scholarly journals Strontium isotope evidence for Neanderthal and modern human mobility at the upper and middle palaeolithic site of Fumane Cave (Italy)

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (8) ◽  
pp. e0254848
Author(s):  
Michael P. Richards ◽  
Marcello A. Mannino ◽  
Klervia Jaouen ◽  
Alessandro Dozio ◽  
Jean-Jacques Hublin ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Transition Period ◽  
Human Mobility ◽  
Isotope Analysis ◽  
Modern Human ◽  
Strontium Isotope ◽  
Upper Palaeolithic ◽  
Mobility Patterns ◽  
Modern Humans ◽  
Isotope Evidence ◽  
Baseline Values

To investigate the mobility patterns of Neanderthals and modern humans in Europe during the Middle-to-Upper Palaeolithic transition period, we applied strontium isotope analysis to Neanderthal (n = 3) and modern human (n = 2) teeth recovered from the site of Fumane Cave in the Monti Lessini region of Northern Italy. We also measured a large number of environmental samples from the region, to establish a strontium ‘baseline’, and also micromammals (vole teeth) from the levels associated with the hominin teeth. We found that the modern humans and Neanderthals had similar strontium isotope values, and these values match the local baseline values we obtained for the site and the surrounding region. We conclude that both groups were utilizing the local mountainous region where Fumane Cave is situated, and likely the nearby Lessini highlands and Adige plains, and therefore the strontium evidence does not show differening mobility patterns between Neanderthals and modern humans at the Fumane site.

scholarly journals Human mobility in a Bronze Age Vatya ‘urnfield’ and the life history of a high-status woman

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (7) ◽  
pp. e0254360
Author(s):  
Claudio Cavazzuti ◽  
Tamás Hajdu ◽  
Federico Lugli ◽  
Alessandra Sperduti ◽  
Magdolna Vicze ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Human Mobility ◽  
Isotope Analysis ◽  
Strontium Isotope ◽  
High Status ◽  
Adult Males ◽  
Mobility Patterns ◽  
History Of ◽  
Middle Bronze Age

In this study, we present osteological and strontium isotope data of 29 individuals (26 cremations and 3 inhumations) from Szigetszentmiklós-Ürgehegy, one of the largest Middle Bronze Age cemeteries in Hungary. The site is located in the northern part of the Csepel Island (a few kilometres south of Budapest) and was in use between c. 2150 and 1500 BC, a period that saw the rise, the apogee, and, ultimately, the collapse of the Vatya culture in the plains of Central Hungary. The main aim of our study was to identify variation in mobility patterns among individuals of different sex/age/social status and among individuals treated with different burial rites using strontium isotope analysis. Changes in funerary rituals in Hungary have traditionally been associated with the crises of the tell cultures and the introgression of newcomers from the area of the Tumulus Culture in Central Europe around 1500 BC. Our results show only slight discrepancies between inhumations and cremations, as well as differences between adult males and females. The case of the richly furnished grave n. 241 is of particular interest. The urn contains the cremated bones of an adult woman and two 7 to 8-month-old foetuses, as well as remarkably prestigious goods. Using 87Sr/86Sr analysis of different dental and skeletal remains, which form in different life stages, we were able to reconstruct the potential movements of this high-status woman over almost her entire lifetime, from birth to her final days. Our study confirms the informative potential of strontium isotopes analyses performed on different cremated tissues. From a more general, historical perspective, our results reinforce the idea that exogamic practices were common in Bronze Age Central Europe and that kinship ties among high-rank individuals were probably functional in establishing or strengthening interconnections, alliances, and economic partnerships.

scholarly journals Initial Upper Palaeolithic humans in Europe had recent Neanderthal ancestry

Nature ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 592 (7853) ◽  
pp. 253-257 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mateja Hajdinjak ◽  
Fabrizio Mafessoni ◽  
Laurits Skov ◽  
Benjamin Vernot ◽  
Alexander Hübner ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Family History ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Late Pleistocene ◽  
Modern Human ◽  
Human Migration ◽  
Upper Palaeolithic ◽  
Modern Humans ◽  
Genome Wide ◽  
Genome Wide Data

AbstractModern humans appeared in Europe by at least 45,000 years ago1–5, but the extent of their interactions with Neanderthals, who disappeared by about 40,000 years ago6, and their relationship to the broader expansion of modern humans outside Africa are poorly understood. Here we present genome-wide data from three individuals dated to between 45,930 and 42,580 years ago from Bacho Kiro Cave, Bulgaria1,2. They are the earliest Late Pleistocene modern humans known to have been recovered in Europe so far, and were found in association with an Initial Upper Palaeolithic artefact assemblage. Unlike two previously studied individuals of similar ages from Romania7 and Siberia8 who did not contribute detectably to later populations, these individuals are more closely related to present-day and ancient populations in East Asia and the Americas than to later west Eurasian populations. This indicates that they belonged to a modern human migration into Europe that was not previously known from the genetic record, and provides evidence that there was at least some continuity between the earliest modern humans in Europe and later people in Eurasia. Moreover, we find that all three individuals had Neanderthal ancestors a few generations back in their family history, confirming that the first European modern humans mixed with Neanderthals and suggesting that such mixing could have been common.

scholarly journals Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Make Me a Match: Migration of Populations via Marriages in the Past

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sang Hoon Lee ◽  
Robyn Ffrancon ◽  
Daniel M. Abrams ◽  
Beom Jun Kim ◽  
Mason A. Porter
Keyword(s):  
City Planning ◽  
Human Mobility ◽  
Modern Human ◽  
Generative Models ◽  
Geographical Information ◽  
Mobility Patterns ◽  
Migration Patterns ◽  
The Past ◽  
And Migration ◽  
Different Cultures

AbstractThe study of human mobility is both of fundamental importance and of great potential value. For example, it can be leveraged to facilitate efficient city planning and improve prevention strategies when faced with epidemics. The newfound wealth of rich sources of data—including banknote flows, mobile phone records, and transportation data—have led to an explosion of attempts to characterize modern human mobility. Unfortunately, the dearth of comparable historical data makes it much more difficult to study human mobility patterns from the past. In this paper, we present such an analysis: we demonstrate that the data record from Korean family books (called “jokbo”) can be used to estimate migration patterns via marriages from the past 750 years. We apply two generative models of long-term human mobility to quantify the relevance of geographical information to human marriage records in the data, and we find that the wide variety in the geographical distributions of the clans poses interesting challenges for the direct application of these models. Using the different geographical distributions of clans, we quantify the “ergodicity” of clans in terms of how widely and uniformly they have spread across Korea, and we compare these results to those obtained using surname data from the Czech Republic. To examine population flow in more detail, we also construct and examine a population-flow network between regions. Based on the correlation between ergodicity and migration patterns in Korea, we identify two different types of migration patterns: diffusive and convective. We expect the analysis of diffusive versus convective effects in population flows to be widely applicable to the study of mobility and migration patterns across different cultures.

O Menino do Lapedo

2001 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Trinkaus ◽  
João Zilhão ◽  
Cidália Duarte
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Isotope Analysis ◽  
Modern Human ◽  
Upper Paleolithic ◽  
Radiometric Dating ◽  
Faunal Remains ◽  
Behavioral Differences ◽  
Modern Humans ◽  
Early Modern Humans ◽  
Southern Iberia

AbstractThe emergence of modern humans during the Late Pleistocene and the phylogenetic fate of the northwestern Eurasian Neandertals have been closely linked to our perceptions of the behavior and abilities of those late archaic humans, the Neandertals. In the past several years, several lines of evidence, including radiometric dating of archeological assemblages, taphonomic analyses of faunal remains, stable isotope analysis of Neandertal remains, the dating of late Neandertal remains, considerations of initial Upper Paleolithic associations and chronologies, and reassessments of Neandertal to early modern human phylogenetic relationships have tended to minimise the perceived behavioral differences between the Neandertals and early modern humans across Europe. Into this context, the discovery of an earlier Upper Paleolithic (Gravettian) early modern human child's skeleton at the Abrigo do Lagar Velho, Lapedo Valley, Portugal with distinctive Neandertal features provides further support for the de-dehumanising of the Neandertals. Its anatomical evidence for population blending when early modern humans spread into southern Iberia after 30,000 B.P. indicates that the behavioral differences between the local Neandertals and in-dispersing early modern humans were subtle and did not preclude them from regarding each other as human.

scholarly journals Respiratory Adaptation to Climate in Upper Palaeolithic Modern Humans: The Case of Sungir and Mladeč.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ekaterina Stansfield ◽  
Philipp Mitteroecker ◽  
Sergey Vasilyev ◽  
Sergey Vasilyev ◽  
Lauren Butaric
Keyword(s):  
Climate Adaptation ◽  
Modern Human ◽  
Cranial Morphology ◽  
Temperate Climate ◽  
Human Populations ◽  
Upper Palaeolithic ◽  
Reduced Rank Regression ◽  
Modern Humans ◽  
Rank Regression ◽  
Face Shape

Abstract When our human ancestors migrated out of Africa, they faced a considerably harsher climate, but the extent to which human cranial morphology has adapted to climate is still debated. In particular, it remains unclear when such facial adaptations arose in human populations. Here, we explore climate-associated features of face shape in a worldwide modern human sample using 3D geometric morphometrics and a novel application of reduced rank regression. Based on these data, we assess climate adaptations in two crucial Upper Palaeolithic human fossils, Sungir and Mladeč, both of which have been archaeologically associated with a boreal-to-temperate climate. We found several aspects of face shape, especially the relative dimensions of the external and internal nose as well as of the maxillary sinuses, that are strongly associated with temperature and humidity, even after accounting for auto-correlation due to geographical proximity of populations. For these features, both fossils revealed adaptations to a dry environment, with Sungir being strongly associated with cold and Mladeč with warm-to-hot temperatures. As both fossils are dated among the earliest recent modern humans in Europe, our results suggest a relatively fast rate of climate adaptation in human respiratory morphology.

scholarly journals Symbolic Revolutions and the Australian Archaeological Record

2005 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Brumm ◽  
Mark W. Moore
Keyword(s):  
Modern Human ◽  
Human Behaviour ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Upper Palaeolithic ◽  
Modern Humans ◽  
Old World ◽  
Remarkable Similarity

Australia was colonized by at least 40,000 bp and scientists agree that the continent was only ever occupied by anatomically and behaviourally modern humans. Australia thus offers an alternative early record for the archaeological expression of behavioural modernity. This review finds that the pattern of change in the Australian archaeological sequence bears remarkable similarity to the pattern from the Lower to Upper Palaeolithic in the Old World, a finding that is inconsistent with the ‘symbolic revolution’ model of the origin of modern behaviour. This highlights the need for archaeologists to rethink the implications of the various criteria and scales of analysis used to identify modern human behaviour.

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