They have an unwarranted image as brutish and uncaring, but new research has revealed just how knowledgeable and effective Neanderthal healthcare was.

Neanderthals were genuinely caring of their peers [Credit: Allan Henderson]

The study, by the University of York, reveals that Neanderthal healthcare was uncalculated and highly effective -- challenging our notions that they were brutish compared to modern humans.

The researchers argue that the care provided was widespread and should be seen as a "compassionate and knowledgeable response to injury and illness."

It is well known that Neanderthals sometimes provided care for the injured, but new analysis by the team at York suggest they were genuinely caring of their peers, regardless of the level of illness or injury, rather than helping others out of self-interest.

Lead author, Dr Penny Spikins, senior lecturer in the Archaeology of Human Origin at the University of York, said: "Our findings suggest Neanderthals didn't think in terms of whether others might repay their efforts, they just responded to their feelings about seeing their loved ones suffering."

Most of the individuals archaeologists know about had a severe injury of some kind, with detailed pathologies highlighting a range of debilitating conditions and injuries.

In some cases the injuries occurred long before death and would have required monitoring, massage, fever management and hygiene care, the study suggests.

Analysis of a male aged around 25-40 at time of death revealed a catalogue of poor heath, including a degenerative disease of the spine and shoulders.

His condition would have sapped his strength over the final 12 months of life and severely restricted his ability to contribute to the group.

Yet, the authors of the study argue he remained part of the group as his articulated remains were subsequently carefully buried.

Dr Spikins added: "We argue that the social significance of the broader pattern of healthcare has been overlooked and interpretations of a limited or calculated response to healthcare have been influenced by preconceptions of Neanderthals as being 'different' and even brutish. However, a detailed consideration of the evidence in its social and cultural context reveals a different picture.

"The very similarity of Neanderthal healthcare to that of later periods has important implications. We argue that organised, knowledgeable and caring healthcare is not unique to our species but rather has a long evolutionary history."

The study was partially supported by the John Templeton Foundation and published in the journal World Archaeology.

Source: University of York [March 13, 2018]

The newcomers who arrived in the little farming villages of medieval Germany would have stood out: They had dark hair and tawny skin, spoke a different language and had remarkably tall heads.

Skulls unearthed from 1,400-year-old burials in southern Germany may show signs of intensive or moderate skull modification, left and center, which researchers believe is a cultural practice seen in tribes from further east [Credit: State collection for Anthropology and Palaeoanatomy Munich]

Now scientists who investigated the unusually shaped skulls say they provide evidence that women also migrated long distances across medieval Europe, not just men. A genetic analysis showed the women traveled from what is now Romania, Bulgaria and northern Greece at a time when the continent was being reshaped by the collapse of the Roman Empire.

In a study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers say the women's elongated heads—a result of binding done after birth—suggest they might have been high-class individuals.

"These women looked extremely different to the local women, very exotic if you will," said one of the researchers, Joachim Burger, a population geneticist at the University of Mainz, Germany.

With colleagues from Europe and the United States, Burger compared the genetic profile of almost 40 human remains unearthed from 5th and 6th century burial sites in Bavaria, along the Isar and Danube rivers.

They expected to find the telltale signs of centuries of Roman presence in the area—soldiers from the Mediterranean leaving their genetic mark on the location population. Instead, it looked "very central or northern European—blond and fair-skinned, like modern-day Scandinavians," Burger said.

The exception was a group with deformed skulls. Known from various cultures across the world, artificially elongated skulls may have been considered a form of beauty or denoted high status because of the time and effort required to bandage a child's head, said Burger.

While the practice is often associated with the Huns who swept into Europe from the East during the 5th century, the genetic makeup of the women found in Bavaria showed little Asian ancestry, suggesting that either head binding had been adopted by people living in southeastern Europe or emerged there independently.

"This is a sound study with quite interesting results," said Jean-Jacques Hublin of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. He had no role in the research.

"Usually large-distance movements involve more males—explorers, soldiers, political elite, etc.—and short range movements are more common for females (spouses moving to their husband's family)," Hublin said via email.

While it's unclear why the women—apparently without men—traveled such a long distance, the study's authors speculate that they may have represented strategic alliances between distant populations across Europe.

"They must have come on purpose," said Burger. "It's not a single case, there are quite a few of them."

Despite their foreign origins, the women integrated into Bavarian society, according to the researchers. They wore the same clothes as the locals and were buried with the same artifacts. Burger said further research is needed to see whether the women intermarried with the local population.

Author: Frank Jordans | Source: The Associated Press [March 12, 2018]

In a multidisciplinary study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an international team of researchers combined archaeological, genetic and stable isotope data to encapsulate 4000 years of Iberian biomolecular prehistory.

El Portalón cave in the Sierra de Atapuerca (northern Spain) contains four millennia of biomolecular prehistory [Credit: Eneko Iriarte (Universidad de Burgos)]

The team analyzed human remains of 13 individuals from the north and south of Spain, including the rich archaeological site of El Portalón, which forms part of the well-known site of Atapuerca in Burgos and in itself harbors four millennia of Iberian prehistory. The study also involved important sites like Cueva de los Murciélagos in Andalusia, from which the genome of a 7,245 year-old Neolithic farmer was sequenced, making it the oldest sequenced genome in southern Iberia representing the Neolithic Almagra Pottery Culture—the early agriculturalists of southern Spain.

Background

Prehistoric migrations have played an important role in shaping the genetic makeup of European populations. After the last glacial maximum about 20,000 years ago, Europe was inhabited by hunter-gatherer groups and two major migrations during the last 10,000 years had massive impacts on lifestyle and gene pool of European populations. First, groups originally coming from the Middle East and Anatolia introduced farming practices to Europe during the Neolithic. Less than 5,000 years ago, herder groups from the Pontic-Caspian steppe spread over the European continent. As both of these movements originated in the east, the most western parts of the continent were last to be reached by these migrations. While archaeogenetic studies have shown that both of these migrations have replaced more than half of the gene pool in Central and Northern Europe, much less is known about the influence of these events in Iberian populations, particularly in the most southern areas such as Andalusia.

Two independent migrations spread farming practices across Europe

The first farmers mainly reached Iberia following a coastal route through the northern Mediterranean Sea. The new study demonstrates that Neolithic Iberians show genetic differences to the migrant farmers that settled in Central and Northern Europe. "This suggests that all early farmers in Iberia trace most of their ancestry to the first Neolithic people that migrated into the peninsula and that later contributions from their central European counterparts were only minor," says archaeogeneticist Cristina Valdiosera from La Trobe University in Australia, one of the lead authors of the study.

Skeletal remains of a 7245-year-old Early Neolithic Farmer from Andalusia, Spain (Cueva de los Murciélagos)  sequenced in this study. 1) Diagram of funerary position, 2) Skull of the individual, 3) Funerary remains as discovered in the cave [Credit: Rafael Martínez-Sánchez (Universidad de Granada) and Antonio Moreno Rosa (Universidad de Córdoba)]

These Mediterranean route migrants show a strong genetic connection with the modern-day inhabitants of the Mediterranean island of Sardinia. "We can probably consider modern Sardinians relatively direct descendants of the people who spread farming practices across the Mediterranean region around 8,000 years ago," adds Mattias Jakobsson, population geneticist at Uppsala University, Sweden and one of the senior authors of the study.

First wave of eastern migration involved small number of individuals

Despite other potential entrances into Iberia, such as North Africa or mainland Europe, the researchers did not find substantial regional differences within Iberia. Uppsala University's Torsten Günther, population geneticist and one of the lead authors of this study, says, "While geographic differences seem minor, we do see some differences over time due to interaction and genetic exchange between groups." The first Iberian farmers show remarkably low levels of genetic diversity, indicating that the first wave of eastern migration to establish itself on the peninsula was relatively small. Following this initial period of low diversity, the newly arrived populations grew in size and mixed with the local hunter-gatherers, rapidly increasing genetic diversity during later periods.

Low genetic impact of later/Bronze Age migrations in Iberia While recent studies have demonstrated that a massive migration of Pontic-Caspian steppe herders during the Late Neolithic/Bronze Age transition is responsible for a major population turnover in central and northern Europe, the authors report in this study that the genetic influence of this migration on contemporary southwestern Europeans, namely the prehistoric Iberians, was only minor. This confirms that the genetic history of Iberia was unique as it has mostly been influenced by the main prehistoric migration associated with the introduction of farming practices—the Neolithic Revolution.

Representation of an Iberian Neolithic farmer [Credit: Maria de la Fuente (Maria de la Fuente Archaeological Illustrations)]

Homogenous diet in Iberian farmers

The authors also investigated the diet of these Neolithic farmers throughout almost 4000 years corroborating that despite the significant biological interaction between culturally different groups the farming culture predominated from the very beginning and continued over time. Molecular archaeologist Colin Smith from La Trobe University, one of the senior authors, explains: "Interestingly, while we do see a substantial genetic influx of hunter-gatherer ancestry into farmers over time, the diet of these early farmers does not change. Their terrestrial diet is characteristic of farming cultures and persist temporally and geographically across the millennia."

The study illustrates the power of interdisciplinary research to understand the full complexity of European prehistory. "Overall, these results emphasize the differences between the westernmost populations and their central European counterparts and highlight the need for detailed regional studies to reveal the full complexity of prehistoric migrations," Dr. Valdiosera concludes.

Source: Uppsala University [March 12, 2018]

Researchers from The Australian National University (ANU) have helped put together the most comprehensive study ever conducted into the origins of people in Vanuatu -- regarded as a geographic gateway from Asia to the Remote Pacific.

Burial excavations on Uripiv Island Malakula [Cretit: ANU]

The new research, published across two separate research papers, uses a combination of DNA analyses of ancient skeletons and modern samples, as well as archaeological evidence, to put together a complete timeline of migration to the island nation.

The results confirm that Vanuatu's first people were of the Lapita culture and arrived 3,000 years ago from South East Asia, followed by Papuan arrivals from the island of New Britain, in the Bismarck Archipelago just to the east of New Guinea and part of the nation of Papua New Guinea.

Dr Stuart Bedford of the ANU School of Culture History and Language said this was the first time researchers had been able to look at a full sequence of DNA samples from the Vanuatu islands.

"We've been able to track a complete genetic timeline at regular intervals starting with the first inhabitants right through to modern times," Dr Bedford said.

"The very first generation of people into Vanuatu are primarily Asian, then very quickly you see a series of migrations of Papuan people from the Bismarck Archipelago who had been living in the region for around 50,000 years.

"That trend continues over the next 3,000 years right up until today as the genetic ancestry was mostly replaced by that of Papuan migrants. The people of Vanuatu today, like many peoples of the Pacific, can claim a dual heritage."

Anciant skeleton at the Teouma site on Efate [Credit: ANU]

Co Researcher Professor Matthew Spriggs of the ANU School of Archaeology and Anthropology said for the first time researchers could determine exactly where these Papuan migration groups came from.

"They came from New Britain, a Papuan island just east of New Guinea," Professor Spriggs said.

"This makes sense. New Britain has some of the earliest known Lapita sites.

"So what we think happened is that Lapita people after arriving in New Britain moved fairly directly on to Vanuatu and encouraged some of the local populations already in place on New Britain to move there as well."

Dr Bedford said the strength of the Lapita culture was evident in the continuity of the language.

"The Lapita people who originally came to Vanuatu from South East Asia spoke a form of Austronesian," Dr Bedford said.

"That language persisted and over 120 descendant languages continue to be spoken today, making Vanuatu the most linguistically diverse place on Earth per capita.

"This is a unique case, where a population's genetic ancestry was replaced but its languages continued."

The two papers were published in the Nature Ecology & Evolution and Current Biology journals respectively.

The study team was made up of researchers from around the world including at the ANU, the Vanuatu National Museum, Harvard Medical School and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.

Source: Australian National University [March 09, 2018]

Homo naledi's relatively taller and more wear resistant molars enabled it to have a much more abrasive diet than other South African hominins. This is the result of a recent study published in the Journal of Human Evolution by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, the University of Durham in the United Kingdom and the University of Arkansas in the United States. The researchers conclude that Homo naledi may have eaten a much grittier diet than other South African hominins.

Molar wear resistance of two older South African hominins (Australopithecus africanus and Paranthropus robustus) and Homo naledi: Darker colours indicate more wear resistant areas of the tooth, and lighter colours indicate less wear resistant areas [Credit: MPI f. Evolutionary Anthropology]

Mammals that eat foods that need to be cut, like leaves and grasses, have sharper, more complex molars (i.e. more cusps and crests) , while mammals that eat foods that need to be crushed, like fruits and nuts, have duller, less complex molars. The researchers used a technique known as dental topography to measure molar sharpness, complexity, and other aspects of tooth shape in South African hominins to reconstruct the diet of Homo naledi.

The researchers found no difference in sharpness or complexity between the molars of Homo naledi and other South African hominins, implying they ate foods with similar mechanical properties. However, Homo naledi did have relatively taller, more wear resistant molars than other South African hominins, suggesting its teeth were adapted to consume foods that wore its teeth faster. "We think that Homo naledi must have been eating foods covered in dust or grit, or possibly ate plants containing lots of defensive silica particles, known as phytoliths," said Michael Berthaume of the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology and Durham University, one of the authors of the study.

Protection from gritty diets

Plants produce phytoliths or 'plant stones' to try and prevent animals from eating too much of them. Animals such as grass-eating antelopes living in dry, and hence gritty, environments have high crowned molars to enable them to eat diets heavy in plant stones and grit without wearing their teeth away too much.

The findings of the present study suggest that Homo naledi may have evolved a similar strategy, and hence was eating a different diet to that of other South African hominins. "This lends support to the idea that Homo naledi, with its mixture of traits from earlier and later hominins, was ecologically distinct to other South African hominins," Berthaume added.

Source: Max Planck Society [March 07, 2018]

Trepanation – the technique of removing bone from the skull by scraping, sawing, drilling or chiselling – has long fascinated those interested in the darker side of medical history. One stock tale is that trepanning is one of the most ancient treatments for migraines. As I study the history of the migraine, it certainly has always caught my attention.

Credit: Shutterstock

The word trepanation comes from the Greek trypanon, meaning a borer. The earliest known trepanned skulls date from around 10,000 BCE, and come from North Africa. There are trepanation accounts in the Hippocratic texts (5th century BCE), when it was used in cases of fracture, epilepsy or paralysis, and in the second century CE Galen wrote of his experiments with trepanation on animals in his clinical studies.

But the reasons for trepanning remain largely unknown. While the famous 17th-century physician William Harvey may have suggested that the procedure was used for migraines, recent authors have acknowledged that there is little evidence to suggest this. So where did this persistent idea come from?

Migraines and fairies

The real source of the myth seems to have come much later. In 1902, the Journal of Mental Science published a lecture by Sir Thomas Lauder Brunton, a London physician well-known for his work on pharmacology and ideas about migraine pathology. The lecture mixed neurological theory and armchair anthropology, and ranged over subjects including premonitions, telepathy, hypnotism, hallucinations, and epileptic and migrainous aura. In one notable passage, Brunton proposed that visions of fairies and the sound of their jingling bells were “nothing more” than the zigzags of migraine aura, and the aural results of nerve centre stimulation.

Brunton proposed that openings bored into ancient Stone Age skulls during life had been made to cure migraine. His suggestion followed considerable excitement during the 1870s when the French physician and anthropologist Paul Broca claimed that ancient skulls discovered in Peru and France had not only been opened surgically during life in order to release evil spirits, but that the patients had survived. To Brunton, it seemed obvious that the holes would have been made at the request of migraine sufferers in order to “let the headache out”. He wrote: "For when the pain of headache becomes almost unbearably severe, an instinctive desire sometimes arises either to strike the place violently in the hope of relieving the pain, or to wish that some operation could be done to remove the pain."

Inca skull showing trepanning [Credit: © Wellcome Collection]

The French surgeon Just Lucas-Champonnière had claimed in 1878 that some South Sea islanders still performed a similar procedure but, essentially, Brunton’s ideas about trepanning were as imaginative as his thoughts on fairies.

Nevertheless, the theory gained traction. In 1913, the world-famous American physician William Osler repeated that trepanation operations had been used “for epilepsy, infantile convulsions, headache and various cerebral diseases believed to be caused by confined demons”. By 1931, T Wilson Parry (who was partial to the odd experiment of his own) reasoned in The Lancet that as the large numbers of trepanned skulls found throughout France could not all be accounted for by epilepsy, the procedure must also have been used to cast out “other devils”. He proposed that this included disorders with “exasperating” head symptoms such as migraine, giddiness, “and distracting noises of the head”.

A ‘burr hole’

If Victorian theories about ancient trepanation for migraine were largely speculative, there is evidence of cutting holes in skulls for migraine somewhat closer to home. In 1936, Alfred Goltman, a physician from Tennessee, observed something strange about a woman with migraine that he was treating for allergies.

In the left frontal region of her skull, the woman had a depression, an inch in diameter, with a marked concentration of blood vessels. Four years earlier, she had been admitted to the care of Dr Raphael Eustace Semmes, the first neurosurgeon in Memphis, who had trained under Harvey Cushing, the American “father” of modern neurosurgery. Semmes had drilled a small circular opening known as a “burr hole” during one of the woman’s severe headaches, while she was under local anaesthetic. As he opened the thick membrane surrounding the brain, “a quantity of fluid escaped under increased pressure”. There was no evidence of a tumour.

This now seems a troubling era in experimental interventionist neurosurgery. Between the 1890s and the 1920s, some surgeons believed that brain surgery could “cure” inherited criminal tendencies. Children referred by juvenile courts were operated on in an attempt to release “pressure on the brain”, a procedure with a mortality rate of up to 42%. By the 1930s, frontal lobotomy was emerging as a treatment for mental illness.

Semmes’ patient survived the surgery, but her migraine headaches did not stop. Goltman noticed that during her headaches the depression left by the surgery began to fill up. As the migraine attack ended, the swelling would recede. Goltman’s observations helped influence the widespread acceptance of a theory that would dominate understanding of migraine until the 1970s: that the origin of migraine headache must be vascular, characterised by dilation of the blood vessels during the attack.

While we now see migraine as neurological, much still remains to be discovered about its causes and mechanisms in the brain. In some ways, trepanning does seem a logical response to the intense pain of migraine. As Andrew Levy notes in his memoir: “The migraining head wants to be cut open; it longs to be cut open.” This does not, of course, mean that it should be.

Author: Katherine Foxhall | Source: The Conversation [March 06, 2018]

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

A team of scientists including researchers from Washington State University has shown for the first time that nicotine residue can be extracted from plaque, also known as "dental calculus," on the teeth of ancient tobacco users.

This is a 1945 picture of a Yokuts Native American woman smoking a pipe [Credit: Clifford Relander]

Their research provides a new method for determining who was consuming tobacco in the ancient world and could help trace the use of tobacco and other intoxicating plants further back into prehistory.

"The ability to identify nicotine and other plant-based drugs in ancient dental plaque could help us answer longstanding questions about the consumption of intoxicants by ancient humans," said Shannon Tushingham, a WSU assistant professor of anthropology and co-author of a new study on the research in Journal of Archaeological Science Reports. "For example, it could help us determine whether all members of society used tobacco, or only adults, or only males or females."

A new source of information

Tracing the ancient spread of tobacco in the Americas has traditionally relied on the presence of pipes, charred tobacco seeds and the analysis of hair and fecal matter. However, these items are rare in the archeological record and are hard to link to particular individuals. As a result, tobacco use has been difficult to document archeologically.

On the other hand, dental plaque adheres to the surfaces of teeth and mineralizes over time, preserving a wide range of substances that are in the mouth. It is easy to link to particular individuals because it can be removed directly from teeth.

Nevertheless, dental plaque was largely ignored by archaeologists until recently.

However, using modern and highly sensitive instrumentation, scientists have found they can detect and characterize trace amounts of a wide variety of compounds, including proteins, bacterial DNA, starch grains and other plant fibers in dental plaque.

Because nicotine is detectable in the dental plaque of contemporary smokers, Tushingham and her collaborators wanted to find out if it also preserved in plaque taken from people who lived long ago.

She and David Gang, a professor in the WSU Institute of Biological Chemistry, Korey Brownstein, a graduate student in the WSU Molecular Plant Sciences Program, and Jelmer Eerkens, an anthropologist at the University of California, Davis, collaborated with members from the Ohlone tribe in San Francisco Bay to extract plaque from the teeth of eight individuals, buried between 6,000 and 300 years ago, and analyze it for nicotine.

Using ordinary dental picks, Eerkens and his team at UC Davis extracted the dental plaque from the ancient teeth and then sent it to Tushingham and Gang's labs at WSU for analysis. The WSU researchers used liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry to test the samples for nicotine and other plant-based drugs like caffeine and atropine, a muscle-relaxant.

Among the samples they analyzed, two tested positive for nicotine, demonstrating for the first time that the drug can survive in detectable amounts in ancient plaque. One of these individuals, an adult man, was also buried with a pipe. A surprise came from the molar of an older woman, which also tested positive for nicotine.

"While we can't make any broad conclusions with this single case, her age, sex, and use of tobacco is intriguing," Eerkens said. "She was probably past child-bearing age, and likely a grandmother. This supports recent research suggesting that younger adult women in traditional societies avoid plant toxins like nicotine to protect infants from harmful biochemicals, but that older women can consume these intoxicants as needed or desired."

While the researchers did not detect evidence of any other plant-based drugs in this particular study, they believe dental plaque could be used help trace the use and spread of other intoxicants as well.

"We think a wide variety of plant-based, intoxicating chemicals could be detected in ancient dental plaque," Brownstein said. "It really opens up a lot of interesting avenues of discovery."

Author: Will Ferguson | Source: Washington State University [February 27, 2018]

New genetic research reveals the complex demographic history of Vanuatu, explaining how Austronesian languages were retained throughout its history despite near-total replacement of early Austronesian-Lapita with Papuan ancestry

Young men in canoes in Northwest Malakula, Vanuatu [Credit: Russell Gray & Heidi Colleran]

The study, published in Nature Ecology & Evolution and led by a multidisciplinary research team at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPI-SHH) together with researchers in France, Australia, New Zealand, Germany and Vanuatu, reveals that migrations of people from the Bismarck Archipelago in Oceania to the previously settled islands of the Pacific began as early as 2,500 years ago, much earlier than previously thought. The Remote Oceanian island nation of Vanuatu is the gateway to the rest of the Pacific and understanding its demographic history is critical to uncovering that of the wider region.

The earliest inhabitants of Vanuatu, arriving about 3,000 years ago, were the Lapita peoples who spoke a form of Austronesian language and who had largely East Asian genetic ancestry. But Vanuatu's contemporary population has largely Near Oceanian heritage, showing that over time the genetic ancestry of the early inhabitants was mostly replaced by that of Bismarck Archipelago migrants, who began arriving very soon after initial settlement. Yet the original Austronesian language persisted and over 120 descendant languages continue to be spoken today, making Vanuatu the per capita most linguistically diverse place on Earth.

Vanuatu therefore presents an unprecedented case, where a population's genetic ancestry but not its languages were replaced. Through analyses of new ancient and modern genome-wide data, the researchers show that rather than occurring in one wave, the genetic replacement was long and complex, likely the result of a sustained long-distance contact between Near and Remote Oceania. This provides demographic support for a model from historical linguistics, in which the initial Austronesian language of Vanuatu survived by being continually adopted by incoming Papuan migrants.

The Austronesian Expansion, which began around 5,500 years ago likely in modern-day Taiwan, was the most geographically extensive dispersal of farming peoples in prehistory, ultimately carrying people as far west as Madagascar and all the way east to Rapa Nui. These seafaring Neolithic people initially expanded out across Island Southeast Asia, carrying farming technology and a major branch of the Austronesian language family, eventually reaching Near Oceania where they encountered the indigenous Papuan peoples of New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago.

Dr. Frédérique Valentin excavating at Uripiv Island, Malakula, Vanuatu [Credit: Stuart Bedford]

The initial settlement east beyond the Solomon Islands and out into Remote Oceania only began around 3,000 years ago, with Austronesian-speaking groups associated with the Lapita pottery culture rapidly expanding east out to Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji and the islands of Western Polynesia. A previous ancient DNA study of Lapita burial sites has shown that these earliest inhabitants had East Asian ancestry with negligible evidence of Papuan genetic admixture. But the present-day genetic make-up of Remote Oceania suggests at least some degree of Papuan ancestry, meaning there must have been subsequent Papuan migration and admixture into the Pacific from Near Oceania.

In order to understand this previously undescribed migration, a multidisciplinary team of researchers brought together different lines of evidence from the fields of genetics, archaeology and linguistics. They generated genome-wide data from the bones and teeth of 19 ancient individuals from across Vanuatu, Tonga, French Polynesia and the Solomon Islands, a significant addition to the ancient DNA record in a region whose environmental conditions generally leads to poor ancient DNA preservation.

As co-lead author Kathrin Nägele of the MPI-SHH says, "The identification of the petrous bone, which has recently been shown to provide fantastic aDNA preservation, has been a real game changer for such regions that were previously considered to be almost inaccessible." The ancient DNA was complemented by new contemporary genome-wide data from 27 present-day inhabitants of Vanuatu, collected as part of a long-term linguistic and anthropological fieldwork project run by co-authors Professor Russell Gray and Dr. Heidi Colleran of the MPI-SHH.

The ancient DNA provided direct evidence that Papuan people began arriving in Vanuatu soon after initial settlement by Austronesians. "We found a genetically Papuan-related individual dating to around 2,500 years ago in Vanuatu, far earlier than had been previously estimated using only modern genetic data," explains co-lead author Dr. Cosimo Posth, also of the MPI-SHH. The researchers were able to show that the ancestry of the initial Austronesian inhabitants of Vanuatu has been largely replaced by ancestry from Papuan peoples coming from the Bismarck Archipelago.

Maps showing the migrations in the area, including, in the final map, the migrations  revealed by the current study [Credit: Hans Sell, adapted from Skoglund et al. Genomic insights into the peopling of the Southwest Pacific. Nature (2016)]

But this genetic replacement was not straightforward, as Dr. Posth says, "Our analyses show that this replacement did not occur in a one-time mass migration event but rather happened incrementally over time, suggesting an enduring long-distance network between groups in Near and Remote Oceania." The authors also directly described ancient individuals with sex-biased admixture, where Papuan males intermixed with Austronesian women, as long assumed based on analyses of the modern genetic make-up of the South Pacific.

Yet despite this genetic replacement, the people of present-day Vanuatu continue to speak languages descended from those spoken by the initial Austronesian inhabitants rather than any Papuan language of the incoming migrants. As Professor Gray, Director of the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the MPI-SHH, says, "Population replacement with language continuity is extremely rare -- if not unprecedented -- in human history.

The linguist Bob Blust has long argued for a model in which a separate Papuan expansion reaches Vanuatu soon after initial Austronesian settlement, with the initial, and likely undifferentiated, Austronesian language surviving as a lingua franca for diverse Papuan migrant groups." Dr. Adam Powell, senior author of the study and also of the MPI-SHH, continues, "The demographic history suggested by our ancient DNA analyses provides really strong support for this historical linguistic model, with the early arrival and complex, incremental process of genetic replacement by people from the Bismarck Archipelago. This provides a compelling explanation for the continuity of Austronesian languages despite the almost complete replacement of the initial genetic ancestry of Vanuatu."

The study in particular highlights the importance of interdisciplinary work and the value that multiple lines of evidence can have in deepening our understanding of human history. As Professor Johannes Krause, a senior author and Director of the Department of Archaeogenetics at the MPI-SHH, explains, "This multidisciplinary work has begun to uncover the complex, localized demographic processes that drove the initial colonization of the wider South Pacific and formed the enduring cultural and linguistic spheres that continue to shape the Pacific today." Ongoing engagement with local communities in Vanuatu, as well as with the Vanuatu Cultural Center, has been critical to this success.

As Dr. Colleran points out, "One strength of this study is the degree to which we are collaborating with communities in Vanuatu who have a real stake in these results and who generously volunteered their data to help answer these questions. We will be back in the field very soon to share the results with those communities and to hear their thoughts on the whole process." The progress of this continuing fieldwork can be followed on the Nature Ecology & Evolution Community website.

Source: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History [February 27, 2018]

In an ancient DNA study published this week in the journal Nature, scientists and archaeologists from over 80 different institutions lift the veil on the genomic history of Southeastern Europe, a region from which very little ancient genetic data has been available until now. This is the second-largest ancient DNA study ever reported. (The largest, reported simultaneously in Nature by many of the same authors, focuses on the prehistory of Northwestern Europe.)

The burial fields of Varna, Bulgaria, is famous for its rich burial gifts. In one of the 6,500 year old graves more gold was found than in all other graves at this time. Genetic examinations show that the DNA of the man buried there had similiarities with the DNA of earlier European famers [Credit: © I, Yelkrokoyade, commons.wikimedia.org, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Starting around 8,500 years ago, agriculture spread into Europe from the southeast, accompanied by a movement of people from Anatolia. This study reports data from the genomes of 225 ancient people who lived both before and after this transition, and documents the interaction and mixing of these two genetically different groups of people. “Southeastern Europe was the beachhead in the spread of farming from Anatolia into Europe. This study is the first to provide a rich genetic characterization of this process by showing how the indigenous population interacted with incoming Asian immigrants at this extraordinary moment in the past,” says Songül Alpaslan-Roodenberg, a consulting anthropologist at Harvard Medical School, who identified and sampled many of the skeletons.

“In some places, hunter-gatherers and incoming farmers seem to have mixed very quickly,” says first author Iain Mathieson, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania, “but mostly the two groups remained isolated, at least for the first few hundred years. These hunter-gatherers had been living there for thousands of years, and it must have been quite a shock to have these new people show up—with a completely different lifestyle and appearance.”

“Three thousand years later, they were thoroughly mixed,” continues David Reich of Harvard Medical School, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, who co-directed the study. “Some populations derived up to a quarter of their ancestry from hunter-gatherers.” In other parts of Europe, this mixing was marked by a so-called sex bias, with most of the hunter-gatherer ancestry contributed by men. In the southeast, however, the pattern was different. “This shows that the mode of interaction between the two groups was different in different places, something we need to try to understand in the context of the archaeological evidence,” added Mathieson.

The new paper also dramatically increases the number of samples from the population of hunter-gatherers that inhabited Europe before the farmers. The study reports a particularly rich sampling of forty hunter-gatherers and early farmers from six archaeological sites from the Iron Gates region, which straddles the border of present-day Romania and Serbia. The genetic results show that the region witnessed intensive interaction between hunter-gatherers and farmers. Out of four individuals from the site of Lepenski Vir, for example, two had entirely Anatolian farmer-related ancestry, fitting with isotope evidence that they were migrants from outside the Iron Gates region, while a third individual had a mixture of ancestries and consumed aquatic resources, as expected if farmers were being integrated into hunter-gatherer groups or were adopting a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

“These results reveal the relationship between migrations, admixture and subsistence in the this key region and show that even within early European farmers, individuals differed in their ancestry, reflecting a dynamic mosaic of hunter-farmer interbreeding,” adds Ron Pinhasi, an anthropologist at the University for Vienna, who co-directed the study.

The new paper also reports ancient DNA from the people who lived at iconic archaeological sites such as Varna, one of the first places in the world where there is evidence of extreme wealth inequality, with one individual from whom the study obtained data buried with more gold than all other known burials of the period. “The DNA from the famous Varna burial is genetically similar to that of other early European farmers. However, we also find one individual from Varna and several individuals at neighboring sites in Bulgaria who had ancestry from the eastern European steppe. This is the earliest evidence of steppe ancestry this far west—two thousand years before the mass migration from the steppe that replaced more than half of the population of northern Europe,” says Johannes Krause, Director of the Department of Archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, who led the work on Varna.

Adds Reich, “These very large ancient DNA studies, involving intense collaboration between geneticists and archaeologists, make it possible to build up a rich picture of key periods of the past that could only be weakly glimpsed before. Studies on this scale represent a coming of age for the field of ancient DNA—I look forward to what we will learn when similar approaches are applied elsewhere in the world.”

Source: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft [February 23, 2018]

Even our earliest human ancestors made and used technology - something we can look back on thanks to the lasting nature of stone tools.

Researchers work on the archaeological site in Spain, known as Porto Maior, where the tool deposits were found [Credit: Eduardo Méndez Quintas, Author provided]

An exceptionally high density of giant handaxes dated to 200,000-300,000 years ago has been uncovered at an archaeological site in Galicia, northwest Spain. The findings are documented in a new article published by our international research team of archaeologists and dating specialists.

The discovery of these handaxes suggests that alternative types of stone tool technologies were simultaneously being used by different populations in this area – supporting the idea that a prehistoric “Game of Thrones” scenario existed as Neanderthals emerged in Europe.

Additional evidence for this idea comes from fossil records showing that multiple human lineages lived in southwest Europe around the same time period.

Stone tool technology

Porto Maior is near the town of As Neves (Pontevedra, Galcia) on a terrace 34m above the current level of the Miño River, which borders northern Portugal and Spain.

The large tools are consistent with a culture known as Acheulean [Credit: Eduardo Mendez Quintas, Author provided]

The archaeological site at Porto Maior preserves an ancient stone tool culture known as the Acheulean. Characterised by symmetrically knapped stones or large flakes (known as bifaces), the Acheulean is the first sophisticated handaxe technology known in the early human settlement record of Europe.

While Acheulean sites are widespread across the continent, Porto Maior represents Europe’s first extensive accumulation of large cutting tools (LCTs) in the Acheulean tradition. Until now, such high densities of LCTs had only been found in Africa. This new finding reinforces an African origin for the Acheulean in Europe, and confirms an overlap in time-frames of distinctly different stone tool cultures on the continent.


At around the same time that handaxes were being used at Porto Maior, a different stone tool tradition (the Early Middle Palaeolithic) was present in Iberia, for example at Ambrona and Cuesta de la Bajada. In central and eastern Europe – where tools were made exclusively on small flakes – the Acheulean tradition has never been found.

Porto Maior introduces further complexity to this overlapping technological pattern, and suggests that distinct early human populations of different geographical origins coexisted during the Middle Pleistocene (between 773,000 and 125,000 years ago).

Abundant large cutting tools

In total, 3,698 discarded artefacts were recovered from river-lain sediments at the site, with 290 of these making up the studied assemblage reported in our new paper.

The stone tool assemblage is composed of 101 LCTs in original position, and that are on average 18cm long, with a maximum length of 27cm. These handaxe dimensions are exceptionally large by European Acheulean standards (typically only 8-15cm long). The assemblage also contains large cleavers, a type of tool typically found in African sites.


At 9.5 pieces per m² in an excavated area of more than 11.8m², the density of the Acheulean stone tool accumulation is one of the highest recorded globally, surpassing previous European findings of smaller Acheulean tools (usually less than 3 artefacts per m²).

Laboratory analyses indicate that the tools were used to process hard materials such wood and bone, in activities that could have included the breaking up of carcasses.

The Spanish site of Porto Maior clearly resembles extensive accumulations of very large tools previously only seen in Africa and the Near East. These similarities reinforce the idea of an African origin for the Acheulean tradition of southwest Europe.

They also raise new questions regarding the origin and mobility of prehistoric human populations – the ancestors of Neanderthals – that occupied the European continent during the Middle Pleistocene period before the arrival of our own species, Homo sapiens.

Dating the tools

The age of these unusually large Acheulean tools at Porto Maior was determined using two different dating methods – post-infrared infrared stimulated luminescence (pIR-IRSL) dating of potassium feldspar grains and electron spin resonance (ESR) dating of quartz grains.

Luminescence dating samples being measured under controlled lighting conditions at the University of Adelaide’s Prescott Environmental Luminescence Laboratory [Credit: Lee Arnold]

These techniques provide an estimate of the last time sand grains within sediments were exposed to sunlight, by looking at their luminescence or paramagnetic properties – that is, they can tell us the timing of sediment burial. This, in turn, can be used to determine when the site was last occupied and when the artefacts discarded by prehistoric populations were subsequently buried by sediment accumulation.

In the study of Porto Maior, pIR-IRSL and ESR dating were applied to grains that had been carefully collected from the sediment layers hosting the stone tools, without exposing the sample material to daylight.

The two methods, which were applied independently at two different Australian institutions (University of Adelaide and Griffith University), produced remarkably similar ages.

This confirms the reliability of the dating results, and indicates that the archaeological record spanned the time period from 200,000 to 300,000 years ago.

Migration from Africa

The Acheulean tool-making tradition originated in Africa about 1.7 million years ago, and disappeared on that continent by 500,000 years ago. The specific type of Acheulean tools described at Porto Maior is exclusive to southwest Europe, suggesting that the technology was brought into the region by an “intrusive” population.

Acheulean tools in their primary position at Porto Maior, Spain [Credit: Eduardo Mendez-Quintas, CC BY]

The age of Porto Maior is consistent with previous findings from Iberia that suggest that the Acheulean culture experienced an expansion in the region between 400,000 to 200,000 years ago.

This latest discovery supports the increasingly complex narrative developing from ongoing studies of human fossils from Europe; namely that human groups of potentially different origins and evolutionary stages coexisted across the continent during a time when the emergence of Neanderthals was taking place.

While it is clear that more human fossil and stone tool sites need to be reliably dated across the region, a picture appears to be emerging of a turbulent “Game of Thrones” style scenario of hominin evolution in Eurasia during the Middle Pleistocene period.

Authors: Martina Demuro, Lee Arnold And Mathieu Duval | Source: The Conversation [February 23, 2018]

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Scientists have found the first major evidence that Neanderthals, rather than modern humans, created the world's oldest known cave paintings -- suggesting they may have had an artistic sense similar to our own.

Panel 3 in Maltravieso Cave showing 3 hand stencils (centre right, centre top and top left). One has been dated to at least 66,000 years ago and must have been made by a Neanderthal (colour enhanced) [Credit: H. Collado]

A new study led by the University of Southampton and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology shows that paintings in three caves in Spain were created more than 64,000 years ago -- 20,000 years before modern humans arrived in Europe.

This means that the Palaeolithic (Ice Age) cave art -- including pictures of animals, dots and geometric signs -- must have been made by Neanderthals, a 'sister' species to Homo sapiens, and Europe's sole human inhabitants at the time.

It also indicates that they thought symbolically, like modern humans.

Published in the journal Science, the study reveals how an international team of scientists used a state-of-the-art technique called uranium-thorium dating to fix the age of the paintings as more than 64,000 years.

Until now, cave art has been attributed entirely to modern humans, as claims to a possible Neanderthal origin have been hampered by imprecise dating techniques. However, uranium-thorium dating provides much more reliable results than methods such as radiocarbon dating, which can give false age estimates.

Panel 78 in La Pasiega. The scalariform (ladder shape) composed of red horizontal and vertical lines dates to older than 64,000 years and was made by Neanderthals [Credit: C.D Standish, A.W.G. Pike and D.L. Hoffmann]

The uranium-thorium method involves dating tiny carbonate deposits that have built up on top of the cave paintings. These contain traces of the radioactive elements uranium and thorium, which indicate when the deposits formed -- and therefore give a minimum age for whatever lies beneath.

Joint lead author Dr Chris Standish, an archaeologist at the University of Southampton, said: "This is an incredibly exciting discovery which suggests Neanderthals were much more sophisticated than is popularly believed.

"Our results show that the paintings we dated are, by far, the oldest known cave art in the world, and were created at least 20,000 years before modern humans arrived in Europe from Africa -- therefore they must have been painted by Neanderthals."

A team of researchers from the UK, Germany, Spain and France analysed more than 60 carbonate samples from three cave sites in Spain -- La Pasiega (north-eastern Spain), Maltravieso (western Spain) and Ardales (south-western Spain).

The ladder shape composed of red horizontal and vertical lines (centre left) dates to older than 64,000 years and was made by Neanderthals [Credit: © P. Saura]

All three caves contain red (ochre) or black paintings of groups of animals, dots and geometric signs, as well as hand stencils, hand prints and engravings.

According to the researchers, creating the art must have involved such sophisticated behaviour as the choosing of a location, planning of light source and mixing of pigments.

Alistair Pike, Professor of Archaeological Sciences at the University of Southampton and co-director of the study, said: "Soon after the discovery of the first of their fossils in the 19th century, Neanderthals were portrayed as brutish and uncultured, incapable of art and symbolic behaviour, and some of these views persist today.

"The issue of just how human-like Neanderthals behaved is a hotly debated issue. Our findings will make a significant contribution to that debate."

Joint lead author Dirk Hoffmann, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, added that symbolic material culture -- a collection of cultural and intellectual achievements handed down from generation to generation -- has, until now, only been attributed to our species.

Drawing of Panel 78 in La Pasiega by Breuil et al (1913). The red scalariform (ladder) symbol has a minimum age of 64,000 years but it is unclear if the animals and other symbols were painted later [Credit: Breuil et al.]

"The emergence of symbolic material culture represents a fundamental threshold in the evolution of humankind. It is one of the main pillars of what makes us human," he said.

"Artefacts whose functional value lies not so much in their practical but rather in their symbolic use are proxies for fundamental aspects of human cognition as we know it."

Early symbolic artefacts, dating back 70,000 years, have been found in Africa but are associated with modern humans.

Other artefacts including cave art, sculpted figures, decorated bone tools and jewellery have been found in Europe, dating back 40,000 years. But researchers have concluded that these artefacts must have been created by modern humans who were spreading across Europe after their arrival from Africa.


There is evidence that Neanderthals in Europe used body ornamentation around 40,000 to 45,000 years ago, but many researchers have suggested this was inspired by modern humans who at the time had just arrived in Europe.

Study co-author Paul Pettitt, of Durham University, commented: "Neanderthals created meaningful symbols in meaningful places. The art is not a one-off accident.

"We have examples in three caves 700km apart, and evidence that it was a long-lived tradition. It is quite possible that similar cave art in other caves in Western Europe is of Neanderthal origin as well."

Source: University of Southampton [February 22, 2018]

Prehistoric Iberians 'exported' their culture throughout Europe, reaching Great Britain, Sicily, Poland and all over central Europe in general. However, they did not export their genes. The Beaker culture, which probably originated in Iberia, left remains in those parts of the continent.

Iberian beakers [Credit: Museo de Almeria]

However, that diffusion was not due to large migrations of populations that took this culture with them. These are the conclusions of an international study in which the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) was involved. Its findings, published in the journal Nature, indicate no evidence of any genetic outflow from Iberia to those areas has been discovered.

"Therefore, the diffusion of the Beaker culture from Iberia is the first example of a culture being transmitted as an idea, basically due to a question of social prestige (since it was associated with the virtues of being virile and of being warriors), which is why it is adopted by other populations," indicates researcher Carles Lalueza-Fox, from the Institute of Evolutionary Biology, a mixed research centre run by CSIC and the Pompeu Fabra University, in Barcelona, Spain.

Between 4,700 and 4,400 years ago, a new type of bell-shaped beaker pottery was introduced throughout western and central Europe. For more than a century, archaeologists have been trying to determine whether the spread of this beaker pottery -- and the (Beaker) culture associated with it -- represented a large-scale migration or whether it was due simply to the exchange of new ideas.

Now, this new study, which includes DNA data from 400 prehistoric skeletons collected from sites across Europe, resolves the debate of whether the spread was due to migrations or ideas, indicating that both arguments are correct. The findings show that the culture which produced these bell-shaped beakers extended from Iberia to central Europe without a significant movement of populations, although the Beaker culture would spread to other places through migrations at a later date.

The study, whose first author is the Spanish researcher Inigo Olalde, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, shows that once the (Bell) Beaker culture reaches the centre of Europe (around Germany and its surrounding area), it expands backwards to other places, notably to the British Isles. Yet, in this case, it does represent a migration, replacing around 90% of the population with it.

"That is to say, the Neolithic people who built Stonehenge (and who had a greater genetic similarity with Neolithic Iberians than with those from Central Europe) almost disappear and are replaced by the populations from the Beaker culture from the Netherlands and Germany. This replacement is almost absolute in terms of the Y chromosome, which is transmitted by the paternal line, indicating an extreme reproductive bias, and therefore a previously unheard of social dominance. The backward flow also reaches other places such as Italy (at least in the north) and Iberia. I believe it is possible that this is also associated with the expansion of the Celtic or Proto-Celtic languages," Mr. Lalueza-Fox points out.

Coordinated by researcher David Reich from Harvard University, the study was developed by an international team of 144 archaeologists and geneticists from institutions in Europe and the United States.

Source: Spanish National Research Council [February 21, 2018]

When and where did humans develop language? To find out, look deep inside caves, suggests an MIT professor.

Stock image of a cave painting in South Africa [Credit: MIT]

More precisely, some specific features of cave art may provide clues about how our symbolic, multifaceted language capabilities evolved, according to a new paper co-authored by MIT linguist Shigeru Miyagawa.

A key to this idea is that cave art is often located in acoustic “hot spots,” where sound echoes strongly, as some scholars have observed. Those drawings are located in deeper, harder-to-access parts of caves, indicating that acoustics was a principal reason for the placement of drawings within caves. The drawings, in turn, may represent the sounds that early humans generated in those spots.

In the new paper, this convergence of sound and drawing is what the authors call a “cross-modality information transfer,” a convergence of auditory information and visual art that, the authors write, “allowed early humans to enhance their ability to convey symbolic thinking.” The combination of sounds and images is one of the things that characterizes human language today, along with its symbolic aspect and its ability to generate infinite new sentences.

“Cave art was part of the package deal in terms of how homo sapiens came to have this very high-level cognitive processing,” says Miyagawa, a professor of linguistics and the Kochi-Manjiro Professor of Japanese Language and Culture at MIT. “You have this very concrete cognitive process that converts an acoustic signal into some mental representation and externalizes it as a visual.”

Cave artists were thus not just early-day Monets, drawing impressions of the outdoors at their leisure. Rather, they may have been engaged in a process of communication.

“I think it’s very clear that these artists were talking to one another,” Miyagawa says. “It’s a communal effort.”

The paper, “Cross-modality information transfer: A hypothesis about the relationship among prehistoric cave paintings, symbolic thinking, and the emergence of language,” is published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. The authors are Miyagawa; Cora Lesure, a PhD student in MIT’s Department of Linguistics; and Vitor A. Nobrega, a PhD student in linguistics at the University of Sao Paulo, in Brazil.

Re-enactments and rituals?

The advent of language in human history is unclear. Our species is estimated to be about 200,000 years old. Human language is often considered to be at least 100,000 years old.

“It’s very difficult to try to understand how human language itself appeared in evolution,” Miyagawa says, noting that “we don’t know 99.9999 percent of what was going on back then.” However, he adds, “There’s this idea that language doesn’t fossilize, and it’s true, but maybe in these artifacts [cave drawings], we can see some of the beginnings of homo sapiens as symbolic beings.”

While the world’s best-known cave art exists in France and Spain, examples of it abound throughout the world. One form of cave art suggestive of symbolic thinking — geometric engravings on pieces of ochre, from the Blombos Cave in southern Africa — has been estimated to be at least 70,000 years old. Such symbolic art indicates a cognitive capacity that humans took with them to the rest of the world.

“Cave art is everywhere,” Miyagawa says. “Every major continent inhabited by homo sapiens has cave art. … You find it in Europe, in the Middle East, in Asia, everywhere, just like human language.” In recent years, for instance, scholars have catalogued Indonesian cave art they believe to be roughly 40,000 years old, older than the best-known examples of European cave art.

But what exactly was going on in caves where people made noise and rendered things on walls? Some scholars have suggested that acoustic “hot spots” in caves were used to make noises that replicate hoofbeats, for instance; some 90 percent of cave drawings involve hoofed animals. These drawings could represent stories or the accumulation of knowledge, or they could have been part of rituals.

In any of these scenarios, Miyagawa suggests, cave art displays properties of language in that “you have action, objects, and modification.” This parallels some of the universal features of human language — verbs, nouns, and adjectives — and Miyagawa suggests that “acoustically based cave art must have had a hand in forming our cognitive symbolic mind.”

Future research: More decoding needed

To be sure, the ideas proposed by Miyagawa, Lesure, and Nobrega merely outline a working hypothesis, which is intended to spur additional thinking about language’s origins and point toward new research questions.

Regarding the cave art itself, that could mean further scrutiny of the syntax of the visual representations, as it were. “We’ve got to look at the content” more thoroughly, says Miyagawa. In his view, as a linguist who has looked at images of the famous Lascaux cave art from France, “you see a lot of language in it.” But it remains an open question how much a re-interpretation of cave art images would yield in linguistics terms.

The long-term timeline of cave art is also subject to re-evaluation on the basis of any future discoveries. If cave art is implicated in the development of human language, finding and properly dating the oldest known such drawings would help us place the orgins of language in human history — which may have happened fairly early on in our development.

“What we need is for someone to go and find in Africa cave art that is 120,000 years old,” Miyagawa quips.

At a minimum, a further consideration of cave art as part of our cognitive development may reduce our tendency to regard art in terms of our own experience, in which it probably plays a more strictly decorative role for more people.

“If this is on the right track, it’s quite possible that … cross-modality transfer helped develop a symbolic mind,” Miyagawa says. In that case, he adds, “art is not just something that is marginal to our culture, but central to the formation of our cognitive abilities.”

Author: Peter Dizikes | Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology [February 21, 2018]