Welcome back, everybody!  I’m Rick Pettigrew, here to tell you about 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!

Analysis of teeth has ruled out the Jomon people of Japan as the ancestors of Native Americans.  A recently discovered medieval document in Italy clearly indicates knowledge of North America 150 years before the Genoese sailor Christopher Columbus.  A study of lake sediments in the Azores clearly shows traces of human habitation centuries before the Portuguese colonization of the fifteenth century.  And hominin footprints in Crete, at six million years of age, are the oldest evidence of upright walking by human ancestors.

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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 for the week of October 10th through the 16th, 2021.

In our first story this week, new evidence testing the origins of the indigenous peoples of North and South America shows that the first Americans didn’t come from ancient Japan. 

Many archaeologists have suggested that the first people to occupy North America might have descended directly from a group called the Jomon, who occupied Japan about 15,000 years ago.  This hypothesis is based on similarities in stone tools found in both Jomon settlements and many early American sites.

As reported by LiveScience.com, new research has tested this scenario using a completely different type of evidence: the anatomical remains of the people themselves. 

According to John Hoffecker, an archaeologist at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado Boulder and co-author of the new study, artifact style similarities can show cultural connections but can also result from independent invention.

For more direct evidence on ancestry, the new study looked at 1,500 sets of teeth.  

Tooth morphology is known to be under strong genetic control.   The shape of teeth, including details such as the shape of crowns and roots, is a good indication of how closely individuals are related. Tooth shapes are rarely influenced by environmental factors, which further makes them a reliable record of ancestry.  Moving to a new environment might lead to new artifact styles, but it won’t change dental morphology.    

In the new study, a research team led by G. Richard Scott, an anthropologist at the University of Nevada, Reno, compared 25 dental morphology traits in ancient teeth dating back over 10,000 years from Native American and Jomon people as well as other ancient groups from East Asia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

Analysis of tooth traits and DNA within the teeth revealed that the Native Americans were not closely related enough to the Jomon people to be their descendants.

According to Scott, the teeth of actual Jomon show more similarities to Southeast Asian and Pacific groups than to any Native Americans from that era.

Both groups would have shared a much older common ancestor, a different group living somewhere in East Asia, although a lot of uncertainty remains about exactly where and when this ancestor lived.

That common ancestor of Jomon and Native Americans could go back many millennia, well over 30,000 years, while the common ancestor of East Asians and Native Americans would be more recent.

According to Scott, the most likely point of origin is Greater Beringia, the region of northeast Asia that connected to the Bering Land Bridge, today’s Alaska, and easternmost Siberia.  If the ancestors of Native Americans lived in isolation here during the late Pleistocene for multiple generations before melting ice sheets and glaciers opened up the corridors for travel into North America, this would account for their differentiation from ancestral populations in East Asia.  However, remains from this area are very limited, so further research is needed to test this hypothesis.

The new results were published online Oct. 13 in the journal, PaleoAmerica.

Next we go to Italy, where a new study of medieval documents from Milan suggests that sailors from Genoa, the home town of Christopher Columbus, knew of America 150 years before Columbus sailed there.  

As reported by Science Daily, the find comes from a document written around 1345 by a Milanese friar named Galvaneus Flamma.   In the course of his transcription, Paolo Chiesa [kee-AY-sa], a Medieval Latin literature expert from the Department of Literary Studies, Philology and Linguistics at the University of Milan, found the surprising passage referring to an area we know today as North America.

According to Chiesa, the text is part of a longer work by Galvaneus called Cronica universalis.  The key passage suggests that sailors from Genoa knew of a land called Markland, or Marckalada, which is also mentioned by some Icelandic sources.  That area is identified by scholars as part of the Atlantic coast of North America, probably Labrador or Newfoundland.

Chiesa’s find was published in the peer-reviewed journal, Terrae Incognitae.

Galvaneus Flamma was a Dominican friar who lived in Milan during the 14th century.  He wrote several literary works in Latin, mainly on historical subjects.  His testimony is valuable for information on contemporary Milan, but Cronica universalis, which Chiesa is currently analyzing, is a later work and was left unfinished.  It aims to detail the history of the whole world, from creation to Flamma’s own time.

According to Chiesa, Cronica universalis demonstrates that Genoa’s port was a gateway for news as well as trade goods, and Flamma heard from seafarers about lands to the extreme northwest, including Greenland, which he details quite accurately for the time. The rumored descriptions of Marckalada were too vague to find their way into maps, but they clearly were circulating in Italy over one hundred years before Columbus.

The Marckalada described by Flamma is said to be rich in trees and animals, not unlike the wooded Markland of the Grœnlendinga Saga.

According to Chiesa, these details could be standard reports about any good land.  However, they are not trivial, because the most common description of northern regions is that they are bleak and barren, as Flamma describes Greenland, or as others of the era described Iceland.  The fourteenth-century nautical charts being drawn in Genoa and in Catalonia also show an advanced geographical representation of the north, suggesting direct contact with those regions.  This information likely came to Genoa through the shipping routes to the British Isles and the continental coasts of the North Sea.

No evidence exists that Italian or Catalan seafarers ever reached Iceland or Greenland at that time, but they certainly brought goods back from northern harbors, where news about these distant lands would have circulated among the Scottish, English, Danish, and Norwegian sailors they met.

Our third story continues the theme of early discovery with new evidence that sailors, possibly Norse, arrived in the Azores long before Portugal claimed the islands.

The Azores are a string of volcanic islands in the North Atlantic, 900 miles from the nearest European shore.  Portugal began settling the Azores around 1450.

As reported in The Daily Mail, an international team of researchers has found evidence in lake soils that show non-native farm animals were present 700 years before the Portuguese.  Other data include a rise in charcoal particles, likely from clearing forests for cattle grazing.  

The new research counters the long-held belief that 15th century Portuguese sailors were the first humans to arrive in the Azores.

According to co-author Santiago Giralt, a paleoclimatologist at Geosciences Barcelona, the new finds show the importance of environmental evidence for tracing human history.  

The Azores began appearing on European maps in the 1350s, and archaeological evidence of humans on the islands dates to 1427, when Portuguese sailor Diogo de Silves landed on Santa Maria Island while searching for new routes to Asia under orders from Prince Henry the Navigator.  The Flores Corvo islands were reached 25 years later and eventually more Portuguese colonized the archipelago.

The environmental record adds considerably more to this story.

Analyzing sediment layers in various lakes in the archipelago, an international team found traces of fecal compounds from non-native animals like cows and sheep that date to between AD 700 and 850.   

They also found increased charcoal particles, likely indicating explorers or colonists were setting large fires, and a drop in native tree pollen.  Together, these suggest people were burning down parts of the forest to provide grazing land for cattle.

Sediment samples are valuable tools in peeling back layers of history, because material that sinks to the bottom of a lake is often preserved as new strata of sediment are layered on top.

According to co-author Timothy Shanahang of the University of Texas, fecal sterols and stanols are well preserved in lake sediments, making them a reliable indicator of the presence of large mammals.

Cows, sheep, goats, and other large mammals didn't live on the Azores prior to the arrival of humans, so the find is a clear sign that humans had arrived.  Sediment from another lake additionally showed traces of non-native ryegrass.

According to lead author Pedro Raposeiro of the University of the Azores, the work shows that early human settlement on the islands caused extensive environmental and ecological changes.

Simulations of climate conditions suggest that these early visitors could have been Norse sailors taking advantage of favorable sailing conditions.  Other research from Cornell University in 2015 found genetic similarities between Azorean mice and rodents from northern Europe.

According to Raposeiro, the results show how important it is to supplement and complement historical records with ecosystem research.  

The study was published in PNAS, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States. 

We should add that Portuguese archaeologist Nuno Ribeiro has claimed to have found ancient Carthaginian temples on the islands and reports exist of ancient Greek coins. Clearly, more archaeological research is needed in the Azores.

We end the week on the Greek island of Crete, where researchers have produced an even older date for footprints left by pre-humans: about six million years ago.

The discovery was made by an international team led by the University of Tübingen, who found the footprints in fossilized beach sediments near the Cretan village of Trachilos in 2017.

As reported by Heritage Daily, the researchers used geophysical and micropaleontological techniques to date the footprints to 6.05 million years ago.  This makes them the oldest direct evidence of a human-like foot used for walking.

According to Uwe Kirscher from the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment at the University of Tübingen, the tracks are almost 2.5 million years older than the tracks attributed to Australopithecus afarensis, also known as Lucy, at the site of Laetoli in Tanzania.  This places the Trachilos footprints in Crete at around the same age as the fossils of the upright-walking Orrorin tugenensis from Kenya.

The Trachilos footprints give new insights into the early evolution of upright hominins.  According to Per Ahlberg from Uppsala University, the foot used for these traces of upright walking had a ball with a strong parallel big toe and successively shorter side toes. The foot had a shorter sole than that of Australopithecus. An arch was not yet pronounced, and the heel was narrower.

Six million years ago, Crete was connected to the Greek mainland via the Peloponnese.  Finding footprints this old on a European island adds to the lively discussion about the location of hominin origins, which some researchers believe could have been in Eurasia rather than Africa.  

The new research appears in the open-access Scientific Reports from the journal, Nature. 

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!