Early contact between late farming and pastoralist societies in southeastern Europe.

Archaeogenetic studies have described two main genetic turnover events in prehistoric western Eurasia: one associated with the spread of farming and a sedentary lifestyle starting around 7000-6000 BC (refs. 1-3) and a second with the expansion of pastoralist groups from the Eurasian steppes starting around 3300 BC (refs. 4,5). The period between these events saw new economies emerging on the basis of key innovations, including metallurgy, wheel and wagon and horse domestication6-9. However, what happened between the demise of the Copper Age settlements around 4250 BC and the expansion of pastoralists remains poorly understood. To address this question, we analysed genome-wide data from 135 ancient individuals from the contact zone between southeastern Europe and the northwestern Black Sea region spanning this critical time period. While we observe genetic continuity between Neolithic and Copper Age groups from major sites in the same region, from around 4500 BC on, groups from the northwestern Black Sea region carried varying amounts of mixed ancestries derived from Copper Age groups and those from the forest/steppe zones, indicating genetic and cultural contact over a period of around 1,000 years earlier than anticipated. We propose that the transfer of critical innovations between farmers and transitional foragers/herders from different ecogeographic zones during this early contact was integral to the formation, rise and expansion of pastoralist groups around 3300 BC.

Ancient DNA from the Near East probes a cradle of civilization.

Studies seek clues to origins of farming, early languages.

[The formation of endocrinology in the ancient times].

The formation of endocrinology as an independent medical discipline was preceded by the accumulation of medical experience during many centuries. The medicine of the ancient times was developing on the basis of continuity according to the basic principle «relata refero¼ (I tell what I have been told). Medicine and pharmacy in the countries of the ancient world had many similarities, but at the same time each civilization had its own geographical, cultural and historical particularities. The pathology of the thyroid was among the most studied pathologies in Ancient world. There are frequent mentions of the endemic goiter in the works of doctors from Ancient China, Ancient India and Ancient Greece.Although the link between iodine and the thyroid was not known, algae and dried sea sponges were using for treating swollen neck.There are many descriptions of neuroendocrine pathologies in historical sources, for example the Bible describes gigantism and the Talmud - hypoprolactinaemia.Special attention was paid to the study of diabetes mellitus, although the pathogenesis and treatment of the disease remained unknown until the 20th century.

Archaeological landscape, settlement dynamics, and sociopolitical organization in the Chactún area of the central Maya Lowlands.

Until recently, an extensive area in the central lowlands of the Yucatán peninsula was completely unexplored archaeologically. In 2013 and 2014, during initial surveys in the northern part of the uninhabited Calakmul Biosphere Reserve in eastern Campeche, Mexico, we located Chactún, Tamchén and Lagunita, three major Maya centers with some unexpected characteristics. Lidar data, acquired in 2016 for a larger area of 240 km2, revealed a thoroughly modified and undisturbed archaeological landscape with a remarkably large number of residential clusters and widespread modifications related to water management and agriculture. Substantial additional information was obtained through field surveys and test excavations in 2017 and 2018. While hydraulic and agricultural features and their potential for solving various archaeologically relevant questions were discussed in a previous publication, here we examine the characteristics of settlement patterns, architectural remains, sculpted monuments, and ceramic evidence. The early Middle Preclassic (early first millennium BCE) material collected in stratigraphic pits at Tamchén and another locale constitutes the earliest evidence of colonization known so far in a broader central lowland area. From then until the Late Classic period, which was followed by a dramatic demographic decline, the area under study witnessed relatively constant population growth and interacted with different parts of the Maya Lowlands. However, a number of specific and previously unknown cultural traits attest to a rather distinctive regional development, providing novel information about the extent of regional variation within the Maya culture. By analyzing settlement pattern characteristics, inscriptional data, the distribution of architectural volumes and some other features of the currently visible archaeological landscape, which largely reflects the Late Classic situation, we reconstruct several aspects of sociopolitical and territorial organization in that period, highlighting similarities with and differences from what has been evidenced in the neighboring Río Bec region and elsewhere in the Maya area.

Barbarigenesis and the collapse of complex societies: Rome and after.

"Barbarism" is perhaps best understood as a recurring syndrome among peripheral societies in response to the threats and opportunities presented by more developed neighbors. This article develops a mathematical model of barbarigenesis-the formation of "barbarian" societies adjacent to more complex societies-and its consequences, and applies the model to the case of Europe in the first millennium CE. A starting point is a game (developed by Hirshleifer) in which two players allocate their resources either to producing wealth or to fighting over wealth. The paradoxical result is that a richer and potentially more powerful player may lose out to a poorer player, because the opportunity cost of fighting is greater for the former. In a more elaborate spatial model with many players, the outcome is a wealth-power mismatch: central regions have comparatively more wealth than power, peripheral regions have comparatively more power than wealth. In a model of historical dynamics, a wealth-power mismatch generates a long-lasting decline in social complexity, sweeping from more to less developed regions, until wealth and power come to be more closely aligned. This article reviews how well this model fits the historical record of late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages in Europe both quantitatively and qualitatively. The article also considers some of the history left out of the model, and why the model doesn't apply to the modern world.

Origin of ethnic groups, linguistic families, and civilizations in China viewed from the Y chromosome.

East Asia, geographically extending to the Pamir Plateau in the west, to the Himalayan Mountains in the southwest, to Lake Baikal in the north and to the South China Sea in the south, harbors a variety of people, cultures, and languages. To reconstruct the natural history of East Asians is a mission of multiple disciplines, including genetics, archaeology, linguistics, and ethnology. Geneticists confirm the recent African origin of modern East Asians. Anatomically modern humans arose in Africa and immigrated into East Asia via a southern route approximately 50,000 years ago. Following the end of the Last Glacial Maximum approximately 12,000 years ago, rice and millet were domesticated in the south and north of East Asia, respectively, which allowed human populations to expand and linguistic families and ethnic groups to develop. These Neolithic populations produced a strong relation between the present genetic structures and linguistic families. The expansion of the Hongshan people from northeastern China relocated most of the ethnic populations on a large scale approximately 5300 years ago. Most of the ethnic groups migrated to remote regions, producing genetic structure differences between the edge and center of East Asia. In central China, pronounced population admixture occurred and accelerated over time, which subsequently formed the Han Chinese population and eventually the Chinese civilization. Population migration between the north and the south throughout history has left a smooth gradient in north-south changes in genetic structure. Observation of the process of shaping the genetic structure of East Asians may help in understanding the global natural history of modern humans.

A quantitative analysis of intensification in the ethnographic record.

The intensification of food production plays a central role in the evolution of complex human societies. However, it is unclear whether the standard model of intensification is theoretically or empirically justified. This leaves social scientists unable to make reasonable inferences about the relationship between intensification and the evolution of social complexity in past societies. To remedy this problem, I derive a model of intensification from human macroecology, settlement scaling theory, human behavioural ecology, cultural evolutionary theory and niche construction theory. The standard and cultural niche construction models are formalized and their predictions are tested using a comprehensive ethnographic dataset that describes food production in 40 human societies, ranging in complexity from foraging bands to agricultural states. Analysis of the ethnographic record suggests that we reject the standard model and tentatively accept the cultural niche construction model. I attempt to demonstrate the broader utility of the cultural niche construction model as a framework that may help explain the transition from small-scale to large-scale complex societies.

The genomic history of the Aegean palatial civilizations.

The Cycladic, the Minoan, and the Helladic (Mycenaean) cultures define the Bronze Age (BA) of Greece. Urbanism, complex social structures, craft and agricultural specialization, and the earliest forms of writing characterize this iconic period. We sequenced six Early to Middle BA whole genomes, along with 11 mitochondrial genomes, sampled from the three BA cultures of the Aegean Sea. The Early BA (EBA) genomes are homogeneous and derive most of their ancestry from Neolithic Aegeans, contrary to earlier hypotheses that the Neolithic-EBA cultural transition was due to massive population turnover. EBA Aegeans were shaped by relatively small-scale migration from East of the Aegean, as evidenced by the Caucasus-related ancestry also detected in Anatolians. In contrast, Middle BA (MBA) individuals of northern Greece differ from EBA populations in showing ∼50% Pontic-Caspian Steppe-related ancestry, dated at ca. 2,600-2,000 BCE. Such gene flow events during the MBA contributed toward shaping present-day Greek genomes.

Astronomical aspects of Group E-type complexes and implications for understanding ancient Maya architecture and urban planning.

In the 1920s, during the first archaeological excavations at Uaxactún, Petén, Guatemala, an architectural complex named Group E was interpreted as an ancient Maya astronomical observatory, intended specifically for sighting the equinoctial and solstitial sunrises. In the following decades, a large number of architectural compounds with the same configuration have been found, most of them in the central lowlands of the Yucatan peninsula. The multiple hypotheses that have been proposed about the astronomical function of these complexes, commonly designated as E Groups, range from those attributing them a paramount role in astronomical observations to those that consider them merely allegorical or commemorative allusions to celestial cycles, without any observational use. This study, based on quantitative analyses of a reasonably large sample of alignment data, as well as on contextual evidence, shows that many of the previous hypotheses cannot be sustained. I argue that E Groups, although built primarily for ritual purposes, were astronomically functional, but also that they had no specific or particularly prominent role in astronomical observations. Their orientations belong to widespread alignment groups, mostly materialized in buildings of other types and explicable in terms of some fundamental concerns of the agriculturally-based Maya societies. I present the evidence demonstrating that the astronomical orientations initially embedded in E Groups, which represent the earliest standardized form of Maya monumental architecture and whose occurrence in practically all early cities in the central Yucatan peninsula attests to their socio-political significance, were later transferred to buildings and compounds of other types. Therefore, it is precisely the importance of the astronomically and cosmologically significant directions, first incorporated in E Groups, that allows us to understand some prominent aspects of ancient Maya architecture and urbanism.

Towards a rigorous understanding of societal responses to climate change.

A large scholarship currently holds that before the onset of anthropogenic global warming, natural climatic changes long provoked subsistence crises and, occasionally, civilizational collapses among human societies. This scholarship, which we term the 'history of climate and society' (HCS), is pursued by researchers from a wide range of disciplines, including archaeologists, economists, geneticists, geographers, historians, linguists and palaeoclimatologists. We argue that, despite the wide interest in HCS, the field suffers from numerous biases, and often does not account for the local effects and spatiotemporal heterogeneity of past climate changes or the challenges of interpreting historical sources. Here we propose an interdisciplinary framework for uncovering climate-society interactions that emphasizes the mechanics by which climate change has influenced human history, and the uncertainties inherent in discerning that influence across different spatiotemporal scales. Although we acknowledge that climate change has sometimes had destructive effects on past societies, the application of our framework to numerous case studies uncovers five pathways by which populations survived-and often thrived-in the face of climatic pressures.

Monumental architecture at Aguada Fénix and the rise of Maya civilization.

Archaeologists have traditionally thought that the development of Maya civilization was gradual, assuming that small villages began to emerge during the Middle Preclassic period (1000-350 BC; dates are calibrated throughout) along with the use of ceramics and the adoption of sedentism1. Recent finds of early ceremonial complexes are beginning to challenge this model. Here we describe an airborne lidar survey and excavations of the previously unknown site of Aguada Fénix (Tabasco, Mexico) with an artificial plateau, which measures 1,400 m in length and 10 to 15 m in height and has 9 causeways radiating out from it. We dated this construction to between 1000 and 800 BC using a Bayesian analysis of radiocarbon dates. To our knowledge, this is the oldest monumental construction ever found in the Maya area and the largest in the entire pre-Hispanic history of the region. Although the site exhibits some similarities to the earlier Olmec centre of San Lorenzo, the community of Aguada Fénix probably did not have marked social inequality comparable to that of San Lorenzo. Aguada Fénix and other ceremonial complexes of the same period suggest the importance of communal work in the initial development of Maya civilization.

Ancient Maya wetland fields revealed under tropical forest canopy from laser scanning and multiproxy evidence.

We report on a large area of ancient Maya wetland field systems in Belize, Central America, based on airborne lidar survey coupled with multiple proxies and radiocarbon dates that reveal ancient field uses and chronology. The lidar survey indicated four main areas of wetland complexes, including the Birds of Paradise wetland field complex that is five times larger than earlier remote and ground survey had indicated, and revealed a previously unknown wetland field complex that is even larger. The field systems date mainly to the Maya Late and Terminal Classic (∼1,400-1,000 y ago), but with evidence from as early as the Late Preclassic (∼1,800 y ago) and as late as the Early Postclassic (∼900 y ago). Previous study showed that these were polycultural systems that grew typical ancient Maya crops including maize, arrowroot, squash, avocado, and other fruits and harvested fauna. The wetland fields were active at a time of population expansion, landscape alteration, and droughts and could have been adaptations to all of these major shifts in Maya civilization. These wetland-farming systems add to the evidence for early and extensive human impacts on the global tropics. Broader evidence suggests a wide distribution of wetland agroecosystems across the Maya Lowlands and Americas, and we hypothesize the increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane from burning, preparing, and maintaining these field systems contributed to the Early Anthropocene.

A Crouzon syndrome from the Classic period of Maya civilization?

This article describes a retrospective diagnosis through an artistic representation of a pre-Columbian Central America bowl figuring a child with clinical characteristics of Crouzon syndrome. The report also highlights the importance of icono-diagnosis for a better description of the existing diseases into ancient societies.

Bioarchaeology of Neolithic Çatalhöyük reveals fundamental transitions in health, mobility, and lifestyle in early farmers.

The transition from a human diet based exclusively on wild plants and animals to one involving dependence on domesticated plants and animals beginning 10,000 to 11,000 y ago in Southwest Asia set into motion a series of profound health, lifestyle, social, and economic changes affecting human populations throughout most of the world. However, the social, cultural, behavioral, and other factors surrounding health and lifestyle associated with the foraging-to-farming transition are vague, owing to an incomplete or poorly understood contextual archaeological record of living conditions. Bioarchaeological investigation of the extraordinary record of human remains and their context from Neolithic Çatalhöyük (7100-5950 cal BCE), a massive archaeological site in south-central Anatolia (Turkey), provides important perspectives on population dynamics, health outcomes, behavioral adaptations, interpersonal conflict, and a record of community resilience over the life of this single early farming settlement having the attributes of a protocity. Study of Çatalhöyük human biology reveals increasing costs to members of the settlement, including elevated exposure to disease and labor demands in response to community dependence on and production of domesticated plant carbohydrates, growing population size and density fueled by elevated fertility, and increasing stresses due to heightened workload and greater mobility required for caprine herding and other resource acquisition activities over the nearly 12 centuries of settlement occupation. These changes in life conditions foreshadow developments that would take place worldwide over the millennia following the abandonment of Neolithic Çatalhöyük, including health challenges, adaptive patterns, physical activity, and emerging social behaviors involving interpersonal violence.

Ancient trash mounds unravel urban collapse a century before the end of Byzantine hegemony in the southern Levant.

The historic event of the Late Antique Little Ice Age (LALIA) was recently identified in dozens of natural and geological climate proxies of the northern hemisphere. Although this climatic downturn was proposed as a major cause for pandemic and extensive societal upheavals in the sixth-seventh centuries CE, archaeological evidence for the magnitude of societal response to this event is sparse. This study uses ancient trash mounds as a type of proxy for identifying societal crisis in the urban domain, and employs multidisciplinary investigations to establish the terminal date of organized trash collection and high-level municipal functioning on a city-wide scale. Survey, excavation, sediment analysis, and geographic information system assessment of mound volume were conducted on a series of mounds surrounding the Byzantine urban settlement of Elusa in the Negev Desert. These reveal the massive collection and dumping of domestic and construction waste over time on the city edges. Carbon dating of charred seeds and charcoal fragments combined with ceramic analysis establish the end date of orchestrated trash removal near the mid-sixth century, coinciding closely with the beginning of the LALIA event and outbreak of the Justinian Plague in the year 541. This evidence for societal decline during the sixth century ties with other arguments for urban dysfunction across the Byzantine Levant at this time. We demonstrate the utility of trash mounds as sensitive proxies of social response and unravel the time-space dynamics of urban collapse, suggesting diminished resilience to rapid climate change in the frontier Negev region of the empire.

Modernity and the regulation of bodies: Elias meets Foucault

This article seeks to reflect on the possibility of a meeting ground where Michel Foucault and Norbert Elias' thought comes together around the issue of the regulation of drives and bodily practices within modernity. Such drives - among which we highlight the use of force and violence, as well as the acceptable regulation of their release and applications - have been the object of particular procedures within the modern era, whether seen in relation to individuals or from to the social body.(AU)

Salt and marine products in the Classic Maya economy from use-wear study of stone tools.

Microscopic study of the edges of Late to Terminal Classic Maya (AD 600-900) chert stone tools from the Paynes Creek Salt Works, Belize, indicates most tools were used for cutting fish or meat or working hide, which was unexpected, given the virtual absence of fish or other animal remains at this large salt-production complex. Use-wear study shows that a minority of stone tools have edge-wear from woodworking. Our study suggests that salting fish was a significant activity at the salt works, which corresponds to Roman, Chinese, and other East Asian civilizations, where salt and salted fish were critical components of food storage, trade, and state finance. Based on analogy with modern Maya salt producers at Sacapulas, Guatemala, we provide estimates of the amounts of salt and salted fish produced at the Paynes Creek Salt Works and the implications for the Classic Maya economy. Salt cakes and salted fish were preserved commodities that could be stored and traded in the marketplace.

Quantification of drought during the collapse of the classic Maya civilization.

The demise of Lowland Classic Maya civilization during the Terminal Classic Period (~800 to 1000 CE) is a well-cited example of how past climate may have affected ancient societies. Attempts to estimate the magnitude of hydrologic change, however, have met with equivocal success because of the qualitative and indirect nature of available climate proxy data. We reconstructed the past isotopic composition (δ18O, δD, 17O-excess, and d-excess) of water in Lake Chichancanab, Mexico, using a technique that involves isotopic analysis of the structurally bound water in sedimentary gypsum, which was deposited under drought conditions. The triple oxygen and hydrogen isotope data provide a direct measure of past changes in lake hydrology. We modeled the data and conclude that annual precipitation decreased between 41 and 54% (with intervals of up to 70% rainfall reduction during peak drought conditions) and that relative humidity declined by 2 to 7% compared to present-day conditions.

Islamic Civilization in Spain - a Magnificient Example of Interaction and Unity of Religion and Science.

Islam and its followers had created a civilization that played very important role on the world stage for more than a thousand years. One of the most important specific qualities of the Islamic civilization is that it is a well-balanced civilization that brought together science and faith, struck a balance between spirit and matter and did not separate this world from the Hereafter. This is what distinguishes the Islamic civilization from other civilizations which attach primary importance to the material aspect of life, physical needs and human instincts, and attach greater attention to this world by striving to instantly satisfy desires of the flesh, without finding a proper place for God and the Hereafter in their philosophies and education systems. The Islamic civilization drew humankind closer to God, connected the earth and heavens, subordinated this world to the Hereafter, connected spirit and matter, struck a balance between mind and heart, and created a link between science and faith by elevating the importance of moral development to the level of importance of material progress. It is owing to this that the Islamic civilization gave an immense contribution to the development of global civilization. Another specific characteristic of the Islamic civilization is that it spread the spirit of justice, impartiality and tolerance among people. The result was that people of different beliefs and views lived together in safety, peace and mutual respect, and that mosques stood next to churches, monasteries and synagogues in the lands that were governed by Muslims. This stems primarily from the commandments of the noble Islam according to which nobody must be forced to convert from their religion and beliefs since freedom of religion is guaranteed within the Islamic order. The Islamic civilization in Spain encompasses many fields that left a profound imprint in the Iberian Peninsula and Europe. The cultural climate of Spain in the era of Muslim rule (711-1492) brought about a prospering of different aspects of science and culture. Numerous schools and libraries were established and books were procured due to which the majority of the people were literate. Literature and art flourished. Buildings were constructed and Islamic art with its specific qualities was cultivated. As a result of that movement, Cordoba became the civilization capital of both Spain and the West in general. Many schools were established in it, such as medical and technical schools in addition to the general education and other vocational schools. Hospitals, chemical plants and observatories were also built. The university in Cordoba was a beacon of thought, education and culture, and it made Cordoba the home of science and of a great number of scholars and scientists in medicine, pharmacy, chemistry, astronomy, mathematics and botany. Scholarly disciplines such as philosophy and logic were also studied and busy translation activities were underway. For that reason travelers and people in quest for knowledge and science from different European countries used to come to Cordoba. This scientific and civilizational movement was not limited to Cordoba alone, but also spread into other cities of Spain, such as Granada, Toledo and other cities under Islamic rule. Relevant historical sources state that young men from Europe, particularly from Italy and France, competed to enroll some of the Islamic universities in Andalusia. One of the students of the university in Cordoba was Gerbert, who later became known as Pope Sylvester II. He introduced science of mathematics and Arabic numerals in Italy. The same historical sources also read that Europe was acquainted with Aristotle's manuscripts via the city of Toledo which was a center of bustling translation work from the Arabic into the Latin language. It was in Toledo that many works of Plato and Galen were translated, as were the philosophy manuscripts by Ibn Sina, al-Farabi, Ibn Tufayl, Ibn Bajjah and Ibn Rushd, and the medical manuscripts by Ibn Sina and al-Razi. These manuscripts quickly spread all over Europe and became a mandatory literature at great European universities. Ibn Sina's Al-Qanun fi al-tibb was considered the fundamental reference book in studies of medicine in Europe for nearly six centuries and was called The Canon of Medicine. This paper cites numerous examples of interaction and unity of religion and science in the times when Islamic culture and civilization flourished in the Iberian Peninsula, the era that lasted for almost eight centuries.