Archaeology News Thread

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Villabruna 1, LA Braña 1, Loschbour, Ötzi The Iceman, Cro Magnon, and Aurignacians.
Dark to black skin and lacked the derived SLC24A5-AA.

The derived SLC24A5-AA is the depigmentation allele that's responsible for pale skin and the 1st Europeans lacked them

DERIVED SLC24A5-AA discovered in Satsurblia Cave GEORGIA with Haplogroup J1.

During the Bronze Age Collapse, The Black Semitic Ebla Kingdom, who were black like their ancestors, the Natufians, were invaded by Caucasian tribes like the Kura-Araxes Hurrians, and Hittites that carried the DERIVED SLC24A5-AA mutation.

An Ice Age Infant’s 17,000-Year-Old DNA Reveals He Had Dark Skin and Blue Eyes
The baby boy’s recovered genome suggests he’s related to a famous Ice Age population

By analyzing the ancient skeleton of a baby found in southern Italy, scientists have put together a striking picture of the young boy: The poorly developed child lived during the Ice Age—17,000 years ago—and he likely had brown skin, curly dark hair and blue eyes.

His remains were discovered in 1998, in the Grotta delle Mura cave in Monopoli, Puglia, according to a study recently published in Nature Communications. Archaeologist Mauro Calattini, one of the study’s coauthors, found the baby’s bones carefully covered with rock slabs, surrounded by no grave goods. The simple burial was the cave’s only grave.

The skeleton was largely intact, allowing scientists to determine that the child was likely a bit over two and a half feet tall when he died, while a recent dental examination revealed that he was somewhere between 7.5 and 18 months old. Earlier radiocarbon dating determined his remains were between 16,910 and 17,320 years old, meaning the so-called “infant of Grotta delle Mura” lived just a few centuries after the Last Glacial Maximum, Earth’s most ice-laden period, when glaciers covered a quarter of the planet’s land about 20,000 years ago.

The cave of Grotta delle Mura is located within the heel of Italy's boot.

As co-lead author Alessandra Modi, an anthropologist at the University of Florence, tells NewScientist’s Christa Lesté-Lasserre, ancient skeletons found in warm climates are usually too degraded to conduct significant genetic analysis. But in the cool cave, the child’s remains were protected from Puglian heat and therefore well preserved. The researchers were able to recover about 75 percent of the boy’s genome, which Modi says is “a remarkable achievement for ancient remains of this age.”

This enabled us to make robust conclusions about the infant’s ancestry, physical characteristics and even certain health aspects,” Modi tells NewScientist.

The boy’s skin was darker than most modern Europeans’ but not as dark as a tropically acclimated person’s, Modi says, and his pale blue eyes match those of other ancient western European hunter-gatherers. The infant also appears to be an ancestor of the Villabruna cluster—a group of post-Ice Age people who lived up to 14,000 years ago—suggesting the Villabruna line began in southern Europe well before the end of the Ice Age, per the study.

The boy’s genome also helped researchers determine his cause of death. He had familial hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, an inherited condition that causes the heart muscle to thicken, which can cause fatal congestive heart failure.

As well as the boy’s age, the researchers’ detailed analysis of the boy’s teeth allowed them “to infer the health and stress experienced by the child during infancy and/or his mother during pregnancy—something we rarely have the opportunity to explore with such precision,” as Modi and her co-lead author, Owen Alexander Higgins, an archaeologist at the University of Bologna, tell Live Science’s Soumya Sagar.

Researchers' analysis of the infant's teeth provided information about the boy's short life, as well as his mother's.

Nine accentuated lines marking the infant’s teeth indicate “physiological stress events” that occurred before and after birth, per the study. Isotopes in the teeth suggest that his mother stayed in one area during pregnancy and may have been malnourished. And judging by a fracture found in the baby’s collarbone, his birth was likely difficult.

“We imagine that the mother lived in a close-knit community,” Higgins tells NewScientist. “Her life may have involved gathering food and taking part in other daily activities, remaining rooted in the local environment.”

The recent study has illuminated some ancient ancestry, providing vital information about humans during the Last Glacial Maximum.

As Vanessa Villalba-Mouco, a paleogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology who wasn’t involved in the study, tells NewScientist, “We are increasingly learning more about Ice Age populations, and this study adds a valuable piece to the puzzle.”

 

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Archaeologists Found a Surprise Hiding in an Ancient Egyptian Tomb—A Second Body
Lady of the House’ and priestess Idy was hidden in a secret room behind the walls of her father’s tomb.

• A roughly 3,900-year-old tomb of an Egyptian priestess named Idy was discovered full of burial goods.
• Located behind a stone wall within a famous tomb near the ancient city of Asyut, experts were surprised by the detail and intricacies of the decorations.
• The find from Egypt’s Middle Kingdom could help scholars better understand the period.

One of the most famous tombs in all of Egypt was holding a family secret: another body.

After 20 years of fieldwork in the mountains of Gebel Asyut al-Gharbi—located near the ancient Egyptian city of Asyut—archaeologists discovered the grave of Idy, a priestess of the goddess Hathor. Idy was also known as the “Lady of the House,” which was a title reserved for prominent families. Her grave was found tucked behind a stone wall within the tomb of her father, Diefaihapi I, who was a regional governor of the ancient city and one of the most powerful people of his day. The find was dated to 1880 B.C.

His rock-cut tomb—36 feet high, 92 feet deep and 229 feet wide—was filled with exquisite paintings and inscriptions. What experts didn’t know was that a side chamber that had been closed off by a stone wall. That chamber included a vertical shaft (about 46 feet deep) and the grave of Diefaihapi I’s only daughter, Idy. Because of its hidden nature, it remained largely untouched (but not totally unscathed) by looters.

The find, which was the result of the Asyut Project led by Jochem Kahl, professor of Egyptology at Free University of Berlin, opens a new window into our understanding of the culture of the Middle Kingdom—Egypt’s least-understood period.

The most striking discoveries in Idy’s grave are two elaborately decorated coffins made from imported wood. One fits inside the other—the small coffin is 7.5 feet long and the larger is 8.6 feet long. Mohamed Ismail Khaled, secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, called the objects “some of the most amazing coffins ever found,” according to a translated statement from Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

The team also discovered a small coffin lid, wood statues, a dagger, a pharaonic insignia, and food offerings.

The coffins feature intricate images and texts articulating the journey into the afterlife. The team of university experts said in a statement that the decorations on the inside and outside of the coffins are more detailed than those found on comparable objects from the same period, and reflect true quality of craftsmanship.

An additional chest—this one also full of inscriptions—contained canopic jars that once stored Idy’s liver, spleen, lungs, and intestines. Remnants of Idy’s clothes and bones—some of which were partially destroyed by looters—now offer clues into her life. For instance, the experts said that she was likely no more than 40 years old when she died, and suffered some sort of foot ailment. Looters removed part of the mummified remains and smashed the canopy vessels, but her skull and some bones were still on site.

The scholars located Idy’s grave while doing cleaning at Diefaihapi I’s tomb—the largest non-royal tomb in Egypt from the Middle Kingdom period, further emphasizing his importance.

Asyut—once a politically and culturally powerful city in the Middle Kingdom—doesn’t have the same prominence in Egyptian archaeology as cities such as Memphis or Thebes, largely because it was buried by flood sediments. Uncovering more details about the city, its powerful inhabitants, and the culture that surrounded them could provide new insight into Egypt’s often-understudied Middle Kingdom.