Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew.  We’re excited to deliver you another weekly installment 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 new analysis confirms that the Paisley Caves coprolites from Oregon are indeed human and very old.  Now we know where the big stones at Stonehenge came from.  Grape pips from villages in Israel’s Negev Desert reveal a sudden decline in cultivation. And DNA from human teeth has revolutionized our understanding of very ancient epidemics and their possible consequences.

The Audio News Team would like to thank our friends for helping us continue this show without a break since we started more than 19 years ago.  If you’re not already a supporting member, please go to archaeologychannel.org and click on the Donate button.  Especially now, we can use all the help we can get!

For the intrepid travelers out there, we welcome you to register now for one of our upcoming 2021 tours!  Please contact us soon about that, and see about all our upcoming tours at archaeologychannel.org/tours.  You won’t have to stay home forever!

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 Audio News July 26th through August 1st, 2020.

In Oregon’s Paisley Caves, archaeologists have confirmed evidence of the oldest known human occupation of the North American landscape.

According to the New York Times, these results offer further confirmation that human occupation in North America clearly predates the Clovis Culture, which 20 years ago was widely thought to represent the earliest human population 13,000 years ago.  Now, archaeologist Lisa-Marie Shilito and her team have demonstrated once more that humans were around much earlier.

The team excavating the cave, led by University of Oregon archaeologist, Dennis Jenkins, found coprolites, or preserved feces, located at the lowest levels of excavation.  Initial DNA analysis suggested they were human feces, but some archaeologists argued that the coprolites were simply later contaminated by humans.  So, in the next round of analysis, the team headed by Shillito, an archaeologist from the University of Newcastle in England, tested the samples for lipids and found uncontaminated human DNA and human fecal markers, confirming their origin.  Radiocarbon dating put the coprolites more than 14,000 years old, at least one thousand years older than previously thought for human occupation.

Human feces provided archaeologists not only with a datable medium with which to confirm the age of stone tools that were also found at the site, but also with insight into the diet of the people who made the tools.  When the team dissected the coprolites, they found a wide and varied diet containing various plant materials, some rodent bones, exoskeletons of insects, and seed coatings.  This certainly isn't the all-woolly-mammoth diet that these early humans are often assumed to have followed.

Studying the different layers of coprolites found in the Paisley Caves as well as others found across North America can give insight into both diets and changes in climate over time.  Furthermore, coprolites found in states like Texas, New Mexico and Utah are demonstrating that humans were moving across the landscape faster than previously thought.  

The findings were published in the journal, Science Advances.

The Guardian reports that a geographer and his team have found the source of some of the massive stones of Stonehenge.

In a recent paper, David Nash, a professor of geography at the University of Brighton, discovered that 50 of the 52 sarsen stones at Stonehenge came from a site 15 miles, or 24 kilometers, away from the Salisbury Plain, in West Woods near the modern-day city of Marlborough.  The sarsen stones are the larger, monumental stones, distinct from the smaller stones, called bluestones.

Nash and his team analyzed a core sample of one of the sarsen stones that had been taken in 1958 and only now has been returned.  They used destructive methods on the cylindrical sample to obtain what geologists called a stone fingerprint that remains unique to the monolith that it comes from and possibly to other stones from the same source.  This was a unique opportunity, as destructive analyses are not allowed at Stonehenge.

The team then chose twenty sites all over England to eliminate possibilities, and found a direct match much earlier than expected.  It appears that the architects of Stonehenge were looking for the largest and best stones to use in the structure, and it makes sense that they would retrieve those from nearby the site so they wouldn't have to transport them any farther than necessary.

What is strange is that two of the sarsen stones do not match the rest.  Geologists and archaeologists speculate that other builders may have obtained them from somewhere else prior to the completion of Stonehenge.

The smaller bluestones that were also used in Stonehenge’s construction came from a site in Wales known as Preseli Hills, which is 200 miles, or 320 kilometers away.

How these ancient peoples moved these stones, both large and small, from their quarry locations to their final destination still remains a mystery, but Nash has a few ideas.  One is that they took the stones south a bit until they reached the River Avon.  Another idea is that they used rollers to slowly move the stones.  For now, the how in the stone moving is still up for speculation.

A study of ancient grape pips in the Negev Highlands in Israel has led archaeologists to believe that plague and climate change catalyzed the fall of a substantial agricultural settlement.

The area in question began its agricultural journey, as most do, with mostly cereal grains -- grains such as wheat and barley, while a few smaller crops like grapes were harvested in small amounts.  

A new study, according to Jewish Press, the largest independent weekly Jewish newspaper in the United States, indicates a rise in grape pips compared to the cereal grains over the course of the 4th century until the mid-6th century AD, followed by a sudden drop off.  The rise in the grape pips correlates to the major export of Gaza wine from the area to places all across the Mediterranean landscape, and the drop also lines up with the sudden disappearance of wine jugs in the record.

Why would these people suddenly stop producing such a stable crop that was clearly good for the local economy?  The team, co-led by PhD student Daniel Fuks at Bar-Ilan University, may have some answers.

After counting and studying more than 10,000 grape, wheat and barley seeds found at the Nagev Highlands site, they concluded that the eruptions of two volcanoes -- one erupting in late AD 535 or early AD 536, and the other erupting in AD 539 -- affected the landscape worldwide by creating a massive dip in temperature as well as extreme drought and possible localized flash flooding.  Another contributor may have been the Plague of Justinian that spread through the Mediterranean region between 541 and 549, killing a large fraction of the population in the process.  

The timeline adds up, but the archaeologists say there is more to study with this line of inquiry, so stay tuned!

Our last story this week focuses on the field of paleogenomics: the study of the DNA remnants in ancient teeth that may help archaeologists and epidemiologists learn more about the plagues that have affected humans throughout history.

As reported by the Washington Post, recent studies show that many diseases that were thought to have developed more recently are actually thousands of years old.  Some diseases running through human populations apparently caused transformative changes within humanity.

The Antonine Plague of AD 165 killed 5 million people, which was a significant amount of the global human population at the time.  The Plague of Justinian in AD 541, mentioned in the previous story, also was devastating, killing around 50 million people.  

DNA from teeth of ancient people remains relatively unharmed from the ravages of climate, erosion and time.  This fact makes possible a look into the history of these diseases.  For example, researchers at MIT discovered that the DNA of Salmonella in the teeth of people in the Volga River region in Russia is over 6500 years old.  Recent discoveries have shown that Parvovirus B19, which was thought to be only a few hundred years old, is actually over 6900 years old, and that Hepatitis B is over 7000 years old.

New methods of extracting DNA that were developed for medical purposes have made paleogenomics possible in just the past decade.  After using dentist tools and a technique called "shotgun sequencing" to extract genetic material, decrypting the data requires bioinformatic specialists to match genetic identities to known pathogens.  Archaeologists are then tasked with putting human diseases into historical context.

According to Kristian Kristiansen, University of Copenhagen archaeologist and co-author of a 2018 study on plague bacteria in Sweden, the evidence from teeth lends credence to the role of diseases in a time known as the Neolithic Decline, around 5000 years ago – when native settlements vanished faster than they appeared, soon to be replaced by migrants from the Eurasian Steppe speaking Indo-European languages ancestral to most European languages today.

The genetic evidence, in tandem with archaeological finds, appears to support the idea that pastoral lifestyles, in which people began living closely with each other and with animals, made possible the introduction and spread of pathogens among humans.  

By the way, the Neolithic Decline and its causes is one of the chief topics to be discussed during our Megalithic Britain experience tour, scheduled for September 2021.

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!