Study sheds new light on the origin of civilization

 

New research from the University of Warwick, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Reichman University, Universitat Pompeu Fabra and the Barcelona School of Economics challenges the conventional theory that the transition from foraging to farming drove the development of complex, hierarchical societies by creating agricultural surplus in areas of fertile land.

In The Origin of the State: Land Productivity or Appropriability?, published in the April issue of the Journal of Political Economy – one of the oldest and most prestigious journals in economics - Professors Joram Mayshar, Omer Moav and Luigi Pascali show that high land productivity on its own does not lead to the development of tax-levying states.

It is the adoption of cereal crops that is the key factor for the emergence of hierarchy.

The authors theorise that this is because the nature of cereals require that they be harvested and stored in accessible locations, making them easier to appropriate as tax than root crops which remain in the ground, and are less storable.

The researchers demonstrate a causal effect of cereal cultivation on the emergence of hierarchy  using empirical evidence drawn from multiple data sets spanning several millennia, and find no similar effect for land productivity.

Professor Mayshar said: “A theory linking land productivity and surplus to the emergence of hierarchy has developed over a few centuries and became conventional in thousands of books and articles. We show, both theoretically and empirically, that this theory is flawed.”

Underpinning the study, Mayshar, Moav and Pascali developed and examined a large number of data sets including the level of hierarchical complexity in society; the geographic distribution of wild relatives of domesticated plants; and land suitability for various crops to explore why in some regions, despite thousands of years of successful farming, well-functioning states did not emerge, while states that could tax and provide protection to lives and property emerged elsewhere.

Professor Pascali said: “Using these novel data, we were able to show that complex hierarchies, like complex chiefdoms and states, arose in areas in which cereal crops, which are easy to tax and to expropriate, were de-facto the only available crops. Paradoxically, the most productive lands, those in which not only cereals but also roots and tubers were available and productive, did not experience the same political developments.” 

They also employed the natural experiment of the Columbian Exchange, the interchange of crops between the New World and the Old World in the late 15th century which radically changed land productivity and the productivity advantage of cereals over roots and tubers in most countries in the world.

Professor Pascali said “Constructing these new data sets, investigating case studies, and developing the theory and empirical strategy took us nearly  a decade of hard work. We are very pleased to see that the paper is finally printed in a journal with the standing of the JPE.” 

Professor Moav said: “Following the transition from foraging to farming, hierarchical societies and, eventually, tax-levying states have emerged. These states played a crucial role in economic development by providing protection, law and order, which eventually enabled industrialization and the unprecedented welfare enjoyed today in many countries.”

“The conventional theory is that this disparity is due to differences in land productivity. The conventional argument is that food surplus must be produced before a state can tax farmers’ crops, and therefore that high land productivity plays the key role.

Professor Mayshar added: “We challenge the conventional productivity theory, contending that it was not an increase in food production that led to complex hierarchies and states, but rather the transition to reliance on appropriable cereal grains that facilitate taxation by the emerging elite. When it became possible to appropriate crops, a taxing elite emerged, and this led to the state.

“Only where the climate and geography favoured cereals, was hierarchy likely to develop. Our data shows that the greater the productivity advantage of cereals over tubers, the greater the likelihood of hierarchy emerging.

“Suitability of highly productive roots and tubers is in fact a curse of plenty, which prevented the emergence of states and impeded economic development.”

ENDS

• A short video presenting the key findings is here: https://youtu.be/_h2C8Z5yYmY
• The Origin of the State: Land Productivity or Appropriability? Joram Mayshar, Omer Moav, and Luigi Pascali; Journal of Political Economy 2022 130:4, 1091-1144
• https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/718372

A population hub out of Africa explains East Asian lineages in Europe 45,000 years ago

 

The ancient human remains unearthed in the Bacho Kiro cave (in present-day Bulgaria) and recently genetically described were surprisingly reported to be more closely related to contemporary East Asians than contemporary Europeans. Several scenarios were proposed to account for the finding, but this puzzling result so far raised more questions than answers concerning the underlying ancient population movements that could explain the presence of genetically East Asian individuals in Europe ~45.000 years ago.

Schematic representation of the peopling of Eurasia through repeated waves of expansion from an out of Africa population Hub (grey-shaded area, precise location is not known); the red arrows represents the expansion associated with Initial Upper Paleolithic material culture and the blue arrows the expansion associated with Upper Paleolithic assemblages. Kya= kylo years ago.

CREDIT

Leonardo Vallini, Giulia Marciani

A study published in Genome Biology and Evolution attempted to solve this mystery, by putting those individuals in the wider context of Eurasian Palaeolithic human genomes and co-analysing genetics and archaeological evidence. The study was led by Leonardo Vallini and by Prof. Luca Pagani, from the University of Padova in collaboration with Dr. Giulia Marciani and Prof. Stefano Benazzi from the University of Bologna, Italy.

In the scenario put forward by the authors, the colonisation of East and West Eurasia was characterised by several events of expansion and local extinction from a population Hub, where the ancestors of all Eurasians thrived after they first ventured out of Africa ~70-60 thousand years ago.

An early, failed Homo sapiens expansion took place sometime earlier than 45 thousand years ago. The only representative of that migration, that is related to neither modern Europeans nor to modern Asians, has been recovered from Zlatý kůň, in present day Czech Republic and it is yet unclear how widespread it was.

“Then, around 45 kya, a new expansion emanated from the Hub and colonised a wide area spanning from Europe to East Asia and Oceania and is associated with a mode of producing stone tools known as Initial Upper Paleolithic” says Leonardo Vallini, first Author of the study.

The fate of these settlers was different in East Asia and in Europe: while in the former they endured and ultimately led to the formation of the modern populations of East Asia, the European representatives of this expansion declined and largely disappeared, leaving the Bacho Kiro, the elusive Oase individual from Romania and a few other remains as the only witness of this early peopling of Europe.

“It is curious to note that, around the same time, also the last Neanderthals went extinct”, says Giulia Marciani, from the University of Bologna and coauthor of the study.

“Finally, one last expansion occurred sometime earlier than 38 kya and re-colonized Europe from the same population Hub, whose location is yet to be clarified”, summarises Luca Pagani, senior author of the study. “Although even in Europe there were occasional interactions with survivors of the previous wave, an extensive and generalized admixture between the two waves only took place in Siberia where it gave rise to a peculiar ancestry known as Ancestral North Eurasian, which eventually contributed to the ancestry of Native Americans”.

This migration is associated with a different cultural assembly named Upper Paleolithic, which characterises the main European palaeolithic sites. “It is noteworthy that, from a cultural perspective, these novel stone tools have often been depicted as an independent assembly rather than a local development of pre-existing technologies in Europe: it is refreshing to see that genetic and cultural information can be reconciled under a comprehensive scenario”, concludes Telmo Pievani, from the University of Padova and coauthor of the study.

The authors conclude that further efforts should be directed into clarifying the geographic whereabouts of the Hub, and to identify both the internal and external causes underlying these ancient population movements, as well as the associated cultural dynamics.

---

JOURNAL

Genome Biology and Evolution

DOI

10.1093/gbe/evac045 

Agriculture in southeast China in Late Neolithic

 The emergence and spread of agriculture in the Neolithic had a revolutionary impact on the development of human society, and it provided a solid economic basis for the origin and development of human civilization. In southern China, the original crop was rice, but over time, millet cultivation gradually spread. Affected by these various environmental and social developmental factors, there are still many issues about spatiotemporal detail of agriculture development in southern Anhui Province, China, with most information currently deriving from historical documents and rather limited archeological evidence.

The study, looked at data of the archeobotanical remains at the Jingshuidun site in the mountainous areas of the lower reaches of the Yangtze River in southern Anhui Province. This work was carried out by the research team of Wu Yan, from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, entitled “The history of agriculture in the mountainous areas of the lower Yangtze River since the late Neolithic” is published online in Frontiers of Earth Science on 2022.

The study site of Jingshuidun (31°48 '3"N, 117°11′ 50" E), located at the intersection of the lower reaches Yangtze River Plain and the mountainous area in southern Anhui Province, preserves thick archeological strata and a rare superpositional relationship of multiple occupational periods, allowing for the study of cultural stages and archaeobotany.

The authors noted that macrobotanical remains and phytoliths of domesticated rice are present in layers at the Jingshuidun site dated to 4874–4820 cal. yr B.P. (middle-late Liangzhu Period) and 2667–2568 cal. yr B.P. (late Western Zhou Dynasty to the early Spring and Autumn Period). Moreover, macrobotanical remains and phytoliths from the site document the earliest remains of foxtail millet (Setaria italica) in southern Anhui Province, from a layer dating to the late Western Zhou Dynasty and the early Spring and Autumn Period (2667–2568 cal. yr B.P.). These results suggest that the people occupying the Jingshuidun site used single rice farming as far back as 4874–4820 cal. yr B.P., and they began to plant millet by at least 2667–2568 cal. yr B.P., documenting the spread of millet agriculture to the southern area by that time.

The study also showed that there were many traces of carbonized millet remains in layers dated to 2667–2568 cal. yr B.P. in the Jingshuidun site, which is the earliest direct dating of millet remains in southern Anhui. Evidence of macrobotanical remains at the Jingshuidun site shows that dry cultivation techniques from northern China had spread to southern Anhui by 2667–2568 cal. yr B.P., and that mixed cultivation of rice and millet occurred. It may be caused by the migration of ancient people and the change of climate.

The analyses of their study on macrobotanical remains and phytoliths also formed the basis for the reconstruction of the subsistence economy of ancient humans at the Jingshuidun site from the late Neolithic to early historical times. They can obtain a clearer picture of the development of rice and millet agriculture in the southern Anhui Province region, as well as the spread of millet cultivation, when combined their dates with that of the previous archeobotanical work. It provides new evidence for further understanding of agricultural development and the transmission route of Millet in southern Anhui since the late Neolithic period.

 

Cite this article

Wang, J., Chen, X., Zhang, G. et al. The history of agriculture in the mountainous areas of the lower Yangtze River since the late Neolithic. Front. Earth Sci. (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11707-021-0956-z

 

First European farmers' heights did not meet expectations

 

 

IMAGE: DRAWING OF A SCIENTIST WORKING WITH HUMAN SKELETAL REMAINS AND ANCIENT DNA. view more 

CREDIT: MARIJA STOJKOVIC

A combined study of genetics and skeletal remains show that the switch from primarily hunting, gathering and foraging to farming about 12,000 years ago in Europe may have had negative health effects as indicated by shorter than expected heights in the earliest farmers, according to an international team of researchers.

"Recent studies tried to characterize the contribution of DNA to height," said Stephanie Marciniak, assistant research professor, Penn State. "We started thinking about the longstanding questions around the shift from hunting, gathering and foraging to sedentary farming and decided to look at the health affect with height as a proxy."

Working with George H. Perry, associate professor of anthropology and biology, Penn State, and more than 40 international researchers, Marciniak looked at the heights of individuals who lived before the Neolithic, and in the Neolithic, Copper, Bronze and Iron ages. The researchers measured the long bones of skeletal remains that were also being sampled or already been sampled for ancient DNA testing by other researchers.

The researchers created a model that used adult height, indicators of stress seen in the bones and ancient DNA. They also looked at genetic indications of ancestry. The researchers reported their results in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Our approach is unique in that we used height measurements and ancient DNA taken from the same individuals," said Marciniak.

The switch from a hunting, gathering and foraging lifestyle to a settled agricultural lifestyle did not occur across Europe simultaneously, but in different places at different times.

The researchers studied 167 individuals who lived from 38,000 to 2,400 years ago. This included preagricultural individuals, the earliest farmers and subsequent farmers. They found that individuals from the Neolithic, taking into account their genetically indicated potential heights, were an average of 1.5 inches shorter than previous individuals and 0.87 inches shorter than subsequent individuals. They also found that heights steadily increased through the Copper — 0.77 inches, the Bronze — 1.06 inches, and the Iron — 1.29 inches with respect to Neolithic heights.

"Right now, what we know is that 80% of height is from genetic makeup and 20% is from the environment," said Marciniak. "Researchers haven't yet identified all the genetic variants associated with for height."

The switch from hunting, gathering and foraging to agriculture did not always result in a height loss, although it did in some parts of Europe, according to Marciniak.

Marciniak and her team also looked at genetic ancestry in their study.

"There was movement of people, generally from east to west, " she said. "We wanted to account for that migration that perhaps brought different proportions of height-associated genetic variants."

When the team incorporated ancestral information, they found that for the Neolithic, the height decrease is reduced a bit so that it is not as extreme.

"This research requires more study with larger datasets," said Marciniak. "Our work represents a snapshot of something that is very dynamic and very nuanced. We need to do more to see what is the cause of the decrease in achieved height versus predicted genetic height during the shift to farming."

The researchers said they believe that their approach is adaptable to studies of past human health and could be applied in other contexts.

How modern European populations have evolved over the past 50,000 years

Neolithic made us taller and more intelligent but more prone to heart disease

 

After the Neolithic, European populations showed an increase in height and intelligence, reduced skin pigmentation and increased risk of cardiovascular disease due to genetic changes that lowered concentrations of 'good' HDL cholesterol. The changes reflect ongoing evolutionary processes in humans and highlight the impact the Neolithic revolution had on our lifestyle and health, write researchers from Nijmegen and Hannover in Frontiers in Genetics. Research of these past events offers interesting starting points for today's science and health care.

 

Just like plants, animals and other organisms, humans are dynamic organisms with variable traits. Look at how humans behave and their appearance and you will see differences in skin colour, eating habits, susceptibility to diseases, height and so on. Such external features are called 'phenotype'. This appearance (phenotype) can be influenced by, for example, genetic factors, social and cultural habits, eating behaviour and environmental factors.

Nijmegen scientists, in cooperation with colleagues from the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research (HZI, Hannover), have investigated whether they could trace the development of some complex human traits of modern Europeans from, say, 50,000 years B.C. to the present. These are complex traits such as height and intelligence. In this case, ‘complex’ means this trait is not determined by one gene but by dozens or even hundreds of genes. Each of these genes has only a very small effect on such a trait.

 

Genetic archaeology

How can you track down all the genes that interfere with height? This can be done with a technique called GWAS: genome-wide association studies. You take all human genes (genome) to see which genes have an effect on height. It’s not a causal relationship (you do not know exactly how those genes influence height), but a statistical relationship (it is always the same genes that show up when height is determined). In a large population study, you can get a list of genes involved in human height and compare this list of genes of modern Europeans with those of our distant ancestors. Archaeological research has unearthed already more than 800 people whose DNA has been mapped. Ultimately, this reference gives you a kind of timeline of European height genes, in which you can search for changes and turning points along the way.

 

Speeding up evolutionary processes

The researchers analyzed not only height but also other complex features such as skin pigmentation, weight/BMI, lipid metabolism, intelligence and cardiovascular disease. "In general, we see a clear change of some of these traits before and after the Neolithic Revolution, as if there was an acceleration of evolutionary processes then," says Mihai Netea from Radboudumc. The Neolithic (New Stone Age) is an important period in human development, often referred to as the Neolithic Revolution. Wandering hunter-gatherers slowly disappeared and were replaced by locally settled farmers, resulting in a completely different lifestyle, change of diet, and different socio-cultural customs.

 

Height, skin colour, cholesterol

Yang Li, researcher at the HZI: "During this transitional period, we not only found a clear change in body height, but in skin colour as well. Europeans, for example, have retained their dark skin colour for a remarkably long time, and it really lightens during this period. This may be due to migration from populations in the Middle East with less pigmented skin. In many genes involved in metabolism and the risk of cardiovascular disease we saw little change, only with one obvious exception: HDL cholesterol - often called 'good' cholesterol - shows a clear decrease. It increases the risk of arthrosclerosis, but there’s a link with intelligence as well."

 

Intelligence

There’s a change in genetic factors that leads to the development of coronary artery disease by means of a decrease in HDL cholesterol. This raises the question, what is the evolutionary advantage of this lower HDL-cholesterol concentration? Li: "Perhaps it is in the development of cognitive functions, because cholesterol is fundamental to the development and functioning of the brain. Some minimal changes in genes - called polymorphisms - in cholesterol metabolism have been linked to cognitive functions, while variations in levels of HDL and LDL have been linked to changes in intelligence, learning and memory. These are hypotheses, not proofs, but illustrate the importance of this research, in which we are exploring factors that can influence the development of complex human traits."

 

Useful for the present

This evolutionary research into the change of human traits in Europeans past can also be useful for the present. Netea: "It helps us to understand the physiology of contemporary humans and we may be able to tailor public health measures better to specific populations. Research has learned, for example, that Asian populations already have an increased risk of metabolic and cardiovascular complications at a lower BMI compared to European populations. We can take that into account in prevention strategies. Look at the mass rural-urban migration, which is accompanied by major changes in social and cultural habits, eating behaviour and environmental factors. What will it mean for important human physiological traits, for evolutionary pressures on human traits and genes, and human diseases in modern societies?"

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JOURNAL

Frontiers in Genetics

DOI

10.3389/fgene.2022.833190 

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Origins of the Avars

 

 

IMAGE: RECONSTRUCTION OF AN AVAR-PERIOD ARMOURED HORSEMAN BASED ON GRAVE 1341/1503 OF THE DERECSKE-BIKÁS-DŰLŐ SITE (DÉRI MUSEUM, DEBRECEN). view more 

CREDIT: © ILONA C. KISS

In the 560s, the Avars established an empire that lasted more than 200 years, centered in the Carpathian Basin. Despite much scholarly debate their initial homeland and origin has remained unclear. They are primarily known from historical sources of their enemies, the Byzantines, who wondered about the origin of the fearsome Avar warriors after their sudden appearance in Europe. Had they come from the Rouran empire in the Mongolian steppe (which had just been destroyed by the Turks), or should one believe the Turks who strongly disputed such a prestigious legacy?

Historians have wondered whether that was a well-organised migrant group or a mixed band of fugitives. Archaeological research has pointed to many parallels between the Carpathian Basin and Eurasian nomadic artefacts (weapons, vessels, horse harnesses), for instance a lunula-shaped pectoral of gold used as a symbol of power. We also know that the Avars introduced the stirrup in Europe. Yet we have so far not been able to trace their origin in the wide Eurasian steppes.

In this study, a multidisciplinary team - including researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, the ELTE University and the Institute of Archaeogenomics of Budapest, Harvard Medical School in Boston, the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton - analysed 66 individuals from the Carpathian Basin. The study included the eight richest Avar graves ever discovered, overflowing with golden objects, as well as other individuals from the region prior to and during the Avar age. “We address a question that has been a mystery for more than 1400 years: who were the Avar elites, mysterious founders of an empire that almost crushed Constantinople and for more than 200 years ruled the lands of modern-day Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Austria, Croatia and Serbia?”, explains Johannes Krause, senior author of the study.

Fastest long-distance migration in human history

The Avars did not leave written records about their history and these first genome-wide data provide robust clues about their origins. “The historical contextualization of the archaeogenetic results allowed us to narrow down the timing of the proposed Avar migration. They covered more than 5000 kilometres in a few years from Mongolia to the Caucasus, and after ten more years settled in what is now Hungary. This is the fastest long-distance migration in human history that we can reconstruct up to this point,” explains Choongwon Jeong, co-senior author of the study.

Guido Gnecchi-Ruscone, the lead author of the study, adds: “Besides their clear affinity to Northeast Asia and their likely origin due to the fall of the Rouran Empire, we also see that the 7th-century Avar period elites show 20 to 30 percent of additional non-local ancestry, likely associated with the North Caucasus and the Western Asian Steppe, which could suggest further migration from the Steppe after their arrival in the 6th century.” The East Asian ancestry is found in individuals from several sites in the core settlement area between the Danube and Tisza rivers in modern day central Hungary. However, outside the primary settlement region we find high variability in inter-individual levels of admixture, especially in the south-Hungarian site of Kölked. This suggests an immigrant Avars elite ruling a diverse population with the help of a heterogeneous local elite.

These exciting results show how much potential there is in the unprecedented collaboration between geneticists, archaeologists, historians and anthropologists for the research on the ‘Migration period’ in the first millennium CE.