̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - stone age

Canterbury suburbs were home to some of Britain’s earliest humans

ta385 — Wed, 22 Jun 2022 06:00:00 +0000

Archaeological discoveries made on the outskirts of Canterbury, England, confirm the presence of early humans in southern Britain between 560,000 and 620,000 years ago, making it one of the earliest known Palaeolithic sites in northern Europe.

Baltic hunter-gatherers adopted farming without influence of mass migration, ancient DNA suggests

fpjl2 — Thu, 02 Feb 2017 17:18:30 +0000

New research indicates that Baltic hunter-gatherers were not swamped by migrations of early agriculturalists from the Middle East, as was the case for the rest of central and western Europe. Instead, these people probably acquired knowledge of farming and ceramics by sharing cultures and ideas rather than genes with outside communities.

Scientists extracted ancient DNA from a number of archaeological remains discovered in Latvia and the Ukraine, which were between 5,000 and 8,000 years old. These samples spanned the Neolithic period, which was the dawn of agriculture in Europe, when people moved from a mobile hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a settled way of life based on food production.

We know through previous research that large numbers of early farmers from the Levant (the Near East) – driven by the success of their technological innovations such as crops and pottery – had expanded to the peripheral parts of Europe by the end of the Neolithic and largely replaced hunter-gatherer populations.

However, the new study, published today in the journal Current Biology, shows that the Levantine farmers did not contribute to hunter-gatherers in the Baltic as they did in Central and Western Europe.

̽��ֱ��research team, which includes scientists from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and Trinity College Dublin, say their findings instead suggest that the Baltic hunter-gatherers learned these skills through communication and cultural exchange with outsiders.

̽��ֱ��findings feed into debates around the ‘Neolithic package’ – the cluster of technologies such as domesticated livestock, cultivated cereals and ceramics, which revolutionised human existence across Europe during the late Stone Age.

Advances in ancient DNA work have revealed that this ‘package’ was spread through Central and Western Europe by migration and interbreeding: the Levant and later Anatolian farmers mixing with and essentially replacing the hunter-gatherers.

But the new work suggests migration was not a ‘universal driver’ across Europe for this way of life. In the Baltic region, archaeology shows that the technologies of the ‘package’ did develop – albeit less rapidly – even though the analyses show that the genetics of these populations remained the same as those of the hunter-gatherers throughout the Neolithic.

Andrea Manica, one of the study’s senior authors from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, said: “Almost all ancient DNA research up to now has suggested that technologies such as agriculture spread through people migrating and settling in new areas.”

“However, in the Baltic, we find a very different picture, as there are no genetic traces of the farmers from the Levant and Anatolia who transmitted agriculture across the rest of Europe.”

“ ̽��ֱ��findings suggest that indigenous hunter-gatherers adopted Neolithic ways of life through trade and contact, rather than being settled by external communities. Migrations are not the only model for technology acquisition in European prehistory.”

̽��ֱ��researchers analysed eight ancient genomes – six from Latvia and two from Ukraine – that spanned a timeframe of three and a half thousand years (between 8,300 and 4,800 years ago). This enabled them to start plotting the genetic history of Baltic inhabitants during the Neolithic.

DNA was extracted from the petrous area of skulls that had been recovered by archaeologists from some of the region’s richest Stone Age cemeteries. ̽��ֱ��petrous, at the base of the skull, is one of the densest bones in the body, and a prime location for DNA that has suffered the least contamination over millennia.

While the sequenced genomes showed no trace of the Levant farmer influence, one of the Latvian samples did reveal genetic influence from a different external source – one that the scientists say could be a migration from the Pontic Steppe in the east. ̽��ֱ��timing (5-7,000 years ago) fits with previous research estimating the earliest Slavic languages.

Researcher Eppie Jones, from Trinity College Dublin and the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, was the lead author of the study. She said: “There are two major theories on the spread of Indo-European languages, the most widely spoken language family in the world. One is that they came from the Anatolia with the agriculturalists; another that they developed in the Steppes and spread at the start of the Bronze Age.

“That we see no farmer-related genetic input, yet we do find this Steppe-related component, suggests that at least the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family originated in the Steppe grasslands of the East, which would bring later migrations of Bronze Age horse riders.”

̽��ֱ��researchers point out that the time scales seen in Baltic archaeology are also very distinct to the rest of Europe, with a much more drawn-out and piecemeal uptake of Neolithic technologies, rather than the complete ‘package’ that arrives with migrations to take most of Europe by storm.

Andrea Manica added: “Our evidence of genetic continuity in the Baltic, coupled with the archaeological record showing a prolonged adoption of Neolithic technologies, would suggest the existence of trade networks with farming communities largely independent of interbreeding.

“It seems the hunter-gatherers of the Baltic likely acquired bits of the Neolithic package slowly over time through a ‘cultural diffusion’ of communication and trade, as there is no sign of the migratory wave that brought farming to the rest of Europe during this time.

“ ̽��ֱ��Baltic hunter-gatherer genome remains remarkably untouched until the great migrations of the Bronze Age sweep in from the East.”

Ancient DNA analyses show that – unlike elsewhere in Europe – farmers from the Near East did not overtake hunter-gatherer populations in the Baltic. The findings also suggest that the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family originated in the Steppe grasslands of the East.

̽��ֱ��Baltic hunter-gatherer genome remains remarkably untouched until the great migrations of the Bronze Age sweep in from the East

Andrea Manica

Valters Grivins

̽��ֱ��shores of Lake Burtnieks in Latvia, near where the human remains were discovered from which ancient DNA was extracted for this study.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Saharan 'carpet of tools' is the earliest known man-made landscape

fpjl2 — Wed, 11 Mar 2015 16:29:13 +0000

A new intensive survey of the Messak Settafet escarpment, a massive outcrop of sandstone in the middle of the Saharan desert, has shown that stone tools occur “ubiquitously” across the entire landscape: averaging 75 artefacts per square metre, or 75 million per square kilometre.

Researchers say the vast ‘carpet’ of stone-age tools – extracted from and discarded onto the escarpment over hundreds of thousands of years – is the earliest known example of an entire landscape being modified by hominins: the group of creatures that include us and our ancestral species.

̽��ֱ��Messak Settafet runs a total length of 350 km, with an average width of 60 km. Parts of the landscape are ‘anthropogenic’, or man-made, through build-up of tools over hundreds of thousands of years.

̽��ֱ��research team have used this and other studies to attempt to estimate the volume of stone tools discarded over the last one million years of human evolution on the African continent alone. They say that it is the equivalent of more than one Great Pyramid of Giza per square kilometre of the entire continent (2.1 x 10¹⁴ cubic metres of rock).

“ ̽��ֱ��Messak sandstone, now in the middle of the vast sand seas of Libya, would have been a high quality rock for hominins to fracture – the landscape is in effect a carpet of stone tools, most probably made in the Middle and Upper Pleistocene,” said Professor Robert Foley, from the Leverhulme Centre for Evolutionary Studies at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, who conducted the research with colleague Dr Marta Mirazón Lahr.

“ ̽��ֱ��term ‘anthropocene’ is now used to denote the point at which humans began to have a significant effect on the environment,” said Mirazón Lahr. “ ̽��ֱ��critical time may well be the beginning of the industrial revolution about 200 years ago. Some talk of an ‘early anthropocene’ about 10,000 years ago when forests began being cleared for agriculture.

“Making stone tools, however, dates back more than two million years, and little research has been done on the impact of this activity. ̽��ֱ��Messak Settafet is the earliest demonstrated example of the scars of human activity across an entire landscape; the effects of our technology on the environment may be considerably older than previously thought,” Mirazón Lahr said. ̽��ֱ��study is published today in the journal PLOS One.

̽��ֱ��survey, conducted in 2011, involved randomly selecting plots of one metre squared across the parts of the plateau surface. In each square, the researchers sifted through all the stones to identify the number that showed evidence of modification through hominin activity – evidence such as a ‘bulb of percussion’: a bulge or curved dent on the surface of a stone tool produced by the angular blows of hominin percussion. ̽��ֱ��average number of artefacts across all sample squares was 75.

At the simple end, large flakes of stone would have been opportunistically hacked from boulders to be used for cutting or as weapons. At the more sophisticated level, researchers found evidence that specific tools had been used to wedge into the stone in order split it.

“It is clear from the scale of activity how important stone tools were, and shows that African hominins were strongly technologically dependent,” said Foley. “Landscapes such as these must have been magnets for hominin populations, either for ‘stone foraging trips’ or residential occupation.”

̽��ֱ��researchers say that if – as seems likely – the success of Stone Age communities depended significantly on tool technology, there would be enormous advantage to knowing, remembering and indeed controlling access to areas with a “super-abundance” of raw materials, such as the Messak Settafet.

“Hominins may well have become tethered to these areas, unable to stray too far if survival depended on access to the raw materials for tools, and forced to make other adaptations subservient to that need,” said Mirazón Lahr.

One way that the environmental impact of hominin tool excavation may have been positive for later humans is through the clusters of small quarrying pits dotted across the landscape (ranging up to 2 metres in diameter, and 50 centimetres in depth).

These pits would have retained moisture – with surface water still visible today after rains – and the small pools would have attracted game. In many of these pits, the team found ‘trapping stones’: large stones used for traps and ties for game and/or cattle during the last 10,000 years.

By combining their data with previous extensive surveys carried out across Africa, the researchers attempted to estimate roughly how much stone had been used as tools and discarded during human evolution.

Although stone tool manufacture dates back at least 2.5 million years, the researchers limited the estimate to one million years. Based on their and others research, they standardised population density (based on extant hunter-gatherers), tool volume, the number of tools used by one person in a year and the amount of resulting debris per tool.

They estimate an average density of between 0.5 and 5 million stone artefacts per square kilometre of Africa. When converted into an estimate of volume, this is the equivalent of between 42 to 84 million Great Pyramids of Giza.

Researchers say this would be the equivalent of finding between 1.3 and 2.7 Great Pyramids per square kilometre throughout Africa.

Researchers used the new survey of the Messak Settafet to estimate that enough stone tools were discarded over the course of human evolution in Africa to build more than one Great Pyramid for every square kilometre of land on the continent.

Landscapes such as these must have been magnets for hominin populations, either for ‘stone foraging trips’ or residential occupation

Robert Foley

Robert Foley/Marta Mirazón Lahr

Left: A view across a valley in the Messak landscape. Right: A Levallois core, a distinctive type of Middle Stone Age stone tool, recovered on the surface of the Messak

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