1,500-year-old secret underground passage uncovered in Istanbul
During the ongoing excavations in the ruins of Saint Polyeuktos Church in Istanbul’s Saraçhane neighborhood, which was destroyed during the Latin invasion, a 1,500-year-old underground passage has been discovered.
A previously unknown underground passage about 20 meters (65 feet) from the nearby Haşim Işçan Passage was discovered.
The carved marble blocks and reliefs in the underground passage, which contains mosaics and stone inlays, have impressed researchers.
Mahir Polat, Deputy Secretary-General of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (IBB), stated that the structure is an excellent example of the city’s architecture that has withstood the test of time and the wrath of earthquakes.
“What is one of the most important aspects of this discovery of a 1,500-year-old passage? Dozens of tremors have passed in these 1,500 years in Istanbul, which is currently struggling with earthquake risk.
This structure has managed to survive all these earthquakes. Türkiye should learn the secret and have knowledge of this,” Polat explained.
The 1,500-year-old underground tunnels discovered in Istanbul, Türkiye. Photo: DHA Photo
Polat pointed out that the main structure of St. Polyeuktos was destroyed, but its infrastructure remains intact.
“The earthquake memory of the city is also here. If you want to see Istanbul’s earthquake memory, what happened in the Fatih district is a good example,” he added.
Reminding that civil engineers and scientific consultants who specialize in earthquakes also assisted in the municipality’s excavation works, Polat stated that the experts would also share a report documenting the earthquakes the area witnessed in the past.
“The mortar with a mixture known as Horasan mortar from the period.
We know it is important in terms of the technology of that period.
We also examined the surface samples of the structure, such as stone, plaster, and possible gypsum, in the laboratory to determine their composition and archaeometry,” Polat added.
During the excavation works in the area, apart from the statue, the teams also found 681 bronze coins, stamped bricks, marble pieces, ceramics, oil lamps, glass, and metal artifacts.
Roman Incense Container Unearthed in Northern England
Archaeologists working on a Cockermouth site uncovered some “particularly spectacular finds” in the final days of their nine-week project.
The nine-strong team of experts has been working in riverside fields off Low Road and behind the Lakes Home Centre.
The Ecus team, from Barnard Castle, was called in by landowner Bob Slack who is keen to put some flood defences in the area.
In the first few weeks they discovered evidence of a Roman foundry, marching camp and small village, said Mr Slack.
They later discovered a bust, steelyard weight, coins, pottery and also the foundations of a building and flagged floors.
In the final week, they came across a copper-alloy incense container, which Ecus project officer Julie Shoemark described as “an exceptionally rare find”.
“The site has produced a wealth of information about the Roman inhabitants of the vicus and last week revealed some particularly spectacular finds,” she said.
“Firstly, we have a highly polished tiny stone figurine which has unfortunately not survived intact. What remains depicts a naked male rendered in typically ‘Romano-British’ style with simply carved large almond eyes and a distinctive spiked hairstyle.
“Secondly, a stone sculpture of a seated female figure was recovered from a rubble deposit. She has unfortunately lost her head, however, enough remains to tell us who she is.
“She wears a pattered mantle and carries a patera (a shallow bowl used for libations) in her right hand and a cornucopia containing an ear of wheat in her left. These attributes identify her as the goddess Fortuna, the goddess of luck, but also closely associated with the harvest in agricultural communities.”
The most striking find was a copper-alloy balsamarium (incense container).
“This is an exceptionally rare find, being one of only a handful excavated in Britain to date,” said Ms Shoemark.
“It is in the form of a bust of the youthful Bacchus, the god of wine, although the features appear to have been modelled after depictions of Antinous, the lover of Emperor Hadrian.
“In addition to being exceptionally rare, this artefact is in superb condition, missing only the lid which would have sat atop the head.”
The only other example of a balsamarium of similar design was recovered from the River Eden, Carlisle and is on display at Tullie House.
Landowner Bob Slack and archaeologist Eddie Dougherty on the site
Bacchus is most widely known as the god of winemaking but is also associated with agriculture, particularly orchards, and fertility.
“We previously had an exquisite steelyard weight depicting Silenus, the satyr companion of Bacchus, so we now have a nice group of finds carrying the running theme of agriculture and fertility, which would have been central to the lives of this community,” said Ms Shoemark.
“Together these and the other artefacts from the excavation are allowing us to build a picture of the history of the site and its inhabitants.
“We look forward to sharing the full results following specialist research and assessment of the assemblage in due course.”
The land, which will be covered with soil and reseeded, is in a flood zone so cannot be developed. Mr Slack has planning permission for 27 homes adjacent to the Lovells development on Low Road.
Neolithic Ritual Cache Discovered in Ukrainian Cave
Mykhailo Sokhatskyi investigating Verteba Cave: Artifacts suggest it was a hiding place because who would want to live here.
Caves have provided shelter for humans and our predecessors for at least two million years. They served as dwellings, hiding places, possibly shrines, and for the last 50,000 years, as a canvas for our art. Now new discoveries in the uninviting Verteba Cave in Ukraine bring us a new glimpse into human history, at the dawn of agriculture in Eastern Europe.
The discoveries, dating to about 5,000 years ago, were made in March by archaeologists from the Borschivskyy Local History Museum in Ukraine, led by Sokhatskyi Mykhailo, a leading scholar of the Trypillian culture and director of the museum. They shed rare light on the enigmatic Cucuteni-Trypillian culture that dominated territories in Ukraine, Romania and Moldova for over 2,000 years.
The Cucuteni-Trypillian culture is known to have been highly developed for its time, the late Neolithic and Chalcolithic. Some of their settlements were extraordinarily large; they farmed and husbanded domestic animals and had pottery and metallurgical skills.
Little however is known about their ritual life due to the scarcity of Trypillian burials. But now some hints have been unearthed at Verteba Cave – including a hidden collection of female figurines.
Beautifully ornamented Trypillian pottery found in Verteba Cave
‘Pompeii on the Dniester’
Verteba Cave is about 9 kilometers (5.6 miles) long and features occasional small stalactites and stalagmites in maze-like tunnels. Its entrance is near the village of Bilche-Zolote, north of the Dniester River in western Ukraine. In fact, the cave has been undergoing archaeological investigation since its discovery in 1829 and gained the soubriquet of “Pompeii on the Dneister” not because of volcano-stricken bodies strewn about but because of the sheer abundance of material from antiquity.
Finds over the years included elaborately ornamented pottery vessels, anthropomorphic and zoomorphic clay figurines, tools made of flint, bone, and stone, copper knives, and various ornaments made of bones and shells. Many are on display inside the cave, which has effectively become an underground museum of Trypillian culture, complete with guided tours.
The team excavating inside the cave Cave Verteba
However, the earlier excavations were not systematic. Archaeological layers got mixed in the process, and valuable data was lost. (Archaeology is the art of destruction, some say, which is why modern archaeological research never excavates whole sites but rather only a slice of them, leaving the rest for future archaeologists equipped with advanced techniques and knowledge.)
Then excavations starting in 1996 found layers undisrupted by previous research, which could be studied using modern methods, guided by almost 200 years of acquired data on the cave.
Female figurines found in previous excavations at Verteba Cave
Stressful times and ‘talking bones’
The unique quality of the Verteba Cave for scholars of the Trypillians is the discovery of three layers of the culture, each separated by a sterile layer. The research concluded that between 6,000 to 4,600 years ago, various groups associated with this culture, differentiated mainly by pottery style, used the cave intermittently, altogether occupying the cave for about 800 years.
What brought these early farmers here, to this unpleasant maze of darkness?
Dank, pitch black, and altogether unwelcoming, but also small stalactites in Verteba Cave
Verteba is not hospitable in any way. It consists of narrow pitch-black labyrinths, and is very humid. Nobody with options would have wanted to live there or stay long. The requisite conclusion, scholars suggest, is that its primary function was as a refuge; but based on the amounts and density of the materials retrieved in the cave, when people did come, it was in large numbers.
Many scholars believe that the late Trypillian period was a turbulent time and indeed the occupation layers in the cave correlate with known migrations to the area by adjacent tribes. Many Trypillian settlements from that time were fortified and surrounded by moats, or were built on high terraces next to rivers.
Cave Verteba
Moreover, the biological evidence found over the years may be scanty but it’s telling. Analysis of 21 Trypillian skulls found between 2008 to 2012 revealed that 12 had head traumas that had to have occurred at death or close to it, because they showed no signs of healing.
Theoretically, at least some of the traumas could have resulted from accidents. Still, osteological research on the position of the injuries and comparison to known markers of violent trauma says violence is the more plausible cause in most cases.
Furthermore, examination of the inhabitants’ teeth and long bones suggested they led a stressful life, at least more so than their predecessors. Their remains indicate that the Verteba cave dwellers were shorter and experienced significantly more enamel defects than Ukraine’s earlier Mesolithic and Neolithic populations, which is indicative of malnutrition and/or disease early in life, during tooth formation.
Bone plate amulet from Verteba Cave
The Trypillian economy was based on agriculture and husbandry alongside hunting and foraging. The Neolithic revolution brought a new way of life, with new stresses. As populations grew and resources became limited, the evidence indicates that people suffered from malnutrition and illness associated with living in dense conditions.
Based on all this, the archaeologists think the cave served to hide in times of conflict likely arising from migration episodes, driven partly by the new way of life. Supporting this thesis, the cave mouth is inconspicuous, at the bottom of a sinkhole in the middle of a flat plateau, making it a perfect hiding spot. Nowadays, the cave has only one entrance but Sokhatskyi and the team discovered that it had several during the Neolithic period.
The entrance to Verteba Cave
The Trypillians weren’t the only ones to hide in the cave system. Around 3,000 years later, others would find refuge in it again – Jews hiding from the Nazis during World War II. An exhibition of items they left behind, like the Trypillians before them, is in process in the underground museum in this extraordinary cave, no place to spend one’s life but a wonderful place to hole up.
An interlude with boars
All that said, hiding wasn’t the only thing the Trypillians did inside Verteba, Sokhatsky surmises. It was also a place of worship and burial. Throughout history, people have sought sanctuary in holy sites, such as churches and temples, he adds.
Among the finds in March, the archaeologists found an enormous clay storage jar with white organic material on its bottom that has yet to undergo analysis. And they noticed a niche in a wall that had been missed, a small one into which only a hand could fit.
Finding the storage jar in Verteba Cave.
Inside it they revealed five female clay figurines, placed closely together, Sokhatskyi says.
“Female figurines are not rare in Trypillian contexts, and hoards of figurines are known, but these were sheltered by the tusks of a wild boar,” he says.
Adult and baby boars in Haifa
Searching the literature produced no parallels, he says.
In general, boar remains are rare within Trypillian complexes. Their tusks have been found within some Early and Middle Trypillian graves but this culture’s rituals seemed to have been focused more on domesticated animals like cattle, sheep, goats, and dogs. When wild animals were represented, they are usually bears or deer.
Verteba is “late Trypillian” and in that context, this find is unique, the archaeologist explains. In Verteba, the team also found jewelry and tools (for pottery production) made of boar teeth, and in 2016, they found a small clay boar figurine.
Boar tusk with perforations suggesting it had been used as a pendant or other item of adornment
For some reason, the boar may have played an important role for the people in the cave. One possibility is the persistence of old traditions, also suggested by the habit of the Trypillians returning to old pottery ornamentation traditions, Sokhatskyi suggests. Perhaps it is that very thing, preserving tradition, that enabled them to preserve their culture for all these years.
An 8-year-old girl unearths Stone Age dagger at her school in Norway
Elise, an 8-year-old student, found the Neolithic dagger while playing near her school in Norway.
While playing outside her school in Norway, an 8-year-old girl found an unexpected treasure — not a lost ball or a discarded jump rope, but a flint dagger crafted by Stone Age people 3,700 years ago.
The student, identified only as Elise in a statement translated from Norwegian, discovered the gray-brown dagger when she was playing in a rocky area by her school in Vestland County. “I was going to pick up a piece of glass, and then the stone was there,” she said in the statement.
Elise showed the stone to her teacher, Karen Drange, who saw that the stone looked ancient. Drange contacted Vestland county council, and archaeologists from the county examined the artifact.
The nearly 5-inch-long (12 centimeters) tool is a rare find, Louise Bjerre Petersen, an archaeologist with Vestland county municipality, said in the translated statement. Flint, a hard sedimentary rock, does not naturally occur in Norway, so the dagger may have come from across the North Sea in Denmark, according to the statement.
The nearly 5-inch-long (12 centimeters) flint dagger was likely crafted during the Neolithic period about 3,700 years ago.
This type of dagger is often found with sacrificial finds, the archaeologists added. To further investigate the area, the Vestland County Council and Vestland County’s University Museum in Bergen, Norway’s second-largest city, teamed up to explore the school’s grounds. But they didn’t find any other evidence dating back to the Stone Age, they said in the statement.
Based on its style, the dagger likely dates to the New Stone Age, or the Neolithic, a time when prehistoric humans shaped stone tools and began to rely on domesticated plants and animals, build permanent villages and develop crafts, such as pottery.
In Norway, the Stone Age, which includes the Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic, lasted from 10000 B.C. to 1800 B.C., with a number of hunter-gatherers permanently settling down to farm around 2400 B.C., according to Talk Norway, an educational website on Norway’s history and cultural heritage.
The dagger will be cataloged and used in research at the University Museum. The artifact isn’t the only Stone Age discovery to recently get attention in Norway.
This past winter, the full-body reconstruction of a Stone Age teenager who lived 8,300 years ago went on display at the Hå Gamle Prestegard museum in southern Norway.
The teen boy was likely part of a Mesolithic hunter-gatherer group, but the details surrounding his death are a mystery; it appears he died alone leaning against a cave wall, as his remains had no indications of a burial.
Modern humans migrated into Europe in 3 waves, ‘ambitious and provocative’ new study suggests
Evidence of the earliest migration of sapiens in all Europe is found at Grotte Mandrin (the rock at the center of the picture) in Mediterranean France.
It was long thought that modern humans first ventured into Europe about 42,000 years ago, but newly analyzed tools from the Stone Age have upended this idea. Now, evidence suggests that modern humans trekked into Europe in three waves between 54,000 and 42,000 years ago, a new study finds.
Our species, Homo sapiens, arose in Africa more than 300,000 years ago, and anatomically modern humans emerged at least 195,000 years ago.
Evidence for the first waves of modern humans outside Africa dates back at least 194,000 years to Israel, and possibly 210,000 years to Greece.
For years, the oldest confirmed signs of modern humans in Europe were teeth about 42,000 years old that archaeologists had unearthed in Italy and Bulgaria. These ancient groups were likely Protoaurignacians — the earliest members of the Aurignacians, the first known hunter-gatherer culture in Europe.
However, a 2022 study revealed that a tooth found in the site of Grotte Mandrin in southern France’s Rhône Valley suggested that modern humans lived there about 54,000 years ago, a 2022 study found. This suggested Europe was home to modern humans about 10,000 years earlier than previously thought.
In the 2022 study, scientists linked this fossil tooth with stone artifacts that scientists previously dubbed Neronian, after the nearby Grotte de Néron site. Neronian tools include tiny flint arrowheads or spearpoints and are unlike anything else found in Europe from that time.
Now, in a new study, an archaeologist argues that another wave of modern humans may have entered Europe between the 42,000-year-old Protoaurignacians and the 54,000-year-old Neronians. “It’s an in-depth rewriting of the historical structure of [the] arrival of sapiens in the continent,” study lead researcher Ludovic Slimak, an archaeologist at the University of Toulouse in France, told Live Science in an email. He detailed his ideas in a study published on Wednesday (May 3) in the journal PLOS One.
These maps show evidence for three distinct waves of early migration of Homo sapiens in Europe from the East Mediterranean coast. In phase 1, the Neronians created tools about 54,000 years ago.
Stone Age evidence
Slimak focused on a group or “industry” of stone artifacts previously unearthed in the Levant, the eastern Mediterranean region that today includes Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Scientists have long thought that the Levant was a key gateway for modern humans migrating out of Africa.
When Slimak compared Neronian tools from Grotte Mandrin with the industry from about the same time from a site known as Ksar Akil in Lebanon, he found notable similarities. This suggested both groups were one and the same, with the Levantine group expanding into Europe over time. The much younger Protoaurignacian artifacts also have very similar counterparts in the Levant from a culture known as the Ahmarian, Slimak noted.
“I buil[t] a bridge between Europe and the East Mediterranean populations during the early migrations of sapiens in the continent,” Slimak said.
In addition, Slimak found thousands of modern human flint artifacts from the Levant that existed in the period known as the Early Upper Paleolithic, between the Ksar Akil and the Ahmarian ones. This led him to look for possible modern human counterparts of these artifacts in Europe.
Stone artifacts from a European industry known as the Châtelperronian highly resemble modern human artifacts seen in the Early Upper Paleolithic of the Levant. In addition, Châtelperronian items date to about 45,000 years ago, or between those of the Neronians and the Protoaurignacians. However, scientists had often thought Châtelperronians were Neanderthals.
Slimak now argues the Châtelperronians were actually a second wave of modern humans into Europe. “We have here, and for the first time, a serious candidate for a non-Neanderthalian origin of these industries,” Slimak said.
This new model of modern human settlement of Europe is “ambitious and provocative,” Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London who did not take part in the new study, told Live Science in an email. “Evidence has been building for a while that there were several early dispersals of Homo sapiens into Europe before the well-attested Aurignacian-associated one about 42,000 years ago.”
Future research can help confirm or disprove this new idea. “I see this paper generating a number of research projects to support or refute it,” Christian Tryon, a Paleolithic archaeologist at the University of Connecticut who helped translate the new study, told Live Science in an email. “People now need to look at some of the archaeological sites here with a critical eye to see if they see the same kinds of technical details reported by Slimak. This is the start of a long process, I suspect.”
Underwater Archaeologists Discover a 7,000-Year-Old Road in Croatia
A team of underwater archaeologists from the University of Zadar has discovered the sunken ruins of a 7,000-year-old road that once linked an ancient artificial landmass to the Croatian island of Korčula.
The road is located at a depth of 5 meters in sediment deposits at the submerged archaeological site of Soline, an artificial landmass and Neolithic settlement of the island Korčula and along with several other artifacts, belonged to a lost maritime culture known as the Hvar, who occupied this area during the Neolithic Era.
By radiocarbon analysis of preserved wood found in the last campaign, the entire settlement was dated around 4,900 years before Christ.
A four-meter-wide linear road made of stone slabs was discovered during a recent underwater survey of the site. People walked on this road almost 7,000 years ago.
Over the weekend, the University of Zadar released new footage of the underwater passage, which was made of stacked stones and measured some 12 feet across.
“In underwater archaeological research of the submerged neolithic site of Soline on the island of Korčula, archaeologists found remains that surprised them,” said the University of Zadar in a statement posted to Facebook on Sunday.
“Namely, beneath the layers of sea mud, they discovered a road that connected the sunken prehistoric settlement of the Hvar culture with the coast of the island of Korčula.”
According to the university, several scientists and organizations are working together on underwater research, which is being directed by archaeologist Mate Parica, who has been studying the location for a while.
The team also found fragments of millstones, flint blades, and stone axes among the underwater ruins.
The artifacts shed light on the enigmatic Hvar peoples, who first appeared on the islands and coasts of the northeast Adriatic Sea around 7,000 years ago.
Korčula is part of an archipelago in the Adriatic that was once a part of the continent.
The coastal valleys of the Dinaric Mountains began to flood as a result of the Earth’s ice cap melting after 12,000 BC, and by 6000 BC the archipelago had roughly reached its current configuration.
Archaeologists discover a new megalithic monument in the heart of Andalusia in southern Spain – a 5,000-year-old secret
Archaeologists in Spain uncovered a previously overlooked tomb while investigating the formation of La Peña de los Enamorados, also known as the sleeping giant.
The Antequera archaeological site in southern Spain is home to a number of ancient structures dating back to the third and fourth millennia BC, including the Menga, Viera, and El Romeral megaliths.
According to a study that was published on April 15 in the journal Antiquity, the Antequera site contains both man-made and “natural monuments,” but is best known for its prehistoric megaliths.
The “natural monuments” at the site include La Peña de los Enamorados, a stone “sleeping giant” that towers about 2,900 feet above the ground, researchers said.
The Sleeping Giant had a 5000-year-old secret hidden in his chest: Piedras Blancas megalithic grave.
The rectangular stone structure was built at least 5,000 years ago, according to the study. It was used for millennia in three distinct phases before being abandoned between 1950 and 1180 B.C.
General view of the excavated Piedras Blancas tomb or megalithic grave from the east, with the numbering of the stones. At the far end, the two ‘arrow-like’ slabs are attached to the bedrock.
Lead author of the new paper, Leonardo García Sanjuán, a Professor in Prehistory at the University of Seville (Spain), said the location of the Piedras Blancas tomb was “carefully chosen.”
The tomb’s stone slabs were carefully arranged to coincide “with the summer solstice sunrise,” researchers said. Some of the “heavily engraved” slabs “appear to have been precisely placed to ‘funnel’ the light from the rising sun towards the back of the chamber at the summer solstice.”
In Antequera, the oldest megaliths date back to 3,000 BC, and this rectangular stone tomb was built at the same time. Researchers believe that bodies were spread out on a sizable flat stone platform at the time ceramic offerings were left in the tomb. Later, the decomposing corpses were pushed off the stone platform and into the surrounding area, where the researchers discovered “40 teeth and 95 bones.”
A skeleton is buried in the added burial niches at the Piedras Blancas tomb.
Furthermore, the archaeologists identified a “triangular, arrow-like stone” lodged into the floor, oriented in the direction of the rising sun.
The Piedras Blancas tomb was renovated around 2500 B.C., and niches for two burials were added, according to the study. Researchers believe these were high-status individuals, most likely a man and a woman. It’s unclear whether they were buried simultaneously or over the course of a century.
The tomb later “underwent another significant transformation,” according to researchers. Stones were placed at the entrance “as if to block or seal” it, and the bones of at least two children and three women were interred.
According to the study, the tomb was abandoned and has remained untouched ever since.
‘Lost’ microbial genes found in dental plaque of ancient humans
‘Lost’ microbial genes found in dental plaque of ancient humans
About 19,000 years ago, a woman died in northern Spain. Her body was deliberately buried with pieces of the natural pigment ochre and placed behind a block of limestone in a cave known as El Mirón.
When her ochre-dyed bones were unearthed in 2010, archaeologists dubbed her the Red Lady. The careful treatment of her body provided scientists with insights into how people from the time buried their dead.
Now, thanks to the poor oral hygiene of that period, her teeth are helping illuminate a vanished world of bacteria and their chemical creations. From dental calculus, the rock-hard plaque that accumulates on teeth, researchers have successfully recovered and reconstructed the genetic material of bacteria living in the mouth of the Red Lady and dozens of other ancient individuals.
The gene reconstructions, reported today in Science, were accurate enough to replicate the enzymes the bacteria produced to help digest nutrients. “Just the fact that they were able to reconstruct the genome from a puzzle with millions of pieces is a great achievement,” says Gary Toranzos, an environmental microbiologist at the University of Puerto Rico who wasn’t involved in the work. “It’s ‘hold my beer, and watch me do it,’ and boy did they do it.”
Changes in diet and the introduction of antibiotics have dramatically altered the modern human microbiome, says University of Trento computational biologist Nicola Segata, who also wasn’t involved.
Sequencing ancient microbes and re-creating their chemical creations “will help us identify what functions our microbiome might have had in the past that we might have lost,” he says. Resurrecting these “lost” genes may one day help scientists devise new treatments for diseases, adds Mikkel Winther Pedersen, a molecular paleoecologist at the University of Copenhagen.
Within the past few decades, sequencing ancient DNA has illuminated physical and physiological features of long-dead organisms, but researchers have also used the same technique to examine the genes belonging to the teeming bacterial communities, or microbiomes, that once populated the mouths and guts of long-dead people.
That work has given them insights into which microbial species might have coexisted with humans before the advent of antibiotics and processed foods. But such understanding has been limited by the fact that researchers could only use modern microbes as references.
“We were limited to bacteria we know from today,” says Harvard University geneticist Christina Warinner, a co-author of the new study. “We were ignoring vast amounts of DNA from unknown or possibly extinct organisms.”
Breaking that barrier presented a monumental challenge. Reconstructing an oral microbiome—a soup of hundreds of different bacterial species, and millions of individual bacteria—from degraded ancient DNA is “like throwing together pieces of many puzzles and trying to solve them with the pieces mixed up and some pieces missing entirely,” Segata says.
Indeed, it took Warinner’s team nearly 3 years to adapt DNA sequencing tools and computer programs to work with the much shorter fragments of DNA found in ancient samples.
At long last, drawing on dental calculus from 46 ancient skeletons—including a dozen Neanderthals and modern humans who died between 30,000 and 150 years ago—Warinner and colleagues identified DNA from dozens of extinct or previously unknown oral bacteria.
Next, the team equipped modern Pseudomonas protegens bacteria with a pair of ancient genes to make proteins that produce milligrams’ worth of a molecule called a furan.
Modern bacteria are thought to use furans for cellular signaling. The new findings suggest ancient bacteria did, too—something that would have been impossible to predict by simply sequencing their genomes. “It’s wet-lab proof of what ancient genes were capable of,” says Pierre Stallforth of the Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology. “You can predict proteins based on DNA, but not necessarily the molecules those proteins are going to make.”
At first glance, the microbe they reconstructed seemed out of place in an oral microbiome. Identified as a type of bacterium called a chlorobium, its modern relatives use photosynthesis to survive on small amounts of light and live in anaerobic conditions, such as stagnant water. They aren’t found in modern mouths and appear to have vanished from ancient humans about 10,000 years ago.
This chlorobium might have entered the mouths of ancient people because they drank water in or near caves. Or, Warinner says, it might once have been a normal part of some people’s ancient oral microbiome, surviving on faint light penetrating the cheek.
Colleagues say dental calculus was an ideal place to start looking for these ancient microbes. Without regular cleaning, teeth trap leftover food and other organic matter in a mineral lattice, essentially encasing it in stone. That both helps preserve any DNA inside and protect it from contamination as the body decays. “Oral calculus is the perfect example of the best place you can find an uncontaminated sample,” Toranzos says. “There’s absolutely no way anything from the outside will get in.”
Although the researchers succeeded in prodding modern bacteria to express their previously undiscovered or extinct cousins’ genes, it’s a far cry from Jurassic Park, Warinner says. “We haven’t brought [the microbes] back to life, but identified key genes for making chemical compounds we’re interested in,” Warinner says.
The recovery of ancient microbial genes has the potential to illuminate our species’ relationship with bacteria over human evolution. Humans coevolved with their microbial partners and parasites for hundreds of thousands of years. The compounds produced by ancient microbes might have played important roles in digestion and immune responses. “Bacteria are not as charismatic as mammoths or woolly rhinos,” she says, “but they are nature’s chemists, and they’re key to understanding the past.”
