Yak milk consumption among Mongol Empire elites

 For the first time, researchers have pinpointed a date when elite Mongol Empire people were drinking yak milk, according to a study co-led by a University of Michigan researcher.

 

By analyzing proteins found within ancient dental calculus, an international team of researchers provides direct evidence for consumption of milk from multiple ruminants, including yak. In addition, they discovered milk and blood proteins associated with both horses and ruminants. The team's results are published in Communication Biology.

 

The study presents novel protein findings from an elite Mongol Era cemetery with exceptional preservation in the permafrost. This is the first example of yak milk recovered from an archaeological context.

 

Previous research indicates that milk has been a critical resource in Mongolia for more than 5,000 years. While the consumption of cattle, sheep, goat and even horse milk have securely been dated, until now, when people began drinking milk from yaks has been difficult to determine. Understanding when and where humans domesticated this iconic species has been limited to rarely recovered yak remains and artistic depictions of yaks. However, whether these are wild or domestic is unclear.

 

The discovery of an elite Mongol era cemetery in northern Mongolia was surprising to the researchers.

 

"Our most important finding was an elite woman buried with a birchbark hat called a bogtog and silk robes depicting a golden five-clawed dragon. Our proteomic analyses concluded that she drank yak milk during her lifetime," said Alicia Ventresca-Miller, U-M assistant professor of anthropology. "This helped us verify the long-term use of this iconic animal in the region and its ties to elite rulers."

 

Located along a high-elevation ridgeline covered in mist, the location bears the name 'Khorig,' meaning taboo. It may be that this cemetery was considered elite, as the researchers recovered evidence of connections to the ruling elite, including a five-clawed dragon depicted on a Cizhou vessel and traditional robe, or deel.

 

"Ceramic vessels were turned into lanterns made of dairy products, which revealed long-standing religious ideas and the daily life of the elites of the Mongol empire," said J. Bayarsaikhan, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and the National Museum of Mongolia.

 

Archaeologists have spent years collecting and conserving pieces of silk and leather strewn across the surface near the burials. Unfortunately, over the past few decades the permafrost has begun to melt and the sites have been heavily looted.

 

"The degree of looting that we are seeing is unprecedented. Nearly every burial that we can locate on the surface has recently been destroyed by looting activity," said Julia Clark of Nomad Science.

 

Archaeologists have long suspected that this area was important, and it remains one of the primary areas of yak herding in the present day. While much was lost to looters, what remained of the burials was still well preserved within the permafrost.

 

An international team of researchers used proteomic analysis of dental calculus to identify the diets of Mongol era elites. They found proteins associated with milk, blood and other tissues that had been consumed by different individuals.

 

"What is really exciting is that between cows and yaks, there is only a single difference in the amino acid sequence in the most commonly recovered milk protein, and in this case, we were able to recover the part which is specific to yak, Bos mutus," said study co-lead and palaeoproteomics specialist Shevan Wilkin of the University of Zurich and Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.

 

Due to the incredible preservation made possible through the permafrost environmental conditions, the team was able to identify intriguing proteins recovered for the first time from archaeological samples. These included horse milk curd proteins as well as caprine and equine blood proteins that had not been previously recovered from dental calculus.

Researchers use 21st century methods to record 2,000 years of ancient graffiti in Egypt

 

IMAGE: SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY GEOGRAPHY PROFESSOR NICK HEDLEY view more 

CREDIT: SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY

Simon Fraser University researchers are learning more about ancient graffiti—and their intriguing comparisons to modern graffiti—as they produce a state-of-the-art 3D recording of the Temple of Isis in Philae, Egypt.

Working with the University of Ottawa, the researchers published their early findings in Egyptian Archaeology and have returned to Philae to advance the project.

“It's fascinating because there are similarities with today's graffiti,” says SFU geography professor Nick Hedley, co-investigator of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)-funded project. “The iconic architecture of ancient Egypt was built by those in positions of power and wealth, but the graffiti records the voices and activities of everybody else. The building acts like a giant sponge or notepad for generations of people from different cultures for over 2,000 years.”

As an expert in spatial reality capture, Hedley leads the team’s innovative visualization efforts, documenting the graffiti, their architectural context, and the spaces they are found in using advanced methods like photogrammetry, raking light, and laser scanning. “I’m recording reality in three-dimensions — the dimensionality in which it exists,” he explains.

With hundreds if not thousands of graffiti, some carved less than a millimeter deep on the temple's columns, walls, and roof, precision is essential.

Typically, the graffiti would be recorded through a series of photographs — a step above hand-drawn documents — allowing researchers to take pieces of the site away and continue working.

Sabrina Higgins, an SFU archaeologist and project co-investigator, says photographs and two-dimensional plans do not allow the field site to be viewed as a dynamic, multi-layered, and evolving space. “The techniques we are applying to the project will completely change how the graffiti, and the temple, can be studied,” she says.

Hedley is moving beyond basic two-dimensional imaging to create a cutting-edge three-dimensional recording of the temple’s entire surface. This will allow the interior and exterior of the temple, and the graffiti, to be viewed and studied at otherwise impossible viewpoints, from virtually anywhere— without compromising detail.

This three-dimensional visualization will also enable researchers to study the relationship between a figural graffito, any graffiti that surrounds it, and its location in relation to the structure of temple architecture.

While this is transformative for viewing and studying the temple and its inscriptions, Hedley points to the big-picture potential of applying spatial reality capture technology to the field of archaeology, and beyond.

“Though my primary role in this project is to help build the definitive set of digital wall plans for the Mammisi at Philae, I’m also demonstrating how emerging spatial reality capture methods can fundamentally change how we gather and produce data and transform our ability to interpret and analyze these spaces. This is a space to watch!” says Hedley.

 

Indigenous cultures adopted horses of primarily Spanish origin before Europeans arrived in the American Great Plains and northern Rockies

Indigenous cultures of the American Great Plains and northern Rockies had integrated domestic horses of Spanish ancestry into their lifeways long before the arrival of European colonizers to the region, according to a new study. The analysis leverages archaeological remains of early historic horse specimens instead of relying on European colonizer records, as many past studies have. The horse is central to many Indigenous cultures across the American Southwest and Great Plains. However, when and how these important animal companions first became integrated into these societies remains poorly understood. It is widely believed by western scientists that domestic horses were introduced to the region by Europeans following the Spanish colonization of Mexico, becoming more broadly dispersed across the American west during the end of the 1600s. Much of what is thought here is derived from European colonizer records, often rife with inaccuracies and strong anti-Indigenous bias, from the 18th and 19th centuries. 

William Taylor and colleagues – a group that included researchers from the Lakota, Comanche, and Pawnee Nations, as well as other Indigenous scholars from across North America – performed a comprehensive interdisciplinary analysis of historical archaeological horse remains from across the American Great Plains and northern Rockies. By integrating osteological, genomic, isotopic, radiocarbon and paleopathological evidence, Taylor et al. discovered that early domestic North American horses show a strong genetic affinity to Spanish horse populations, indicating a European origin. However, these horses had spread throughout the region far earlier than previously believed, their findings suggest; the animals had already spread northward from Spanish settlements in the American Southwest and become deeply integrated into the Indigenous cultures of the Rockies and Great Plains during the first half of the 1600s at the latest, and long before the 18th century arrival of Europeans to the region, they say. 

“Our findings have deep ramifications for our understanding of social dynamics in the Great Plains during a period of disruptive social changes for Indigenous peoples,” write Taylor and colleagues.

Ancient DNA reveals Asian ancestry introduced to East Africa in early modern times Findings clarify and complicate understanding of Swahili history

At a glance:

• Who were the people of the medieval Swahili civilization? Ancient DNA reveals African founders intermingled with migrants from southwest Asia around 1000 CE
• Findings complicate scientific views as well as colonial-era beliefs
• For the first time, analyses determine that some present-day Kenyans who identify as Swahili are genetically very different from medieval residents of the same region, while others have retained substantial medieval ancestry

 

While serfs toiled and knights jousted in Europe and samurai and shoguns rose to power in Japan, the medieval peoples of the Swahili civilization on the coast of East Africa lived in multicultural, coral-stone towns and engaged in trade networks spanning the Indian Ocean. 

Archaeologists, anthropologists, and linguists have been locked in a century-long debate about how much people from outside Africa contributed to Swahili culture and ancestry. Swahili communities have their own histories, and evidence points in multiple directions.

The largest-yet analysis of ancient DNA in Africa, which includes the first ancient DNA recovered from members of the Swahili civilization, has now broken the stalemate.

The study reveals that a significant number of people from Southwest Asia moved to the Swahili coast in medieval and early modern times and had children with the people living there. Yet the research also shows that hallmarks of the Swahili civilization predated those arrivals.

“Archaeological evidence overwhelmingly showed that the medieval Swahili civilization was an African one, but we still wanted to understand and contextualize the nonlocal heritage,” said co-senior author Chapurukha Kusimba, professor of anthropology at the University of South Florida. 

“Taking a genetics pathway to find the answers took courage and opened doors beyond which lie answers that force us to think in new ways,” he said.

The analyses, published online March 29 in Nature, included the newly sequenced ancient DNA of 80 individuals from the Swahili coast and inland neighbors dating from 1300 CE to 1900 CE. 

They also included new genomic sequences from 93 present-day Swahili speakers and previously published genetic data from a variety of ancient and present-day eastern African and Eurasian groups.

The international team was led by Kusimba and David Reich, professor of genetics in the Blatavnik Institute at Harvard Medical School and professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University.

Mixing between Asia and Africa

The study revealed that around 1000 CE, a stream of migrants from Southwest Asia intermingled with African people at multiple locations along the Swahili coast, contributing close to half of the ancestry of the analyzed ancient individuals.

“The results provide unambiguous evidence of ongoing cultural mixing on the East African coast for more than a millennium, in which African people interacted and had families with immigrants from other parts of Africa and the Indian Ocean world,” said Reich. 

The study confirmed that the bedrock of Swahili culture remained unchanged even as the newcomers arrived and Islam became a dominant regional religion, said Kusimba; the primary language, tomb architecture, cuisine, material culture, and matrilocal marriage residence and matriarchal kinship remained African and Bantu in nature.

The findings contradict one widely discussed scholarly view, which held that there was little contribution from foreigners to Swahili peoples, the authors said. 

The researchers added that the findings also refute a diametrically opposed viewpoint prevalent in colonial times, which held that Africans provided little contribution to the Swahili towns.

“Ancient DNA allowed us to address a longstanding controversy that could not be tested without genetic data from these times and places,” Reich said.

The researchers found that the initial waves of newcomers were mainly from Persia. These findings align with the oldest Swahili oral stories, which tell of Persian (Shirazi) merchants or princes arriving on the Swahili shores. 

“It was exciting to find biological evidence that Swahili oral history probably depicts Swahili genetic ancestry as well as cultural legacy,” said Esther Brielle, research fellow in genetics in the Reich lab.

Brielle is co-first author of the paper with Stephanie Wynne-Jones at the University of York and Jeffrey Fleisher at Rice University.

After about 1500 CE, ancestry sources became increasingly Arabian. In later centuries, intermingling with other populations from Asia and Africa further changed the genetic makeup of Swahili-coast communities.

Ancestry contributions from women from India

Analyses also showed that the initial stream of migrants had about 90 percent ancestry from Persian men and 10 percent ancestry from Indian women. 

Although South Asian-associated artifacts are well documented at Swahili archaeological sites and Indian words have been integrated into Swahili, “no one had previously hypothesized an important role for Indian people in contributing to the populations of the medieval Swahili towns,” said Reich.

Extreme sex differences in genetic contributions

The predominant groups that contributed to Swahili-coast populations during the initial influx in 1000 CE were male Persians and female Africans. Similar genetic signatures of sex imbalances in other populations around the world sometimes indicate that incoming men forcibly married local women, but that scenario does not align with the tradition of matriarchal Swahili societies, the authors said.

A more likely explanation, said Reich, is that “Persian men allied with and married into local trading families and adopted local customs to enable them to be more successful traders.”

The authors say their hypothesis is supported by the fact that the children of Persian fathers and Swahili-coast mothers passed down the language of their mothers and that the region’s matriarchal traditions did not change even after locals settled down with people from traditionally patriarchal regions in Persia and Arabia and practiced the Islamic religion of their male ancestors.

Genetics and identity

The team found that the proportion of Persian-Indian ancestry has decreased among many people of the Swahili coast in the last several centuries. Many among those in present-day Kenya who identify as Swahili and had their genomes analyzed were “genetically very different” from the people who lived in the region during medieval times, the authors found, while others retained substantial medieval ancestry.

“These results highlight an important lesson from ancient DNA: While we can learn about the past with genetics, it does not define present-day identity,” said Reich.

Decolonizing history

In addition to helping to diversify the populations included in ancient DNA research, the study pushes back against “a profoundly difficult history” of more than 500 years of colonization in this region of Africa, which continues to be a major problem today, said Reich.

“The story of Swahili origins has been molded almost entirely by non-Swahili people,” he said. 

The study results “contradict and complicate” narratives advanced in archaeological, historical, and political circles, said Kusimba, who has spent 40 years working to recover the Swahili past and to address injustices experienced by descendants of the Swahili civilization.

Ancient African empires’ impact on migration revealed by genetics

Traces of ancient empires that stretched across Africa remain in the DNA of people living on the continent, reveals a new genetics study led by UCL researchers.

Published in Science Advances, the collaboration between UCL geneticists working alongside anthropologists, archaeologists, historians and linguists in Africa and beyond found evidence for when different peoples intermixed across the continent. Their findings indicate migration linked to vast empires such as the Kanem-Bornu and the kingdoms of Aksum and Makuria, as well as the spread of the Bantu language group, now spoken by close to one in four Africans.

Much of their study focused on Cameroon, where the researchers had collected the most genomes, and they show that the central African country has as much genetic diversity by some measures as the whole of Europe.

Representing one of the most densely sampled studies of African genomes to date, the study used new genetic data from more than 1,300 individuals from 150 ethnic groups from across Africa (primarily Cameroon, Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Nigeria, and Sudan, plus some more in southern Africa). By comparing genetic variation patterns between present-day people from different parts of Africa and elsewhere, they identified when intermixing occurred between different ethnic groups, which likely indicates relatively high migration at specific times and places.

First author of the study, PhD candidate Nancy Bird (UCL Genetics Institute) said: “We found evidence that roughly 600 years ago people from north and east Africa were migrating into the region of the Kanem-Bornu Empire, likely reflecting its huge impact on trade across Africa. Historical records of the empire are poor, so it is exciting to show how it possibly had such a geographically widespread impact on the continent, perhaps bringing in people from over 1,000 kilometres away.”

The Kanem-Bornu Empire, which covered present-day northern Cameroon and Chad, emerged around 700 CE and existed for more than 1,000 years, at its height spanning almost 2,000 kilometres across north and central Africa. It had vast trading networks linking northern, eastern and western Africa, resulting in genetic traces from all corners of the continent remaining in the DNA of the present-day people of Cameroon.

The study also sheds light on the Kingdom of Aksum, which encompassed northeast Africa and southern Arabia in the first millennium, and was considered one of the world's four great powers of the third century alongside contemporary empires in China, Persia and Rome, as well as the Kingdom of Makuria, which spread along the Nile in Sudan between the fifth and 16th centuries and signed one of the longest lasting peace treaties in history with Egyptian Arabic groups.

Nancy Bird said: “We see evidence of migrations from the Arabian Peninsula into Sudan during the era of the Kingdom of Aksum, highlighting its importance as a global centre around 1,500 years ago. We also see evidence of Arabic groups migrating into Sudan down the Nile, but importantly these genetic signals almost entirely originate after the peace treaty between Makuria and Egypt had started to break down.”

Furthermore, while previous studies have highlighted the wide-ranging genetic impact of the migration of Bantu speakers from Cameroon into eastern and southern Africa, this study provides compelling evidence that expansions may have also extended to the west, possibly linked to climate change.

Nancy Bird said: “There is some evidence from other researchers of climate change altering the environment around 3,000 years ago, reducing forest coverage. That this corresponds with the timings of some ancient migrations we are detecting suggests climate change may be instigating or facilitating these large-scale movements of people.”

Senior author Dr Garrett Hellenthal (UCL Genetics Institute) said: “The African continent has an immense and complicated pre-colonial history often overlooked by western curricula. The legacy of colonialism means that many events in African history have been deliberately obscured or lost. This includes the range and influence of historical African empires.”

The staggering amount of genetic diversity uncovered in this paper and other emerging studies highlights the vital importance of analysing diverse African genomes from across the continent.

Dr Hellenthal added: “Despite the clear insights into medicine and human history that studying the immense genetic diversity found among African peoples can provide, African genomes have been, and still are, underrepresented in genetic studies compared to other regions of the world.”

Co-author Dr Forka Leypey Matthew Fomine (University of Buea, Cameroon) said: “There are still lots of ethnic groups, for example in Cameroon, that have not yet been studied, whose genomes likely hold many other secrets. We have the capability to collect these samples and are looking for interested collaborators.”

The study, supported by the BBSRC, Natural Environment Research Council, Wellcome, Royal Society and the National Institute for Health Research UCLH Biomedical Research Centre, involved researchers at UCL and other institutions in the UK, Cameroon, Ghana, Sudan, Canada, China, France, Finland, and the US.

---

JOURNAL

Science Advances

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.abq2616 

A reconstruction of prehistoric temperatures for some of the oldest archaeological sites in North America

 Scientists often look to the past for clues about how Earth’s landscapes might shift under a changing climate, and for insight into the migrations of human communities through time. A new study offers both by providing, for the first time, a reconstruction of prehistoric temperatures for some of the first known North American settlements.

The study, published in Quaternary Science Reviews, uses new techniques to examine the past climate of Alaska’s Tanana Valley. With a temperature record that reaches back 14,000 years, researchers now have a glimpse into the environment that supported humans living at some of the continent’s oldest archaeological sites, where mammoth bones are preserved alongside evidence of human occupation. Reconstructing the past environment can help scientists understand the importance of the region for human migration into the Americas.

“When you think about what was happening in the Last Glacial Maximum, all these regions on Earth were super cold, with massive ice sheets, but this area was never fully glaciated,” says Jennifer Kielhofer, Ph.D., a paleoclimatologist at DRI and lead author of the study. “We're hypothesizing that if this area was comparatively warm, maybe that would have been an attractive reason to come there and settle.”

Kielhofer conducted the research during her doctoral studies at the University of Arizona, and was attracted to the Alaska location because of the wealth of research expertise being focused on the area. She also saw an opportunity to contribute to scientific understanding of a part of the world that is particularly sensitive to global climate change.

“We have to look to the past to try to better constrain how these areas have responded previously,” she said, “and how they might respond in the future under climate scenarios that we predict.”

Earlier research had relied on coarse temperature records by examining changes in vegetation and pollen. However, this information can only provide a general sense of whether a region was warming or cooling over time. To obtain a more precise history of temperatures, Kielhofer examined soil samples from the archeological sites. Using a technique known as brGDGT paleothermometry, she examined temperature records stored in bacteria to obtain a record of mean annual air temperature above freezing with a precision within about 2.8 degrees Celsius.

“Bacteria are everywhere,” she said. “That's great because in areas where you might not have other means of recording or assessing past temperature, you have bacteria. They can preserve for millions of years, so it's a great opportunity to look at pretty much anywhere on Earth.”

The results were surprising, she said, because many scientists had previously believed that the region experienced large swings in temperature, which may have contributed to the movement of early humans. But Kielhofer’s data showed that temperatures in the Tanana Valley remained fairly stable over time.

“The region wasn't really responding to these global scale climate changes as we might expect,” she said. “Because temperatures are really stable through this record, we can't necessarily use temperature as a way to explain changes in human occupation or adaptation through time, as scientists have previously tried to do.”

Kielhofer’s now turning her attention to other historical records, like changes in aridity, that could help explain how conditions in this region influenced early human communities. 

 

The “Stonehenge calendar” shown to be a modern construct

 

IMAGE: STONEHENGE (VIEW FROM THE NW) view more 

CREDIT: JUAN BELMONTE)

Stonehenge is an astonishingly complex monument, which attracts attention mostly for its spectacular megalithic circle and “horseshoe”, built around 2600 BC.

Over the years, several theories have been put forward about Stonehenge's meaning and function. Today, however, archaeologists have a rather clear picture of this monument as a “place for the ancestors”, located within a complex ancient landscape which included several other elements.

Archaeoastronomy has a key role in this interpretation since Stonehenge exhibits an astronomical alignment to the sun which, due to the flatness of the horizon, refers both to the summer solstice sunrise and to the winter solstice sunset. This accounts for a symbolic interest of the builders in the solar cycle, most probably related to the connections between the afterlife and winter solstice in Neolithic societies

This is, of course, very far from saying that the monument was used as a giant calendrical device, as instead has been proposed in a new theory published in the renewed Archaeology Journal Antiquity.  According to this theory, the monument represents a calendar based on 365 days per year divided into 12 months of 30 days plus five epagomenal days, with the addition of a leap year every four. This calendar is identical to the Alexandrian one, introduced more than two millennia later, at the end of the first century BC as a combination of the Julian calendar and the Egyptian civil calendar.

To justify this “calendar in stone”, the number of the days is obtained by multiplying the 30 sarsen lintels (probably) present in the original project by 12 and adding to 360 the number of the standing trilithons of the Horseshoe, which is five. The addition of a leap year every four is related to the number of the “station stones”, which is, indeed, four. This machinery was allegedly kept in operation using the solstice alignment of the axis and was supposedly taken from Egypt, much refining, however, the Egyptian calendar, which was of 365 days (the leap year correction was not present until Roman times).

This is the admittedly fascinating theory that has been subjected to a severe stress test by two renewed experts of  Archaeoastronomy, Juan Antonio Belmonte (Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias and Universidad de La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain) and Giulio Magli (Politecnico of Milan). In their paper, which is going to be published on Antiquity as well, the authors show that the theory is based on a series of forced interpretations of the astronomical connections of the monument, as well as on debatable numerology and unsupported analogies.

First of all, astronomy. Although the solstice alignment is quite accurate, Magli and Belmonte show that the slow movement of the sun at the horizon in the days close to solstices makes it impossible to control the correct working of the alleged calendar, as the device (remember: composed by huge stones) should be able to distinguish positions as accurate as a few arc minutes, that is, less than 1/10 of one degree.  So, while the existence of the axis does show interest in the solar cycle in a broad sense, it provides no proof whatsoever for inferring the number of days of the year conceived by the builders.

Second, is numerology. Attributing meanings to “numbers” in a monument is always a risky procedure. In this case, a “key number” of the alleged calendar, 12, is not recognizable anywhere, as well as any means of taking into account the additional epagomenal day every four years, while other “numbers” are simply ignored (for instance, the Stonehenge portal was made of two stones). Thus, the theory suffers also from the so-called “selection effect”, a procedure in which only the elements favourable to a desired interpretation are extracted from the material records.

Finally, cultural paragons. The first elaboration of the 365 plus 1-day calendar is documented in Egypt only two millennia later than Stonehenge (and entered into use further centuries later). Thus, even if the builders took the calendar from Egypt, they refined it on their own. In addition, they invented on their own also a building to control time, since nothing of this kind ever existed in ancient Egypt - probably the Egyptians reflected the drift of their 365-day

calendar through the seasons in their architecture but this is far different. Besides, a transfer and elaboration of notions with Egypt occurred around 2600 BC and has no archaeological basis.

All in all, the alleged “Neolithic” solar-precise Stonehenge calendar is shown to be a purely modern construct whose archaeoastronomical and calendrical bases are flawed.

As occurred many times in the past – for instance, for the claims (shown untenable by modern research) that Stonehenge was used to predict eclipses – the monument returns to its role of the silent witness of the sacred landscape of its builders, a role which – as Magli and Belmonte stress – does not take anything away from his extraordinary fascination and importance.

Early European farmers borrowed genes from hunter-gatherers to survive disease

 

IMAGE: THIS IS A FIGURE SHOWING GENOME-WIDE SIGNALS OF ADMIXTURE IN NEOLITHIC EUROPEAN FARMERS view more 

CREDIT: DAVY ET AL.

When early Stone Age farmers first moved into Europe from the Near East about 8,000 years ago, they met and began mixing with the existing hunter-gatherer populations. Now genome-wide studies of hundreds of ancient genomes from this period show more hunter-gatherer ancestry in adaptive-immunity genes in the mixed population than would be expected by chance. 

The findings, reported in Current Biology on March 23, suggest that mixing between the two groups resulted in mosaics of genetic variation that were acted upon by natural selection, a process through which all organisms, including humans, adapt and change over time. 

The changes in immunity genes appeared in the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) region, a cluster of genes that code for surface proteins on cells and help our immune systems recognize pathogens. The researchers also detected more farmer ancestry in a gene called SLC24A5, which is involved in skin pigmentation.

“This tells us that these regions of the genome were experiencing natural selection,” said Tom Davy (@TomDavy_) of the Francis Crick Institute’s Ancient Genomics Laboratory in London. “The genetic variants predominantly carried by hunter-gatherers in the MHC region and by farmers in SLC25A5 increased in frequency in the descendant population.”

In recent years, the study of ancient genomes has allowed scientists to essentially travel back in time to trace the evolution of humans and other organisms. Whereas most ancient DNA studies have focused on archaeological questions, Davy and Pontus Skoglund at the Francis Crick Institute and Iain Mathieson and colleagues of the University of Pennsylvania realized that the increasing availability of standardized and shared ancient genome data now allows new questions about natural selection and human adaptation in prehistoric times.

They analyzed genome-wide DNA from 677 individuals spanning Mesolithic and Neolithic Europe. Their goal was to look for any ancestry deviations in the genomes of admixed individuals and to test whether those deviations appeared to be the result of natural selection, as opposed to random changes. 

Their analysis found that a pigmentation-associated gene was the most overrepresented from the Neolithic local ancestry. In contrast, the mixed group retained more genes from the important MHC immunity locus from the hunter-gatherers. The findings could simply reflect the advantage of having more diversity in immune response, the researchers say. On the other hand, the MHC alleles from the hunter-gatherers might have been positively selected for because they facilitated greater survival and adaptation to pathogens in the Neolithic group. 

Although other factors may have been at play, the findings highlight immune function as a prime target of natural selection in late-Stone-Age populations. The researchers say the increased immune representation from hunter-gatherers came as something of a surprise to them.

“A longstanding idea is that farming lifestyles drove immune adaptation due to denser settlements, new diets, and proximity to livestock,” Skoglund said. “When farming groups expanded from the Near East into Europe and mixed with local hunter-gatherers, the natural prediction would be that the farmers' immunity genes would be best adapted to the farming lifestyle and thus selected for. However, we see the opposite, that hunter-gatherer ancestry is enriched at the MHC immunity locus. This could, for example, be because the hunter-gatherers were already adapted to pathogens found in Europe, or it could be the result of natural selection favoring diversity in immunity genes.”

As for changes in pigmentation, earlier studies also had shown selection for reasons that aren’t fully understood. “One hypothesis is that lighter skin pigmentation allowed farmers to synthesize more vitamin D from ultraviolet radiation, while hunter-gatherers were able to obtain sufficient vitamin D from their diet,” Mathieson says.

Overall, the new study extends recent findings of adaptive admixture at the MHC region to selection in a Stone Age human population for the first time. The researchers say the discovery of greater diversity at the MHC locus opens new avenues for understanding the adaptations that came along with the shift to an agricultural lifestyle, which the researchers note was a fundamental transition that happened worldwide in human history. 

“This study revealed natural selection during the agricultural transition in one region of the world, Europe, but other regions are not well understood,” Skoglund said. “Future ancient-DNA studies will also be able to address to what extent immunity was a key target also in other periods of environmental and lifestyle change during human evolution.”

Current Biology, Davy et al.: “Hunter-gatherer admixture facilitated natural selection in Neolithic European farmers” https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(23)00189-6 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2023.02.049

Copper artifacts unearth new cultural connections in southern Africa

A University of Missouri researcher and colleagues use geochemical analyses on copper objects to reveal centuries of previously unknow – Chemical and isotopic analysis of copper artifacts from southern Africa reveals new cultural connections among people living in the region between the 5th and 20th centuries according to a University of Missouri researcher and colleagues.

People in the area between northern South Africa and the Copperbelt region in central Africa were more connected to one another than scholars previously thought, said Jay Stephens, a post-doctoral fellow in the MU Research Reactor (MURR) Archaeometry Lab.

“Over the past 20 to 30 years, most archaeologists have framed the archaeological record of southern Africa in a global way with a major focus on its connection to imports coming from the Indian Ocean,” he said. “But it’s also important to recognize the interconnected relationships that existed among the many groups of people living in southern Africa. The data shows the interaction between these groups not only involved the movement of goods, but also flows of information and the sharing of technological practices that come with that exchange.”

Mining copper ore

For years, scholars debated whether these artifacts, called rectangular, fishtail and croisette copper ingots, were made exclusively from copper ore mined in the Copperbelt region or from Zimbabwe’s Magondi Belt. As it turns out, both theories are correct, Stephens said.

“We now have tangible linkages to reconstruct connectivity at various points in time in the archeological record,” he said. “There is a massive history of interconnectivity found throughout the region in areas now known as the countries of Zambia, Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This also includes people from the contemporary Ingombe Ilede, Harare, and Musengezi traditions of northern Zimbabwe between at least the 14th and 18th centuries A.D.”

To determine their findings, researchers took small samples from 33 copper ingots and analyzed them at the University of Arizona. All samples were carefully selected by researchers from archeological samples found in the collections of the Museum of Human Sciences in Harare, Zimbabwe, and the Livingstone Museum in Livingstone, Zambia.

“We didn’t want to impact the display of an object, so we tried to be aware of how museums and institutions would want to interact with the data we collected and share it with the general public,” Stephens said. “We also want our knowledge to be accessible for the individuals in these communities who continue to interact with these objects. Hopefully, some of the skills linked with these analyses can be used by whomever wants to ask similar questions in the future.”

Stephens said copper ingots are excellent objects for this type of analysis because they often have emblematic shapes that allow archaeologists to identify specific markings and follow changes over different time periods.

“By looking at their changes in shape and morphology over time, we can pair those changes with how technology changed over time,” he said. “This often comes from observing the decorative features produced from the cast object or mold, or other surface attributes found on these objects.”

Gathering scientific evidence

Once the samples arrived at the University of Arizona lab, researchers took a small amount of each sample — less than one gram — and dissolved it with specific acids to leave behind a liquid mixture of chemical ions. Then the samples were analyzed for lead isotopes and other chemical elements. One challenge the team encountered was a lack of existing data to match their samples with.

"One part of the project included analyzing hundreds of ore samples from different geological deposits in southern Africa — especially ones mined before the arrival of European colonial forces — to create a robust data set,” Stephens said. “The data can provide a scientific foundation to help back up the inferences and conclusions we make in the study.”

Historical connections

Stephens said the data they collect is one of the only remaining tangible links that exist today to those precolonial mines in Africa.

“Unfortunately, large open pit mines have destroyed a lot of the archaeological sites and broader cultural landscapes around these geological deposits,” he said. “This makes it a challenge to reconstruct the history related to these mines. It’s a concerning development, especially with the global push toward more electric vehicles which use minerals like copper and cobalt found in the Copperbelt.”

“Reconstructing the geological provenance and long-distance movement of rectangular, fishtail, and croisette copper ingots in iron age Zambia and Zimbabwe,” was published in PLOS ONE. Co-authors are David Killick at the University of Arizona and Shadreck Chirikure at the University of Oxford and University of Cape Town. This study was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the funding agencies.

Editor's Note: Stephens and his colleagues have applied for an additional grant to allow them to analyze copper ingots from other sites in South Africa and Malawi that were not included in the current project. The data collected will be used to help address any knowledge gaps they identify in their current research. All work for the next phase of the project will be done at the MU Research Reactor (MURR) Archaeometry Lab.

“MU has done an amazing job of creating a center for archeological science at MURR,” Stephens said. “I think that’s fantastic because it lets researchers be as creative as they want in asking questions about their research because of the number of different tools that are available to help answer those questions.”

Neolithic ceramics reveal dairy processing from milk of multiple species

 

 

IMAGE: NEOLITHIC CERAMICS IDENTIFIED WITH HIGH CURD-CONTENT RESIDUES, INDICATING MULTIPLE DAIRY ANIMALS WERE USED. view more 

CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF YORK

A new study has found evidence of cheesemaking, using milk from multiple animals in Late Neolithic Poland.

The research suggests that early farmers reduced the lactose content in milk by making it into cheese or other dairy products like yoghurt, and used dairy products from a number of different animals, such as cows, sheep or goats.

Lactose intolerance was a common condition in almost everyone in Europe during the Neolithic and until the Late Bronze Age when the genetic mutation became widespread, enabling adults to produce lactase, the enzyme which breaks down lactose in the body.

Researchers looked at the practice of dairy processing in the Late Neolithic, identifying high curd-content residues in pottery indicating cheesemaking, and revealing that multiple dairy species were utilised.

Dr Harry Robson, from the Department of Archaeology at the University of York, said: “These results contribute significantly to our understanding of the use of dairy products by some of the earliest farmers of Central Europe. 

“Whilst previous research has shown that dairy products were widely available in some European regions during this period, here, for the first time, we have clear evidence for a diversified dairy herd, including cattle, sheep and goats, from the analysis of ceramics.”

The scientists and archaeologists from the Universities of York, Cambridge, Toruń and Kraków used a multi-stranded proteomic and lipid-analysis approach to investigate ceramics and deposits on their surface, from the site of Sławęcinek in central Poland.

The new development provides evidence that cheesemaking (and other curd-enriching dairy processing) can be directly detected by scrutinising the proportion of curd proteins, by comparing proteomic data. The results are also the first of their kind in Europe. 

Despite widespread lactose intolerance in the period, there is evidence of dairy being consumed during the Neolithic, such as animal bones with kill patterns expected for dairy herds, dairy lipids in ceramic vessels, and dairy proteins in ancient dental calculus or plaque. 

Lead author, Miranda Evans, PhD student at Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology, said: “The proteomic results showed that the ancient residues closely resembled both the modern cheesemaking residues and cheese itself and not whole milk. This reveals that the people of Sławęcinek practised cheesemaking or another form of curd-enriching dairy processing.”

Evidence of multiple species used for cheesemaking was backed up by the presence of both cow and sheep or goat bones on the site.”

Dr Jasmine Lundy from the Department of Archaeology, said: “This study highlights how complementary lipid and proteomic analyses are, particularly in understanding the use of the ceramic vessel over time. From this, for example, we could see that not only did some techniques waterproof or seal the ceramics but also what foods were being produced in them.  

The study is published in the Royal Society Open Science

Uncovering the ritual past of an ancient stone monument in Saudi Arabia

 

 

IMAGE: MAIN ARCHITECTURAL FEATURES OF A MUSTATIL. view more 

CREDIT: KENNEDY ET AL., 2023, PLOS ONE, CC-BY 4.0 (HTTPS://CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/LICENSES/BY/4.0/)

A comprehensive analysis of an archaeological site in Saudi Arabia sheds new light on mustatils—stone monuments from the Late Neolithic period thought to have been used for ritual purposes. Melissa Kennedy of the University of Western Australia, Perth, and colleagues, in conjunction with The Royal Commission for AlUla present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on March 15, 2023.

Built around 7,000 years ago, mustatils are rectangular, low-walled, stone structures that range from 20 to 600 meters in length. Researchers first discovered them in the 1970s, and more than 1,600 mustatils have now been discovered, primarily concentrated in northern Saudi Arabia.

Recent excavations in the city of AlUla suggest that mustatils were used for ritualistic purposes involving placement of animal offerings. Now, Kennedy and colleagues have conducted an extensive excavation at a mustatil located 55 east of AlUla. This mustatil is 140 meters long and is constructed from local sandstone.

The researchers’ analysis included identification of 260 fragments of animal skulls and horns, primarily from domestic cattle, as well as from domestic goats, gazelle, and small ruminants. Nearly all of these remains were clustered around a large upright stone interpreted to be a betyl. Radiocarbon dating suggested that the betyl is one of the oldest identified in the Arabian Peninsula, and the bones provide some of the earliest evidence for domestication of cattle in the northern Arabia.

This study also uncovered evidence for several phases of offerings at the mustatil, as well as interment of an adult male human, suggesting that the site may have been the destination of repeated pilgrimages.

Taking all the new data into consideration, the researchers suggest that ritualistic belief and economic factors were more closely intertwined for Neolithic people in northwest Arabia than previously thought, and that this entanglement was shared over a broad geographic area.

The authors add: “The ritual deposition of animal horns and upper cranial element within the mustatil suggests a profound intersection of belief and economic life-ways in the Late Neolithic of Northern Arabia. The incorporation of these two facets suggests a deeply rooted ideological entanglement, one which was shared over a vast geographic distance, indicating a far more interconnected landscape and culture than had previously been supposed for the Neolithic period in north-west Arabia.”

JOURNAL

PLoS ONE

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0281904 

Peru: How ancient pottery was made — and how an empire functioned

 

IMAGE: GRÁVALOS INSIDE AN ANCIENT RECUAY HOUSEHOLD AT THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE OF JECOSH IN ANCASH, PERU. RECUAY WAS ONE OF THE LOCAL CULTURES WITH WHOM WARI INTERACTED DURING THEIR IMPERIAL EXPANSION. view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO CREDIT: EMILY SHARP.

Peru’s first great empire, the Wari, stretched for more than a thousand miles over the Andes Mountains and along the coast from 600-1000 CE. The pottery they left behind gives archaeologists clues as to how the empire functioned. In a new study in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, researchers showed that rather than using “official” Wari pottery imported from the capital, potters across the empire were creating their own ceramics, decorated to emulate the traditional Wari style. To figure it out, the scientists analyzed the pottery’s chemical make-up, with help from laser beams.

“In this study, we looked at the idea of cosmopolitanism, of incorporating different cultures and practices into a society,” says M. Elizabeth Grávalos, a postdoctoral researcher at the Field Museum in Chicago and the study’s lead author. “We’re trying to show that potters were influenced by the Wari, but this influence was blended with their own local cultural practices.”

Grávalos says this model of cosmopolitanism is a little like trying to replicate a recipe from another culture, but with a local spin. “If you live in the US and you’re making pad thai at home, you might not have access to all the ingredients that someone living in Thailand would have, so you substitute some things,” she says. “Wari ceramics are a little like that — people throughout the empire were interested in Wari material culture, but they weren’t necessarily getting it directly from the Wari heartland. More often than not, we see local people trying to make their own version of Wari pottery.”

Grávalos and her colleagues led archaeological digs throughout Peru, working with local communities to excavate the thousand-year-old remains of households, tombs, and administrative centers, in search of Wari lifeways. The researchers were then granted permission from Peru’s Ministry of Culture to bring samples of ceramics from their excavations to Chicago for analysis.

Clay from different regions has a different chemical makeup, so studying the ceramics’ chemical makeup could tell the researchers if the pots were produced in different places or if they were all imported from the Wari capital.

“We’d take a tiny piece of a pot and used a laser to cut an even tinier piece, basically extracting a piece of the ceramic’s clay paste,” says Grávalos. “Then helium gas carried it to the mass spectrometer, which measures the elements present in the  clay paste.” (The lab set-up didn’t have open laser beams and floating shards of pottery cutting across the room, though — the whole process takes place on a microscopic scale inside a big boxy machine.)

The analysis showed that the pots excavated from distinct regions of Peru have different chemical signatures, and were therefore made with distinct clays. That helps show how the Wari culture spread.

Some empires, like the ancient Romans, took a “top-down” approach to spreading their aesthetic, shipping pottery across the Mediterranean so that people throughout the empire were using the official Roman style. Local potters emulating the traditional Wari style in their own work seems to hint at a more “bottom-up” approach.

“Of course, local people in all empires have some degree of agency and creative control — the only empire that’s truly top-down is the Borg from Star Trek,” says Patrick Ryan Williams, Curator of Archaeological Science and Director of the Elemental Analysis Facility  at the Field Museum and the study’s senior author. “Even the Romans had local people doing things their own way. But what we’re finding in this study is the agency of local peoples and the importance of local economies. In some regions, we find that Wari colonists had their own production centers and were recreating Wari lifeways locally. In other areas, we see that local communities made Wari pottery in their own way. I think that’s what’s really important about this study.”

The researchers say that the patterns revealed by this pottery could help explain why the Wari empire was able to thrive for so long. “Local production, even in a cosmopolitan society with lots of far-flung connections, makes a society more resilient,” says Williams. “If you’re entirely dependent on someone far away sending you things you need, you’re extremely vulnerable.”

Beyond the economic lessons that we might learn from the Wari, Grávalos says that the study matters because “this work challenges some of the assumptions we have about how societies work, particularly Indigenous groups who are often misrepresented or left out of broader narratives of world history. There are many people whose stories haven’t been told, and this study shows their resilience and their accomplishments.”