Face of Anglo-Saxon teen VIP revealed with new evidence about her life

 

IMAGE: TRUMPINGTON CROSS BURIAL FACIAL RECONSTRUCTION CREATED BY FORENSIC ARTIST HEW MORRISON USING MEASUREMENTS OF THE WOMAN’S SKULL AND TISSUE DEPTH DATA FOR CAUCASIAN FEMALES view more 

CREDIT: HEW MORRISON ©2023

 

The face of a 16-year-old woman buried near Cambridge (UK) in the 7th century with an incredibly rare gold and garnet cross (the ‘Trumpington Cross’) has been reconstructed following analysis of her skull. The striking image is going on public display for the first time on 21st June, with new scientific evidence showing that she moved to England from Central Europe as a young girl, leading to an intriguing change in her diet.

 

The image and artefacts from the mysterious woman’s burial – discovered in 2012 by the Cambridge Archaeological Unit at Trumpington Meadows on Cambridge’s southern limits – including her famous cross will be unveiled in a major new exhibition at Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA). ‘Beneath Our Feet: Archaeology of the Cambridge Region’ will run from 21st June to 14th April 2024.

Forensic artist Hew Morrison created the likeness using measurements of the woman’s skull and tissue depth data for Caucasian females. Without DNA analysis, Morrison could not be sure of her precise eye and hair colour, but the image offers a strong indication of her appearance shortly before she died.   

Hew Morrison said: “It was interesting to see her face developing. Her left eye was slightly lower, about half a centimetre, than her right eye. This would have been quite noticeable in life.”

New “you are what you eat” isotopic analysis of the young woman’s bones and teeth conducted by bioarchaeologists Dr Sam Leggett and Dr Alice Rose, and archaeologist Dr Emma Brownlee, during PhD research at the University of Cambridge also reveals that she moved to England from somewhere near the Alps, perhaps southern Germany, sometime after she turned 7 years old.

Leggett and Rose also found that once the girl had arrived in England, the proportion of protein in her diet decreased by a small but significant amount. This change occurred close to the end of her young life, showing that the period between her migration and burial near Cambridge was tragically short.

Dr Leggett, now at the University of Edinburgh, said: “She was quite a young girl when she moved, likely from part of southern Germany, close to the Alps, to a very flat part of England. She was probably quite unwell and she travelled a long way to somewhere completely unfamiliar – even the food was different. It must have been scary.”

Previous analysis indicated that the young woman had suffered from illness but her cause of death remains unknown. She was buried in a remarkable way – lying on a carved wooden bed wearing the cross, gold pins (also on display) and fine clothing.

Hers is one of only 18 bed burials ever uncovered in the UK. Her ornate cross, combining gold and garnets (third quarter of the 7th century), is one of only five of its kind ever found in Britain and identifies her as one of England’s earliest converts to Christianity and as a member of the aristocracy if not royalty. The best known example of such a cross was found in the coffin of St Cuthbert.

In 597 AD, the pope dispatched St Augustine to England on a mission to convert the pagan Anglo-Saxon kings, a process which continued for many decades.

Dr Leggett said: “She must have known that she was important and she had to carry that on her shoulders. Her isotopic results match those of two other women who were similarly buried on beds in this period in Cambridgeshire.

“So it seems that she was part of an elite group of women who probably travelled from mainland Europe, most likely Germany, in the 7th century, but they remain a bit of a mystery. Were they political brides or perhaps brides of Christ? The fact that her diet changed once she arrived in England suggests that her lifestyle may have changed quite significantly.”

Dr Sam Lucy, a specialist in Anglo-Saxon burial from Newnham College, Cambridge, who published the Anglo-Saxon excavations at Trumpington*, said:

“These are intriguing findings, and it is wonderful to see this collaborative research adding to our knowledge of this period. Combining the new isotopic results with Emma Brownlee’s research into European bed burials really does seem to suggest the movement of a small group of young elite women from a mountainous area in continental Europe to the Cambridge region in the third quarter of the seventh century.

“Southern Germany is a distinct possibility owing to the bed burial tradition known there. Given the increasingly certain association between bed burial, such cross-shaped jewellery, and early Anglo-Saxon Christianity, it is possible that their movement related to pan-European networks of elite women who were heavily involved in the early Church.”

Dr Jody Joy, the exhibition’s co-curator, said: “The story of this young woman goes to the very heart of what our exhibition is all about – new research making visible the lives of people at pivotal moments of Cambridgeshire’s history. MAA holds one of Britain’s most important collections of Early Medieval archaeology and the Trumpington bed burial is so important. It looks like it still has much more to teach us.”

In the exhibition, the ‘Trumpington Cross’ will be displayed together with the delicate gold and garnet pins connected by a gold chain, which were found near the teenager’s neck. These pins probably secured a long veil to an outer garment of fine linen. The pins would have caught the light as she moved. The burial bed’s decorative headboard will also be exhibited.

 

Beneath Our Feet exhibition – other highlights

MAA’s exhibition explores the traces of where people have lived, worked and died for thousands of years in Cambridgeshire. It unveils a wide range of treasures never and rarely seen by the public including:

• Pottery and textile finds from Must Farm “Britain’s Pompeii”;
• An ornate armlet and pottery belonging to a feast-loving chieftain who died shortly before the Roman invasion;
• A carving of an Iron Age man with a distinctive hairstyle and moustache, made soon after the invasion;
• Finds from a cemetery at Girton College now known, thanks to the work of Dr Emma Brownlee, to have been in continuous use from Roman to Early Medieval times;
• A young friar’s elephant ivory belt buckle recently found in the cemetery of Cambridge’s Augustinian Friary.

‘Beneath Our Feet’ is a free exhibition at the University of Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (21st June 2023 – 14th April 2024). More info here.

 

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Climate change likely led to violence in early Andean populations

Climate change in current times has created problems for humans such as wildfires and reduced growing seasons for staple crops, spilling over into economic effects. Many researchers predict, and have observed in published literature, an increase in interpersonal violence and homicides when temperatures increase.

Violence during climatic change has evidence in history. University of California, Davis, researchers said they have have found a pattern of increased violence during climatic change in the south central Andes between A.D. 470 and 1500. During that time, which includes the Medieval Climatic Anomaly (ca. A.D. 900-1250), temperatures rose, drought occurred, and the first states of the Andes collapsed.

Climate change and potential competition for limited resources in the south central Andes likely led to violence among people living in the highlands at that time, researchers suggest in a new paper. Their study looked at head injuries of the populations living there at that time, a commonly used proxy among archaeologists for interpersonal violence.

“We found that decreased precipitation predicts increased rates of cranial trauma,” said Thomas J. Snyder, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology’s Evolutionary Wing and the primary author of the study.

“This observation suggests that climate change in the form of decreased precipitation exerted a significant effect on rates of interpersonal violence in the region.”  

The study was published June 5 in Quaternary Research, Cambridge University Press. Co-author of the paper is Randall Haas, formerly of the same lab at UC Davis and currently a professor at Wayne State University.

Violence not found in coastal, mid-elevation regions

The same results were not found in coastal and mid-elevation regions, indicating they chose nonviolent solutions to climate change or were not affected by it, researchers said. There was also more agricultural and economic diversity there, potentially buffering against the onset of climate change. Drought-induced resource scarcity in the highlands, however, seems like a likely explanation for the violence there, researchers said.

Snyder said looking at the history of people’s interaction with nature is important when considering possible effects of current climate change challenges and people’s interaction with their climate.  

“Our findings reinforce the idea that people living in already marginal environments are the most likely to be hit hardest by climate change,” he said. “Archaeological research can help us predict how best to handle the challenges faced by people in precarious positions in a rapidly changing climate.”

UC Davis researchers recorded violence during early years in the Andes by analyzing existing data of nearly 3,000 skeletal fractures of humans found at 58 archaeological sites — comparing them to ice accumulation at the time at the Quelccaya glacier — in what is now Peru, Chile and Bolivia. At the same time, there was widespread abandonment of Wari and Tiwanaku sites in the region, indicating a sociopolitical unraveling after the onset of the centuries-long global climate changes.

The archaeology of the Andes provides an excellent opportunity to study the human response to climate change given the region’s extreme climatic variability, incredible archaeological preservation and robust records, researchers said. In this study, researchers found that on average, for every 10-centimeter decrease in annual ice accumulation at the Quelccaya glacier, the likelihood of interpersonal violence more than doubled.

 

Remains at Crenshaw site are local, ancestors of Caddo, study finds

 

IMAGE: JOHN SAMUELSEN CONDUCTING GRADIOMETRY SURVEY AT THE CRENSHAW SITE IN SOUTHWEST ARKANSAS. view more 

CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS

Hundreds of human skulls and mandibles recovered from the Crenshaw site in southwest Arkansas are the remains of ancestors of the Caddo Nation and not foreign enemies, according to a new study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

Collaborating with the Caddo Nation in Oklahoma, researchers at the University of Arkansas and Arkansas Archeological Survey tested lead and strontium isotopes in the teeth of human remains and compared them to ancient animal teeth from several surrounding regions to determine that the 700-year-old human remains were local people.

“Our study tested and ultimately refutes hypotheses that the Crenshaw remains are ‘trophy skulls’ killed during raiding expeditions,” said lead author John Samuelsen. “Demonstrating that the remains are Caddo ancestors provides both researchers and the Caddo Nation a clear answer to questions that have long persisted about the site and the remains.”

Samuelsen serves as science and technology administrator at the Arkansas Archeological Survey and a graduate faculty member in the Department of Anthropology at the U of A. He specializes in geochemical analysis of remains and archeological materials to detect geographical movement of ancient people and animals.

For the Crenshaw study, he worked with Adriana Potra, associate professor in the Department of Geosciences at the U of A. Potra, who studies ore geology and radiogenic isotope geochemistry to enhance an understanding of the geochemistry and tectonic framework of ore deposits, helped improve scientific methods using the lead isotopes.

Their study of the Crenshaw site is the first to use lead isotopes in ancient animal teeth from many different regions to evaluate where humans lived. These isotopes in tooth enamel are set during childhood tooth formation and reflect the isotopes in the underlying geology where the children grew up.

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JOURNAL

Journal of Archaeological Science

The Viking disease can be due to gene variants inherited from Neanderthals

 

 

IMAGE: HUGO ZEBERG, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR AT THE DEPARTMENT OF PHYSIOLOGY AND PHARMACOLOGY, KAROLINSKA INSTITUTET view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO: ALEXANDER DONKA

Many men in northern Europe over the age of 60 suffer from the so-called Viking disease, which means that the fingers lock in a bent position. Now researchers at Karolinska Institutet, together with colleagues, have used data from over 7,000 affected individuals to look for genetic risk factors for the disease. The findings, which have been published in Molecular Biology and Evolution, show that three of the strongest risk factors are inherited from Neanderthals.

Up to 30 percent of men in northern Europe over 60 suffer from a condition called Dupuytren's contracture. The condition is sometimes called the Viking disease because it mainly affects individuals with northern European ancestry. The disease is significantly more common in men than women and usually begins as a lump in the palm of the hand that grows and causes one or more fingers to lock in a bent position. The condition is usually not painful, but the nodules may sometimes be tender to pressure.

The researchers in the study, led by Hugo Zeberg from Karolinska Institutet and Svante Pääbo from Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, set out to investigate whether genetic variants inherited from Neanderthals are involved in the disease.

Neanderthals lived in Europe and western Asia until about 40,000 years ago, when they were replaced by modern humans. However before Neanderthals disappeared, they mixed with modern humans. As a result, between one and two percent of the genomes of people with roots outside of Africa come from Neanderthals.

“Since Dupuytren's contracture is rarely seen in individuals of African descent, we wondered whether gene variants from Neanderthals can partly explain why people outside of Africa are affected”, says Hugo Zeberg, assistant professor at the department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Karolinska Institutet.

The researchers used data from three large clinical cohorts in the US, UK, and Finland, which allowed them to compare the genomes of 7,871 sufferers and 645,880 healthy controls. They identified 61 genetic risk factors for Dupuytren's contracture. The researchers found that three of these were inherited from Neanderthals, and these included the second and third most important risk factors.

The study is further evidence that the intermingling between Neanderthals and our ancestors has important consequences for the prevalence of some diseases, particularly among certain groups.

“This is a case where the meeting with Neanderthals has affected who suffers from illness, although we should not exaggerate the connection between Neanderthals and Vikings”, says Hugo Zeberg.

The study was financed by The Swedish Research Council, The Swedish Brain Foundation, The Erik Philip-Sörensen Foundation, Petrus och Augusta Hedlunds Stiftelse, and Emil och Wera Cornells Stiftelse.

Publication: “Major genetic risk factors for Dupuytren's disease are inherited from Neanderthals”, Richard Ågren, Snehal Patil, Xiang Zhou, FinnGen, Kristoffer Sahlholm, Svante Pääbo and Hugo Zeberg, Molecular Biology and Evolution, online June 14, 2023, doi: 10.1093/molbev/msad130 

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Genomics and archaeology rewrite the Neolithic Revolution in the Maghreb

 

IMAGE: RESEARCHER DURING HIS WORKS view more 

CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF CORDOBA

Cultural exchanges and interbreeding between African hunter-gatherers, Neolithic European farmers, and East-Saharan herders shaped changes in lifestyles, cultural expression and genetic makeup in the Maghreb between 5500 and 4500 BC, according to a study published today in Nature.

For decades Archaeology has been trying to explain how and why humans went from being exclusively hunter-gatherers to producing food, adopting agriculture and livestock. How did the "Neolithic Revolution" happen? Where did it all begin, and how did it spread?

To answer some of these questions and, as always in Science, to pose new ones, an international team - on which the Universities of Cordoba, Huelva and Burgos participated - published today, in the journal Nature, the results of a new work that dispels some myths about the beginning of the Neolithic and, therefore, of agriculture, in North Africa about 7,500 years ago.

Until recently, archaeologists debated the origins of agriculture and livestock in North Africa; that is, whether this had arisen independently, and the humans who inhabited that territory managed to domesticate local species and develop techniques similar to those of the inhabitants of the valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates; or whether the process had been strictly the result of a cultural transmission from other regions, such as the Near East or the Mediterranean. A new work spearheaded by the University of Uppsala and Burgos, with an important role played by the Moroccan Institute of Archaeology and Heritage Sciences (INSAP), shows that neither vision is true. Rather, the advent of the Neolithic in North Africa was the result of a complex and multifaceted process like few others, in light of the archaeological data observed thus far in the Old World all together.

The originality of the study lies in its combined genomic reading of Neolithic human remains from three key sites: the Kaf Taht el-Ghar cave, in Tetouan; Ifri n'Amr Ou Moussa, in Khémisset province; and Skhirat-Rouazi, south of Rabat. In the first the remains of a small group of individuals descended from European farmers who settled in the area around 7400 years ago were identified and studied. In the second, the existence of a necropolis in a cave has been confirmed where a couple of centuries later individuals of purely local ancestry were buried; that is, farmers with ceramics who had descended from native hunter-gatherers who adopted these new techniques from the aforementioned immigrant groups. Finally, in the third, a prehistoric necropolis dating from a thousand years later, genomes associated with the expansion of pastoral peoples from the Fertile Crescent were identified, which Archaeology had been detecting throughout present-day North Africa.

The dating of all these remains and their genomic study has allowed this Iberian-Swedish-Moroccan team (the main author is Luciana Simões, a Portuguese researcher at the University of Uppsala), to verify that the biological and cultural diversity of the humans who inhabited the territory more than 7,000 years ago could be behind the success of Neolithization in North Africa. In this regard, the work published InNature - and on which Rafael M. Martínez, of the University of Cordoba: Juan Carlos Vera, of the University of Huelva; and Cristina Valdiosera, of the University of Burgos, co-director of the project, appear as co-authors - expressly points out that long before the Romanization of the western end of the Mediterranean and, of course, long before the Islamization of the territory, human groups on both sides of the Strait of Gibraltar already shared knowledge, cultural aspects and, of course, genes.

According to Rafael M. Martínez, at the University of Córdoba, this work represents "a turning point in our understanding of many aspects related to the Neolithic diffusion processes in the region, settling the question regarding its origin in Andalusia and the Maghreb. The unidirectionality of the process now seems quite clear, probably from Iberia, situating the printed decoration of these first Moroccan ceramics in the larger set of the first adorned ceramics from the Western Mediterranean, including the Italian Peninsula, Southern France and the Iberian Mediterranean. Regarding the "pastoral" component of the necropolis of Skhirat, Martínez states that "precisely the ceramics present as trousseaus in these tombs, are completely different from the oldest printed ones, having precedents in styles previously known throughout the Sahara and decorated with rope patterns. A work of ours from 2018 already pointed out the relationship between this type of ceramics and pastoralist peoples; or, in any case, with very different origins."

Juan Carlos Vera, meanwhile, underscored that Genomics has come to ratify what archaeology has already been asserting for the last ten years: "The genetic sampling campaign was carried out in 2016, but the clear, complete image of the cultural and economic-social changes parallel to the mestizaje and population movements now demonstrated would not have been possible without the archaeological work we did in Morocco between 2011 and 2013 as part of the ERC AGRIWESTMED project, coordinated by the archaeobotanical expert Leonor Peña-Chocarro, at the CSIC (Madrid), thanks to an agreement with the Moroccan INSAP, coordinated by our colleague Youssef Bokbot. Thanks to these works, it was possible to detect ancient cereal and legume seeds grown in several of these Neolithic contexts, which already pointed to a diffusion process, although in this case we could not ascertain the 'human' scope of the process, or the immigrants' 'physical' arrival to the territory, with the projection of their genes, which this work demonstrates," says the professor at the University of Huelva.

Cristina Valdiosera, a Ramón y Cajal researcher at the University of Burgos and co-director of the project, along with Mattias Jakobsson, concluded that this is a work with enormous implications in the genomic history of North Africa. The settlers of the Maghreb, the historical Berbers (imazighen), have an ancestry made up of three main components: the first of them is that of African hunter-gatherers, present since the Upper Paleolithic in the cave of Taforalt; that of the European Neolithic farmers, who ultimately descend from the first peasants of Anatolia, spread over the Mediterranean and who probably arrived in Morocco from the Iberian Peninsula around 5500 BC; and, finally, that of the pastoralist peoples who penetrated the African continent, towards the west and south, crossing the Sinai from the fertile crescent, and who arrived in the Moroccan Atlantic approximately a thousand years later. "The fact that Berber and Semitic languages belong to the Afro-Asian linguistic trunk may be a consequence of the genomic history we are observing."

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JOURNAL

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41586-023-06166-6 

Ancient breeding of scarlet macaws

People were breeding scarlet macaws (Ara macao) in what is today New Mexico in the 1100s, according to examination of eggshell found at the Old Town archeological site. Cyler Conrad and colleagues examined six eggshell fragments associated with the articulated remains of a macaw. The eggshells are indirectly dated to the early 1100s by previous bone radiocarbon dating of the macaw. Using a non-destructive scanning electron microscope, the authors looked for evidence of fetal development inside the eggs, which can be inferred from reabsorption of a layer of eggshell known as the mammillary cone. Five specimens showed clear evidence of reabsorption, and the samples included at least two separate eggs, based on the developmental ages identified. 

The presence of fertilized scarlet macaw eggs at this site strongly suggests macaw breeding was occurring at Old Town in the 1100s. This is the first evidence of macaw breeding north of Paquimé, in Northwestern Mexico, where macaw breeding was known to occur after 1275. According to the authors, the findings may help shed light on the practice of breeding and keeping macaws in the Americas. The birds are native to the rainforests of Mexico and Central America but were transported and kept by people as far north as the desert Southwest in what is now the United States as early as the 600s. Contemporary experts are not sure precisely why scarlet macaws were bred and translocated.

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JOURNAL

PNAS Nexus

DOI

10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad138 

A rare glimpse of our first ancestors in mainland Southeast Asia

 

IMAGE: LOOKING BACK AT THE ENTRANCE OF TAM PÀ LING CAVE FROM THE CAVE FLOOR. THE EXCAVATION PIT IS THE THE LEFT OF THIS LOCATION. view more 

CREDIT: COPYRIGHT KIRA WESTAWAY (MACQUARIE UNIVERSITY)

• Tam Pà Ling, a cave in northern Laos, reveals new secrets about our earliest human journeys from Africa through to Australia.
• Between 86,000 and 68,000 years ago, modern humans passed by a cave in mainland Southeast Asia on their way through Asia to become Australia’s First People.
• Evidence for a human presence in this region lasting at least 56,000 years was found in approximately seven metres of cave sediment.
• This evidence demonstrates our abilities to move through forested areas and along inland river systems, and could represent a previously-used migration path among our ancestors.

Photos, video and visualisations available in a media pack: https://bit.ly/3oSUd4L

What connects a fossil found in a cave in northern Laos with stone tools made in north Australia? The answer is, we do. When our early Homo sapiens ancestors first arrived in Southeast Asia on their way from Africa to Australia, they left evidence of their presence in the form of human fossils that accumulated over thousands of years deep in a cave.

The latest evidence from Tam Pà Ling cave in northern Laos, uncovered by a team of Laotian, French, American and Australian researchers and published in Nature Communications, demonstrates beyond doubt that modern humans spread from Africa through Arabia and to Asia much earlier than previously thought.

It also confirms that our ancestors didn’t just follow coastlines and islands. They travelled through forested regions, most likely along river valleys, too. Some then moved on through Southeast Asia to become Australia’s First People.

“Tam Pà Ling plays a key role in the story of modern human migration through Asia but its significance and value is only just being recognised,” says University of Copenhagen palaeoanthropologist Assistant Professor Fabrice Demeter, one of the paper’s lead authors.

Three Australian Universities contributed to the project. Macquarie University and Southern Cross University dated samples using multiple techniques. Flinders University showed that the sediment in the cave had been laid down in distinct layers over tens of thousands of years.

Since the first excavation and the discovery of a skull and mandible in 2009, the cave has been controversial. Evidence of our earliest journeys from Africa into Southeast Asia is usually dominated by island locations such as Sumatra, Philippines and Borneo.

This was before Tam Pà Ling, an upland cave site more than 300 kilometres from the sea in northern Laos, started divulging its secrets. The skull and jawbone were identified as belonging to Homo sapiens who had migrated through the region. But when?

As is usual in questions of human dispersal, the debate comes down to timing. But this evidence was hard to date.

The human fossils cannot be directly dated as the site is a World Heritage area and the fossils are protected by Laotian law. There are very few animal bones or suitable cave decorations to date, and it is too old for radiocarbon dating. This placed a heavy burden on the luminescence dating of sediments to form the backbone of the timeline.

Luminescence dating relies on a light-sensitive signal that is reset to zero when exposed to light but builds up over time when shielded from light during burial. It was originally used to constrain the burial sediments that encased the fossils.

“Without luminescence dating this vital evidence would still have no timeline and the site would be overlooked in the accepted path of dispersal through the region,” says Macquarie University geochronologist Associate Professor Kira Westaway. “Luckily the technique is versatile and can be adapted for different challenges.”

These techniques returned a minimum age of 46,000 years – a chronology in line with the expected timing of Homo sapiens’ arrival in Southeast Asia. But the discovery didn’t end here.

From 2010 to 2023, annual excavations (delayed by three years of lockdowns) revealed increasingly more evidence that Homo sapiens had passed through en route to Australia. Seven pieces of human skeleton were found at intervals through 4.5 metres of sediment, pushing the potential timeline far back into the realms of the earliest Homo sapiens migrations to this region.

In this study, the team overcame these issues by creatively applying strategic dating techniques where possible, such as the uranium-series dating of a stalactite tip that had been buried in sediment, and the use of uranium-series dating coupled with electron-spin-resonance dating techniques to two rare but complete bovid teeth, unearthed at 6.5 metres.

“Having direct dating of the fossil remains confirmed the age sequence obtained by luminescence, allowing us to propose a comprehensive and secure chronology for a Homo sapiens presence at Tam Pà Ling,” says Southern Cross University geochronologist Associate Professor Renaud Joannes-Boyau.

The team supported the dating evidence with a detailed analysis of the sediments to assess the origin of the fossils using micromorphology, a technique that examines sediments under a microscope to establish the integrity of the layers. This key component of the new chronology helped establish that there was a consistent accumulation of sedimentary layers over a long period.

“Far from reflecting a rapid dump of sediments, the site represents a consistent and seasonally deposited stack of sediments,” explains Flinders University geoarchaeologist Associate Professor Mike Morley, who worked with PhD students Vito Hernandez and Meghan McAllister-Hayward.

The new chronology revealed there had a been a human presence in this area for more than 56,000 years. Furthermore, the age of the lowest fossil at seven metres – a fragment of a leg bone – provides a timeline for modern human arrival in this region of between 86,000 to 68,000 years ago. This pushes back the arrival time in mainland Southeast Asia by approximately 40,000 years. Although, according to the genetics, these early migrations did not contribute significantly to our modern-day populations.

“This really is the decisive paper for the Tam Pà Ling evidence,” says Associate Professor Westaway. “Finally we have enough dating evidence to confidently say when Homo sapiens first arrived in this area, how long they were there and what route they may have taken.”

Tam Pà Ling cave is very close to the recently discovered Cobra Cave, which was frequented by Denisovans approximately 70,000 years earlier. Despite the previous lack of evidence for early arrival in mainland Southeast Asia, this area might be a previously used dispersal route among our ancestors, long before Homo sapiens.

“We have much to learn from the caves and forests of Southeast Asia,” adds Associate Professor Westaway.

 

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JOURNAL

Nature Communications

DOI

10.1038/s41467-023-38715-y