A Neanderthal tooth discovered in Serbia reveals human migration history

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on April 23, 2019 / comment : 0 Anthropology, Early Humans, Europe, Fossils, Serbia, Southern Europe

In 2015, our Serbian-Canadian archaeological research team was working at a cave site named Pešturina, in Eastern Serbia, where we had found thousands of stone tools and animal bones. One day, an excited Serbian undergrad brought us a fossil they had uncovered: a small molar tooth, which we immediately recognized as human.

A 3D recreation of a recently discovered Neanderthal tooth [Credit: Joshua Lindal]

A single tooth may not seem like much, but a lot of information can be drawn from it. We knew it was about 100,000 years old, because the layer it was found in had previously been dated. We were able to build a high-resolution 3D model to study the shape of the crown, roots and internal structure. We made detailed measurements and performed statistical analyses which are published in the June 2019 issue of the Journal of Human Evolution.

The results of our analysis are clear: our little tooth belonged to a Neanderthal. Neanderthal fossils have been found in Croatia and Greece, but they are still relatively rare in the Balkans, compared to Western Europe and the Middle East. This is the first Neanderthal ever found in Serbia.

The first Neanderthal from Serbia

The Neanderthals were a group of ancient humans who lived in western Eurasia during the Pleistocene epoch. Their earliest ancestors lived in Spain almost half a million years ago, and their range gradually expanded eastward through Europe and the Levant and as far as Siberia.

But around 100,000 years ago, modern humans (like us) started to migrate out of Africa and into Eurasia. By 40,000 years ago, Neanderthals began to disappear from Europe, retreating westward as modern humans moved in on their territory. And, around 30,000 years ago, the last remaining Neanderthals in Spain died out.


The timing of the Neanderthal demise and the modern human conquest of Europe can’t be a coincidence. Ten years ago, most paleoanthropologists would have told you that our two groups were competitors: Neanderthals were bigger and stronger, but we were smarter, and in the battle for survival in the harsh landscape, brains beat out brawn.

Attitudes quickly changed in 2010 when the Neanderthal genome was sequenced for the first time, and along with it we discovered that all living humans outside of sub-Saharan Africa carry a small amount of Neanderthal DNA. More recently, we’ve discovered that they carried some of our genes too.

This means that, at least some of the time, our two groups were lovers and not fighters. We’ve never found modern human and Neanderthal skeletons together at the same site, so it’s possible these romantic flings were rare exceptions. But we don’t have any clear evidence of violence between the two groups either, so the question remains open.

The crossroads of Europe

The Central Balkans could hold the key to answering these questions. Sitting at the “crossroads of Europe,” the Balkan Peninsula represents the intersection of several important migration corridors. Rivers like the Danube cut paths through mountain ranges, creating highways for migrating animals and people to follow. Modern humans followed these routes when they first migrated into Europe, funnelled through the same valleys the Neanderthals called home.

A map showing Pešturina’s location [Credit: Miloš Radonjić]

Pešturina Cave sits along one of these migration routes, in the side of Jelašnica Gorge, facing out towards the great floodplain of the Nišava River near the modern city of Niš. Even though no one had ever found a Neanderthal fossil in Serbia before now, we were pretty sure they lived there because we have found the remains of their culture: the so-called “Mousterian” stone tool tradition. We also know that early modern human migrants made Pešturina their home later on, because we find their unique stone tool traditions as well. This makes Pešturina Cave one of very few sites in Serbia where we know that both groups lived in the same place, albeit at different times.

Unfortunately, we still don’t know very much about the early prehistory of the Central Balkans, despite the long tradition of archaeological research in the region. Twentieth century archaeologists concentrated on early farmers, Roman palaces and Medieval fortresses. Less visible and more difficult to interpret, Palaeolithic archaeology took a back seat, until now.

Filling in the gaps

Led by archaeology professor Dušan Mihailović of Belgrade University and Bojana Mihailović, curator at the National Museum of Serbia, our international team of researchers has been identifying and excavating caves throughout Serbia, trying to fill the gaps in our knowledge of this important region. Along with our coauthor Predrag Radović, our role on the team is to study fossil human remains.

Pešturina Cave, where the fossil was found [Credit: Dušan Mihailović]

A decade ago, in a cave not far from Pešturina named Mala Balanica, we found a human jawbone which would later be dated to about half a million years old — the oldest human fossil from the Central Balkans and one of the oldest from Europe. This jawbone did not belong to a Neanderthal, but to an older (and different) kind of human called Homo heidelbergensis. But we expect to find even older remains: human fossils have been dated to 1.8 million years ago in Georgia and to 1.4 million years ago in Spain; the Balkan crossroads lies right in the middle.

Pešturina Cave has also given up other gifts as well. In the same level as the tooth, our team found a cave bear bone with a series of parallel cut marks made by stone tools. They’re not butchery cuts, and it looks like they might have a symbolic purpose. This would be a big deal because until recently, most researchers thought symbolism and artistic expression were uniquely modern human behaviours. This attitude is shifting, since we’ve recently discovered that Neanderthals probably adorned themselves with feathers, talons and shells and even painted their caves.

The tooth from Pešturina is a small but exciting step towards reconstructing the complex prehistory of human migration and cultural contact in the Central Balkans.

In a collaboration between Belgrade University and the University of Winnipeg, we have been able to offer hands-on field experience to Canadian and international students. Through this collaboration, the Central Balkans will continue to give up more and more clues about our early ancestors and their relationship with the mysterious Neanderthals.

Authors: Mirjana Roksandic & Joshua Allan Lindal | Source: The Conversation [April 23, 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]

Cattle pulled loads 2,000 years earlier than previously thought

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on December 13, 2018 / comment : 0 Archaeology, Bosnia, Croatia, Europe, Serbia, Southern Europe

In the study, published in Antiquity, archaeologists discovered that the bones in the feet of Neolithic cattle demonstrated distinctive wear patterns, indicative of exploitation as ‘animal engines’. If these practices can be proven elsewhere, it is expected to have major ramifications on our understanding of animal use in the Neolithic.

Cattle were being used to pull loads as early as 6,000 BC according to new research led by UCL,  providing the earliest systematic evidence of animals being used as engines [Credit: Jane Gaastra/UCL]

Lead author Dr Jane Gaastra (UCL Archaeology), said: “We have been able to provide the first conclusive evidence that farmers were using cattle for ‘traction’ almost 2,000 years earlier than the previous consensus date. There has only been one other foot sample from the Neolithic period found in Syria but this was inconclusive.

“The part of the Balkans where we found the bones was heavy forested in the Neolithic period, so chopping trees to create settlements would have required lot of man power. Cattle would therefore have been a vital asset helping to transport items such timber for housing.”

The study was conducted in the central and western Balkans and shows that the earliest European farmers were not simply using cattle as a source of meat or dairy products, but also as a source of propulsion. The findings indicate that traction in some form, and not necessarily through the use of ploughs or wagons, was present much earlier than previously thought.

Most other studies have focused on the use of traction in much later periods, because it has often been conflated with ploughing or the use of carts which came much later.

Fundamentally, however, traction is the use of animals as engines to pull loads. While ploughing and cartage are forms of traction, they represent only two types of activity on a much broader spectrum of exploitive practices from specialised animals bred and used for regular work through to animals used for more occasional pulling activities, or for regular labour over a short number of years.

Co-author Dr Marc Vander Linden (formerly of UCL Archaeology, now at University of Cambridge), said: “Until now it has generally been considered that traction only emerged by the 5th and 4th millennium BC, parallel to the introduction of the plough and the wheel, but our study demonstrates that this is not the case.

“We reveal that when the wheel and the plough became available farmers were already experienced in using cattle for traction, and this could have facilitated the spread of these innovations.”

The researchers investigated 12 cattle foot bone samples, from both male and female cattle (predominantly cows), from 11 Neolithic sites in the central and western Balkans (modern-day Croatia, Serbia, Romania and Bosnia-Herzegovina) spanning from 6,000 to 4,500 BC. The sites were open air settlements from multiple phases of the Neolithic.

Foot bone was chosen as it is most affected by the stress of pulling and happens to be most commonly preserved in the archaeological record. In determining traction, the archaeologists were looking for extra bone growth in the inner part of the foot, as this is typically where the foot takes most of the load.

The researchers hope to replicate the study in other European regions to determine the extent and duration of this form of traction. It is still unknown whether this form of traction is seen in only a selection of Neolithic groups or was a common practice across Europe. A firm understanding of the nature of early traction evidence in prehistoric Europe has significant implications for our knowledge of both management practices and the nature of labour and movement in prehistoric societies.

Dr Gaastra concluded: “What is now needed is a wider comparative assessment of sub-pathological evidence for cattle traction in Neolithic (and post-Neolithic) Europe to determine both how widely this pattern of early traction was distributed and at what point we begin to see evidence for specialised heavy-traction animals.”

Source: University College London [December 13, 2018]

22 Roman graves discovered in Serbia

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on August 10, 2018 / comment : 0 Archaeology, Europe, Serbia, Southern Europe

Archaeologists have discovered an important Roman necropolis complete with 22 graves containing ancient skeletons and burial gifts.

Credit: CEN

The startling discovery was made in a quarry near the town of Arandjelovac in Serbia close to the Vencac mountain.

The team of archaeologists told local media that the necropolis contained 22 graves of people who lived in the area between the fourth and sixth centuries.

Credit: CEN

The skeletons were buried in typical Roman fashion with the bodies laid northwest to southeast and the proximity of the graves to each other reportedly shows a well-arranged necropolis.

Snezana Stankovic from the Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments told local media: "We have a few whole skeletons, it is an exceptional find."

Credit: RTS

Local media report that each grave contained objects that provided clues about the lives of those that are buried on the site.

Slavica Djordjevic from the Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments told reporters that earrings, head accessories, glass objects and a variety of ceramics had been found in the graves.

Credit: RTS

The fertile valley where the graves were discovered provided a suitable settlement during Roman times and the findings will give new insights into life in the region during the Roman period, according to reports.

Source: Express [August 10, 2018]

Serbian archaeologists find sarcophagus with two skeletons and jewellery in Roman city of Viminacium

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on June 01, 2018 / comment : 0 Archaeology, Europe, Serbia, Southern Europe

Serbian archaeologists at the site of the ancient Roman city of Viminacium have found an intact sarcophagus with two skeletons bedecked with gold and silver adornments.

Roman sarcophagus excavated at Viminacium, Serbia [Credit: Marko-Djurica/Reuters]

Ilija Mikic, an anthropologist at the site, said the skeletons were of a tall, middle-aged man and a slim younger woman.

In addition to three delicate glass perfume bottles, the woman had golden earrings, a necklace, a silver mirror and several expensive hair pins, while a silver belt buckle and remains of shoes were found lying around the man.

Skulls found inside the Roman sarcophagus at Viminacium, Serbia [Credit: Marko-Djurica/Reuters]

“According to grave goods … we can conclude that these two people surely belonged to a higher social class,” Mikic said.

The Viminacium site, near the town of Kostolac, around 70 km east of Belgrade, was a military camp and the capital of the Roman province of Moesia Superior, dating back to the 1st century AD. It had a hippodrome, fortifications, a forum, palace, temples, amphitheatre, aqueducts, baths and workshops.

Objects found inside the Roman sarcophagus at Viminacium, Serbia [Credit: Marko-Djurica/Reuters]

According to historians, it could have been the home to some 40,000 people. So far, only about 4 percent of it has been explored, said Miomir Korac, the director of the site.

He said that ancient Roman settlements that were not buried under modern cities such as London, Milan, Budapest or Belgrade were rare.

Jewellery found inside the Roman sarcophagus at Viminacium, Serbia [Credit: Marko-Djurica/Reuters]

“Only Viminacium with its 450 hectares is an open area for exploration. And I am sure this will bring an immeasurable quantity of information,” Korac said.

So far, archaeologists there have uncovered tens of thousands of artefacts, including golden tiles engraved with Roman magical symbols, jade and marble sculptures, pottery, mosaics and frescos, along with 14,000 tombs, since excavations started in 1882.

Model of the Roman city of Viminacium, Serbia [Credit: Marko-Djurica/Reuters]

Devastated by the Huns in the 5th century, Viminacium was later rebuilt by the Emperor Justinian. It was razed and destroyed by the Slavs in the 6th century.

Over the centuries since, the sarcophagus would have survived looters, ploughing and a machinery of a nearby coal mine.

Source: Reuters [June 01, 2018]

Earliest evidence of lead pollution uncovered in the Balkans

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on May 31, 2018 / comment : 0 Archaeology, Earth Science, Europe, Serbia, Southern Europe

New research from Northumbria University has revealed that metal-related pollution began in the Balkans more than 500 years before it appeared in western Europe, and persisted throughout the Dark Ages and Medieval Period, meaning the region played a far bigger role in mineral exploitation than previously believed.

A blacksmith furnace using medieval techniques to create metal objects [Credit: Northumbria University]

The study provides a new perspective on both the timing and extent of metallurgy – the technique of extracting metal from ores prior to heating or working with metals to give them a desired shape – in the Balkans, and the associated economic change this brought to the region, such as the inception of the Metal Ages.

The exploitation of mineral resources has a broad range of environmental impacts, including metal-contaminated wastewater and the release of microscopic chemical particles into the atmosphere from mining and smelting. As these particles settle on to the surface of a peat bog, an environment in which the sediment develops year on year, a clear history of the bog’s development may be established.

Samples recovered from the Crveni Potok peat bog, located on the Serbia/Montenegro border, were geochemically examined by researchers from Northumbria’s Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences alongside colleagues from the University of Montpellier and the Romanian Academy. They found the first clear evidence of metal pollution originating from lead in the region dating back to approximately 3600 BC.

The evidence is supported by a concurrent rise in charcoal concentration, which suggests an increase in biomass burning which is potentially related to a broad range of economic activities, including fuel production for metal smelting.

A metre of Serbian peat bog contains 3,000 years of atmospheric history [Credit: Walter Finsinger]

Previously, the oldest European environmental pollution dating to circa 3000 BC had been found in southern Spain, but the new data from Crveni Potok show that metal pollution was evident in this region of eastern Europe more than 500 years earlier. This evidence is the earliest documented in European environmental records and indicates environmental pollution from metallurgy at a time when Britons were still in the Stone Age. This confirms that the Balkans were not only the birthplace of metallurgy in Europe, but also of metallic pollution.

Furthermore, levels of lead pollution decreased dramatically in western Europe after the collapse of the Roman Empire, a feature not observed in this Balkan record. This suggests that the region – which is metal rich – should be considered more of a major player in environmental metal pollution through Dark and Middle Ages than previously thought.

This contrast between eastern and western Europe indicates that while western Europe was in the ‘Dark Ages’ there was significant economic development in the Balkan area with high levels of metal environmental pollution throughout the Medieval period. This confirms the large extent and size of the metalworking industry in the Balkans during this era.

As part of his PhD research Jack Longman uncovered these findings, supervised by Dr Vasile Ersek, Senior Lecturer in Physical Geography in the University’s Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences.

The first spike in lead (pb) pollution at the site in Serbia happened around 3600 BC [Credit: Longman et al./PNAS]

Dr Ersek explained: “Much of the focus in determining sources of ancient pollution has been on established sources such as the Romans or ancient Greeks, but these findings highlight the crucial role that the Balkan metallurgy has played in the economic development of the area.

“Metallurgy and mining is intimately linked to socioeconomic development, therefore improving our knowledge of how these resources were exploited in the past can help us understand better how societies developed over time. In this respect, the peat bog record from Crveni Potok provides a fascinating history of pollution from the early Bronze Age through to the Industrial Revolution.”

Dr Longman added: “What is most interesting is that after the Roman Empire falls in the third and fourth centuries AD, lead pollution continues and even increases, indicating that the strong mining and smelting culture developed by the Romans was continued by the local population. This goes against the long-held view of barbaric hordes with little technological know-how ousting the Romans leading to the Dark Ages – as we term the 1,000 years following the Roman period.

“These Dark Ages may well have been true in much of western Europe, but in the Balkans, it seems that this period was, in fact, rather ‘well-lit’.”

The findings are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Source: Northumbria University [May 31, 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]