An amazing discovery in Egypt – The bones of a 3600-year-old giant palm
A team of archaeologists has found that one of the palaces in the ancient city of Avaris, in Egypt, has hundreds of human sacrifices hidden beneath the earth. Archaeologists in the past have excavated the skeletons of 16 human hands that were found in four pits.
Two of the pits, located in front of what is believed to be a throne room, hold one hand each. Two other pits, constructed at a slightly later time in outer space of the palace, contain the 14 remaining hands.
They are all right hands; there are no lefts.
“Most of the hands are quite large and some of them are very large,” Manfred Bietak, project and field director of the excavations, told LiveScience.
A severed right hand discovered in front of a Hyksos palace at Avaris (modern-day Tell el-Daba). It would have been chopped off and presented to the king (or a subordinate) in exchange for gold. This discovery is the first archaeological evidence of the practice. At the time they were buried, about 3,600 years ago, the palace was being used by King Khayan. The Hyksos were a people believed to be from northern Canaan, they controlled part of Egypt and made their capital at Avaris on the Nile Delta.
The finds, made in the Nile Delta northeast of Cairo, date back about 3,600 years to a time when the Hyksos, a people believed to be originally from northern Canaan, controlled part of Egypt and made their capital at Avaris a location known today as Tell el-Daba. At the time the hands were buried, the palace was being used by one of the Hyksos rulers, King Khayan.
The hands appear to be the first physical evidence of a practice attested to in ancient Egyptian writing and art, in which a soldier would present the cut-off right hand of an enemy in exchange for gold, Bietak explains in the most recent edition of the periodical Egyptian Archaeology.
“Our evidence is the earliest evidence and the only physical evidence at all,” Bietak said. “Each pit represents a ceremony.”
Cutting off the right hand, specifically, not only would have made counting victims easier, it would have served the symbolic purpose of taking away an enemy’s strength.
“You deprive him of his power eternally,” Bietak explained. It’s not known whose hands they were; they could have been Egyptians or people the Hyksos were fighting in the Levant. “Gold of valor”
Cutting off the right hand of an enemy was a practice undertaken by both the Hyksos and the Egyptians.
One account is written on the tomb wall of Ahmose, son of Ibana, an Egyptian fighting in a campaign against the Hyksos. Written about 80 years later than the time the 16 hands were buried, the inscription reads in part:
“Then I fought hand to hand. I brought away a hand. It was reported to the royal herald.” For his efforts, the writer was given “the gold of valor” (translation by James Henry Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, Volume II, 1905). Later, in a campaign against the Nubians, to the south, Ahmose took three hands and was given “gold in double measure,” the inscription suggests.
Scientists are not certain who started this gruesome tradition. No records of the practice have been found in the Hyksos’ likely homeland of northern Canaan, Bietak said, so could have been an Egyptian tradition they picked up, or vice versa, or it could have originated from somewhere else.
Bietak pointed out that, while this find is the earliest evidence of this practice, the grisly treatment of prisoners in ancient Egypt was nothing new.
The Narmer Palette, an object dating to the time of the unification of ancient Egypt about 5,000 years ago, shows decapitated prisoners and a pharaoh about to smash the head of a kneeling man.
The archaeological expedition at Tell el-Daba is a joint project of the Austrian Archaeological Institute’s Cairo branch and the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
A team of international researchers led by ancient DNA experts from the University of Adelaide has resolved the longstanding issue of the origins of the people who introduced farming to Europe some 8000 years ago.
A detailed genetic study of one of the first farming communities in Europe, from central Germany, reveals marked similarities with populations living in the Ancient Near East (modern-day Turkey, Iraq and other countries) rather than those from Europe.
Project leader Professor Alan Cooper, Director of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD) at the University of Adelaide, says: “This overturns current thinking, which accepts that the first European farming populations were constructed largely from existing populations of hunter-gatherers, who had either rapidly learned to farm or interbred with the invaders.”
Ancient DNA from human remains (pictured) found in Anatolia, Turkey, has revealed that the farmers who lived there 8,000 years ago were among the first to spread into Europe. The farming revolution brought about changes in human culture that led to some of the first civilisations in history emerging.
The results of the study have been published in the online peer-reviewed science journal PLoS Biology.
“We have finally resolved the question of who the first farmers in Europe were — invaders with revolutionary new ideas, rather than populations of Stone Age hunter-gatherers who already existed in the area,” says lead author Dr Wolfgang Haak, Senior Research Associate with ACAD at the University of Adelaide.
“We’ve been able to apply new, high-precision ancient DNA methods to create a detailed genetic picture of this ancient farming population, and reveal that it was radically different to the nomadic populations already present in Europe.
“We have also been able to use genetic signatures to identify a potential route from the Near East and Anatolia, where farming evolved around 11,000 years ago, via south-eastern Europe and the Carpathian Basin (today’s Hungary) into Central Europe,” Dr Haak says.
The project involved researchers from the University of Mainz and State Heritage Museum in Halle, Germany, the Russian Academy of Sciences and members of the National Geographic Society’s Genographic Project, of which Professor Cooper is a Principal Investigator and Dr Haak is a Senior Research Associate.
The ancient DNA used in this study comes from a complete graveyard of Early Neolithic farmers unearthed at the town of Derenburg in Saxony-Anhalt, central Germany.
Neolithic farmers spread to replace hunter-gatherer populations in Europe. Wall paintings of hunters (pictured) found in Catal Hoyuk in Anatolia, Turkey is thought to have been made in 6,000BC, just as farming was beginning to spread into Europe. The new study suggests the area was a hub for the farming revolution
“This work was only possible due to the close collaboration of archaeologists excavating the skeletons, to ensure that no modern human DNA contaminated the remains, and nicely illustrates the potential when archaeology and genetics are combined,” says Professor Kurt Werner Alt from the collaborating Institute of Anthropology in Mainz, Germany.
An ancient Egyptian mummy was wrapped in an unusual mud shell
As a result, the discovery of a remarkable “mud mummy” from ancient Egypt has shocked archaeologists, who weren’t expecting to find the deceased encased in a hardened mud shell.
The mud shell was added after the woman’s original mummification, perhaps to repair the damage inflicted by grave robbers.
The “mud carapace” is an unparalleled find; it reveals “a mortuary treatment not previously documented in the Egyptian archaeological record,” the researchers wrote in the study, published online Wednesday in the journal PLOS One.
It’s possible the “mud wrap” was used to stabilize the mummy after it was damaged, but the mud may have also been meant to emulate practices used by society’s elite, who were sometimes mummified with imported resin-based materials during a nearly 350-year period, from the late New Kingdom to the 21st Dynasty (about 1294 B.C. to 945 B.C.), the researchers said.
So, why was this individual covered with mud, rather than resin? “Mud is a more affordable material,” study lead researcher Karin Sowada, a research fellow in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, told Live Science in an email.
The mud sheath isn’t the mummy’s only oddity. The mummy, dated to about 1207 B.C., was damaged after death, and was even interred in the wrong coffin actually meant for a woman who died more recently, the researchers found.
Like many ancient Egyptian mummies, the “mud mummy” and its lidded coffin were acquired in the 1800s by a Western collector, in this case, Sir Charles Nicholson, an English-Australian politician who brought it to Australia.
Nicholson donated them to the University of Sydney in 1860, and today they reside at the university’s Chau Chak Wing Museum. But it appears that whoever sold the artefacts tricked Nicholson; the coffin is younger than the body buried in it, the researchers found.
“Local dealers likely placed an unrelated mummified body in the coffin to sell a more complete ‘set,’ a well-known practice in the local antiquities trade,” the researchers wrote in the study.
The coffin is inscribed with a woman’s name — Meruah or Meru(t)ah — and dates to about 1000 B.C., according to iconography decorating it, meaning the coffin is about 200 years younger than the mummy in it.
While the individual isn’t Meruah, anatomical clues hint that it is a female who died between the ages of 26 and 35, the researchers said.
Muddy treatment
Researchers got their first inkling that the 3,400-year-old mummy was unusual in 1999 when a CT (computed tomography) scan revealed something strange inside. To investigate, the researcher extracted a few samples of the wrappings and discovered they contained a sandy mud mixture.
When a new team of researchers re-scanned the mummy in 2017, they uncovered previously unknown details about the carapace, especially when they chemically reexamined the mud fragments.
After she died, the woman was mummified and wrapped in textiles. Then, her remains, including her left knee and lower leg, were damaged in “unknown circumstances,” possibly by grave robbers, which prompted someone to repair her mummy, likely within one to two generations of her first burial — a feat that included “rewrapping, packing and padding with textiles, and application of the mud carapace,” the researchers wrote in the study.
CT images of the mummy offered clues to the wrapping process.
Whoever repaired the mummy made a complicated earthy sandwich, placing a batter of mud, sand and straw between layers of linen wrappings.
The bottom of the mud mixture had a base coat of a white calcite-based pigment, while its top was coated with ochre, a red mineral pigment, Sowada said. “The mud was apparently applied in sheets while still damp and pliable,” she said. “The body was wrapped with linen wrappings, the carapace applied, and then further wrappings placed over it.”
Later, the mummy was damaged again, this time on the right side of the neck and head. Because this damage affects all of the layers, including the muddy carapace, it appears this damage was more recent and prompted the insertion of metal pins to stabilize the damaged areas at the time, the researchers said.
This “mud mummy” isn’t the only ancient Egyptian mummy subject to post-mortem repair; the body of King Seti I was wrapped more than once, and so were the remains of King Amenhotep III (King Tut’s grandfather), the researchers noted.
As for the woman’s mud carapace, “this is a genuinely new discovery in Egyptian mummification,” Sowada said. “This study assists in constructing a bigger — and a more nuanced — picture of how the ancient Egyptians treated and prepared their dead.”
‘Find of the century’: a medieval hoard of treasures unearthed in Cambridge
A mediaeval graveyard with an excess of unidentified graves being uncovered underneath student accommodation in Cambridge University is listed as being one of the most exciting discoveries of Anglo-Saxon archaeology since the 19th century.
The human remains found at the Cambridge site are remarkably well preserved in the alkaline soil.
After demolishing a group of 1930s buildings that had recently housed graduates and employees in the west of the city, King’s College discovered the “extensive” cemetery, containing more than 60 graves, to make way for more modern halls.
Many objects (around 200 items) have been found in the graves, including bronze brooches, bead necklaces, knives, small blades, pottery and glass bottles.
A late Roman glass flask found at the site.
Most date from the early Anglo-Saxon period from 400 to 650, although evidence of iron-age structures and Roman earthworks has also been found. Caroline Goodson, who teaches early medieval history at King’s College, said the human remains they found were remarkably “well-preserved.”
“The alkaline soil, which is typical around here, hasn’t decomposed the bones,” she said.
This is significant because it would enable archaeologists to apply modern scientific techniques to reveal the diet and DNA of the dead, permitting analysis of migration and family relationships.
Goodson said excavators had been “surprised” to find so many graves and such an extensive early medieval cemetery surrounded by Roman ditches and so close to the remains of Roman Cambridge.
According to Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, which was written in the eighth century, Cambridge was abandoned — like many other Roman towns — when the Romans withdrew their military forces from England during the fifth century.
“We already know that Cambridge wasn’t fully abandoned. But what we’re seeing now is a greater and clearer picture of life in the post-Roman settlements,” she said.
Goodson speculated that people living in Cambridgeshire were a mix of descendants from earlier Roman populations and recent migrants to Britain from the continent, living in a post-imperial world.
“They are no longer living as the Romans did, they’re eating differently, dressing differently and finding different ways of exploiting the land. They are changing the way they are living during a period of considerable fluidity,” Goodson said.
Some of the finds throw up questions about the emotional connections people living at the time of the burials might have felt toward the Romans who lived in Cambridge before them.
In one grave, archaeologists found a body buried with what appears to be a late Roman piece of glass shaped like a small barrel for storing wine.
“It looks like a classic Roman object being reused in a post-Roman context, as grave goods,” Goodson said.
Another grave looks like a typical late Roman burial from the fifth century, suggesting there might have been continuity of use of the burial ground from the Roman period onward.
Archaeologists have so far not found “strong evidence” that people living in the sixth century were still choosing to bury their dead near late Roman graves, but few graveyards of this size have ever been scientifically excavated using modern methods and technologies, such as advanced radiocarbon dating techniques and isotopic analysis.
The site of the dig, in the west of the city.
“It would be great to say very clearly — and we’re going to need an ample suite of carbon-14 dates to do this — that we’ve got people using this site from the fifth until the seventh century,” Goodson said. “We can see that the burial of the dead and the treatment of their bodies is particularly significant to living in a way that is different from elsewhere in the post-Roman world.”
That points to a different world view and a different “cosmology”: “It’s a new form of commemoration,” she said.
She hoped to find out whether anyone in the cemetery died of the Justinianic Plague, a pandemic that raged across Europe in the 540s.
Archaeologists unearth bronze age graves at Stonehenge tunnel site
New items discovered near the proposed road tunnel underneath Stonehenge could shed light on the makers of the famous stone circle. Early discoveries include various graves dating back to the Bronze Age as well as two burial pits of Beaker people, who arrived in Britain around 4,500 years ago after Stonehenge was erected in the late Neolithic period around 5,000 years ago.
The findings have thus far not provided any insight into who may have built Stonehenge, or how they may have done it, but researchers believe ongoing excavations could help unpick some of the mystery surrounding the monument. Small finds uncovered at the site pertain mostly to everyday life and allow experts to build a clearer image of life pre-and post-erection of Stonehenge, which could help inform future studies and theories about its origin.
Wessex Archaeology is leading hundreds of trial digs around the site to ensure the construction work, due to start in 2023, does not destroy any archaeological items.
Early discoveries include various graves dating back to the Bronze Age as well as two burial pits of Beaker people (pictured), who arrived in Britain around 6,500 years ago, long before Stonehenge was erected in the late Neolithic period around 5,000 years ago
Map showing archaeological investigations along the proposed route of the A303 at Stonehenge
‘We’ve found a lot – evidence about the people who lived in this landscape over millennia, traces of people’s everyday lives and deaths, intimate things,’ Matt Leivers, A303 Stonehenge consultant archaeologist at Wessex Archaeology told The Guardian.
Every detail lets us work out what was happening in that landscape before during and after the building of Stonehenge. Every piece brings that picture into a little more focus. Objects from the Neolithic period were also found scattered around the site, including chunks of pottery, flint, and red deer antlers. It is possible these items were left by the same people who built Stonehenge, but the archaeologists are currently unavailable to prove this.
One discovery of note is a cylindrical piece of shale that was found in a 4,000-year-old Beaker burial. It has been described by archaeologists as ‘an oddity’ and unique. The item is thought to have sat atop a staff or mace and was inside the grave of an adult who was also interred in a crouched position with a small pot and a copper awl.
A cylindrical shale object from a Beaker burial
Nearby to this pit was the burial site of a young child from the same period of time. All that remains of the youngster are the inner ear bones and the baby was buried in a plain pot, which was likely a grave good for the deceased. This bland Beaker pot is unusual for the culture, which is known for its ornate items. The simplicity likely reflects the age of the person who was buried there, the experts believe.
The Beaker sites were found near the Western portal of the proposed tunnel, which sits south of the Stonehenge visitor center. Even further south the team of archaeologists discovered an unusual arrangement of C-shaped ditches, and their use remains unknown.
To the south of the Stonehenge visitor centre the team of archaeologists discovered an unusual arrangement of C-shaped ditches, and their use remains unknown. ‘It is a strange pattern of ditches,’ Matt Leivers, A303 Stonehenge consultant archaeologist at Wessex Archaeology told The Guardian . ‘It’s difficult to say what it was, but we know how old it is because we found a near-complete bronze age pot (pictured) in one of the ditches’
It is a strange pattern of ditches,’ Mr Leivers told The Guardian. It’s difficult to say what it was, but we know how old it is because we found a near-complete bronze age pot in one of the ditches. The excavation also revealed large amounts of burnt flint in the ditches, which could indicate an industrial purpose. Mr. Leivers says this could be related to metal, leatherworking, pottery, or crops.
Digs at the earmarked location for the Eastern portal of the tunnel have revealed fewer items, but they themselves have intrigued archaeologists. One dig found evidence of debnitage, the waste material produced when making flint tools. Ditches in the area have also been found which date to the Iron Age and may be connected to the nearby Vespasian’s Camp, a hillfort located to the south.
All items unearthed so far are being stored temporarily in nearby Salisbury and will eventually go on display at the city’s museum. The controversial £1.7billion tunnel project is designed to divert traffic away from the iconic site by removing the current stretch of the A303 which passes within a few hundred yards of the UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Traffic will be sent underground and into the new dual-carriageway tunnel network, which will be 164ft further away from the site than the current road, in a bid to ease congestion around the landmark.
The current road will become a public footpath. Environmentalists, archaeologists, and druids have been outraged at the plans, which were first unveiled in 2017, and a legal battle was mounted last year.
Highways England says its plan for the dual carriageway tunnel, located 164ft further away from Stonehenge compared to the existing A303 route, will remove the sight and sound of traffic passing the site and cut journey times.
The area is often severely congested on the single carriageway stretch near the stones, particularly on Bank Holiday weekends. But some environmentalists and archaeologists have voiced their opposition to the plan due to its potential impact on the area.
Modern-day druids, who each year celebrate the winter and summer solstices at Stonehenge, have also hit out at the plans. As a result, huge amounts of archaeological preparation is being conducted by Wessex, renowned leaders and experts in commercial excavations,
They have recently revealed the ‘Hampton Court of Warwickshire’ as well as a 19th-century Victorian bathhouse in Bath. The experts drafted in specialists to hand dig and sift through more than 2,000 test pits and trenches. Next, the company intends to bring in 150 archaeologists to clear a larger swath of the land later this year.
Construction work on the tunnel is expected to start in 2023, and Andy Crockett, A303 project director for Wessex Archaeology, acknowledges it is impossible to mitigate all risk to an area’s archaeology when road projects are involved.
Highways England says the unprecedented amount of surveying done on the area is due to the significance of the Stonehenge site. David Bullock, A303 project manager for Highways England, told The Guardian: ‘There has been a huge amount of investigations so that this route can be threaded through so as to disturb as little as possible.’
Dozens of terracotta figurines that are over 2,000 years old have been found by archaeologists, including ones that represent gods, goddesses, men, women, cavalry, and animals. In the ancient city of Myra, in what is now modern-day Demre in Turkey, some of the figurines still had drawings on them and some had inscriptions, and both opened a window into life.
Some of the figurines didn’t have bodies, suggesting there were other terracottas to be found in the area.
This collection of figurines, “gives us rich clues about what existed in the mysterious Myra under a thick silt layer in the first and second centuries B.C.,” said Nevzat Çevik, a professor of archaeology at Akdeniz University in Turkey who led the excavation.
Myra is “one of the most important ancient settlements in Lycia,” an important maritime region along the Mediterranean Sea.
Myra’s port was once one of the largest harbors in the ancient Mediterranean; it is famous for its rock-cut tombs jutting from the hills, the church of Saint Nicholas, who was Myra’s bishop in the fourth century, and its 11,000-seat Roman-era theater.
Çevik and his team were excavating parts of this theater between June and October 2020 when they unearthed a second, smaller theater below the Roman remains.
The older structure dates back to the Hellenistic period, from 323 B.C. when Alexander the Great died to the beginning of the Roman Empire in 30 B.C. They expected to find the Hellenistic theater, but the terracotta figurines scattered in it were “an unexpected big surprise,” Çevik told Live Science.
“It is as if the people of ancient Myra were resurrected and ran through the time tunnel all together and came to our day,” Çevik remembers telling his team when they found the figurines.
The figurines were discovered in a Hellenistic theater buried beneath the famous ancient Myra theatre in southwestern Turkey.
The figurines, which are 2,100 to 2,200 years old included mortal men and women as well as divine figures such as Artemis, Heracles, Aphrodite, Leto, and Apollo; they also included figurines depicting a woman and a child, a boy with a fruit, a horseman and a woman carrying hydria (an ancient Greek water vessel).
Because of the “collective coexistence” of the figurines and the fact that the collection included divine figurines, votive plates, and incense containers, the researchers think that the figurines may have been brought in from a cult area and thrown here.
The collection gives “important clues about the Hellenistic period of Myra and Lycia,” he said.
Some of the statues had partially preserved paint on them. Red, blue and pink were used “intensely in different shades” in the clothes of the figurines, he said.
The inscriptions on the backs of some of the figurines could be the name of a master or workshop. The fact that the team discovered more than 50 terracotta heads that are missing their bodies suggests there are more figurines in the area to be found.
The team also discovered a variety of ceramic, bronze, lead, and silver objects around the terracottas. They plan to continue excavating the area this year.
In the meantime, the excavation team is working to preserve, repair, and assemble the hundreds of small pieces that make up the terracotta collection. They plan to publish their findings and display the terracottas at the Andriake Lycian Civilizations Museum in Antalya, Turkey.
The excavations were led on behalf of Akdeniz University and Turkey’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism.
It may look more like a shiny mosaic or a piece of jewellery, but the world’s oldest plant stem cells contain a 320 million-year-old fossil. And it gives us an entirely new understanding of the evolution of how plants grow.
The oldest fossilised remains of an actively growing root meristem, named Radix carbonica (Latin for coal root).
The fossil shows that the way plants grew from their roots millions of years ago was totally different from the way many modern plants form. Stem cells, self-renewing cells responsible for the development of multicellular organisms, in groups called meristems, are present in plants at the tips of shoots and roots.
Scientists at Oxford University have discovered the oldest known population of plant root stem cells in a 320 million-year-old fossil. The researchers found the 320 million-year-old stem cells are different to all those living today, revealing a unique pattern of cell division that had remained unknown until now.
This means some of the mechanisms controlling root formation in plants and trees back then have now become extinct.
The fossils were the remains of the soil from the first giant tropical rainforests on Earth. These fossils made up the rooting structures of the plants growing in the Earth’s first global tropical wetland forests.
The cells, which gave rise to the roots of an ancient plant, were found in a fossilized root tip held in the Oxford University Herbaria – a preserved selection of plants kept for scientists to study.
‘I was examining one of the fossilized soil slides held at the University Herbaria as part of my research into the rooting systems of ancient trees when I noticed a structure that looked like the living root tips we see in plants today,’ said Alexander Hetherington, from Oxford University, who made the discovery during the course of his research.
‘I began to realize that I was looking at a population of 320 million-year-old plant stem cells preserved as they were growing – and that it was the first time anything like this had ever been found.
Thin slice of 320-million-year old fossil coal ball.
‘It gives us a unique window into how roots developed hundreds of millions of years ago.’ This is the first time an actively growing fossilized root has been discovered.
The soil was preserved in the rock that formed in the Carboniferous swamps which gave rise to the coal sources spanning what is now Appalachia to central Europe.
This includes the coalfields in Wales, northern England, and Scotland. Because of this, Mr. Hetherington has named the stem-cell fossil Radix carbonica, which is Latin for ‘coal root’.
The forests had trees over 164 feet (50 meters) tall, and were in part responsible for one of the most dramatic climate change events in history.
When deep rooting systems evolved, this increased the rate of chemical weathering of silicate minerals in rocks – a chemical reaction that pulled carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. This led to the cooling of the Earth and one of the planet’s great ice ages.
Professor Liam Dolan, Head of the Department of Plant Sciences at Oxford University and senior author of the paper, said ‘these fossils demonstrate how the roots of these ancient plants grew for the first time.
‘It is startling that something so small could have had such a dramatic effect on the Earth’s climate.
‘This discovery also shows the importance of collections such as the Oxford University Herbaria – they are so valuable, and we need to maintain them for future generations.’
Humans Have Been Taking Out Insurance Policies for at Least 30,000 Years
Archaeologists say—The same way we trade social media likes or friendship bracelets, our ancestors swapped bits of ostrich eggshell jewellery 30,000 years ago. Items—shell fragments with holes bored in—would have served as a symbol of the interpersonal links made up of ancient social networks.
Ostrich eggshell beads have been used to cement relationships in Africa for more than 30,000 years
Experts researching beads discovered in the African country of Lesotho have shown that the tradition seen in modern hunter-gatherers had a longer history than believed.
Analysis of elements within the beads has revealed that they were passed from person to person, travelling as far as 621 miles from where they were made.
‘Ostrich eggshell beads and the jewellery made from them basically acted like Stone Age versions of Facebook or Twitter “likes”,’ said archaeologist Brian Stewart of the University of Michigan.
These tokens, he added, would have ‘simultaneously affirmed connections to exchange partners while alerting others to the status of those relationships.’
The beads are thought to have been given as gifts in ancient times
‘Humans are just outlandishly social animals, and that goes back to these deep forces that selected for maximising information, information that would have been useful for living in a hunter-gatherer society 30,000 years ago and earlier.’
Anthropologists have long-known that modern hunter-gatherers trade ostrich eggshell beads to cement their interpersonal relationships — with such being practised among living Bushman groups in the Kalahari Desert.
They were able to trace the origin of the beads using atom analysis
Ostriches don’t typically live in the mountainous, high-elevation environment of Lesotho, however — and archaeologists found no evidence, like bead fragments or samples of unworked eggshell, to suggest the beads were being made there either.
This led Professor Stewart and colleagues to wonder exactly where the beads found in the archaeological record there had come from.
To trace the origin of the beads, the team looked at a radioactive isotope called strontium, which is formed for the breakdown of another element, rubidium-87. Older rocks — such as granites and gneisses — contain more strontium than younger rocks like basalts.
Strontium atoms are taken up from the ground by plants like grass, which are in turn eaten by animals like ostriches — and in this way can end up within materials like eggshells, creating a signal of the geology where they were formed.
Using plant and soil samples, as well as tooth enamel is taken from modern rodent specimens from museum collections, the researchers created a map of the strontium signals from across Lesotho and the surrounding areas.
The basalt-rich volcanic mountains that make up the core of Lesotho contain less strontium, for example than the surrounding and older sedimentary rocks.
The team’s analysis revealed that nearly 80 percent of the beads found in Lesotho could not have originated from nearby highland areas. ‘These ornaments were consistently coming from very long distances,’ said Dr. Stewart.
‘The oldest bead in our sample had the third-highest strontium isotope value, so it is also one of the most exotic.’
Some of the beads, the team found, must have come from eggshells from at least 202 miles (325 kilometres) from Lesotho — and perhaps even as far away as 621 miles (1,000 kilometres).
The archaeologists worked at rock shelters at Sehonghong and Melikane in southern Africa
The team also found that the beads were being exchanged during a period of climatic upheaval which spanned from around 59–29 thousand years ago.
According to Dr. Stewart, the use of the beads to build relationships between different hunter-gatherer groups may have ensured one group’s access to others’ resources when their region’s weather took a turn for the worse.
‘What happened 50,000 years ago was that the climate was going through enormous swings, so it might be no coincidence that that’s exactly when you get this technology coming in,’ he said.
‘These exchange networks could be used for information on resources, the condition of landscapes, of animals, plant foods, other people and perhaps marriage partners.’ The full findings of the study were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
