Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew.  Brace yourself now for the latest 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!

The use of honey in West Africa now dates back at least 3500 years.  Also in West Africa, some really old stone technology lasted remarkably late.  Analysis of data from the Pacific Northwest shows clearly that Native American people ate much more than just salmon. And a new paper strongly debunks recently revived claims of cannibalism in the Caribbean region.

The Audio News Team would like to thank our friends for helping us continue this show without a break since we started nearly 20 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!

We encourage our listeners to check out our answer to Netflix, which is Heritage Broadcasting Service, available at heritagetac.org and just launched at the beginning of 2021.  Currently, we have a growing list of 125 fascinating titles for you to binge upon on your smart TVs with Roku.  Again, that link is heritagetac.org.

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 for the week of April 11th through the 17th, 2021. 

A team of scientists led by the University of Bristol, with colleagues from Goethe University, in Frankfurt, found the evidence inside pottery fragments from archaeological sites of the Nok people, who lived in what is now central Nigeria. 

Very little evidence survives to show early human exploitation of the honey bee, except for rock art, and little is known about when humans began using bee products.  Palaeolithic rock art, mostly in Africa, shows bees and honey collecting dating to as early as 40,000 years ago. 

Historical and ethnographic literature from across Africa also suggests that bee products, including both honey and larvae, were important as a food source and were used to make beer, mead and wine.

As reported by the science website, Phys.org, archaeologists found evidence of bee products when analyzing more than 450 prehistoric potsherds.  The project hoped to learn what the Nok people cooked. 

The Nok people are known for their remarkable large-scale terracotta figurines and early iron production in West Africa, during the first millennium BC.  Soils at these sites are highly acidic, which allows few organic remains to survive.  Thus, details of the Nok diet had remained a mystery.

According to Professor Peter Breunig from Goethe University, the archaeological director of the Nok project and a co-author of the study, the potsherd analysis began due to lack of animal bones at Nok sites.  They hoped to find evidence for meat processing in the pots.  

The analysis results surprised the team, showing that around one third of the Nok’s pottery vessels were used to process or store beeswax, evident by the presence of specific lipid traces. 

The beeswax could have gotten there in two ways.   The first way is to melt wax combs with low heat to produce storable supplies of beeswax. Alternatively, the beeswax could be a remnant of honey stored, processed or cooked in the jars. 

Honey has been used as a preservative to store other products.  The Okiek people of Kenya preserve smoked meat with honey, keeping it edible for up to three years.  The Nok pots contain chemical evidence for both beeswax and meat products, suggesting they may have cooked or preserved meat with honey. 

Honey and beeswax may also have been used for medicinal, cosmetic and technological purposes.  Beeswax as a sealant or waterproofing agent has been found on Early Neolithic collared flasks in northern Europe.  The use of beeswax for candles and lamps is found in many prehistoric archaeological sites. 

According to Julie Dunne, lead author on the study, and a researcher at the University of Bristol's School of Chemistry, the honey discovery is a remarkable example of combining biomolecular information and ethnographic data.

The new study is published in the journal, Nature Communications.

For our next story, we stay in West Africa, but go earlier in time to the Middle Stone Age. 

Some of the earliest Middle Stone Age stone tools have been found with the oldest Homo sapiens fossils.  Now, research led by Eleanor Scerri, of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, has been uncovering evidence in Senegal revealing how long this  lifeway lasted in West Africa.

As reported on the science website, The Conversation.com, conventional understanding is that the Middle Stone Age in Africa ended around 40,000 years ago.  However, the reason is unknown.  Still less understood is how different groups organized across the landscape, how they may have exchanged ideas and genes, and how these processes shaped the later stages of human evolution.

Unfortunately, vast swathes of Africa lack information about deep prehistory, making addressing these questions difficult.  Research often focuses on eastern Africa, where preservation is better. 

Scerri and her colleagues have been focusing on West Africa, one of the least understood African regions.  The team’s recent work is validating this decision, and providing surprising new information on Middle Stone Age lifeways.

In 2016 and 2018, Scerri’s team looked for sites in different regions of Senegal, on tributaries of the Senegal River and the Gambia River.  These water sources were likely site locations, and river terraces often offer excellent preservation conditions. 

The site of Laminia, on the Gambia, was dated using rock layers to a surprisingly young 24,000 years ago.  Comparison to artifacts of that age confirmed that a young Middle Stone Age was indeed present in the region.

The site of Saxomununya produced an even greater surprise.  Here, classically Middle Stone Age artifacts, such as retouched Levallois [leh-VAL-wa] points and scrapers, had been found at a young terrace of the Falémé River, confirming the site was relatively young.  This site dates to 11,000 years ago, making it the first time Middle Stone Age material culture had been found in such recent times in Africa.  

These results extend the last known occurrence of the Middle Stone Age by a staggering 20,000 years.  At the same time, work by colleagues in Senegal also suggested an equally late first occurrence of the Later Stone Age at around 11,000 years—younger than in most other African regions.

Why did the Middle Stone Age last so long and why did the Later Stone Age arrive so late?

The answer lies in the fact that parts of West Africa appear to have been less affected by the extremes of repeated cycles of climate change.  This may have created stable environmental conditions over a long period of time, resulting in specialization refined for millennia.  

Another factor is that this region of Africa was relatively isolated, separated by the Sahara Desert to the north and rainforests to the east.  Around 15,000 years ago, an increase in humidity and forest growth may have linked the eastern and western rainforests, leading to dispersal of human populations, genetic and cultural mixing, and an end to humanity’s first and earliest cultural repertoire. 

What is clear is that the long-held unilinear model of cultural change towards ‘modernity’ is not supported by the evidence.  Groups of hunter-gatherers utilizing different technologies may have occupied neighboring regions of Africa for thousands of years, and sometimes shared the same regions.  Long-isolated regions, on the other hand, may have been important reservoirs of cultural and genetic diversity.  This matches genetic studies and may have been a defining factor in the success of our species.  These findings are a reminder of the dangers of ignoring gaps on the map.

Our third story takes us to North America, where new evidence shows Pacific Northwest tribes subsisted on much more than salmon. 

Research led by Washington State University anthropologist Shannon Tushingham documents that Pacific Coast people limited salmon intake to avoid “salmon starvation,” a potentially fatal condition brought on by consuming too much lean protein.  

As reported by the science website, Eurekalert, salmon, supplemented by other foods, is a critical resource in the Pacific Northwest. 

According to Tushingham, the lead author of the paper published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, the new data show just how wide the Northwest people’s diet was. 

In the past, some archaeologists have incorrectly assumed that Northwest people had a diet extremely biased toward protein supplied by salmon, due to the amount of salmon bone often found at sites. 

Tushingham and her co-authors argue that such a protein-intensive diet would be unsustainable. Using a global database of hunter-gatherer diets, they found people have a dietary limit on lean protein of around 35 percent.  Exceeding that ceiling can be physically debilitating within a few days and fatal within weeks. 

The researchers found that in California, acorns were often used to offset lean meats, while in Oregon and Washington they ate root crops like camas and fat-heavy mammals and fish. 

The authors focus on the limits of salmon, which is widely considered a "prime mover" of Pacific Northwest populations, but their analysis also has implications for the study of historical human nutrition.  If their argument is correct, it is unlikely that any human society was fully driven by pursuit of protein alone as their diets had to be more complex.

For our last story, we return to a January 2020 paper in the prestigious journal Science Reports, which revived a long-discredited theory that cannibals wiped out population groups in the Caribbean.  First touted by Christopher Columbus, the notion suggests cannibals from South America decimated islands in the Caribbean centuries before he arrived. 

The report, which pegged this predation at around AD 800, caught the attention of other archaeologists, anthropologists and historians, including Scott Fitzpatrick, a professor of Anthropology at the University of Oregon and associate director of the Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History.

According to Fitzpatrick, the hypothesis both interested and agitated scholars.  Reviving the cannibalistic narrative seemed both disingenuous and hurtful to Indigenous groups.

Fitzpatrick, Christina Giovas at Simon Fraser University and Tom Leppard at Florida State University led a group of 10 scholars who have rebutted the paper's findings.  Some of their criticism focuses on the previous paper’s methodology and analyses.  The rejoinder has just been published in the same journal, Scientific Reports, an online, peer-reviewed journal published by Nature.

Fitzpatrick and his colleagues find the methods and conclusions of the previous study faulty to a fatal degree.  According to Fitzpatrick, the two lines of evidence cited by the original authors have no basis in scientific fact.

Rigorous give-and-take is not uncommon in the academic world, where a controversial paper will draw a response from other scholars who use their own data to compare and contrast the original findings.  However, only rarely are scientists given the opportunity to write a rejoinder that effectively refutes an earlier paper.

The original study suggested that people known as “Caribs, marauders and rumored cannibals” from South America invaded Jamaica, Hispaniola and the Bahamas around AD 800, representing a previously unknown third wave of migration to the Caribbean.  Previously, scholars had believed that Caribs never made it farther north than Guadeloupe.

To buttress their findings, the researchers used two lines of evidence.  They examined cranial specimens to show similarities between Caribs from Venezuela and the people of Hispaniola, Jamaica and the Bahamas, and they compared samples of pottery from the different regions, again to show that Caribs migrated to the Caribbean.

In their rejoinder, Fitzpatrick and colleagues say the main weaknesses of the original paper have to do with the number, chronology and archaeological contexts of the examined skulls.  To support the argument of a third wave of migration, the Caribbean skulls and the Venezuela skulls would need to be close in time and space.

However, the four skulls from Venezuela in the first study are of unknown age, location and cultural affiliation, and they are unlikely to represent the biological diversity of the region.  Overall, 85 percent of the cranial specimens examined by the original authors lack direct radiocarbon dates and can be assigned only to a 500- to 700-year range.

Further, the original paper uses statistical analysis that cannot reliably represent biological relationships between the series.

The original authors also argued that pottery from Hispaniola, Jamaica and the Bahamas is identical to pottery associated with the Carib expansion in the Amazon and Orinoco [OR-i-NO-ko] basins, but no archaeological evidence is provided to support the assertion.

According to Fitzpatrick, the archaeological record in the Caribbean includes quite a bit of skeletal remains, but no evidence of any kind of cannibalism.  Indigenous groups may have told Columbus their rivals were war-like and cannibalistic to curry favor with the Europeans.

The cannibalism trope was used by Europeans to legitimize their abuse of Indigenous peoples.  Scholars have worked to debunk the concept, which is why many were disconcerted to see the new study revive that harmful idea with no scientific basis.

According to Fitzpatrick, these tales have no basis in scientific fact, the support that is suggested to explain them has no merit, and the false accusation of cannibalism is harmful to people who are of Carib descent.

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!