EUROPE, IRELAND, WORLD

Possible Irish Sweathouse Unearthed in Australia

Possible Irish Sweathouse Unearthed in Australia

Unlike the world’s great metropolitan centres, ghost towns don’t usually enter sister-city partnerships. But in a paddock north of Adelaide, at a place called Baker’s Flat, there are traces of a village that is, in some ways, an unacknowledged sibling to dozens of similarly half-forgotten hamlets on the other side of the Earth.

Possible Irish Sweathouse Unearthed in Australia
An archaeological dig of the remains of the Irish clachan, or village, at Baker’s Flat.

“You look at it now and it’s basically a field,” said Irish-Australian archaeologist Susan Arthure.

“There’s no evidence above the ground that all these people were there for nearly 100 years.”

The west of Ireland is today dotted with ghost villages: Settlements emptied by the starvation that swept the land in the 1840s and ’50s, when a combination of crop and political failure caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the migration of hundreds of thousands more.

Following the sea lanes, they flocked to London and Liverpool, Boston and Baltimore, Melbourne and Sydney, but also to sites such as Baker’s Flat. But unlike those abandoned villages in Ireland, this village owes its beginnings rather than its decline to the Great Famine.

“The famine was a driving force, it drove migration enormously,” Ms Arthure said.

“The people of Baker’s Flat were predominantly poor and Catholic, and at that time in South Australia they weren’t particularly well-favoured.”

The so-called “clachan” (the Irish word for a clustered communal settlement) that existed at the site has been painstakingly excavated and investigated for more than six years by Ms Arthure.

Ms Arthure is currently putting the finishing touches on her PhD thesis through Flinders University. For her, the clachan remnants are partly a time machine and partly a treasure-trove: They offer glimpses of SA’s colonial past but are also a potential portal into the history of Ireland itself.

Whitewash, whiskey or sweat?

When Ms Arthure began digging at Baker’s Flat, she was expecting to — and did — unearth the remains of the thatched and whitewashed cottages so redolent of Irishness today.

But her most recent research focused on a distinctive round structure that was buried beneath scrap metal.

After initially thinking it may have been for making whitewash, Ms Arthure discounted that hypothesis because “there was no evidence at all of burning or preparing lime” — the basic ingredient in the paint.

Instead, her suspicions shifted to another typically Irish liquid.

“I thought perhaps it might have been an area for a poitín still, where people were distilling illegal whiskey,” Ms Arthure said.

“But one of the roads at the back of Baker’s Flat runs quite close to that area, so it’s not hidden enough.”

At a loss, she consulted experts in Ireland and one of them suggested a sweathouse.

“Sweathouses were very common in Ireland up until probably famine times,” Ms Arthure explained.

“They would be used to deal with illness, to help with rheumatic or arthritic pain, or with fever.”

These semi-subterranean and beehive-like buildings largely died out when modern medicines became more widely available and have “faded from memory” even in the Emerald Isle.

“Given all of the help people have given me, it would be really nice to be able to reciprocate by saying, ‘Here is some information from the SA landscape that maybe can shed some light on sweathouses in Ireland,'” Ms Arthure said.

“What is really exciting about the one here at Baker’s Flat is that we can look not only at how people were following the same traditions, but how they were adapting.”

From heyday to decline

Part of the appeal of Baker’s Flat lay in its proximity to Kapunda’s copper mine, which provided work for the local community. At its peak, as many as 500 people were living there — including a large population from County Clare in the west of Ireland, which was hardest hit by the famine.

Artefacts from the site reveal the richness of its cultural life. In addition to coins, buttons and brooches, there were buckles embossed with cricketers, seemingly in recognition of the local team that was dubbed Hibernian.

“It’s not very well known but, in the 19th century, cricket was one of the most popular sports in Ireland,” Ms Arthure said.

During her research, she identified about 145 family names linked to Baker’s Flat, including Driscoll, Donnellan, McInerney and Conolan.

As those families left for greener pastures, the Baker’s Flat clachan fell into decline and then desuetude, which left only a certain Ms O’Callahan as the last surviving resident.

Local historian Peter Swann, who is 84, recalls visiting her when he was a boy.

“There were only ruins then, except for one old house that this old lady lived in,” he said.

“She lived out there on her own. If you look there now, you see nothing. Everything’s gone.”

Three-quarters of a century before the Irish famine, in an act of astonishing literary prescience, the Anglo-Irish poet Oliver Goldsmith produced an epic called The Deserted Village.

A painted scene from Goldsmith’s poem today hangs in the Art Gallery of SA, and the following quatrain could easily serve as an epitaph for Baker’s Flat and countless sites across Ireland:

While, scourged by famine from the smiling land,

The mournful peasant leads his humble band;

And while he sinks, without one arm to save,

The country blooms—a garden, and a grave.

However, there is a crucial difference between the abandoned villages of Ireland and the clachan at Baker’s Flat.

If the former were sites of sorrow, the latter was emphatically a place of security, vitality and survival.

ASIA, RUSSIA, WORLD

Graves of Elite Warrior and Aphrodite Cult Priestess Uncovered in Russia

Graves of Elite Warrior and Aphrodite Cult Priestess Uncovered in Russia

A silver medallion was discovered in the grave of an Aphrodite priestess, showing the goddess and signs of the zodiac, minus Aquarius and Libra.

About 1,900 years ago, a woman died and was buried in Phanagoria – a city established centuries earlier on the coast of the Taman Peninsula in southern Russia. Her grave was together with others in the ancient city’s necropolis and while there was nothing particularly unusual about it, she was a priestess of the Aphrodite cult, the archaeologists excavating the ancient city concluded.

Another intriguing find at the Black Sea site was a warrior’s tomb featuring a sword that had been made in early medieval Iran. The woman’s grave was found by archaeologists Nikolay Sudarev and Mikhail Treister, during the 2022 summer season of the Phanagoria archaeological expedition, which has been supported since 2004 by the Oleg Deripaska Volnoe Delo Foundation, says its spokesman Ruben Bunyatyan.

Her adornments included a silver medallion showing the goddess and signs of the zodiac, minus Aquarius and Libra. Such medallions were common in the territory of the Bosporan Kingdom as early as 2,300 years ago, says Maria Chashuk, senior research associate of the Phanagoria archaeological expedition. No, the medallion, a big one – about 7 centimetres (2.75 inches) in diameter and 15 millimetres thick – was not broken, so it is puzzling why Aquarius and Libra are missing, she adds.

Rings and belt found by the priestess

Medallions of the sort were used in many ways: as brooches, as headgear accessories and as pendants, Chashuk explains. “It was found on the lower part of the woman’s chest. On the flip side, there is a brace through which one could put a cord and wear the medallion as a pendant. It looks like that was how the medallion was worn by the woman, but that question is still being studied.”

How did the researchers conclude that the ornament shows none other than Aphrodite? Sudarev and Treister based their decision on iconographic features of the image of the goddess, as well as similar images on other analogous findings in the region, Chashuk and Bunyatyan say.

“The images of the zodiac signs around the goddess also point to the fact that this is indeed Aphrodite Urania, as they emphasize her heavenly hypostasis,” Chashuk adds.

“Aphrodite Urania” refers to the divine aspect of the goddess as opposed to her earthly aspect “Aphrodite Pandemos,” not to mention the legend that she was sired by emissions from the genital package of Uranus that had been hacked off by his son Cronos. Moving on.

One of the grave goods was found in the tomb at Phanagoria, southern Russia.

The woman also wore silver earrings with pendants in the form of doves and rings that had images so poorly preserved that they can’t quite be made out: possibly images of cornucopia and Eros with wings, Chashuk suggests.

Other grave goods included a red clay jug with a twisted handle, iron scissors with a bronze handle, a bronze mirror, a string of 157 beads (somebody counted) and three bronze coins. The implication – that members of the ancient Greek pantheon were worshipped in first-century Taman – is not surprising. Christianity would only reach the region in the Middle Ages, around the ninth and 10th century, before which the people followed Slavic pagan religions – and before which some evidently adored the Hellenistic pantheon.

Some of the findings at Phanagoria.

The medallion also suggests belief in astrology, a pseudoscience that posits causative relationships between the positions of celestial bodies and events on Earth. Astrology goes back at least 4,000 years and has been suspected for at least much of that time. Cicero, for instance, wrote roughly 2,050 years ago that divination (by any means) would be awesome if it wasn’t hooey: “A really splendid and helpful thing it is – if only such a faculty exists,” he wrote in “Defense Divinatione.” He added that all men believe “signs are given of future events” – which applies, more or less, to this day.

While Cicero wrote arguments (at remarkable length) for and against astrology’s merits, centuries before him Xenophanes, born in the sixth century B.C.E., reportedly took an actual stand against trying to peer into the future through omens and portents – if only because the gods can’t be bothered to communicate with us, lowly humans.

So, a woman died in first-century Phanagoria and was buried with a medallion showing Aphrodite and 10 signs of the zodiac, and some goods for the afterlife. But maybe she was a groupie of the goddess – why think she was a priestess?

The site is at Phanagoria in southern Russia, by the Black Sea.

Sudarev, an archaeologist with the Russian Academy of Sciences, believes that some of the items from the burial have specific semantic meanings, Chashuk says. “For example, silver earrings with pendants in the form of doves could be associated with different deities, but most often doves are mentioned as a symbol of Aphrodite Urania. The mirror and scissors often had a ritual meaning (as a tool for trimming hair) and could also be one of the symbols of the goddess.”

The excavators also found two scarab-type beads made of Egyptian faience, found with other beads on her neck, but they bear highlighting because they bore hieroglyphs at the bottom: one showing a sitting cat-raptor and the other a cobra-Uraeus with a solar disk.

“Mr. Sudarev notes that the symbols on the scarabs relate to the Egyptian analogues of Aphrodite Urania – Wadjet [the cobra goddess] and Hathor,” Chashuk sums up. 

At the end of the day, the presence of Aphrodite worship and, possibly, the burial of a priestess to her cult support the belief that Phanagoria was founded as a Greek colony on the Taman Peninsula, the archaeologists say.

Graves of Elite Warrior and Aphrodite Cult Priestess Uncovered in Russia
Grave with Sassanian sword
Signs of Sassanians

While the existence of deities and their amiable propensity to share information is dubious, and if anybody had consistently gotten their forecasts right, we would probably have heard about it – there is no similar dubiety about the existence of war. The discovery of the Sassanian sword in a burial in Phanagoria, from about 1,500 years ago, is more information about practical matters. “Archaeologists believe that the weapon is part of the Iranian group of swords due to the distinctive golden top of its wooden hilt,” explains Bunyatyan.

Finding a fine sword of Iranian (Sassanian) origin in the territory of the Kingdom of the Cimmerian Bosporus supports historic sources describing the Sassanid Empire’s political and military influence in the Caucasus region and along the Taman Peninsula, says Alexey Voroshilov, head of the Phanagorian expedition’s necropolis team. It could have been a diplomatic gift.

Buried with a precious sword

Or, might it reveal the use of mercenaries, foreign soldiers fighting for filthy lucre, which was apparently not unknown in Classic times? It seems that even the “Greek army” that combated the “Carthaginian forces” were stuffed to the gills with hired help.

Not likely, because the sword was just too good, says Voroshilov. “Expensive prestigious weapons were either made to order or came as war trophies. The ceremonial arms and horse harness were part of the diplomatic gifts,” he says. “Hence, it is highly unlikely that the owner of the sword was a mercenary. There is no doubt that this person was a representative of the elite of Phanagoria and was a bearer of the military aristocratic culture of the Bosporan Kingdom in the Migration Period.”

It’s the only sword of its kind to be found in Phanagoria, he says, adding that “this is the first major discovery in Phanagoria testifying to cultural ties between the elites of Phanagoria and the Sassanid Empire.”

The warrior was also buried with other fine stuffs. “In the tomb itself, a lot of rare things were discovered, including imported items: glass jugs, wooden and metal utensils, and wooden boxes with decayed cloths. The tomb is notable for its monumentality and considerable depth (about 7 meters), as well as for its opulent burial rites. There is a lot to suggest that noble and wealthy city dwellers were buried in the crypt along with the warrior,” Voroshilov sums up. The priestess seems to have gotten relatively short shrift a few centuries earlier.

EUROPE, SPAIN, WORLD

Neanderthals seem to have been carnivores

Neanderthals seem to have been carnivores

A new study published on October 17, 2022, in the journal PNAS, led by a CNRS researcher, uses zinc isotope analysis for the first time to determine the place of Neanderthals in the food chain. The results obtained suggest that they would indeed have been carnivores.

Were Neanderthals carnivores? Scientists have not yet decided on the question. If certain studies of dental calculus of individuals coming from the Iberian peninsula could suggest that they were large consumers of plants, other research carried out on non-Iberian sites seemed rather indicate an almost exclusive consumption of meat.

Thanks to new analytical techniques applied to a molar from an individual of this species, researchers 1  have demonstrated that the Neanderthals at the Gabasa site in Spain seemed to be carnivores.

Until then, to try to define an individual’s place in the food chain, scientists generally had to extract proteins and analyze the isotopes of nitrogen present in the collagen of bones. 

However, this method is often only applicable in temperate environments, and rarely on samples over 50,000 years old. When these conditions are not met, the analysis of nitrogen isotopes is very complex, if not impossible. This was particularly the case for the molar from the Gabasa site, studied here.

Faced with these constraints, Klervia Jaouen, a researcher at the CNRS, and her colleagues have this time analyzed the isotopic ratios of zinc contained in dental enamel, a mineral resistant to all forms of degradation. This is the first time this method has been used to try to identify the diet of a Neanderthal.

The lower the proportions of zinc isotopes in the bones, the more likely they are to belong to a carnivore.

This measurement was also carried out on animal bones from the same period and geographical area, both on carnivores such as the lynx or the wolf, and on herbivores such as the rabbit or the chamois. As a result, the Neanderthal to whom this Gabasa tooth belonged would have been carnivorous and did not consume the blood of its prey.

According to broken bones found at the site and isotopic data, this individual would also have eaten the bone marrow of its prey, without consuming the bones. 

Other chemical tracers show that he was weaned before he was two years old. Analyzes also show that he would probably have died where he had lived as a child.

Compared to previous techniques, this new method, by analyzing zinc isotopes, makes it possible to better distinguish omnivores from carnivores. 

The scientists hope to reproduce the experiment on other individuals, coming from other sites to confirm their conclusions, in particular on the Payre site where new research has begun.

Neanderthals seem to have been carnivores
The First Neanderthal molar analyzed for this study
Excavation work at the Gabasa site, in Spain

Bibliography

A Neandertal dietary conundrum: new insights provided by tooth enamel Zn isotopes from Gabasa, Spain . Klervia Jaouen, Vanessa Villalba Mouco, Geoff M. Smith, Manuel Trost, Jennifer Leichliter, Tina Lüdecke, Pauline Méjean, Stéphanie Mandrou, Jérôme Chmeleff, Danaé Guiserix, Nicolas Bourgon, Fernanda Blasco, Jéssica Mendes Cardoso, Camille Duquenoy, Zineb Moubtahij, Domingo C. Salazar Garcia, Michael Richards, Thomas Tütken, Jean Jacques Hublin, Pilar Utrilla, and Lourdes Montes, PNAS , October 17, 2022. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2109315119

EUROPE, WORLD

Dairy Fat Detected in Neolithic Pottery from Central Europe

Dairy Fat Detected in Neolithic Pottery from Central Europe

A new study has shown milk was used by the first farmers from Central Europe in the early Neolithic era around 7,400 years ago, advancing humans’ ability to gain sustenance from milk and establishing the early foundations of the dairy industry.

The international research, led by the University of Bristol and published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), deployed a pioneering technique to date dairy fat traces preserved in the walls of pottery vessels from the 54th Century BC.

This method targets fatty acids from animal fat residues, making it uniquely suited to pinpointing the introduction of new foodstuffs in prehistoric times.

Dairy Fat Detected in Neolithic Pottery from Central Europe
Part of a decorative LBK ceramic pot used for food storage from the Ensisheim site in Alsace, France.
Part of an LBK ceramic pot used for food storage from the Colmar site in Alsace, France.
LBK ceramics from the Alsace region on display at the Historic Museum of Mulhouse, Mulhouse France.

Lead author Dr Emmanuelle Casanova, who conducted the research while completing her PhD in archaeological chemistry at the University of Bristol, said: “It is amazing to be able to accurately date the very beginning of milk exploitation by humans in prehistoric times.

The development of agropastoralism transformed prehistoric human diet by introducing new food commodities, such as milk and milk products, which continues to the present day.”

These settlers of South East, East, and West Europe were the earliest Neolithic farming groups in Central Europe, known as the Linearbandkeramik (LBK) culture.

The findings of this research showed some of the very first settlers in the region were using milk at scale.

This work was part of the European Research Council (ERC) NeoMilk project led by Professor Richard Evershed FRS of the School of Chemistry at the University of Bristol.

His team analysed more than 4,300 pottery vessels from 70 LBK settlements for their food residues. The results revealed considerable variation in milk use across the region, with only 65 percent of sites presenting evidence of dairy fats in ceramic vessels, suggesting milk use, while common, was not universally adopted by these early farmers.

Focussing on the sites and ceramics with dairy residues, the researchers produced around 30 new radiocarbon dates to chart the advent of dairy exploitation by LBK farmers. These new dates correspond to the earliest LBK settlements during the middle of the 6th Millenium BC.

Co-lead author Professor Evershed said: “This research is hugely significant as it provides new insights into the timing of major changes in human food procurement practices, as they evolved across Europe. It provides clear evidence that dairy foods were in wide circulation in the Early Neolithic, despite variations in the scale of activity.”

The study was conducted in collaboration with chemists from the University of Bristol and archaeologists from the Universities of Gdańsk, Paris 1, Strasbourg, Leiden, and Adam Mickiewicz, the Dobó István Castle Museum, Historic England, and the LVR-State Service for Archaeological Heritage, which directed excavations of the studied sites.

ASIA, EUROPE, RUSSIA, WORLD

DNA Analysis Identifies Neanderthal Family Members

DNA Analysis Identifies Neanderthal Family Members

The first snapshot of a Neanderthal community has been pieced together by scientists who examined ancient DNA from fragments of bone and teeth unearthed in caves in southern Siberia.

DNA Analysis Identifies Neanderthal Family Members
The remains were found in caves in southern Siberia.

Researchers analysed DNA from 13 Neanderthal men, women and children and found an interconnecting web of relationships, including a father and his teenage daughter, another man related to the father, and two second-degree relatives, possibly an aunt and her nephew.

All of the Neanderthals were heavily inbred, a consequence, the researchers believe, of the Neanderthals’ small population size, with communities scattered over vast distances and numbering only about 10 to 30 individuals.

Laurits Skov, the first author on the study at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, said the fact that the Neanderthals were alive at the same time was “very exciting” and implied that they belonged to a single social community.

Neanderthal remains have been recovered from numerous caves across western Eurasia – territory the heavy-browed humans occupied from about 430,000 years ago until they became extinct 40,000 years ago. It has previously been impossible to tell whether Neanderthals found at particular sites belonged to communities or not.

“Neanderthal remains in general, and remains with preserved DNA in particular, are extremely rare,” said Benjamin Peter, a senior author on the study in Leipzig. “We tend to get single individuals from sites often thousands of kilometres, and tens of thousands of years apart.”

In the latest work, researchers including Svante Pääbo, who won this year’s Nobel prize in medicine for breakthrough studies on ancient genomes, examined DNA from the remains of Neanderthals found in the Chagyrskaya cave and nearby Okladnikov cave in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia.

Neanderthals sheltered in the caves about 54,000 years ago, seeking cover to feast on the ibex, horse and bison they hunted as the animals migrated along the river valleys the caves overlook. Beyond Neanderthal and animal bones, tens of thousands of stone tools were also found.

Writing in the journal Nature, the scientists describe how the ancient DNA points to the Neanderthals living at the same time, with some being members of the same family.

Further analysis revealed more genetic diversity in Neanderthal mitochondria – the tiny battery-like structures found inside cells which are only passed down the maternal line – than in their Y chromosomes, which are passed down from father to son.

The most likely explanation, the researchers say, is that female Neanderthals travelled from their home communities to live with male partners. Whether force was involved is not a question DNA can answer, however.

“Personally, I don’t think there is particularly good evidence that Neanderthals were much different from early modern humans that lived at the same time,” said Peter.

“We find that the community we study was likely very small, perhaps 10 to 20 individuals and that the wider Neanderthal populations in the Altai mountains were quite sparse,” Peter said. “Nevertheless, they managed to persevere in a rough environment for hundreds of thousands of years, which I think deserves great respect.”

Dr Lara Cassidy, an assistant professor in genetics at Trinity College Dublin, called the study a “milestone” as “the first genomic snapshot of a Neanderthal community”.

“Understanding how their societies were organised is important for so many reasons,” Cassidy said. “It humanises these people and gives rich context to their lives. But also, down the line if we have more studies like this, it may also reveal unique aspects of the social organisation of our own Homo sapiens ancestors. This is crucial to understanding why we are here today and Neanderthals are not.”

ASIA, CHINA, WORLD

A 6,000-year-old skull found in a cave in Taiwan possibly confirms the legend of an Indigenous tribe

A 6,000-year-old skull found in a cave in Taiwan possibly confirms the legend of an Indigenous tribe

A team of researchers with members from Australia, Japan, Taiwan and Vietnam found a 6,000-year-old skull and femur bones in a cave in a mountainous part of Taiwan that might prove the existence of an ancient Indigenous tribe.

The preceramic human remains from No. 5 Cave (1) and representative stone tools from the preceramic layer, including the cobble chopping tools (2), flake tools (3), and fine-material lithic tools made of quartz (4) of Xiaoma (after Huang and Chen 1990). Credit: World Archaeology (2022). DOI: 10.1080/00438243.2022.2121315
The preceramic human remains from No. 5 Cave (1) and representative stone tools from the preceramic layer, including the cobble chopping tools (2), flake tools (3), and fine-material lithic tools made of quartz (4) of Xiaoma (after Huang and Chen 1990).

In their paper published in the journal World Archaeology, the group describes the skull, where it was found and what it might represent.

In Taiwan, there have been stories passed down through the generations about a tribe of short, dark-skinned people that once lived in mountainous parts of the island. But until now, there has been no physical evidence of them.

In this new effort, the researchers found skull and leg bones in a cave that have been dated back to approximately 6,000 years ago—a time before the ancestors of people who are alive on the island arrived.

In studying DNA from the skull, the researchers found it close to African samples from around the same time period. But they also found that its size and shape resemble that of Negritos, who lived in parts of what is now South Africa and in the Philippines.

A study of bones left behind in those areas showed them to be quite short with small body size. Femur bones found near the skull were from the same person as the skull, a young woman.

The researchers estimate she stood approximately 1.3 meters tall.

The researchers suggest their findings confirm the existence of the ancient people in Taiwan but they do not explain what might have happened to them.

They were apparently gone by the time other early Austronesian groups of people began arriving.

The researchers also note that the mention of small, dark-skinned people was made in documents from the Quin Dynasty, and all but one of the 16 Austronesian groups living in Taiwan today have stories that describe small, dark-skinned people who once lived in the mountains.

Such tales differ, however, between groups, the researchers note, with some believing that the earlier people were ancestors of theirs. Others see them as former enemies.

One group claims to have killed off the last of the ancient people 1,000 years ago.

WORLD

Banana Domestication More Complex Than Previously Thought

Banana Domestication More Complex Than Previously Thought

People like to know where their food comes from, but even experts are throwing up their hands when it comes to the origins of the modern banana.

Breeding helped get rid of wild bananas’ seeds to create the fleshy fruit cherished today.

An extensive genetic analysis of more than 100 varieties of wild and cultivated bananas unpeels the fruit’s tangled history of domestication and reveals the existence of three previously unknown—and possibly still living—ancestors.

Banana experts want to track down those mysterious forebears to see whether their genes might help keep modern banana crops healthy.

“Banana domestication is much more complicated than I had realized previously,” says Loren Rieseberg, an evolutionary biologist at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, who was not involved in the study.

About 7000 years ago, bananas were not the seedless, fleshy fruits we know today. The flesh was pitted with black seeds and nearly inedible. Instead, people ate the banana tree’s flowers or its underground tubers. They also stripped fibres from the trunklike stem to make rope and clothes. Banana trees back then were “very far from the bananas we see in people’s fields today,” says Julie Sardos, a genetic resources scientist at the Alliance of Bioversity International, which stockpiles banana varieties.

Scientists do know the banana’s predominant wild ancestor is a species named Musa acuminata, which occurs from India to Australia. Most researchers agree that Papua New Guinea is where domesticated bananas as we know them first appeared. Today, there are many banana varieties—more than 1000 at the last count.

Over the course of their domestication, the modern bananas available in supermarkets lost their seeds and became fleshier and sweeter. But it’s been hard to pin down exactly how and when that domestication occurred.

Complicating matters, some bananas have the usual two sets of chromosomes, whereas others have three sets or more, suggesting at least some modern bananas are hybrids that resulted from the interbreeding of two or more varieties, or even different species.

There’s good reason to try to tap into the modern banana’s deep historical gene pool: The $8 billion banana industry, which produces 100 billion bananas annually, is threatened by diseases such as Panama disease and banana bacterial wilt.

Banana breeders are scrambling to find ways to combat such pathogens, particularly the ones that attack the Cavendish banana, which accounts for more than half of all the bananas exported to the United States and Europe.

Some are collecting wild relatives and obscure varieties that are more resistant to disease. But introducing genes from distant ancestors could also help steel modern-day bananas. Genetic analyses can help piece together the history of domestication and pin down living members of those ancestral fruits.

Nabila Yahiaoui, a banana genomics scientist at the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development in Montpellier, and colleagues previously compared DNA from 24 collected samples of wild and domestic bananas.

In a few of them, they found something puzzling: DNA that didn’t match that from any of the other samples. Based on that finding, they proposed in 2020 that, in addition to M. acuminata and other known wild relatives, two unknown species contributed DNA to the modern banana.

In the new study, Sardos and her colleagues expanded on that work, focusing on banana varieties with two sets of chromosomes, as they are likely more closely related to the first domesticated bananas. (The Cavendish has three sets.) They sampled the DNA of 68 samples of wild relatives and of 154 types of cultivated bananas, including 25 varieties Sardos’s team collected in Papua New Guinea. That’s an impressive number of cultivars, some of which can be hard to obtain, says Tim Denham, an archaeologist at Australian National University who was not involved with the work.

The comparison provided more evidence that bananas were originally cultivated on New Guinea and suggested an M. acuminata subspecies named “banksia” was the first to be domesticated.

The same subspecies subsequently contributed to more widespread cultivated varieties, Sardos and colleagues report this month in Frontiers in Plant Science. “This [conclusion] is significant,” Denham says. “It confirms previous archaeological, botanical, linguistic, and genetic studies.”

The samples also pointed to the existence of a third unknown source of banana genetic material, the team reported. Scientists have yet to identify the three species; their data suggest one came from New Guinea, one from the Gulf of Thailand, and the third from somewhere between northern Borneo and the Philippines.

Denham was surprised to find that the modern banana varieties on New Guinea are more genetically diverse than their wild ancestor. “This runs counter to most genetic arguments that speculate that initial domestication results in a bottleneck,” he says. He suspects that even as banana growers worked to improve bananas, there was rampant interbreeding with wild relatives, leading to bunches of varieties with different genetic ancestries.

“This work further confirms the importance of hybridization in the evolution of [certain] crops,” says Rieseberg, whose work with sunflowers has demonstrated that interbreeding can be important for evolution.

The field remains ripe with possibility: Sardos and other banana aficionados are hoping to visit small farms and other sites in the ancestral bananas’ homelands to see whether they can find more modern descendants. They, too, may yield a stock resistant to disease that can be crossbred with commercial bananas. “There is a lot of unsampled banana diversity out there,” Rieseberg says.

CZECH REPUBLIC, EUROPE, WORLD

The ancient Golden Belt Discovered in the Czech Republic

The ancient Golden Belt Discovered in the Czech Republic

A small farmer in the Opava region in the northeast of Czechia made a unique discovery while working in a field, unearthing a golden belt dating back to the Bronze Age. The ornamented piece, which is exceptionally well-preserved, should go on display at the Bruntál museum at the end of next year.

The golden belt had been lying underground for thousands of years before being unearthed by a farmer while he was harvesting beetroots.

The founder, who wishes to remain in anonymity, discovered the ancient piece of apparel at the end of September and immediately contacted archaeologists from the Silesian Museum in Opava.

Jiří Juchelka, head of the museum’s archaeology department, says that as soon as he saw a photo of the item, he knew it was something exceptional.

The first hypothesis was that the thin golden sheet of metal, which is around 50 centimetres long, was a tiara. However, after examining the object in greater detail, experts now believe it was actually part of a belt:

“It is decorated with raised concentric circles and topped with rose-shaped clasps at the ends. We realized that it was too long to fit on someone’s head.  So we actually think it is not a tiara, but something much rarer – a part of a belt.

“Belts at the time were made of leather and this was strapped to its front part. It was crumpled when the finder found it, probably as a result of agricultural activity, so it is a miracle it has been so well preserved. It may be missing a few tiny parts, but otherwise, it is in perfect condition.”

The thin metal sheet is made mostly of gold, along with some silver and traces of copper and iron. A preliminary analysis places its origin around the 14th century BC, says Tereza Alex Kilnarová, conservator at the Museum of Bruntál.

“It is estimated to be from the middle to the late Bronze Age, but it is only a preliminary determination based on the decoration.

“Similar decorative ornaments appear in more than one prehistoric culture and therefore more detailed research and analysis of the metal is needed.

“It probably belonged to someone in a high position in society, because items of such value were rarely produced at the time. That’s why we are talking about someone more esteemed.”

While the monetary value of the belt is yet to be determined, it is already clear that the object has an incalculable cultural and historical value, says Ms Kilnarová:

“Such objects are rarely found even during excavations, so it is a really unique discovery, not only in our region but all over Czechia. I think it is safe to say that it will be one of the most valuable objects that will have on display in our museum.”

The rare item, which will become part of the Museum of Bruntál collections, will now be thoroughly examined and conserved, before going on display for the public.

The ancient Golden Belt Discovered in the Czech Republic

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