Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew.  We’re excited to bring you another weekly dose of 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!

Some ancient footprints in Africa are giving researchers a picture of human foraging activity that happened 10,000 years ago.  A new analysis suggests that the Neanderthal extinction in Europe resulted from competition from modern humans over basic resources.  Cadaver dogs are becoming a favored tool for archaeologists. And a bone arrowhead in southern Africa is pushing back the earliest date of the bow and arrow and advanced human cognition.

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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 May 18th through May 23rd, 2020.

In 2006, a group of Maasai villagers discovered stone footprints.  Archaeologists soon learned that these footprints were over 10,000 years old, and new research has begun to reveal their history.

According to Smithsonian Magazine, Briana Pobiner, a paleoanthropologist from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and her team are working with the Human Origins Program and proposing that these ancient footprints belonged to a group of women who foraged along the ancient lakeside.

Kevin Hata, the lead author of the study published in Scientific Reports, suggested that initially only 56 possible footprints were exposed, but based on their direction into a pile of heavy sediment, the possibility existed for more.  Between 2009 and 2012, the site was excavated, uncovering the largest number of footprints to be discovered—a total of 408.  They have been dated to an approximate range of 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, but within the range of 19,000 to 5,760 years ago.

Discovered at the base of the still-active Ol Doinyo Lengai volcano in Tanzania, the footprints were pressed into the mud while the group walked by and deposits washed into the footprints, encasing them.  One area of the excavation had so much foot traffic, the team has dubbed it the “dance floor.”

Footprints can reveal information about a group of individuals that other traces cannot, such as how many people traveled together, what time they traveled, and the sex of those who traveled in the group.

Footprints can show the size and shape of individual feet.  The orientation of the foot suggests in which direction that they were traveling, and measurable space between the steps tell how fast an individual was moving.  One man in this area was running in excess of six miles per hour in the opposite direction of the rest of the footprints.

The researchers have found that fourteen women traveled together, occasionally accompanied by two men and one juvenile at some point.  This suggests that the females were foraging together, but Pobiner notes that they may not have only been foraging-- they were just foraging at this snapshot in time. Yet this behavior correlates with what anthropologists see in modern hunter-gather societies, such as the Hadza people of Tanzania.

No animals apparently were traveling with the women, but it seems a zebra and a buffalo did pass by the site at some point, suggesting that the group coexisted with the animal population that also used Lake Natron [NAY-tron] as a resource.

Vince Rossi, co-author of the research and supervisor of the 3D project at the Smithonian’s Digitization Project Office, has created 3D renderings of the footprints, helping to confirm the initial analysis and to begin pacing out the footprints to see how far the individuals could go from that point.  He used two sets of images—one from his 2010 array and the other from Appalachian State University’s 3D imaging of the footprints in 2017.  Just over that short period of time, the footprints had already begun to erode, suggesting the need to be protected while archaeologists continue their research.

For many years, scientists have debated the causes of Neanderthal extinction, from arguments about the rapidly changing climate at the time to the interbreeding of Neanderthal and modern humans.  New research from the director of IBS Center for Climate Physics at Pusan National University, Axel Timmermann, suggests that it may have been a competition for resources.

Neanderthals populated the Eurasian continent for approximately 300,000 years and rapidly began disappearing from the archaeological record approximately 43 to 38 thousand years ago.  Their extinction has remained a scientific mystery.

Timmermann has come close to solving this mystery by creating the first realistic computer model to simulate Neanderthal extinction, mathematically factoring climate change, resource competition and interbreeding.  He tells Phys dot org that he can turn on and off different factors within the model to see the various results, which leads him to believe that it was not the rapid climate change that cause the extinction, but more likely the appearance of modern humans in Europe that cause Neanderthals to die out.

Neanderthals had previously lived through worse abrupt climate changes than the one that had happened during their extinction.  This fact led Timmermann to look for other sources.  The model suggests that modern humans had some advantage over Neanderthals when competing for the same limited resources.  This could be related to a number of factors: modern humans may have been better adept at hunting, able to resist certain pathogens, or may even been more fertile than their Neanderthal cousins.

Timmermann presented his findings in the Quaternary Science Review.  He and his team are now working on adding in many of the megafauna of the time period along with more realistic climate scenarios to get a better picture of what the research is suggesting, that this could be the first major extinction caused by modern Homo sapiens.

In Croatia, four cadaver dogs scented an area where archaeologists had already excavated three tombs, as an experiment developed by lead archaeologist Vedrana Glavas and cadaver dog trainer Andrea Pintar to see just how accurate the dogs’ findings could be.

As reported by the New York Times, the dogs were able to locate four more tombs previously unknown to archaeologists.  They also confirmed a fifth site that Glavas had suspected for some time.  

Before the experiment, Glavas wondered if the age of the remains would affect the dogs’ performance.  In September of 2015, she and Pintar did their initial test, returning one year later to repeat the test and garnering the same results.  Glavas then excavated the area to confirm the dogs’ findings with surprising accuracy.  They published their results in September 2019 in the Journal of Archaeological Methods and Theory.

Previously, a necropolis of beehive-shaped tombs in Drvisica had been excavated, revealing stone chests that contained skeletal fragments, amber beads, belt buckles, bronze pins, teeth, and phalanges.  Radiocarbon dating indicated that the artifacts were around 2,700 years old.  The skeletal fragments are still being analyzed. 

Trainers previously used cadaver dogs to find World War II burial sites, inspiring the use of dogs for older archaeological work.  Both the dog handler and the archaeologists faced a learning curve as they learned the basics of each other’s fields.

However, archaeologists have used cadaver dogs before.  In the United States, dogs have helped discover Native American sites that had been heavily looted, improperly excavated by early archaeologists, or moved because of development or agriculture.

In 2002, Paul Martin, a dog trainer now completing his doctorate in Earth Sciences and Geoarchaeology, was helping police find a murder victim when his dog picked up a scent at a Native American burial mound.  Martin contacted John Sullivan, then state archaeologist of Winterville Mounds near Greenville, Mississippi, and they went to work.  After a few years, they discovered that the dog had located human remains, dating to around AD 1450 when the mound was last thought to be in use.

In another instance, cadaver dogs in Florida found a human toe bone dating 1,300 years old.

Archaeologists and dog trainers think that this could be a wonderful pairing as we learn more about dogs’ olfactory senses and their ability to detect decomposing tissue.  Archaeologists continue to use dogs throughout the United States on Native American sites, and Pintar’s dogs in Croatia have already been requested to help on a number of other sites.

Bow hunting origins have been on the debate table for over 20 years, in part because learning this could help archaeologists and other sciences understand the beginnings of complex cognitive thinking.

Initial evidence from a bone arrowhead discovered in South Africa suggests that complex cognition started 20,000 years earlier than previously thought.  Bow hunting outside Africa took place approximately 45,000 years ago in southern Europe and the earliest known non-African arrow tips made from bone come from a site on Timor Island and are approximately 35,000 years old.

Since these pieces are made of organic, or easily decomposed material, very little evidence survives in the archaeological record.  Several sites in South Africa have had small stone fragments found that are thought to be pieces of arrow tips or barbs—dating back 60,000 years.

The advantage of bow-and-arrow hunting is the ability to distance hunt as well as conceal oneself while hunting to provide shelter from possible attack or being spotted by prey.  Understanding those logistics as well as understanding the complexities of creating and operating a bow-and-arrow demonstrates high cognitive ability.

According to the website, The Conversation, the KwaZulu-Natal region in South Africa was thought to have the oldest known arrowhead material, but artifacts found at Klasies River Main site in the Eastern Cape have moved the distribution of bow-and-arrow technology farther south and the timeline farther back.

One key artifact from Klasies River Main is a long, delicately made, pointed bone artifact, found in deposits more than 60,000 years old.  A nondestructive chemical analysis revealed a black organic material similar to 20th century poisons and a glue used to attach points to the shafts of the arrows.  A CT scan of the bone point confirmed it had been attached onto a shaft during its life cycle.  Finally, a microscopic analysis revealed structural damage indicating that the bone had been shot at high velocity.  The advent of glues and poisons more than 60,000 years ago demonstrates advanced cognitive abilities in these early modern humans.

That wraps up the news for this week!

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