Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew with the top news stories that appeared on Archaeologica this past week!  Send us feedback on The Archaeology Channel Facebook page or post a message on our social networking site, ArchaeoSeek!

Timbers from a missing Spanish galleon from the 17th century have turned up on the Oregon coast.  Late Pleistocene human remains from southern China have DNA that links them to early populations in the Americas. And a very early Anglo-Saxon cemetery near London might contain the remains of some of the first Anglo-Saxon migrants to come after the Roman withdrawal.

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And now, here’s Laura Kennedy 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 Kennedy, and these are the headlines in archaeological and historical news for the week of July 10th through the 16th, 2022.

We go to the Pacific coast of the United States, where marine archaeologists have recovered timbers believed to be from the hull of the 17th-century Spanish galleon Santo Cristo de Burgos, which was lost in 1693, in sea caves in Oregon.

Legends of the ship are said to have inspired Steve Spielberg's 1985 film, The Goonies, in which a group of children follow a treasure map leading to a pirate's fortune.

As reported by the Daily Mail, the recovery mission came after a fisherman found some old timbers in a sea cave in 2013 and later reported them to the Maritime Archaeological Society, or MAS.  After a period of delays, a team finally recovered some of the timbers and moved them to the Columbia River Maritime Museum in Astoria, Oregon, where it is hoped they will reveal more information on the way Spanish galleons were built.

The location of the rest of the shipwreck remains a mystery, but archaeological excavation shows that debris from the wreck predates a tsunami that hit the Oregon coast in the year 1700.  That work narrowed down the list of possibilities to the galleon lost in 1693, one of a series of ships, called “Manilla Galleons,” which annually for about 250 years carried cargo from Acapulco to Manilla and from Manilla back to Acapulco.

According to Jim Delgado, an archaeological investigator and the senior vice president of cultural resource management firm SEARCH Inc., the timbers are physical evidence for stories that have been known and passed down through generations.  

A written account from 1813 tells of a Spanish galleon that was wrecked many years earlier near Neahkahnie Mountain, along the Oregon coast.  Indigenous tribes also passed down the legend of a ship that had wrecked off the Oregon coast, carrying porcelain and beeswax.  These stories were backed up by mysterious chunks of beeswax that would continue to appear along the shoreline of Nehalem Bay throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Legends of lost treasure were widely reported in Oregon newspapers during the late twentieth century, and allegedly caught the attention of director Steven Spielberg.

Actual evidence of the wreck itself had never been located, until in 2013 fisherman Craig Andes came across some mysterious timber remnants in sea caves near the town of Manzanita.  In 2020, he contacted the MAS, which had been searching for evidence of the wreckage since 2006, and asked them to recover the timbers before they could be carried away again by the ocean. 

Lab analysis confirmed the wood was from a tropical hardwood tree, and radiocarbon dating indicated that it was cut down around 1650.  This meant it was of the type and age that would have been used for the galleon, and prompted a recovery mission.

That summer, archaeologists scrambled into the sea caves, only accessible at low tide, to further study the wood.  They concluded that they were not evidence of the shipwreck itself, but had perhaps been washed into the cave by a tsunami in 1700.  Finally, in June 2022, they recovered some of the timbers for analysis.

The MAS teams will continue to search for the source of porcelain and beeswax that still washes up on the coast, and further remains of the Santo Cristo de Burgos.

In our third story, researchers have successfully sequenced, for the first time, the genome of ancient human fossils from southern China dating to the Late Pleistocene.

As reported by ScienceDaily.com, the results suggest that the mysterious hominin whose genes were revealed was part of an extinct branch of modern humans, one that might have been related to Native Americans.

The path to this discovery started over three decades ago, when a group of archaeologists in China discovered a large set of bones in the Maludong, or Red Deer Cave, in southern China's Yunnan Province.  Radiocarbon dating placed the fossils in the Late Pleistocene, about 14,000 years ago, a time when modern humans had migrated to many parts of the world.

A hominin skull cap from the cave had characteristics of both modern and archaic humans.  For example, the shape of the skull resembled that of Neanderthals, but unlike Neanderthals, its brain appeared to be smaller than that of modern humans.  As a result, some anthropologists thought the skull either belonged to an unknown archaic human species that lived until fairly recently, or to a hybrid population of archaic and modern humans.

In 2018, a team led by Bing Su from the Kunming Institute of Zoology in the Chinese Academy of Sciences successfully extracted ancient DNA from the skull.  Genomic sequencing showed that the hominin belonged to an extinct maternal lineage of a group of modern humans whose surviving descendants are now found in East and Southeast Asia.

The new results show that Late Pleistocene hominins living in southern East Asia had rich genetic and morphologic diversity, more so than in northern East Asia during the same period.  

According to Su, this suggests that early humans who first arrived in eastern Asia had initially settled in the south before some of them moved to the north.

The genome definitively shows that the Red Deer Cave people were modern humans instead of an archaic species, such as Neanderthals or Denisovans, despite their unusual morphological features.

Next, the researchers compared the genome of these fossils to that of people from around the world.  They found a link to the ancestry of Native Americans.  Combined with previous data, this finding led the team to propose that some of the southern East Asia people had traveled north along the coastline of present-day eastern China through Japan and reached Siberia tens of thousands of years ago.  They then might have crossed the Bering Strait between the continents of Asia and North America and became the first people to arrive in the New World.

Next, the team plans to sequence more ancient human DNA by using fossils from southern East Asia, especially ones that predated the Red Deer Cave people.

The results are published in the July 14 issue of Current Biology. 

Our final story brings us to Great Britain, where a pagan burial ground dating from the fifth century AD has come to light near London during construction for a high-speed rail project.

As reported by livescience.com, the new discoveries include more than 100 skeletons.  Other finds on the route include a Roman market town, dozens of decapitated skeletons and a 2,000-year-old wooden figurine.

According to Rachel Wood, the lead archaeologist for Fusion JV, Anglo-Saxon cemeteries are normally a few individuals, sometimes 20 or 30.  This one, with 141 burials, is one of the largest known.

The human remains include a young man who appears to have been killed by a spear.  Grave goods include brooches [BRO-chez] and rings of silver and other metals decorated with gold; grooming kits with tweezers and spoons for removing ear-wax; and objects probably imported from Europe, like amber beads and glass drinking vessels.

According to Wood, this may have been the burial ground of a single affluent landowning family over several generations.  

The cemetery, near the town of Wendover, is one of the earliest Anglo-Saxon sites anywhere in Britain.  The later graves date from the sixth century, but the earliest date from the fifth century — maybe only a few generations after the end of direct Roman rule in about AD 410.

By that time, several armies garrisoning the Roman province of Britannia, in the regions that are now England and Wales, had been withdrawn to fortify Gaul against rebellions and invasions by the encroaching Germans.  After that, much of the region reverted to indigenous Romanized and largely Christian rulers, but after AD 440 the pagan Anglo-Saxons from northern Europe began to settle the area as well.

The Anglo-Saxons buried at Wendover were definitely armed — the grave goods included an iron sword, 15 spearheads and the remains of seven shields.  A metal point, probably the tip of a spear, was found in the spine of one man and apparently killed him.

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No other evidence emerged, however, to suggest that the people in the cemetery had spent their lives fighting with the Romano-British. 

The period between Roman rule and the established Anglo-Saxon kingdoms used to be called the "Dark Ages" in Britain, possibly because so little was written down at that time; and it's been portrayed as time of near-constant warfare between the Romano-British and the Anglo-Saxons.  For example, the legends of King Arthur — a post-Roman Christian king fighting the invaders — are set in this time.

According to Wood, the reality was probably less savage.  The skeletal remains and grave goods suggest this was a largely peaceful group of people, perceived as uncultured only because they didn't write anything down.

The burial group represents the first generations living after the end of the Roman administration.  Isotope analysis will be carried out to discover whether these were also the first generations of Anglo-Saxon invaders.  The isotope study will identify the geochemistry of the bones to reveal the environment at the time they were living, and possibly their geographic origin.

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! Also, be sure to check out our new subscription platform, Heritage Broadcasting Service, at heritagetac.org!

I’m Laura Kennedy and I’ll see you next week!