New footprints offer evidence of co-existing hominid species 1.5 million years ago

 

Newly discovered footprints show that at least two hominid species were walking through the muddy submerged edge of a lake in Kenya’s Turkana Basin at the same time, about 1.5 million years ago. The find from the famous hominid fossil site of Koobi Fora described by Kevin Hatala and colleagues provides physical evidence for the co-existence of multiple hominid lineages in the region—something that has only been inferred previously from overlapping dates for scattered fossils. Based on information on gait and stance gleaned from the footprints, Hatala et al. think that the two species were Homo erectus and Paranthropus boisei. This is the first evidence of two different patterns of bipedalism among Pleistocene hominids appearing on the same footprint surface. After examining the new Koobi Fora footprints, the researchers analyzed other similar-age hominid footprints and conclude there is a distinct pattern of two different types of bipedalism across the East Turkana region. The overall analysis indicates that the different species were contemporaneously using these lake habitats, with varying possibilities of competition or niche partitioning that could have impacted trends in human evolution. William Harcourt-Smith discusses the implications of the footprints in a related Perspective.

A complex structure created by Neanderthals discovered in Gibraltar

 

All cultures, however primitive, have used glues, resins and pitches obtained from various plants for their mechanical or medicinal properties. Neanderthals were no exception.

This species commonly used birch pitch as an adhesive to bind lithic pieces and even as a chewing agent, possibly medicinal.

However, until now, it was not known how they could obtain this pitch.

Theoretical work distinguished two methods of obtaining pitch: a simple, not very productive one, by open-air combustion of birch bark, and a more complex one requiring anoxic heating of birch chips.

That is, using buried pieces of wood heated with a fire so that they exuded the resin while they could not burn because they were insulated from oxygen.

Whether they used one method or the other has major implications for rating their cognitive ability. The more complex method requires a significant degree of organisation and practice.

Caves that are a reflection of the past

A scientific study, involving the University of Seville, has for the first time described a structure compatible with theoretical studies of anoxic heating.

The structure looks like a simple pit, and this simplicity may be why this structure has not been identified.

Only through a multitude of analyses and the collaboration of a multidisciplinary team has it been possible to demonstrate its use as an anoxic heating chamber.

The discovery was made in Vanguard Cave (Gibraltar, UK), part of the ‘Gorham’s Caves Complex,’ which has been recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2016.

This complex has once again proved its ability to preserve authentic snapshots of past human activities due to the rapid advance of a dune that has sealed its remains.

To reach the conclusion that this structure could only have been made by Neanderthals some 60,000 years ago, 31 researchers from more than 5 countries, specialists in 15 different disciplines, worked together.

Its branches of knowledge include palaeobonatics, archaeology, ichnology, geochemistry and mineralogy.

“They were not the brutes of the popular imagination”

Fernando Muñiz, a lecturer in the Department of Crystallography, Mineralogy and Agricultural Chemistry at the University of Seville, explains that “our extinct cousins were not the brutalised humans of popular imagination.”

This human species has been shown to have cognitive abilities, as reflected in research showing mastery of industrial processes for making resin as an adhesive to attach stone points to spear handles.

On the other hand, excavation manager Clive Finlayson explains that:

“Neanderthals had to go through a series of thought processes, choosing which plants to select and figuring out how to extract resin without burning them.”

To demonstrate that the structure created by Neanderthals is viable, methodologies have been developed and an experimental archaeology exercise has even been completed.

The geochemical and fossil pollen evidence suggests that the resin was obtained from prickly rockrose (cistus ladanifer) rather than birch, a rarer tree in Mediterranean latitudes at the time.

It is known that until the 20th century oil of labdanum was obtained from rockroses to be used as perfume, cough syrup and as an antiseptic in a method very similar to the one described in this study.

This project, led by the Museum of Gibraltar, the University of Murcia and the Andalusian Institute of Earth Sciences (CSIC), with the participation of the University of Seville, sets a precedent in understanding of the technological and organisational capacity of Neanderthals, while also opening up new opportunities to identify and analyse similar structures at other sites.

Signs of primitive art

In 2012, Finlayson’s team found a strange hashtag-like mark on a piece of limestone, which has interpreted by some experts as a sign of primitive art.

They collected feathers, but only black ones, from a wide variety of birds, possibly for aesthetic or ceremonial purposes.

“They used medicinal plants, buried their dead, made jewellery and specialist tools, as well as ochre and other pigments, perhaps to paint their faces or bodies.

Their tracheal anatomy suggests that they could speak and probably had high-pitched, hoarse voices,” Muñiz says.

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Journal

Quaternary Science Reviews

DOI

10.1016/j.quascirev.2024.109025 

Viking colonizers of Iceland and nearby Faroe Islands had very different origins

Band of Viking men from all over Scandinavia first settled Faroe Islands show geneticists

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Frontiers

 

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The landscape on the Faroe Islands today

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Credit: Eyðfinn Magnussen

The ancient Vikings certainly had the travel bug. Between the late eighth century and approximately 1050 CE, they roamed the Atlantic in their longships all the way to Newfoundland, Labrador, and Greenland, as well as exploring the Mediterranean and continental Eurasia.

Among the places the Vikings are known to have settled were the Faroe Islands, an archipelago of 18 islands in the North Atlantic. They probably weren’t the first to do so: archaeologists have found evidence that these islands had been inhabited since approximately 300 CE, possibly by Celtic monks or others from the British Isles. But according to the Færeyinga Saga, written around 1200, a Viking chief called Grímur Kamban settled in the Faroe Islands between approximately 872 and 930 CE.

But where in Scandinavia did Grímur and his followers come from?

“Here we provide strong evidence that the Faroe Islands were colonized by a diverse group of male settlers from multiple Scandinavian populations,” said Dr Christopher Tillquist, an associate professor at the University of Louisville in Kentucky and the lead author of a new study in Frontiers in Genetics.

Tillquist’s co-authors were Dr Allison Mann from the University of Wyoming and Dr Eyðfinn Magnussen from the University of the Faroe Islands.

The scientists determined the genotype at 12 ‘short tandem repeat’ (STR) loci on the Y-chromosome of 139 men from the Faroese islands of Borðoy, Streymoy, and Suðuroy. They assigned each man to the most likely haplogroup, each of which has different known distribution across today’s Europe.

The researchers compared the distribution of genotypes to those found in 412 men from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, and Ireland. This allowed them to reconstruct the source population of the Viking population founders.

Advanced analyses showed that the range of Faroese samples resembled the range of genotypes from broader Scandinavian, whereas the Icelandic genotypes where distinct.

The authors also developed a powerful innovative genetic method, called ‘Mutational Distance from Modal Haplotype’ to analyze variation in SNPs (single-nucleotide polymorphisms) within the STRs. This allowed them to reveal a ‘founder effect’ – traces of random loss of diversity during historic colonization by a small number of people – persisting in the genetic make-up of today’s Faroese and Icelandic male populations.

“Scientists have long assumed that the Faroe Islands and Iceland were both settled by similar Norse people. Yet our novel analysis has shown that these islands were founded by men from different gene pools within Scandinavia,” said Tillquist.

“One group, diverse in their Scandinavian origins, established themselves in the Faroe Islands, while another and more genetically divergent band of Vikings colonized Iceland. They have separate genetic signatures that persist to this day.”

“There doesn’t seem to have been any interbreeding afterwards between these two populations, despite their geographic proximity. Our results demonstrate that Viking expansion into the North Atlantic was more complex than previously thought.”

“Each longship that set sail for these distant islands carried not just Vikings, but distinct genetic legacies. We can now trace these separate journeys of conquest and settlement, revealing a more nuanced story of Viking exploration than told by the history books.”

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Journal

Frontiers in Genetics

DOI

10.3389/fgene.2024.1462736 

Prehistoric hunter-gatherers heard the elks painted on rocks talking

 

Peer-Reviewed Publication

University of Helsinki

 

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Figure 1. Painted rock of Keltavuori in Southeastern Finland.

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Credit: Photo by Julia Shpinitskaya

Finnish prehistoric rock paintings (5000–1500 BCE) on the cliffs rising directly from the lakes are acoustically special environments.

When the lake levels have remained unchanged, these extremely smooth rock surfaces generate distinct single-repeat echoes, which accurately copy the given sounds, forming auditory mirror images that appear to emanate from behind the rock walls. The adjacent, more jagged lakeshore cliffs generate weaker and less distinct echoes, while the more or less contemporary dwelling sites on the sandy shores of the same water bodies have no audible echoes at all.

Recording from the ice or a raft

The acoustic measurement data were collected with a custom-designed recording raft or during the winter from the lake ice. The data shows that prehistoric hunter-gatherers approaching the rock painting sites by water entered a special sensory environment where reality sounded doubled.

”According to the psychoacoustic criterion used, the echoes are so strong that there is no reason to assume that the people in the past did not hear them”, archaeologist Riitta Rainio estimates.

”So, people heard the painted elks talking and the human figures responding with a voice that resembled their own.”

A digital reconstruction helps perceive the acoustics

In addition to the acoustic analysis, the researchers used impulse responses to make the acoustic characteristics of the rock painting sites perceptible to the public.

Perttu Kesäniemi and Mikko Ojanen recorded the artists’ vocal and instrumental improvisations at the University of Helsinki Music Research Laboratory, and digitally added the acoustics of selected sites to them. Listen to the sound sample in Youtube.

Based on on-site and aerial LiDAR scans, Paavo Rinkkala and Jami Pekkanen created a digital 3D reconstruction of the Siliävuori site, which complements the audio demonstrations with a visual scenery and animated scenes from about 5000 years ago. Watch the video in Youtube.

Sound reflections participated in the activities

Ethnomusicologist Julia Shpinitskaya is excited about the results of the multi-year project:

”Although the sounds produced by prehistoric people are beyond our reach, this study brings out one key feature of the sensory experiences associated with rock paintings by the water – that sound reflections strongly participated in the activities, making the cliffs energetic and active agents.”

The possibility to communicate reciprocally with the physical environment or more-than-human reality may have been an essential reason why these cliffs were visited and painted, and why offerings were left to them. For the history of sound and music, the study provides an example of how significant a role sound reflections could have in past societies.

The work was part of the Academy of Finland funded project Acoustics and auditory culture at hunter-gatherer rock art sites in Northern Europe, Siberia and North America (2018–2023).

 

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Journal

Sound Studies

DOI

10.1080/20551940.2024.2419293 

Focaccia: a Neolithic culinary tradition dating back 9,000 years ago

 

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona

 

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‘Focaccia’ with animal fat experimentally baked in a replica husking tray inside a domed oven. Author: Sergio Taranto

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Credit: Author: Sergio Taranto

A study led by researchers from the UAB and the University La Sapienza in Rome indicates that during the Late Neolithic, between 7000 and 5000 BCE, the fully agricultural communities in the Fertile Crescent region of the Near East, developed a complex culinary tradition that included the baking of large loaves of bread and “focaccias” with different flavours on special trays known to archaeologists as husking trays.

The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports (Nature Portfolio) and also involved staff from the Milà i Fontanals Institution (IMF-CSIC) and the University of Lyon (France).

The husking trays were containers with a large oval base and low walls, made of coarse clay. They differed from common trays due to their internal surface, marked with rough impressions or incisions arranged repetitively and regularly. Previous experiments using replicas of these trays and cooking structures similar to those found at archaeological sites from the studied period had already allowed researchers to hypothesize their function. These investigations suggested that large loaves made with water and flour might have been baked on these trays, placed in domed ovens for about 2 hours at an initial temperature of 420°C. The grooves on the internal surface would have facilitated the removal of the bread once baked. Moreover, the large size of the loaves, approximately 3 kg, suggested they were likely intended for communal consumption.

The research team analyzed ceramic fragments of husking trays from between 6400 and 5900 BCE to identify their use as specialized containers for baking cereal-based doughs and whether these doughs could have been seasoned with products such as animal fat or vegetable oil. The analyzed remains come from the archaeological sites of Mezraa Teleilat, Akarçay Tepe, and Tell Sabi Abyad, located in the area between Syria and Turkey. The analyses were carried out at the Universities of Istanbul and the Koç (Turkey).

The study, based on various types of analyses from an integrated perspective, provides clear evidence regarding both the uses of these artifacts and the nature of the foods processed in them. In particular, the analysis of phytoliths (silica residues from plants) suggests that cereals such as wheat (Triticum sp.) or barley (Hordeum sp.), reduced to flour, were processed in these trays. Furthermore, the analysis of organic residues indicates that some of the trays were used to cook foods containing animal-derived ingredients, such as animal fat, and in one case, plant-based seasonings. The degradation state of the residues suggests that, in at least two cases, the trays reached temperatures compatible with those experimentally verified for baking dough in domed ovens. Finally, the use-alterations analysis of the ceramic surface allowed the identification of use-wear specifically associated with bread residues and others linked to seasoned focaccia residues.

“Our study offers a vivid picture of communities using the cereals they cultivated to prepare breads and ‘focaccias’ enriched with various ingredients and consumed in groups,” explains Sergio Taranto, lead author of the study, part of a doctoral thesis carried out at the UAB and La Sapienza. “The use of the husking trays we identified leads us to consider that this Late Neolithic culinary tradition developed over approximately six centuries and was practiced in a wide area of the Near East”, the researcher concludes.

Researchers from the UAB's Prehistoric Archaeology of the Near East Research Group (SAPPO), Adrià Breu, Anna Bach, and Miquel Molist, are also authors of the study.

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Journal

Scientific Reports

DOI

10.1038/s41598-024-78019-9

Herodotus' theory on Armenian origins debunked by first whole-genome study

Armenians, a population in Western Asia historically inhabiting the Armenian highlands, were long believed to be descendants of Phrygian settlers from the Balkans. This theory originated largely from the accounts of the Greek historian Herodotus, who observed that Armenians were armed in Phrygian fashion when serving in the Persian army. Linguists further supported this theory, suggesting that the Armenian language shares ties with the Thraco-Phrygian subgroup of Indo-European languages.

But the first whole-genome study is challenging this long-held belief, revealing no significant genetic link between Armenians and the populations in the Balkan region. The study compares newly generated modern Armenian genomes and published genetic data of ancient individuals from the Armenian highlands with both modern and ancient genomes from the Balkans. 

“For centuries, historical beliefs have shaped our understanding of the past, often leading us to accept theories as truth,” said Dr Anahit Hovhannisyan, Marie Curie Fellow in Trinity College Dublin’s School of Genetics and Microbiology, and first author of the just-published study in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

“However, with the availability of whole genome sequencing and the advancement of ancient DNA research, we can now question and reframe these long-held ideas, revealing a much more nuanced and scientifically grounded view of the history of human populations.”

The researchers behind the new study also disproved another belief – claims of an Assyrian ancestry for the Sasun, an Armenian population that inhabited the southern part of the Armenian highlands (modern-day southeastern Turkey). This connection had been referenced in many historical sources, including the Bible, in cuneiform texts, and local traditional stories. Instead, they found that the Sasun had experienced a significant contraction in size in the recent past, which sets them apart from other populations.

“While checking for genetic continuity in the Armenian highlands, we found a genetic input into the region from a source linked to Neolithic Levantine farmers at some point after the Early Bronze Age. In terms of timing and genetic ancestry, this aligns with previous findings in adjacent regions, thus allowing us to conclude that there was a large-scale post-Early Bronze Age movement across the Middle East. The questions of exactly where and when it came from, as well as what triggered such a widespread migration wave, remain unanswered and yet to be studied,” said Andrea Manica, Professor at the University of Cambridge, who is the last and co-senior author in the publication.

Researchers also shed light on the population structure and genetic variation of different Armenian groups, finding that populations from the eastern, western, and central parts of the Armenian highlands show a relatively high level of similarity. 

“This is the first study attempting to draw the genetic atlas of the Armenian highlands,” said Levon Yepiskoposyan, Professor at the Institute of Molecular Biology, NAS RA, and co-senior author of the publication.

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Journal

American Journal of Human Genetics

Peaches spread across North America through Indigenous networks

 

Peer-Reviewed Publication

 Spanish explorers may have brought the first peach pits to North America, but Indigenous communities helped the ubiquitous summer fruit really take root, according to a study led by a researcher at Penn State.

The study, published in Nature Communications, shows that Indigenous political and social networks and land use practices played key roles in the peach’s adoption and dispersal across the continent, according to the researchers.

“Peaches need a lot of care by people to be productive. They need to be planted in appropriate places with a lot of sunlight and the right soil drainage, and they need to be pruned,” said Jacob Holland-Lulewicz, first author and assistant professor of anthropology at Penn State. “For a long time, the narrative was that the Spanish introduced peaches and then peaches spread very quickly. The reality is way more complicated. How quickly peaches spread is very much a product of Indigenous networks and land management.”

The researchers analyzed historical documents that mentioned peaches, such as the travel writings of French missionary explorer Jacques Marquette and English merchant Jonathan Dickinson. They also employed radiocarbon dating — a method that measures the decay of radioactive carbon-14 atoms in organic material — to determine the approximate ages of peach pits and other organic samples, like carbonized tree wood, from 28 archaeological sites and two regional locales where archaeologists previously recovered preserved peach pits. The sites were located in the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee and Arkansas.

The team found that peaches were likely widespread across Indigenous settlements in the interior southeast as early as the year 1620, roughly 100 years after the earliest Spanish expeditions in Florida and in Georgia’s Oconee Valley. The timing suggests that early Spanish settlements becoming important trade nodes within existing Indigenous networks created the necessary conditions for the spread of peaches, according to Holland-Lulewicz.

“Many narratives talk about the Spanish, or Europeans generally, arriving and then you see instantaneous changes to Indigenous histories and the spread of materials, but those initial interactions didn’t cause major changes,” he said. “It’s not until Spanish networks and Indigenous networks become entangled 100 years later that we have the necessary conditions for the spread of peaches.”

The team also identified what are possibly the earliest peaches in North America at a Muskogean farmstead in the Oconee Valley. In the 1990s, the late Penn State archaeologist James Hatch recovered peach pits from the bottom of post holes that once housed support structures for the farmstead’s house. The researchers radiocarbon dated charcoal, nuts and corn kernels from these post holes and found that occupation at the site began between 1520 and 1550 and ended between 1530 and 1570. This timing suggests that peaches had spread to the interior southeast possibly decades before the founding of St. Augustine in 1565, according to the researchers.

“Understanding the path that the introduction of species, such as peach trees, took through colonization and the role that Indigenous people and their long-term relationship with the environment played in shaping these histories demonstrates the importance of these events, people and processes to what becomes a broader American history,” said co-author Victor Thompson, Distinguished Research Professor of archaeology at the University of Georgia (UGA) and executive director of the Georgia Museum of Natural History. “Further, the fact that all of this work took place on museum specimens underscores the importance of maintaining these collections for future study.”

Indigenous peoples not only adopted the peach but selectively bred new varieties outnumbering the varieties found in Europe even at this early time, Holland-Lulewicz said.

“When Europeans started to move through and into the interior of the continent in the mid- to late 1600s, they noted that there were way more varieties of peaches being grown by Indigenous peoples than there were in Europe,” he said, explaining that the fruit had become an important aspect of Indigenous culture. “At this time, Europeans are noting really dense peach orchards around Indigenous towns, but some of these towns and people had never previously interacted with or even heard of Europeans. In fact, there are records of Indigenous peoples describing peaches as an Indigenous fruit.”

The fruit had become so integral to Indigenous history and culture that when the ancestors of the modern-day Muscogee (Creek) Nation were forcibly removed from Georgia and Alabama during the 1800s, they took peaches with them.

“There are Muscogee (Creek) peoples today who grow peaches as heritage crops,” Holland-Lulewicz said. “The act of growing and caring for those peaches is an important cultural practice. These were the first peaches introduced in the 1500s and 1600s that were then carried halfway across the continent and continue to be grown today.”

Earliest fish-trapping facility in Central America discovered in Maya lowlands

 

Wetland investigations uncover network of pre-Columbian linear channels and ponds in Belize

Peer-Reviewed Publication

University of New Hampshire

 

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Researchers doing reconnaissance in the Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary CTWS where they discovered evidence of a large-scale pre-Columbian fish-trapping facility.

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Credit: Courtesy Belize River East Archaeology (BREA) Project

DURHAM, N.H.—(November 22, 2024)—An archaeologist from the University of New Hampshire and her team have collected data which indicates the presence of a large-scale pre-Columbian fish-trapping facility. Discovered in the Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary (CTWS), the largest inland wetland in Belize, the team dated the construction of these fisheries to the Late Archaic period (cal. 2000-1900 BCE), pre-dating Amazonian examples by a thousand years or more.

“The network of canals was designed to channel annual flood waters into source ponds for fish trapping and would have yielded enough fish to feed as many as 15,000 people year-round, conservatively,” said Eleanor Harrison-Buck, professor of anthropology and director of the Belize River East Archaeology (BREA) project. “The dates indicate that the fisheries were initially constructed by Late Archaic hunter-gatherer-fishers and continued to be used by their Formative Maya descendants (approximately 2000 BCE to 200 CE). For Mesoamerica in general, we tend to regard agricultural production as the engine of civilization, but this study tells us that it wasn’t just agriculture—it was also potential mass harvesting of aquatic species.”

Published in the journal Science Advances, the research used 26 radiocarbon dates from test excavation sites in the CTWS, which indicate that such landscape-scale wetland enhancements may have been an adaptive response to long-term climate disturbance recorded in Mesoamerica between 2200 and 1900 BCE.

“The early dates for the canals surprised us initially because we all assumed these massive constructions were built by the ancient Maya living in the nearby city centers,” said Harrison-Buck. “However, after running numerous radiocarbon dates, it became clear they were built much earlier.”

Sediment samples were collected along the walls of the excavation units and sequenced for specific elements, such as nitrogen and carbon, to look for environmental changes over time. The sediment showed a strong tropical forest dominance during that period and no evidence of crop cultivation, specifically maize. Along with a lack of any pollen from domesticated crops, there were not any signs of ditched and drained agricultural fields in the immediate area dating to that time. The multiproxy data gathered suggests the distinctive long linear zigzag channels served primarily as large-scale fish-trapping facilities.

“It seems likely that the canals allowed for annual fish harvests and social gatherings, which would have encouraged people to return to this area year after year and congregate for longer periods of time,” said Marieka Brouwer Burg, professor of anthropology at the University of Vermont and BREA co-director. “Such intensive investments in the landscape may have led ultimately to the development of the complex society characteristic of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization, which subsequently occurred in this area by around 1200 BCE.”

“Wetlands have always been a critical ecosystem for humans across the globe,” said Samantha Krause, professor of geography and environmental studies at Texas State University. “Knowing how to manage wetland resources responsibly is essential for the continued resilience of these ecosystems both in the past and today. The Archaic hunter-gatherer-fishers knew how to protect their resources and use them in a way that could sustain these habitats, not exhaust them, which explains their long-lasting occupation in this area.”

With the support of the local community, the team plans to return to Crooked Tree to investigate a larger sample of these landscape-scale modifications that they have identified across a broad area of northern Belize, hoping to more fully understand the complexity of human-wetland interactions in the past.

Other co-authors include Mark Willis, department of archaeology, Flinders University, Adelaide, South Australia; Angelina Perrotti, Palynology & Environmental Archaeology Research Lab; Monona, Wisconsin; and Katie Bailey, department of anthropology, University of Vermont.

This research was funded by a grant from the Alphawood Foundation Chicago. Additional support was provided by a collaborative research grant from the National Science Foundation. The Belize Institute of Archaeology provided an archaeological permit, granting permission to excavate in the Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary. The Crooked Tree Village Council welcomed the research team and permitted them to map and excavate in the wetlands around their community.

Caption: Researchers doing reconnaissance in the Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary CTWS where they discovered evidence of a large-scale pre-Columbian fish-trapping facility.

Credit:  Courtesy Belize River East Archaeology (BREA) Project

Social distancing in ancient cities

 

Peer-Reviewed Publication

University of Tennessee at Knoxville

 

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The site of the ancient settlement of the Trypillia culture in Moldova,

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Credit: University of Tennessee

The term “social distancing” spread out across the public vocabulary in recent years as people around the world changed habits to combat the Covid pandemic. New research led by UT Professor Alex Bentley, however, reveals the practice of organized elbow room could date back approximately 6,000 years.

Bentley, from the Department of Anthropology, published research on “Modeling cultural responses to disease spread in Neolithic Trypillia mega-settlements” in the Journal of The Royal Society Interface. His coauthors include Simon Carrignon, a former UT postdoctoral researcher who was a research associate at the Cambridge University’s McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research while working on this project.

“New ancient DNA studies have shown that diseases such as salmonella, tuberculosis, and plague emerged in Europe and Central Asia thousands of years ago during the Neolithic Era, which is the time of the first farming villages,” said Bentley. “This led us to ask a new question, which is whether Neolithic villagers practiced social distancing to help avoid the spread of these diseases.”

Urban Planning Over the Centuries

As computational social scientists, Bentley and Carrignon have published on both ancient adaptive behaviors and the spread of disease in the modern world. This project brought these interests together. They found that the “mega-settlements” of the ancient Trypillia culture in the Black Sea region, circa 4,000 BC, were a perfect place to test their theory that boundaries of personal space have long been integral parts of public-health planning.

They focused on a settlement called Nebelivka, in what is now Ukraine, where thousands of wooden homes were regularly spaced in concentric patterns and clustered in neighborhoods.

“This clustered layout is known by epidemiologists to be a good configuration to contain disease outbreaks,” said Bentley. “This suggests and helps explain the curious layout of the world’s first urban areas—it would have protected residents from emerging diseases of the time. We set out to test how effective it would be through computer modeling.”

Carrignon and Bentley adapted models developed in a previous National Science Foundation-funded project at UT. Bentley was co-investigator with research lead Professor Nina Fefferman in this work modeling the effects of social distancing behaviors on the spread of Covid-like pandemics to study what effects these practices—such as reducing interaction between neighborhoods—might have had on prehistoric settlements.

“These new tools can help us understand what the archaeological record is telling us about prehistoric behaviors when new diseases evolved,” said Bentley. “The principles are the same—we assumed the earliest prehistoric diseases were foodborne at first, rather than airborne.”

Following the Trail

Their current study simulated the spread of foodborne disease, such as ancient salmonella, on the detailed plan of Nebelivka. 

They teamed with:

• John Chapman and Bisserka Gaydarska, archaeologists from England’s Durham University, who excavated Nebelivka;
• Brian Buchanan, a researcher at Eastern Washington University researcher who did a detailed digital map of the site;
• and Mike O’Brien, a cultural evolution expert from Texas A&M in San Antonio.

They ran the archeological data through millions of simulations to test the effects of different possible disease parameters.

“The results revealed that the pie-shaped clustering of houses at Nebelivka, in distinct neighborhoods, would have reduced the spread of early foodborne diseases,” said Bentley. “Fighting disease might also explain why the residents of Nebelivka regularly burned their wooden houses to replace them with new ones. The study shows that neighborhood clustering would have helped survival in early farming villages as new foodborne diseases evolved.”

Applications for Today

With their success in modeling from sparse archaeological data, this approach could be applied to contemporary and future situations when disease data are sparse, even for airborne illnesses.

“In the early 2020 days of the Covid epidemic, for example, few US counties were reporting reliable infection statistics,” said Bentley. “By running millions of simulations with different parameter values, this approach—known as ‘Approximate Bayesian Computation’—can be applied to test different models versus contemporary disease data, such as infection numbers in US counties over time.”

The team’s mix of ancient solutions and modern applications exemplifies the innovative approaches that Volunteer researchers in the College of Arts and Sciences bring to making lives better for Tennesseans and beyond.

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Journal

Journal of The Royal Society Interface

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Modelling cultural responses to disease spread in Neolithic Trypillia mega-settlements

Visual experience in a Pompeian domestic space: analysis using virtual reality-based eye tracking and GIS

Many scholars have examined the ways in which ancient Roman house design emphasized views and viewing within the domestic space; indeed, the role of the vista in the architecture of this period was so important that Roman law codified “the right to an unobstructed view.” Most villas were constructed on the principle of axiality, providing a view through the entire house, but other techniques were utilized, too, often to complement certain domestic rituals or patterns of movement. Parts of the interior that were visible to an outsider walking past the entrance, for instance, often favored “easily legible decorative schemes,” while rooms where a guest was intended to relax on a couch tended to feature more complex ornamentation such as sculptures or fountains.

Yet while many authors have described these elements of ancient Roman design, they have often done so based on work with stationary fragments like sketches or models, which privilege the single perspective frame. A new paper in the American Journal of Archaeology, “Visual Experience in a Pompeian Domestic Space: Analysis Using Virtual Reality-Based Eye Tracking and GIS,” provides a more holistic account of Roman architecture by taking into account factors like body and eye movement, and illumination. The article by authors Danilo Marco Campanaro and Giacomo Landeschi “aims to identify the nuances of social rituals in connection with visibility and proximity and the construction of the self through a study that combines space, movement, and time.” This work was made possible thanks to the Digital Archaeology Laboratory and the Humanities Lab of Lund University, Sweden.

The setting for the authors’ research was the House of the Greek Epigrams in the ruins of Pompeii. A 3D virtual reality reconstruction of the house was created, and the experiences of five participants moving through the reconstruction recorded and uploaded into a geographic information system (GIS). Specifically, the researchers tracked the participants’ position in the space of the house, their gaze, and their fixations, or what their vision focused on when their eyes were stable. Additionally, these recreations were conducted under two different light conditions—that approximating early morning on the winter solstice, and that approximating the summer solstice noon.

The House of the Greek Epigrams is decorated on the inside with many paintings and figural scenes. Through their experiment, the authors were able to observe how long their participants spent with each artwork, and how visible they found each piece. The varying light conditions, the study found, affected the participants’ relationship to each painted vignette, and so did their dynamic movement closer to or further from the scenes. “Indeed,” the authors write, “the different times of day and seasons would have created ever-changing experiences, where endless possibilities for interaction with different painted images could have been realized.” Scrutinizing a painting of Bacchus, for instance, close up in the winter gloom, would have produced a very different effect than seeing it in the glow of the summer sun. “Rather than rooms with a single view or multiple views,” conclude the authors, “the Roman house would have offered a complex visual palimpsest made up of moving views, interconnected journeys, and comings and goings, of successive investigations in search of the unexpected new detail and mnemonic connections, through the skillful play of paintings under the light and in the shadows.”

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Journal

American Journal of Archaeology

DOI

10.1086/731330  

The chilling sound of the Aztec death whistle

 

Peer-Reviewed Publication

University of Zurich

 

image: 

The skull-shaped body of the Aztec death whistle may represent Mictlantecuhtli, the Aztec Lord of the Underworld. (Bild: Sascha Frühholz, UZH)

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Credit: Sascha Frühholz

Many ancient cultures used musical instruments in ritual ceremonies. Ancient Aztec communities from the pre-Columbian period of Mesoamerica had a rich mythological codex that was also part of their ritual and sacrificial ceremonies. These ceremonies included visual and sonic iconographic elements of mythological deities of the Aztec underworld, which may also be symbolized in the Aztec death whistle. Their skull-shaped body may represent Mictlantecuhtli, the Aztec Lord of the Underworld, and the iconic screaming sound may have prepared human sacrifices for their mythological descent into Mictlan, the Aztec underworld.

 

Aztec death whistles have a unique instrumental construction

To understand the physical mechanisms behind the whistle’s shrill and screeching sound, a team of researchers at the University of Zurich led by Sascha Frühholz, Professor of Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, created 3D digital reconstructions of original Aztec death whistles from the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. The models revealed a unique internal construction of two opposing sound chambers that create physical air turbulence as the source of the screeching sound. “The whistles have a very unique construction, and we don’t know of any comparable musical instrument from other pre-Columbian cultures or from other historical and contemporary contexts,” says Frühholz.

 

Death whistles very, very frightening

The research team also obtained sound recordings of original Aztec death whistles as well as from handmade replicas. Listeners rated these sounds as extremely chilling and frightening. The Aztec death whistle seems to acoustically and affectively mimic other deterring sounds. Most interestingly, human listeners perceived the sound of the Aztec death whistle to be partly of natural and organic origin, like a human voice or scream. “This is consistent ith the tradition of many ancient cultures to capture natural sounds in musical instruments, and could explain the ritual dimension of the death whistle sound for mimicking mythological entities,” explains Frühholz.  

 

Affective response and symbolic association

The Aztec death whistle sounds were also played to human listeners while their brains were being recorded. Brain regions belonging to the affective neural system responded strongly to the sound, again confirming its daunting nature. But the team also observed brain activity in regions that associate sounds with symbolic meaning. This suggests a “hybrid” nature of these death whistle sounds, combining a basic psychoaffective influence on listeners with more elaborate mental processes of sound symbolism, signifying the iconographic nature.    

 

Connecting modern humans with Aztec audiences

Music has always had strong emotional impact on human listeners in both contemporary and ancient cultures, hence its use in ritual religious and mythological contexts. Aztec communities may have specifically capitalized on the frightening and symbolic nature of the death whistle sound to influence the audience in their ritual procedures, based on the knowledge of how the sound affects modern humans. “Unfortunately, we could not perform our psychological and neuroscientific experiments with humans from ancient Aztec cultures. But the basic mechanisms of affective response to scary sounds are common to humans from all historical contexts,” says Frühholz.