Late Roman-era rooms and earthen offering vessels have been discovered by archaeologists in southern Türkiye amid ongoing excavations of the ancient city of Antiocheia, the head of the dig said on Friday.
Excavations around the Church of St. Pierre, a pilgrimage site for many Christians, began on Oct. 10 in the province of Hatay, launched by a 12-person team led by the local archaeology museum.
“During the excavations, we found rooms and many offering vessels belonging to the settlement from the late Roman era,” said Ayse Ersoy, head of the Hatay Archeology Museum.
Speaking to Anadolu Agency, Ersoy said: “We think that at that time, people who visited the church on pilgrimage bought offering vessels from here, and filled it with holy water in the Church of St. Pierre”
Touching on the historical significance of the site, Ersoy said: “Antiocheia was founded by Seleukos I in 300 BC, and then this region was inhabited during the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman periods.”
The ancient city was situated on the foothills of Mount Starius, also known as Habib-i Neccar, and the Asi River, including the cave church, carved into the mountainside at the place where St. Pierre first preached, according to UNESCO.
These were the first scientific excavations in the residential areas of Antiocheia, noted Ersoy.
She also said the team was working on a project to turn the site of the Church of St. Pierre and the nearby Necmi Asfuroglu Archeology Museum into an open-air museum.
17th-Century Toddler May Have Died from Lack of Sunlight
Scientists used a ‘virtual autopsy’ to examine the mummy of a child found in an aristocratic family crypt, revealing him most probably as Reichard Wilhelm (1625-1626). Despite his wealthy background, the child experienced extreme nutritional deficiency and tragically early death from pneumonia.
A team of scientists based in Germany have examined a 17th-century child mummy, using cutting-edge science alongside historical records to shed new light on Renaissance childhood.
The child was found in an aristocratic Austrian family crypt, where the conditions allowed for natural mummification, preserving soft tissue that contained critical information about his life and death.
Curiously, this was the only unidentified body in the crypt, buried in an unmarked wooden coffin instead of the elaborate metal coffins reserved for the other members of the family buried there.
The team, led by Dr Andreas Nerlich of the Academic Clinic Munich-Bogenhausen, carried out a virtual autopsy and radiocarbon testing, and examined family records and key material clues from the burial, to try to understand who the child was and what his short life looked like.
“This is only one case,” said Nerlich, lead author of the paper published today in Frontiers in Medicine, “but as we know that the early infant death rates generally were very high at that time, our observations may have considerable impact in the over-all life reconstruction of infants even in higher social classes.”
Well fed, but not well nourished
The virtual autopsy was carried out through CT scanning. Nerlich and his team measured bone lengths and looked at tooth eruption and the formation of long bones to determine that the child was approximately a year old when he died.
The soft tissue showed that the child was a boy and overweight for his age, so his parents were able to feed him well – but the bones told a different story.
The child’s ribs had become malformed in the pattern called a rachitic rosary, which is usually seen in severe rickets or scurvy. Although he received enough food to put on weight, he was still malnourished. While the typical bowing of the bones seen in rickets was absent, this may have been because he did not walk or crawl.
Since the virtual autopsy revealed that he had inflammation of the lungs characteristic of pneumonia, and children with rickets are more vulnerable to pneumonia, this nutritional deficiency may even have contributed to his early death.
“The combination of obesity along with a severe vitamin-deficiency can only be explained by a generally ‘good’ nutritional status along with an almost complete lack of sunlight exposure,” said Nerlich. “We have to reconsider the living conditions of high aristocratic infants of previous populations.”
The son of a powerful count
However, although Nerlich and his team had established a probable cause of death, the question of the child’s identity remained. The deformation of his skull suggested that his simple wooden coffin wasn’t quite large enough for the child. However, a specialist examination of his clothing showed that he had been buried in a long, hooded coat made of expensive silk.
He was also buried in a crypt exclusively reserved for the powerful Counts of Starhemberg, who buried their title-holders — mostly first-born sons — and their wives there. This meant that the child was most likely the first-born son of a Count of Starhemberg.
Radiocarbon dating of a skin sample suggested he was buried between 1550-1635 CE, while historical records of the crypt’s management indicated that his burial probably took place after the crypt’s renovation around 1600 CE. He was the only infant buried in the crypt.
“We have no data on the fate of other infants of the family,” Nerlich said, regarding the unique burial. “According to our data, the infant was most probably [the count’s] first-born son after the erection of the family crypt, so special care may have been applied.”
This meant that there was only one likely candidate for the little boy in the silk coat: Reichard Wilhelm, whose grieving family buried him alongside his grandfather and namesake Reichard von Starhemberg.
UK’s oldest human DNA obtained, revealing two distinct Palaeolithic populations
Published today in Nature Ecology and Evolution, the new study by UCL Institute of Archaeology, the Natural History Museum and the Francis Crick Institute researchers reveals for the first time that the recolonisation of Britain consisted of at least two groups with distinct origins and cultures.
The study team explored DNA evidence from an individual from Gough’s Cave, Somerset, and an individual from Kendrick’s Cave, North Wales, who both lived more than 13,500 years ago. Very few skeletons of this age exist in Britain, with around a dozen found across six sites in total. The study, which involved radiocarbon dating and analysis as well as DNA extraction and sequencing, shows that it is possible to obtain useful genetic information from some of the oldest human skeletal material in the country.
The authors say that these genome sequences now represent the earliest chapter of the genetic history of Britain, but ancient DNA and proteins promise to take us back even further into human history.
The researchers found that the DNA from the individual from Gough’s Cave, who died about 15,000 years ago, indicates that her ancestors were part of an initial migration into northwest Europe around 16,000 years ago. However, the individual from Kendrick’s Cave is from a later period, around 13,500 years ago, with his ancestry from a western hunter-gatherer group. This group’s ancestral origins are thought to be from the near East, migrating to Britain around 14,000 years ago.
Study co-author Dr Mateja Hajdinjak (Francis Crick Institute) said: “Finding the two ancestries so close in time in Britain, only a millennium or so apart, is adding to the emerging picture of Palaeolithic Europe, which is one of a changing and dynamic population.”
The authors note that these migrations occurred after the last ice age when approximately two-thirds of Britain was covered by glaciers. As the climate warmed and the glaciers melted, drastic ecological and environmental changes took place and humans began to move back into northern Europe.
Study co-author Dr Sophy Charlton, who undertook the study whilst at the Natural History Museum, said: “The period we were interested in, from 20-10,000 years ago, is part of the Palaeolithic – the Old Stone Age. This is an important time period for the environment in Britain, as there would have been significant climate warming, increases in the amount of forest, and changes in the type of animals available to hunt.”
As well as genetically, the two groups were found to be culturally distinct, with differences in what they ate and how they buried their dead.
Study co-author Dr Rhiannon Stevens (UCL Institute of Archaeology) said: “Chemical analyses of the bones showed that the individuals from Kendrick’s Cave ate a lot of marine and freshwater foods, including large marine mammals.
“Humans at Gough’s Cave, however, showed no evidence of eating marine and freshwater foods, and primarily ate terrestrial herbivores such as red deer, bovids (such as wild cattle called aurochs) and horses.”
The researchers discovered that the mortuary practices of the two groups also differed. Although there were animal bones found at Kendrick’s Cave, these included portable art items, such as a decorated horse jawbone. No animal bones were found that showed evidence of being eaten by humans, and the scientists say that this indicates the cave was used as a burial site by its occupiers.
In contrast, animal and human bones found in Gough’s Cave showed significant human modification, including human skulls modified into ‘skull-cups’, which the researchers believe to be evidence of ritualistic cannibalism. Individuals from this earlier population seem to be the same people who created the Magdalenian stone tools, a culture known also for iconic cave art and bone artefacts.
Gough’s Cave is also the site where Britain’s famous Cheddar Man was discovered in 1903, dated to 10,564-9,915 years BP. In this study, Cheddar Man was found to have a mixture of ancestries, mostly (85%) western hunter-gatherers and some (15%) of the older type from the initial migration.
Co-author Dr Selina Brace (Natural History Museum) said: “We really wanted to find out more about who these early populations in Britain might have been.
“We knew from our previous work, including the study of Cheddar Man, that western hunter-gatherers were in Britain by around 10,500 years BP, but we didn’t know when they first arrived in Britain, and whether this was the only population that was present.”
1,700-Year-Old Roman Villa Complex Identified By Archaeologists Using Google Earth Images in England
Using Google Earth images, archaeologists identified a Roman villa complex—complete with a bathhouse and central heating system—in Kent, England last month.
Excavation of the Roman villa complex in Kent, England, 2022.
Crop markings captured by Google outlined the linear features of the site.
The wall foundations of the main villa, in addition to a pillar from the partially intact hypocaust, or Roman central heating system, were excavated by the Kent Archaeological Society with volunteers from the local community.
The hypocaust system would have been used to circulate heat through the walls and floors of an adjacent bathhouse.
“There are many villas spread across Kent, but the fact there’s a hypocaust system remaining is rare.
Operating a hypocaust was expensive, requiring a constant supply of fuels – firewood – and a workforce to operate it,” site director Richard Taylor told local publication KentOnline.
The presence of this kind of system suggests that the inhabitants would have been high-status farmers, as a hypocaust is typically limited to wealthy villas and public villas.
Additionally uncovered were several artefacts such as an amphora-shaped belt adornment dating to ca. 375 C.E., a small Roman-British key, two 4th-century C.E. coins, pottery, and wall plaster from the main villa.
After dating these objects, the team estimates that the villa dates to the 3rd or 4th century C.E.; these Roman-British farmers, however, would not have been the first residents in the area.
The nearby site Coldrum Long Barrow dates to roughly 3900 B.C.E., indicating that the land was likely being farmed for thousands of years prior to the villa’s construction.
“This suggests a continuity of settlement in the area that goes back c.5000 years, which is not surprising given its idyllic location and agricultural potential,” Taylor continued. “The villa is like just one episode in a much greater time frame.”
Black Death immunity came at a cost to modern-day health
Using DNA from the excavated remains of plague victims, including those buried in a London cemetery from 1348–1349, and from people who died earlier and later, researchers searched for evidence of how the Black Death pushed the immune system to evolve.
A genetic variant that appears to have boosted medieval Europeans’ ability to survive the Black Death centuries ago may contribute — albeit in a small way — to an inflammatory disease afflicting people today.
Researchers used DNA collected from centuries-old remains to discern the fingerprints that the bubonic plague during the Black Death left on Europeans’ immune systems.
This devastating wave of disease tended to spare those who possessed a variant of a gene known as ERAP2, causing it to become more common, researchers report on October 19 in Nature. That variant is already known to scientists for slightly increasing the odds of developing Crohn’s disease, in which errant inflammation harms the digestive system.
The results show “how these studies on ancient DNA can help actually understand diseases even now,” says Mihai Netea, an infectious diseases specialist at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, Netherlands, who was not involved with the study. “And the trade-off is also very clear.”
Caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, bubonic plague once killed 60 per cent of those infected (SN: 6/15/22). In the ancient world, it caused successive waves of misery, the most devastating of which was the Black Death, often dated from 1346 to 1350, an episode thought to have wiped out at least 25 million people — about a third or more of the European population.
By sparing individuals whose immune systems bear certain traits, pathogens such as Y. pestis have shaped the evolution of the human immune system. Studies are teasing out the ways the massive winnowing of the plague altered Europeans’ immune-related genetics.
In this most recent study, population geneticist Luis Barreiro of the University of Chicago and colleagues collected samples containing DNA from the remains of 516 people in London and Denmark who died between 1000 and 1800, including those buried during the Black Death. The researchers examined stretches of DNA for immune-related genes and areas associated with autoimmune and inflammatory diseases.
Researchers collected DNA samples from burial sites in London, including the East Smithfield plague pits (shown here), and in Denmark.
Within those regions, the researchers identified four locations on chromosomes where they saw strong evidence of genetic changes that appeared to have been driven by the Black Death. In follow-up work, one change stood out: an increase in the frequency of a variant of ERAP2.
When infected with Y. pestis, immune cells from people with this version of ERAP2 more effectively killed the bacteria than cells lacking the variant. Studies of modern populations have linked that same variant to Crohn’s disease.
While the researchers calculate that the ERAP2 variant improved the odds of surviving the Black Death by as much as 40 per cent, it only slightly increases the risk for Crohn’s disease.
For complex disorders like Crohn’s, “you require probably hundreds, sometimes thousands of genetic variants to actually increase your risk in a significant manner,” Barreiro says.
For some time now, researchers in the field have theorized that adaptations that helped our ancestors fortify their immune systems against infectious diseases can contribute to excessive, damaging immune activity.
Likewise, this latest discovery suggests that genetic changes that have amped up the human immune response in the past, empowering it to better fight off ancient infections, can come at a cost. “If you turn the heat too much, that leads to disease,” Barreiro says.
Wreckage of 17th-Century Swedish Warship Identified
A diver approaches Äpplet’s wreck. Hansson said: ‘With Äpplet, we can add another key piece of the puzzle in the development of Swedish shipbuilding.’
Swedish maritime archaeologists have discovered the long-lost sister ship of the 17th-century warship Vasa, which sank on its maiden voyage, the Swedish Museum of Wrecks has said.
Launched in 1629, Äpplet (the Apple) was built by the same shipbuilder as the famed 69-metre Vasa, which was carrying 64 cannons when it sank on its maiden voyage outside Beckholmen, in the capital, Stockholm.
“Our pulses raced when we saw how similar the wreck was to Vasa,” said Jim Hansson, a maritime archaeologist at the museum.
Hansson said the construction and the dimensions seemed “very familiar”, raising hopes it could be one of Vasa’s sister ships. While parts of the vessel’s sides had fallen off, the hull was preserved up to the lower gundeck, and the parts that had dropped showed gunports on two levels.
A diver approaches the wreck. While parts of the ship’s sides had fallen off, the hull was preserved up to the lower gundeck.
The huge shipwreck was discovered in December 2021 in a strait off the island of Vaxholm, just outside Stockholm, according to the museum. A more thorough survey was carried out in the spring of 2022, which revealed details that had previously been seen only on Vasa.
The museum said technical details as well as measurements and wood samples confirmed that it was indeed Äpplet.
In 2019, the museum reported the discovery of two other warships in the same area.
Archaeologists at the time believed that one of them could have been Äpplet, but further investigations showed that those vessels were in fact two medium-sized warships from 1648 named Apollo and Maria.
“With Äpplet, we can add another key piece of the puzzle in the development of Swedish shipbuilding,” Hansson said, adding that this enabled researchers to study the differences between Äpplet and Vasa.
Named after the house of Vasa, the royal dynasty at the time, Vasa was meant to serve as a symbol of Sweden’s military might but capsized after sailing just over 1,000 metres.
It was salvaged in 1961 and is on display at the Vasa Museum in Stockholm, one of Sweden’s most popular tourist spots.
Three other ships were ordered from the same shipwright: Äpplet, Kronan (the Crown) and Scepter, and unlike their predecessor, they served in the Swedish navy and participated in naval battles.
The ships are believed to have been sunk on purpose after they were decommissioned, serving as underwater spike strips to snag enemy vessels.
Archaeologists Just Unearthed 10,500-Year-Old Human Remains In A German Bog
Archaeologists think this was a temporary campsite on the shore of an ancient lake that has now silted up; it was used for roasting hazelnuts and for spearing fish, and the bones were probably from someone who died nearby.
Archaeologists in northern Germany have unearthed 10,000-year-old cremated bones at a Stone Age lakeside campsite that was once used for spearing fish and roasting hazelnuts, major food sources for groups of hunter-gatherers at that time.
The site is the earliest known burial in northern Germany, and the discovery marks the first time human remains have been found at Duvensee bog in the Schleswig-Holstein region, where dozens of campsites from the Mesolithic era or Middle Stone Age (roughly between 15,000 and 5,000 years ago) have been found.
Hazelnuts were a big attraction in the area because Mesolithic people could gather and roast them, Harald Lübke, an archaeologist at the Center for Baltic and Scandinavian Archaeology, an agency of the Schleswig-Holstein State Museums Foundation, told Live Science.
The campsites changed over time, the research shows. “In the beginning, we have only small hazelnut roasting hearths, and in the later sites, they become much bigger” — possibly a consequence of hazel trees becoming more widespread as the environment changed.
Archaeologists think Duvensee was a lake at that time, and that Mesolithic campsites on islands and the shore were used by hunter-gatherers who visited there in the fall to harvest hazelnuts.
The burial was found during excavations earlier this month at a site first identified in the late 1980s by archaeologist Klaus Bokelmann and his students, who found worked flints there not during a formal excavation, but during a barbecue at a house on the edge of a nearby village, Lübke said.
“Because the sausages were not ready, Bokelmann told his students that if they found anything [in the bog nearby], then he would give them a bottle of Champagne,” he said. “And when they came back, they had a lot of flint artefacts.”
The cremated bones date from about 10,500 years ago, during the Mesolithic era. They are the first human remains found at any of the Mesolithic sites at the Duvensee bog.
Ancient lake
The burial site is near at least six Mesolithic campsites, which would have been on the shores of the ancient lake at Duvensee, Lübke said.
The first sites investigated by Bokelmann in the 1980s were on islands that would have been near the western shore of the lake, which has completely silted up over the last 8,000 years or so, and formed a peat bog, called a “moor” in Germany.
Archaeologists have discovered mats made of bark for sitting on the damp soil, pieces of worked flint, and the remains of many Mesolithic fireplaces for roasting hazelnuts, but they haven’t unearthed any burials at the island sites.
“Maybe they didn’t bury people on the islands but only at the sites on the lake border, which seem to have had a different kind of function,” Lübke said.
Unlike during the later Mesolithic era, when specific areas were set aside for the burial of the dead, at this time it seemed the dead were buried near where they died, he said. Significantly, the body was cremated before its burial at the Duvensee site, like other burials of approximately the same age near Hammelev in southern Denmark, which is about 120 miles (195 kilometres) to the north.
Only pieces of the largest bones were left after the cremation, and it’s not clear if they were wrapped in hiding or bark before they were buried. In any case, “burning the body seems to be a central part of burial rituals at this time,” Lübke said.
The site where the cremated bones were found was identified in the 1980s when fragments of worked flints were found there, but it wasn’t excavated until this summer.
Changing landscape
As well as roasting hazelnuts and burning bodies — both of which are activities utilizing fire — Mesolithic people used the lakeside campgrounds for spearing fish, according to the discovery of several bone points crafted for that purpose that were found at the site.
Flint fragments also have been found throughout the area, although flint doesn’t occur naturally there, suggesting that Mesolithic people repaired their tools and hunting weapons in this place during the annual hazelnut harvest in the fall, Lübke said.
The Duvensee bog is among the most important archaeological regions in northern Europe; dozens of Mesolithic sites have been found there since 1923, and most of them since the 1980s.
The Mesolithic sites at Duvensee are about the same age as the Mesolithic site at Star Carr in North Yorkshire in the United Kingdom, and some of the artifacts found there are very similar, Lübke said.
From that time until about 8,000 years ago, the Schleswig-Holstein region and Britain were connected by a now-submerged region called Doggerland, and it’s likely that Mesolithic groups would have shared technologies, he said.
The researchers now plan to carry out further excavations at the site of the Mesolithic burial, to determine what other activities took place there. Ulf Ickerodt, head of Schleswig-Holstein’s State Archaeology Department, said the latest find at Duvensee is of global significance.
“It speaks to the long tradition of archaeological research in Schleswig-Holstein in the expiration of moors and wetlands,” he told Live Science in an email. “The present find advances itself and the landscape around it to something spectacular.”
But he noted that the preservation of organic finds in the Duvensee region is threatened by climatic changes that could result in heavy rain and flooding or dry periods.
Both types of changes could threaten archaeological features in the area, so archaeologists are working to recover any finds and to develop strategies for better managing the area in the face of a changing climate, Ickerodt said.
Neanderthals, and humans co-existed in Europe for over 2,000 years: Study
Distinctive stone knives are thought to have been produced by the last Neanderthals in France and northern Spain. This specific and standardized technology is unknown in the preceding Neanderthal record and may indicate a diffusion of technological behaviours between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals immediately prior to their disappearance from the region.
Neanderthals and humans lived alongside each other in France and northern Spain for up to 2,900 years, modelling research suggested Thursday, giving them plenty of time to potentially learn from or even breed with each other.
While the study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, did not provide evidence that humans directly interacted with Neanderthals around 42,000 years ago, previous genetic research has shown that they must have at some point.
Research by Swedish paleogeneticist Svante Paabo, who won the medicine Nobel prize last week, helped reveal that people of European descent—and almost everyone worldwide—have a small percentage of Neanderthal DNA.
Igor Djakovic, a Ph.D. student at Leiden University in the Netherlands and lead author of the new study, said we know that humans and Neanderthals “met and integrated into Europe, but we have no idea in which specific regions this actually happened.”
Exactly when this happened has also proved elusive, though previous fossil evidence has suggested that modern humans and Neanderthals walked the Earth at the same time for thousands of years.
To find out more, the Leiden-led team looked at radiocarbon dating for 56 artifacts—28 each for Neanderthals and humans—from 17 sites across France and northern Spain.
The artifacts included bones as well as distinctive stone knives thought to have been made by some of the last Neanderthals in the region.
The researchers then used Bayesian modeling to narrow down the potential date ranges.
‘Never really went extinct’
Then they used optimal linear estimation, a new modeling technique they adapted from biological conservation sciences, to get the best estimate for when the region’s last Neanderthals lived.
Humans, neanderthals, Denisovan and mystery hominins.
Djakovic said the “underlying assumption” of this technique is that we are unlikely to ever discover the first or last members of an extinct species.
“For example, we’ll never find the last woolly rhino,” he told AFP, adding that “our understanding is always broken up into fragments.”
The modeling found that Neanderthals in the region went extinct between 40,870 and 40,457 years ago, while modern humans first appeared around 42,500 years ago.
This means the two species lived alongside each other in the region for between 1,400 and 2,900 years, the study said.
During this time there are indications of a great “diffusion of ideas” by both humans and Neanderthals, Djakovic said.
The period is “associated with substantial transformations in the way that people are producing material culture,” such as tools and ornaments, he said.
There was also a “quite severe” change in the artifacts produced by Neanderthals, which started to look much more like those made by humans, he added.
Given the changes in culture and the evidence in our own genes, the new timeline could further bolster a leading theory for the end of the Neanderthals: mating with humans.
Breeding with the larger human population could have meant that, over time, Neanderthals were “effectively swallowed into our gene pool,” Djakovic said.
“When you combine that with what we know now—that most people living on Earth have Neanderthal DNA—you could make the argument that they never really went extinct, in a certain sense.”
