All posts by Archaeology World Team

AFRICA, WORLD

What Ancient DNA Reveals About Life in Africa 20,000 Years Ago

What Ancient DNA Reveals About Life in Africa 20,000 Years Ago

What Ancient DNA Reveals About Life in Africa 20,000 Years Ago
Kondoa Irangi rock art in present-day Tanzania features the cultural expressions of hunter-gatherers and pastoralists over a 2,000-year span.

Every person alive on the planet today is descended from people who lived as hunter-gatherers in Africa. The continent is the cradle of human origins and ingenuity, and with each new fossil and archaeological discovery, we learn more about our shared African past. Such research tends to focus on when our species, Homo sapiens, spread out to other landmasses 80,000–60,000 years ago. But what happened in Africa after that, and why don’t we know more about the people who remained?

Our new study, conducted by an interdisciplinary team of 44 researchers based in 12 countries, helps answer these questions. By sequencing and analyzing ancient DNA (aDNA) from people who lived as long ago as 18,000 years, we roughly doubled the age of sequenced aDNA from sub-Saharan Africa. And this genetic information helps anthropologists like us understand more about how modern humans were moving and mingling in Africa long ago.

TRACING OUR HUMAN PAST IN AFRICA

Beginning about 300,000 years ago, people in Africa who looked like us—the earliest anatomically modern humans—also started behaving in ways that seem very human. They made new kinds of stone tools and began transporting raw materials up to 250 miles, likely through trade networks. By 140,000–120,000 years ago, people made clothing from animal skins and began to decorate themselves with pierced marine shell beads.

While early innovations appeared in a patchwork fashion, a more widespread shift happened around 50,000 years ago—around the same time that people started moving into places as distant as Australia. New types of stone and bone tools became common, and people began fashioning and exchanging ostrich eggshell beads. And while most rock art in Africa is undated and badly weathered, an increase in ochre pigment at archaeological sites hints at an explosion of art.

Ostrich eggshell beads were popular trade items, tracing the reach of ancient social networks.

What caused this shift, known as the Later Stone Age transition, has been a longstanding archaeological mystery. Why would certain tools and behaviours, which up until that point had appeared in a piecemeal way across Africa, suddenly become widespread? Did it have something to do with changes in the number of people or how they interacted?

THE CHALLENGE OF ACCESSING THE DEEP PAST

Archaeologists reconstruct human behaviour in the past mainly through things people left behind—remains of their meals, tools, ornaments, and sometimes even their bodies. These records may accumulate over thousands of years, creating views of daily livelihoods that are really averaged over long periods of time. However, it’s hard to study ancient demography, or how populations changed, from the archaeological record alone.

This is where DNA can help. When combined with evidence from archaeology, linguistics, and oral and written history, scientists can piece together how people moved and interacted based on which groups share genetic similarities.

But DNA from living people can’t tell the whole story. African populations have been transformed over the past 5,000 years by the spread of herding and farming, the development of cities, ancient pandemics, and the ravages of colonialism and slavery. These processes caused some lineages to vanish and brought others together, forming new populations. Using present-day DNA to reconstruct ancient genetic landscapes is like reading a letter that was left out in the rain: Some words are there but blurred, and some are gone completely. Researchers need ancient DNA from archaeological human remains to explore human diversity in different places and times, and to understand what factors shaped it.

Unfortunately, aDNA from Africa is particularly hard to recover because the continent straddles the equator and heat and humidity degrade DNA. While the oldest aDNA from Eurasia is roughly 400,000 years old, all sequences from sub-Saharan Africa to date have been younger than around 9,000 years.

BREAKING THE “TROPICAL CEILING”

Because each person carries genetic legacies inherited from generations of their ancestors, our team was able to use DNA from individuals who lived between 18,000–and 400 years ago to explore how people interacted as far back as the last 80,000–50,000 years. This allowed us, for the first time, to test whether demographic change played a role in the Later Stone Age transition.

Our team sequenced aDNA from six individuals buried in what are now Tanzania, Malawi, and Zambia. We compared these sequences to previously studied aDNA from 28 individuals buried at sites stretching from Cameroon to Ethiopia and down to South Africa. We also generated new and improved DNA data for 15 of these people, trying to extract as much information as possible from the small handful of ancient African individuals whose DNA is preserved well enough to study.

Genetic data reveals people’s movements and engagements across the Eastern African Rift Valley during the ice ages.

This created the largest genetic dataset so far for studying the population history of ancient African foragers—people who hunted, gathered, or fished. We used it to explore population structures that existed prior to the sweeping changes of the past few thousand years.

DNA WEIGHS IN ON A LONGSTANDING DEBATE

We found that people did in fact change how they moved and interacted around the Later Stone Age transition. Despite being separated by thousands of miles and years, all the ancient individuals in this study were descended from the same three populations related to ancient and present-day Eastern, Southern, and Central Africans. The presence of Eastern African ancestry as far south as Zambia, and Southern African ancestry as far north as Kenya, indicate that people were moving long distances and having children with people located far away from where they were born. The only way this population structure could have emerged is if people were moving long distances over many millennia.

Additionally, our research showed that almost all ancient Eastern Africans shared an unexpectedly high number of genetic variations with hunter-gatherers who today live in Central African rainforests, making ancient Eastern Africa truly a genetic melting pot. We could tell that this mixing and moving happened about 50,000 years ago when there was a major split in Central African forager populations.

We don’t know why people began “living locally” again. Changing environments as the last ice age peaked and waned between about 26,000 and 11,500 years ago may have made it more economical to forage closer to home, or perhaps elaborate exchange networks reduced the need for people to travel with objects. We also noted that the individuals in our study were genetically most like only their closest geographic neighbours. This tells us that around 20,000 years ago, the foragers in some African regions were almost exclusively finding their partners locally. This practice must have been extremely strong and persisted for a very long time, as our results show that some groups remained genetically independent of their neighbours over several thousand years. It was especially clear in Malawi and Zambia, where the only close relationships we detected were between people buried around the same time at the same sites.

Alternatively, new group identities may have emerged, restructuring marriage rules. If so, we would expect to see artefacts and other traditions, like rock art, diversify, with specific types clumped into different regions. Indeed, this is exactly what archaeologists find—a trend known as regionalization. Now we know that this phenomenon not only affected cultural traditions, but also the flow of genes.

NEW DATA, NEW QUESTIONS

As always, aDNA research raises as many questions as answers. Finding Central African ancestry throughout Eastern and Southern Africa prompts anthropologists to reconsider how interconnected these regions were in the distant past. This is important because Central Africa has remained archaeologically understudied, in part because of political, economic, and logistical challenges that make research there difficult.

Additionally, while genetic evidence supports a major demographic transition in Africa 50,000 years ago, we still don’t know the key drivers. Determining what triggered the Later Stone Age transition will require closer examination of regional environmental, archaeological, and genetic records to understand how this process unfolded across sub-Saharan Africa.

Finally, this study is a stark reminder that researchers still have much to learn from ancient individuals and artefacts held in African museums, and highlights the critical role of the curators who steward these collections. While some human remains in this study were recovered within the past decade, others have been in museums for a half-century.

Even though technological advances are pushing back the time limits for aDNA, it is important to remember that scientists have only just begun to understand human diversity in Africa, past and present.

AFRICA, TANZANIA, WORLD

Ancient DNA reveals surprises about how early Africans lived, travelled and interacted

Ancient DNA reveals surprises about how early Africans lived, travelled and interacted

A new analysis of human remains that were buried in African archaeological sites has produced the earliest DNA from the continent, telling a fascinating tale of how early humans lived, travelled and even found their significant others.

An interdisciplinary team of 44 researchers outlined its findings in “Ancient DNA reveals deep population structure in sub-Saharan African foragers.” The paper was published today in Nature and reports findings from ancient DNA from six individuals buried in Malawi, Tanzania and Zambia who lived between 18,000 and 5,000 years ago.

“This more than doubles the antiquity of reported ancient DNA data from sub-Saharan Africa,” said David Reich, a professor at Harvard University and investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute whose lab generated the data in the paper. “The study is particularly exciting as a truly equal collaboration of archaeologists and geneticists.”

The study also reanalyzed published data from 28 individuals buried at sites across the continent, generating new and improved data for 15 of them. The result was an unprecedented dataset of DNA from ancient African foragers — people who hunted, gathered or fished.

Their genetic legacy is difficult to reconstruct from present-day people because of the many population movements and mixtures that have occurred in the last few thousand years.

Thanks to this data, the researchers were able to outline major demographic shifts that took place between about 80,000 and 20,000 years ago. As far back as about 50,000 years ago, people from different regions of the continent moved and settled in other areas and developed alliances and networks over longer distances to trade, share information and even find reproductive partners. This social network helped them survive and thrive, the researchers wrote.

Elizabeth Sawchuk, an author of the study who is a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Alberta and a research assistant professor at Stony Brook University, said a dramatic cultural change took place during this timeframe, as beads, pigments and other symbolic art became common across Africa. Researchers long assumed that major changes in the archaeological record about 50,000 years ago reflected a shift in social networks and maybe even changes in population size. However, such hypotheses have remained difficult to test.

What Ancient DNA Reveals About Life in Africa 20,000 Years Ago
Kondoa Irangi rock art in present-day Tanzania features the cultural expressions of hunter-gatherers and pastoralists over a 2,000-year span.

“We’ve never been able to directly explore these proposed demographic shifts, until now,” she said. “It has been difficult to reconstruct events in our deeper past using the DNA of people living today, and artefacts like stone tools and beads can’t tell us the whole story. Ancient DNA provides direct insight into the people themselves, which was the missing part of the puzzle.”

Mary Prendergast, an author of the paper and associate professor of anthropology at Rice University, said there are arguments that the development and expansion of long-distance trade networks around this time helped humans weather the last Ice Age.

“Humans began relying on each other in new ways,” she said. “And this creativity and innovation might be what allowed people to thrive.”

The researchers were also able to demonstrate that by about 20,000 years ago, people had stopped moving around so much.

“Maybe it was because by that point, previously established social networks allowed for the flow of information and technologies without people having to move,” Sawchuk said.

Prendergast said the study provides a better understanding of how people moved and mingled in this part of Africa. Previously, the earliest African DNA came from what is now Morocco — but the individuals in this study lived as far from there as Bangladesh is from Norway, she noted.

“Our genetic study confirms an archaeological pattern of more local behaviour in eastern Africa over time,” said Jessica Thompson, an assistant professor of anthropology at Yale University, and author of the study and one of the researchers who uncovered the remains. “At first people found reproductive partners from wide geographic and cultural pools. Later, they prioritized partners who lived closer, and who were potentially more culturally similar.”

The research team included scholars from Canada, Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, the United States, Zambia and many other countries. Critical contributions to the study came from curators and co-authors at African museums who are responsible for protecting and preserving the remains.

Potiphar Kaliba, director of research at the Malawi Department of Museums and Monuments and an author of the study, noted that some of the skeletons sampled for the study were excavated a half-century ago, yet their DNA is preserved despite hot and humid climates in the tropics.

“This work shows why it’s so important to invest in the stewardship of human remains and archaeological artefacts in African museums,” Kaliba said.

The work also helps address global imbalances in research, Prendergast said.

“There are around 30 times more published ancient DNA sequences from Europe than from Africa,” she said. “Given that Africa harbours the greatest human genetic diversity on the planet, we have much more to learn.”

“By associating archaeological artefacts with ancient DNA, the researchers have created a remarkable framework for exploring the prehistory of humans in Africa,” said Archaeology and Archaeometry program director John Yellen of the U.S. National Science Foundation, one of the funders behind this project. “This insight is charting a new way forward to understanding humanity and our complex shared history.”

ASIA, CHINA, WORLD

Ancient Bowl From Tibet Shows Alexander the Great – the Jewish Version

Ancient Bowl From Tibet Shows Alexander the Great – the Jewish Version

An ancient silver bowl with Greek-style reliefs found in Tibet decades ago does not show scenes from Homer’s “Iliad,” as has been postulated. Rather, the bowl shows Alexander the Great and his servants, based on a Jewish version of the “Alexander Romance” dating to the fifth or sixth century C.E. that had been previously unknown, according to a new paper published in the Bulletin of the Asia Institute.

Alexander himself is shown three times on this bowl: once picking fruit from the Tree of Life, and twice drinking from the Fountain of Life, claim authors Anca Dan of CNRS, University Paris Sciences & Letters, and Frantz Grenet of the College de France.

The bowl also has the earliest known depiction in the Far East of the terrestrial Paradise, the two scholars say in their paper. Their innovative view of the bowl’s Jewish origin is based, among other things, on the fact that the nude figure they believe represents Alexander the Great, shown drinking the Water of Life and picking the frankincense from the Tree of Life – is circumcised, which was not a habit known among the Macedonians.

The bowl from Tibet, was probably made or ordered by a Jewish merchant on the Silk Road

If Dan and Grenet are right about their interpretation of the dish’s Jewish origin, then the bowl indicates that Jews involved in long-distance trade along the Silk Road played a role in the evolution of the Alexander legends in the centuries following the king’s death. In short, this one wee bowl indicates Jewish influence in medieval Central Asia (between northern India, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan) centuries before the Arabic conquest.

Medieval fanfic

The earliest versions of the Alexander Romance – accounts of real and imagined exploits of the powerful ruler of ancient Macedonia – which were written in Greek, Latin, Armenian and Syriac, date to the third century C.E. and relate to the boy king’s military campaign that began in his homeland and reached as far as India. The main text of the Romance was wrongly ascribed to Callisthenes, Aristotle’s nephew and Alexander’s official historian. Two extant texts describe the Jewish legend that Alexander the Great arrived at the Garden of Eden. The first is a passage in Aramaic in the Babylonian Talmud, written sometime in the sixth century C.E. It relates that Alexander washed his face in the Water of Life and arrived at the Gate of the Lord, through which only the righteous may enter, based on Psalm 118:20: “He ascended along the length of the entire spring until he reached the entrance of the Garden of Eden. He raised a loud voice, calling out: ‘Open the gate for me!’” (Tamid 32b, Babylonian Talmud).

The second, Sefer Toldot Alexandros ha-Makdoni (the history of Alexander the Macedonian), is part of a collection of Hebrew texts compiled by Eleazar of Worms (now in Germany) in roughly 1325, which is preserved in a manuscript in Oxford. It describes how Alexander was circumcised by his doctors so that he could enter the Garden of Eden as a righteous person. The images on the bowl seem to combine elements from both the Tamid and the Sefer Toldot Alexandros ha-Makdoni. If so, they indicate that the Jews of Central Asia had developed their version of Alexander’s accession to Paradise before the Islamic conquest, Dan and Grenet contend.

Alexander, nude, holding a long-necked flask and drinking bowl

In the Garden of Eden

The interior of the bowl is smooth, as befits practical tableware. The exterior bears a dense riot of imagery done in reliefs that project up to 9 millimetres above the silver surface, the authors explain. It shows six male figures. According to Dan and Grenet, Alexander himself is shown three times, once picking fruit from the Tree of Life, and twice drinking from the Fountain of Life. The researchers recognize two Indian carriers of the Water of Life, and a priest playing on an Indian drum with strings (dhol).

Between each man is a gnarled tree with a snake climbing up toward a nest. In each nest the birds are at a different stage of life: In one there are eggs, in another, a bird is feeding chicks, and finally, one nest shown empty could indicate that the serpent ate them. Between the two figures of Alexander picking fruit from the Tree of Life and drinking from the Fountain of Life, however, the birds are nesting in flourishing trees, as in an eternal spring, the authors explain. As for the Jewish bent of the Alexander depiction, the state of his penis is unmistakable even though the bowl is very small: 6.5 centimetres in height, 21 centimetres in rim diameter and with a capacity of 120 cubic centimetres, which is about half a cup. Its weight corresponds to 250 drachms, in keeping with standard measurements used in ancient Bactria and Sogdiana (4.43 to 4.55 grams).

Tree of Life with snake approaching bird on a nest; images of Alexander are on both sides of the tree
Priest playing the drum

Clearly, the absence of the monarch’s foreskin was of importance, which argues that the artisan or maybe the commissioner of the art was Jewish. The ancient Greeks did depict naked young men, frequently, but did not circumcise. Neither did Macedonians, or the Indians or Iranians conquered by the Macedonians, Dan observes.

Speaking of prohibitions, Jews aren’t supposed to show graven images and nudity isn’t a hallmark of Jewish art. The bowl may have been commissioned by a Hellenized Jew living in central Asia who adored Alexander but did not necessarily shrink at such depictions, the researcher suggests.

There are precedents of nudity in ancient Jewish art: for example, the synagogue of Dura Europos, a city that existed in Syria from 300 B.C.E. to the year 256 C.E., has frescoes showing people dressed to the nines but also a nude woman in the water – a maid or Pharaoh’s daughter herself – rescuing baby Moses.

Moses was found in the river. Fresco from Dura Europos synagogue

Back to the bowl. Even if it was commissioned by a Jew, why would the conqueror have been shown thus trimmed? Because, according to the Jewish version of his “Romance” (from which only medieval versions survive), he had to be in order to visit the Garden of Eden, albeit briefly. The bowl, actually made of a silver alloy with a high concentration of copper, had been obtained in Lhasa half a century ago by Dr David Snellgrove, a professor of Tibetan Buddhist studies at the SOAS University of London, the authors say. The reinterpretation of it by Dan and Grenet was undertaken based on photographs of the bowl, which today belongs to a private owner in Japan who displays it in the Ancient Orient Museum in Tokyo.

Closeup of Alexander the Great’s penis on the Tibetan silver bowl: That is circumcised

Alexander in the altogether

Alexander the Great died young, aged just 32, but left a giant Hellenistic mark on culture wherever he went, which includes Judea. En route to conquering his nemesis Persia, the Macedonian forces he led rolled over Judea and seized control of Jerusalem itself in the year 332 B.C. Centuries later, in the first century C.E., historian Flavius Josephus was aware of (and wrote about) Alexander’s alleged visit to Jerusalem and his meeting with the priests (“Antiquities of the Jews,” 11.317-345). Never mind the veracity of the account; clearly, Alexander was intimately involved with the ancient Jewish world.  He isn’t mentioned by name in the Bible though some choose to believe that the prophet Daniel foresaw him and the fate of his Macedonian empire. But accounts of Alexander’s life, and traditions and legends about the young king, appear time and again in other Hebrew literature. He appears by name in the First Book of the Maccabees – in fact, the first chapters are all about this industrious Macedonian. That first book was apparently written in Hebrew (going by its use of idiom) over 2,100 years ago, after the rise of the Hasmonean kingdom, a century and a half after Alexander’s death. The original version has been lost and all that remains is a Greek translation in the Septuagint that tells how Alexander conquered Judea and later, how his empire was shattered by his death.

Servant bearing a vessel
Alexander holding frankincense

Before addressing his seemingly Jewish trait, why should one think it’s Alexander at all (in three of the six cases)? Because the image on the bowl is of a young man whose hairdo complies with the classical canon, short and abundant, and is done in his specific hairstyle: two curls are flipped upward, away from the forehead, recalling a lion’s mane, Dan explains.

“Alexander was probably born when the Sun was in Leo. The lion was a symbol of kingship and Macedonian kings were showing themselves hunting the lion, as heirs of Heracles, the Greek hero who fought the Nemean lion,” she adds.

His depiction in the nude fits with the Greek version of the Romance, which has the emperor consulting with the Oracle of the Sun and Moon, at the end of the Earth, for which purpose nudity was de rigueur. “The bare Alexander has only a royal mantle or a scarf draped over his shoulder, a symbol of royalty in the Sassanian culture of Iran, which continued to influence Central Asia after the Hunnic invasions, in the 5th century C.E.,” Dan explains. The scarfed Alexander holds a long-necked flask in one hand, of a type known from Syria and Egypt in the 3rd to 4th centuries C.E. (so the silver bowl couldn’t date to before that, Dan argues). Such flasks were used to hold small amounts of precious liquid and here the researchers think the flask is supposed to hold the Water of Life, in keeping with the Jewish version of the Alexander legend – it is only in the Jewish version that the king himself, as opposed to his cook or other servants, attains the Water of Life.

Regarding the trees, Dan and Grenet suspect they’re frankincense-secreting trees of Boswellia serrata that grow in the Indus Valley, which Alexander partly conquered. Possibly the bowl-maker or person who commissioned it was involved in the incense trade. The Greek and Latin versions of the Alexander Romance describe his visit to a sacred Indian wood “full of frankincense and opobalsamum.”

Alexander with a handful of frankincense: The state of his member is very clear

In the trees are birds who sometimes escape the snake and sometimes don’t, images that may depict the fight between good and evil, Dan suggests. She and Grenet reject the explanation published in 1973 by Philip Denwood that the bowl represents an episode of Homer’s life, in which a snake that ascended a plane tree near Artemis’ sanctuary in Aulis ate eight chicks and their mother, and was then turned to stone, presaging the nine years of war between Greeks and Trojans.

The tree isn’t a plane tree, the authors point out, and the bowl doesn’t show eight chicks and a mother bird. None of the characters mentioned in the “Iliad” and nothing from the Greek temple in Aulis is depicted in this bowl.

Pseudo-letters to his mother

The Alexander Romance is comprised of various texts which were rewritten, revised, reinvented, rehashed, changed, and generally evolved throughout antiquity and Middle Ages. The scenes on the bowl could plausibly be based on two apocryphal letters ostensibly written by Alexander the Great that appear in a 5th-century Greek version of the Romance: one where he ostensibly tells his mother Olympias and his teacher Aristotle about his discovery of the Fountain of Life in the Land of Darkness and of the Blessed; and one about gathering aromatic plants (frankincense) around the Oracle of the Sun and the Moon, at the end of his expedition, as related in the pseudo-missive “Letter about the Marvels of India.”

And there you have it. A beautiful young man with classic artistic hallmarks of the young conqueror plus a very clearly circumcised penis, among incense trees, attended by servants. If Dan and Grenet are right about the identification of the iconic man on the bowl and about its origin, then this bowl – a “unique visual representation” of Alexander’s legend in the Jewish context – is also the earliest attestation of the Alexander Romance in the Indo-Iranian world, Grenet says.

The bowl was manufactured at the time of the Sassanian (aka Neo-Persian) Empire, which ruled from the year 224 to 651 C.E, in its eastern regions, which were already dominated by the Huns called “Hephtalites” who occupied Central Asia between 457 and 565 C.E. And if all this is correct then, Dan and Grenet suggest, not only ancient Greek and Roman and Indo-Iranian traditions but Jewish traditions too may have contributed to the awe we feel for Alexander to this very day, as well as to the image of Paradise in various cultures – even among the most eastward Zoroastrians. The base of the bowl is also interesting, in showing six fish in three pairs of two, possibly swimming in the paradisiac Fountain of Life after being resurrected following desiccation for consumption. The frankincense tree recalls the Tree of Life, with its serpent, and the two Alexanders on each side of the tree may correspond to the stereotypical image of Adam and Eve in Eden in Judeo-Christian representations as of the third and fourth century onward; or they may correspond with Zoroastrian representations of a couple in Heaven.

Alexander the Great in the Temple of Jerusalem, Sebastiano Conca (1680–1764)

What about the Jewish prohibition on making graven images? Well, iconoclasm in Late Antiquity may not have been all it’s been thought to be, Grenet and Dan postulate. Depicting the king as a circumcised man allowed to visit the glory of Paradise does not smack of worship per se, but may be indicative of the Jewish appropriation of the figure of Alexander as one of “the righteous”: Jewish tradition goes so far as to suggest that the great conqueror, upon encountering the high priest of the Jews in Jerusalem, bowed before him. It bears adding that to this day some Jews name their children Alexander but nary a one is named, for instance, Ahasuerus.

Possibly, then, living at some point in the 5th century or early 6th, in the Hephthalite Empire that ruled central Asia at the time, was a well-to-do Jew – there were many Jews in that region. This one had become imbued with Hellenic culture, Dan and Grenet sum up; and he wished to salute Alexander, protector of his religion and his people in the form of this beautiful bowl showing stories of the legends of the young king, cut in the only way he could possibly have entered Paradise as the story says.

CHILE, SOUTH AMERICA, WORLD

A tsunami wiped out ancient communities in the Atacama Desert 3,800 years ago

A tsunami wiped out ancient communities in the Atacama Desert 3,800 years ago

A recent study of geological deposits and archaeological remains has identified a massive earthquake and tsunami that wiped out communities along the coastline of Chile’s the Atacama Desert around 3,800 years ago. Studying the ancient disaster—and people’s responses to it—could help with modern hazard planning along the seismically active coast.

A long-forgotten disaster

Broken walls and toppled stones reveal the calamity that struck Zapatero, an ancient community in what’s now northern Chile, about 4,000 years ago. The people who lived along the coast of the Atacama Desert 5,700 to 4,000 years ago built villages of small stone houses atop massive piles of shells (Zapatero’s shell-filled midden is two meters deep and spans six square kilometres). Usually, these houses stood adjacent to each other, opening onto inner patios. People buried their dead beneath the houses’ floors. The cement floors were made from algae ash, seawater, and shells—the same material that held the stone walls together.

But stones and mortar failed in the face of the ocean’s power. One house at Zapatero stands in ruins, with the stones from its walls toppled inland as if struck by a giant wave. Another lies with its stones scattered back toward the sea, in exactly the pattern you’d expect from “strong currents associated with tsunami backwash,” University of Chile archaeologist Diego Salazar and his colleagues say. In a third house, the floors are covered in a layer of washed-in sand laden with the remains of marine algae and echinoderm spines, mingled with chunks of rock, shells, and sediment ripped up from the ground.

A tsunami wiped out ancient communities in the Atacama Desert 3,800 years ago

Elsewhere on the Zapatero midden, Salazar and his colleagues found similar layers of sand and ripped-up ground left behind by an ancient tsunami, along with channels gouged out by the tsunami’s strong, sudden current. When the archaeologists radiocarbon-dated shells from these layers, they found that many of the shells were actually older than the ones in undisturbed layers underneath—evidence that something had churned up the ground and ripped these older shells from their resting places to deposit them on the surface.

The same story is written in ruins and sediment at other archaeological sites along a several-hundred-kilometre stretch of the Atacama coastline. In recent surveys, Salazar and his colleagues also found geological evidence of an earthquake and tsunami that struck the region: layers of sandy, shell-laden seafloor sediment lifted several meters above sea level by seismic upheaval. The researchers radiocarbon-dated shells in these uplifted chunks of ancient coastline, along with shells and charcoal in the layers just above and below the tsunami deposits, and narrowed the date of the ancient disaster to around 3,800 years ago, give or take a century or two.

Combined, the geological and archaeological evidence points to a natural disaster of epic proportions: a rupture along a 1,000-kilometer stretch of the fault system where the Nazca Plate is slowly sliding under the South American Plate. The estimated magnitude 9.5 megathrust earthquake would have shoved parts of the coastline upward and triggered a tsunami 19 to 20 meters high along a huge stretch of the Chilean coast (and all the way across the Pacific in New Zealand, where geologists have also found deposits from a tsunami of about the same age).

The combined earthquake and tsunami struck a devastating blow for ancient people who lived close to the Pacific Ocean with a hyperarid desert at their backs. Archaeological evidence reveals that people abandoned the coast for centuries after the disaster.

Abandoned villages and scattered camps

The Atacama Desert is a hard place to live. It’s the driest desert in the world outside Antarctica, with less than 1 millimetre of rain a year. But people have lived—and thrived—here for at least 12,000 years. In part, they’ve pulled it off by turning to the sea.

Just offshore, the Humboldt Current wells up with nutrient-rich water, fueling a rich, teeming coastal ecosystem that’s still one of the world’s most productive fisheries. Thanks to the long, slow tectonic collision between the Nazca Plate and the South American Plate, the region is also fraught with seismic hazards. But for millennia, people traded that sporadic, long-term risk for the riches of the ocean. They left behind archaeological evidence of their presence and their adaptations to life in this unique environment.

But in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami 3,800 years ago, people deserted the settlements of shell middens and stone houses that dotted the Atacama coast. The sea has always been vital to life in the Atacama, but it’s clear that, for centuries, no one wanted to live too close.

Above the layers of sand and debris from the waves, mixed with toppled walls, there’s little or no trace of human activity at sites like Zapatero. The only evidence speaks of very short visits: small hearths and a sparse scattering of artefacts lying atop flood debris and broken stone walls. When people had to return to the ruins of their ancestors, they clearly didn’t want to stay long.

Archaeologists can see the wariness in the abandoned buildings and short-lived camps at places like Zapatero, but they can also read it in larger-scale changes that span the whole north Chilean coast. In one 100-kilometer stretch near Taltal, an area of northern Chile rich in archaeological sites, a survey revealed a 65 per cent decrease in the number of settlements after around 3,800 years ago.

Northeast view of the Zapatero archaeological in the Taltal region of northern Chile.

That date marks not only the estimated arrival of the tsunami, but the boundary between two archaeologically distinct cultures, Archaic IV (5,700 to 4,000 years ago) and Archaic V. After that boundary, settlements are scarcer, and both homes and cemeteries tend to be farther inland and on higher ground. Close to shore, what settlements there are get smaller, with fewer artifacts left buried and scattered.

Ancient mine gets the shaft

Even very important resources, like the iron oxide mine at San Ramón, were abandoned.

“Iron oxide was used as a pigment for several reasons, including the realization of pictures on stones that can be found in several sites along this region of the coastal Atacama Desert,” University of Chile geologist Gabriel Easton, a co-author of the recent study, tells Ars. These pigments appear to have been important for local communities and were involved in their rites and ceremonies.

A 3 centimetre-wide vertical crack in the wall of the mine probably dates to the earthquake 3,800 years ago, and after that, work here seems to have stopped. “The San Ramón 15 archaeological site constitutes one of the most ancient [pieces of] evidence of mining activity in the Americas, exploited since 12,000 years ago, and abandoned after around 4,000 years ago, most possibly because of the effects caused by the earthquake in the region,” Easton tells Ars.

But this is still a seismically active zone, and the risk of a major earthquake or tsunami is real. That’s why Salazar and his colleagues say the 3,800-year-old disaster they’ve revealed is important not just to our understanding of the past but our plans for the future. Most of the hazard assessments for coastal northern Chile are based on historical data that goes back just a few centuries, but the fault system in the region runs on a much larger temporal scale. Data about ancient quakes and tsunamis like the one that reshaped society here 3,800 years ago could offer a longer-term perspective to hazard planners.

Unfortunately, the Indigenous people who still live in the Atacama, including the Changos (recently recognized by the Chilean government after years of effort) lost much of their history, traditional culture, and lore to the ravages of European conquest, epidemics, and centuries of marginalization. But learning how their ancestors responded and adapted could help all of us prepare to face the next disaster.

According to Salazar and his colleagues, the aftermath of the ancient Atacama disaster is a reminder that resilience doesn’t mean a “return to the pre-shock state” but rather “the capacity of human communities to absorb changes… allowing for their long-term adaptation.”

EUROPE, ITALY, WORLD

Does Composition of Roman Coins Reflect Currency Crisis?

Does Composition of Roman Coins Reflect Currency Crisis?

New scientific analysis of the composition of Roman denarii has brought fresh understanding to a financial crisis briefly mentioned by the Roman statesman and writer Marcus Tullius Cicero in his essay on moral leadership, De Officiis, and solved a longstanding historical debate.

Does Composition of Roman Coins Reflect Currency Crisis?

Researchers at the University of Warwick and the University of Liverpool have analysed coins of the period and revealed a debasement of the currency far greater than historians had thought, with coins that had been pure silver before 90BC cut with up to 10 per cent copper five years later.

Dr. Ponting at the University of Liverpool said: “The Romans had been used to extremely fine silver coinage, so they may well have lost confidence in the denarius when it ceased to be pure. The precise level of debasement might have been less important to contemporaries than the mere realisation that the coin was adulterated and no longer made of true ‘silver’.”

Professor Butcher at the University of Warwick said “The discovery of this significant decrease in the value of the denarius has shed new light on Cicero’s hints of a currency crisis in 86BC. Historians have long debated what the statesman and scholar meant when he wrote “the coinage was being tossed around so that no one was able to know what he had.” (De Officiis, 3:80) and we believe we have now solved this puzzle.”

The reference is part of an anecdote describing self-serving behaviour by Marius Gratidianus, who took credit for a proposal for currency reform worked out jointly by the tribunes and the college of praetors and became hugely popular with the public as a result.

But what was the cause of the coinage being ‘tossed about, and what were the solutions for which Gratidianus took credit?  

Rome and the Coinages of the Mediterranean 200 BCE – 64 CE, a five-year research project funded by the ERC aims to increase our understanding of the economies of classical Rome and other Mediterranean states by analysing the composition of their coins and cross-referencing the findings with the historical record.

The research team includes Professor Kevin Butcher at the University of Warwick, Dr Matthew Ponting at the University of Liverpool, and Dr Adrian Hillier at ISIS Neutron and Muon Facility, STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.

Dr Ponting said: “Our minimally invasive sampling technique used to take samples from these important coins has revealed a significant decline in the value of the denarius – from being a pure silver coin, the denarius first dropped to under 95% fine, and then it fell again to 90%, with some coins as low as 86%, suggesting a severe currency crisis.”

Professor Kevin Butcher explains the context: “In the years after 91 BC, the Roman state was in danger of becoming bankrupt. The Romans were at war with their own allies in Italy, and by the conclusion of the war, in 89 BC, there was a debt crisis.

“By 86 BC there appears to have been a crisis of confidence in the currency, too. Cicero related how the Roman tribunes approached the college of praetors to resolve the crisis before Gratidianus claimed sole credit for the collective effort.

“One theory is that Gratidianus fixed the exchange rate between the silver denarius and the bronze as (which had only recently been reduced in weight). Another is that he published a method for detecting fake denarii, and so restored faith in the coinage.

“Unfortunately, Cicero’s choice of words is too obscure for historians to determine exactly what was going on. His purpose in writing about it wasn’t to illuminate monetary history; he was just using the incident as an illustration of a Roman magistrate behaving badly by taking credit for the work of others.

“It has long been thought that there was a very slight devaluation of the denarius between 89-87, but was it enough to trigger a currency crisis?”

The results of the metallurgical analysis suggest that the financial difficulties experienced by Rome in these years led to a relaxation of standards at the mint in 90 BC, with the result that the silver content of the coinage declined in two stages so that by 87 BC the coinage was deliberately alloyed with 5-10% copper.

Professor Butcher added: “This could be the meaning of Cicero’s words: that the value of the coinage was ‘tossed about’ because nobody could be certain whether the denarii they had were pure or not.

“It is all the more noteworthy that around the time Gratidianus published his edict, the standard of fineness rose sharply, reversing the debasement and restoring the denarius to a high-quality currency.

“Although the precise chronology remains uncertain, the new scientific data suggest that it could have been the main aim of Gratidianus’ edict, rather than something to do with exchange rates between silver and bronze or detecting forgeries.”

In the decades that followed, the Romans avoided debasing the denarius again, until the state once again faced huge expenses during the civil war between Pompey and Julius Caesar. Even then, the Roman mint did not go as far as it had in the time of Gratidianus.

These findings are part of a larger EU-funded study that aims to examine the financial and monetary strategies of Mediterranean states from c. 150 BCE to a major coinage reform in c. 64 CE by providing a detailed and reliable set of analyses of the chemical composition of all major silver coinages of that period.

AUSTRALIA, WORLD

WA Aboriginal site near Rio Tinto mine more than 50,000 years old, a new study reveals

WA Aboriginal site near Rio Tinto mine more than 50,000 years old, a new study reveals

An Aboriginal sacred place located 65 metres from a land bridge used by Rio Tinto to haul iron ore is at least 50,000 years old, with new research finding evidence of occupation during the height of the last ice age. The mining giant, which funded the latest excavation, has promised to ensure the site “is preserved for future generations”.

WA Aboriginal site near Rio Tinto mine more than 50,000 years old, a new study reveals
Traditional owners say the latest excavation at the Aboriginal sacred site Yirra is globally significant and needs to be protected.

Archaeological exploration at the site, known as Yirra by the Yinhawangka traditional owners, has yielded stone tools, charcoal and bone which show a 50,000-plus year habitation, making it one of the oldest sites yet found in Australia. The research is the first traditional owner-led, non-mining related, heritage excavation in Yinhawangka country, and the first time Rio Tinto has participated in such exploration.

The initiative is part of the company’s efforts to improve its relationships with traditional owner groups in the wake of the Juukan Gorge disaster, when the iron ore giant destroyed a 46,000-year-old rock shelter against the consent of Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura traditional owners.

A subsequent 2021 federal parliamentary inquiry heard that archaeological work was usually perfunctory, and only done as part of a mining company’s application to destroy Aboriginal heritage sites under Western Australia’s previous heritage laws.

Heritage experts told the inquiry that very few sites were studied in detail before the sign-off to destroy was given. The work at Yirra marks a significant departure from that practice.

Yinhawangka people told the Juukan Gorge inquiry they were concerned for the integrity of Yirra, which was recorded in the WA heritage system but was not a registered site and therefore “unprotected”. The traditional owners said Yirra was very close to a “massive” (110-metre high) land bridge that haul pack trucks used to deliver ore from the mine pit. They said large boulders had rolled onto the site and there was significant soil erosion.

Experts say the Yirra site is among the oldest known places of human habitation in Australia.

Rio Tinto’s cultural heritage management plan did not provide for any actions relating to Yirra at that time, they said.

Now there are calls for more work of this kind to be done.

“We hope that Yirra will help us tell our ancestral story to Australia and our future generations. We would still be visiting this site if it wasn’t for the mining leases,” Yinhawangka Aboriginal Corporation (YAC) chair Halloway Smirke said.

“All Pilbara groups should have this kind of scientific work done on cultural sites.

“Important sites like Yirra need to be protected, especially when they turn out to be amongst the oldest known places of human habitation in Australia,” Smirke said.

YAC heritage manager, archaeologist and anthropologist Dr Anna Fagan said the study was globally significant.

“This was the first study of its kind to be done, not for mining compliance or heritage clearance, but for Yinhawangka People and Country. The Yirra findings help overturn and reset ideas of desert presence in Australia and I’m confident in global narratives,” Dr Fagan said.

A spokesperson for Rio Tinto said the company acknowledged the significance of Yirra “and is committed to working in partnership with the Yinhawangka people” to preserve it.

“We’ve undertaken a geotechnical study to further our understanding of the surrounds of the site and implemented additional controls,” the spokesperson said, without elaborating.

YAC conducted the archaeological work in collaboration with Archae-aus heritage consultants, and researchers from the University of Western Australia. Archae-aus director Fiona Hook, who excavated the site with her husband, the late Dr Bruce Veitch, and traditional owners more than 20 years ago, said the importance of the site has now been proven beyond doubt.

“When the old dates were returned, I was overwhelmed by emotion. I’ve worked with three generations of Yinhawangka People at this place. It is such an immense relief that we finally got to return to the site and excavate Yirra again after 20 years of waiting,” Hook said.

Rio Tinto said it plans to fund further traditional owner-led cultural research and archaeological excavations.

“This is a wonderful outcome for the Yinhawangka people and we welcome this incredible discovery,” Rio’s iron ore chief executive Simon Trott said.

“These findings at Yirra are a major archaeological breakthrough of international significance, expanding knowledge of Aboriginal occupation in the Pilbara,” Trott said.

Rio Tinto is in talks with other traditional owner groups in the Pilbara to fund further traditional owner-led cultural research and archaeological excavations, a spokesperson said.

EUROPE, POLAND, WORLD

Researchers Reconstruct Likenesses From 400-Year-Old Bones

Researchers Reconstruct Likenesses From 400-Year-Old Bones

The bust of an elderly man and digital images of a young woman and a young man are the results of research conducted on human skulls found in an early medieval stronghold.

Researchers Reconstruct Likenesses From 400-Year-Old Bones

The appearance of the former inhabitants of Upper Lusatia was recreated by anthropologists, archaeologists and visual artists.

The three reconstructions were made by the team of Professor Barbara Kwiatkowska from the Wroclaw University of Environmental and Life Sciences in collaboration with visual artists from the Academy of Art and Design in Wroclaw. One female and two male skulls were found in Göda, western Saxony.

‘Radiocarbon dating of human remains showed that the cemetery in the yard of the stronghold functioned between the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the 17th century when the stronghold was already abandoned.

The older man’s appearance has been recreated in the form of a full, realistic bust. The reconstruction of the appearance of the young man and the young woman was done digitally.

Upon discovery almost a century ago, these burials were thought to date from the early Middle Ages. That is why we included them in our research project that concerns the Polish-German border 1,000 years ago.

This allowed verifying their chronology. It turned out that these graves were much younger than previously thought. This is another example that it is worth it to re-analyse past archaeological discoveries with modern research tools’, explains Dr. Paweł Konczewski, an archaeologist from the Wroclaw University of Environmental and Life Sciences.

The reconstructions are presented at the City Museum in Budziszyn at an exhibition devoted to the period of the early Middle Ages in Upper Lusatia – a geographic and historical region located today on both sides of the Polish-German border.

The exhibition was prepared as part of the Polish-German scientific and educational project ‘1000 years of Upper Lusatia – the people, the forts, the cities’.

ENGLAND, EUROPE, WORLD

Silver coins unearthed in New England may be loot from one of the ‘greatest crimes in history’

Silver coins unearthed in New England may be loot from one of the ‘greatest crimes in history’

A handful of Arabian silver coins found in New England may be the last surviving relics of history’s most notorious act of piracy — and perhaps one of the most famous pirates who ever lived. Evidence suggests the distinctive coins were spent as common silver in the American colonies in the late 1690s by the fugitive pirate crew of Henry Every, also known as John Avery, who had fled there after plundering the Mughal treasure ship Ganj-i-Sawai as it was returning pilgrims from the Muslim Hajj.

Silver coins unearthed in New England may be loot from one of the 'greatest crimes in history'
The 1693 Yemeni silver coin was found in 2014 in Rhode Island. Similar similar coins have since been unearthed at American colonial sites.

Researchers aren’t certain that the coins are from the Ganj-i-sawai, but their origin, their dates and their discovery in such a distant region suggest they were seized by the pirates and spent in the Americas. 

The coins may have been handled by Every himself, who disappeared a few years later but who came to be portrayed as an almost heroic figure from what some have called the “Golden Age of Piracy.”

Their discovery has also cast new light on Every’s whereabouts shortly before he vanished with his loot. “We can prove beyond a doubt that he actually was in the mainland American colonies,” Rhode Island metal detectorist Jim Bailey told Live Science. 

Bailey found one of the first Arabian silver coins, called a comassee, in 2014 at the site of a colonial settlement on Aquidneck Island, about 20 miles (32 kilometres) south of Providence. 

More than a dozen similar coins thought to be from the pirate raid on the Ganj-i-sawai have now been discovered by metal detectorists and archaeologists elsewhere in Rhode Island, and in Massachusetts, Connecticut and North Carolina — may be the last evidence of one of the greatest crimes in history. 

Captain Henry Every and his crew take one of the Great Mogul’s ships in this illustration.

Pirate attack

In 1695, Every and his cutthroat crew onboard their ship Fancy joined a pirate raid on a convoy in the Red Sea that was returning to India from Mecca. Every’s ship chased and caught the convoy’s flagship, the Ganj-i-sawai, which belonged to the Grand Mughal Aurangzeb, the Muslim emperor of what is now India and Pakistan.

Reports say the pirates tortured and killed its crew and 600 passengers, before making off with gold and silver, including thousands of coins, said to be worth between 200,000 and 600,000 British pounds — the equivalent of between $40 million and $130 million in today’s money.

After an outcry led by the British East India Company, whose profits on the riches of India were threatened by the raid, Britain’s King William III ordered what is regarded as the first international manhunt to capture Every and the other pirates.

By this time, however, Every and his crew had escaped to the New World. They lived for several months in the Bahamas, possibly with the collusion of the British governor of the islands; but they fled in late 1696 as the Royal Navy closed in. 

Some of Every’s crew went to live in the mainland colonies, where they were eventually tried and acquitted, possibly as a result of bribery; but there were no further sightings of Every. Later reports suggested he had sailed to Ireland while still on the run and that he died there, impoverished, a few years later. Since his loot from the Ganj-i-sawai was never accounted for, rumours long persisted that the treasure had been buried somewhere in secret.

Bailey unearthed other metallic objects from the same period, including these bit-bosses from a horse’s bridle, a buckle for a spur and part of a spur itself.

Arabian silver

Bailey is an amateur archaeologist who worked on the recovery of the wreck of the Whydah, a pirate ship discovered off Cape Cod in 1984. In 2014, his metal detector picked up the first of the mysterious coins in a meadow on Aquidneck Island that was once the site of a colonial township.

“You never field-clean a coin, because you could damage it,” he said. “I had to run to my car and get a big bottle of water… the mud came off, and I saw this Arabic script on the coin and I was amazed because I knew exactly where it’d come from,” he said. “I was aware that the American colonies had been bases of operation for piracy in the late 17th century.”

Studies of the Arabic writing on the coin showed it had been minted in Yemen in southern Arabia in 1693, just a few years before the pirate attack on the Ganj-i-sawai. Another 13 have been found, mostly by metal detectorists, but the latest in 2018 by archaeologists in Connecticut; two Ottoman Turkish silver coins thought to be from the same hoard have also been unearthed in the region. 

Bailey has carefully studied each of the discoveries while researching historical sources about the pirates who might have brought the coins to the Americas; and in 2017, some of his work was published in the Colonial Newsletter, a research journal published by the American Numismatic Society. 

Several of the coins show the year they were minted, while some are marked with the names of rulers at the time, which can be used to date them. “None of the coins date after 1695, when the Ganj-i-sawai was captured,” Bailey said.

Pirate treasure

Everyone is thought to have sailed directly to Ireland after his time in the Bahamas, but Bailey’s research suggests Every first spent several weeks on the American mainland, trading in African slaves he had bought with the loot from the Ganj-i-sawai. Historical records relate that a ship Every had acquired in the Bahamas, Sea Flower, sold dozens of slaves on the mainland, and Bailey’s research suggests that Everyone was on board, he said.

Bailey thinks Every probably died in Ireland eventually, as described by some chroniclers. But others portrayed him as a swashbuckling “king” who ruled for years over a fictional pirate utopia in Madagascar. There’s no way to know if Everyone handled the New England coins himself, but Bailey thinks they were almost certainly part of the hoard looted from the Mughal ship (Some coin specialists, however, are not convinced by his theory.) 

While most of the loot was probably melted down to hide the origins, “what we’re finding basically are the coins that were being used by the pirates when they were on the run: coins for lodgings, coins for meals, coins for drinking,” he said.  Astonishingly, the coins may also have been referred to in the manhunt proclamation by King William, which stated that Every and the other fugitives had looted many “Indian and Persian” gold and silver coins from the captured ship. 

“How often do you find a coin that’s mentioned in the proclamation for the capture of a pirate and the subject of the first worldwide manhunt?” Bailey said. “It’s just fantastic.”