Welcome back, everybody!  I’m Rick Pettigrew with our latest batch of four top news stories from this past week of Archaeologica.  Send us feedback on The Archaeology Channel Facebook page or post a message on our social networking site, ArchaeoSeek!

Some clay cylinders found in Syria surprisingly are marked with what appear to be the earliest known alphabetic characters.  High-tech examination of the Blue Qur’an, one of the most lavish Qur'an manuscripts ever created, reveals hidden verses beneath a layer of gold ornamentation.  A novel statistical method applied to hundreds of European DNA samples covering thousands of years has identified stages of natural selection not perceptible in the modern population.  And excavations in Bermuda are clarifying the history of the earliest English settlement there, which played a role in the colonization of the Americas.

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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 November 17th through the 23rd, 2024.

Our first story takes us to western Syria, where excavators have unearthed what may be the oldest alphabetic writing in human history.  

As reported by Phys.org, finger-length clay cylinders, etched with figures that appear to be alphabetic characters, came to light from a tomb at Tell Umm-el Marra—home of the first medium-sized urban centers in the region.  A team from Johns Hopkins University, working jointly with colleagues from the University of Amsterdam, has been conducting the dig east of modern-day Aleppo for more than sixteen years.

The tomb, one of several dating to the Early Bronze Age, is among the best-preserved at the site.  Along with the etched cylinders, it contained six skeletons, likely remains of a wealthy and powerful family, along with gold and silver jewelry, a spearhead, and intact pottery vessels. 

According to Glenn Schwartz, Johns Hopkins professor of archaeology and co-director of the multi-year dig, the development of alphabets caused a massive shift in the way people lived, thought and communicated.  Writing was no longer a privilege of royals and the elite, but available to everyone.  

The Syrian find shows that people were experimenting with alphabets much earlier and in a different location than researchers had thought.  Previously, scholars believed the alphabet had been invented in or around Egypt sometime after 1900 BC.  Carbon-14 dating techniques have confirmed the ages of the Syrian tombs, artifacts and writing to around 2400 BC—some 500 years before other known alphabetic scripts.  

Earlier writing systems, like cuneiform, used an array of signs to represent words, sounds or ideas.  Alphabetic characters refer only to phonemes, or sounds, with most languages only incorporating 20 to 30 phonetic values.

The cylinders are perforated, indicating that they may have been attached with strings to other objects.  Serving as labels or tags, they would have described the contents of vessels, where they came from, or whom they belonged to.  With no way to translate the writing yet, we can only guess at their meanings.

Next, we travel to the United Arab Emirates, where a research team at the Zayed National Museum, or ZNM, has unearthed a hidden, centuries-old text within a page from one of the most important examples of Islamic calligraphy ever produced: the Blue Qur'an.  

As reported by Arkeo News, cutting-edge multispectral imaging, which can detect faded text and images no longer visible to the human eye, uncovered the verses under an intricate layer of gold leaf ornamentation.  

The hidden verses from the fourth chapter, Surah al-Nisa', focus on the rights of women, the law of inheritance, care for orphans, lawful and unlawful women to marry, and standing for justice.

Dating between AD 800 and 900, the Blue Qur'an is one of the most lavish Qur'an manuscripts ever created, with vivid indigo sheepskin pages, silver decoration and gold Kufic calligraphy.  Its origins have been variously ascribed to North Africa, Iraq or Andalusia.  Only 100 of its 600 pages exist today, scattered throughout private and museum collections.  Five are held by the ZNM.  

Scholars believe the patterns were created to hide a calligrapher's mistake—possibly a duplicated verse.  Starting a new page would have been impractical due to the high cost of indigo-dyed sheepskin.

According to Mai Al Mansouri, Associate Curator at ZNM, the discoveries provide new insight into this important manuscript’s creation and highlight the value of the Museum in the United Arab Emirates and the world.

Our third story covers a range of archaeological sites and eras across ancient Europe, where DNA from human skeletal remains has provided new insights into how ancient Europeans adapted to their environments over 7,000 years.

As reported by Science Daily, a team of researchers from The University of Texas at Austin and the University of California, Los Angeles, utilized a novel statistical method suited for DNA analysis.  The samples used dated from the Neolithic to the late Roman period across Europe.

While natural selection leaves subtle signatures on our genome, they can erode over generations.  By grouping over 700 samples into four time periods—Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age, and Historical—this new technique allowed the team to detect signs of natural selection more effectively than traditional methods.  It enabled them to uncover evidence of genetic adaptation to environmental pressures not seen in the DNA of modern Europeans.  

Researchers were able to identify natural selection in 14 regions of the genome, including the ability to produce Vitamin D and digest milk into adulthood, the selection of immune-related genes, and other adaptations to environmental challenges over millennia.  

It also showed how certain traits have persisted, disappeared, or been altered over time, demonstrating how those that once conferred a survival advantage became invisible in today's  genetic landscape.  Half of the adaptive signals observed were detectable only in the oldest samples, highlighting the effect of genetic drift or mixing in later populations.

The findings, published in Science Communications, reveal that traits crucial for survival in early populations often disappear over time, leaving modern genomes with only fragments of these evolutionary stories.

Our final destination this week is Bermuda, where new archaeological finds have revealed secrets about one of Britain's first settlements in the New World.

As reported by Smithsonian Magazine, the archipelago was once home to more settlers than Virginia or Massachusetts, and far more prosperous.  The English first grew tobacco in the New World here, and purchased enslaved Africans to work the fields.

A town on Smith's Island, established eight years before the Pilgrims stepped ashore at Plymouth, Massachusetts, was quickly abandoned, even its name forgotten.  Now, after four centuries, it is being unearthed.  

For the past 14 years, Michael Jarvis, a historian and archaeologist at the University of Rochester in New York, has led annual excavations seeking to uncover the secrets of Bermuda's neglected colonial history.  He believes Smith's Island was its first substantial British settlement.

Bermuda's fierce weather kept ships away until 1609, when a large English fleet en route to Jamestown took a shortcut that sent its flagship aground on the rocks of St. George's Island.  Through the fall and winter, the crew and passengers built two vessels from local cedar and set sail for the Virginia coast in the spring.  Three men, later dubbed The Three Kings, stayed behind.  Tales of the beautiful but storm-tossed island inspired Shakespeare to pen The Tempest, a play that intrigued would-be settlers.

Within six months of the work's debut, a small vessel with 60 passengers landed on Smith's Island to establish a capital.  Just months later, the colonists would move their activities to St.  George's, leaving the thick jungle over the next four centuries to smother one of the oldest English towns in the New World.

In the nearly 30 years since archaeologists have begun to search Bermuda, most excavations have focused on fortifications, churches and eighteenth-century domestic sites.  Jarvis's investigations, however, seek to shed light on the lives of Bermuda’s earliest settlers.

Ongoing annual excavations have shown that Smith's Island is home to an exceptionally well preserved assemblage of sites that shed light on Bermuda's early agricultural and maritime past.  They are helping us understand how Bermuda's first settlers adapted to life in a new colony and the nature of the island's now entirely lost early timber-frame architecture.

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!