Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew.  Here comes 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!

A deeply buried deposit far from the modern coastline, the oldest shell midden yet found in China reveals some fascinating artifacts.  A study of ancient and modern tapirs in the Americas gives some insight into the function of the bony skull ridge in some human ancestors. And starch grains recovered from grinding tools in Papua New Guinea reveal the identity of some nuts and tubers consumed there over 4000 years ago.

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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 June 7th through the 13th, 2020.

Our journey this week begins in China, where in May 2020 archaeologists revealed their findings from the Jingtoushan site.  China Daily reports that the Jingtoushan site is the oldest and largest shell mound ever found in the country.  Construction workers discovered this site years earlier.

Miles from the modern coastline of the East China Sea, the 2-meter, or 7 foot, thick shell mound was hidden 10 meters, or 33 feet underground, also making it the deepest Chinese shell mound ever found in the marshy area of former tidal flats.  According to Sun Guoping, the leading archaeologist of the site and a researcher at the Zhejiang Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, the team feared that digging too deep could cause the excavation walls to collapse. The team constructed steel frames underground to shore up the 750 square meter area before they began to excavate it in September 2019. 

Since then, over 1,000 boxes of shells have been recovered from the shell mound.  Sun was amazed to discover that the shells - which included giant oyster shells, bigger than most found on people’s dinner tables nowadays - have been remarkably well preserved, although radiocarbon dating has shown the shell mound to be between 7,800 and 8,300 years old. 

Although Sun estimated that over 70 percent of the mound is made of shells, they also discovered woven bags of reed, protected for thousands of years by the airtight caking of mud, exquisitely designed handles of hatchets and oars, and a set of unique artifacts with pegs and buckles.  Sun speculates that the latter may be China’s earliest known example of an interlocked mortise-and-tenon joint, a key architectural feature throughout Chinese history that allows the construction of large palaces without the use of nails. 

Currently, a site of the Hemudu Culture, just 1.5 kilometers, or one mile, from the Jingtoushan site, has provided the earliest examples of mortise-and-tenon joints in Chinese architecture, dated about 7000 years old.  However, according to Sun, these findings from the Jingtoushan shell-mound may indicate older predecessors to the Hemudu culture. 

Potsherds found in Jingtoushan have also shown similarities to Hemudu artifacts in their decorative patterns, although they have unique characteristics as well.  Furthermore, research shows that shell mounds in China stopped forming after 2,000 BC, around the same time rice cultivation became prominent in China.

According to Zhao Hui, a professor at Peking University, it will take more research into the cultural facade of Jingtoushan to understand its connection to other nearby cultures and whether the shell mound is indicative of an independent Jingtoushan culture. 

For decades, anthropologists have tried to uncover what early human ancestors ate to survive.  As reported by Phys.org, a new study published in the journal,l Scientific Reports, suggests that the way tapirs eat may provide insight.

Some tapirs have large sagittal crests—bony ridges on the top of their skulls where large jaw muscles attach—which are similar to certain hominins.  

The research team, led by Larisa DeSantis, paleontologist and associate professor of biological sciences at Vanderbilt, used finite element analysis and dental microwear texture analysis, methods typically used by engineers, to assess the stress and strain that chewing a variety of food textures inflicts on different skull structures.

According to DeSantis, the research found that sagittal crests in tapirs allow for prolonged chewing of tough foods like leaves, and are not present in tapir species that eat the hardest foods.

Looking to other mammals for hints is essential to understanding the lives of hominins.  In primates, large sagittal crests occur in apes like gorillas and orangutans, which eat a mixture of hard and tough foods and are pronounced in the largest males.  Due to many complicating factors like body size, there are no perfect primate models for inferring ancient hominin diets.

The new research builds on published analysis of Paranthropus boisei, an early hominin often referred to as "nutcracker man." Because of their specialized skull shape, P. boisei were thought to eat hard foods, but a microscopic look at teeth textures and chemical signatures in the teeth suggest otherwise.  As opposed to hard foods like nuts, P. boisei consumed soft or tough food like grasses, fibrous leaves and stems.

The research team analyzed both modern tapirs with known diets and tapir fossils from throughout the southeastern U.S., including the Gray Fossil Site in east Tennessee, home of the world's most abundant tapir fossil assemblage.  The research team's analysis found that the South America-dwelling lowland tapir with the largest sagittal crest eats tough foods like leaves.  Meanwhile, Baird's tapir - from Latin America - lacks a sagittal crest and eats the hardest foods, including palm seeds.  The results demonstrate that sagittal crests are not required for eating hard food, but provide an advantage in processing lots of tough foods.

The research team suggests that the sagittal crests in some ancient hominins may have yielded similar benefits.  In particular, P. boisei may have benefited from increased muscle volume to process significant amounts of vegetation with less muscle fatigue.

Mary Silcox, a professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto Scarborough, noted that it seems increasingly likely that a skull we used to refer to as 'nutcracker man' might technically be better called 'tough chewing man.' 

Our last story this week focuses on a new study by Glenn Summerhayes, archaeology professor at the University of Otago, which has revealed some of the food staples of ancient Papua New Guinea, confirming decades-long suspicions about the diets of its ancient residents. 

Throughout New Guinea, stone bowls and mortars have been routinely collected and dug up by local New Guineans while gardening, and often have been reused.  Few have been excavated for archaeological purposes.  However, when 4,400 year old stone tools and mortar fragments were uncovered at the Joe’s Garden archaeological site in Ivane Valley, located 2000 meters above sea level, Summerhayes discovered microscopic starch grains. 

The grains came from two commonly found plants of the region, the Castanopsis acuminatissima, a type of tree nut, and the Pueraria lobata, a type of tuber.  As reported by Nature World News, analysis of the residue reveals that the tools were used to process the nuts and tubers, providing unique insight into the subsistence patterns of 4,400 years ago. 

Previously, Summerhayes co-authored a study on the use of plants by humans in the highlands of New Guinea, and discovered that ancient settlers made regular use of another starch, the Pandanus nut, and with stone tools cleared patches of forest to cultivate other starchy tubers.  Over the past 300 years, New Guineans abandoned these plants as the sweet potato became more prominent in agriculture.  However, this new study shows that the Castanopsis was prevalent in highlands subsistence, and ground stone technology, which dates back to the late Pleistocene, was used as a means of production and consumption of these staples.  

The discovery of the stone tool technology employed by ancient New Guineans confirms previous speculations on what food was widespread in the past.  Furthermore, the preservation of the residue on the tools adds to a body of evidence demonstrating the resiliency of starch over thousands of years.

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!