Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew.  Stay tuned to hear four top news stories that came out this past week on Archaeologica.  Send us feedback on The Archaeology Channel Facebook page or post a message on our social networking site, ArchaeoSeek!

Cooking plant roots for dinner apparently goes back at least 170,000 years.  Human remains beneath a Connecticut home appear to be from Revolutionary War soldiers.  A loophole in Nevada state law is placing Native American burials at risk. And atherosclerosis has turned up surprisingly in pre-contact Inuit mummies.

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And now, here’s Laura Pettigrew with the Audio News from Archaeologica.  We hope you find this to be a valuable part of your day. 

Welcome to the Audio News from Archaeologica!  I’m Laura Pettigrew and these are the headlines in archaeological and historical news from December 29th through January 4th. 

At an archaeological site in Border Cave, near the border between South Africa and Swaziland, archaeologists have found charred remains of starchy plants.  The archaeobotanical remnants, believed to be from thick underground plant stems known as rhizomes, are evidence that early humans were cooking plant-based, carbohydrate-rich foods around 170,000 years ago.

Lead author on the study, Dr. Lyn Wadley, an archaeologist at the Wits University’s Evolutionary Studies Institute in Johannesburg, and an international team of scientists, discovered the remains while analyzing the ashes of ancient cooking fires at the site.  The specimens are the oldest cooked rhizomes found to date, and the food eaten in Border Cave would have been cooked and consumed by Middle Stone Age humans.

As reported in BBC Science Focus Magazine, the researchers were drawn specifically to the plant-based meals of early humans, which remain relatively unstudied when compared with examples of their animal-based diets.  Evidence relating to hunting, such as bones or stone tools, are often much better preserved than plant-based foods, which quickly biodegrade.  In the case of these plant stems, Dr. Wadley believes that the small, uniform charcoal pieces were preserved only because they were burnt.  The researchers did also find burnt bones alongside the rhizomes, which they believe indicates that people balanced their nutrition between both plants and meat.

The team found splits in the specimens, which suggests that they were still fresh when cooked, and split while burning, rather than that they accidentally caught fire.  Dr. Wadley posits that, once cooked, the rhizomes were shared out around the cave between the youngest and the oldest, an idea with implications about the social organization of the time, but which is based on analogy with modern humans.

Upon analysis of their specimens, the team found they belonged to a small flowering plant called Hypoxis angustifolia, which has a white rhizome and can be found growing throughout southern Africa.  Hypoxis angustifolia is evergreen, with a wide geographical distribution across Africa and beyond, making it a ready and reliable carbohydrate source for early humans in Africa, potentially facilitating their travel.

In Ridgefield, Connecticut, USA, the renovation of a home came to an abrupt halt when the people living there discovered human remains beneath the foundations.  The bones were taken to Quinnipiac University's Center for Medicine, Nursing and Health Science for further analysis and are believed to be potentially the first recovered in the state from Revolutionary War soldiers.

The human skeletal remains, found in December under an 18th century home, are believed to have belonged to three men.  Before the university laboratory began tests, researchers suggested, based on the way the bodies were buried, their condition, and artifacts found with them, that they are probably three soldiers dating from the Battle of Ridgefield, which was fought in the area in April 1777 between US and British forces during the American Revolutionary War.

The bodies were buried haphazardly, together, overlapping and lying on top of one another—consistent with other wartime graves.  They were found with five copper buttons, which, despite not identified as British or American, do lend credence to the idea that they wore military uniforms, although no weapons were present at the burial.

Nick Bellantoni, emeritus state archaeologist of the Connecticut Museum of Natural History, noted that the medical examiner suspected the bones to be very old because of their flakey condition and their lack of remaining organic matter.  Bellantoni described the bones as long, robust, dense, and thick with muscle attachments.  He’s eager to discover more about their identities from the ongoing forensic work.

According to NBC New York, Jaime Ullinger, director of anthropology at Quinnipiac University, has confirmed that X-ray analysis on the bones has begun.  Researchers hope that this will help to further examine pieces of the skeletons that have deteriorated over time.  Until then, researchers will establish other information, such the men’s diets and where they might have come from. 

Tania Grgurich, clinical associate professor of diagnostic imaging at the university, stressed the importance of such an opportunity to learn about this history and for staff and students to be up close with these unusual and potentially unprecedented remains.  She noted the discovery’s relevance to the history of the local area and local people, but also highlighted the humanity of the people who have been unearthed.

For now, the identities of the three bodies remain a mystery.

Now we go to the other side of the USA, in Carson City, Nevada, where an opinion issued in November  by the state attorney general’s office has highlighted some of the issues still existing around Native American burial sites.  The opinion states that, while permits are required to conduct archaeological digs of such sites in the state, no such paperwork is required to dig up the same site and build a swimming pool in its place.

The state law that requires such permits for archaeological digs of known Native American burial sites has several other exemptions, including construction, mining, logging, and ranching on private land.

Myron Freedman, director of the Nevada State Museum, posed a question to the attorney general’s office about whether these exemptions extended to minor building projects like swimming pools.  For some Native Americans, like Michon Eben of the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony’s Tribal Historic Preservation Office, the response revealed concerning loopholes in laws that were written to protect ancient burial sites.

Eben noted that more must be done to ensure the protection of Native American human remains, funerary objects and cultural resources in the state of Nevada.  She also highlighted that, should Freedman’s hypothetical situation ever become real, there would be no requirement to consult with local tribes, which is of paramount importance to her.

As reported in the Las Vegas Review Journal, Eben’s desire is that Native American burial sites should be treated like any other cemetery, without everything being excavated, moved and studied.  The historical precedent for the protection of sites such as pioneer cemeteries can be hurtful when not extended to Native American remains, no matter how long ago they were buried.

In 1989, the Legislature passed the Native American Burial Act, which laid out what private landowners must do if they find Native American human remains during construction or other projects. That law was updated in 2017 to add the permit requirements for projects on sites that are known to the state as ancient Native American burial grounds.  The intent was to extend the existing protections from federal land to private land.

State Senator Julia Ratti, the bill’s lead sponsor, is a firm believer that where Native American sites are found, tribes should be consulted.  She has expressed a willingness to re-examine the issue in 2021.

According to Freedman, archaeological records show that Native Americans have lived in Nevada for over 14,000 years.  However, when compared with neighboring California, few human remains have come to light in the state’s archaeological sites, with even fewer classified as cemetery or burial ground sites.  He noted that since the new law took effect, he had only issued one archaeological permit, but that Native American burials’ scarcity in the area did not equate to their nonexistence.

Our final story comes from Massachusetts, where a study of 500-year-old Greenlandic Inuit mummies has revealed evidence of atherosclerosis, despite their heavily marine-based diet.  The Horus Study Group built on previous research into vascular calcification in the mummified remains of ancient people, analyzing four mummies who lived on the island of Uunartoq.

The mummies, one infant, two men ages 18 to 30, and two women ages 16 to 30, had been buried in the 1500s and discovered in 1929.  They were preserved by the cold environment of the island, and have since been kept at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

As Inuit people, they would have been hunter-gatherers, with active lifestyles and diets rich in omega-3 fatty acids.  Despite this, whole body CT scanning at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in Boston, revealed that in three of the four mummies, specks of calcification were present in the arterial tree, in the carotids and the distal aorta.  The fourth mummy, the infant, could not be scanned.

Researchers led bydoctor L. Samuel Wann of Ascension Healthcare in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, reported that incomplete visualization prevented them from confirming whether these mummies had suffered from clinical heart disease.  They did, however, confirm that the appearance of vascular calcification in the mummies was consistent with atherosclerosis in other mummies as well as inliving people.

TCTMD.com reported that the Horus researchers have previously proven the existence of atherosclerosis as long ago as 4000 BC, among people from various civilizations, including the Egyptians, Peruvians, Ancestral Puebloans, and Unangan hunter-gatherers of the Aleutian Islands.  The difference between these mummies and the Inuits is the marine-based diet, which might be expected to protect against atherosclerosis.

According to Wann, the important message of this and other studies into vascular calcification in mummies is that atherosclerosis does not have just one cause.  An explanation for the disease in Inuit people, who lived in a preindustrial society, were active and ate a diet high in fish oil, is the burning of fires in igloos where they lived.  Exposure to particulate matter—from fires and other sources—has been recognized as a factor contributing to the development of atherosclerosis, although it is not the confirmed source.  A comparative modern source is gasoline- and diesel-powered cars.  Wann suggests that reducing their emissions could play a massive role in preventive health.

That wraps up the news for this week!

For more stories and daily news updates, visit Archaeologica on the World Wide Web at www.archaeologica.org where all the news is history!

I’m Laura Pettigrew and I’ll see you next week!