Uncovering a 5000-year-old family tragedy

Eight years ago, a mass grave was unearthed in the southern Polish village of Koszyce. The circumstances surrounding the 5000-year-old gravesite have been a mystery ever since. The skeletons of 15 women, children and young men were found - each slain by powerful blows to the head. Yet, their bodies were neatly positioned alongside one another and with an abundance of gifts for their final voyage.
An international team, composed of researchers from the universities of Copenhagen and Aarhus and the Archaeological Museum in Poznan, Poland, used DNA profiles to demonstrate that the mass murder was that of a large, three generational family. Using genomic analyses, radiocarbon dating, isotopic analyses and archaeological data, the researchers gained detailed insight into a this Stone Age society and a grizzly occurrence some 5000 years ago.
"By analyzing ancient DNA from the skeletons, we were able to map each of the family relationships. We can see that mothers are laid next to their children and brothers side-by-side. Those who buried the dead knew them well. We also see that most of the fathers from this extended family are absent from the grave. Our suggestion is that they weren't at the settlement when the massacre occurred and that they returned later, and subsequently buried their families in a respectful way," says evolutionary biologist Morten Allentoft of the University of Copenhagen.
A period of transition
"We do not know who was responsible for this massacre," according to University of Copenhagen archaeo-geneticist Hannes Schroeder. "But it is thought-provoking that it occurred 5,000 years ago, as the late Neolithic Period was transitioning into the Bronze Age. During this period, European cultures were being heavily transformed by Yamnaya cultures migrating from the east. It is easy to imagine that these changes somehow precipitated violent territorial clashes.
In relation to archaeological findings, archaeologist Niels N. Johannsen of Aarhus University adds:
"We know from other gravesite discoveries that violent conflicts played out among different cultural groups at this time. However, they have never been as clearly documented as here. All the violence and tragedy aside, our study clearly demonstrates that family unity and care meant a lot for these people, some 5,000 years ago, both in life and in death."
International collaboration
The three Danish researchers underscore the importance of close collaboration among experts in ancient DNA (aDNA), archaeology, anthropology, and isotopic analyses in clarifying this 5000-year-old murder mystery. Marzena Szmyt, Director of the Archaeological Museum in Poznan, was equally enthusiastic about the interdisciplinary results from the international group of experts.
The new results, funded in part by the Villum Foundation and Aarhus University Research Foundation, have allowed genetic testing to "extend our insight into a particularly tumultuous period of European prehistory, significantly," according to Szmyt.

Ancient DNA suggests that some Northern Europeans got their languages from Siberia

Most Europeans descend from a combination of European hunter-gatherers, Anatolian early farmers, and Steppe herders. But only European speakers of Uralic languages like Estonian and Finnish also have DNA from ancient Siberians. Now, with the help of ancient DNA samples, researchers reporting in Current Biology on May 9 suggest that these languages may have arrived from Siberia by the beginning of the Iron Age, about 2,500 years ago, rather than evolving in Northern Europe.
The findings highlight the way in which a combination of genetic, archaeological, and linguistic data can converge to tell the same story about what happened in particular areas in the distant past.
"Since the transition from Bronze to Iron Age coincides with the diversification and arrival time of Finnic languages in the Eastern Baltic proposed by linguists, it is plausible that the people who brought Siberian ancestry to the region also brought Uralic languages with them," says Lehti Saag of University of Tartu, Estonia.
Although researchers knew that the Uralic-speaking people share common Siberian ancestry, its arrival time in the Eastern Baltic had remained uncertain. To characterize the genetic ancestry of people from the as-yet-unstudied cultural layers, Saag along with Kristiina Tambets and colleagues extracted DNA from the tooth roots of 56 individuals, 33 of which yielded enough DNA to include in the analysis.
"Studying ancient DNA makes it possible to pinpoint the moment in time when the genetic components that we see in modern populations reached the area since, instead of predicting past events based on modern genomes, we are analyzing the DNA of individuals who actually lived in a particular time in the past," Saag explains.
Their data suggest that the Siberian ancestry reached the coasts of the Baltic Sea no later than the mid-first millennium BC--around the time of the diversification of west Uralic/Finnic languages. It also indicates an influx of people from regions with strong Western hunter-gatherer characteristics in the Bronze Age, including many traits we now associate with modern Northern Europeans, like pale skins, blue eyes, and lactose tolerance.
"The Bronze Age individuals from the Eastern Baltic show an increase in hunter-gatherer ancestry compared to Late Neolithic people and also in the frequency of light eyes, hair, and skin and lactose tolerance," Tambets says, noting that those characteristics continue amongst present-day Northern Europeans.
The researchers are now expanding their study to better understand the Iron Age migration processes in Europe. They say they will also "move forward in time and focus on the genetic structure of the medieval time period."

Abrupt climate change drove early South American population decline

Abrupt climate change some 8,000 years ago led to a dramatic decline in early South American populations, suggests new UCL research.
The study, published in Scientific Reports, is the first to demonstrate how widespread the decline was and the scale at which population decline took place 8,000 to 6,000 years ago.
"Archaeologists working in South America have broadly known that some 8,200 years ago, inhabited sites in various places across the continent were suddenly abandoned. In our study we wanted to connect the dots between disparate records that span the Northern Andes, through the Amazon, to the southern tip of Patagonia and all areas in between," said lead author, Dr Philip Riris (UCL Institute of Archaeology).
"Unpredictable levels of rainfall, particularly in the tropics, appear to have had a negative impact on pre-Columbian populations until 6,000 years ago, after which recovery is evident. This recovery appears to correlate with cultural practices surrounding tropical plant management and early crop cultivation, possibly acting as buffers when wild resources were less predictable," added Dr Riris.
The study focused on the transition to the Middle Holocene (itself spanning 8,200 and 4,200 years ago), a period of particularly profound change when hunter-gatherer populations were already experimenting with different domestic plants, and forming new cultural habits to suit both landscape and climate change.
While the research shows that there was a significant disruption to population, the study highlights that indigenous people of South America were thriving before and after the middle Holocene.
Co-author, Dr Manuel Arroyo-Kalin (UCL Institute of Archaeology), said: "In the years leading up to population decline, we can see that population sizes were unharmed. This would suggest that early Holocene populations, probably with a social memory of abrupt climate change during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, developed successful strategies to deal with climate change.
"Abandonment of certain regions and the need to adapt quickly to new circumstances may have promoted the exploration of alternative strategies and new forms of subsistence, including the early adoption of low scale cultivation of domestic plants. Viewed in the context of at least 14,000 years of human presence in South America, the events of the Middle Holocene are a key part of indigenous South Americans' cultural resilience to abrupt and unexpected change."
In this new study, archaeologists examined data from nearly 1,400 sites consisting of more than 5,000 radiocarbon dates to understand how population changed over time, and cross-referenced this information with climate data.
Dr Riris explained: "We studied ancient records of rainfall such as marine sediments for evidence of exceptional climate events. Within windows of 100 years, we compared the Middle Holocene to the prevalent patterns before and after 8,200 years ago. Normal patterns of rainfall suggest on average an unusually dry or wet year every 16-20 years, while under highly variable conditions this increases to every 5 years or so. This puts in perspective the challenge that indigenous communities would have faced."
The authors believe that the research offers crucial historical context on how ancient indigenous South American populations dealt with climate change.
Dr Arroyo-Kalin concluded: "Our study brings a demographic dimension to bear on understandings of the effects of past climate change, and the challenges that were faced by indigenous South Americans in different places. This understanding gauges the resilience of past small-scale productive systems and can potentially help shape future strategies for communities in the present."

Origin of Sino-Tibetan language family revealed by new research

The Sino-Tibetan language family includes early literary languages, such as Chinese, Tibetan, and Burmese, and is represented by more than 400 modern languages spoken in China, India, Burma, and Nepal. It is one of the most diverse language families in the world, spoken by 1.4 billion speakers. Although the language family has been studied since the beginning of the 19th century, scholars' knowledge of the origin of these languages is still severely limited. An interdisciplinary study published in PNAS, led by scientists of the Centre des Recherches Linguistiques sur l'Asie Orientale (Paris), the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (Jena), and the Centre de Recherches en Mathématiques de la Décision (Paris), now sheds new light on the place and date of the origin of these languages. Based on a phylogenetic study of 50 ancient and modern Sino-Tibetan languages, the scholars conclude that the Sino-Tibetan languages originated among millet farmers, located in North China, around 7,200 years ago.
During the past 10,000 years, two of the world's largest language families emerged, one in the west and one in the east of Eurasia. Together, these families account for nearly 60% of the world's population: Indo-European (3.2 billion speakers), and Sino-Tibetan (1.4 billion). The Sino-Tibetan family comprises about 500 languages spoken across a wide geographic range, from the west coast of the Pacific to Nepal, India, and Pakistan. Speakers of these languages have played a major role in human prehistory, giving rise to early high cultures China, Tibet, Burma, and Nepal. However, while archaeogeneticists, phylogeneticists, and linguists have energetically discussed the origins of the Indo-European language family, the formation of Sino-Tibetan languages has previously received little attention.
One of the world's most diverse language families "The Sino-Tibetan language family is one of the most diverse families in the world. It includes all of the different types of morphological systems, ranging from isolating languages, such as Chinese, Burmese, and Tujia, to polysynthetic languages, such as Gyalrongic and Kiranti languages," explains Guillaume Jacques of the Centre des Recherches Linguistiques sur l'Asie Orientale, co-first author of the study. "While our knowledge of how to compare these languages linguistically is improving, important aspects of the development of their sound systems and their grammar remain poorly understood."
A database of core words from 50 Sino-Tibetan languages In order to shed light on the complex history of these languages, the scholars assembled a lexical database containing core vocabulary from 50 Sino-Tibetan languages. This database, published here for the first time, includes ancient languages spoken 1000 and more years ago, such as Old Chinese, Old Burmese, and Old Tibetan, as well as modern languages documented by field work.
"In order to compare these languages in a transparent way, we developed a specific annotation framework that allows us not only to mark which words we identify as sharing a common origin, but also which sounds in the words we think are related," says Johann-Mattis List of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, who led the study. "A particular problem in identifying the truly related words were the numerous cases where languages borrowed words from each other," mentions Jacques. "Luckily, we know the history of particular languages rather well and could rely on techniques that we developed before to reveal the true history concealed by these borrowings."
Evolutionary trees suggest that the language family originated about 7200 years ago Using powerful computational phylogenetic methods, the team inferred the most probable relationships between these languages and then estimated when these languages might have originated in the past. "We find clear evidence for seven major subgroups with a complex pattern of overlapping signals beyond that level," says Simon J. Greenhill of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. "Our estimates suggest that the ancestral language has arisen around 7,200 years ago."
An agricultural analysis reveals the most likely origin and expansion scenario of the language family To further resolve the complex pathways of the evolution of the Sino-Tibetan languages, the authors looked at related words describing domesticates, because they may reveal how agricultural knowledge spread through the region. This agricultural analysis suggests an origin of the Sino-Tibetan family in Northern Chinese communities of millet farmers of the Neolithic cultures of late Cishan and early Yangshao. "The most likely expansion scenario of the languages involves an initial separation between an Eastern group, from which the Chinese dialects evolved, and a Western group, which is ancestral to the rest of the Sino-Tibetan languages," summarizes Laurent Sagart of the Centre des Recherches Linguistiques sur l'Asie Orientale, co-first author of the study, who carried out the agricultural analysis.
"We are very excited about our findings," says List. "Our approach combines robust, traditional scholarship with cutting-edge computational methods within a computer-assisted framework that allows us to use our knowledge of today's languages as a key to their past."

Ayahuasca fixings found in 1,000-year-old bundle in the Andes

New evidence that the mind-blowing brew goes back millennia

University of California - Berkeley

IMAGE: Ritual bundle with leather bag, carved wooden snuff tablets and snuff tube with human hair braids, pouch made of three fox snouts, camelid bone spatulas, colorful textile headband and wool... view more 

Credit: Photos courtesy of Juan Albarracín-Jordán and José Capriles.

Today's hipster creatives and entrepreneurs are hardly the first generation to partake of ayahuasca, according to archaeologists who have discovered traces of the powerfully hallucinogenic potion in a 1,000-year-old leather bundle buried in a cave in the Bolivian Andes.
Led by University of California, Berkeley, archaeologist Melanie Miller, a chemical analysis of a pouch made from three fox snouts sewn together tested positive for at least five plant-based psychoactive substances. They included dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and harmine, key active compounds in ayahuasca, a mind-blowing brew commonly associated with the Amazon jungle.
"This is the first evidence of ancient South Americans potentially combining different medicinal plants to produce a powerful substance like ayahuasca," said Miller, a researcher with UC Berkeley's Archaeological Research Facility who uses chemistry and various technologies to study how ancient humans lived.
She is lead author of the study, published today (Monday, May 6) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Miller's analysis of a scraping from the fox-snout pouch and a plant sample found in the ritual bundle -- via liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry -- turned up trace amounts of bufotenine, DMT, harmine, cocaine and benzoylecgonine. Various combinations of these substances produce powerful, mind-altering hallucinations.
The discovery adds to a growing body of evidence of ritualistic psychotropic plant use going back millennia, said Miller, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Otago in New Zealand who conducted the research during her doctoral studies at UC Berkeley.
"Our findings support the idea that people have been using these powerful plants for at least 1,000 years, combining them to go on a psychedelic journey, and that ayahuasca use may have roots in antiquity," said Miller.
The remarkably well-preserved ritual bundle was found by archaeologists at 13,000-foot elevations in the Lipez Altiplano region of southwestern Bolivia, where llamas and alpacas roam. The leather kit dates back to the pre-Inca Tiwanaku civilization, which dominated the southern Andean highlands from about 550 to 950 A.D.
In addition to the fox-snout pouch, the leather bundle contained intricately carved wooden "snuffing tablets" and a "snuffing tube" with human hair braids attached, for snorting intoxicants; llama bone spatulas; a colorful woven textile strip and dried plant material. All the objects were in good shape, due to the arid conditions of the Andean highlands.
Though the cave where the artifacts were found appeared to be a burial site, an excavation did not turn up human remains. Moreover, the plants found in the bundle do not grow at those altitudes, suggesting the bundle's owner may have been a traveling shaman or another expert in the rituals of psychotropic plant use, or someone who was part of an extensive medicinal plant trading network.
"A lot of these plants, if consumed in the wrong dosage, could be very poisonous," Miller said. "So, whoever owned this bundle would need to have had great knowledge and skills about how to use these plants, and how and where to procure them."
Of particular fascination to Miller is the pouch made of three fox snouts. She describes it as "the most amazing artifact I've had the privilege to work with."
"There are civilizations who believe that, by consuming certain psychotropic plants, you can embody a specific animal to help you reach supernatural realms, and perhaps a fox may be among those animals," Miller said.
Ayahuasca is made from brewing the vines of Banisteriopsis Caapi and the leaves of the chacruna (Psychotria viridis) shrub. The leaves release DMT, and the vines release harmine -- and therein lies the secret of the ayahuasca effect.
"The tryptamine DMT produces strong, vivid hallucinations that can last from minutes to an hour, but combined with harmine, you can have prolonged out-of-body altered states of consciousness with altered perceptions of time and of the self," Miller said.
Once the drugs take effect, ayahuasca users typically enter a purgative state, which means they vomit a lot.
Though its use is currently fashionable among Silicon Valley techies, Hollywood celebrities and spiritual awakening-seekers worldwide, Miller says these latest archaeological findings pay homage to ayahuasca's ancient history.
Miller joined the Cueva del Chileno excavation project when archaeologists Juan Albarracín-Jordán of the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés in Bolivia and José Capriles of Pennsylvania State University sought her expertise to identify the plant matter they had found in the bundle.
She traveled for two days to reach the cave site near the remote south Bolivian village of Lipez and helped with the final phases of the excavation. The bundle was transported to a laboratory in La Paz and, once permits were in place, samples were exported to the lab of Christine Moore, chief toxicologist with the Immunalysis Corp. in Pomona, California.
Moore's lab provided the liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry technology needed to conduct toxicology tests on the samples. Once the contents of the Andean bundle tested positive for five kinds of psychotropic substances, Miller's research team was over the moon.
"We were amazed to see the incredible preservation of these compounds in this ritual bundle," said Miller. "I feel very lucky to have been a part of this research."

New reading of the Mesha Stele inscription has major consequences for biblical history

IMAGE: The Mesha Stele, the longest extra-biblical inscription ever found, now at the Louvre Museum in Paris. view more 

Credit: Public domain photograph.

The legendary King Balak from the Book of Numbers may have been a real historical figure, according to a new reading of the Mesha Stele, the longest extra-biblical inscription in existence.
The Mesha Stele, an ancient inscribed stone dating to the ninth century BCE, tells the story of the territorial expansion and construction endeavors of King Mesha of Moab, who is also mentioned in the Second Book of Kings in the Old Testament. The stele was found in the 19th century among the ruins of the ancient town of Dibon in Moab, located in today's Jordan, east of the Dead Sea. The stele is on display at the Louvre Museum.
According to the study, a word on Line 31 of the stele that has until now been interpreted as "House of David" in fact refers to King "Balak," who is known as a Moab ruler only from the Book of Numbers.
The new Tel Aviv University-Collège de France study was published on May 2 in Tel Aviv: Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University. It was co-authored by Prof. Israel Finkelstein and Prof. Nadav Na'aman of TAU's Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures in collaboration with Prof. Thomas Römer of Collège de France and the University of Lausanne.
A recent exhibit, Mésha et la Bible, held in October 2018 at the Collège de France in Paris in conjunction with the Louvre Museum, showcased the Meshe Stele "squeeze," a reverse copy of the inscription on paper. This exhibition afforded researchers the unique opportunity to take high-resolution photographs of the squeeze.
Although the stele had been cracked in the 19th century, the parts that went missing were preserved in the squeeze, which was made before the stone broke into pieces.
The authors of the new research studied new high-resolution photographs of the squeeze and of the stele itself. These new images made it clear that there are three consonants in the name of the monarch mentioned in Line 31, and that the first is the Hebrew letter bet, which corresponds to the English letter "B."
The most likely candidate for the monarch's name is "Balak." The seat of the king referred to in Line 31 was "Horonaim," which is mentioned four times in the Bible in relation to the Moabite territory south of the Arnon River.
"We believe Balak was a historical figure like Balaam, who, before the discovery of the famous Deir Alla inscription in Jordan in 1967, was considered an 'invented' character," explains Prof. Finkelstein. "The new photographs of the Mesha Stele and the squeeze indicate that the reading 'House of David' -- accepted by many scholars for more than two decades -- is no longer valid."
In 1994 the French epigrapher André Lemaire suggested that letters missing in Line 31 of the stele would spell "House of David," as in the Tel Dan Stele, which features the term in reference to the Kingdom of Judah. Accordingly, Lemaire proposed that in the mid-ninth century Judah ruled in southern Moab, east of the Dead Sea.
"With due caution, we suggest that the line refers to the Moabite King Balak, who, according to the Balaam story in Numbers 22-24, was supposed to bring a divine curse on the people of Israel," Prof. Na'aman says.
"The biblical story was written down later than the time of the Moabite king referred to in the Mesha Stele," Prof. Römer adds. "But to proffer a sense of authenticity to his story, its author must have integrated into the plot certain elements borrowed from ancient reality, including the names Balaam and Balak."

Middle Pleistocene human skull reveals variation and continuity in early Asian humans C

IMAGE: The Hualongdong Middle Pleistocene human skull and the collapsed cave site, with the fossil-bearing breccia in beige aournd the limestone blocks view more 

Credit: WU Xiujie and Erik Trinkaus

A team of scientists led by LIU Wu and WU Xiujie from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences reported the first ever Middle Pleistocene human skull found in southeastern China, revealing the variation and continuity in early Asian humans. Their findings were published on April 30 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Excavations in Middle Pleistocene cave deposits in southeastern China yielded a largely complete skull that exhibits morphological similarities to other East Asian Middle and Late Pleistocene archaic human remains, but also foreshadows later modern human forms.
Fossil evidence for human evolution in East Asia during the Pleistocene is often fragmentary and scattered, which makes evaluating the pattern of archaic human evolution and modern human emergence in the region complicated.
WU Xiujie and his colleagues reported the recent discovery of most of a skull and associated remains dating to around 300,000 years ago in Hualong Cave (Hualongdong). The features of the Hualongdong fossils complement those of other East Asian remains in indicating a continuity of form through the Middle Pleistocene and into the Late Pleistocene.
In particular, the skull features a low and wide braincase with a projecting brow but a less prominent midface, as well as an incipient chin. The teeth are simple in form, contrasting with other archaic East Asian fossils, and its third molar is either reduced in size or absent.
According to the authors, the remains not only add to the expected variation of these Middle Pleistocene humans, recombining features present in other individuals from the same time period, but also foreshadow developments in modern humans, providing evidence for regional continuity.