Early Bronze Age burials unearthed in Romania

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on July 30, 2019 / comment : 0 Archaeology, Europe, Romania, Southern Europe

Excavations of a kurgan in Boldesti Gradistea in Prahova County, south eastern Romania, have revealed five burials dating from the beginning of the Bronze Age.

Credit: Prahova County Museum of History and Archaeology

"We have located five burials dating from the beginning of the Bronze Age, about 5000 years ago, but only two have been excavated at this point. In addition to the skeletal remains, we also found various furnishings, plant debris and deposition of ochre, which could have been part of the funeral ritual", said Dr. Alin Frinculeasa, the archaeologist from the Prahova County Museum who is heading the excavation.

"The graves may belong to the Yamnaya culture (also known as Pit Grave culture or Ochre Grave culture), which used to farm along the river here. It is a very important archaeological find. No such discovery has been made in this area before", said the archaeologist.

Credit: Prahova County Museum of History and Archaeology

According to the Prahova County Museum of History and Archaeology, representatives of the University of Helsinki also participate in the excavations, within the project The Yamnaya Impact on Prehistoric Europe, funded by the European Research Council.

The research team consists of archaeologists and specialists in related disciplines such as genetics or bioanthropology, as well as students from the University of Helsinki.

Source: MediaFax [trsl. TANN, July 30, 2019]

Murder in the Paleolithic? Evidence of violence behind human skull remains

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on July 03, 2019 / comment : 0 Anthropology, Europe, Forensics, Romania, Southern Europe

New analysis of the fossilized skull of an Upper Paleolithic man suggests that he died a violent death, according to a study published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by an international team from Greece, Romania and Germany led by the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany

Right lateral view of the Cioclovina calvaria exhibiting a large depressed fracture [Credit: Kranoti et al, 2019]

The fossilized skull of a Paleolithic adult man, known as the Cioclovina calvaria, was originally uncovered in a cave in South Transylvania and is thought to be around 33,000 years old. Since its discovery, this fossil has been extensively studied. Here, the authors reassessed trauma on the skull--specifically a large fracture on the right aspect of the cranium which has been disputed in the past--in order to evaluate whether this specific fracture occurred at the time of death or as a postmortem event.

The authors conducted experimental trauma simulations using twelve synthetic bone spheres, testing scenarios such as falls from various heights as well as single or double blows from rocks or bats. Along with these simulations, the authors inspected the fossil both visually and virtually using computed tomography technology.

Mechanism of blunt force trauma on the vault A) Low velocity impact on the skull causing fracture formation at the impact point due to initial inbending of the cranial vault with peripheral outbending; inward displacement of the bony fragment due to plastic deformation; small fragments remaining in place suggest that the impact  took place while soft tissue was present. B) Radiating fractures in the area of outbending which start at one or more points distant to the impact site, progressing both towards to the impact point and in the opposite  direction (away from it); C) The radiating fractures stop when they meet the sutures (e.g. R1). D) Formation of concentric fractures forming perpendicular to the radiating fractures [Credit: Iakovos Ouranos]

The authors found there were actually two injuries at or near the time of death: a linear fracture at the base of the skull, followed by a depressed fracture on the right side of the cranial vault. The simulations showed that these fractures strongly resemble the pattern of injury resulting from consecutive blows with a bat-like object; the positioning suggests the blow resulting in the depressed fracture came from a face-to-face confrontation, possibly with the bat in the perpetrator's left hand. The researchers' analysis indicates that the two injuries were not the result of accidental injury, post-mortem damage, or a fall alone.

While the fractures would have been fatal, only the fossilized skull has been found so it's possible that bodily injuries leading to death might also have been sustained. Regardless, the authors state that the forensic evidence described in this study points to an intentionally-caused violent death, suggesting that homicide was practiced by early humans during the Upper Paleolithic.

The authors add: "The Upper Paleolithic was a time of increasing cultural complexity and technological sophistication. Our work shows that violent interpersonal behaviour and murder was also part of the behavioural repertoire of these early modern Europeans."

Source: Public Library of Science [July 03, 2019]

Freshwater mussel shells were material of choice for prehistoric craftsmen

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on May 07, 2019 / comment : 0 Archaeology, Denmark, Europe, Germany, Romania

A new study suggests that 6000-years-ago people across Europe shared a cultural tradition of using freshwater mussel shells to craft ornaments.

Prehistoric shell ornaments made with freshwater mother-of-pearl [Credit: Jérôme Thomas (UMR CNRS 6282 Biogeosciences, University of Burgundy-Franche-Comté]

An international team of researchers, including academics from the University of York, extracted ancient proteins from prehistoric shell ornaments - which look remarkably similar despite being found at distant locations in Denmark, Romania and Germany - and discovered they were all made using the mother-of-pearl of freshwater mussels.

The ornaments were made between 4200 and 3800 BC and were even found in areas on the coast where plenty of other shells would have been available.

Archaeological evidence suggests the ornaments, known as "double-buttons", may have been pressed into leather to decorate armbands or belts.

Senior author of the study, Dr Beatrice Demarchi, from the Department of Archaeology at the University of York and the University of Turin (Italy), said: "We were surprised to discover that the ornaments were all made from freshwater mussels because it implies that this material was highly regarded by prehistoric craftsmen, wherever they were in Europe and whatever cultural group they belonged to. Our study suggests the existence of a European-wide cross-cultural tradition for the manufacture of these double-buttons".

Freshwater molluscs have often been overlooked as a source of raw material in prehistory (despite the strength and resilience of mother-of-pearl) because many archaeologists believed that their local origin made them less "prestigious" than exotic marine shells.

Co-author of the paper, Dr André Colonese, from the Department of Archaeology at the University of York, said: "The ornaments are associated with the Late Mesolithic, Late Neolithic and Copper Age cultures. Some of these groups were still living as hunter gatherers, but in the south they were farmers with switching to a more settled lifestyle."

"The fact that these ornaments look consistently similar and are made from the same material suggests there may have been some kind of interaction between these distinct groups of people at this time. They may have had a shared knowledge or tradition for how to manufacture these ornaments and clearly had a sophisticated understanding of the natural environment and which resources to use."

Mollusc shells contain a very small proportion of proteins compared to other bio-mineralised tissues, such as bone, making them difficult to analyse.

The researchers are now working on extracting proteins from fossilised molluscs, a method which they have dubbed "palaeoshellomics". These new techniques could offer fresh insights into some of the earliest forms of life on earth, enhancing our knowledge of evolution.

Dr Demarchi added: "This is the first time researchers have been able to retrieve ancient protein sequences from prehistoric shell ornaments in order to identify the type of mollusc they are made from."

"This research is an important step towards understanding how molluscs and other invertebrates evolved. We hope that using these techniques we will eventually be able to track an evolutionary process which began at least 550 million years ago."

The study is published in the journal eLife.

Source: University of York [May 07, 2019]

Earliest example of animal nest sharing revealed by scientists

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on February 20, 2019 / comment : 0 Early Birds, Fossils, Palaeontology, Romania

An international team of scientists, including researchers from the University of Southampton, has shown that fossilised eggshells unearthed in western Romania represent the earliest known nest site shared by multiple animals.

Model of enantiornithe bird [Credit: José-Manuel Benito Álvarez]

The shells - some complete and others broken into thousands of pieces - are densely packed and encased in mudstone which formed part of the remains of a bird breeding colony, probably comprising hundreds of seperate nests. Now in the collections of the Transylvanian Museum Society in Cluj Napoca, Romania, the samples date from the late-Cretaceous period (approx. 70 million years ago) and were discovered near the city of Sebes in Transylvania by local palaeontologist Mátyás Vremir about nine years ago.

Led by Centro Regional Universitario Bariloche in Argentina, the scientists examined sophisticated electron microscope images of the unique, fossilised material from the site. They established it contains four different types of egg shell, indicating that four types of animals all shared the same nesting site; extinct birds within a group known as enantiornithes, birds of undetermined classification, gecko-like lizards and smaller predecessors of today's crocodiles.

The site and accumulation. (A) Map showing the Late Cretaceous Od location (star), Sebes, Romania. (B) One part of the Od calcareous lens as collected and prior to preparation. Scale bar is 5 cm. (C) Stratigraphic profile of Od/A outcrop in the Maastrichtian, Sebes Formation [Credit: Mariela Soledad Fernández et al, 2019]

Christian Laurent, Tizard Scholar and member of the Aerodynamics and Flight Mechanics Group at the University of Southampton, comments: "We know very little about the parental behaviour of Mesozic birds, We know they had nests, laid eggs and hatched young which were relatively mature and able to move around after hatching - but evidence is scant beyond this. This research suggests they were tolerant of creating their nests, not only alongside other birds, but also reptiles."

The team, which also includes researchers from the University of Jinan (China), the Transylvanian Museum Society (Romania), the Royal British Columbia Museum (Canada), the University of Debrecen (Hungary), and Pavol Jozef Safarik University (Slovak Republic), has published its findings in the journal Scientific Reports.

The prehistoric nesting site as it is today on the Sebes River, Romania [Credit: Gareth Dyke]

Their paper speculates that an area of plain created by seasonal flooding offered the enantiornithes safety from predators. It's also believed that their nest environments afforded shelter to smaller reptiles which benefitted from the security of the birds guarding their own nests. The researchers suggest that the lizard and crocodile type animals were not perceived as a threat to the bird eggs and nestlings - possibly because they were much smaller than the adult birds and so not a predatory threat to them or their hatchlings. To date, this is the oldest example of this kind of ecological strategy.

Christian Laurent adds: "Evidence supporting our theory can still be seen today in Argentina, where lizards (Salvator merianae) co-habit and lay eggs inside the nests of the caiman crocodile - safe in the knowledge that the female doesn't feed during the incubation of her eggs and poses no threat to the hatchling lizards."

Source: University of Southampton [February 20, 2019]

New insights into what Neolithic people ate in Southeastern Europe

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on January 15, 2019 / comment : 0 Archaeology, Europe, Romania, Serbia, Southern Europe

New research, led by the University of Bristol, has shed new light on the eating habits of Neolithic people living in southeastern Europe using food residues from pottery extracts dating back more than 8,000 years.

The Iron Gates gorges and, inset, a reconstructed Starčevo pot [Credit: C. Bonsall and M. Toderaș]

With the dawn of the Neolithic age, farming became established across Europe and people turned their back on aquatic resources, a food source more typical of the earlier Mesolithic period, instead preferring to eat meat and dairy products from domesticated animals.

The research, published today in the journal Royal Society Proceedings B, reveals that people living in the Iron Gates region of the Danube continued regular fish-processing, whereas pottery extracts previously examined from hundreds of sherds elsewhere in Europe show that meat and dairy was the main food source in pots.

This region is archaeologically very important because the sites document Late Mesolithic forager settlements and the first appearance of Neolithic culture, which is spreading up through Europe illustrated by the first appearances of pottery, domesticated plants and animals and different burial styles.

The Iron Gates is a unique landscape on the border between modern-day Romania and Serbia where the Danube cuts through the junction of the Balkan and Carpathian mountain chains. It provided a rich wild aquatic resource base for prehistoric hunter-fisher-foragers during the Late Glacial and early Holocene.

As farming spread from south west Asia into Europe, prehistoric diets ultimately transformed towards a diet based upon domesticated plants and animals. However, in this region, evidence has suggested that wild resources may have continued to be important well into the early Neolithic.

This research involved analysis of organic residues surviving in the fabric of 8,000-year-old Neolithic pottery excavated from sites on the banks of the Danube.

Chemical analyses allowed scientists to directly see what kinds of resources were being prepared in these newly-appearing pots and compare this with the way the same type of pottery was being used by farmers in the wider Balkans region.

Dr Lucy Cramp from the University of Bristol's Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, led the research. She said: "The findings revealed that the majority of Neolithic pots analysed here were being used for processing fish or other aquatic resources.

"This is a significant contrast with an earlier study showing the same type of pottery in the surrounding region was being used for cattle, sheep or goat meat and dairy products.

"It is also completely different to nearly all other assemblages of Neolithic farmer-type pottery previously analysed from across Europe (nearly 1,000 residues) which also show predominantly terrestrial- based resources being prepared in cooking pots (cattle/sheep/goat, possibly also deer), even from locations near major rivers or the coast."

The research team suggest that this unusual dietary/subsistence pattern may be for several reasons.

It is possible that farmers were attracted to this location by the impressive aquatic resources available including huge sturgeon which swam up the river from the Black Sea.

It may also be that Late Mesolithic dietary practices are continuing here, but now using new Neolithic pottery as a result of these early interactions between Mesolithic and Neolithic communities.

Source: University of Bristol [January 15, 2019]

Roman Castrum in SE Romania town to be 'rebuilt' with EU money

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on October 18, 2018 / comment : 0 Archaeology, Europe, Heritage, Romania, Southern Europe

The local authorities of Ovidiu, a town in Constanta county, in South-Eastern Romania, have obtained EU funding worth some EUR 3 million to rebuilt the 'Roman Castrum', planning to integrate it in the tourist circuit.

Aerial view of the Castrum [Credit: Observator de Constanta]

The archaeological site is located on the shore of Lake Siutghiol, a former Black Sea bay, on a total area of 7,120 sqm, the Ovidiu Town Hall said in a press release. The project targets the so-called Roman Castrum (a Byzantine fortification from the Sixth Century), a Basilica church outside the Castrum walls, a Byzantine settlement and an aqueduct.

According to the City Hall, archaeologists have been investigating the 'Roman Castrum' since 1979. The Castrum had the role of protecting the aqueduct that supplied Tomis (the city of Constanta today). In terms of architecture, the Castrum has four towers at the corners, two circular and two rectangular. The two rectangular towers have only two sides outside the enclosure and this is, according to the local authorities, an unusual feature not seen in other fortifications of this kind.

The fortification’s interior covers 2,200 sqm, of which about half has been researched so far. Back in 1984, a money deposit was discovered inside the Castrum, with pieces from the time of the Byzantine Emperor Zeno (474-491).

The proposed tourist installation at the Castrum [Credit: Primaria Ovidiu]

The Ovidiu Town Hall said that part of the Castrum’s interior would be arranged for exhibitions and part as an amphitheatre area with concrete benches covered in wood. It will be partially covered with a light metal structure and will have state-of-the-art multimedia equipment, an open-air stage to be used for screenings, cultural events, children’s history classes, and other such events.

The Basilica was built before the Castrum but was discovered later, outside the city walls. It was identified in 1998 and researched until 2003. The project proposes the creation of a bridge made of secure glass, from where the visitors will be able to see the entire site.

The project also includes the construction of sanitary groups, pedestrian alleys and car parks. It should be completed in two and a half years from the moment the work starts.

Author: Irina Marica | Source: Romania Insider [October 18, 2018]

Cold, dry climate shifts linked to Neanderthal disappearance

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on August 27, 2018 / comment : 0 Anthropology, Early Humans, Earth Science, Europe, Palaeoclimate, Romania, Southern Europe

Ancient periods of cold and dry climate helped our species replace Neanderthals in Europe, a study suggests.

In this 2013 photo provided by Bogdan Onac, researcher Vasile Ersek stands in the Ascunsa Cave in Romania. Scientists say ancient shifts in climate helped our species replace Neanderthals in Europe. Researchers used data from this cave and another to document two lengthy cold and dry periods. The repor found these periods coincided with the disappearance of Neanderthals and the arrival of our species in specific places [Credit: Bogdan Onac via AP]

Researchers found that such cold periods coincided with an apparent disappearance of our evolutionary cousins in different parts of the continent, followed by the appearance of our species, Homo sapiens.

"Whether they moved or died out, we can't tell," said Michael Staubwasser of the University of Cologne in Germany.

Neanderthals once lived in Europe and Asia but died out about 40,000 years ago, just a few thousand years after our species, Homo sapiens, arrived in Europe. Scientists have long debated what happened, and some have blamed the change in climate. Other proposed explanations have included epidemics and the idea that the newcomers edged out the Neanderthals for resources.

Staubwasser and colleagues reported their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They drew on existing climate, archaeological and ecological data and added new indicators of ancient climate from studies of two caves in Romania.

Their study highlighted two cold and dry periods. One began about 44,000 years ago and lasted about 1,000 years. The other began about 40,800 years ago and lasted six centuries. The timing of those events matches the periods when artifacts from Neanderthals disappear and signs of H. sapiens appear in sites within the Danube River valley and in France, they noted.

The climate shifts would have replaced forest with shrub-filled grassland, and H. sapiens may have been better adapted to that new environment than the Neanderthals were, so they could move in after Neanderthals disappeared, the researchers wrote.

Katerina Harvati, a Neanderthal expert at the University of Tuebingen in Germany who wasn't involved in the study, said it's helpful to have the new climate data from southeastern Europe, a region that H. sapiens is thought to have used to spread through the continent.

But she said it's unclear whether Neanderthals disappeared and H. sapiens appeared at the times the authors indicate, because the studies they cite rely on limited evidence and are sometimes open to dispute.

Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London said he thought the paper made a good case for an impact of the climate shifts on Neanderthals, although he believes other factors were also at work in their disappearance.

Rick Potts of the Smithsonian Institution called the study "a refreshing new look" at the species replacement.

"As has been said before, our species didn't outsmart the Neanderthals," Potts said in an email. "We simply outsurvived them. The new paper offers much to contemplate about how it occurred."

Author: Malcolm Ritter | Source: The Associated Press [August 27, 2018]

3,400-year-old citadel unearthed in Romania

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on August 06, 2018 / comment : 0 Archaeology, Europe, Romania, Southern Europe

Romanian and German archaeologists have discovered in Arad county, in Western Romania, a citadel that covers almost 90 hectares and is believed to be almost 3,400 years old, dating from the Bronze Age, local sources reported.

Credit: Aradon Romania

The “Old Citadel” (Cetatea Veche), as the archaeologists called it, was unearthed on the territory of Sântana, a town in Arad county. The first excavations were made there in 2009 but the team of German and Romanian archaeologists has intensified the research in the last two years, revealing the huge discovery.

Rüdiger Krause, professor at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, and Romanian professor Florin Gogâltan, from the Institute of Archaeology and History of Art of the Romanian Academy in Cluj-Napoca, came to the conclusion that the “Old Citadel” in Sântana was built in the 14th century BC, about 3,400 years ago.

Credit: Aradon Romania

“The citadel in Sântana is one of the largest fortifications built during the mentioned period. Our purpose is to find out why this fortification was made, why this construction was needed,” the German professor said.

The discoveries also made the archaeologists believe that the “Old Citadel” in Romania is much bigger than the ancient city of Troy.

Credit: Aradon Romania

“Troy had an area of 29 hectares, the Citadel in Sântana covers 89 hectares. The buildings of Troy were made of stone. At Sântana, the buildings were made of clay and wood, a sign that civilization was more developed and adapted to the building materials it had,” Florin Gogâltan explained. “We are facing one of the biggest and impressive fortresses in Europe.”

In addition to excavations, the archaeologists are also using state-of-the-art technologies to draw a map of the fortification.

“We researched about 55 hectares of the nearly 90. And, following these measurements, we found something that scared us: a huge palace, with a length of 100 meters and width of 40 meters. We want to continue digging and, if possible, we want to make this citadel great again, just as it was over 3,000 years ago,” the Romanian professor also said.

Author: Irina Marica | Source: Romania Insider [August 06, 2018]

Unearthing the opportunity costs of Palaeolithic mobility and resilience strategies

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on June 26, 2018 / comment : 0 Archaeology, Belgium, Europe, Romania, Southern Europe

Traditionally, European palaeolithic research has focused broadly on cultural history and technological trajectories. The EU-funded PALMOBI project set out to contribute an assessment of hunter-gatherer mobility strategies and technological resilience in response to the variable availability and accessibility of raw materials. For the first time, investigators incorporated measurable geochemical signatures of the siliceous raw materials from Belgium and Romania.

The Aurignacian and Gravettian are significant periods of the Early Upper Palaeolithic (EUP) which reflect changes in stone tool technology and mobility. The PALMOBI project combined for the first time a unique range of methodologies to better understand these changes [Credit: PxHere]

PALMOBI brought together geochemistry, petrography, lithic technology, GIS geospatial techniques and environmental modelling to reconstruct mobility and land-use strategies during the Early Upper Palaeolithic (EUP), between 36,000 and 30,000 years ago. The project found evidence of effective provisioning and management of lithic resources characterised by an increased mobility during the Gravettian period.

First-time combination of cutting-edge methodologies

While a better understanding of prehistoric mobility should be based on the reliable sourcing of stone (lithic) raw materials to start with, its misinterpretation can lead to problematic behavioural reconstructions. Identification is usually based on visual classification which lends itself to errors, such as those which can occur between visually similar raw materials such as chert or flint.

Explaining the inception of the PALMOBI project, coordinator Dr. Luc Moreau says, "Any attempt to trace long distance transport of materials—with important implications for mobility strategies, time-budgeting and social networks—should be reinforced by microscopic/petrographic and geochemical comparisons."

PALMOBI conducted raw material surveys in Romania and Belgium – both rich in well-understood EUP records of human occupation and environmental change. The geological samples collected during these surveys served as proxies for the prehistoric landscape, against which changing adaptive strategies could be modelled. As Dr. Moreau enthuses, "A comparison of these two regions using a combination of cutting-edge methodologies in tandem with evolutionary anthropology methods and theories has never previously been attempted."

The team used Laser Ablation—Inductively Coupled Plasma—Mass Spectrometer (LA-ICP-MS) for non-destructive geochemical analysis of archaeological and geological samples, which quickly and accurately provided information about lithic raw material variability and provenance, from multiple trace elements. Petrographic characterisation of flint surfaces was also undertaken using a binocular microscope to assess in more detail the secondary depositional context of the rocks collected by EUP foragers.

Additionally, a GIS was used to provide multivariate modelling of raw material selection behaviour, drawing a distinction between human choices and wider restraining factors. As Dr. Moreau cautions, "Before inferring social causes for variation in human behaviour, potential trade-offs should first be evaluated. In PALMOBI, terrain and raw material variables hold the key to modelling the costs and decision-making process of technological investment and mobility to cope with variable conditions towards the Last Glacial Maximum of the Last Ice Age."

The evidence mounts up

PALMOBI's results suggested that the scale of group mobility in EUP hunter-gatherer societies indeed appears indicative of adaptation to the environmental context. Long distance mobility increased in frequency under conditions of deteriorating climate and increasing cold temperatures, when the availability and predictability of subsistence resources were subject to important fluctuations.

PALMOBI also shed more light on why some raw material sources were used more than others. Results showed that besides raw material quality and abundance, terrain difficulty and calculations of mobility costs help explain and predict the variability in treatment and intensity of raw material use, found in the archaeological record.

As Dr. Moreau summarises, "Not only did Gravettian hunter-gatherers accept higher costs of obtaining lithic raw materials when local rocks proved unsatisfactory, their social networks mitigated the risk of resource failure, more than in any previous period. Contrary to common narratives, strong technological similarities between Aurignacian and Gravettian assemblages in Romania reflect changing adaptive and mobility strategies, not a new incoming population."

Alongside participation in a number of public dissemination events, the project's work on the role of mobility in promoting social change inspired the organisation of an international conference which explored the processes that can lead a society away from egalitarianism.

Source: CORDIS [June 26, 2018]

Romania recovers looted Dacian treasure

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on April 19, 2018 / comment : 0 Archaeology, Europe, Heritage, Romania, Southern Europe

Coins and bracelets from the 1st century that were looted from western Romania years ago and smuggled out of the country were put on display Thursday after a joint investigation with Austria brought them back home.

An ancient Dacian gold bracelet is displayed during a press conference at the national history museum in Bucharest, Romania, Thursday, April 19, 2018. A treasure trove of coins and bracelets from the 1st century that were stolen from archeological sites in western Romania and illegally smuggled out of the country has been put on display after being recovered in Austria during a cross-border investigation [Credit: AP/Vadim Ghirda]

The treasure trove of gold and silver artifacts, stolen between 2000 and 2001, was presented at Romania's National History Museum. The items were found in Austria in 2015 and returned following a cross-border investigation.

The artifacts_473 coins and 18 bracelets— were taken from archaeological sites in the Orastie Mountains that had been inhabited by Dacians, who fought against the Romans in the early 2nd century.

General Prosecutor Augustin Lazar said 21 people have been convicted in the thefts.

Museum curator Ernest Oberlander-Tarnoveanu said it was "one of the finest recoveries of Dacian treasure in last 200 years" and called their return "a moment of joy, hope and ... pride."

He said the artifacts may have been an offering that a Dacian family made to the gods, which now was valued at "tens of millions of euros (dollars)."

Lazar urged Romanians to be vigilant in guarding their national heritage, and praised a local shepherd who called police after he saw someone entering an archaeological site with a metal detector.

He said intermediaries had taken the artifacts to auction houses and antique shops claiming "they are from my late grandparent's collection."

Author: Alison Mutler | Source: The Associated Press [April 19, 2018]

Ancient DNA study reveals the prehistory of Southeastern Europe

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on February 23, 2018 / comment : 0 Anthropology, Bulgaria, Europe, Genetics, Romania, Serbia, Southern Europe

In an ancient DNA study published this week in the journal Nature, scientists and archaeologists from over 80 different institutions lift the veil on the genomic history of Southeastern Europe, a region from which very little ancient genetic data has been available until now. This is the second-largest ancient DNA study ever reported. (The largest, reported simultaneously in Nature by many of the same authors, focuses on the prehistory of Northwestern Europe.)

The burial fields of Varna, Bulgaria, is famous for its rich burial gifts. In one of the 6,500 year old graves more gold was found than in all other graves at this time. Genetic examinations show that the DNA of the man buried there had similiarities with the DNA of earlier European famers [Credit: © I, Yelkrokoyade, commons.wikimedia.org, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Starting around 8,500 years ago, agriculture spread into Europe from the southeast, accompanied by a movement of people from Anatolia. This study reports data from the genomes of 225 ancient people who lived both before and after this transition, and documents the interaction and mixing of these two genetically different groups of people. “Southeastern Europe was the beachhead in the spread of farming from Anatolia into Europe. This study is the first to provide a rich genetic characterization of this process by showing how the indigenous population interacted with incoming Asian immigrants at this extraordinary moment in the past,” says Songül Alpaslan-Roodenberg, a consulting anthropologist at Harvard Medical School, who identified and sampled many of the skeletons.

“In some places, hunter-gatherers and incoming farmers seem to have mixed very quickly,” says first author Iain Mathieson, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania, “but mostly the two groups remained isolated, at least for the first few hundred years. These hunter-gatherers had been living there for thousands of years, and it must have been quite a shock to have these new people show up—with a completely different lifestyle and appearance.”

“Three thousand years later, they were thoroughly mixed,” continues David Reich of Harvard Medical School, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, who co-directed the study. “Some populations derived up to a quarter of their ancestry from hunter-gatherers.” In other parts of Europe, this mixing was marked by a so-called sex bias, with most of the hunter-gatherer ancestry contributed by men. In the southeast, however, the pattern was different. “This shows that the mode of interaction between the two groups was different in different places, something we need to try to understand in the context of the archaeological evidence,” added Mathieson.

The new paper also dramatically increases the number of samples from the population of hunter-gatherers that inhabited Europe before the farmers. The study reports a particularly rich sampling of forty hunter-gatherers and early farmers from six archaeological sites from the Iron Gates region, which straddles the border of present-day Romania and Serbia. The genetic results show that the region witnessed intensive interaction between hunter-gatherers and farmers. Out of four individuals from the site of Lepenski Vir, for example, two had entirely Anatolian farmer-related ancestry, fitting with isotope evidence that they were migrants from outside the Iron Gates region, while a third individual had a mixture of ancestries and consumed aquatic resources, as expected if farmers were being integrated into hunter-gatherer groups or were adopting a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

“These results reveal the relationship between migrations, admixture and subsistence in the this key region and show that even within early European farmers, individuals differed in their ancestry, reflecting a dynamic mosaic of hunter-farmer interbreeding,” adds Ron Pinhasi, an anthropologist at the University for Vienna, who co-directed the study.

The new paper also reports ancient DNA from the people who lived at iconic archaeological sites such as Varna, one of the first places in the world where there is evidence of extreme wealth inequality, with one individual from whom the study obtained data buried with more gold than all other known burials of the period. “The DNA from the famous Varna burial is genetically similar to that of other early European farmers. However, we also find one individual from Varna and several individuals at neighboring sites in Bulgaria who had ancestry from the eastern European steppe. This is the earliest evidence of steppe ancestry this far west—two thousand years before the mass migration from the steppe that replaced more than half of the population of northern Europe,” says Johannes Krause, Director of the Department of Archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, who led the work on Varna.

Adds Reich, “These very large ancient DNA studies, involving intense collaboration between geneticists and archaeologists, make it possible to build up a rich picture of key periods of the past that could only be weakly glimpsed before. Studies on this scale represent a coming of age for the field of ancient DNA—I look forward to what we will learn when similar approaches are applied elsewhere in the world.”

Source: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft [February 23, 2018]