IMAGE: SUMMARY IMAGE SHOWING INFLUENCE OF POLITICAL SYSTEMS ON LIVESTOCK view more
CREDIT: ARIADNA NIETO-ESPINET
In ancient European settlements, livestock use was likely primarily determined by political structure and market demands, according to a study published February 17, 2021 in the open-access journal PLOS ONEby Ariadna Nieto-Espinet and colleagues of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Barcelona.
Zooarchaeology - the study of animal remains from archaeological sites - has great potential to provide information on past human communities. Livestock preferences are known to have changed over time in Europe, but little is known about how much these changes are influenced by environmental, economic, or political conditions of ancient settlements.
In this study, Nieto-Espinet and colleagues gathered data from 101 archaeological sites across the northeastern Iberian Peninsula, ranging from the Late Bronze Age to Late Antiquity, a span of around 1700 years during which European cultural and agricultural practices underwent significant changes. At each site, they compared livestock remains with data on the local environment (including plant and climate data) and the economic and political conditions of the settlement.
These data show that political and economic factors were most important in determining the species distribution and body size of ancient livestock. During the Late Bronze Age and Late Antiquity, when political systems were more fragmented and food production was focused more on local markets, livestock choice was more dependent upon local environmental conditions. But during the later Iron Age and the time of the Roman Empire, the demands of a pan-Mediterranean market economy favored more changes in livestock use independent of environmental factors. Zooarchaeology is thus a vital source of information for understanding political and economic changes through time.
The authors add: "Archaeology reveals the influence of political systems on livestock practices over time."
IMAGE: HISTORICAL SILK ROAD TRADE ROUTES ARE ILLUSTRATED IN RED, AND THE WHITE STAR MARKS THE STUDIED CAVE IN CENTRAL ASIA view more
CREDIT: @SCIENCE CHINA PRESS
The Silk Road was the most elaborate network of trade routes in the ancient world, linking ancient populations in East Asia to those in southwest Asia, via Central Asia. These trade routes fostered the spread of ideas, religions, and technologies over the past 2,000 years. Before the establishment of organized exchange, starting around the time of the Chinese Han Dynasty (2,223 years ago), a process of trans-Eurasian exchange was already underway through the river valleys and oases of Central Asia. The establishment of populations in the oases of the Taklimakan Desert in Xinjiang, China, was a major factor facilitating this trans-Eurasian exchange. However, archaeological evidence for human occupation in these arid regions as well as long-distance diffusion of cultural material is largely lacking prior to the early fourth millennium BP. Paleoecologists have long been aware of the potential for regional climatic fluctuations in Arid Central Asia (ACA), and the shifting oases or river ways of the desert zone can influence cultural diffusion along the pre-Silk Road.
In this publication, a team of paleoclimatologists provides evidence suggesting that an extended dry period may have made it more difficult to traverse these deserts for a 640-year period in prehistory. The megadrought in ACA appears to have occurred during 5820-5180 BP, and was likely tied into a northward shift in the prevailing air masses. The dearth of archaeological evidence for sedentary human occupation in the region during this drought period suggests that the climatic conditions may have hindered human movement and effectively reduced or blocked overland travel between eastern and western Central Asia. The agricultural regions of the ancient world were isolated from each other by the high peaks of the Himalaya, but exceptionally arid climatic conditions in Central Asia may have further contributed to that cultural isolation.
The results of this international research endeavor, led by Dr. Liangcheng Tan, a professor from The Belt & Road center of the Institute of Earth Environment, through the Chinese Academy of Sciences, were recently published in Science Bulletin as a cover paper. The article is titled "Megadrought and cultural exchange along the proto-Silk Road". The research team includes collaborations with 15 scientific institutions and universities from China, the United States, Kyrgyzstan, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
Archeological studies indicate that trans-Eurasian exchange was occurring as early as the terminal 5th millennium BP, but only started in earnest during the 4th millennium BP. This exchange is marked by the dispersal of wheat, barley, sheep, goats, and cattle from West Asia into northern China. Likewise, East Asian broomcorn and foxtail millet dispersed from northern China into West Asia, and eventually on to Europe. Some scholars have referred to this process as food globalization in prehistory. The traditional narrative suggest that early movements of humans crossed the northern Eurasian steppe. However, increasingly archaeologists are recognizing that the main routes of cultural dispersal in prehistory followed the same routes as the historic Silk Road. These river valleys and desert oases fostered connections between intensive agricultural regions in prehistory.
This international team worked in collaboration with officials in Kyrgyzstan to collect stalagmites from Talisman Cave. The cave is located in the southeastern Fergana Valley, near the crossroads of the historic Silk Road. Stalagmites are cave formations that gradually accumulate over thousands of years as water drips from the cave roof and calcium precipitates out of it. These features trap in their cores a highly detailed climatic record, unlike what can be pieced together through pollen or paleolake shore studies. The researchers on this project used oxygen and carbon isotopes, as well as trace element records to track precipitation changes through time. They also used a radiometric U-Th dating techniques on the two stalagmites to reveal precipitation (rainfall and snowfall) history in ACA over the past 7,800 years. The average dating uncertainty of this method is about 6‰, and average temporal resolution of the proxies is roughly 3 years. This nuanced level of precision allows for a high-resolution precipitation record.
The climatic record illustrated frequent short-duration shifts in the precipitation regimes for this intercontinental region. The most remarkable feature of the precipitation record was a prolonged period of aridity or a megadrought lasting 640 years, between 5820 and 5180 BP. The scale of the megadrought is unlike any of the other environmental shifts that the team noted for the last 7,800 years. This period of aridity would have had significant consequences in the local environment, especially in the ephemeral desert oases. For example, the level of Lake Balkhash was at least 20 meters lower during the peak of the megadrought than at present. The scientists suggest that the megadrought resulted from a northward shift of the westerly jet. As explained by Dr. Liangcheng Tan, "the northward shift of the westerly jet could have reduced the frequency and intensity of Mediterranean storms, decreasing precipitation in the Mediterranean and parts of southwest Asia, and reducing the moisture transfer to Arid Central Asia". In addition, it strengthened and shifted the westerlies northward, decreasing the sea surface temperature of the North Atlantic, and reducing the evaporated moisture transported from the North Atlantic to ACA. The two processes could have worked together and amplified the regional effects of the other, ultimately resulting in the megadrought.
The researchers further collected up-to-date archaeological records from across Eurasia over the past 10,000 years, and found a synchronous shift in the timing of the dispersal of cultural traits across East and West Asia. Agropastoral groups did not begin to expand into ACA until after the megadrought. "No society could overcome the severity of these conditions over such a long period and the archaeological record of the area falls largely silent during this period. This suggests societies in Arid Central Asia had to abandon life around oases and relocate to areas with mountains and run-off to the north and south for reliable supplies of water", said by Prof. John Dodson from University of Wollongong. The megadrought would have hindered human movement and effectively reduced or blocked overland travel between eastern and western Central Asia along the pre-Silk Road. Instead, it may have pushed human movements further north into the Eurasian Steppe or forest steppe, further resulting in the first trans-Eurasian movements of people along the southern Siberia Steppe during the 5th millennium BP.
After the megadrought, precipitation gradually increased and the oases recovered, allowing for a demographic expansion and the beginning of cultural dispersal across ACA. Meanwhile, the development of agricultural and herding techniques, the domestication of the horse and eventually the camel further increased the mobility of agropastoral groups, which facilitated the interconnection of East and West Asian peoples by the 4th millennium BP.
Dr. Guanghui Dong of Lanzhou University, one of the paper's coauthors, think this study reveals the underlying mechanism of the spatial-temporal transformation of the Bronze Age trans-Eurasian exchange from a climatic and environmental aspect, and provides support for a better understanding of the formation of the prehistoric Silk Road. "The unusual precipitation record identified in this study could also contribute to a better understanding of the centennial- to decadal-scale hydroclimate changes in ACA, as well as predicting the future precipitation trends in this ecologically vulnerable region", said Dr. Tan.
Last year, researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany showed that a major genetic risk factor for severe COVID-19 is inherited from Neandertals. Now the same researchers show, in a study published inPNAS, that Neandertals also contributed a protective variant. Half of all people outside Africa carry a Neandertal gene variant that reduces the risk of needing intensive care for COVID-19 by 20 percent.
Some people become seriously ill when infected with SARS-CoV-2 while others get only mild or no symptoms. In addition to risk factors such as advanced age and diabetes, gene variants also make people more or less sensitive to developing severe COVID-19. A major genetic risk factor is located on chromosome 3 and dramatically increases the risk of respiratory failure and even death. Hugo Zeberg and Svante Pääbo at Karolinska Institutet and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology discovered last year that this risk variant is inherited from Neandertals.
Now the research duo shows that the Neandertals also contributed a protective variant to present-day people. They find that a region on chromosome 12 that reduces the risk of needing intensive care upon infection with the virus by 20 percent is inherited from Neandertals. The genes in this region are called OAS and regulate the activity of an enzyme that breaks down viral genomes, and the Neandertal variant of the enzyme seems to do this more efficiently.
"This shows that our heritage from Neandertals is a double-edged sword when it comes to our response to SARS-CoV-2. They have given us variants that we can both curse and thank them for," says Hugo Zeberg, researcher at the Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
The study also shows that the protective variant from Neandertals has increased in frequency since the last Ice Age so that it is now carried by about half of all people outside Africa.
"It is striking that this Neandertal gene variant has become so common in many parts of the world. This suggests that it has been favourable in the past," says Svante Pääbo, director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. "It is also striking that two genetic variants inherited from Neandertals influence COVID-19 outcomes in opposite directions. Their immune system obviously influences us in both positive and negative ways today."
MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY
Long held in a private collection, the newly analysed tooth of an approximately 9-year-old Neanderthal child marks the hominin's southernmost known range. Analysis of the associated archaeological assemblage suggests Neanderthals used Nubian Levallois technology, previously thought to be restricted to Homo sapiens.
CAPTION
The view from Shukbah Cave
CREDIT
Amos Frumkin
With a high concentration of cave sites harbouring evidence of past populations and their behaviour, the Levant is a major centre for human origins research. For over a century, archaeological excavations in the Levant have produced human fossils and stone tool assemblages that reveal landscapes inhabited by both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, making this region a potential mixing ground between populations. Distinguishing these populations by stone tool assemblages alone is difficult, but one technology, the distinct Nubian Levallois method, is argued to have been produced only by Homo sapiens.
In a new study published in Scientific Reports, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History teamed up with international partners to re-examine the fossil and archaeological record of Shukbah Cave. Their findings extend the southernmost known range of Neanderthals and suggest that our now-extinct relatives made use of a technology previously argued to be a trademark of modern humans. This study marks the first time the lone human tooth from the site has been studied in detail, in combination with a major comparative study examining the stone tool assemblage.
"Sites where hominin fossils are directly associated with stone tool assemblages remain a rarity - but the study of both fossils and tools is critical for understanding hominin occupations of Shukbah Cave and the larger region," says lead author Dr Jimbob Blinkhorn, formerly of Royal Holloway, University of London and now with the Pan-African Evolution Research Group (Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History).
Shukbah Cave was first excavated in the spring of 1928 by Dorothy Garrod, who reported a rich assemblage of animal bones and Mousterian-style stone tools cemented in breccia deposits, often concentrated in well-marked hearths. She also identified a large, unique human molar. However, the specimen was kept in a private collection for most of the 20th century, prohibiting comparative studies using modern methods. The recent re-identification of the tooth at the Natural History Museum in London has led to new detailed work on the Shukbah collections.
"Professor Garrod immediately saw how distinctive this tooth was. We've examined the size, shape and both the external and internal 3D structure of the tooth, and compared that to Holocene and Pleistocene Homo sapiens and Neanderthal specimens. This has enabled us to clearly characterise the tooth as belonging to an approximately 9 year old Neanderthal child," says Dr. Clément Zanolli, from Université de Bordeaux. "Shukbah marks the southernmost extent of the Neanderthal range known to date," adds Zanolli.
Although Homo sapiens and Neanderthals shared the use of a wide suite of stone tool technologies, Nubian Levallois technology has recently been argued to have been exclusively used by Homo sapiens. The argument has been made particularly in southwest Asia, where Nubian Levallois tools have been used to track human dispersals in the absence of fossils.
"Illustrations of the stone tool collections from Shukbah hinted at the presence of Nubian Levallois technology so we revisited the collections to investigate further. In the end, we identified many more artefacts produced using the Nubian Levallois methods than we had anticipated," says Blinkhorn. "This is the first time they've been found in direct association with Neanderthal fossils, which suggests we can't make a simple link between this technology and Homo sapiens."
"Southwest Asia is a dynamic region in terms of hominin demography, behaviour and environmental change, and may be particularly important to examine interactions between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens," adds Prof Simon Blockley, of Royal Holloway, University of London. "This study highlights the geographic range of Neanderthal populations and their behavioural flexibility, but also issues a timely note of caution that there are no straightforward links between particular hominins and specific stone tool technologies."
"Up to now we have no direct evidence of a Neanderthal presence in Africa," said Prof Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum. "But the southerly location of Shukbah, only about 400 km from Cairo, should remind us that they may have even dispersed into Africa at times."
A new study published in the journal Science Advances shows that Bantu-speaking communities in the Congo rainforest underwent a major population collapse from 1600 to 1400 years ago, probably due to a prolonged disease epidemic, and that significant resettlement did not restart until around 1000 years ago. These findings revise the population history of no less than seven present-day African countries (Cameroon, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, and Angola) and challenges the commonly held belief that the settlement of Central Africa by Bantu-speaking communities was a continuous process from about 4000 years ago until the start of the transatlantic slave trade.
Ongoing debates about decolonization, restitution of African cultural heritage and antiracism have also renewed interest in the European colonization of Central Africa, even if it was a relatively short period in the long and eventful history of the region. Modern humans lived in the savannas of Central Africa several tens of thousands of years before they emerged in Europe. Also, in the Congo rainforest did our ancestors overcome many challenges long before the first European expedition traversed it, as shown again in this recently published study.
Unique interdisciplinary research method
As part of a cross-disciplinary research project examining the interconnections between human migration, language spread, climate change and early farming in pre-colonial Central Africa, the current study combines a comprehensive analysis of all available archeological radiocarbon dates as a proxy for human activity and demographic fluctuation with a comprehensive analysis of the diversity and distribution of pottery styles as a proxy for socio-economic development. These well-dated archeological records were further compared in this study with genetic and linguistic evidence to gain new insights into the ancient settlement history of Bantu-speaking populations in the Congo rainforest.
According to archeologist Dirk Seidensticker (UGent), one of the two lead authors, the multi-proxy approach developed in this study is unique both in terms of empirical evidence and scientific method, in that it uses 1149 radiocarbon dates linked to 115 pottery styles recovered from 726 sites throughout the Congo rainforest and adjacent areas: "We are the first to integrate these three types of archeological datasets on such a large scale and for such a long period and to demonstrate that throughout Central Africa two periods of more intense human activity (~800 BCE to 400 CE and ~1000 to 1900 CE) are separated by a widespread population collapse between 400 and 600 CE. Doing so, we could clearly delineate the periods commonly known as the Early Iron Age and Late Iron Age, each of them characterized by distinct pottery styles which first underwent a widespread expansion phase followed by a regionalization phase with many more local pottery styles. Pottery being one of the few material items of cultural heritage that has survived the ravages of time, this is an important step forward for the archeology of Central Africa."
New insights on the controversial Bantu Expansion
The initial spread of Bantu-speaking people from their homeland on the border between Nigeria and Cameroon towards eastern and southern Africa starting some 4000 years ago is unique in the world due to its magnitude, rapid pace, and adaptation to multiple ecozones. This spread had a momentous impact on the continent's linguistic, demographic, and cultural landscape. The Bantu languages constitute Africa's largest language family: about 1 out of 3 Africans speak one or several Bantu languages.
Historical linguist and Africanist Koen Bostoen (UGent) is excited about how these new insights that urge us to rethink the Bantu Expansion, one of the most controversial issues in African History: "Africa's colonization by Bantu speech communities is usually seen as a single, long-term and continuous macro-event. We tend to see today's Bantu speakers as direct descendants from those who originally settled the rainforest some 2700 years ago. Likewise, we think that current-day Bantu languages developed directly from the ancestral languages of those first settlers. However, our results show that this initial wave of Bantu-speaking Early Iron Age communities had largely vanished from the entire Congo rainforest region by 600 CE. The Bantu languages of this area may thus be almost 1000 years younger than previously thought. Scientifically speaking, this introduces new challenges for our use of linguistic data to reconstruct Africa's history. More generally, our study shows that African societies faced serious catastrophes long before the transatlantic slave trade and European colonization and had the resilience to overcome them. This is hopeful."
A prolonged epidemic as the cause of population collapse?
Paleobotanist and tropical forest ecologist Wannes Hubau (UGent & RMCA Tervuren), the other lead author, highlights that the drastic population collapse around 400-600 CE coincided with wetter climatic conditions across the region and may therefore have been promoted by a prolonged disease epidemic: "We note the broad coincidence between the sharp demographic decline in the Congo rainforest and the Justinian Plague (541-750 CE), which is regarded as one of the factors leading to the fall of both the Roman Empire and the Aksumite Empire in Ethiopia. It may have killed up to 100 million people in Asia, Europe, and Africa. We have no firm evidence that the population collapse observed in our archeological data is really due to a persistent vector-borne disease. However, the bacteria Yersinia pestis, which caused the Justinian Plague, has a long-standing presence in Central Africa. One particular strain, still found today in DRC, Zambia, Kenya and Uganda, has prevailed in Central Africa for at least 300 years and is the oldest living strain closely related to the lineage that caused the Black Death in 14th century Europe. We therefore consider a prolonged pandemic of plague to be a plausible hypothesis for the observed supra-regional population decline in 5th-6th century Central Africa."
For the first time in more than 17,000 years, three mellifluous musical notes - close in tone to C, D, and C sharp - have reverberated from a conch shell modified to serve as a wind instrument. The specimen, archaeologists have now determined, is the earliest conch shell horn yet known, and stands out as a unique find among European Upper Paleolithic artifacts. First found in 1931 in the cave of Marsoulas, nestled in the foothills of the French Pyrenees, the discoverers initially suspected the shell served as a ceremonial drinking cup, and noted no discernable modifications by human hands.
But after looking at the shell with fresh eyes - and advanced imaging techniques - Carole Fritz and colleagues determined that the Magdalenian occupants of Marsoulas cave had carefully modified the shell to install a mouthpiece. These ancient craftspeople also removed the outermost edges of the shell's labrum, the flared ridge that extends outward from the shell's main opening, and adorned the exterior of the shell with ochre-red pigment designs that match the style of wall art found inside Marsoulas cave.
Previous work has documented the presence of flutes and whistles made of bone in Upper Paleolithic archaeological sites. But instruments made of other materials such as this shell, which once belonged to a large sea snail of the species Charonia lampas, are unusual.
Using photogrammetry techniques to highlight exterior modifications not readily seen with the naked eye, Fritz et al. painstakingly characterized the traces of human intervention. They noted the fingerprint-shaped, faded ochre markings, impact points along the modified labrum, and signs that the shell's apex had been carefully and deliberately removed to create a second opening. They also noted traces of a brown organic substance, likely a resin or wax, around the apex opening that may have been used as an adhesive to affix a mouthpiece. They then used CT scans to visualize the shell's interior, finding that two additional holes had been chipped away in the spiral layers directly beneath the shell's apex, likely to accommodate the mouthpiece's long tube extension.
Fritz et al. then enlisted the help of a musicologist who specializes in wind instruments, who was able to reproduce the sound of the horn in three distinct notes that nearly matched the tones of C, D, and C sharp in modern musical nomenclature.
"Around the world, conch shells have served as musical instruments, calling or signaling devices, and sacred or magic objects depending on the cultures," the authors write. "To our knowledge, the Marsoulas shell is unique in the prehistoric context, however, not only in France but at the scale of Paleolithic Europe and perhaps the world."
Ancient Amazonian communities fortified valuable land they had spent years making fertile to protect it from conflict, excavations show. Farmers in Bolivia constructed wooden defences around previously nutrient-poor tropical soils they had enriched over generations to keep them safe during times of social unrest. These long-term soil management strategies allowed Amazonians to grow nutrient demanding crops, such as maize and manioc and fruiting trees, and this was key to community subsistence. These Amazonian Dark Earths, or Terra Preta, were created through burning, mulching, and the deposition of organic waste. It was known that some communities built ditches and embankments, known locally as a zanja, around their settlements, which had suggested to act as a defensive structure. The examples from Bolivia were specifically constructed to also enclose the enriched soil and this is the first evidence of an additional fortification built in the ditch, demonstrating how important communities felt it was to protect their investment in the land. Excavations, at the Versalles archaeological site along the Iténez River in the Bolivian Amazon, provide the first archaeological evidence that communities in the region built wooden palisades along with earthworks. The construction circles the outer perimeter of the village, enclosing and protecting homes and the enriched soil and forest.
Researchers had long speculated on the function of the zanjas and whether there had also been a palisade structure, but until now no direct evidence of a wooden construction had been found. The harsh tropical climate is unfavourable for the preservation of wooden architecture, but through careful excavation, the decomposed remains of the construction posts were detected in the soil. It is not possible to know what the structure would have looked like.
Archaeological analysis show that those living in Versalles began enriching soils around 500 BC. After almost two millennia, the zanja was constructed around AD 1300, at the same time as social unrest spread across Amazonia. The fortifications were later remodelled, including the addition of the palisade, around AD 1628 to 1803. Archaeological excavations suggests the community continued to thrive during this time, creating elaborate ceramics and producing a diversity of foods from staple crops to fruits and nuts, alongside fish and hunted animals.
The research, published in the journal Geoarchaeology, was conducted in collaboration with the modern Versalles community, by Dr.Mark Robinson and Professor. Jose Iriarte from the University of Exeter, Dr. Carla Jaimes?Betancourt, from the University of Bonn, Dr. Sarah Elliott, from Bournemouth University, and Dr. Yoshi Maezumi, from the University of Amsterdam, with students from the UK and Bolivia participating in excavations.
Dr Robinson said: "This is further evidence the Amazon is not a pristine place, untouched by human hands. People have had a great impact on the ecology of the rainforest. Communities invested heavily, generation after generation, to enrich the natural resources around them. As broad Amazon-wide social-unrest spread, the community felt the need to protect the resources into which they and their ancestors had invested so much."
