Going back
The Neolithic Agricultural Revolution and the Origin of Private Property
Samuel Bowles & Jung-Kyoo Choi
Journal of Political Economy, forthcoming
Abstract:
Familiar explanations of why hunter-gatherers first took up farming – superior labor productivity, population pressure, or adverse climate – receive little support from recent evidence. Farming would be an unlikely choice without possession-based private property, which appears to have existed among rare groups of sedentary hunter-gatherers who became the first farmers. Our model shows that among them, farming could have benefited first adopters because private possession was more readily established and defended for cultivated crops and domesticated animals than for the diffuse wild resources on which hunter-gatherers relied, thus explaining how farming could have been introduced even without a productivity advantage.
Late Middle Pleistocene Levallois stone-tool technology in southwest China
Yue Hu et al.
Nature, forthcoming
Abstract:
Levallois approaches are one of the best known variants of prepared-core technologies, and are an important hallmark of stone technologies developed around 300,000 years ago in Africa and west Eurasia. Existing archaeological evidence suggests that the stone technology of east Asian hominins lacked a Levallois component during the late Middle Pleistocene epoch and it is not until the Late Pleistocene (around 40,000–30,000 years ago) that this technology spread into east Asia in association with a dispersal of modern humans. Here we present evidence of Levallois technology from the lithic assemblage of the Guanyindong Cave site in southwest China, dated to approximately 170,000–80,000 years ago. To our knowledge, this is the earliest evidence of Levallois technology in east Asia. Our findings thus challenge the existing model of the origin and spread of Levallois technologies in east Asia and its links to a Late Pleistocene dispersal of modern humans.
Decoding European Palaeolithic art: Extremely ancient knowledge of precession of the equinoxes
Martin Sweatman & Alistair Coombs
University of Edinburgh Working Paper, May 2018
Abstract:
A consistent interpretation is provided for Neolithic Gobekli Tepe and Catalhoyuk as well as European Palaeolithic cave art. It appears they all display the same method for recording dates based on precession of the equinoxes, with animal symbols representing an ancient zodiac. The same constellations are used today in the West, although some of the zodiacal symbols are different. In particular, the Shaft Scene at Lascaux is found to have a similar meaning to the Vulture Stone at Gobekli Tepe. Both can be viewed as memorials of catastrophic encounters with the Taurid meteor stream, consistent with Clube and Napier's theory of coherent catastrophism. The date of the likely comet strike recorded at Lascaux is 15,150 BC to within 200 years, corresponding closely to the onset of a climate event recorded in a Greenland ice core. A survey of radiocarbon dates from Chauvet and other Palaeolithic caves is consistent with this zodiacal interpretation, with a very high level of statistical significance. Finally, the Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel, circa 38,000 BC, is also consistent with this interpretation, indicating this knowledge is extremely ancient and was widespread.
The earliest human occupation of the high-altitude Tibetan Plateau 40 thousand to 30 thousand years ago
X.L. Zhang et al.
Science, 30 November 2018, Pages 1049-1051
Abstract:
The Tibetan Plateau is the highest and one of the most demanding environments ever inhabited by humans. We investigated the timing and mechanisms of its initial colonization at the Nwya Devu site, located nearly 4600 meters above sea level. This site, dating from 40,000 to 30,000 years ago, is the highest Paleolithic archaeological site yet identified globally. Nwya Devu has yielded an abundant blade tool assemblage, indicating hitherto-unknown capacities for the survival of modern humans who camped in this environment. This site deepens the history of the peopling of the “roof of the world” and the antiquity of human high-altitude occupations more generally.
More intelligent chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) have larger brains and increased cortical thickness
William Hopkins, Xiang Li & Neil Roberts
Intelligence, forthcoming
Abstract:
Though sometimes controversial, there is growing consensus that human general intelligence is associated with variation in a number of aspects of cortical organization including brain volume, white and gray matter volume, connectivity, and cortical thickness. Recent studies in great apes have shown, like humans, they exhibit both general and domain specific forms of intelligence when tested on a wide range of cognitive tests; however, whether individual variation in intelligence is associated with measures of cortical organization remains untested. Here we show that general intelligence in chimpanzees is associated with total brain volume, total gray matter volume, mean cortical thickness and regional variation in both gray matter volume and cortical thickness. These results suggest that increased gray matter volume and cortical thickness may produce enhanced computational cognitive processes and may have been selected for during primate brain evolution.
The first technical sequences in human evolution from East Gona, Afar region, Ethiopia
Henry de Lumley et al.
Antiquity, October 2018, Pages 1151-1164
Abstract:
Gona in the Afar region of Ethiopia has yielded the earliest Oldowan stone tools in the world. Artefacts from the East Gona (EG) 10 site date back 2.6 million years. Analysis of the lithic assemblage from EG 10 reveals the earliest-known evidence for refitting and conjoining stone artefacts. This new information supplements data from other Oldowan sites in East Africa, and provides an important insight into the technological capacities and evolutionary development of hominins during this period.
The 3.7kaBP Middle Ghor Event: Catastrophic Termination of a Bronze Age Civilization
Phillip Silvia et al.
Trinity Southwest University Working Paper, October 2018
Abstract:
This paper surveys the multiple lines of evidence that collectively suggest a Tunguska-like, cosmic airburst event that obliterated civilization — including the Middle Bronze Age city-state anchored by Tall el-Hammam — in the Middle Ghor (the 25 km diameter circular plain immediately north of the Dead Sea) ca. 1700 B.C.E., or 3700 years before present (3.7kaBP). Analyses of samples taken over twelve seasons of the Tall el-Hammam Excavation Project have been and are being performed by a team of scientists from New Mexico Tech, Northern Arizona University, NC State University, Elizabeth City (NC) State University, DePaul University, Trinity Southwest University, the Comet Research Group, and Los Alamos National Laboratories, with remarkable results. Commensurate with these results are the archaeological data collected from across the entire occupational footprint (36 ha) of Tall el-Hammam, demonstrating a directionality pattern for the high-heat, explosive 3.7kaBP Middle Ghor Event that, in an instant, devastated approximately 500 km2 immediately north of the Dead Sea, not only wiping out 100% of the Middle Bronze Age cities and towns, but also stripping agricultural soils from once-fertile fields and covering the eastern Middle Ghor with a super-heated brine of Dead Sea anhydride salts pushed over the landscape by the Event’s frontal shockwaves. Based upon the archaeological evidence, it took at least 600 years to recover sufficiently from the soil destruction and contamination before civilization could again become established in the eastern Middle Ghor.
Alpine ice-core evidence for the transformation of the European monetary system, AD 640–670
Christopher Loveluck et al.
Antiquity, forthcoming
Abstract:
The seventh-century AD switch from gold to silver currencies transformed the socio-economic landscape of North-west Europe. The source of silver, however, has proven elusive. Recent research, integrating ice-core data from the Colle Gnifetti drill site in the Swiss Alps, geoarchaeological records and numismatic and historical data, has provided new evidence for this transformation. Annual ice-core resolution data are combined with lead pollution analysis to demonstrate that significant new silver mining facilitated the change to silver coinage, and dates the introduction of such coinage to c. AD 660. Archaeological evidence and atmospheric modelling of lead pollution locates the probable source of the silver to mines at Melle, in France.
Emergence and Spread of Basal Lineages of Yersinia pestis during the Neolithic Decline
Nicolás Rascovan et al.
Cell, forthcoming
Abstract:
Between 5,000 and 6,000 years ago, many Neolithic societies declined throughout western Eurasia due to a combination of factors that are still largely debated. Here, we report the discovery and genome reconstruction of Yersiniapestis, the etiological agent of plague, in Neolithic farmers in Sweden, pre-dating and basal to all modern and ancient known strains of this pathogen. We investigated the history of this strain by combining phylogenetic and molecular clock analyses of the bacterial genome, detailed archaeological information, and genomic analyses from infected individuals and hundreds of ancient human samples across Eurasia. These analyses revealed that multiple and independent lineages of Y. pestis branched and expanded across Eurasia during the Neolithic decline, spreading most likely through early trade networks rather than massive human migrations. Our results are consistent with the existence of a prehistoric plague pandemic that likely contributed to the decay of Neolithic populations in Europe.
The long-distance exchange of amazonite and increasing social complexity in the Sudanese Neolithic
Andrea Zerboni et al.
Antiquity, October 2018, Pages 1195-1209
Abstract:
The presence of exotic materials in funerary contexts in the Sudanese Nile Valley suggests increasing social complexity during the fifth and sixth millennia BC. Amazonite, both in artefact and raw material form, is frequently recovered from Neolithic Sudanese sites, yet its provenance remains unknown. Geochemical analyses of North and East African raw amazonite outcrops and artefacts found at the Neolithic cemetery of R12 in the Sudanese Nile Valley reveals southern Ethiopia as the source of the R12 amazonite. This research, along with data on different exotic materials from contemporaneous Sudanese cemeteries, suggests a previously unknown, long-distance North African exchange network and confirms the emergence of local craft specialisation as part of larger-scale developing social complexity.