New archaeological findings from Nyayanga, Kenya suggest that Oldowan technology – the earliest known stone tool industry in prehistory – was more ancient and widespread than previously believed, researchers report. They say the Oldowan tools they found were used to process a variety of foods, including ancient hippopotamuses, at least 600,000 years earlier than evidence at other Oldowan sites has suggested. And although it remains unknown which genera of hominin were using the Nyayanga Oldowan tools, the authors note the discovery of contemporaneous Paranthropus fossils at the site, which are also the first yet identified in southwestern Kenya. Previously, the oldest Oldowan tool sites, from around 2.6 million years ago (mya), were confined to Ethiopia’s Afar Triangle. Their appearance represented a technological milestone in early hominin development. Despite their rudimentary nature, these intentionally crafted, sharp-edged stone tools were the first geographically widespread and long-lasting technology.
Although Oldowan is often attributed to the genus Homo, it’s thought that multiple other overlapping hominins may have made and/or used the early tools. However, due to a lack of early Oldowan sites, scientists still don’t understand the technology’s emergence, use and distribution. Thomas Plummer and colleagues report the discovery of Oldowan sites dated to 3-2.6 mya at Nyayanga, Kenya. Not only were Oldowan tools present, but fossilized bones from the sites with associated stone-tool damage demonstrate the tools were used to butcher large animals, namely hippopotamids and bovids. Furthermore, use-wear patterns on the tools themselves suggest the processing of plant materials.
While no Homo remains were identified at Nyayanga, Plummer et al. did identify Paranthropus fossils at the site – 2 molars – one of which was in clear association with Oldowan artifacts, raising the possibility that these hominins made or were at least using the stone tools. “The late Pliocene expanded geography of the earliest Oldowan, and new evidence of its use in diverse tasks amplifies our understanding of the adaptive advantage of early stone technology in hominin diet and foraging technology,” write Plummer et al.
Launched on the anniversary of Mary’s execution, study reveals 50 new letters in cipher – with some still believed missing – shedding new light on her captivity
Peer-Reviewed Publication Secret, coded letters penned by Mary Queen of Scots while she was imprisoned in England by her cousin Queen Elizabeth I have been uncovered by a multidisciplinary team of international codebreakers.
The contents of the letters were believed for centuries to have been lost. That was until George Lasry, a computer scientist and cryptographer, Norbert Biermann, a pianist and music professor, and Satoshi Tomokiyo who is a physicist and patents expert, stumbled upon them while searching the national library of France’s – Bibliothèque nationale de France’s (BnF) – online archives for enciphered documents.
The trio only discovered Mary was the author after solving her sophisticated cipher system. Their decipherment work of 57 letters, which is presented in the peer-reviewed journal Cryptologia, reveals approximately 50 new scripts previously unknown to historians.
These date from 1578 to 1584, a few years before her beheading on this very day 436 years ago – 8th February, 1587.
Mary’s correspondences expose fascinating insights into her captivity. Most are addressed to Michel de Castelnau de Mauvissière, the French ambassador to England. He was a supporter of Catholic Mary who was under the Earl of Shrewsbury’s custody when she wrote them.
“Upon deciphering the letters, I was very, very puzzled and it kind of felt surreal,” says lead author Lasry, who is also part of the multi-disciplinary DECRYPT Project – involving several universities in Europe, with the goal of mapping, digitizing, transcribing, and deciphering historical ciphers.
“We have broken secret codes from kings and queens previously, and they’re very interesting but with Mary Queen of Scots it was remarkable as we had so many unpublished letters deciphered and because she is so famous.
“This is a truly exciting discovery.”
He added: “Together, the letters constitute a voluminous body of new primary material on Mary Stuart – about 50,000 words in total, shedding new light on some of her years of captivity in England.
“Mary, Queen of Scots, has left an extensive corpus of letters held in various archives. There was prior evidence, however, that other letters from Mary Stuart were missing from those collections, such as those referenced in other sources but not found elsewhere.
“The letters we have deciphered … are most likely part of this lost secret correspondence.”
One of the 16th century’s most famous historical figures, Mary was first in line of succession to the English throne after her cousin Elizabeth.
Catholics considered Mary to be the legitimate sovereign and Elizabeth had her imprisoned for 19 years because she was seen as a threat. Mary was eventually executed aged 44 for her alleged part in a plot to kill Elizabeth.
During her time in captivity, Mary communicated with her associates and allies through extensive efforts to recruit messengers and to maintain secrecy.
The existence of a confidential communication channel between Mary and Castelnau is well-known to historians, and even to the English government at the time.
But Lasry and his fellow codebreakers provide new evidence that this exchange was already in place as early as May 1578 and active until at least mid-1584.
Using computerized and manual techniques, the study authors decoded the letters which show the challenges Mary faced maintaining links with the outside world, how the letters were carried and by whom.
Key themes referred to in Mary’s correspondence include complaints about her poor health and captivity conditions, and her negotiations with Queen Elizabeth I for her release, which she believes are not conducted in good faith.
Her mistrust of Elizabeth’s spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham is also apparent, as well as her animosity for Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester and a favourite of Elizabeth. She also expresses her distress when her son James (future King James I of England) is abducted in August 1582, and her feeling they have been abandoned by France.
Writing in this Special Issue version of Cryptologia, Lasry and hisco-authors describe how they first came across the letters. Some were in a large set of unmarked documents in cipher and using the same set of graphical symbols.
The BnF catalogue listed them as from the first half of the 16th century, and related to Italian matters. However, the study authors say they ‘quickly realised’ – after starting to crack the code – they were written in French and ‘had nothing to do with Italy’.
Their detective work revealed verbs and adverbs often in the feminine form, several mentions of captivity, and the name ‘Walsingham’ which arose the suspicion that they might be from Mary, Queen of Scots.
This fact was confirmed by comparing them with the plaintext of letters in Walsingham’s papers in the British Library and through other methods. A search for similar letters in BnF collections uncovered 57 letters with the same cipher.
Commenting on the new paper, Mary Queen of Scots expert, John Guy, who wrote the 2004 biography of Mary Queen of Scots which led to a major Hollywood film, says this is the most significant find about Mary for a century.
“This discovery is a literary and historical sensation. Fabulous! This is the most important new find on Mary Queen of Scots for 100 years. I’d always wondered if de Castelnau’s originals could turn up one day, buried in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France or perhaps somewhere else, unidentified because of the ciphering.
“And now they have.”
Lasry and his co-authors suggest, too, that other enciphered letters from Mary which are known to have existed may still be missing. A physical inspection of documents, as well as online searches, are needed to uncover these, they add.
It is hoped, now too, that the study will lead to future research.
“In our paper, we only provide an initial interpretation and summaries of the letters. A deeper analysis by historians could result in a better understanding of Mary’s years in captivity,” adds Lasry. “It would also be great, potentially, to work with historians to produce an edited book of her letters deciphered, annotated, and translated.”
The collapse of the Hittite Empire in the Late Bronze Age has been blamed on various factors, from war with other territories to internal strife. Now, a Cornell University team has used tree ring and isotope records to pinpoint a more likely culprit: three straight years of severe drought.
The Hittite Empire emerged around 1650 BC in semi-arid central Anatolia, a region that includes much of modern Turkey. For the next five centuries, the Hittites were one of the major powers of the ancient world, but around 1200 BC, the capital at Hattusa was abandoned and the empire was no more.
To find an explanation for the empire’s much-debated collapse, Sturt Manning, professor of arts and sciences in classical archaeology teamed up with Jed Sparks, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.
Manning and Sparks combined their labs to scrutinize samples from the Midas Mound Tumulus at Gordion, a human-made 53-meter-tall structure located west of Ankara, Turkey. The mound contains a wooden structure believed to be a burial chamber for a relative of King Midas, possibly his father. But equally important are the juniper trees – which grow slowly and live for centuries, even a millennium – that were used to build the structure and contain a hidden paleoclimatic record of the region.
The researchers looked at the patterns of tree-ring growth, with unusually narrow rings likely indicating dry conditions, in conjunction with changes in the ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-13 recorded in the rings, which indicate the tree’s response to the availability of moisture.
Their analysis finds a general shift to drier conditions from the later 13th into the 12th century BC, and they peg a dramatic continuous period of severe dryness to approximately 1198–96 BC, plus or minus three years, which matches the timeline of the Hittite’s disappearance.
“We have two complementary sets of evidence,” Manning said. “The tree-ring widths indicate something really unusual is going on, and because it’s very narrow rings, that means the tree is struggling to stay alive. In a semi-arid environment, the only plausible reason that’s happening is because there’s little water, therefore it’s a drought, and this one is particularly serious for three consecutive years. Critically, the stable isotope evidence extracted from the tree-rings confirms this hypothesis, and we can establish a consistent pattern despite this all being over 3,150 years ago.”
At three consecutive years of drought, hundreds of thousands of people, including the enormous Hittite army, would face famine, even starvation. The tax base would crumble, as would the government. Survivors would be forced to migrate, an early example of the inequality of climate change.
Severe climate events may not have been the sole reason for the Hittite Empire’s collapse, the researchers noted, and not all of the ancient Near East suffered crises at the time. But this particular stretch of drought may have been a tipping point, at least for the Hittites.
“Situations where you get prolonged, really extreme events like this for two or three years are the ones that can undo even well-organized, resilient societies,” Manning said.
That finding has particular relevance today, when global populations are reckoning with catastrophic climate change and a warming planet.
“We may be approaching our own breaking point,” Manning said. “We have a range of things we can cope with, but as we are stretched too far beyond that, we’ll hit a point where our adaptative capacities are no longer matched against what we’re facing.”
90,000 years ago, Neanderthals based in Portugal harvested and roasted brown crabs
In a cave just south of Lisbon, archeological deposits conceal a Paleolithic dinner menu. As well as stone tools and charcoal, the site of Gruta de Figueira Brava contains rich deposits of shells and bones with much to tell us about the Neanderthals that lived there – especially about their meals. A study published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology shows that 90,000 years ago, these Neanderthals were cooking and eating crabs.
“At the end of the Last Interglacial, Neanderthals regularly harvested large brown crabs,” said Dr Mariana Nabais of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES-CERCA), lead author of the study. “They were taking them in pools of the nearby rocky coast, targeting adult animals with an average carapace width of 16cm. The animals were brought whole to the cave, where they were roasted on coals and then eaten.”
Catching crabs in Paleolithic Portugal
A wide variety of shellfish remains were found in the archeological remains Nabais and her colleagues studied, but the shellfish in the undisturbed Paleolithic deposits are overwhelmingly represented by brown crabs. Their size was estimated by calculating the size of the carapace relative to the crabs’ pincers, which preserve better than other parts of the crab, so are more likely to survive to be found by scientists. The archeologists assessed the breakage on the shells, looked for butchery or percussion marks, and determined whether the crabs had been exposed to high heat.
Nabais and her colleagues found that the crabs were mostly large adults which would yield about 200g of meat. By studying the patterns of damage on the shells and claws, they ruled out the involvement of other predators: there were no carnivore or rodent marks, and the patterns of breakage didn’t reflect predation by birds. Crabs are evasive, but Neanderthals could have harvested brown crabs of this size from low tide pools in the summer.
Accumulations of shellfish which are caused by hominins are identified by their association with stone tools and other hominin-made features like hearths, surface modifications like the burns found on approximately 8% of the crab shells, and evidence of intentional fractures; the fracture patterns on the crabs at Gruta de Figueira Brava suggested they’d been broken open for access to the meat. The expectation is also that larger individuals will be overrepresented, as at Gruta de Figueira Brava, reflecting hominins choosing animals which offer more meat.
Shellfish on the menu
The evidence indicated to Nabais and her colleagues that Neanderthals weren’t just harvesting the crabs, they were roasting them. The black burns on the shells, compared to studies of other mollusks heated at specific temperatures, showed that the crabs were heated at about 300-500 degrees Celsius, typical for cooking.
“Our results add an extra nail to the coffin of the obsolete notion that Neanderthals were primitive cave dwellers who could barely scrape a living off scavenged big-game carcasses,” said Nabais. “Together with the associated evidence for the large-scale consumption of limpets, mussels, clams, and a range of fish, our data falsify the notion that marine foods played a major role in the emergence of putatively superior cognitive abilities among early modern human populations of sub-Saharan Africa.”
The authors cautioned that it was impossible to know why Neanderthals chose to harvest crabs or whether they attached any significance to consuming crabs, but whatever their reasons eating the crabs would have offered meaningful nutritional benefits.
“The notion of the Neanderthals as top-level carnivores living off large herbivores of the steppe-tundra is extremely biased,” said Nabais. “Such views may well apply to some extent to the Neanderthal populations of Ice Age Europe’s periglacial belt, but not to those living in the southern peninsulas — and these southern peninsulas are where most of the continent’s humans lived all through the Paleolithic, before, during and after the Neanderthals.”
IMAGE: FIGURE A: A PALEOGEOGRAPHIC MAP OF SOUTH ASIA AND THE SUNDALAND IN SOUTHEAST ASIA OVER 20,000 YEARS AGO. THESE LANDS WERE OCCUPIED BY THEIR RESPECTIVE EARLIEST SETTLERS. FIGURE B: RISING SEA LEVEL FLOODED THE SUNDALAND, REDUCED THE LAND AREA AND CAUSED LAND SPLITS INTO SMALLER ISLANDS, INFLUENCING MULTIPLE POPULATION DISPERSAL AND POPULATION SURGE, ESPECIALLY IN THE ISLAND SOUTHEAST ASIAN REGION. FIGURE C: OVERPOPULATION IN THE ISLAND SOUTHEAST ASIAN REGION DROVE THE MALAYSIAN INDIGENOUS GROUP (MALAYSIA NEGRITO, OR COMMONLY KNOWN AS ‘ORANG ASLI’) TO MIGRATE BACK NORTHWARDS, TOWARDS MAINLAND SOUTHEAST ASIA AND SOUTH ASIA.view more
CREDIT: NTU SINGAPORE
An interdisciplinary team of scientists at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU, Singapore) has found that rapid sea-level rise drove early settlers in Southeast Asia to migrate during the prehistoric period, increasing the genetic diversity of the region today.
The Malay Peninsula and the islands of Sumatra, Borneo, and Java were originally part of a large landmass of rainforests and coastal mangroves in the South Asia continental shelf known as ‘The Sundaland’ some 26,000 years ago (Figure a).
But during the last major period of global warming in Earth’s history, from the Last Glacial Maximum period (approximately 26,000 - 20,000 years ago) to the mid-50 Holocene (approximately 6,000 years ago), sea level rose 130 metres. The rise in sea level flooded and submerged half of The Sundaland, breaking land bridges and splitting the large landmass into smaller islands of the region today.
To understand the impact on humans living in The Sundaland during one of the most dramatic sea-level rises in the Earth’s history, the team of NTU Singapore scientists reconstructed the history of the landmass using two different approaches: paleogeography – the study of historical physical landscapes, and population genetics.
Lead investigator, Assistant ProfessorKim Hie Lim from NTU’s Asian School of the Environment (ASE), and the Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering (SCELSE) at NTU said, “Environmental changes have profound impacts on human history, driving population migration, growth, and distribution. However, less discussed is how environmental changes can shape the genetics of populations. Our work is the first reported instance to provide proof that sea-level rise changed the genetic makeup of human populations in Southeast Asia – a legacy that continues to impact current populations.”
Using data for Southeast and South Asia’s sea-level history, including ancient Singapore records established by the NTU’s Earth Observatory of Singapore (EOS) and ASE[1], the research team constructed paleogeographic maps dating from 26,000 years ago to the present.
The NTU team also used whole-genome sequence data from 59 ethnic groups, including that belonging to populations native to Southeast and South Asia from 50,000 years ago. By analysing the high-quality genome data, the team was able to infer the genetic ancestry and demographic history of the groups, including their population size and distribution.
While researchers elsewhere have studied population history based on genetics, most of them used mitochondrial DNA (genes inherited from the mother), which does not tell the full picture of individual ancestry.
By using whole-genome sequence data – precise information of an individual's entire genetic makeup inherited from both the mother and the father – the NTU study offers an unbiased demographic history of the indigenous populations inhabiting The Sundaland.
The whole-genome sequence data was generated by the non-profit organisation GenomeAsia 100K. Launched in 2016 and hosted by NTU, the initiative aims to better understand the genome diversity of Asian ethnicities by sequencing 100,000 genomes of people living in Asia.
Contributing author, Professor Stephan Schuster, President’s Chair in Genomics at NTU’s School of Biological Sciences, Research Director of SCELSE, and Scientific Chair of GenomeAsia 100K, said, “GenomeAsia 100K systematically generates maps of Asian human genetic diversity, including indigenous ethnicities who have occupied the region for a long time. Integrating those maps with paleoclimatic data allows us now to understand exactly how past climatic events have resulted in ancient human migrations, as well as their impact on today's population structure.”
The research is aligned with the NTU 2025 strategy, where the University adopts more collaborative, global and interdisciplinary means of research to address Singapore’s national research priorities, such as health & society.
Piecing together the story of human migration in ancient Sundaland
Combining findings from the two approaches, the scientists inferred the changes in population density from the high quality historical paleogeographic maps generated.
The map paints a picture of prehistoric human migration in The Sundaland, showing that the earliest documented instance of forced human migration was driven by sea level rise.
The scientists found that two periods of rapid sea level rise (rates of sea level rise at46 mm/year and 22 mm/year)[2] promoted the separation of populations into smaller groups across The Sundaland, as the large landmass became split into smaller islands, forcing people to disperse.
Even as the landmass decreased after the rapid sea level rises, temperature increased from the Last Glacial Maximum, creating a favourable living environment to support human population growth. This caused population density to surge by at least eight times from the Last Glacial Maximum, especially in the Island Southeast Asian region, including Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, and Borneo (Figure b).
As a result, overpopulation drove people to migrate in search of new places to settle and the people in The Sundaland later migrated back northwards, towards Mainland Southeast Asia and South Asia (Figure c).
This finding is supported by evidence of migration by the ancestors of the Malaysian indigenous group (Malaysia Negrito, or commonly referred to as ‘Orang Asli’) into South Asian tribal groups (Austroasiatic speakers). Genetic analysis confirmed common genetic ancestry between the Malaysian and South Asian indigenous groups.
The entire process of migration therefore shaped the diverse ethnicities across Southeast and South Asian regions, as early settlers of The Sundaland interbred across different indigenous groups.
Co-author of the study, Dr Li Tanghua, Senior Research Fellow at NTU’s EOS said, “Based on our findings, the Orang Asli Malaysian indigenous group can be considered the first ‘casualties’ of sea-level rise, or what are known as ‘climate refugees’ today. The population had no choice but to move from their original territory due to environmental pressures. This forced migration caused an indelible change to the genetic footprint of South Asians, contributing to one of the most ethnically diverse regions in the world.”
Findings useful to understand impact of sea level rise on human ancestry
The study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Communications Biology in February, is the first to trace the impact of prehistoric sea level rise to human ancestry in Southeast Asia.
Co-author of the study, Professor Benjamin Horton, Director of NTU’s EOS, said, “The study of past sea levels is essential to predicting how increasing amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide will alter Earth's climate and raise future sea levels. These projections inform how societies can mitigate and adapt to climate change impacts.”
Moving forward, the NTU team is looking to extend their research, to trace the story of human migration from North Asia to America, and other parts of Southeast Asia.
Evidence suggests Vikings arrived in Britain with animals from Scandinavia as early as the ninth century AD
IMAGE: FRAGMENT OF CREMATED BONE FROM THE HORSE.view more
CREDIT: LÖFFELMANN ET AL., 2023, PLOS ONE, CC-BY 4.0 (HTTPS://CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/LICENSES/BY/4.0/)
An analysis of cremated bone fragments from burial mounds in Derbyshire, UK, provides the first solid evidence that Vikings crossed the North Sea with horses, dogs and other animals as early as the ninth century AD. The study is published in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Tessi Löffelmann of the University of Durham, UK, the Vrije Universiteit Brussels, Belgium, and colleagues. The researchers analyzed samples of human and animal remains, finding that they most likely originated from Scandinavia and that they died soon after arrival in Britain.
Heath Wood in Derbyshire has 59 burial mounts, twenty of which have been investigated, mostly in the 1940s and 50s. A contemporary source states that in AD 873, the Viking Great Army went to winter in Repton, close to Heath Wood. Remains there have been carbon dated to between the eighth and tenth centuries, but the origins have not been clear.
The researchers sampled small, cremated fragments of femur and cranium bones from the remains of two adults and one juvenile, as well as three animal remains: a horse, a dog and probably a pig. The fact that these remains were cremated suggests a strong Scandinavian influence as inhumation burial was the contemporary mode in Britain.
Samples were tested to determine ratios for strontium — a trace element present in rocks, soil, waters, plants, and animals — and these ratios were compared with those in the local area. The strontium in one adult and the animals differed from local strontium ratios, while the other adult and infant human samples were consistent with local ratios. These data suggest that there are people with different histories at the burial site, and if they belonged to the Great Viking Army, this band was made up of different populations.
The authors suggest that their research presents the first solid evidence for the transport of animals from Scandinavia to the heart of England in the ninth century. This differs from contemporaneous reports in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which states that horses were taken by the Scandinavians from the local population in eastern England upon arrival.
The authors add: “Our study shows for the first time that Vikings brought animals, specifically horses and dogs, to Britain in the 9th century. Most likely, they were travelling alongside humans on ships.”
Anglo-Saxon monasteries were more resilient to Viking attacks than previously thought, archaeologists have concluded. Lyminge, a monastery in Kent, was on the front line of long-running Viking hostility which ended in the victories of Alfred the Great. The monastery endured repeated attacks, but resisted collapse for almost a century, through effective defensive strategies put in place by ecclesiastical and secular rulers of Kent, University of Reading archaeologists say. The new evidence is presented after a detailed examination of archaeological and historical evidence by Dr Gabor Thomas, from the Department of Archaeology at the University of Reading. “The image of ruthless Viking raiders slaughtering helpless monks and nuns is based on written records, but a re-examination of the evidence show the monasteries had more resilience than we might expect,” Dr Thomas said. Despite being located in a region of Kent which bore the full brunt of Viking raids in the later 8th and early 9th centuries, the evidence suggests that the monastic community at Lyminge not only survived these attacks but recovered more completely than historians previously thought, Dr Thomas concludes in research, published today (30 January 2023) in the journal Archaeologia. During archaeological excavations between 2007-15 and 2019, archaeologists uncovered the main elements of the monastery, including the stone chapel at its heart surrounded by a wide swathe of wooden buildings and other structures where the monastic brethren and their dependents lived out their daily lives. Radiocarbon dating of butchered animal bones discarded as rubbish indicates that this occupation persisted for nearly two centuries following the monastery’s establishment in the second half of the 7th century. Historical records held at nearby Canterbury Cathedral show that after a raid in 804 CE, the monastic community at Lyminge was granted asylum within the relative safety of the walled refuge of Canterbury, a former Roman town and the administrative and ecclesiastical capital of Anglo-Saxon Kent. But evidence from Dr Thomas’s dig shows the monks not only returned to re-establish their settlement at Lyminge, but continued living and building for several decades over the course of the 9th century. Dateable artefacts such as silver coins discovered at the site provided Dr Thomas with an insight into the re-establishment of the monastic community. Dr Thomas said: “This research paints a more complex picture of the experience of monasteries during these troubled times, they were more resilient than the ‘sitting duck’ image portrayed in popular accounts of Viking raiding based on recorded historical events such as the iconic Viking raid on the island monastery of Lindisfarne in AD 793. “However, the resilience of the monastery was subsequently stretched beyond breaking point. “By the end of the 9th century, at a time when Anglo-Saxon king Alfred the Great was engaged in a widescale conflict with invading Viking armies, the site of the monastery appears to have been completely abandoned. “This was most likely due to sustained long-term pressure from Viking armies who are known to have been active in south-eastern Kent in the 880s and 890s. “Settled life was only eventually restored in Lyminge during the 10th century, but under the authority of the Archbishops of Canterbury who had acquired the lands formerly belonging to the monastery.” The latest research article is based on the results of over a decade of archaeological research at Lyminge, directed by Dr Thomas. The village was first established by Anglo-Saxons in the 5th century.
