Some time ago
A dispersal of Homo sapiens from southern to eastern Africa immediately preceded the out-of-Africa migration
Teresa Rito et al.
Scientific Reports, March 2019
Abstract:
Africa was the birth-place of Homo sapiens and has the earliest evidence for symbolic behaviour and complex technologies. The best-attested early flowering of these distinctive features was in a glacial refuge zone on the southern coast 100–70 ka, with fewer indications in eastern Africa until after 70 ka. Yet it was eastern Africa, not the south, that witnessed the first major demographic expansion, ~70–60 ka, which led to the peopling of the rest of the world. One possible explanation is that important cultural traits were transmitted from south to east at this time. Here we identify a mitochondrial signal of such a dispersal soon after ~70 ka – the only time in the last 200,000 years that humid climate conditions encompassed southern and tropical Africa. This dispersal immediately preceded the out-of-Africa expansions, potentially providing the trigger for these expansions by transmitting significant cultural elements from the southern African refuge.
Ancient trash mounds unravel urban collapse a century before the end of Byzantine hegemony in the southern Levant
Guy Bar-Oz et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
The historic event of the Late Antique Little Ice Age (LALIA) was recently identified in dozens of natural and geological climate proxies of the northern hemisphere. Although this climatic downturn was proposed as a major cause for pandemic and extensive societal upheavals in the sixth–seventh centuries CE, archaeological evidence for the magnitude of societal response to this event is sparse. This study uses ancient trash mounds as a type of proxy for identifying societal crisis in the urban domain, and employs multidisciplinary investigations to establish the terminal date of organized trash collection and high-level municipal functioning on a city-wide scale. Survey, excavation, sediment analysis, and geographic information system assessment of mound volume were conducted on a series of mounds surrounding the Byzantine urban settlement of Elusa in the Negev Desert. These reveal the massive collection and dumping of domestic and construction waste over time on the city edges. Carbon dating of charred seeds and charcoal fragments combined with ceramic analysis establish the end date of orchestrated trash removal near the mid-sixth century, coinciding closely with the beginning of the LALIA event and outbreak of the Justinian Plague in the year 541. This evidence for societal decline during the sixth century ties with other arguments for urban dysfunction across the Byzantine Levant at this time. We demonstrate the utility of trash mounds as sensitive proxies of social response and unravel the time–space dynamics of urban collapse, suggesting diminished resilience to rapid climate change in the frontier Negev region of the empire.
Prosperity and complexity without farming: The South China Coast, c. 5000–3000 BC
Hsiao-chun Hung
Antiquity, forthcoming
Abstract:
Around 5000 BC, affluent village communities emerged along the South China Coast. Although traditionally regarded as ancestors of Austronesian migrants, whose farming economies expanded into the Asia-Pacific region, the new synthesis presented here shows that these coastal groups actually lived as hunter-gatherers and fishers, with evidence of socio-cultural complexity. Around c. 3000–2500 BC, this ‘first layer’ of hunter-gatherers witnessed the arrival of a ‘second layer’, associated with rice farming and Austronesian assemblages. This new synthesis positions global coastlines as centres of socio-economic and political complexity, long-distance contact and technological advancement.
Maritime Hunter-Gatherers Adopt Cultivation at the Farming Extreme of Northern Europe 5000 Years Ago
Santeri Vanhanen et al.
Scientific Reports, March 2019
Abstract:
The dynamics of the origins and spread of farming are globally debated in anthropology and archaeology. Lately, numerous aDNA studies have turned the tide in favour of migrations, leaving only a few cases in Neolithic Europe where hunter-gatherers might have adopted agriculture. It is thus widely accepted that agriculture was expanding to its northern extreme in Sweden c. 4000 BC by migrating Funnel Beaker Culture (FBC) farmers. This was followed by intense contacts with local hunter-gatherers, leading to the development of the Pitted Ware Culture (PWC), who nonetheless relied on maritime prey. Here, we present archaeobotanical remains from Sweden and the Åland archipelago (Finland) showing that PWC used free-threshing barley and hulled and free-threshing wheat from c. 3300 BC. We suggest that these hunter-gatherers adopted cultivation from FBC farmers and brought it to islands beyond the 60th parallel north. Based on directly dated grains, land areas suitable for cultivation, and absence of signs of exchange with FBC in Sweden, we argue that PWC cultivated crops in Åland. While we have isotopic and lipid-biomarker proof that their main subsistence was still hunting/fishing/gathering, we argue small-scale cereal use was intended for ritual feasts, when cereal products could have been consumed with pork.
Foraging Performance, Prosociality, and Kin Presence Do Not Predict Lifetime Reproductive Success in Batek Hunter-Gatherers
Thomas Kraft et al.
Human Nature, March 2019, Pages 71–97
Abstract:
Identifying the determinants of reproductive success in small-scale societies is critical for understanding how natural selection has shaped human evolution and behavior. The available evidence suggests that status-accruing behaviors such as hunting and prosociality are pathways to reproductive success, but social egalitarianism may diminish this pathway. Here we introduce a mixed longitudinal/cross-sectional dataset based on 45 years of research with the Batek, a population of egalitarian rain forest hunter-gatherers in Peninsular Malaysia, and use it to test the effects of four predictors of lifetime reproductive success: (i) foraging return rate, (ii) sharing proclivity, (iii) cooperative foraging tendency, and (iv) kin presence. We found that none of these factors can explain variation in lifetime reproduction among males or females. We suggest that social egalitarianism, combined with strikingly low infant and juvenile mortality rates, can mediate the pathway between foraging, status-accruing behavior, and reproductive success. Our approach advocates for greater theoretical and empirical attention to quantitative social network measures, female foraging, and fitness outcomes.