Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Audio News from Archaeologica!  I'm Laura Kennedy.  Rick Pettigrew is away on our tour of Brittany, so I'll be telling you about four of the best stories posted online this past week on our archaeology news website, Archaeologica.org!  Here are the headlines in archaeological and historical news for the week of September 8th through the 14th, 2024.

We begin this week in the Rhone River valley of southern France, where archaeologists uncovered the teeth and portions of the skull of a late Neanderthal male at the entrance of the Grotte Mandrin rock shelter.  They have nicknamed him Thorin after a dwarf king in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. 

As reported by Live Science, a team of researchers led by Ludovic Slimak [LOO doe veek  SLY mock] of the Center for Anthropobiology and Genomics, Toulouse, France, analyzed Thorin's genome to learn more about when and how Neanderthals disappeared.  The results suggest that multiple late Neanderthal communities in Europe lived close to each other, but they didn't interact.  Thorin came from a lineage of Neanderthals that stayed isolated for thousands of years.  

Twenty years ago, Slimak had theorized that Neanderthals found in the Rhone Valley differed from those found in nearby regions, based on differences in the stone tools uncovered at the Grotte Mandrin rock shelter.  This led him to propose that Thorin and his relatives didn't use the toolmaking style of the tools found at other nearby sites.

Slimak's theory proved accurate.  When Slimak and his colleagues used part of the root of Thorin's molar to generate a whole-genome sequence, they noted his high genetic homozygosity -- inheritance of the same gene allele variant from both parents.  This shows not only that Thorin did not interbreed with modern humans.  He and his relatives did not even exchange genes with the classical Neanderthal populations for about fifty thousand years.

Using techniques like radiocarbon dating and cave geologic strata assessment, the researchers determined that Thorin died between 52,000 and 42,000 years ago.  In 2023, new evidence suggested Thorin's death more likely occurred 42,000 years ago.  This means that he was among the last of the Neanderthals.  Thus, per Slimak, our past accounts of how this great human population extinction event happened need to be rewritten.

It is hard to understand how populations separated by only a two-week walk managed to stay genetically isolated for 50,000 years.  In view of the Neanderthals' small group sizes and their genetic isolation, researchers are reassessing when and why the Neanderthals disappeared.  One hypothesis is that those who lived in small, isolated groups may have struggled to maintain their population levels.

The site of the discovery is still under excavation, and the exact location of the rest of Thorin's body has not been determined.  But nothing so far indicates that he spent any time away from Grotte Mandrin. 

Our second story takes us to Rapa Nui, a remote Polynesian island 2,300 miles west of coastal Chile and commonly known as Easter Island.  As reported by Live Science, a new analysis of ancient DNA reveals that the island never experienced a self-inflicted population collapse, as previously believed.

In the past, researchers have debated whether deforestation, overuse of resources, or warfare during the late 1600s caused this decline.  According to a study published in the journal Nature, all these events happened before the arrival of Europeans, which occurred a century later.  

The team was approved by Rapa Nui representatives to study the remains of fifteen bodies removed from the island during colonization in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and now located at a museum in France.  According to study co-author Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas [SOOP foe  malas PEE nus], a postdoctoral researcher in evolutionary genomics at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, population collapse will manifest a loss in genetic diversity.  But genomes taken from the fifteen bodies show no evidence of such a genetic bottleneck.  

Instead, the DNA reveals that the island's small population steadily increased until the 1860s.  This is when Peruvian slave raiders attacked the island and eliminated thirty percent of the population.  According to Stephan Schiffels [SHIFF uls] and Kathrin Nägele [NAY gay lay] -- archaeogeneticists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany -- the study shows that no more than 3,000 people at a time ever populated the island.  

In June, a different research group used satellite images and machine learning to analyze rock gardens on Rapa Nui.  They found that these gardens, tended by islanders, could have supported only a small population on the island.  

The analysis also showed that past Rapa Nui inhabitants had Native American DNA.  This suggests either that they crossed the Pacific Ocean to visit the Americas, and returned, or that Native Americans had journeyed to Rapa Nui.  This intermixing would have happened in 1300s.  A European presence wasn't established on the island until 1722.  

According to Joanna Van Tillburg, an archaeologist and director of the Easter Island Statue Project, who was not involved in the study, more research is needed.  The fifteen human remains analyzed were among hundreds removed after the arrival of Europeans, and need better documentation.  

However, DNA still confirms that the fifteen ancient individuals sampled originated from Rapa Nui.  

A key goal of the team is to restore these ancestral remains to the Rapa Nui community.    

Our third story takes us to the Iberian Peninsula, where new evidence suggests that southeastern Iberia's transition from the Copper Age to the Bronze Age was not violent, as previously thought.

As reported by Phys.org, when researchers recently unearthed individuals with Steppe ancestry in southeastern Iberian graves, their findings revealed that the subjects mixed with small local groups or occupied uninhabited areas.  This challenges the theory that Steppe-related warriors from Eastern Europe violently overthrew the male population of the region some 4,200 years ago.  

This study, conducted by Universidad Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) [oo nee ver see DAD  ow TOE nuh muh  day  bar sey LOW nuh] and the University of Murcia (UM), [MOOR cee uh] analyzed a large sample of radiocarbon dates from bones uncovered in these graves.  The team took into account what they already knew about the transition from the Copper Age to the Bronze Age, including a shift from communal burials to single- and double-tomb burials.  The analysis suggested that this change happened quickly.

The intermixing of Steppe people with demographically weakened locals could have had a great impact.  According to Rafael Micó [mee COE], professor at the UAB and co-director of the Mediterranean Social Archaeoecology Research Group, it's possible that the local inhabitants were already few in number from 2200 to 2000 BC.

While major social disruptions did occur in Central and Western Europe between the Late Copper Age and the Early Bronze Age, archaeologists are still debating their exact sources.  According to Camila Oliart [OH lee art], UAB researcher and co-author of the study, the hypothesis that the Steppe people migrated westward from the Black Sea region, with horse and wheel technology, and violently raided Western Europe is likely a false one.

Violence was indeed part of social life in the Copper Age, but nothing yet shows that it ended in conflict between local and invading groups.  The team emphasizes that these sites are scantly documented.  They expect that further genetic analysis and high-precision radiocarbon dating will reveal more about the changes that shaped Bronze Age societies.

This study was published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

We end this week's archaeological news at a campsite in Southwest Michigan, where researchers uncovered evidence that the Great Lakes region was occupied by some of the earliest humans to enter North America.

As reported by Phys.org, the Clovis people appeared in North America about 13,000 years ago, during the Pleistocene.  Until recently, evidence that these people occupied the Great Lakes region has been scarce.  A 2021 study from the University of Michigan confirmed that the Clovis people occupied a camp called the Belson site in southwest Michigan.  According to Brendan Nash, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in archaeology, they revisited this site annually for at least three consecutive years, and more likely for five.  

Tools uncovered at the site also indicate that the area enriched their diets with a wide variety of game, including musk ox, caribou, hare -- and peccary, a Pleistocene relative of the pig.  This contradicts the belief that Pleistocene humans were exclusively big game hunters, eating mostly mammoths and mastodons.

The Great Lakes region holds a long record of Late Glacial sites, but reconstructing the chronological sequence and patterns of human occupation has been difficult.  Virtually all of these Late Glacial sites are surface sites.  Hence, heavy plowing since has left little early organic material intact.

The Belson site, in Mendon, Michigan, was the first to be discovered in this region with a deeper, more intact deposit, below the plow zone.  This created new opportunities for understanding living patterns, and how plow zone disturbance has changed original site layouts.  At this site, researchers uncovered tools made from a stone type called chert.

In 2008, Thomas Talbot, the independent researcher who uncovered the first Clovis point at the Belson site, conducted a chert analysis.  The evidence indicated that some of the pieces came from chert formations in northeastern Kentucky.  But the majority of the raw chert material and chert tools represented Attica chert, originating to the south, in Indiana.  

The tools and flakes assemblage uncovered at the Belson site indicates that the people who occupied it either made, or traded for, the items in Indiana, near the quarry site.  If they so traded, they then brought the items with them to the Belson site, where they modified, further traded, or discarded them.  Other Michigan and Indiana sites from the same period follow this pattern as well.  

This new study offers insight into how the Clovis people lived and migrated.  Additional –  excavations at the site are expected to provide data that will help further refine the team's interpretations.

The results of the excavation are detailed in the journal PLOS ONE.

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 growing video-streaming subscription platform, Heritage Broadcasting Service, at heritagetac.org!

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