Archaeology – Page 9 – Carbon Chemist

March 6, 2024

Oldest stone tools in Europe hint at ancient humans’ route there

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Close up view of a stone tool possibly from Layer VII at Korolevo I. — A stone tool from the archaeological site of Korolevo in western Ukraine.Credit: Roman Garba

Stone tools found in western Ukraine date to roughly 1.4 million years ago¹, archaeologists say. That means the tools are the oldest known artefacts in Europe made by ancient humans and offer insight into how and when our early relatives first reached the region.

The findings support the theory that these early arrivals — probably of the versatile species Homo erectus — entered Europe from the east and spread west, says study co-lead author Roman Garba, an archaeologist at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. “Until now, there was no strong evidence for an east-to-west migration,” he says. “Now we have it.”

Prehistoric sites documenting the presence of human ancestors in Europe before 800,000 years ago are extremely rare, says Véronique Michel, a geochronologist at the University of Côte d’Azur in Nice, France, who was not involved in the research. “This new study adds another piece to the puzzle [of] the dispersal of early hominins in Europe.”

The findings were published on 6 March in Nature.

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The tools were discovered in the 1980s at the Korolevo archaeological site near Ukraine’s border with Romania, yet no one had been able to precisely date them.

Carbon dating, the archaeological workhorse, is getting a major reboot

To do so, Garba and his colleagues used a dating method based on cosmogenic nuclides — rare isotopes generated when high-energy cosmic rays collide with chemical elements in minerals on Earth’s surface. Changes in the concentrations of these cosmogenic nuclides can reveal how long ago a mineral was buried. By calculating the ratio of specific cosmogenic nuclides in the sediment layer in which the tools were buried, the team estimated that the implements must be 1.4 million years old. The dating analyses, Michel says, “appear highly reliable”.

Until now, the earliest precisely dated evidence of hominins in Europe comprised fossils² and stone tools³ found in Spain and France. Both are 1.1 million to 1.2 million years old.

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The dates of the Korolevo tools lead the researchers to speculate that the human ancestors who made them were H. erectus, the only archaic humans known to have lived outside Africa about 1.4 million years ago. What’s more, the Korolevo tools resemble those found at archaeological sites in the Caucasus Mountains that have been linked to H. erectus and dated to about 1.8 million years ago, says Mads Knudsen, a geoscientist at Aarhus University in Denmark, who co-led the study. However, Knudsen adds, Korolevo’s most ancient layer of sediment didn’t yield any fossilized human remains, so it is impossible to say for sure that the tools were made by H. erectus.

Geographically, Korolevo lies between older archaeological sites at the intersection of Asia and Europe, and younger sites in southwestern Europe. The findings give a fuller picture of the direction of travel probably taken by the first Europeans, supporting the idea that they spread from east to west — perhaps along the valleys of the Danube River, Garba says.

Russia’s war in Ukraine is disrupting studies of ancient life

Korolevo is a treasure trove of prehistoric remains, says study co-author Vitaly Usyk, an archaeologist affiliated with the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv, who visited the site last year with Garba for the first time since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The Korolevo site is relatively safe and hasn’t been damaged during the war, although the area is now overgrown with vegetation, Garba says. “I can imagine doing fieldwork there even now.”

However, Usyk notes, few scientists can participate in field research at Korolevo or anywhere else in the country, because of travel restrictions or because they have fled the conflict. Usyk himself left Ukraine in 2022 and is now working at the Institute of Archaeology in Brno, Czech Republic, with a fellowship that allows him to continue doing his research. “Would I like to go back [to Ukraine]? Yes, of course,” he says. “I would like to organize expeditions to Korolevo to help other scientists reveal how ancient humans came from Africa to Europe.”

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March 6, 2024

Crypt review: Alice Roberts on murder and mayhem in the Middle Ages

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A close-up view of a burial trench between rows of individual graves, excavated between the concrete foundations of the Royal Mint, from the excavation of the Black Death cemetery, East Smithfield, London, view looking west. (Photo by MOLA/Getty Images) — Above and below: London’s Crossrail excavations unearthed victims of the Black Death

MOLA/Getty Images

Crypt
Alice Roberts (Simon & Schuster)

ANOTHER year, another really good book from archaeologist Alice Roberts. Part of me almost wants to find that the quality has slipped, just for the sheer surprise – but no, her standards are as high as ever.

Roberts may be the UK’s best-known archaeologist, in part due to her many TV appearances. She has also written a string of books, including Wolf Road, her first children’s novel. Her specialism is osteoarchaeology, the…

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February 28, 2024

The life and gruesome death of a bog man revealed after 5000 years

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Fragments of a skull and jawbone, missing the right eye socket and cheerk, assembled on a black stand. — Vittrup Man’s skull was shattered by at least eight blows.Credit: Stephen Freiheit via Fischer A., *et al./PLoS ONE*

Before he was bludgeoned to death and left in a Danish bog, an ancient individual now known as Vittrup Man was an emblem of past and future ways of living.

He was born more than 5,000 years ago into a community of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who probably lived in northern Scandinavia as their ancestors had for millennia. But Vittrup Man spent his adult life across the sea in Denmark among farming communities, whose ancestors came from the Middle East.

It’s impossible to know the lives that Vittrup Man touched during his lifetime, but it was his death that caught people’s imagination thousands of years later. His remains — ankle and shin bones, a jawbone and a skull fractured by at least eight heavy blows — were discovered in the early twentieth century in a peat bog near a town called Vittrup in northern Denmark, alongside a wooden club that was probably the murder weapon.

His “unusually violent” death distinguished Vittrup Man from other similarly aged remains found in bogs, says Karl-Göran Sjögren, an archaeologist at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, who co-led a team that charted Vittrup Man’s life in a study¹ published last week.

But nothing else about Vittrup Man stood out until researchers examined his ancestry for a study that came out earlier this year². Vittrup Man, they learnt, was related to hunter-gatherers from what is now Norway and Sweden, and not to the farming communities with Middle Eastern roots that had arrived in Denmark hundreds of years before his death.

“This is an indication that his origin may be a bit further north,” says Sjögren, possibly near the Arctic Circle where people still lived by fishing, hunting and gathering. Carbon and nitrogen isotope levels in bones and teeth, which can reveal aspects of diet, suggest that Vittrup Man got his calories from the ocean as a child, before transitioning to freshwater fish and wild game as a teenager and a diet including cereals, dairy and meat typical of farming communities starting as a young adult. Incorporated into his teeth, the researchers found protein fragments from seals, whales and fish as well as sheep or goats.

A childhood among northern Scandinavian hunter-fisher-gatherers might have prepared Vittrup Man for a long open-sea voyage to Denmark. What’s not clear is why he left the familiar to live among farmers. Some archaeologists, including some of Sjögren’s co-authors, surmise that Vittrup Man was taken captive and enslaved before being killed — a fate not uncommon in early Neolithic Scandinavia, when numerous social groups coexisted.

Sjögren favours the idea that Vittrup Man lived like a foreign merchant, mediating the exchange of goods between farmers and hunter-gatherers. Flint axes made of high-quality Danish stone, which have been identified along the Norwegian coast, could have been traded for materials from northern Scandinavia such as basalt.

“Maybe once he came of age, his role in society was to establish connections with farmer that lived across the sea,” says Thomas Booth, a bioarchaeologist at the Francis Crick Institute in London. He lived with the farmers for the last decades of his life, but it’s not inconceivable that he voyaged back and forth between homes old and new, adds Sjögren.

What, then, of Vittrup’s Man violent death, probably in his early thirties? Dozens, of Neolithic human remains — many of them young males, like Vittrup Man — have been discovered in bogs, and archaeologists think ritual sacrifice explains many of these deaths. Many of these people had bone malformations that would have marked them out among their peers, but not Vittrup Man, says Sjorgen.

Genome analysis suggests that Vittrup Man was blue-eyed and his skin may have been darker than typical Neolithic farmers, while his dark hair colour and height wouldn’t have stood out. “Why they chose to sacrifice some people it’s really hard to say,” says Sjorgen.

Vittrup’s Man’s hunter-gatherer ancestry more or less vanished from all of Scandinavian in the centuries after his death, and it’s not clear if any close relatives survived him. Researchers sequencing ancient human genomes by the hundreds have begun to build genealogies of ancient families, and it’s not inconceivable that a relative could one day be found.

The life — and death — of Vittrup Man goes to the heart of one Europe’s biggest transitions, says Booth, when hunter-gathering communities like his sat on the edge of a new way of life. “It gives you a sense of the worlds that these people are inhabiting.”

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February 21, 2024

Ancient bronze hand may offer clue to the origins of Basque language

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An ancient bronze hand found at Irulegi in northern Spain

Juantxo Egana

Inscriptions found on a 2000-year-old metal hand may be written in a language related to modern-day Basque. If this interpretation is correct, it could help explain the origins of the Basque language – one of the biggest mysteries in linguistics.

However, other linguists say there isn’t enough evidence to link the inscriptions with Basque.

The bronze hand was found in July 2021 on a hilltop called Irulegi in the Pyrenees in northern Spain. Archaeologists had been digging there since 2007, first to uncover a medieval castle and then to explore a much older settlement from the Iron Age.

That settlement was founded between 1500 and 1000 BC. It came under attack, possibly by the Romans, and was abandoned in the first century BC.

The Irulegi hand is a sheet of bronze 14 centimetres long, 12.8 cm wide and just 0.1 cm thick, with a greenish patina. On the back of the hand are four lines of text, which were first scratched in and then re-written by punching dots into the metal.

Most of the words can’t be linked to any known language, but the first word is “sorioneku”. Mattin Aiestaran at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain, and his colleagues argue that this is similar to the Basque word zorioneko, which means “of good fortune”. Additionally, the last word is “eráukon”, which they compare to the Basque verb zeraukon.

The Irulegi hand, bearing an inscription in a mysterious language

Mattin Aiestaran, et. al.

The hand was probably meant to signify or attract good luck, perhaps by appealing to a deity, says Mikel Edeso Egia at the Aranzadi Science Society in Donostia – also called San Sebastián – in Spain, which supported the excavations.

The researchers further argue that the hand is evidence of languages related to Basque being spoken in northern Spain for 2000 years. Whereas most languages spoken in Europe today belong to the Indo-European language family, Basque doesn’t. “It’s not related to any other language that we know of,” says Edeso Egia. Previous research has tentatively linked Basque to a group of people called the Vascones who, according to classical sources, lived in the Pyrenees.

However, the idea that the inscriptions on the hand are in a language related to Basque isn’t universally accepted. After the hand was first described in a 2022 book, linguists Céline Mounole at the University of Pau and the Adour Region in France and Julen Manterola at the University of the Basque Country in Vitoria-Gasteiz published a critique.

“The evidence is not enough,” says Manterola. This is partly because there are so few words on the Irulegi hand: not enough to properly compare it with known languages, he says.

Furthermore, the link with Basque rests almost solely on the similarity of “sorioneku” and zorioneko. “We can’t really relate any of the other words with historical Basque,” says Mounole.

Even that similarity may be misleading, says Manterola. Similar phrases in Basque have changed in predictable ways over the centuries to reach their current forms, but if “sorioneku” became zorioneko, it must have followed a very different path.

“We are hoping that more inscriptions will appear,” says Mounole. “In this case, we would be able to know more about this language and its possible relation with the Basque language.”

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February 20, 2024

Tag: Archaeology

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