Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew.  To help keep you entertained and mentally sharp in these coronavirus days, our show features 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!

Wear patterns suggest big obsidian points played a role in early Ohio rituals.  A newly published metastudy shows that plant foods have been dietary staples for tens of thousands of years.  A pile of skeletons in Inner Mongolia points to what may be the world’s first recorded epidemic, 5000 years ago. And a Fourth Millennium BC ball court in highland Mexico seems to indicate that the famous Mesoamerican ball game spread into the highlands much earlier than previously suspected..

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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 March 22nd through the 28th, 2020.

Between AD 1 and 400, the Hopewell culture created a series of gigantic earthworks across southern Ohio.  One of the largest of these was the Hopewell Mound Group, now part of Hopewell Culture National Historical Park in Ross County.  This is where archaeologists first recognized the distinctive characteristics of this ancient American Indian culture, which they named after the site.

The largest mound at the Hopewell Mound Group is Mound 25, a rather uninspired name for the largest mound the Hopewell ever built.  Spreading over two city blocks and reaching the height of a three-story building, it contained the largest number of iconic Hopewell artifacts ever found in a mound.

Among them were a number of large spear points made from obsidian, quarried and traded from Obsidian Cliff in Yellowstone Park, Wyoming, about 1500 miles away.  Although they look like spear points, some of them are over a foot long -- too big to have been used that way.

Ohio State University archaeologist Richard Yerkes [YERK-eez] , Ariane Pépin – a graduate student at the University of Quebec at Chicoutimi and Jay Toth, a retired tribal archaeologist, put these artifacts under high-powered magnification to look for wear patterns that could reveal how they had been used.

According to The Columbus Dispatch newspaper, Yerkes and Pépin examined eight large obsidian points.  None of them had traces of use on their edges, but four had wear on their bases.  Toth proposed that the points were attached to poles – ceremonial regalia, to be displayed in Hopewell rituals with crowds of people present.

When these rituals were over, it appears that ceremonial leaders broke at least some of the points – perhaps to ritually "kill" them and release their spirits.  They were then burned in a clay basin, along with other regalia, and buried under Mound 25.

Seneca Nation of Indians initiated and funded this research project, which represents a collaboration among the tribe, archaeologists and museum curators.  Yerkes and his team have called for continued collaboration with the Nation to better understand the motivation of the Hopewell behind their large earthworks and elaborate rituals.

Early cave paintings of hunting scenes can give the impression that our Stone Age ancestors lived mainly on chunks of meat.  The evidence for meat eating is clear from animal bones that still show cuts made by human butchering tools.  But almost all evidence of plant eating disintegrates, leaving no trace.

Now, as reported by Horizon magazine, new research shows that plants were the staple foods even at the height of the last Ice Age.  

Dr. Amanda Henry, a paleobiologist and associate professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands, leads a project called HARVEST, that studies the diets of early human species and the role of plants as food – specifically, tubers and cereals.  Plants like these are sources of glucose, which is important for energy as well as brain growth.

Some of the earliest evidence Dr. Henry’s team found for eating tubers and cereals is from the Paleolithic period, about 40,000 years ago.  Remains from caves in Iraq and Belgium show the Neanderthal inhabitants likely ate water lily tubers, and grains related to wheat and barley.

To unlock the energy in the plant starches, the grains may have been eaten green, when they are easier to digest.

Changes found in the starch granules on dental calculus, or tartar, suggest that the plants were boiled.  Cooking not only releases energy, but also makes tubers safe to eat.

Around 30,000 years ago, a new technology for processing plant food was the grinding stone.  According to Dr. Emanuela Cristiani, associate professor of prehistoric archaeology at Sapienza University of Rome, people were looking for new ways to eat during a period of dramatic climate change. 

Grinding meant people could make flour, which is another way to unlock the energy in plants. The earliest evidence of flour dates back 30,000 years and was found in Russia, the Czech Republic, and Italy.  In the Balkans, grinding stones, as well as plant remains in dental calculus, show that some hunter-gatherers ate a lot of wild oats, legumes and acorn flour.

In a separate project in Italy, Dr. Emanuela Cristiani's team found evidence of hunter-gatherers eating cattail plants from a river.  Cattail roots are rich in starch which, when dried, can be made into flour that cooks into a sweet-tasting bread.

The evidence indicates that cave dwellers ate a wide variety of plant foods, throwing doubt on the idea that they died out due to unvaried diets.

On average, Paleolithic people who survived infancy lived to about 50 or 60 years of age, likely dying from infections, parasites or physical trauma.

Once people began raising animals and crops, disease levels rose – mainly because diseases could spread from animals to humans – and thus, life expectancy fell.  Nonetheless, the rise of agriculture is also associated with the expansion of the human population.

On March 21, the eighth group of medical workers from Inner Mongolia boarded a Chinese Air Force plane and traveled 723 miles to fight the Coronavirus in Hubei.  Wuhan, Hubei’s capital, is known to be the kick-off point of the current global pandemic.

According to the Indian news network Republic TV, China is not just the kick-off point of the Covid-19 scourge – it also has the unique record of being the first known site of a deadly prehistoric pestilence.  Or perhaps a couple of them.

The oldest of these sites is the 5000-year-old Neolithic village of Hamin Mangha in Inner Mongolia – an autonomous zone of Northeast China.  Between the winter of 2011 and the summer of 2015, excavations here led to China’s Jilin University team finding the abandoned village of just 29 homes, where 100 charred skeletons were found stuffed inside a hut. 

The bodies appeared to have been piled one on top of the other in a hurry.

How many residents could a 29-house village have?  And if 100 of them died, how many were left alive? 

Anthropologists say their cause of death appears to have been an infection; one that created so much fear that to stop its spread, the villagers did not even bury their dead, as was the common practice.  They set the hut and bodies on fire, and the thatched roof of the hut collapsed.  The village was buried in the sands of time – forsaken, isolated and uninhabited.

Researchers don’t know what the disease could have been – but most suggest that if it killed so many so quickly, and led to such a ghastly mass cremation, it could only have been a virulent infection.

A couple of other nearby sites from different time periods also bear the footprints of epidemics, mass burials and abandonment.  What they have in common is the Holocene Climate Optimum.  The Hamin Mangha epidemics all seem to have occurred around the end of a warm climatic period on earth that lasted for over four millennia. 

We are in yet another period of climate change today and the world is again a warmer place.  And China, where our current pandemic began, has a warmer ground level average temperature than the global rate. 

Is history repeating itself?  Only science and time will tell.

For our last story, we travel to the Maya city of Etlatongo, where archaeologists are learning about the early development of the famous Maya Ballgame.  That’s the ritual and athletic game in which teams of players wearing belts and loincloths used their hips to knock a hard rubber ball toward goals at either end of the court.  The game re-enacted a creation story recorded in the Maya religious text Popul Vuh, and was a major part of political, religious, and social life -- for the Maya, the Aztec, and before them, the Olmec.

The ball court was a stone-floored alley about 50 meters, or 165 feet long.  Sometime between 1174 and 1102 BC, the people of Etlatongo, in Oaxaca, Mexico,  ritually dismantled the court.  That ceremony left burned bits of plants, broken Olmec-style pottery, animal bones, shells, and a few human bones scattered on both the carved bedrock floor of the court and atop the earth mounds that ran the length of its sides.

But beneath that 12th century BC ball court lay another, even older one, dating to 1374 BC.  That's roughly when the formal version of the game—played on elaborate stone courts for crowds of wealthy, high-ranking spectators—was still in development.

Archaeologists Jeffrey Blomster and Victor Salazar were surprised to find a ball court this old in the mountainous highlands of Mexico instead of the Olmec-dominated tropical lowlands, where archaeologists assumed the game was created.

The oldest known Mesoamerican ball court, which dates to 1650 BC and has a floor of compacted earth, is at Paso de la Amada in Chiapas, on the Pacific coast of Mexico just northwest of Guatemala.  It was previously thought that people didn’t start building formal stone ball courts in the Mexican highlands until nearly a thousand years later.  

But the discovery of the new ball court indicates that by 1374 BC, the game was already important enough in the highlands to occupy a prominent place in the city and justify the investment of resources it took to build a stone court.  People in the highlands may have played a role in developing the layout and the rules of the game.

The ball game must already have been at the center of trade and interaction between regions.  The customary equipment for the game was a hard rubber ball, likely made from rubber trees in the lowland coastal regions.  To facilitate the game 3,400 years ago, there must have been trade in rubber, or at least in rubber balls.  

The game would also have linked far-flung cities and shaped political life.  Building stone ball courts and staging important ball games would have united communities, and given emerging political leaders a chance to show off their wealth, power and status.

The earliest versions of the ball game probably were played in open fields, and informal games probably were played wherever there was open space, which means they didn’t leave archaeological evidence behind.  Courts wouldn't have been built until the game became a major social and political fixture.

Blomster and Salazar found yet another structure under the ball court at Etlatongo.  But archaeologists didn’t have enough time to determine whether it was a third ball court.  They aren’t even sure of the age of the structure because there was no suitable material for them to radiocarbon-date.

According to Blomster and Salazar, ideas about the ancient ball game may have been shared among communities until they coalesced into an activity recognized from one end of Mesoamerica to the other.

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!