Wild birds as offerings to the Egyptian gods

 

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IMAGE: FIRST AUTHOR MARIE LINGLIN SAMPLES A MUMMIFIED NORTHERN LONG-LEGGED BUZZARD SPECIMEN AT THE MUSÉE DES CONFLUENCES, LYON. view more 

CREDIT: © ROMAIN AMIOT/LGL-TPE/CNRS

Millions of ibis and birds of prey mummies, sacrificed to the Egyptian gods Horus, Ra or Thoth, have been discovered in the necropolises of the Nile Valley. Such a quantity of mummified birds raises the question of their origin: were they bred, like cats, or were they hunted? Scientists from the CNRS, the Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 and the C2RMF (1) have carried out extensive geochemical analyses on mummies from the Musée des Confluences, Lyon. According to their results, published on 22nd September 2020 in the journal Scientific Reports, they were wild birds.

Mammals, reptiles, birds: the tens of millions of animal mummies deposited as offerings in the necropolises of the Nile Valley bear witness to an intense religious fervour, and to the practices of collecting and preparing animals that undoubtedly contributed significantly to the economy from the Old Kingdom (3rd millennium BC) to Roman Egypt (1st-3rd centuries AD). However, the origin of these animals and the methods of supply remain unknown. For some tamed species, such as the cat, breeding was probably the most efficient way of supplying large numbers of animals for mummification. But unlike cats, bird mummies cover all stages of development, from egg to adult, which may indicate more opportunistic sourcing practices.

In order to determine the origin -- breeding or hunting -- of the mummified birds, tiny fragments of feathers, bones and embalming strips were taken from 20 ibis and birds of prey mummies from the collections of the Musée des Confluences, Lyon. If these birds, which migrate in the wild, had been bred, their diet would have been homogeneous, of local origin and reflected in the uniform isotopic composition (2) of the animal remains, regardless as to whether that diet had been produced specifically or derived from that of coexisting humans.

The various tissues were therefore dated using the carbon-14 method; and the isotopic compositions of oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, sulfur and strontium were measured, interpreted in terms of food sources and compared with those of contemporaneous human mummies. However, far from being homogeneous, these isotopic compositions showed a high variability and "exotic" signatures compared to those of ancient Egyptian humans: the birds were wild, migrating seasonally out of the Nile Valley.

These results, combined with that of a genetic study carried out by another team (3), suggest the mass hunting and capture of birds as documented on certain tomb frescoes (for example on the wall of Nakht's tomb in the Theban Necropolis). Indeed, the Egyptians probably exerted a significant ecological pressure on wild bird populations long before the decline in avifauna observed today.

Archaeology uncovers infectious disease spread in Asia - 4000 years ago

 New bioarchaeology research from a University of Otago PhD candidate has shown how infectious diseases may have spread 4000 years ago, while highlighting the dangers of letting such diseases run rife.

Yaws - from the same bacteria species responsible for syphilis (Treponema pallidum) - is a childhood disease causing highly infectious skin lesions. It is spread via touch from person to person and, in advanced cases, can leave sufferers with severe bone disfigurement. While it is easily curable in its early stages, the bone disfigurements are irreversible.

The disease has been eradicated from much of the world but is still prevalent in the Western Pacific, affecting some 30,000 people. A previous global attempt to eradicate this tropical disease failed at the last hurdle in the 1950's and a new attempt was curtailed by the COVID-19 outbreak, University of Otago Department of Anatomy PhD candidate Melandri Vlok says.

Ms Vlok's PhD research uses archaeology to shed light on the spread of diseases when different human populations interact for the first time. Her specific interest is in what she calls the "friction zone", where ancient agricultural people met hunter gatherer people.

In 2018 she travelled to Vietnam to study skeletal remains from the Man Bac archaeological site. From the Ninh Bình Province in the north of the country, Man Bac was excavated in 2005 and 2007 and has delivered a treasure trove of information for archaeologists thanks to its role during the transition away from foraging to farming in Mainland Southeast Asia.

Now housed in Hanoi's Institute of Archaeology those remains are well-studied but had not been analysed for evidence of yaws, Ms Vlok says.

Her supervisor at Otago, renowned bioarchaeologist Professor Hallie Buckley, had seen what she thought might be yaws on a photograph of Man Bac remains. Professor Buckley travelled with Ms Vlok and together with a passionate team of experts from Vietnam they confirmed their suspicions, Ms Vlok says. Later, Ms Vlok found a second example of the disease.

This was significant, as the Man Bac site dates back 4000 years. Till now, there was no strong evidence for yaws in prehistoric Asia.

Ms Vlok's research suggests yaws was introduced to hunter-gathers in present-day Vietnam by an agricultural population moving south from modern-day China. These hunter-gathers descended from the first people out of Africa and into Asia who also eventually inhabited New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Australia.

The farmers had been in China for at least 9000 years but it wasn't until around 4000 years ago farming was introduced to Southeast Asia. It is possible this movement of people brought diseases, including yaws, at the same time.

Ms Vlok says the length of time the disease has existed in the region is relevant when addressing how hard it has been to eradicate.

"This matters, because knowing more about this disease and its evolution, it changes how we understand the relationship people have with it. It helps us understand why it's so difficult to eradicate. If it's been with us thousands of years it has probably developed to fit very well with humans."

This year's COVID-19 pandemic has focused people's attention on infectious diseases, and there are lessons to be learned from the past, Ms Vlok says.

"Archaeology like this is the only way to document how long a disease has been with us and been adapting to us. We understand with COVID-19 today how fantastic that disease is at adapting to humans. And Treponema has been with us for so much longer.

"So, this shows us what happens when we don't take action with these diseases. It's a lesson of what infectious diseases can do to a population if you let them spread widely. It highlights the need to intervene, because sometimes these diseases are so good at adapting to us, at spreading between us."

A 48,000 years old tooth that belonged to one of the last Neanderthals in Northern Italy

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IMAGE: AN UPPER CANINE MILK-TOOTH THAT BELONGED TO A NEANDERTHAL CHILD, AGED 11 OR 12, THAT LIVED BETWEEN 48,000 AND 45,000 YEARS AGO. view more 

CREDIT: JOURNAL OF HUMAN EVOLUTION

A milk-tooth found in the vicinity of "Riparo del Broion" on the Berici Hills in the Veneto region bears evidence of one of the last Neanderthals in Italy. This small canine tooth belonged to a child between 11 and 12 that had lived in that area around 48,000 years ago. This is the most recent Neanderthal finding in Northern Italy.

The study uncovering this tooth was carried out by a group of researchers from the Universities of Bologna and Ferrara, who have recently published a paper in the Journal of Human Evolution. "This work stems from the synergy between different disciplines and specializations", says Matteo Romandini, lead author of this study and researcher at the University of Bologna. "High-resolution prehistoric field-archaeology allowed us to find the tooth, then we employed virtual approaches to the analyses of its shape, genome, taphonomy and of its radiometric profile. Following this process, we could identify this tooth as belonging to a child that was one of the last Neanderthals in Italy".

The genetic analysis reveals that the owner of the tooth found in Veneto was a relative, on their mother's side, of Neanderthals that had lived in Belgium. This makes this site in Veneto a key-area for comprehending the gradual extinction of Neanderthals in Europe.

"This small tooth is extremely important", according to Stefano Benazzi, professor at the University of Bologna and research coordinator. "This is even more relevant if we consider that, when this child who lived in Veneto lost their tooth, Homo Sapiens communities were already present a thousand kilometres away in Bulgaria".

Researchers analysed the tooth by employing highly innovative virtual methods. "The techniques we employed to analyse the tooth led to the following discovery: this is an upper canine milk-tooth that belonged to a Neanderthal child, aged 11 or 12, that lived between 48,000 and 45,000 years ago", as report Gregorio Oxilia and Eugenio Bortolini, who are co-authors of the study and researchers at the University of Bologna. "According to this dating, this little milk-tooth is the most recent finding of the Neanderthal period in Northern Italy and one of the latest in the entire peninsula".

The findings retrieved from the "Riparo del Broion" are still being analysed. However, preliminary results show that this site had been used for a long period of time as there are signs of hunting activities and butchering of large prays. "The manufacturing of tools, mainly made of flint, shows Neanderthals' great adaptability and their systematic and specialized exploitation of the raw materials available in this area", adds Marco Peresanti, a professor of the University of Ferrara who contributed to the study.

Ancient human footprints in Saudi Arabia give glimpse of Arabian ecology 120000 years ago

 

Situated between Africa and Eurasia, the Arabian Peninsula is an important yet understudied region for understanding human evolution across the continents. Recent research highlighting the role of the Arabian Peninsula in human prehistory shows that humans repeatedly dispersed into the peninsula's interior at times when its harsh deserts were transformed into lush grasslands. However, the nature and timing of these dispersals have remained elusive, due to a scarcity of datable material and poor-resolution paleoecological data associated with evidence for humans.

In a new study published in Science Advances, researchers from the Max Planck Institutes for Chemical Ecology (MPI-CE) and the Science of Human History (MPI-SHH) in Jena, Germany and Royal Holloway University of London, UK, together with a team of international partners, describe a large assemblage of fossilized footprints discovered in an ancient lake deposit in Saudi Arabia's Nefud Desert. The footprints, dated to roughly 120 thousand-years-ago, include those of humans, elephants and horses, among other animals. These findings represent the earliest dated evidence for human movements into this part of the world, contemporary with well-known human dispersals from Africa to the Levant. In addition, it appears that the movements and landscape use patterns of humans and large mammals were tightly linked, perhaps in response to dry conditions and diminishing water supplies.

A Green Arabia in Human Prehistory

Because the Arabian Peninsula is characterized by large, hyper-arid deserts inhospitable to early humans and the animals they relied on, Arabia has received considerably less attention than Africa or Eurasia, neighboring regions that are vital to understanding human prehistory. However, research over the last decade has shown that this was not always the case, and it is now well-understood that conditions in Arabia have fluctuated significantly over the past million years.

"At certain times in the past, the deserts that dominate the interior of the peninsula transformed into expansive grasslands with permanent freshwater lakes and rivers," explains Richard Clark-Wilson of Royal Holloway, one of the lead authors of the study. "It was during these periods of climatic upturn that human and animal populations dispersed into the interior, as shown by the archaeological and fossil record."

Footprints as a High-Resolution Proxy

The footprints described in the new study were discovered during a recent survey of the Nefud Desert in Saudi Arabia. At an ancient lake deposit dubbed 'Alathar' (meaning "the trace" in Arabic) by the team, hundreds of human and animal footprints were discovered embedded in the surface, having been exposed following the erosion of overlying sediments.

"We immediately realized the potential of these findings," says Mathew Stewart of MPI-CE, one of the study's lead authors. "Footprints are a unique form of fossil evidence in that they provide snapshots in time, typically representing a few hours or days, a resolution we tend not get from other records."

Researchers were able to identify a number of animals from the footprints, including elephants, horses, and camels. The presence of elephants was particularly notable, as these large animals appear to have gone locally extinct in the Levant by around 400 thousand-years-ago.

"The presence of large animals such as elephants and hippos, together with open grasslands and large water resources, may have made northern Arabia a particularly attractive place to humans moving between Africa and Eurasia," says Michael Petraglia of MPI-SHH, who has been conducting research in the region for over a decade.

The dense concentration of footprints and evidence from the lake sediments suggests that animals may have been congregating around the lake in response to dry conditions and diminishing water supplies. Humans, too, may have been utilizing the lake for water and the surrounding area for foraging.

"We know people visited the lake, but the lack of stone tools or evidence of the use of animal carcasses suggests that their visit to the lake was only brief," says Stewart. Human movements and landscape use patterns, therefore, may have been closely linked to the large animals they shared the area with.

Early Human Dispersals into Arabia

The age of the footprints is of particular interest. They date to a period known as the last interglacial, a time of relatively humid conditions across the region and an important moment in human prehistory. Environmental changes during the last interglacial would have allowed humans and animals to disperse across otherwise desert regions, which normally acted as major barriers to dispersal during the less humid periods. Fossil and archaeological records indicate that these conditions also facilitated human dispersal from Africa into the Levant.

"It is only after the last interglacial with the return of cooler conditions that we have definitive evidence for Neanderthals moving into the region," says Stewart. "The footprints, therefore, most likely represent humans, or Homo sapiens."

These findings suggest that human movements beyond Africa during the last interglacial extended into northern Arabia, highlighting the importance of Arabia for the study of human prehistory.

Ancient DNA shows domestic horses were introduced in the southern Caucasus and Anatolia during the Bronze Age

Domestic horses likely did not originate in Anatolia as previously suspected, according to a new study of ancient horse remains dating as far back as 9000 BCE. Instead, they may have been introduced to the peninsula - which makes up most of modern-day Turkey - and the nearby Caucasus region from the Eurasian Steppe by about 2000 BCE, during the Bronze Age. The findings also suggest imported domestic horses were bred with local wild Anatolian horses and donkeys and provide the earliest genomic evidence for a mule in southwest Asia, dating to between 1100 and 800 BCE. Domestication of horses about 5,500 years ago forever changed transportation, trade, warfare, and migration. But despite their transformative role in human history, it remains unclear where, when, and how many times horses were domesticated. In recent years, careful recovery of horse remains from well-preserved archaeological sites in Anatolia and neighboring areas together with progress in paleogenetic approaches has made it possible to specifically address the processes responsible for the origins of domestic horses in this part of western Asia. To explore whether Anatolia might have been this mysterious point of origin, Silvia Guimaraes and colleagues analyzed more than 100 equid remains from 8 sites in central Anatolia and 6 sites in the Caucasus dating mostly from the Early Neolithic to the Iron Age (from 9000 to 500 BCE). The researchers performed both morphological and paleogenetic analyses, scrutinizing mitochondrial DNA, Y chromosome DNA, and DNA markers related to coat color. They found that nonlocal genetic lineages still present in domestic horses today suddenly appeared in about 2000 BCE rather than developing gradually over time, as would be expected if these changes emerged within Anatolia. This directs attention to nearby Black Sea regions as a more likely origin for domesticated horses, the authors say.

New Viking DNA research yields unexpected information about who they were

In the popular imagination, Vikings were fearsome blonde-haired warriors from Scandinavia who used longboats to carry out raids across Europe in a brief but bloody reign of terror. But the reality is more complex, says SFU Archaeology Prof. Mark Collard.

Collard is a member of an international team of researchers that has just published the results of the world's largest DNA sequencing of Viking skeletons, in this week's edition of Nature.

Led by Prof. Eske Willerslev of the Universities of Cambridge and Copenhagen, the research team extracted and analysed DNA from the remains of 442 men, women and children.

The remains were recovered from archaeological sites in Scandinavia, the U.K., Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, Estonia, Ukraine, Poland and Russia, and mostly date to the Viking Age (ca. 750-1050 AD).

The team's analyses yielded a number of findings. One of the most noteworthy is that contrary to what has often been assumed, Viking identity was not limited to people of Scandinavian ancestry--the team discovered that two skeletons from a Viking burial site in the Orkney Islands were of Scottish ancestry.

They also found evidence that there was significant gene flow into Scandinavia from the British Isles, Southern Europe, and Asia before and during the Viking Age, which further undermines the image of the Vikings as 'pure' Scandinavians.

Another discovery that runs counter to the standard image of the Vikings is that many had brown hair, not blonde hair.

The analyses' results also shed light on the Vikings' activities. For example, consistent with patterns documented by historians and archaeologists, the team found that Vikings who travelled to England generally had Danish ancestry, while the majority of Vikings who travelled to Scotland, Ireland, Iceland and Greenland had Norwegian ancestry. In contrast, Vikings who headed east were mostly from Sweden.

Interestingly, says Collard, data revealed a number of close kin among the 442 individuals. Four members of a Viking raiding party interred in a boat burial in Estonia were found to be brothers, while two individuals buried 300 to 400 kilometers apart in Sweden were found to be cousins. Perhaps even more strikingly, the team identified a pair of second-degree male relatives (i.e. half-brothers, nephew-uncle, or grandson-grandfather) from two sites, one in Denmark and one in England.

"We have this image of well-connected Vikings mixing with each other, trading and going on raiding parties to fight Kings across Europe because this is what we see on television and read in books - but genetically we have shown for the first time that it wasn't that kind of world. This study changes the perception of who a Viking actually was," says Willerslev. "No one could have predicted these significant gene flows into Scandinavia from Southern Europe and Asia happened before and during the Viking Age."

Of all the team's discoveries, Collard is most intrigued by the identification of close kin.

"While the 'big picture' discoveries are great, I was blown away by the fact that the analyses revealed the presence of four brothers in the Estonian boat burial, and a possible nephew and uncle on either side of the North Sea."

"These findings have important implications for social life in the Viking world, but we would've remained ignorant of them without ancient DNA. They really underscore the power of the approach for understanding history."

Dust may have controlled ancient human civilization

 

New study published in Geology

GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA

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IMAGE: MAP SHOWS THE LEVANT REGION (SHADED IN ORANGE), WHICH IS THE WESTERN PART OF THE OVERALL FERTILE CRESCENT REGION (SHADED IN YELLOW); THE STUDY AREAS IN ISRAEL AND CRETE ARE... view more 

CREDIT: RIVKA AMIT ET AL. AND GEOLOGY

Boulder, Colo., USA: When early humans began to travel out of Africa and spread into Eurasia over a hundred thousand years ago, a fertile region around the eastern Mediterranean Sea called the Levant served as a critical gateway between northern Africa and Eurasia. A new study, published in Geology, shows that the existence of that oasis depended almost entirely on something we almost never think about: dust.

Dr. Rivka Amit, at the Geological Survey of Israel, and her team initially set out with a simple question: why are some soils around the Mediterranean thin and why are some thick? Their investigation led them to discover not only that dust deposition played a critical role in forming thick soils in the Levant, but also that had the source of dust not changed 200,000 years ago, early humans might have had a much tougher time leaving Africa, and parts of the Fertile Crescent wouldn't have been so hospitable for civilization to take root.

Thick soils tend to form in areas with wet, humid climates, and thin soils form in arid environments with lower weathering rates. But in the Mediterranean, where much of the bedrock is dissolvable carbonate, the opposite is true: wetter northern regions have thin, unproductive soils, and more arid southeastern regions have thick, productive soils. Some scientists have attributed these patterns to differences in the rates of erosion, driven by human activity. But for Amit, who has been studying the area for years, a high erosion rate alone didn't make sense. She challenged the existing hypotheses, reasoning that another factor--dust input--likely plays a critical role when weathering rates are too slow to form soils from bedrock.

To assess the influence of dust on Mediterranean soils, Amit and her team needed to trace the dust back to its original source. They collected dust samples from soils in the region, as well as nearby and far-flung dust sources, and compared the samples' grain size distribution. The team identified a key difference between areas with thin and thick soils: thin soils comprised only the finest grain sizes sourced from distant deserts like the Sahara, whereas the thicker, more productive soils had coarser dust called loess, sourced from the nearby Negev desert and its massive dune fields. The thick soils in the eastern Mediterranean formed 200,000 years ago when glaciers covered large swaths of land, grinding up bedrock and creating an abundance of fine-grained sediments. "The whole planet was a lot dustier," Amit said, which allowed extensive dune fields like those in the Negev to build up, creating new sources of dust and ultimately, thicker soils in places like the Levant.

Amit, then, had her answer: regions with thin soils simply hadn't received enough loess to form thick, agriculturally productive soils, whereas the southeastern Mediterranean had. "Erosion here is less important," she said. "What's important is whether you get an influx of coarse [dust] fractions. [Without that], you get thin, unproductive soils."

Amit didn't stop there. She now knew that the thickest soils had received a large flux of coarse dust, leading to the area's designation as the "land of milk and honey" for its agricultural productivity. Her next question was, had it always been like this?

She was surprised at what they found. Looking below the loess in the soil profile, they found a dearth of fine-grained sediments. "What was [deposited] before the loess were very thin soils," she said. "It was a big surprise... The landscape was totally different, so I'm not sure that people would [have chosen] this area to live in because it was a harsh environment and [an] almost bare landscape, without much soil." Without the changing winds and formation of the Negev dune field, then, the fertile area that served as a passage for early humans may have been too difficult to pass through and survive.

In the modern Mediterranean, the soils aren't accumulating any more. "The dust source is cut off," Amit explained, since the glaciers retreated in the Holocene, "now we're only reworking the old loess." Even if there were a dust source, it would take tens of thousands of years to rebuild a soil there. That leaves these mountainous soils in a fragile state, and people living there must balance conservation and agricultural use. Employing responsible agricultural practices in the region, as terracing has been used for thousands of years, is critical for soil preservation if agriculture is to continue.