Younger Dryas comet impact encoded in Göbekli Tepe?

Fascinating if true.

Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry, Vol. 17, No 1, (2017), pp. 233-250


DECODING GÖBEKLI TEPE WITH ARCHAEOASTRONOMY: WHAT DOES THE FOX SAY? 

Martin B. Sweatman* and Dimitrios Tsikritsis

We have interpreted much of the symbolism of Göbekli Tepe in terms of astronomical events. By matching low-relief carvings on some of the pillars at Göbekli Tepe to star asterisms we find compelling evidence that the famous ‘Vulture Stone’ is a date stamp for 10950 BC ± 250 yrs, which corresponds closely to the proposed Younger Dryas event, estimated at 10890 BC. We also find evidence that a key function of Göbekli Tepe was to observe meteor showers and record cometary encounters. Indeed, the people of Göbekli Tepe appear to have had a special interest in the Taurid meteor stream, the same meteor stream that is proposed as responsible for the Younger-Dryas event. Is Göbekli Tepe the ‘smoking gun’ for the Younger-Dryas cometary encounter, and hence for coherent catastrophism?

Link (pdf)

37,000 year old skull from Malaysia related to indigenous people of Borneo

Front. Ecol. Evol., 27 June 2016 | http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2016.00075

Deep Skull from Niah Cave and the Pleistocene Peopling of Southeast Asia

Darren Curnoe et al.

The Deep Skull from Niah Cave in Sarawak (Malaysia) is the oldest anatomically modern human recovered from island Southeast Asia. For more than 50 years its relevance to tracing the prehistory of the region has been controversial. The most widely held view, originating with Brothwell's 1960 description and analysis, is that the Niah individual is related to Indigenous Australians. Here we undertake a new assessment of the Deep Skull and consider its bearing on this question. In doing so, we provide a new and comprehensive description of the cranium including a reassessment of its ontogenetic age, sex, morphology, and affinities. We conclude that this individual was most likely to have been of advanced age and female, rather than an adolescent male as originally proposed. The morphological evidence strongly suggests that the Deep Skull samples the earliest modern humans to have settled Borneo, most likely originating on mainland East Asia. We also show that the affinities of the specimen are most likely to be with the contemporary indigenous people of Borneo, although, similarities to the population sometimes referred to as Philippine Negritos cannot be excluded. Finally, our research suggests that the widely supported “two-layer” hypothesis for the Pleistocene peopling of East/Southeast Asia is unlikely to apply to the earliest inhabitants of Borneo, in-line with the picture emerging from genetic studies of the contemporary people from the region.

Link

Periods of human activity in Chauvet-Pont d'Arc cave

PNAS DOI: doi: 10.1073/pnas.1523158113

A high-precision chronological model for the decorated Upper Paleolithic cave of Chauvet-Pont d’Arc, Ardèche, France

Anita Quiles et al.

Radiocarbon dates for the ancient drawings in the Chauvet-Pont d’Arc Cave revealed ages much older than expected. These early ages and nature of this Paleolithic art make this United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) site indisputably unique. A large, multidisciplinary dating program has recently mapped the anthropological evolution associated with the cave. More than 350 dates (by 14C, U-Th, TL and 36Cl) were obtained over the last 15 y. They include 259 radiocarbon dates, mainly related to the rock art and human activity in the cave. We present here more than 80 previously unpublished dates. All of the dates were integrated into a high-precision Bayesian model based on archaeological evidence to securely reconstruct the complete history of the Chauvet-Pont d’Arc Cave on an absolute timescale. It shows that there were two distinct periods of human activity in the cave, one from 37 to 33,500 y ago, and the other from 31 to 28,000 y ago. Cave bears also took refuge in the cave until 33,000 y ago.

Link

Nubian assemblages from the Negev

Nubian assemblages from the Levant are quite important because they provide an intermediate link (along land routes) between those from Africa and Arabia. It's also more difficult now to consider the Arabian finds as a limited event without broader implications about modern human dispersals. From the paper:

Mapping the earliest dated sites that contain a Nubian component does not permit an unequivocal identification of a region of origin for the Nubian Technology.

Quaternary International doi:10.1016/j.quaint.2016.02.008

“Diffusion with modifications”: Nubian assemblages in the central Negev highlands of Israel and their implications for Middle Paleolithic inter-regional interactions

Mae Goder-Goldberger, Natalia Gubenko, Erella Hovers

Nubian Levallois cores, now known from sites in eastern Africa, the Nile Valley and Arabia, have been used as a material culture marker for Upper Pleistocene dispersals of hominins out of Africa. The Levantine corridor, being the only land route connecting Africa to Eurasia, has been viewed as a possible dispersal route. We report here on lithic assemblages from the Negev highlands of Israel that contain both Levallois centripetal and Nubian-type cores. Wetter conditions over the Sahara and Negev deserts during MIS 6a–5e provided a generally continuous environmental corridor into the Levant that enabled the dispersal of hominin groups bearing the Nubian variant of prepared core technologies. The Negev assemblages draw renewed attention to the place of the Levant as one of the dispersal routes out of Africa during the Late Pleistocene and could suggest that processes of human dispersals and cultural diffusion resulted in the spread of Nubian technology across eastern Africa, the western Sahara and the Nile Valley, the southern Levant and Arabia.

Link

Zhiren cave human remains: 116-106 ka old

Quaternary International doi:10.1016/j.quaint.2015.12.088

The age of human remains and associated fauna from Zhiren Cave in Guangxi, southern China

Yanjun Cai et al.

Zhiren Cave in southern China is an important site for the study of the origin and the environmental background of early modern humans. The combination of Elephas kiangnanensis, Elephas maximus, and Megatapirus augustus, indicates an early representative of the typical Asian elephant fauna. Previous U-series dating of flowstone calcite has pinpointed an upper age limit for the fossils of about 100 ka. In order to achieve a better comprehension of the chronology of the modern human and contemporaneous faunal assemblage, paleomagnetic, stratigraphic, and optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating methods have been applied to the cave sediments. Paleomagnetic analyses reveal that there is a reversed polarity excursion below the fossiliferous layer. This excursion can be regarded as the Blake excursion event, given the U-series ages of the overlying flowstone calcite, the OSL measurements, the virtual geomagnetic pole (VGP) path of the excursion, the two reverse polarity zones within this excursion event, and the characteristic of the fauna assemblage. The human remains and mammalian fauna assemblage can be bracketed to 116–106 ka. Application of OSL dating leads to erroneous ages, largely due to the uncertainty associated with the estimation on the dose rates.

Link

Middle (not Upper) Paleolithic hobbits

Nature (2016) doi:10.1038/nature17179

Revised stratigraphy and chronology for Homo floresiensis at Liang Bua in Indonesia

Thomas Sutikna, Matthew W. Tocheri, Michael J. Morwood, E. Wahyu Saptomo, Jatmiko, Rokus Due Awe, Sri Wasisto, Kira E. Westaway, Maxime Aubert, Bo Li, Jian-xin Zhao, Michael Storey, Brent V. Alloway, Mike W. Morley, Hanneke J. M. Meijer, Gerrit D. van den Bergh, Rainer Grün, Anthony Dosseto, Adam Brumm, William L. Jungers & Richard G. Roberts

Homo floresiensis, a primitive hominin species discovered in Late Pleistocene sediments at Liang Bua (Flores, Indonesia)1, 2, 3, has generated wide interest and scientific debate. A major reason this taxon is controversial is because the H. floresiensis-bearing deposits, which include associated stone artefacts2, 3, 4 and remains of other extinct endemic fauna5, 6, were dated to between about 95 and 12 thousand calendar years (kyr) ago2, 3, 7. These ages suggested that H. floresiensis survived until long after modern humans reached Australia by ~50 kyr ago8, 9, 10. Here we report new stratigraphic and chronological evidence from Liang Bua that does not support the ages inferred previously for the H. floresiensis holotype (LB1), ~18 thousand calibrated radiocarbon years before present (kyr cal. BP), or the time of last appearance of this species (about 17 or 13–11 kyr cal. BP)1, 2, 3, 7, 11. Instead, the skeletal remains of H. floresiensis and the deposits containing them are dated to between about 100 and 60 kyr ago, whereas stone artefacts attributable to this species range from about 190 to 50 kyr in age. Whether H. floresiensis survived after 50 kyr ago—potentially encountering modern humans on Flores or other hominins dispersing through southeast Asia, such as Denisovans12, 13—is an open question.

Link

Humans in the central Siberian Arctic ~45,000 years ago

The lack of such northerly sites prior to 45,000 years ago makes it quite likely that this mammoth kill was made by modern humans (it would be quite a coincidence if it was made by Neandertals at the same time as the expansionary Homo sapiens make their appearance all over the rest of Eurasia). If this is right, it's quite remarkable that by the mid to late 40,000s, modern humans were at ease from the equator to the arctic and from Europe to the remotest parts of Asia.

Science 15 Jan 2016:
Vol. 351, Issue 6270, pp. 260-263

Early human presence in the Arctic: Evidence from 45,000-year-old mammoth remains

Vladimir V. Pitulko, Alexei N. Tikhonov et al.

Archaeological evidence for human dispersal through northern Eurasia before 40,000 years ago is rare. In west Siberia, the northernmost find of that age is located at 57°N. Elsewhere, the earliest presence of humans in the Arctic is commonly thought to be circa 35,000 to 30,000 years before the present. A mammoth kill site in the central Siberian Arctic, dated to 45,000 years before the present, expands the populated area to almost 72°N. The advancement of mammoth hunting probably allowed people to survive and spread widely across northernmost Arctic Siberia.

Link

Mesolithic monolith from Sicilian Channel

Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports Volume 3, September 2015, Pages 398–407

A submerged monolith in the Sicilian Channel (central Mediterranean Sea): Evidence for Mesolithic human activity

Emanuele Lodolo, Zvi Ben-Avraham

The ancient geography of the Mediterranean Basin was profoundly changed by the increase in sea level following the Last Glacial Maximum. This global event has led to the retreat of the coastlines, especially in lowland areas and shallow shelves, such as the Sicilian Channel. The NW sector of this shelf, known as Adventure Plateau, is studded by isolated shoals mostly composed of Late Miocene carbonate rocks and by some volcanic edifices. These shoals, until at least the Early Holocene, formed an archipelago of several islands separated by stretches of extremely shallow sea. One of these submerged features – the Pantelleria Vecchia Bank – located 60 km south of Sicily, has been extensively surveyed using geophysical and geological methods. It is composed of two main shoals, connected seaward by a rectilinear ridge which encloses an embayment. Here we present morphological evidence, underwater observations, and results of petrographic analysis of a man-made, 12 m long monolith resting on the sea-floor of the embayment at a water depth of 40 m. It is broken into two parts, and has three regular holes: one at its end which passes through from part to part, the others in two of its sides. The monolith is composed of calcirudites of Late Pleistocene age, as determined from radiocarbon measurements conducted on several shell fragments extracted from the rock samples. The same age and composition characterize the metre-size blocks forming the rectilinear ridge. The rest of the rocks composing the shoals are mostly Tortonian limestones–sandstones, as revealed by their fossil content. Extrapolating ages from the local sea level curve, we infer that seawater inundated the inner lands at 9350 ± 200 year B.P., the upper limit which can be reasonably taken for the site abandonment. This discovery provides evidence for a significant Mesolithic human activity in the Sicilian Channel region.

Link

Modern humans, not Neandertals made the Proto-Aurignacian

Science DOI: 10.1126/science.aaa2773

The makers of the Protoaurignacian and implications for Neandertal extinction

S. Benazzi et al.

The Protoaurignacian culture is pivotal to the debate about the timing of the arrival of modern humans in Western Europe and the demise of Neandertals. However, which group is responsible for this culture remains uncertain. We investigated dental remains associated with the Protoaurignacian. The lower deciduous incisor from Riparo Bombrini is modern human, based on its morphology. The upper deciduous incisor from Grotta di Fumane contains ancient mitochondrial DNA of a modern human type. These teeth are the oldest human remains in an Aurignacian-related archeological context, confirming that by 41,000 calendar years before the present, modern humans bearing Protoaurignacian culture spread into Southern Europe. Because the last Neandertals date to 41,030 to 39,260 calendar years before the present, we suggest that the Protoaurignacian triggered the demise of Neandertals in this area.

Link

Neandertal flutes debunked

Royal Society Open Science DOI: 10.1098/rsos.140022

‘Neanderthal bone flutes’: simply products of Ice Age spotted hyena scavenging activities on cave bear cubs in European cave bear dens

Cajus G. Diedrich

Punctured extinct cave bear femora were misidentified in southeastern Europe (Hungary/Slovenia) as ‘Palaeolithic bone flutes’ and the ‘oldest Neanderthal instruments’. These are not instruments, nor human made, but products of the most important cave bear scavengers of Europe, hyenas. Late Middle to Late Pleistocene (Mousterian to Gravettian) Ice Age spotted hyenas of Europe occupied mainly cave entrances as dens (communal/cub raising den types), but went deeper for scavenging into cave bear dens, or used in a few cases branches/diagonal shafts (i.e. prey storage den type). In most of those dens, about 20% of adult to 80% of bear cub remains have large carnivore damage. Hyenas left bones in repeating similar tooth mark and crush damage stages, demonstrating a butchering/bone cracking strategy. The femora of subadult cave bears are intermediate in damage patterns, compared to the adult ones, which were fully crushed to pieces. Hyenas produced round–oval puncture marks in cub femora only by the bone-crushing premolar teeth of both upper and lower jaw. The punctures/tooth impact marks are often present on both sides of the shaft of cave bear cub femora and are simply a result of non-breakage of the slightly calcified shaft compacta. All stages of femur puncturing to crushing are demonstrated herein, especially on a large cave bear population from a German cave bear den.

Link

Strong (?) linguistic and archaeological evidence for steppe Indo-Europeans

In a new paper in Annual Review of Linguistics, David Anthony and Don Ringe make the archaeological and linguistic case for the steppe IE homeland hypothesis. It is very useful to see the evidence presented concisely in this way. Of course, I don't think that the evidence for the steppe IE hypothesis is "so strong" as it is said to be in the paper's abstract.

The authors first discuss the phylogeny of IE languages:

It seems clear that the ancestor of the Anatolian subgroup (which includes Hittite) separated from the other dialects of PIE first, so from a cladistic point of view Anatolian is half the IE family (e.g., Jasanoff 2003). Within the non-Anatolian half, it appears that the ancestor of the Tocharian subgroup (whose attested languages were spoken in Xinjiang, today in western China, until approximately the tenth century ce) separated from the other dialects before the latter had diverged much (e.g., Winter 1998, Ringe 2000). It follows that an item inherited by two or more of the daughter subgroups can be reconstructed for “early” PIE only if it is attested in at least one Anatolian language and at least one non-Anatolian language, and such an item can be reconstructed for the ancestor of the non-Anatolian subgroups only if it is attested in one or both of the Tocharian languages and in some other IE language. 

This doesn't seem to be evidence for the steppe hypothesis, but rather for the Anatolian one. The authors hypothesis a pre-4000BC Out-of-Steppe migration into the Balkans (migration 1 left), but that takes you only into the Balkans and not into all the places in Anatolia where IE languages were spoken historically (right). The hypothesis that pre-4000BC Proto-Anatolians migrated from the steppe must bridge quite a lot of ground to reach the historical Anatolians of the 2nd and 1st millennium BC. It must also explain that the physical anthropological change in Anatolia in the Chalcolithic and the Bronze Age is associated with migration of brachycephals which seems incompatible with movements from either the Copper Age Balkans or the Pontic-Caspian steppe that were occupied by gracile and robust dolicho-mesocephals respectively. Migration 1 is of course possible but it is hardly a better explanation for the first-order split of Anatolian vs. post-Anatolian Indo-European than expansions from the Neolithic "womb of nations" that included Anatolia. Arrows 1 and 2 do harmonize with the proposed linguistic phylogeny. But, why would steppe Indo-Europeans first migrate southwest, then east, and then west? What was the cause of this particular sequence of migrations (which is invoked to harmonize the the linguistic evidence)? I am perfectly willing to consider linguistic replacement in Anatolia (it happened at least twice in recorded history, first with Greek and then with Turkish), but the case is not particularly strong that it happened from a pre-4000BC Out-of-Steppe movement via the eastern Balkans. As for the Tocharians, their recorded language of the 1st millennium AD is 4ky removed from movement 2 to the Altai, so even if future discoveries convincingly prove this movement, the yawning gap of 4 thousand years will remain. My analysis of modern Uygurs shows that the Caucasoid element in the Turkic inhabitants of Eastern Turkestan (which presumably includes the Indo-European element) is complex, and perfectly compatible with a non-steppe, but rather West Asian ultimate origin of Tocharians.

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The authors next discuss the wheel vocabulary (left). The idea is that wheeled vehicles weren't known when farmers colonized Europe, so if PIE has terminology for wheeled vehicles, then it has to be later. I don't find these arguments convincing, because words change meanings, and PIE doesn't have a word for wheeled vehicle, but for a variety of its components, each of which might have meant something else originally.

But, even if one concedes wheeled vehicles, it's still the case that neither Anatolian nor Tocharian has a repertoire of many terms for wheeled vehicles. So, all the wheel vocabulary proves (if one accepts it at all) is that post-Anatolian or even post-Tocharian languages had wheeled vehicles. This then provides a chronological constraint to the spread of post-Anatolian (or post-Tocharian) IE languages after the invention of wheeled vehicles, but tells us absolutely nothing about where they spread from (and hence the steppe hypothesis) but only when they spread. Thus, the wheel vocabulary is consistent with a whole number of theories that propose a spread of IE languages after the invention of wheeled vehicles and provides no special support for the steppe hypothesis over others.

The authors next discuss the lexical borrowings into Proto-Uralic and Proto-Finno-Ugrian. But, this only shows that early Uralic and Finno-Ugrian speakers came into contact with early Indo-Europeans, not that Indo-Europeans originated near Uralic and Finno-Ugrian speakers. Moreover, the authors also mention that PIE shows evidence of contacts with Proto-Kartvelian speakers. By the same line of argument, the PIE homeland should be close to Georgia where Proto-Kartvelian languages were presumably spoken. Indeed, Uralic languages are very widely spoken from Europe to eastern Siberia and the Uralic geographical constraint is much weaker than the Kartvelian one, as there are many parts of Eurasia (including the Pontic-Caspian steppe) that Uralic languages may have been spoken of, but a very small part of Eurasia (the southern Caucasus and northeastern Anatolia) for which any evidence of Kartvelians exists. The authors suggest that a steppe PIE explains both Proto-Uralic and Proto-Kartvelian borrowings as the steppe is between presumable speakers of these two language families. True, but Northeast and Northwest Caucasian speakers lie between Proto-Kartvelians and the steppe. A PIE origin on the steppe must bypass the NW/NE Caucasian speakers to bring Indo-Europeans in contact with Kartvelians, and a PIE origin in highland West Asia must bypass the same to bring them into contact with Uralic speakers. In sum, I don't see at all how the evidence from lexical borrowings favors the steppe hypothesis strongly.

The authors next discuss the archaeological implications of placing the homeland on the steppe and discuss how it may have been carried out. I continue to think that the spread of metallurgy is the most obvious candidate for an enabling factor. Having the capacity to build and trade metal objects, or kill people with metal weapons gives one obvious advantages that are unquestionable in every circumstance in the way that flocks of cattle and sheep, horses, and wheeled vehicles are not. Not only Indo-Europeans but also Semitic speakers may have been enabled by metallurgy to spread their languages. Neither Indo-Europeans nor Semites may have been master metallurgists, but metallurgical progress enabled language spread just as other technological innovations (e.g., stirrups, firearms, ocean-worthy boats) did in more recent history.

The authors then criticize past work on phylogenetic modeling of languages and end their article with this sentence:

Work currently in progress by the team of Chang, Hall, Cathcart, and Garrett promises to fill that gap.

An article by these authors is listed in the journal Language website, albeit without the actual text of the article yet:

Ancestry-constrained phylogenetic analysis supports the Indo-European steppe hypothesis 

Will Chang, Chundra Cathcart, David Hall and Andrew Garrett, University of California, Berkeley 

Discussion of Indo-European origins and dispersal focuses on two hypotheses. Qualitative evidence from reconstructed vocabulary and correlations with archaeological data suggest that Indo-European languages originated in the Pontic-Caspian steppe and spread together with cultural innovations associated with pastoralism, beginning c. 6500–5500 BP. An alternative hypothesis, according to which Indo-European languages spread with the diffusion of farming from Anatolia, beginning c. 9500–8000 BP, is supported by statistical phylogenetic and phylogeographic analyses of lexical traits. The time and place of the Indo-European ancestor language therefore remain disputed. Here we present a phylogenetic analysis in which ancestry constraints permit more accurate inference of rates of change, based on observed changes between ancient or medieval languages and their modern descendants, and we show that the result strongly supports the steppe hypothesis. Positing ancestry constraints also reveals that homoplasy is common in lexical traits, contrary to the assumptions of previous work. We show that lexical traits undergo recurrent evolution due to recurring patterns of semantic and morphological change.

It's not clear what the article itself shows. If this is simply a criticism of the "old" dates of the first PIE split proposed by Gray/Atkinson and Bouckaert et al., then this does not really support the steppe hypothesis uniquely, but rather argues against the Neolithic Anatolian one. However, there are many hypotheses other than these two (including my Bronze Age expansion of Indo-European languages hypothesis from West Asia which is somewhat related to that of Stanislav Grigoriev) that can accommodate a later split of PIE.

To conclude, I think that archaeology and linguistics have failed to make a convincing case for steppe Proto-Indo-Europeans. It is certainly a respectable and popular theory but the evidence for it is hardly "so strong" as to create serious problems for other hypotheses. Hopefully, archaeogenetics will succeed where archaeology and linguistics (despite their valiant efforts) have failed.

Annual Review of Linguistics Vol. 1: 199-219 (Volume publication date January 2015) DOI: 10.1146/annurev-linguist-030514-124812

David W. Anthony1 and Don Ringe2

The Indo-European Homeland from Linguistic and Archaeological Perspectives

Archaeological evidence and linguistic evidence converge in support of an origin of Indo-European languages on the Pontic-Caspian steppes around 4,000 years BCE. The evidence is so strong that arguments in support of other hypotheses should be reexamined.

Link

Tomb II at Vergina belonged to Philip II and a possible Scythian wife

Remains of Alexander the Great's Father Confirmed Found

A team of Greek researchers has confirmed that bones found in a two-chambered royal tomb at Vergina, a town some 100 miles away from Amphipolis's mysterious burial mound, indeed belong to the Macedonian King Philip II, Alexander the Great's father. 

The anthropological investigation examined 350 bones and fragments found in two larnakes, or caskets, of the tomb. It uncovered pathologies, activity markers and trauma that helped identify the tomb's occupants.

Along with the cremated remains of Philip II, the burial, commonly known as Tomb II, also contained the bones of a woman warrior, possibly the daughter of the Skythian King Athea, Theodore Antikas, head of the Art-Anthropological research team of the Vergina excavation, told Discovery News.

~40 thousand year old cave art from Indonesia

The BBC website has some nice pictures of it.

Nature 514, 223–227 (09 October 2014) doi:10.1038/nature13422

Pleistocene cave art from Sulawesi, Indonesia

M. Aubert et al.

Archaeologists have long been puzzled by the appearance in Europe ~40–35 thousand years (kyr) ago of a rich corpus of sophisticated artworks, including parietal art (that is, paintings, drawings and engravings on immobile rock surfaces)1, 2 and portable art (for example, carved figurines)3, 4, and the absence or scarcity of equivalent, well-dated evidence elsewhere, especially along early human migration routes in South Asia and the Far East, including Wallacea and Australia5, 6, 7, 8, where modern humans (Homo sapiens) were established by 50 kyr ago9, 10. Here, using uranium-series dating of coralloid speleothems directly associated with 12 human hand stencils and two figurative animal depictions from seven cave sites in the Maros karsts of Sulawesi, we show that rock art traditions on this Indonesian island are at least compatible in age with the oldest European art11. The earliest dated image from Maros, with a minimum age of 39.9 kyr, is now the oldest known hand stencil in the world. In addition, a painting of a babirusa (‘pig-deer’) made at least 35.4 kyr ago is among the earliest dated figurative depictions worldwide, if not the earliest one. Among the implications, it can now be demonstrated that humans were producing rock art by ~40 kyr ago at opposite ends of the Pleistocene Eurasian world.

Link

43,500-year old Aurignacian north of the Alps

PNAS doi: 10.1073/pnas.1412201111

Early modern human settlement of Europe north of the Alps occurred 43,500 years ago in a cold steppe-type environment

Philip R. Nigst et al.

The first settlement of Europe by modern humans is thought to have occurred between 50,000 and 40,000 calendar years ago (cal B.P.). In Europe, modern human remains of this time period are scarce and often are not associated with archaeology or originate from old excavations with no contextual information. Hence, the behavior of the first modern humans in Europe is still unknown. Aurignacian assemblages—demonstrably made by modern humans—are commonly used as proxies for the presence of fully behaviorally and anatomically modern humans. The site of Willendorf II (Austria) is well known for its Early Upper Paleolithic horizons, which are among the oldest in Europe. However, their age and attribution to the Aurignacian remain an issue of debate. Here, we show that archaeological horizon 3 (AH 3) consists of faunal remains and Early Aurignacian lithic artifacts. By using stratigraphic, paleoenvironmental, and chronological data, AH 3 is ascribed to the onset of Greenland Interstadial 11, around 43,500 cal B.P., and thus is older than any other Aurignacian assemblage. Furthermore, the AH 3 assemblage overlaps with the latest directly radiocarbon-dated Neanderthal remains, suggesting that Neanderthal and modern human presence overlapped in Europe for some millennia, possibly at rather close geographical range. Most importantly, for the first time to our knowledge, we have a high-resolution environmental context for an Early Aurignacian site in Central Europe, demonstrating an early appearance of behaviorally modern humans in a medium-cold steppe-type environment with some boreal trees along valleys around 43,500 cal B.P.

Link

Levallois technology in Nor Geghi 1, Armenia

From the paper:

Empirical evidence supports the contention that Levallois technology is an inherent property of the Acheulian that evolves out of the existing, but previously separate technological systems of façonnage and débitage (7, 35), and shows that Acheulian bifacial technology and Levallois technology are homologous, reflecting an ancestor-descendant relationship (36). Rather than a “technical breakthrough” that spread from a single point of origin, Levallois technology resulted from the gradual synthesis of stone knapping behaviors shared among hominins in Africa and those indigenous to the Acheulian dispersal area in Eurasia (Fig. 1). Consequently, the development of Levallois technology within Late Acheulian contexts represents instances of technological convergence.

Science 26 September 2014: Vol. 345 no. 6204 pp. 1609-1613 DOI: 10.1126/science.1256484

Early Levallois technology and the Lower to Middle Paleolithic transition in the Southern Caucasus 

D. S. Adler

ABSTRACT The Lower to Middle Paleolithic transition (~400,000 to 200,000 years ago) is marked by technical, behavioral, and anatomical changes among hominin populations throughout Africa and Eurasia. The replacement of bifacial stone tools, such as handaxes, by tools made on flakes detached from Levallois cores documents the most important conceptual shift in stone tool production strategies since the advent of bifacial technology more than one million years earlier and has been argued to result from the expansion of archaic Homo sapiens out of Africa. Our data from Nor Geghi 1, Armenia, record the earliest synchronic use of bifacial and Levallois technology outside Africa and are consistent with the hypothesis that this transition occurred independently within geographically dispersed, technologically precocious hominin populations with a shared technological ancestry.

Link

ESHE 2014 abstracts

The abstracts for the European Society for the study of Human Evolution meeting that just took place are available in this PDF.

An archaeological scenario for Out of Arabia

Jeffrey Rose and Anthony Marks have a preprint in which he details an archaeological scenario for the emergence of the Emiran (arguably the best candidate for the ur-Upper Paleolithic at the moment) from Arabian progenitors who themselves had Northeast African Nubian Levallois progenitors. I proposed Out of Arabia a few years ago and followed research suggestive of such a trajectory of modern humans in various posts under the Out of Arabia label.

In a nutshell, it seems to me that the 50kya OoAfrica model is wrong, falsified by (i) the dating of Neandertal adixture (which precedes it and could only have happened outside of Africa), (ii) the dating of human mtDNA and NRY trees in numerous papers that show a split that precedes 50kya. This in itself proves that the Upper Paleolithic (which is attested in the post-50kya period and rapidly spreads across Eurasia in a genetic Big Bang of expansion leading to the full disappearance of Neandertals by ~40kya) must have local Eurasian origins rather than being an import from Africa.

If UP is not linked to the Out-of-Africa event, then two questions arise: (i) how did the UP arise in Eurasia, and (ii) when did the Out-of-Africa event take place? The increasing adoption of a "slow mutation rate", the discovery of a potential ~100kya layer of ancestry separating Europeans from East Asians, and, on the archaeology side, the proliferation of evidence against the "coastal migration route" all hint in OoAfrica taking place much earlier than the UP revolution in answer to question (ii).  Indeed, one of the few stumbling blocks of a much earlier Out-of-Africa (the date of L3~70kya) may actually be falling, if it turns out that African L3 is nested within Eurasian M+N and not vice versa. The new preprint by Rose snf Marks helps answer question (i) by proposing an archaeological scenario that derives the UP of the Levant from the MP of Arabia.

From the paper:

In sum, the tool assemblages of the early Emiran include a combination of both classic UP tool types and MP Levallois points; it cannot be accurately characterized as fully UP, rather, an amalgamation of MP and UP forms. Viewed solely within a Levantine context, the technological and typological patterning of the early Emiran might suggest it derived from local innovation without significant external demographic input. 

... 

So, with no clear cut antecedents in the Levant, do the three Emiran technological traits that have no deep Levantine ancestry (i.e., bidirectional core preparation, the use of cresting, and the presence of lateral modification on Levallois points), have  demonstrable origins elsewhere? Conversely, do those deeply rooted Levantine characteristics of the Emiran (i.e., elongated Levallois point production and UP tool  manufacture) have comparable analogues in adjacent areas? 

...  

Given these technological and typological considerations, we find no direct relationship between any northeast African MIS 5 industry and the early Emiran. The African data do suggest that the Emiran preferential bidirectional Levallois point production strategy ultimately arose in northeast Africa during late MIS 6. This reduction strategy became increasingly widespread during MIS 5, where it spread as far south as the Ethiopian Rift and east into the Arabian Peninsula. This wide distribution suggests extensive cultural contact, either direct or indirect, along the Nile Valley and across the Red Sea during the Last Interglacial, when climatic conditions were optimal. 

...  

By MIS 5.3 (~ 100 ka), perhaps, even as early as the Last Interglacial, the African Nubian Complex was widespread in Arabia, from the Yemeni Hadramawt to the eastern edge of the Nejd Plateau in southern Oman. Additional manifestations of this technocomplex have been found in the Rub' al Khali, central Saudi Arabia, and the Al Jawf basin of northern Saudi Arabia, less than 300 km southeast of ‘Ain Difla. Given the Nilotic origin of the Nubian Complex, its presence in Arabia may be firmly understood as a huntergatherer range expansion out of northeast Africa.  

...  

The techno-typological patterns we have observed point to an origin of the Emiran that was neither wholly rooted in the Levant nor the result of a complete demographic replacement from groups expanding out of Africa; rather, the Emiran combines elements of the Nubian Levallois system with typological elements from the southern Levantine Mousterian. This scenario envisions a zone stretching across the interface of northwestern Arabia and the southern Levant, where the territories of Levantine and Arabian huntergatherer populations overlapped during MIS 5. Bilateral exchange over time resulted in the incorporation of an Afro-Arabian core reduction strategy with a Levantine toolmaking tradition that extends back to the Early Mousterian. 

...  

African Nubian Complex toolmakers, at least, were modern humans. AMH specimens have been documented in North Africa from 150 ka onward (Smith et al., 2007; Hublin and McPherron, 2012), while no other species has yet been found there. An AMH child burial was excavated from an extraction pit associated with Activity Phase III at Taramsa Hill 1 (Vermeersch et al., 1998; Van Peer et al., 2010), with a terminus post quem of ca. 70 ka. Given the technological similarity of the Classic Dhofar Nubian and the Late Nubian Complex of the Middle Nile Valley in Egypt, as well as the fact that there is no evidence for prior MP human occupation in southern Oman, it is reasonable to associate the distribution of Nubian Complex sites with a population of AMHs spread across northeast Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. The presence of Nubian Levallois technology in southern Arabia and the Horn of Africa (Clark, 1954; Kurashina, 1978; Clark, 1988; Beyin, 2013), as well as northern Arabia and in the Red Sea hills of Egypt, suggests that early human groups traveled to and from Africa via both the Arabian and Levantine Corridors.

It is unfortunate that Arabia is so poor (to wholly deficient?) in ancient human remains from this critical period. Nonetheless, it makes sense that if modern humans were present in Northeast Africa in association with Nubian Complex tools, they would be the ones who carried them to Arabia. The presence of AMH in the Levant (associated with Mousterian tools) was often dismissed until recently as the Out-of-Africa that failed, partly because the Shkul/Qafzeh hominins were the only pre-UP modern humans in Eurasia (making their extinction plausible) and partly because of the widespread view that Out-of-Africa happened ~70-50kya (which by definition would imply that the Mount Carmel hominins weren't the Out-of-Africa.

However, if AMH were also present in Arabia during the MP it is much more difficult to argue for extinction of Eurasian modern humans and later replacement by a "late" Out-of-Africa event: this would imply that both the Levantine and Arabian humans would disappear. Moreover, the genetics no longer requires a late Out-of-Africa event and the UP is no longer plausibly concurrent with the OoAfrica event. In short, a quite simple explanation is that one group of AMH (from Arabia) mixed with another group of AMH (from the Levant) and the UP arose in this population. The latter group (from the Levant) lived in proximity to Neandertals and thus the evidence for Neandertal admixture in non-Africans is easily explained (no need to invoke unattested Neandertals admixing with "coastal route" migrating humans).

"Out of Arabia" and the Middle-Upper Palaeolithic transition in the southern Levant 

Jeffrey I. Rose, Anthony E. Marks

Beginning some 50 thousand years ago, a technological transition spread across the Near East and into Eurasia, in the most general terms characterized by a shift from preferential, prepared core reduction systems to the serial production of elongated points via opposed platform cores. The earliest known occurrence of such a technological shift is the Emiran Industry, whose earliest manifestations are found in the southern Levant. The cultural and demographic source(s) of this industry, however, remain unresolved. Looking to archaeogenetic research, the emerging picture indicates a major dispersal of our species out of Africa between 100 and 50 thousand years ago. Ancient DNA evidence points to low levels of admixture between Neanderthal and these pioneering modern human populations, which some suggest occurred in the Near East between 60 and 40 thousand years ago. These propositions underscore the significance of the Emiran and beg a reassessment of its origins. In this paper, we ask whether the Emiran was a local development, a cultural/demographic replacement, or the fusion of indigenous and exogenous lithic traditions. Our analysis considers the techno-typological features of the early Emiran in relation to late Middle Palaeolithic and contemporaneous assemblages from adjacent territories in Northeast Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, in order to identify overlapping cultural features and potential antecedents. Parsimonious with the archaeogenetic scenario of admixture, the Emiran seems to represent a fusion of local southern Levantine Mousterian typological elements with the Afro-Arabian Nubian Levallois reduction strategy. We conclude that the Emiran is primarily rooted in the Early Nubian Complex of the Nile Valley, which spread into the Arabian Peninsula during the Last Interglacial and developed at the interface of these two contextual areas between 100 and 50 thousand years ago.

Link

Amphipolis caryatid

The constant stream of discoveries from the Amphipolis tomb are fascinating. It is not often that one sees archaeology reported almost in "real time".

It is clear that a tomb with a 500m perimeter from the last quarter of the 4th c. BC (i) was built for someone very important, and (ii) someone that is in the history books. 

Unfortunately, such a huge monument would be sure to have attracted attention even in antiquity and it's possible that it was robbed; the intact tomb of Philip II in Vergina (where more tombs in the royal necropolis have recently been discovered) is, by comparison, much more modest, which may have contributed to its lucky fate. Even if the tomb was robbed, the non-movable art from the site by itself would make it an amazing discovery from the ancient world.

Perhaps one day non-cremated remains from a Macedonian Argead royal will be tested for ancient DNA. In the Peloponnese, the institution of kingship waned in power and so the tombs of the descendants of the kings of Argos or Sparta might be indistinguishable from those of their Dorian compatriots. Finding the lineage of Hercules may seem like science fiction at the moment, but ancient DNA keeps revealing amazing new things about the past, so one can always hope!

Dairy farming transition ~2,500 years BC in the far north of Europe

Proceedings of the Royal Society B doi: 10.1098/rspb.2014.0819

Neolithic dairy farming at the extreme of agriculture in northern Europe

Lucy J. E. Cramp et al.

The conventional ‘Neolithic package’ comprised animals and plants originally domesticated in the Near East. As farming spread on a generally northwest trajectory across Europe, early pastoralists would have been faced with the challenge of making farming viable in regions in which the organisms were poorly adapted to providing optimal yields or even surviving. Hence, it has long been debated whether Neolithic economies were ever established at the modern limits of agriculture. Here, we examine food residues in pottery, testing a hypothesis that Neolithic farming was practiced beyond the 60th parallel north. Our findings, based on diagnostic biomarker lipids and δ13C values of preserved fatty acids, reveal a transition at ca 2500 BC from the exploitation of aquatic organisms to processing of ruminant products, specifically milk, confirming farming was practiced at high latitudes. Combining this with genetic, environmental and archaeological information, we demonstrate the origins of dairying probably accompanied an incoming, genetically distinct, population successfully establishing this new subsistence ‘package’.

Link

Wine cup of Pericles found

Wine cup used by Pericles found in grave north of Athens

Experts are "99 per cent" sure that the cup was used by the Athenian statesman, as one of the other names listed, Ariphron, is that of Pericles' elder brother.

"The name Ariphron is extremely rare," Angelos Matthaiou, secretary of the Greek Epigraphic Society, told the newspaper.

"Having it listed above that of Pericles makes us 99 per cent sure that these are the two brothers," he said.

Finding the cup of Pericles is cool, but finding his actual tomb would be even cooler. Thanks to Pausanias and other ancient observers, the location and identity of many of the tombs of ancient prominent Athenians is known.