Category: Archaeology

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The spread of agriculture into Europe

You may recall a post a few days back on how domestic pig keeping spread into Europe. Well, Razib over at Gene Expression, a genetics blog, has a post today which includes a map of the spread of agriculture north and west from the Middle East. He points out that current thinking is that either the practice of agriculture did the spreading (cultural diffusion), or people themselves (demic diffusion) — or both. Both was what the pig work implied, of course. Human genetic studies suggest that Neolithic people have made a fairly low (maybe 20%) contribution to European ancestry, and Razib summarizes the current debate about whether that therefore refutes the hypothesis that movement of people was involved in the spread of agriculture, as well as that of ideas. Bottom line: it probably doesn’t.

He also links to a recent paper that calculates a figure for the rate of movement ((Tracing the Origin and Spread of Agriculture in Europe. Pinhasi R, Fort J, Ammerman AJ. 2005. PLoS Biology Vol. 3, No. 12. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0030410)): 1 km/year, give or take. That was arrived at by interpolating radiocarbon dates of Neolithic archaeological sites across Europe, and it fits very well with the results of models using human genetic data. ((As far as I’m aware, however, nobody’s done anything similar with crops.)) An interesting way to think about that speed of movement is that it is roughly a one-day walk per generation.

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Earliest known rice?

It’s late, and I really should get to bed, but I cannot ignore my duty to inform you of a paper just published in Nature. Fire and flood management of coastal swamp enabled first rice paddy cultivation in east China by Y. Zong, Z. Chen, J. B. Innes, C. Chen, Z. Wang and H. Wang describes how, 7,700 years ago, people in the lower reaches of the Yangtze converted brackish swamps into rice paddies that remained pretty productive for a couple of hundred years until the sea upped and swallowed the area. There’s a lot more to be gleaned from the paper, which is probably behind a paywall (I can’t check) but will nevertheless be picked up around the world. I’ll look out for a story in the China Daily tomorrow.

Later … Nothing I could see in the paper here, but the LA Times and National Geographic have more.

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Roman antibiotics

Also from Tangled Bank comes news of a study looking at the evidence for various infectious diseases from the skeletons of people killed at Herculaneum by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. ((That’s the one that also destroyed Pompeii, though in a somewhat different way.)) Among the diseases was brucellosis, evidence for which was also gleaned from the carbonized cheeses found at the site. Herculaneum was apparently famous for its goat cheeses, which seem, however, to have been badly infected. Which is all amazing enough. But one of the commenters on the article points to another paper which adds a twist to the story.

It seems the inhabitants of Herculaneum, despite their brucellosis and tuberculosis, were relatively free of non-specific bone inflammations. And that may be because:

Pomegranates and figs, consumed by the population, were mainly dried and invariably contaminated by Streptomyces, a bacterium that produces natural tetracycline, an antibiotic.

Is there similar evidence from contemporary populations of the protection conferred by natural antibiotics?

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Bees older than agriculture?

A press release from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem says that scientists have uncovered the world’s oldest known bee hives, which date back around 11,500 years, at Tel Rehov in the Beath Shean valley.

The beehives there were found in the center of a built-up area there that has been excavated since 1997 by Dr. Nava Panitz-Cohen of the Hebrew University. Three rows of beehives were found in the apiary, containing more than 30 hives. It is estimated, however, based on excavations to date, that in all the total area would have contained some 100 beehives.

Beehives of very similar construction are apparently still in use in Arab villages in Israel and elsewhere around the Mediterranean.