Welcome back, everybody!  I’m Rick Pettigrew.  Get set for a brand-new 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!

A new DNA study has apparently solved a persistent mystery about the origins of the Indo-European language family.  An Arabic manuscript that slumbered for centuries in a Dutch library turns out to contain translated versions of lost books by a famous Greek philosopher.  A statistical analysis of thousands of radiocarbon dates has described 2000 years of population fluctuation across North America.  And an interdisciplinary team using AI has revealed lots more text from a carbonized scroll recovered from the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum.

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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 February 2nd through the 8th, 2025.

We begin this week with a new study that utilizes ancient DNA to provide new insight into the development of the Indo-European language family.

As reported by ArkeoNews, this family comprises more than 400 languages, including those in the Romance, Slavic, Germanic, Indo-Iranian, and Celtic branches.  More than 40% of the global population are among its speakers.

Since the 19th century, historians and linguists have been working to trace the evolution of the Proto-Indo-European language family, which developed out of the Proto-Indo-European language.  However, persistent gaps have remained in our knowledge about its linguistic roots and geographic spread. 

The study, a joint effort by Ron Pinhasi’s team from the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Vienna and David Reich’s ancient DNA laboratory at Harvard University, appeared in the journal Nature.

According to an earlier genetic study, the Yamnaya culture, active between 3300 and 3600 BC, migrated from the Pontic-Caspian steppe into Europe and Central Asia around 3100 BC.  Of any event in the last 5,000 years, this movement probably had the most significant impact on European genomes and was likely instrumental in the spread of Indo-European languages. 

Prior to this study, the only branch of Indo-European language speakers without any steppe ancestry was the Anatolian.  Researchers had believed this branch to be the first to diverge, preserving linguistic features that would later be lost in the other languages.

According to David Reich, the senior author of the study, the Hittites, an Anatolian-speaking population, lack Yamnaya ancestry. This led the team to speculate that another, deeper population was the ultimate origin point for Indo-European languages.

The research team examined DNA from 435 individuals buried across Eurasia who lived between 6400 and 2000 BC.  They identified a new group that had not been adequately identified before: a population originating in the steppe between the north Caucasus Mountains and the lower Volga River. 

Genetic analysis revealed that the Yamnaya population derived nearly 80% of its ancestry from the Caucasus Lower Volga, or CLV, people.  The Bronze Age central Anatolians also received at least a tenth of their ancestry from the CLV group, indicating that they probably are the origin point for both of these lineages.

According to study co-author Ron Pinhasi, this group's discovery establishes a connection among all Indo-European speaking groups, resolving a question researchers have sought to answer for over 200 years.

Next, we travel to the Netherlands, where two significant books by Apollonius, the prominent Greek mathematician, have turned up in an Arabic manuscript.  Long thought to be lost, these texts were under lock and key in Leiden University’s Middle Eastern Library. 

As reported by Phys.org, Apollonius was known throughout the ancient world as “The Great Geometer.”  In his groundbreaking book, “The Conics of Apollonius,” he introduced the terms hyperbola, ellipse and parabola.

This revelation is noted in the volume “Prophets, Poets and Scholars,” which describes the collections in the University’s possession.  Authored by Dr. Arnoud Vrolijk and colleagues at the Library, the essays detail the relationships connecting the Dutch, the Middle East and North Africa.  The initial interactions involving the Dutch and Arabic manuscripts took place in the early 17th century.

Apollonius formulated his theories in eight books, only four of which were accessible to European scholars during the Renaissance. Two of the lost books—numbers 5 and 7—were among nearly 200 Middle Eastern manuscripts purchased for Leiden University in the 17th century by Dutch orientalist and mathematician Jacob Golius.

Golius brought four other Arabic manuscripts that lay out aspects of classic Arab and Muslim scientific traditions.

According to Jan Pieter Hogendijk, a Dutch mathematician and science historian, the Arabic translation of Apollonius’s work is not only precise but also decorated with colored images and written in skilled calligraphy. 

Many Western university libraries hold Arabic and Islamic manuscripts, but only a fraction have been thoroughly studied due to the lack of local scholars fluent in Arabic, Persian and Turkish.  

According to Mesut Idriz, a professor of Islamic civilization at Sharjah University in the United Arab Emirates, social science researchers need specialized knowledge—such as paleography, historical context and scientific expertise— to thoroughly investigate the vast information embedded in these manuscripts.

We now head to the United States, where a team of archaeologists and anthropologists is utilizing radiocarbon dating of bone fragments and other artifacts to learn more about fluctuations in the Indigenous population before the arrival of Europeans.  In a collaboration between the University of Wyoming, Michigan State University, and the Desert Research Institute, they published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

As reported by Phys.org, the team examined tens of thousands of objects recovered from multiple sites across North America, including food scraps, textiles and charcoal bits spanning more than two millennia.  They worked for over 10 years to carbon-date this collection.

Researchers based their regional population estimates on the quantity of each type of object they dated, scaling that up to a population number for the entire continent.

Based on their maps and data, fluctuations in population size differed by region and time due to local influences.  Focusing on a specific area, the team detailed Cahokia’s history.  Known as the largest city in prehistoric North America, Cahokia reached its peak population around 1100. Soon after that, however, its numbers dwindled due to over-farming, hunting and climate shifts, leading to the city’s abandonment by 1350.

The population of North America peaked around 1150, after which numbers ebbed and flowed.  The Europeans arrived at a time when the population was rebounding across the continent; it would drop soon after that and continue to plummet throughout the following centuries.

Finally, we take a look at the two-year effort by an interdisciplinary team of computer scientists, scholars and citizen scientists to decipher a scroll damaged by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius nearly 2,000 years ago.  The research team labels the scroll PHerc. [Pee-Herk] 172, and it is housed at the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries.

As reported by Smithsonian Magazine, the scroll is one of thousands of papyrus rolls recovered by archaeologists in the 1750s.  It had survived inside a Roman mansion, now known as the “Villa of the Papyri,” located today in the Italian town of Ercolano. 

Life in the seaside city, then known as Herculaneum, came to a halt with the avalanche of ash and debris expelled by the volcano.  It lay just ten miles north of Pompeii, a city that notably suffered a similar fate. 

While researchers have long suspected that the scrolls contained ancient literary and philosophical texts, the intense heat from the eruption burned them severely, making them too fragile to be unrolled by hand.  Modern technology has given researchers a new method to try: opening the scrolls digitally. 

Scientists reached out to the public for help, launching the Vesuvius Challenge.  This worldwide contest has awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars to participants who have used artificial intelligence to reveal thousands of characters and even a word—“purple”—in one of the scrolls.  

According to Dr. Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky and leader of the effort to decode the scrolls, this project has revealed the most recoverable text in any scanned Herculaneum scroll so far.  

Several columns of text are visible, with each comprising around 26 lines.  The research team hopes to bring the writing on the rest of the scroll into view, gradually moving from the handful of words deciphered so far to substantial passages.

Building on the work of these computer scientists, scholars are using other deciphered ancient scrolls to make sense of PHerc. 172. They suspect its contents are connected to the teachings of the Greek philosopher Epicurus [epi-CURE-us].  They’ve also been able to translate one of the formerly unreadable words, “disgust,” which appears at least twice in the text.

According to Stephen Parsons, leader of the Vesuvius Challenge, the team is confident that we’ll one day be able to read the scroll in its entirety.

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

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