DNA Offers Clues to Medieval Ashkenazi Jewish Communities

A rare look at the genetics of Ashkenazi Jews who lived in medieval Germany reveals this group had more genetic diversity 600 years ago than today, and reaffirms a recent finding that a “genetic bottleneck” in the Ashkenazi population occurred before the Middle Ages.

Religious laws usually prohibit any such research into the Jewish dead, but scientists worked with the region’s modern Jewish community to find a workaround: They studied the centuries-old DNA in detached teeth unearthed in the burials recovered from excavations in Erfurt, a town in central Germany, according to a study published Nov. 30 in the journal Cell.

Teeth do not have the same religious significance as other human remains, which means they can be scientifically studied. “The teeth have less importance,” Shai Carmi, a population geneticist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told Live Science. “The rest of a body needs to be reburied and cannot be destroyed; but based on Jewish law, the teeth do not need to be reburied — they are considered external to the body.”

So far, the workaround applies only to the German state of Thuringia, but Carmi is hopeful that the team’s solution will set a precedent for genetic studies of ancient Jewish populations elsewhere.

Medieval Jewry

The Jewish cemetery at Erfurt served its medieval population from the late 11th century until 1454, when Jews were expelled from the city. Erfurt had been home to a thriving Jewish community until that time, although a brutal massacre in 1349 killed more than 100 Jews in the city, possibly because they were incorrectly accused of being responsible for the Black Death.

After the 1454 expulsion, a barn and a granary were built on the site of the Jewish cemetery. Centuries later, in 2013, archaeologists unearthed 47 Jewish graves during an archaeological excavation ahead of the site’s redevelopment into a multistory parking garage, Carmi said.

In 2021, the remains of these individuals were reburied in a 19th-century cemetery used by the local Jewish community, according to the study.

Before the reburial, the researchers obtained ancient DNA from the teeth of 33 people interred in the graves, and the study shows these individuals had very similar genetic makeups to modern Ashkenazi Jews living in Europe and the United States. 

Scientists think the ancestors of Ashkenazi Jews migrated in the early medieval period from what’s now Italy to the Rhineland in what’s now Germany, and that large population migrated from there to Eastern Europe, possibly in response to religious persecution by Christians after the 12th century.

About half of modern Jews identify as Ashkenazi Jews; others are descended from other populations, including Sephardic Jews from what is now Portugal and Spain. 

Genetic bottleneck

The researchers found evidence that Jews in medieval Erfurt had greater genetic diversity than modern Ashkenazi Jews, and they saw signs that a characteristic “genetic bottleneck” in Ashkenazi Jews occurred centuries earlier than previously thought, in about A.D. 1000, when the first Ashkenazi Jewish communities were established in the Rhineland.

That genetic bottleneck — the result of a drastically reduced ancestral population — has led to a higher incidence of certain genetic disorders among modern Ashkenazi Jews, such as Tay-Sachs disease and some hereditary cancers; and the new study shows those disorders were already present in this population by the early 15th century, Carmi said.

An analysis of the mitochondrial DNA — genetic material passed down through mothers — revealed that a third of the analyzed Erfurt individuals shared a specific sequence, which indicated they were descended from a single woman through their maternal line, the researchers added.

The research from the Erfurt remains reinforces the findings from a study earlier this year of medieval Jewish remains found in a well in Norwich, England, that likely contained the victims of an antisemitic attack.

“This paper really shows off how archaeogenetics and archaeology can give us new and otherwise unobtainable insight into periods covered by written histories,” Tom Booth, a bioarchaeologist at The Francis Crick Institute in London, told Live Science in an email. Booth was not involved in the latest research, but he was a co-researcher of the Norwich study.

Selina Brace, a specialist in ancient DNA at the National History Museum in London — who was the lead author of the Norwich research but wasn’t involved with the Erfurt study — added that it was “positive” that it drew the same conclusions as the Norwich study, including that the genetic bottleneck probably occurred about 1,000 years ago, when the first Ashkenazi Jewish communities were established.

A 19-Year-Old Intern Unearthed a Rare, 2,000-Year-Old Roman Dagger in a Tiny German Town

An intern working for the Westphalie Department for the Preservation and Care of Field Monuments in Germany shocked his employers when he uncovered a rare Roman dagger at an archaeological site.  

Likely used in battles against the Germanic tribes in the first century AD, the 2,000-year-old object was unearthed last April at Haltern am See, a small town in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

It was an extremely rare find for the team of archaeologists, and one made even more special for the well-preserved state in which the dagger was found.

“The discovery of the dagger was emotional. We were lost for words,” Bettina Tremmel, an archaeologist working for the Westphalie Department told Live Science. “Imagine: Though thousands of Roman soldiers were stationed in Haltern over almost 15 years or more, there are only a few finds of weapons, especially complete and intact ones.”

The dagger was corroded to the point of being unrecognizable when Nico Calman, the 19-year-old man on work-study unearthed it and the remains of a decorated leather belt from the grave of a soldier. But after a rigorous restoration effort that lasted nine months, conservators in Germany unveiled the ornate 13-inch-long weapon and its bejewelled sheath underneath the grime this week.

Silver and brass adorn the dagger’s handle, while its iron scabbard features inlaid wood, glass, and red enamel.

The weapon likely belonged to a legionary or auxiliary infantryman or a centurion officer in the Roman army, Tremmel says. But why the weapon was buried with its owner remains a mystery, she says, explaining that “it was not the normal practice for Roman soldiers to be buried with their military equipment.” 

Located at the edge of the Roman empire, Haltern am See was home to a large military camp during the Augustan period (27 BC to AD 14), where three legions of soldiers, each consisting of some 5,000 men, were slain by Germanic tribes.

Roman fighters killed during the battles were buried at a cemetery nearby.

Despite archaeological digs taking place at the site for nearly 200 years, a weapon as sophisticated and well-preserved as the dagger has never before been found.

The newly restored dagger will go on view in Haltern’s Roman history museum beginning in 2022.

The oldest grave in northern Germany is 10,500 years old

Archaeologists have discovered the oldest known human remains in northern Germany in a 10,500-year-old cremation grave in Lüchow, Schleswig-Holstein.

The remains were discovered in the Duvensee bog, a prehistoric inland lake that contains more than 20 Mesolithic and Neolithic archaeological sites.

The bog’s anaerobic environment preserves organic remains, including burned bones, but there was so little left that it wasn’t until the team discovered a human thigh bone that they were able to confirm they had discovered a burial.

Burials of hunter-gatherer-fisher people who lived in Europe during the early Mesolithic period are extremely rare. Mesolithic burials have previously been discovered in northern Germany and southern Scandinavia, but only from the Late Mesolithic period (7th-6th millennia B.C.).

The only burial that was comparable in time was discovered in Jutland, Denmark. It, too, is a cremation burial, an indication that cremation may have been the preferred method of burial among Mesolithic hunter-gatherers.

Several bone fragments that were not completely charred were found during the excavation. Excavation director Harald Lübke hopes to recover archaeological DNA from them.

The entire grave was raised in a soil block for additional excavation and laboratory study.

Archaeologists have been excavating Duvensee Moor since 1923 and have also discovered the shelter of Stone Age hunters and gatherers.

The oldest known North German raises a lot of questions. For example, according to the circumstances of death. In the case of burned bones, it is difficult to determine the cause of death, says Harald Lübke.

For archaeologists, the entire Duvenseer Moor is a hotspot. “We’ve only opened a new door here at the moment. But behind it, there are only dark rooms at the moment.”

Due to their spectacular cremation find, they will probably continue digging there in the coming year.

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.

Archaeologists Just Unearthed 10,500-Year-Old Human Remains In A German Bog

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.

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.” 

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.

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 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.

Genome Study Offers Clues to Anglo-Saxon Migration

The Archaeogenetics Research Group at the University of Huddersfield has played a key role in the largest genetic study to date of Early Medieval Europe. 

The study has been conducted by an interdisciplinary team that consisted of more than 70 geneticists and archaeologists, led by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and the University of Central Lancashire, with the help and expertise of the University’s Archaeogenetics Research Group.

The team has examined, in detail, one of the largest population transformations in the post-Roman world.

Following their analysis of more than 400 individuals from ancient Britain, Ireland, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands, the research has shown that there was a large-scale stream of migration from the Continental North Sea region into Eastern England during the Anglo-Saxon period, starting around 1500 years ago.

Almost 500 years after the Romans left, early historians like the Venerable Bede wrote about the Angles and Saxons and their migrations to Britain. But over the last century, views of what happened became polarised amongst historians and archaeologists. Was there really a large-scale migration from the Continent, or was it more of conquest by a small warrior elite?

The new genetic results now show that three-quarters of the Early Medieval population in Eastern England was comprised of migrants whose ancestors originated from Continental regions bordering the North Sea. What is more, as analysis of the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA by Huddersfield specialist Dr Maria Pala demonstrated, the immigrants were made up as much of women as men – in other words, whole families were involved.

Migrants intermarried with the local population, but with variation from place to place

These families interbred with the existing population of Britain, but this integration varied enormously from region to region. For example, at West Heslerton, an Anglo-Saxon cemetery in North Yorkshire excavated over several decades by Professor Dominic Powlesland, most ancestries were from the Continent, whereas at the contemporary post-Roman site of Worth Matravers in Dorset, excavated by Bob Kenyon and Lilian Ladle, there was almost none.

However, most of the Anglo-Saxon sites in eastern and southern England fell somewhere in between. Dr Ceiridwen Edwards, who runs the Ancient DNA Facility at Huddersfield, studied the site of Apple Down in Sussex.

This cemetery had almost 50 per cent of Continental ancestry but, unusually, there were distinct burial styles for people with local and immigrant ancestry, which suggests some level of social separation, at least at this site.

“With 278 ancient genomes from England and hundreds more from Europe, we have now gained really fascinating insights into population-scale and individual histories during post-Roman times,” explains PhD researcher Joscha Gretzinger, who led the study with Dr Stephan Schiffels at the Max Planck Institute and Professor Duncan Sayer at UCLan.

Also, at the same time, the Anglo-Saxons were far from being the only people to shape the ancestry of the English. The team estimated that the present-day English derive only around 40 per cent of their DNA from these medieval Continental ancestors.

Director of the Evolutionary Genomics Research Centre, Professor Martin Richards, leads the Archaeogenetics Research Group at the University of Huddersfield and says this research has only been made possible due to a huge advance in ancient DNA sequencing technologies.

“Resolving the question of the English settlements has been a dream of mine since I first started working in archaeogenetics three decades ago,” said Professor Richards. “It has now finally become possible because of the incredible strides in ancient DNA sequencing technologies that have been made in the last few years.”

The work at Huddersfield was funded as part of a Leverhulme Trust Doctoral Scholarship programme awarded to Professor Richards and Dr Maria Pala, and a Leverhulme Trust Project Grant awarded to Dr Ceiridwen Edwards.

This open access work was published in Nature on 21 September 2022 titled ‘The Anglo-Saxon migration and the formation of the early English gene pool’. Further discussion of this research will be available in a special issue of the Current Archaeology magazine in print on 6 October. 

1400-Year-Old Folding Chair Found in a Woman’s Grave in Germany

Archaeologists have made a very unusual find. A Medieval folding chair has been discovered in a woman’s grave. The excavation team unearthed the chair in a woman’s grave in Steinsfeld in Central Franconia in the Ansbach district.

Franconia lies in the north of the Free State of Bavaria, parts of Baden-Württemberg, and South Thuringia and Hesse in Germany.

It is only the second discovery of an iron folding chair from the early Middle Ages in Germany, said the Bavarian State Office for the Preservation of Monuments. 

Across Europe, 29 sites of early medieval graves with folding chairs have been handed down, only six of which are made of iron.

According to the state office, it dates from around 600 AD, i.e., from the early Middle Ages. When folded, the chair, which was about 70 by 45 centimetres in size, had been placed at the feet of the dead.

“This find, which at first glance seems so modern, is an absolute rarity and of the greatest cultural-historical interest because it gives an insight into the burial equipment of prominent sections of the population and into the early use of furniture,” said the head of the state office, Mathias Pfeil.

People have been making iron and bronze folding chairs since ancient times.

They were considered essential official signs and symbolized power, authority, and dignity. According to the state office, they appear as grave goods in women’s graves.

Examinations of the woman’s skeleton showed she was around 40 to 50 when she died. The dead woman had a necklace of coloured glass beads around her neck.

On the belt was a fibulae hanger and a large pearl, among other things.

In addition, the experts also uncovered a man’s grave in which they found, among other things, a belt with a bronze buckle and a complete set of weapons.

Early Medieval Graves Unearthed in Germany

Archaeological treasures, including Stone Age pottery and medieval graves with swords and jewellery, have revealed a long history of human habitation near the Danube River in Germany. 

At the site, in the Geisingen-Gutmadingen district of Tuttlingen, in southwestern Germany, archaeologists discovered one grave from the Neolithic, or Stone Age, that dates to the third millennium B.C. and contains distinctive pottery from the Corded Ware culture.

They also found 140 early medieval graves, dating to between A.D. 500 and 600, that contain goods including swords, lances, shields, bone combs, drinking glasses and earrings. 

“Our Gutmadingen district is probably much older than we previously assumed,” Mayor Martin Numberger said in a statement.

The district had previously been dated to 1273 based on the first written records of settlement there. 

The finds were made by a team from the archaeology firm ArchaeoTask GmbH in an area near the Danube river where a rainwater retention pond is planned.

The Stone Age grave points to the presence of Corded Ware people, who are now known mostly for their pottery decorated by geometric lines formed by pressing cord into clay and leaving the impressions to dry.

These people were probably pastoralists who kept animals such as cows and sheep, and some also practised early farming of crops such as barley. Graves from this period are rare in southwestern Germany, according to local officials.

The early medieval graves date to the century after the end of the Western Roman Empire, which fell in 476 A.D. when the German warlord Odoacer deposed the Roman emperor Romulus Augustus.

This period is part of what is known as the Migration Period, or the Völkerwanderung, when various tribes in Europe moved around, often conquering one another and pushing each other into new territories.

Historians consider this period the transition between antiquity and the early Middle Ages.  

In other graves from this period found in Germany, men are often buried with weapons, and women are interred with jewellery and beads. Burial rites sometimes changed as conquerors took over a particular village or region.

For example, a Germanic tribe called the Alemanni was defeated by the Franks in A.D. 496 and became absorbed into the Duchy of the Merovingian. 

During this transition, the Alemanni began burying the dead of their households together in graves called adelsgrablege (meaning “noble graves”), which also held rich goods, like armour and jewellery.

A 2018 study of one of these graves dating to about A.D. 580 to 630 found that the members of the household weren’t necessarily related by blood and that adopted members of the family were valued equally to those born or married into it.