence in Eurasia independently confirms recently published environmental DNA evidence that shows that woolly mammoths were roaming around Siberia 5,000 years ago,” said Associate Professor Jeremey Austin from the University of Adelaide’s Australian Centre for Ancient DNA.

Associate Professor David Nogues-Bravo from the University of Copenhagen was a co-author of the study which is published in the journal Ecology Letters.

“Our analyses strengthens and better resolves the case for human impacts as a driver of population declines and range collapses of megafauna in Eurasia during the late Pleistocene,” he said.

“It also refutes a prevalent theory that climate change alone decimated woolly mammoth populations and that the role of humans was limited to hunters delivering the coup de grâce”.

“And shows that species extinctions are usually the result of complex interactions between threatening processes.”

The researchers emphasise that the pathway to extinction for the woolly mammoth was long and lasting, starting many millennia before the final extinction event.