Researchers solve ancient mystery of Maya calendar

 

The 819-day calendar used by ancient Mayans has long stumped researchers, but anthropologists from Tulane University may have finally deciphered its secrets.

Researchers long suspected the calendar followed astronomical events, specifically how long it takes a planet to appear in the same place in the night sky as seen from Earth, known as the synodic periods of planets. But, according to the study published in Ancient Mesoamerica, the cycles in the Maya calendar cover a much larger timeframe than scholars previously thought.

“Although prior research has sought to show planetary connections for the 819-day count, its four-part, color-directional scheme is too short to fit well with the synodic periods of the visible planets,” wrote anthropologists John Linden, a Tulane alumnus, and Victoria Bricker, PhD, professor emerita at Tulane University School of Liberal Arts. “By increasing the calendar length to 20 periods of 819-days, a pattern emerges in which the synodic periods of all the visible planets commensurate with station points in the larger 819-day calendar.”

Previously, researchers thought the calendar referred to four cycles of 819, but that time span didn’t sync neatly with the synodic periods of all the planets that can be seen with the naked eye: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. The researchers discovered it takes 20 cycles of 819 days, which is about 45 years, to align with the synodic periods of all visible planets.

Within 20 cycles, each planet goes through some number of synodic periods a whole number of times: Mercury every cycle, Venus every 5 cycles, Saturn every 6 cycles, Jupiter every 19 cycles, and Mars every 20 cycles.

 

Each synodic period is less than 819 days, but only Mercury has one that happens a whole number of times within a single cycle. Combining the cycles allows for prediction of the placement of the planets, which Linden and Bricker say is also connected to important dates and celebrations.
 

“Rather than limit their focus to any one planet, the Maya astronomers who created the 819-day count envisioned it as a larger calendar system that could be used for predictions of all the visible planet's synodic periods,” the authors wrote.

This research is a key part of understanding how the ancient Maya studied astronomy and is part of a decades-long quest to understand the complexity of ancient Maya calendars.

 

 

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JOURNAL

Ancient Mesoamerica

DOI

10.1017/S0956536122000323 

Modern-day Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish people have Pictish ancestry

The Picts of Scotland who have long intrigued and have been ascribed exotic origins in fact descended from indigenous Iron Age society and were genetically most similar to people living today in Scotland, Wales, North Ireland and Northumbria. Adeline Morez of Liverpool John Moores University and Linus Girdland-Flink of the University of Aberdeen report these findings in a new study published April 27 in the journal PLOS Genetics.

Complete article:

 PLOS Genetics:

http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal. pgen.1010360

The Picts, who inhabited early medieval Scotland from about 300-900 AD, formed the first documented kingdoms of eastern Scotland, but have often been a subject of mystery due to the lack of historical and archaeological evidence and due to their enigmatic symbol tradition inscribed on stone. In their new study, Morez and Girdland-Flink sampled Pictish burials to extract genomes to explore how the Picts are related to other cultural groups in Britain. They sequenced DNA from two individuals from central and northern Scotland that dated from the fifth to the seventh century AD. They compared the resulting high-quality genomes to more than 8,300 previously published ancient and modern genomes.

The analysis revealed that Picts descended from local Iron Age populations, who lived across Britain before the arrival of mainland Europeans. Additionally, the researchers found genetic similarities between the Picts and present-day people living in western Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and Northumbria. Medieval traditions, including from the time of the Picts themselves, had ascribed exotic origins to the Picts including them coming from Thrace (north of the Aegean Sea), Scythia (eastern Europe), or isles north of Britain, but the new research suggests much less sensational origins.

A further analysis of DNA sequenced from seven individuals interred in a Pictish cemetary showed that the individuals did not share a common ancestor on their mother’s side. This finding suggests that females may have married outside their own social group and runs counter to older speculation, such as that mentioned by the great English scholar Bede, that the Picts were matrilineal; that they had had a society based on kinship through the mother’s lineage.

The new findings support current archaeological theories that Picts descended from Iron Age people in Britain. The study also provides novel insights into the genetic relationships that existed amongst Pictish individuals buried in cemeteries together and between ancient Picts and present-day groups in the United Kingdom.

####

Author Interview:

PLOS: What first drew you to study paleogenetics?

Dr. Morez: I always have been fascinated by human evolution overall: where are we from? How did we manage to settle worldwide and adapt to the wide diversity of environments? I chose to focus on paleogenetics, the study of ancient DNA, as it is a formidable opportunity to gain direct knowledge of an individual ancestry or a population's genetic diversity, free from inference based on modern genomes. And now, we actually see that the migrations and population mixtures are more numerous and complex than previously hypothesised.

PLOS:  What did you choose to investigate in this study, and why?

Dr. Morez: In this study, I chose to investigate the genetic ancestry of the Picts - people living in Scotland during the early medieval period (here from individuals buried in eastern and northern Scotland). It has never been done and many historical-based hypotheses stated that they were biologically diverse from their neighbours, with possible ties from the Eurasian steppes. Once we realised they were actually genetically very similar to their contemporaries living in the UK, we decided to push the limit in terms of analytical resolution using imputation of genotypes and analyses based on the autosomal haplotype information (chunks of DNA shared from parents to offspring, modify by mutation and recombination). It allows us to study the fine-scale genetic structure between the Picts and ancient and modern individuals from the UK and Europe.

PLOS: What are the key findings from your research on ancient Pictish genetics?

Dr. Morez: The two Picts studied here showed a greater affinity (by haplotype sharing) with present-day populations from western Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and Northumbria compared to the populations from southern England, which is important for understanding how present-day diversity formed in the UK.

Thanks to comparison with previously published genomes from Pictish people living in the Orkney islands, we could also show that individuals living in the Orkney and in mainland Scotland, likely gathered under the same cultural unit, were slightly divergent likely because of limited gene flow between the two regions and small population size in Orkney, which is known to speed up genetic divergence.

PLOS: What most surprised or interested you about your findings?

Dr. Morez: I was surprised to find that the two Pictish genomes from eastern and northern Scotland show a slightly higher but noticeable haplotype sharing with present-day people living in western Scotland, rather than with those from the East where Pictish culture is believed to thrive. This was unexpected and may be caused by several reasons; either we are detecting a population movement from the west of Scotland toward the east but which did not leave a long-lasting genetic signature, or later population movements in the East replaced some of the Pictish ancestry. We still don’t know which one is correct.

PLOS: What do you hope your findings might lead to, and what are the next steps for your research?

Dr. Morez: I hope the fascination for the Iron Age and medieval period in the UK will increase and lead to more genomes being discovered and analysed, to get a better understanding of the genetic structure across Scotland. Thanks to these genomes, those already published and the many more yet to come, the UK will soon become the first country where we understand in detail how genetic diversity has formed.

Future research will provide new information on the Pictish lifestyle, thanks to archaeologists from the University of Aberdeen and co-authors of the study. Gordon Noble who is reassessing and excavating new Pictish sites, and Kate Britton who investigates dietary habits and mobility using stable isotopes. Linus Girdland Flink (senior author, University of Aberdeen) is coordinating further research on Pictish DNA. This ongoing project will provide an excellent tool to facilitate interdisciplinary research to connect archaeology, archaeological science, history, and human population genetics.

New insight into the mystery of ancient Gaza wine

 

Research into grape pips found from an excavated Byzantine monastery in Israel hints at the origins of the ‘mysterious’ Gaza wine and the history of grapevine cultivation in desert conditions.

The pips from settlements in Israel’s Negev desert - one of which was dated to the 8th century - were likely from a white grape, and is potentially the earliest of its kind documented anywhere in the world. 

It is thought it could be linked to the sweet white wine - the Gaza wine - that archaeologists have seen references to in historical records, but a lack of evidence of white varieties from the period has until now left a question mark over its true origins.

The wine was produced in the Negev and shipped across the Byzantine Empire, as well as to Germany, France and Britain, where it is thought to have been enjoyed by royal households. 

Researchers from the University of York, Tel Aviv University, and the University of Copenhagen, used genetic analyses to identify several different grape cultivars that were grown in Negev vineyards including both white and black grapes. 

Dr Nathan Wales, from the University of York's Department of Archaeology, said: “This is the first time that genetics has been used to identify the colour of an ancient grape, and gives us a glimpse into the internationally famous Gaza wine during the period.  

“It also gave us the opportunity to link ancient seeds with modern varieties that are still grown around the Mediterranean today. 

“Identifying the grape varieties that grew in the Negev during the Byzantine period and the genetic characteristics that were nurtured in these dry, desert conditions, could provide valuable insights into how plant varieties could be developed to resist the extremes of climate conditions today.”

The grapevines made some of the largest profits of any crop in Byzantine times and trade from Negev, with Lebanon and Crete for example, have sprung modern varieties of red wine that are still produced in these areas today.

The research, also in collaboration with the University of Haifa and the Israel Antiquities Authority, is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America (PNAS).

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JOURNAL

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.221356312 

Oldest human remains from Puerto Rico reveal a complex cultural landscape since 1800BC

 

IMAGE: VIEW ACROSS BOQUERÓN BAY, CABO ROJO, PUERTO RICO, WITH THE ORTIZ SITE IN THE DISTANCE. view more 

CREDIT: WILLIAM J. PESTLE, CC-BY 4.0 (HTTPS://CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/LICENSES/BY/4.0/)

The earliest inhabitants of Puerto Rico might have used common burial sites and mortuary practices across many centuries, according to a study published April 26, 2023, in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by William J. Pestle of the University of Miami, Florida and colleagues.

Puerto Rico was inhabited by people for several thousand years prior to the Ceramic Age, but little is known about these earliest inhabitants due to a paucity of evidence and research, with only 20 ancient individuals reported from this time period. In this study, Pestle and colleagues describe five adult individuals from burials at the Ortiz site in Cabo Rojo, southwestern Puerto Rico, representing a substantial addition to archaeological information about this time period.

Radiocarbon dating of the remains yielded ages as old as 1800BC and as young as 800BC, thus including the oldest directly dated human remains from Puerto Rico and representing as much as 1,000 years of burials at the Ortiz site. The mortuary practices, including the positioning of the bodies and the associated grave goods, are similar to other early sites, indicating standard burial practices over many centuries. In addition, Strontium isotope analysis also indicates that these buried individuals were born in different nearby geographical locales. Thus, the Ortiz site might have held cultural significance as a common mortuary space for various local communities.

The authors caution that it is difficult to draw broad conclusions from limited evidence, but these results hint at a long history of persistent and formalized use of a common site over centuries. The earliest inhabitants of Puerto Rico have been traditionally interpreted in a simplistic fashion, but the results from this study and hopefully future studies shed light on what was likely a more vibrant and varied cultural landscape than previously appreciated.

The authors add: “This study assiduously documents the oldest dated burials from the island of Puerto Rico and provides detailed scientific and cultural insights into the lives of some of the earliest people to inhabit that island. We hope that this work contributes to the ongoing re-framing of our understanding of the deep past of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean.”

Searching for ancient bears in an Alaskan cave led to an important human discovery

The first people to live in the Americas migrated from Siberia across the Bering land bridge more than 20,000 years ago. Some made their way as far south as Tierra del Fuego, at the tip of South America. Others settled in areas much closer to their place of origin where their descendants still thrive today.

In “A paleogenome from a Holocene individual supports genetic continuity in Southeast Alaska,” published Friday in the journal iScience, University at Buffalo evolutionary biologist Charlotte Lindqvist and collaborators show, using ancient genetic data analyses, that some modern Alaska Natives still live almost exactly where their ancestors did some 3,000 years ago.

Lindqvist, PhD, associate professor of biological sciences in the UB College of Arts and Sciences, is senior author of the paper. In the course of her extensive studies in Alaska, she explored mammal remains that had been found in a cave in the state’s southeast coast. One bone was initially identified as coming from a bear. However, genetic analysis showed it to be the remains of a human female.

“We realized that modern Indigenous peoples in Alaska, should they have remained in the region since the earliest migrations, could be related to this prehistoric individual,” says Alber Aqil, a UB PhD student in biological sciences and the first author of the paper. This discovery led to efforts to solve this mystery, which DNA analyses are well suited to address when archeological remains are as sparse as these were.

Learning from an ancestor

The earliest peoples had already started moving south along the Pacific Northwest Coast before an inland route between ice sheets became viable. Some, including the female individual from the cave, made their home in the area that surrounds the Gulf of Alaska. That area is now home to the Tlingit Nation and three other groups: Haida, Tsimshian, and Nisga’a.

As Aqil and colleagues analyzed the genome from this 3,000-year-old individual — “research that was not possible just 20 years ago,” Lindqvist noted — they determined that she is most closely related to Alaska Natives living in the area today. This fact showed it was necessary to carefully document as clearly as possible any genetic connections of the ancient female to present-day Native Americans.

In such endeavors, it is important to collaborate closely with people living in lands where archeological remains are found. Therefore, cooperation between Alaska Native peoples and the scientific community has been a significant component of the cave explorations that have taken place in the region. The Wrangell Cooperative Association named the ancient individual analyzed in this study as “Tatóok yík yées sháawat” (Young lady in cave).

Genetic continuity in Southeast Alaska persists for thousands of years

Indeed, Aqil and Lindqvist’s research demonstrated that Tatóok yík yées sháawat is in fact closest related to present-day Tlingit peoples and those of nearby tribes along the coast. Their research therefore strengthens the idea that genetic continuity in Southeast Alaska has continued for thousands of years.

Human migration into North America, although it began some 24,000 years ago, came in waves — one of which, about 6,000 years ago — included the Paleo-Inuit, formerly known as Paleo-Eskimos. Importantly for understanding Indigenous peoples’ migrations from Asia, Tatóok yík yées sháawat’s DNA did not reveal ancestry from the second wave of settlers, the Paleo-Inuit. Indeed, the analyses performed by Aqil and Lindqvist helped shed light on the continuing discussion of migration routes, mixtures among people from these different waves, as well as modern territorial patterns of inland and coastal people of the Pacific Northwest in the pre-colonial era.

Oral history links an ancient woman to people living in Southeast Alaska today

The oral origin narratives of the Tlingit people include the story of the most recent eruption of Mount Edgecumbe, which would place them exactly in the region by 4,500 years ago. Tatóok yík yées sháawat, their relative, therefore informs not just modern-day anthropological researchers but also the Tlingit people themselves.

Out of respect for the right of the Tlingit people to control and protect their cultural heritage and their genetic resources, data from the study of Tatóok yík yées sháawat will be available only after review of its use by the Wrangell Cooperative Association Tribal Council.

“It’s very exciting to contribute to our knowledge of the prehistory of Southeast Alaska,” said Aqil.

Long distance voyaging among the Pacific Islands

 

 

IMAGE: EMAE ISLAND IN CENTRAL VANUATU. view more 

CREDIT: © AYMERIC HERMANN

Polynesian peoples are renowned for their advanced sailing technology and for reaching the most remote islands on the planet centuries before the Europeans reached the Americas. Through swift eastward migrations that are now well covered by archaeological research, Polynesian societies settled virtually every island from Samoa and Tonga to Rapa Nui/Easter Island in the east, Hawai’i in the north, and Aotearoa/New Zealand in the south. But little is known about Polynesian migrations west of the 180th meridian.

In order to better understand the relationship between these Polynesian societies of the western Pacific, Melanesia and Micronesia – often referred to as “Polynesian Outliers” – a multidisciplinary team of researchers analysed the geochemical signature of stone artefacts collected in Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and the Caroline Islands between 1978 and 2019. An international research team, led by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, was able to identify the geological origin of these artefacts after comparing their geochemical and isotopic compositions with reference datasets of natural rocks and archaeological quarries in the region.

The connection to the Polynesian homeland

Adzes are versatile cutting tools comparable to axes. Among the eight adzes or adze fragments the researchers analysed, six were sourced to the same large fortified quarry complex of Tatagamatau on Tutuila Island (American Sāmoa), which is located more than 2,500 kilometres away in the Polynesian homeland. “Tatagamatau adzes were among the most disseminated items across West and East Polynesia, and the sourcing of Taumako and Emae adzes suggest bursts of long-distance mobility towards the Outliers similar to those that led to the settlement of East Polynesia”, says lead author Aymeric Hermann, researcher at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and associate researcher at the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Hermann points out that the transportation of such socially valued items – often passed down for generations among Polynesian chiefly families – suggests carefully planned voyages, rather than accidental landfalls.

The geochemical investigation of stone artefacts from the Polynesian Outliers also provides critical information on inter-island transfers between the Polynesians and their neighbours in the western Pacific, specifically between the Banks Islands and Central Vanuatu, and between the Bismarck and the Caroline Islands. The team highlights that such inter-island contacts are signals that Polynesian sailors might have played an important role in the reappraisal of long-distance mobility and in the distribution of specific material culture items and technologies such as shell adzes, back-strap loom, and obsidian points among the mosaic of Pacific Island societies in the western Pacific during the last millennium A.D. “A recent study describes an obsidian stemmed point as a chiefly heirloom found on Kapingamarangi Island with a geochemical signature matching an obsidian source on Lou Island in the Admiralties: this is an exciting find that echoes our identification of a basalt flake from mainland New Britain on that same atoll”, adds Hermann.

Long-distance mobility in the past

In the Pacific region, geochemical sourcing has been particularly successful at locating sources of stone artefacts and tracing the transport of specific items across distant islands and archipelagos. Such material evidence of long-distance inter-island voyaging shows that Pacific Island societies were never completely isolated from one another. These patterns of interaction are central to our understanding of the deeply intertwined history of cultural systems in the Pacific.

In this study, atomic emission spectroscopy and mass spectrometry were used to measure concentration of oxides, trace elements and ratios of radiogenic isotopes in order to identify geological provenances with a high level of accuracy. Thanks to the collaboration of experts in archaeology, geochemistry and data science, a cutting-edge approach to geochemical sourcing was developed, which involves the use of computer-assisted comparisons with open-access databases.

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JOURNAL

Science Advances

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.adf4487 

Chicken breeding in Japan dates back to fourth century BCE

Conclusive evidence of chicken breeding in the Yayoi period of Japan has been discovered from the Karako-Kagi site.

The chicken is one of the most common domesticated animals, with a current estimated population of over 33 billion individuals. They are reared for their meat and eggs, and may be kept as pets.

The chicken is believed to have been domesticated in Southeast Asia about 3500 years ago, following which they were carried to all corners of the world. The exact date of introduction of chicken breeding to Japan is under debate, as there are no historical records and archeological evidence is inconclusive.

Professor Masaki Eda at the Hokkaido University Museum led a team to uncover the earliest conclusive evidence of chicken breeding in Japan. The findings, which show chickens were bred in the Karako-Kagi site, a settlement from the Yayoi period [5th century BCE to around 2nd century BCE], were published in the journal Frontiers in Earth Sciences.

“Chickens and their wild relatives belong to a family of birds called Phasianids, which includes pheasants, turkeys and quail,” explains Eda. “Bones of juvenile phasianids recovered from archeological sites could not indisputably be identified as belonging to chickens or to similarly sized wild pheasants. Identification of juveniles is important, as it would indicate that breeding of chickens took place.”

The Karako-Kagi site, in what is now Tawaramoto Town, Nara Prefecture, is considered to be a settlement that played the role of a leader of the Kinki region during the Yayoi period. There are multiple archeological digs in the area; one such dig, at the 58th research point, yielded ten phasianid bones, four of which belonged to juvenile birds.

The team used a technique called Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) to analyze the collagen in two of the juvenile phasianid bones. Previous work by Eda had shown that domestic chicken and Japanese wild pheasants had different ZooMS fingerprints; ZooMS revealed that both the two bones belonged to chickens. The collagen from one of the bones was also carbon dated to 381–204 BCE, corresponding to the middle Yayoi period.

“Ten of the eleven previously-discovered bones of adult chickens from this period have all belonged to males; hence, it was thought chicken breeding could not have occurred on the Japanese archipelago,” Eda elaborated. “By identifying bones from juvenile chickens, we provide clear evidence that breeding did occur in that time period—which is also the earliest time chickens could have been introduced to Japan. In addition, Karako-Kagi is considered an important trade hub of the Yayoi period, so there is a possibility that this status is a factor in chicken breeding during the period.”

The archeological discoveries of chickens in Japan show that the human-chicken relationship was very different from that revealed by archeological studies in China and in Europe. Future research will focus on understanding these differences.

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JOURNAL

Frontiers in Earth Science

DOI

10.3389/feart.2023.1104535 

Sea-level rise in southwest Greenland as a contributor to Viking abandonment

Vikings occupied Greenland from roughly 985 to 1450, farming and building communities before abandoning their settlements and mysteriously vanishing. Why they disappeared has long been a puzzle, but a new paper from the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences (EPS) determines that one factor – rising sea level – likely played a major role.

 

“There are many theories as to what exactly happened” to drive the Vikings from their settlements in Greenland, said Marisa J. Borreggine, lead author of the “Sea-Level Rise in Southwest Greenland as a Contributor to Viking Abandonment,” which published this week [4/17] in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). “There's been a shift in the narrative away from the idea that the Vikings completely failed to adapt to the environment and toward arguments that they were faced with a myriad of challenges, ranging from social unrest, economic turmoil, political issues, and environmental change,” said Borreggine, a doctoral candidate in the Harvard Griffin GSAS in EPS.

 

“The changing landscape would’ve proven to be yet another factor that challenged the Viking way of life. Alongside these other challenges,” said Borreggine, who works in the Mitrovica Group led by Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science Jerry X. Mitrovica. This likely led “to a tipping point before they abandoned the settlement.”

 

The departure of these Viking settlers coincided with the beginning of the period known as the Little Ice Age, which had a particular impact on the North Atlantic. But while cooling and freezing might seem likely to lower sea levels, a variety of factors combined to have the opposite effect in Greenland.

 

With the waters of the North Atlantic, “contributing to that new ice volume, intuition might suggest that sea level should go down,” Borreggine noted. However, a closer look at previously published geomorphological and paleoclimate data and the researchers’ modeling of ice-sheet growth suggested that the opposite occurred in Greenland, focusing on the Vikings’ Eastern Settlement. “What we study in our group is glacial isostatic adjustment, a process that leads to changes in the gravitational field, the rotation axis, and crustal deformation as the ice grows or melts,” said Borreggine.

 

In a first for this kind of research “we were able to apply that analysis of non-uniform sea-level change and more accurate sea-level physics to this longstanding archeological question of, ‘Why exactly did Vikings abandon the Eastern Settlement?’”

 

What the researchers found was striking: Not only were sea levels drawn up by gravity, other factors – including the subsidence of Greenland’s land mass – made the settlement more prone to flooding.

 

Focusing on the period of Viking habitation from 1000 to 1450, “there’s already a background trend of sea-level rise upon Viking arrival in the Eastern Settlement,” they said. “It's been rising for a few thousand years.”  But there’s also a local effect: “crustal subsidence, or the sinking of land and the gravitational pull of water toward the growing ice sheet.”

 

“Not only do you have the ground being pushed down, you also have the sea surface going up,” Borreggine noted. “It’s a double whammy.”

 

During this period, researchers found that the settlers experienced “up to 3.3 meters of sea-level rise throughout their occupation.” For comparison’s sake, “that’s two to six times the rate of 20th-century sea-level rise. So it was pretty intense,” they said.

 

Archaeological research into the life of the Vikings who settled in Greenland together with this novel application of sea-level science fleshed out this compelling story. Noting the partially drowned ruins of a Viking warehouse, Borreggine pointed out that one analysis done by the group found that 75 percent of Viking sites are within a thousand meters of an area of flooding. “This flooding was pervasive.”

 

The impact of rising seas can also be seen in the changing diet of the Vikings, as they shifted from their own agricultural products to more marine-based foods, perhaps as their fields became saturated with salt or flooded. Such a shift, said Borreggine, reveals “they were attempting to adapt to the rising sea level.”

 

This paper “shows the advantages of interdisciplinary research, bringing ideas from one field to another and contributing powerful new insights,” said Mitrovica. Borreggine “has shown that in addition to the various challenges the Vikings faced as the climate descended into the ice age, they also faced pervasive flooding — an insight that only someone like Marisa, with deep expertise in the sea-level physics, could have had.”

 

If the lasting impact of sea-level rise sounds familiar in understanding current efforts to mitigate climate change, Borreggine noted the parallels – and one major difference. “The Vikings didn't really have a choice,” they said. “They couldn't stop the Little Ice Age. We can do work to mitigate climate change. The Vikings were locked into it.”

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Ancient DNA reveals the multiethnic structure of Mongolia’s first nomadic empire

MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY

 

IMAGE: THE XIONGNU BUILT A MULTIETHNIC EMPIRE ON THE MONGOLIAN STEPPE THAT WAS CONNECTED BY TRADE TO ROME, EGYPT, AND IMPERIAL CHINA. ARTIST RECONSTRUCTION OF LIFE AMONG THE XIONGNU IMPERIAL ELITE BY GALMANDAKH AMARSANAA. view more 

CREDIT: © DAIRYCULTURES PROJECT

Long obscured in the shadows of history, the world’s first nomadic empire - the Xiongnu - is at last coming into view thanks to painstaking archaeological excavations and new ancient DNA evidence. Arising on the Mongolian steppe 1,500 years before the Mongols, the Xiongnu empire grew to be one of Iron Age Asia’s most powerful political forces - ultimately stretching its reach and influence from Egypt to Rome to Imperial China. Economically grounded in animal husbandry and dairying, the Xiongnu were famously nomadic, building their empire on the backs of horses. Their proficiency at mounted warfare made them swift and formidable foes, and their legendary conflicts with Imperial China ultimately led to the construction of the Great Wall.

However, unlike their neighbors, the Xiongnu never developed a writing system, and consequently historical records about the Xiongnu have been almost entirely written and passed down by their rivals and enemies. Such accounts, largely recorded by Han Dynasty chroniclers, provide little useful information on the origins of the Xiongnu, their political rise, or their social organization. Although recent archaeogenetics studies have now traced the origins of the Xiongnu as a political entity to a sudden migration and mixing of disparate nomadic groups in northern Mongolia ca. 200 BCE, such findings have raised more questions than answers.

To better understand the inner workings of the seemingly enigmatic Xiongnu empire, an international team of researchers at the Max Planck Institutes for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) and Geoanthropology (MPI-GEO), Seoul National University, the University of Michigan, and Harvard University conducted an in-depth genetic investigation of two imperial elite Xiongnu cemeteries along the western frontier of the empire: an aristocratic elite cemetery at Takhiltyn Khotgor and a local elite cemetery at Shombuuzyn Belchir.

“We knew that the Xiongnu had a high degree of genetic diversity, but due to a lack of community-scale genomic data it remained unclear whether this diversity emerged from a heterogeneous patchwork of locally homogenous communities or whether local communities were themselves genetically diverse,” explains Juhyeon Lee, first author of the study and PhD student at Seoul National University. “We wanted to know how such genetic diversity was structured at different social and political scales, as well as in relation to power, wealth, and gender.”

The rise of a multiethnic empire

Researchers found that individuals within the two cemeteries exhibited extremely high genetic diversity, to a degree comparable with that found across the Xiongnu Empire as a whole. In fact, high genetic diversity and heterogeneity was present at all levels – across the empire, within individual communities, and even within individual families - confirming the characterization of the Xiongnu Empire as a multiethnic empire. However, much of this diversity was stratified by status. The lowest status individuals (interred as satellite burials of the elites, likely reflecting a servant status) exhibited the highest genetic diversity and heterogeneity, suggesting that these individuals originated from far-flung parts of the Xiongnu Empire or beyond. In contrast, local and aristocratic elites buried in wood-plank coffins within square tombs and stone ring graves exhibited lower overall genetic diversity and harbored higher proportions of eastern Eurasian ancestries, suggesting that elite status and power was concentrated among specific genetic subsets of the broader Xiongnu population. Nevertheless, even elite families appear to have used marriage to cement ties to newly incorporated groups, especially at Shombuuzyn Belchir.

“We now have a better idea of how the Xiongnu expanded their empire by incorporating disparate groups and leveraging marriage and kinship into empire building,” says senior author Dr. Choongwon Jeong, Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at Seoul National University.

Powerful women in Xiongnu society

A second major finding was that high status Xiongnu burials and elite grave goods were disproportionately associated with women, corroborating textual and archaeological evidence that Xiongnu women played especially prominent political roles in the expansion and integration of new territories along the empire’s frontier. At the aristocratic elite cemetery of Takhiltyn Khotgor, researchers found that the elite monumental tombs had been built for women, with each prominent woman flanked by a host of commoner males buried in simple graves. The women were interred in elaborate coffins with the golden sun and moon emblems of Xiongnu imperial power and one tomb even contained a team of six horses and a partial chariot. At the nearby local elite cemetery of Shombuuzyn Belchir, women likewise occupied the wealthiest and most elaborate graves, with grave goods consisting of wooden coffins, golden emblems and gilded objects, glass and faience beads, Chinese mirrors, a bronze cauldron, silk clothing, wooden carts, and more than a dozen livestock, as well as three objects conventionally associated with male horse-mounted warriors: a Chinese lacquer cup, a gilded iron belt clasp, and horse tack. Such objects and their symbolism convey the great political power of the women.

“Women held great power as agents of the Xiongnu imperial state along the frontier, often holding exclusive noble ranks, maintaining Xiongnu traditions, and engaging in both steppe power politics and the so-called Silk Road networks of exchange,” says Dr. Bryan Miller, project archaeologist and Assistant Professor of Central Asian Art & Archaeology at the University of Michigan.

Children in Xiongnu society

Genetic analysis also provided rare insights into the social roles of children in Xiongnu society. “Children received differential mortuary treatment depending upon age and sex, giving clues to the ages at which gender and status were ascribed in Xiongnu society,” says senior author Dr. Christina Warinner, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University and Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Researchers found, for example, that although adolescent Xiongnu boys as young as 11-12 years old were buried with a bow and arrows, in a manner resembling that of adult males, younger boys were not. This suggests that the gendered social roles of hunter and warrior were not ascribed to boys until late childhood or early adolescence.

The legacy of the Xiongnu today

Although the Xiongnu empire ultimately disintegrated in the late 1st century CE, the findings of the study point to the enduring social and cultural legacy of the Xiongnu. “Our results confirm the long-standing nomadic tradition of elite princesses playing critical roles in the political and economic life of the empires, especially in periphery regions - a tradition that began with the Xiongnu and continued more than a thousand years later under the Mongol Empire,” says Dr. Jamsranjav Bayarsaikhan, project archaeologist and Mongolian Archaeology Project: Surveying the Steppes (MAPSS) project coordinator at the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology. “While history has at times dismissed nomadic empires as fragile and short, their strong traditions have never been broken.”

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JOURNAL

Science Advances

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.adf3904 

Dairy foods helped ancient Tibetans thrive in one of Earth’s most inhospitable environments

Ancient protein evidence shows milk consumption was a powerful cultural adaptation that stimulated human expansion onto the highland Tibetan Plateau

 

IMAGE: DENTAL CALCULUS OF THE HIGHEST ALTITUDE INDIVIDUAL INVESTIGATED IN THE STUDY (CAL. 601-758 CE) view more 

CREDIT: LI TANG

The Tibetan Plateau, known as the “third pole”, or “roof of the world”, is one of the most inhospitable environments on Earth. While positive natural selection at several genomic loci enabled early Tibetans to better adapt to high elevations, obtaining sufficient food from the resource-poor highlands would have remained a challenge. 

Now, a new study in the journal Science Advances reveals that dairy was a key component of early human diets on the Tibetan Plateau. The study reports ancient proteins from the dental calculus of 40 human individuals from 15 sites across the interior plateau. 

“We tried to include all the excavated individuals with sufficient calculus preservation from the study region,” states Li Tang, lead author of the study. “Our protein evidence shows that dairying was introduced onto the hinterland plateau by at least 3500 years ago,” states Prof. Hongliang Lu, corresponding author of this study.

Ancient protein evidence indicates that dairy products were consumed by diverse populations, including females and males, adults and children, as well as individuals from both elite and non-elite burial contexts. Additionally, prehistoric Tibetan highlanders made use of the dairy products of goats, sheep, and possibly cattle and yak. Early pastoralists in western Tibet seem to have had a preference for goat milk.

“The adoption of dairy pastoralism helped to revolutionize people’s ability to occupy much of the plateau, particularly the vast areas too extreme for crop cultivation,” says Prof. Nicole Boivin, senior author of the study. 

Tracing dairying in the deep past has long been a challenge for researchers. Traditionally, archaeologists analyzed the remains of animals and the interiors of food containers for evidence of dairying, however the ability of these sources to provide direct evidence of milk consumption is often limited. 

“Palaeoproteomics is a new and powerful tool that allowed us to investigate Tibetan diets in unprecedented detail,” says coauthor Dr. Shevan Wilkin. “The analysis of proteins in ancient human dental calculus not only offers direct evidence of dietary intake, but also allows us to identify which species the milk came from.” 

“We were excited to observe an incredibly clear pattern,” says Li Tang. “All our milk peptides came from ancient individuals in the western and northern steppes, where growing crops is extremely difficult. However, we did not detect any milk proteins from the southern-central and south-eastern valleys, where more farmable land is available.” 

Surprisingly, all the individuals with evidence for milk consumption were recovered from sites higher than 3700 meters above sea level (masl); almost half were above 4000 masl, with the highest at the extreme altitude of 4654 masl. 

“It is clear that dairying was crucial in supporting early pastoralist occupation of the highlands,” notes Prof. Shargan Wangdue. Li Tang concludes: “Ruminant animals could convert the energy locked in alpine pastures into nutritional milk and meat, and this fueled the expansion of human populations into some of the world’s most extreme environments.”

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JOURNAL

Science Advances

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.adf0345 

One of Vasa’s crewmen was a woman

 

 

IMAGE: MARIE ALLEN, PROFESSOR AT DEPARTMENT OF IMMUNOLOGY, GENETICS AND PATHOLOGY, UPPSALA UNIVERSITY, SWEDEN view more 

CREDIT: MIKAEL WALLERSTEDT

When the human remains found on board the warship Vasa were investigated, it was determined that the skeleton designated G was a man. New research now shows that the skeleton is actually from a woman.

About thirty people died when Vasa sank on its maiden voyage in 1628. We cannot know who most of them were, only one person is named in the written sources. When the ship was raised in 1961 it was the scene of a comprehensive archaeological excavation, in which numerous human bones were found on board and examined.

“Through osteological analysis it has been possible to discover a great deal about these people, such as their age, height and medical history. Osteologists recently suspected that G could be female, on the basis of the pelvis. DNA analysis can reveal even more”, says Dr Fred Hocker, director of research at the Vasa Museum, in Stockholm, Sweden.

Since 2004 the Vasa Museum has collaborated with the Department of Immunology, Genetics and Pathology at Uppsala University in Sweden to investigate all of the remains from Vasa and find out as much as possible about each individual. Initially the project focused on confirming if certain bones belonged to a specific person. Marie Allen, professor of forensic genetics, has led the work.

“For us, it is both interesting and challenging to study the skeletons from Vasa. It is very difficult to extract DNA from bone which has been on the bottom of the sea for 333 years, but not impossible”, says Marie Allen. She continues:

“Already some years ago we had indications that skeleton G was not a man but a woman. Simply put, we found no Y-chromosomes in G’s genetic material. But we could not be certain and wanted to confirm the result”.

The result has now been confirmed thanks to an interlaboratory study with Dr Kimberly Andreaggi of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System’sArmed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory (AFMES-AFDIL) in Delaware, USA. The AFMES-AFDIL is the American Department of Defense’s laboratory, specializing in human remains DNA testing from deceased military personnel. They have established a new testing method for the analysis of many different genetic variants.

“We took new samples from bones for which we had specific questions. AFMES-AFDIL has now analysed the samples, and we have been able to confirm that G was a woman, thanks to the new test”, says Marie Allen.

For Marie Allen and Kimberly Andreaggi, the analysis of the Vasa skeletons is a way to develop their forensic methods, which can then be used to analyse DNA in criminal investigations or to identify fallen soldiers.

For the Vasa Museum the results of the DNA analysis are an important puzzle piece in the museum’s research into the people on the ship. Dr. Anna Maria Forssberg, historian and researcher at the museum, explains:

“We want to come as close to these people as we can. We have known that there were women on board Vasa when it sank, and now we have received confirmation that they are among the remains. I am currently researching the wives of seamen, so for me this is especially exciting, since they are often forgotten even though they played an important role for the navy“.

More results are expected shortly from the new samples. Marie Allen and Kimberly Andreaggi will be able to say something about how individuals looked, what colour their hair and eyes had, and possibly where their families came from.

“Today we can extract much more information from historic DNA than we could earlier and methods are being continuously refined. We can say if a person was predisposed to certain illnesses, or even very small details, such as if they had freckles and wet or dry ear wax”, says Marie Allen.

The Vasa Museum’s researchers are currently studying the skeletons from several perspectives, including the personal possessions found with them. Eventually the results will be presented in an exhibition at the museum and a book about the people who died on board Vasa.

Female-led migration into Bronze Age Orkney

 

IMAGE: THE PROJECT – A COLLABORATION BETWEEN EASE ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE UNIVERSITY OF HUDDERSFIELD – FOCUSED ON HUMAN REMAINS EXCAVATED AT THE LINKS OF NOLTLAND, A BRONZE AGE CEMETERY ON THE ISLAND OF WESTRAY. THIS WORK REVEALED THE FIRST CONCRETE EVIDENCE OF A MAJOR INFLUX OF NON-LOCAL PEOPLE INTO ORKNEY DURING THE BRONZE AGE – AND, SIGNIFICANTLY, IT APPEARS THAT THIS MIGRATION WAS DOMINATED BY WOMEN. view more 

CREDIT: CURRENT ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE UNIVERSITY OF HUDDERSFIELD

A revolutionary investigation that shed vivid light on pioneering female migrants who made their way to Orkney during the Bronze Age has won Research Project of the Year at the prestigious Current Archaeology Awards for 2023.

The project – a collaboration between EASE Archaeology and the University of Huddersfield – focused on human remains excavated at the Links of Noltland, a Bronze Age cemetery on the island of Westray. This work revealed the first concrete evidence of a major influx of non-local people into Orkney during the Bronze Age – and, significantly, it appears that this migration was dominated by women.

It had previously been thought that Orkney (which is renowned for its spectacular Neolithic monuments) had become more insular and less influential as the archipelago entered the Bronze Age. However, ancient DNA analysis of human skeletons from the Links of Noltland revealed that there had been a substantial replacement of Westray’s population between the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age. More than that, while similar waves of Bronze Age migration seen across Europe are thought to have been led by men, in Orkney the incomers were predominantly women.