Volcanic climate forcing, extreme cold and the Neolithic Transition in the northern US Southwest

The impacts on global climate of the AD 536 and 541 volcanic eruptions are well attested in palaeoclimatic datasets and in Eurasian historical records. Their effects on farmers in the arid uplands of western North America, however, remain poorly understood. The authors investigate whether extreme cold caused by these eruptions influenced the scale, scope and timing of the Neolithic Transition in the northern US Southwest. Archaeological tree-ring and radiocarbon dates, along with settlement survey data suggest that extreme cooling generated the physical and social space that enabled early farmers to transition from kin-focused socio-economic strategies to increasingly complex and widely shared forms of social organisation that served as foundational elements of burgeoning Ancestral Pueblo societies.

Past Emerging Viruses

This chapter focuses on past emerging viruses. For our ancestors, it was their change in lifestyle from hunter-gatherer to farmer some 10,000 years ago that triggered an onslaught of new, emerging infectious diseases. The switch from the nomadic life to living in fixed communities, along with the change from hunting animals to their domestication, encouraged spillover of new viruses as well as other types of microbes. As such, the early farmers’ emerging viruses jumped from the animals they domesticated, while the cramped conditions of life in villages, and later towns, gave these viruses the opportunity to thrive in their new human host. This was the beginning of many of our acute childhood infections, so-called crowd diseases. The chapter looks at how these ancient afflictions have evolved over the intervening 10,000 years with a view to understanding how diseases like COVID-19 might evolve over time. It considers smallpox and measles, which are both highly infectious, lethal, airborne viruses, as well as polio, which is spread by faecal–oral contamination.

Using Y-chromosome capture enrichment to resolve haplogroup H2 shows new evidence for a two-path Neolithic expansion to Western Europe

Uniparentally-inherited markers on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and the non-recombining regions of the Y chromosome (NRY), have been used for the past 30 years to investigate the history of humans from a maternal and paternal perspective. Researchers have preferred mtDNA due to its abundance in the cells, and comparatively high substitution rate. Conversely, the NRY is less susceptible to back mutations and saturation, and is potentially more informative than mtDNA owing to its longer sequence length. However, due to comparatively poor NRY coverage via shotgun sequencing, and the relatively low and biased representation of Y-chromosome variants on capture assays such as the 1240 k, ancient DNA studies often fail to utilize the unique perspective that the NRY can yield. Here we introduce a new DNA enrichment assay, coined YMCA (Y-mappable capture assay), that targets the "mappable" regions of the NRY. We show that compared to low-coverage shotgun sequencing and 1240 k capture, YMCA significantly improves the mean coverage and number of sites covered on the NRY, increasing the number of Y-haplogroup informative SNPs, and allowing for the identification of previously undiscovered variants. To illustrate the power of YMCA, we show that the analysis of ancient Y-chromosome lineages can help to resolve Y-chromosomal haplogroups. As a case study, we focus on H2, a haplogroup associated with a critical event in European human history: the Neolithic transition. By disentangling the evolutionary history of this haplogroup, we further elucidate the two separate paths by which early farmers expanded from Anatolia and the Near East to western Europe.

Early farmers and their environment: archaeobotanical research at Neolithic and Chalcolithic sites in Jordan

PhD thesis written between 1998 and 2004 when I was a student at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia.

Honey-collecting in prehistoric West Africa from 3500 years ago

Honey and other bee products were likely a sought-after foodstuff for much of human history, with direct chemical evidence for beeswax identified in prehistoric ceramic vessels from Europe, the Near East and Mediterranean North Africa, from the 7th millennium BC. Historical and ethnographic literature from across Africa suggests bee products, honey and larvae, had considerable importance both as a food source and in the making of honey-based drinks. Here, to investigate this, we carry out lipid residue analysis of 458 prehistoric pottery vessels from the Nok culture, Nigeria, West Africa, an area where early farmers and foragers co-existed. We report complex lipid distributions, comprising n-alkanes, n-alkanoic acids and fatty acyl wax esters, which provide direct chemical evidence of bee product exploitation and processing, likely including honey-collecting, in over one third of lipid-yielding Nok ceramic vessels. These findings highlight the probable importance of honey collecting in an early farming context, around 3500 years ago, in West Africa.

An integrative skeletal and paleogenomic analysis of prehistoric stature variation suggests relatively reduced health for early European farmers

Human culture, biology, and health were shaped dramatically by the onset of agriculture ~12,000 years before present (BP). Subsistence shifts from hunting and gathering to agriculture are hypothesized to have resulted in increased individual fitness and population growth as evidenced by archaeological and population genomic data alongside a simultaneous decline in physiological health as inferred from paleopathological analyses and stature reconstructions of skeletal remains. A key component of the health decline inference is that relatively shorter statures observed for early farmers may (at least partly) reflect higher childhood disease burdens and poorer nutrition. However, while such stresses can indeed result in growth stunting, height is also highly heritable, and substantial inter-individual variation in the height genetic component within a population is typical. Moreover, extensive migration and gene flow were characteristics of multiple agricultural transitions worldwide. Here, we consider both osteological and ancient DNA data from the same prehistoric individuals to comprehensively study the trajectory of human stature variation as a proxy for health across a transition to agriculture. Specifically, we compared "predicted" genetic contributions to height from paleogenomic data and "achieved" adult osteological height estimated from long bone measurements on a per-individual basis for n=160 ancient Europeans from sites spanning the Upper Paleolithic to the Iron Age (~38,000-2,400 BP). We found that individuals from the Neolithic were shorter than expected (given their individual polygenic height scores) by an average of -4.47 cm relative to individuals from the Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic (P=0.016). The average osteological vs. expected stature then increased relative to the Neolithic over the Copper (+2.67 cm, P=0.052), Bronze (+3.33 cm, P=0.032), and Iron Ages (+3.95 cm, P=0.094). These results were partly attenuated when we accounted for genome-wide genetic ancestry variation in our sample (which we note is partly duplicative with the individual polygenic score information). For example, in this secondary analysis Neolithic individuals were -3.48 cm shorter than expected on average relative to individuals from the Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic (P=0.056). We also incorporated observations of paleopathological indicators of non-specific stress that can persist from childhood to adulthood in skeletal remains (linear enamel hypoplasia, cribra orbitalia, and porotic hyperostosis) into our model. Overall, our work highlights the potential of integrating disparate datasets to explore proxies of health in prehistory.

Ancient Burial Mounds as a Symbolic System

Analysis of early dates and stratigraphy of burial mound complexes (the second half of the V millennium BC) led to the conclusion, that they are not directly related to the burial embankment, but relate to complex monumental structures — sanctuaries. The sanctuaries preceded the burial mounds in chronological aspect, and they functioned for a long time without creating an embankment above them. The part of sanctuaries had astronomical reference points and were connected to calendar-zodiac symbolism. Sometimes burials were carried out on the territory of sanctuaries; these burials had sacral nature. These were flat burials and the mound above them were not erected. Burial mounds above the sanctuaries began to appear after burials of later epochs were carried out in sacral places (not earlier than 38/37 BC.). These mounds erroneously are associated with flat burials or ground sanctuaries. The dating of burial mounds by the dating of sacral flat burials (or by the dating of «pillar sanctuaries») mistakenly depreciated the dating of appearance of the first mounds in the Steppe Black Sea region and Transcaucasia. The separation of these complexes in time and space (the flat ground sanctuary and the burial mound itself) allowed drawing conclusions about the existence of this sanctuaries in 45—40 BC. The burial mounds appear later, their installation in the place of sanctuaries is connected with the sacral nature of the place. Throughout Europe, barrows appear almost simultaneously, in 38/37 BC, although in different cultures. It is possible to assume the Central European and Lower Danube influence on the formation of ideological ideas of the Steppe population. In particular, the phenomenon of sanctuaries of the Middle Eneolithic may have originated under Central European influence. It obviously had structural similarities with other complexes built in accordance with the movement of the celestial luminaries in the late Neolithic of Central and Atlantic Europe. The appearance of sanctuaries can be attributed to the circle of archaeological evidence of the interaction between the world of early farmers of Southeast and Central Europe and the "steppe" world of the pastoralists. The barrows of the Black Sea and Caucasian steppe are synchronous with European burial mounds, and their ancientization and equation with the dating of sanctuaries is erroneous.

Beside or by turn? The Buh-Dnister foragers and the Linear Band Pottery farmers on the Southern Buh River (Ukraine)

For a long time, finds of the Linear Band Pottery culture (LBK) on the Southern Buh numbered only two bowls from the Buh-Dnister culture site of Bazkiv Ostriv. After the recent discovery of a few more vessels and four stationary LBK settlements, some scholars have assumed the Neolithic incomers regularly inhabited the most of the region. However new direct AMS dates on the Buh-Dnister pottery have shown the existence of the indigenous hunter-gatherers here from 5300 to 5000 BC. Therefore, today, the cluster of four sites is the only verified area that was settled by the early farmers near the town of Zavallia. The occurrence of the settlements at very this place is explained by the fertile local soil and the desire of the inhabitants to control the huge deposit of graphite, which was a centre of an extensive exchange network for the North-Pontic indigenous groups. This could have given the local LBK community significant social prestige through the active production and exchange of valuable goods.

Comparing maxillary first molar crown shape using elliptical Fourier analysis in the Late Neolithic cave burials of Belgium

The Belgian Meuse karstic basin holds more than 200 Late Neolithic collective burials. Four of the largest include Hastière Caverne M, Hastière Trou Garçon C, Sclaigneaux and Bois Madame. The remains from these caves are commingled and fragmentary. However, in situ maxillary molars are well preserved permitting an investigation of molar crown shape within and across sites. Crown outlines from the burials are compared using elliptical Fourier analysis to capture shape distinctions in the relatively numerous first maxillary molars (n = 27). Elliptical Fourier analysis is designed to compare deviations between each shape outline and an idealized ellipse, recorded as amplitudes of the harmonics which are reduced to principal components (PC) scores. We expect individuals from each site will be more similar to one another than to other internments in PC scores, and that the sites will be distributed along PC axes according to differences in chronology and geographic location. Principal components analysis reveals that individuals tend to cluster together based on cave burial as well as time period. Geographic distance only differentiates the final/late Neolithic cave burials. The earliest of the sites, Hastière Caverne M, is distinctive and includes multiple outliers. Hastière Trou Garçon C from earlier in the Late Neolithic does not cluster with Hastière Caverne M as expected. Instead, this cave burial groups with Sclaigneaux, the most geographically distant site but chronologically the closest to Hastière Trou Garçon C. Although the limited sample sizes for each site must be considered, it appears that early farmers of the Belgian Meuse basin exhibited intricate human population dynamics which may have included small, semi-isolated groups early in the Late Neolithic and larger communities with greater contact toward the onset of the northern European Bronze Age.