Scientists extract genetic secrets from 4,000-year-old teeth to illuminate the impact of changing human diets over the centuries

Researchers at Trinity College Dublin have recovered remarkably preserved microbiomes from two teeth dating back 4,000 years, found in an Irish limestone cave. Genetic analyses of these microbiomes reveal major changes in the oral microenvironment from the Bronze Age to today. The teeth both belonged to the same male individual and also provided a snapshot of his oral health.

The study, carried out in collaboration with archaeologists from the Atlantic Technological University and University of Edinburgh, was published today in journal Molecular Biology and Evolution. The authors identified several bacteria linked to gum disease and provided the first high-quality ancient genome of Streptococcus mutans, the major culprit behind tooth decay.

While S. mutans is very common in modern mouths, it is exceptionally rare in the ancient genomic record. One reason for this may be the acid-producing nature of the species. This acid decays the tooth, but also destroys DNA and stops plaque from fossilising. While most ancient oral microbiomes are retrieved from fossilised plaque, this study targeted the tooth directly.

Another reason for the scarcity of S. mutans in ancient mouths may be the lack of favorable habitats for this sugar-loving species. An uptick of dental cavities is seen in the archaeological record after the adoption of cereal agriculture thousands of years ago, but a far more dramatic increase has occurred only in the past few hundred years when sugary foods were introduced to the masses.

The sampled teeth were part of a larger skeletal assemblage excavated from Killuragh Cave, County Limerick, by the late Peter Woodman of University College Cork. While other teeth in the cave showed advanced dental decay, no cavities were visible on the sampled teeth. However, one tooth produced an unprecedented amount of S. mutans DNA, a sign of an extreme imbalance in the oral microbial community.

"We were very surprised to see such a large abundance of S. mutans in this 4,000-year-old tooth," said Dr Lara Cassidy, an assistant professor in Trinity's School of Genetics and Microbiology, and senior author of the study. "It is a remarkably rare find and suggests this man was at a high risk of developing cavities right before his death."

The researchers also found that other streptococcal species were virtually absent from the tooth. This indicates the natural balance of the oral biofilm had been upset -- mutans had outcompeted the other streptococci leading to the pre-disease state.

The team also found evidence to support the "disappearing microbiome" hypothesis, which proposes modern microbiomes are less diverse than those of our ancestors. This is cause for concern, as biodiversity loss can impact human health. The two Bronze Age teeth produced highly divergent strains of Tannerella forsythia, a bacteria implicated in gum disease.

"These strains from a single ancient mouth were more genetically different from one another than any pair of modern strains in our dataset, despite the modern samples deriving from Europe, Japan and the USA," explained Iseult Jackson, a PhD candidate at Trinity, and first author of the study. "This represents a major loss in diversity and one that we need to understand better."

Very few full genomes from oral bacteria have been recovered prior to the Medieval era. By characterising prehistoric diversity, the authors were able to reveal dramatic changes in the oral microenvironment that have happened since.

Dr Cassidy added: "Over the last 750 years, a single lineage of T. forsythia has become dominant worldwide. This is the tell-tale sign of natural selection, where one strain rises rapidly in frequency due to some genetic advantage it holds over the others. T. forsythia strains from the industrial era onwards contain many new genes that help the bacteria colonise the mouth and cause disease.

"S. mutans has also undergone recent lineage expansions and changes in gene content related to pathogenicity. These coincide with humanity's mass consumption of sugar, although we did find that modern S. mutans populations have remained more diverse, with deep splits in the S. mutans evolutionary tree pre-dating the Killuragh genome."

The scientists believe this is driven by differences in the evolutionary mechanisms that shape genome diversity in these species.

"S. mutans is very adept at swapping genetic material between strains," said Dr Cassidy. "This means an advantageous innovation can be spread across S. mutans lineages like a new piece of tech. This ability to easily share innovations may explain why this species retains many diverse lineages without one becoming dominant and replacing all the others."

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Study reveals 'cozy domesticity' of prehistoric stilt-house dwellers in England's ancient marshland

A major report on the remains of a stilt village that was engulfed in flames almost 3,000 years ago reveals in unprecedented detail the daily lives of England's prehistoric fenlanders.

Must Farm, a late Bronze Age settlement, dates to around 850BC, with University of Cambridge archaeologists unearthing four large wooden roundhouses and a square entranceway structure -- all of which had been constructed on stilts above a slow-moving river.

The entire hamlet stood approximately two metres above the riverbed, with walkways bridging some of the main houses, and was surrounded by a two-metre-high fence of sharpened posts.

The settlement was less than a year old when it was destroyed by a catastrophic fire, with buildings and their contents collapsing into the muddy river below. The combination of charring and waterlogging led to exceptional preservation. The site has been described as "Britain's Pompeii."

Years of research conducted on thousands of artefacts from the site have now shown that early Fen folk had surprisingly comfortable lifestyles, with domestic layouts similar to modern homes, meals of "honey-glazed venison" and clothes of fine flax linen, and even a recycling bin.

The settlement-on-stilts also contained a stack of spears with shafts over three metres long, as well as a necklace with beads from as far away as Denmark and Iran, and a human skull rendered smooth by touch, perhaps a memento of a lost loved one.

The Cambridge archaeologists say the site provides a unique "blueprint" for the circular architecture, home interiors and overall domesticity of those who inhabited the swampy fenland of East Anglia some eight centuries before Romans set foot on British shores.

Full findings from the Must Farm site -- excavated by the Cambridge Archaeological Unit (CAU) in 2015-16 after its discovery on the edge of Whittlesey near Peterborough -- are published in two reports, both made available by Cambridge's McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.

"These people were confident and accomplished home-builders. They had a design that worked beautifully for an increasingly drowned landscape," said CAU's Mark Knight, report co-author and excavation director.

"While excavating the site there was a sense that its Bronze Age residents had only just left. You could almost see and smell their world, from the glint of metal tools hanging on wattled walls to the sharp milkiness of brewed porridge."

'Mirror' of ancient home interiors

The ruins of five structures were uncovered, along with walkways and fencing, but the original settlement was likely twice as big -- half the site was removed by 20th century quarrying -- with researchers saying it may have held up to sixty occupants in family units.

The river running underneath the community would have been shallow, sluggish and thick with vegetation. This cushioned the scorched remains where they fell, creating an archaeological "mirror" of what had stood above -- allowing researchers to map the layout of the structures.

One of the main roundhouses, with almost fifty square metres of floor space, appeared to have distinct activity zones comparable to rooms in a modern home.

"Conducting research on Must Farm is a bit like getting an estate agent's tour of a Bronze Age stilt house," said David Gibson, report co-author and Archaeological Manager at CAU.

Ceramic and wooden containers, including tiny cups, bowls, and large storage jars, were found in the northeast quadrant of "Structure One," the location of a kitchen. Some pots were even nested: designed to stack inside one another to save space.

Metal tools were stored along the building's eastern side, while the empty northwest area was probably reserved for sleeping. The southeast space had lots of cloth fragments, along with bobbins and loom weights. This was close to a likely entrance, where extra light would have helped with textile work.

The roundhouse's southwest quadrant was reserved for keeping lambs indoors. There was no evidence of humans dying in the fire, but several young sheep had been trapped and burnt alive.

Skeletal remains showed the lambs were three to six months old, suggesting the settlement was destroyed sometime in late summer or early autumn. Evidence that the wooden architecture was still "green" confirms construction took place around nine months to a year earlier.

Tool kits, textiles and a token of good luck

Household inventories were remarkably consistent. All the roundhouses contained a metalwork "tool kit" that included sickles (crop-harvesting blades) along with axes and curved "gouges" used to hack and chisel wood, as well as hand-held razors for cutting hair.

Most buildings had objects for making textiles, from spindle whorls to thread bobbins, although the distribution suggests that "spinning" -- the process of twisting fibres together -- was conducted in three of the roundhouses, but Structure One was where this yarn got converted to fabrics.

The textiles are the finest of this period found in Europe, with details such as "pile tufts" that would have given garments a soft, almost velvety feel, and "tubular selvedge" for neat seams and hems.

Each roundhouse roof had three layers: insulating straw topped by turf and completed with clay -- making them warm and waterproof but still well ventilated. "In a freezing winter, with winds cutting across the Fens, these roundhouses would have been pretty cosy," said CAU project archaeologist Dr Chris Wakefield.

Structure Four, a smaller square building, may also have acted as the settlement's entrance. A large wooden bucket had been kept within, containing several damaged bronze objects and worn axe-heads, waiting to be smelted down and recycled into new tools.

Encircling the footprint of each roundhouse were "middens," haloes of rubbish dumped from the stilt village above, included broken pots, butchered animal bone, and "coprolites" or fossilised faeces. Some human coprolites had parasite eggs, suggesting inhabitants struggled with intestinal worms.

One item, however, had been placed in the silt directly beneath Structure One: an intact hafted axe, perhaps a token of good fortune, or an offering to some kind of spirit on completion of the build.

'Meaty porridge'

Despite millennia in the mud, many artefacts still bore traces of daily life -- along with its sudden interruption as inhabitants abandoned their possessions to escape the blaze.

For example, a pottery bowl with the finger-marks of its maker captured in the clay was found still holding its final meal: a wheat-grain porridge mixed with animal fats (possibly goat or red deer). The wooden spatula used for stirring was resting against the inside of the bowl.

"It appears the occupants saved their meat juices to use as toppings for porridge," said Dr Chris Wakefield. "The site is providing us with hints of recipes for Bronze Age breakfasts and roast dinners."

"Chemical analyses of the bowls and jars showed traces of honey along with ruminant meats such as deer, suggesting these ingredients were combined to create a form of prehistoric honey-glazed venison."

The stilt-house dwellers even had favourite cuts of meat, often only bringing the forelegs of a boar back for roasting, for example. Preferred aquatic dishes included pike and bream.

Several small dog skulls suggest the animals were kept domestically, perhaps as pets but also to help flush out prey on a hunt. Dog coprolites show they fed on scraps from their owners' meals.

Must Farm's residents used the local woodlands -- evidence suggests within a two-mile radius -- to hunt boar and deer, graze sheep, and harvest crops such as wheat and flax as well as wood for construction. Waterways were vital for transporting all these materials.

The remains of nine log-boats, canoes hollowed from old tree trunks, were found upstream, dating from across the Bronze and into the Iron Age, included some that were contemporary to Must Farm.

"Boat journeys through reed swamps to the woodlands would have been made many times during the site's short life," said Wakefield. "In summer, that meant traversing clouds of mosquitos."

Much of what was retrieved from Must Farm were everyday items, the Bronze Age equivalent to the TV remotes and coffee mugs of our own lives. However, some items would have been precious.

A necklace of beads made from glass, amber, siltstone and shale had been lost in the fire. In fact, decorative beads were found right across the site. All but one of Must Farm's 49 glass beads came from far-flung places, including Northern and Eastern Europe, and even the Middle East.

"Such items would gradually make their way across thousands of miles in a long series of small trades," said Wakefield.

Up in flames…

The researchers say that, while the Bronze Age could be violent, and aspects of the site's structure are clearly defensive, its location may be as much to do with resources. Spears found on site, up to 3.4 metres in length, as well as swords, were as likely to be used in animal hunts as on rival groups.

A few human remains were recovered, including the skull of an adult woman polished by repeated touch -- a sign this may have been a keepsake of love rather than war.

"The cause of the fire that tore through the settlement will probably never be known," said CAU's David Gibson. "Some argue it may have come under attack, as the occupants never returned for their goods, which would have been fairly easy to retrieve from the shallow waters."

However, others think it more likely to have been an accident. If an internal fire took hold in one of the roundhouses, it would spread between the tightknit structures within minutes.

Added Gibson: "A settlement like this would have had a shelf-life of maybe a generation, and the people who built it had clearly constructed similar sites before. It may be that after the fire, they simply started again."

"There is every possibility that the remains of many more of these stilted settlements are buried across Fenland, waiting for us to find them."

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Lost tombs and quarries rediscovered on British military base in Cyprus

More than forty archaeological sites in Cyprus dating potentially as far back as the Bronze Age that were thought lost to history have been relocated by University of Leicester scientists working for the Ministry of Defence.

A small team of archaeologists from University of Leicester Archaeological Services, funded by the DIO Overseas Stewardship Project, undertook a 'walkover survey' -- a systematic surveying and recording of visible archaeological remains -- of the Eastern Sovereign Base Area at Dhekelia (ESBA) on the south coast of the island. The work, licensed by Cyprus' Department of Antiquities in Nicosia, is to inform site management by the DIO, which is the custodian of the UK and overseas Defence estate.

Dhekelia is about 30km south-east of Nicosia, and 80km north-east of the Western Sovereign Base Area (WSBA) at Akrotiri where the University of Leicester has been working since 2015.

The task of the walkover was to relocate around 60 possible archaeological sites that had been recorded in the early 1960s prior to the development of the garrison within the Dhekelia base, and the laying out of the Kingsfield Airstrip at the western end of the area.

In preparation of the survey a Geographic Information System (GIS) record was compiled that included all the known information, and from that co-ordinate points for the possible sites were exported to standard handheld GPS units. Archaeologists then visited each site and searched for the evidence that had been previously recorded. When successfully found, each site would then be photographed, GPS located, and recorded on pro forma sheets.

In total, 51 sites including 5 historic buildings were located. Some records survived for 47 of the sites, but a further four were known only from labels on a 1:25,000 scale plan. Although the dating of most of the sites is currently unknown, they are likely to span from the Bronze Age which started c.2500 BC to the Byzantine period which ended in the 12th Century AD, and to include sites from the Hellenistic period (312 -- 58 BC) and Roman periods (58 BC -- 395 AD).

Particular highlights included three coastal quarries where stone was being taken off low spits running out into the sea. One quarry had a little ramp that looked like it was used for loading slabs of quarried rock into boats tied in deep water alongside, and another had dozens of very clear circular grinding stone removals which, where immediately adjacent to each other, left behind distinct clover leaf shapes in the bed rock.

Large areas of rock cut tomb extended over several hectares in one part of the inland plateau. Most of these tombs were in a very poor state and some bore clear signs of looting in the form of adjacent mounds of earth. Many tombs have been used as convenient areas for fly tipping. One tomb, part of a substantial cemetery surrounding a monastery to the west of Xylotymbou village was being used for caging cats.

Matt Beamish from University of Leicester Archaeological Services, who led the survey, said:

"Our GIS and survey methods had worked well when used for a similar survey of the Akrotiri peninsula in 2019. Many of the sites we were planning to survey had been last visited over 20 years ago, and in many instances had been reported as no longer existing or being unfindable. On reflection this had more to do with inadequate mapping, lack of preparation and lack of satellite location technologies: we found that many of the sites could be re-found with a little bit of patience.

"There were undoubtedly problems with some of the archive information which was incomplete and had been inaccurately redrawn at some stage in the past. Some sites had clearly been lost to the subsequent development of roads and buildings."

The Dhekelia Sovereign base is around 20km wide and 7km deep and sits on the east side of Larnaca Bay. The topography is varied including a flat coastal strip meeting steep limestone cliffs and hills, with a broadly flat plateau on the interior which includes more areas of rocky outcrop and is bisected by rivers which are generally dry beds under cultivation. The coastal strip and plateau include areas of agriculture and horticulture, and areas of olive and citrus grove and scrub. In the north of the area there are large dairy and livestock farms.

Cyprus' position on Mediterranean sea routes has led to a rich and diverse cultural heritage, and it is famed for the preservation of many archaeological sites from the Bronze Age, Hellenistic/Iron Age, Roman, and Byzantine or medieval periods. At the western end of the Dhekelia area this occupation is represented in a significant archaeological landscape comprising a large Bronze Age defended hilltop settlement at Kokkinokremnos and an adjacent Iron Age hillfort at Vikla, both sitting above the Roman harbour town of Koutsopetria: all these protected sites are subject to recent research excavations. The Roman harbour is all now infilled, possibly stemming from a catastrophic tsunami event.

Much of the known archaeology across Dhekelia is funerary, and this mostly comprises rock cut tombs, some of which were built into the limestone caves (generally Hellenistic/Iron Age), and rock cut shaft graves (generally Byzantine/Roman-Medieval).

Matt Beamish added: "The survey was very successful with the identification of significant archaeological areas. We know that many more archaeological sites will exist which are not obvious to the naked eye. Much of the area has seen no systematic archaeological survey, and the application of remote sensing or aerial survey perhaps using LiDAR would enable a wider picture of previous human activity to be drawn. The information will enable the DIO to better manage the archaeological sites within the Sovereign Base Administration Area, and allow a wider understanding of Dhekelia's archaeological heritage."

Alex Sotheran, Archaeology Advisor, DIO, praised the survey and the results:

"The work carried out by Matt and the team has really improved our knowledge and understanding of the archaeology across the Dhekelia area and will allow for an improved system of management of these vital and important heritage assets going forward."

The data created during the survey has been entered into DIO's Historic Buildings, Sites and Monuments Record, which in turn is vital for helping to protect the historic environment across the Ministry of Defence's UK and overseas estate.

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Bronze Age family systems deciphered: Mainz palaeogeneticists analyse a 3,800-year-old extended family

The diversity of family systems in prehistoric societies has always fascinated scientists. A groundbreaking study by Mainz anthropologists and an international team of archaeologists now provides new insights into the origins and genetic structure of prehistoric family communities.

Researchers Jens Blöcher and Joachim Burger from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) have analysed the genomes of skeletons from an extended family from a Bronze Age necropolis in the Russian steppe. The 3,800-year-old "Nepluyevsky" burial mound was excavated several years ago and is located on the geographical border between Europe and Asia. Using statistical genomics, the family and marriage relationships of this society have now been deciphered. The study was carried out in cooperation with archaeologists from Ekaterinburg and Frankfurt a. M. and was partly financially supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Russian Science Foundation (RSCF).

The kurgan (burial mound) investigated was the grave of six brothers, their wives, children and grandchildren. The presumably oldest brother had eight children with two wives, one of whom came from the Asian steppe regions in the east. The other brothers showed no signs of polygamy and probably lived monogamously with far fewer children.

Fascinating snapshot of a prehistoric family

"The burial site provides a fascinating snapshot of a prehistoric family," explains Jens Blöcher, lead author of the study. "It is remarkable that the first-born brother apparently had a higher status and thus greater chances of reproduction. The right of the male firstborn seems familiar to us, it is known from the Old Testament, for example, but also from the aristocracy in historical Europe."

The genomic data reveal even more. Most women buried in the kurgan were immigrants. The sisters of the buried brothers, in turn, found new homes elsewhere. Joachim Burger, senior author of the study, explains: "Female marriage mobility is a common pattern that makes sense from an economic and evolutionary perspective. While one sex stays local and ensures the continuity of the family line and property, the other marries in from the outside to prevent inbreeding."

The genomic diversity of the prehistoric women was higher than that of the men

Accordingly, the Mainz population geneticists found that the genomic diversity of the prehistoric women was higher than that of the men. The women who married into the family thus came from a larger area and were not related to each other. In their new homeland, they followed their husbands into the grave. From this the authors conclude that in Nepluyevsky there was both "patrilineality", i.e. the transmission of local traditions through the male line, and "patrilocality", i.e. the place of residence of a family is the place of residence of the men.

"Archaeology shows that 3,800 years ago, the population in the southern Trans-Ural knew cattle breeding and metalworking and subsisted mainly on dairy and meat products," comments Svetlana Sharapova, archaeologist from Ekaterinburg and head of the excavation, adding, "the state of health of the family buried here must have been very poor. The average life expectancy of the women was 28 years, that of the men 36 years."

In the last generation, the use of the kurgan suddenly stopped and almost only infants and small children were found. Sharapova adds, "it is possible that the inhabitants were decimated by disease or that the remaining population went elsewhere in search of a better life."

Multiple partners and many children for the putative firstborn son

"There is a global connection between different family systems and certain forms of life-style and economy," says Blöcher. "Nevertheless, human societies are characterised by a high degree of flexibility." He adds, "in Nepluyevsky, we find evidence of a pattern of inequality typical of pastoralists: multiple partners and many children for the putative firstborn son and no or monogamous relationships for most others."

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Caribou have been using same Arctic calving grounds for 3,000 years

Caribou have been using the same Arctic calving grounds for more than 3,000 years, according to a new study by the University of Cincinnati.

Female caribou shed their antlers within days of giving birth, leaving behind a record of their annual travels across Alaska and Canada's Yukon that persists on the cold tundra for hundreds or even thousands of years. Researchers recovered antlers that have sat undisturbed on the arctic tundra since the Bronze Age.

"To walk around the landscape and pick up something that's 3,000 years old is truly amazing," said Joshua Miller, an assistant professor of geosciences at the University of Cincinnati.

He has been leading summer expeditions to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge since 2010, using rafts to navigate remote rivers to search for caribou antlers exposed on the tundra.

"We think about having to dig down into the soil to find that kind of ecological history, but on the Coastal Plain, the vegetation grows extremely slowly," Miller said. "Bones dropped by animals that lived dozens or even hundreds of generations in the past can provide really meaningful information."

The study demonstrates how important the area is for an animal that native Alaskans and Candians still depend on for sustenance, even as energy companies seek to exploit oil and gas resources in this protected area.

The Biden Administration in 2021 suspended drilling leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the largest tract of undeveloped wilderness in the United States.

"We know this region of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has been an important area for caribou for millennia," Miller said. "That should give us pause on how we think about those landscapes."

The study was published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.

Barren ground caribou undertake nature's longest overland migration, traveling as far as 800 miles each year to reach their spring calving grounds in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and Canada's Ivvavik National Park. The largest herd in this area, named for the Porcupine River, numbers in the hundreds of thousands of animals.

Scientists think caribou use these areas because they have fewer predators and offer seasonal vegetation near places where they can avoid the worst of the mosquitoes.

"The mosquitoes are horrible," Miller said. "You get swarmed -- literally covered in them. They can do significant damage to a young calf."

Whatever the reason, the antlers they leave behind provide a physical record of their epic yearly travels that researchers can unlock through isotopic analysis.

Caribou antlers, like those of elk, deer and moose, are made of fast-growing bone that the animals shed each year and regrow the following year.

"It is amazing to think that the oldest of the antlers found in our study were growing approximately the same time Homer was penning 'the Iliad' and 'the Odyssey,'" study co-author Patrick Druckenmiller said.

He is director of the University of Alaska Museum and professor of the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Eric Wald from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service also co-authored the study.

The antler surveys in the vast expanse of the Arctic refuge require meticulous logistical planning, Miller said. Small planes deposit researchers and their gear deep in the interior, where they have to be watchful for grizzly and polar bears. They pilot rafts to the Beaufort Sea, conducting a grid search of suitable caribou habitat identified in advance using aerial photography.

"We search for antlers along old river terraces, walking back and forth, covering every inch of habitat to find those ancient treasures," Miller said.

While male caribou antlers span four feet and weigh more than 20 pounds, female caribou antlers are much smaller. The antlers contain nutrients such as phosphorus and calcium that are important to plants and animals.

The dropped antlers create "nutrient sinks," which could have a profound effect on the area's vegetation. Miller said the caribou's migration serves as a nutrient "conveyor belt" that might even draw caribou back to reap the benefits of this fertilizer in a reinforcement loop.

Caribou and other mammals are known to chew on dropped antlers for their valuable minerals. This could be an important dietary supplement for new caribou moms.

"We'd like to know to what degree this conveyor belt influences why caribou are going there in the first place," Miller said. The study was supported by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Geographic Society, the National Science Foundation, the Wildlife Society and the UC Office of Research.

Miller said the Arctic is warming faster than other parts of the globe. Parts of the Arctic that were once barren tundra are sprouting new spruce forests.

Read more at Science Daily

Findings from 2,000-year-old Uluburun shipwreck reveal complex trade network

More than 2,000 years before the Titanic sunk in the North Atlantic Ocean, another famous ship wrecked in the Mediterranean Sea off the eastern shores of Uluburun -- in present-day Turkey -- carrying tons of rare metal. Since its discovery in 1982, scientists have been studying the contents of the Uluburun shipwreck to gain a better understanding of the people and political organizations that dominated the time period known as the Late

Now, a team of scientists, including Michael Frachetti, professor of archaeology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, have uncovered a surprising finding: small communities of highland pastoralists living in present-day Uzbekistan in Central Asia produced and supplied roughly one-third of the tin found aboard the ship -- tin that was en route to markets around the Mediterranean to be made into coveted bronze metal.

The research, published on November 30 in Science Advances, was made possible by advances in geochemical analyses that enabled researchers to determine with high-level certainty that some of the tin originated from a prehistoric mine in Uzbekistan, more than 2,000 miles from Haifa, where the ill-fated ship loaded its cargo.

But how could that be? During this period, the mining regions of Central Asia were occupied by small communities of highlander pastoralists -- far from a major industrial center or empire. And the terrain between the two locations -- which passes through Iran and Mesopotamia -- was rugged, which would have made it extremely difficult to pass tons of heavy metal.

Frachetti and other archaeologists and historians were enlisted to help put the puzzle pieces together. Their findings unveiled a shockingly complex supply chain that involved multiple steps to get the tin from the small mining community to the Mediterranean marketplace.

"It appears these local miners had access to vast international networks and -- through overland trade and other forms of connectivity -- were able to pass this all-important commodity all the way to the Mediterranean," Frachetti said.

"It's quite amazing to learn that a culturally diverse, multiregional and multivector system of trade underpinned Eurasian tin exchange during the Late Bronze Age."

Adding to the mystique is the fact that the mining industry appears to have been run by small-scale local communities or free laborers who negotiated this marketplace outside of the control of kings, emperors or other political organizations, Frachetti said.

"To put it into perspective, this would be the trade equivalent of the entire United States sourcing its energy needs from small backyard oil rigs in central Kansas," he said.

About the research

The idea of using tin isotopes to determine where metal in archaeological artifacts originates dates to the mid-1990s, according to Wayne Powell, professor of earth and environmental sciences at Brooklyn College and a lead author on the study. However, the technologies and methods for analysis were not precise enough to provide clear answers. Only in the last few years have scientists begun using tin isotopes to directly correlate mining sites to assemblages of metal artifacts, he said.

"Over the past couple of decades, scientists have collected information about the isotopic composition of tin ore deposits around the world, their ranges and overlaps, and the natural mechanisms by which isotopic compositions were imparted to cassiterite when it formed," Powell said. "We remain in the early stages of such study. I expect that in future years, this ore deposit database will become quite robust, like that of Pb isotopes today, and the method will be used routinely."

Aslihan K. Yener, a research affiliate at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University and a professor emerita of archaeology at the University of Chicago, was one of the early researchers who conducted lead isotope analyses. In the 1990s, Yener was part of a research team that conducted the first lead isotope analysis of the Uluburun tin. That analysis suggested that the Uluburun tin may have come from two sources -- the Kestel Mine in Turkey's Taurus Mountains and some unspecified location in central Asia.

"But this was shrugged off since the analysis was measuring trace lead and not targeting the origin of the tin," said Yener, who is a co-author of the present study.

Yener also was the first to discover tin in Turkey in the 1980s. At the time, she said the entire scholarly community was surprised that it existed there, right under their noses, where the earliest tin bronzes occurred.

Some 30 years later, researchers finally have a more definitive answer thanks to the advanced tin isotope analysis techniques: One-third of the tin aboard the Uluburun shipwreck was sourced from the Mušiston mine in Uzbekistan. The remaining two-thirds of the tin derived from the Kestel mine in ancient Anatolia, which is in present-day Turkey.

Findings offer glimpse into life 2,000-plus years ago

By 1500 B.C., bronze was the "high technology" of Eurasia, used for everything from weaponry to luxury items, tools and utensils. Bronze is primarily made from copper and tin. While copper is fairly common and can be found throughout Eurasia, tin is much rarer and only found in specific kinds of geological deposits, Frachetti said.

"Finding tin was a big problem for prehistoric states. And thus, the big question was how these major Bronze Age empires were fueling their vast demand for bronze given the lengths and pains to acquire tin as such a rare commodity. Researchers have tried to explain this for decades," Frachetti said.

The Uluburun ship yielded the world's largest Bronze Age collection of raw metals ever found -- enough copper and tin to produce 11 metric tons of bronze of the highest quality. Had it not been lost to sea, that metal would have been enough to outfit a force of almost 5,000 Bronze Age soldiers with swords, "not to mention a lot of wine jugs," Frachetti said.

"The current findings illustrate a sophisticated international trade operation that included regional operatives and socially diverse participants who produced and traded essential hard-earth commodities throughout the late Bronze Age political economy from Central Asia to the Mediterranean," Frachetti said.

Unlike the mines in Uzbekistan, which were set within a network of small-scale villages and mobile pastoralists, the mines in ancient Anatolia during the Late Bronze Age were under the control of the Hittites, an imperial global power of great threat to Ramses the Great of Egypt, Yener explained.

The findings also show that life 2,000-plus years ago was not that different from what it is today.

"With the disruptions due to COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine, we have become aware of how we are reliant on complex supply chains to maintain our economy, military and standard of living," Powell said. "This is true in prehistory as well. Kingdoms rose and fell, climatic conditions shifted and new peoples migrated across Eurasia, potentially disrupting or redistributing access to tin, which was essential for both weapons and agricultural tools.

"Using tin isotopes, we can look across each of these archaeologically evident disruptions in society and see connections were severed, maintained or redefined. We already have DNA analysis to show relational connections. Pottery, funerary practices, etc., illustrate the transmission and connectivity of ideas. Now with tin isotopes, we can document the connectivity of long-distance trade networks and their sustainability."

More clues to explore

The current research findings settle decades-old debates about the origins of the metal on the Uluburun shipwreck and Eurasian tin exchange during the Late Bronze Age. But there are still more clues to explore.

After they were mined, the metals were processed for shipping and ultimately melted into standardized shapes -- known as ingots -- for transporting. The distinct shapes of the ingots served as calling cards for traders to know from where they originated, Frachetti said.

Many of the ingots aboard the Uluburun ship were in the "oxhide" shape, which was previously believed to have originated in Cyprus. However, the current findings suggest the oxhide shape could have originated farther east. Frachetti said he and other researchers plan to continue studying the unique shapes of the ingots and how they were used in trade.

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Bronze Age women altered genetic landscape of Orkney, study finds

An international team led by researchers at the University of Huddersfield has used ancient DNA to rewrite the history of the Orkney islands to show that Orkney actually experienced large-scale immigration during the Early Bronze Age, which replaced much of the local population.

The project was a close collaboration between genetic researchers in Huddersfield and Edinburgh, led by Professor Martin Richards and Dr Ceiridwen Edwards, and archaeologists living and working on Orkney.

Orkney is world-famous for its archaeological heritage. Around 5000 years ago, during the Neolithic period when farming first took hold, it was a hugely influential cultural centre. With many superbly preserved stone dwellings, temples and megalithic monuments, and a style of ceramics that appears to have spread out across Britain and Ireland, it has even been described as "Britain's ancient capital."

Over the thousand years that followed however, as Europe moved into the Bronze Age, it has been widely viewed that somehow Orkney became left behind. Its influence dwindled and the islands became more insular. But with fewer archaeological remains to study, much less was known about this time.

By combining archaeology with the study of ancient DNA from Bronze Age human remains from the Links of Noltland site, on the remote northern island of Westray, researchers now know much more about this time than ever before, and the results have come as a great surprise to geneticists and archaeologists alike.

Firstly, despite the supposed insularity, the team has shown that Orkney experienced large-scale immigration during the Early Bronze Age, which replaced much of the local population. The new arrivals were probably the first to speak Indo-European languages, and carried genetic ancestry derived in part from pastoralists living on the steppe lands north of the Black Sea.

This mirrored what was happening in the rest of Britain and Europe in the third millennium BC. But the researchers found a fascinating difference that makes Orkney highly distinctive.

Across most of Europe, the expansion of pastoralists on the eve of the Bronze Age was typically led by men, with women being sucked into the expanding populations from local farming groups. But in Orkney the researchers found exactly the opposite. The Bronze Age newcomers were mainly women, while male lineages from the original Neolithic population survived for at least another thousand years -- something not seen anywhere else. These Neolithic lineages, however, were replaced from the Iron Age and are vanishingly rare today.

But why was Orkney so different? Dr Graeme Wilson and Hazel Moore of the Orkney-based EASE Archaeology, who excavated the Links of Noltland, argue that the answer may lie in the long-term stability and self-sufficiency of farmsteads on Orkney, which the genetic data suggests may have already been male dominated by the peak of the Neolithic. When a Europe-wide recession hit towards the end of the Neolithic, they may have been uniquely placed to weather harsher times and maintain their grip on the population as newcomers arrived.

This implies that Orkney was much less insular than has long been assumed, and that there was a protracted period of negotiation between the indigenous males and the newcomers from the south, over many generations.

"This shows that the third-millennium BC expansion across Europe was not a monolithic process but was more complex and varied from place to place," explained Dr George Foody, one of the lead researchers on the project from the University of Huddersfield.

The results have been surprising for both the archaeologists and geneticists on the team, although for different reasons: the archaeologists did not expect such large-scale immigration, whereas the geneticists did not foresee survival of the Neolithic male lineages.

The University's Director of the Evolutionary Genomics Research Centre Professor Martin Richards said: "This research shows how much we still have to learn about one of the most momentous events in European prehistory -- how the Neolithic came to an end."

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Genetic changes in Bronze Age southern Iberia

The third millennium BCE is a highly dynamic period in the prehistory of Europe and western Asia, characterized by large-scale social and political changes. In the Iberian Peninsula, the Copper Age was in full swing around 2,500 years BCE with substantial demographic growth, attested by a large diversity of settlements and fortifications, monumental funerary structures, as well as ditched mega-sites larger than 100 hectares. For reasons that are still unclear, the latter half of the millennium experienced depopulation and the abandonment of the mega-sites, fortified settlements and necropoles.

In southeastern Iberia, one of the most outstanding archaeological entities of the European Bronze Age emerged around 2,200 BCE. This so-called 'El Argar' culture, one of the first state-level societies on the European continent, was characterised by large, central hilltop settlements, distinct pottery, specialized weapons and bronze, silver and gold artefacts, alongside an intra-murial burial rite. A new study explores the relation between dynamic shifts at population scale and the major social and political changes of the third and second millennia BCE by analysing the genomes of 136 ancient Iberians, ranging from 3,000 to 1,500 BCE.

Genetic turnover and melting pot

Including published genomes from Iberia, the new study encompasses data from nearly 300 ancient individuals and focuses specifically on the Copper to Bronze Age transition around 2,200 BCE.

"While we knew that the so-called 'steppe'-related ancestry, which had spread across Europe during the third millennium BCE, eventually reached the northern Iberian Peninsula around 2,400 BCE, we were surprised to see that all prehistoric individuals from the El Argar period carried a portion of this ancestry, while the Chalcolithic individuals did not," says Max Planck researcher Wolfgang Haak, senior author and principal investigator of the study.

The genomic data reveals some of the processes underlying this genetic shift. While the bulk of the genome shows that Bronze Age individuals are a mix of local Iberian Chalcolithic ancestry and a smaller part of incoming ancestry from the European mainland, the paternally inherited Y chromosome lineages show a complete turnover, linked to the movement of steppe-related ancestry that is also visible in other parts of Europe.

The rich new data from the El Argar sites also show that these two components do not fully account for the genetic make-up of the early Bronze Age societies.

"We also found signals of ancestry that we traced to the central and eastern Mediterranean and western Asia. We cannot say exactly whether these influences arrived at the same time as the steppe-related ancestry, but it shows that it formed an integrative part of the rising El Argar societies, attesting to continued contacts to these regions," adds Vanessa Villalba-Mouco, postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute and Instituto de Biología Evolutiva.

Social implications

"Whether the genetic shift was brought about by migrating groups from North and Central Iberia or by climatic deteriorations that affected the eastern Mediterranean around 2,200 BCE is the million-dollar question," says co-PI and senior author Prof Roberto Risch from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. "It would be foolish to think that it can all be explained by a simple, one-factor model. While the temporal coincidence is striking, it is likely that many factors played a role."

One of these factors could be pandemics, such as an early form of the Plague, which has been attested to in other regions of Europe around the time. While not found directly among the tested individuals in southern Iberia, it could be a cause or driver for the movement or disappearance of other groups in the region.

"In any case, we can now conclude that the population movement starting in the eastern European steppe zones around 3,000 BCE was not a single migratory event, but required over four centuries to reach the Iberian Peninsula and another 200 years to appear in present-day Murcia and Alicante," adds Risch.

The archaeological record of the El Argar group shows a clear break with previous Chalcolithic traditions. Burial rites, for example, changed from communal to single and double burials within the building complexes. Elite burials also indicate the formation of strong social hierarchies. Testing for biological relatedness, the researchers found that males are on average more closely related to other people at the site, indicating that the group was likely patrilineally structured. Such a social organization could explain the stark reduction of the Y-lineage diversity.

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Cosmic impact destroyed a biblical city in Jordan Valley

In the Middle Bronze Age (about 3600 years ago or roughly 1650 BCE), the city of Tall el-Hammam was ascendant. Located on high ground in the southern Jordan Valley, northeast of the Dead Sea, the settlement in its time had become the largest continuously occupied Bronze Age city in the southern Levant, having hosted early civilization for a few thousand years. At that time, it was 10 times larger than Jerusalem and 5 times larger than Jericho.

"It's an incredibly culturally important area," said James Kennett, emeritus professor of earth science at the UC Santa Barbara. "Much of where the early cultural complexity of humans developed is in this general area."

A favorite site for archaeologists and biblical scholars, the mound hosts evidence of culture all the way from the Chalcolithic, or Copper Age, all compacted into layers as the highly strategic settlement was built, destroyed, and rebuilt over millennia.

But there is a 1.5-meter interval in the Middle Bronze Age II stratum that caught the interest of some researchers, for its "highly unusual" materials. In addition to the debris one would expect from destruction via warfare and earthquakes, they found pottery shards with outer surfaces melted into glass, "bubbled" mudbrick, and partially melted building material, all indications of an anomalously high-temperature event, much hotter than anything the technology of the time could produce.

"We saw evidence for temperatures greater than 2,000 degrees Celsius," said Kennett, whose research group at the time happened to have been building the case for an older cosmic airburst about 12,800 years ago that triggered major widespread burning, climatic changes and animal extinctions. The charred and melted materials at Tall el-Hammam looked familiar, and a group of researchers including impact scientist Allen West and Kennett joined Trinity Southwest University biblical scholar Philip J. Silvia's research effort to determine what happened at this city 3,650 years ago.

Their results are published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports.

Salt and Bone

"There's evidence of a large cosmic airburst, close to this city called Tall el-Hammam," Kennett said, of an explosion similar to the Tunguska Event, a roughly 12-megaton airburst that occurred in 1908, when a 56-60-meter meteor pierced the Earth's atmosphere over the Eastern Siberian Taiga.

The shock of the explosion over Tall el-Hammam was enough to level the city, flattening the palace and surrounding walls and mudbrick structures, according to the paper, and the distribution of bones indicated "extreme disarticulation and skeletal fragmentation in nearby humans."

For Kennett, further proof of the airburst was found by conducting many different kinds of analyses on soil and sediments from the critical layer. Tiny iron- and silica-rich spherules turned up in their analysis, as did melted metals.

"I think one of the main discoveries is shocked quartz. These are sand grains containing cracks that form only under very high pressure," Kennett said of one of many lines of evidence that point to a large airburst near Tall el-Hammam. "We have shocked quartz from this layer, and that means there were incredible pressures involved to shock the quartz crystals -- quartz is one of the hardest minerals; it's very hard to shock."

The airburst, according to the paper, may also explain the "anomalously high concentrations of salt" found in the destruction layer -- an average of 4% in the sediment and as high as 25% in some samples.

"The salt was thrown up due to the high impact pressures," Kennett said, of the meteor that likely fragmented upon contact with the Earth's atmosphere. "And it may be that the impact partially hit the Dead Sea, which is rich in salt." The local shores of the Dead Sea are also salt-rich so the impact may have redistributed those salt crystals far and wide -- not just at Tall el-Hammam, but also nearby Tell es-Sultan (proposed as the biblical Jericho, which also underwent violent destruction at the same time) and Tall-Nimrin (also then destroyed).

The high-salinity soil could have been responsible for the so-called "Late Bronze Age Gap," the researchers say, in which cities along the lower Jordan Valley were abandoned, dropping the population from tens of thousands to maybe a few hundred nomads. Nothing could grow in these formerly fertile grounds, forcing people to leave the area for centuries. Evidence for resettlement of Tall el-Hammam and nearby communities appears again in the Iron Age, roughly 600 years after the cities' sudden devastation in the Bronze Age.

Fire and Brimstone

Tall el-Hamman has been the focus of an ongoing debate as to whether it could be the biblical city of Sodom, one of the two cities in the Old Testament Book of Genesis that were purportedly destroyed by God for how wicked the cities and their inhabitants had become. According to the story, one denizen, Lot, is saved by two angels who instruct him not to look behind as they flee. Lot's wife, however, lingers and is turned into a pillar of salt. Meanwhile, fire and brimstone fell from the sky; multiple cities were destroyed; thick smoke rose from the fires; city inhabitants were killed and area crops were destroyed in what sounds like an eyewitness account of a cosmic impact event.

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Milk enabled massive steppe migration

The long-distance migrations of early Bronze Age pastoralists in the Eurasian steppe have captured widespread interest. But the factors behind their remarkable spread have been heavily debated by archaeologists. Now a new study in Nature provides clues regarding a critical component of the herders' lifestyle that was likely instrumental to their success: dairying.

From the Xiongnu to the Mongols, the pastoralist populations of the Eurasian steppe have long been a source of fascination. Amongst the earliest herding groups in this region were the Yamnaya, Bronze Age pastoralists who began expanding out of the Pontic-Caspian steppe more than 5000 years ago. These Bronze Age migrations resulted in gene flow across vast areas, ultimately linking pastoralist populations in Scandinavia with groups that expanded into Siberia.

Just how and why these pastoralists travelled such extraordinary distances in the Bronze Age has remained a mystery. Now a new study led by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany has revealed a critical clue and it might come as a surprise. It appears that the Bronze Age migrations coincided with a simple but important dietary shift -- the adoption of milk drinking.

The researchers drew on a humble but extraordinary source of information from the archaeological record -- they looked at ancient tartar (dental calculus) on the teeth of preserved skeletons. By carefully removing samples of the built-up calculus, and using advanced molecular methods to extract and then analyse the proteins still preserved within this resistant and protective material, the researchers were able to identify which ancient individuals likely drank milk, and which did not.

Their results surprised them. "The pattern was incredibly strong," observes study leader and palaeoproteomics specialist Dr. Shevan Wilkin, "The majority of pre-Bronze Age Eneolithic individuals we tested -- over 90% -- showed absolutely no evidence of consuming dairy. In contrast, a remarkable 94% of the Early Bronze Age individuals had clearly been milk drinkers."

The researchers realized they had uncovered a significant pattern. They then further analysed the data in order to examine what kind of milk the herders were consuming. "The differences between the milk peptides of different species are minor but critical," explains Dr. Wilkin. "They can allow us to reconstruct what species the consumed milk comes from." While most of the milk peptides pointed to species like cow, sheep and goat, which was not surprising in light of the associated archaeological remains, calculus from a couple of individuals revealed an unexpected species: horse.

"Horse domestication is a heavily debated topic in Eurasian archaeology," notes Dr. Wilkin. One site where early Central Asian milk drinking had been proposed was the 3500-year-old site of Botai in Kazakhstan. The researchers tested calculus from a couple of Botai individuals, but found no evidence of milk drinking. This fits with the idea that Przewalskii horses -- an early form of which were excavated from the site -- were not the ancestors of today's domestic horse, as shown by recent archaeogenetic study. Instead, horse domestication -- and the drinking of horse milk -- likely began about 1500 kilometers to the west in the Pontic Caspian steppe.

"Our results won't make everyone happy, but they are very clear," says Professor Nicole Boivin, senior author of the study and Director of the Department of Archaeology at the MPI Science of Human History. "We see a major transition to dairying right at the point that pastoralists began expanding eastwards." Domesticated horses likely had a role to play too. "Steppe populations were no longer just using animals for meat, but exploiting their additional properties -milking them and using them for transport, for example," states Professor Boivin.

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Genetic histories and social organization in Neolithic and Bronze Age Croatia

Present-day Croatia was an important crossroads for migrating peoples along the Danubian corridor and the Adriatic coast, linking east and west. "While this region is important for understanding population and cultural transitions in Europe, limited availability of human remains means that in-depth knowledge about the genetic ancestry and social complexity of prehistoric populations here remains sparse," says first author Suzanne Freilich, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and the University of Vienna.

To this aim, an international team of researchers set out to fill the gap. They studied two archaeological sites in eastern Croatia -- one containing predominantly Middle Neolithic burials from within the settlement site, the other a Middle Bronze Age necropolis containing cremations and inhumations -- and sequenced whole genomes of 28 individuals from these two sites. The researchers' goal was to understand both the genetic ancestry as well as social organisation within each community -- in particular, to study local residency patterns, kinship relations and to learn more about the varied burial rites observed.

Middle Neolithic settlement at Popova zemlja

Dated to around 4,700-4,300 BCE the Middle Neolithic settlement at Beli-Manastir Popova zemlja belongs to the Sopot culture. Many children, especially girls, were buried here, in particular along the walls of pit houses. "One question was whether individuals buried in the same buildings were biologically related to each other," says Suzanne Freilich.

"We found that individuals with different burial rites did not differ in their genetic ancestry, which was similar to Early Neolithic people. We also found a high degree of haplotype diversity and, despite the size of the site, no very closely related individuals," Freilich adds. This suggests that this community was part of a large, mainly exogamous population where people marry outside their kin group. Interestingly, however, the researchers also identified a few cases of endogamous mating practices, including two individuals who would have been the children of first cousins or equivalent, something rarely found in the ancient DNA record.

Middle Bronze Age necropolis at Jagodnjak-Krčevine

The second site the researchers studied was the Middle Bronze Age necropolis of Jagodnjak-Krčevine that belongs to the Transdanubian Encrusted Pottery Culture and dates to around 1,800-1,600 BCE. "This site contains burials that are broadly contemporaneous with some individuals from the Dalmatian coast, and we wanted to find out whether individuals from these different ecoregions carried similar ancestry," says Stephan Schiffels.

The researchers found that the people from Jagodnjak actually carried very distinct ancestry due to the presence of significantly more western European hunter-gatherer-related ancestry. This ancestry profile is present in a small number of other studied genomes from further north in the Carpathian Basin. These new genetic results support archaeological evidence that suggests a shared population history for these groups as well as the presence of trade and exchange networks.

"We also found that all male individuals at the site had identical Y chromosome haplotypes," says Freilich. "We identified two male first degree relatives, second degree and more distantly related males, while the one woman in our sample was unrelated. This points to a patrilocal social organisation where women leave their own home to join their husband's home." Contrary to the Middle Neolithic site at Popova zemlja, biological kinship was a factor for selection to be buried at this site. In addition the authors found evidence of rich infant graves that suggests they likely inherited their status or wealth from their families.

Filling the gap in the archaeogenetic record

This study helps to fill the gap in the archaeogenetic record for this region, characterising the diverse genetic ancestries and social organisations that were present in Neolithic and Bronze Age eastern Croatia. It highlights the heterogeneous population histories of broadly contemporaneous coastal and inland Bronze Age groups, and connections with communities further north in the Carpathian Basin. Furthermore, it sheds light on the subject of Neolithic intramural burials -- burials within a settlement -- that has been debated among archaeologists and anthropologists for some time. The authors show that at the site of Popova zemlja, this burial rite was not associated with biological kinship, but more likely represented age and sex selection related to Neolithic community belief systems.

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Bronze Age farmers gave preferential treatment to cows over domesticated sheep, goats

The movements of ancient crop and animal domesticates across prehistoric Eurasia are well-documented in the archaeological record. What is less well understood: How Bronze Age farmers and herders incorporated newly introduced domesticates -- like cows from southwestern Asia -- into their long-standing animal husbandry and culinary traditions.

New research led by archaeologists at Washington University in St. Louis shows that meat and dairy played a more significant role in human diets in Bronze Age China than previously thought. The analysis also suggests that farmers and herders tended to sheep and goats differently than they did their cows, unlike in other parts of the world -- keeping cows closer to home and feeding them the byproducts of grains that they were growing for their own consumption, like the grass stalks from millet plants.

The study published in Scientific Reports integrates new and previously published data from nine sites along the Hexi Corridor, a key region between the Gobi Desert and Tibetan Plateau that facilitated the movement of ancient crops between Central and East Asia.

Petra Vaiglova, postdoctoral research associate, and Xinyi Liu, associate professor of archaeology in Arts & Sciences, based their analysis on bone records and other isotopic data from humans, animals and plants.

"Using the method of stable isotope analysis, we looked at the diets of the local herbivores that were managed in the Bronze Age Hexi Corridor of northwestern China," Vaiglova said. "The results showed that cattle and sheep or goats were managed distinctly in the different ecological niches across the study region. We propose that this was a result of varying management choices made by the local farmers, who aimed to strike a balance between tradition and innovation.

"In previous research, this method has been applied to understanding the nature of human diets, and the role of different domesticates in it," she said. "In this paper, we switched focus to trying to understand the minutiae of animal diets -- and what that tells us about animal management in the Bronze Age."

While sheep and goats seem to have eaten naturally available vegetation by grazing in the vicinity of the villages, the scientists found evidence that cattle were both grazed and fed. The cattle bones that the researchers analyzed exhibited a higher input of plants that are more adapted to arid conditions in places where these plants contributed little to the natural vegetation. This group of crops includes millet, which was originally cultivated in Eastern Asia.

These findings suggest that cattle diets were more influenced by human provisioning and that cattle may therefore have been reared closer to the human settlements than sheep and goats.

Liu and other researchers in his laboratory at Washington University study how social and culinary systems react to novel crops and exotic domestic animals in China. His research has revealed how foreign innovations adopted in ancient Central China were transformed within existing and highly organized social and cultural systems.

"Our results suggest a similar process in the adoption and localization of cattle in the Hexi Corridor, an animal domesticated in a markedly different environment," Liu said. "In locations with limited grazing lands suitable for pasturing of cattle, people adapted the local pig-rearing economy towards cattle stall-feeding."

These conclusions resonate with modern ethnographic examples from North China, the researchers said, where cattle are more tethered to human settlements, rather than being allowed to roam on local or more distant pastures alongside sheep and goats.

Understanding past farming and dietary conditions can help us with some of the challenges we face in today's world, Liu said. Those challenges are as much environmental as social.

"In the context of a warming climate, where soil moisture is predicted to be increasingly depleted on a global scale, one can draw parallels to the Mid-Holocene conditions of northwest China," Liu said.

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On the origins of money: Ancient European hoards full of standardized bronze objects

 In the Early Bronze Age of Europe, ancient people used bronze objects as an early form of money, even going so far as to standardize the shape and weight of their currency, according to a study published January 20, 2020 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Maikel H. G. Kuijpers and Cătălin N. Popa of Leiden University, Netherlands.

Money is an important feature of modern human society. One key feature of money is standardization, but this can be difficult to identify in the archaeological record since ancient people had inexact forms of measurement compared with today. In this study, the authors assessed possible money from the Early Bronze Age of Central Europe, comparing the objects based on their perceived -- if not precise -- similarity.

The objects studied were made of bronze in shapes described as rings, ribs, and axe blades. The authors examined more than 5,000 such objects from more than 100 ancient hoards. They statistically compared the objects' weights using a psychology principle known as the Weber fraction, which quantifies the concept that, if objects are similar enough in mass, a human being weighing them by hand can't tell the difference.

They found that even though the objects' weights varied, around 70% of the rings were similar enough to have been indistinguishable by hand (averaging about 195 grams), as were subsets of the ribs and axe blades.

The authors suggest that this consistent similarity in shape and weight, along with the fact that these objects often occurred in hoards, are signs of their use as an early form of standardized currency. Later, in the Middle Bronze Age of Europe, more precise weighing tools appear in the archaeological record along with an increase in scrap bronze, pointing to a developed system of weighing.

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The aroma of distant worlds

Spices

Asian spices such as turmeric and fruits like the banana had already reached the Mediterranean more than 3000 years ago, much earlier than previously thought. A team of researchers working alongside archaeologist Philipp Stockhammer at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich (LMU) has shown that even in the Bronze Age, long-distance trade in food was already connecting distant societies.

A market in the city of Megiddo in the Levant 3700 years ago: The market traders are hawking not only wheat, millet or dates, which grow throughout the region, but also carafes of sesame oil and bowls of a bright yellow spice that has recently appeared among their wares. This is how Philipp Stockhammer imagines the bustle of the Bronze Age market in the eastern Mediterranean. Working with an international team to analyze food residues in tooth tartar, the LMU archaeologist has found evidence that people in the Levant were already eating turmeric, bananas and even soy in the Bronze and Early Iron Ages. "Exotic spices, fruits and oils from Asia had thus reached the Mediterranean several centuries, in some cases even millennia, earlier than had been previously thought," says Stockhammer. "This is the earliest direct evidence to date of turmeric, banana and soy outside of South and East Asia." It is also direct evidence that as early as the second millennium BCE there was already a flourishing long-distance trade in exotic fruits, spices and oils, which is believed to have connected South Asia and the Levant via Mesopotamia or Egypt. While substantial trade across these regions is amply documented later on, tracing the roots of this nascent globalization has proved to be a stubborn problem. The findings of this study confirm that long-distance trade in culinary goods has connected these distant societies since at least the Bronze Age. People obviously had a great interest in exotic foods from very early on.

For their analyses, Stockhammer's international team examined 16 individuals from the Megiddo and Tel Erani excavations, which are located in present-day Israel. The region in the southern Levant served as an important bridge between the Mediterranean, Asia and Egypt in the 2nd millennium BCE. The aim of the research was to investigate the cuisines of Bronze Age Levantine populations by analyzing traces of food remnants, including ancient proteins and plant microfossils, that have remained preserved in human dental calculus over thousands of years.

The human mouth is full of bacteria, which continually petrify and form calculus. Tiny food particles become entrapped and preserved in the growing calculus, and it is these minute remnants that can now be accessed for scientific research thanks to cutting-edge methods. For the purposes of their analysis, the researchers took samples from a variety of individuals at the Bronze Age site of Megiddo and the Early Iron Age site of Tel Erani. They analyzed which food proteins and plant residues were preserved in the calculus on their teeth. "This enables us to find traces of what a person ate," says Stockhammer. "Anyone who does not practice good dental hygiene will still be telling us archaeologists what they have been eating thousands of years from now!"

Palaeoproteomics is the name of this growing new field of research. The method could develop into a standard procedure in archaeology, or so the researchers hope. "Our high-resolution study of ancient proteins and plant residues from human dental calculus is the first of its kind to study the cuisines of the ancient Near East," says Christina Warinner, a molecular archaeologist at Harvard University and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and co-senior author of the article. "Our research demonstrates the great potential of these methods to detect foods that otherwise leave few archaeological traces. Dental calculus is such a valuable source of information about the lives of ancient peoples."

"Our approach breaks new scientific ground," explains LMU biochemist and lead author Ashley Scott. That is because assigning individual protein remnants to specific foodstuffs is no small task. Beyond the painstaking work of identification, the protein itself must also survive for thousands of years. "Interestingly, we find that allergy-associated proteins appear to be the most stable in human calculus," says Scott, a finding she believes may be due to the known thermostability of many allergens. For instance, the researchers were able to detect wheat via wheat gluten proteins, says Stockhammer. The team was then able to independently confirm the presence of wheat using a type of plant microfossil known as phytoliths. Phytoliths were also used to identify millet and date palm in the Levant during the Bronze and Iron Ages, but phytoliths are not abundant or even present in many foods, which is why the new protein findings are so groundbreaking -- paleoproteomics enables the identification of foods that have left few other traces, such as sesame. Sesame proteins were identified in dental calculus from both Megiddo and Tel Erani. "This suggests that sesame had become a staple food in the Levant by the 2nd millennium BCE," says Stockhammer.

Two additional protein findings are particularly remarkable, explains Stockhammer. In one individual's dental calculus from Megiddo, turmeric and soy proteins were found, while in another individual from Tel Erani banana proteins were identified. All three foods are likely to have reached the Levant via South Asia. Bananas were originally domesticated in Southeast Asia, where they had been used since the 5th millennium BCE, and they arrived in West Africa 4000 years later, but little is known about their intervening trade or use. "Our analyses thus provide crucial information on the spread of the banana around the world. No archaeological or written evidence had previously suggested such an early spread into the Mediterranean region," says Stockhammer, although the sudden appearance of banana in West Africa just a few centuries later has hinted that such a trade might have existed. "I find it spectacular that food was exchanged over long distances at such an early point in history."

Stockhammer notes that they cannot rule out the possibility, of course, that one of the individuals spent part of their life in South Asia and consumed the corresponding food only while they were there. Even if the extent to which spices, oils and fruits were imported is not yet known, there is much to indicate that trade was indeed taking place, since there is also other evidence of exotic spices in the Eastern Mediterranean -- Pharaoh Ramses II was buried with peppercorns from India in 1213 BCE. They were found in his nose.

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New mathematical method shows how climate change led to fall of ancient civilization

 A Rochester Institute of Technology researcher developed a mathematical method that shows climate change likely caused the rise and fall of an ancient civilization. In an article recently featured in the journal Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science, Nishant Malik, assistant professor in RIT's School of Mathematical Sciences, outlined the new technique he developed and showed how shifting monsoon patterns led to the demise of the Indus Valley Civilization, a Bronze Age civilization contemporary to Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt.

Malik developed a method to study paleoclimate time series, sets of data that tell us about past climates using indirect observations. For example, by measuring the presence of a particular isotope in stalagmites from a cave in South Asia, scientists were able to develop a record of monsoon rainfall in the region for the past 5,700 years. But as Malik notes, studying paleoclimate time series poses several problems that make it challenging to analyze them with mathematical tools typically used to understand climate.

"Usually the data we get when analyzing paleoclimate is a short time series with noise and uncertainty in it," said Malik. "As far as mathematics and climate is concerned, the tool we use very often in understanding climate and weather is dynamical systems. But dynamical systems theory is harder to apply to paleoclimate data. This new method can find transitions in the most challenging time series, including paleoclimate, which are short, have some amount of uncertainty and have noise in them."

There are several theories about why the Indus Valley Civilization declined -- including invasion by nomadic Indo-Aryans and earthquakes -- but climate change appears to be the most likely scenario. But until Malik applied his hybrid approach -- rooted in dynamical systems but also draws on methods from the fields of machine learning and information theory -- there was no mathematical proof. His analysis showed there was a major shift in monsoon patterns just before the dawn of this civilization and that the pattern reversed course right before it declined, indicating it was in fact climate change that caused the fall.

Malik said he hopes the method will allow scientists to develop more automated methods of finding transitions in paleoclimate data and leads to additional important historical discoveries. The full text of the study is published in Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science.

From Science Daily

Archaeologists on a 5,000-year-old egg hunt

Ostrich with eggs

An international team of specialists, led by the University of Bristol, is closer to cracking a 5,000-year-old mystery surrounding the ancient trade and production of decorated ostrich eggs.

Long before Fabergé, ornate ostrich eggs were highly prized by the elites of Mediterranean civilisations during the Bronze and Iron Ages, but to date little has been known about the complex supply chain behind these luxury goods.

Examining ostrich eggs from the British Museum's collection, the team, led by Bristol's Dr Tamar Hodos, were able to reveal secrets about their origin and how and where they were made. Using state-of-the-art scanning electron microscopy, Dr Caroline Cartwright, Senior Scientist at the British Museum was able to investigate the eggs' chemical makeup to pinpoint their origins and study minute marks that reveal how they were made.

In the study, published today in the journal Antiquity, the researchers describe for the first time the surprisingly complex system behind ostrich egg production. This includes evidence about where the ostrich eggs were sourced, if the ostriches were captive or wild, and how the manufacture methods can be related to techniques and materials used by artisans in specific areas.

"The entire system of decorated ostrich egg production was much more complicated than we had imagined! We also found evidence to suggest the ancient world was much more interconnected than previously thought," said Dr Hodos, Reader in Mediterranean Archaeology in Bristol's School of Arts.

"Mediterranean ostriches were indigenous to the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa. Using a variety of isotopic indicators, we were able to distinguish eggs laid in different climatic zones (cooler, wetter and hotter, drier). What was most surprising to us was that eggs from both zones were found at sites in the other zone, suggestive of more extensive trade routes."

Dr Hodos and colleagues believe eggs were taken from wild birds' nests despite evidence of ostriches being kept in captivity during this period. This was no ordinary egg-hunt -- ostriches can be extremely dangerous so there was a tremendous risk involved in taking eggs from wild birds.

"We also found eggs require time to dry before the shell can be carved and therefore require safe storage. This has economic implications, since storage necessitates a long-term investment and this, combined with the risk involved, would add to an egg's luxury value," said Dr Hodos.

The study is part of an ongoing research project into ancient luxury goods, Globalising Luxuries.

Dr Hodos explains: "We are assessing not only how ancient luxuries were produced but also how they were used by different peoples. These questions are incredibly important for our own society today, in which the same object may have different social or symbolic meanings for different groups. Such knowledge and understanding helps foster tolerance and mutual respect in a multi-cultural society. If we can understand these mechanisms in the past, for which we have long-term outcomes in terms of social development, we can use this knowledge to better inform our own society in a number of ways."

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Archaeologists find Bronze Age tombs lined with gold

Archaeologists with the University of Cincinnati have discovered two Bronze Age tombs containing a trove of engraved jewelry and artifacts that promise to unlock secrets about life in ancient Greece.

The UC archaeologists announced the discovery Tuesday in Greece.

Jack Davis and Sharon Stocker, archaeologists in UC's classics department, found the two beehive-shaped tombs in Pylos, Greece, last year while investigating the area around the grave of an individual they have called the "Griffin Warrior," a Greek man whose final resting place they discovered nearby in 2015.

Like the Griffin Warrior's tomb, the princely tombs overlooking the Mediterranean Sea also contained a wealth of cultural artifacts and delicate jewelry that could help historians fill in gaps in our knowledge of early Greek civilization.

UC's team spent more than 18 months excavating and documenting the find. The tombs were littered with flakes of gold leaf that once papered the walls.

"Like with the Griffin Warrior grave, by the end of the first week we knew we had something that was really important," said Stocker, who supervised the excavation.

"It soon became clear to us that lightning had struck again," said Davis, head of UC's classics department.

The Griffin Warrior is named for the mythological creature -- part eagle, part lion -- engraved on an ivory plaque in his tomb, which also contained armor, weaponry and gold jewelry. Among the priceless objects of art was an agate sealstone depicting mortal combat with such fine detail that Archaeology magazine hailed it as a "Bronze Age masterpiece."

Artifacts found in the princely tombs tell similar stories about life along the Mediterranean 3,500 years ago, Davis said. A gold ring depicted two bulls flanked by sheaves of grain, identified as barley by a paleobotanist who consulted on the project.

"It's an interesting scene of animal husbandry -- cattle mixed with grain production. It's the foundation of agriculture," Davis said. "As far as we know, it's the only representation of grain in the art of Crete or Minoan civilization."

Like the grave of the Griffin Warrior, the two family tombs contained artwork emblazoned with mythological creatures. An agate sealstone featured two lion-like creatures called genii standing upright on clawed feet. They carry a serving vase and an incense burner, a tribute for the altar before them featuring a sprouting sapling between horns of consecration, Stocker said.

Above the genii is a 16-pointed star. The same 16-pointed star also appears on a bronze and gold artifact in the grave, she said.

"It's rare. There aren't many 16-pointed stars in Mycenaean iconography. The fact that we have two objects with 16 points in two different media (agate and gold) is noteworthy," Stocker said.

The genius motif appears elsewhere in the East during this period, she said.

"One problem is we don't have any writing from the Minoan or Mycenaean time that talks of their religion or explains the importance of their symbols," Stocker said.

UC's team also found a gold pendant featuring the likeness of the Egyptian goddess Hathor.

"Its discovery is particularly interesting in light of the role she played in Egypt as protectress of the dead," Davis said.

The identity of the Griffin Warrior is a matter for speculation. Stocker said the combination of armor, weapons and jewelry found in his tomb strongly indicate he had military and religious authority, likely as the king known in later Mycenaean times as a wanax.

Likewise, the princely tombs paint a picture of accumulated wealth and status, she said. They contained amber from the Baltic, amethyst from Egypt, imported carnelian and lots of gold. The tombs sit on a scenic vista overlooking the Mediterranean Sea on the spot where the Palace of Nestor would later rise and fall to ruins.

"I think these are probably people who were very sophisticated for their time," she said. "They have come out of a place in history where there were few luxury items and imported goods. And all of a sudden at the time of the first tholos tombs, luxury items appear in Greece.

"You have this explosion of wealth. People are vying for power," she said. "It's the formative years that will give rise to the Classic Age of Greece."

The antiquities provide evidence that coastal Pylos was once an important destination for commerce and trade.

"If you look at a map, Pylos is a remote area now. You have to cross mountains to get here. Until recently, it hasn't even been on the tourist path," Stocker said. "But if you're coming by sea, the location makes more sense. It's on the way to Italy. What we're learning is that it's a much more central and important place on the Bronze Age trade route."

The princely tombs sit close to the palace of Nestor, a ruler mentioned in Homer's famous works "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey." The palace was discovered in 1939 by the late UC Classics professor Carl Blegen. Blegen had wanted to excavate in the 1950s in the field where Davis and Stocker found the new tombs but could not get permission from the property owner to expand his investigation. The tombs would have to wait years for another UC team to make the startling discovery hidden beneath its grape vines.

Excavating the site was particularly arduous. With the excavation season looming, delays in procuring the site forced researchers to postpone plans to study the site first with ground-penetrating radar. Instead, Stocker and Davis relied on their experience and intuition to focus on one disturbed area.

"There were noticeable concentrations of rocks on the surface once we got rid of the vegetation," she said.

Those turned out to be the exposed covers of deep tombs, one plunging nearly 15 feet. The tombs were protected from the elements and potential thieves by an estimated 40,000 stones the size of watermelons.

The boulders had sat undisturbed for millennia where they had fallen when the domes of the tombs collapsed. And now 3,500 years later, UC's team had to remove each stone individually.

"It was like going back to the Mycenaean Period. They had placed them by hand in the walls of the tombs and we were taking them out by hand," Stocker said. "It was a lot of work."

At every step of the excavation, the researchers used photogrammetry and digital mapping to document the location and orientation of objects in the tomb. This is especially valuable because of the great number of artifacts that were recovered, Davis said.

"We can see all levels as we excavated them and relate them one to the other in three dimensions," he said. UC's team will continue working at Pylos for at least the next two years while they and other researchers around the world unravel mysteries contained in the artifacts.

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Archaeology: Social inequality in Bronze Age households

Archaeogenetic analyses provide new insights into social inequality 4000 years ago: nuclear families lived together with foreign women and individuals from lower social classes in the same household.

Social inequality already existed in southern Germany 4000 years ago, even within one household, a new study published in the journal Science finds. Archaeological and archaeogenetic analyses of Bronze Age cemeteries in the Lech Valley, near Augsburg, show that families of biologically related persons with higher status lived together with unrelated women who came from afar and also had a high status, according to their grave goods. In addition, a larger number of local but clearly less well-off individuals were found in the same cemeteries, which were small gravesites associated with single homesteads. The researchers conclude that social inequality was already part of households structures in that time and region. Whether the less well-off individuals were servants or slaves can only be speculated upon.

In Central Europe, the Bronze Age covers the period from 2200 to 800 BCE. At that time people acquired the ability to cast bronze. This knowledge led to an early globalization, since the raw materials had to be transported across Europe. In an earlier study, the current team had shown that, 4000 years ago, the majority of women in the Lech Valley came from abroad and may have played a decisive role in the transfer of knowledge. Supraregional networks were apparently fostered by marriages and institutionalized forms of mobility.

The current archaeological-scientific project was situated at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and led by Philipp Stockhammer from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich together with Johannes Krause and Alissa Mittnik from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena and the University of Tübingen. The researchers attempted to investigate the effects of this mobility and other concurrent changes. The excavations south of Augsburg, which took place at the sites of Bronze Age homestead farms and their associated graveyards, enabled archaeologists to zoom into the Bronze Age in unprecedented resolution in order to investigate how the transition from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age affected the households of that time. "Wealth was correlated with either biological kinship or foreign origin. The nuclear family passed on their property and status over generations. But at every farm we also found poorly equipped people of local origin," says Philipp Stockhammer, Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology at LMU Munich. This finding suggests a complex social structure of households, as is also known from Classical Greece and Rome. In Roman times, slaves were also part of the family unit, but had a different social status. However, these people in the Lech Valley lived over 1500 years earlier. "This shows how long the history of social inequality in family structures goes back in time," Stockhammer continues.

Stable social structures over 700 years

It was already known that the first larger hierarchical social structures evolved in the Bronze Age. The findings of the current study were surprising in that social differences existed within a single household and were maintained over generations.

Grave goods can reveal the social status of the deceased to archaeologists. In the Lech Valley, weapons and elaborate jewelry were only found in the graves of closely related family members and women who came into the family from long distances, up to several hundred kilometers away. Other unrelated individuals of local origin were found in the same cemeteries without such high-status grave goods.

This study also succeeded in reconstructing for the first time family trees from prehistoric cemeteries spanning four to five generations. Surprisingly, however, these only included the male lineages. The female descendants apparently left the farms where they reached adulthood. The mothers of the sons, on the other hand, were all women who had moved in from afar. "Archaeogenetics provides us with a completely new view of the past. Until recently, we would not have thought it possible to examine marriage rules, social structure and social inequality in prehistory," says Johannes Krause, Director of the Department of Archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for Human History.

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Hoard of the rings: Unusual rings are a novel type of Bronze Age cereal-based product

Wheat

Strange ring-shaped objects in a Bronze Age hillfort site represent a unique form of cereal-based product, according to a study published June 5, 2019 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Andreas G. Heiss of the Austrian Archaeological Institute (ÖAW-ÖAI) and colleagues.

Agricultural practices are well known in the archaeological record, but less understood is how food was produced and prepared by ancient cultures. In this study, Heiss and colleagues describe unusual cereal-derived rings from the Late Bronze Age site of Stillfried an der March in Austria. Between 900-1000BCE, this settlement was a center of grain storage, and archaeological materials have been excavated from around 100 pits interpreted as grain storage pits.

This study focuses on the fragmentary charred remains of three ring-shaped objects, each around three centimeters across. Analysis confirms that they are made of dough derived from barley and wheat. The authors were able to determine that the dough was made from fine quality flour and then most likely shaped from wet cereal mixture and dried without baking. This time-consuming preparation process differs from other foods known from the site, leading the authors to suggest that these cereal rings may not have been made for eating.

These rings also bear a striking resemblance to clay rings interpreted as loom weights found in the same pit and may have been designed to imitate them. The unusual context of these cereal rings and the care that went into making them, suggests they may have been created for some unknown ritual purpose, thus expanding the list of ways the cultures of this time period are known to have used cereal products. Since such remains are scarce, the authors suggest that future studies sample more intensely for similar plant-based products that may typically be overlooked.

Heiss adds: "Prehistoric bakers produced so much more than just bread. A Late Bronze Age "odd" deposit from central European site Stillfried (Austria) yielded dough rings comparable to Italian tarallini, discovered together with a larger number of clay loom weights, likewise ring-shaped -- resulting in new insights into the material culture of food, symbolism, and diversity of dishes."

From Science Daily