Evidence of 3600 + year old settlement uncovered in Eastern Arabian Peninsula

 

VIDEO: THE ACCIDENTAL ARCHEOLOGIST view more 

CREDIT: USC VITERBI SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING

Scholars looking for underground water sources on the Eastern Arabian Peninsula for a project funded by the United State Agency for Aid and International Development, have accidentally uncovered the outlines of a settlement that appears to be over 3600 years old.   A symmetrical,  2 x 3 kilometer, landscaped area—or trace outlines of a settlement  (and one of the largest potential settlements uncovered in the area) was identified using advanced radar satellite images in an area of Qatar where there was previously thought to be little evidence of sedentary, ancient civilizations. Their new study, published in the ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, counters the narrative that this peninsula was entirely nomadic and evidence mapped from space indicates that the population appears to have had a sophisticated understanding of how to use groundwater. The research also points to the critical need to study water and safeguard against climate fluctuations in arid areas.

 “Makhfia,” the name attributed to the settlement by researchers at University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (and which refers to an invisible location in the local Arabic language), was discovered using L-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar images from the Japanese Satellite ALOS 1 and specially acquired, high-resolution radar images by its successor, ALOS 2. While the settlement was not visible from space using normal satellite imaging tools nor through surface observation on the earth—the large, underground rectangular plot, it was determined, had to be manmade due to its shape, texture and soil composition which were in sharp contrast to surrounding geological features.  Independent carbon dating of retrieved charcoal samples suggest that the site is at least 3650 years old, dating back potentially to the same era of the Dilmun civilization.

Lead author, Essam Heggy, of the USC Arid Climate and Water Research Center, describes the site as akin to “natural fortress surrounded by very rough terrain,” almost making the area inaccessible.

This discovery has significant historic and scientific implications.  Historically, this may be the first piece of evidence of a sedentary community in the area—and perhaps evidence of an advanced engineering for the time period.  While we cannot see the remains of a monument or walls of a settlement, the proof is in the soil.  The properties of the soil at the site have a different surface texture and composition than the terrain surrounding it—a disparity typically associated with planting and landscaping.

A settlement of this size in this particular area, which is far from the coastline where most ancient civilizations were located, is unusual, says Heggy.

“With this area now averaging about 110 degrees Fahrenheit in summer months, this is like finding evidence of very green ranch in the middle of Death Valley, California dating back thousands of years ago.”

Further, the site yields new insights on the poorly understood climatic fluctuations that occurred in the region, and how these changes may have impacted human settlement and mobility.

Most critically, the scholars believe that this settlement must have been in place for an extended period due to its development of agriculture and reliance on groundwater, a fact which speaks to the civilization’s advanced engineering prowess given Qatar’s complex aquifers and harsh terrain.

The researchers believe that a population with sufficient knowledge to leverage such unpredictable groundwater resources— inaccessible by digging through hard limestone and dolomite—would have certainly been ahead of its time in mitigating droughts within harsh, inland environments. There is strong evidence that this settlement’s inhabitants relied on deep groundwater sapping, a method by which one accesses water from deeper aquifers through fractures in the ground, in order to use this water for crop irrigation and to support daily life.

This presence of this settlement is now enabling researchers to piece together the most recent paleoclimatic changes that took place on the Eastern Arabian Peninsula.

The bleak side of this, says Heggy, is that we do not fully know who this culture was and why they disappeared. However, based on the presence of charcoal found on the site, Heggy and his colleagues suggest that fire could be one of several plausible explanations for its demise.

This evidence calls for increased study of this area by archeologists, says Heggy.

The work also has some implications for how we study and address climate fluctuations today.

“Deserts cover about 10 percent of our planet. We might think today that they were always inhabitable, but this discovery (along with others in the area) shows that this might not have been always the case,” says Heggy who is a research scientist at the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering at USC.

His concern is that the increase in climate fluctuations in arid areas can worsen  food insecurity, migration, and degradation of water resources.

Why should people care about the ruins of this ancient settlement? To Heggy, this culture’s ability to mitigate climatic fluctuations could be our story.

“This story is very important today. In arid areas, we have widespread disbelief in climate research. Many think climate change is something in the future or far away in the ‘geologic’ past. This site shows that it has always been here and that our recent ancestors have made its mitigation a key to their survival,” he says.

Heggy remains hopeful.  He says the forthcoming NASA Earth Observation missions focused on desert research will bring new subsurface mapping capabilities and will provide unique insights on deserts’ paleoclimatic evolution as well as human presence in desert areas during climate fluctuations.

 

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Climate change in the Early Holocene

 

• Radiocarbon dating from a prehistoric cemetery in Northern Russia reveals human stress caused by a global cooling event 8,200 years ago

• Early hunter gatherers developed more complex social systems and, unusually, a large cemetery when faced by climate change

 

New insight into how our early ancestors dealt with major shifts in climate is revealed in research,  published today [27 Jan] in Nature Ecology & Evolution, by an international team, led by Professor Rick Schulting from Oxford University’s School of Archaeology.

It reveals, new radiocarbon dates show the large Early Holocene cemetery of Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov, at Lake Onega, some 500 miles north of Moscow, previously thought to have been in use for many centuries, was, in fact, used for only one to two centuries. Moreover, this seems to be in response to a period of climate stress.

The team believes the creation of the cemetery reveals a social response to the stresses caused by regional resource depression. At a time of climate change, Lake Onega, as the second largest lake in Europe, had its own ecologically resilient microclimate. This would have attracted game, including elk, to its shores while the lake itself would have provided a productive fishery. Because of the fall in temperature, many of the region’s shallower lakes could have been susceptible to the well-known phenomenon of winter fish kills, caused by depleted oxygen levels under the ice.

The creation of the cemetery at the site would have helped define group membership for what would have been previously dispersed bands of hunter-gatherers - mitigating potential conflict over access to the lake’s resources.

But when the climate improved, the team found, the cemetery largely went out of use, as the people presumably returned to a more mobile way of life and the lake became less central.

The behavioural changes - to what could be seen as a more ‘complex’ social system, with abundant grave offerings – were situation-dependent. But they suggest the presence of important decision makers and, say the team, the findings also imply that early hunting and gathering communities were highly flexible and resilient.

The results have implications for understanding the context for the emergence and dissolution of socioeconomic inequality and territoriality under conditions of socio-ecological stress.

Radiocarbon dating of the human remains and associated animal remains at the site reveals that the main use of the cemetery spanned between 100-300 years, centring on ca. 8250 to 8,000 BP. This coincides remarkably closely with the 8.2 ka dramatic cooling event, so this site could provide evidence for how these humans responded to a climate-driven environmental change.

The Holocene (the current geological epoch which began approximately 11,700 years before present) has been relatively stable in comparison to current events. But there are a number of climate fluctuations recorded in the Greenland ice cores. The best known of these is the 8,200 years ago cooling event, the largest climatic downturn in the Holocene, lasting lasted one to two centuries. But there is little evidence that the hunter-gatherers, who occupied most of Europe at this time, were much affected, and if they were, in what specific ways.

Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov is one of the largest Early Holocene cemeteries in northern Eurasia, with up to 400 possible graves, 177 of which were excavated in the 1930s by a team of Russian archaeologists.  Based on their work, the cemetery site has an important position in European Mesolithic studies, in part because of the variation in the accompanying grave offerings. Some graves lack these entirely, to those with abundant and elaborate offerings.

Earliest known report of ball lightning phenomenon in England discovered

 

IMAGE: EXTRACT FROM THE CHRONICLE OF GERVASE OF CANTERBURY WHERE THE MEDIEVAL MONK DESCRIBES THE BALL LIGHTNING PHENOMENON. THIS IS THE EARLIEST KNOWN DESCRIPTION OF BALL LIGHTNING IN ENGLAND TO HAVE BEEN FOUND. view more 

CREDIT: THE MASTER AND FELLOWS OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE. REFERENCE: CAMBRIDGE, TRINITY COLLEGE, MS R.4.11, P.324.

Researchers have discovered what appears to be the earliest known account of a rare weather phenomenon called ball lightning in England.

Ball lightning, usually associated with thunderstorms, is unexplained and has been described as a bright spherical object on average 25 centimetres, but sometimes up to several metres, in diameter.

Working together, physicist Emeritus Professor Brian Tanner and historian Professor Giles Gasper, of Durham University, UK, made the connection to a ball lightning event while exploring a medieval text written some 750 years ago.

The account, by the 12th century Benedictine monk Gervase of Christ Church Cathedral Priory, Canterbury, pre-dates the previous earliest known description of ball lightning recorded in England by nearly 450 years.

The findings are published in the Royal Meteorological Society’s journal, Weather.

In his Chronicle, composed around 1200, Gervase stated that “a marvellous sign descended near London” on 7 June 1195. He went on to describe a dense and dark cloud, emitting a white substance which grew into a spherical shape under the cloud, from which a fiery globe fell towards the river.

The Durham researchers compared the text in Gervase’s Chronicle with historical and modern reports of ball lightning.

Professor Brian Tanner, Emeritus Professor in the Department of Physics, Durham University, said: “Ball lightning is a rare weather event that is still not understood today.

“Gervase’s description of a white substance coming out of the dark cloud, falling as a spinning fiery sphere and then having some horizontal motion is very similar to historic and contemporary descriptions of ball lightning.

“If Gervase is describing ball lightning, as we believe, then this would be the earliest account of this happening in England that has so far been discovered.”

Prior to this account, the earliest report of ball lightning from England is during a great thunderstorm in Widecombe, Devon on 21 October 1638.

Medieval writings rarely survive in the author’s original version and Gervase’s Chronicle and other works now exist in only three manuscripts (one in the British Library, and two at the University of Cambridge). The Latin text was edited by Bishop William Stubbs in 1879 and there is no translation into English.

Professor Giles Gasper, in the Department of History, Durham University, said: “The main focus of Gervase’s writings was Christ Church Cathedral Priory in Canterbury, its disputes with neighbouring houses and an Archbishop of Canterbury, as well as chronicling the actions of the king and his nobles. But he was also interested in natural phenomena, from celestial events and signs in the sky to floods, famine, and earthquakes.”

The researchers looked at Gervase’s credibility as a writer and a witness, having previously examined his records of eclipses and a description of the splitting of the image of the crescent moon.

Professor Gasper added: “Given that Gervase appears to be a reliable reporter, we believe that his description of the fiery globe on the Thames on 7 June 1195 was the first fully convincing account of ball lightning anywhere.”

 As climate shifted 23,000 years ago, humans in Israel experienced a new abundance of food, according to a study published January 26, 2022 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Tikvah Steiner of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and colleagues.

Map with location of southern Levantine Epipaleolithic sites mentioned in the text (a), plan of Ohalo II (b) and plan of Brush Hut 1 (c). (IMAGE)

PLOS

 

CAPTION

Early Epipaleolithic sites are marked with red circles, Middle Epipaleolithic with black squares and Late Epipaleolithic with blue triangles.

The submerged archaeological site of Ohalo II, located on the southern tip of the Sea of Galilee in Israel, preserves extensive evidence of human occupation about 23,000 years ago. This was a time period of global climate fluctuation, and also a time when humans notably diversified their dietary habits. Some researchers have suggested this diet shift was necessary due to decreasing food availability, while others suggest the change was an opportunistic one made possible by increasing food abundance. In this study, Steiner, Nadel and colleagues from a multidisciplinary team from four Israeli and Spanish universities tested these competing hypotheses via analysis of animal remains at Ohalo II.

The authors examined over 20,000 animal remains, including reptiles, birds, and mammals, from well-preserved successive floors of a brush hut at the site. The results show that the people of Ohalo II were successfully hunting prime large game, while at the same time gathering a wide variety of fish, other small animals, and plants.

According to the authors, this evidence does not indicate a drop in food availability, but rather an abundance of multiple prey sources. They suggest that while some animals were gathered for meat, others might have been hunted for pelts (e.g.: foxes, hares) or shells (e.g.: tortoises). From this study, it seems that fluctuating climate conditions did not create food stress, at least in this region, but instead new dietary opportunities. The researchers hope that this work at Ohalo II will serve as a model for similar investigations of human diet changes at other locations and time periods.

The authors add: “The choice of a littoral habitat that could be intensively exploited year-round may be an example of niche selection. The availability of multiple food sources within a rich habitat may have driven exploitation of myriad local resources, rather than targeting mainly energetically-rich large prey.”

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JOURNAL

PLoS ONE

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0262434 

Question the importance of meat eating in shaping our evolution

 “Generations of paleoanthropologists have gone to famously well-preserved sites in places like Olduvai Gorge looking for — and finding — breathtaking direct evidence of early humans eating meat, furthering this viewpoint that there was an explosion of meat eating after 2 million years ago,” W. Andrew Barr, an assistant professor of anthropology at the George Washington University and lead author on the study, said. “However, when you quantitatively synthesize the data from numerous sites across eastern Africa to test this hypothesis, as we did here, that ‘meat made us human’ evolutionary narrative starts to unravel.”

 Quintessential human traits such as large brains first appear in Homo erectus nearly 2 million years ago. This evolutionary transition towards human-like traits is often linked to a major dietary shift involving greater meat consumption. A new study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, however, calls into question the primacy of meat eating in early human evolution. While the archaeological evidence for meat eating increases dramatically after the appearance of Homo erectus, the study authors argue that this increase can largely be explained by greater research attention on this time period, effectively skewing the evidence in favor of the “meat made us human” hypothesis.

Barr and his colleagues compiled published data from nine major research areas in eastern Africa, including 59 site levels dating between 2.6 and 1.2 million years ago. They used several metrics to track hominin carnivory: the number of zooarchaeological sites preserving animal bones that have cut marks made by stone tools, the total count of animal bones with cut marks across sites, and the number of separately reported stratigraphic levels.

The researchers found that, when accounting for variation in sampling effort over time, there is no sustained increase in the relative amount of evidence for carnivory after the appearance of H. erectus. They note that while the raw abundance of modified bones and the number of zooarchaeological sites and levels all demonstrably increased after the appearance of H. erectus, the increases were mirrored by a corresponding rise in sampling intensity, suggesting that intensive sampling – rather than changes in human behavior – could be the cause.

“I’ve excavated and studied cut marked fossils for over 20 years, and our findings were still a big surprise to me,” Briana Pobiner, a research scientist in the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and co-author on the study, said. “This study changes our understanding of what the zooarchaeological record tells us about the earliest prehistoric meat-eating. It also shows how important it is that we continue to ask big questions about our evolution, while we also continue to uncover and analyze new evidence about our past.”

In the future, the researchers stressed the need for alternative explanations for why certain anatomical and behavioral traits associated with modern humans emerged. Possible alternative theories include the provisioning of plant foods by grandmothers and the development of controlled fire for increasing nutrient availability through cooking. The researchers caution that none of these possible explanations currently have a strong grounding in the archaeological record, so much work remains to be done.

“I would think this study and its findings would be of interest not just to the paleoanthropology community but to all the people currently basing their dieting decisions around some version of this meat-eating narrative,” Barr said. “Our study undermines the idea that eating large quantities of meat drove evolutionary changes in our early ancestors.”

In addition to Barr and Pobiner, the research team included John Rowan, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Albany; Andrew Du, an assistant professor of anthropology and geography at Colorado State University; and J. Tyler Faith, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Utah.

-GW-

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JOURNAL

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2115540119 

The secrets of ancient Japanese tombs revealed thanks to satellite images

 

IMAGE: DAISEN KOFUN, AERIAL VIEW view more 

CREDIT: © MINISTRY OF TERRITORY, INFRASTRUCTURE, TRANSPORT AND TOURISM, UNDER KIND PERMISSION

A research group at the Politecnico di Milano analysed the orientation of ancient Japanese tombs – the so-called Kofun. This study has never been carried out before, due to the very large number of monuments and the fact that access to these areas is usually forbidden. For these reasons, high-res satellite imagery was used. The results show that these tombs are oriented towards the arc of the rising sun, the Goddess Amaterasu that the Japanese emperors linked to the mythical origin of their dynasty.

The Japanese islands are dotted with hundreds of ancient burial mounds, the largest of which are in the typical shape of a keyhole and are called Kofun. Built between the third and the seventh centuries AD, the most imposing are attributed to the semi-legendary first emperors, while the smaller ones probably belong to court officers and to members of the royal family. Among these, the so-called Daisen Kofun is one of the largest monuments ever built on Earth: it measures 486 meters in length and about 36 in height. It is traditionally attributed to Emperor Nintoku, the sixteenth emperor of Japan. The Daisen Kofun belongs to a group of tombs recently inscribed in the UNESCO World Heritage List.
There are no written sources on these tombs, and excavations are rare and limited to the smaller ones, since the largest are considered the tombs of the first semi-legendary emperors and, as such, are strictly protected by law. Protection also extends to the outside: many monuments are fenced, and it is not allowed to enter the perimeter. For these reasons, it is impossible to obtain accurate measurements of size, height and orientation. Furthermore, their number discourages any on field investigation. It is therefore natural to study them using high-resolution satellite images, which furnish simple but very powerful tools for remote sensing investigations.
This is what Norma Baratta, Arianna Picotti and Giulio Magli of the Politecnico di Milano did, with the aim of deepening the knowledge of the relationships between these fascinating monuments with the landscape and, in particular, with the sky. The team measured the orientation of more than 100 Kofuns and came to interesting conclusions.
The results - just published in the scientific journal "Remote Sensing" https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/14/2/377 - indicate a strong connection of the Kofun entrance corridors with the arc in the sky where the Sun and the Moon are visible every day of the year, and show the orientation of the hugest keyhole-shaped Kofuns to the arc of the Sun rising/shining. In particular, the Daisen Kofun is oriented towards the Sun rising at the winter solstice.

Orientation of the imperial tombs towards the Sun does not happen by chance: rather, it is in full agreement with the Japanese imperial tradition. Indeed, the mythical origin of the dynasty of the Japanese Emperors considers them as direct descendants of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu.

 

 

Risky food-finding strategy could be the key to human success

  It’s a cold and rainy Sunday afternoon: would you rather be running after tasteless wild berries, or curled up on your couch with fuzzy socks and a good book?

You might not have had that choice if our ancestors had not taken a big gamble with their food.

A new study published in Science on December 24 shows that early human foragers and farmers adopted an inefficient high-risk, high-reward strategy to find food. They spent more energy in pursuit of food than their great ape cousins, but brought home much more calorie-rich meals that could be shared with the rest of their group. This strategy allowed some to rest or tackle other tasks while food was being acquired.

“Hunting and gathering is risky and inefficient, but the rate of return is enormous,” said study co-leader, Herman Pontzer, an associate professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University. “We can share our food, and because we got so many calories before noon, we can hang out around each other in this new space, a free-time space.”

Humans spend a lot more energy than great apes. We have big brains that eat up a lot of calories, we live a long time, we can have long pregnancies that produce big babies, and these babies rely on adults for a long time.

To find out how humans obtained this extra energy, a group of researchers led by Thomas Kraft, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California Santa Barbara, and Pontzer  compared the energy budgets of wild gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans with that of populations of Tanzanian hunter-gatherers (Hadza) and Bolivian forager-horticulturalists (Tsimane).

Hunter-gatherers and forager-horticulturalists both gather food from wild plants and animals, but the Tsimane also produce small-scale crops.

Energy budgets depend on how much food energy is absorbed, and how much time and energy are spent obtaining food. Humans were thought to maintain their energetically costly lifestyle in one of two ways: they could be super-efficient, spending little time and energy finding food – in part due to the use of tools and technological advances, or they could spend a lot of energy to quickly bring home a lot of food, sacrificing energy efficiency.

The researchers found that hunter-gatherers and forager-horticulturalists are inefficient, high-intensity foragers. Like a gas-guzzling pick-up truck bringing home a ton of donuts, they spend a lot more energy obtaining food than great apes, but they do it faster and the food they obtain is high in calories. Rather than minimizing their costs, they take a risk to maximize their rewards.

Chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans, on the other hand, are like an electric car bringing home a head of lettuce and some apples. They are essentially herbivores and frugivores who eat very little, if any, meat. Their strategy is one of low risk, low rewards: their food is easy to find, but it’s fibrous, low in energy, and it takes a lot of time to get enough of it.

The Hadza hunter-gatherers and the Tsimane forager-horticulturalists both eat high-calorie foods that are harder to get. They spend a lot of energy hunting, gathering, planting and harvesting, but can quickly bring home a nutritious lunch. What’s more, they bring enough to share.

Pontzer said sharing provides a safety net, enabling some group members to take risks, targeting big game and other high-risk, high-reward foods. If they come home empty-handed, which they often do, they know others will have something to share. The possibility of sharing food also means some group members can even stay at the camp on occasion, enjoying one of our most precious commodities: free time.

“This slight shift in the way that we go about getting our food has fundamentally made everything else possible,” Pontzer said. Free time allows group members to communicate about things other than food. It allows for experimentation, for learning, for creativity, for play, for culture.

Being wired to finding and sharing energy bombs was, and still is, a winning strategy for hunter-gatherers and foragers-horticulturalists, Pontzer said. But it also can be treacherous for those of us with a pantry full of delicious highly caloric food.

“We are built to try and get a lot of food,” Pontzer said. “We are hugely ravenous and inefficient, and that's how we've evolved for 2 million years.”

“That doesn’t mean we can be careless with our energy today, and it doesn't mean that we have to say, ‘well there's nothing we can do about it’,” Pontzer said. “We have to be aware of ourselves and our evolutionary history.”

This research was Supported by the National Science Foundation (BCS0422690, BCS-0850815, BCS-1440867, BCS-1062879, BCS-1440841, BCS-1440671, BCS-0242455), NIH (R01AG024119, R56AG024119), the Leakey Foundation, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, the University of California, San Diego, and the American School of Prehistoric Research (Harvard University), as well as IAST funding from ANR under grant ANR-17-EUR-0010 (Investissements d’Avenir program).

CITATION: “The Energetics of Uniquely Human Subsistence Strategies,” Thomas S. Kraft,  Vivek V. Venkataraman, Ian J. Wallace, Alyssa N. Crittenden, Nicholas B. Holowka, Jonathan Stieglitz, Jacob Harris, David A. Raichlen, Brian Wood, Michael Gurven, Herman Pontzer. Science, 374 (6575), eabf0130. Decemer 2021. DOI: 10.1126/science.abf0130

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JOURNAL

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.abf0130