Largest ever human family tree: 27 million ancestors

 Researchers from the University of Oxford's Big Data Institute have taken a major step towards mapping the entirety of genetic relationships among humans: a single genealogy that traces the ancestry of all of us. The study has been published today in Science.

The past two decades have seen extraordinary advancements in human genetic research, generating genomic data for hundreds of thousands of individuals, including from thousands of prehistoric people. This raises the exciting possibility of tracing the origins of human genetic diversity to produce a complete map of how individuals across the world are related to each other.

Until now, the main challenges to this vision were working out a way to combine genome sequences from many different databases and developing algorithms to handle data of this size. However, a new method published today by researchers from the University of Oxford's Big Data Institute can easily combine data from multiple sources and scale to accommodate millions of genome sequences.

Dr Yan Wong, an evolutionary geneticist at the Big Data Institute, and one of the principal authors, explained: "We have basically built a huge family tree, a genealogy for all of humanity that models as exactly as we can the history that generated all the genetic variation we find in humans today. This genealogy allows us to see how every person's genetic sequence relates to every other, along all the points of the genome."

Since individual genomic regions are only inherited from one parent, either the mother or the father, the ancestry of each point on the genome can be thought of as a tree. The set of trees, known as a "tree sequence" or "ancestral recombination graph," links genetic regions back through time to ancestors where the genetic variation first appeared.

Lead author Dr Anthony Wilder Wohns, who undertook the research as part of his PhD at the Big Data Institute and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, said: "Essentially, we are reconstructing the genomes of our ancestors and using them to form a vast network of relationships. We can then estimate when and where these ancestors lived. The power of our approach is that it makes very few assumptions about the underlying data and can also include both modern and ancient DNA samples."

The study integrated data on modern and ancient human genomes from eight different databases and included a total of 3,609 individual genome sequences from 215 populations. The ancient genomes included samples found across the world with ages ranging from 1,000s to over 100,000 years. The algorithms predicted where common ancestors must be present in the evolutionary trees to explain the patterns of genetic variation. The resulting network contained almost 27 million ancestors.

After adding location data on these sample genomes, the authors used the network to estimate where the predicted common ancestors had lived. The results successfully recaptured key events in human evolutionary history, including the migration out of Africa.

Although the genealogical map is already an extremely rich resource, the research team plans to make it even more comprehensive by continuing to incorporate genetic data as it becomes available. Because tree sequences store data in a highly efficient way, the dataset could easily accommodate millions of additional genomes.

Dr Wong said: "This study is laying the groundwork for the next generation of DNA sequencing. As the quality of genome sequences from modern and ancient DNA samples improves, the trees will become even more accurate and we will eventually be able to generate a single, unified map that explains the descent of all the human genetic variation we see today."

Dr Wohns added: "While humans are the focus of this study, the method is valid for most living things; from orangutans to bacteria. It could be particularly beneficial in medical genetics, in separating out true associations between genetic regions and diseases from spurious connections arising from our shared ancestral history."

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Ancient DNA reveals surprises about how early Africans lived, traveled and interacted

New research provides evidence of demographic shifts in sub-Saharan Africa

 

IMAGE: HORA ROCKSHELTER IN MALAWI, WHERE RECENT EXCAVATIONS UNCOVERED TWO OF THE INDIVIDUALS ANALYZED IN A COLLABORATIVE STUDY OF ANCIENT DNA. view more 

CREDIT: JACOB DAVIS.

A new analysis of human remains that were buried in African archaeological sites has produced the earliest DNA from the continent, telling a fascinating tale of how early humans lived, traveled and even found their significant others. 

An interdisciplinary team of 44 researchers outlined its findings in "Ancient DNA reveals deep population structure in sub-Saharan African foragers." The paper was published today in Nature and reports findings from ancient DNA from six individuals buried in Malawi, Tanzania and Zambia who lived between 18,000 and 5,000 years ago.

“This more than doubles the antiquity of reported ancient DNA data from sub-Saharan Africa,” said David Reich, a professor at Harvard University and investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute whose lab generated the data in the paper. “The study is particularly exciting as a truly equal collaboration of archaeologists and geneticists.”

The study also reanalyzed published data from 28 individuals buried at sites across the continent, generating new and improved data for 15 of them. The result was an unprecedented dataset of DNA from ancient African foragers — people who hunted, gathered or fished. Their genetic legacy is difficult to reconstruct from present-day people because of the many population movements and mixtures that have occurred in the last few thousand years.

Thanks to this data, the researchers were able to outline major demographic shifts that took place between about 80,000 and 20,000 years ago. As far back as about 50,000 years ago, people from different regions of the continent moved and settled in other areas and developed alliances and networks over longer distances to trade, share information and even find reproductive partners. This social network helped them survive and thrive, the researchers wrote.  

Elizabeth Sawchuk, an author of the study who is a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Alberta and research assistant professor at Stony Brook University, said a dramatic cultural change took place during this timeframe, as beads, pigments and other symbolic art became common across Africa. Researchers long assumed that major changes in the archaeological record about 50,000 years ago reflected a shift in social networks and maybe even changes in population size. However, such hypotheses have remained difficult to test.

"We've never been able to directly explore these proposed demographic shifts, until now," she said. “It has been difficult to reconstruct events in our deeper past using the DNA of people living today, and artifacts like stone tools and beads can’t tell us the whole story. Ancient DNA provides direct insight into the people themselves, which was the missing part of the puzzle.”

Mary Prendergast, an author of the paper and associate professor of anthropology at Rice University, said there are arguments that the development and expansion of long-distance trade networks around this time helped humans weather the last Ice Age.

"Humans began relying on each other in new ways," she said. "And this creativity and innovation might be what allowed people to thrive."

The researchers were also able to demonstrate that by about 20,000 years ago, people had stopped moving around so much.

"Maybe it was because by that point, previously established social networks allowed for the flow of information and technologies without people having to move," Sawchuk said.

Prendergast said the study provides a better understanding of how people moved and mingled in this part of Africa. Previously, the earliest African DNA came from what is now Morocco — but the individuals in this study lived as far from there as Bangladesh is from Norway, she noted.

“Our genetic study confirms an archaeological pattern of more local behavior in eastern Africa over time,” said Jessica Thompson, an assistant professor of anthropology at Yale University, an author of the study and one of the researchers who uncovered the remains. “At first people found reproductive partners from wide geographic and cultural pools. Later, they prioritized partners who lived closer, and who were potentially more culturally similar.” 

The research team included scholars from Canada, Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, the United States, Zambia and many other countries. Critical contributions to the study came from curators and co-authors at African museums who are responsible for protecting and preserving the remains.

Potiphar Kaliba, director of research at the Malawi Department of Museums and Monuments and an author of the study, noted that some of the skeletons sampled for the study were excavated a half-century ago, yet their DNA is preserved despite hot and humid climates in the tropics.

“This work shows why it’s so important to invest in the stewardship of human remains and archaeological artifacts in African museums,” Kaliba said.

The work also helps address global imbalances in research, Prendergast said.

“There are around 30 times more published ancient DNA sequences from Europe than from Africa,” she said. “Given that Africa harbors the greatest human genetic diversity on the planet, we have much more to learn.”

"By associating archaeological artifacts with ancient DNA, the researchers have created a remarkable framework for exploring the prehistory of humans in Africa," said Archaeology and Archaeometry program director John Yellen of the U.S. National Science Foundation, one of the funders behind this project. "This insight is charting a new way forward to understanding humanity and our complex shared history.”

The paper is online at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04430-9.

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Centuries-old capture documents now online

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IMAGE: PRINTED PRIZE APPEALS (TNA, HCA 45).view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO: MARIA CARDAMONE, PRIZE PAPERS PROJECT. IMAGES REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES, LONDON, ENGLAND.

Centuries-old documents related to the capture of ships by the British are accessible online from today, for the use of international researchers. The “Prize Papers”  Project of the Academy of Sciences and Humanities Göttingen is, as a first stage, making available online via the website www.prizepapers.de documents from court processes linked to approximately 1,500 ship captures between 1793 and 1815. The act of capturing ships, as so-called prize, was once a common practice during the conduct of war by legitimate means. Since 2018, the research project has had as its long-term objectives the cataloguing and digitisation of the “Prize Papers” in their entirety, which were originally drawn up for or during court processes related to ship captures by the English or British between 1652 and 1817. This project, which is situated at the University of Oldenburg, as well as at The National Archives, UK (TNA), is being funded by the Academies Programme of the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities which in turn is, in equal parts, financed by the Federal Government of Germany and the state of Lower Saxony. The project co-operates closely with the German Historical Institute London, as well as the VZG, the Head Office of the Common Library Network in Göttingen (VZG) in Göttingen, who provide their IT expertise.

In total, The National Archives’ collection of Prize Papers comprises documents from 14 naval wars which England or Great Britain participated in and that resulted in more than 35,000 ships being captured. By 2037, the anglophone Open-Access portal will be gradually extended to ultimately grant access to the entire archival “Prize Papers” collection as approximately 3.5 million digital copies in 19 different languages. “In addition to the trial records, the body of evidence, which consists of confiscated ships papers as well as a wide range of items, promises unique discoveries for the international research”, says the director of the project, historian Prof. Dr Dagmar Freist.

The digital copies that are now accessible via the research portal include 55 so-called case books. These comprise printed copies of documents from appeal cases that were held between 1793 and 1815 and are related to the prize appeals and evidence of approximately 1,500 captures, originally heard at the High Court of Admiralty in London or the assigned Vice-Admiralty Courts in the colonies, including those in the Caribbean and the Northwest Atlantic. Two-thirds of all appeals in this time came from the United States. The more than 57,000 photographed pages are linked to trials that were held during the French Revolutionary War or the Napoleonic Wars. “The case books serve as an excellent point of entry into the historical period, as well as the global systematic capturing of merchant ships”, says Dr Amanda Bevan, head of The National Archives’ Prize Papers team located in London.

Regarding the research portal’s structure, the “Prize Papers” team is aiming at being highly transparent by design. “Every database functions on the basis of an underlying concept limiting possible approaches and questions, we, however, want to keep the restrictions of accessing information for potential discoveries at a minimum,” states head of the project Freist. “In accordance with this, we are aiming at designing the portal to not only make the recorded legal structure of the systematic seizing and capturing of ships available to the researchers, but also to grant users direct access to the documents and the diverse global contexts they originated from. For example, due to inventory lists we have gained the knowledge that many ships were transporting enslaved people. Discoveries such as these caused us to set ourselves the additional goal of making the colonial relations explorable, too,” Freist explains.

In the further course of this year, a selected part of the archival collections that date from the War of Austrian Succession (1740 – 1748) will be added to the online portal, including examples of confiscated letters, of which a total of 160.000 have been preserved, as well as logbooks, ships papers and bills, poems, drawings, fabrics and playing cards. Many of these artefacts have not only managed to stand the test of time over the course of the past centuries, but have also managed to remain virtually untouched until today. Images and videos of, as well as a documentary on the handling of and working with this truly unique material by the project’s international team can be found on the homepage.

How humans in middle-late Neolithic China process plant food

 

Over the span of human history, tools to process plant food have been ever-changing.

Recently, researchers discovered that the combination of grinding slabs and rollers in the middle and lower Yellow River reaches declined gradually after 7,000 years BP. In the meantime, more efficient mortars and pestles were frequently used by prehistoric humans with the rapid development of agriculture and a transitional lifestyle from hunting and gathering to farming.  

In a study published in Archaeometry, Prof. YANG Yuzhang's team from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences made an investigation into the plant food processing tools in the Shuangdun site. The team conducted damage characteristics analysis of excavated artefacts dated back to the middle-late Neolithic period and for the first time provided solid evidence for the rise of mortar and pestle for their high processing efficiency in that period.

Researchers extracted plant starch grains from six stone artefacts, including two grinding slabs, two pestles, one mortar, and one special cake-shaped artefact, which were made of sandstone, diabase and crystal tuff. A widely used micro-remain analysis method was adopted to probe into the similarities and differences between two sets of food processing tools: slabs and rollers, as well as mortars and pestles.

The results indicated that based on their morphology and size, various plants such as Triticeae, Job’s tears, lotus root, and bean were found in both types of grinding tools. However, starch grains of rice (Oryza sativa) only appeared in mortars and pestles, suggesting this set of tools was particularly adopted to process rice in middle-late Neolithic China.

The damage type analysis of a variety of starches showed that mortars and pestles were also used for grinding plant foods in the same way as grinding slabs, while some roughly made slabs might not be used for grinding but only for pounding specific plant food.

All statistics demonstrated that with the rise of mortars and pestles, they were frequently used to hull plant seeds and to process plant foods into small pieces or powder. Grinding slabs and rollers, however, were gradually replaced, and began to decline in human economic life.

This study pioneered the research of mortars and pestles in prehistoric China. It not only deepens the understanding of the processing approaches of grinding tools, but also advances exploration into prehistoric plant food processing tools. Additionally, it provides a full picture of the evolution of food processing tools and reflects abundant details of lifestyles in prehistoric Eastern China.

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JOURNAL

Archaeometry

DOI

10.1111/arcm.12749 

Book: 'Origin' details peopling of the Americas via latest genetic and archaeological evidence

 A new book for popular audiences combines archaeology with emerging genetic evidence to tell the story of peoples from Siberia who were the first to populate the Americas some 20,000 years ago.

“Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas,” written by Jennifer Raff, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas, was published this month by Twelve Books and recently has entered the New York Times' bestseller list.

“This book is for everybody,” Raff said. “I hope that faculty who teach about themes in this book might find it useful for their courses as well, but it’s definitely not aimed at a scholarly audience — it’s very much for the general public, who seem to be very, very interested in the peopling of the Americas and what we know about it. It’s an exploration and an overview of the genetic and archaeological evidence for how people first got to the Americas.”

Raff’s book also explores how scientists arrived at current knowledge of the peopling of the Americas — research that has at times come at the expense of Indigenous communities.

“It’s not really a pleasant history,” Raff said. “Indigenous peoples have been very harmed by some of the research that’s been done in pursuit of an answer to the question of where and how did people get here. As I was writing this book, I thought it was important to explore that theme, as well as what the genetic and archaeological evidence shows us — these things are intertwined.”

According to the KU researcher, because of so much interest in the topic, both on a scholarly level and from the public, it’s important to understand implications of this area of study on descendants of the original peoples of the Americas.

“Genetics can be used as a tool for understanding the past, but also this area of research can harm Indigenous peoples, and we need to be mindful of that,” Raff said. “I give examples of harmful research in the book. But I also talk about examples of the good work that has been done by many archaeologists and geneticists who have worked collaboratively with tribes, developing long-term relationships and doing research together in productive and respectful partnerships.”

This, she said, is how she and her colleagues in the Department of Anthropology try to do their work.

“KU’s anthropology department has long been a leader in community-engaged anthropological genetics research, and all of us — from the chair of the department to the undergraduate researchers — prioritize respect for tribal sovereignty and care for Indigenous ancestors in our work.”

She said the state of knowledge of how the Americas were populated is “really in flux” and recent discoveries hold the potential to change the story.

“Current genetic and archaeological evidence situate the ancestors of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas first in Siberia and East Asia,” Raff said. “There were two populations — one is ancestral to present-day East Asians; one is referred to as Ancient North Eurasians. By about 25,000 years ago, give or take, these two populations interacted and produced multiple populations, one of which became ancestral to Native Americans, and one of which stayed in Siberia.”

Raff said the population that became ancestral to Native Americans subsequently was isolated for a few thousand years during the height of the Last Glacial Maximum — a period of intense cold and dryness globally when around the world human populations retreated into refugia.

“During that period of isolation, this population evolves variants that are unique to the peoples of the Americas,” Raff said. “We don’t really know where that isolation happened, so it could have happened in Beringia itself, which was this land connection between Asia and North America that was huge — about twice the size of Texas. And during the Last Glacial Maximum at the height of the last Ice Age, paleoenvironmental reconstructions have shown there were areas within it that appear to have been decent places to live, especially along the southern coast of Beringia.”

The KU investigator said these refugia might have supported populations that were to become the original peoples of the Americas.

“In the central part of Beringia, it would have been warmer and wetter, and plants and animals and people could have lived there relatively easily,” she said. “That’s one of the places archaeologists and geneticists are pinpointing as potentially where this population was during the Last Glacial Maximum. But we don’t have a lot of direct archaeological evidence to show that, because that area is underwater now — so it’s a bit of an unsolved mystery in this history, and people could have been in other places, too; they might have been in Siberia, or even in North America, south of the massive ice sheets that were covering all of Canada.”

To underscore the mysterious nature of the migration of the first peoples into North Americas, Raff pointed to a site found in White Sands, New Mexico, which shows evidence of humans living there about 25,000 years ago.

“It’s just mind-blowing, so that’s one of the big outstanding questions — how people got into the Americas after the Last Glacial Maximum, or maybe before,” she said. “We’re still working it out. What we see in the genomes of these ancient populations is a splitting of the populations into different groups, and then there’s an interesting distribution of those groups across North and South America. That’s all in the book.”

This would likely not come as a surprise to Indigenous peoples, Raff said, because a number of tribes’ oral histories situate their origins within the Americas at a point far earlier than has been traditionally accepted by the majority of scientists. Raff would like to see more collaborations between researchers and tribes along these lines.

“Histories reconstructed from archaeological and genetic data and oral histories won’t always agree, of course, and we shouldn’t necessarily expect them to,” she said. “But there have been some fantastic cases where traditional knowledge holders have worked with researchers to interpret their findings together. This approach takes a long time, but it’s important that we non-Native scientists respect the expertise of descendant communities regarding their own histories.”

So far, “Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas" has been a critical and commercial success. In addition to making the New York Times' bestseller list, Raff’s new book has reached as high as No. 11 on Amazon’s nonfiction bestsellers and is currently sold out on that website.

“The reason I wrote this book was because this field is so complex and intense, and research is getting published so often that changes what we know,” she said. “I thought the general public might be interested in this topic — and it turns out, they really are. I’m a little astonished by the scale of interest but very grateful to be able to bring our fascinating field to a wider audience.”

Exploring Indian genetic heritage in present-day Thailand

Past migrations of Indian people may have led to spread of Indian culture in mainland Southeast Asia

 

IMAGE: EARLY THAI STONE INSCRIPTION view more 

CREDIT: DAVID WILEY, FLICKR (CC-BY 2.0, HTTPS://CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/LICENSES/BY/2.0/)

A new genetic analysis reveals novel insights into the genetic heritage of people living in Thailand in the present day, which suggest the potential importance of past migrations in spreading Indian culture to the region. Piya Changmai of the University of Ostrava, Czech Republic, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS Genetics on February 17th:

http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1010036

Mainland Southeast Asia has a complex population history and features hundreds of indigenous languages from five different major language families. During the first millennium of the Common Era—after trading began with India—Indian culture influenced establishment of early states in the region, and that cultural influence remains evident today. However, few studies have adequately explored the extent of evidence of prior mixing of South Asian genetic lineages in present-day Southeast Asian populations.

To provide a clearer picture of such genetic admixture, Changmai and colleagues conducted a genetic analysis of present-day people from 10 ethnic groups in Thailand. The study focused on genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), a type of variation found in different individuals’ distinct DNA sequences that can be associated with different genetic lineages. The researchers combined SNP data from 119 present-day individuals with previously published genetic data from relevant populations and analyzed the entire dataset using a variety of genetic methods.

The various methods returned consistent results, finding evidence for South Asian genetic admixture in several different mainland Southeast Asian populations that are known to have been influenced by Indian culture in the past. However, evidence of South Asian admixture was lacking for Southeast Asian populations that only recently emerged from cultural isolation. These findings suggest the potential importance of past migrations of Indian people in spreading Indian culture in this region.

The researchers also found evidence for close genetic links between people who speak languages from the Kra-Dai language family and people who speak languages from the Austronesian language family, supporting an earlier linguistic hypothesis that the two language families may share a common origin.

Changmai adds, “Indian genetic heritage in Southeast Asian populations suggests multiple waves of migrations from India to Southeast Asia in the past, which may have been responsible for the spread of Indian culture in the region.”

http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1010036 

90% of medieval chivalry and heroism manuscripts have been lost

 

New research released today [17 Feb] finds that, while the Knights of the Round Table have won global fame, most medieval English heroic or chivalric stories have been lost. Meanwhile, more than three quarters of medieval stories in Icelandic and Irish survive to the present, in an unusual pattern suggesting island ‘ecosystems’ helped preserve culture.

The findings come from an international research team, including Oxford experts, which has applied statistical models used in ecology to estimate the loss and survival of precious artefacts and narratives from different parts of Europe. This ecological approach offers a new perspective on the loss of cultural heritage, complementing past research. Their findings are published in the journal Science, with Mike Kestemont (University of Antwerp) and Folgert Karsdorp (KNAW Meertens Institute) as the main authors.

Dr Katarzyna Anna Kapitan, an Old Norse philologist and Junior Research Fellow at Linacre College, Oxford, says, ‘By using statistical methods borrowed from ecology, we were able to add to previous scholarship.

‘We estimate that more than 90% of medieval manuscripts preserving chivalric and heroic narratives have been lost. This corresponds roughly to the scale of loss that book historians had estimated using different approaches. Moreover, we were able to estimate that some 32% of chivalric and heroic works from the Middle Ages have been lost over the centuries.’

The team used ‘unseen species models’ from ecology to gauge the loss of narratives from medieval Europe, such as romances about King Arthur, or heroic legends about Sigurd the dragon slayer or the legendary ruler Ragnar lóðbrok, known to wider audiences from the TV series Vikings. The estimates of loss and survival they obtained are compatible with the scant historical evidence.

The study revealed significant differences in survival rates for medieval works and manuscripts in different languages, suggesting that Irish tradition of medieval narrative fiction is best preserved, while works in English suffered the most severe losses. The team calculated that around 81% of medieval Irish romances and adventure tales survive today, compared to only 38% of similar works in English. Similarly, results suggest that around 19% of medieval Irish manuscript books survive, compared to only 7% of English examples.

Dr Daniel Sawyer, Fitzjames Research Fellow in Medieval English Literature at Merton College, Oxford, says, ‘We found notably low estimated survival rates for medieval fiction in English. We might blame the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, which did scatter many libraries. But heroic stories in English rarely appear in the library catalogues of monasteries and friaries in the first place.’

‘Another possible explanation might be found in the limited prestige of the English language during this period’, Dr Sawyer continues. ‘Today, English is learned as a second language all over the world but, during the Middle Ages, it had little international significance. After the Norman Conquest, in particular, French was important in England as an international language of power and culture, and the English crown owned parts of what is now France.

‘In fact, if we add fiction written in Norman French in England to the evidence in English, the survival rate for English evidence looks more like the rates for other languages. This shows the importance of Norman French to English culture, and suggests heroic stories in Norman French and in English formed a connected tradition.’

Meanwhile, Dr Kapitan explains it is a very different picture for Iceland, where, she says, ‘We know today around three out of four medieval Icelandic romances and adventure tales (or 77%), but only one out of six medieval manuscripts preserving these works (17%).’

Besides events such as library fires and the recycling of books, the research identifies the original ‘evenness’ of cultural production as an overlooked factor in the survival of ancient artefacts.

Dr Kapitan says, ‘Our research has revealed interesting similarities between Icelandic and Irish evidence. Icelandic and Irish literatures both have high survival rates for medieval works and manuscripts, and also very similar “evenness profiles”. This means the average number of manuscripts that preserve medieval works is more evenly distributed than in other traditions we examined.’

‘The similarities between Iceland and Ireland may be caused by lasting traditions of copying literary texts by hand long after the invention of print,’ explains Dr Kapitan.

Dr Sawyer adds, ‘The evidence might tell us about England’s ties to continental Europe in the Middle Ages, and about the influence of wider European culture on English writing. England’s size and its very close links to the Continent could explain why the English evidence doesn’t display the evenness found in the island distributions of stories in Iceland and Ireland.’

These analyses call for a wider application of these methods across the heritage sciences. The researchers agree that the collaboration between disciplines has been very stimulating. As Dr Kapitan concludes, ‘This shows how trans-disciplinary research lets us step beyond anecdotal case-studies of single scribes or texts, and allows large comparisons across different places, traditions, and languages.’

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Ancient Andean societal complexities tie knots in evolutionary understanding

 

 

IMAGE: TAWANTINSUYU—THE INKA IMPERIAL “FOURFOLD DOMAIN”—ENCOMPASSED ABOUT A MILLION SQUARE KILOMETERS AND A POPULATION OF SOME 10 MILLION INHABITANTS WITH DIFFERENT CULTURES AND LANGUAGES IN AN EXTREMELY DIVERSE LANDSCAPE. view more 

CREDIT: JOURNAL OF SOCIAL COMPUTING

Fiber tells the story of its being, each lock carrying the history of its curator, of its origin. Spun into thread, plied into yarn, woven into tapestries, the fiber arts are ancient and ubiquitous. For ancient Andean peoples, including Inkas, the craft appeared to be even more vital as an expansive means of data management and imperial rule — yet contemporary classifications overlook the sophisticated approach to sharing and controlling information, leading scholars to question the societal complexity of communities without what they consider written language.

 

Steven A. Wernke, associate professor and director of the Spatial Analysis Research Laboratory in the Department of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University, however, argues that, rather than an accurate representation of a less complex society, the oversight marks an incomplete and insensitive understanding of global diversity as it pertains to social, political, economic, and technological systems of ancient peoples. His explanation of the Inka writing system, as well as how such signals of complexity may be updated in modern data systems, was made available online ahead of its publication in the March edition of the Journal of Social Computing.  

 

“The Inkas and ancient Andean societies more generally have often played the role of ‘exceptions to the rule’ in global discussions of the development of social complexity,” Wernke said. “They are often pointed to as examples of the development of complex society ‘in the absence of’ writing, currency, markets, the wheel, iron and the like. In particular, the Inkas seemingly violate quantitative comparative models of the development of ancient empires because they seemed to lack key technologies for information management. This understanding is profoundly mistaken.”

 

In the study of human and societal evolution, scholars are trending toward favoring a threshold model of information processing. Societies grow, shifting the dynamics of interactions, how information is managed and shared changes — often through technological innovation — which allows further growth. In other words, empires are built on the ability to communicate with more and further dispersed people, typically through written language. This threshold model is evidenced by the field’s go-to data source Seshat, an extensive database systematically fed information on how human civilizations have evolved over time by researchers around the world.

 

“The Andean region appears to violate this model because the Seshat database records writing and other information processing technologies as absent in the case of the Inka empire,” Wernke said. “I argue that the dynamics of the Andean region are actually consistent with the information threshold model, but the data as constituted do not capture the relevant variables.”

 

The Inkas did not have written language as conventionally understood—that is, by graphic signs representing parts of speech. Instead, they let the fiber talk through the khipu. Arrangements of knotted cords, khipus could record simple accounting tasks or extravagant narratives.

 

“The Inkas did have a system of writing, through the khipu, a tactile fiber medium,” Wernke said, explaining the deep history of fiber arts as a means of technology and art for Andean people, from fabricating intricate textiles to elaborately braiding roof thatching. “Khipus emerged from this especially advanced domain of knowledge and technological advancement based on exquisitely attuned sensibilities to the affordances of fiber media. This highly complex knotted cord technology could record quantitative, qualitative and, optionally, linguistic data through encoding systems that we still only partially grasp.”

 

Similar to written language in other societies, and in accordance with the threshold model, khipu use exploded as the Inka empire expanded.

 

“During the Late Horizaon, from 1450 to 1532 CE, there was an unprecedented elaboration and standardization of their structural, visual and tactile properties, suggesting they were key innovations for information management associated with Inka imperial expansion,” Wernke said. Less than 20 pre-Inka khipus survived to modern day, but about 1,300 khipus with presumed Inka cultural affiliation — and much greater diversity of knot types, indicating a greater diversity of information recorded — persisted.

 

As khipu use exploded, so did the Inka empire. Starting in the mid-15th century, the road system eventually connected the two million square kilometers area of the Inka empire, with evidence of messengers transmitting khipus along the routes. According to Wernke, this implies a broad understanding of the language of khipus, even across the varied spoken languages during the Inka imperial rule, further calling into question the threshold model of writing as an index of social complexity only when it correlates to spoken language. He is continuing to map the road network and model movement through it at an empire-wide scale.

 

“Without the development of diverse systems of data registry, the achievements of the societies of the peoples of the Americas will not be adequately represented,” Wernke said. “This paper is an attempt to point out these shortcomings and point to how they can be corrected.”

Neolithic fisherman died by drowning in the sea

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IMAGE: THE INDIVIDUAL STUDIED IN THE COPACA STUDY SITE view more 

CREDIT: PROF PEDRO ANDRADE

A new study has confirmed saltwater drowning as the cause of death for a Neolithic man whose remains were found in a mass grave on the coast of Northern Chile. A team of researchers developed an enhanced version of a modern forensic test to solve the 5000 year-old cold case, opening up new possibilities for assessing the remains of our prehistoric ancestors.

The scientists believe it will help archaeologists understand more about past civilisations in coastal regions and the human stories behind the remains they discover.

Modern forensics can confirm drowning as the cause of death in recent victims by testing for diatoms inside the bones of the victims. Diatoms are a group of algae found in oceans, freshwater and soils. If they are found inside the bones of victims’ bodies, it is likely that they drowned. This is because if they had died before entering the water, they would not have swallowed any saltwater. The test has never been successfully tried to determine drowning in saltwater on prehistoric human remains, until now.

In addition to the diatom test, the research team, led by the University of Southampton, carried out a wide-ranging microscopic analysis of bone marrow extracted from a man found in a 5000 year old mass burial site. This allowed them to search for a greater range of microscopic particles that could provide more insight into the cause of his death.

The results, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, found a variety of marine particles that suggested he drowned in saltwater. These particles included fossilised algae, parasite eggs and sediment, which would not have been detected by the standard diatom test.

Professor James Goff of the University of Southampton, who led the study said, “mass burials have often been necessary after natural disasters such as tsunamis, floods or large storms. However we know very little about whether prehistoric mass burial sites near coastlines could be the result of natural disasters or other causes such as war, famine and disease. This gave us our light bulb moment of developing an enhanced version of a modern forensic test to use on ancient bones.”

After scanning archaeological papers for records of mass burial sites near coastlines, Prof Goff and his team worked with Prof Pedro Andrade of the Universidad de Concepción in Chile. Prof Andrade had previously studied an archaeological site known as Copaca 1, 30 kilometres south of Tocopilla on the Chilean coastline. The site area contains a grave with three well preserved skeletons.

The individual they studied was a male hunter-gather aged between 35 and 45. The condition of his bones suggested he was a fisherman as there were signs of frequent harpooning, rowing and harvesting of shellfish. This made him the ideal candidate to study for signs of drowning and for evidence of the event that led to his death.

“By looking at what we found in his bone marrow, we know that he drowned in shallow saltwater,” Prof Goff continued. “We could see that the poor man swallowed sediment in his final moments and sediment does not tend to float around in sufficient concentrations in deeper waters.”

Based on their initial findings, the team believe that he died in a marine accident rather than in a major catastrophic event. This is partly because the bones of the others he was buried with did not contain marine particles so it is unlikely they all died by saltwater drowning. The team advise they could shed more light on this by testing other human remains in the site and studying geological records for evidence natural disasters in the area.

Most importantly, the scientist believe this new technique can be used for ancient mass burial sites around the world to get a richer picture of the lives of people in coastal communities throughout history.

“In taking more time over the forensic technique and testing for a broader range of beasties inside the prehistoric bones, we’ve cracked open a whole new way to do things,” Prof Goff continued. “This can help us understand much more about how tough it was living by the coast in pre-historic days – and how people there were affected by catastrophic events, just as we are today.”

“There are many coastal mass burial sites around the world where excellent archaeological studies have been carried out but the fundamental question of what caused so many deaths has not been addressed. Now we can take this new technique out around the world and potentially re-write prehistory.”

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JOURNAL

Journal of Archaeological Science

DOI

10.1016/j.jas.2022.105565