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Nature, Published online: 11 June 2024; doi:10.1038/d41586-024-01700-6
Buried items show that the poor got poorer as the Assyrian empire and its bureaucracy swelled.
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Tag: Archaeology
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Ancient graves reveal taxes’ sharp bite nearly 3,000 years ago
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Origins of modern horses traced to breeding revolution 4200 years ago
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The domestication of horses began on the Eurasian steppes
Lina Shatalova/iStockphoto/Getty Images
Ancient breeders dramatically shortened the natural generation times of horses starting about 4200 years ago, according to a genetic study of hundreds of ancient horses. This intensive breeding led to a massive expansion of those bloodlines across Eurasia within a few centuries, says Ludovic Orlando at the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse, France.
“In other words, they controlled the reproduction of the horse,” he says. “So this tells us something about the process of breeding that was underlying the success of the expansion of horses around the world.”
Horses were first domesticated 5500 years ago by the Botaï people in what is now Kazakhstan, but they didn’t spread their horse culture elsewhere, says Orlando. The Botaï eventually died out and their horses returned to the wild.
More than a thousand years later, however, a different line of horses became domesticated in the Pontic-Caspian steppes of southern Russia. It was this line that ultimately spread across the planet, leading to every domestic horse in the world today, he says.
To chart the history of horse husbandry, Orlando and his colleagues analysed the genomes of 475 ancient horses from Eurasia dating up to 50,000 years ago. They compared those with the genomes of 71 modern domestic horses representing 40 breeds worldwide, as well as six endangered Przewalski’s horses – which are a different sub-species.
The team confirmed that horses prior to the third millennium BC weren’t being bred or domesticated – except among the Botaï. This means horses didn’t contribute to human migrations and cultural expansions before that time, contrary to some theories, says Orlando.
The DNA analysis revealed significant inbreeding 4200 years ago in the Pontic-Caspian steppe horses, probably because people aimed to develop specific traits that make high-quality riding and chariot horses, he says.
Then, using a new technique combining genome sequencing and carbon dating, the scientists were able to estimate the average number of years between two successive generations, which Orlando calls the generational time interval. That interval got remarkably shorter – half as long as in the wild – during the same period of massive inbreeding in the Pontic-Caspian steppes.
“Right at the time of the domestication bottleneck, around 2200 BC, this is when breeders managed to control the reproduction of the horse so much that generations were ticking faster and faster,” says Orlando.
Orlando suspects the breeders were probably shortening generations by having them mate at younger ages than they would in the wild, he said at the International Havemeyer Foundation Horse Genome Workshop, which took place last month in Caen, France.
Christine Aurich at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna suspects the shortened generations were probably due to better survival rates rather than younger breeding ages. Horses give birth lying down in open grasslands, making them highly susceptible to predators until the foal can run, several hours later. Plus, any disturbances could prevent the foal from drinking its first milk – which always leads to death.
“It must be assumed that for horses living in the care of humans, losses of mares and their newborn foals were considerably reduced in comparison to horses living under wildlife conditions,” says Aurich.
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Precision dating pinpoints time between use of ancient fireplaces
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Nature, Published online: 05 June 2024; doi:10.1038/d41586-024-01501-x
Knowing the occupation timescales for ancient sites offers insights into population dynamics. A dating approach now establishes the time frame during which prehistoric hearths were in use at a high level of precision.
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Mystery of huge ancient engravings of snakes solved at last
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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01656-7
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Ancient Egyptian skull shows oldest known attempt at treating cancer
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The skull of an ancient Egyptian man with a round lesion caused by a tumour near the top
Tondini, Isidro, Camarós, 2024
Tiny etchings on a 4000-year-old skull suggest that the ancient Egyptians may have been the first people to try to treat cancer.
“Ancient Egyptian medicine was very advanced,” says Edgard Camarós at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain. “They were able to deal with many conditions, including traumatisms and infections, and treat oral health.”
Camarós and his…
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I study artefacts left in prehistoric caves
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“The piece of ochre in my hands in this picture was once held by some of the earliest artists in human history. Before I found it, this ancient specimen had lain buried in a cave in southwest Sulawesi, Indonesia, for around 30,000 years. After I cleaned the dirt from its surface, I could see scratch marks where the artists had scraped off powder to create their cave wall art.
The karst limestone mountains of Sulawesi’s Maros–Pangkep region contain hundreds of prehistoric caves, many of which contain rock art. In 2019, I was part of a team that dated a hunting scene at one of these caves to at least 43,900 years ago — making it the earliest piece of figurative artwork yet discovered.
I was working as an independent researcher at the time, but the focus of my current research — a PhD project supervised by archaeologist Adam Brumm at Griffith University, Australia — is an archaeological dig into the floor of a different cave, known as Leang Bulu Bettue, in the same region. We have dug down to a sediment layer that’s the same age as the hunting scene, to find out more about the people who created it. As well as ochre, we have found animal bones, stone tools and carved stone jewellery depicting buffalo and the Sun. We’ve also found a small piece of human skull.
We know from digs at other sites on Sulawesi that, before the arrival of Homo sapiens around 50,000 years ago, an earlier group of archaic hominins lived here. I would like to find out whether there was any overlap or exchange between the two cultures before the hominins vanished. During our next field trip to Leang Bulu Bettue, scheduled for mid-2024, we will dig into older and older sediments until we reach the bedrock of the cave.
Next year, I expect to finish my PhD, but I hope to continue my research here. I have fallen in love with this area, and there are still so many questions to answer.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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Greek soldiers prove that ancient armour was combat-worthy
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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01402-z
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A lost branch of the river Nile flowed past the pyramids of Egypt
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The Red Pyramid at Dahshur in Egypt was one of many built close to a lost branch of the Nile
Eman Ghoneim
Many of the pyramids of ancient Egypt were built along a now extinct branch of the river Nile, geological surveys have revealed. This could explain why these pyramids, including the famed Great Pyramid of Giza, are clustered in a thin strip of arid, inhospitable land.
“Since ancient times, the Nile has provided sustenance to Egyptian settlements, and it functions as the main water corridor that allowed for the transportation of goods and building materials in the past,” says Tim Ralph at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. “For this reason, most of the key cities and monuments were built in close proximity to the banks of the Nile and its peripheral branches.”
More than 100 pyramids were constructed between 4700 and 3500 years ago as grand tombs for Egypt’s pharaohs. Thirty-one of these, including the pyramids of Dahshur, Giza and Saqqara, are dotted along the edge of Egypt’s Western desert, several kilometres away from the Nile.
To transport the enormous number of people and resources necessary to build these pyramids, researchers have long thought that the Nile may have once had an offshoot that flowed by the construction sites.
To investigate further, Ralph and his colleagues looked at radar satellite imagery and land elevation data of the region. Depressions in the landscape indicated that the old water channel may have stretched 64 kilometres past the pyramid fields between the northern city of Giza and the village of Lisht in the south. It was also close to the ancient Egyptian capital of Memphis and the Abusir, Saqqara and Dahshur pyramid complexes.
Once the researchers had a rough idea of the branch’s location, they took soil and sediment core samples along its path and discovered a riverbed of sand hidden under what is now farmland or desert.
“We guess that it was roughly between 200 and 700 metres wide, and at least 8 metres deep at its deepest,” says Ralph.
Causeways that have been found around the 31 pyramids seem to end at the banks of this ancient Nile branch – a sign that the water channel was used to transport building materials thousands of years ago.
The ancient offshoot, dubbed the Ahramat branch after the Arabic word for pyramid, eventually dried up after a severe drought hit the region around 4200 years ago, says Ralph.
The course of the ancient Ahramat branch of the Nile
Eman Ghoneim et al.
“The existence of the channel is an excellent result,” says Penny Wilson at Durham University, UK. “Mapping all of this is a wonderful addition to the ancient landscape that has been buried and shows a cost-efficient way to reconstruct and re-evaluate the economic and social systems of the pharaonic state.”
Campbell Price at the University of Liverpool, UK, says: “I think people often imagine Egyptian pyramids being marooned in the middle of the desert.”
“This research seems to further demonstrate that they were in fact closely connected with the agricultural life of pharaonic Egypt – and the river Nile,” he says.
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long-lost branch of the Nile that ran by the pyramids
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The Red Pyramid, the largest of the pyramids at the Dahshur necropolis, was built more than 4,500 years ago.Credit: Eman Ghoneim
Stretching beneath the ground near the Giza pyramid complex in Egypt lie the remains of an ancient branch of the Nile River that might once have helped ancient Egyptians to build their monuments.
The highest concentration of pyramids in Egypt can be found in a stretch of desert between Giza and the village of Lisht. These sites are now several dozens of kilometres away from the Nile River. But Egyptologists have long suspected that the Nile might once have been closer to that stretch than it is today.
Satellite images and geological data now confirm that a tributary of the Nile — which researchers have named the Ahramat Branch — used to run near many of the major sites in the region several thousand years ago. The discovery, reported on 16 May in Communications Earth and Environment1, could help to explain why ancient Egyptians chose this area to build the pyramids (See ‘Ancient river’).
Source: Ref. 1 Image source: NASA Visible Earth
“The pyramids seem like pretty monumental work,” says Judith Bunbury, a geoarchaeologist at the University of Cambridge, UK. “But it’s less arduous if you can bring big stones up by boat rather than carrying them over land.”
Wandering waterways
For thousands of years, the Nile and its flood-plain have provided food, agriculture and water to Egypt’s inhabitants. The majority of the country’s population still lives in the Nile basin.
But the river is prone to migrating, and in the past, populations have had to relocate to keep up. Over the last few hundred years, the Nile has moved several kilometres to the east, possibly owing to shifting plate tectonics.
There is evidence that some of Egypt’s important archaeological sites do not have the same relationship to the river as they would have had at the time they that were built. There are remains of harbours and other such clues at sites between Giza and Lisht. But scientists have found it difficult to chart the scope or locations of these lost waterways.
While looking for traces of ancient water, a team led by Eman Ghoneim, a geomorphologist at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, spotted what looked like a dried-up river channel several kilometres west of the Nile. The channel ran for around 60 kilometres through agricultural areas and had a similar depth and width to the modern Nile.
The research team prepares to analyse soil samples collected from an area in the Nile Valley close to the pyramids.Credit: Eman Ghoneim
To investigate whether the channel could be part of an ancient riverbed, the researchers collected core samples of sediment from the channel. Beneath the wet mud of the fields, they found an layer of gravel and sand consistent with that of a riverbed. Combining this sample data with satellite imagery allowed the team to map the branch’s location. They found that it would have flowed past more than 30 Old- and Middle-Kingdom pyramids dating from between 2686 to 1649 bc — thus the decision to called it the ‘Ahramat’ branch, using the Arabic word for pyramid.
The Ahramat “connected all these different pyramid fields”, says Suzanne Onstine, an egyptologist at the University of Memphis in Tennessee. “Their valley temples and causeways all oriented exactly to where the water would have been.”
Riverside sites
Researchers have long debated the significance of the pyramids’ locations. The waterway running right past them could have been an important factor, because it would have provided a convenient way for builders to transport materials to the sites.
This theory aligns with documents from the era which state that building materials were brought in by boat, says Bunbury.
Eventually, the movement of the Nile and sand blowing in from the Sahara Desert would have caused the Ahramat Branch to dry up and become unnavigable. Today, only a few stray lakes and channels remain where the major branch once ran.
But knowing the ancient river’s location provides a blueprint that archaeologists can use to try and uncover more ancient Egyptian settlements, says Onstine. And the finding that Egyptians were probably using boats rather than land transportation to move materials to build the pyramids hints that they were “a lot more pragmatic than perhaps we realized before”, says Bunbury.
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