Green Group discussion
General
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Humans in Prehistory and Medieval History
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"An international team of researchers has found evidence of a megathrust earthquake occurring approximately 3,800 years ago off the coast of what is now Chile. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the team describes evidence they found of the ensuing tsunami and its impact on the people who lived in the area at the time.
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"The work by the researchers involved digging through layers of dirt in the Atacama Desert looking for sediment left behind by the tsunami. Radiocarbon dating of shells and charcoal fragments in the sediment showed it to be from approximately 3,800 years ago. The tsunami was so big it left a trail of debris for 1,000 miles and likely pushed seawater up to 15 to 20 meters above sea level.
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"The researchers also found evidence of shifts in population centers following the tsunami—people moved inland and to higher ground. Evidence was also found of people moving their burial grounds. The researchers found that the people did not start returning to the shore for over a thousand years and even then, they appeared to be hesitant to move too close to the sea. Researchers note that they have not found evidence of how the memory of the tsunami could have persisted for so long in a people who did not have a written language. They also suggest that their work could contribute to safety plans for the people who live in the area today."
https://phys.org/news/2022-04-megathr....
More information: Diego Salazar et al, Did a 3800-year-old M w ~9.5 earthquake trigger major social disruption in the Atacama Desert?, Science Advances (2022). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abm2996
Journal information: Science Advances
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An hourglass and a graph provide data visualisations of all the people who ever lived.
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https://www.rte.ie/news/world/2022/05...
"Archaeologist Luc Vanrell's life changed the second he surfaced inside the Cosquer cavern and saw its staggering images. Even now, 30 years on, he remembers the "aesthetic shock".
But the cave and its treasures, some dating back more than 30,000 years, are in grave danger. Climate change and water and plastic pollution are threatening to wash away the art prehistoric men and women created over 15 millennia."
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They say ducks. I see camels. In profile, the 2 legs on this side shown. What do you see?
https://phys.org/news/2022-06-turkish...
"Turkey—which in the past has not been renowned for making the best of its vast archaeological heritage—has wholeheartedly embraced the discoveries.
The items excavated from Gobekli Tepe are shown in the impressive archaeological museum in the nearest city, Sanliurfa, which is itself so ancient that Abraham is believed to have been born there.
Indeed its new museum built in 2015 boasts "the most extensive collection of the neolithic era in the world," according to its director Celal Uludag. "All of the portable artifacts from Gobekli Tepe are exhibited here.""
Geometry guided construction of earliest known temple, built 6,000 years before Stonehenge
https://phys.org/news/2020-05-geometr...
The first two on the left don't look at all like ducks. The three on the right have duck like heads but the legs are all wrong. It looks like the entire pattern could be surrealistic or deliberately distorted or it was cut into the stone using existing natural curves or cracks in the rock.
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https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-...
The dog is first, but books like The Valley Of Horses show how horses might have been tamed - though not necessarily turned into domestic stock - a lot earlier than in the graph. The donkey came before the camel, but is not placed on the graph.
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https://gizmodo.com/sweeping-genetic-...
Mainly they show that for thousands of years there was little mixing among widely scattered populations. Well, if you went anywhere you walked or rowed, and if you wanted to trade anything you had to carry it yourself. Items might rot along the way.
The most valuable item a person could trade was themselves, with their clan's different blood and skills. Once they found a place to settle, why go further?
But once people had settled in a new place they retained contacts, and so a web of connection among farming communities developed.
http://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sc...
http://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sc...
http://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sc...
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"Prof. Ben-Yosef says, "Based on the amount of industrial waste found at the processing sites we can calculate the quantity of woody plants required for producing copper. For example, the production site called the 'Slaves' Hill,' which was only one of several sites operating simultaneously, burned as many as 400 acacias and 1,800 brooms every year. As these resources dwindled, the industry looked for other solutions, as evidenced by the changing composition of the charcoal. However, transporting woody plants from afar did not prove cost-effective for the long run, and eventually, during the 9th century BCE, all production sites were shut down. The copper industry in the Timna Valley was renewed only 1,000 later, by the Nabateans."
Dr. Langgut concludes, "Our study indicates that 3,000 years ago humans caused severe environmental damage in the Timna Valley, which affects the area to this day. The damage was caused through overexploitation, especially of the acacia and white broom, which, as key species in the ecosystem of the Southern Arava, had supported many other species, stored water, and stabilized the soil. Their disappearance generated a domino effect of environmental damage, irreparably harming the entire area. Three thousand years later, the local environment still hasn't recovered from the crisis. Some species, like the white broom, once prevalent in the Timna Valley, are now very rare, and others have disappeared forever.""
More information: Mark Cavanagh et al, Fuel exploitation and environmental degradation at the Iron Age copper industry of the Timna Valley, southern Israel, Scientific Reports (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-18940-z
Journal information: Scientific Reports
Provided by Tel Aviv University
Our unspoken motto is we never pay attention. Today, 3,000 years ago, even farther back, we keep going/grabbing until we got everything there is to get. Even if some are paying attention, far more aren't, and the human reach is enormous. Our bodies are impossibly complex machines which can amplify our thoughts and actions a million times greater than any other animal on the planet. Animals have a big impact on the planet but they can only achieve a big impact with big population numbers. With only a few people present we can decimate a landscape, no problem.
A few people can flatten a piece of land, remove the vegetation, concrete it over, plant some useless grass, erect a sterile
non-biodiverse structure, consume vast amounts of energy that benefits nothing but human personal comfort. And that's not even erecting a metal refining set up.
A side note on copper refining, one of the substances that is found with copper ore is arsenic which goes up in smoke when smelted in fire pits. The people smelting copper at the ancient sites weren't very healthy. The copper ore itself is very toxic.
Living the nomad life was actually pretty easy, use up what the land had to offer, then move on. With small numbers (compared to recent times) of people wandering around, it was easy to pack up and move on because the land usually grew back and there was always a fresh place to set up camp again.
Apparently even then there were activities that could leave a lasting negative impact on the land. Or maybe it just happens when people stay in the same place without replenishing it in a big way while they are there. Draining a place down to zero or less and then replenishing the land may not work on a big scale.
It's even in the newly established digital land where everything could have had a fresh start. The overwhelming motto is that if it [data] isn't nailed down, it's free to take and do what you want, regardless of what happens afterwards. When in reality, what is really happening is that if it's not nailed down, it's free to steal.
The thing that everyone might be missing is that everything needs to be done in a manner that replenishes all the life while the land is being processed/occupied, at the same time, otherwise all one gets is ever diminishing returns.
People will argue that we have to have cities and we have to have factories. We can have cities and factories, they just have to be run in a manner that has minimal impact on the environment, and that takes a lot of planning, and a lot of expenses. Probably needs a big buffer area around it, an area that is free of anything that negatively impacts the land. Probably also has to transform the city's emissions into something that is similar to natural things.
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3,000-Year-Old Indigenous Canoe Recovered from Wisconsin LakeA canoe from 1,200 years ago was also recently found.
Brown said that both canoes confirm that the Ho-Chunk people have been in the Madison area for thousands of years.
“Western academia, especially history, is based on evidence, or proof,” Brown told Native News Online. “Well, here’s a 3,000-year-old canoe. Anyone who wants to deny Indigenous history, it’s harder to do that now.”
Brown went on to say that lower water levels — an effect of climate change — likely made the canoe visible.
https://nativenewsonline.net/currents...
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https://www.rte.ie/news/world/2022/10...
"The team found that having two copies of the "good" ERAP2 gene allowed the individuals to produce functional proteins - molecules which help the immune system recognise an infection.
According to the scientists, these ERAP2 copies allowed for "more efficient neutralisation of Y. pestis by immune cells".
Prof Barreiro said the presence of this variant would have made a person about 40% more likely to survive the Black Death, compared with those who did not have it.
It meant those who survived the Black Death were able to pass on this "good" ERAP2 gene variant to their children.
Scientists analysed more than 500 ancient DNA samples from the remains of individuals who died between 1348 and 1349.
Further analysis revealed that while ERAP2 is protective against the Black Death, in modern populations, it is associated with an increased susceptibility to autoimmune diseases, such as Crohn's disease and rheumatoid arthritis."
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https://phys.org/news/2022-11-human-e...
"Malagasy ancestral Asian population was isolated on the island for more than 1,000 years with an effective population size of just a few hundred individuals.
Their isolation ended about 1,000 years ago when a small group of Bantu-speaking African people came to Madagascar. Afterward, the population continued to expand rapidly over generations. The growing human population led to extensive changes to the Madagascar landscape and the loss of all large-bodied vertebrates that once lived there, they suggest.
The findings have important implications that may now be applied to studies of other human populations. For instance, it shows it's possible to untangle the demographic history of ancient populations even well after two or more groups have mixed, by using genetic data and computer simulations to test the likelihood of different scenarios. The findings also offer new insights into how past changes in human populations led to changes in whole ecosystems."
More information: Denis Pierron, The loss of biodiversity in Madagascar is contemporaneous with major demographic events, Current Biology (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.09.060. www.cell.com/current-biology/f … 0960-9822(22)01602-5
Journal information: Current Biology
Provided by Cell Press
Maybe the reasons people were moving around might have something to do with how things were going. They could be moving because things were tough, hard to survive, so they were looking for a better place. That might make their survival or prosperity hit or miss. Or things were going pretty good such that it might seem like the situation was getting crowded or harder to get what was needed because of successful practices. The ability to get what was needed was effective but limited by overcrowding.
If people were moving because things were going good and they could move out to areas with fewer or no people and bring their successful practices with them then they could immediately start successfully "depleting" the resources where they went to. Being successful by using pre-existing methods they could move, easily increase their numbers without a lot of trial and error, hit or miss efforts.
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We could argue that it is trade which has demolished the world's wildlife population. Animals carry themselves around, food to their young, a few animals hoard food or what they regard as valuables. Nothing I can think of, carries a goods a long, long way and exchanges or donates them, except the animal's body covering / young / eggs.
https://phys.org/news/2022-11-sentenc...
"There are 17 Canaanite letters on the comb. They are archaic in form—from the first stage of the invention of the alphabet script. They form seven words in Canaanite, reading: "May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard."
"This is the first sentence ever found in the Canaanite language in Israel. There are Canaanites in Ugarit in Syria, but they write in a different script, not the alphabet that is used till today. The Canaanite cities are mentioned in Egyptian documents, the Amarna letters that were written in Akkadian, and in the Hebrew Bible. The comb inscription is direct evidence for the use of the alphabet in daily activities some 3700 years ago. This is a landmark in the history of the human ability to write," said Garfinkel.
Ancient combs were made from wood, bone, or ivory. Ivory was a very expensive material and likely an imported luxury object. As there were no elephants in Canaan during that time period, the comb likely came from nearby Egypt—factors indicating that even people of high social status suffered from lice."
More information: Daniel Vainstub et al, A Canaanite's Wish to Eradicate Lice on an Inscribed Ivory Comb from Lachish, Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology (2022). DOI: 10.52486/01.00002.4
Provided by Hebrew University of Jerusalem
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https://www.livescience.com/ice-age-r...
"The thousands of ice age paintings include both handprints, geometric designs and a wide array of animals, from the "small" — such as deer, tapirs, alligators, bats, monkeys, turtles, serpents and porcupines — to the "large," including camelids, horses and three-toed hoofed mammals with trunks. Other figures depict humans, hunting scenes and images of people interacting with plants, trees and savannah creatures. And, although there is also ice age animal rock art in Central Brazil, the new findings are more detailed and shed light on what these now-extinct species looked like, the researchers said."
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https://techxplore.com/news/2023-01-r...
""It's exciting to think about how these more durable concrete formulations could expand not only the service life of these materials, but also how it could improve the durability of 3D-printed concrete formulations," says Masic.
Through the extended functional lifespan and the development of lighter-weight concrete forms, he hopes that these efforts could help reduce the environmental impact of cement production, which currently accounts for about 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Along with other new formulations, such as concrete that can actually absorb carbon dioxide from the air, another current research focus of the Masic lab, these improvements could help to reduce concrete's global climate impact."
More information: Linda Seymour et al, Hot Mixing: Mechanistic Insights into the Durability of Ancient Roman Concrete, Science Advances (2023). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.add1602. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ad...
Journal information: Science Advances
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https://www.rte.ie/news/world/2023/01...
"A researcher from Queen's University in Belfast provided data for the study, which compared skeletons from archaeological sites spread over 25,000 years.
The research, which was led by the University of Western Ontario, found that between 2,000 and 7,000 years ago the size increase was found in regions where ancient humans had higher levels of genes that allow the production of enzymes that digest milk into adulthood - this is called lactase persistence.
It also highlights that the process of evolution led to the pattern of lactose intolerance seen today, where people in the north of Europe are more lactose tolerant than people in the south of Europe."
Butter: A Rich History
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https://phys.org/news/2023-02-trove-s...
"The loss of the ship led to a change in plans—Hans attacked Sweden soon thereafter and conquered the country instead of negotiating for it. But the sinking of the ship also created a motherlode of artifacts for modern historians to study.
The wreck of the ship was found in the 1960s and was studied by marine archaeologists in the years thereafter, but not very thoroughly. The new study was launched in 2019 and continued through 2021. The team found that most of the expected artifacts had already been found in earlier expeditions, but something important had been overlooked—containers holding well-preserved plant material—more than 3,000 specimens."
More information: Mikael Larsson et al, The king's spice cabinet–Plant remains from Gribshunden, a 15th century royal shipwreck in the Baltic Sea, PLOS ONE (2023). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0281010
Journal information: PLoS ONE
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Death in the Time of Ice
Death on the Trek
Death in the New Land
Kaye George
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https://phys.org/news/2023-04-sea-lev...
"The impact of rising seas can also be seen in the changing diet of the Vikings; as they shifted from their own agricultural products to more marine-based foods, perhaps as their fields became saturated with salt or flooded. Such a shift, said Borreggine, reveals that "they were attempting to adapt to the rising sea level."
This paper "...shows the advantages of interdisciplinary research, bringing ideas from one field to another and contributing powerful new insights," said Mitrovica, noting that Borreggine "has shown that in addition to the various challenges the Vikings faced as the climate descended into the ice age, they also faced pervasive flooding—an insight that only someone like Marisa, with deep expertise in the sea-level physics, could have had."
If the lasting impact of sea-level rise sounds familiar in understanding current efforts to mitigate climate change, Borreggine noted the parallels—and one major difference. "The Vikings didn't really have a choice," she said. "They couldn't stop the Little Ice Age. We can do work to mitigate climate change. The Vikings were locked into it.""
More information: Borreggine, Marisa, Sea-level rise in Southwest Greenland as a contributor to Viking abandonment, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2023). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2209615120.
Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Provided by Harvard University
Good book on Greenland.
The Greenlanders
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https://phys.org/news/2023-06-native-...
"Far too many large animals disappeared too quickly across the North American continent for it to have been at the hand of human hunters. Clovis culture, the most technologically advanced big game hunters on the planet, largely abandoned their big game hunting implements at this time.
The intensity of fishing in the Tanana River basin shows up during the Younger Dryas, and then as quickly as it appears, it diminishes. While the practice of fishing eventually becomes an essential part of native subsistence, the evidence in the study suggests that the switch to fishing was in response to big game disappearing from the landscape, illustrating the adaptability of humans to change with the environment.
The current study shows evidence that the ancient native Beringians increased their reliance on fishing during the Younger Dryas time frame.
What is not part of the study is the mystery of another Younger Dryas survivor—brown bears. While many large predatory mammals were dying off, including the massive short-faced bear known to hunt large prey, brown bears survived. Like humans, these bears were more adaptable eaters and, perhaps most importantly in light of this study, good at fishing."
More information: Ben A. Potter et al, Freshwater and anadromous fishing in Ice Age Beringia, Science Advances (2023). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adg6802
Journal information: Science Advances
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"In Southeast Asia, the oldest artifacts made of plant fibers are around 8,000 years old. In this study, Xhauflair and colleagues identify indirect evidence of much older plant technology.
This evidence comes from stone tools in Tabon Cave, Palawan Philippines dating as far back as 39,000 years old. These tools exhibit microscopic damage accrued during use. Indigenous communities in this region today use tools to strip plants like bamboo and palm, turning rigid stems into supple fibers for tying or weaving. Researchers experimentally followed these plant processing techniques and found that this activity leaves a characteristic pattern of microscopic damage on stone tools. This same pattern was identified on three stone artifacts from Tabon Cave."
More information: The invisible plant technology of Prehistoric Southeast Asia: Indirect evidence for basket and rope making at Tabon Cave, Philippines, 39–33,000 years ago, PLoS ONE (2023). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0281415. journals.plos.org/plosone/arti … journal.pone.0281415
Journal information: PLoS ONE
Provided by Public Library of Science
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https://phys.org/news/2023-08-archaeo...
"During a recent dive, archaeologists uncovered evidence suggesting the settlement was fortified with thousands of spiked planks used as defensive barricades.
"To protect themselves in this way, they had to cut down a forest," said Hafner.
But why did the villagers need to build such extensive fortifications to defend themselves? Archaeologists are still searching for an answer to the elusive question.
Researchers estimate that roughly 100,000 spikes were driven into the bottom of the lake off Lin, with Hafner calling the discovery "a real treasure trove for research".
Lake Ohrid is one of the oldest lakes in the world and has been around for more than a million years.
Assisted by professional divers, archaeologists have been picking through the bottom of the lake often uncovering fossilised fragments of wood and prized pieces of oak.
Analysis of the tree rings helps the team reconstruct the daily life of the area's inhabitants—providing "valuable insights into the climatic and environmental conditions" from the period, said Albanian archaeologist Adrian Anastasi.
"Oak is like a Swiss watch, very precise, like a calendar," said Hafner.
"Building their village on stilts was a complex task, very complicated, very difficult, and it's important to understand why these people made this choice," said Anastasi."
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I can't imagine what the spiked planks looked like. Also not sure why they are at the bottom of the lake, unless it was a fence that encircled the compound. If they were on the bottom, spikes facing up, even more mysterious.Seems like it was common to build over the water or very close to it and put the buildings on stilts to protect from flooding. There are still places where it is done. Stilt houses are also built on land, the elevation, up to 12 feet, was for protection from floods as well as for security.
Looking at how the rainfall is going, towards excessive amounts in a short amount of time, putting any building on stilt structures is not such a bad idea. It was done because people were not able to see the weather much farther out than 24 hours to get advanced warning of possible flooding.
We may have reached a point in time where we need to put everything back on stilts because while we can see the weather coming a long way off, the chance of a flooding event has gone from a rare highly sporadic event to a common day occurrence. We are back to being powerless to do anything about it, except to be physically prepared for it before it happens. Another example of "old engineering practices" that need to be re-examined.
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The poles might have looked like the traditional fort with spikes on top, or maybe the spikes were on the ground end which seems more likely. If the people kept animals, it would reduce wandering and keep wolves out. If the people farmed, it would stop wild aurochs trampling the tasty crops.
Early farmers were also in competition with hunter gatherer tribes who were still nomadic. This fence would reduce theft of stores while everyone was out at work.
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https://phys.org/news/2023-09-paleoli...
"The data were matched against other paleoenvironmental indicators from across the Tibetan Plateau and confirmed that these climate changes were persistent across the region, not solely localized to the study lake. This included precipitation records inferred from a second lake located 50km north of Xardai Co, Banggong Co, as well as temperature records from China.
Linking the climate changes to its impact upon the population of the time, agriculture and livestock farming were the dominant livelihoods, with crop production in the Yarlung Zangbo River valley and grazing on the Qangtang Plateau. During empire expansion, the warmth and rain would have encouraged crop production and wild pasture for grazing animals, as well as raised the altitude at which they could be grown. Horses, goats and yaks are grazing animals and were important for the trade economy of Tibet.
However, the comparatively sudden climate decline over ~60–70 years would have stunted plant growth, leading to a reduction in agriculture and pastoral grazing. This would have critical impacts on the survival of the population with food shortages as well as the economic prosperity of a trade-reliant empire. Social unrest likely followed, with fragmentation of different political agendas ultimately leading to the end of the Tibetan Empire.
Today, agriculture and pastoral activities account for over half of Tibet's annual income, so understanding climate's toll on communities in harsh environments is paramount to ensure they not only survive, but thrive."
More information: Zhitong Chen et al, Collapse of the Tibetan Empire attributed to climatic shifts: Paleolimnological evidence from the western Tibetan Plateau, Quaternary Science Reviews (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.quascirev.2023.108280
Journal information: Quaternary Science Reviews
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https://phys.org/news/2022-02-el-nio-...
"The authors found that El Niño-induced drier conditions are associated with a decrease in the number of enslaved people brought to the Americas, and it happened at a two-year lag. The lag is important, showing that El Niño-induced drier conditions caused a delayed response in the slave trade.
The authors suggest that agricultural stresses may have reduced the demand for slaves during droughts, resulting in the decrease of enslaved peoples transported from Africa. They note, however, that sociological studies are needed to fully understand how West African societies responded to drought during the slave trade. Nonetheless, they found a clear association between El Niño and the slave trade.
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""In this study, we showed that weather was one of several driving forces of the transatlantic slave trade," said Nathan. "Lessons learned from this study reverberate today, as evidenced by the Syrian civil war, which studies have shown was exacerbated by extreme drought. Given current projections of climate change, one can only wonder what the future holds for future potential conflicts when people are forced to move from hotter and drier areas."
The authors end the study with the West African word "sankofa," which roughly translates to "the past informs the future.""
More information: The El Niño–Southern Oscillation and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Weather, Climate, and Society (2021). DOI: 10.1175/WCAS-D-21-0036.1
Provided by UC Davis
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https://www.rte.ie/news/2023/0923/140...
"What remains of the farmer's house was found at a place called Ballyhemiken. It is thought to date from early Neolithic times and was probably built around 5,700 years ago.
"It's a simple timber structure, probably thatched, that would have housed a single family and there may well in the general vicinity have been other similar houses that formed part of a community," Mr Hanley explained.
"What's interesting about these is that there had been thousands of years of a nomadic hunter gatherer society in Ireland and these people introduced farming.
"The evidence points to a community of people who arrived in Cork Harbour with their livestock and introduced their farming practices to what had been been - up to then - a nomadic, hunter gatherer society.
"The evidence so far seems to suggest that it was an influx of people, that they brought their livestock, their families and the whole farming package with them, and they started building these houses. So, it's basically the first farming community to arrive in this part of Cork Harbour. It's an extremely exciting find for us."
Mr Hanley estimates that the house was built some time around 3,700BC, making it more than a 1,000 years older than Egypt's Pyramids of Giza."
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https://phys.org/news/2023-09-deep-ge...
""We were able to locate groups which were thought to have disappeared more than 50 years ago," says Jorge Rocha, a population geneticist from Centro de Investigação em Biodiversidade e Recursos Genéticos (CIBIO, University of Porto) who led the fieldwork, together with Angolan anthropologists Samuel and Teresa Aço from the Centro de Estudos do Deserto (CEDO).
Among the communities the team encountered are the Kwepe, a pastoral group who used to speak a language known as Kwadi. "Kwadi was a click-language that shared a common ancestor with the Khoe languages spoken by foragers and herders across southern Africa," explains Anne-Maria Fehn, a linguist from CIBIO who participated in the fieldwork and was able to interview what may well be the last two speakers of Kwadi.
"Khoe-Kwadi languages have been linked to a prehistoric migration of eastern African pastoralists," adds Rocha, whose research focuses on southern African population history.
In addition, the team contacted Bantu-speaking groups that are part of the dominant pastoral tradition of southwest Africa, as well as marginalized groups whose origins have been associated with a foraging tradition, distinct from that of the neighboring Kalahari peoples, and whose original language was supposedly lost."
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"“Experimental Archaeology: Brewing” is one strand of the project which adopted a ‘radical interdisciplinary’ approach to investigate the nature, quality and nutritional characteristics of early modern beer, bringing together experts from very diverse areas – craft, microbiology, brewing science, archaeology and history.
The team, led by Dr Susan Flavin, School of Histories and Humanities, Trinity, took as a case study the household of Lord Deputy William Fitzwilliam at Dublin Castle, which housed 100 staff and welcomed numerous guest and messengers. Unpublished records from the Fitzwilliam archive between 1570s and 1590s provide remarkably rich detail documenting the beer-making process in the castle’s brewhouse as well as records of the volumes of beer produced and consumed by the household. This allowed the team to undertake a faithful reconstruction of beer brewed in Dublin Castle in 1570s.
In addition to its investigation on how important beer was to diet in the 16th century, the study sheds new light on the practice of early modern brewing practices, as well as the challenges facing the preservation of historic skills and foods. Details of the study were published in a paper in The Historical Journal earlier this year."
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journa...
Mod
Eve is an excellent read and redresses the balance.
Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution
Cat Bohannon
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"Archaeologists have used declassified spy satellite imagery from the 1960s and 70s to reevaluate one of the first aerial archaeology surveys ever, revealing 396 previously undiscovered Roman forts in what is now Syria and Iraq.
The initial survey, published by Father Antoine Poidebard in 1934, recorded a line of 116 forts that corresponded to the eastern frontier of the Roman Empire.
...
""We were only able confidently to identify extant archaeological remains at 38 of Poidebard's 116 forts," states Professor Casana. "In addition, many of the likely Roman forts we have documented in this study have already been destroyed by recent urban or agricultural development, and countless others are under extreme threat.""
More information: Jesse Casana et al, A wall or a road? A remote sensing-based investigation of fortifications on Rome's eastern frontier, Antiquity (2023). DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2023.153
Journal information: Antiquity
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https://phys.org/news/2023-12-north-a...
"Praetorious' team used climate models and found that ocean currents were more than twice the strength they are today during the height of the last glacial maximum around 20,000 years ago due to glacial winds and lower sea levels. While not impossible to paddle against, these conditions would have made traveling by boat very difficult, Praetorius said.
However, the records also showed that much of the area was home to winter sea ice until around 15,000 years ago. As a cold-adapted people, "rather than having to paddle against this horrible glacial current, maybe they were using the sea ice as a platform," Praetorius said.
Arctic people today travel along sea ice on dog sleds and snow mobiles. Early Americans may also have used the 'sea ice highway' to get around and hunt marine mammals, slowly making their way into North America in the process, Praetorius said. The climate data suggest conditions along the coastal route may have been conducive to migration between 24,500 and 22,000 years ago and 16,400-14,800 years ago, possibly aided by the presence of winter sea ice."
More information: Paper: agu.confex.com/agu/fm23/meetin … pp.cgi/Paper/1323023
Provided by American Geophysical Union
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"In the past 20 years, there has been a revolution within DNA sequencing. Mapping entire genomes has become both easy and inexpensive, and as a result, the DNA of many species has now been mapped.
The mapped genomes of species all over the globe are freely accessible on the internet—and this is the data that the research group from Aarhus University has utilized, explains Assistant Professor Juraj Bergman, the lead researcher behind the new study.
"We've collected data from 139 large living mammals and analyzed the enormous amount of data. There are approximately 3 billion data points from each species, so it took a long time and a lot of computing power," he says.
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" "The classic arguments for the climate as an explanatory model are based on the fact that the woolly mammoth and a number of other species associated with the so-called "mammoth steppe" disappeared when the ice melted, and the habitat type disappeared," he says, and continues, "This is basically an unsatisfactory explanatory model, as the vast majority of the extinct megafauna species of the period did not live at all on the mammoth steppe."
"They lived in warm regions, such as temperate and tropical forests or savannahs. In our study, we also show a sharp decline during this period in populations of the many megafauna species that survived and come from all sorts of different regions and habitats."
The final full stop in the debate has probably yet to be set, but Jens-Christian Svenning finds it difficult to see how the arguments for the climate as an explanation can continue.
"It seems inconceivable that it is possible to come up with a climate model that explains how, across all continents and groups of large animals, there have been extinctions and continuous decline since about 50,000 years ago. And how this selective loss of megafauna has been unique for the past 66 million years despite huge climate change."
"Given the rich data we now have, it's also hard to deny that instead, it is because humans spread across the globe from Africa and subsequently grew in population.""
More information: Juraj Bergman et al, Worldwide Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene population declines in extant megafauna are associated with Homo sapiens expansion rather than climate change, Nature Communications (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-43426-5
Journal information: Nature Communications
Provided by Aarhus University
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"Researchers from the Archaeozoology Laboratory and the High Mountain Archaeology Group of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), the University of Évora (HERCULES Laboratory), the Milà i Fontanals Institution-CSIC and the General Directorate of Cultural Heritage of the Government of Aragon, have now for the first time managed to characterize the livestock practices and feeding strategies of domesticated animals in high mountain regions during the Early Neolithic, specifically in the archaeological site of Coro Trasito, located in the region of Sobrarbe, Aragon. Their research has yielded new elements to be used in the study of the complexity of neolithization processes in the Central Pyrenees.
The study conducted by the research team focused on assessing animal ecology, livestock management strategies and feeding practices implemented by the first societies settling in high mountain regions (more than 1,500 meters above sea level). To do so, the team became the first to apply to high mountain contexts a combination of analysis of stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes in bone collagen—the study of these two isotopes can be used to determine the diet and the position in the food chain of the animals—and the archaeozoological analysis of the remains of animals from that period. Thanks to this combination, researchers were able to document that management and feeding strategies differed among flocks.
The results obtained showed that flocks belonging to these first settlers were small and formed by a few number of each species: cows, goats, sheep and pigs (Bos taurus, Capra hircus, Ovis aries and Sus domesticus), and were mainly used for their meat and milk production. In addition, researchers were able to document the rise in the economic importance of pigs (Sus domesticus) during the Neolithic.
The presence in some of the cases studied of different ways of managing the feeding of animals, with access to different pastures and the possible provision of forage, mainly from surplus agricultural products, shows that livestock practices developed at the Coro Trasito site were consolidated practices at the start of the Neolithic and related to agricultural practices. The study also demonstrates how flocks were adapted to the environmental conditions of the cave."
More information: Vanessa Navarrete et al, Early husbandry practices in highland areas during the Neolithic: the case of Coro Trasito cave (Huesca, Spain), Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology (2023). DOI: 10.3389/fearc.2023.1309907
Provided by Autonomous University of Barcelona
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"A pair of historians at the University of Tübingen have found evidence that an ancient baton, thought to be a work of art created by early humans thousands of years ago, is actually a device to assist with making rope. In their study, published in the journal Science Advances, Nicholas Conard and Veerle Rots created a replica of the baton and found that it could easily be used to make rope.
...
"Prior research has shown that early humans were making rope thousands of years ago, and were living in the part of Germany where the batons were found. One of the pieces, a baton approximately 21 cm long, looked to the researchers like a modern cricket bat with four holes carved through its flattest part.
Working on a hunch, the researchers studied the baton and found wear on the edges of the holes, along with groves, indicating that something had been repeatedly pulled through them. Residue on the hole walls suggested that it was some sort of plant material.
They experimented with several materials, including nettles, willow, linden, cattail, hemp, flax and deer sinew. They found that the baton would have worked well for such a purpose.
Making rope involves twining, like braiding hair, using multiple strands. To make rope using the baton, individual strands were passed through the holes, which kept them in place. As the strands were fed through together, a person on the opposite side would twine them together, resulting in a well-formed rope."
More information: Nicholas J. Conard et al, Rope making in the Aurignacian of Central Europe more than 35,000 years ago, Science Advances (2024). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adh5217
Journal information: Science Advances
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https://phys.org/news/2024-02-stone-a...
"Excluding natural processes and a modern origin, the stone wall could only have been formed after the end of the last ice age, when the landscape was not yet flooded by the Baltic Sea.
"At this time, the entire population across northern Europe was likely below 5,000 people. One of their main food sources were herds of reindeer, which migrated seasonally through the sparsely vegetated post-glacial landscape. The wall was probably used to guide the reindeer into a bottleneck between the adjacent lakeshore and the wall, or even into the lake, where the Stone Age hunters could kill them more easily with their weapons," explains Marcel Bradtmöller from the University of Rostock.
Comparable prehistoric hunting structures have already been found in other parts of the world, for example, at the bottom of Lake Huron (Michigan) at a depth of 30 meters. Here, US archaeologists documented stone walls as well as hunting blinds constructed for hunting caribou, the North American equivalent of reindeer. The stone walls in Lake Huron and in Mecklenburg Bight share many characteristics such as a location on the flank of a topographic ridge, as well as a subparallel trending lakeshore on one side.
As the last reindeer herds disappeared from our latitudes around 11,000 years ago, when the climate became warmer and forests were spreading, the stone wall was most likely not built after this time. This would make it the oldest human structure ever discovered in the Baltic Sea."
More information: Geersen, Jacob et al, A submerged Stone Age hunting architecture from the Western Baltic Sea, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2024). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2312008121
Provided by Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde
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Fascinating! I wasn't aware of the Lake Huron example of this, right in my part of the US. Will have to read up on that!
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"Using eggshell fragments collected from 12 archaeological sites spanning roughly 1,500 years, the researchers show that chickens were widely raised in Central Asia from approximately 400 BCE to 1000 CE and were likely dispersed along the ancient Silk Road. The abundance of eggshells further suggests that the birds were laying out of season. It was this trait of prolific egg laying, the researchers argue, that made the domestic chicken so attractive to ancient peoples.
To reach these conclusions, the team collected tens of thousands of eggshell fragments from sites located along the main Central Asian corridor of the Silk Road.
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""This study showcases the potential of ZooMS to shed light on human-animal interactions in the past," says Dr. Carli Peters, researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and first author of the new paper.
The identification of these shell fragments as chickens, and their abundance throughout the sediment layers at each site, led the researchers to an important conclusion: the birds must have been laying more frequently than their wild ancestor, the red jungle fowl, which nests once per year and typically lays six eggs per clutch.
"This is the earliest evidence for the loss of seasonal egg laying yet identified in the archaeological record," says Dr. Robert Spengler, leader of the Domestication and Anthropogenic Evolution research group and principal investigator on the study. "This is an important clue for better understanding the mutualistic relationships between humans and animals that resulted in domestication."
Taken together, the new study suggests an answer to the age-old riddle of the chicken and the egg. In Central Asia, evidence suggests that the ability to lay a multitude of eggs is what made the chicken the chicken we know today—a global species of enormous economic importance."
More information: When Did the Chicken Cross the Road: Archaeological and molecular evidence for ancient chickens in Central Asia, Nature Communications (2024).
https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024...
Journal information: Nature Communications
Provided by Max Planck Society
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https://phys.org/news/2024-05-medieva...
"In the new study, the researchers studied 25 human and 12 squirrel samples to look for M. leprae at two archaeological sites in Winchester. The city was well known for its leprosarium (a hospital for people with leprosy) and connections to the fur trade. In the Middle Ages, squirrel fur was widely used to trim and line garments. Many people also kept squirrels, trapping wild squirrels as kits in the wild and raising them as pets.
The researchers sequenced and reconstructed four genomes representing medieval strains of M. leprae, including one from a red squirrel. An analysis to understand their relationships found that all of them belonged to a single branch on the M. leprae family tree. They also showed a close relationship between the squirrel strain and a newly constructed one isolated from the remains of a medieval person.
They report that the medieval squirrel strain is more closely related to human strains from medieval Winchester than to modern squirrel strains from England, indicating that the infection was circulating between people and animals in the Middle Ages in a way that hadn't been detected before.
"The history of leprosy is far more complex than previously thought," Schuenemann said. "There has been no consideration of the role that animals might have played in the transmission and spread of the disease in the past, and as such, our understanding of leprosy's history is incomplete until these hosts are considered. This finding is relevant to today as animal hosts are still not considered, even though they may be significant in terms of understanding the disease's contemporary persistence despite attempts at eradication.""
More information: Ancient Mycobacterium leprae genome reveals medieval English red squirrels as animal leprosy host, Current Biology (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.04.006.
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/...
Journal information: Current Biology
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Old words in England for stoats and weasels are fitches and vairs. The weasel is small and chestnut-red so, while not a rodent, may have looked similar enough to the red squirrel, especially to people without eyeglasses, cameras or binoculars. Main difference would be where you see the creatures.
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"Conch-shell trumpets have been found in burial contexts at Chaco Canyon, despite the nearest source of the shells being some 1,000km away. Today, these shells are used in contemporary Pueblo ritual practices, suggesting that they were also significant in ancient Chacoan society.
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"Soundshed Analysis calculates the distance a sound can travel from a point, taking into account both the type of sound and environmental conditions such as elevation and ambient noise.
In this case, the team modeled the sound of a conch from great houses at five Chacoan communities to determine whether it would reach all habitation sites within the community.
They found that if somebody blew a conch-shell trumpet from the great house at the center of all five Chacoan communities, the sound would have reached almost all of the surrounding settlements.
This suggests that ancient Puebloans may have managed their land-use and community structures around the sound of trumpets. The sound was potentially used to signal communal activities, such as religious ceremonies."
More information: Ruth M. Van Dyke et al, Seashells and sound waves: modelling soundscapes in Chacoan great-house communities, Antiquity (2024).
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journa...
Journal information: Antiquity
Provided by Antiquity
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https://gizmodo.com/lost-river-ancien...
"Thirty-one different Egyptian pyramids appear to have been built along a branch of the Nile River that dried up millennia ago, according to new research published today in Communications Earth & Environment.
The group of pyramids—which include the famous pyramids of Giza and others like the Bent Pyramid and the Step Pyramid of Djoser—now exist on a narrow strip of desert west of the Nile. They were build over a millennium, beginning about 4,700 years ago. According to the authors of the recent study, there was once a 40-mile-long (64-kilometer) branch of the Nile that extended through the now inhospitable landscape, explaining the rather odd placement of the pyramids so far from the Nile, the longest river in the world and the lifeblood of Ancient Egyptian civilization.
“Revealing this extinct Nile branch can provide a more refined idea of where ancient settlements were possibly located in relation to it and prevent them from being lost to rapid urbanization,” the team wrote. “This could improve the protection measures of Egyptian cultural heritage.”
The team identified the branch—long since filled in by silt—using satellite imagery, geophysical surveys, and sediment cores sampled from the Western Desert Plateau. They propose dubbing the ancient branch Ahramat, Arabic for “pyramids.”
The team also found that many of the pyramids they studied along the Western Desert Plateau had causeways which terminated where the Ahramat Branch ran. Thus, the team proposes that the river branch was likely used to transport construction materials for the pyramids."
https://www.nature.com/articles/s4324...
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My thinking is that when the crops failed the people had to travel further to get more alternatives, as nearby sources would be soon stripped, and they could not easily transport it all back to the city, without roads, heavy draught animals and carts, so the people started to dissipate and live in smaller groups.
https://phys.org/news/2022-01-reveals...
""When botanists study drought resistance, they're usually talking about a specific plant, or a particular ecosystem," Fedick said. "One of the reasons this project was so challenging is because we examined the dietary flora of an entire civilization—annuals, perennials, herbs, trees, domesticates, and wild species. It was a unique endeavor."
Though the researchers do not have a clear answer about why ancient Maya society unraveled, they suspect social and economic upheaval played a role.
"One thing we do know is the overly simplistic explanation of drought leading to agricultural collapse is probably not true," Fedick said.
The research also demonstrates the importance of exploiting a variety of plants to survive drought and climate change.
"Even given a series of droughts, maintaining a diversity of resilient crops would enable people, both ancient and modern, to adapt and survive," Santiago said."
More information: Scott L. Fedick et al, Large variation in availability of Maya food plant sources during ancient droughts, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2021). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2115657118
Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Provided by University of California - Riverside