Earliest evidence for domestic yak found using both archaeology, ancient DNA

 

 

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XINYI LIU, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ARCHAEOLOGY, WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS

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CREDIT: SEAN GARCIA, WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS

The high-altitude hero of the Himalayas, yak are among the few large animals that can survive the extremely cold, harsh and oxygen-poor conditions of the Tibetan Plateau. In the mountainous regions of Asia, yak and yak-cattle hybrids serve as vital sources of meat, milk, transportation and fuel. However, little is known about their history: when or where yak were domesticated.

In a study published Dec. 13 in Science Advances, an international team of researchers that includes archaeologists at Washington University in St. Louis report archaeologically and genetically confirmed evidence for domestic yak, dating back 2,500 years, by far the oldest record.

The researchers zeroed in on this date using ancient DNA from a single male yak that lived alongside domestic cattle and yak-cattle hybrids in a settlement known as Bangga, a community in the southern Tibetan Plateau located at an elevation of approximately 3,750 meters (12,300 feet) above sea level.

“Many scholars have speculated that yak was first domesticated in the high-altitude regions of the Tibetan Plateau,” said Xinyi Liu, an associate professor of archaeology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University. “It was a well-informed speculation, but up to this point, there hasn’t been robust evidence for that,” Liu said. “This is the first evidence supported by both archaeology and ancient DNA.”

From unknown origins

Once widespread in the Tibetan Plateau, wild yak are now listed as “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, with only an estimated 7,500 to 10,000 mature individuals left in the wild.

Domesticated yak, however, are prevalent across much of the world. An estimated 14 million to 15 million live in the highlands of Asia alone.

Scientists have previously traced the origins of other domestic bovine species found in Asia. This includes the taurine cattle found primarily in Europe and temperate areas of Asia; indicine cattle, or zebus, found primarily in India and tropical areas of Asia; and water buffalos in East and Southeast Asia. “Yak remains an open inquiry,” Liu said.

“Identifying domestic yak and yak-cattle hybrids at Bangga is not only essential to the understanding of the origin of this charismatic creature, the yak, but also informs us in general about animal domestication pathways, in which gene flow between related stocks is increasingly appreciated,” he said.

A transdisciplinary approach

Bangga is one of the earliest agro-pastoral settlements in the southern Tibetan Plateau and the only site in the region with abundant animal remains to have been systematically excavated in recent decades. This work at Bangga, led by Hongliang Lu from Sichuan University, has provided scientists with a glimpse of daily lives at extremely high elevations between 3,000 and 2,000 years ago, contributing excellent momentum around improving our knowledge about the ancient Himalayan region.

The excavations at Bangga also offer a rare opportunity to explore the history of early yak, cattle and their hybrids. For this study, Liu and his fellow archaeologists paired up with livestock geneticists. The team used ancient DNA sequencing as well as zooarchaeological analysis and radiocarbon measurements to help answer questions that could not be resolved with field analysis alone. “Our research at Bangga is a good example of the transdisciplinary and internationally collaborative nature of the 21st century archaeology,” Liu said.

Starting with more than 10,000 pieces of mammal bones collected at Bangga, Zhengwei Zhang, an alumnus of Washington University who is now a postdoctoral researcher at Sichuan University, identified and sorted out 193 specimens belonging to the genus Bos, a group that includes all domestic cattle, zebus and yak, as well as their wild progenitors, aurochs.

The researchers subsequently selected five well-preserved bones from these Bos samples to sequence for whole-genomic ancestry. The sequencing work was led by Ningbo Chen and Chuzhao Lei, two leading geneticists at Northwest A&F University who specialized in Bos domestication.

Genetic analysis revealed that only one of the ancient bones came from a yak, a male individual, while the other four bones were from female taurine cattle. Even figuring out that the cattle were taurine cattle was a surprise, Liu said, as Bangga is located close to the Himalayas and within the range of zebus and Indian aurochs, which were not found at Bangga. Instead, the cattle belonged to the taurine lineage that was introduced to the region from Anatolia via the silk route and northern Tibetan Plateau.

Additional analysis helped clarify that the bone from the male yak was truly a domestic variant, and not just a bone from a wild yak that hunters had killed and brought back to the settlement as food. The researchers also saw evidence for hybridization between the two species.

Bringing yak home

This new discovery of domesticated yak from 2,500 years ago fits into the larger story that is beginning to emerge about how humans adapted to living in a high-altitude environment on the Tibetan Plateau. For example, Liu and his colleagues have previously documented how people in this region grew barley as they faced a challenging environment.

“Bangga provided us with a unique window into lifeways at high elevations 3,000 to 2,000 years ago,” Liu said. “They cultivated barley in an intensive way, provisioned sheep with fodder and water and consumed milk. All these resources were introduced to the Tibetan Plateau from other world regions as part of prehistoric food globalization and had become part of the Tibetan legacy. Now we know they had domestic yak.”

This discovery of the genetically confirmed evidence of domestic yak does not yet solve all questions about yak domestication, nor does it necessarily represent the very beginning of that domestication process. However, it hints at what motivated herders to bring yak home.

Early herders in this region were likely faced with harsh conditions, where animals died out quickly because of prolonged winters and severe snow storms. One would need to be innovative, living in such conditions. A possible solution is intensive corralling, which would have allowed herders to provision their herds with agricultural by-products and water year-round. This strategy is attested by recent zooarchaeological and isotopic work led by Liu and Zhang.

The other solution would be to combine the environmental hardiness of yak with the productivity of cattle. “Dzomo (female hybrid) and dzo (male) are still the most common stocks in the Plateau even today for that reason. Cattle produce more milk and meat, but they are not as good at adapting to the high-altitude environment as yak,” Liu said. “Hybridization allows cattle to move high, and yak to move low at the same time they produce more milk.”

Study co-author Fiona Marshall, professor emerita of Washington University and a world-leading expert on animal domestication, said the study draws attention to the genetic continuity among domestic yak and taurine cattle on the Tibetan Plateau. In many regions of the world, early domesticated animals were replaced by later varieties. The genomic data suggests such faunal turnover did not happen on the Tibetan Plateau.

“This suggests a successful and long-lasting legacy of early Tibetan communities who were cosmopolitan in subsistence strategies and resilient and innovative in facing a challenging climate,” Liu said. “Bangga provides the best example of such a community.”

 

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JOURNAL

Science Advances

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.adi6857 

Archaeologists unearth one of earliest known frame saddles

 

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SCIENTISTS UNCOVERED A ELEGANTLY CARVED SADDLE MADE FROM SEVERAL PIECES OF BIRCH WOOD FROM AN ANCIENT CAVE IN MONGOLIA.

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CREDIT: WILLIAM TAYLOR/ CU BOULDER

In April 2015, looters sacked an ancient cave burial at a site called Urd Ulaan Uneet high within the Altai Mountains of western Mongolia. When police apprehended the criminals, they uncovered, among other artifacts, an elegantly carved saddle made from several pieces of birch wood.

Now, in a new study, researchers from Mongolia collaborating with University of Colorado Boulder archaeologist William Taylor have described the find. The team’s radiocarbon dating pins the artifact to roughly the 4th Century C.E., making it one of the earliest known frame saddles in the world. 

“It was a watershed moment in the technological history of people and horses,” said Taylor, corresponding author of the new study and curator of archaeology at the CU Museum of Natural History.

He and his colleagues, including scientists from 10 countries, published their findings Dec. 12 in the journal Antiquity.

The research reveals the underappreciated role that ancient Mongolians played in the spread of horse riding technology and culture around the globe. Those advances ushered in a new and sometimes brutal era of mounted warfare around the same time as the fall of the Roman Empire. 

The discovery also highlights the deep relationships between human and animals in Mongolia. For millennia, pastoral peoples have traveled between the vast grasslands of the Mongolian Steppe with their horses—which, in the region, tend to be short but sturdy, capable of surviving winter temperatures that can plummet far below freezing. Airag, a lightly alcoholic beverage made from fermented horse milk, remains a popular libation in Mongolia.

“Ultimately, technology emerging from Mongolia has, through a domino effect, ended up shaping the horse culture that we have in America today, especially our traditions of saddlery and stirrups,” Taylor said.

But these insights also come at a time when Mongolia’s horse culture is beginning to disappear, said study lead author Jamsranjav Bayarsaikhan. 

“Horses have not only influenced the history of the region but also left a deep mark on the art and worldview of the Nomadic Mongols,” said Bayarsaikhan, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany. “However, the age of technology is slowly erasing the culture and use of horses. Instead of herders riding horses, more and more people are riding motorcycles in the plains of Mongolia.”

Mounted combat

Bayarsaikhan was working as a curator at the National Museum of Mongolia when he and his colleagues got the call from police in Hovd Province. The team later excavated the Urd Ulaan Uneet cave and unearthed the mummified remains of a horse, which the group partially described in a 2018 paper.

The saddle itself was made from about six pieces of birch wood held together with wooden nails. It bears traces of red paint with black trim and includes two leather straps that likely once supported stirrups. (The researchers also reported an iron stirrup recently discovered from around the same time period in eastern Mongolia).

The group couldn’t definitively trace back where those materials came from. Birch trees, however, grow commonly in the Mongolian Altai, suggesting that locals had crafted the saddle themselves, not traded for it.

Taylor explained that humans had used pads, a form of proto-saddle, to keep their rear ends comfortable on horseback since the earliest days of mounted riding. Rigid wooden saddles, which were much sturdier, paired with stirrups opened a new range of things that people could do with horses. 

“One thing they very gave rise to was heavy cavalry and high-impact combat on horseback,” Taylor said. “Think of jousting in Medieval Europe.”

Traveling west

In the centuries after the Mongolian saddle was crafted, these types of tools spread rapidly west across Asia and into the early Islamic world. There, cavalry forces became key to conquest and trade across large portions of the Mediterranean region and northern Africa. 

Where it all began, however, is less clear. Archaeologists have typically considered modern-day China the birthplace of the first frame saddles and stirrups—with some finds dating back to the 5th to 6th Century C.E. or even earlier.

The new study, however, complicates that picture, Taylor said. 

“It’s not the only piece of information suggesting that Mongolia might have been either among the very first adopters of these new technologies—or could, in fact, be the place where they were first innovated,” he said.

He suspects that Mongolia’s place in that history may have gone underappreciated for so long in part because of the region’s geography. The population density in the country’s mountainous expanses is low, among the lowest on Earth, making it difficult to encounter and analyze important archaeological finds. 

Bayarsaikhan, for his part, calls for more archaeological research in the nation to better tell the story of horses in Mongolia. 

“Mongolia is one of the few nations that has preserved horse culture from ancient times to the present day,” he said. “But the scientific understanding of the origin of this culture is still incomplete.”

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JOURNAL

Antiquity

DOI

Archaeology of Pots

 For thousands of years pottery has been used worldwide, which is the reason why studying its origins and expansion in particular regions have attracted much scientific interest. There was a common assumption that the presence of pots had been strictly connected with  animal and land farming, and pottery was possibly developed in the same centers as farming.

It was later proved, however, that the origins of pottery were by no means exclusively related with farming. Also, earlier means of gathering food, e.g. picking berries or seeds,  procuring food by hunting, and especially fishing, contributed to the development of pottery, says dr Kamil Adamczak from the Department of Prehistory, NCU. According to the state-of-the-art knowledge, the oldest pots are attributed hunter-gatherer communities from the Far East, the Japanese archipelago, the Amur and Yangtze basins. They were produced around 12,000 – 10,000 BC, which roughly corresponds to the beginnings of the history of farming in the Near East. The appearance of a new method of gathering food is accompanied by the development of pottery, and thus, by the end of the 8,000 BC, first pots of shapes and applications we are nowadays familiar with were produced. It can be concluded that pottery production was a certain consequence of the advent of farming since changes in collecting food required changes in its processing methods.  

Near East is crucial when discussing the origins of pottery in Europe. The  colonization movements of the Anatolian farmers were populationally strong and dynamic. It can be said  the pottery traditions from Near East were influential enough to have  the dominant meaning in propagating pottery as an invention, and hence, shaping culinary traditions in our part of the world.

Pottery in the Baltic Sea regions

Pots made of clay and produced for the purposes of agriculture reached the area of Poland around 5,500 – 5,400 BC, together with agricultural communities that had already mastered the skills of producing ornately decorated crockery used for cooking or for serving dishes separately.  In that period of time, the areas around the Baltic Sea were inhabited by people recognized as hunters-gatherers-fishermen and, alike Far East communities, they also used pots made of clay.

Gatherer-hunter pottery reached Europe from the East, so it initially became popular in the eastern parts of Europe whereas farmers with their pots arrived in Europe travelling from Anatolia, across the Balkans, Central Europe, and crossed the Alps to get to the North European Plain. The earliest evidence of the presence of farmers by the Baltic coast are found in the regions of the lower Vistula and the Oder rivers.

The difference between gatherers and farmers basically lied in the broad range of pots and dishes the latter used right from the beginning, explains dr Adamczak. They produced pots to serve dishes as well as to prepare  and store foodstuff. Different functions determined shapes, ornamenting, and the methods of preparing clay to produce dishes for particular purposes. Excavation sites can be filled with bowls, plates, mugs, amphoras, and large storage pots used to keep food in bulk and liquids. In hunter-gatherer communities, simple-shaped pots prevailed. Such pots were of baggy shapes, with flat or, even more commonly, conical bottoms. Such devices were predominantly used for food processing, for cooking.

In the Baltic region, pots described by archeologists as tub-shaped also appeared, and they resembled modern serving plates. In pre-war times, when such excavations were initiated, a popular belief existed that people living in settlements by the Baltic coast had used such pots to render seal fat, fry fish, or as lamps, to provide lighting. Even nowadays, archeologists keep asking questions and discussing why pottery was developed in hunter-gatherer communities if they had managed well without such utensils for hundreds of thousands of years. Another issue is whether, once developed, they served the same functions as dishes produced by farmer communities.  

Prehistoric menu

The answers to the above and other questions can be provided by the results of analyses performed by a research network which connects scientific centers around the Baltic Sea, including the Institute of Archeology at the NCU. In the years 2016 – 2023, an international specialist team led by researchers from the University of York  and the BioArCh laboratory examined the development and application of pots in northern Europe. The article entitled The impact of farming on prehistoric culinary practices throughout Northern Europe which presents the results of the studies was published in PNAS.

It was concluded that, due to their structure, prehistoric pots absorbed substances stored or cooked inside them. 

Additionally, during use, the inside or even the outside surfaces accumulated residues composed of burned food for instance, explains dr Adamczak. The organic residues are an abundant source of information about products processed in pots. Up till now, mainly a broad variety of fats remained since they penetrated into the walls of the pots and did not undergo complete degradation despite many thousands of years of deposition.

Scientists carried out the examination of the remains. As it turned out, the ratio of carbon isotopes and oxygen in lipids is the marker characteristic of animals consuming particular food and living in specific environment, explains the researcher from Toruń. Due to such information we can prove that meat consumed from a given plate was sourced from a wild, bred,  or sea animal. Fats found in milk which is the product of animal farming, i.e. agriculture,  constitute a distinct group of traces.  

Hence, owing to such examinations, scientists were able to recreate certain economic behaviors and culinary practices both in hunter-gatherer communities as well as farmers. Researchers were able to conclude that fish, aquatic mammals which were hunted for or mollusks which were picked  were the predominant dietary components. Such a conclusion can be evidenced by large deposits of mussel shell fragments discovered in certain excavation sites, especially in contemporary Denmark or southern Sweden.

According to scientific findings, obvious differences in diets of various Baltic Sea catchment area inhabitants can be discerned. In the eastern parts of the area under investigation, i.e. what is contemporarily called Estonia and Finland, seafood resources dominated.  A similar observation is also valid, possibly to a lesser extent, for the western coast of the Baltic Sea, which is now the territory of Denmark. The deeper inland the studies are performed, i.e. in the forests  of Central and Eastern Europe including the  Rhine, northern Poland, the Chełmno Land, Greater Poland, Cuiavia, the more abundant traces of wild hoofed animals such as wild boars, deer, or roe deer meat in diets are visible. Noteworthy is the fact that finding food in  water was not uncommon, which can prove that all the available sources of food were exploited. There was also food exchange among different communities, which is evidenced by discovering the existence of milk lipids in pots belonging to hunter-gatherers. The presence of traces of such lipids in sites inhabited by the latter communities undoubtedly indicates the mutual and close relations the both types of communities established. Hence, dairy products, which by nature undergo fermentation and go bad easily, were plentifully provided to hunter-gatherers and consumed right away.

When examining one of the archeological sites in Denmark, scientists came across pots which allowed them to conclude that grain also constituted a significant component of hunter-gatherer communities diet. Unfortunately,  such plants do not contain fats which could remain long enough to be examined. Therefore, the information concerning plants as an essential diet component and the resulting culinary  practices is not as explicit as  in the case of food of animal origin, says the scientist from the NCU. In this case, apart from the analysis of pots, additional palynological examinations, i.e. those concerning studying the pollen grain of plant species grown in the areas inhabited by hunter-gatherers, were performed. 

As the investigation results show, different kinds of grain were essential diet components of hunter-gatherers who lived in the Baltic Sea catchment area, but they became a part of menu significantly later than bred animals. Over a huge area covering the Rhine and the Meuse deltas, the territory of Belgium and the Netherlands as well as Jutland, the Dutch islands, and northern-western regions of Poland, land cultivation was initiated later than animal breeding. It seems to be a rather common model. Hunter-gatherers first mastered  the domestication of animals, and next started plant cultivation. Scientists assume that bred animals  were artificially introduced into areas inhabited by farmers, which means they traveled with people. Thus, animal farming was not based on the domestication of animal species living in Europe.

Exchange on a plate

One of the more interesting conclusions that can be drawn from our observations is that farmer communities having their own sets of pots and culinary practices start to modify their own diet when influenced by hunter-gatherers they get in contact with, emphasizes dr Adamczak. The farmer pots we examined increasingly often carried traces of aquatic animal fats. Apparently, farmers were more open to new trends and adapted to the surrounding environment  as well as local practices better than hunter-gatherers.  It seems particularly interesting since it was commonly believed that farmers had arrived in these regions with an already shaped culture model and livestock making an attempt to introduce them into new territories.  They, however, took advantage of the new environment to the fullest.

Therefore, we should not be surprised that ‘strangers’ tried to adapt to local environment and take full advantage of its resources. Still, it seems the processes cannot be considered as occurring exclusively within a given community; they resulted from interactions farmers had established with hunter-gatherers. We have evidence of contacts and the transfer of knowledge between the two kinds of communities, but the results of ancient DNA analyses show they did not interbreed with each other, notices the archeologist from the NCU. Research in this field is scarce, so the results cannot be considered conclusive. It should be assumed that the two environments fostered cultural isolationism.

The transfer of knowledge can be discerned in e.g. pottery making. Even though farmers developed their own technology and their variety of pots was much broader, they adapted certain patterns from hunter-gatherers. It is mainly the matter of pottery paste preparation, i.e. the addition of crushed shells or special ornamenting.  Hunter-gatherers followed one model of pottery making which started evolving when influenced by farmers. At some point of time, the former was  completely replaced by pottery making methods employed by farmers, says dr Adamczak. It first happened in the southern regions of the Baltic coast, i.e. the northern territories of Germany, and it ended in areas now known as Estonia and Finland where ‘tableware’ was replaced in around the middle of the 3rd millennium BC. The whole culture of the region virtually changes at that time. 

Long-term cooperation

Scientists whose activity is focused on investigating the Baltic Sea basin have been cooperating for years, and the research paper published in PNAS is not the first one resulting from this cooperation. In December 2022, an article entitled The transmission of pottery technology among prehistoric European hunter-gatherers was published  in Nature Human Behaviour.  In this work, the authors discussed the development of pottery making and its applications in northern Europe covering the East European Plain and the North European Plain, i.e. the territories extending between Belgium and the Ural Mountains.

Together with Prof. Stanisław Kukawka from the  Department of Prehistory, NCU, we have been invited to become part of the team because our investigations are focused on the North-East of Poland, says dr Adamczak. Prof. Kukawka developed his own model of relations between the earliest farmers and hunter-gatherers in this area. The model attracted much scientific interest from researchers representing other centers. Moreover, during archeological examinations and as a part of our activity, we gain new artefacts directly connected with that period of time.

The current project which results in a scientific paper published in PNAS was aimed at the examination of pots related to the so-called  Central European farming of Middle Eastern background, i.e. since around 5,500 – 5,400 BC until the moment in which farmers appeared all around the Baltic Sea region and a very archaic hunter-gatherer lifestyle either disappeared or was significantly reduced to remain only in the northern regions. It took place ca. 2,500 – 2,300 BC. Then, farming prevails on the whole coast of the Baltic Sea, informs the archeologist from the NCU. It is assumed that the appearance of the so-called Corded Ware culture is the breakthrough  as communities practicing pasturing and breeding animals are formed. It is their prevalent economic model.

As a result, an article entitled Detection of dairy products from multiple taxa in Late Neolithic pottery from Poland: an integrated biomolecular approach, published in Royal Society Open Science, was issued. For the first time cow, sheep, and goat milk fats which remained on pots used several thousand years ago in Cuiavia were distinguished. It enables us to gain the insight into the species composition of herds and dairy economy of societies living in the 4th millennium BC. Thus, the researchers are planning to deal with this topic  more intensively soon. 

When the examinations were in progress, the effect of which were scientific papers published in Nature Human Behaviour and PNAS, the Institute of Archeology at the NCU was visited by Ekaterina Dolbunova, a scientist representing the British Museum in London and the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg. She took samples for analyses herself. For the purposes of studies in the field of dairying, the archeologists from the NCU select samples and send them to Great Britain.

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JOURNAL

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2310138120 

Ancient Balkan genomes trace the rise and fall of Roman Empire’s frontier, reveal Slavic migrations to southeastern Europe

 

IMAGE: 

SKULL OF AN INDIVIDUAL OF EAST AFRICAN ANCESTRAL ORIGIN FOUND IN VIMINACIUM, WITH THE OIL LAMP FEATURING AN EAGLE FOUND IN HIS TOMB.

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CREDIT: PHOTO CREDIT: MIODRAG (MIKE) GRBIC.

A multidisciplinary study has reconstructed the genomic history of the Balkan Peninsula during the first millennium of the common era, a time and place of profound demographic, cultural and linguistic change. The team has recovered and analyzed whole genome data from 146 ancient people excavated primarily from Serbia and Croatia—more than a third of which came from the Roman military frontier at the massive archaeological site of Viminacium in Serbia—which they co-analyzed with data from the rest of the Balkans and nearby regions.

The work, published in the journal Cell, highlights the cosmopolitanism of the Roman frontier and the long-term consequences of migrations that accompanied the breakdown of Roman control, including the arrival of people speaking Slavic languages. Archaeological DNA reveals that despite nation-state boundaries that divide them, populations in the Balkans have been shaped by shared demographic processes.

“Archaeogenetics is an indispensable complement to archaeological and historical evidence. A new and much richer picture comes into view when we synthesize written records, archaeological remains like grave goods and human skeletons, and ancient genomes”, said co-author Kyle Harper, a historian of the ancient Roman world at the University of Oklahoma.

Massive demographic influx into the Balkans from the East during the Roman Empire – largely from the eastern Mediterranean and even from East Africa

After Rome occupied the Balkans, it turned this border region into a crossroads, one that would eventually give rise to 26 Roman Emperors, including Constantine the Great, who shifted the capital of the empire to the eastern Balkans when he founded the city of Constantinople.

The team’s analysis of ancient DNA shows that during the period of Roman control, there was a large demographic contribution of people of Anatolian descent that left a long-term genetic imprint in the Balkans. This ancestry shift is very similar to what a previous study showed happened in the megacity of Rome itself—the original core of the empire—but it is remarkable that this also occurred at the Roman Empire’s periphery.

A particular surprise is that there is no evidence of a genetic impact on the Balkans of migrants of Italic descent: “During the Imperial period, we detect an influx of Anatolian ancestry in the Balkans and not that of populations descending from the people of Italy," said Íñigo Olalde, Ikerbasque researcher at the University of the Basque Country and co-lead author of the study. "These Anatolians were intensively integrated into local society. At Viminacium, for example, there is an exceptionally rich sarcophagus in which we find a man of local descent and a woman of Anatolian descent buried together."

The team also discovered cases of sporadic long-distance mobility from far-away regions, such as an adolescent boy whose ancestral genetic signature most closely matches the region of Sudan in sub-Saharan Africa and whose childhood diet was very different from the rest of the individuals analyzed. He died in the 2nd century CE and was buried with an oil lamp representing an iconography of the eagle related to Jupiter, one of the most important gods for the Romans.

“We don’t know if he was a soldier, slave or merchant, but the genetic analysis of his burial reveals that he probably spent his early years in the region of present-day Sudan, outside the limits of the Empire, and then followed a long journey that ended with his death at Viminacium (present-day Serbia), on the northern frontier of the Empire,” said Carles Lalueza-Fox, principal investigator at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology and director of the Museum of Natural Sciences of Barcelona.

The Roman Empire incorporated “barbarian” peoples long before its collapse

The study identified individuals of mixed Northern European and Pontic steppe descent in the Balkans from the 3rd century, long predating the final breakdown of Roman imperial control. Anthropological analysis of their skulls shows that some of them were artificially deformed, a custom typical of some populations of the steppes, including groups labeled by ancient authors as “Huns." These results reflect the integration of people from beyond the Danube into Balkan society centuries before the fall of the Empire.

"The borders of the Roman Empire differed from the borders of today's nation-states. The Danube served as the geographic and military boundary of the Empire. But it also acted as a crucial communication corridor that was permeable to the movement of people attracted by the wealth Rome invested in its frontier zone," said co-author Michael McCormick, Francis Goelet Professor of Medieval History at Harvard University.

Slavic populations changed the demographic composition of the Balkans

The Roman Empire permanently lost control of the Balkans in the sixth century, and the study reveals the subsequent large-scale arrival in the Balkans of individuals genetically similar to the modern Slavic-speaking populations of Eastern Europe. Their genetic fingerprint accounts for 30-60% of the ancestry of today's Balkan peoples, representing one of the largest permanent demographic shifts anywhere in Europe in the early medieval period.

The study is the first to detect the sporadic arrival of individual migrants who long preceded later population movements, such as a woman of Eastern European descent buried in a high imperial cemetery. Then, from the 6th century onwards, migrants from Eastern Europe are observed in larger numbers; as in Anglo-Saxon England, the population changes in this region were at the extreme high end of what occurred in Europe and were accompanied by language shifts.

"According to our ancient DNA analysis, this arrival of Slavic-speaking populations in the Balkans took place over several generations and involved entire family groups, including both men and women," explains Pablo Carrión, a researcher at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology and co-lead author of the study.

The establishment of Slavic populations in the Balkans was greatest in the north, with a genetic contribution of 50-60% in present-day Serbia, and gradually less towards the south, with 30-40% in mainland Greece and up to 20% in the Aegean islands. "The major genetic impact of Slavic migrations is visible not only in current Balkan Slavic-speaking populations, but also in places that today do not speak Slavic languages such as Romania and Greece," said co-senior author David Reich, professor of genetics in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School and professor of human evolutionary biology in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Bringing together historians, archaeologists, and geneticists

The study involved an interdisciplinary collaboration of over 70 researchers, including archaeologists who excavated the sites, anthropologists, historians and geneticists.

“This work exemplifies how genomic data can be useful for getting beyond contentious debates around identity and ancestry that have been inspired by historical narratives rooted in nascent nineteenth-century nationalisms and that have contributed to conflict in the past," Lalueza-Fox said.

The team also generated genomic data from diverse present-day Serbs that could be compared with ancient genomes and other present-day groups from the region.

"We found there was no genomic database of modern Serbs. We therefore sampled people who self-identified as Serbs on the basis of shared cultural traits, even if they lived in different countries such as Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro or North Macedonia", said co-author Miodrag Grbic, a professor at the University of Western Ontario, Canada.

Co-analyzing the data with that of other modern people in the region, as well as the ancient individuals, shows that the genomes of the Croats and Serbs are very similar, reflecting shared heritage with similar proportions of Slavic and local Balkan ancestry.

"Ancient DNA analysis can contribute, when analyzed together with archaeological data and historical records, to a richer understanding of the history of Balkans history,” said Grbic. “The picture that emerges is not of division, but of shared history. The people of the Iron Age throughout the Balkans were similarly impacted by migration during the time of the Roman Empire, and by Slavic migration later on. Together, these influences resulted in the genetic profile of the modern Balkans—regardless of national boundaries.”

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Paper: Olalde & Carrión et al., 2023, Cell 186, 1-14; December 7, 2023; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2023.10.018

Hunting of straight-tusked elephants was widespread among Neanderthals 125.000 years ago

Finds uncovered in the east of Germany show that Neanderthals stored vast amounts of meat and fat or temporarily aggregated in larger groups to consume these

 

IMAGE: 

PELVIC BONE OF A PALAEOLOXODON ANTIQUUS FOUND IN GRÖBERN

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CREDIT: PHOTO/©: LUTZ KINDLER, LEIZA

Hunting the now extinct straight-tusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) was widespread among Neanderthals. This is the conclusion reached by a research team consisting of members of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), the Leibniz-Zentrum für Archäologie (LEIZA), also based in Mainz, and Leiden University in the Netherlands. The study has recently been published in the journal PNAS. The researchers closely examined the bones of elephants that are approximately 125,000 years old and that were discovered in Gröbern in Saxony-Anhalt and Taubach in Thuringia, Germany, decades ago. They were able to identify cut marks made by stone tools used by the Neanderthals that indicate that the animals must have been hunted before they were extensively butchered.

It was two years ago that the same team during the analysis of bones found at the Neumark-Nord site, in a former lignite mine in Saxony-Anhalt, discovered the very first evidence that Neanderthals actively hunted straight-tusked elephants, the largest terrestrial mammals of the Pleistocene. This study was published in Science Advances in early 2023 (see https://press.uni-mainz.de/neanderthals-hunted-elephants-earliest-evidence-found-of-humans-killing-elephants-for-food/). "The results of the more recent examination of the bones from Gröbern and Taubach now show that the hunting of these elephants by Neanderthals was not an isolated phenomenon but must have been a more regular activity," emphasized Sabine Gaudzinski-Windheuser, Professor of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Archaeology at JGU and Director of the Archaeological Research Center and Museum of Human Behavioral Evolution MONREPOS in Neuwied, an institute run under the aegis of LEIZA. Gaudzinski-Windheuser was extensively involved in the investigation of the bones from Gröbern and Taubach as well as the previous study of the bones from the Neumark-Nord site.

The yield of a straight-tusked elephant bull would have been sufficient to cover the daily calorie requirements of 2,500 Neanderthals

Palaeoloxodon antiquus roamed the landscapes of Europe and Western Asia 800,000 to 100,000 years ago. With shoulder heights of up to four meters and body masses of up to 13 tons, the European straight-tusked elephant was the largest land-living animal at the time, significantly larger than today's African and Asian elephants and even bigger than the extinct woolly mammoth. "We have estimated that the meat and fat supplied by the body of an adult Palaeoloxodon antiquus bull would have been sufficient to satisfy the daily calorie intake of at least 2,500 adult Neanderthals," explained Gaudzinski-Windheuser. "This is a significant number because it furnishes us with new insights into the behavior of Neanderthals." So far, for instance, research had generally assumed that Neanderthals associated in groups of no more than 20 individuals. However, the information now obtained in relation to the systematic exploitation of straight-tusked elephants indicates that Neanderthals must have gathered, at least temporarily, in larger groups or mastered techniques that allowed them to preserve and store large quantities of foodstuffs – or both. In a follow-up project, the researchers hope to learn more about how Neanderthals hunted these massive elephants and how their hunting activities impacted these and other prey animals as well as their environments.

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JOURNAL

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1038/s41598-023-46956-6  

Why scientific techniques matter in archaeology

Peer-Reviewed Publication

FLINDERS UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: 

RESIN-CASTING OF BLOCKS PERMIT FURTHER SAMPLING AND ANALYSES OF DIRT WITHOUT DISTURBING OR SPOILING THEIR SPATIAL RELATIONSHIPS. (IMAGE CREDIT: DR JULIEN LUBEEK).

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CREDIT: DR JULIEN LUBEEK.

Scientists should seek answers hidden in the dirt using proven and state-of-the-art archaeological science techniques to support new discoveries about human evolution following recent controversies at a cave site in Africa, says a group of international experts.

Their recommendations follow claims published in June of this year that Homo naledi—a small-brained human species—buried their dead in Rising Star Cave, South Africa, between 335,000 and 241,000 years ago, and may also have decorated the cave walls with engravings. These claims were accompanied by a Netflix documentary, ‘Unknown: Cave of Bones’.

In scientific commentary published today in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, led by Associate Professor Mike Morley at Flinders University (Australia), a group of archaeological scientists strongly advocate for the use of modern scientific techniques to support claims such as those made about Homo naledi.

“Many scientists—including the authors of our comment out today—remain unconvinced by the evidence provided in three papers published online prior to peer review,” says Associate Professor. Mike Morley, Director of the Flinders Microarchaeology Laboratory.

“Fortunately, there are a range of state-of-the-art techniques that scientists can use to study the many forms of evidence for human evolution – the fossils, artefacts and even the sediments (or dirt) from which they have been recovered. These techniques are crucial when attempting to identify features such as the burials they claim to have found at Rising Star Cave”

Dr Ania Kotarba, a co-author from the University of Adelaide, says that the routine use of these techniques to generate supporting data will help avoid future controversies and increase the confidence that the public hold in such claims.

“When you consider that significant discoveries are normally small and scarce, ranging in size from teeth to strands of DNA found in caves, then proper scientific analysis holds immense potential to rewrite what we know about the evolution of our closest ancestors,” says Dr Kotarba.

The experts argue that one key scientific technique that is gaining traction in the field is known as micromorphology.

This technique involves the microscopic analysis of sediment that surrounds fossils or archaeology. By studying intact blocks of sediment removed from archaeological trenches, microscopic clues can be pieced together to reconstruct the past environments present at the site and in the local environment.

“Micromorphology has proven to be a powerful tool for analysing ancient human remains and burial practices. In 2021, scientists who studied the oldest known human burial (78,000 years ago) published in the journal Nature used micromorphology to help identify the burial” says Vito Hernandez, a PhD candidate using this technique in his research at Flinders University.

“Developments in analytical techniques mean that archaeological science can provide information about the past at the molecular and even elemental scales. Through these developments we now better understand the processes that form sites and preserve fossils and artefacts in incredibly detailed ways.”

In their commentary, the researchers agree that they would like to see a future where all archaeological investigations use scientific techniques such as these from the outset as standard to avoid future controversy.

“In that way we might avoid future controversy and find clues that strongly support hypotheses and allow for greater confidence in findings that are presented to the scientific community and public alike,” says Associate Professor. Mike Morley.

“This is especially important in the ‘post-truth’ world that we now live in where it is incredibly difficult for the public to disentangle facts from fiction. Scientists need to be much more careful about how they communicate their findings to avoid increasing scepticism towards scientists that can have a major impact across all aspects of modern life.

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JOURNAL

Nature Ecology & Evolution

DOI

10.1038/s41559-023-02215-5 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Commentary/editorial

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

‘Bone biographies’ reveal lives of medieval England’s common people – and illuminate early benefits system

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

 

IMAGE: 

THE REMAINS OF NUMEROUS INDIVIDUALS UNEARTHED ON THE FORMER SITE OF THE HOSPITAL OF ST. JOHN THE EVANGELIST, TAKEN DURING THE 2010 EXCAVATION.

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CREDIT: CAMBRIDGE ARCHAEOLOGICAL UNIT/ST JOHN’S COLLEGE

• New study of remains from medieval Cambridge hospital reveals the spectrum of poverty during the time of Black Death, and gives an inside look at medieval benefits system.
   
• Researchers may have identified a few of Cambridge University’s first scholars within the hospital cemetery, suggesting some ended up in penury.    
   
• Website launched of full “osteobiographies”: life stories of sixteen ordinary residents of medieval Cambridge recreated based on extensive skeletal analyses.

A series of ‘bone biographies’ created by a major research project tell the stories of medieval Cambridge residents as recorded on their skeletons, illuminating everyday lives during the era of Black Death and its aftermath.

The work is published alongside a new study investigating medieval poverty by examining remains from the cemetery of a former hospital that housed the poor and infirm.

University of Cambridge archaeologists analysed close to 500 skeletal remains excavated from burial grounds across the city, dating between the 11th and 15th centuries. Samples came from a range of digs dating back to the 1970s. 

The latest techniques were used to investigate diets, DNA, activities, and bodily traumas of townsfolk, scholars, friars and merchants. Researchers focused on sixteen of the most revealing remains that are representative of various “social types”.

The full “osteobiographies” are available on a new website launched by the After the Plague project at Cambridge University.

“An osteobiography uses all available evidence to reconstruct an ancient person’s life,” said lead researcher Prof John Robb from Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology. “Our team used techniques familiar from studies such as Richard III’s skeleton, but this time to reveal details of unknown lives – people we would never learn about in any other way.”

“The importance of using osteobiography on ordinary folk rather than elites, who are documented in historical sources, is that they represent the majority of the population but are those that we know least about,” said After the Plague researcher Dr Sarah Inskip (now at University of Leicester).  

The project used a statistical analysis of likely names drawn from written records of the period to give pseudonyms to the people studied.

“Journalists report anonymous sources using fictitious names. Death and time ensure anonymity for our sources, but we wanted to them to feel relatable,” said Robb.

Meet 92 (‘Wat’), who survived the plague, eventually dying as an older man with cancer in the city’s charitable hospital, and 335 (‘Anne’), whose life was beset by repeated injuries, leaving her to hobble on a shortened right leg.

Meet 730 (‘Edmund’), who suffered from leprosy but – contrary to stereotypes – lived among ordinary people, and was buried in a rare wooden coffin. And 522 (‘Eudes’), the poor boy who grew into a square-jawed friar with a hearty diet, living long despite painful gout.

Inside the medieval benefits system

The website coincides with a study from the team published in the journal Antiquity, which investigates the inhabitants of the hospital of St. John the Evangelist.

Founded around 1195, this institution helped the “poor and infirm”, housing a dozen or so inmates at any one time. It lasted for some 300 years before being replaced by St. John’s College in 1511. The site was excavated in 2010.

“Like all medieval towns, Cambridge was a sea of need,” said Robb. “A few of the luckier poor people got bed and board in the hospital for life. Selection criteria would have been a mix of material want, local politics, and spiritual merit.”

The study gives an inside look at how a “medieval benefits system” operated. “We know that lepers, pregnant women and the insane were prohibited, while piety was a must,” said Robb. Inmates were required to pray for the souls of hospital benefactors, to speed them through purgatory. “A hospital was a prayer factory.”  

Molecular, bone and DNA data from over 400 remains in the hospital’s main cemetery shows inmates to be an inch shorter on average than townsfolk. They were more likely to die younger, and show signs of tuberculosis.

Inmates were more likely to bear traces on their bones of childhoods blighted by hunger and disease. However, they also had lower rates of bodily trauma, suggesting life in the hospital reduced physical hardship or risk.

Children buried in the hospital were small for their age by up to five years’ worth of growth. “Hospital children were probably orphans,” said Robb. Signs of anaemia and injury were common, and about a third had rib lesions denoting respiratory diseases such as TB.

As well as the long-term poor, up to eight hospital residents had isotope levels indicating a lower-quality diet in older age, and may be examples of the “shame-faced poor”: those fallen from comfort into destitution, perhaps after they became unable to work.

“Theological doctrines encouraged aid for the shame-faced poor, who threatened the moral order by showing that you could live virtuously and prosperously but still fall victim to twists of fortune,” said Robb.

The researchers suggest that the variety of people within the hospital – from orphans and pious scholars to the formerly prosperous – may have helped appeal to a range of donors.   

Finding the university scholars

The researchers were also able to identify some skeletons as probably those of early university scholars. The clue was in the arm bones.

Almost all townsmen had asymmetric arm bones, with their right humerus (upper arm bone) built more strongly than their left one, reflecting tough working regimes, particularly in early adulthood.

However, about ten men from the hospital had symmetrical humeri, yet they had no signs of a poor upbringing, limited growth, or chronic illness. Most dated from the later 14th and 15th century.

“These men did not habitually do manual labour or craft, and they lived in good health with decent nutrition, normally to an older age. It seems likely they were early scholars of the University of Cambridge,” said Robb.

“University clerics did not have the novice-to-grave support of clergy in religious orders. Most scholars were supported by family money, earnings from teaching, or charitable patronage.

“Less well-off scholars risked poverty once illness or infirmity took hold. As the university grew, more scholars would have ended up in hospital cemeteries.”

Isotope work suggests the first Cambridge students came mainly from eastern England, with some from the dioceses of Lincoln and York.

Cambridge and the Black Death

Most remains for this study came from three sites. In addition to the Hospital, an overhaul of the University’s New Museums Site in 2015 yielded remains from a former Augustinian Friary, and the project also used skeletons excavated in the 1970s from the grounds of a medieval parish church: ‘All Saints by the Castle’.  

The team laid out each skeleton to do an inventory, then took samples for radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis. “We had to keep track of hundreds of bone samples zooming all over the place,” said Robb

In 1348-9 the bubonic plague – Black Death – hit Cambridge, killing between 40-60% of the population. Most of the dead were buried in town cemeteries or plague pits such as one on Bene’t Street next to the former friary.

However, the team have used the World Health Organization’s methods of calculating “Disease Adjusted Life Years” – the years of human life and life quality a disease costs a population – to show that bubonic plague may have only come in tenth or twelfth on the risk rundown of serious health problems facing medieval Europeans.

“Everyday diseases, such as measles, whooping cough and gastrointestinal infections, ultimately took a far greater toll on medieval populations,” said Robb.

“Yes, the Black Death killed half the population in one year, but it wasn’t present in England before that, or in most years after that. The biggest threats to life in medieval England, and in Western Europe as a whole, were chronic infectious diseases such as tuberculosis.”  
 

NOTES:

• Medieval Cambridge was home to just a few thousand people, with timber-framed houses clustered around a dozen churches, each with a small cemetery. A ten-minute walk in any direction ended in fields worked by many of the locals.
• Major Christian orders – such as Dominicans and Franciscans – had bases in the town, and the early University consisted of large hostels for religious students, with the first college, Peterhouse, established in 1284.
• Initially small and relatively poor, the colleges start to grow and multiply by the later 14th century thanks to endowments from aristocrats and royalty. By 1400 there were between 4-700 scholars.
• Remains from “All Saints by the Castle”, as well as from surrounding villages, had been in storage for decades, with some housed in the University’s Duckworth Laboratory, and others held in an old salt mine in Cheshire.
• Analyses of townsfolk from the “All Saints” cemetery suggest an adequate diet, mainly grains, vegetables and a little dairy. Around half of this group did not survive childhood, but of those that did, around half made it past the age of 45. 
• Men from the Augustinian Friary were around an inch taller than those from town, with bone chemistry suggesting diets rich with meat and fish. The hospital inmates were the shortest group, likely as a result of poor and disease-ridden childhoods.
• Three people from the hospital, including 332 (‘Christina’), began life some distance away, maybe even as far as Norway. They may have been buried in the Hospital cemetery’s consecrated ground as an act of charity, after dying while visiting Cambridge – perhaps to trade at the town’s famous Stourbridge Fair.

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JOURNAL

Antiquity

DOI

10.15184/aqy.2023.167 

ARTICLE TITLE