Beyond bones & stones
In this week's journal Science Advances, University of Cambridge researchers compared the bones of women. Their sample included Central European women living in the first 5,000 years (or about 7,400-7,000 years ago) of agriculture those those of typical college students and college athletes including those that row in crew. As you know bone is a living... Continue Reading →
The internet has been buzzing about a potential 11,500-12,000 year old skull cult from Göbekli Tepe in Turkey. Göbekli Tepe was just discovered several years ago. The site is decorated with pillars depicting carvings of headless humans, snakes, and scorpions. It is thought be world's oldest known Neolithic monumental religious complex. Yesterday, in Science Advances German... Continue Reading →
This week PNAS published evidence of social stratification and hereditary inequality from over 7,000 years ago in Central Europe. Lead author, R. Alexander Bentley and team took strontium 86/87 isotope ratios of the enamel of teeth of over 300 early Neolithic humans from seven different sites (Aiterhofen, Ensisheim, Kleinhadersdorf, Nitra, Souffelweyersheim, Schwetzingen, and Vedrovice). The ratio... Continue Reading →
If you look at the time stamp of both Bora's and Greg Laden's posts, you'd notice that they just broke the embargo on a new study of a prehistoric case of tuberculosis that was supposed to go live at 5pm PST, 8pm EST. Now that the news is out, albeit slightly earlier than expected, I... Continue Reading →
Whatever you call him Ötzi, Oetzi or simply the 5,300 year old Tyrolean iceman mummy found in the Alps in 1991... you can't deny that he doesn't have a special place in our collective curiosity. We've explored his fertility, his last meal, and his cause of death. Why? Well, he's the most intact late Neolithic... Continue Reading →
Last week, I shared with you all some research on the Neolithic/agricultural revolution in Iran and Turkey, specifically on barley and cattle domestication. Since then, PNAS has published a related paper, "Domestication and early agriculture in the Mediterranean Basin: Origins, diffusion, and impact," by Melinda Zeder. Zeder believes that the domestication of sheep and goat... Continue Reading →
Two papers have come out this week that refine our understanding of the agricultural revolution in the Neolithic Near East. The first is actually an advance copy, "Population Based Re-sequencing Reveals that the Flowering Time Adaptation of Cultivated Barley Originated East of the Fertile Crescent," published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, in which... Continue Reading →
A new paper in the journal Antiquity interprets the remains of 34 found buried in the village of Talheim, in south-west of Germany as evidence that Neolithic men fought to secure women. The paper is titled, "Isotopic signatures and hereditary traits: snapshot of a Neolithic community in Germany." The remains were excavated in the 1980s... Continue Reading →
The Neolithic revolution is a really important transition in human prehistory, one that is identified by an increase in technology. During this time people became skilled agriculturalists, adopted more sedentary lifestyles that revolved around more complex, structured city-state societies. Not every area of the world experienced the Neolithic at the same time. It is believed... Continue Reading →
Ken Aplin of Australia's national science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, has been analyzing the mtDNA of 170 black rats from over 76 regions in 32 countries. He's been doing so to investigate the animals’ genetic links and origins. As you may know, the humans and rats share precarious symbioses. Actually, come... Continue Reading →
