Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew.  You won’t be surprised to hear that some fascinating news stories 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!

A canoe burial in Argentina is the first solid prehistoric evidence for a practice known from ethnographic accounts.  Coring in two well preserved mounds on the campus of Louisiana State University shows that the first of them began to be built an astounding 11,000 years ago.  Detailed analysis of a leg bone and arm bones from a site in Chad found in 2002 suggests that upright walking in human ancestors dates back seven million years.  And a massive DNA study of the region from the Balkans to Iran yields many fascinating insights into the movement of human groups and languages in that critical region over the past 15,000 years.

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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 August 21st through the 27th, 2022.

We start this week in Argentina, where an examination of a pre-Columbian grave site has revealed the first archaeological evidence for the practice of canoe burials.

As reported by Live Science, the site in northern Patagonia contains three burials – one of which houses the remains of a young woman whose body position and surroundings indicate she was buried in a canoe.  The burial canoe has rotted away, but fragments of the wood -- from a Chilean cedar tree -- remain.  The grave also contains freshwater clam shells that likely formed a bed the body rested upon.  Radiocarbon dating suggests the grave dates between 850 and 1000 years ago.

The evidence suggests the woman was interred in a traditional canoe burial representing the Mapuche belief that a soul must make a final boat journey before it arrives in the land of the dead.

The practice of canoe burials is well attested in ethnographic evidence and is still carried out in some cultures today.  However, until now, no physical record for the practice during the pre-Hispanic period had been found.  According to lead author Alberto Pérez of Temuco Catholic University in Chile, the degradation of wood in the humid climate means that few remains of these practices have survived.  

The study also points to shared cultural traditions on the east and west side of the Andes mountains.  A pottery jug decorated with white glaze and red geometric patterns, placed in the grave by the woman’s head, suggests a connection with the "red on white bichrome" tradition of pre-Hispanic ceramics on both sides of the Andes.  According to the report, this is the earliest known example of this type of pottery being used as a grave gift.

The study was published this month in the online journal PLOS One.

Our second story takes us to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where new research into the Campus Mounds on the grounds of the Louisiana State University reveals they are the oldest known built structures in North America.

As reported by Phys.org, the new research includes the discovery of thousands-of-years-old charred mammal bone fragments and a coordinated alignment of both mounds toward one of the brightest stars in the night sky.

The two 20-foot-tall grassy mounds on the LSU campus are among more than 800 mounds built by ancient indigenous people in what is today Louisiana.  While many mounds in the region have been destroyed, the LSU Campus Mounds have been preserved and are listed on the National Register for Historic Places.

Researchers collected sediment cores from the mounds, revealing layers of ash from burned reed and cane plants, as well as the burned bone fragments.  Radiocarbon dating of the layers of material indicates the mounds were built in multiple episodes over thousands of years.  These findings show that people began to build the first mound about 11,000 years ago.

The layers of ash and charred microscopic bone fragments may indicate the mound was used for ceremonial purposes, which included burning reed and cane plants to make large, hot fires that would have been too hot for cooking.  The scientists do not know what type of mammals were cremated on the mounds or why.  However, they found many microscopic, charred bone fragments, known as osteons, the building blocks of large mammal bones, in the ash beds in both LSU Campus Mounds.

Then, around 8,200 years ago, the southern mound was abandoned.  Tree roots found in the 8,200-year-old sediment layer indicate that the mound was not used for about 1,000 years.   Around 8,200 years ago, the northern hemisphere experienced a major climate event with temperatures suddenly dropping on average by about 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit, which lasted about 160 years.

According to LSU Department of Geology & Geophysics Professor Emeritus Brooks Ellwood, the sudden and dramatic environmental change may have affected many aspects of the daily life of the people who built the mounds.

Then, around 7,500 years ago, the indigenous people began to build a new mound just to the north of the first mound.

According to the new analyses of the sediment layers and their ages, indigenous people cleared the abandoned first-built mound and began to build it up to its current height before completing the second mound.  Both mounds were completed around 6,000 years ago and are similar in height.

The crests of both mounds are aligned along an azimuth that is about 8.5 degrees east of true north.  According to LSU astronomer and study coauthor Geoffrey Clayton, about 6,000 years ago, the red giant star Arcturus would rise about 8.5 degrees east of north in the night sky, which means it would have aligned along the crests of both Campus Mounds.  Arcturus is one of the brightest stars that can be seen from Earth.

The research was published last month in the American Journal of Science. 

Our third story this week features a new study that sheds light on the early development of bipedalism in human ancestors.

As reported by Smithsonian Magazine, a new study argues that Sahelanthropus tchadensis 

[SaHEL - anthropus CHAD - ensis], a species that lived during the critical time when our human lineage diverged from chimpanzees and habitually walked on two legs.  Since many consider bipedalism the major milestone that put our own lineage on a different evolutionary path from the apes, Sahelanthropus could be the first known hominin—the group including modern humans.

The species could even be our oldest non-ape ancestor, if its lineage led to Homo sapiens instead of dying out.  But while the fossil femur appears to have supported the demands of habitual upright walking, Sahelanthropus’s chimp-like forearms show that it still spent plenty of time in the trees.  Two surviving arm bones reveal that the species used a grasping climbing technique to support a type of hybrid lifestyle that could have persisted among early hominins for some time.

The only known example of Sahelanthropus tchadensis comprises fossils found two decades ago in Chad’s Djurab Desert.  The reasonably complete skull, jaw and teeth became known as Toumaï, meaning “hope of life” in the local Goran language, and it was described as a new species in 2002.  The femur and two arm bones were found nearby and initially wasn’t considered part of the same group of specimens, although they were located actually near the skull.

Study co-author Jean-Renaud Boisserie of the University of Poitiers and others compared more than twenty traits of the femur and forearm bones with a large sample of living chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans; fossil Miocene apes, early hominin bipeds and remains of prehistoric Homo and Homo sapiens.  They compared external shapes, curves, internal structures, and thicknesses to learn if the bone had the same characteristics as those known to be well suited to upright walking.  The femur showed many similarities with other hominin species, while no traits of the femur were found exclusively in apes.

The conclusion that Sahelanthropus tchadensis is therefore a biped might continue to face pushback.  Just two years ago a study in the Journal of Human Evolution suggested that the same femur belonged to an individual that was not habitually bipedal.

In fact, some scientists don’t believe that the species is a hominin at all.  Because Sahelanthropus lived so close to the divergence between hominins and chimpanzees, scientists debate whether the fossils are from an individual who lived after that divergence or perhaps one who lived just before the divergence.  If the latter, Sahelanthropus could be an ancestor of either chimps or humans, or some common ancestor to both lineages, or possibly even a close relative which is ancestral to neither.

However, Sahelanthropus seems to show two of the foundational adaptations that all later hominins share: a femur restructured for habitual upright walking and reduced canine teeth that restructured the mouth.  Other fossils of the earliest known hominins also share these traits, notably Orrorin tugenensis, which lived around six million years ago, and Ardipithecus ramidus [ aar – dih – PI – thih – kuhs  RA – mih – duhs ], which lived about 4.4 million years ago.

The study was published this week in the journal Nature.

Our final story this week features groundbreaking genetic research from Harvard University.

As announced by Harvard Medical School, researcher Iosif Lazaridis published three papers describing 15,000 years of genetic history in the Balkans, Eastern Mediterranean, Anatolia, the Levant and Iran, a region the researchers call the “Southern Arc.”

Featuring the genomes of more than 1,300 ancient people, 727 of them sequenced for the first time, the work represents one of the largest analyses to date of ancient human DNA.   The research was made possible by a new technique for extracting DNA from fossils of the inner ear, allowing access to DNA remains previously thought lost to time and harsh climates.  The work was carried out by collaboration across borders and specialties. The Reich lab, where Lazaridas works, partnered with researchers at the University of Vienna to lead a 206 person team based in more than 30 countries.

Co-authors in different fields worked together to interpret the findings in the context of what was already known through archaeological evidence, ancient texts and other materials.  The findings are wide ranging. 

The study provides a range of new evidence about the origins and spread of Indo-European languages and cultures, as well as the genetic identity of the first farmers.  The rise of Indo-European languages until now was associated with ancestry from the Eurasian steppe.  However, the study shows that ancient people in Anatolia who spoke Indo-European languages had no steppe ancestry and experienced significant gene flow from the Caucasus.  This suggests that the homeland of the language that gave rise to both Anatolian and Indo-European languages was in the Caucasus rather than the steppe.  That interpretation inevitably will be controversial.

The papers also acknowledge the nuances of identity in later periods, particularly in the Roman Empire.  Previous genetic studies had shown that as the Empire coalesced, the ancestry of people in and around the city of Rome shifted, with most having roots in the eastern Empire. 

After obtaining dozens of additional Roman-era genomes from the region, the team zeroed in on the source of those newcomers: Anatolia.  But the researchers agree that people with “Anatolian” DNA moving to the Italian peninsula likely saw themselves as citizens of Rome rather than as part of a distinct “Anatolian” ethnic group.

The 3 papers were published this week in Science

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 Kennedy and I’ll see you next week!