Thousands of Years Ago
The origins of the state: Technology, cooperation and institutions
Giacomo Benati & Carmine Guerriero
Journal of Institutional Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We develop a theory of state formation shedding light on the rise of the first stable state institutions in Bronze Age Mesopotamia. Our analysis suggests that the mix of adverse production conditions and unforeseen innovations pushed groups favored by old technologies to establish the state by granting political and property rights to powerless individuals endowed with new and complementary skills. Through these reforms, the elite convinced the nonelite that a sufficient part of the returns on joint investments would be shared via public spending and, thus, to cooperate and accumulate a culture of cooperation. Different from the main alternative theories, we stress that: (1) group formation is heavily shaped by unforeseen shocks to the returns on both risk-sharing and innovation; (2) complementarity in group-specific skills, and not violence, is key determinant of state formation; (3) military, merchant and, especially, religious ranks favored state formation and culture accumulation.
Why do chimpanzees have diverse behavioral repertoires yet lack more complex cultures? Invention and social information use in a cumulative task
Gillian Vale et al.
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Humans are distinctive in their dependence upon products of culture for survival, products that have evolved cumulatively over generations such that many cannot now be created by a single individual. Why the cultural capacity of humans appears unrivalled in the animal kingdom is a topic of ongoing debate. Here we explore whether innovation and/or social learning propensities may constrain the ability of one of our closest living relatives, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), to master an extractive foraging and tool-use task designed to afford opportunities for cumulative culture to develop. We further explore the potential demographic characteristics associated with novel task solutions. Chimpanzees (N = 53) were inventive, flexibly exploring the novel task, albeit complex inventions were rare and shaped by prior individual experience with similar tool-use tasks. However, they displayed no evidence of cumulative cultural learning. Communities displayed richer behavioral repertoires and had greater task success than chimpanzees tested in an asocial control condition, but their solution complexity did not surpass what individuals invented. The lack of social transmission of complex and beneficial solutions in contexts like those we studied provides one explanation for the limited cumulative culture observed in this species.
Exotic foods reveal contact between South Asia and the Near East during the second millennium BCE
Ashley Scott et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although the key role of long-distance trade in the transformation of cuisines worldwide has been well-documented since at least the Roman era, the prehistory of the Eurasian food trade is less visible. In order to shed light on the transformation of Eastern Mediterranean cuisines during the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, we analyzed microremains and proteins preserved in the dental calculus of individuals who lived during the second millennium BCE in the Southern Levant. Our results provide clear evidence for the consumption of expected staple foods, such as cereals (Triticeae), sesame (Sesamum), and dates (Phoenix). We additionally report evidence for the consumption of soybean (Glycine), probable banana (Musa), and turmeric (Curcuma), which pushes back the earliest evidence of these foods in the Mediterranean by centuries (turmeric) or even millennia (soybean). We find that, from the early second millennium onwards, at least some people in the Eastern Mediterranean had access to food from distant locations, including South Asia, and such goods were likely consumed as oils, dried fruits, and spices. These insights force us to rethink the complexity and intensity of Indo-Mediterranean trade during the Bronze Age as well as the degree of globalization in early Eastern Mediterranean cuisine.
A Neolithic mega-tsunami event in the eastern Mediterranean: Prehistoric settlement vulnerability along the Carmel coast, Israel
Gilad Shtienberg et al.
PLoS ONE, December 2020
Abstract:
Tsunami events in antiquity had a profound influence on coastal societies. Six thousand years of historical records and geological data show that tsunamis are a common phenomenon affecting the eastern Mediterranean coastline. However, the possible impact of older tsunamis on prehistoric societies has not been investigated. Here we report, based on optically stimulated luminescence chronology, the earliest documented Holocene tsunami event, between 9.91 to 9.29 ka (kilo-annum), from the eastern Mediterranean at Dor, Israel. Tsunami debris from the early Neolithic is composed of marine sand embedded within fresh-brackish wetland deposits. Global and local sea-level curves for the period, 9.91–9.29 ka, as well as surface elevation reconstructions, show that the tsunami had a run-up of at least ~16 m and traveled between 3.5 to 1.5 km inland from the palaeo-coastline. Submerged slump scars on the continental slope, 16 km west of Dor, point to the nearby “Dor-complex” as a likely cause. The near absence of Pre-Pottery Neolithic A-B archaeological sites (11.70–9.80 cal. ka) suggest these sites were removed by the tsunami, whereas younger, late Pre-Pottery Neolithic B-C (9.25–8.35 cal. ka) and later Pottery-Neolithic sites (8.25–7.80 cal. ka) indicate resettlement following the event. The large run-up of this event highlights the disruptive impact of tsunamis on past societies along the Levantine coast.
A genetic history of the pre-contact Caribbean
Daniel Fernandes et al.
Nature, forthcoming
Abstract:
Humans settled the Caribbean about 6,000 years ago, and ceramic use and intensified agriculture mark a shift from the Archaic to the Ceramic Age at around 2,500 years ago. Here we report genome-wide data from 174 ancient individuals from The Bahamas, Haiti and the Dominican Republic (collectively, Hispaniola), Puerto Rico, Curaçao and Venezuela, which we co-analysed with 89 previously published ancient individuals. Stone-tool-using Caribbean people, who first entered the Caribbean during the Archaic Age, derive from a deeply divergent population that is closest to Central and northern South American individuals; contrary to previous work, we find no support for ancestry contributed by a population related to North American individuals. Archaic-related lineages were >98% replaced by a genetically homogeneous ceramic-using population related to speakers of languages in the Arawak family from northeast South America; these people moved through the Lesser Antilles and into the Greater Antilles at least 1,700 years ago, introducing ancestry that is still present. Ancient Caribbean people avoided close kin unions despite limited mate pools that reflect small effective population sizes, which we estimate to be a minimum of 500–1,500 and a maximum of 1,530–8,150 individuals on the combined islands of Puerto Rico and Hispaniola in the dozens of generations before the individuals who we analysed lived. Census sizes are unlikely to be more than tenfold larger than effective population sizes, so previous pan-Caribbean estimates of hundreds of thousands of people are too large. Confirming a small and interconnected Ceramic Age population, we detect 19 pairs of cross-island cousins, close relatives buried around 75 km apart in Hispaniola and low genetic differentiation across islands. Genetic continuity across transitions in pottery styles reveals that cultural changes during the Ceramic Age were not driven by migration of genetically differentiated groups from the mainland, but instead reflected interactions within an interconnected Caribbean world.
Ancient DNA from Guam and the peopling of the Pacific
Irina Pugach et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Humans reached the Mariana Islands in the western Pacific by ∼3,500 y ago, contemporaneous with or even earlier than the initial peopling of Polynesia. They crossed more than 2,000 km of open ocean to get there, whereas voyages of similar length did not occur anywhere else until more than 2,000 y later. Yet, the settlement of Polynesia has received far more attention than the settlement of the Marianas. There is uncertainty over both the origin of the first colonizers of the Marianas (with different lines of evidence suggesting variously the Philippines, Indonesia, New Guinea, or the Bismarck Archipelago) as well as what, if any, relationship they might have had with the first colonizers of Polynesia. To address these questions, we obtained ancient DNA data from two skeletons from the Ritidian Beach Cave Site in northern Guam, dating to ∼2,200 y ago. Analyses of complete mitochondrial DNA genome sequences and genome-wide SNP data strongly support ancestry from the Philippines, in agreement with some interpretations of the linguistic and archaeological evidence, but in contradiction to results based on computer simulations of sea voyaging. We also find a close link between the ancient Guam skeletons and early Lapita individuals from Vanuatu and Tonga, suggesting that the Marianas and Polynesia were colonized from the same source population, and raising the possibility that the Marianas played a role in the eventual settlement of Polynesia.
Pluridisciplinary evidence for burial for the La Ferrassie 8 Neandertal child
Antoine Balzeau et al.
Scientific Reports, December 2020
Abstract:
The origin of funerary practices has important implications for the emergence of so-called modern cognitive capacities and behaviour. We provide new multidisciplinary information on the archaeological context of the La Ferrassie 8 Neandertal skeleton (grand abri of La Ferrassie, Dordogne, France), including geochronological data -14C and OSL-, ZooMS and ancient DNA data, geological and stratigraphic information from the surrounding context, complete taphonomic study of the skeleton and associated remains, spatial information from the 1968–1973 excavations, and new (2014) fieldwork data. Our results show that a pit was dug in a sterile sediment layer and the corpse of a two-year-old child was laid there. A hominin bone from this context, identified through Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) and associated with Neandertal based on its mitochondrial DNA, yielded a direct 14C age of 41.7–40.8 ka cal BP (95%), younger than the 14C dates of the overlying archaeopaleontological layers and the OSL age of the surrounding sediment. This age makes the bone one of the most recent directly dated Neandertals. It is consistent with the age range for the Châtelperronian in the site and in this region and represents the third association of Neandertal taxa to Initial Upper Palaeolithic lithic technocomplex in Western Europe. A detailed multidisciplinary approach, as presented here, is essential to advance understanding of Neandertal behavior, including funerary practices.
Early specialized maritime and maize economies on the north coast of Peru
Tiffiny Tung et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 22 December 2020, Pages 32308-32319
Abstract:
We assess diet and economies of middle Holocene (∼7,500 to 4,000 calibrated [cal] B.P.) humans at coexisting mound sites (Huaca Prieta and Paredones) in north coastal Peru and document regular consumption of maize by ∼6,500 to 6,000 cal B.P. and its earliest use as a staple food in this area of the Andes between 5,000 and 4,500 cal B.P. Stable isotope data from enamel carbonates and dentin collagen (childhood diet) and dental microwear texture analysis (adult diet) demonstrate dietary and economic specialization. Previous studies revealed maize and mixed-food refuse at both sites, but this study documents actual food consumption, showing that these communities situated a few hundred meters apart had significantly distinct diets in childhood and adulthood. Huaca Prieta focused on marine resources, although there are some contributions from terrestrial meat. Paredones individuals primarily consumed maize during childhood (up to 70% of the juvenile diet), as shown by δ13C values, apatite-collagen spacing, and discriminant analysis of δ13Ccoll, δ13Ccarb, and δ15N values. Maize was likely used as a weaning food (e.g., gruel and/or chicha—a maize beverage), hinting at the significant role of breastfeeding mothers, weanling infants, and children in the development of maize as a staple crop. Additionally, dental microwear data show Paredones adult diets are high in abrasives, potentially from maize processing. The distinct foodways at these neighboring sites result from and also reflect their social and political distinctions. These differences in food production, distribution, and consumption generated opportunities for exchange, an interaction that bound them together in mutual benefit.