Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew with a fresh 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!

Archaeologists in Turkey have identified an ancient ritual center where priests sacrificed animals in a pool of carbon dioxide gas.  Accelerated erosion, possibly made worse by climate change, is threatening the world’s oldest known rock art in Indonesia.  A study of DNA sequences in dental plaque surprisingly suggests that Neanderthals consumed starchy foods much as modern humans do. And after lots of argument, a presidential decision soon will determine the fate of Bears Ears National Monument in Utah.

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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 for the week of May 9th through the 15th, 2021.

Our first story comes from central Turkey, where scientists have uncovered the deadly secret of a temple known as the Gate to Hell.

As reported by Sciencealert.com, the cave is in the city of Hieropolis, in the ancient kingdom of Phrygia on Anatolia’s central plateau.  The opening of the cave was thought to be a plutonium, or gate to the underworld.   Sacrificial animals led into the arena built around the gate quickly died, while the human priests with them remained unharmed.

The cause turns out to be carbon dioxide, a suffocating gas, which trickles out from the cave and forms a dense pool along the ground surface.  The humans leading animals into this mist didn’t die, because their heads were well above the fumes.

Worship at the cave began at least as early as 200 BC.  Archaeologists from Italy’s University of Salento rediscovered it in 2011. 

In the ancient ceremonies, the castrated priests of Pluto led powerful bulls into the arena where spectators watched as the animals entered the mists and promptly died. 

According to the Greek historian Strabo [STRAY-bo], the floor of the arena was filled by a vapor so misty and dense that one could scarcely see the ground.  Any animal that passed inside met instant death.   Strabo himself threw in some sparrows and they immediately breathed their last and fell to the earth.

Birds still occasionally fall from the air above, and it was this phenomenon that alerted the archaeology team to the cave's location.  

The origin of the deadly leak is connected to seismic activity under the ground.  According to volcanologist Hardy Pfanz of the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, whose team studied the cave in 2018, a volcanic fissure running deep beneath the region emits large amounts of carbon dioxide, which pools at the mouth of this cave before dissipating into the surrounding air.  

During the day, the sun dissipates the gas, while at night it accumulates.  Thus, at dawn, the toxic lake is at its deepest and deadliest.  The concentration is over 50 percent at the deepest point, and could kill humans if they were at ground level.  Inside the cave, concentrations range from 86 to 91 percent. 

The spectacle of the deadly mist fueled a bustling cult in Roman times.  Worshippers could buy small animals and birds and then throw them to the floor of the arena as sacrifices.  On feast days, the priests sacrificed larger animals while the crowd watched.

According to ancient sources, the priests stood tall, clearly aware of the toxic fumes, sometimes using stones to gain height.  They sometimes put their heads inside the cave or entered it at midday, to demonstrate their own power, holding their breath to survive.  They used this to demonstrate the god’s protection by remaining unharmed.  According to Francesco D’Andria, however, the discoverer of the grotto, finds of oil lamps suggest that the priests entered the cave at night, too.

The research, appearing in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, shows that studying seismic activity maps could reveal the locations of other plutonia like this one.

Next, we go to Indonesia, where some of the world’s earliest known cave art is vanishing at an alarming rate from accelerated erosion potentially caused by climate change.

As reported by Cosmos Magazine online, the region’s archaeologists are racing to document and understand the rock art even as it disappears. 

According to research recently published in Scientific Reports, the sudden fragility attacking the rock surfaces correlates with volatile weather patterns associated with climate change.

The paintings are as old as 44,000 years, beginning during the Pleistocene era.  Rivalling European cave art, these illustrations of hunting scenes and mystical beings are the earliest evidence of figurative art on the planet.

According to lead author Jillian Huntley from Griffith University, Australia, local site keepers for the ancient artworks of Maros-Pangkep in Sulawesi have observed the accelerated pace of decay. 

Huntley’s team investigated the chemistry of the limestone rock face and found pervasive evidence of salt crystallization, or haloclasty.  These salts chemically weaken the rock and mechanically separate the surface of the panels from the limestone wall and ceiling, causing the rock art to flake off the walls.

The team’s analysis into the types of salts, along with paleoclimate records, suggests that natural geological weathering processes in this tropical region are being exacerbated by increasing temperatures and more extreme weather.  This includes more consecutive dry days, prolonged droughts, water from storms, flooding, increased humidity from standing water in floods, and also from agriculture techniques such as flooded rice fields and aquaculture ponds.

Next to extensive quarry mining of limestone, the weathering poses the greatest threat to preservation of the irreplaceable cave art.

The findings underscore the importance of research and conservation efforts in Maros-Pangkep and across Australasia, where more sites are being discovered every year.

In our third story, new research on Neanderthals shows that humans adapted to eating starch-rich foods as far back as 100,000 years ago.  This is much earlier than previously thought and it probably was beneficial to the development of the human brain capacity.  

According to Harvard professor Christina Warinner, the new evidence shows that humans were exploiting this new food source in the form of roots, starchy vegetables and seeds providing increased carbohydrates, the brain’s fuel source.

The findings come from an international study by more than 50 scientists who reconstructed oral microbiomes, or tooth bacteria, from Neanderthals, primates, and humans.  The data set included possibly the oldest oral microbiome ever sequenced, from a 100,000-year-old Neanderthal fossil.

As reported by the science news site, EurekAlert.com, people today in industrialized contexts already have high disease burdens, and the researchers wanted to learn what the core members of the microbiome originally were.  

The scientists analyzed the fossilized dental plaque of both modern humans and Neanderthals and compared them to those of humanity's closest primate relatives, chimpanzees and gorillas, as well as howler monkeys, a more distant relative.

They analyzed billions of DNA fragments preserved in fossilized plaque to reconstruct their genomes and discover which microorganisms co-evolved with us. 

The big surprise was finding strains of oral bacteria that are specially adapted to break down starch.  These strains, from the genus Streptococcus, have a unique ability to capture starch-digesting enzymes from human saliva, which they then use to feed themselves.  

Both the Neanderthals and the ancient humans in the study had these starch-adapted strains in their dental plaque, while most of the primates had almost no streptococci that could break down starch.

According to Warinner, this suggests a human-specific evolutionary trait, in which starch became a regular part of the diet, and our Streptococcus acquired the ability to break it down.

The Neanderthal and modern human oral microbiomes were almost indistinguishable, but individual bacterial strains showed differences.  For example, Ice Age humans living in Europe before 14,000 years ago shared some bacterial strains with Neanderthals that are no longer found in humans today.

This finding pushes back on the idea that Neanderthals were carnivores, but also makes sense, because for hunter-gatherer societies around the world, starch-rich foods like roots, tubers, forbs, nuts, and seeds are important and reliable food sources.  In fact, starch currently provides about 60 percent of human calories worldwide.

The research identified 10 groups of bacteria that have been part of the human and primate oral microbiome for more than 40 million years and are still shared today.  While these bacteria may serve important and beneficial roles, so little is known about them that some don't even have names.

The new study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Our final story takes us to Utah, where arguments over the size of the Bears Ears National Monument will determine the fate of hundreds of precious archaeological sites.   

As reported by Utah radio station KUER, southeastern Utah is home to thousands of sites, including some of the oldest rock art in America.  According to Josh Ewing, director of a conservation group in Bluff, Utah, called Friends of Cedar Mesa, in just a short walk one can see Ute imagery from 150 to 200 years ago, Puebloan petroglyphs, still older works from 4,000 to 8,000 years ago, and even older ones from 14,000 years ago. 

Edgar Lee Hewett, one of the first archaeologists to document the region, recommended protecting it in 1904.  However, that protection didn’t come until recently.  Although Hewett drafted the Antiquities Act, passed in 1906, which gives presidents the power to create national monuments, the Bears Ears monument was not created until 2016.

President Barack Obama included 1.3 million acres in Bears Ears monument, but just a year later, in 2017, President Donald Trump removed thousands of archeological sites, reducing the size by 85%.

Now, President Joe Biden, who promised during his campaign to expand the monument, is reviewing its boundaries.  However, Utah Governor Spencer Cox has said the state of Utah will sue if Bears Ears is restored.  Cox says that large national monuments hurt rural Utahns by reducing economic development opportunities, and presidents who follow the Antiquities Act should make those areas as small as possible to protect the actual antiquities. 

According to David McDonald, an attorney with a conservative non-profit called the Mountain States Legal Foundation, they are right.  Congress passed the Antiquities Act so that presidents could move quickly to protect archeological sites from looting, not convert large amounts of land into the equivalent of national parks. 

The Antiquities Act intended monuments to be limited in both time and space.  Indeed, early versions of the Antiquities Act include size limitations for monuments. 

However, according to John Ruple, a law professor at the University of Utah and a board member of Ewing’s conservation group, the wording leaves a lot of room for interpretation.  The president has discretion over what culturally significant objects are and what size they cover.  According to Ruple, no court has ever disturbed a president's conclusion on those grounds.

To prove Bears Ears is too big, lawyers would have to prove the landscape within the monument is not an object of scientific or historic interest.  According to Jim Allison, an archaeology professor at Brigham Young University, that will be difficult to claim.  Bears Ears is a landscape of interest to scientists and Native Americans.  Landscapes are objects of archaeological interest, evidencing changes in patterns describing where people live and how they live. 

The Bears Ears landscape is important to the Zuni, Hopi, Ute, Ute Mountain Ute, and Navajo tribes.  This tribal coalition is asking President Joe Biden to enlarge Bears Ears National Monument to 1.9 million acres.

Similar scales were applied to monuments from Anglo-American history, like the famous Hole-in-the-Rock Trail, a 180-mile route that Mormon settlers used to reach Bluff from Escalante in the early 1900s.  The entire trail area, including sections now vanished or very indistinct, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.

According to Allison, Bears Ears deserves no less.

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!