The Great London:
Middle East

Ali al-Bayati clambered onto the remains of a giant winged bull statue that once stood as a protector of Iraq's fabled ancient Nimrud before the Islamic State group came.

"When you came here before, you could imagine the life as it used to be," the local leader and tribal militia commander told AFP on Tuesday.

"Now there is nothing."

Iraqi forces announced that they had recaptured Nimrud -- located some 30 kilometres (18 miles) south of Mosul, the country's last city still held by the Islamic State group -- two days before.

The capital of the kingdom of Assyria some 3,000 years ago, Nimrud was one of the richest archaeological sites in the region.

But after IS took over the area along with swathes of other territory in 2014, it sought to level what remained of the city for propaganda gain.

The jihadist group released video footage last year of fighters blowing up the remnants of the famed Northwest Palace and smashing stone carvings at the site -- destruction it justified as wiping out un-Islamic idols.

Now it appears that almost nothing is left undamaged.

Statues lie shattered, the reconstructed palace is wrecked and the remains of a ziggurat -- once one of the tallest structures left from the ancient world at some 50 metres (yards) high -- has been reduced to a fraction of its height.

"One hundred percent has been destroyed," Bayati said as he surveyed the hilltop site, just 500 metres from his native village, for the first time in more than two years.

"Losing Nimrud is more painful to me than even losing my own house," he said.

UNESCO has said that the destruction of Nimrud by IS amounts to a war crime.

Bombs and booby traps

The group also blew up and looted antiquities in the spectacular Syrian site of Palmyra, smashed sculptures at ancient Hatra in Iraq, which is still under IS control, and rampaged through the Mosul museum.

In Nimrud, the jihadists attacked the antiquities with ferocity as they claimed they represented idols banned under their extreme interpretation of Islam.

But that has not stopped them from looting and selling such allegedly forbidden items to fund their operations.

"They want to make a new picture of Iraq -- with nothing before Daesh," Bayati said, using an Arabic acronym for the group.

He said he thought IS "destroyed this place because they wanted to destroy Iraq -- the new Iraq and old Iraq".

Most of Nimrud's priceless artefacts were moved long ago to museums in Mosul, Baghdad, Paris, London and elsewhere, but giant "lamassu" statues -- winged bulls with human heads -- and reliefs were still on site.

Now it will take experts to carry out a full evaluation of the damage IS has wrought at Nimrud.

But it may be some time before they can get there: the jihadists that Iraqi forces are fighting to drive back are still just a few kilometres away, and occasional explosions can be heard in the distance.

The site also still needs to be fully investigated and cleared by security forces of any hidden dangers IS may have left behind.

"There are many (bombs) and booby traps suspected," said Lieutenant Wissam Hamza, a member of an army explosives disposal team, as he walked carefully across the site.

"So we want to find them and clear the area -- then after that it can be called safe."

Source: AFP [November 17, 2016]

The transition from hunter-gatherer to sedentary farming 10,000 years ago occurred in multiple neighbouring but genetically distinct populations according to research by an international team including UCL.

“It had been widely assumed that these first farmers were from a single, genetically homogeneous population. However, we’ve found that there were deep genetic differences in these early farming populations, indicating very distinct ancestries,” said corresponding author Dr Garrett Hellenthal, UCL Genetics.

The study, published today in >Science and funded by Wellcome and Royal Society, examined ancient DNA from some of the world’s first farmers from the Zagros region of Iran and found it to be very different from the genomes of early farmers from the Aegean and Europe. The team identified similarities between the Neolithic farmer’s DNA and that of living people from southern Asia, including from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and Iranian Zoroastrians in particular.

“We know that farming technologies, including various domestic plants and animals, arose across the Fertile Crescent, with no particular centre” added co-author Professor Mark Thomas, UCL Genetics, Evolution & Environment.

“But to find that this region was made up of highly genetically distinct farming populations was something of a surprise. We estimated that they separated some 46 to 77,000 years ago, so they would almost certainly have looked different, and spoken different languages. It seems like we should be talking of a federal origin of farming.”

The switch from mobile hunting and gathering to sedentary farming first occurred around 10,000 years ago in south-western Asia and was one of the most important behavioural transitions since humans first evolved in Africa some 200,000 years ago. It led to profound changes in society, including greater population densities, new diseases, poorer health, social inequality, urban living, and ultimately, the rise of ancient civilizations.

Animals and plants were first domesticated across a region stretching north from modern-day Israel, Palestine and Lebanon to Syria and eastern Turkey, then east into, northern Iraq and north-western Iran, and south into Mesopotamia; a region known as the Fertile Crescent.

“Such was the impact of farming on our species that archaeologists have debated for more than 100 years how it originated and how it was spread into neighbouring regions such as Europe, North Africa and southern Asia,” said co-author Professor Stephen Shennan, UCL Institute of Archaeology.

“We’ve shown for the first time that different populations in different parts of the Fertile Crescent were coming up with similar solutions to finding a successful way of life in the new conditions created by the end of the last Ice Age.”

By looking at how ancient and living people share long sections of DNA, the team showed that early farming populations were highly genetically structured, and that some of that structure was preserved as farming, and farmers, spread into neighbouring regions; Europe to the west and southern Asia to the east.

“Early farmers from across Europe, and to some extent modern-day Europeans, can trace their DNA to early farmers living in the Aegean, whereas people living in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and India share considerably more long chunks of DNA with early farmers in Iran. This genetic legacy of early farmers persists, although of course our genetic make-up subsequently has been reshaped by many millennia of other population movements and intermixing of various groups,” concluded Dr Hellenthal.

Source: University College London [July 14, 2016]