Terracotta Army: Legacy of the First Emperor of China

Cincinnati Art Museum 
April 20 through August 12, 2018

First discovered in 1974 by farmers in China,  an underground army of nearly 8,000 life-size terracotta figures is known as one of the greatest archaeological finds of the 20th century. Discovered one mile east of the known burial site of the First Emperor of China (r. 221–210 BC), or Qin Shihuang, the terracotta army was created to accompany the emperor to the afterlife. This exhibition features ten majestic terracotta figures, including a cavalry horse, among 130 works that tell the story of China’s birth and one man’s lasting imprint on a nation.

The exhibition also features arms and armor, horse and chariot fittings, ritual bronze vessels, works in gold and silver, jade ornaments, precious jewelry, and ceramics. Excavated from the First Emperor’s mausoleum complex, as well as aristocratic and nomadic tombs, the objects date from the Eastern Zhou dynasty (770–256 BC) through the Qin dynasty (221–206 BC) and represent the complex history, myths, and burial customs of ancient China. They also explore the First Emperor’s profound influence on Chinese history.

Kneeling Archer, Qin dynasty (221–206 BC), earthenware, Excavated from Pit 2, Qin Shihuang’s Mausoleum, 1977, Emperor Qin Shihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum

The formation and vast influence of China’s landmark Qin dynasty will be showcased in Terracotta Army: Legacy of the First Emperor of China from April 20 through August 12, 2018.

This special exhibition includes 120 objects drawn from the collections of Chin ese art museums and archaeological institutes. More than 40 of these works have never been on view in the U.S. before this exhibition. Expanding upon previous exhibitions, Terracotta Army not only includes the impressive terracotta figures, but also consi ders important works of art from the Qin's neighboring states and tells the story of the nomadic peoples of northwestern China.

Dating from 770 - 206 B.C., these works of art, excavated from the emperor’s mausoleum as well as aristocratic and nomadic tombs, richly reflect history, myths and burial practices in ancient China. In addition to the nine life - size terracotta figures, the exhibition includes a cavalry horse, arms and armor, ritual bronze vessels, works in gold and silver, jade ornaments, precious jewelry and ceramics.

 “This international exchange is a momentous occasion for our museum and the Greater Cincinnati region. The original scholarship supporting the exhibition and the opportunity for Cincinnati to learn about the legacy of the First Emperor will be a revelation to every visitor to the museum. We are proud to showcase the splendor of the art and history of China through our ambitious par tnership with Shaanxi Province ,” said Cameron Kitchin, Cincinnati Art Museum’s Louis and Louise Dieterle Nippert Director.

"Standing Archer," Qin dynasty (221-206 BC), earthenware. Excavated from Pit 2, Qin Shihuang’s Mausoleum, 1997. © Emperor Qin Shihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum. (Photo courtesy Virginia Museum of Fine Arts)

The Cincinnati Art Museum co - organized the exhibition with the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA), where it make s its debut from No v ember 18, 2017 to Mar ch 11, 2018. The exhibition is presented in partnership with Shaanxi Provincial Cultural Relics Bureau, Shaanxi History Museum (Shaanxi Cultural Heritage Promotion Center), and Emperor Qin Shihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum of the People’s Republic of China.

Dr. Hou - mei Sung, Curator of Asian Art at the Cincinnati Art Museum, curated the exhibition with Li Jian, the VMFA’s E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Curator of East Asian Art.

Terracotta Army’s story begins with Ying Zheng (259 - 210 B.C.), who became the first emperor of China in 221 B.C., after his army defeated other regional states and unified the country. After coming to power, he implemented fundamental cultural, political and economic reforms and established China’s core territory.

In 1974 local farmers digging a well outside the city of Xi’an in Shaanxi province, China, discovered pottery shards and bronze arrows near the mausoleum of Ying Zheng.





This led to the astonishing discovery of 8,000 life - size terracotta warriors and horses , which is considered one of the most important archaeological finds in human history. The mausoleum was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987.

Significantly, the exhibition considers the relationship between the first emperor’s Qin dynasty (221 - 206 B.C.) and other peoples, exploring their distinctive artistic styles and fostering an appreciation of diverse cultures. The exhibition also provides a glimpse into ongoing excavations and research, which continue to shed new light on the Qin culture and th e First Emperor’s burial complex.

“I believe this exhibition will provide a great opportunity for American audiences to understand the daily life of Qin people and the visual culture of the empire more than 2,000 years ago. This exhibition actively promote s cultural exchange between China and the United States, and increases understanding and friendship between peoples of both nations,” said Dr. Zhao Rong, Director of the Shaanxi Provincial Cultural Relics Bureau.

Armored General, Qin Dynasty (221–206 BC), earthenware. Excavated from Pit 1, Qin Shihaung’s Mausoleum, 1977. (© Emperor Qin Shihaung’s Mausoleum Site Museum)

A major scholarly catalogue titled Terracotta Army: Legacy ofthe First Emperor of China accompanies the exhibition. It includes contributions from the curators and other scholars and features new scholarship and research based on recent excavations.

image: https://www.vmfa.museum/exhibitions/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2017/09/06ArmorBLKOpt.jpg

https://www.vmfa.museum/exhibitions/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2016/09/TerracottaGoogle.jpg

DNA adds twist to ancient story of a Native American group

The ancient genomes of the Tsimshian indigenous people left tell-tale markers on the trail of their past, revealing that at least 6,000 years ago their population size was on a slow but steady decline.

The American Journal of Human Genetics published the findings, which draw from the first population-level nuclear DNA analysis of a Native American group from ancient to modern times.

"The finding contradicts a popular notion," says John Lindo, a geneticist in Emory University's Department of Anthropology and first author on the paper. "There is this idea that after Native Americans came in through the Bering Strait that they were all expanding in population size until Europeans showed up. At least for this one population, we've shown that was not the case."

A boon in next-generation DNA sequencing technology has opened the possibility to explore the evolutionary history of different populations. "Ancient nuclear DNA analysis is a relatively new field," Lindo says. "Not until recently have we had methods to sequence an entire genome quickly and inexpensively."

Nuclear DNA provides information on an individual's lineages going back hundreds of thousands of years. Lindo is one of the few geneticists looking at ancient whole genomes of Native Americans. He is especially interested in understanding how the genomes of their different populations evolved over time.

"Their evolutionary histories are radically different," Lindo says. "Over thousands of years, various Native American populations have adapted to living in every ecology throughout North and South America, from the Arctic to the Amazon. That's about as an extreme as you can get for differences in environments."

The Tsimshian people historically lived in longhouses in coastal British Columbia and southern Alaska where they harvested the abundant sea life. Lindo and his colleagues sequenced the genomes of 25 living Tsimshian people and 25 ancient individuals who lived in the same region between 6,000 and 500 years ago, and confirmed that they were a continuous population through time.

In a previous paper, drawing from the same data set, they found a dramatic shift between the two time periods in a class of genes associated with the immune system, suggesting a strong evolutionary pressure on the population to adapt to pathogens. A demographic model indicated a crash in the Tsimshian population size of about 57 percent during the early-to-mid 19th century. That finding fitted with historical accounts for how smallpox, introduced by European colonization, devastated the Tsimshian population during two epidemics within that timeframe.

The current paper looked at broader genetic variations between the ancient and modern DNA. An analysis showed both how the variation declined slowly in the ancient population before the collapse, but has since recovered.

"After a population collapse, only a subset of the genetic diversity remains," Lindo says. "We find a more nuanced story, that despite the population collapse, the genetic diversity of modern Tsimshian people varies significantly."

Intermarriage with other Native American groups and non-native populations increased the genetic diversity of some of the modern-day Tsimshian people so that it is near the levels prior to their population collapse, the analysis showed.

"A population with relatively high genetic diversity has a greater potential to fight off pathogens and avoid recessive traits," Lindo says. "It exemplifies the benefits of gene flow between populations, especially following catastrophic events such as the small pox epidemics that the Tsimshian endured."

Senior authors on the paper are Michael DeGiorgio from Pennsylvania State University and Ripan Malhi from the University of Illinois. The paper's coauthors include Tsimshian representatives Joycelynn Mitchell and Barbara Petzelt from the Metlakatla Treaty Office in Prince Rupert, Canada.
Malhi, a leader in forging trusting relationships between genetic researchers and indigenous people, was a mentor to Lindo, who earned his PhD at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.
Lindo is continuing that tradition of building trust and working closely with indigenous populations. His ancient DNA research at Emory integrates the approaches of ancient whole genomes, statistical modeling and functional methods.

One of his projects is focused on genetic fluctuations to help understand ancient adaptions in various Native American populations. He is currently working with 10 different tribes from throughout North America.

"Community engagement is essential when working with indigenous communities," says Lindo, explaining that he first meets personally with a tribal community to talk about how a genetic study might add to their knowledge of their own history.

"I listen to their stories and how they are working to keep their cultures alive," he says. "One elder from a southwestern tribe told me that his grandfather was taken away in the early 1900s because he was a shaman and Christianity was swelling through the area. Each tribe's stories are different but they are all powerful, and sometimes difficult, stories to hear."

Most ancient DNA analyses have come out of Europe, where more ancient DNA labs are based and cold temperatures have helped preserve specimens.

Lindo wants to bring some of the same insights that those of European ancestry are gaining about their past to Native Americans.

"I'd like to disentangle this idea that Native Americans are part of a singular race," he says. "I want to help Native American tribes to reclaim knowledge of their very ancient evolutionary histories -- histories that have been largely wiped away because of colonialism."

Study sheds light on recently evolved traits among Japanese descendants

Osaka University

IMAGE: Genetic loci with strong recent selection pressure in the Japanese population. view more 

Credit: Osaka University

Osaka - Evolution enables beneficial traits to dominate a population. Given enough time, groups exposed to different environments will eventually evolve unique adaptive traits. Knowing how environmental pressures shape human evolution can lead to a better understanding of why certain populations or ethnic groups today are predisposed to certain characteristics. In a new study published in Nature Communications, researchers centered at Osaka University conducted a large-scale genomic analysis to explore recent evolutionary events among individuals of Japanese descent.
The team performed whole-genome sequencing using 2,234 Japanese participants. As its name suggest, the technique attempts to read the entirety of a genome--all three billion letters of it. Comparing the genomes of many individuals at once makes it possible to find regions that have changed more rapidly than others--in other words, places where evolution has caused a particular genetic trait to predominate.
Not all genome sequencing studies are created equal; however, with some doing a better job of reading genomes than others.
"Whole-genome sequencing is a common technique, but our analysis achieved exceptionally 'deep' sequencing," lead author Yukinori Okada explains. "This means that we collected significantly more information from each person's genome compared with similar studies. This allowed us to identify evolutionary changes that occurred over much more recent periods of time, on the scale of the last 2,000 to 3,000 years."
Previous studies looking at similar time scales have focused exclusively on European ancestry. In those studies, it was found that Europeans mostly experienced adaptations related to height, obesity, and the immune system. The current study supplements these findings by focusing on Japanese individuals--from an area where evolutionary pressures have had a distinct impact on adaptive traits.
"Our study is the largest high-depth sequencing study conducted to date on a non-European population," contributing author Saori Sakaue adds. "We found that very different evolutionary traits have evolved in Japanese populations over the last few thousand years, particularly traits involved in the metabolism of alcohol, glucose, and lipids. Given the clear evolutionary differences between European and Japanese populations, we expect our findings to shed light on how different ancestries can evolve divergent traits over very short periods of time."

Palmyra: Loss and Remembrance

Palmyra: Loss and Remembrance

Getty Villa. LOS ANGELES

April 18, 2018 – May 27, 2019

The ancient city of Palmyra (“Place of Palms”), well situated in an oasis in the Syrian desert, flourished between the first and third centuries AD. At the crossroads of trade routes between the Roman and Parthian Persian empires, the people of Palmyra embellished their tombs with distinctive funerary portraits that illuminate the rich cultural exchanges and interactions taking place throughout the eastern Mediterranean and Near East. 

Head of a Man, AD 190-210. Palmyran Limestone. H: 34 x W: 26.5 x D: 33 cm (13 3/8 x 10 7/16 x 13 in.) Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen IN1145 VEX.2018.3.1

Palmyra: Loss and Remembrance , on display as a long- term loan at the Getty Villa from April 18, 2018 through May 27, 2019, presents a selection of the finest surviving Palmyran funerary portrait sculptures from the unrivalled collection of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen. 

The exhibition will also include historical engravings and photographs from the Getty Research Institute that represent the earliest photographic record of this unique archaeological site. As part of the reinstallation of the antiquities collection at the Getty Villa, this exhibition will be the first display in a new gallery dedicated to “The Classical World in Context,” which will present long- term loans of objects from cultures that engaged and interacted with the ancient classical cultures of Greece and Italy. 

“Control of the Near Eastern lands conquered by Alexander the Great in the 320s BC gradually shrank back to Syria and the eastern littoral of the Mediterranean, where it remained into the first centuries of the Roman Empire. But the influence of Greek and Roman art in the further reaches of Alexander’s conquests lingered m uch longer , and we see remarkable efflorescences of classicizing sculpture in the first centuries AD in Parthia ( Mesopotamia and Persia), Gandhara (Pakistan), and , closer to the Mediterranean, at Petra and Palmyra,” says Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “The remarkable works of art from the latter site are the most vivid artistic evidence of a cosmopolitan, polyg lot, and multicultural world that flourished in the first centuries of the Christian era . Sadly, much of this extraordinary artistic heritage has been the subject of horrendous vandalism in recent years —which makes those works that survive even more precious .” 


The people of the ancient city of Palmyra grew rich transporting silk, spices, gems, and other commodities, as well as slaves, by caravan to the Mediterranean from Persia, India, and as far east as China. Grand temples, colonnaded streets, and richly decorated communal tombs attest to Palmyra’s period of great prosperity. Ornamented tombs contained expressive likenesses of men, women, and children accompanied by inscriptions naming the deceased. 

Details of their dress, jewelry, and other attributes reveal the city’s distinctive cultural mix of Greek, Roman, and Parthian (ancient Iranian) culture . Inspired by their Greek and Roman neighbors, Palmyrans made and publicly displayed portraits honoring the deeds of important citizens. Most surviving sculpture from the site, however, consists of funerary portraits commemorating the dead. 

Reliefs carved from local limestone and then brightly painted were arranged in rows within monumental tombs. They were used to seal loculi (individual burial niches) within towers, hypogea (underground chambers) , and mausolea (temple- like structures ) where hundreds were buried in vast galleries of multi- generational family portraits . 

Most reliefs bear inscriptions in Palmyr an Aramaic express ing grief for the loss of the deceased, naming family members, and, in some cases, provid ing lengthy genealogies. 

The Palmyran custom was to depict the deceased finely clothed and gazing forward. Men usually appear in tunics and Greek -style cloaks; their professions are rarely indicated, though priestly status is noted. In early reliefs, women hold a distaff and spindle for spinning wool —traditional symbols of female virtue. With time, female portraits included rich displays of jewelry and changing hairstyles, likely reflecting the increasing wealth, growing trade connections, and evolving fashions of the city. 

Although Palmyran reliefs usually present their subjects with generic features and neutral expressions, they nonetheless reveal deliberate and individualized choices. Those who commissioned and carved the portraits selected from a repertoire of hairstyles, clothing, gestures, jewelry, and other meaningful attributes. In commemorating the dead, they sometimes also included representations of other family members. Palmyran portraits —while less naturalistic than Roman sculptures of the time—embody familial aspirations and communal values as well as personal emblems of those they represent. 

“These vivid personal portraits bring the viewer face- to-face with ancient individuals and their families, expressing their values and reflecting developing social trends,” says Kenneth Lapati , curator of the exhibition. “At the same time, they convey ancient cosmopolitanism and connections between diverse cultures.” 

Designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1980, the ancient buildings of Palmyra have inspired Western artists and architects s ince the late 1600s. Though the monuments of Palmyra survived for millennia, the site has suffered greatly in the current Syrian civil war, which has resulted in thousands of deaths and the deliberate destruction of buildings and artifacts. 

Recently acquired by the Getty Research Institute and on view for the first time, are well - preserved photographs of the site taken in 1864 by Louis Vignes, a French naval officer who was trained in photography by the renowned photographer Charles Nègre. The earliest photographic record of the site, these photographs include unique views and panoramas of Palmyra’s Roman ruins, some of which are now destroyed. 

Man with Camel, about AD 160

PalmyranLimestone

Object: H: 56.5 x W: 54.5 x D: 10 cm (22 1/4 x 21 7/16 x

3 15/16 in.)

Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen IN2883

VEX.2018.3.11

 

Male and His Sons (?) AD 192–210

Palymran Limestone

Object: H: 60 x W: 36 x D: 19.5 cm (23 5/8 x 14 3/16 x 7 11/16 in.)

Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, Stanford Family

Collections, Palo Alto JLS.17200 (left), Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek,

Copenhagen IN2775 (right)

VEX.2018.3.24

Another highlight of the exhibition is a double relief of a father and son, which was broken in half and sold separately sometime before 1880, and will be reunited in the exhibition for the first time . 

In 1880, Leland Stanford Jr. purchased one half in Rome . Today, it is in the collection of the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University. In 1929, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek acquired the other half from a collector in Beirut. In 2012, former Getty scholar Fred Albertson recognized that part of the younger man’s shoulder, as well as the branch that supports the dorsalium (funerary curtain) behind him, is preserved on the slab 4 depicting the older man. The s imilar carving of the faces, drapery, and inscriptions confirm ed that the two pieces belong together. 

Palmyra: Loss and Remembrance is curated by Kenneth Lapatin, curat or of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum in collaboration with Rubina Raja, director of the Palmyra Portrait Project and professor of classical art and a rchaeology at Aarhus University , and Anne Marie Nielsen , curator of Greek and Roman art at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek.

Identifying the use of tinder fungi among neolithic communities at la Draga

The use of fungi to light or transport fire at la Draga some 7,300 years ago is one of the oldest examples documented until now of the technological use of these organisms

Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona

IMAGE: Sample of Ganoderma adspersum with signs of carbonization. view more 

Credit: la Draga team

Inhabitants of the Neolithic community at la Draga (Banyoles, Girona) already used fungi to light or transport fires 7300 years ago. The discovery represents one of the oldest examples of technological use of fungi documented until now and is the result of several archaeological interventions at the site, which have also yielded an exceptional collection of these organisms, unique in all of prehistoric Europe.
The study of this atypical set of remains, published recently in the journal PLOS ONE, was conducted by Marian Berihuete-Azorín (Hohenheim University), Josep Girbal (UAB), Raquel Piqué (UAB), Antoni Palomo (Museum of Archaeology of Catalonia) and Xavier Terradas (CSIC-IMF).

"Despite the use of fire being well documented, at the la Draga site we had not yet found proof of the materials used to light or transport it. Data gathered points to the majority of fungi recovered were selected, taken to the forest surrounding the site, dried and stored, with the intention of using them as tinder. In addition, it was evident in two of the samples we analysed that they were being used for this purpose, which proved our hypothesis", explains Raquel Piqué, researcher at the UAB Department of Prehistory.

The site of la Draga is one of the exceptional examples for the study of archaeological remains, which remain under the phreatic level, and this has allowed researchers to recover up to 86 different individuals, some of them complete, and conduct a taxonomic study which allowed to verify the presence of six fungi species: Skeletocutis nivea, Coriolopsis gallica, Daedalea quercina, Daldinia concentrica, Ganoderma adspersum and Lenzites warnieri.

"Being able to recover these remains is extraordinary, given that their conservation as archaeological material is very difficult due to their easiness to decompose", adds Antoni Palomo, research at the MAC and the UAB.

The majority of fungi recovered at la Draga are polypore and can both grow on dead tree trunks and parasitise living trees. They are non-edible species which have been traditionally used to light fires, and are therefore known as "tinder-fungi". Their woody structure makes them high inflammable and therefore ideal for starting and transporting fire. Among the species used for this purpose there are Daedalea quercina, different kinds of Ganoderma, Coriolopsis gallica and Daldinia concentrica, all of them documented at la Draga.

Tinder fungi was used to catch the sparks produced by hitting a siliceous rock against a mineral rich in ferric sulphide such as pyrite or marcasite. Researchers assure that the discovery makes La Draga an exceptional example for the study of fungi during Prehistory. It is one of the archaeological sites with a higher variety of fungi that has been retrieved till date.

Until now, the few archaeological discoveries of fungi belonged to sites in northern and central Europe, and only in a few cases was it possible to demonstrate technological uses. One of the most important was at the Mesolithic site of Starr Carr in England, in which samples were also interpreted as having been intentionally transported in order to be used as tinder fungi. Another notable example, but chronologically more recent than La Draga, are the remains transported by the iceman Ötzi as part of his equipment.

Importance of the Neolithic Site of la Draga
The remains studied form part a set of discoveries made at the Neolithic site of la Draga, located at the eastern shore of Lake Banyoles. The importance of this prehistoric settlement lies in the fact that it is one of the first enclaves where Neolithic farming societies decided to settle in the northeast of the Iberian Peninsula, about 7300 years ago, transforming the surroundings in order to carry out the agricultural and livestock practices necessary for their subsistence. The most outstanding feature at the site is the conservation of elements built with wood and other organic materials, an exceptional feat for such an early society and which contributes to a more complete comprehension of these first farming societies of the westernmost Mediterranean.

The site was discovered in 1990 and since then, different interventions have been carried out under the coordination of the Archaeological Museum of Banyoles and the participation of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, the Spanish National Research Council (IMF, Barcelona) and the Museum of Archaeology of Catalonia.

The equine herald of a new age

As they had for more than a decade, Stuart Tyson Smith and his colleagues were excavating a tomb in what was Upper Nubia in their years-long UC Santa Barbara-Purdue University mission to understand the history of an ancient village on the fringes of Egyptian dominance.

But rather than finding mummified human remains, they unearthed the skeleton of a horse so well-preserved it had hair on its legs. It had been covered with a burial shroud, and among the items found with it was a piece of iron that appeared to be a cheek piece from a bridle.

Smith, a professor of archaeology in UCSB's Department of Anthropology, called the find "a complete surprise. I was not expecting to find that. We had this nice pyramid tomb and we were going down the shaft expecting to find a few human burials, and there we were about half-way down the shaft and here's this horse."

The horse turned out to be much more than an unexpected oddity. In their paper "Symbolic Equids and Kushite State Formation: A Horse Burial at Tombos," in the journal Antiquity, Smith and his collaborators -- lead author Sarah Schrader, horse specialist Sandra Olsen and co-director of the expedition Michele Buzon -- argue that the horse represents a shift away from Egyptian governance and towards a Kushite rule in which the animal was embraced as central to the state's identity.

"One of the interesting things about our horse is that it foreshadows the later development where these Nubian kings are really into horses," Smith said. Indeed, when the Kushite king Piankhi put down a rebellion in northern Egypt he was said to be enraged that his horses there had been starved in his absence. "His complaint was not that they had rebelled against him, but they had mistreated his horses," he said.

IMAGE: The Tombos horse was discovered in 2011. The ancient horse is dated to the Third Intermediate Period, 1050-728 B.C.E., and it was found more than 5 feet underground in a... view more 

Credit: Photo provided

 The Tombos horse was discovered in 2011, and members of the Purdue team - professor Michele Buzon and alumna Sarah Schrader - played a part in the excavation and analysis. The horse is dated to the Third Intermediate Period, 1050-728 B.C.E., and it was found more than 5 feet underground in a tomb. The horse, with some chestnut-colored fur remaining, had been buried in a funeral position with a burial shroud. 
"It was clear that the horse was an intentional burial, which was super fascinating," said Buzon, a professor of anthropology. "Remnants of fabric on the hooves indicate the presence of a burial shroud. Changes on the bones and iron pieces of a bridle suggest that the horse may have pulled a chariot. We hadn't found anything like this in our previous excavations at Tombos. Animal remains are very rare at the site."

Buzon, a bioarchaeologist, has worked with Stuart Tyson Smith, anthropology professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, for 18 years at this site in modern-day Sudan, and both are principal investigators on the project. Buzon uses health and cultural evidence from more than 3,000-year-old burial sites to understand the lives of Nubians and Egyptians during the New Kingdom Empire. This is when Egyptians colonized the area in about 1500 B.C. to gain access to trade routes on the Nile River. Over the years, hundreds of artifacts, including pottery, tools, carvings and dishes were unearthed at this burial site for about 200 individuals.

"Finding the horse was unexpected," Schrader said. "Initially, we weren't sure if it was modern or not. But as we slowly uncovered the remains, we began to find artifacts associated with the horse, such as the scarab, the shroud and the iron cheekpiece. At that point, we realized how significant this find was. Of course, we became even more excited when the carbon-14 dates were assessed and confirmed how old the horse was."

Schrader, who graduated from Purdue in 2013 with a doctoral degree in anthropology, is an assistant professor of human osteoarchaeology at Leiden University in The Netherlands. Schrader is lead author on this article, and she helped frame this find within the context of Nubian history.

Once the archaeologists discovered the horse, Sandra Olsen, curator-in-charge at the Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum at the University of Kansas and a well-known ancient horse expert, was invited to Purdue to analyze the horse skeleton. Buzon coordinated the analysis between the team, and she established the chronology of the horse via radiocarbon dating.

"The horse was treated well in life, seeing as how it lived to a mature age," Schrader said. "It also was important to the people of ancient Tombos because it was buried - a rite that is usually reserved for humans. Furthermore, the fact that one of the earliest pieces of iron from Africa was found in association with the horse reiterates how special it was to the people. It is also important to assess the context of Tombos with regard to the horse - the horse is an important and rare find. The fact that it is buried at Tombos indicates that this town may have served an important function in the post-colonial Napatan Period."


Using radiocarbon testing, the Tombos horse was dated to about 950 BC, in the Third Intermediate Period, when the Kushites of Nubia took advantage of strife in Egypt to coalesce into a political, economic and military power.

The horse was buried about 100 years after the colony began to break away in 1070 BC. The burial, Smith said, was a new development in the village at the Third Cataract of the Nile. Buried in an older tomb that had been adapted for the task, the horse was laid to rest in sacred ground.

"It's gorgeous, and the bones are a nice, rich brown color that you don't see in other contemporary horse burials," Smith noted. "All the pieces are there, everything's intact. It even had some fur left on it. As a result, because of the preservation, it's one of the most complete skeletons, and best preserved, of any of these early horses that have been found in northeast Africa."

The Tombos horse, which was determined to be female, was carefully lain on its side. Close inspection of the skeleton also revealed it suffered from arthritis and degeneration associated with wearing a chariot saddle harness. Curiously, Egyptian art always depicted chariot horses as stallions.
"It makes a certain amount of sense that they would emphasize stallions in the art," Smith said, "because they're fierce in warfare and that sort of thing. But it is interesting that in reality they were using mares as well. It's just that the artwork emphasizes the stallion as the pre-eminent chariot horse."

Among the more intriguing items found with the horse was the piece of iron that Smith said radiocarbon testing dates to around 950 BC. "This is a very early date for iron," he noted. "For a long time people had thought that iron production in Nubia really didn't ramp up until about 500 BC."
Smith, who owns a horse, said he quickly recognized the artifact as a cheek piece for a bridle, and co-author Olson has since confirmed the assessment. "It's rare to find iron like that in a good context," he said, "where you can really pin the date down.

"It also counters the narrative that Nubians were backwards somehow, that anything good they got they got from Egypt," he continued. "But they seem to have been going out and seizing what they needed. They had the latest military technology in the form of iron weaponry like we found, but also these iron trappings from the horse."

Smith and Buzon have been excavating Tombos, just east of the Nile River in Sudan, since 2000. It was founded by the Egyptians as an administrative center in Nubia around 1450 BC. Their work there has unraveled what they term "cultural entanglement," the process by which colonizing powers and indigenous people influence one another and change over time.

"You can see this long, entangled history of the horse weaving its way through all these different cultures until it comes to Nubia," Smith said. "But then, horses were important in Egypt, but we have very few horse burials there. If it was a widespread practice you'd expect to see more of them."
The Nubians, who would conquer Egypt and establish the Kushite Dynasty in 728 BC, proved to be adept at adapting Egyptian practices and technology and making them their own.

"For Nubians, they really elaborated on Egyptian materials and practices in a way that you don't see in Egypt," Smith said. "That's the case with a lot of these features that Nubians were borrowing. They often take something they really like, like horses, and they make it much more elaborate, through ritualized burial, than the examples that you have in Egypt."

Did last ice age affect breastfeeding in Native Americans?

IMAGE: Photograph of human upper incisors with significant "shoveling, " anatomical variation influenced by the EDAR V370A allele alongside an increase in mammary duct branching. view more 

Credit: Christy G. Turner, II, courtesy G. Richard Scott

The critical role that breast feeding plays in infant survival may have led, during the last ice age, to a common genetic mutation in East Asians and Native Americans that also, surprisingly, affects the shape of their teeth.
The genetic mutation, which probably arose 20,000 years ago, increases the branching density of mammary ducts in the breasts, potentially providing more fat and vitamin D to infants living in the far north where the scarcity of ultraviolet radiation makes it difficult to produce vitamin D in the skin.
If the spread of this genetic mutation is, in fact, due to selection for increased mammary ductal branching, the adaptation would be the first evidence of selection on the human maternal-infant bond.
"This highlights the importance of the mother-infant relationship and how essential it has been for human survival," said Leslea Hlusko, an associate professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley.
As for the teeth, it just so happens that the gene controlling mammary duct growth also affects the shape of human incisors. Consequently, as the genetic mutation was selected for in an ancestral population living in the far north during the last Ice Age, shovel-shaped incisors became more frequent too. Shoveled incisors are common among Native Americans and northeastern Asian populations but rare in everyone else.
Hlusko and her colleagues outline the many threads of evidence supporting the idea in an article published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The finding could also have implications for understanding the origins of dense breast tissue and its role in breast cancer.
For the study, Hlusko and her colleagues assessed the occurrence of shovel-shaped incisors in archeological populations in order to estimate the time and place of evolutionary selection for the trait. They found that nearly 100 percent of Native Americans prior to European colonization had shoveled incisors, as do approximately 40 percent of East Asians today.
The team then used the genetic effects that are shared with dental variation as a way to discern the evolutionary history of mammary glands because of their common developmental pathway.
"People have long thought that this shoveling pattern is so strong that there must have been evolutionary selection favoring the trait, but why would there be such strong selection on the shape of your incisors?" Hlusko said. "When you have shared genetic effects across the body, selection for one trait will result in everything else going along for the ride."
The vitamin D connection Getting enough vitamin D, which is essential for a robust immune system and proper fat regulation as well as for calcium absorption, is a big problem in northern latitudes because the sun is low on the horizon all year long and, above the Arctic Circle, doesn't shine at all for part of the year. While humans at lower latitudes can get nearly all the vitamin D they need through exposure of the skin to ultraviolet light, the scarce UV at high latitudes forced northern peoples like the Siberians and Inuit to get their vitamin D from animal fat, hunting large herbivores and sea mammals.
But babies must get their vitamin D from mother's milk, and Hlusko posits that the increased mammary duct branching may have been a way of delivering more vitamin D and the fat that goes with it.
Hlusko, who specializes in the evolution of teeth among animals, in particular primates and early humans, discovered these connections after being asked to participate in a scientific session on the dispersal of modern humans throughout the Americas at the February 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting. In preparing her talk on what teeth can tell us about the peopling of the New World, she pulled together the genetics of dental variation with the archaeological evidence to re-frame our understanding of selection on incisor shape.
Incisors are called "shovel-shaped" when the tongue-side of the incisors - the cutting teeth in the front of the mouth, four on top, four on the bottom - have ridges along the sides and biting edge. It is distinctive of Native Americans and populations in East Asia - Korea, Japan and northern China - with an increasing incidence as you travel farther north. Unpersuaded by a previously proposed idea that shoveled incisors were selected for use softening animal hides, she looked at explanations unrelated to teeth.
The genetic mutation responsible for shoveling - which occurs in at least one of the two copies, or alleles, of a gene called EDAR, which codes for a protein called the ectodysplasin A receptor - is also involved in determining the density of sweat glands in the skin, the thickness of hair shafts and ductal branching in mammary glands. Previous genetic analysis of living humans concluded that the mutation arose in northern China due to selection for more sweat glands or sebaceous glands during the last ice age.
"Neither of those is a satisfying explanation," Hlusko said. "There are some really hot parts in the world, and if sweating was so sensitive to selective pressures, I can think of some places where we would have more likely seen selection on that genetic variation instead of in northern China during the Last Glacial Maximum."
The Beringian standstill Clues came from a 2007 paper and later a 2015 study by Hlusko's coauthor Dennis O'Rourke, in which scientists deduced from the DNA of Native Americans that they split off from other Asian groups more than 25,000 years ago, even though they arrived in North American only 15,000 years ago. Their conclusion was that Native American ancestors settled for some 10,000 years in an area between Asia and North America before finally moving into the New World. This so-called Beringian standstill coincided with the height of the Last Glacial Maximum between 18,000 and 28,000 years ago.
According to the Beringian standstill hypothesis, as the climate became drier and cooler as the Last Glacial Maximum began, people who had been living in Siberia moved into Beringia. Gigantic ice sheets to the east prohibited migration into North America. They couldn't migrate southwest because of a large expanse of a treeless and inhospitable tundra. The area where they found refuge was a biologically productive region thanks to the altered ocean currents associated with the last ice age, a landmass increased in size by to the lower sea levels. Genetic studies of animals and plants from the region suggest there was an isolated refugium in Beringia during that time, where species with locally adaptive traits arose. Such isolation is ripe for selection on genetic variants that make it easier for plants, animals and humans to survive.
"If you take these data from the teeth to interpret the evolutionary history of this EDAR allele, you frame-shift the selective episode to the Beringian standstill population, and that gives you the environmental context," Hlusko said. "At that high latitude, these people would have been vitamin D deficient. We know they had a diet that was attempting to compensate for it from the archaeological record, and because there is evidence of selection in this population for specific alleles of the genes that influence fatty acid synthesis. But even more specifically, these genes modulate the fatty acid composition of breast milk. It looks like this mutation of the EDAR gene was also selected for in that ancestral population, and EDAR's effects on mammary glands is the most likely target of the selection."
The EDAR gene influences the development of many structures derived from the ectoderm in the fetus, including tooth shape, sweat glands, sebaceous glands, mammary glands and hair. As a consequence, selection on one trait leads to coordinated evolution of the others. The late evolutionary biologist and author Steven Jay Gould referred to such byproducts of evolution as spandrels.
"This Beringian population is one example of what has happened thousands of times, over millions of years: Human populations form, exist for a little while and then disperse to form new populations, mixing with other groups of people, all of them leaving traces on modern human variation today," Hlusko said. "An important take-home message is that human variation today reflects this dynamic process of ephemeral populations, rather than the traditional concept of geographic races with distinct differences between them."