Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew.  Right on schedule, here’s another weekly batch of top news stories that appeared on Archaeologica!  Send us feedback on The Archaeology Channel Facebook page or post a message on our social networking site, ArchaeoSeek!

Researchers have found 3000-year-old fabrics from southern Israel colored with the very rare royal purple dye.  Proteins from tooth plaque in East Africa show that people there have been consuming milk products for as much as 6000 years.  A new analysis of existing data concludes that the earliest human migrants to the Americas came with their domesticated dogs.  And skeletal remains from Medieval Cambridge show that common laborers were more likely than others to suffer physical trauma.

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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 Archaeologica for the week of January 24th through the 30th, 2021.

Our first story this week comes from the Timna Valley in Israel, in the southernmost, and driest, part of the country, just north of the Gulf of Aqaba.  Here, archaeologists have found textiles dyed royal purple and dating to approximately 1000 BC.  These rare textiles are the first of their kind discovered from the biblical era of King David and King Solomon. 

As reported by the science news site, Phys.org, archaeologists at Tel-Aviv University discovered the fabric while examining many colored textiles from the region, known for its ancient copper production. 

The researchers found remnants of woven fabric, a tassel, and woolen fibers dyed with royal purple. The fibers were directly carbon-dated to 1000 BC. 

According to Professor Erez Ben-Yosef from Tel Aviv University's Archaeology Department, the purple wool discovery was thanks to the uniquely dry climate of Timna, and this kind of preservation doesn't happen in most parts of Israel. 

Dr. Naama Sukenik, a curator of organic finds at the Israel Antiquities Authority, said the wool is the first-ever discovery of a purple-dyed Iron Age textile in the southern Levant.  The unexpected find, led by anthropologists at the University of Tel-Aviv and the Israel Antiquities Authority, was originally published in PLOS One.

The purple dye, often mentioned in the bible and in ancient times connected with royalty because of its rarity and cost, was made from the glands of Mediterranean mollusks, found over three hundred kilometers, or about a hundred and eighty-six miles, from the Timna Valley.  The mollusk species used include the Banded Dye-Murex, the Spiny Dye-Murex, and the Red-Mouthed Rock-Shell. 

Researchers identified these mollusks by sourcing raw materials from modern-day Italy and comparing them with the ancient dyes.  These dyes represent a labor-intensive process that required great wealth to attain, and continues to shape our understanding of Israel and its deep past. 

Next, we go to Kenya, where archaeologists are attempting to track milk consumption by humans.  The research has been going on for decades, but new finds of ancient proteins may reveal some clues. 

According to Phys.org, past milk-detecting methods involved indirect identification of milk fat in pottery, or signs of animal use for milking.  By using proteomics, researchers can extract small proteins in ancient materials, like milk proteins, which can then trace back to specific kinds of milk. 

One place to find these proteins is in ancient dental calculus, or plaque.  This plaque provides archaeologists with a wealth of information about the diet and habits of past peoples. 

The team, led by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, and the National Museums of Kenya in Nairobi, Kenya, have been analyzing particularly challenging tooth plaques, degraded by high temperature and humidity. 

The team analyzed plaque from forty-one individuals from thirteen sites in Sudan and Kenya, and found milk proteins in eight samples. 

The proteins varied in preservation, but showed a long history of milk consumption in Africa. 

The oldest of these proteins came from a cemetery site in Sudan called Kadruka 21, which is about 6,000 years old.  In nearby Kadruka 1, they also identified proteins dating back to 4,000 years ago, and these proteins turned out to be from goat’s milk. 

The team identified other milk proteins in individuals from Lukenya Hill in southern Kenya that are between three thousand six hundred, and three thousand two hundred years old. 

The finds in Africa play a large role in identifying milk and dairy use world-wide, especially as researchers search for the unique evolution of lactase persistence, and the important role milk may play in how genes and culture evolved together.

Lactase, an enzyme that enables the body to digest milk, usually disappears after childhood in humans, but this is not the case for everyone.  Europeans have one main lactase persistence mutation, while across Africa, as many as four appear. 

By comparing these ancient proteins to those found in modern populations, researchers determined that the ancient individuals did not have the lactase persistence mutation, but they went ahead and consumed dairy anyway.  This suggests that persistently consuming milk led to a change in biology, creating a lactase persistence gene.  Senior author and Max Planck Director Nicole Boivin notes that this is a prime example of how human culture has reshaped human biology.

Our third story takes us to the Americas, where research headed by Doctor Angela Perri, of Durham University, shows that the first settlers of the Americas, over fifteen thousand years ago, probably brought their canine companions with them. 

Phys.org reported that the domestication of dogs likely took place over twenty-three thousand years ago in Siberia.  Chances are that the dogs accompanied travelers out of Siberia, including to the Americas.

Researchers came to this conclusion after analyzing archaeological and genetic evidence of people and dogs in the Americas, and evidence of human relationships with them.  Their findings are published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Americas were one of the last regions on earth to be settled by people.  By then, according to these researchers, dogs had already been domesticated, and were playing many roles within human society. 

The evidence, both genetic and archaeological, points to the importance of the dog’s role in human society, and suggests their companionship would have been widespread by the time the Americas were settled. 

During the Last Glacial Maximum, about twenty three thousand to nineteen thousand years ago, both Beringia, the now largely submerged land extending from Alaska into Siberia, and most of Siberia to the west were extremely cold and dry.

The harsh climatic conditions leading up to and during this period may have served to bring human and wolf populations together, given their attraction to the same prey.

Future archaeological and genetic research will likely reveal how the mutual relationship between people and dogs led to their successful dispersal.

We end this week in Cambridge, England, where archaeologists from Cambridge University have studied x-rays of more than three hundred skeletons from local graveyards. 

The x-rays revealed high levels of injuries in Medieval manual laborers, with forty-four percent of working people in a parish cemetery having bone fractures, compared to thirty-two percent among wealthier cemeteries, and twenty-six percent in a cemetery for the infirm. 

The burial sites are in what is now the historic city center, and the one hundred and fourteen studied skeletons were at least twenty-five percent complete.

The skeletons dated from the 10th to the 14th century, and represent a primarily provincial era in Cambridge. 

Researchers examined skeletons from an Augustinian friary, where seventy-five skeletons represent both wealthy donors and clergy.  They also examined a hundred and fifty-five skeletons from the charitable Hospital of St John the Evangelist, and eighty-four from the parish graveyard, All Saints by the Castle, which had the largest number of fractures. 

The fractures show the highest risk of injury among ordinary working people, mainly artisans and laborers.  The study, originally reported by the BBC, found that male remains also had a higher likelihood of fractures than those of females. 

According to Doctor Jenna Dittmar, from the university's Department of Archaeology, working life often began at the age of twelve, and those buried at the parish site would have had long hours of heavy manual labor, including blacksmithing, stonemasonry, or intensive work in the fields.

Unique cases appeared among the injuries, such as a woman at All Saints cemetery who showed signs of domestic abuse, from rib, jaw, foot, and vertebrae fractures healed before death. 

The most severe of the injuries found come from a friar, who had both thigh bones broken in a suspected cart accident.  Another friar showed defensive wounds, and many signs of severe trauma span social classes. 

The bone fractures paint a clearer picture of daily life of people during Medieval times. 

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!