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Primary Source Documents and the mysteries that surround them.

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What Prehistoric Cave Paintings Reveal About Early Human Life | HISTORY

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Some of the oldest known art may hint at the beginning of language development, while later examples portray narratives with human and animal figures.

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The story of humanity is always unfolding.

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6 Iconic Ancient Artifacts That Changed History Around the World

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What are the most famous ancient artifacts? From the Venus of Willendorf to King Tut’s funerary mask, here’s what these items reveal about the ancient world.

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Following a New Trail of Crumbs to Agriculture's Origins

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It's mid-August in 2013, and we are working in the dry heat of the Jordanian Harra basalt desert. It is the last week of our second season of excavations at the 14,500-year-old archaeological site called Shubayqa 1. We have just finished exposing the stone floor of a Paleolithic house, and we are elated-it took six weeks of digging to get to this point. Our next target is to reach a circular, stone-lined fireplace, measuring about a meter across, that is set into the floor of the building. Careful excavation over the course of the next two days produces excitement among the team members: We have unearthed tens of thousands of charred plant remains preserved in the ashy sediment. This is an unprecedented find because plant remains from this timeframe in southwest Asia are exceptionally rare. And to uncover thousands in one spot is an archaeobotanist's dream. Little did we know that further analysis would reveal something even more shocking: We had happened upon the earliest known crumbs of bread.

Bread is the most common staple food in most parts of the world, apart from some areas of Asia where rice is king. It is also one of the most diverse food products: Each region makes its own distinct varieties using doughs made from water mixed with wheat, rye, corn, or other common plant-derived ingredients. Bread also has significant cultural, even national, connotations: What would France be without its baguette and croissant? Denmark without its rugbrød (rye bread) and smørrebrød (open-faced sandwiches)? The Arab world without pita? Every culture has developed its own types of bread that have, in many cases, become a culinary expression of identity. Baguettes, rye breads, tortillas, bagels, pitas, chapatis, focaccia, malooga (a flatbread found in Yemen), or nan-if you live in Europe, the Americas, Africa, or most parts of Asia, there's a good chance that you'll eat bread on any given day.

Yet the origins of bread, and why and how it became such a popular and versatile staple food, have been shrouded in something of a mystery.

Although labor intensive, making simple bread is relatively straightforward: One only needs water, flour, and a suitable place to bake-something as simple as a hot, flat stone will work. Archaeologists have detected traces of starch on grinding tools dating to the Upper Paleolithic (11,500-50,000 years ago) at a number of archaeological sites in modern-day Russia, , the Czech Republic, and . Although some archaeologists think this means that humans started producing flour quite early on, these tools could have been used to squash or pound starchy plants for other reasons, such as to make gruel or porridge. Grinding tools are also quite rare in the Upper Paleolithic, so even if these tools were used only for making flour, it doesn't appear to have been a very common activity.

Most archaeologists put the beginning of bread making in the Neolithic era, which first began around 11,500 years ago in southwest Asia. In the Fertile Crescent-an arch-shaped region stretching from the Nile Valley through the Levant into Anatolia and Mesopotamia-charred plant remains excavated from archaeological sites, along with abundant grinding tools, flint sickles blades, and storage facilities, suggest that people had begun to cultivate wild wheat, rye, and barley, as well as legumes. But what they produced from these plants has also been long debated. Some archaeologists assume it was bread, but other suggestions include porridge or beer.

Conclusive evidence has been hard to come by-until now.

Stretching from the Jebel Druze in southern Syria through eastern Jordan and into Saudi Arabia, the Black Desert got its name from its extensive black basalt boulder fields, which are only occasionally interrupted by a Qa' (Arabic for a playa or mudflat) and wadis (a seasonal river). Archaeologists had long assumed that this semi-arid region played only a peripheral role in history. As a result, few scholars had looked at this area in any detail.

One exception is the Australian archaeologist Alison Betts, whose pioneering search for archaeological sites in this area turned up a number of settlements dating to the so-called Natufian period. The Natufian, dated to 11,700-15,000 years ago, is often described as an important cultural precursor to the Neolithic era. During the Natufian, the world's earliest stone houses, grinding tools, and sickle blades appear in large numbers in the Levant, suggesting that the hunter-gatherers here included plants, cereals amongst them, more frequently in their everyday diet. Natufian hunter-gatherers were also more sedentary than preceding Paleolithic societies, which may have pushed them onto a road of no return toward plant cultivation and agriculture.

One of the sites that Betts excavated in the Black Desert in 1996 is the Natufian site Shubayqa 1, named after the nearby Qa' Shubayqa. Although she briefly carried out excavations at this site, no further work was conducted at Shubayqa 1 until 2012, when our team from the University of Copenhagen launched a new series of excavations that continued until 2015. Our work revealed two impressively well-constructed circular buildings with cobbled stone floors dated to between 11,700 and 14,500 years ago-some of the earliest buildings known. This is where we found a surprising cache of more than 60,000 charred plant remains. This discovery in itself was extraordinary because, with the exception of Tell Abu Hureyra, a site situated on the Euphrates River in modern-day Syria, plant remains are so rare in this period-often just a handful or sometimes a few hundred.

Analyzing ancient plant remains is a time-consuming, laborious process: To start, 10- or 20-liter samples of sediment have to be taken from different archaeological deposits and preferably dry-screened to pick out the most fragile remains. The remaining material is then run through a "flotation tank"-essentially a water-filled drum with a water pump and a series of meshes and fine screens. The previously screened sediment is loaded into a fine mesh affixed to the top of the drum. Water is then pumped up from the bottom of the barrel, dissolving the sediment. Light charred plant particles then float to the surface and are caught in a series of fine-meshed sieves at the top of the barrel. Once dried, the collected material must then be sorted under the microscope into different categories: wood charcoal, seeds, fruits, nuts, unidentifiable charred material, and dirt.

Then the real work begins: the identification of the different species of plant materials, separating out, for example, wild from domestic types of barley. To do this, archaeobotanists use a reference collection-a library of known, charred seeds and other plant parts-against which the ancient material is compared using a standard microscope. We used the archaeobotanical reference collection at the Institute of Archaeology at the University College London (UCL) to help us with our identifications, since it is one of the best in the world. This, as it turned out, was a fortuitous decision.

Lara González Carretero is a Ph.D. student at the UCL who studies archaeobotanical remains from the important late Neolithic site Çatalhöyük in Anatolia, Turkey, dating to about 9,000 years old. Using a scanning electron microscope (SEM)-a powerful tool that has a resolution of up to 1 nanometer-last year she discovered that many charred particles that were previously grouped under the catchall category of "unidentifiable" sediment in samples from Çatalhöyük were in fact microscopic particles of bread and porridge. That was perhaps the oldest evidence for bread. But around the same time, Amaia Arranz-Otaegui, the University of Copenhagen project's archaeobotanist and a co-author of this article, peered into a microscope in the UCL archaeobotany lab and noticed a number of pieces of microscopic lumps of charred material that she just could not identify. So Arranz-Otaegui asked Carretero to take a look, and she was shocked when Carretero said, "Yes, this looks like what I have from Çatalhöyük. Where is that from?"

When Arranz-Otaegui told her that it was from a 14,500-year-old hunter-gatherer site in Jordan, it was Carretero's turn to be stunned. The site was thousands of years older than Çatalhöyük.

Together with Carretero's supervisor, Dorian Fuller, we then set out to confirm this initial suspicion, using the methodology Carretero had developed for Çatalhöyük. Over the course of two weeks, Carretero took hundreds of images with the SEM to compare the Shubayqa 1 samples with reference samples, and she confirmed that the charred particles from Shubayqa 1 were in fact tiny pieces of bread. To be sure, we then invited another specialist, Monica Nicolaides Ramsey at the University of Cambridge, to try and extract starch from the particles we had found. She found starch, confirming our finds.

Our results, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also allowed us to reconstruct the ingredients that went into this hunter-gatherer bread. The bread makers used flour ground from wild barley, einkorn, and oat. But we also found an unexpected type of plant: tubers. Club-rush tubers, an aquatic plant of the family of papyrus (Cyperaceae), was frequently present in the archaeobotanical assemblage from Shubayqa 1. These tubers were ground into flour, mixed with cereal flour, and likely baked on a hot stone to produce a flatbread product. The hunter-gatherer bread from Jordan was a multigrain and tuber bread-not necessarily what you might expect purely in terms of maximizing calories for the labor involved. (The plant remains in the fireplace also contained a surprisingly wide variety: from tubers to grasses, seeds, and fruit.)

What does this mean for our understanding of the processes that led to the appearance of agricultural economies in southwest Asia about 10,000 years ago? The transition from the hunting and gathering lifestyle of the Paleolithic to the agricultural economies of the Neolithic has long been seen as a fundamental step in world history. Archaeologists have debated when, where, and why this transition occurred, but given the long timespans involved, details have been elusive. It can be argued that the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture was, at its heart, not an economic or symbolic "revolution," as has often been posited, but rather a food revolution-a matter of taste. What has been lacking so far is a better understanding of what people actually ate and how they obtained and made their food.

With the discovery of bread at Shubayqa 1, we now know a little bit more about past foodways in southwest Asia. But this just leads us to ask new questions. Was bread already a staple food during the Natufian-or perhaps even earlier? Or was it a rare treat? Did people fall in love with bread, and did this spark their interest in producing more flour, perhaps incentivizing them to start cultivating plants? What were the effects of bread making and its consumption on Natufian and Neolithic societies?

Thinking about what kind of foods people actually made in the past, how they obtained the necessary ingredients, and in what settings this food was consumed introduces a very human perspective on past food cultures. It is astonishing to think of the people who were able to make bread long before they had cultivated crops; bread is not the product of a "civilized society" but perhaps a precursor to it.

So, next time you slide your toast into the toaster, pick up your croissant from the bakery, or dip nan into your curry, spare a thought for our Paleolithic forbearers who first came up with the idea of mixing flours of different plants together to come up with your daily bread.

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Following a New Trail of Crumbs to Agriculture's Origins

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It's mid-August in 2013, and we are working in the dry heat of the Jordanian Harra basalt desert. It is the last week of our second season of excavations at the 14,500-year-old archaeological site called Shubayqa 1. We have just finished exposing the stone floor of a Paleolithic house, and we are elated-it took six weeks of digging to get to this point.

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Archaeologists in China discover Oldest Stone Tools outside Africa

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Matter

Chipped rocks found in western China indicate that human ancestors ventured from Africa earlier than previously believed.

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One of the 2.1 million-year-old artifacts, right, recovered from a gully in western China, left, suggest that hominins may have left Africa far earlier than previously believed. Credit Zhaoyu Zhu

The oldest stone tools outside Africa have been discovered in western China, scientists reported on Wednesday. Made by ancient members of the human lineage, called hominins, the chipped rocks are estimated to be as much as 2.1 million years old.

The find may add a new chapter to the story of hominin evolution, suggesting that some of these species left Africa far earlier than once believed and managed to travel over 8,000 miles east of their evolutionary birthplace.

The age of the Chinese tools suggests that the hominins who made them were neither tall nor big-brained. Instead, they may have been small bipedal apes, with brains about the size of a chimpanzee's.

"The implications of all this are large," said Michael Petraglia, a paleoanthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, who was not involved in the new study. "We must re-evaluate our understanding of human prehistory in Eurasia."

The human lineage arose in Africa; the ancestors of modern humans separated from those of chimpanzees over seven million years ago. But scientists have known for many years that Asia has a long human history.
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In 1891, the Dutch explorer Eugene Dubois discovered a humanlike skull in Indonesia that turned out to be about half a million years old. Paleoanthropologists later named Dubois's skull Homo erectus, a species subsequently found at many other sites across Asia; some specimens were as old as 1.6 million years.

Asian fossils showed that these hominins were about as tall as living humans and had fairly big brains. While chimpanzees have brains about a third the size of ours, Homo erectus had a brain about two-thirds as large.

In Africa, paleoanthropologists were discovering an even longer fossil record of hominins. The oldest yet found date back more than six million years.

Stone tools may have helped make it possible for hominins to travel far from Africa, archaeologists said. Credit Zhaoyu Zhu

The earliest hominins could walk on two legs, but they were short and only had chimpanzee-size brains. By 1.9 million years ago, Homo erectus or some close relative was striding across East Africa.

Many paleoanthropologists came to assume that Homo erectus were the first migrants to leave Africa. But this picture grew blurry in the 1990s, as older hominin bones were discovered in other parts of Asia.

In Dmanisi, Georgia, scientists uncovered remarkably ancient fossils, some as old as 1.75 million years. Some stone tools found there appeared to be even older: 1.82 million years.

The Dmanisi hominins didn't much resemble Homo erectus: They were short and had tiny brains.

In China, researchers also found evidence of early hominin occupation. In 1964, researchers unearthed a Homo erectus skull in a western county called Lantian. Initial estimates found it to be 1.15 million years old.

But in 2001, Zhaoyu Zhu, a geologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Guangzhou, and his colleagues began taking a fresh look at the fossil site. They determined that the Lantian skull was actually much older: 1.63 million years.

In their surveys of the region around the fossil, Dr. Zhu and his colleagues also came across what looked like ancient stone tools embedded 200 feet deep in the side of a gully.

The researchers decided to make a thorough search of the gully, clambering across the steep slope to search for more artifacts. "Working up and down it can be hair-raising at times," said Robin Dennell, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Exeter who joined Dr. Zhu's team in 2010.

The risk paid off. The researchers found over a hundred stone tools embedded in 17 geologic layers of the gully.

But it was painstakingly slow work, because the researchers wanted to make a compelling case that these really were tools made by hominins - and that they really were ancient.

"We wanted to make it watertight and bombproof," said Dr. Dennell.

In the new study, he and his colleagues argue that the stones could not have been naturally damaged. The surrounding rock had formed from grassland soil, which didn't contain stones the size and shape of the tools.

Instead, the researchers argue, the hominins at Lantian must have traveled miles away to mountain streams to find the right stones for making tools. The hominins carried the tools with them to use in gathering food, perhaps using sharp-edged stones to carve meat from carcasses.

To determine the age of the tools, the researchers took advantage of the planet's changing magnetic field.

From time to time, Earth's magnetic field flips, turning north to south. Magnetic minerals in the soil and ocean are pushed into alignment with the field; when they are trapped in rocks, they still point in the telltale direction.

Geophysicists have precisely determined the timing of these magnetic flips, which have taken place at the same time all around the world. It's a useful way to date the material found in layers of rock.

Dr. Zhu and his colleagues used the Earth's magnetic fields to help determine the age of the rocks found in the Shangchen and Qinling Mountains. Credit Zhaoyu Zhu

The layers in the gully formed over many hundreds of thousands of years. And the oldest tools were neatly sandwiched between rocks that formed between two flips of the magnetic field: one 2.14 million years ago, and a second about 1.85 million years ago.

Dr. Dennell and his colleagues estimate that the tools are close to the far end of that window: 2.12 million years old. That would make these tools the oldest evidence of hominins ever found outside Africa.

And that makes it unlikely that the first hominins to expand out of Africa were Homo erectus. Instead, Dr. Dennell speculated, a much earlier branch of the human tree ventured forth.

The trigger for that migration? Maybe it was figuring out how to make sharp stone tools.

"Suddenly you had a primate that could obtain meat from a carcass, and it opened up a new world for them," Dr. Dennell said. "That simple technology was enough to get them out of Africa and right across Asia."

Rick Potts, the head of the Smithsonian Institution's Human Origins Program, found the new study compelling, offering strong evidence that the stones were indeed tools and that they were extremely old. "I think they've got it," he said.

Dr. Potts did not think that the hominins of Lantian were short and small-brained, though. Instead, he speculated that there are Homo erectus-like fossils older than 2.1 million years waiting to be discovered back in Africa.

But John J. Shea, a paleoanthropologist at Stony Brook University, is yet to be convinced that anyone crafted the stones. At the very least, he argued, Dr. Dennell and his colleagues should make a statistical comparison between these supposed tools and naturally damaged rocks.

And Dr. Shea was leery of relying on tools alone for evidence that hominins were in Asia over two million years ago.

"Bottom line - no hominin fossils, no hominins," he said.

Since paleoanthropologists have already found a 1.63 million-year-old skull in the Lantian province, Dr. Dennell said it was possible that researchers might someday find a far more ancient hominin fossil lurking alongside the tools.

"Mind you, it will take some time," he said. "But it will be worth looking."

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Archaeologists in China Discover the Oldest Stone Tools Outside Africa

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Matter Chipped rocks found in western China indicate that human ancestors ventured from Africa earlier than previously believed. The oldest stone tools outside Africa have been discovered in western China, scientists reported on Wednesday. Made by ancient members of the human lineage, called hominins, the chipped rocks are estimated to be as much as 2.1 million years old.

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Ancient kids' toys have been hiding in the archaeological record

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Youngsters have probably been playing their way into cultural competence for at least tens of thousands of years. So why are signs of children largely absent from the archaeological record?

A cartoon that Biblical scholar Kristine Garroway taped up in her college dorm helps to explain kids' invisibility at ancient sites: Two men in business suits stare intently at an unidentifiable round object sitting on a table. "Hey, what's this?" asks the first guy. "I dunno, probably a toy ... or a religious object," says the second.

Archaeologists have long tended to choose the second option, says Garroway, now a visiting scientist at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles. Ambiguous finds, such as miniature pottery vessels and small figurines, get classified as ritual or decorative objects. Some of these artifacts undoubtedly were used in ceremonies. But not all of them, Garroway argues.
Of 48 miniature clay vessels excavated from inside roughly 3,650- to 4,000-year-old houses at Israel's Tel Nagila site, 10 retained fingerprints the size of children's that were made during the shaping of soft clay, before the clay was heated and hardened, archaeologists reported in 2013. Kids must have made those somewhat unevenly shaped jars and bowls, each easily held within a child's hand, concluded Joe Uziel of the Israel Antiquities Authority in Jerusalem and independent Israeli researcher Rona Avissar Lewis in Palestine Exploration Quarterly.
Unusual finds in Israel dating to around 3,000 years ago also represent children's early attempts to mimic adult craftwork, Garroway said in a November 18 presentation in Boston at the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research. Numerous rounded clay disks, each pierced with two holes, have mystified investigators for nearly a century. As early as 1928, an archaeologist suggested that these button-sized objects were toys.

After passing a string through both of a disk's holes and tying the ends together, a youngster could swing the string to wind up the toy and then pull both ends of the string to make the disk spin. Clay disks from six Israeli sites can be separated into those made by skilled artisans and others - featuring rough edges and unevenly spaced holes - made by novices, including children, Garroway proposes. If those items were toys, sloppy execution may have partly resulted from children's impatience to play with the final product, she suspects.

Garroway's proposal appears likely, especially in light of evidence that more than 10,000 years earlier, people in France and Spain made similar spinning disks decorated with animals that appeared to move as the toy twirled ( SN: 6/30/12, p. 12), says archaeologist Michelle Langley of Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia.

Western European finds from as early as 14,000 to 21,000 years ago also may have gone unrecognized as children's toys, Langley suggests in a paper published this month in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology. One specimen, a cave lion carved out of a reindeer's antler, displays so much polish from handling that children may have played with the item for years, she says. Some bone spearpoints with broken tips bear signs of unskilled repair, suggesting adults gave the damaged weapons to children to practice bone-working skills and perhaps play with, she adds.

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Ancient kids' toys have been hiding in the archaeological record

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Youngsters have probably been playing their way into cultural competence for at least tens of thousands of years. So why are signs of children largely absent from the archaeological record? A cartoon that Biblical scholar Kristine Garroway taped up in her college dorm helps to explain kids' invisibility at ancient sites: Two men in business suits stare intently at an unidentifiable round object sitting on a table.

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The First Americans:  Ancient DNA Rewrites the Settlement Story (1/3/18)

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The First Americans:  Ancient DNA Rewrites the Settlement Story (1/3/18)

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Alaskan "sunrise" girl sheds light on how humans populated the Americas. New information that changes how we view history.

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(Image credit: Ben Potter)

A genetic analysis of a baby's remains dating back 11,500 years suggests that a previously unknown human population was among the first to settle in the Americas.

Scientists recovered the DNA from an infant - only a few weeks old when she died - buried at the Upward Sun River archaeological site in the interior of Alaska. Their data indicated that the baby belonged to a group of people who were genetically distinct from humans in northeastern Asia, the region that launched a migration into North America over a now-submerged land bridge across the Bering Strait.

However, the data also showed that this group differed genetically from the two known branches of ancestral Native Americans. The unexpected discovery of this Alaskan population offers a new perspective on the first people to settle in the Americas and presents a more detailed view of their migratory path, researchers explained in a new study. [ In Photos: Human Skeleton Sheds Light on First Americans]

Life and death in the Americas

Many thousands of years ago, the site where the infant lived - albeit briefly - and died was a residential camp with three tent-like structures. The baby, a girl, was buried beneath one of them, along with another female infant who was likely stillborn; later, a third child, who was about 3 years old when he or she died, was cremated in a hearth at the same spot, study co-author Ben Potter, a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, told Live Science.

A burial deep in a pit below the frozen surface helped to preserve the infant's remains - along with viable samples of the baby's DNA and partial DNA from the younger infant. The two were named Xach'itee'aanenh t'eede gaay ("sunrise child-girl") and Yełkaanenh t'eede gaay ("dawn twilight child-girl") by the local indigenous community, according to the study. The researchers worked closely with native representatives while recovering and examining the remains and the rest of the archaeological site, Potter said.

(Image credit: Eric S. Carlson in collaboration with Ben Potter)

The remains of ice age humans are exceptionally scarce. Populations were highly mobile foragers; people generally didn't settle together in permanent villages or create burial grounds, and finding a site where someone had died and was buried was typically a matter of luck, Potter explained.

"It's really rare to encounter hunter-gatherer burials - period," he told Live Science.

"Another issue is that we're dealing with some of the earliest people in the Americas, and so there's an even smaller population to deal with. All of these factors make it difficult to find these [remains], so these are really rare and priceless windows into the past," he said.

Reconstructing an ancient journey

Previous explanations of humans' arrival in the Americas suggested that about 15,000 years ago, during the latter part of the icy Pleistocene epoch (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago), people crossed Beringia - the Bering land bridge - in a single migratory wave, then dispersed to North America and later to South America. More-recent findings showed that founding populations of Native Americans diverged genetically from their Asian ancestors about 25,000 years ago, introducing the idea that humans settled in Beringia for 10,000 years before reaching North America.

This newfound Alaskan group - now dubbed ancient Beringians - appeared about 20,000 years ago, while the Native American ancestral branches showed up between 17,000 and 14,000 years ago, the study authors reported.

(Image credit: Ben Potter)

The new DNA data - among the oldest genomic material from ice age humans to date - bolsters the notion of an extended stay in Beringia. But the surprising discovery of the previously unknown population in Alaska, which has its own distinct genetic makeup, adds a new twist to the human migration story, suggesting two scenarios for the transition from Beringia into the New World, Potter said.

The most likely possibility is that the genetic "split" between the ancient Beringians and ancestral Native Americans occurred in Eurasia, with the groups arriving independently in North America, the study said. The populations arrived either at the same time through different geographic areas or one after the other following the same general route, according to the study.

"This scenario is most consistent with the archaeological record, which to date lacks secure evidence of human occupation in Beringia and the Americas" dating to more than 20,000 years ago, the scientists wrote.

But it is also possible that the split occurred after a single population was established in eastern Beringia, the researchers added. [ In Images; Ancient Beasts of the Arctic]

Adaptable and persistent

The far north was one of the last places on Earth to be populated by modern humans, a species that evolved in Africa. And there is much to be learned by examining how our species migrated and then adapted along the way to survive and thrive in vastly different ecosystems - particularly in the north, where this group of ancient Beringians persisted from 12,000 to 6,000 years ago, weathering dramatic environmental shifts along the way, such as climate change, large extinctions of animal species and the emergence of evergreen forests, Potter told Live Science.

And the Beringians managed to do it without significantly changing their technology, centered on a unique type of stone tool called a microblade, he said. This tool was commonly seen in ancient hunter-gatherer societies in Asia but was not found anywhere else in North or South America, Potter said.

"Understanding the adaptive strategies that made that possible - the innovations, the social organization, how people cooperated and how they made their tools - is really a profound way to understand our species," Potter said.

The findings were published online today (Jan. 3) in the journal Nature.

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The First Americans: Ancient DNA Rewrites Settlement Story

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(Image credit: Ben Potter) A genetic analysis of a baby's remains dating back 11,500 years suggests that a previously unknown human population was among the first to settle in the Americas. Scientists recovered the DNA from an infant - only a few weeks old when she died - buried at the Upward Sun River archaeological site in the interior of Alaska.

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How Art Made the World - Storytelling Interactive

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'songs of bronze: the greek myths made real'

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How Art Made the World . Interactive | PBS

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THE EPIC STORY OF HOW HUMANS MADE ART, AND ART MADE US HUMAN

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120,000 year old tumor

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A Neanderthal who lived more than 120,000 years ago had a tumor in a bone, the earliest of its kind in the human fossil record, a new study reports. The tumor, which was discovered in the rib of a Neanderthal specimen found in present-day Croatia, is described in the journal PLoS One.

"Normally ribs are full of spongy bone, but this rib has a big cavity," said David W. Frayer, an anthropologist at the University of Kansas and one of the researchers involved in the study. Since the rib being studied is an incomplete specimen, it is unclear how the tumor, a benign mass known as fibrous dysplasia, affected the overall health of the individual, Dr. Frayer said.

The specimen was excavated between 1895 and 1905 near Krapina. In 1999, a radiologist suspected there might have been a tumor in the rib bone, but there was no definitive evidence. Dr. Frayer and his colleagues used micro CT scans and X-rays to study it more closely.

Before this discovery, the earliest known bone tumor of this kind was found in specimens that are approximately 1,000 to 4,000 years old.

Correction: June 14, 2013

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120,000-Year-Old Tumor in Neanderthal Rib

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A Neanderthal who lived more than 120,000 years ago had a tumor in a bone, the earliest of its kind in the human fossil record, a new study reports. The tumor, which was discovered in the rib of a Neanderthal specimen found in present-day Croatia, is described in the journal PLoS One.

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Unearthing Prehistoric Tumors

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"The rarity of cancer in antiquity suggests that such factors are limited to societies that are affected by modern lifestyle issues such as tobacco use and pollution resulting from industrialization," wrote the authors, A. Rosalie David of the University of Manchester in England and Michael R. Zimmerman of Villanova University in Pennsylvania. Also on the list would be obesity, dietary habits, sexual and reproductive practices, and other factors often altered by civilization.

Across the Internet, news reports made the matter sound unequivocal: "Cancer Is a Man-Made Disease." "Cure for Cancer: Live in Ancient Times." But many medical experts and archaeologists were less impressed.

"There is no reason to think that cancer is a new disease," said Robert A. Weinberg, a cancer researcher at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass., and the author of the textbook "The Biology of Cancer." "In former times, it was less common because people were struck down in midlife by other things."

Another consideration, he said, is the revolution in medical technology: "We now diagnose many cancers - breast and prostate - that in former times would have remained undetected and been carried to the grave when the person died of other, unrelated causes."

Even with all of that taken into account, there is a fundamental problem with estimating ancient cancer rates. Two hundred suspected cases may not sound like much. But sparsity of evidence is not evidence of sparsity. Tumors can remain hidden inside bones, and those that dig their way outward can cause the bone to crumble and disappear. For all the efforts of archaeologists, only a fraction of the human bone pile has been picked, with no way to know what lies hidden below.

Anne L. Grauer, president of the Paleopathology Association and an anthropologist at Loyola University of Chicago, estimates that there are roughly 100,000 skeletons in the world's osteological collections, and a vast majority have not been X-rayed or studied with more modern techniques.

According to an analysis by the Population Reference Bureau, the cumulative total of everyone who had lived and died by A.D. 1 was already approaching 50 billion, and had nearly doubled by 1750. (The analysis refutes the oft-made assertion that more people are alive today than have ever lived on earth.) If those figures hold, the number of skeletons in the archaeological database would represent barely one ten-thousandth of 1 percent of the total.

Within that minuscule sample, not all of the remains are complete. "For a long time archaeologists only collected skulls," said Heather J. H. Edgar, curator of human osteology at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. "For the most part, there's no way to know what the rest of those people's skeletons might have said about their health."

So how are scientists to evaluate, for example, the significance of the handful of fossilized examples of osteosarcoma, a rare bone cancer that mostly affects young people? (What may be the oldest case was found in 1932 by the anthropologist Louis Leakey in a prehistoric relative of man.) Today the incidence of osteosarcoma among people younger than 20 is about five cases per million per year.

"You would need to screen 10,000 individuals to find a case," said Mel Greaves, a professor of cell biology at the Institute of Cancer Research in England, and the author of "Cancer: The Evolutionary Legacy" (Oxford, 2000). Not enough teenage remains have been scrutinized, he said, to draw a meaningful conclusion.

There is a further complication: more than 99 percent of cancers originate not in bone but in softer organs, which quickly decay. Unless they spread to bone, they will most likely go unrecorded.

Ancient mummies would seem to be an exception. But here, too, the pickings have been slim.

Only on rare occasions can pathologists get their hands on a comparatively recent mummy like Ferrante I of Aragon, king of Naples, who died in 1494. When his body was autopsied five centuries later, adenocarcinoma, which begins in glandular tissues, was found to have spread to the muscles of his small pelvis.

A molecular study revealed a typographical error in a gene that regulates cell division - a G had been flipped to A - which pointed to colorectal cancer. The cause, the authors speculated, might have been gluttonous consumption of red meat.

Over the years hundreds of Egyptian and South American mummies have turned up a few other cases. A rare tumor called a rhabdomyosarcoma was found on the face of a Chilean child who lived sometime between A.D. 300 and 600.

Dr. Zimmerman, co-author of the recent review, discovered a rectal carcinoma in a mummy dated between A.D. 200 and 400, and he confirmed the diagnosis with a microscopic analysis of the tissue - a first, he said, in Egyptian paleopathology.

"The fact remains that there are only a minute number of truly ancient mummies and skeletons that show evidence of cancer," he said. "We just don't find anything like the modern incidence of cancer."

Although average life span was lower in ancient Egypt than it is today, Dr. Zimmerman argues that many individuals, especially the wealthy, lived long enough to get other degenerative diseases. So why not cancer?

Other experts have suggested that most tumors would have been destroyed by the invasive rituals of Egyptian mummification. But in a study published in 1977, Dr. Zimmerman showed it was possible for the evidence to survive.

In one experiment, he took the liver from a modern patient who had succumbed to metastatic colon cancer, dried it out in an oven and then rehydrated it - demonstrating, he said, that "the features of cancer are well preserved by mummification and that mummified tumors are actually better preserved than normal tissue."

But as with skeletons, the problem remains: Given the small sample size, just how much cancer should scientists expect to see?

To get a rough idea, Tony Waldron, a paleopathologist at University College London, analyzed British mortality reports from 1901 to 1905 - a period late enough to ensure reasonably good records and early enough to avoid skewing the data with, for example, the spike in lung cancer caused in later decades by the popularity of cigarettes.

Taking into account variations in life span and the likelihood that different malignancies will spread to bone, he estimated that in an "archaeological assemblage" one might expect cancer in less than 2 percent of male skeletons and 4 to 7 percent of female skeletons.

Andreas G. Nerlich and colleagues in Munich tried out the prediction on 905 skeletons from two ancient Egyptian necropolises. With the help of X-rays and CT scans they diagnosed five cancers - right in line with Dr. Waldron's expectations. And as his statistics predicted, 13 cancers were found among 2,547 remains buried in an ossuary in southern Germany between A.D. 1400 and 1800.

For both groups, the authors wrote, malignant tumors "were not significantly fewer than expected" when compared with early-20th-century England. They concluded that "the current rise in tumor frequencies in present populations is much more related to the higher life expectancy than primary environmental or genetic factors."

With so little to go on, archaeology may never have a definitive answer. "We can say that cancer certainly existed, and probably in somewhat lower frequency than it does today," said Arthur C. Aufderheide, emeritus professor of pathology at the University of Minnesota and co-author of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Paleopathology. That may be as certain as we ever can be.

As scientists continue to investigate, there may be comfort in knowing that cancer is not entirely civilization's fault. In the normal course of life a creature's cells must be constantly dividing - millions of times a second. Sometimes something will go wrong.

"Cancer is an inevitability the moment you create complex multicellular organisms and give the individual cells the license to proliferate," said Dr. Weinberg of the Whitehead Institute. "It is simply a consequence of increasing entropy, increasing disorder."

He was not being fatalistic. Over the ages bodies have evolved formidable barriers to keep rebellious cells in line. Quitting smoking, losing weight, eating healthier diets and taking other preventive measures can stave off cancer for decades. Until we die of something else.

"If we lived long enough," Dr. Weinberg observed, "sooner or later we all would get cancer."

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Trying to Estimate Cancer Rates in Ancient Times

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"The rarity of cancer in antiquity suggests that such factors are limited to societies that are affected by modern lifestyle issues such as tobacco use and pollution resulting from industrialization," wrote the authors, A. Rosalie David of the University of Manchester in England and Michael R. Zimmerman of Villanova University in Pennsylvania.

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Dog and man: a 30,000 year friendship

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To the left is a figure which illustrates the phylogenetic inferences from a new paper in Nature Communications, The genomics of selection in dogs and the parallel evolution between dogs and humans (see Carl Zimmer's coverage in The New York Times). Why is this paper important? The first thing that jumped out at me is that because they're using whole genomes (~10X coverage) of a selection of dogs and wolves the results aren't as subject to the bias of using "chips" of polymorphisms discovered in dogs on wolves (see: Genome-wide SNP and haplotype analyses reveal a rich history underlying dog domestication). The second aspect is that the coalescence of the dog vs. wolf lineage is pushed further back in time than earlier genetic work, by a factor of three. A standard model for the origin of dogs is that they arose in the Middle East ~10,000-15,000 years ago , possibly as part of the broad shift of lifestyles which culminated in the Neolithic Revolution.

This model is now in serious question. Though there have always been claims of fossils of older domestic canids (adduced as such in terms of morphology) than the ones discovered in the Middle East ~15,000 years ago, this year there has been publication of ancient mtDNA results from ~30,000 years before the present which imply the separation of putative domestic and wolf lineages at least to that date. Over the past few years I have wondered about the specific nature of the emergence of both modern humans and modern dogs, and their co-evolutionary trajectory, over the Pleistocene and into the Holocene, in light of these results.

So the preponderance of data (genomic and archaeological) leans me toward accepting the general shape and >15,000 year B.P. date for the divergence of dog and wolf lineages outlined by the authors. But there is a lot more in terms of the phylogenetics of the paper which I am not willing to agree with as so obvious and clear. In particular, the authors support a Chinese/Southeast Asian origin for the dog, rather than a Middle Eastern one. This position is backed up by the reality that the Southeast Asian dog lineages do seem quite genetically diverse, and basal to other dogs (i.e., they diverge first within the clade of domestic dogs). Additionally, in the paper itself they note that the PCA, which visualizes genetic distance, suggests that the East Asian lineages are somewhat shifted toward the wolf. Model based clustering also implies that East Asian lineages are "more wolf."

The reason I don't buy this conjecture is as they say in the paper itself modern distributions and relationships don't always map onto ancient distributions and relationships. We've already gotten into trouble doing this for human populations of similar time depth as the new putative period of dog domestication. Ancient DNA has uncovered a great deal of discordance between the past and present. I don't expect dogs to be any different. The authors have whole genomes of a dozen animals. When the data set is expanded to hundreds with reasonable geographic coverage let's talk. They attempt to model some gene flow, but I suspect that this is a major problem when talking about regions of origin of a group of organisms whose divergence from the ancestral outgroup is not quite clear in its nature.

But, a bigger point which has less to do with the zone of origination of the dog is the mode of the origination "event." In the paper the authors present a stark model of the classic origination event for dogs, where Ice Age hunter-gatherers adopt some puppies, and this population exhibits a sharp and punctuated divergence from the main line of the wolves. These genetic data don't indicate that at all. Rather, the "bottleneck" as very mild, if you could call it a bottleneck (see: Vulcans through the eye of the bottleneck). Certainly some inbred modern lineages have gone through bottlenecks, but this was long subsequent to the initial separation of dog and wolf. Rather, the authors put forward an alternative hypothesis where dogs were co-existent with early man, with a subset of wolves who were happy to scavenge on the margins of human settlements. There are variations and flavors of this sort of argument, but you can bracket them as the "self domestication" model. The reality here is that I think our explicit differentiation between forms of selection is wrongheaded, the primary issue isn't whether dogs were self-domesticated or human-domesticated, but the rate of adaptation and demographic history. It may be that the best way to think about the origin of dogs and humans isn't that the latter domesticated the former, but that both dogs and humans changed together as their lifestyles and interactions changed. With the rise of agriculture and increased specialization of human lifestyles there occurred a concomitant diversification of dogs.

And that is where I think the second part of the paper, focusing on parallel adaptations on the genomic level, is really interesting.

If you don't want to click the image above, it seems that genes involved in neurological function, metabolism, and cancer are enriched in terms of signals of selection in domestic dogs. This is not surprising. Dogs exhibit great life history differences from wolves (they breed more, and are not pair bonded), and famously may be able to read human faces despite being less intelligent than wolves. And of course dogs have to eat what we eat, at least to some extent.

To understand this functional aspect of the evolutionary history of dogs though one does have to nail the phylogenetics down. So there will no doubt be more coming down the pipeline in this domain, and within the next few years the natural history of man's best friend will be of deep interest. As ancient DNA has revolutionized the understanding of the human past, I suspect there will be attempts to analyze samples from dogs as well (though I assume that the data sets will always be thinner because scholars have always been preoccupied with human remains).

Citation: Wang, Guo-dong, et al. "The genomics of selection in dogs and the parallel evolution between dogs and humans." Nature Communications 4 (2013): 1860.

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Dog and man: a 30,000 year friendship - Gene Expression

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To the left is a figure which illustrates the phylogenetic inferences from a new paper in Nature Communications, The genomics of selection in dogs and the parallel evolution between dogs and humans (see Carl Zimmer's coverage in The New York Times). Why is this paper important?

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32,000 year old plant brought back to life--oldest one yet

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Rethinking Your Relatives—the Fossilized Ones

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Zurab Kurtsikidze / EPA

Scholars of human evolution often don't have much to go on. It's rare that prehistoric bones are preserved as fossils, and much rarer still that paleo-anthropologists find anything approaching the complete skeleton of any individual. Newly discovered specimens are often categorized based only on a single surviving bone-and if that sounds like a sketchy exercise, it is. You can easily imagine a scientist of the future digging up the arm bone of a jockey and the leg bone of an NBA center and deciding they belong to two entirely different species.

That's why a new discovery reported in the latest Science is so important. A team of investigators has uncovered the exquisitely preserved skull of a hominid dating back some 1.8 million years at a site called Dimanisi, in the Republic of Georgia, in Central Asia. And that artifact raises doubts about the generally accepted idea that several human species populated the Earth at that time.

"We have one global human species today," said Christoph Zollikofer, of the Anthropological Institute and Museum in Zurich, Switzerland, a co-author of the Science report, at a press conference. "And what we can infer from our study is that 1.8 million years ago there was another [single] global human species."

( MORE: Hands Beat Feet: An Old Evolutionary Question is Answered)

This flies in the face of conventional wisdom in the field of human evolution. Experts know that at various points in our history, multiple human species have walked the Earth together, including as recently as 30,000 years ago, when modern humans and Neanderthals co-existed-and maybe even cuddled-in parts of Europe. (There might even have been a third species hiding out at the time in parts of Indonesia.) Back in 1.8 million B.C., there may have been multiple species as well, Homo erectus, Homo ergaster and Homo rudolfensis among them.

Or maybe not: the Dimanisi site has proven so rich that Zollikofer and his co-authors had not the newly announced skull to work with, but four others as well. What's more, the five skulls were found close together physically, and they were all deposited within a few hundred years of each other in what had been a cave, now collapsed. "It's the most complete collection of hominid fossils from any site of this age," said lead author David Lordkipanidze, of the Georgian National Museum in Tbilisi. Along with thousands of other plant and animal remains found at the site, "it's a real snapshot in time; it preserves the whole ecosystem.

The proximity in space and time makes it very likely that all five individuals belonged to the same population, although not necessarily the same generation. ("It would be a beautiful story if they all were from one family," said Lordkipanidze, "but maybe too beautiful.") And that in turn allowed the scientists to measure variations from one individual to the next-particularly since they weren't limited to fragments that would leave them studying the jawbone of one skull and the braincase of another. In fact, the lower jaw of the new skeleton was found first, back in 2000; the rest of the skull emerged in 2005. "We are convinced," said Zollikofer, "that if the pieces had been found in different places they would have been attributed to different species."

( MORE: Meet the Half-Billion Year Old Lobster Spider. With Tusks)

That's no surprise, said co-author Marcia Ponce de Leon, also of Zurich's Anthropological Institute. "The braincase is very unexpectedly small, around a third of that of modern humans. At the same time, the face is quite large and the jaws are quite massive. It's a fresh combination of features we didn't know before in early Homo." But the jaw fits the skull perfectly, and when a variety of characteristics from all five individuals were compared, the result, said Zollikofer, was that "they're no more different from each other than five randomly chosen humans would be, or five chimps, or five bonbos."

This has implications for other parts of the fossil record. The differences among the specimens at Dimanisi are no greater than those among some collections of African fossils that were assumed to have come from different species. But if the new remains represent a single species, the earlier ones might too. Not everyone agrees: paleo-anthropologist Ian Tattersall, for example, of New York's American Museum of Natural History, told Science for an accompanying news story that he remains unconvinced of the conclusions the authors draw about the Dimanisi fossils, and others are equally wary.

But everyone agrees that the new, complete skull is an extraordinary find. It is, Tattersall told Science, "undoubtedly one of the most important ever discovered," while Tim White, of the University of California, Berkeley called it "iconic." And there's likely more to come: the Dimanisi site covers some 540,000 sq. ft. (50,000 sq. m), only a fraction of which has yet been excavated. By the time Lordkipanidze and his colleagues are done, at least one chapter in the story of human evolution could be completely rewritten.

( MORE: Brainy Elephants. One More Way They're As Smart As Humans)

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Rethinking Your Relatives-the Fossilized Ones

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Scholars of human evolution often don't have much to go on. It's rare that prehistoric bones are preserved as fossils, and much rarer still that paleo-anthropologists find anything approaching the complete skeleton of any individual. Newly discovered specimens are often categorized based only on a single surviving bone-and if that sounds like a sketchy exercise, it is.

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Fossil Discovery Will Rewrite Primate and Human Evolutionary History, Say Scientists (June 2013)

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Fossil Discovery Will Rewrite Primate and Human Evolutionary History, Say Scientists

Unearthed in China, the nearly complete fossil skeleton suggests major implications for primate evolution.

An international research team has announced the discovery of the world's oldest known fossil primate skeleton, an animal that lived about 55 million years ago during the Eocene Epoch in present-day China. Smaller than today's smallest primate (the pygmy mouse lemur), Archicebus achilles, as they named it, was unearthed from an ancient lake bed in central China's Hubei Province near the Yangtze River.

At the time that it lived, much of the world was covered in tropical rainforests, with palm trees growing as far north as Alaska. The fossil skeleton was found by splitting apart layers of sedimentary rock, the fossilized remnant of this ancient environment, containing the fossil. The fossil is thus preserved in two complementary pieces, each of which contains elements of the actual skeleton as well as impressions of bones from the other side.

Study of the fossil involved scanning it for meticulous detail using state-of-the-art high energy x-ray facilities at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France. The researchers then employed three-dimensional digital reconstruction of the fossil using the scans in order to study the tiny, fragile skeleton. The analysis indicated that it would have weighed about 20 to 30 grams (about 1 ounce) as an adult.

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This is a 3-D computer graphic image of the skeleton of Archicebus achilles, above a background photo of the fossil. The 3-D image was rendered from X-ray computed tomography data. Credit: ESRF/P. Tafforeau

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This is an artist impression of Archicebus achilles in its natural habitat of trees. Credit: Credit CAS/Xijun Ni.

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The significance of the find is that the skeleton of Archicebus is about 7 million years older than the oldest known fossil primate skeletons, and that it constitutes an entirely separate branch of the primate evolutionary tree, lying much closer to the lineage leading to modern monkeys, apes, and humans.

" Archicebus marks the first time that we have a reasonably complete picture of a primate close to the divergence between tarsiers and anthropoids," said lead researcher Xijun Ni, a scientist at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History. "It represents a big step forward in our efforts to chart the course of the earliest phases of primate and human evolution."

Tarsiers are small, nocturnal tree-dwelling primates. Anthropoids include modern monkeys, apes, and humans.

Archicebus' tiny size and very basal evolutionary position support the idea that the earliest primates, as well as the common ancestor of tarsiers and anthropoids, were minuscule. This overturns some previous scientific ideas suggesting that the earliest members of the anthropoid lineage were quite large, the size of modern monkeys.

In addition, says research participant and Northern Illinois University anthropologist Dan Gebo, "there's an odd combination of foot features. We see typical robust grasping big toes, long toes and nailed digits of primitive arboreal primates, but we also have rather monkey-looking heel bones and monkey-like long metatarsals, often viewed as advanced features that you would not normally find in a primitive early Eocene fossil primate."

"We have interpreted this new combination of features as evidence that this fossil is quite primitive and its unique anatomical combination is a link between the tarsier and monkey-ape branches of dry-nosed primates," he said. "This new view suggests that the advanced foot features of anthropoids (monkeys and apes) are in fact primitive for the entire lineage of dry-nosed primates."

Gebo said primitive primate fossils have been discovered on several continents, including North America, but he believes Archicebus and other ancient fossils point to Asia as the continent where primates originated.

"In the past, many scientists believed that Africa was the continent of origin for all primates, but it appears over the last decade that Asia is the more likely continent of origin, and this new skeleton supports that view," Gebo said.

Details of the study are published in the journal . Study authors included Xiju Ni, Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Daniel Gebo, Northern Illinois University, and Marian Dagosto, Northwestern University in Chicago. Funding was provided by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the National Basic Research Program of China, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the ESRF, and the American Museum of Natural History.

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Sources: Adapted and edited from several related press releases: Discovery of oldest primate skeleton helps chart early evolution of humans, apes, American Museum of Natural History, June 5, 2013; Scientists discover oldest primate skeleton, Northern Illinoise University, June 5, 2013; Researchers announce discovery of oldest known primate skeleton, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, June 5, 2013; Discovery of oldest primate skeleton, ancestor of humans and apes, European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, June 5, 2013.

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Cover Photo, Top Left: This fossil primate was encased within a rock and discovered after the rock was split open, yielding a skeleton and impressions of primate bones on each side of the two rock halves. (One half shown above.) Credit: Xijun Ni, Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing

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Fossil Discovery Will Rewrite Primate and Human Evolutionary History, Say Scientists

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Fossil Discovery Will Rewrite Primate and Human Evolutionary History, Say Scientists Unearthed in China, the nearly complete fossil skeleton suggests major implications for primate evolution. An international research team has announced the discovery of the world's oldest known fossil primate skeleton, an animal that lived about 55 million years ago during the Eocene Epoch in present-day China.