Melting Snow Reveals Ancient Bow and Arrows in Norway

A Neolithic bow and arrows were recently unearthed when a snow patch that had remained untouched for thousands of years melted.
Credit: Hojem/Callanan-NTNU
image

Topic: Ancient hunters of Norway

A melting patch of ancient snow in the mountains of Norway has revealed a bow and arrows likely used by hunters to kill reindeer as long ago as 5,400 years.

The discovery highlights the worrying effects of climate change, said study author Martin Callanan, an archaeologist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

“It’s actually a little bit unnerving that they’re so old and that they’re coming out right now,” Callanan told LiveScience. “It tells us that there’s something changing.”

Locked in snow

Callanan and his colleagues spend every summer hiking up the Trollheim and Dovre mountains a few hours south of Trondheim, Norway, to study the snow patches in the area, track snow melt and look for archaeological artifacts. The mountains stretch 6,200 feet (1,900 meters) above sea level, and at the highest elevations, only rocks and snow prevail year-round.

In 2010 and 2011, a patch of snow melted, revealing an ancient bow and several arrows that had been locked in the snow for centuries. The bow was made from a common type of elm that grows at lower altitudes along the coast. The arrows were tipped in slate and set in different types of wood. [See Photos of the Ancient Bow and Arrows ]

Dating revealed the Neolithic bow was about 3,800 years old, while the oldest of the arrows were 5,400 years old.

Ancient Stone Age hunters probably used the bow and arrows to kill reindeer, which spend summer days at high altitudes. The mountain retreat would have allowed the animals a respite from pesky insects, while standing on snow patches would have helped the shaggy creatures keep cool, Callanan said. Those predictable habits likely made them easy prey for ancient hunters.

No one knows exactly who left these ancient hunting instruments, but the bow and arrows have a design that’s strikingly similar to those found thousands of miles away in other frigid landscapes, such as the Yukon, Callanan said.

“The people in Norway, they didn’t have any contact with people in the Yukon, but they have the same type of adaptation,” Callanan said. “Across different cultures, people have acted in the same way.”

Decomposing artifacts

Finding such well-preserved tools is rare, said E. James Dixon, an archaeologist and director of the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico, who was not involved in the study.

“It’s one of the rare glimpses that we have into this Neolithic-period archery technology,” Dixon said.

However, while the find itself is stunning, the climate change that caused such ancient snow to melt is bad for archaeology, he said.

Artifacts locked in ice can be preserved for thousands of years.

“As soon as ice melts and it comes out, it’s subject to decomposition and we lose it,” Dixon told LiveScience. “For every artifact we find, there are probably hundreds, maybe thousands, that are lost and just destroyed forever.”

The bow and arrows are described in the September issue of the journal Antiquity.

Follow Tia Ghose on Twitter and Google+. Follow LiveScience @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on livescience
Sep30, 2013

Advertisement

Read Full Post »

Ancient Humans Dined on Bacon from Weird, Spotted Pigs

About 6,600 years ago the Ertebølle Mesolithic hunter-gatherers acquired domesticated pigs whose black-spotted coat might have looked similar to that of this modern-day Bentheimer pig.

Topic: Hunter-gatherers domesticated pigs

Ancient hunter-gatherers in Europe, whose meat intake was once limited to wild game, may have enjoyed bacon, ham, pork chops and other tasty bites from pigs they owned starting about 7,000 years ago, researchers say.

The new findings suggest these hunter-gatherers had domesticated pigs about 500 years earlier than previously thought, yielding new insights into the movements and interactions of prehistoric humans and the exchange of technologies and knowledge, scientists said.

The first humans in Europe were Neanderthals, an early human lineage that may have gone extinct there some 50,000 years ago. Their successors in Europe, modern humans, were hunter-gatherers that by the Mesolithic, or middle period of the Stone Age,were focused heavily on collecting and hunting wild game. [The 10 Biggest Mysteries of the First Humans]

Later on, incoming Neolithic or New Stone Age farmers who migrated to Europe from the south between 5500 B.C. and 4200 B.C. owned domestic plants and animals, such as sheep, goats, cattle and swine. Past research found that Mesolithic and Neolithic communities long co-existed.

Some communication apparently occurred between the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and the Neolithic farmers, as suggested by pottery and other tool finds. However, the scale of the interaction and the extent to which hunter-gatherers took ideas from their neighbors remains hotly debated.

Until now, there was only circumstantial evidence of Mesolithic hunter-gatherer ownership of domestic animals other than dogs in continental Europe.

“Mesolithic hunter-gatherers definitely had dogs, but they did not practice agriculture and did not have pigs, sheep, goats or cows, all of which were introduced to Europe with incoming farmers [in] about 6000 B.C.,” researcher Ben Krause-Kyora, an archaeologist and biochemist at Christian-Albrechts University in Kiel, Germany, said in a statement. “Having people who practiced a very different survival strategy nearby must have been odd, and we know now that the hunter-gathers possessed some of the farmers’ domesticated pigs.”

The scientists analyzed the ancient DNA from the bones and teeth of 63 pigs in northern Germany from a Mesolithic site known as Ertebølle and a number of Neolithic sites. They found that as early as 4600 B.C., the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers owned pigs that had both near-Eastern and European ancestry, which means they were domestic swine as opposed to wild boar.

“We address a long-standing debate in archaeology that has implications beyond northern Germany,” researcher Almut Nebel, a molecular geneticist at Christian-Albrechts University, told LiveScience. “Our multidisciplinary approach can also be used to obtain information on cultural contact — for example, between hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists — for other areas of Europe and the world.”

Genetic analysis revealed the domestic pigs had colorful coats and spots that likely would have seemed exotic and strange to the hunter-gatherers and may have attracted them to the swine.

“Humans love novelty, and though hunter-gatherers exploited wild boar, it would have been hard not to be fascinated by the strange-looking, spotted pigs owned by farmers living nearby,” researcher Greger Larson at Durham University in England, said in a statement. “It should come as no surprise that the hunter-gatherers acquired some [of the pigs] eventually, but this study shows that they did very soon after the domestic pigs arrived in northern Europe.”

Scientists are not sure whether the hunter-gatherers procured the pigs via trade or by capturing escaped animals. Still, given the close proximity of these two groups and how they occasionally exchanged artifacts, the researchers suspect trade for pigs was a more likely scenario than hunting of escaped domestic pigs, Krause-Kyora told LiveScience.

The scientists detailed their findings in the Aug. 27 issue of the journal Nature Communications.

Original article:
livescience.com

By Charles Choi, LiveScience Contributor | August 27, 2013

Read Full Post »

Archaeology: The milk revolution

Topic: Milk for the ages

When a single genetic mutation first let ancient Europeans drink milk, it set the stage for a continental upheaval.

In the 1970s, archaeologist Peter Bogucki was excavating a Stone Age site in the fertile plains of central Poland when he came across an assortment of odd artefacts. The people who had lived there around 7,000 years ago were among central Europe’s first farmers, and they had left behind fragments of pottery dotted with tiny holes. It looked as though the coarse red clay had been baked while pierced with pieces of straw.

Looking back through the archaeological literature, Bogucki found other examples of ancient perforated pottery. “They were so unusual — people would almost always include them in publications,” says Bogucki, now at Princeton University in New Jersey. He had seen something similar at a friend’s house that was used for straining cheese, so he speculated that the pottery might be connected with cheese-making. But he had no way to test his idea.

The mystery potsherds sat in storage until 2011, when Mélanie Roffet-Salque pulled them out and analysed fatty residues preserved in the clay. Roffet-Salque, a geochemist at the University of Bristol, UK, found signatures of abundant milk fats — evidence that the early farmers had used the pottery as sieves to separate fatty milk solids from liquid whey. That makes the Polish relics the oldest known evidence of cheese-making in the world.

Roffet-Salque’s sleuthing is part of a wave of discoveries about the history of milk in Europe. Many of them have come from a €3.3-million (US$4.4-million) project that started in 2009 and has involved archaeologists, chemists and geneticists. The findings from this group illuminate the profound ways that dairy products have shaped human settlement on the continent.

During the most recent ice age, milk was essentially a toxin to adults because — unlike children — they could not produce the lactase enzyme required to break down lactose, the main sugar in milk. But as farming started to replace hunting and gathering in the Middle East around 11,000 years ago, cattle herders learned how to reduce lactose in dairy products to tolerable levels by fermenting milk to make cheese or yogurt. Several thousand years later, a genetic mutation spread through Europe that gave people the ability to produce lactase — and drink milk — throughout their lives. That adaptation opened up a rich new source of nutrition that could have sustained communities when harvests failed.

This two-step milk revolution may have been a prime factor in allowing bands of farmers and herders from the south to sweep through Europe and displace the hunter-gatherer cultures that had lived there for millennia. “They spread really rapidly into northern Europe from an archaeological point of view,” says Mark Thomas, a population geneticist at University College London. That wave of emigration left an enduring imprint on Europe, where, unlike in many regions of the world, most people can now tolerate milk. “It could be that a large proportion of Europeans are descended from the first lactase-persistent dairy farmers in Europe,” says Thomas.

Strong stomachs

Young children almost universally produce lactase and can digest the lactose in their mother’s milk. But as they mature, most switch off the lactase gene. Only 35% of the human population can digest lactose beyond the age of about seven or eight (ref. 2). “If you’re lactose intolerant and you drink half a pint of milk, you’re going to be really ill. Explosive diarrhoea — dysentery essentially,” says Oliver Craig, an archaeologist at the University of York, UK. “I’m not saying it’s lethal, but it’s quite unpleasant.”

Most people who retain the ability to digest milk can trace their ancestry to Europe, where the trait seems to be linked to a single nucleotide in which the DNA base cytosine changed to thymine in a genomic region not far from the lactase gene. There are other pockets of lactase persistence in West Africa (see Nature 444, 994–996; 2006), the Middle East and south Asia that seem to be linked to separate mutations (see ‘Lactase hotspots’).

The single-nucleotide switch in Europe happened relatively recently. Thomas and his colleagues estimated the timing by looking at genetic variations in modern populations and running computer simulations of how the related genetic mutation might have spread through ancient populations. They proposed that the trait of lactase persistence, dubbed the LP allele, emerged about 7,500 years ago in the broad, fertile plains of Hungary.

Powerful gene

Once the LP allele appeared, it offered a major selective advantage. In a 2004 study, researchers estimated that people with the mutation would have produced up to 19% more fertile offspring than those who lacked it. The researchers called that degree of selection “among the strongest yet seen for any gene in the genome”.

Compounded over several hundred generations, that advantage could help a population to take over a continent. But only if “the population has a supply of fresh milk and is dairying”, says Thomas. “It’s gene–culture co-evolution. They feed off of each other.”

To investigate the history of that interaction, Thomas teamed up with Joachim Burger, a palaeogeneticist at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz in Germany, and Matthew Collins, a bioarchaeologist at the University of York. They organized a multidisciplinary project called LeCHE (Lactase Persistence in the early Cultural History of Europe), which brought together a dozen early-career researchers from around Europe.

By studying human molecular biology and the archaeology and chemistry of ancient pottery, LeCHE participants also hoped to address a key issue about the origins of modern Europeans. “It’s been an enduring question in archaeology — whether we’re descended from Middle Eastern farmers or indigenous hunter-gatherers,” says Thomas. The argument boils down to evolution versus replacement. Did native populations of hunter-gatherers in Europe take up farming and herding? Or was there an influx of agricultural colonists who outcompeted the locals, thanks to a combination of genes and technology?

One strand of evidence came from studies of animal bones found at archaeological sites. If cattle are raised primarily for dairying, calves are generally slaughtered before their first birthday so that their mothers can be milked. But cattle raised mainly for meat are killed later, when they have reached their full size. (The pattern, if not the ages, is similar for sheep and goats, which were part of the dairying revolution.)

On the basis of studies of growth patterns in bones, LeCHE participant Jean-Denis Vigne, an archaeozoologist at the French National Museum of Natural History in Paris, suggests that dairying in the Middle East may go all the way back to when humans first started domesticating animals there, about 10,500 years ago. That would place it just after the Middle Eastern Neolithic transition — when an economy based on hunter-gathering gave way to one devoted to agriculture. Dairying, says Roz Gillis, also an archaeozoologist at the Paris museum, “may have been one of the reasons why human populations began trapping and keeping ruminants such as cattle, sheep and goats”. (See ‘Dairy diaspora’.)

Dairying then expanded in concert with the Neolithic transition, says Gillis, who has looked at bone growth at 150 sites in Europe and Anatolia (modern Turkey). As agriculture spread from Anatolia to northern Europe over roughly two millennia, dairying followed a similar pattern.

On their own, the growth patterns do not say whether the Neolithic transition in Europe happened through evolution or replacement, but cattle bones offer important clues. In a precursor study, Burger and several other LeCHE participants found that domesticated cattle at Neolithic sites in Europe were most closely related to cows from the Middle East, rather than indigenous wild aurochs. This is a strong indication that incoming herders brought their cattle with them, rather than domesticating locally, says Burger. A similar story is emerging from studies of ancient human DNA recovered at a few sites in central Europe, which suggest that Neolithic farmers were not descended from the hunter-gatherers who lived there before.

Taken together, the data help to resolve the origins of the first European farmers. “For a long time, the mainstream of continental European archaeology said Mesolithic hunter-gatherers developed into Neolithic farmers,” says Burger. “We basically showed they were completely different.”

Milk or meat

Given that dairying in the Middle East started thousands of years before the LP allele emerged in Europe, ancient herders must have found ways to reduce lactose concentrations in milk. It seems likely that they did so by making cheese or yogurt. (Fermented cheeses such as feta and cheddar have a small fraction of the lactose found in fresh milk; aged hard cheeses similar to Parmesan have hardly any.)

To test that theory, LeCHE researchers ran chemical tests on ancient pottery. The coarse, porous clay contains enough residues for chemists to distinguish what type of fat was absorbed during the cooking process: whether it was from meat or milk, and from ruminants such as cows, sheep and goats or from other animals. “That gave us a way into saying what types of things were being cooked,” says Richard Evershed, a chemist at the University of Bristol.

Evershed and his LeCHE collaborators found milk fat on pottery in the Middle Eastern Fertile Crescent going back at least 8,500 years, and Roffet-Salque’s work on the Polish pottery offers clear evidence that herders in Europe were producing cheese to supplement their diets between 6,800 and 7,400 years ago. By then, dairy had become a component of the Neolithic diet, but it was not yet a dominant part of the economy.

That next step happened slowly, and it seems to have required the spread of lactase persistence. The LP allele did not become common in the population until some time after it first emerged: Burger has looked for the mutation in samples of ancient human DNA and has found it only as far back as 6,500 years ago in northern Germany.

Models created by LeCHE participant Pascale Gerbault, a population geneticist at University College London, explain how the trait might have spread. As Middle Eastern Neolithic cultures moved into Europe, their farming and herding technologies helped them to out-compete the local hunter-gatherers. And as the southerners pushed north, says Gerbault, the LP allele ‘surfed’ the wave of migration.

Lactase persistence had a harder time becoming established in parts of southern Europe, because Neolithic farmers had settled there before the mutation appeared. But as the agricultural society expanded northwards and westwards into new territory, the advantage provided by lactase persistence had a big impact. “As the population grows quickly at the edge of the wave, the allele can increase in frequency,” says Gerbault.

The remnants of that pattern are still visible today. In southern Europe, lactase persistence is relatively rare — less than 40% in Greece and Turkey. In Britain and Scandinavia, by contrast, more than 90% of adults can digest milk.

Cattle conquest

By the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, around 5,000 years ago, the LP allele was prevalent across most of northern and central Europe, and cattle herding had become a dominant part of the culture. “They discover this way of life, and once they can really get the nutritional benefits they increase or intensify herding as well,” says Burger. Cattle bones represent more than two-thirds of the animal bones in many late Neolithic and early Bronze Age archaeological sites in central and northern Europe.

The LeCHE researchers are still puzzling out exactly why the ability to consume milk offered such an advantage in these regions. Thomas suggests that, as people moved north, milk would have been a hedge against famine. Dairy products — which could be stored for longer in colder climes — provided rich sources of calories that were independent of growing seasons or bad harvests.

Others think that milk may have helped, particularly in the north, because of its relatively high concentration of vitamin D, a nutrient that can help to ward off diseases such as rickets. Humans synthesize vitamin D naturally only when exposed to the sun, which makes it difficult for northerners to make enough during winter months. But lactase persistence also took root in sunny Spain, casting vitamin D’s role into doubt.

The LeCHE project may offer a model for how archaeological questions can be answered using a variety of disciplines and tools. “They have got a lot of different tentacles — archaeology, palaeoanthropology, ancient DNA and modern DNA, chemical analysis — all focused on one single question,” says Ian Barnes, a palaeogeneticist at Royal Holloway, University of London, who is not involved in the project. “There are lots of other dietary changes which could be studied in this way.”

The approach could, for example, help to tease apart the origins of amylase, an enzyme that helps to break down starch. Researchers have suggested that the development of the enzyme may have followed — or made possible — the increasing appetite for grain that accompanied the growth of agriculture. Scientists also want to trace the evolution of alcohol dehydrogenase, which is crucial to the breakdown of alcohol and could reveal the origins of humanity’s thirst for drink.

Some of the LeCHE participants are now probing further back in time, as part of a project named BEAN (Bridging the European and Anatolian Neolithic), which is looking at how the first farmers and herders made their way into Europe. Burger, Thomas and their BEAN collaborators will be in Turkey this summer, tracing the origins of the Neolithic using computer models and ancient-DNA analysis in the hope of better understanding who the early farmers were, and when they arrived in Europe.

Along the way, they will encounter beyaz peynir, a salty sheep’s-milk cheese eaten with nearly every Turkish breakfast. It is probably much like the cheese that Neolithic farmers in the region would have eaten some 8,000 years ago — long before the march of lactase persistence allowed people to drink fresh milk.

Original article:
nature.com
By Andrew Curry July 16, 2013

Read Full Post »

SHELLFISH AND THE RISE OF MODERN HUMAN BEHAVIOUR

Topic: shellfish and migration

Artefacts from the African Middle Stone Age (MSA; ∼200 to ∼50 ka), provide us with the first glimpses of modern human art and culture. Approximately 50 ka, one or more subgroups of modern humans expanded from Africa to populate the rest of the world.

Significant behavioural change accompanied this expansion, and archaeologists commonly seek its roots during this period. Recognizable art objects and “jewellery” become common only in sites that postdate the MSA in Africa and Eurasia, but some MSA sites contain possible precursors, including abstractly incised fragments of ochre and perforated mollusc shells interpreted as beads.

Was population growth the driver of change?

Researchers had previously theorised that it was an increase in population that drove behavioural innovations which in turn led to the creation of these artefacts and eventually, the expansion out of Africa. However, by examining mollusc shells from Stone Age sites, Richard Klein of Stanford University and Teresa Steele of University of California, Davis, have determined that a significant population increase did not occur until the Later Stone Age (LSA), after the out of Africa migration had already begun. Their research appears in the June 2013 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Archaeologists have found precursors of modern human artwork and jewellery, including fragments of ochre with abstract incisions and shells with perforations, in MSA sites and it is therefore concluded that the humans who made them, between 85,000 and 65,000 years ago, must have had modern cognitive abilities and behaviours. During the LSA, these abilities and behaviours allowed humans to create objects as recognizable art and spurred the migration to Eurasia.

Population growth has been the popular explanation for the innovations of the MSA. As population increases, the opportunity for innovation increases, while concurrently, the probability that an idea will be lost decreases.

Symbolic thought in the form of decorative art appears in excavations at Blombos Cave on the southern Cape coast from about 75 ka, associated with small perforated shells that retain traces of red ochre. This suggests that they had been collected and strung together as a necklace. In the underlying level dated to about 80 ka, two pieces of ochre were found, engraved with a pattern of lines that formed diamond shapes. The question to be asked is how and when this transformation to modern human behaviour began.

Testing a new hypothesis

To test the hypothesis that a large increase in population drove MSA innovation, Klein and Steele measured the shells of slow-growing molluscs found in MSA and LSA middens on the southern and western coasts of South Africa. They reasoned that selection pressure, caused by an increase in human population, would decrease median shell size. Frequent foraging by large numbers of humans would have prevented many shellfish from reaching their full size.

Pinnacle Point Cave 13B, South Africa and Bajondillo Cave, Spain show that human shellfishing began at least 160–150 ka, during the MSA in Africa and the coeval Middle Palaeolithic (also known as Mousterian) of Europe.

The researchers found that the median size of MSA shells was larger than that of LSA shells. This showed that selection pressure, and therefore human population, was greater in the LSA rather than the MSA. In addition, shellfish from smaller species were more common in LSA than in newer Stone Age sites. As selection pressure increased with population size, humans would be less likely to overlook smaller shellfish as a source of food.

Need for more data

Klein and Steele claim that because the population increase did not occur until after the migration out of Africa had already begun, there must be another explanation for the cultural advancements of the MSA. They hope that other sites around the African coasts, especially northwest Africa, can be used to investigate the possibility that MSA molluscs that were collected as a foodsource were generally larger than those in later sites and thus add weight to the evidence that MSA population growth did not underlie innovation.

Alternative explanations, particularly for the birth of cognitive and behavioural innovation at the MSA/LSA interface, include the pressure of late Pleistocene climatic fluctuations and perhaps even changes in the human genome that ancient DNA analyses promises to reveal.

Original article:
past horizons
June 22, 2013

Read Full Post »

FISH BASED DIETS CAUSE ARCHAEOLOGICAL DATING PROBLEMS

Above: Burning fish stew and pic 2 the residue

Topic: Pottery shards obtain ancient food

Some years ago in northern Germany, archaeologist Sönke Hartz carried out excavations at a prehistoric camp-site belonging to the Ertebølle culture, close by the river Trave.

During these excavations he discovered an ancient pottery sherd which held remnants of burnt food. Hartz, an expert in the Stone Age of northern Europe, sent the pot sherd away for carbon-14 dating and was amazed when the laboratory came back with a date of 5200 BC.

“It was an archaeological sensation! This pottery was many hundreds of years older than all the pottery that was previously found in Northern Germany. It was older than everyone expected. But, then I was in doubt. I had found the pot by the river, so the food crust could possibly consist of fish. I remembered that there were dating problems with freshwater fish, which could give misleading ages,“ explained Hartz.

Reservoir effect

In order to obtain a radiocarbon date, the amount of remaining Carbon-14 atoms in a sample are measured. The less Carbon-14 that is left, the older the sample.

Hard water contains less Carbon-14 than the atmosphere, because dissolved carbonates are Carbon-14 free. A fish caught in hard water has thus a higher Carbon-14 age than contemporaneous terrestrial samples. If such a fish is then cooked in a ceramic pot, the radiocarbon age of the food crust will be higher than if a terrestrial animal was cooked in the pot.

This is known as the “reservoir effect” because the fish’s carbon actually comes from another “reservoir” than the carbon in terrestrial animals from the surrounding area. “Reservoir age” is the difference between the true age and the Carbon-14 date.

The effect, highlighted by the erroneous date from the carbonised residue on Sönkes’ ceramic sherd, persuaded The AMS 14C Dating Centre at Aarhus University in Denmark that they needed to carry out further investigations.

Variety and size of error surprising

On examining freshly caught fish from the River Trave the results revealed not only a large reservoir effect, but also a dramatic variance from between 500 to 2100 years. In effect, this means that some of the fish swimming in the Trave today seem to be over 2000 years old, when radiocarbon dated.

Felix Riede, an archaeologist at Aarhus University who regularly uses Carbon-14 dating in his work, is well aware that fish diets can give anomalous results, but this new research on the variety and size of the error surprised him.

“I had not anticipated an error of up to 2000 years,” he said.

“The implications of this discovery are fairly frightening, because it is crucial for archaeology to have a reliable dating procedure.”

“An error of a few hundred years is acceptable when you date Palaeolithic finds, but an error of 2000 years is of great importance, even for the oldest periods.”

Riede highlighted the need to look at more reliable dates (for example Carbon-14 dates of short-lived terrestrial plants or twigs) and compare them to the now highly unreliable dates from cooking pots.

It is worth noting that even charcoal from a camp fire could be another error source – the “old wood effect”: where the charcoal dated might be from the innermost ring of a 500-year-old tree which was felled 100 years before it finally ended up in the camp fire. Knowing what might cause an error is vital when it comes to dating.

An added surprise

Now armed with the knowledge produced by The Aarhus AMS 14C Dating Centre, a group of researchers actually cooked some fish stew in ceramic pots.

The group, after making their own pots, boiled up the various ingredients – including a freshly caught fish with a Carbon-14 age of 700 years. They then succeeded in burning the meal onto the pot fabric, which was then taken for dating.

Even though the food crust was made only weeks before, Carbon-14 dating returned a 14th century date and thus provided evidence that food crusts on pottery take on the same age as the ingredients.

These results reveal that freshwater reservoir effects have to be seriously considered and understood whenever residues on prehistoric pottery is radiocarbon dated. The same also applies to the bones of humans who had eaten significant amounts of freshwater fish.

This is real food for thought.

Original article:

pasthorizons

By: Bente Philippsen and Rasmus Rørbæk
March 25, 2013

Above: Burning fish stew on purpose!

Read Full Post »

Market Square construction yields archaelogical find

Topic: New find

Not much in the way of food finds yet, but I will keep my eye out for more information. This site looks ripe for ancient food discoveries.

Daily News Photo by MAX UFBERG Construction along Krondprindsens Gade in downtown Charlotte Amalie on St. Thomas has been halted after crews uncovered an archaelogical find that is an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 years old.

ST. THOMAS ­- Archaeologists monitoring V.I. Public Works Department’s Market Square construction project in downtown Charlotte Amalie have discovered a site containing thousands of artifacts from a settlement dating back an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 years.

A 200-foot trench on Krondprindsens Gade between Strand Gade and General Gade gives access to a midden, the archaeological term for a dumping ground where people deposited food waste, excrement and discarded broken pots and tools.

The site will be hand-excavated during the next several weeks by a team of archaeologists called in for their expertise in the “Saladoid” period, which dates from 500 B.C. to 545 A.D.

Artifacts already extracted from the dig include hundreds of whelk shells, hundreds of pottery fragments and some bones of fish, birds, hutia and marine mammals.

Strand Gade will be closed to vehicles at its intersection with Curaçao Gade within the next two days and will remain closed for the duration of the dig. The street will remain accessible to pedestrians, according to Public Works Commissioner Darryl Smalls.

Smalls said his department was erecting signs and fencing to protect the area and that eventually the public would be invited to tour and view the work site.

The discovery has been hailed by local archaeologists, Public Works and the V.I. State Historic Preservation Office as a valuable opportunity to learn more about the people indigenous to St. Thomas during the pre-Columbian period and well worth any delays or expense it creates.

“We have a major site here, one that is rich in the history of St. Thomas,” said David Hayes, the archaeologist hired by Public Works’ contractor to monitor the construction. “It takes priority over everything else because once the water lines are put in, the site will be completely destroyed. We have to extract as much information as possible.”

While a trench for the installation of water lines was being dug on Jan. 22, Hayes noticed hundreds of whelk shells and pottery shards pouring out from the newly disturbed soil. The discovery led him to call a halt to the construction and to begin testing the materials to establish how old they are.

The significance of the find has prompted Public Works to forestall construction around the trench until archaeologists complete their extraction of artifacts, which will be turned over for storage to the V.I. State Historic Preservation Office.

The people associated with the newly discovered site are believed to have migrated from the Orinoco River valley in South America. The first settlers in the Virgin Islands are believed to predate the Saladoid people by 1,000 years.

Archaeological evidence of these first settlers was discovered in Krum Bay. The people of the Saladoid period were more advanced than these first settlers in that they practiced agriculture and had more advanced stone tool technology.

The Saladoid people may have been indirect ancestors of the Taino population native to the islands at the time of Columbus, according to Emily Lundberg, an archaeologist who has done work at the Krum Bay site and the new site.

The Federal Highway Administration funds the downtown infrastructure improvement project and will, because of federal laws regulating the preservation of historic resources, be obliged to pay the extra costs associated with the archaeological work.

The Public Works Department has to comply with the Historic Preservation Act of 1966 in allowing sufficient time for archaeologists to glean as much as they can from the site, according to Sean Krigger, the acting director of the V.I. State Historic Preservation Office.

Hayes said the costs of excavating the site could run “between $100,000 and $1 million” depending on how many artifacts are culled and what kind of research needs to be done on them.

“This is a complex project where the archaeology has to be done and the infrastructure has to be done, and we are all working together to achieve both the knowledge of the past and the infrastructure for a modern St. Thomas,” Hayes said.

In the early 1980s, a small sample of similar artifacts was unearthed in the same area during a much smaller construction project. The findings indicated the area is significant to the history of the Saladoid period, but archeologists had no idea of the wealth of evidence in the area until the recent discovery.

“We had a small peek into this area’s value in terms of the period many, many years ago,” Hayes said. “But nobody realized how big the site was until we started to see the enormous deposits of shells and pottery coming out of the trench.”

In 1990, the construction of Tutu Park Mall unearthed remnants of a village dating to the same period. In about a year of excavation work where the Kmart and the parking lot adjacent to it now exist, archeologists uncovered skeletons and round houses from the Tutu site before the developers began pushing to continue their project.

Experts have said the new Main Street discovery is comparable in terms of significance and size.

Krigger said that the Main Street discovery potentially could be even more fruitful in terms of what could be learned about the culture of the Saladoid residents of St. Thomas because of the number of artifacts and because the archaeological team will not be under pressure from private developers to rush the extraction of artifacts.

The Tutu project became the “banner or poster child” for the V.I. Legislature’s passing the Antiquities and Cultural Properties Act of 1998 to protect archaeological discoveries not connected to federal money and therefore not protected by federal law, according to Krigger.

“We don’t have sufficient information of what their lifestyle was, and what we do have is not specific enough. This is why this is such a golden opportunity for us to conduct this archaeological investigation,” Krigger said. “Circumstances didn’t allow for the full investigation of Tutu Park site. Now we have time to really do it right and to get another snapshot of the lives of these people and what their contribution to island history was.”

Original article:
virginislanddailynews

BY AMANDA NORRIS (DAILY NEWS STAFF)
Published: February 14, 2013

Read Full Post »

Isotopic data show farming arrived in Europe with migrants

Topic: Farming

MADISON – For decades, archaeologists have debated how farming spread to Stone Age Europe, setting the stage for the rise of Western civilization.

Now, new data gleaned from the teeth of prehistoric farmers and the hunter-gatherers with whom they briefly overlapped shows that agriculture was introduced to Central Europe from the Near East by colonizers who brought farming technology with them.

“One of the big questions in European archaeology has been whether farming was brought or borrowed from the Near East,” says T. Douglas Price, a University of Wisconsin-Madison archaeologist who, with Cardiff University’s Dusan Boric, measured strontium isotopes in the teeth of 153 humans from Neolithic burials in an area known as the Danube Gorges in modern Romania and Serbia.

The report, which appears this week (Feb. 11, 2013) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, draws on isotopic signatures of strontium found in the tooth enamel of people who died nearly 8,000 years ago, about 6,200 B.C. Strontium is a chemical found in rocks everywhere. It enters the body through diet at or around birth and etches an indelible signature in teeth that accurately documents the geology of an individual’s birthplace.

“The evidence from the Danube Gorges shows clearly that new people came in bringing farming and replaced the earlier Mesolithic hunter-gatherers,” says Price, a UW-Madison professor of anthropology and an expert on early agriculture in Europe.

The Danube Gorges slice through the Carpathian Mountains and in the Stone Age were a heavily forested setting, rich in fish and game, including huge sturgeon, catfish, red deer and wild boar. The bends and twists of the Danube in the Gorges region made it especially important as a source of fish, and thus potentially a desirable entryway to Europe for highly mobile and expanding Neolithic communities accompanied by their domesticates – wheat, barley, flax, goats and cattle.

The new research, explains Price, speaks to the question of colonization versus adoption of transformative technologies such as farming. “It is also useful because it suggests another route across the Black Sea or up the east coast of Bulgaria to the Danube for farmers moving into Europe. This contrasts with movement by sea across the Mediterranean or Aegean, which is the standard picture.”

Archaeologists have long wrestled with the question of how farming spread across Europe, ushering in a host of technologies, including the use of pottery, that ultimately led to the rise Western civilizations. Two big ideas have dominated the debate: Did the technology arrive with colonizers from Asia, notably Anatolia or modern Turkey? Or did the technology, including newly domesticated plants and animals, simply diffuse across the European landscape through networks of local foragers?

There is some evidence for the importation of early agriculture along the shores of the Mediterranean and in Central Europe, Price notes, “but elsewhere in Europe it is not clear whether it was colonists or locals adopting.”

Isotopic studies of strontium and other chemicals found in the teeth and bones of Neolithic humans, however, are now helping archaeologists better track the movement of ancient peoples across the landscape. Strontium signatures last not just a lifetime, but potentially thousands of years as tooth enamel, the densest tissue in the body, resists decomposition and contamination after death. It is now commonly used by archaeologists to determine if an individual was local or foreign to the place where their remains were discovered.

An interesting finding of the study is that 8,000 years ago, when Neolithic farmers were beginning to migrate into the Danube Gorges and overlap with Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, more women than men were identified as foreigners. A possible explanation for the variance, according to the study, is that women came to these sites from Neolithic farming communities as part of an ongoing social exchange.

In the Danube Gorges, the overlap of colonizing early farmers and hunter-gatherers lasted perhaps a couple of hundred years before the forager societies were completely absorbed by the beginning of the sixth millennium B.C.

###
The new study was supported by the National Science Foundation.

Terry Devitt, 608-262-8282, trdevitt@wisc.edu
Original article:
eurekalert.org
Feb 11, 2013

Read Full Post »

Stone Age Hunters Liked Their Carbs

Topic Stone Age Diet

Analyses of Stone Age settlements reveal that the hunters were healthy and would gladly eat anything they could get their hands on, including carbohydrates – contrary to the modern definition of the Paleolithic, or Stone Age diet.

The Stone Age hunter’s food contained large amounts of protein from fish, lean mean, herbs and coarse vegetables and has formed the basis of one of today’s hottest health trends: the paleo diet.

The modern version of the Stone Age diet excludes foods rich in carbohydrates. This exclusion of carbs is based on the idea that Stone Age hunters didn’t have access to bread, rice or pasta.

But is it true that Stone Age hunters and gatherers didn’t eat any carbohydrates at all?

Sabine Karg, an external lecturer at Copenhagen University’s Saxo Institute, specialises in archaeobotany. She says that Stone Age hunters, unlike many followers of the modern Stone Age diet, joyfully munched away at carbs when the opportunity presented itself.

“Carbohydrates have been part of their diet. In flooded settlements from the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods, traces of roots and seeds from various aquatic plants and wild grasses have been found.”

Stone Age hunters were not picky

The modern version of the paleo diet forsakes everything that’s reminiscent of bread, rice, pasta, legumes and milk.

But according to Karg, the Stone Age hunters were nowhere near that fastidious about their food.

Easily digestible food with high energy content is a welcome feature if you have to make the effort of finding the next meal yourself, and traces of foods containing carbohydrates have also been found in the old settlements.

“What archaeologists find in their excavations is dependent on both the preservation conditions and how the people had prepared their food,” says Karg. “For us, the conditions are particularly good in flooded settlements where organic material is well preserved, or in burn layers or fireplaces where we can find charred plant residues,” she says, giving an example:

“We have found seeds of wild grasses, aquatic plants and root vegetables, all of which have formed part of the hunters’ diet. Especially after an unsuccessful hunt, they had to go out and dig up roots.”

Paleo diet for 9,000 years

The Stone Age menu was widely different depending on the region, climate and season. In Denmark, people lived by hunting and gathering for more than 9,000 years until they changed their ways and became farmers.

During the course of these 9,000 years, Denmark presented the hunters with terrains ranging from frozen landscapes similar to today’s Greenland to warm islands with temperatures like those in today’s Southern European holiday destinations.

The starch sources that the archaeologists have so far found include acorns and sea beet, the latter of which is the ancestor of both the beetroot and the sugar beet.

Compared to today, the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic diets included lots of proteins, less fat and fewer, though some, carbohydrates.

You are what you eat

A healthy diet was as important to Stone Age hunters as it to modern man. But since we can’t just send a Stone Age hunter to hospital for a fitness test, if we are to find out about the health of the hunters, we need to make do with what’s available to us – bones and teeth.

So ScienceNordic asked Pia Bennike, a biological anthropologist and lecturer at Copenhagen University, to bring out the boxes of Neolithic bones and tell us about their condition.

“The hunters’ dental health was excellent,” she says. “There is very little tooth loss and no caries. That’s understandable because they didn’t consume many sugary carbohydrates. The only sweet food available at the time was honey. The advantage with the starch sources they had, e.g. root vegetables, is that it’s coarse food, which actually helps clean the teeth.”

Stone Age food was less prepared than today’s food

Bennike explains that the Stone Age hunters made good use of their healthy teeth:

“The skulls reveal that they had a strong chewing system and that their teeth were worn. The very heavy tooth wear shows that they have had a coarse diet, but also that perhaps they didn’t prepare their food as much as we do today.”

When it comes to tooth decay, she says, it’s not only about the contents of the food, but also about how it’s prepared:

“Caries emerges at the beginning of the Neolithic period and increases in the Iron Age and the Viking Age. This occurs in line with people starting to eat more carbohydrates, but also much more finely processed food.”

The hunters had strong bones

From the bones, we see that the general health condition of the Stone Age hunters wasn’t all that bad. Their life expectancy, however, was a lot shorter than it is for modern man.

“There are only few visible signs of diseases on the bones, but that could be put down to the low average age at the time. Those who survived into adulthood could expect an average lifespan of around 35-40 years,” says Bennike.

“Bone quality was generally better than today, but the question is whether that’s due to diet or exercise. Both factors have probably played a part, but the level of physical activity in particular makes a difference. It may also be an evolutionary feature because the further we go back in time, the stronger the bones.”

Stone Age people got their calcium from shellfish

Calcium is crucial to the quality and strength of our bones. Today we are advised to drink milk because of its high calcium content. But milk was not featured in the Stone Age diet, so the hunters must have found their calcium elsewhere.

“Calcium is found in many other foods, e.g. shellfish, so I think they got the calcium they needed,” says Bennike.

Stone Age hunters had strong bones and strong teeth. They lived active lives and ate a coarse diet, consisting of anything edible that they could get their hands on.

Original article:
sciencenordic.com
Jan 4, 2013

Read Full Post »

DNA sleuth hunts wine roots in Anatolia

Topic Stone Age Wine

ELAZIG, Turkey — There are easier places to make wine than the spectacular, desolate landscapes of southeast Turkey, but DNA analysis suggests it is here that Stone Age farmers first domesticated the wine grape.
Today Turkey is home to archaeological sites as well as vineyards of ancient grape varieties like Bogazkere and Okuzgozu, which drew the curiosity of the Swiss botanist and grape DNA sleuth Jose Vouillamoz, for the clues they may offer to the origin of European wine.
Together with the biomolecular archaeologist Patrick McGovern, Vouillamoz has spent nearly a decade studying the world’s cultivated and wild vines.
“We wanted to collect samples from wild and cultivated grape vines from the Near East — that means southeastern Anatolia, Armenia and Georgia — to see in which place the wild grape was, genetically speaking, linked the closest to the cultivated variety.”
“It turned out to be southeastern Anatolia,” the Asian part of modern Turkey, said Vouillamoz, speaking at the EWBC wine conference in the Turkish city of Izmir this month. “We propose the hypothesis that it is most likely the first place of grape vine domestication.”
McGovern’s lab at the University of Pennsylvania Museum also provided archaeological evidence of wine’s Anatolian roots after analysing residues of liquid recovered from vessels thousands of years old.
Author of “Uncorking the Past” and “Ancient Wine”, McGovern used a sensitive chemical technique to look for significant amounts of tartaric acid — for which grapes are the only source in the Middle East.
While Georgia, Armenia and Iran all played a role in ancient winemaking, preliminary evidence from pottery and even older clay mineral containers, seems to place the very first domestication of the wild Eurasian grape Vitis vinifera in southeastern Anatolia sometime between 5,000 and 8,500 BC, McGovern said.
Southeast Anatolia is part of the Fertile Crescent, the name given to a vast area stretching through modern-day Iraq and Iran to the Nile Valley in the south, widely seen as the birthplace of the eight so-called “founder” crops — from chickpea to barley — that are the world’s first known domesticated plants.
Evidence found by the research duo suggests that for wine too, hundreds of today’s grapes find their roots in “founder” varieties descended from the wild grapes of the region.
Through DNA profiling, Vouillamoz says he has isolated 13 of these “founder” grapes by tracing the family trees of European fine wine grapes.
He believes farmers across southeast Anatolia or the Near East started domesticating the wild Vitis vinifera grape around the same time — giving rise to the 13 “founders”.
This, he says, debunks the long-held notion that most Western European grapes were introduced independently from the Middle East, Near East or Egypt, Turkey or Greece, at different times and in different places.
One of the “founders”, Gouais Blanc, is a good example.
“He gave birth to at least 80 varieties in western Europe, including Chardonnay, Gamay, Furmint, and Riesling,” said Vouillamoz, who recently co-authored, “Wine Grapes,” a monumental opus on 1,368 vine varieties. “I call it the Casanova of grapes.”
Standing in a gully between Elazig and Diyarbakir, Daniel O’Donnell, chief winemaker at the Turkish winery Kayra, gestured to the great expanse of mountains where wild grape vines still grow in gullies and washes.
“It is a wine-making pilgrimage to come back here and find, genetically, 8,000, 9,000-year old vines,” said O’Donnell, who arrived here from California in 2006.
“It’s mind-blowing to be a Napa guy paying attention to the fine details, the minutiae of wine making, and come here.”
But this heritage is now under threat.
In the Kurdish Diyarbakir region, where women on subsistence farms tend the vines and goats do the pruning, phylloxera is killing vineyards that have not been grafted onto disease-resistant rootstock.
“Unfortunately, phylloxera has arrived here. Every year we see the vines die,” said Murat Uner, wine production manager at Kayra.
Phylloxera annihilated vineyards in Europe in the late 19th century. Wild vines are somewhat protected by their eco-system, but cultivated vines are extremely vulnerable.
“We explain it to them, but they don’t want to listen,” says Uner.
The frustration is shared by winemakers who are trying to develop the Turkish wine industry, and experts who fear the loss of an irreplaceable genetic diversity within these ancient varieties.
“They are incredibly lucky to have this,” said Vouillamoz. “It has been lost in many places.”

Original article:
By Suzanne Mustacich
google.com/ hosted news

Read Full Post »

Small lethal tools have big implications for early modern human complexity

Topic Early tools

On the south coast of South Africa, scientists have found evidence for an advanced stone age technology dated to 71,000 years ago at Pinnacle Point near Mossel Bay. This technology, allowing projectiles to be thrown at greater distance and killing power, takes hold in other regions of Africa and Eurasia about 20,000 years ago. When combined with other findings of advanced technologies and evidence for early symbolic behavior from this region, the research documents a persistent pattern of behavioral complexity that might signal modern humans evolved in this coastal location. These findings were reported in the article “An Early and Enduring Advanced Technology Originating 71,000 Years Ago in South Africa” in the November 7 issue of the journal Nature.

“Every time we excavate a new site in coastal South Africa with advanced field techniques, we discover new and surprising results that push back in time the evidence for uniquely human behaviors,” said co-author Curtis Marean, project director and Arizona State University professor in the Institute of Human Origins, a research center of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change.

The reported technology focused on the careful production of long, thin blades of stone that were then blunted (called “backing”) on one edge so that they could be glued into slots carved in wood or bone. This created light armaments for use as projectiles, either as arrows in bow and arrow technology, or more likely as spear throwers (atlatls). These provide a significant advantage over hand cast spears, so when faced with a fierce buffalo (or competing human), having a projectile weapon of this type increases the killing reach of the hunter and lowers the risk of injury. The stone used to produce these special blades was carefully transformed for easier flaking by a complex process called “heat treatment,” a technological advance also appearing early in coastal South Africa and reported by the same research team in 2009.

“Good things come in small packages,” said Kyle Brown, a skilled stone tool replicator and co-author on the paper, who is an honorary research associate with the University of Cape Town, South Africa. “When we started to find these very small carefully made tools, we were glad that we had saved and sorted even the smallest of our sieved materials. At sites excavated less carefully, these microliths may have been discarded in the back dirt or never identified in the lab.”

Prior work showed that this microlithic technology appear briefly between 65,000 and 60,000 years ago during a worldwide glacial phase, and then it was thought to vanish, thus showing what many scientists have come to accept as a “flickering” pattern of advanced technologies in Africa. The so-called flickering nature of the pattern was thought to result from small populations struggling during harsh climate phases, inventing technologies, and then losing them due to chance occurrences wiping out the artisans with the special knowledge.

“Eleven thousand years of continuity is, in reality, an almost unimaginable time span for people to consistently make tools the same way,” said Marean. “This is certainly not a flickering pattern.”

The appearance and disappearance is more likely a function of the small sample of well-excavated sites in Africa. Because of this small sample, each new site has a high probability of adding a novel observation. The African sample is a tiny fraction of the known European sample from the same time period.

“This is why continued and well-funded fieldwork in Africa is of the highest scientific priority if we want to learn about what it means to be human, and where and when it happened,” said Marean.

The site where this technology was discovered is called Pinnacle Point 5-6 (PP5-6). This spectacular site preserves about 14 meters of archaeological sediment dating from approximately 90,000 to 50,000 years ago. The documentation of the age and span of the technology was made possible by an unprecedented fieldwork commitment of nine, two-month seasons (funded by the National Science Foundation and Hyde Family Foundation) where every observed item related to human behavior was plotted directly to a computer using a “total station.” A total station is a surveying instrument that digitally captures points where items are found to create a 3D model of the excavation. Almost 200,000 finds have been plotted to date, and excavations continue. This was joined to over 75 optically stimulated luminescence dates by project geochronologist Zenobia Jacobs at the University of Wollongong (Australia), creating the highest resolution stone-age sequence from this time span.

“As an archaeologist and scientist, it is a privilege to work on a site that preserves a near perfect layered sequence capturing almost 50,000 years of human prehistory,” said Brown, who codirected excavations at PP5-6. “Our team has done a remarkable job of identifying some of the subtle but important clues to just how innovative these early humans on the south coast were.”

Research on stone tools and Neanderthal anatomy strongly suggests that Neanderthals lacked true projectile weapons.

“When Africans left Africa and entered Neanderthal territory they had projectiles with greater killing reach, and these early moderns probably also had higher levels of pro-social (hyper-cooperative) behavior. These two traits were a knockout punch. Combine them, as modern humans did and still do, and no prey or competitor is safe,” said Marean. “This probably laid the foundation for the expansion out of Africa of modern humans and the extinction of many prey as well as our sister species such as Neanderthals.”

Original article:
November7, 2012
eurekalert.org

Photos are of the excavation site is at Pinnacle Point, Mossel Bay, on the southern coast of South Africa. The cave opening is in the center of the top image.

Read Full Post »