Archaeology News Report

Thursday, April 8, 2021

Archaeologists uncover earliest evidence of domesticated dogs in Arabian Peninsula

Dog bones dated between circa 4200 and 4000 BCE discovered

TAYLOR & FRANCIS GROUP

IMAGE: THIS BURIAL SITE IN A BADLANDS AREA OF ALULA IN NORTH-WEST SAUDI ARABIA IS CURRENTLY RARE FOR NEOLITHIC-CHALCOLITHIC ARABIA IN BEING BUILT ABOVE-GROUND AND MEANT TO BE VISUALLY PROMINENT.... view more
CREDIT: ROYAL COMMISSION OF AL-ULA

A team of archaeologists in north-west the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has uncovered the earliest evidence of dog domestication by the region's ancient inhabitants.

The discovery came from one of the projects in the large-scale archaeological surveys and excavations of the region commissioned by the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU).

The researchers found the dog's bones in a burial site that is one of the earliest monumental tombs identified in the Arabian Peninsula, roughly contemporary with such tombs already dated further north in the Levant.

Evidence shows the earliest use of the tomb was circa 4300 BCE and received burials for at least 600 years during the Neolithic-Chalcolithic era - an indication that the inhabitants may have had a shared memory of people, places and the connection between them.

"What we are finding will revolutionize how we view periods like the Neolithic in the Middle East. To have that kind of memory, that people may have known for hundreds of years where their kin were buried - that's unheard of in this period in this region," said Melissa Kennedy, assistant director of the Aerial Archaeology in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (AAKSAU) - AlUla project.

"AlUla is at a point where we're going to begin to realize how important it was to the development of mankind across the Middle East," said the AAKSAU director, Hugh Thomas.

This is the earliest evidence of a domesticated dog in the Arabian Peninsula by a margin of circa 1,000 years.

The findings are published in the Journal of Field Archaeology.

The project team, with Saudi and international members, focused its efforts on two above-ground burial sites dating to the 5th and 4th millennia BCE and located 130 kilometers apart, one in volcanic uplands and the other in arid badlands. The sites were above ground, which is unique for that period of Arabian history, and were positioned for maximum visibility.

The research team detected the sites by using satellite imagery and then by aerial photography from a helicopter. Ground fieldwork began in late 2018.

It was in the volcanic uplands site that 26 fragments of a single dog's bones were found, alongside with bones from 11 humans - six adults, an adolescent and four children.

The dog's bones showed signs of arthritis, which suggests the animal lived with the humans into its middle or old age.

After assembling the bones, the team then had to determine that they were from a dog and not from a similar animal such as a desert wolf.

The team's zoo archaeologist, Laura Strolin, was able to show it was indeed a dog by analyzing one bone in particular, from the animal's left front leg. The breadth of this bone was 21.0 mm, which is in the range of other ancient Middle Eastern dogs. In comparison, the wolves of that time and place had a breadth of 24.7 to 26 mm for the same bone.

The dog's bones were dated to between circa 4200 and 4000 BCE.

Rock art found in the region indicates that the Neolithic inhabitants used dogs when hunting ibex, and other animals.

The fieldwork uncovered other noteworthy artefacts, including a leaf-shaped mother-of-pearl pendant at the volcanic uplands site and a carnelian bead found at the arid badlands site.

The researchers expect more findings in future as a result of the massive survey from the air and on the ground, and multiple targeted excavations in the AlUla region undertaken by the AAKSAU and other teams, which are operating under the auspices of the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU). The AAKSAU team is led by researchers from the University of Western Australia in Perth, Australia.

The researchers note that AlUla is a largely unexplored area located in a part of the world that has a fertile archaeological heritage of recognized global value.

"This article from RCU's work at AlUla establishes benchmarks. There is much more to come as we reveal the depth and breadth of the area's archaeological heritage," said Rebecca Foote, Director of Archaeology and Cultural Heritage Research for RCU.

Study: Scant evidence that 'wood overuse' at Cahokia caused collapse

WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS

Research News

Whatever ultimately caused inhabitants to abandon Cahokia, it was not because they cut down too many trees, according to new research from Washington University in St. Louis.

Archaeologists from Arts & Sciences excavated around earthen mounds and analyzed sediment cores to test a persistent theory about the collapse of Cahokia, the pre-Columbian Native American city in southwestern Illinois that was once home to more than 15,000 people.

No one knows for sure why people left Cahokia, though many environmental and social explanations have been proposed. One oft-repeated theory is tied to resource exploitation: specifically, that Native Americans from densely populated Cahokia deforested the area, an environmental misstep that could have resulted in erosion and localized flooding.

But such musings about self-inflicted disaster are outdated -- and they're not supported by physical evidence of flooding issues, Washington University scientists said.

"There's a really common narrative about land use practices that lead to erosion and sedimentation and contribute to all of these environmental consequences," said Caitlin Rankin, an assistant research scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who conducted this work as part of her graduate studies at Washington University.

"When we actually revisit this, we're not seeing evidence of the flooding," Rankin said.

"The notion of looming ecocide is embedded in a lot of thinking about current and future environmental trajectories," said Tristram R. "T.R." Kidder, the Edward S. and Tedi Macias Professor of Anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University. "With a growing population and more mouths to feed, overconsumption of all resources is a real risk.

"Inevitably, people turn to the past for models of what has happened. If we are to understand what caused changes at sites like Cahokia, and if we are to use these as models for understanding current possibilities, we need to do the hard slogging that critically evaluates different ideas," added Kidder, who leads an ongoing archaeological research program at the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site. "Such work allows us to sift through possibilities so we can aim for those variables that do help us to explain what happened in the past -- and explore if this has a lesson to tell us about the future."

No indications of self-inflicted harm

Writing in the journal Geoarchaeology, Rankin and colleagues at Bryn Mawr University and Northern Illinois University described their recent excavations around a Mississippian Period (AD 1050-1400) earthen mound in the Cahokia Creek floodplain.

Their new archaeological work, completed while Rankin was at Washington University, shows that the ground surface on which the mound was constructed remained stable until industrial development.

The presence of a stable ground surface from Mississippian occupation to the mid-1800s does not support the expectations of the so-called "wood-overuse" hypothesis, the researchers said.

This hypothesis, first proposed in 1993, suggests that tree clearance in the uplands surrounding Cahokia led to erosion, causing increasingly frequent and unpredictable floods of the local creek drainages in the floodplain where Cahokia was constructed.

Rankin noted that archaeologists have broadly applied narratives of ecocide -- the idea that societies fail because people overuse or irrevocably damage the natural resources that their people rely on -- to help to explain the collapse of past civilizations around the world.

Although many researchers have moved beyond classic narratives of ecocide made popular in the 1990s and early 2000s, Cahokia is one such major archaeological site where untested hypotheses have persisted.

"We need to be careful about the assumptions that we build into these narratives," Rankin said.

"In this case, there was evidence of heavy wood use," she said. "But that doesn't factor in the fact that people can reuse materials -- much as you might recycle. We should not automatically assume that deforestation was happening, or that deforestation caused this event."

Kidder said: "This research demonstrates conclusively that the over-exploitation hypothesis simply isn't tenable. This conclusion is important because the hypothesis at Cahokia -- and elsewhere -- is sensible on its face. The people who constructed this remarkable site had an effect on their environment. We know they cut down tens of thousands of trees to make the palisades -- and this isn't a wild estimate, because we can count the number of trees used to build and re-build this feature. Wood depletion could have been an issue."

"The hypothesis came to be accepted as truth without any testing," Kidder said. "Caitlin's study is important because she did the hard work -- and I do mean hard, and I do mean work -- to test the hypothesis, and in doing so has falsified the claim. I'd argue that this is the exciting part; it's basic and fundamental science. By eliminating this possibility, it moves us toward other explanations and requires we pursue other avenues of research."

Wednesday, April 7, 2021

Neanderthal ancestry identifies oldest modern human genome

The fossil skull of a woman in Czechia has provided the oldest modern human genome yet reconstructed, representing a population that formed before the ancestors of present-day Europeans and Asians split apart

MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY

Research News

IMAGE: INITIAL ATTEMPTS TO DATE ZLATÝ K?? BASED ON THE SHAPE OF HER SKULL SUGGESTED SHE WAS AT LEAST 30,000 YEARS OLD. RESEARCHERS NOW BELIEVE SHE LIVED MORE THAN 45,000 YEARS... view more
CREDIT: MARTIN FROUZ

Ancient DNA from Neandertals and early modern humans has recently shown that the groups likely interbred somewhere in the Near East after modern humans left Africa some 50,000 years ago. As a result, all people outside Africa carry around 2% to 3% Neandertal DNA. In modern human genomes, those Neandertal DNA segments became increasingly shorter over time and their length can be used to estimate when an individual lived. Archaeological data published last year furthermore suggests that modern humans were already present in southeastern Europe 47-43,000 years ago, but due to a scarcity of fairly complete human fossils and the lack of genomic DNA, there is little understanding of who these early human colonists were - or of their relationships to ancient and present-day human groups.

In a new study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, an international team of researchers reports what is likely the oldest reconstructed modern human genome to date. First discovered in Czechia, the woman known to researchers as Zlatý k?? (golden horse in Czech) displayed longer stretches of Neanderthal DNA than the 45,000-year-old Ust'-Ishim individual from Siberia, the so-far oldest modern human genome. Analysis suggests that she was part of a population that formed before the populations that gave rise to present-day Europeans and Asians split apart.

A recent anthropological study based on the shape of Zlatý k??'s skull showed similarities with people who lived in Europe before the Last Glacial Maximum - at least 30,000 years ago - but radiocarbon dating produced sporadic results, some as recent as 15,000 years ago. It wasn't until Jaroslav Br?�ek from the Faculty of Science, Prague and Petr Velemínský of Prague's National Museum collaborated with the genetics laboratories of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History that a clearer picture came into view.

"We found evidence of cow DNA contamination in the analyzed bone, which suggests that a bovine-based glue used in the past to consolidate the skull was returning radiocarbon dates younger than the fossil's true age," says Cosimo Posth, co-lead author of the study. Posth was formerly a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and is currently Professor of Archaeo- and Palaeogenetics at the University of Tübingen.

However, it was the Neandertal DNA that led the team to their major conclusions about the age of the fossil. Zlatý k?? carried about the same amount Neanderthal DNA in her genome, as Ust Ishim or other modern humans outside Africa, but the segments with Neanderthal ancestry were on average much longer.

"The results of our DNA analysis show that Zlatý k?? lived closer in time to the admixture event with Neanderthals," says Kay Prüfer, co-lead author of the study.

The scientists were able to estimate that Zlatý k?? lived approximately 2,000 years after the last admixture. Based on these findings, the team argues that Zlatý k?? represents the oldest human genome to date, roughly the same age as - if not a few hundred years older than - Ust'-Ishim.

"It is quite intriguing that the earliest modern humans in Europe ultimately didn't succeed! Just as with Ust'-Ishim and the so far oldest European skull from Oase 1, Zlatý k?? shows no genetic continuity with modern humans that lived in Europe after 40,000 years ago," says Johannes Krause, senior author of the study and director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

One possible explanation for the discontinuity is the Campanian Ignimbrite volcanic eruption roughly 39,000 years ago, which severely affected climate in the northern hemisphere and may have reduced the survival chances of Neanderthals and early modern humans in large parts of Ice Age Europe.

As advances in ancient DNA reveal more about the story of our species, future genetic studies of other early European individuals will help to reconstruct the history and decline of the first modern humans to expand out of Africa and into Eurasia before the formation of modern-day non-African populations.

Foetus in bishop's 1679 coffin was probably his grandson

Bishop Peder Winstrup died in 1679, and is one of the most well-preserved human bodies from the 1600s. Researchers at Lund University in Sweden may now have solved the mystery of why a foetus was hidden in his coffin in Lund Cathedral. DNA from the bishop and the foetus, along with kinship analyses, has shown that the child was probably the bishop's own grandson.

Something is protruding between Bishop Peder Winstrup's two calves. The X-ray reveals small bones. Could it be an animal? When the image is studied more closely, the osteologists from Lund University can see faint signs of what is to become the collarbones - it is a human foetus.

Inside the coffin they find the bundle, wrapped in a piece of linen cloth. Judging by the length of the femur, it was 5-6 months old and stillborn. The discovery raised a number of questions - one of them was why it was in the bishop's coffin.

"It was not uncommon for small children to be placed in coffins with adults. The foetus may have been placed in the coffin after the funeral, when it was in a vaulted tomb in Lund Cathedral and therefore accessible", says Torbjörn Ahlström, professor of historical osteology at Lund University, and one of the leading researchers behind the study.

The burial book from Lund Cathedral confirms that coffins of children were placed here, without them being related to the family.

"Placing a coffin in a vault is one thing, but placing the foetus in the bishop's coffin is quite another. It made us wonder if there was any relationship between the child and the bishop", says Torbjörn Ahlström.

Therefore, researchers at Stockholm University analyzed samples from Peder Winstrup and the foetus. The results show that it was a boy, and that they had a second-degree kinship, that is, they shared roughly 25% of the same genes. Since they had different mitochondrial lineages, but there was a Y-chromosome match, the relationship was determined to be on the father's side.

"Archaeogenetics can contribute to the understanding of kinship relations between buried individuals, and in this case more specifically between Winstrup and the foetus", says Maja Krzewinska at the Center for Paleogenetics at Stockholm University, who was involved in the analysis.

As is the case for second-degree relationships, the following constellations involving Winstrup and the foetus are possible: uncles, nephews, grandparents, grandchildren, half-siblings and double cousins. What is the most probable relationship in this scenario can be deduced from the knowledge that exists about the Winstrup family.

By studying this, the researchers were able to rule out a number of possible relationships, however, one remained a distinct possibility.

"It is possible that the stillborn baby boy was Peder Pedersen Winstrup's son, and therefore the bishop was his grandfather", says Maja Krzewinska.

Perhaps it is a family drama we see the contours of here. Peder Pedersen Winstrup did not follow in his father's and grandfather's footsteps and study theology, instead he became interested in the art of fortification. He lost his father's property in the Great Reduction in 1680, and probably lived on alms from relatives during the latter part of his life. With Peder Pedersen Winstrup's death, the male lineage came to an end for the noble family Winstrup. Placing the deceased foetus in the bishop's coffin must have been a heavily symbolic act: he had given birth to a son, albeit stillborn.

800-year-old medieval pottery fragments reveal Jewish dietary practices

IMAGE: MAP SHOWING THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CITY OF OXFORD FROM THE 8TH CENTURY TO C. 1292, WITH THE JEWISH QUARTER SHOWN IN BLUEview more
CREDIT: PAM MANIX

A team of scientists, led by the University of Bristol, with archaeologists from Oxford Archaeology, have found the first evidence of a religious diet locked inside pottery fragments excavated from the early medieval Jewish community of Oxford.

Keeping kosher is one of the oldest known diets across the world and, for an observant Jew, maintaining these dietary laws (known as Kashruth) is a fundamental part of everyday life. It is a key part of what identifies them as Jews, both amongst their own communities and to the outside world.

Oxford's Jewish quarter was established around St. Aldates in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, following William the Conqueror's invitation to Jews in Northern France to settle in England. Recent excavations by Oxford Archaeology at St Aldates, in the historic heart of Oxford, revealed evidence for two houses, which a medieval census suggested belonged to two Jewish families. One was owned by Jacob f. mag. Moses and called Jacob's Hall, and was said to be one of the most substantial private houses in Oxford and the other house was owned by an Elekin f. Bassina.

During excavations, archaeologists found a stone-built structure, identified as a latrine, and dated to the late 11th and 12th century. A remarkable animal bone assemblage was unearthed in this latrine, dominated by domestic fowl (mainly goose), and with a complete absence of pig bones, hinting at a kosher diet. Fish bones comprised only species such as herring which are kosher. This combination of species suggests a Jewish dietary signature, identified in British zooarchaeology for the first time, and just the third time in medieval Europe.

To investigate whether the inhabitants of the two houses were eating a Jewish diet, the team used a combined chemical and isotopic approach to identify and quantify the food residues absorbed into medieval vessels found at the site.

Their findings, published recently in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, showed that the possible Jewish vessels were only used to cook meats from cattle, sheep and goat. Evidence for pig processing was entirely absent. However, the cooking and eating of pork was evident from the pottery residues and animal bones from a contemporaneous site outside of the Jewish Quarter in Oxford (The Queen's College), and from the earlier Anglo-Saxon phase at St Aldates.

Lead author, Dr Julie Dunne from the University of Bristol's School of Chemistry, said: "This is a remarkable example of how biomolecular information extracted from medieval pottery and combined with ancient documents and animal bones, has provided a unique insight into 800-year-old Jewish dietary practices."

This is the first study of its kind that has been able to identify the practice of keeping kosher, with its associated ritual food practices and taboos, using ancient food residues found in cooking pots, opening the way for similar studies in future.

Edward Biddulph, who managed the post-excavation project at Oxford Archaeology, said: "The results of the excavation at St Aldates and Queen Street have been astonishing, not only revealing rare archaeological evidence of a medieval Jewry in Britain, but also demonstrating the enormous value of carefully focused analysis that combines traditional finds and stratigraphic analysis with scientific techniques."

Dr Lucy Cramp who is a senior lecturer in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at Bristol, and is a co-author of the study, added: "Human dietary choices are based on far more than availability or caloric content. What's really exciting is how this evidence for dietary patterns in Medieval Oxford informs us about the diversity of cultural practices and beliefs that were present in the past, as today."

Professor Richard Evershed FRS who heads up Bristol's Organic Geochemistry Unit and is a co-author of the study, added: "This is another remarkable example of just how far we are able to go with using archaeological science to define many aspects of the lives of our ancestors."

Ancient genomes shed new light on the earliest Europeans and their relationships with Neandertals

IMAGE: THE NICHE 1 SECTOR (LEFT) AND THE MAIN SECTOR (RIGHT) DURING THE EXCAVATIONS OF BACHO KIRO CAVE, BULGARIA, IN 2016. THE CEMENT AREA IN THE FOREGROUND WAS PREVIOUSLY EXCAVATED IN... view more
CREDIT: MPI-EVA/ NIKOLAY ZAHERIEV

An international research team has sequenced the genomes of the oldest securely dated modern humans in Europe who lived around 45,000 years ago in Bacho Kiro Cave, Bulgaria. By comparing their genomes to the genomes of people who lived later in Europe and in Asia the researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, show that this early human group in Europe contributed genes to later people, particularly present-day East Asians. The researchers also identified large stretches of Neandertal DNA in the genomes of the Bacho Kiro Cave people, showing that they had Neandertal ancestors about five to seven generations back in their family histories. This suggests that mixture with Neandertals was the rule rather than the exception when the first modern humans arrived in Europe.

Last year, a research team led by researchers from the National Institute of Archaeology with Museum at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany, reported the discovery of modern human remains found in direct association with the Initial Upper Palaeolithic stone tools at the site of Bacho Kiro Cave in Bulgaria. The oldest individuals found in the cave were directly radiocarbon dated to between 43,000 and 46,000 years ago. They are thus the earliest known dispersal of modern humans across the mid-latitudes of Eurasia.

Mateja Hajdinjak and colleagues have now sequenced the genomes of five individuals found at the Bacho Kiro Cave. Four individuals are between 43,000 to 46,000-years-old and were found together with stone tools belonging to the Initial Upper Palaeolithic, the earliest culture associated with modern humans in Eurasia. An additional individual found in the cave is around 35,000-years-old and found with stone tools of a later type. It was previously thought that bearers of the Initial Upper Palaeolithic died out without contributing genetically to modern humans arriving later. However, the researchers now show that the oldest Bacho Kiro Cave individuals, or groups closely related to them, contributed genes to present-day people. Surprisingly, this contribution is found particularly in East Asia and the Americas rather than in Europe where the Bacho Kiro Cave people lived. These genetic links to Asia mirror the links seen between the Initial Upper Palaeolithic stone tools and personal ornaments found in Bacho Kiro Cave and tools and ancient jewelry found across Eurasia to Mongolia.

Genetic differences between individuals

Importantly, the later 35,000-year-old individual found in Bacho Kiro Cave belonged to a group that was genetically distinct from the earlier inhabitants of the cave. This shows that the earliest history of modern humans in Europe may have been tumultuous and involved population replacements.

The earliest people at Bacho Kiro Cave lived at a time when Neandertals were still around. The researchers therefore scanned their genomes for fragments of Neandertal DNA. "We found that the Bacho Kiro Cave individuals had higher levels of Neandertal ancestry than nearly all other early humans, with the exception of a 40,000-year-old individual from Romania. Crucially, most of this Neandertal DNA comes in extremely long stretches. This shows that these individuals had Neandertal ancestors some five to seven generations back in their family trees" says Mateja Hajdinjak.

Although only a handful of genomes from modern humans who lived at the same time in Eurasia as some of the last Neandertals have been recovered, nearly all of them have recent Neandertal ancestors. "The results suggest that the first modern humans that arrived in Eurasia mixed frequently with Neandertals. They may even have become absorbed into resident Neandertal populations. Only later on did larger modern human groups arrive and replace the Neandertals" says Svante Pääbo, who coordinated the genetic research.

Monday, April 5, 2021

Humans were apex predators for two million years

What did our ancestors eat during the stone age? Mostly meat

TEL-AVIV UNIVERSITY

Research News

IMAGE: HUMAN BRAIN view more
CREDIT: DR. MIKI BEN DOR

Researchers at Tel Aviv University were able to reconstruct the nutrition of stone age humans. In a paper published in the Yearbook of the American Physical Anthropology Association, Dr. Miki Ben-Dor and Prof. Ran Barkai of the Jacob M. Alkov Department of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, together with Raphael Sirtoli of Portugal, show that humans were an apex predator for about two million years. Only the extinction of larger animals (megafauna) in various parts of the world, and the decline of animal food sources toward the end of the stone age, led humans to gradually increase the vegetable element in their nutrition, until finally they had no choice but to domesticate both plants and animals - and became farmers.

"So far, attempts to reconstruct the diet of stone-age humans were mostly based on comparisons to 20th century hunter-gatherer societies," explains Dr. Ben-Dor. "This comparison is futile, however, because two million years ago hunter-gatherer societies could hunt and consume elephants and other large animals - while today's hunter gatherers do not have access to such bounty. The entire ecosystem has changed, and conditions cannot be compared. We decided to use other methods to reconstruct the diet of stone-age humans: to examine the memory preserved in our own bodies, our metabolism, genetics and physical build. Human behavior changes rapidly, but evolution is slow. The body remembers."

In a process unprecedented in its extent, Dr. Ben-Dor and his colleagues collected about 25 lines of evidence from about 400 scientific papers from different scientific disciplines, dealing with the focal question: Were stone-age humans specialized carnivores or were they generalist omnivores? Most evidence was found in research on current biology, namely genetics, metabolism, physiology and morphology.

"One prominent example is the acidity of the human stomach," says Dr. Ben-Dor. "The acidity in our stomach is high when compared to omnivores and even to other predators. Producing and maintaining strong acidity require large amounts of energy, and its existence is evidence for consuming animal products. Strong acidity provides protection from harmful bacteria found in meat, and prehistoric humans, hunting large animals whose meat sufficed for days or even weeks, often consumed old meat containing large quantities of bacteria, and thus needed to maintain a high level of acidity. Another indication of being predators is the structure of the fat cells in our bodies. In the bodies of omnivores, fat is stored in a relatively small number of large fat cells, while in predators, including humans, it's the other way around: we have a much larger number of smaller fat cells. Significant evidence for the evolution of humans as predators has also been found in our genome. For example, geneticists have concluded that "areas of the human genome were closed off to enable a fat-rich diet, while in chimpanzees, areas of the genome were opened to enable a sugar-rich diet."

Evidence from human biology was supplemented by archaeological evidence. For instance, research on stable isotopes in the bones of prehistoric humans, as well as hunting practices unique to humans, show that humans specialized in hunting large and medium-sized animals with high fat content. Comparing humans to large social predators of today, all of whom hunt large animals and obtain more than 70% of their energy from animal sources, reinforced the conclusion that humans specialized in hunting large animals and were in fact hypercarnivores.

"Hunting large animals is not an afternoon hobby," says Dr. Ben-Dor. "It requires a great deal of knowledge, and lions and hyenas attain these abilities after long years of learning. Clearly, the remains of large animals found in countless archaeological sites are the result of humans' high expertise as hunters of large animals. Many researchers who study the extinction of the large animals agree that hunting by humans played a major role in this extinction - and there is no better proof of humans' specialization in hunting large animals. Most probably, like in current-day predators, hunting itself was a focal human activity throughout most of human evolution. Other archaeological evidence - like the fact that specialized tools for obtaining and processing vegetable foods only appeared in the later stages of human evolution - also supports the centrality of large animals in the human diet, throughout most of human history."

The multidisciplinary reconstruction conducted by TAU researchers for almost a decade proposes a complete change of paradigm in the understanding of human evolution. Contrary to the widespread hypothesis that humans owe their evolution and survival to their dietary flexibility, which allowed them to combine the hunting of animals with vegetable foods, the picture emerging here is of humans evolving mostly as predators of large animals.

"Archaeological evidence does not overlook the fact that stone-age humans also consumed plants," adds Dr. Ben-Dor. "But according to the findings of this study plants only became a major component of the human diet toward the end of the era."

Evidence of genetic changes and the appearance of unique stone tools for processing plants led the researchers to conclude that, starting about 85,000 years ago in Africa, and about 40,000 years ago in Europe and Asia, a gradual rise occurred in the consumption of plant foods as well as dietary diversity - in accordance with varying ecological conditions. This rise was accompanied by an increase in the local uniqueness of the stone tool culture, which is similar to the diversity of material cultures in 20th-century hunter-gatherer societies. In contrast, during the two million years when, according to the researchers, humans were apex predators, long periods of similarity and continuity were observed in stone tools, regardless of local ecological conditions.

"Our study addresses a very great current controversy - both scientific and non-scientific," says Prof. Barkai. "For many people today, the Paleolithic diet is a critical issue, not only with regard to the past, but also concerning the present and future. It is hard to convince a devout vegetarian that his/her ancestors were not vegetarians, and people tend to confuse personal beliefs with scientific reality. Our study is both multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary. We propose a picture that is unprecedented in its inclusiveness and breadth, which clearly shows that humans were initially apex predators, who specialized in hunting large animals. As Darwin discovered, the adaptation of species to obtaining and digesting their food is the main source of evolutionary changes, and thus the claim that humans were apex predators throughout most of their development may provide a broad basis for fundamental insights on the biological and cultural evolution of humans."