The Great London:
Forensics

A gruesome discovery in eastern France casts new light on violent conflicts that took lives — and sometimes just limbs — around 6,000 years ago.

Excavations of a 2-meter-deep circular pit in Bergheim revealed seven human skeletons plus a skull section from an infant strewn atop the remains of seven human arms, say anthropologist Fanny Chenal of Antea Archéologie in Habsheim, France, and her colleagues.

Two men, one woman and four children were killed, probably in a raid or other violent encounter, the researchers report in the December Antiquity. Their bodies were piled in a pit that already contained a collection of left arms hacked off by axes or other sharp implements. Scattered hand bones at the bottom of the pit suggest that hands from the severed limbs had been deliberately cut into pieces.

It’s unclear who the arms belonged to. All the Bergheim skeletons have both their arms except for a man with skull damage caused by violent blows. His skeleton lacks a left arm, the researchers say. They have been unable to determine whether that arm ended up in the pit.

Chenal’s group doesn’t know whether attackers targeted victims’ left arms for a particular reason. The arms could have been taken as war trophies, the team speculates.

Radiocarbon dating of two bones indicates that individuals in the Bergheim pit lived roughly 6,000 years ago. From 6,500 to 5,500 years ago, during what’s known as the Neolithic period, one of the many ways of disposing of the dead in farming communities throughout Central and Western Europe was in circular pits.

Discoveries of human and nonhuman bones, as well as pottery, in these pits go back more than a century. The Bergheim pit provides the first evidence that people killed and mutilated in raids or battles were sometimes buried in circular pits, too, says study coauthor Bruno Boulestin, an anthropologist at the University of Bordeaux in France.

Unusual deposits in Neolithic circular pits, such as attack victims and severed limbs at Bergheim, “may have been more common than previously expected,” says biological anthropologist Silvia Bello of the Natural History Museum in London, who did not participate in the new study. She suspects, for instance, that closer inspection of human bones previously found in circular pits elsewhere in Europe will reveal additional instances of violent deaths from a time when armed conflicts occurred between some communities.

Bergheim’s brutalized victims spice up attempts to make sense of Neolithic circular pits. Many researchers regard these pits as remnants of storage silos that were put to other uses, possibly as receptacles for the bodies of people deemed unworthy of formal burials.

Others argue that a large proportion of pits were dug as graves for high-ranking individuals, whose servants or relatives were killed to accompany them. Or, slaves might have been killed and put in pits as displays of wealth or as sacrifices to gods.

Of 60 circular pits excavated in Bergheim in 2012 in advance of a construction project, 14 contained human bones. The researchers found skeletons or isolated bones of at least one to five individuals in each of 13 pits. The final pit contained the bodies and limbs described in the new paper.

Joints of severed arms and skeletons in that pit were well-preserved, indicating that all had been placed there at or around the same time with a minimum amount of jostling disturbance. The pit also contained remains of a piece of jewelry made with a mussel’s valve, a stone arrowhead, a fragment of a pig’s jaw and two hare skeletons. The skeleton of a woman who had been put in the pit later lay on top of a sediment layer encasing those finds.

Neither that woman nor human remains in the other Bergheim pits showed signs of violent death or limb loss.

Author: Bruce Bower | Source: Science News [December 12, 2015]

The stories of Roman lives are written their bones: diet, disease, childbirth and trauma all leave their mark. Individual skeletons can tell rich tales, but the fullest information comes from large groups, when we can look at populations. So what can we learn about about a Roman community from their skeletons?

Whether they were a slave

Slavery was ubiquitous in the Roman world, and some of its agonies are preserved on skeletons: those working in and living near Roman mines in Jordan were exposed to lead and copper at levels that would have been toxic, and caused a range of illnesses. The remains of people who were likely to have been slaves have also been found still wearing iron shackles, for instance in a subterranean room of a villa in Pompeii, and near the silver mines of Laurion in Roman-era Greece.

Whether they played sports

Among the human remains from ancient Herculaneum, which was destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius at the same time as Pompeii, were a possible boxer, with typical fractures to his hands and nose, and a javelin-thrower whose bones reveal the same elbow problems experienced by modern athletes.

How they died, who they loved

At Dura-Europos in Syria, remains of Roman and Sasanian troops trapped in a siege mine beneath the walls of the ancient city reveal the brutal and violent reality of ancient conflict, including gas warfare. In the nearby cemetery, families were buried together in underground tombs, with women and children placed together.

Where people came from

Even places like Roman Britain were diverse. Scientific methods (such as isotope analysis), as well as the study of graves and grave goods (the objects buried with a body) can tell us where a person was likely to have come from, or where they had links to. For instance, work on the cemeteries of Roman York has shown that people buried there came from other places in Britain, and much further afield in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.

The extent of childhood illnesses

In the Roman world, children often didn’t make it to adulthood. Roman cemeteries such as Poundbury in Dorset include many children with rickets, scurvy and anaemia – survival rates were staggeringly low by modern Western standards. Infant and early childhood mortality was high in the Roman period, with 45% of children unlikely to survive past five years of age.

So we can learn a lot about how a Roman may have lived from her or his remains, but, while skeletons are biological, bodies are cultured and contextual; they can be modified to fit ideals of beauty, status, or gender. Ultimately, Roman skeletons tell us that culture is a significant factor in determining difference: underneath it all, we’re pretty much the same collection of 206 interlocking parts.

Dr Jen Baird and Dr Tim Reynolds from the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck College, University of London, will be talking in depth about Roman skeletons at a Guardian Live/Birkbeck event on 21 November.

Authors: Dr Jen Baird and Dr Tim Reynolds | Source: The Guardian [November 14, 2015]

A mummy from ancient Egypt was heavily tattooed with sacred symbols, which may have served to advertise and enhance the religious powers of the woman who received them more than 3,000 years ago.

The newly reported tattoos are the first on a mummy from dynastic Egypt to show actual objects, among them lotus blossoms on the mummy’s hips, cows on her arm and baboons on her neck. Just a few other ancient Egyptian mummies sport tattoos, and those are merely patterns of dots or dashes.

Especially prominent among the new tattoos are so-called wadjet eyes: possible symbols of protection against evil that adorn the mummy’s neck, shoulders and back.

“Any angle that you look at this woman, you see a pair of divine eyes looking back at you,” says bioarchaeologist Anne Austin of Stanford University in California, who presented the findings last month at a meeting of the >American Association of Physical Anthropologists.

Austin noticed the tattoos while examining mummies for the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology, which conducts research at Deir el-Medina, a village once home to the ancient artisans who worked on tombs in the nearby Valley of the Kings. Looking at a headless, armless torso dating from 1300 to 1070 bc, Austin noticed markings on the neck. At first, she thought that they had been painted on, but she soon realized that they were tattoos.

Hidden history

Austin knew of tattoos discovered on other mummies using infrared imaging, which peers more deeply into the skin than visible-light imaging. With help from infrared lighting and an infrared sensor, Austin determined that the Deir el-Medina mummy boasts more than 30 tattoos, including some on skin so darkened by the resins used in mummification that they were invisible to the eye. Austin and Cédric Gobeil, director of the French mission at Deir el-Medina, digitally stretched the images to counter distortion from the mummy’s shrunken skin.

The tattoos identified so far carry powerful religious significance. Many, such as the cows, are associated with the goddess Hathor, one of the most prominent deities in ancient Egypt. The symbols on the throat and arms may have been intended to give the woman a jolt of magical power as she sang or played music during rituals for Hathor.

The tattoos may also be a public expression of the woman’s piety, says Emily Teeter, an Egyptologist at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute in Illinois. “We didn’t know about this sort of expression before,” Teeter says, adding that she and other Egyptologists were “dumbfounded” when they heard of the finding.

Some tattoos are more faded than others, so perhaps some were made at different times. This could suggest that the woman’s religious status grew with age, Austin says.

Penetrating gaze

She has already found three more tattooed mummies at Deir el-Medina, and hopes that modern techniques will uncover more elsewhere.

Even infrared imaging can’t penetrate an intact mummy’s linen binding. But a nineteenth-century penchant for unwrapping mummies could enable the discovery of more tattoos, says Marie Vandenbeusch, a curator at the British Museum in London. Such examples could provide needed evidence “to really pinpoint the use of those tattoos”, she says.

Austin argues that the scale of the designs, many of them in places out of the woman’s reach, implies that they were more than simple adornment.

The application of the tattoos “would’ve been very time consuming, and in some areas of the body, extremely painful”, Austin says. That the woman subjected herself to the needle so often shows “not only her belief in their importance, but others around her as well”.

Author: Traci Watson | Source: Nature [doi:10.1038/nature.2016.19864] [May 09, 2016]

Cutting-edge genome technology in Trinity College Dublin has cast more light on a mystery that has perplexed archaeologists for more than a decade. The origins of a set of Roman-age decapitated bodies, found by York Archaeological Trust at Driffield Terrace in the city, have been explored, revealing a Middle Eastern body alongside native British.

Archaeologists have speculated that the skeletons belonged to gladiators, although they could also have been soldiers or criminals. Several suffered perimortem decapitation and were all of a similar age – under 45 years old. Their skulls were buried with the body, although not positioned consistently – some were on the chest, some within the legs, and others at the feet.

Although examining the skeletons revealed much about the life they lived – including childhood deprivation and injuries consistent with battle trauma – it was not until genomic analysis by a team from Trinity College Dublin, led by Professor of Population Genetics, Dan Bradley, that archaeologists could start to piece together the origins of the men.

The Trinity College team recently published the first prehistoric Irish genomes and this analysis by Trinity PhD Researcher, Rui Martiniano, also breaks new ground as it represents the first genome analysis of ancient Britons.

From the skeletons of more than 80 individuals, Dr Gundula Muldner of the University of Reading, Dr Janet Montgomery of the University of Durham and Malin Holst and Anwen Caffel of York Osteoarchaeology selected seven for whole genome analyses. Despite variation in isotope levels which suggested some of the 80 individuals lived their early lives outside Britain, most of those sampled had genomes similar to an earlier Iron Age woman from Melton, East Yorkshire. The poor childhood health of these men suggests that they were locals who endured childhood stress, but their robust skeletons and healed trauma, suggest that they were used to wielding weapons.

The nearest modern descendants of the Roman British men sampled live not in Yorkshire, but in Wales. A man from a Christian Anglo-Saxon cemetery in the village of Norton, Teesside, has genes more closely aligned to modern East Anglia and Dutch individuals and highlights the impact of later migrations upon the genetic makeup of the earlier Roman British inhabitants.

However, one of the decapitated Romans had a very different story, of Middle Eastern origin he grew up in the region of modern day Palestine, Jordan or Syria before migrating to this region and meeting his death in York.

"Archaeology and osteoarchaeology can tell us a certain amount about the skeletons, but this new genomic and isotopic research can not only tell us about the body we see, but about its origins, and that is a huge step forward in understanding populations, migration patterns and how people moved around the ancient world," says Christine McDonnell, Head of Curatorial and Archive Services for York Archaeological Trust.

"This hugely exciting, pioneering work will become the new standard for understanding the origins of skeletons in the future, and as the field grows, and costs of undertaking this kind of investigation fall, we may be able to refine our knowledge of exactly where the bodies were born to a much smaller region. That is a remarkable advance."

As well as Trinity College Dublin, the multi-disciplinary scientific analysis involved scientists from the University of York and The York Archaeological Trust, as well as the universities of Durham, Reading and Sheffield, University College London and the University Medical Centre in Utrecht. The research also included experts from York Osteoarchaeology Ltd, City of York Council and the Natural History Museum.

The Roman skeletons sampled were all male, under 45 years old and most had evidence of decapitation. They were taller than average for Roman Britain and displayed evidence of significant trauma potentially related to interpersonal violence. All but one would have had brown eyes and black or brown hair but one had distinctive blue eyes and blond hair similar to the single Anglo-Saxon individual.

The demographic profile of the York skeletons resembles the population structure in a Roman burial ground believed to be for gladiators at Ephesus. But the evidence could also fit with a military context—the Roman army had a minimum recruitment height and fallen soldiers would match the age profile of the York cemetery.

Professor Dan Bradley, Trinity, said: "Whichever the identity of the enigmatic headless Romans from York, our sample of the genomes of seven of them, when combined with isotopic evidence, indicate six to be of British origin and one to have origins in the Middle East. It confirms the cosmopolitan character of the Roman Empire even at its most northerly extent."

PhD Researcher and lead author, Rui Martiniano, Trinity, said: "This is the first refined genomic evidence for far-reaching ancient mobility and also the first snapshot of British genomes in the early centuries AD, indicating continuity with an Iron Age sample before the migrations of the Anglo-Saxon period."

Professor Matthew Collins, of the BioArCh research facility in the Department of Archaeology at York, who co-ordinated the report on the research, "These genomes give the first snapshot of British genomes in the early centuries AD, showing continuity with the earlier Iron Age and evidence of migrations in the Anglo-Saxon period."

The paper is published in >Nature Communications.

Source: Trinity College Dublin [January 20, 2016]

Scientists used the full DNA sequences of Schistosoma mansoni parasites from Africa and the French Caribbean to discover the fluke's origins, map its historic transmission and identify the secrets of its success. Their findings, published in Scientific Reports, show how the global slave trade transported the disease from Senegal and Cameroon to Guadeloupe. Further genomic comparison with a closely related schistosome species that infects rodents reveals how the parasite has adapted to infecting human beings.

Schistosoma mansoni is a blood fluke (flatworm) that infects more than 250 million people worldwide and causes more than 11,000 deaths each year. Six years ago the Sanger Institute published the parasite's first full DNA sequence (genome); this latest study used that 'genetic map' to construct and compare the genomes of S. mansoni parasites gathered from across Africa and the New World, the majority of which were held at the Schistosomiasis Collection in the Natural History Museum, London.

By analysing the differences between the human-infecting S. mansoni and its close relative, the rodent-infecting S. rodhaini, the scientists calculated that the two species evolved from a common ancestor approximately 107,000 to 148,000 years ago in East Africa. This finding suggests that the species is much 'younger' than previously thought.

"The timing of the separation of the two species coincidences with the first archaeological evidence of fishing in Africa," explains Thomas Crellen, first author of the study from Imperial College London, the Sanger Institute and the Royal Veterinary College London. "The parasite develops in freshwater and infects people by burrowing through their skin. The introduction of fishing would have meant that people spent more time in the water, greatly increasing their chances of being infected."

Analysing the differences between genomes from different locations also revealed the darker side of human history.

"Comparing the S. mansoni genomes suggests that flukes in West Africa split from their Caribbean counterparts at some point between 1117AD and 1742AD, which overlaps with the time of the 16th-19th Century Atlantic Slave Trade," says Professor Joanne Webster from Imperial College London and the Royal Veterinary College. "During this period more than 22,000 African people were transported from West Africa to Guadeloupe by French slave ships, and the fluke was carried with them."

Comparing the genomes of S. mansoni with S. rodhaini also revealed the genetic variations that have been positively selected over time in the human-infecting fluke and have been "fixed" into its DNA. It is likely that these variations are the evolutionary adaptations that have occurred to enable the fluke to successfully tunnel into, and thrive within, human beings.

"When we looked for the differences between human-infecting S. mansoni DNA and its rodent infecting cousin S. rodhaini, we found two important variations. We found that changes to two genes in S. mansoni's DNA -- VAL21 and an elastase gene -appear to be important in allowing the fluke to enter and live in humans," says Dr James Cotton, senior author of the study from the Sanger Institute. "VAL genes produce proteins that cause allergic responses, so it is possible that the variation in VAL21 helps the fluke to hide from our immune systems. The elastase gene helps the parasite to burrow in to the body, by breaking down elastin -- a major component of human skin."

It is hoped that exploring the genetic makeup of the fluke it will be possible to discover more about the processes the parasite relies on to infect humans and offer new opportunities to develop preventive and therapeutic interventions.

Source: Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute [February 17, 2016]

Bodies found in a 200 year-old Hungarian crypt have revealed the secrets of how tuberculosis (TB) took hold in 18th century Europe, according to a research team led by the University of Warwick.

A new study published in Nature Communications details how samples taken from naturally mummified bodies found in an 18th century crypt in the Dominican church of Vác in Hungary have yielded 14 tuberculosis genomes, suggesting that mixed infections were common when TB was at peak prevalence in Europe.

The research team included collaborators from the Universities of Warwick and Birmingham, University College London, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the Hungarian Natural History Museum in Budapest. Lead author Professor Mark Pallen, from Warwick Medical School, said the discovery was significant for current and future infection control and diagnosis.

Professor Pallen said: “Microbiological analyses of samples from contemporary TB patients usually report a single strain of tuberculosis per patient. By contrast, five of the eight bodies in our study yielded more than one type of tuberculosis – remarkably from one individual we obtained evidence of three distinct strains.”

The team used a technique called “metagenomics” to identify TB DNA in the historical specimens—that is direct sequencing of DNA from samples without growing bacteria or deliberately fishing out TB DNA. This approach draws on the remarkable throughput and ease of use of modern DNA sequencing technologies.

Gemma Kay, first author on the paper says: “Poignantly, we found evidence of an intimate link between strains from in a middle-aged mother and her grown-up daughter, suggesting both family members died from this devastating infection.”

The team used the 18th century sequences to date the origin of the lineage of TB strains commonly found in Europe and America to the late Roman period, which fits in with the recent controversial suggestion that the most recent common ancestor of all TB strains occurred as recently as six thousand years ago.

Professor Pallen said: “By showing that historical strains can be accurately mapped to contemporary lineages, we have ruled out, for early modern Europe, the kind of scenario recently proposed for the Americas—that is wholesale replacement of one major lineage by another—and have confirmed the genotypic continuity of an infection that has ravaged the heart of Europe since prehistoric times.”

Professor Pallen added that with TB resurgent in many parts of the world, the struggle to contain this ancient infection was far from over. He concludes: “We have shown that metagenomic approaches can document past infections. However, we have also recently shown that metagenomics can identify and characterize pathogens in contemporary samples, so such approaches might soon also inform current and future infectious disease diagnosis and control.”

For more photos of the Hungarian mummies visit the website Morbid Anatomy.

Source: University of Warwick [April 07, 2015]

Analysis of ancient cadavers recovered at a famous archaeological site confirm the existence of a sophisticated culture of butchering and carving human remains, according to a team of scientists from the Natural History Museum, University College London, and a number of Spanish universities.

Gough's Cave in Somerset was thought to have given up all its secrets when excavations ended in 1992, yet research on human bones from the site has continued in the decades since.

After its discovery in the 1880s, the site was developed as a show cave and largely emptied of sediment, at times with minimal archaeological supervision.

The excavations uncovered intensively-processed human bones intermingled with abundant butchered large mammal remains and a diverse range of flint, bone, antler, and ivory artefacts.

New radiocarbon techniques have revealed remains were deposited over a very short period of time, possibly during a series of seasonal occupations, about 14,700 years ago.

Dr Silvia Bello, from the Natural History Museum's Department of Earth Sciences, lead researcher of the work said, "The human remains have been the subject of several studies. In a previous analysis, we could determine that the cranial remains had been carefully modified to make skull-cups. During this research, however, we've identified a far greater degree of human modification than recorded in earlier. We've found undoubting evidence for defleshing, disarticulation, human chewing, crushing of spongy bone, and the cracking of bones to extract marrow."

The presence of human tooth marks on many of the bones provides incontrovertible evidence for cannibalism, the team found. In a wider context, the treatment of the human corpses and the manufacture and use of skull-cups at Gough's Cave has parallels with other ancient sites in central and western Europe.

But the new evidence from Gough's Cave suggests that cannibalism during the 'Magdalenian period' was part of a customary mortuary practice that combined intensive processing and consumption of the bodies with the ritual use of skull-cups.

Simon Parfitt, of University College London, said, "A recurring theme of this period is the remarkable rarity of burials and how commonly we find human remains mixed with occupation waste at many sites. Further analysis along the lines used to study Gough's Cave will help to establish whether the type of ritualistic cannibalism practiced there is a regional ('Creswellian') phenomenon, or a more widespread practice found throughout the Magdalenian world."

Source: Natural History Museum [April 16, 2015]

The Museum of London today announced a ground-breaking research project to explore the effects of industrialisation on Londoners. The research hopes to uncover new clues about the very nature of disease and how it has affected people as Britain has moved into the age of industrialisation.

The research has been made possible by a City of London Archaeological Trust grant from a bequest made by the late Rosemary Green.

John Schofield, Secretary of the City of London Archaeological Trust, said: “The City of London Archaeological Trust is very happy that the Rosemary Green bequest is used to gather this cutting-edge data on the signs of industrialisation in the skeletal collections on the Museum of London.”

Leading the project is Jelena Bekvalac, based at the Museum of London’s Centre for Human Bioarcheology, along with her research team, Gaynor Western and Mark Farmer.

Jelena Bekvalac, said: “The most tangible evidence we have for the long-term consequences of the industrialisation process upon us is, quite simply, written in our bones. Using the very latest digital technology, we will examine the skeletal remains of over 1,000 adult men and women from industrial-era London in addition to a further 500 skeletons from the medieval metropolis.

“Modern health trends have seen a shift towards increasing life expectancy but we want to look again at what are often thought of as ‘man-made’ conditions like obesity and cancer. Given today’s more sedentary lifestyles, far removed from the physically active and natural existence of most of our forebears, there are some big questions about the origins of these diseases and how they relate to the modern environment.”

The research aims to address some of these questions by analysing diseases affecting the human skeleton. The museum will use the latest clinical techniques, including direct digital radiography, CT scanning and 3D modelling, to get a better understanding of what the bones tell us and to assess their change over time. The research aims to examine the influence of the industrial revolution, a pivotal catalyst in the formation of the modern age, on the changing nature of disease – from the medieval and post-medieval periods through to the present day.

The project offers an exciting opportunity to digitise some of London’s most important skeletal collections, while simultaneously telling a new story about the health of Londoners over time.

This work will culminate in the creation of an extensive new interactive digital resource that can be explored online. Jelena Bekvalac plans to make an immediate start on the digital scanning. She aims to publish her team’s findings as soon as possible and deliver a series of lectures about the work.

Source: Museum of London [April 24, 2015]

Biological anthropologist Sharon DeWitte studies ancient skeletons that can open a window onto the human history she hopes to illuminate. But as she and graduate student Samantha Yaussy show in a recently published study, some of the markers on the skeletons that scientists use to decipher the past might need to be looked at in a new light.

DeWitte, one of the world's foremost experts on the Black Death, which killed one-third to one-half of Europe's inhabitants over just seven years in a mid-1300s pandemic, is also interested in the periods before and after the Black Death, both in times of famine and, for the medieval era, relative plenty.

"This was a time when you had all of these other stressors existing, like multiple infectious diseases, people living in really crowded conditions, lack of hygiene," DeWitte says. "I'm interested in looking at how famine might have affected subsequent patterns of health and risks of mortality."

In research recently published in the >American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Yaussy and DeWitte worked with skeletal remains excavated from London's St. Mary Spital cemetery, which was in use from about 1120 to 1540 A.D. The cemetery was organized well enough over those years that modern-day researchers can assign burial groupings according to location to a number of shorter time periods within that larger 420-year time frame. Because they were focused on the effects of famine, the scientists specifically excluded burials from the Black Death era in the study.

The way that people were buried in plots also provided important data. Large group burials within a single grave were taken to be the result of catastrophic famine losses over short periods of time, whereas single interments were categorized as "attritional" deaths, that is, deaths in "normal" times.

Using a total of more than 1,500 individual adult remains that were almost evenly divided between famine deaths and normal deaths, DeWitte and Yaussy carefully examined the skeletons for markers that are indicative of stress during the individual's lifetime.

One stress marker they looked for is called "linear enamel hypoplasia" (LEH), which is a horizontal groove on a tooth that results from childhood physiological stress or trauma sometime between 6 months and 6 years of age, when the tooth is forming in the jaw.

"It could be the result of an infection, lack of nutrition, or even breaking a leg," says Yaussy. "Your enamel just stops creating itself for a day or a little longer. It starts back up again, but during that time when it was shut off, there's no enamel on that portion of the teeth, and it leaves a groove."

They found that that stress marker, LEH, was significantly correlated with famine. "It was a pretty sensitive indicator of famine burials," Yaussy says. "Having that early life insult seems to instigate this pattern of lifelong frailty, so when a famine event occurs, it causes mortality in those individuals."

Another indicator of life stress, though, turned out to be a horse of a different color. Using shin bones (tibia), the researchers looked for what's called periosteal lesions. It's a place on the bone where new growth on the surface has occurred in response to physical or physiological stress.

"When it's put under stress, and it can be from something like an infection, or a break, or even just stress from carrying heavy buckets all day, bone can grow onto itself and strengthen itself," Yaussy says. "These are nonspecific -- we're not necessarily saying that it was an infection that caused it, or that it was from someone hitting their shin repeatedly. I just see that there was bone growth there, so there's some stressor that's causing the bone to generate more bone."

In contrast to people with the LEH indicator, individuals with areas of bone regrowth were correlated with periods of normal, or attritional, death. That result came as a something of a surprise to colleagues in the field.

"This project was a bit of a shock to some of the people at the paleopathology meetings where we presented it," Yaussy says. "A lot of people have been thinking that things like periosteal lesions are bad, that people who had them weren't especially healthy. But this study in part might be saying that those people were actually pretty healthy. It takes time, a couple of weeks, to build up this bone, so it could be that if there was some stress event that was substantial enough to kill a person before they could even register a response, we wouldn't be seeing it on the bone now."

The unexpected result helps inform DeWitte in the larger goal of looking at what happens to populations after crises, such as the Black Death or famines, pass, and particularly how cultural norms might influence the outcomes.

"What I'm interested in going forward is looking at access to resources before the Black Death, during normal conditions during famine conditions, and then after the Black Death, again during normal and famine conditions," Dewitte says. "Seeing if there were social factors that affected people's access to resources when there was little available and then when they became abundant again."

"I think this might have implications for living populations, understanding how social, economic and political factors affect access to resources beyond the actual amount of resources that are available."

Author: Steven Powell | Source: University of South Carolina [May 02, 2016]

Archaeologists from the British museum have reconstructed an ancient man's face, allowing visitors to see what he looked like for the first time.

The man lived 9,500 years ago in the holy city of Jericho, now found in the Palestinian territories near the West Bank.

The 'Jericho skull' was found by British archaeologists in 1953, but until now nobody knew what the he had looked like.

Scientists still don't know the man's true identity, but they speculate that he was once someone of great importance.

This is based on the amount of care people had taken to fill his skull with plaster once he had died, almost 10,000 years ago.

Back then, plastered skulls were a form of ritual burial, like the Egyptians' infamous mummification burials.

The gruesome practice involved removing the corpse's skull and filling it with plaster, before painting over the dead person's face and filling his eye sockets with shells.

These remains were likely put on display for locals while the rest of the body was buried under the family home.

The Jericho skull was found nestled alongside several other plastered skulls, but was by far the most well-preserved of the group.

'He was certainly a mature individual when he died, but we cannot say exactly why his skull, or for that matter the other skulls that were buried alongside him, were chosen to be plastered,' British Museum curator Alexandra Fletcher told >Seeker.

'It may have been something these individuals achieved in life that led to them being remembered after death.'

Before the reconstruction, the ancient skull showed few human features due to the plaster pasting over most of its features.

To investigate the grim burial practice, the scientists sent the skull off for a scan at the Imaging and Analysis Centre at London's Natural History Museum.

Here, a complete micro-CT scan unveiled a ream of new information about the skull, and inspired the Museum to undertake a full plaster reconstruction.

Through the CT scans, the team discovered that the ancient man was missing a jaw underneath the plaster, and had lines of decaying teeth.

They could see he had suffered a broken nose at some point in his life.

He had also undergone head-binding, a traditional practice in which the skull of a human being is deformed intentionally, usually by forcefully distorting a child's skull.

'Head binding is something that many different peoples have undertaken in various forms around the world until very recently,' Fletcher told Seeker.

'In this case, the bindings have made the top and back of the head broader - different from other practices that aim for an elongated shape. I think this was regarded as a 'good look' in Jericho at this time.'

All of the newly gathered details allowed the team to make an accurate plaster reconstruction of the man's head.

And while the fascinating new model provides fresh insight into the man's life, plenty more work needs to be done to discover more about his history and culture.

The team hopes to gather DNA samples from the skull in future, laying out 10,000 year-old genes for investigation.

But the process would be risky - it's likely to damage the skull and useful results aren't guaranteed.

'If we were able to extract DNA from the human remains beneath the plaster, there is currently a very slight chance that we would be able to find out this individual's hair and eye colour,' Fletcher said.

'I say a slight chance because the DNA preservation in such ancient human remains can be too poor to obtain any information.'

The reconstructed face will be on display at the British Museum in London from next Thursday until mid-February.

Author: Harry Pettit | Source: Daily Mail Online [December 09, 2016]

Archaeologists have created a new database from the teeth of prehistoric humans found at ancient burial sites in Britain and Ireland that tell us a lot about their climate, their diet and even how far they may have travelled. In a paper, led by Dr Maura Pellegrini from the University of Oxford, researchers say that individuals in prehistoric Britain were highly mobile.

The study is part of the international Beaker People project lead by Professor Mike Parker Pearson of University College London, and involves scientists from many institutions, including the universities of Oxford, Durham, Bradford, University College London, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. The paper says most of the teeth in the collection date back to Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age periods (from 2500 to 1500 BC) and the analysis, published in the journal >Scientific Reports, suggests not only were people moving around their own country but may also have travelled to and from continental Europe.

Researchers describe how tests on tooth fragments using an oxygen isotope analysis of tooth enamel provides evidence of where an individual lived when the tooth formed. Oxygen, a naturally occurring element in the environment, is absorbed by plants and animals and fixed in the mineral component of mammalian teeth, with an isotopic composition related to the environment in which that individual spent their childhood.  Based on the theory that prehistoric people would have sourced water and food locally, the team were able to geographically map the oxygen isotopic variability in the landscape of Britain and Ireland thereby providing a guide to where individuals sampled had lived as children.

An analysis of the teeth of those buried in the Stonehenge region, the Peak District, and the hills of the Yorkshire Wolds (in East Riding and North Yorkshire) show many were not 'local' to their final resting place. They were drawn from far and wide, sometimes to focal points containing sacred monuments. The variability in the isotope values was found to be particularly marked in individuals recovered from Woodhenge, a timber circle situated near Stonehenge; Bee Low, a Bronze Age round cairn in the Peak District, and Garton Slack in Yorkshire where there is a complex range of barrow types and burial practices.

Tooth enamel fragments from 261 individual teeth were tested with researchers focusing on the central part of the tooth crown in each case. The teeth sampled from these individuals mineralise from the age of two years up to 8 years old, providing the clues to the environmental conditions, including the water they drank as a child. The possibility that people were outsiders who came into areas where they eventually died was calculated by comparing their values with the 'isoscape' information gleaned from most of the other samples in each area, as it was assumed the latter represented 'local' individuals. As individuals' signatures in the teeth were matched with areas where the majority, or 'local' people, were found, the researchers identified those who had lived in other areas as children.

Source: University of Oxford [October 08, 2016]