Burial practices point to an interconnected early Medieval Europe

 

UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

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Early Medieval Europe is frequently viewed as a time of cultural stagnation, often given the misnomer of the 'Dark Ages'. However, analysis has revealed new ideas could spread rapidly as communities were interconnected, creating a surprisingly unified culture in Europe.

Dr Emma Brownlee, Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, examined how a key change in Western European burial practices spread across the continent faster than previously believed - between the 6th - 8th centuries AD, burying people with regionally specific grave goods was largely abandoned in favour of a more standardised, unfurnished burial.

"Almost everyone from the eighth century onwards is buried very simply in a plain grave, with no accompanying objects, and this is a change that has been observed right across western Europe," said Dr Brownlee.

To explore this change, Emma examined over 33,000 graves from this period in one of the largest studies of its kind. Statistical analysis was used to create a 'heat map' of the practice, tracking how it changed in frequency over time.

The results of this analysis, published in the journal Antiquity, reveal that changes in grave good use began to decline from the mid-sixth century in England, France, Germany, and the Low Countries, and by the early eighth century, it had been abandoned entirely.

"The most important finding is that the change from burial with grave goods to burial without them was contemporary across western Europe," said Dr Brownlee. "Although we knew this was a widespread change before, no one has previously been able to show just how closely aligned the change was in areas that are geographically very far apart."

Crucially, this contemporary transition provides strong evidence that early Medieval Europe was a well-connected place, with regular contact and exchange of ideas across vast areas.

Evidence of increasing long-distance trade is seen around this period, which may have been how these connections were facilitated. As the idea spread between communities, social pressure drove more people to adopt it. As more people did, this pressure grew - explaining why the spread of unfurnished funerals appeared to accelerate over time.

With people sharing more similarities, this likely reinforced the connections themselves as well.

"The change in burial practice will have further reinforced those connections; with everyone burying their dead in the same manner, a medieval traveller could have gone anywhere in Europe and seen practices they were familiar with," said Dr Brownlee.

An interconnected Europe with long-distance trade and travel facilitating the spread of new ideas to create a shared culture may sound modern, but in reality, Europe has been 'global' for over a millennium.

On the origins of money: Ancient European hoards full of standardized bronze objects

 

Early Bronze Age cultures traded in bronze objects of standardized weight

PLOS

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IMAGE: RIBS (SPANGENBARREN) view more 

CREDIT: M.H.G. KUIJPERS, AUTHOR PHOTO (CC-BY 4.0, HTTPS://CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/LICENSES/BY/4.0/)

In the Early Bronze Age of Europe, ancient people used bronze objects as an early form of money, even going so far as to standardize the shape and weight of their currency, according to a study published January 20, 2020 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Maikel H. G. Kuijpers and C?t?lin N. Popa of Leiden University, Netherlands.

Money is an important feature of modern human society. One key feature of money is standardization, but this can be difficult to identify in the archaeological record since ancient people had inexact forms of measurement compared with today. In this study, the authors assessed possible money from the Early Bronze Age of Central Europe, comparing the objects based on their perceived - if not precise - similarity.

The objects studied were made of bronze in shapes described as rings, ribs, and axe blades. The authors examined more than 5,000 such objects from more than 100 ancient hoards. They statistically compared the objects' weights using a psychology principle known as the Weber fraction, which quantifies the concept that, if objects are similar enough in mass, a human being weighing them by hand can't tell the difference.

They found that even though the objects' weights varied, around 70% of the rings were similar enough to have been indistinguishable by hand (averaging about 195 grams), as were subsets of the ribs and axe blades.

The authors suggest that this consistent similarity in shape and weight, along with the fact that these objects often occurred in hoards, are signs of their use as an early form of standardized currency. Later, in the Middle Bronze Age of Europe, more precise weighing tools appear in the archaeological record along with an increase in scrap bronze, pointing to a developed system of weighing.

The authors add: "The euros of Prehistory came in the form of bronze rings, ribs and axes. These Early Bronze Age artefacts were standardized in shape and weight and used as an early form of money."

Contents of ancient Maya drug containers identified

 

Scientists have identified the presence of a non-tobacco plant in ancient Maya drug containers for the first time.

The Washington State University researchers detected Mexican marigold (Tagetes lucida) in residues taken from 14 miniature Maya ceramic vessels.

Originally buried more than 1,000 years ago on Mexico's Yucatán peninsula, the vessels also contain chemical traces present in two types of dried and cured tobacco, Nicotiana tabacum and N. rustica. The research team, led by anthropology postdoc Mario Zimmermann, thinks the Mexican marigold was mixed with the tobacco to make smoking more enjoyable.

The discovery of the vessels' contents paints a clearer picture of ancient Maya drug use practices. The research, which was published today in Scientific Reports, also paves the way for future studies investigating other types of psychoactive and non-psychoactive plants that were smoked, chewed, or snuffed among the Maya and other pre-Colombian societies.

"While it has been established that tobacco was commonly used throughout the Americas before and after contact, evidence of other plants used for medicinal or religious purposes has remained largely unexplored," Zimmermann said. "The analysis methods developed in collaboration between the Department of Anthropology and the Institute of Biological Chemistry give us the ability to investigate drug use in the ancient world like never before."

Zimmermann and colleagues' work was made possible by NSF-funded research which led to a new metabolomics-based analysis method that can detect thousands of plant compounds or metabolites in residue collected from containers, pipes, bowls and other archaeological artifacts. The compounds can then be used to identify which plants were consumed.

Previously, the identification of ancient plant residues relied on the detection of a limited number of biomarkers, such as nicotine, anabasine, cotinine and caffeine.

"The issue with this is that while the presence of a biomarker like nicotine shows tobacco was smoked, it doesn't tell you what else was consumed or stored in the artifact," said David Gang, a professor in WSU's Institute of Biological Chemistry and a co-author of the study. "Our approach not only tells you, yes, you found the plant you're interested in, but it also can tell you what else was being consumed."

Zimmermann helped unearth two of the ceremonial vessels that were used for the analysis in the spring of 2012. At the time, he was working on a dig directed by the National Institute of Anthropology and History of Mexico on the outskirts of Mérida where a contractor had uncovered evidence of a Maya archeological site while clearing lands for a new housing complex.

Zimmermann and a team of archeologists used GPS equipment to divide the area into a checkerboard-like grid. They then hacked their way through dense jungle searching for small mounds and other telltale signs of ancient buildings where the remains of important people such as shamans are sometimes found.

"When you find something really interesting like an intact container it gives you a sense of joy," Zimmermann said. "Normally, you are lucky if you find a jade bead. There are literally tons of pottery sherds but complete vessels are scarce and offer a lot of interesting research potential."

Zimmermann said the WSU research team is currently in negotiations with several institutions in Mexico to get access to more ancient containers from the region that they can analyze for plant residues. Another project they are currently pursuing is looking at organic residues preserved in the dental plaque of ancient human remains.

"We are expanding frontiers in archaeological science so that we can better investigate the deep time relationships people have had with a wide range of psychoactive plants, which were (and continue to be) consumed by humans all over the world," said Shannon Tushingham, a professor of Anthropology at WSU and a co-author of the study. "There are many ingenious ways in which people manage, use, manipulate and prepare native plants and plant mixtures, and archaeologists are only beginning to scratch the surface of how ancient these practices were."

Teeth pendants speak of the elk's prominent status in the Stone Age

UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI

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IMAGE: A TOTAL OF 90 ELK TEETH WERE PLACED NEXT TO THE HIPS AND THIGHS OF THE BODY IN GRAVE 127, POSSIBLY ATTACHED TO A GARMENT RESEMBLING AN APRON. THERE WERE... view more 

CREDIT: DRAWING BY TOM BJORKLUND

Roughly 8,200 years ago, the island of Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov in Lake Onega in the Republic of Karelia, Russia, housed a large burial ground where men, women and children of varying ages were buried. Many of the graves contain an abundance of objects and red ochre, signifying the wish to ensure the comfort of the buried also after death. Pendants made of elk incisors were apparently attached to clothing and accessories, such as dresses, coats, cloaks, headdresses and belts. Although no clothing material has been preserved, the location of the elk teeth sheds light on the possible type of these outfits.

A people of grooved elk tooth pendants

A study headed by archaeologist Kristiina Mannermaa, University of Helsinki, aimed to determine who the people buried in outfits decorated with elk tooth ornaments were, and what the pendants meant to them. The study analysed the manufacturing technique of a total of more than 4,000 tooth ornaments, or the way in which the teeth had been processed for attachment or suspension. The results were surprising, as practically all of the teeth had been processed identically by making one or more small grooves at the tip of the root, which made tying the pendants easier. Only in two instances had a small hole been made in the tooth for threading, both of which were found in the grave of the same woman. The tooth pendants found in graves located in the Baltic area and Scandinavia from the same period as the Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov graves are almost exclusively perforated. Perforation is the surest way of fastening the pendant, but making holes in the narrow tip of a tooth is more laborious than grooving.

Archaeological and ethnographic research has shown that humans have been using decorations almost always and everywhere in the world, for several different purposes. To many indigenous peoples in Eurasia, including the Sámi communities, decorations have been and still are an important way of describing a person's identity and origin. They are not only aesthetic details, but also connected to intercommunity communication and the strengthening of intracommunity uniformity. External elements such as ornaments can also influence the names which neighbouring groups use to refer to a community. In fact, Kristiina Mannermaa calls the people found in the burial site the people of grooved elk tooth pendants.

"Even though there are pendants made of beaver and bear teeth in the graves, the share of elk teeth in them is overwhelming," Mannermaa says.

Typically, only one or at the most a couple of different groove types were prevalent in individual graves. This indicates that the pendants found in a specific grave or cluster were the result of routine serial production of sorts carried out in a fairly short period of time. The most common groove types were firm as well as quick and easy to make.

"Interestingly, the grooves were not always made on the broadest side of the tooth, which would be the easiest option. In many graves, the grooves are on the thin side of the tooth where the unstable position of the tooth makes them harder to do. The artisan may have resorted to this method in order to tie them in a specific position," researcher Riitta Rainio notes.

The highest number of elk teeth were found in the graves of young adult women and men, the lowest in those of children and elderly people. In other words, elk tooth ornaments were in one way or another linked to age, possibly specifically to the peak reproductive years.

Elk was the most important animal in the ideology and beliefs of the prehistorical hunter-gatherers of the Eurasian forest zone, and their limited availability made elk teeth a valuable material to ancient hunters. Elks were not brought down very often, and not all members of the community contributed to hunting. It may be that a single individual was given all of the incisors of a caught elk. Elks have a total of eight incisors, six permanent ones in the lower jaw and two permanent canines in the shape of incisors. At times, corresponding deciduous teeth were also processed into ornaments. The largest ornaments required the teeth of at least 8 to 18 elks.

First human culture lasted 20,000 years longer than thought

Some 11 thousand years ago, Africa's furthest west harbored the last populations to preserve tool-making traditions first established by the earliest members of our species

MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY

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IMAGE: FRESHLY FOUND ARTEFACT FROM LAMINIA, SENEGAL view more 

CREDIT: ELEANOR SCERRI

Fieldwork led by Dr Eleanor Scerri, head of the Pan-African Evolution Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany and Dr Khady Niang of the University of Cheikh Anta Diop in Senegal, has documented the youngest known occurrence of the Middle Stone Age. This repertoire of stone flaking methods and the resulting tools includes distinctive ways of producing sharp flakes by carefully preparing nodules of rock, some of which were sometimes further shaped into tool forms known as 'scrapers' and 'points.' Middle Stone Age finds most commonly occur in the African record between around 300 thousand and 30 thousand years ago, after which point they largely vanish.

It was long thought that these tool types were replaced after 30 thousand years ago by a radically different, miniaturized toolkit better suited to diversified subsistence strategies and patterns of mobility across Africa. In a paper published in Scientific Reports this week, Scerri and colleagues show that groups of hunter-gatherers in what is today Senegal continued to use Middle Stone Age technologies associated with our species' earliest prehistory as late as 11 thousand years ago. This contrasts with the long-held view that humanity's major prehistoric cultural phases occurred in a neat and universal sequence.

The 'Last Eden'?

"West Africa is a real frontier for human evolutionary studies - we know almost nothing about what happened here in deep prehistory. Almost everything we know about human origins is extrapolated from discoveries in small parts of eastern and southern Africa," says Dr Eleanor Scerri, the lead author of the study.

To redress this gap in the data, Scerri and Niang put together a research program to explore different regions of Senegal. The program ranges from Senegal's desert edges to its forests and along different stretches of its major river systems: the Senegal and the Gambia, where they found multiple Middle Stone Age sites, all with surprisingly young dates.

"These discoveries demonstrate the importance of investigating the whole of the African continent, if we are to really get a handle on the deep human past." says Dr Khady Niang. "Prior to our work, the story from the rest of Africa suggested that well before 11 thousand years ago, the last traces of the Middle Stone Age - and the lifeways it reflects - were long gone."

Explaining why this region of West Africa was home to such a late persistence of Middle Stone Age culture is not straightforward.

"To the north, the region meets the Sahara Desert," explains Dr Jimbob Blinkhorn, one of the paper's authors. "To the east, there are the Central African rainforests, which were often cut off from the West African rainforests during periods of drought and fragmentation. Even the river systems in West Africa form a self-contained and isolated group."

"It is also possible that this region of Africa was less affected by the extremes of repeated cycles of climate change," adds Scerri. "If this was the case, the relative isolation and habitat stability may simply have resulted in little need for radical changes in subsistence, as reflected in the successful use of these traditional toolkits."

"All we can be sure about is that this persistence is not simply about a lack of capacity to invest in the development of new technologies. These people were intelligent, they knew how to select good stone for their tool making and exploit the landscape they lived in," says Niang.

An ecological, biological and cultural patchwork

The results fit in with a wider, emerging view that for most of humanity's deep prehistory, populations were relatively isolated from each other, living in subdivided groups in different regions.

Accompanying this striking finding is the fact that in West Africa, the major cultural shift to more miniaturized toolkits also occurs extremely late compared to the rest of the continent. For a relatively short time, Middle Stone Age using populations lived alongside others using the more recently developed miniaturized tool kits, referred to as the 'Later Stone Age'.

"This matches genetic studies suggesting that African people living in the last ten thousand years lived in very subdivided populations," says Dr Niang. "We aren't sure why, but apart from physical distance, it may be the case that some cultural boundaries also existed. Perhaps the populations using these different material cultures also lived in slightly different ecological niches."

Around 15 thousand years ago, there was a major increase in humidity and forest growth in central and western Africa, that perhaps linked different areas and provided corridors for dispersal. This may have spelled the final end for humanity's first and earliest cultural repertoire and initiated a new period of genetic and cultural mixing.

"These findings do not fit a simple unilinear model of cultural change towards 'modernity'," explains Scerri. " Groups of hunter-gatherers embedded in radically different technological traditions occupied neighbouring regions of Africa for thousands of years, and sometimes shared the same regions. Long isolated regions, on the other hand, may have been important reservoirs of cultural and genetic diversity," she adds. "This may have been a defining factor in the success of our species."

Sharing leftover meat may have contributed to early dog domestication

 

Humans feeding leftover lean meat to wolves during harsh winters may have had a role in the early domestication of dogs, towards the end of the last ice age (14,000 to 29,000 years ago), according to a study published in Scientific Reports.

Maria Lahtinen and colleagues used simple energy content calculations to estimate how much energy would have been left over by humans from the meat of species they may have hunted 14,000 to 29,000 years that were also typical wolf prey species, such as horses, moose and deer. The authors hypothesized that if wolves and humans had hunted the same animals during harsh winters, humans would have killed wolves to reduce competition rather than domesticate them. With the exception of Mustelids such as weasels, the authors found that all prey species would have supplied more protein than humans could consume, resulting in excess lean meat that could be fed to wolves, thus reducing the competition for prey.

Although humans may have relied on an animal-based diet during winters when plant-based foods were limited, they were probably not adapted to an entirely protein-based diet and may have favoured meat rich in fat and grease over lean, protein-rich meat. As wolves can survive on a solely protein-based diet for months, humans may have fed excess lean meat to pet wolves, which may have enabled companionship even during harsh winter months. Feeding excess meat to wolves may have facilitated co-living with captured wolves and the use of pet wolves as hunting aids and guards may have further facilitated the domestication process, eventually to full dog domestication.

Oldest hominins of Olduvai Gorge persisted across changing environments

 

~2.0 to 1.8 million year-old archaeological site demonstrates that early humans had the skills and tools to cope with ecological change

MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY

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IMAGE: OLDUVAI (NOW OLDUPAI) GORGE, KNOWN AS THE CRADLE OF HUMANKIND, IS A UNESCO WORLD HERITAGE SITE IN TANZANIA. NEW INTERDISCIPLINARY FIELD WORK HAS LED TO THE DISCOVERY OF THE OLDEST... view more 

CREDIT: MICHAEL PETRAGLIA

Olduvai (now Oldupai) Gorge, known as the Cradle of Humankind, is a UNESCO World Heritage site in Tanzania, made famous by Louis and Mary Leakey. New interdisciplinary field work has led to the discovery of the oldest archaeological site in Oldupai Gorge as reported in Nature Communications, which shows that early human used a wide diversity of habitats amidst environmental changes across a 200,000 year-long period.

Located in the heart of eastern Africa, the Rift System is a prime region for human origins research, boasting extraordinary records of extinct human species and environmental records spanning several million years. For more than a century, archaeologists and human palaeontologists have been exploring the East African Rift outcrops and unearthing hominin fossils in surveys and excavations. However, understanding of the environmental contexts in which these hominins lived has remained elusive due to a dearth of ecological studies in direct association with the cultural remains.

In the new study, published in Nature Communications, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for for the Science of Human History teamed up with lead partners from the University of Calgary, Canada, and the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, to excavate the site of 'Ewass Oldupa' (meaning on 'the way to the Gorge' in the local Maa language, as the site straddles the path that links the canyon's rim with its bottom). The excavations uncovered the oldest Oldowan stone tools ever found at Oldupai Gorge, dating to ~2 million years ago. Excavations in long sequences of stratified sediments and dated volcanic horizons indicated hominin presence at Ewass Oldupai from 2.0 to 1.8 million years ago.

Fossils of mammals (wild cattle and pigs, hippos, panthers, lions, hyena, primates), reptiles and birds, together with a range of multidisciplinary scientific studies, revealed habitat changes over 200,000 years in riverine and lake systems, including fern meadows, woodland mosaics, naturally burned landscapes, lakeside palm groves and dry steppe habitats. The uncovered evidence shows periodic but recurrent land use across a subset of environments, punctuated with times when there is an absence of hominin activity.

Dr. Pastory Bushozi of Dar es Salaam University, Tanzania, notes, "the occupation of varied and unstable environments, including after volcanic activity, is one of the earliest examples of adaptation to major ecological transformations."

Hominin occupation of fluctuating and disturbed environments is unique for this early time period and shows complex behavioural adaptations among early human groups. In the face of changing habitats, early humans did not substantially alter their toolkits, but instead their technology remained stable over time. Indicative of their versatility, typical Oldowan stone tools, consisting of pebble and cobble cores and sharp-edged flakes and polyhedral cobbles, continued to be used even as habitats changed. The implication is that by two million years ago, early humans had the behavioural capacity to continually and consistently exploit a multitude of habitats, using reliable stone toolkits, to likely process plants and butcher animals over the long term.

Though no hominin fossils have yet been recovered from Ewass Oldupa, hominin fossils of Homo habilis were found just 350 metres away, in deposits dating to 1.82 million years ago. While it is difficult to know if Homo habilis was present at Ewass Oldupa, Professor Julio Mercader of the University of Calgary asserts that "these early humans were surely ranging widely over the landscape and along shores of the ancient lake." Mercader further notes that this does not discount the possibility that other hominin species, such as the australopithecines, were also using and making stone tools at Ewass Oldupa, as we know that the genus Paranthropus was present in Oldupai Gorge at this time.