Before horses, ass hybrids were bred for warfare

 

 

CAPTION

The “War panel” of the “Standard of Ur”, exhibited in the British Museum, London.

CREDIT

© Thierry Grange / IJM / CNRS-Université de Paris.

The 4,500-year-old iconography and texts from Mesopotamia show that the elite used equids for travel and warfare; however, the nature of these animals remained mysterious. In Science Advances (January 14, 2022) a team from the Institut Jacques Monod (CNRS/Université de Paris) used ancient DNA to show that these animals were the result of crossing domestic donkeys with wild asses. This makes them the oldest known example of animal hybrids, which were produced by Syro-Mesopotamian societies 500 years before the arrival of domestic horses in the region.

Equids have played a key role in the evolution of warfare throughout history. Although domesticated horses did not appear in the Fertile Crescent until about 4,000 years ago1, the Sumerians had already been using equid-drawn four-wheeled war wagons on the battlefield for centuries, as evidenced by the famous "Standard of Ur", a 4,500-year-old Sumerian mosaic (see photo). Cuneiform clay tablets from this period also mention prestigious equids with a high market value called "kunga"; however, the precise nature of this animal has been the subject of controversy for decades.

A team of palaeogeneticists from the Institut Jacques Monod (CNRS/Université de Paris) has addressed this question by studying the equid genomes from the 4,500-year-old princely burial complex of Umm el-Marra (northern Syria). On the basis of morphological and archaeological criteria, these animals, buried in separate installations, have been proposed to be the prestigious "kungas" by an archaeozoologist from the United States. 

Although degraded, the genome of these animals could be compared to those of other equids: horses, domestic donkeys and wild asses of the hemione family, specially sequenced for this study. The latter includes the remains of an 11,000-year-old equid from the oldest known temple, Göbekli Tepe (south-east of present-day Turkey), and the last representatives of Syrian wild asses that disappeared in the early 20th century. According to the analyses, the equids of Umm el-Marra are first generation hybrids resulting from the cross of a domestic donkey and a male hemione. As kungas were sterile and the hemiones were wild, it was necessary each time to cross a domestic female with a previously captured hemione (capture represented on an Assyrian bas-relief from Nineveh).

Rather than domesticating the wild horses that populated the region, the Sumerians produced and used hybrids, combining the qualities of the two parents to produce offspring that were stronger and faster than donkeys (and much faster than horses) but more controllable than hemiones. These kungas were eventually supplanted by the arrival of the domestic horse, which was easier to reproduce, when it was imported to the region from the Pontic Steppe.

 

Notes

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1 This is a previous finding of the same research group: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abb0030

Earliest human remains in eastern Africa dated to more than 230,000 years ago

 The age of the oldest fossils in eastern Africa widely recognised as representing our species, Homo sapiens, has long been uncertain. Now, dating of a massive volcanic eruption in Ethiopia reveals they are much older than previously thought.

The remains -- known as Omo I -- were found in Ethiopia in the late 1960s, and scientists have been attempting to date them precisely ever since, by using the chemical fingerprints of volcanic ash layers found above and below the sediments in which the fossils were found.

An international team of scientists, led by the University of Cambridge, has reassessed the age of the Omo I remains -- and Homo sapiens as a species. Earlier attempts to date the fossils suggested they were less than 200,000 years old, but the new research shows they must be older than a colossal volcanic eruption that took place 230,000 years ago. The results are reported in the journal Nature.

The Omo I remains were found in the Omo Kibish Formation in southwestern Ethiopia, within the East African Rift valley. The region is an area of high volcanic activity, and a rich source of early human remains and artefacts such as stone tools. By dating the layers of volcanic ash above and below where archaeological and fossil materials are found, scientists identified Omo I as the earliest evidence of our species, Homo sapiens.

"Using these methods, the generally accepted age of the Omo fossils is under 200,000 years, but there's been a lot of uncertainty around this date," said Dr Céline Vidal from Cambridge's Department of Geography, the paper's lead author. "The fossils were found in a sequence, below a thick layer of volcanic ash that nobody had managed to date with radiometric techniques because the ash is too fine-grained."

As part of a four-year project led by Professor Clive Oppenheimer, Vidal and her colleagues have been attempting to date all the major volcanic eruptions in the Ethiopian Rift around the time of the emergence of Homo sapiens, a period known as the late Middle Pleistocene.

The researchers collected pumice rock samples from the volcanic deposits and ground them down to sub-millimetre size. "Each eruption has its own fingerprint -- its own evolutionary story below the surface, which is determined by the pathway the magma followed," said Vidal. "Once you've crushed the rock, you free the minerals within, and then you can date them, and identify the chemical signature of the volcanic glass that holds the minerals together."

The researchers carried out new geochemical analysis to link the fingerprint of the thick volcanic ash layer from the Kamoya Hominin Site (KHS ash) with an eruption of Shala volcano, more than 400 kilometres away. The team then dated pumice samples from the volcano to 230,000 years ago. Since the Omo I fossils were found deeper than this particular ash layer, they must be more than 230,000 years old.

"First I found there was a geochemical match, but we didn't have the age of the Shala eruption," said Vidal. "I immediately sent the samples of Shala volcano to our colleagues in Glasgow so they could measure the age of the rocks. When I received the results and found out that the oldest Homo sapiens from the region was older than previously assumed, I was really excited."

"The Omo Kibish Formation is an extensive sedimentary deposit which has been barely accessed and investigated in the past," said co-author and co-leader of the field investigation Professor Asfawossen Asrat from Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia, who is currently at BIUST in Botswana. "Our closer look into the stratigraphy of the Omo Kibish Formation, particularly the ash layers, allowed us to push the age of the oldest Homo sapiens in the region to at least 230,000 years."

"Unlike other Middle Pleistocene fossils which are thought to belong to the early stages of the Homo sapiens lineage, Omo I possesses unequivocal modern human characteristics, such as a tall and globular cranial vault and a chin," said co-author Dr Aurélien Mounier from the Musée de l'Homme in Paris. "The new date estimate, de facto, makes itthe oldest unchallenged Homo sapiens in Africa."

The researchers say that while this study shows a new minimum age for Homo sapiens in eastern Africa, it's possible that new finds and new studies may extend the age of our species even further back in time.

"We can only date humanity based on the fossils that we have, so it's impossible to say that this is the definitive age of our species," said Vidal. "The study of human evolution is always in motion: boundaries and timelines change as our understanding improves. But these fossils show just how resilient humans are: that we survived, thrived and migrated in an area that was so prone to natural disasters."

"It's probably no coincidence that our earliest ancestors lived in such a geologically active rift valley -- it collected rainfall in lakes, providing fresh water and attracting animals, and served as a natural migration corridor stretching thousands of kilometres," said Oppenheimer. "The volcanoes provided fantastic materials to make stone tools and from time to time we had to develop our cognitive skills when large eruptions transformed the landscape."

"Our forensic approach provides a new minimum age for Homo sapiens in eastern Africa, but the challenge still remains to provide a cap, a maximum age, for their emergence, which is widely believed to have taken place in this region," said co-author Professor Christine Lane, head of the Cambridge Tephra Laboratory where much of the work was carried out. "It's possible that new finds and new studies may extend the age of our species even further back in time."

"There are many other ash layers we are trying to correlate with eruptions of the Ethiopian Rift and ash deposits from other sedimentary formations," said Vidal. "In time, we hope to better constrain the age of other fossils in the region."

Medieval warhorses were surprisingly small in stature

Medieval warhorses are often depicted as massive and powerful beasts, but in reality many were no more than pony-sized by modern standards, a new study shows.

Horses during the period were often below 14.2 hands high, but size was clearly not everything, as historical records indicate huge sums were spent on developing and maintaining networks for the breeding, training and keeping of horses used in combat.

A team of archaeologists and historians searching for the truth about the Great Horse have found they were not always bred for size, but for success in a wide range of different functions – including tournaments and long-distance raiding campaigns.

Researchers analysed the largest dataset of English horse bones dating between AD 300 and 1650, found at 171 separate archaeological sites.

The study, published in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, shows that breeding and training of warhorses was influenced by a combination of biological and cultural factors, as well as behavioural characteristics of the horses themselves such as temperament.

Depictions of medieval warhorses in films and popular media frequently portray massive mounts on the scale of Shire horses, some 17 to 18 hands high. However, the evidence suggests that horses of 16 and even 15 hands were very rare indeed, even at the height of the royal stud network during the 13th and 14th centuries, and that animals of this size would have been seen as very large by medieval people.

Researcher Helene Benkert, from the University of Exeter, said: “Neither size, nor limb bone robusticity alone, are enough to confidently identify warhorses in the archaeological record. Historic records don’t give the specific criteria which defined a warhorse; it is much more likely that throughout the medieval period, at different times, different conformations of horses were desirable in response to changing battlefield tactics and cultural preferences.”

The tallest Norman horse recorded was found at Trowbridge Castle, Wiltshire, estimated to be about 15hh, similar to the size of small modern light riding horses. The high medieval period (1200-1350 AD) sees the first emergence of horses of around 16hh, although it is not until the post-medieval period (1500-1650 AD) that the average height of horses becomes significantly larger, finally approaching the sizes of modern warmblood and draft horses.

Professor Alan Outram, from the University of Exeter, said: “High medieval destriers may have been relatively large for the time period, but were clearly still much smaller than we might expect for equivalent functions today. Selection and breeding practices in the Royal studs may have focused as much on temperament and the correct physical characteristics for warfare as they did on raw size.”

Professor Oliver Creighton, the Principal Investigator for the project, commented: “The warhorse is central to our understanding of medieval English society and culture as both a symbol of status closely associated with the development of aristocratic identity and as a weapon of war famed for its mobility and shock value, changing the face of battle.“

The research, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. was carried out by Carly Ameen, Helene Benkert, Malene Lauritsen, Karina Rapp, Tess Townend, Laura May Jones, Camille Mai Lan Vo Van Qui, Robert Webley, Naomi Sykes, Oliver H. Creighton and Alan Outram from the University of Exeter, Tamsyn Fraser from the University of Sheffield, Rebecca Gordon, Matilda Holmes and Will Johnson from the University of Leicester, Mark Maltby from Bournemouth University, Gary Paul Baker and Robert Liddiard from the University of East Anglia.#

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JOURNAL

International Journal of Osteoarchaeology

DOI

10.1002/oa.3038 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

In search of the ‘great horse’: A zooarchaeological assessment of horses from England (AD 300–1650)

Archaeological dig reveals participants in California’s Gold Rush dined on salted Atlantic cod

 It turns out San Francisco has been a destination for lovers of imported delicacies since its earliest Gold Rush days.

According to results published recently in the peer-reviewed Journal of Anthropological Research, an excavation at Thompson’s Cove in San Francisco has shown “Atlantic cod were imported during the 1850s, likely as a (largely) deboned, dried and salted product from the East Coast of the United States.” The results underscore the importance of global maritime trade in northern California during the Gold Rush.

Co-author Brittany Bingham, doctoral student in anthropology at the University of Kansas, performed genetic analysis on 18 cod bones recovered from Thompson’s Cove to determine if they came from cod caught in the deep nearby waters of the Pacific or were shipped in packages by boat from Atlantic fisheries. Her results on five specimens for ancient DNA show Atlantic cod were imported during the debut of the Gold Rush.

Bingham said bones tend to be better preserved and more suitable for analysis than other materials left behind from the rapid surge in San Francisco’s population. (In the first year of the Gold Rush, between 1848-49, the area’s 800 residents quickly swelled to more than 20,000.)

“Bones preserve better than other things that don’t last in the archaeological record as well,” she said. “You won’t get a quality DNA sample from every bone — some are burned, and soil and other factors can affect preservation, so we typically check for DNA and determine what we’re looking at. But often people move bones elsewhere and maybe they’re thrown in a different place than the rest of the bones, so you don’t have the whole specimen to look at. That’s where people like me come into play, and we’ll take the one tiny piece of bone that might have been found and figure out what it actually came from.”

The results of Bingham’s analysis were among the first archaeological results to confirm findings from historical newspapers and invoices: The early history of San Francisco included the importation of a wide range of fish and seafood to support the population boom.

The project came about when the Musto Building built in 1907 at Thompson’s Cove — where the city was first settled — undertook a mandatory retrofitting to be more resilient to earthquakes, triggering a California compliance law requiring archaeological work in conjunction with construction at the site. Today, the building is home to a private social club.

Kale Bruner, who earned her doctorate in anthropology at KU, worked on the Thompson’s Cove site as construction took place. Today, Bruner serves as a research associate at the Museum of the Aleutians.

“Compliance work is challenging in a lot of ways because you don’t really get a lot of control over the excavations, and this case was kind of an extreme example of that — the fieldwork conditions were overwhelming — and I was the only archaeologist on site,” Bruner said. “They were fortunately only excavating dirt in one location at a time, so I only had one piece of machinery to be watching, but we were hitting archaeologically significant material constantly. It was two years essentially of monitoring that kind of activity and documenting as rapidly as possible everything that was being uncovered.”

Aside from evidence of Atlantic cod, the authors reported about 8,000 total specimens or fragments of animal bone, and a total number of artifacts collected that numbered nearly 70,000. The work will yield more academic papers on the historical significance of the site.

Lead author Cyler Conrad, adjunct assistant professor of anthropology at the University of New Mexico and archaeologist with Los Alamos National Laboratory, has published other findings from work at Thompson’s Cove, including evidence of a California hide and tallow trade, eating of wild game, hunting of ducks and geese, and even importation of Galapagos tortoise.

He described the Gold Rush era as exciting and chaotic, a time that in some ways mirrored the supply chain problems plaguing the world in the COVID-19 era.

“During the Gold Rush, it took many months for vessels to arrive in San Francisco, so often when you needed things is not when they would arrive, and when things would arrive, they were often not needed anymore,” Conrad said. “You find these descriptions of San Francisco as this kind of muddy mess, a kind of a tent city where there were shacks built upon shacks all the way up until the shoreline, just stacked with crates and boxes. Even at Thompson’s Cove, I think Kale excavated several essentially intact crates of frying pans and shovel heads. You can imagine shiploads of shovels might arrive, but maybe everyone had a shovel already or maybe it was winter, and no one was in the gold fields and you have all this material that accumulates right along the shoreline — but that was convenient for our work.”

Conrad said the work to determine the Atlantic origins of cod bones found at the site was a significant contribution to understanding maritime trade of the era, when Atlantic cod was either shipped by boat all the way around Cape Horn — or shipped to Panama, then hauled across the isthmus, before being shipped up to the Northern California gold fields.

“We have this really fascinating aggregation of material, and it’s remarkable we only found 18 bones we can identify to the genus of cod from the Atlantic,” he said. “Brittany’s DNA work was critical for this because it’s difficult to distinguish between bones of Atlantic versus Pacific cods — their bone morphology is virtually the same. We’ve been able to tie the DNA from Brittany’s work with some slight differences in the very far tail vertebrae. If you think how cod were prepped and salted, they removed almost all bones, except for the very last few bones. Perhaps this was rapidly prepared and exported cod from the East Coast, because of this rush to the gold fields and demand for food. Perhaps they were just kind of shipping out whatever they could. There are some interesting details in the cod bones, and we would never have been able to answer these questions without DNA — and it really supports this identification that, yes, these are Atlantic cod — and that opens up a whole new window into this human experience.”

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JOURNAL

Journal of Anthropological Research

DOI

10.31235/osf.io/9dmeb 

Ancient Maya lessons on surviving drought

 

 

IMAGE: CASSAVA, A DROUGHT-RESISTANT EDIBLE PLANT GROWN BY THE ANCIENT MAYA. view more 

CREDIT: THAMIZHPPARITHI MAARI

A new study casts doubt on drought as the driver of ancient Mayan civilization collapse. 

There is no dispute that a series of droughts occurred in the Yucatan Peninsula of southeastern Mexico and northern Central America at the end of the ninth century, when Maya cities mysteriously began to be depopulated. Believing the Maya were mostly dependent on drought-sensitive corn, beans, and squash, some scholarsassume the droughts resulted in starvation.

However, a new analysis by UC Riverside archaeologist Scott Fedick and plant physiologist Louis Santiago shows the Maya had nearly 500 edible plants available to them, many of which are highly drought resistant. The results of this analysis have now been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

“Even in the most extreme drought situation — and we have no clear evidence the most extreme situation ever occurred — 59 species of edible plants would still have persisted,” Santiago said.

Some of the toughest plants the Maya would have turned to include cassava with its edible tubers, and hearts of palm. Another is chaya, a shrub domesticated by the Maya and eaten today by their descendants. Its leaves are high in protein, iron, potassium, and calcium.

“Chaya and cassava together would have provided a huge amount of carbohydrates and protein,” Santiago said. 

Unable to find a master list of indigenous Maya food plants, Fedick recently compiled and published one that draws on decades of Maya plant knowledge. Faced with much speculation about drought as the cause of Maya social disruptions, he and Santiago decided to examine all 497 plants on the list for drought tolerance. 

“When botanists study drought resistance, they’re usually talking about a specific plant, or a particular ecosystem,” Fedick said. “One of the reasons this project was so challenging is because we examined the dietary flora of an entire civilization — annuals, perennials, herbs, trees, domesticates, and wild species. It was a unique endeavor.”

Though the researchers do not have a clear answer about why ancient Maya society unraveled, they suspect social and economic upheaval played a role. 

“One thing we do know is the overly simplistic explanation of drought leading to agricultural collapse is probably not true,” Fedick said. 

The research also demonstrates the importance of exploiting a variety of plants to survive drought and climate change. 

“Even given a series of droughts, maintaining a diversity of resilient crops would enable people, both ancient and modern, to adapt and survive,” Santiago said.
 

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JOURNAL

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2115657118 

People who carry the Neanderthal protein have a higher risk of developing diseases

Very few proteins in the body have a change that makes them unique compared to the corresponding proteins in Neanderthals and apes. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have now studied one such protein, glutathione reductase, which protects against oxidative stress. They show that the risk for inflammatory bowel disease and vascular disease is increased several times in people carrying the Neanderthal variant.

What makes modern humans unique is a question that has eluded researchers for a long time. One way to approach this question is to study the proteins, or building blocks, in the body that have changes that are carried by almost all living people today and occurred after we separated from the ancestors we shared with Neanderthals about 500,000 years ago. There are around 100 proteins that have such a unique change. One of these proteins is glutathione reductase which is part of the body's defense against oxidative stress.

The study, which is published in the journal Science Advances, examines the change in glutathione reductase in detail and was led by Hugo Zeberg at Karolinska Institutet and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute. They show that the Neanderthal protein created more reactive oxygen radicals which are the cause of oxidative stress. It is the third protein change unique to present-day humans that has been studied so far.

The study also shows that the Neanderthal protein has passed over to present-day humans in low frequency when our ancestors mixed with them about 60,000 years ago. Today, it occurs mainly on the Indian subcontinent at an estimated frequency of 1 to 2 per cent of the population. The researchers found that people who carry the Neanderthal protein have a higher risk of developing vascular disease and inflammatory bowel disease, both diseases that are linked to oxidative stress.

“The risk increases we see are large; several times increased risk of inflammatory bowel disease and vascular disease,” says Hugo Zeberg.

The researchers can only speculate about why this particular change came to be one of the unique changes that almost all modern humans carry.

“Stopping oxidative stress is a bit like preventing something from rusting. Perhaps the fact that we are living longer has driven these changes,” says Svante Pääbo.

The research was supported by NOMIS Foundation, the Max Planck Society, the Jeansson Foundations and the Magnus Bergvall Foundation. The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Publication: “A substitution in the glutathione reductase lowers electron leakage and inflammation in modern humans”. Lucia Coppo, Pradeep Mishra, Nora Siefert, Arne Holmgren, Svante Pääbo and Hugo Zeberg. Science Advances, online January 5, 2022, doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abm1148

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JOURNAL

Science Advances

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.abm1148 

The toilet of a First Temple period luxury villa reveals:

 

IMAGE: THE STONE TOILET SEAT FOUND DURING THE 2019 EXCAVATION AT ARMON HANATZIV.view more 

CREDIT: YA’AKOV BILLIG, THE ISRAEL ANTIQUITIES AUTHORITY.

Due to poor sanitary conditions, the Jerusalem elite suffered from infectious disease

• The 2,700-year-old remains of intestinal parasite eggs were discovered in a cesspit beneath the toilet in the garden of a luxury estate uncovered at the Armon Hanatziv Promenade in Jerusalem.
• The researchers: These intestinal parasites resulted from poor hygiene and sanitary conditions that led to illness with symptoms including abdominal pain and diarrhea, perhaps even malnutrition and developmental delays in children.

A new study by Tel Aviv University and the Israel Antiquities Authority has exposed the remains of 2,700-year-old intestinal worm eggs below the stone toilet of a magnificent private estate. The egg remnants belong to four different types of intestinal parasites: roundworm, tapeworm, whipworm, and pinworm. According to the researchers, the stone toilet seat was in the estate’s “restroom,” and the presence of the worms indicates that even the wealthy residents of Jerusalem at that time suffered from diseases and epidemics. The article was recently published in the International Journal of Paleopathology.

 

The study was led by Dr. Dafna Langgut of Tel Aviv University’s director of the Laboratory of Archaeobotany and Ancient Environments at the Institute of Archaeology and the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History. Dr. Langgut collected sediment samples from underneath the stone toilet, where the cesspit was located. Next, in her laboratory, she chemically extracted the parasite eggs, scrutinized them under a light microscope, and identified them. The egg remains were discovered as part of a salvage excavation by the Israel Antiquities Authority, recently carried out at the Armon Hanatziv Promenade in Jerusalem.

 

“The findings of this study are among the earliest observed in Israel to date,” says Dr. Langgut. “These are durable eggs, and under the special conditions provided by the cesspit, they survived for nearly 2,700 years. Intestinal worms are parasites that cause symptoms like abdominal pain, nausea, diarrhea, and itching.  Some of them are especially dangerous for children and can lead to malnutrition, developmental delays, nervous system damage, and, in extreme cases, even death.”

 

Dr. Langgut believes that intestinal disease at the time might have been due to poor sanitary conditions that caused fecal contamination of food and drinking water. Or, it might have been due to a lack of hygiene awareness, such as a failure to wash hands. Other possible sources of infection were the use of human feces to fertilize field crops and the consumption of improperly cooked beef or pork. In the absence of medicine, recovery from intestinal worms was difficult to impossible, and those infected could suffer from the parasites for the rest of their lives. Therefore, it is quite possible that the findings of the study indicate a bothersome and long-lasting infectious disease (comparable to lice and pinworms in the kindergartens of today) that affected the entire population. Langgut points out that these parasites still exist today, but the modern Western world has developed effective diagnostic means and medications, so they don’t turn into an epidemic.

 

Ya’akov Billig, the director of the excavation on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, explains that the uncovered royal estate dates back to the mid-7th century BC (the late Iron Age). According to Billig, magnificent stone artifacts of extraordinary workmanship were found at the site, such as decorated stone capitals (in the Proto-Aeolian style) of a quantity and quality not yet observed in ancient Israel. Adjacent to the mansion was a spectacular garden with a breathtaking view of the City of David and the Temple Mount. It was here, along with the remains of fruit and ornamental trees, that the cesspit sampled by Langgut was found. It was capped by a square limestone installation with a hole in its center, identified as a toilet’s drop hole. The salvage excavation at Armon Hanatziv was funded by the Ir David Foundation.

 

For Dr. Langgut, this was an opportunity to apply a field of research called archeoparasitology that she had begun to develop in her laboratory. In this field, researchers identify microscopic remains of intestinal worm eggs to learn about the history of diseases and epidemics. This area provides new information regarding human health, hygiene, lifestyle, and sanitary conditions.

 

Langgut and Billig were not surprised by the recovery of a toilet in the estate’s prestigious garden. “Toilet facilities were extremely rare at that time and were a status symbol – a luxury facility that only the rich and high-ranking could afford. As the Talmud teaches, ‘Who is wealthy?... Rabbi Yosef says: Anyone who has a bathroom close to his table.’” (Bavli Shabbat 25: 2).

 

According to Eli Escozido, director of the Israel Antiquities Authority, “The research conducted by the Israel Antiquities Authority and our partners manages to touch on the finest details of everyday life in antiquity; thanks to advanced equipment and fruitful collaboration with complementary research institutions, it is now possible to extract fascinating information from materials that we previously didn’t have the tools to handle scientifically. Today, archeological research is reaching remarkable achievements and leading to a better understanding of past lifeways – an understanding, it seems, that will only continue to evolve.”

 

Dr. Langgut concludes, “Studies like this one help us document the history of infectious diseases in our area and provide us with a window into the lives of people in ancient times.” Dr. Langgut is currently conducting additional analyses on the sediments collected from the cesspit in order to learn about the diet and medicinal herbs used in Jerusalem in the late Iron Age.

 

Link to the article:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1879981721000838?via%3Dihub