Last January we reported that the discovery of stone hand axes on the Mediterranean island of Crete indicate that an ancient Homo species had used rafts or other seagoing vessels to cross from northern Africa to Europe via at least some of the larger islands in between. Now the debate is raging on. "I was flabbergasted," said Boston University archaeologist and stone-tool expert Curtis Runnels. "The idea of finding tools from this very early time period on Crete was about as believable as finding an iPod in King Tut's tomb." Even so, as researchers from the Directorate of Paleoanthropology and Speleology of South Greece and four U.S. universities combed the island, evidence of this unlikely journey kept mounting.
     The team lead by Providence College archaeologist Thomas Strasser found more than 30 hand axes, as well as other stone tools of similar vintage, embedded into geological deposits at nine different locations on the southwestern coast of Crete near the town of Plakias. Some artifacts had possibly eroded out from caves in the sea cliffs, becoming incorporated into ancient beach deposits. Over time, geological processes lifted these ancient beaches up and away from the shore, forming natural terraces. The team's geologists dated the youngest of the terraces associated with the hand axes to at least 45,000 years ago using radiocarbon dating, and they estimated the oldest terrace with stone tools to be at least 130,000 years ago.
     Although archaeologists had found hints of early humans on Crete, these new discoveries, says Strasser, "are the first geologically datable finds. It seems likely that future research will support this initial discovery." If ancient humans were crossing the Mediterranean, Runnels said, then they certainly could have crossed other water barriers, such as the Red Sea or the Gulf of Aden. "And that means that the assumptions that we have had-that the peopling of Eurasia was done by early hominins moving overland through the Near East, into India and down-will have to be revisited."
     Geoff Bailey, an archaeologist at York University in England and an expert on ancient coastal migrations, calls the idea of such ancient sea crossings 'plausible.' But he thinks the team needs to find and conduct excavations at sites where ancient humans were actually making and using the stone tools. "At the moment" Bailey said, "the dating is very vague." Katerina Harvati, a paleoanthropologist who has worked extensively in Greece, accepts the team's identification of the quartz artifacts as hand axes, but she wants to see other lines of evidence for the dates.
     At present, the earliest widely accepted evidence of ancient seafaring comes from Australia.To reach the southern continent from the Southeast Asian mainland some 50,000 years ago, modern humans had to cross a 600-mile-long (970-kilometer-long) band of islands and at least ten ocean straits.Other pieces of evidence, however, suggest that seafaring could go back much deeper in time. The discovery of human remains and stone tools in Spain dating to over a million years ago may indicate that some ancient hominin navigated the hazardous Straits of Gibraltar from Morocco, a journey of less than 12 miles (19 kilometers). Moreover, Michael Morwood, an archaeologist at the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, has long proposed that Homo erectus voyaged from the Indonesian island of Bali to nearby Flores, where excavations have revealed 700,000- to 800,000-year-old stone tools.
     If additional work confirms that the earliest stone tools on Crete date to more than 130,000 years ago, archaeologists may want to take a closer look at these hypotheses. One solid bet is that archaeologists will be giving more thought in years to come to the question of why early humans chose to venture out on the sea in the first place.

Source: National Geographic News (17 February 2010)

Researchers are closer than ever to having a first draft of a complete sequence of the genome of a Neanderthal woman who lived some 30,000 years ago, and this means it may one day be possible to create a living person from the DNA sequence. The fragments of DNA from the bones of a Neanderthal woman who died in the Vindija cave in what is now Croatia were assembled using human and chimpanzee genomes as references. Researcher Gerald Irzyk said putting the fragments in order is difficult because at first it seems a random assemblage of the nucleotide bases, but there are patterns and motifs that are often specific to a group of organisms.
     Creating body parts, organs, and even a complete living individual once the genome is completely sequenced would be difficult but is theoretically possible. The procedure would involve making possibly millions of changes to the DNA in a human stem cell to match the Neanderthal genetic sequence, but there remain problems because even if the Neanderthal genes could be recreated we do not know how they were expressed. Assuming it can be created, the stem cell with Neanderthal DNA would divide to produce a colony of cells that could then be instructed to become any type of cell in the body, theoretically including an entire individual.
     Chief science officer of Advanced Cell Technology, Robert Lanza said that "species such as cows and goats are now routinely cloned with few problems," and while there are many more challenges in the case of cloning a Neanderthal, it possibly could be done. The ethics of such a move would be certain to spark a great deal of debate, and not just between paleoanthropologists. However, it is likely to be quite some time before we need to deal with the ethical issues. Stephan Schuster, a geneticist from Pennsylvania State University, explained that the first draft of the genome will probably contain many errors due to the age of the sample and the contamination, and he calculates the DNA in five different samples of bone would have to be sequenced, and in all the genome would need to be sequenced 30 times before we could be confident of its accuracy. Mapping the genome should allow scientists to answer questions about the relationship between us and Neanderthals, such as whether we interbred, and were separate species.
     
Source: Physorg (11 February 2010)

A 4,000-year-old Greenland man just entered the scientific debate over the origins of prehistoric populations in the Americas. A nearly complete sequence of nuclear DNA extracted from strands of the long-dead man's hair - the first such sequence obtained from an ancient person - highlights a previously unknown and relatively recent migration of northeastern Asians into the New World about 5,500 years ago, scientists say. Greenland's first known settlers were not Inuit or Native Americans as widely believed, but the direct descendants of Siberians who somehow crossed the Bering Strait to Alaska and then headed east, according to the new report. Because the hair was found in the permafrost, it had been very well preserved; scientists already know from studying the remains of woolly mammoths that hair is a particularly good source of uncontaminated DNA.
     An analysis of differences, or mutations, at single base pairs on the ancient Greenlander's nuclear genome indicates that his father's ancestors came from northeastern Siberia, report geneticist Morten Rasmussen of the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen and his colleagues in the Feb. 11 Nature. Three modern hunter-gatherer groups in that region - the Nganasans, Koryaks and Chukchis - display a closer genetic link to the Greenland individual than do Native American groups living in cold northern areas of North America, Rasmussen says. A largely complete mitochondrial DNA sequence from the ancient man's hair, extracted by the same researchers in 2008, places his maternal ancestry in northeastern Asia as well.
     Danish-led excavations more than 20 years ago unearthed four fragmentary bones and several hair tufts belonging to this ancient man, dubbed Inuk. His remains were found at a site from the Saqqaq culture, the earliest known people to have inhabited Greenland. Saqqaq people lived in Greenland from around 4,750 to 2,500 years ago. One popular hypothesis traces Saqqaq ancestry to Native American groups that had settled Arctic parts of Alaska and Canada by 11,000 years ago.
     Inuk's strong genetic ties to Siberian populations raise a different scenario. "We've shown that this ancient individual was not related to Native Americans but derived from an expansion of northeastern Asians into the New World and across to Greenland," says geneticist and study coauthor Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen. The team's new comparative analysis of Inuk's previously sequenced mitochondrial DNA indicates that the Saqqaqs diverged from their closest present-day relatives, Siberian Chukchis, an estimated 5,400 years ago. That calculation implies that ancestral Saqqaqs separated from their Asian relatives shortly before departing for the New World and rapidly traversing that continent to reach Greenland. No land bridge connected Asia to North America at that time, so migrants probably crossed the Bering Strait from what's now Russia to Alaska by boat, Willerslev speculates. As to why the group should head towards Greenland, where it is permanently cold, rather than balmier climes farther south "is a good question," he said. It could be that more favorable lands for settlement were already occupied by rivals, or perhaps they were used to Arctic hardship," said Willerslev. "There's no clear answer to it."

Sources: ScienceNews, Channel 4, Discovery News (10 February 2010), Telegraph.co.uk (11 February 2010)

The female known as the Auning Woman, found in a northeastern Jutland bog 1886, and housed at the Museum for Culture and History in Randers (Denmark), has finally got a face. Reasonably well-preserved when she popped up from the bog, the woman's 2000-year-old skull was broken into several pieces. But sculptor Bjørn Skaarup and medical examiner Niels Lynnerup from the Panum Institute in Copenhagen have now reconstructed the Auning Woman's face, using the common forensic clay method first developed by Russian anthropologist Mikhail Gerasimov.
     The finished product was put on display today at the museum. And although the results have shown her to be neither attractive nor particularly ugly, a reproduction of her face that is according to Lynnerup 'as close to reality as it comes', can now be viewed. Experts believe the woman was killed as a sacrifice, probably to pagan gods.
     Lynnerup and Skaarup have had considerable experience using their talents, having performed reconstructions of the oldest known Dane ever found, the 10,000 year-old Koelbjerg Woman. With a plastic copy of the body's skull - and knowing the sex and approximate age of the deceased - the pair is able to determine the general shape of the head and face, including the size of the nose and mouth. Skaarup first creates the model's muscles and tendons with help from Lynnerup as a kind of medical advisor. Then each layer of 'skin' is added on and moulded into shape. Lynnerup admitted, however, that there was no way to know what a person's ears and hair looked like without a sample. Eyebrows, eye colour, wrinkles and other features were also unable to be exactly recreated, he said.

Source: The Copenhagen Post (29 January 2010)

After a three-week viewing period at the Ministry for Gozo, the submissions for the design contest for enhancing the visitor experience in the Ġgantija Heritage Park World Heritage Site will be exhibited in Valletta (Malta). The design contest included proposals for: an interpretation centre incorporating all amenities and interpretation facilities, a welcoming orientation point to the cultural resources in Xagħra, a walkway to connect the interpretation centre to the temple and landscaping works. The design contest was won by architect Robert Sant, who was selected from among 12 submissions. Alex Torpiano Martin Xuereb were awarded an honourable mention by the jury.
     In the contest's memorandum, Heritage Malta declared that the winning "The proposed construction methodology will also have minimum physical impact on the site, avoiding the necessity of any rock cutting, making the proposed intervention reversible. It presents a solution which respects the context while providing a challenging counterpoint in the transition from the urban area to the Ġgantija Temple complex.
     The total budget for the Ġgantija Heritage Park ranges around €2.5 million which also includes a study regarding the temple structure stability. This project forms part of the €9.2 million Archaeological Heritage Conservation Project, 85 per cent of which is co-financed through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). The project includes works on two other sites, namely the Tarxien Temples, and St Paul's Catacombs in Rabat. The exhibition will be exhibited at Heritage Malta's head office in Merchants Street, Valletta from Monday until February 21.
     More information about the design contest and other aspects of the Archaeological Heritage Conservation Project can be viewed on www.heritagemalta.org/erdf032.

Source: Times of Malta (15 January 2010)

Centuries ago, come September, galleys would be rowed into Mġarr ix-Xini harbour (Malta) and loaded with amphorae filled with wine that had been pressed in the valley. Winemakers would fill shallow basins with grapes and, once pressed, the juice would flow through holes and channels into a deeper collecting holder, all carved into the rock. These wine presses, said to date back to 500 BCE, can still be seen embedded in the Gozitan valley and are being studied and documented in a project carried out by the Superintendence of Cultural Heritage and the Sannat and Xewkija local councils with the support of Camilleri Wines.
     "What is not seen today is that Mġarr ix-Xini valley was functioning as a main artery, as a seaport... It functioned as a huge agro-industrial area," explained Superintendent of Cultural Heritage Anthony Pace, who leads the project together with archaeologist George Azzopardi. He explained how the presses, dug into the ground, were made of a shallow basin upon which an additional structure was mounted to press the grapes. The juices would flow into the deeper basin and this motion was aided by the fact that the presses were built on an incline. Similar presses are present in Malta in the Mġarr Valley in and near Mnajdra, in an area known as Misqa tanks.
     Such presses have also been identified in various parts of the world such as Portugal, Spain, Italy, France, Greece, Turkey, Palestine, Syria and South Africa. Mr Pace elaborated that winemakers would have minimised losses through seepage by first filling the basins with water so the rock would soak up the water. Excess water would then be removed shortly before pressing. He said it was believed that, once pressed, the wine was collected in amphorae and shipped off to Sicily on galleys that came into the harbour.
     Since the project started in 2005, 15 presses have been identified, documented and mapped. Pieces of pottery, including drinking glasses, were also found during excavation works that helped date the presses. Next summer the second excavation will take place, with the help of students and volunteers. The next step, Mr Pace said, would be to publish the data.

Source: Times of Malta (12 january 2010)

Stone hand axes unearthed on the Mediterranean island of Crete indicate that an ancient Homo species - perhaps Homo erectus - had used rafts or other seagoing vessels to cross from northern Africa to Europe via at least some of the larger islands in between, says archaeologist Thomas Strasser of Providence College in Rhode Island. Several hundred double-edged cutting implements discovered at nine sites in southwestern Crete date to at least 130,000 years ago and probably much earlier, Strasser reported. Many of these finds closely resemble hand axes fashioned in Africa about 800,000 years ago by H. erectus, he says. It was around that time that H. erectus spread from Africa to parts of Asia and Europe.
     Until now, the oldest known human settlements on Crete dated to around 9,000 years ago. Traditional theories hold that early farming groups in southern Europe and the Middle East first navigated vessels to Crete and other Mediterranean islands at that time. "We're just going to have to accept that, as soon as hominids left Africa, they were long-distance seafarers and rapidly spread all over the place," Strasser says. Other researchers have controversially suggested that H. erectus navigated rafts across short stretches of sea in Indonesia around 800,000 years ago and that Neandertals crossed the Strait of Gibraltar perhaps 60,000 years ago.
     Questions remain about whether African hominids used Crete as a stepping stone to reach Europe or accidentally ended up on Crete from time to time when close-to-shore rafts were blown out to sea, remarks archaeologist Robert Tykot of the University of South Florida in Tampa. Only in the past decade have researchers established that people reached Crete before 6,000 years ago, Tykot says. Strasser's team cannot yet say precisely when or for what reason hominids traveled to Crete. Large sets of hand axes found on the island suggest a fairly substantial population size.
     In excavations conducted near Crete's southwestern coast during 2008 and 2009, Strasser's team unearthed hand axes at caves and rock shelters. Most of these sites were situated in an area called Preveli Gorge. Hand axes found on Crete were made from local quartz but display a style typical of ancient African artifacts. "Hominids adapted to whatever material was available on the island for tool making," Strasser proposes. "There could be tools made from different types of stone in other parts of Crete."

Source: ScienceNews (8 January 2010)

The long-awaited official report into the excavations of the Gozo Stone (aka Brockdorff) Circle in Xaghra - a unique underground prehistoric burial site near Ggantija temples - may have rewritten Maltese history in more ways than one: by failing to properly acknowledge that the site was originally discovered by Gozitan historian Joseph Attard Tabone, whose extensive research led to its precise relocation in 1965.
     Recently launched at the Gozo Ministry, Victoria, the 521-page volume purports to be an exhaustive collection of articles and papers related to this unique underground Neolithic burial complex. But a seminal paper written by Attard Tabone in 1965, detailing the precise circumstances of the burial site's discovery, was neither included nor even mentioned in the entire book. And yet it was Tabone who first alerted archaeologist Prof. David Trump, who oversaw the initial excavations, to the discovery of three previously unidentified standing stones in a farmer's rubble wall in 1959; and it was also Attard Tabone who later understood the significance of the find, recognising them as the only external remnants of a stone circle that had been described in historical writings, but subsequently lost.
     "In 1959 I reported this megalithic wall to Dr David Trump, then Curator of Archaeology," Mr Attard Tabone said in a 2002 interview. "We inspected the site together and he included it in the 1959/60 Museum Report; but we did not realise then, that under our feet lay a great wealth of archaeological material and that this wall was part of the Gozo Stone Circle. The secrets of the site were still hidden in libraries, archives and underground."
     It took Attard Tabone another five years to identify the site as part of the lost underground ruin, having established the location through visual evidence in the form of an 18th century illustration by French artist and writer, Jean Houel.
Attard Tabone wrote about his discoveries in 1965, detailing the research and surface observations that led him to identify this field as the site of the complex later named the 'Brockdorff Circle'.  But he limited his contribution only to making public the exact location, leaving the actual excavation to professional archaeologists.
     "How do I feel about it? Hurt, mostly," an aggrieved Attard Tabone said when contacted. "After all that hard work - not just to discover the monument, but also to conserve it: I have had to put up with years of abuse by builders who would willingly have reduced it all to rubble, if they had their own way... And then, after all this, to be left out completely... it's a great disappointment."

Source: Malta Today (6 January 2010)

Scientists have analysed DNA extracted from the remains of a 30,000-year-old European hunter-gatherer. Studying the DNA of long-dead humans can open up a window into the evolution of our species. But previous studies of this kind have been hampered by scientists' inability to distinguish between the ancient human DNA and modern contamination. In Current Biology journal, a German-Russian team details how it was possible to overcome this hurdle.
     Svante Pääbo, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and colleagues used the latest DNA sequencing techniques to study genetic information from human remains unearthed in 1954 at Kostenki, Russia. Excavations at Kostenki, on the banks of the river Don in southern Russia, have yielded large concentrations of archaeological finds from the Palaeolithic (roughly 40,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago). Some of the finds date back as far as 45,000 years. The DNA analysed in this study comes from a male aged 20-25 who was deliberately buried in an oval pit some 30,000 years ago. Known as the Markina Gora skeleton, it was found lying in a crouched position with fists reaching upwards and a face orientated down towards the dirt. The bones were covered in a pigment called red ochre, thought to have been used in prehistoric funeral rites.
     The new approach, developed by Professor Pääbo and his colleagues, exploits three features which tend to distinguish ancient DNA from modern contamination. One of these is size; fragments of ancient DNA are often shorter than those from modern sources. A second characteristic of ancient DNA was its tendency to show particular changes, or mutations, in the genetic sequence at the ends of DNA molecules. A third feature was a characteristic breakage of molecules at particular positions in the DNA strand. The apparent ease with which modern DNA can infiltrate ancient remains has led many researchers to doubt even those studies employing the most rigorous methods to weed out contamination by modern genetic material. Using the new techniques, the researchers were able to sequence the entire mitochondrial genome of the Markina Gora individual.
     Future studies like the one in Current Biology could help shed light on whether the humans living in Europe 30,000 years ago are the direct ancestors of modern populations or whether they were replaced by immigrants who introduced farming to the continent several thousand years ago. The researchers were able to assign the Kostenki individual to haplogroup "U2", which is relatively uncommon among modern populations. Despite its rarity, the very presence of this haplogroup in today's Europeans suggests some continuity between Palaeolithic hunters and the continent's present-day inhabitants, argue the authors of the latest study. U2, along with closely related haplogroups such as U5, are among those which could plausibly have arrived in Europe during the Palaeolithic.
     A recent study found a very high percentage of U types in the skeletal remains of ancient hunter-gatherers from Central Europe compared with later farming immigrants and modern people from the region. Meanwhile, an analysis last year of mtDNA from 28,000-year-old remains unearthed at Paglicci Cave in Italy showed this individual belonged to haplogroup "H" - the most common type found in modern Europeans.

Sources: EurekAlert! (31 December 2009), BBC News (1 January 2010), Deccan Chronicle (3 January 2010)

A 4,000-year-old lentil seed found during an archeological excavation has germinated, exciting scientists as the event might lead to invaluable data for comparisons between the organic and genetically engineered plants of today. "It would be the first seed from very old times whose genes were never modified," say the scientists.
     Project leader and Dumlupınar University archeology faculty Professor Nejat Bilgen said they found the seeds during an excavation undertaken last year in Kütahya province (Turkey). Bilgen said a layer from the container in which they found the seeds was determined to be from the middle Bronze Age. He said his team found many seeds, but most had been burnt, adding that they had failed to make the others turn green before the recent success. The excavation team believes they found a silo because there were many other containers around.
     "A seed dug from underground and dating back approximately 4,000 years sprouted. The plant that came out of this seed is under examination and will be presented to the scientific community [so they can] make various analyses over it," Bilgen said. Nükhet Bingöl, an assistant professor from the same department, said she planted one of the seeds last year but that it dried up after germinating, adding that she sent another to Istanbul for fat analyses. Bingöl said she planted the present seed three months ago before it successfully germinated. "Scientifically, we are still at the beginning," said Bingöl, who explained that the age of the seed needs to be determined and compared to the lentils of today.
     "We are at the beginning of our research. First, we need to determine the precise age of all three seeds. This needs to be proven despite them being found as part of the archaeological dig," Bingöl added. She also said the the plant seems to be similar to the lentil and is pretty weak - unlike its modern day versions - yet they hope it will be able to flower and produce seeds. If that happens, according to Bingöl, they would have extremely important data to compare with the organic and genetically engineered plants of today. "It would be the first seed from very old times whose genetics were never modified."

Sources: Hurriet Daily News (16 December 2009), Today's Zaman (18 December 2009)