Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew.  We’ve lined up for you 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!

A Basque museum in Spain is reassembling a Basque whaling ship more than 400 years old.  Ancient human DNA from central Africa is filling gaps in the story of the spread of distinct populations.  Features exposed by Australian fires reveal a very extensive aquaculture system more than 6000 years old. And excavators in central Anatolia have uncovered the world’s oldest mosaic floor.

The Audio News Team would like to thank our friends for helping us continue this show without a break since we started more than 18 years ago.  If you’re not already a supporting member, please go to archaeologychannel.org and click on the Donate button.  We can use all the help we can get!

For the intrepid travelers out there, we welcome you to register now for our June 2020 tour of Peru, including a flight over the Nazca lines!  Please contact us soon about that, and see about all our upcoming tours at archaeologychannel.org/tours.

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 January 19th to 25th, 2020.  

Mention the word “Basque” and most people envision shepherds and cheese production, for which the region in the western Pyrenees between the borders of France and Spain is well known.  But ongoing archaeological examination and rebuilding of a Basque whaling ship which sank 400 years ago has proven that the Basque were the dominant seafarers and maritime merchants of their time.

According to Xabier [HAW-bi-air] Agote, chairman of the Albaola [al-BAOW-la] Shipyard Museum in the Basque town of Pasajes [puh-SAH-she], the Basques practiced whaling on an industrial scale and held a monopoly on the trade of whale oil and blubber until the 17th century, when the English and Dutch emerged as competitors. 

In 1565, the 52-foot, 240 ton, 3-masted Basque whaling ship, San Juan, was laden with a thousand barrels of whale oil.  It sank during a storm at Red Bay, Labrador, where it remained for hundreds of years, until Parks Canada’s Department of Underwater Archaeology rediscovered it, beneath a layer of ballast stones and sediment. 

As reported in Geographical Magazine, the underwater team dismantled the ship piece-by-piece, recovering some 3,000 items in all over a period of eight years, as the harsh climate limited the recovery efforts to just a few months a year.   It took another 22 years to reassemble the vessel. 

Mr. Agote is leading a group of carpenters to reconstruct the San Juan at the Albaola Museum by painstakingly utilizing the Basque ship building techniques, which were employed in its original construction—including raw materials and use of original tools.  The reproduction is scheduled to be launched this year and plans are to embark on a tour of European cities before setting sail for Labrador, just like an average of 15 Basque ships a year did in the 1500s, a journey of some 3,400 nautical miles.

Other finds in Red Bay over the years include large galleons and small chalupas, vessels used to harpoon the whales.  The San Juan was adopted as the logo of the United Nations in 1990, and Red Bay was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2013. 

In the Shum Laka rock shelter, in the grasslands of Cameroon, DNA data taken from the remains of four children—two buried approximately 8,000 years ago and two buried 3,000 years ago—is shedding new light on how humans spread through Africa over thousands of years.  The DNA is also providing important evidence of a mysterious group known as Ghost Modern people, who contributed minimal amounts of the DNA exhibited by present day African groups.

As reported in the New York Times, the ancient genomes contain vital clues to the history of the continent and are giving scientists information for a new evaluation of our species’ development.  A team of researchers, led by Dr. David Reich, a Harvard Medical School geneticist, was surprised by the quality of the find, which was so well preserved in the harsh climate.  Dr. Reich stated that one of the 8,000 year old skeletons was rich with human DNA comparable to a modern medical genome.

Dr. Mary Prendergast, a professor of anthropology at Saint Louis University in Madrid and co-author of the report, originally published in the journal Nature, described herself as being shocked when she first received the incredibly high-quality results from the lab.  Most surprising, she stated, was that none of the Shum Laka samples bore close relation to Bantu speakers, who today comprise more than 30 percent of Africa’s population.  They were more closely related to the Aka, a hunter-gatherer pygmy type people, who now reside in rainforests 1,000 miles to the east.

This find indicates that present day Bantu speakers across Africa did not descend from the sequenced children’s population, as previously supposed.  DNA from the Shum Lake children’s skeletons show ancestry from numerous deep lineages, including an early diverging ancestry source in West Africa of which little is known.  All four of the skeletons contained DNA similar to the hunter-gatherers, but two thirds of the DNA is attributed to what are referred to as the Ghost Modern people.

The Harvard team noted that the DNA samples recorded will enhance their understanding of the deep ancestral relationships among populations in sub-Saharan Africa, which remains the region of greatest human diversity, even to the present day.

The Shum Laka rock shelter has been an important archaeological site since the 1980s.  Human remains dating to 30,000 years ago have been unearthed there, and the region has been recognized as the origin of the most important human expansions in the history of Africa.  About 4,000 years ago the Bantu people began farming palm oil and grains, and soon thereafter began a major migration throughout Africa.  

The researchers agree that, as exciting as the find is, a lot of work remains to be done.  As Dr. Prendergast acknowledged, going into research with one set of questions can mean coming out with unexpected answers that raise a whole new set of questions.

We go now to the state of Victoria, in Australia, where bushfires burned away vegetation that had concealed an elaborate aquaculture network.  The Aboriginal inhabitants, known as the Gunditjmara [GUN-ditch-MAR-a), thousands of years ago had utilized the network for the harvest of eels.

Portions of the canals were known previously and added to the UNESCO World Heritage list last July, but the fires revealed a larger network of channels that contained weirs—structures placed in water to trap fish.  Also exposed were dams built from volcanic rock from a nearby dormant volcano.  The area is in the Budj Bim [BOOJ-bim] National Park and is considered by UNESCO to be one of the oldest and most extensive aquaculture sites in the world.

As reported by CNN, the Gunditjmara people built the system over 6,600 years ago, long before Egypt’s pyramids.  They used it to catch and cultivate one of their primary foods, which were eels, captured in woven baskets placed in fish traps.  The eels then were smoked in hollowed-out trees.

Denis Rose, speaking for the Gunditj Mirring Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation, said that the uncovering of one channel measuring about 25 meters, or 82 feet, and several dam and pond structures came as a surprise.  

Firefighters, aware that they were working in a World Heritage area, incorporated extra precautions to avoid using heavy equipment against the blaze, as it could cause lasting damage.

The Gundijmara first encountered Europeans in the early 1800s, when whalers and seal hunting expeditions came through.  Soon, settlers began arriving and began to eliminate the indigenous people in an ongoing series of clashes and massacres.   The Gunditj Mirring website quotes George Augustus Robinson, the official Protector of Aborigines, who traveled through the region in 1841, as reporting that the settlers spoke of shooting the aborigines as coolly as if speaking of shooting birds.

We finish this week in Turkey, where the world’s oldest mosaic has come to light in what is believed to have been a Bronze Age Hittite [HIT-ite] city.  As reported by the newspaper Haaretz [har-ETZ], Dr. Anacleto D’Agostini of Pisa University suggests that the site might be the lost city of Zippalanda, home of the Storm God.

The mosaic turned up in the central part of the country, at Usakli [YOOZ-uh-klee] Hoyuk, a major archaeological site that has been known since the early 20th Century.   According to The Archaeological Project at Usakli Hoyuk, occupation of the city began at the end of the 3rd millennium, and fragments of cuneiform tablets found there indicate that it once was a prominent Hittite center,.

Near a large building on a terrace dating back to the Late Bronze Age, in the second millennium BC, excavators uncovered  a courtyard that contained a mosaic measuring about 20 feet by nine feet, or 7 meters by 3 meters.  The mosaic comprised over 3,000 pieces of stone, apparently roughly shaped and cut.  According to Haaretz, it is the earliest-known rendition in rock of geometric patterns.   D’Agostini noted that the mosaic contains three rectangular frames, each containing three rows of triangles of different colors, primarily white, light red and blue-black, and is overall framed by perpendicular stones in white, blue-black and white again.

D’Agostini believes that the site may have been a temple dedicated to the Storm God, a major Hittite deity, based on the building and mosaic representing what he describes as high-status architecture.  This, he says, lends credence to the supposition that the site could well be the lost city of Zippalanda. 

In ancient times, the Storm God was the ruler of the sky and the mountains and generated thunder, lightning, clouds, rain, and obviously, storms.  He was also worshipped as a fertility deity.

This significant find is adding an important new factor to the knowledge and history of images comprising polychromatic stones, an art form that reached its zenith in the Classical Period in the Mediterranean.

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!