Imagine a year in Africa that summer never arrives. The sky takes on a gray hue during the day and glows red at night. Flowers do not bloom. Trees die in the winter. Large mammals like antelope become thin, starve and provide little fat to the predators (carnivores and human hunters) that depend on them. Then, this same disheartening cycle repeats itself, year after year. This is a picture of life on earth after the eruption of the super-volcano, Mount Toba in Indonesia, about 74,000 years ago. In a paper published this week in Nature, scientists show that early modern humans on the coast of South Africa thrived through this event.

The glass shards at Pinnacle Point were carried nearly 9000 km from the source in Indonesia [Credit: Erich Fisher]

An eruption a hundred times smaller than Mount Toba - that of Mount Tambora, also in Indonesia, in 1815 - is thought to have been responsible for a year without summer in 1816. The impact on the human population was dire - crop failures in Eurasia and North America, famine and mass migrations. The effect of Mount Toba, a super-volcano that dwarfs even the massive Yellowstone eruptions of the deeper past, would have had a much larger, and longer-felt, impact on people around the globe.

The scale of the ash-fall alone attests to the magnitude of the environmental disaster. Huge quantities of aerosols injected high into the atmosphere would have severely diminished sunlight - with estimates ranging from a 25 to 90 percent reduction in light. Under these conditions, plant die-off is predictable, and there is evidence of significant drying, wildfires and plant community change in East Africa just after the Toba eruption.

If Mount Tambora created such devastation over a full year - and Tambora was a hiccup compared to Toba - we can imagine a worldwide catastrophe with the Toba eruption, an event lasting several years and pushing life to the brink of extinctions.

In Indonesia, the source of the destruction would have been evident to terrified witnesses - just before they died. However, as a family of hunter-gatherers in Africa 74,000 years ago, you would have had no clue as to the reason for the sudden and devastating change in the weather. Famine sets in and the very young and old die. Your social groups are devastated, and your society is on the brink of collapse.

The effect of the Toba eruption would have certainly impacted some ecosystems more than others, possibly creating areas - called refugia - in which some human groups did better than others throughout the event. Whether or not your group lived in such a refuge would have largely depended on the type of resources available. Coastal resources, like shellfish, are highly nutritious and less susceptible to the eruption than the plants and animals of inland areas.

The research team has been excavating caves at Pinnacle Point, South Africa, for nearly 20 years. Glass shards from Mount Toba were discovered at the PP5-6 location [Credit: Erich Fisher]

When the column of fire, smoke and debris blasted out the top of Mount Toba, it spewed rock, gas and tiny microscopic pieces (cryptotephra) of glass that, under a microscope, have a characteristic hook shape produced when the glass fractures across a bubble. Pumped into the atmosphere, these invisible fragments spread across the world.

Panagiotis (Takis) Karkanas, director of the Malcolm H. Wiener Laboratory for Archaeological Science, American School of Classical Studies, Greece, saw a single shard of this explosion under a microscope in a slice of archaeological sediment encased in resin.

"It was one shard particle out of millions of other mineral particles that I was investigating. But it was there, and it couldn't be anything else," says Karkanas.

The shard came from an archaeological site in a rockshelter called Pinnacle Point 5-6, on the south coast of South Africa near the town of Mossel Bay. The sediments dated to about 74,000 years ago.

"Takis and I had discussed the potential of finding the Toba shards in the sediments of our archaeological site, and with his eagle eye, he found one," explains Curtis W. Marean, project director of the Pinnacle Point excavations. Marean is the associate director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University and honorary professor at the Centre for Coastal Palaeoscience at Nelson Mandela University, South Africa.

Marean showed the shard image to Eugene Smith, a volcanologist with the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, and Smith confirmed it was a volcanic shard.

"The Pinnacle Point study brought me back to the study of glass shards from my master's thesis 40 years earlier," says Smith.

Students excavating the site at Vleesbaai [Credit: Dr. Jayne Wilkins]

Early in the study, the team brought in expert cryptotephra scientist Christine Lane who trained graduate student Amber Ciravolo in the needed techniques. Racheal Johnsen later joined Ciravalo as lab manager and developed new techniques.

From scratch, with National Science Foundation support, they developed the Cryptotephra Laboratory for Archaeological and Geological Research, which is now involved in projects not only in Africa, but in Italy, Nevada and Utah.

Encased in that shard of volcanic glass is a distinct chemical signature, a fingerprint that scientists can use to trace to the killer eruption. In their paper in Nature, the team describes finding these shards in two archaeological sites in coastal South Africa, tracing those shards to Toba through chemical fingerprinting and documenting a continuous human occupation across the volcanic event.

"Many previous studies have tried to test the hypothesis that Toba devastated human populations," Marean notes. "But they have failed because they have been unable to present definitive evidence linking a human occupation to the exact moment of the event."

Most studies have looked at whether or not Toba caused environmental change. It did, but such studies lack the archaeological data needed to show how Toba affected humans.

The Pinnacle Point team has been at the forefront of development and application of highly advanced archaeological techniques. They measure everything on site to millimetric accuracy with a "total station," a laser-measurement device integrated to handheld computers for precise and error-free recording.

Naomi Cleghorn with the University of Texas at Arlington, recorded the Pinnacle Point samples as they were removed.

Cleghorn explains, "We collected a long column of samples - digging out a small amount of sediment from the wall of our previous excavation. Each time we collected a sample, we shot its position with the total station."

Sampling of Cryptotephra at Vleesbaai, South Africa [Credit: Dr. Jayne Wilkins]

The sample locations from the total station and thousands of other points representing stone artifacts, bone, and other cultural remains of the ancient inhabitants were used to build digital models of the site.

"These models tell us a lot about how people lived at the site and how their activities changed through time," say Erich Fisher, associate research scientist with the Institute of Human Origins, who built the detailed photorealistic 3D models from the data. "What we found was that during and after the time of the Toba eruption people lived at the site continuously, and there was no evidence that it impacted their daily lives."

In addition to understanding how Toba affected humans in this region, the study has other important implications for archaeological dating techniques. Archaeological dates at these age ranges are imprecise - 10 percent (or 1000s of years) error is typical. Toba ash-fall, however, was a very quick event that has been precisely dated. The time of shard deposition was likely about two weeks in duration - instantaneous in geological terms.

"We found the shards at two sites," explains Marean. "The Pinnacle Point rockshelter (where people lived, ate, worked and slept) and an open air site about 10 kilometers away called Vleesbaai. This latter site is where a group of people, possibly members of the same group as those at Pinnacle Point, sat in a small circle and made stone tools. Finding the shards at both sites allows us to link these two records at almost the same moment in time."

Not only that, but the shard location allows the scientists to provide an independent test of the age of the site estimated by other techniques. People lived at the Pinnacle Point 5-6 site from 90,000 to 50,000 years ago. Zenobia Jacobs with the University of Wollongong, Australia, used optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) to date 90 samples and develop a model of the age of all the layers. OSL dates the last time individual sand grains were exposed to light.

The photo shows a volcanic glass shard erupted 74,000 years ago from the Toba volcano in Indonesia found at an archaeological site nearly 9000 km away at Vleesbaai, South Africa [Credit: Racheal Johnsen]

"There has been some debate over the accuracy of OSL dating, but Jacobs' age model dated the layers where we found the Toba shards to about 74,000 years ago - right on the money," says Marean. This lends very strong support to Jacobs' cutting-edge approach to OSL dating, which she has applied to sites across southern Africa and the world.

"OSL dating is the workhorse method for construction of timelines for a large part of our own history. Testing whether the clock ticks at the correct rate is important. So getting this degree of confirmation is pleasing," says Jacobs.

In the 1990s, scientists began arguing that this eruption of Mount Toba, the most powerful in the last two million years, caused a long-lived volcanic winter that may have devastated the ecosystems of the world and caused widespread population crashes, perhaps even a near-extinction event in our own lineage, a so-called bottleneck.

This study shows that along the food-rich coastline of southern Africa, people thrived through this mega-eruption, perhaps because of the uniquely rich food regime on this coastline. Now other research teams can take the new and advanced methods developed in this study and apply them to their sites elsewhere in Africa so researchers can see if this was the only population that made it through these devastating times.

Source: Arizona State 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]

A previously unknown language has been found in the Malay Peninsula by linguists from Lund University in Sweden. The language has been given the name Jedek.

Jedek is an Austroasiatic language spoken by 280 people in northern Peninsular Malaysia [Credit: Niclas Burenhult]

"Documentation of endangered minority languages such as Jedek is important, as it provides new insights into human cognition and culture," says Joanne Yager, doctoral student at Lund University.

"Jedek is not a language spoken by an unknown tribe in the jungle, as you would perhaps imagine, but in a village previously studied by anthropologists. As linguists, we had a different set of questions and found something that the anthropologists missed," says Niclas Burenhult, Associate Professor of General Linguistics at Lund University, who collected the first linguistic material from Jedek speakers.

The language is an Aslian variety within the Austroasiatic language family and is spoken by 280 people who are settled hunter-gatherers in northern Peninsular Malaysia.

The researchers discovered the language during a language documentation project, Tongues of the Semang, in which they visited several villages to collect language data from different groups who speak Aslian languages.

The discovery of Jedek was made while they were studying the Jahai language in the same area.

"We realised that a large part of the village spoke a different language. They used words, phonemes and grammatical structures that are not used in Jahai. Some of these words suggested a link with other Aslian languages spoken far away in other parts of the Malay Peninsula," says Joanne Yager.


The community in which Jedek is spoken is more gender-equal than Western societies, there is almost no interpersonal violence, they consciously encourage their children not to compete, and there are no laws or courts. There are no professions either, rather everyone has the skills that are required in a hunter-gatherer community. This way of life is reflected in the language. There are no indigenous words for occupations or for courts of law, and no indigenous verbs to denote ownership such as borrow, steal, buy or sell, but there is a rich vocabulary of words to describe exchanging and sharing.

"There are so many ways to be human, but all too often our own modern and mainly urban societies are used as the yardstick for what is universally human. We have so much to learn, not least about ourselves, from the largely undocumented and endangered linguistic and cultural riches that are out there," states Niclas Burenhult.

Joanne Yager and Niclas Burenhult have spent long periods of time working with speakers of Aslian languages. This is necessary in order to systematically study, observe and document the languages -- it is not enough to simply conduct interviews.

"This work depends on devoted field workers with a strong passion for discovering more about linguistic diversity," explains Niclas Burenhult.

An estimated 6,000 languages are currently spoken in the world. About 80 per cent of the world's population speak one of the major world languages, while approximately 20 per cent speak one of the 3 600 smaller languages. Researchers believe that about half of the world's languages will be extinct 100 years from now.

The study is published in Linguistic Typology.

Source: Lund University [February 06, 2018]

Residents of Siwal village in Sukoharjo regency, Central Java, found a headless cow statue on Monday presumed to date back to the ancient Mataram era.

Officials from the Sukoharjo Culture and Tourism Agency and the Culture and Education Agency measure and identify  a headless cow statue on Tuesday found by residents of Siwal village, Baki district, Sukoharjo regency, Central Java  [Credit: JP/Ganug Nugroho Adi]

Local resident Walidi uncovered the statue when he was digging holes in the soil to plant banana trees in his neighbour’s yard.

“Then I called some neighbours to [help] lift the statue because it was very heavy. We needed eight people to lift the statue,” Walidi told The Jakarta Post on Tuesday.

The statue is around 1m long, 45cm wide and 60cm tall.

Siwal village secretary Yusuf said ancient artefact collectors had attempted to locate the statue a few years ago. Some people dug in several locations across the village but to no avail, until the statue was unearthed on Monday.

“We will coordinate with the village chief and relevant institutions for the handling of this ancient object,” Yusuf said.

A headless cow statue is ready for inspection after being found by residents of Siwal village, Baki district, Sukoharjo  regency, Central Java, on Jan. 8. The artefact is believed to be a relic of the Hindu Mataram era  [Credit: JP/Ganug Nugroho Adi]

Sukoharjo Culture and Tourism Agency head Siti Laila said her agency would register the statue and report it to the Yogyakarta Cultural Heritage Preservation Agency.

Sukoharjo cultural heritage analyst Bimo Kokor Wijanarko said the statue was assumed to be a relic of the Hindu Mataram kingdom. The statue depicts Lembu Andini, a sacred animal believed to be the carriage of Shiva, he added.

Bimo suspected the statue had been stolen before and then buried, because the head was missing.

“A lot of animal-shaped ancient relics were found headless. Maybe this is because the heads of statues are very valuable,” he said.

Author: Ganug Nugroho Adi | Source: The Jakarta Post [January 10, 2018]