Ancient humans: Clarifying the co-existence between modern humans and Neanderthals

 

Modern humans may have co-existed with Neanderthals in France and northern Spain for between 1,400 and 2,900 years before Neanderthals disappeared, according to a modelling study published in Scientific Reports. These findings add to our understanding of the existence of the two species of humans in this region.

Recent fossil evidence suggests that modern humans (Homo Sapiens) and Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) may have co-existed in Europe for as long as 5,000 to 6,000 years before Neanderthals became extinct. However, there is currently little evidence for their co-existence at a regional level and it is difficult to establish when the two species first appeared and disappeared in these areas.

Igor Djakovic and colleagues analysed a dataset of 56 Neanderthal and modern human artefacts (28 for each group) from seventeen archaeological sites across France and northern Spain, as well as an additional ten Neanderthal specimens from the same region. All samples had been radiocarbon dated using robust modern techniques since 2000 for greater accuracy. 

The authors used Optimal Linear Estimation and Bayesian probability modelling to estimate the date ranges for these samples and the populations responsible, and infer the earliest and latest dates that these human groups might have been present at the sites. This modelling served to fill in missing portions of the archaeological record, which hamper date estimation.

Based on this modelling, the authors estimate that Neanderthals artefacts first appeared between 45,343 and 44,248 years ago, and disappeared between 39,894 and 39,798 years ago. The date of Neanderthal extinction, based on directly-dated Neanderthal remains, was between 40,870 and 40,457 years ago. Modern humans were estimated to first appear between 42,653 and 42,269 years ago. The authors conclude that this suggests the two species of humans co-existed in these regions for between 1,400 and 2,900 years. These results do not, however, indicate how or whether modern humans and Neanderthals interacted.

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JOURNAL

Scientific Reports

DOI

10.1038/s41598-022-19162-z 

Why is there a genetic risk for brain disorders? Neandertal DNA may provide some answers

It has been known for a long time that human brain disorders such as neurological or psychiatric diseases run in families, suggesting some heritability. In line with this hypothesis, genetic risk factors for developing these illnesses have been identified. However, fundamental questions about the evolutionary drivers have remained elusive. In other words, why are genetic variants that increase the risk for diseases not eliminated in the course of evolution?

To answer these questions has been notoriously difficult. However, new discoveries about events in the deep human past have handed scientists new tools to start to unravel these mysteries: when modern humans moved out of Africa >60,000 years ago, they met and mixed with other archaic humans such as Neandertals. Around 40% of the Neandertal genome can still be found in present-day non-Africans, and each individual still carries ~2% of Neandertal DNA. Some of the archaic genetic variants may have conferred benefits at some point in our evolutionary past. Today, scientists can use this information to learn more about the impact of these genetic variants on human behaviour and the risk of developing diseases.

Using this approach, a new study from an international team led by researchers from the University of Tartu, Charité Berlin and the Amsterdam UMC analysed Neandertal DNA associations with a large variety of more than a hundred brain disorders and traits such as sleep, smoking or alcohol use in the UK Biobank with the aim to narrow down the specific contribution of Neandertal DNA to variation in behavioural features in people today.

The study found that while Neandertal DNA showed over-proportional numbers of associations with several traits that are associated with central nervous system diseases, the diseases themselves did not show any significant numbers of Neandertal DNA associations. Among the traits with the strongest Neandertal DNA contribution were smoking habits, alcohol consumption and sleeping patterns. Using data from other cohorts such as the Estonian Biobank, the Netherlands Study of Depression and Anxiety, FinnGen, Biobank Japan and deCode, several of these results could be replicated. Of specific note were two independent top-risk Neandertal variants for a positive smoking status that were found in the UK Biobank and Biobank Japan respectively.

“Our results suggest that Neandertals carried multiple variants that substantially increase the smoking risk in people today. It remains unclear what phenotypic effects these variants had in Neandertals. However, these results provide interesting candidates for further functional testing and will potentially help us in the future to better understand Neandertal-specific biology,” said Michael Dannemann, associate professor of evolutionary genomics at the University of Tartu and the lead author of this study.

“The significant associations of Neandertal DNA with alcohol and smoking habits might help us to unravel the evolutionary origin of addictive and reward-seeking behaviour,” added Stefan M Gold, professor of neuropsychiatry at Charité, Berlin, who co-led this study. “It is important to note that sleep problems, alcohol and nicotine use have consistently been identified as common risk factors for a range of neurological and psychiatric disorders. On the other hand, there are some intriguing findings from anthropology that have suggested some social benefits of higher tolerance to these substances in hunter-gatherers. Thus, our findings support the hypothesis that it is not brain diseases themselves that have evolutionary explanations but that natural selection shapes traits that make us vulnerable to them in the modern context.”

“Neandertals populated parts of Eurasia already more than 100,000 years before modern humans went out of Africa to populate the rest of the world. The high frequency of some of the variants that are associated with varying sleeping patterns might suggest that these have been advantageous outside of Africa – an environment that is defined, for example, by different levels of seasonality and UV light exposures than the environment that modern humans evolved in,” added Dannemann.

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JOURNAL

Translational Psychiatry

DOI

10.1038/s41398-022-02196-2 

Shrine discovered with rituals never seen to take place before in an Egyptian temple

Researchers from the Sikait Project, directed by UAB Professor Joan Oller Guzmán, recently published new findings from the excavations of the Berenike site, a Greco-Roman seaport in the Egyptian Eastern desert. The study results, published in the American Journal of Archaeology, describes the excavation of a religious complex from the Late Roman Period (between the fourth and sixth centuries) with unprecedented discoveries linked to the presence of the Blemmyes, a nomadic people.

The Sikait Project research team, directed by Professor Joan Oller Guzmán from the Department of Antiquity and Middle Age Studies at the UAB, with financial support from the Fundación PALARQ and the necessary permits from the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities, recently published in American Journal of Archeology the results obtained from the January 2019 excavation season at the ancient seaport of Berenike, located in Egypt’s Eastern desert.

The paper describes the archaeological dig of a religious complex from the Late Roman Period (4th to 6th centuries CE) named the “Falcon Shrine” by researchers, and located within the Northern Complex, one of the most important buildings of the city of Berenike at that time.

The site, which was excavated by the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology and the University of Delaware, was a Red Sea harbour founded by Ptolomy II Philadelphus (3rd century BCE) and continued to operate into the Roman and Byzantine periods, when it was turned into the main point of entrance for commerce coming from Cape Horn, Arabia and India. Within this chronological period, one of the phases yielding the most new discoveries was the one corresponding to the Late Roman Period, from the fourth to sixth centuries CE, a period in which the city seemed to be partially occupied and controlled by the Blemmyes, a nomadic group of people from the Nubian region who at that moment were expanding their domains throughout the greater part of Egypt’s Eastern desert. In this sense, the Northern Complex is fundamental in providing clear evidence of a link with the Blemmyes people, thanks to the discover of inscriptions to some of their kings or the aforementioned Falcon Shrine.

Researchers were able to identify a small traditional Egyptian temple, which after the 4th century was adapted by the Blemmyes to their own belief system. “The material findings are particularly remarkable and include offerings such as harpoons, cube-shaped statues, and a stele with indications related to religious activities, which was chosen for the cover of the journal’s current  issue”, highlights UAB researcher Joan Oller.

The most remarkable consecrated element found was the arrangement of up to 15 falcons within the shrine, most of them headless. Although burials of falcons for religious purposes had already been observed in the Nile Valley, as had the worshipping of individual birds of this species, this is the first time researchers discovered falcons buried within a temple, and accompanied by eggs, something completely unprecedented. In other sites, researchers had found mummified headless falcons, but always only individual specimens, never in group as in the case of Berenike. The stele contains a curious inscription, reading: “It is improper to boil a head in here”, which far from being a dedication or sign of gratitude as normally corresponds to an inscription, is a message forbidding all those who enter from boiling the heads of the animals inside the temple, considered to be a profane activity. 

According to Joan Oller, “all of these elements point to intense ritual activities combining Egyptian traditions with contributions from the Blemmyes, sustained by a theological base possibly related to the worshipping of the god Khonsu”. He goes on to say, “The discoveries expand our knowledge of these semi-nomad people, the Blemmyes, living in the Eastern desert during the decline of the Roman Empire”.

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JOURNAL

American Journal of Archaeology

DOI

10.1086/720806 

Viking beadmakers’ secrets revealed

The Viking Age bead makers were more advanced than previously believed. New research shows that craftsmen in Denmark around year 700 used sophisticated and sustainable methods when they gave old Roman glass mosaics new life as glass beads.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

 

IMAGE: GLASS ANALYSED IN THIS STUDY; COLOURLESS AND WEAKLY GREENISH-YELLOWISH GLASS ‘CUBES’ GILDED WITH A THIN PLATE OF GOLD ON ONE EXTERIOR SURFACE (STILL ATTACHED ON CUBE IN UPPER RIGHT SIDE OF THE PILE) AND WHITE VIKING BEADS ANALYSED IN THIS STUDY. THE CHEMISTRIES OF THE LATTER SHOWED HOW THE GLASSMAKERS IN RIBE HAD FOUND AN EASY WAY TO ‘UPCYCLE’ THE CUBES IN AN EFFORT TO SAVE FUEL AND ENERGY BY SIMPLY CRUSHING AND REMELTING THEM IN OPEN AIR AT LOW TEMPERATURE, THEREBY TRAPPING AIR SO BUBBLES COULD NOT ESCAPE. THIS WAY, THEY COULD PRODUCE OPAQUE WHITE BEADS WITH A MINIMUM USE OF RESOURCES. view more 

CREDIT: MUSEUM OF SOUTHWEST JUTLAND

Ribe was an important trading town in the Viking Age. At the beginning of the 8th century, a trading place was established on the north side of the river Ribe, to which traders and craftsmen flocked from far and wide to manufacture and sell goods such as brooches, suit buckles, combs and coloured glass beads.

When glass became a scarce commodity in the Early Medieval time, coloured glass cubes – so-called tesserae – were torn down from mosaics in abandoned Roman and Byzantine temples, palaces and baths, transported North and traded at emporia towns such as Ribe, where the beadmakers melted them down in large vessels and shaped them into beads.

Until now, archaeologists have assumed that the pearl makers used the opaque white tesserae as raw material for the production of white, opaque beads.

Smart and sustainable production

And it is here that a geochemist and an archaeologist from Aarhus University together with a museum curator from Ribe have made a surprising discovery, which they have just published in the scientific journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences:

The chemical composition of white Viking beads from one of the earliest workshops showed that the glassmakers had found a more sustainable way to save time and wood for their furnaces: crush gold-gilded, transparent glass cubes, remelt them at low temperature, stir to trap air in the form of bubbles, and finally wrap the glass around an iron mandrel to form beads and voila! - opaque white beads created in a short time using a minimum of resources.  

The valuable ultra-thin sheets of gold stuck to the surface of the gold mosaic stone were of course salvaged by the glassmaker prior to remelting the glass, but the new findings show that some gold inevitably had ended up in the melting pot. Tiny drops of gold in the white beads, the many air holes (which is why the beads are opaque), as well as the fact that there are no chemical color tracers present, the researchers show that it was in fact the gold mosaic stones that was the raw material for the beads.

Such traces of gold were found not only in the white but also in the blue beads from the same workshop. Here the chemistry shows that the glassmaker's recipe consisted of a mixture of the blue and golden mosaic stones. Mixing them was necessary because the Roman blue mosaic stones contained high concentrations of chemical substances which made them opaque – and therefore ideal for mosaics, but not for blue beads. By thus diluting the chemical substances, the result was the deep blue, transparent glass that we know from Viking Age beads.

Connoisseur craftsmanship

The bead maker in Ribe could instead have chosen to dilute the glass mixture with old shards from funnel beakers, which were also found in the workshop. But these turned out to be old, contaminated, Roman glass that had been remelted over and over again.

"And the glassmakers in Ribe were clearly connoisseurs who preferred the clearest glass they could get their hands on," says Gry Hoffmann Barfod from the Department of Geoscience at Aarhus University. She adds:

"For a geochemist, it has been a privilege to work with the fantastic material, and to discover how relevant the knowledge stored here is for our society today."

Interdisciplinary research

The interdisciplinary study was a collaboration between Gry Barfod, Søren Sindbæk, professor of archeology at the Danish National Research Foundation's Center for Urban Network Development (UrbNet) at Aarhus University, and museum curator Claus Feveile at the Museum of Southwest Jutland specializing in the Viking Age and Ribe's earliest history.

“The most outstanding achievements at the Ribe trading site were not just the products, but also the circular economy and their awareness to preserve limited resources” states professor Søren Sindbæk. 

And museum curator Claus Feveile comments:

“These exciting results clearly show the potential of elucidating new facts about the vikings. By combining our high-resolution excavations with such chemical analyses I predict many more revelations in the near future.”

Søren Sindbæk and Claus Feveile headed the archaeological excavations of the Northern Emporium Project from 2016-2018, where new high-definition approaches for the first time allowed for a resolution down to a few decades within the extremely well-preserved Ribe stratigraphy. The finds from the excavations are currently displayed inside reconstructed replicas of the beadmakers’ workshops in the new special exhibition at the Ribe viking museum.

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JOURNAL

Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences

DOI

10.1007/s12520-022-01646-8 

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Stone spheres could be from Ancient Greek board game

 

IMAGE: GROUPS OF SPHERES FROM AKROTIRI view more 

CREDIT: KONSTANTINOS TRIMMIS

Archaeologists from the University of Bristol have suggested that mysterious stone spheres found at various ancient settlements across the Aegean and Mediterranean could be playing pieces from one of the earliest ever board games.

There has been quite a lot of speculation around these spheres found at sites on Santorini, Crete, Cyprus, and other Greek Islands with theories around their use including being for some sort of sling stones, tossing balls, counting/record-keeping system or as counters/pawns.

Previous research by the same team from the University of Bristol indicated that there was variability in sphere size within specific clusters and collections of spheres. Following on from this the team wanted to explore potential patterning within these sphere concentrations, to help give an insight into their potential use. 

The latest study published this week in the Journal of Archaeological Science Reports by Drs Christianne Fernée  and Konstantinos Trimmis from the University of Bristol’s Department of Anthropology and Archaeology examined common features on 700 stones – which range from around 4,500 to 3,600 years old – found at the Bronze Age town of Akrotiri on the island of Santorini.

The stones, which are smaller than golf balls, are in various colours and made from different materials. The analysis put the stones into two groups of larger stones and smaller. In addition, in Akrotiri and in other settlements across the Aegean there are stone slabs with shallow cup marks where the spheres could have sat or been placed.

Dr Ferneé said: “The most important finding of the study is that the speres fit two major clusters (one of smaller and one of larger stones). This supports the hypothesis that they were used as counters for a board game with the spheres most possibly have been collected to fit these clusters rather than a counting system for which you would expect more groupings.”

If these spheres are in-fact part of a boardgame, they will be one of the earliest examples, along with similar examples from the Levant and Egypt, such as the Egyptian Mehen and Senet.

Dr Trimmis added: “The social importance of the spheres, as indicated by the way they were deposited in specific cavities, further supports the idea of the spheres being part of a game that was played for social interaction. This gives a new insight into the social interaction in the Bronze Age Aegean.”

The next stage of the research is to apply a similar methodology to the slabs to see if there is clustering in the cup marks and trying to associate the spheres and slabs together. The team also hope to use artificial intelligence techniques to determine how the game was actually played.

Paper:

‘The rolling stones of Bronze Age Aegean: Applying machine learning to explore the use of lithic spheres from Akrotiri, Thera’ by C. Ferneé and K. Trimmis in Journal of Archaeological Science Reports

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JOURNAL

Journal of Archaeological Science Reports

Detailing a disastrous autumn day in ancient Italy

Volcanic eruptions evoke images of lava, fire, and destruction; however, this is not always the case. The Plinian eruption of Mount Vesuvius around 4,000 years ago – 2,000 years before the one that buried the Roman city of Pompeii— left a remarkably intact glimpse into Early Bronze Age village life in the Campania region of Southern Italy.

The village of Afragola was situated near present-day Naples, about 10 miles from Mount Vesuvius. Following the eruption, the village was encased in meters of ash, mud, and alluvial sediments, which lent a surprising degree of protection to the site, a rarity for archaeological sites from this era in Europe. Owing to the level of preservation and the diversity of preserved plants at the site, researchers were interested to see if they could pinpoint the time of year when the eruption occurred.

The village of Afragola was excavated over an area of 5,000 square meters, making it among the most extensively investigated sites of the Early Bronze Age in Italy, with a large group of archaeologists who meticulously carried out the sampling.

UConn Department of Anthropology researcher Tiziana Matarazzo ’14 (Ph.D.) and coauthors and archaeologists Monica Stanzione, Giuliana Boenzi, and Elena Laforgia from the Soprintendenza of Archeology, Fine Arts and Landscape for the Metropolitan Area of ​​Naples and Polo Museale Campania to tell the story of Afragola and have published their most recent findings in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

“The site is exceptional, because Afragola was buried by a gigantic eruption of Vesuvius, and it tells us a lot about the people who lived there, and the local habitat. In this case, by finding fruits and agricultural materials, we were able to identify the season of the eruption, which is usually impossible,” says Matarazzo.

Matarazzo explains that the course of the eruption happened in different phases, starting with a dramatic explosion that sent debris traveling primarily to the northeast. This gave the villagers time to flee, which is why the site does not contain human remains as other sites like Pompeii do, but it does contain several footprints of adults and children fleeing the area. Then the direction of the wind changed, bringing a copious amount of ash toward Afragola.

“The last phase brought mostly ash and water – called the phreatomagmatic phase — mainly dispersed to the west and northwest up to a distance of about 25 km from the volcano,” Matarazzo explains. “This last phase is also what completely buried the village. The thick layer of volcanic material replaced the molecules of the vegetal macro-remains and produced perfect casts in a material called cinerite,” and these conditions meant the materials were resistant to degradation, even after several millennia.

“Leaves that were in the woods nearby were also covered by mud and ash which was not super-hot, so we have beautiful imprints of the leaves in the cinerite,” she says.

The village offers a rare glimpse at how people lived in Italy in the Early Bronze Age, the researchers say.

“In Campania at this time, we have huts, but in Greece, they had palaces,” Matarazzo says. “These people probably lived in groups with maybe one or more persons was the head of the group.”

There was also one storage building in the village where all the grains and various agricultural goods and fruits were gathered from nearby woods to be stored and likely shared with the whole community.

Fortunately for this study, unlike the other huts in the village, the plant food warehouse caught fire probably due to the arrival of pyroclastic materials. Its collapse made indirect carbonization of the stored vegetal materials possible.

Matarazzo says the Bronze Age Campanian Plain was home to a rich diversity of food sources, including a variety of grains and barley, hazelnuts, acorns, wild apples, dogwood, pomegranates, and cornelian cherry, all extraordinarily well-preserved in the aftermath of the volcanic eruption.

The evidence points toward the eruption happening in the fall, as the villagers amassed their food stores from the nearby woods.  Matarazzo explains that imprints of leaves found at the base of the trees along with ripe fruits are very indicative of the seasonality.

Between climate change and development, Matarazzo explains the area looks vastly different from the way it once was.  “The reason we found the site is because of the construction of a high-speed train line. ”

For now, the researchers can reference the materials recovered from the site which are now housed off-site in a storage facility. The focus of future research includes a closer examination of animal bones found on site, including cattle, goats, pigs, and fish, as well as footprints, says Matarazzo.

“This eruption was so extraordinary that it changed the climate for many years afterward. The column of the Plinian eruption rose to basically the flight altitude of airplanes. It was unbelievable. The cover of ash was so deep that it left the site untouched for 4,000 years — no one even knew it was there. Now we get to learn about the people who lived there and tell their stories.”

This study would not have been possible without the Soprintendenza Archeologia Belle Arti e Paesaggio per l’Area Metropolitana di Napoli and the RFI-Italferr Team Ferrovie dello Stato Italiano.

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JOURNAL

Journal of Archaeological Science

DOI

10.1016/j.jasrep.2022.103587 

Key phases of human evolution coincide with flickers in eastern Africa’s climate

  

 

IMAGE: CHEW BAHIR CORING SITE, EXTRACTING A LINER FULL OF RECOVERED SEDIMENT MATERIAL FROM THE 280-M-LONG CORE: THE DAY SHIFT TRYING TO PULL THE LINER OUT WITH COMBINED FORCES view more 

CREDIT: FRANK SCHAEBITZ

Three distinct phases of climate variability in eastern Africa coincided with shifts in hominin evolution and dispersal over the last 620,000 years, an analysis of environmental proxies from a lake sediment record has revealed. The project explores the youngest chapter in human evolution by analysing lacustrine sediments in close vicinity to paleo-anthropological key sites in eastern Africa using scientific deep drilling. The research endeavour included more than 22 researchers from 19 institutions in 6 countries, and was led by Dr Verena Foerster at the University of Cologne’s Institute of Geography Education. The article ‘Pleistocene climate variability in eastern Africa influenced hominin evolution’ has now appeared in Nature Geoscience.

Despite more than half a century of hominin fossil discoveries in eastern Africa, the regional environmental context of the evolution and dispersal of modern humans and their ancestors is not well established. Particularly for the Pleistocene (or Ice Age) between 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago, there are no continuous high-resolution paleo-environmental records available for the African continent.

The research team extracted two continuous 280-metre sediment cores from the Chew Bahir Basin in southern Ethiopia, an area where early humans lived and developed during the Pleistocene. Chew Bahir is very remotely situated in a deep tectonic basement in close vicinity to the Turkana area and the Omo-Kibish, key paleo-anthropological and archaeological sites. The cores yielded the most complete record for such a long period ever extracted in the area, revealing how different climates influenced the biological and cultural transformation of humans inhabiting the region.

An interdisciplinary team including geoscientists, sedimentologists, micro-paleontologists, geologists, geographers, geochemists, archaeologists, chronologists, and climate modellers worked towards recovering the two continuous sediment cores, from which so-called proxies (like microfossils or elemental variations) were used to glean data to reconstruct the region’s climate history. Archaeologists, evolutionary biologists, and evolutionary anthropologists then identified phases of climatic stress as well as more favourable conditions and interpreted how these factors changed human habitats, influencing human biological and cultural evolution as well as their dispersal.

Specifically, the scientists found that various anatomically diverse hominin groups inhabited the area during a phase of long-lasting and relatively stable humid conditions from approximately 620,000 to 275,000 years BP (Before Present). However, a series of shorter abrupt and extreme arid pulses interrupted this long generally stable and wet phase. Most likely, this resulted in a fragmentation of habitats, shifts in population dynamics and even the extinctions of local populations. As a result, small, reproductively and culturally isolated populations then had to adapt to dramatically transformed local environments, likely stimulating the appearance of the many geographically and anatomically distinct hominin groups and the separation of our modern human ancestors from archaic groups.

A phase with significant climate swings resulting in regularly transformed habitats in the area from approximately 275,000 to 60,000 years BP repeatedly resulted in environmental shifts from lush vegetation with deep fresh water lakes to highly arid landscapes with the extensive lakes reduced to small saline puddles. In this phase, the population groups gradually transitioned from Acheulean technologies (oval  hand axes made of stone and primarily associated with Homo ergaster/erectus) to more sophisticated Middle Stone Age technologies. This crucial phase also encompasses the emergence of Homo sapiens in eastern Africa as well as key human social, technological, and cultural innovations that could have buffered early Homo sapiens from the impacts of severe environmental changes. ‘These innovations, such as more varied toolkits and long-distance transport, would have equipped modern humans with an unprecedented adaptability to the repeated expansions and contractions of habitats,’ said Dr Foerster, the paper’s lead author.

The phase from approximately 60,000 to 10,000 years BP saw the most extreme environmental fluctuations, but also the most arid phase of the entire record, which could have acted as a motor for continuous indigenous cultural change. The scientists believe that the brief alignment of humid pulses in eastern Africa with wet phases in north-eastern Africa and the Mediterranean was key to opening favourable migration routes out of Africa on a roughly north-south axis along the East African Rift System (EARS) and into the Levant, facilitating the global dispersal of Homo sapiens.

‘In view of current threats to the human habitat from climate change and the overuse of natural resources through human activity, understanding how the relationship between climate and human evolution has become more relevant than ever,’ Foerster concluded.

This research is part of the Hominin Sites and Paleolakes Drilling Project (HSPDP). In order to evaluate the impact that different timescales and magnitudes of climatic shifts have had on the living conditions of early humans, the project has cored five lake archives of climate change during the last 3.5 million years. All five sites in Kenya and Ethiopia are located in close vicinity to paleoanthropological key sites covering various steps in human evolution, with the site in southern Ethiopia exploring the youngest chapter.

As part of HSPDP, the project has received funding from the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP), the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the DFG Collaborative Research Centre 806 ‘Our Way to Europe’. CRC 806 was based at the universities of Cologne, Bonn, and Aachen and received generous financial and infrastructural support from these institutions from 2009 to 2021.

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JOURNAL

Nature Geoscience

DOI

10.1038/s41561-022-01032-y