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Stone Age People: New Findings & Theories

How the extinction of ice age mammals may have forced us to invent civilisation

Source: Nick Longrich, University of Bath/ theconversation.com
Date: 3 January 3, 2020

Why did we take so long to invent civilisation? Modern Homo sapiens first evolved roughly 250,000 to 350,000 years ago. But initial steps towards civilisation – harvesting, then domestication of crop plants – began only around 10,000 years ago, with the first civilisations appearing 6,400 years ago.

For 95% of our species’ history, we didn’t farm, create large settlements or complex political hierarchies. We lived in small, nomadic bands, hunting and gathering. Then, something changed.

We transitioned from hunter-gatherer life to plant harvesting, then cultivation and, finally, cities. Strikingly, this transition happened only after the ice age megafauna – mammoths, giant ground sloths, giant deer and horses – disappeared. The reasons humans began farming still remain unclear, but the disappearance of the animals we depended on for food may have forced our culture to evolve.

https://theconversation-com.cdn.amp...-have-forced-us-to-invent-civilisation-128799
 
How the extinction of ice age mammals may have forced us to invent civilisation?

That is one thought provoking article?
 
Anthropologists confirm the existence of specialized sheep-hunting camp in prehistoric Lebanon

Source: archaeology-world.com
Date: 30 January, 2020

The presence of a hunting camp, currently situated in north-eastern Lebanon, over 10,000 years old, has been confirmed by anthropologists at the University of Toronto – one that straddles the period marking the transition from nomadic hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural settlements at the onset of the last stone age.

The study of decades-old, collected from the Nachcharini Cave high in anti-Lebanon mountains that form the modern-day border between Lebanon and Syria, shows the site as a short-term hunting camp that served as a temporary outpost to emerging and more substantial villages elsewhere in the region, and that sheep were the primary game.

The finding confirms the hypothesis of retired U of T archeologist Bruce Schroeder, who excavated the site on several occasions beginning in 1972, but who had to discontinue his work when the Lebanese Civil War began in 1975.

“The site represents the best evidence of a special-purpose camp – not a village or settlement – in the region,” said Stephen Rhodes, a Ph.D. candidate in the department of anthropology in the Faculty of Arts & Science and lead author of a study published this week in PLOS ONE

https://www.archaeology-world.com/a...ed-sheep-hunting-camp-in-prehistoric-lebanon/
 
Early potters.

Pottery making may not have emerged in one Big Bang–like event. Instead, it was more like a cluster of ceramic eruptions among ancient East Asian hunter-gatherer groups as the last Ice Age waned, a new study suggests.

East Asian hunter-gatherer populations living about 700 kilometers apart made and used cooking pots in contrasting ways between around 16,200 and 10,200 years ago, says a team led by Shinya Shoda, an archaeologist currently based at the University of York in England. Each of those groups probably invented its own distinctive pottery-making techniques, the scientists suspect.

“Our results indicate that there was greater variability in the development and use of early pottery than has been appreciated,” Shoda says.

Pieces of ceramic cooking pots from one group preserved chemical markers of fish, including salmon, Shoda’s group reports in the Feb. 1 Quaternary Science Reviews. Early pottery making by those hunter-gatherers accompanied seasonal harvests of migrating fish, the researchers say


https://www.sciencenews.org/article/food-residues-offer-taste-pottery-diverse-origins-east-asia
 
Newly published analysis describes sophistication in burial practices in France 30,000 years ago.
Cave remains offer new insights into Paleolithic mortuary rituals

Ancient human remains found in a French cave have offered researchers new insights into the mortuary rituals of humans during the Paleolithic period.

The cave, found in southwestern France at the end of the last century, was originally occupied by members of the Gravettian culture, approximately 30,000 years ago.

The hunter-gatherers were prolific cave artists; scientists have found more than 800 engravings inside the Grotte de Cussac cave. These early humans also carved Venus figurines and performed elaborate burial rituals.

Now, paleontologists have gained new insights into the ways the Paleolithic people handled the deceased prior to burial, detailing their discoveries in a new paper published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. ...

Deep inside a branch of the cave, scientists found a male skeleton placed in the bowl-like depression of a former bear nest. In another two abandoned bear nests, researchers found the remains of two more ancient humans, their bones sorted anatomically.

The team of paleontologists also observed the bones of at least three other individuals, sorted and place in hollows along the cave walls. Their analysis suggests the bones are sorted by lower and upper extremities. ...
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FULL STORY: https://www.upi.com/Science_News/20...o-Paleolithic-mortuary-rituals/5771592251900/
 
Here are the bibliographic details and abstract for the new research cited above ...

Complex mortuary dynamics in the Upper Paleolithic of the decorated Grotte de Cussac, France

Sacha Kacki, Erik Trinkaus, Eline M. J. Schotsmans, Patrice Courtaud, Irene Dori, Bruno Dutailly, Pierre Guyomarc’h, Pascal Mora, Vitale S. Sparacello, and Sébastien Villotte

PNAS first published June 15, 2020

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2005242117

Abstract
The Mid-Upper Paleolithic (Gravettian) karstic Grotte de Cussac (France) contains two areas of human remains in the context of abundant (and spectacular) parietal engravings. The first area (loci 1 and 2) includes the skeleton of a young adult male in a bear nest, rearranged by postdecomposition inundation, and the variably fragmentary remains of at least two individuals distributed across two bear nests, sorted anatomically and with most of the elements constrained to one side of one nest. The second area (locus 3) retains remains of two adults and an adolescent, in upper hollows and variably distributed down the slope, largely segregated into upper versus lower body groups. The only decoration associated with the human remains is red pigment on some of the bones or underlying sediment. The human remains indicate variable nonnatural deposition and manipulation of human bodies, body portions, and skeletal elements of at least six individuals. Moreover, Cussac is unusual in the association of these remains with exceptional parietal art. The complex Cussac mortuary pattern joins growing evidence from other Gravettian sites of variable treatment of individuals after death, within and across sites, in terms of formal deposition of the body versus postmortem manipulation versus surface abandonment. It provides a window onto the social diversity and the complex interactions of the living and the dead among these successful Late Pleistocene foragers.

SOURCE: https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/06/09/2005242117
 
Upside doon hooses.

New archaeological research by the University of the Highlands and Islands at the Stone Age tomb, Maeshowe located within the Orkney UNESCO World Heritage Site, has found its side chambers are stylistically upside-down from the main chamber, and therefore proposes they were built as inverted netherworlds specifically for the dead to enter the afterlife.

The research investigation led by Jay van der Reijden, a Masters by Research student at the university's Archaeology Institute, studies the communally-built dry-stone tombs, referred to as 'houses for the dead' given the similar layout to domestic houses. Her work shows the side chambers of Maeshowe have literally been built for the dead by inverting their architectural designs, as though the chamber is within the underworld.

Her novel findings, will be published tomorrow (4 September 2020), in the Archaeological Review from Cambridge and are based on inspecting the physical aspects of the stones such as their shape and orientation to reveal the existence of unique design oppositions between the main and side chambers.

Ms. van der Reijden said: "I'm delighted that my research, studying the order by which stones have been placed during construction, has been able to reveal novel results and that it is therefore able to make a real contribution to the field of Archaeology. ...

https://phys.org/news/2020-09-upside-houses-dead-maeshowe.html
 
Some more sophisticated tools found.

An archaeological dig at a site earmarked for housing has uncovered more than 300 stone age tools and artefacts.

The 9,000-year-old site, on Castle Hill, Rhuddlan, Denbighshire, is "on a par with the oldest proven Mesolithic site" in Wales, archaeologists say. The site was a target for developers for about a decade and planning consent was granted for a house in 2017. But the need for an archaeological dig was agreed before building could begin.

The site yielded a total of 314 stone artefacts. Experts believe it was a sandy ridge overlooking the flood-plain of the River Clwyd. Many of the finds were flakes of flint and chert - a hard, fine-grained sedimentary rock - but rudimentary tools were also discovered, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service.

The team found scrapers, possibly used by butchers to cut meat and scrape hide, and microliths - small shaped blades which were often used as cutting and slicing tools. There was also a "notch" - a small tool which could have been used to shape wood.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-56106312
 
Kingsize Wombat said:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smar...ns-about-spread-ancient-technology-180968020/
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ramonmercado said:
"I asked her her name and in a dark brown voice she said, "Lola""


_110164066_tb_lola_final_lores.jpg
Image copyrightTOM BJÖRKLUNDImage captionAn artist has made a reconstruction of the woman, who has been nicknamed "Lola"

This is the face of a woman who lived 6,000 years ago in Scandinavia.

Thanks to the tooth marks she left in ancient "chewing gum", scientists were able to obtain DNA, which they used to decipher her genetic code. This is the first time an entire ancient human genome has been extracted from anything other than human bone, said the researchers. She likely had dark skin, dark brown hair and blue eyes.

Dr Hannes Schroeder from the University of Copenhagen said the "chewing gum" - actually tar from a tree - is a very valuable source of ancient DNA, especially for time periods where we have no human remains.

"It is amazing to have gotten a complete ancient human genome from anything other than bone,'' he said.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-50809586
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its a nice story but how can you extract DNA from a tooth impression?
 
Inland Stone Age Cultures in Africa.

Africa’s southern Kalahari Desert is not typically regarded as a hotbed of Stone Age innovations. And yet human culture blossomed there around 105,000 years ago, back when it was green, researchers say.

Calcite crystals and other finds at a South African rock-shelter more than 600 kilometers from the nearest shoreline reflect cultural behaviors on a par with those previously reported for ancient humans living on or near South Africa’s coast, researchers report March 31 in Nature. Those coastal sites date to between roughly 125,000 and 70,000 years ago, including one where locals used tools to make paint out of pigment around 100,000 years ago (SN: 10/13/11).

Given the scarcity of human sites from that time period, it’s hard to know whether cultural innovations emerged independently in groups spread across southern Africa or originated in one particular region before being adopted elsewhere. But the new discoveries fit a scenario in which “the emergence of Homo sapiens involved the interaction of many different populations across Africa,” says archaeologist Jayne Wilkins of Griffith University in Nathan, Australia. “And that included the Kalahari Desert.” ...

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/stone-age-culture-africa-inland-coasts-crystals-tools
 
Based on recent research results the northernmost known site for Paleolithic human activity has been relocated to an island 990 km north of the Arctic Circle.
Russian expedition finds evidence of northernmost Stone Age hunters above the Arctic Circle

Ancient cut marks on mammoth bones unearthed on a remote island in the frozen extremes of Siberia are the northernmost evidence of Paleolithic humans ever found, according to archaeologists.

The bones from the woolly mammoth skeleton, dated to about 26,000 years ago, were excavated this summer by a Russian expedition to Kotelny Island, in the far northeast of Siberia — 615 miles (990 kilometers) north of the Arctic Circle.

The team pieced together more than two-thirds of the skeleton — and they found cut marks and notches, made by stone or bone tools, on almost every bone. That indicates the animal was deliberately butchered, probably after it was hunted down by a nomadic band of Stone Age hunters ...

It's the northernmost evidence of Paleolithic humans ever found, said expedition leader Alexander Kandyba ...

"This suggests that the northern border of human existence in the Pleistocene was much to the north of the generally accepted ideas," ... referring to the Pleistocene epoch between 2.6 million and 11,700 years ago — the time of the last ice age.

Until now, the northernmost traces of Stone Age humans came from the valley of the Yana River in the Yakutia region of Siberia, and dated to between 27,000 and 29,000 years ago ...

The team didn't find any of the tools that caused the marks, but they did find a large number of ivory shavings and chips that indicated that ancient people had carved into the mammoth tusks. They also found two ivory tools made from the tusks: a small spatula and a strange object that looks somewhat like a squeegee; archaeologists are still trying to determine what it was used for ...
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FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/northernmost-stone-age-hunters-found
 
ramonmercado said:
More news on the earliest domestication of horses.

The horse revolutionized prehistoric living, allowing people to travel farther and faster than ever before, and to wage war in yet-unheard-of ways. But who first domesticated horses is a hotly debated question. One leading hypothesis suggests Bronze Age pastoralists called the Yamnaya were the first to saddle up, using their fleet transport to sweep out from the Eurasian steppe and spread their culture—and their genes—far and wide. But a new study of ancient DNA suggests that wasn’t the case in Asia, and that another culture, the Botai, domesticated the horse first.

“This is a really exciting paper,” says Priya Moorjani, a geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, who notes that the field of ancient DNA is moving so quickly that every study reveals something new. Yet other researchers caution that the debate isn’t anywhere near settled.

The first signs of horse domestication—pottery containing traces of mares’ milk and horse teeth with telltale wear from a riding bit—come from the Botai hunter-gatherers who lived in what is now Kazakhstan from about 3700 B.C.E. to 3100 B.C.E. Yet some researchers thought the isolated Botai were unlikely to have invented horse husbandry because they kept to their hunting and gathering ways long after their neighbors had adopted farming and herding.

These researchers assumed the Botai must have learned to handle horses from the Yamnaya, their neighbors to the west who were already herding sheep and goats. As part of the “steppe hypothesis,” the Yamnaya also migrated east and west during the Bronze Age, mixing with locals and spreading genes found in ancient and modern European, Central Asian, and South Asian populations. Some researchers hypothesize that they also spread early branches of the hypothesized Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language, which later diversified into today’s Indo-European languages, including English, Italian, Hindi, Russian, and Persian.

To explore the Yamnaya’s legacy in Asia, a team led by geneticist Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen and the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom sequenced the whole genomes of 74 ancient Eurasians, most of whom lived between 3500 B.C.E. and 1500 B.C.E. Bodies included people from both the Botai and Yamnaya cultures, among others. The researchers devised a rough family tree, which they extended using samples from modern and ancient people.

Surprisingly, the team found no Yamnaya DNA in the three Botai individuals, suggesting the two groups hadn’t mixed, the team reports today in Science. That implies the Botai may have tamed horses on their own, following something called the “prey path” to domestication: hunting, then managing herds for food, and finally—riding. “It’s an extremely important achievement from a group of people we all think of as being pretty simple,” Willerslev says. ...

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018...ly_2018-05-09&et_rid=394299689&et_cid=2020743
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Finding the homeland of modern horses, no doubt there will be neighsayers. This might go more properly in the Bronze Age Thread but imo it links back to the above article.

About 4200 years ago, a few herders on the western Eurasian steppe got a brand-new mount.

They were experienced at herding wild horses for food, but their new steeds had a calmer disposition and a stronger back, making the horses easier to train and ride, perhaps for the first time. The new model galloped across Eurasia within a few centuries, triggering major shifts in Bronze Age human cultures. “Once we domesticated this new kind of horse, suddenly they were everywhere,” says molecular archaeologist Ludovic Orlando of the French national research agency CNRS and Paul Sabatier University.

Orlando is lead author of a landmark study that pinpoints where the new horse first appeared and how it replaced earlier equids to become the ancestor of modern horses, from Shetland ponies to massive Clydesdales and sleek thoroughbreds. He and a giant interdisciplinary team analyzed 300 ancient horse genomes from 121 archaeological sites in Eurasia. In a paper in this week’s issue of Nature, they conclude that the ancestor of all modern horses made its first appearance by 4200 years ago in the western Eurasian steppe.

“They have found the original homeland of modern horses,” says molecular archaeologist Christina Warinner of Harvard University and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, who was not part of the study. ...

https://www.science.org/content/article/ancient-dna-reveals-long-sought-homeland-modern-horses
 

Ancient DNA reveals the world’s oldest family tree​


Most of the people buried in one of the best-preserved Neolithic tombs in Britain were from five continuous generations of a single extended family, new research involving the University of York has revealed.

In a study published in Nature, researchers analysed DNA extracted from the bones and teeth of 35 individuals entombed approximately 5700 years ago at Hazleton North long cairn in the Cotswolds-Severn region. They found that 27 of them were descended from four women who all had children with the same man.

The group lived around 100 years after farming had been introduced to Britain and the authors of the study say that the results provide new insights into kinship and burial practices in Neolithic times.

Ancient%20DNA%20505.jpg


An artist's reconstruction of the Hazleton North cairn

The cairn at Hazleton North included two L-shaped burial chambers which were located north and south of the main ‘spine’ of the linear structure. The research findings indicate that men were generally buried with their father and brothers, suggesting that descent was patrilineal with later generations buried at the tomb connected to the first generation entirely through male relatives.

_122490744_hazletonfamily-tree-research-graphicv2_io_final.jpg


The family tree for burials in Hazleton North cairn

While two of the daughters of the lineage who died in childhood were buried in the tomb, the complete absence of adult daughters suggests that their remains were placed either in the tombs of male partners with whom they had children, or elsewhere.

Although the right to use the tomb ran through patrilineal ties, the choice of whether individuals were buried in the north or south chambered area initially depended on the first-generation woman from whom they were descended, suggesting that these first-generation women were socially significant in the memories of this community.

The researchers also found indications that ‘stepsons’ (males whose mother was buried in the tomb but not their biological father, and whose mother had also had children with a male from the patriline) were adopted into the lineage.

Additionally, the team found no evidence that another eight individuals were biological relatives of those in the family tree, which might further suggest that biological relatedness was not the only criterion for inclusion. However, three of these were women and it is possible that they could have had a partner in the tomb but either did not have any children or had daughters who reached adulthood and left the community so are absent from the tomb.

https://www.york.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/2021/research/dna-tree-neolithic/

maximus otter
 
ramonmercado said:
And seeing as you assked for it: Donkeys. Fear not: the riding refers to the use of donkeys for transportation purposes.

This ancient skeleton suggests humans were riding donkeys nearly 5000 years ago
By Michael PriceMay. 16, 2018 , 2:00 PM

Some 4700 years ago, a caravan of Egyptian herders and their donkeys followed a trade route through the foothills of central Israel, destined for the ancient city-state of Tell es-Safi/Gath. There, a Bronze Age builder slaughtered and buried one of the young animals and built a mudbrick house atop it—a sacrificial offering to ensure the edifice’s stability.

When a team of archaeologists uncovered the donkey’s skeleton (pictured) in 2008, they noted curious indentations in its lower premolars. The beveling strongly resembled that seen in the teeth of horses and other equids when they wear a bit, a piece of material secured in an animal’s mouth to control its head movements when riding.

Now, new radiocarbon dating from elsewhere in the site suggests the animal lived around 2700 B.C.E., providing the earliest evidence yet of donkey ridership in the Near East, the authors report today in PLOS ONE.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018...ans-were-riding-donkeys-nearly-5000-years-ago
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More on Donkey domestication.

Donkeys may lack the popularity and prestige of horses, but these diminutive equines played an outsize role in human history.

Now, an extensive analysis of the genomes of both modern and ancient donkeys reveals they were domesticated only once, in East Africa around 5000 B.C.E. Soon after, they rapidly spread throughout Eurasia and became distinctive populations, with limited mixing between them. That likely helped donkeys adapt to serve as critical pack animals for transporting water, belongings, and goods across a variety of environments.

“This is the story of the donkeys … and the detail is amazing,” says Greger Larson, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford who was not involved with the work. The new work clarifies a debate over how many times donkeys were tamed, he says, and reveals that donkeys never became inbred in the way that horses have been.

Improvements in the sequencing of both modern and ancient DNA have shed light on the domestication of horses, dogs, maize, goats, and microbes. But relatively little work has been done on donkey domestication, in part because they are not central to life in industrialized countries today, says Fiona Marshall, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis who was not involved with the work. That’s an oversight, she says. “Their domestication transformed society. They were the first land-based transport.” In many parts of the world, they still serve that role.

To better understand the origins of these humble beasts of burden, evolutionary biologist Ludovic Orlando from Paul Sabatier University—who has spent years working out the domestication history of horses—turned to donkeys. Working with Evelyn Todd in his lab and colleagues from 37 laboratories, they evaluated the genomes of 207 modern donkeys from around the world and sequenced DNA from the skeletons of 31 early donkeys, some dating as far back as 4000 years. “They made a remarkable effort to sequence the worldwide diversity,” says Eva-Maria Geigl, a paleogeneticist at the French national research agency, CNRS, at the University Paris-Cité who was not involved with the work.

https://www.science.org/content/art...ion-donkeys-helped-build-empires-around-world
 
Footprints on a Stone Age Serengeti.

"It's about 8,200 years old," says Dr Alison Burns, pointing to a perfectly preserved human footprint pressed into ancient mud on Formby Beach.

It is one of hundreds of newly discovered ancient footprints here. The sandy stretch of the north-west England coast is already known to be home to one of the largest collections of prehistoric animal tracks on Earth.

As well as adding to that collection, researchers found the oldest prints were formed much earlier than thought. The first date back almost 9,000 years and the youngest of the prints are medieval - about 1,000 years old.

These findings, published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, tell the story of a coastal environment that transformed over thousands of years, as sea levels rapidly rose and humans settled permanently by the water.

The size and shape of the picture-perfect human footprint that Dr Burns has found suggest it belonged to a young man - perhaps a teenager. Strangely, this adolescent foot had the very distinct protrusion of a bunion on its little toe.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-63036911
 

UK had at least two genetically distinct human groups at end of last ice age, DNA reveals​

Britain was home to at least two genetically distinct groups of humans at the end of the last ice age, the oldest human DNA from the UK has revealed.

About 19,000 years ago, ice sheets that had covered much of Britain were melting and the landscape once again became habitable to humans. Evidence of their return dates back to about 15,500 years ago. These early groups crossed now submerged land that once connected Britain to mainland Europe.

Human remains from the late ice age have been found at only a handful of sites in Britain, including at Gough’s Cave in Somerset and Kendrick’s Cave in Llandudno, Wales. The former is famous for having been home to “Cheddar Man” – an individual who lived about 10,000 years ago – as well as older remains that showed signs of cannibalism.
Now researchers have extracted and analysed DNA from two individuals found at these sites – the oldest DNA from Britain.
“We can see that there are two different genetic ancestry present in Britain during this late glacial period, which is perhaps not what we expected to find,” said Dr Sophy Charlton, the first author of the study from the University of York.

Supporting previous work, the team found that the Gough’s Cave individual mainly relied on terrestrial animals, such as horses, while the diet of the Kendrick’s Cave individual included marine creatures.

The researchers then analysed nuclear and mitochondrial DNA from the two individuals. The results reveal that the remains from Gough’s Cave are from a female who lived about 14,900 years ago. This female, who was cannibalised, shared ancestry with an individual discovered in a cave in Belgium, known as Goyet Q2, who lived 15,000 years ago.

However, despite Kendrick’s Cave containing a Magdalenian-style stone tool and a cut bovid bone from the time of the Gough Cave female, the remains from Kendrick’s Cave showed a different ancestry. This individual, a male who lived about 13,500 years ago, shares ancestry with 14,000-year-old remains found in Villabruna, northern Italy. Such ancestry is associated with western hunter-gatherers who expanded from south-east Europe or the near east.

Dr Selina Brace, a co-author of the study from the Natural History Museum, said the results were unexpected given a mixture of the two ancestries had previously been found in older human remains from southern Europe, with the new study revealing Cheddar Man also had such dual ancestry.

The team said the results suggest that at least two different human groups, with different ancestries, diets and cultures – including funerary practices – were present in Britain at the end of the last ice age.

“In keeping with what prehistorians have long known about the highly mobile, small populations of ice age hunter-gatherers, this [research] adds evidence to the growing picture of remarkably small, ecologically fragile human groups spread thinly across late Pleistocene Europe,” he said.
Click to expand...
Skull from Gough's Cave

1666627744789.png



Full report in Nature.com
 
ramonmercado said:
Early potters.

Pottery making may not have emerged in one Big Bang–like event. Instead, it was more like a cluster of ceramic eruptions among ancient East Asian hunter-gatherer groups as the last Ice Age waned, a new study suggests.

East Asian hunter-gatherer populations living about 700 kilometers apart made and used cooking pots in contrasting ways between around 16,200 and 10,200 years ago, says a team led by Shinya Shoda, an archaeologist currently based at the University of York in England. Each of those groups probably invented its own distinctive pottery-making techniques, the scientists suspect.

“Our results indicate that there was greater variability in the development and use of early pottery than has been appreciated,” Shoda says.

Pieces of ceramic cooking pots from one group preserved chemical markers of fish, including salmon, Shoda’s group reports in the Feb. 1 Quaternary Science Reviews. Early pottery making by those hunter-gatherers accompanied seasonal harvests of migrating fish, the researchers say


https://www.sciencenews.org/article/food-residues-offer-taste-pottery-diverse-origins-east-asia
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New findings on the use of pottery in ancient days.

Broken, charred and still crusted with nearly 8000-year-old food, the remnants of ancient pottery found across northern Eurasia wouldn’t be mistaken for fine china. But the advent of this durable technology—used to cook and store abundant plant and animal resources—was a huge step forward for hunter-gatherers in this part of the globe. It was also home-grown, new research suggests.

For decades, researchers believed pottery arrived in Europe along with agriculture and domesticated animals, as part of a “package” of technologies that spread northward from Anatolia beginning about 9000 years ago. Pots found in Northern Europe dating around the same time were thought to be mere knockoffs by hunter-gatherers copying their more sophisticated farmer neighbors, says Thomas Terberger, an archaeologist at the University of Göttingen who was not involved with the new research. “A generation ago, nobody looked to the East.”

But a study published today in Nature Human Behaviour tells a different story. Beginning about 20,000 years ago, the know-how needed to make and use pottery spread among groups of hunter-gatherers in the Far East. This containers replaced less durable vessels made of hide and skin, and were better able to withstand fire than wood bowls. Starting about 7900 years ago, clay pots became common from the Ural Mountains to southern Scandinavia within just a few centuries.

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To map pottery’s spread, Rowan McLaughlin, an archaeologist at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, and colleagues analyzed broken shards collected from 156 sites around the Baltic Sea and across the European part of the former Soviet Union—many stored in museums in modern-day Russia and Ukraine. By sampling burned crusts of food stuck to the broken pots—remnants of bygone meals—they were able to get hundreds of new radiocarbon dates.

Fat residues revealed whether meat from ruminants like deer or cattle was on the menu, or whether people were boiling fish soup, pork, or plants instead. And comparing decorations and pot shapes helped the team map how pottery trends spread from community to community.

Though the raw material to make clay pots was widely available, the technical knowledge needed to shape and fire them must have been passed from person to person. New cooking and food preparation techniques had to be learned as well.

Put together, the data suggest pottery spread across parts of northern Eurasia rapidly, the team reports. Within a few hundred years, the technology swept north and west from the Caspian Sea, all the way to the eastern shore of the Baltic and southern Scandinavia.

The speed of the spread suggests potterymaking knowledge passed from group to group, rather than being introduced by new people migrating into the region. “There’s no way a population could grow that fast,” McLaughlin says.

a broken pot with burnt food on it

Burned crusts of food on a pot used by early hunter-gatherers in northeastern Europe about 7500 years agoEKATERINA DOLBUNOVA/BRITISH MUSEUM

Lucy Kubiak-Martens, an archaeobotanist at BIAX Consult, a commercial archaeology company in the Netherlands who was not involved with the paper, agrees with that interpretation. “It seems the knowledge traveled, not people,” she says.

If so, that would contrast with how similar technology spread out from Anatolia: Recent genetic evidence suggests that around the same time, farmers from Anatolia brought their own pottery styles and traditions with them as they expanded into southern Europe.

https://www.science.org/content/article/ancient-hunter-gatherers-were-potters-too
 
ramonmercado said:
Finding the homeland of modern horses, no doubt there will be neighsayers. This might go more properly in the Bronze Age Thread but imo it links back to the above article.

About 4200 years ago, a few herders on the western Eurasian steppe got a brand-new mount.

They were experienced at herding wild horses for food, but their new steeds had a calmer disposition and a stronger back, making the horses easier to train and ride, perhaps for the first time. The new model galloped across Eurasia within a few centuries, triggering major shifts in Bronze Age human cultures. “Once we domesticated this new kind of horse, suddenly they were everywhere,” says molecular archaeologist Ludovic Orlando of the French national research agency CNRS and Paul Sabatier University.

Orlando is lead author of a landmark study that pinpoints where the new horse first appeared and how it replaced earlier equids to become the ancestor of modern horses, from Shetland ponies to massive Clydesdales and sleek thoroughbreds. He and a giant interdisciplinary team analyzed 300 ancient horse genomes from 121 archaeological sites in Eurasia. In a paper in this week’s issue of Nature, they conclude that the ancestor of all modern horses made its first appearance by 4200 years ago in the western Eurasian steppe.

“They have found the original homeland of modern horses,” says molecular archaeologist Christina Warinner of Harvard University and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, who was not part of the study. ...

https://www.science.org/content/article/ancient-dna-reveals-long-sought-homeland-modern-horses
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Now it looks like the Yamnaya were riding horses 5,000 years ago.

About 5300 years ago, people from the steppes of modern-day Russia and Ukraine expanded rapidly across Eurasia. Within a few centuries these “Yamnaya” left a lasting genetic mark on populations from central Europe to the Caspian Sea. Today, archaeologists call them “eastern cowboys” for their livestock herding and highly mobile lifestyle.

But one part of the classic cowboy picture was missing: horseback riding. Although cattle bones and sturdy wagons have been found in Yamnaya sites, horse bones are scarce, and most archaeologists assumed people did not start to ride horses until at least 1000 years later.

In a new study, presented today at the annual meeting of AAAS (which publishes Science) in Washington, D.C., and published in Science Advances, researchers say they’ve found the earliest evidence of horseback riding not in the bones of ancient horses, but in their Yamnaya riders. “Everyone has focused on horse remains to get an idea of early horse riding,” says co-author and University of Helsinki archaeologist Volker Heyd. “Our approach was to look at humans.”

Genetic and other evidence suggests horses were domesticated as early as 3500 B.C.E. Yet the earliest mentions of riding in historical sources or pictorial evidence date from more than 2000 years later, long after the Yamnaya spread across the steppes. The eastern cowboys, many archaeologists thought, were content to walk alongside their herds of cattle. ...

https://www.science.org/content/article/earliest-evidence-horseback-riding-found-eastern-cowboys
 
ramonmercado said:
Now it looks like the Yamnaya were riding horses 5,000 years ago.

About 5300 years ago, people from the steppes of modern-day Russia and Ukraine expanded rapidly across Eurasia. Within a few centuries these “Yamnaya” left a lasting genetic mark on populations from central Europe to the Caspian Sea. Today, archaeologists call them “eastern cowboys” for their livestock herding and highly mobile lifestyle.

But one part of the classic cowboy picture was missing: horseback riding. Although cattle bones and sturdy wagons have been found in Yamnaya sites, horse bones are scarce, and most archaeologists assumed people did not start to ride horses until at least 1000 years later.

In a new study, presented today at the annual meeting of AAAS (which publishes Science) in Washington, D.C., and published in Science Advances, researchers say they’ve found the earliest evidence of horseback riding not in the bones of ancient horses, but in their Yamnaya riders. “Everyone has focused on horse remains to get an idea of early horse riding,” says co-author and University of Helsinki archaeologist Volker Heyd. “Our approach was to look at humans.”

Genetic and other evidence suggests horses were domesticated as early as 3500 B.C.E. Yet the earliest mentions of riding in historical sources or pictorial evidence date from more than 2000 years later, long after the Yamnaya spread across the steppes. The eastern cowboys, many archaeologists thought, were content to walk alongside their herds of cattle. ...

https://www.science.org/content/article/earliest-evidence-horseback-riding-found-eastern-cowboys
Click to expand...

Although difficult to make out, due to many engravings having been made on top of one-another, the remarkable cave art from La Marche in France includes one image that appears to show a rider on a horse. The cave art is thought to date from, the middle Magdalenian period - approximately 14,000 BC.

lamarche.png


A short video here shows a reconstruction of the image of the famous "old man" from La Marche cave (he was probably only about 45!).
It's beautifully done, from the tanned, weathered skin and pensive expression, you really feel you've jumped back all those millennia and are looking into the eyes of a stone-age man.

 
Happy campers in the Nefeud.

About 7,000 years ago, a small group of people sat around a fire, next to a small lake in what is now the Nefud Desert of northern Saudi Arabia.

We found some of the tools they left behind—and on close inspection of the tools, we discovered these Stone Age herders were busy grinding animal bones, wild plants and pigments while their meat was cooking.

Our results are published in a new paper in PLOS ONE.

Herders and artists​

Our earlier research has shown that between 10,000 and 6,000 years ago much of Arabia was far wetter and greener than it is today.

Grasslands spread, and trees and shrubs grew near water sources. Lakes formed and provided water. Herders lived around these lakes and led their cattle, sheep and goats to the best pastures.

These Stone Age herders were also skilled artists. They carved thousands of images into rock surfaces on cliffs and boulders, documenting their daily lives.

The rock art shows Stone Age people hunting gazelles, wild donkeys and ibex, and it also shows their most precious possession: their cattle.

Stone Age camp sites​

Archaeological sites from this period consist of collections of small fireplaces. The herders seem to have been extremely mobile, moving around the landscape with their herds, searching for pasture and water.

Stone Age herders transported heavy rock tools to grind animal bones, plants and pigment


A grinding stone reassembled from fragments appears to have had two holes for carrying with a rope or cord. Credit: Ceri Shipton, CC BY

On these routes they made small camps near lakes, returning to the same places again and again as the years passed and the seasons turned.

https://phys.org/news/2023-10-stone-age-herders-heavy-tools.html
 
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