Archaeologists in Iceland have for decades examined the remains of more than 350 graves from the Viking Age. In approximately 150 of these, teeth or bones of horses were found. Geneticists and archaeologists have now
examined ancient DNA from 19 horses in such graves, and it turned out that all horses – except one – were male.
Iceland was a heavily forested, uninhabited island until the Vikings settled there in the
870s. The first Vikings were, according to stories in the Landnámabók, noblemen with
their families who traveled to Iceland to get away from the harsh rule of the king Harald
Fairhair. Around 930 the population of Iceland had already increased to 9000, and in light of this it is puzzling that only 350 graves dating to the Viking Age have been found so far.
“There should be thousands of such graves”, says PhD student Albína Hulda Pálsdottir at CEES, Department of Biosciences at the University of Oslo. As a zooarchaeologist, she is an expert in studying animal remains from archaeological excavations.
The modest number of Viking graves makes it all the more interesting to study those that have been found, in the hope of getting a better insight into how the Vikings of Iceland
lived and thought. And now we have a clearer picture of the Viking burial ritual, because
a multidisciplinary research team of archaeologists and geneticists from Iceland, Norway,
Denmark, United Kingdom and France have examined ancient DNA (aDNA) from 19
horses that were found in these graves.
“It is reasonable to believe that a Viking who received a horse in the grave, must have
had a certain amount of power and influence. We would therefore like to know more
about these horses, for example of which sex they were”, says Pálsdottir.
Ancient DNA revealed the horses’ sex
But it is not very easy to determine the sex of more than 1000-year-old bone fragments
and teeth from horses. Male and female horses are quite similar, both in size and
appearance. Zooarchaeologists have previously tried to sex horse remains from the
Vikings’ graves by looking at the canines and pelvis, and they found that most horses
were male – stallions or geldings. The pelvis of male horses looks a little different from
that of female horses, and in most cases males have large canines while most mares do
not have canines at all.
“These morphological sexing methods can’t always be used when the skeletons are badly
preserved. Often the burial remains don’t contain any canines or pelvic bones. We have
therefore now sexed the remains of 19 horses from Viking age graves in Iceland by
analyzing the ancient DNA preserved in the fragments. Then it turned out that 18 of them

were male”, says Sanne Boessenkool – she is also based at CEES at the Department of
Biosciences.
The horses in the burials were in their prime; they were thus not buried because of old
age or illness. Sanne Boessenkool, who is a biologist and expert in evolution and the
analysis of ancient DNA, adds that DNA remains cannot provide answers to whether the
buried male animals were stallions or geldings (castrated animals).
Stallions as symbols of power
The Arctic fox, also called the polar fox, was the only land mammal that existed in
Iceland before people settled there. But this changed quickly when the Vikings arrived
and imported animals such as dogs, sheep, cows, pigs, goats, chickens and horses. In the
end there were many horses in Iceland, and archaeologists have therefore been uncertain
what it really meant when a Viking was buried with a horse. But when 18 of the 19
buried horses analyzed turned out to be male, it appears to have been a conscious choice
to place a male horse in a burial.
“It is natural to imagine that the slaughter of the virile and to some extent aggressive male
animals must have been part of a burial ritual that was intended to convey status and
power”, explains archaeologist Rúnar Leifsson from The Cultural Heritage Agency of
Iceland (Minjastofnun Íslands). He is one of the collaborators on the scientific paper that
is now published in the Journal of Archaeological Sciences.
“In addition to the 19 buried horses, we have examined the remains of three horses that
were found outside graves. All of these were female”, says Sanne Boessenkool. These
horses had not been given a ceremonial funeral and were likely eaten. The impression is
therefore that male and female animals had a different status.
New light shed on graves
It has been a challenge to interpret the grave remains from the Viking Age in Iceland,
because many of the graves were found during road works or other construction projects
between 50 and 100 years ago. In many cases the burials were not examined by an
archaeologist and only a small part of the material found was sent back to the National
Museum of Iceland. Therefore most of the skeletons are incomplete.
“It is striking that we find almost exclusively middle-aged men in the graves on Iceland.
There are almost no infants or children, and very few women. We don’t know how the
rest of the population was buried. Perhaps they were laid in swamps or lakes, or sunk in
the sea”, suggests Pálsdottir.
It is also striking that the Vikings in Iceland apparently developed their own burial
customs.

“It was common to cremate the dead in Scandinavia, where the Vikings of Iceland came
from. But we find no traces of cremation on Iceland. Other scientists have studied the
occurrence of different isotopes in the Viking skeletons, and it turned out that the buried
women who were found must have come to Iceland during adulthood. This may indicate
that the men from the first settlement brought women to Iceland from Scandinavia”,
suggests Pálsdottir.
The Vikings didn’t think like us
Sanne Boessenkool stresses that we should not mirror our own modern cultural ideas
when we attempt to interpret the grave finds from Viking Age Iceland.
“Today, we think of death and a funeral as an ending, and then it may seem wasteful to
slaughter a great stallion just to bury it. But if the people at the time believed in a life
after death, they maybe thought that the horse had a function”, suggests Boessenkool.
Albína Hulda Pálsdottir agrees:
“Nowadays, it is easy to imagine such rituals as a form of demonstrating power, perhaps
as “conspicuous consumption” that was intended to demonstrate wealth and status, rather
than to cover real needs. But maybe the Vikings thought totally different, Pálsdóttir
points out.
It is noted that the term conspicous consumption was at the time introduced by the
Norwegian-American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen, who felt that the
motivation was to demonstrate power and prosperity, rather than to satisfy one’s own
desires and needs.
Skulls on stakes
Researchers have in some cases been able to see how the animals were killed before they
were placed in Viking graves.
“If a horse skull has a fracture on the forehead, it is very clear that it was slaughtered with
a hit on the forehead. There are also a few cases where the horse has been beheaded,
meaning the head has been separated from the rest of the body. An interesting example
that is not included in our study, comes from the farm at Hofstaðir in northern Iceland.
There archaeologists found many cattle skulls with fractures in the forehead that showed
weathering on the front, but not on the back”, says Pálsdóttir.
Archaeologist’s inferred that these animals had been killed ceremonially in connection
with for example a festivity where skulls were put on stakes outside the Viking hall.
Maybe as a sign of warning; an enemy may think twice before approaching a Viking
farm surrounded by skulls on stakes. Weathering suggests that the skulls must have been
left on display long enough for the weather and wind to leave its marks on the side of the
skull that was most exposed.

The ancestors of the Icelandic horse
Albína Hulda Pálsdottir and Sanne Boessenkool emphasize that the horses that existed in
Iceland under the Viking Age, are not necessarily exactly the same as what we today call
the Icelandic horses.
“The horse breeds we have today are bred up in the course of the last 200 years or so, but
the horse bones we have examined are of course much older. But we can assume that
these horses are the ancestors of the Icelandic horses today”, Boessenkool says.
The researchers at CEES are now working on sexing the remains of several animal
species from the Viking Age using ancient DNA.
“In the course of this project we have developed a simple method for sex determination
using ancient DNA. It is an important advance, because it would not have been possible
to sex over half of the horses in the study with other methods”, Boessenkool explains.
“The method is fairly easy to use for all species that have sex chromosomes, and we have
shown that the method is robust. We also do not need a lot of DNA to get secure results,
so we expect that other researchers will take advantage of the method we present in the
paper”, she adds.
Most aDNA from bacteria
The researchers’ method is described in more detail in the scientific article, but the first
step is to pick a tooth or a bone that is then cleaned. Then the researchers cut out a little
bit which is crushed into powder, and then the DNA is extracted from the powder. The
DNA is then analyzed using a method called shotgun sequencing, which implies that the
researchers sequence all the DNA in the sample. But in a tooth from the Viking Age there
can be a lot of DNA that comes from other organisms:
“Most of the old DNA we find is not actually from horse! In some cases, as much as 99.5
percent is from bacteria or undefined organisms”, Boessenkool says.
Sanne Boessenkool and Albína Hulda Pálsdottir have many good experiences with the
interdisciplinary collaboration in the project.
“Interdisciplinary work is difficult, not the least because biologists and archaeologists in
a way speak different languages and write scientific articles in different ways. But when
we really get into it and make an effort, as we did here, we are able to do research and
find things that none of us could have done alone”, says Pálsdottir.
University of Oslo, Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences

During the Stone Age ancestral humans lived with a variety of animal
species along what was an area of wetlands in the middle of the Jordanian
desert.
The site, in the town of Azraq Basin, has been excavated and has revealed an abundance
of tools and animal bones from up to 250,000 years ago, leading to better understanding
of how ancestral humans have adapted to this changing environment.
James Pokines, PhD, associate professor of forensic anthropology at Boston University
School of Medicine, was a leader of the excavation with a team from the Azraq Marshes
Archaeological and Paleoecological Project.
The team discovered bone and tooth specimens belonging to wild ancestors of modern-
day camels and elephants, as well as horse, rhinoceros, antelope and wild cattle species,
among others. Poor preservation of small and less dense bones has resulted in limited
conclusions about smaller species of animals that may have inhabited the area during this
time.
Prior research in the site revealed evidence of butchery, with blood proteins from
multiple species appearing on Stone Age tools. “The periphery of the wetlands where
large animals drank and grazed would have presented excellent hunting opportunities for
ancestral humans. Humans may have also faced their own challenges from other
predatory competitors such as lions and hyenas roaming the area,” said Pokines,
corresponding author of the study.    
The team’s discovery adds important background to a growing picture of land use over
time in Azraq Basin. “There are many portions of the globe that we still know so little
about in terms of how ancestral humans lived and evolved there and how they adapted to
that environment … we hope to understand how different populations of ancestral
humans adapted to this changing, arid environment throughout the Stone Age.”
The excavation efforts were the outcome of a successful collaboration with Jordanian
authorities and according to the researchers has paved the way for future excavations in
the region.
BOSTON UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE

By Jon Rogers
A LARGE stone ball dating from the 13th century which was used during a siege of
Edinburgh Castle has been discovered by archaeologists.
The large carved stone looks like a cannon ball but has been dated to the 13th century,
more than 200 years before the introduction of gunpowder or cannons in Scotland.
It was found during excavations at the Grassmarket in Edinburgh as archaeologists from
AOC Archaeology continue to investigate the site, which has been earmarked for
Europe's first Virgin Hotel.
It is thought the ball was launched from a large wooden catapult known as a trebuchet,
either from or towards the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle during the Siege of Edinburgh in
1296.
The three-day siege, also known as The Longshanks Siege, saw the English king Edward
I capture Edinburgh Castle and then install a garrison of 350 knights to defend it.
The castle would remain in English hands for 18 years, using it as a base to plunder
treasure from across Scotland including the Stone of Destiny from Scone Abbey.
Edinburgh Castle was recaptured in 1314 by the Scottish after Thomas Randolph, the
First Earl of Moray led a surprise attack with a small band of 20 men to retake the
stronghold.
The archaeology work is entirely funded by India Buildings Ltd, which is developing the
site, and managed by CgMs Heritage.
Richard Conolly, of CgMs, said: "As archaeologists, most of our work deals with the
remnants of day-to-day life. So, it is really exciting for the team to find something that
potentially provides a direct link to an historic event and specific date.
"The siege only lasted three days – we don't often get that kind of precision in our dating.
It is also a reminder that it was not just the castle that was involved in the siege; the
surrounding town must also have taken a battering."
Over the centuries around 23 different siege attempts were made on Edinburgh Castle
and experts have been intrigued by the latest discovery.
City of Edinburgh Council archaeologist John Lawson said: "It looks like the type of ball
which would have been fired by a trebuchet, one of the most powerful catapults used in
the Middle Ages.

"Worldwide, the most famous account of a trebuchet is that of Warwolf, the giant
catapult used by Edward I's army at Stirling Castle in 1304.
"What we've discovered here suggests similar weapons were also used in Edinburgh,
possibly even during Edward I's Siege of Edinburgh in 1296, when the Stone of Destiny
was stolen and the castle taken out of Scottish hands.
"We always knew this area of the Grassmarket could shed new light on Edinburgh in the
dark ages, and here we are with the discovery of a medieval weapon. It's a really exciting
find, particularly if we can prove its links to the Siege of Edinburgh."
Archaeologists began digging in the Grassmarket area in May and work is expected to
continue into the new year.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/8080868/edinburgh-castle-siege-stone-ball-catapult-
found/

Posted by Jason Organ in Public science communication
Here we are, once again, at the end of a calendar year filled with lots of exciting news in the field of human evolution. Last year, just as we were finalizing edits on the 2017 Top 5 Human Evolution Discoveries list, the remainder of the skeleton of a human ancestor nown colloquially as “Little Foot” (belonging to the genus Australopithecus, the same genus, but different species, as the famed “Lucy” fossil) was finally revealed after 20
years of cleaning and excavation from its embedding rock. Amazingly, just as we are finishing the edits for this year’s installment of top human evolution discoveries, Little Foot is back in the news. As of the last week of November, full descriptions and analyses of the remainder of the fossils are now available (prior to undergoing peer-review) on the preprint server bioRxiv.

Enjoy reading our Top 6 list for 2018! Why 6? These stories are
too cool not to share.–JMO
By Ella Beaudoin, BA, and Briana Pobiner, PhD, Human Origins Program, Smithsonian Institution, National Muse \um of Natural History
What does it mean to be human? What makes us unique among all other organisms on Earth? Is it cooperation? Conflict? Creativity? Cognition? There happens to be one anatomical feature that distinguishes modern humans (Homo sapiens) from every other living and extinct animal: our bony chin! But does a feature of our jaws have actual
meaning for our humanity? We want to talk about the top six discoveries of 2018, all from the last 500,000 years of human evolution, that give us more insight into what it means to be human. If you want to learn more about our favorite discoveries from last year, read our 2017 blog post!
1) Migrating modern humans: the oldest modern human fossil found outside of Africa
Every person alive on the planet today is a Homo sapiens,and our species evolved around 300,000 years ago in Africa. In January of this year, a team of archaeologists led by Israel Hershkovitz from Tel Aviv University in Israel made a stunning discovery at a site on the western slope of Mount Carmel in Israel—Misliya Cave. This site had previously yielded
flint artifacts dated to between 140,000 and 250,000 years ago, and the assumption was that these tools were made by Neanderthals which had also occupied Israel at this time.
But tucked in the same layer of sediment as the stone tools was a Homo sapiens upper jaw! Dated to between 177,000 and 194,000 years ago by three different dating techniques, this finding pushes back the evidence for human expansion out of Africa by roughly 40,000 years. It also supports the idea that there were multiple waves of modern humans migrating out of Africa during this time, some of which may not have survived to pass on their genes to modern humans alive today. Remarkably, this jawbone was
discovered by a freshman student at Tel Aviv University working on his firstarchaeological dig in 2002! So, there is hope for students wishing to make a splash in this field!
2) Innovating modern humans: long-distance trade, the use of color, and the oldest Middle Stone Age tools in Africa At the prehistoric site of Olorgesailie in southern Kenya, years of careful climate research
and meticulous excavation by a research team lead by Rick Potts of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and Alison Brooks of George Washington University were able to explore both the archaeological and paleoenvironmental records to document behavioral change by modern humans in response to climatic variation. The artifacts show a shift from the larger and clunkier tools of the Acheulean, characterized
by teardrop-shaped handaxes, to the more sophisticated and specialized tools of the Middle Stone Age (MSA). The MSA tools were dated to 320,000 years ago, the earliest evidence of this kind of technology in Africa. They also found evidence that one of the kinds of rock used to make the MSA tools, obsidian, was obtained from at least 55 miles (95 kilometers) away. Such long distances led the teams to conclude that obsidian was traded in social networks, since this is much further than modern human forager groups typically travel in a day. On top of that, the team found red and black rocks (pigments) used for coloring material in the MSA sites, indicating symbolic communication, possibly used to maintain these social networks with distant groups. Finally, all of these innovations occurred during a time of great climate and landscape instability and unpredictability, with a major change in mammal species (about 85%). In the face of this uncertainty, early members of our species seem to have responded by developing technological innovations, greater social connections, and symbolic communication. These exciting findings were published in a set of three papers in Science, focused on the dating of these finds; the stone tool technology and transport and use of pigments; and the
earlier changes in environments and technology that anticipate later characteristics of the stone tools.
(Featured image at the top of this post is the famous “Catwalk Site”, one of the open air displays at the National Museums of Kenya Olorgesailie site museum, which is littered with ~900,000 year old handaxes. Photo courtesy of Briana Pobiner.)

3) Art-making Neanderthals: our close evolutionary cousins actually created the
oldest known cave paintings
Neanderthals are often imagined as primitive brutes dragging clubs behind them. But new
discoveries, including one made last year, continue to reshape that image. A team led by
Alistair Pike from the University of Southampton found red ocher paintings – dots, boxes,
abstract animal figures, and handprints – deep inside three Spanish caves. The most
amazing part? These paintings dated to at least 65,000 years ago –a full 20,000-25,000
years before Homo sapiens arrived in Europe (which was 40,000 to 45,000 years ago)!
The age of the paintings was determined by using uranium-thorium dating of white crusts
made of calcium carbonate that had formed on top of the paintings by water percolating

through the rocks. Since the calcite precipitated on top of the paintings, the paintings
must have been there first – so they are older than the age of the calcite. The age of the
paintings suggests that Neanderthals made them. It has been generally assumed that
symbolic thought (the representation of reality through abstract concepts, such as art) was
a uniquely Homo sapiensability. But sharing our ability for symbolic thought with
Neanderthals means we may have to redraw our images of Neanderthal in popular
culture: forget the club, maybe they should be holding paint brushes instead.
4) Trekking modern humans: the oldest modern human footprints in North
America
When we think about how we make our marks on this world, we often picture leaving
behind cave paintings, structures, old fire pits, and discarded objects. But even a footprint
can leave behind traces of past movement! A discovery this year by a team led by
Duncan McLaran from the University of Victoria with representatives from the Heiltsuk
and Wuikinuxv First Nations revealed the oldest footprints in North America ! These 29
footprints were made by at least three people on the tiny Canadian island of Calvert. The
team used Carbon-14 dating of fossilized wood found in association with the footprints to
date the find to 13,000 years ago. This site may have been a stop on a late Pleistocene
coastal route humans used when migrating from Asia to the Americas. Because of their
small size, some of the footprints must have been made by a child – who would have
worn about a size 7 kids shoe today, if they were wearing shoes (interestingly, the
evidence indicates they were walking barefoot). As humans, our social and caregiving
nature has been essential to our survival. One of the research team members, Jennifer
Walkus, mentioned why the child’s footprints were particularly special: “Because so
often kids are absent from the archeological record. This really makes the archaeology
more personal.” Any site with preserved human footprints is pretty special, as there are
currently only a few dozen in the world.
5) Winter-stressed, nursing Neanderthals: Neanderthal children’s teeth reveal
intimate details of their daily lives
Evidence of children is very rare in the prehistoric archaeological record; their bones are
more delicate than those of adults and therefore less likely to survive and fossilize, and
their material artifacts are also almost impossible to identify. For instance, a stone tool
made by a child might be interpreted as made hastily or by a novice, and toys are quite a
new invention. To find remains that are conclusively juvenile is very exciting to
archaeologists – not only for the personal connection we feel, but for the new insights we
can learn about how individuals grew, flourished, and according to a new study led by
Dr. Tanya Smith from Griffith University in Australia, suffered. Smith and her team
studied the teeth of two Neanderthal children who lived 250,000 years ago in southern
France. They took thin sections of the two teeth and “read” the layers of enamel, which
develops in a way similar to tree rings: in times of stress, slight variations occur in the
layers of tooth enamel. The tooth enamel chemistry also recorded environmental
variation based on the climate where the Neanderthals grew up, because it reflects the
chemistry of the water and the food that the Neanderthals kids ate and drank. The team

determined that the two young Neanderthals were physically stressed during the winter
months – they likely experienced fevers, vitamin deficiency, or disease more often during
the colder seasons. The team found repeated high levels of lead exposure in both
Neanderthal teeth, though the exact source of the lead is unclear – it could have been
from eating or drinking contaminated food or water, or inhaling smoke from a fire made
from contaminated material. They also found that one of the Neanderthals was born in
the spring and weaned in the fall, and nursed until it was about 2.5 years old, similar to
the average age of weaning in non-industrial modern human populations. (Our closest
living relatives (chimpanzees and bonobos) nurse for much longer than we do, up to 5
years.) Discoveries like this are another indication that Neanderthals are more similar to
Homo sapiensthan we had ever thought. Paleoanthropologist Kristin Krueger notes how
discoveries like this are making “the dividing line between ‘them’ and ‘us’ [become more
blurry] every day.”
6) Hybridizing hominins: the first discovery of an ancient human hybrid
Speaking of blurring lines (and probably the biggest story of the year): a new discovery
from Denisova Cave in Siberia has added to the complicated history of Neanderthals and
other ancient human species. While Neanderthal fossils have been known for nearly two
centuries, Denisovans are a population of hominins only discovered in 2008 based on the
sequencing of their genome from a 41,000-year-old finger bone fragment from Denisova
Cave – which was also inhabited by Neanderthals and modern humans (and whom they
also mated with). While all of the known Denisovan fossils could nearly fit in one of your
hands, the amount of information we can gain from their DNA is enormous! This year, a
stunning discovery was made from a fragment of a long bone identified as coming from a
13-year-old girl nicknamed “Denny” who lived about 90,000 years ago: she was the
daughter of a Neanderthal mother and Denisovan father . A team led by Viviane Slon and
Svante Pääbo from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig,
Germany first looked at her mitochondrial DNA and found that it was Neanderthal – but
that didn’t seem to be her whole genetic story. They then sequenced her nuclear genome
and compared it to the genomes of other Neanderthals and Denisovans from the same
cave, and compared it to a modern human with no Neanderthal ancestry. They found that
about 40% of Denny’s DNA fragments matched a Neanderthal genome, and another 40%
matched a Denisovan genome. The team then realized that this meant she had acquired
one set of chromosomes from each of her parents, who must have been two different
types of early humans. Since her mitochondrial DNA – which is inherited from your
mother – was Neanderthal, the team could say with certainty that her mother was a
Neanderthal and a father that was Denisovan. However, the research team is very careful
about not using the word “hybrid” in their paper, instead stating instead that Denny is a
“first generation person of mixed ancestry.” They note the tenuous nature of the
biological species concept: the idea that one major way to distinguish one species from
another is that individuals of different species cannot mate and produce fertile offspring.
Yet we see interbreeding commonly occurring in the natural world, especially when two
populations seem to be in the early stages of speciating – because speciation is a process
that often takes a long time. It is clear from genetic evidence that Neanderthals and Homo
sapiens individuals were sometimes able to mate and produce children, but it is unclear if

these matings included difficulty with becoming pregnant or bringing a fetus to term –
and modern human females and Neanderthal males may have had particular trouble
making babies . While Neanderthals contributed DNA to the modern human genome, the
reverse seems not to have occurred. Regardless of the complicated history of
intermingling of different early human groups, Dr. Skoglund from the Francis Crick
institute echoes what many other researchers are thinking about this amazing
discovery, “[that Denny might be] the most fascinating person who has had their genome
sequenced.”

ITHACA, N.Y. – New research from Cornell University raises questions about the timing and nature of early interactions between indigenous people and Europeans in North America.

Until now, it’s been assumed that the presence of European trade goods, such as metals and glass beads, provide a timeline for the indigenous peoples and settlements in the 15th and 16th centuries. New research suggests this may be a mistake in cases where there was not direct and intensive exchange between the two groups of people.

Radiocarbon dating and tree-ring evidence shows that three major indigenous sites in Ontario, Canada, conventionally dated 1450-1550 – because there were no or very few European goods recovered – are in fact 50-100 years more recent. This dates the sites to the worst period of the Little Ice Age, around 1600.

“This seems extraordinary: Given this was only 400 years ago, how can we have been wrong by as much as 25 percent?” said first author Sturt Manning, professor of classical archaeology.

Manning is lead author of “Radiocarbon Re-dating of Contact-era Iroquoian History in Northeastern North America,” published in Science Advances. Other Cornell authors include Cornell Tree-Ring Laboratory senior researcher Carol Griggs and doctoral student Samantha Sanft.

Previously, dates in the early contact period were based on the absence – and then presence – of types of glass beads and other European trade goods in excavated sites, along with shifts in material culture, such as changes in ceramic designs. Dates were assigned according to “time transgression,” the assumption that when European goods are found in one place with a confirmed date associated with them, that same date can be used for other places where those trade goods are found.

“But goods don’t get distributed evenly within societies or across distances,” said Manning. “This is a vast area with complex local societies and economies, so the concept that everybody gets the same thing necessarily all at once is a bit ludicrous in retrospect.”

The team’s chronological findings dramatically rewrite how history has been understood in the region. The period of first European contact, rather than following major changes in Iroquoian society, can now be seen to coincide with those changes. This suggests that contact-era transformations happened much later than previously thought.

“Of course, we’ve dated only one site sequence, and there are many more,” Manning said. “What this paper really shows is we now need to reassess all those site sequences where there’s not a clear historical link or association.”

###

The research was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

For more information, see this Cornell Chronicle story.

Cornell University has dedicated television and audio studios available for media interviews supporting full HD, ISDN and web-based platforms.

Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.

In a 5,000 year old grave outside Falköping, scientists have found the oldest traces of the plague bacterium’s DNA in the world. An international research team including archaeologists from the University of Gothenburg made the discovery using advanced DNA techniques. According to the researchers, this discovery may also have identified the first pandemic in history which stretched from Europe across to Asia as a result of the new trade routes in this period.

The remarkable finds were made at Frälsegården in Gökhem outside Falköping in a passage grave – a kind of collective grave with a large stone burial chamber. Traces of the DNA of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes the plague, were found in the skeletons of Middle Neolithic farmers who have lived at the site approximately 4,900 years ago. The bacterium, which started the Black Death for example, is the deadliest in human history and has cost millions of people their lives.

The discovery was made by a multidisciplinary research team from France, Denmark and Sweden that includes archaeologists Kristian Kristiansen and Karl-Göran Sjögren from the University of Gothenburg.

“The discovery of such an early variant of the bacterium in Falköping was totally unexpected since previous findings pointed to Yersinia pestis as having originated in Asia. This now needs to be re-evaluated, so it certainly is a significant discovery,” says Karl-Göran Sjögren.

The find in Falköping also means that the researchers may have solved another mystery. It was only recently discovered that people in different regions of Eurasia were all infected with the plague during the Bronze Age. But where and when the disease first appeared and how it spread has been unknown – until now. The variant of the bacterium discovered in Falköping seems to have given rise to all subsequent variants and is believed to have spread rapidly since the bacterium has been discovered in finds dating from just a few hundred years later across a huge area from Eastern Europe to Central Asia.

“We think now that the first plague may have occurred in the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture north of the Black Sea a few hundred years before the find in Falköping and then spread to both the west and the east, changing along the way. Its spread may have been facilitated by better communications such as ox-wagons, which were then starting to be used,” says Karl-Göran Sjögren.

It was by analysing ‘molecular clock’ data that the researchers discovered that different strains of the plague bacterium spread very rapidly in Eurasia between 5,000 and 6,000 years ago. This matches exactly a period in South-East Europe when the first large population densities arose but also collapsed. It was also at this time that many technological breakthroughs occurred such as the wheel, the use of draught animals, and metallurgy – breakthroughs that facilitated long-distance trade, for example.

“This very rapid spread is indicative of well-developed communications and contacts that linked groups across very large areas,” says Karl-Göran Sjögren.

Based on this evidence, the researchers therefore believe that it really was a pandemic of the plague that occurred in those large population densities which subsequently had major consequences for future civilisations and migration patterns.

Explore further: An ancient strain of plague may have led to the decline of Neolithic Europeans

Provided by: Göteborgs universitet

Let’s stand up for equality, justice and human dignity
Human Rights Day is observed every year on 10 December – the day the United Nations General Assembly adopted, in 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights . This year, Human Rights Day marks the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a milestone document that proclaimed the inalienable rights which everyone is inherently entitled to as a human being — regardless of race, colour, religion, sex, language, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. It is the most translated document in the world, available in more than 500 languages .
Drafted by representatives of diverse legal and cultural backgrounds from all regions of
the world, the Declaration sets out universal values and a common standard of
achievement for all peoples and all nations. It establishes the equal dignity and worth of
every person. Thanks to the Declaration, and States' commitments to its principles, the dignity of millions has been uplifted and the foundation for a more just world has been laid. While its promise is yet to be fully realized, the very fact that it has stood the test of time is testament to the enduring universality of its perennial values of equality, justice and human dignity.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights empowers us all. The principles enshrined in the Declaration are as relevant today as they were in 1948. We need to stand up for our own rights and those of others. We can take action in our own daily lives, to uphold the rights that protect us all and thereby promote the kinship of all human beings.
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