IMAGE: VIEW OF THE SITE KAF TAHT EL-GHAR (KTG).view more
CREDIT: VIEW OF THE SITE KAF TAHT EL-GHAR (KTG). PHOTOGRAPHER: JUAN CARLOS VERA
A genomic analysis of ancient human remains from Morocco in northwest Africa revealed that food production was introduced by Neolithic European and Levantine migrants and then adopted by local groups. A research team from Sweden, Spain and Morocco present their results in Nature on June 7th.
In northwestern Africa, lifestyle transitioned from foraging to farming some 7,400 years ago, but what sparked that change remained unclear. Previous studies support conflicting views: that migrant European Neolithic farmers brought the new way of life to North Africa, or that local hunter-gatherers adopted farming practices.
“We found a remarkable population continuity up until seven and a half thousand years ago in northwestern Africa, where a group of local foragers had been living – isolated – for at least 8,000 years, perhaps since much further back in time”, says Professor Mattias Jakobsson, Uppsala University, who led the study.
Then something happened.
After being isolated for so long, northwestern Africa received two new ancestries within ca. 1000 years, one migration wave following the northern Mediterranean coast, and another, the southern.
“A foreign ancestry related to the first European Farmers is found in North Africa in the remains of the earliest Neolithic context around 7500 years ago”, says Dr. Luciana Simoes from Uppsala University, first author of the study, indicating that migrants from Europe introduced this new lifestyle.
“Inspired by their new neighbours, within a few hundred years, the local foragers started to change their way of life to farming and the two groups lived side by side for at least another century”, says Dr. Cristina Valdiosera from University of Burgos in Spain, who co-led the study.
“This phenomenon has not been seen in any other part of the world” says Dr. Torsten Günther from Uppsala University
Around 6,300 years ago, a new genetic ancestry appeared in the human remains, likely as a consequence of migrants from the Levant arriving at the same time as pastoralism arrives in the region. Later, all three ancestries blend together during the Late Neolithic.
“I think it is great that the genomic data generated in this study confirms what the ceramic decoration was already pointing to: a unidirectional diffusion from the Iberian coast to the Tingitana Peninsula, around 7500 years ago”, says Dr. Rafael Martínez Sánches from the University of Córdoba, Spain
“Filling these key chronological gaps in the Maghreb proved crucial to better understand how the different subsistence strategies were acquired in this region” says Dr. Youssef Bokbot from L’Institut National des Sciences de l’Archéologie et du Patrimoine désigné ci-dessous in Morocco.
IMAGE: THE STUDY WAS DEVELOPED THROUGH DIRECT EXCHANGE WITH THE PARTICIPANTS.view more
CREDIT: RENATO GIUGLIANO
How do today’s indigenous communities of South America trace back to the history of human migration and contact in the continent? An international team has worked to reconstruct the legacy of Chile’s largest indigenous community, the Mapuche, in a quest to strengthen their representation in the history of the continent. It appears the Mapuche long lived in relative isolation but do bear some influences from other populations of the Central Andes and the far south of Chile.
South America was the last continent to be settled by humans. The first migrants moved in rapidly from North to South America in the Late Pleistocene, around 15,000 years ago, as testified by early traces of human presence in what today is central-southern Chile. Human migrations brought in multiple ancestry streams, but how they interacted and the exact routes they took are not well resolved. A new international study sheds light on those missing links, starting out by contextualizing present-day indigenous ancestries, and highlighting the depth of their pre-Hispanic roots in the Americas.
Genetic origins in the Southern Andes
A research team led by the University of Zurich (UZH), in collaboration with the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, studied the genetic ancestry of the Mapuche in concert with linguistic, archaeological and historical data. “We compared the genetic profile of participants of Mapuche descent against data from many other populations of the Americas, including ancient DNA from archaeological excavations,” says Epifanía Arango-Isaza, a Ph.D. student at UZH who conducted the study.
The genetic ancestry of the Mapuche is typical of the Southern Cone, the southernmost part of the continent, which so far has been underrepresented in genetic and historical studies. Other major genetic ancestries in South America include one found mostly in the Central Andes and another mostly in Amazonia. “The ancestors of the Mapuche separated from inhabitants of the Far South over 4,000 years ago and did not meet with later migration streams from the north that reached the Central Andes and parts of Amazonia”, says the first author.
Relationships within the Andes and the South
The Andes form the world’s longest mountain range. European ethnographers once tended to conceive of the Andes as a homogeneous and inter-related cultural unit. However, past relationships between populations of the Andes now appear more nuanced. Chiara Barbieri, lead author of the study at UZH, says: “We see that distinctive Mapuche lineages originated locally and have remained in relative isolation. This general isolation is punctuated by episodes of contact with other South American populations over the last millennium or so”.
Paul Heggarty, a linguist based at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology during this study, adds: “The main genetic link is to the Central Andes, mirroring how domesticated crops like the potato also spread south, as did a handful of loanwords borrowed from Quechua into Mapudungun, the language of the Mapuche”. This contact may date back to before contact with the Inca Empire.
Other specific connections point southwards, to the southernmost tip of the Andes. “We found that different Mapuche territorial identities – Pehuenche from the Andes, Lafkenche on the coast, and Huilliche from the island of Chiloé – are related to each other, but the Huilliche still bear traces of genetic contact with the Far South. This may be a signature of genetic structure originating in other groups known as the Chono, who once inhabited Chiloé”, explains Kentaro Shimizu, professor of genetics and director of the “University Research Priority Program in Evolution in Action” at UZH.
Participation of indigenous and local communities
The study was developed through direct exchange with the participants. “Traditional stories and reports relate a profound legacy of Mapuche culture in the region. Our work has value for the participants in how they feel represented,” says María José Aninao, a Mapuche linguist and co-author of the study. Chiara Barbieri concludes: “We also recorded the process of discussing the results with participants and cultural representatives in a documentary that is now ready to be distributed. In it we seek to explain the complexity of indigenous identities today, from conversations with people in Chile who had Mapuche ancestors or indeed self-identify as Mapuche”.
A Cranfield University-led project excavating a fortress site in southern Georgia aims to uncover why communities in this area were more resilient than in some other parts of the world at the end of the Bronze Age – a period of significant change, around 1200 BC.
The project – Surviving the Crisis Years: The Foundations of Societal Resilience in the Caucasus at the End of the Bronze Age – has received a Gerda Henkel Grant of €132,308 and will begin in June 2023. The project is led by Dr Nathaniel Erb-Satullo, Lecturer in Archaeological Science at Cranfield University, in collaboration with Dimitri Jachvliani, an archaeologist from the Georgian National Museum in Tbilisi. Cranfield osteoarchaeologist Dr Nivien Speith, and a wide range of specialist partners from Cornell University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Oxford will also join the project.
Fortress settlement will give clues to community resilience
During the so-called ‘12th Century BC crisis’ and its aftermath, most areas of the Middle East experienced a period of huge disruption with the collapse of empires, famine, failed harvests, warfare, and migration. The Caucasus (present-day Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan) seem, by contrast, to have been insulated from this chaos, displaying only gradual change in material culture and settlement patterns. Either the region escaped the wider disruption entirely, or it did not have the same cultural, economic, and political impact on communities in the area – implying they were perhaps more resilient than other areas.
Dr Erb-Satullo commented: “The key to understanding why the Bronze Age-Iron Age transition is different in the Caucasus is to study the fortress communities that dot the landscape during this period. We’re looking for clues about life in the Late Bronze Age through examining areas such as ceramics, burial rituals, farming practices, tools and social structures.
“Given the upheaval at that time in other nearby regions, we are intrigued to find out more about one of these sites and determine what underlies their apparent resilience.”
Specialist team will be joined by local experts and residents
The fortress site, called Dmanisis Gora, is based in the Kvemo Kartli region of Georgia and an international team of up to 30 people will work to excavate the site. The team includes Cranfield students and graduates, Georgian archaeologists, and specialists from a number of UK and US universities. Local residents from the modern town nearby the site will also assist in excavation.
The project builds on initial pilot excavations at the site conducted before the pandemic, as well as a comprehensive drone-based photogrammetric survey conducted in Autumn 2022 and will continue existing research on the topic. It will be using the latest forensic technologies including isotopic analysis of animal remains, metallurgy, magnetometry and deploying drones to scan the area.
“What’s really exciting about this site is its size, preservation, and the fact that it has layers dating precisely to the years around the 12th Century BC crisis,” continued Dr Erb-Satullo. “Many fortresses are on hills which are prone to erosion. But this one has relatively flat topography, so the sediment will have built up in layers over time, helping to preserve artefacts and archaeological clues from the Late Bronze age.”
Earliest evidence of wine drinking in the Americas found in Caribbean pottery vessels
No evidence of fish in ceramics suggests tendency for indigenous people to cook proteins on barbeques
Research is first study to use molecular analysis methods on 15th century ceramics from Puerto Rico region
Scientists have found what they believe to be the earliest known evidence of wine drinking in the Americas, inside ceramic artefacts recovered from a small Caribbean island. Forty ceramic sherds were examined in the first study to have used molecular analysis techniques – Gas Chromatography and Mass Spectrometry - to investigate 15th century pottery from the Puerto Rico region.
The research focused on artefacts from the island of Isla de Mona, situated between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. The findings, published in Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, address questions around dietary changes and cultural exchanges in the Greater Antilles prior to and after European arrival.
Olive jar reveals earliest evidence of wine in the area
In a study was led by the Dr Lisa Briggs , Visiting Researcher at the British Museum and 75th Anniversary Research Fellow at Cranfield University, alongside the University of Leicester.
The analysis included sherds from a Spanish olive jar that could be dated between 1490-1520 AD. The rounded style of the jar shows it to be this early and aligns it to the timing of when Columbus first noted the existence of the island in his diary in 1494.
The olive jar, used then as a general container for all sorts of food and liquid goods, transporting them on Spanish ships, had evidence of wine residues inside.
“Whether consumed by Europeans or members of the indigenous population, this is direct evidence for the importation and drinking of European wine to a tiny island in the Caribbean shortly after the arrival of Spanish colonialists,” say the researchers.
Fusion food experience over 500 years ago
As first generations of Spanish colonists brought European traditions of wine consumption to the area, despite their conquest over indigenous people the local traditions for cooking on barbeques continued.
The researchers believe that barbeque cooking was commonplace among the Taino community, indigenous to this area in the Caribbean, and adopted by early colonists. With no large mammals on the Caribbean islands in this area, it’s likely that the indigenous population would have barbequed a large rodent-like animal called a hutier, as well as iguanas.
Indigenous people in this area of the Caribbean cooked fish and meat with charcoal over a raised grill, and the origin of the word ‘barbeque’ is traced to ‘Barbacoa’ – a word used by the Taino people. The researchers suggest that in some ways, two culinary traditions came together - creating a fusion food and drink experience hundreds of years ago.
Dr Briggs continued: “Two culinary worlds collided in the Caribbean over 500 years ago, driven by the early Spanish colonial impositions. We really didn’t know much about the culinary heritage of this area and the influence of early colonialists on food traditions, so uncovering the discoveries have been really exciting.
“The strong culinary traditions of the Taino people in creating the barbeque held firm despite Spanish colonialism, and influenced food right round the world. This continues today, as we are all familiar with a barbeque. I’m really pleased that this research shines a light on the cultural heritage of this community.”
On excavating the area last year, scientists from the British Museum found many fish and meat bones around the site – but crucially none were found inside cooking pots.
In the Caribbean ceramics analysed, there was no evidence they were used for dairy or meat products. Whilst dairy products were long a staple of European cooking, this does not appear to be the case on Isla de Mona – giving further evidence that indigenous culinary traditions persisted in the face of colonialism and imported ceramic vessels.
“This offers an interesting insight into culinary exchange on the island,” the researchers say. “...it appears traditional foodways were maintained even after an influx of European colonists arrived on the island with their glazed ceramics and olive jars. The lack of evidence for dairy products in our samples further suggests that European colonialists quickly came to adopt and rely on indigenous culinary traditions.”
This indicates that the indigenous people continued to cook proteins on charcoal over a raised grill, and vegetable dishes in the ceramic pots. This culinary tradition is far apart from the contemporary European preference for stews and casseroles – with cooking pots from that area often including meat remnants.
The research paper Molecular evidence for new foodways in the early colonial Caribbean: organic residue analysis at Isla de Mona, Puerto Ricoinvolved a team of researchers from Cranfield University, Leicester University, the University of East Anglia, the University of York and the British Museum.
IMAGE: THE DIMENSIONS OF DESERT DRAGONS ONLY BECOME APPARENT FROM THE AIR: AT JEBEL AZ-ZILLIYAT IN SAUDI ARABIA, THE TRUE-TO-SCALE ENGRAVING DEPICTS NEARBY DESERT DRAGONS.view more
CREDIT: OLIVER BARGE, CNRS
Although human constructions have modified natural spaces for millennia, few plans or maps predate the period of the literate civilizations of Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt. Researchers from the French research organisation "Centre national de la recherche scientifique" (CNRS), together with Prof. Dr. Frank Preusser from the University of Freiburg, have now been able to identify engravings in Jordan and Saudi Arabia as the oldest known true-to-scale construction plans in human history. The 8,000 to 9,000-year-old engravings depict so-called desert dragons – kilometre long prehistoric megastructures used to trap animals. "Conclusions can be drawn from the findings about the people of the time. The ability to transfer a large space to a small, two-dimensional plan represents a milestone in intelligent behaviour," explains Preusser. The results, which were published in mid-May in the scientific journal PLOS ONE, should help to understand how desert dragons were conceived and built.
Scale plans of desert dragons discovered in Jordan and Saudi Arabia
Both finds are representations of nearby desert dragons engraved with stone tools. First sighted from aircrafts in the 1920s, desert dragons, up to five kilometres long, consist of stone walls that converge in a complex bounded by pits. As archaeologists have been able to determine in recent years, they were used for large-scale trapping of wild animals. In Jordan, there are eight desert dragons in the area of Jibal al-Khasabiyeh. There, the researchers found a depiction engraved in stone that measures 80 by 32 cm, its age is about 9,000 years. At Jebel az-Zilliyat in Saudi Arabia, two visible pairs of dragons are found three and a half kilometres apart. Here, too, a scaled engraving dating back about 8,000 years was discovered with a total length of 382 cm and a width of 235 cm.
Plans of large structures have so far only been attested by rough representations, in stark contrast to the precision of the engravings of al-Khashabiyeh and az-Zilliyat. The question of their exact use and how they were implemented, especially due to the difficulty of grasping the entire complex from the ground, remains for the time being the secret of the people by whom they were created.
Overview of facts:
Crassard R., Abu-Azizeh W., Barge O., Brochier J.É., Preusser F., Seba H., Kiouche A.E., Régagnon E., Sánchez Priego J.A., Almalki T., Tarawneh M., 2023. The oldest plans to scale of humanmade mega-structures. PLOS ONE 18(5): e0277927. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0277927
Frank Preusser is Professor for Sedimentology at the Institute for Earth and Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Environment and Natural Resources, at the University of Freiburg. His research emphasis is on the response of terrestrial sedimentary systems to climate change and human impact during the Quaternary. In particular, he is investigating the erosion and depositional history of the Alps and environmental developments on the Arabian Peninsula. A special interest is on geochronology, specifically luminescence dating.
The South-Eastern Badia Archaeological Project (SEBAP; research at Jibal al-Khashabiyeh) is funded by grants from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Al-Hussein Bin Talal University (project No. 164/2016) and the CNRS National Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences. The GLOBALKITES project (research at Jebel az-Zilliyat) was funded by a French National Research Agency grant ANR-12-JSH3-0004-01 (RC). The Dumat al-Jandal archaeological project (research at Jebel az-Zilliyat) was funded by grants from the Saudi Heritage Commission, the French and Italian Ministries of Foreign Affairs, CNRS UMR-8167 Orient & Méditerranée, the University L’Orientale of Naples (Guillaume Charloux and Romolo Loreto).
SMBE JOURNALS (MOLECULAR BIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION AND GENOME BIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION)
IMAGE: THE EXTENSIVE ADMIXTURE FOUND IN AFRICAN GENOMES IS SYMBOLIZED BY A MARBLED PAINT EFFECT.view more
CREDIT: JOSEPH LACHANCE ET AL.
The course of human history has been marked by complex patterns of migration, isolation, and admixture, the latter a term that refers to gene flow between individuals from different populations. Admixture results in a blending of genetic lineages, leading to increased genetic diversity within populations. In addition to admixture among modern human populations, ancient humans reproduced with other hominin groups, such as Neanderthals and Denisovans. This resulted in fragments of DNA from these ancient lineages being passed down to modern humans in a process known as introgression. Two recent studies published in Genome Biology and Evolution examine patterns of admixture in two different regions of the world—Africa and the Americas—revealing how this process has shaped the genomes of modern humans.
Africa is the birthplace of humanity, where our species originated and diversified. Because of this, Africa contains the highest levels of genetic diversity and population structure among humans, with non-African populations largely representing a subset of the genetic variation present on the African continent. Genomes of Africans contain mixtures of multiple ancestries, each of which has experienced different evolutionary histories. In the article “Evolutionary Genetics and Admixture in African Populations,” researchers from two institutes – Georgia Institute of Technology and Mediclinic Precise Southern Africa – reviewed how multiple demographic events have shaped African genomes over time (Pfennig, et al. 2023). According to Joseph Lachance, one of the review’s authors, “What stands out is the sheer complexity of human demographic history, especially in Africa. There are many examples of population divergence followed by secondary contact, the legacy of which is written in our genomes.”
For example, ancient introgression from archaic “ghost” populations of hominins that are no longer extant contributed approximately 4–6% of the ancestry of present-day Khoe-San, Mbuti, and western African populations. More recent demographic events that have occurred over the last 10,000 years have similarly resulted in admixture among modern humans, including gene flow among different click-speaking Khoe-San populations, the spread of pastoralism from eastern to southern Africa, and migrations of Bantu speakers across the continent.
Importantly, biomedical studies often fail to capture this diversity, resulting in implications for the health and disease of those with African ancestry. A better understanding of genetic architecture can help predict disease risk in a population or even inform clinical decision-making for individual patients. Such information is critical for equitable biomedical research, leading the study’s authors to call for more ethically conducted studies of genetic variation in Africa. “A critical point right now is the relative lack of African genetic data,” says Lachance. “Most genomic studies have focused on Eurasian populations, and this limitation can exacerbate existing health inequities.”
One avenue for better understanding the genetic architecture of African genomes is the study of ancient DNA: “Going forward, analysis of ancient DNA is expected to become much more common. Future studies are also likely to focus on fine-scale population structure in Africa. However, logistical and financial obstacles persist. There is a clear need for funding mechanisms that build research capacity in Africa.”
A second article recently published in GBE, titled “The impact of modern admixture on archaic human ancestry in human populations,” focuses on admixture in the Americas (Witt, et al. 2023), which were colonized by modern humans relatively recently. The first people to enter the continent were Indigenous Americans who migrated from Siberia. Subsequent migration of Europeans and Africans due to European colonization and the Transatlantic slave trade resulted in admixed populations that combine ancestries from different continents.
In the study, researchers from Brown University, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and the University of California-Merced analyzed how the resulting gene flow between modern humans redistributed archaic ancestry in admixed genomes. They used data from the 1000 Genomes Project that were acquired from several admixed populations, including Colombians from Medellin, individuals with Mexican Ancestry from Los Angeles, Peruvians from Lima, and Puerto Ricans from Puerto Rico. These genomes were compared to the high-coverage genomes of Neanderthals and Denisovans, ancient hominins that diverged from modern humans about 500,000 years ago and mated with humans in Eurasia before going extinct about 40,000 years ago.
According to one of the study’s authors, Kelsey Witt from Brown University, these admixed populations are relatively understudied compared to more homogeneous populations. “It is common in studies like this for admixed populations to be excluded because the multiple ancestry sources can make those questions harder to answer. For this work, we wanted to focus on admixed populations to determine what we could learn from them, and whether admixed populations could provide information about all of the ancestry sources that contributed to them.”
The study found that the amount of introgression from Neanderthals and Denisovans was proportional to the amount of Indigenous American or European ancestry in each population. Although European and Indigenous American tracts in these admixed genomes have approximately equal proportions of Neanderthal variants, Denisovan variants are found primarily in Indigenous American tracts. This reflects the shared ancestry between Indigenous Americans and Asian populations, which also have higher levels of Denisovan introgression.
Moreover, by searching for archaic alleles present at high frequency in admixed American populations but low frequency in East Asian populations, the study’s authors identified several genes as candidates for adaptive introgression. These genes were related to multiple pathways including immunity, metabolism, and brain development. Such findings have potential implications for the health of individuals in these admixed populations. “We’ve seen many examples of genetic mismatch in the literature,” says Witt, “where some variants were adaptive at some point in the past, but in the present environment, they have a negative impact on health. In addition, in admixed populations, genetic variants that are unique to separate populations may now interact in unexpected (sometimes negative) ways when they are present in the same individual. Our work suggests that some archaic variants are specific to some ancestry sources and not others."
Like Lachance, Witt knows that additional research is needed to continue to untangle the effects of admixture on modern humans. “In a lot of ways, admixed populations in the Americas are straightforward to study because we have a good idea of the timing and number of gene flow events,” notes Witt. “I’d like to apply this work to other admixed populations, where we may not know when admixture occurred or which populations contributed to it, or in cases where the contributing populations are more closely related. I think that the answers in those cases may not be as clear-cut, but they may contribute to a better understanding of those recent admixture events.”
These studies show admixture has played a significant role in shaping human evolution, both in Africa and in the Americas. Admixture not only reshuffles the genetic variation within and between populations, but also introduces new sources of variation that may have adaptive potential. By comparing the genomes of admixed populations with those of their ancestral groups and with those of archaic humans, these studies reveal how the mixing and matching of alleles has shaped the evolution of our species.
