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Research now shows that forested islands in the Amazon are of human construction and were built to grow planted crops beginning more than 10,000 years ago.  High-tech analysis now shows that many bone points recovered from Mesolithic Doggerland, now beneath the North Sea, are made of human bone.  A new genetic study is changing the story about how the Caribbean islands were settled.  And an analysis of tooth plaque is showing that ordinary people of the Bronze Age in what is now Israel commonly ate foods from far away.

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Welcome to the Audio News from Archaeologica!  I’m Laura Pettigrew, and these are the headlines in archaeological and historical news from December 20th through the 26th, 2020.

Our first story revisits the forest islands that stretch between the Andes Mountains and the Amazon rainforest in northern Bolivia in a region known as Llanos de Moxos [YAHN-ohs day MOH-hohs].  Here, thousands of tree-covered mounds still stand solidly several feet above seasonally flooded grassland.

As reported this week by Discover Magazine, in 2006 Umberto Lombardo, of the University of Bern in Switzerland, first stepped onto a forest island and was puzzled over how such features could have been formed naturally.

One hypothesis suggested that, over centuries, ranchers carved away lush rainforest to create pastures, but left scattered groves of about three hundred trees each.  However, that theory didn’t explain why the trees grew on higher ground.

Lombardo and colleagues pieced together the region’s history, and it turns out these forest islands were indeed made by people, but are much older than once suspected.  

Lombardo and study co-author José M. Capriles launched excavations in 2012, and based on archaeological evidence found at the sites such as burned clay, food scraps, and human burials, they concluded that at least three mounds were made by ancient people.

In the probes, the team also found microscopic plant remains from the oldest-known squash in Amazonia and the oldest-known crops of the tuber cassava worldwide, also known as manioc.  

They also found nearly 7,000-year-old corn, a plant domesticated about 2,000 years earlier in Mexico.

Researchers believe that, roughly 10,800 years ago, humans cultivated crops in the Llanos de Moxos, putting them close in age to the oldest known domesticated plants which were cultivated in the Middle East about 12,000 years ago.  This marks Amazonia as one of the first places on Earth where people domesticated wild plants.

The gardens were created by piling up fertile compost, allowing trees to root above the seasonal flood line.  These artificial islands resulted in enhanced biodiversity, providing homes for rare species of plants and animals which still exist here today.

For the new study, published in May 2020 by Nature, Lombardo used Google Earth to map another 6,643 forest islands.  Researchers then probed some of the islands and found archaeological debris similar to the fully excavated sites in sixty-four out of eighty-two of the tested mounds, ranging between 2,300 and 10,850 years old.  

From this ratio, the team estimates that humans built at least 4,700 of the 6,643 forest islands.

The new data also suggest an 8,000-year gap between small-scale gardening and the onset of full-scale, complex agricultural systems  Elsewhere in the world, this shift happened over only an eighth of that time.  Lombardo’s next endeavor will be to explore why this process took so long in Amazonia.

As the Ice Age faded, melting glaciers submerged the territory of Doggerland, ground that once connected Britain to mainland Europe.  For over 8,000 years, distinctive weapons, including slender, saw-toothed bone points made by the land’s last inhabitants, rested at the bottom of the North Sea.  

That was until 20th-century engineers, with mechanical dredgers, began scooping up the sea-floor to fortify the shores of The Netherlands with silt.  This ongoing work has brought an upwelling of artifacts and fossils found along the Dutch coastline.

Fossil-hunters and hobbyists have collected over one thousand jagged bone weapons, known to archaeologists as Mesolithic barbed points.  Similar items have been found from Ireland to Russia, with estimates dating from between 11,000 and 8,000 years ago, when the last foragers inhabited Europe.  

Mesolithic peoples likely attached the points to wooden shafts to fashion arrows, spears and harpoons.

Over the past decade, a new technological method known as “zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry,” or ZooMS, has helped to detect the molecular building blocks of bone collagen, which differs slightly between animal species.

Scientists had questioned whether this methodology would work on Mesolithic Doggerland points, as millennia under the sea may have damaged or even destroyed any remaining collagen.  

However, in 2018, Joannes Dekker, lead author of a study forthcoming in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, decided to try it as part of his bachelor’s thesis in archaeology at Leiden University.  He worked with Virginie Sinet-Mathiot, an anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, to run the ZooMS analysis.  

Collaborators at the University of Groningen carried out radiocarbon dating, confirming the artifacts were Mesolithic in age, and that two of the ten were made from human bone.

Archaeologists had never before found evidence of ancient Europeans crafting human bones into weaponry.

Purely practical or economic concerns seem unlikely explanations for this anomaly. According to author Dekker, the most economical activity would have been for ancient hunter-gatherers to produce strong points quickly from animal parts leftover from meals.  

In that case, researchers would expect to find points made from durable antlers, as well as the bones of aurochs, other deer species, and Eurasian elk.

Dekker posits that the fact that the scientists found predominantly red deer and human bones suggests there may have been some other reason, perhaps cultural, as to why it was important to use only these specific species’ bones.

Earlier in 2020, a much larger ZooMS study determined the animal types comprising 120 Mesolithic barbed points recovered from peat bogs of Denmark and Sweden identified bones from red deer, moose and bear, but none from Homo sapiens.  That study concluded that Mesolithic crafters chose bone types with preferable mechanical properties and practical results, rather than cultural considerations.

The new and differing results raise the possibility that only inhabitants of Doggerland turned human bones into deadly points during the Mesolithic.  Scholars hope this question will be clarified through additional ZooMS analysis.

Our next story takes us to the Caribbean, where a new genetic study is changing our understanding about the origins and history of the islanders

Much of what is known about the history of the Caribbean people until now is based on studies of the changes in pottery styles over time and from the accounts of European colonizers, such as Columbus, and historians, such as Bartolomé de las Casas.

In a tropical climate, organic material breaks down rapidly, but a small, dense bit of bone protecting the inner ear can persist in human remains.  By extracting DNA from this source, an international team, led by David Reich of Harvard Medical School, analyzed the genomes of 263 individuals.  The study, published in the journal Nature and reported at the news site Phys.org, found two major migrations and genetic groups in the human history of the Caribbean, as well as major findings about the size of the early population.

The first migratory group involved stone tool users who came to the islands through Cuba some 6000 years ago, and then migrated eastward during the region's Archaic Age.  

These people don't quite match any indigenous group in the Americas, but are more closely related to Central and South Americans than North Americans.  Similar evidence has been found in Belize and Cuba, strengthening their case for a Central American origin.

The second migration to the Caribbean was an Arawak-speaking group from northeastern South America, who migrated from the interior to coastal Venezuela and then north into the Caribbean Sea.  

These farmers and potters settled in Puerto Rico and then moved west.  They were the farmers and potters who ushered in the Ceramic age of pottery in the Caribbean.

Present-day Cubans, Dominicans, and Puerto Ricans are largely descendants of the second migration as well as descendants of European immigrants and enslaved Africans.  Only marginal evidence was found of the Archaic Age in the ancestry of the people living today.

In the past, analysis of the pottery record alone had led people to believe that the several changes in styles of ceramics reflected the arrival of several different peoples over time to the Caribbean, but we now see, by the genetic record, that was not the case.

The study also showed pairs of cousins living all over the Caribbean, showing that the people were more highly mobile between islands than previously thought.

Additionally, a new technique developed by study co-author Harald Ringbauer used shared DNA segments to estimate past population size, which led to stunning conclusions.  

The technique suggested that about ten to fifty thousand people lived on two of the largest Caribbean islands, Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, shortly before European arrival.  

This is far fewer than the million inhabitants that Columbus described upon return to Europe.  Later, Bartolomé de las Casas estimated the region was home to 3 million, and this study suggests that both these numbers appear to have been greatly exaggerated.  We expect this result to be controversial.

Our final story this week takes us to Israel, where paleoproteomics, the study of ancient proteins, has revealed what local people ate here thousands of years ago.

An archaeological team studied fossilized dental plaque contained in remains from two burial sites.  One site is Tel Meggido, better known by its biblical name of Armageddon.  

The second site is Tel Erani, which archaeologists have connected to the people referred to in the Bible as Philistines.  

The dental calculus of sixteen individuals revealed evidence of people eating bananas, turmeric, and soybeans from South and East Asia during the time from the Middle Bronze Age to the early Iron Age.  

Plant proteins, such as those in spices and oils, break down easily.  They aren't as durable as proteins from animal DNA, milk, or the crystals left by tough grains, and have therefore been nearly invisible in the archaeological record until now.  

This study incorporates new techniques to get more protein out of the calculus, and includes comparisons of collected samples against existing libraries of plant proteins.  

Phillip Stockhammer, one of 14 co-authors of a research paper recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, believes their research shows that ,some 3500 years ago, the people of the eastern Mediterranean enjoyed imported foods from as far away as Asia.  

According to co-author Christina Warinner, a molecular archaeologist, this high-resolution study of ancient proteins and plant residues from human dental calculus is the first of its kind to study the cuisines of the ancient Near East.  

National Geographic reports Levantine civilizations imported items ranging from livestock to spices from India and Indonesia.  Evidence was also found of eating sesame from South Asia in several forms, such as raw seeds and ground paste.  

Archaeologists previously found sesame in the tomb of pharaoh Tutankhamun, buried in about 1400 BC, but researchers doubted it was a common commodity in Egypt at the time of the burial.  

In contrast, the variety of foods present in the dental plaque at the sites in modern-day Israel were found among simple burials, indicating the samples represent the diet of common people of the Levant.

The study adds to the evidence that the southern Levant served as an important trade bridge linking the Mediterranean, Asia, and Egypt in the 2nd millennium BC.

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!