ARCHÆOLOGY
A MONTHLY EXCAVATION OF ODDITIES AND ANTIQUITIES PAUL DEVEREUX digs up the latest discoveries and ponders the legacy of our Neanderthal genes
NEANDERTHAL HELP WITH COVID
In 2002, scuba-diving explorers found a male Palæolithic jawbone, c.40,000 BC, deep within the Peştera cu Oase (“Cave with Bones”), near Anina, Romania. Hailed as the earliest known vestige of early modern humans in Europe, when scientists analysed its DNA in 2015, they were surprised to find it contained roughly three times the amount of Neanderthal DNA found in today’s Europeans. Because the genome contained large stretches of uninterrupted Neanderthal sequences, researchers calculated that the jawbone’s owner is likely to have been the product of a modern human-Neanderthal sexual liaison barely 200 years before his birth.
In a recent column ( FT400:14-15) we remarked that modern humans were having sex rather a lot with various archaic hominids, especially Neanderthals, even into relatively later Palæolithic times, as this Romanian example testifies. Indeed, one theory is that the Neanderthal genome was diluted by modern human DNA to the point where the Neanderthals, like old soldiers, just faded away – as the Romanian jawbone seems to indicate.
This Neanderthal legacy we all carry in our genes has significant effects on us, good and bad, and more so than we might imagine. “[T]hese unions are thought to have contributed to a range of traits modern humans carry today, from skin tone, hair colour and height to our sleeping patterns, mood and immune systems. Learning about them is already leading to potential treatments for modern diseases, such as drugs that target a Neanderthal gene thought to contribute to severe cases of Covid-19,” writes Zaria Gorvett in a BBC
Future feature of 13 January 2021. www.bbc. com/future/article/20210112-heres-what-sexwith-neanderthals-was-like.
AZTEC TAPAS
Tecoaque (aka Zultepec) is a Mesoamerican archæological site in western Tlaxcala state, central Mexico, close to Calpulalpan. Translated from the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs, its name means “the place where they ate them”. This refers to an incident in 1520 when the inhabitants captured a detachment of Spanish soldiers and their extensive retinue – females, children and various others included – and ate them all, even the horses, over a period of months.
The hard-hearted might say that the Spaniards and the others shouldn’t have been there anyway, but Conquistador Hernán Cortes naturally didn’t see it that way, and ordered Gonzalo de Sandoval to destroy the town in a reprisal attack in early 1521. Excavations suggest the inhabitants of Tecoaque tried to hide the feasted-upon bones (some of which had been worked into trophies), but to no avail. Recent excavations reported by Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History Museum show that those inhabitants who were present when the revenge attack took place were mercilessly butchered. “The placement of the burials suggests these people were fleeing, were massacred and buried hurriedly,” the report states. “Women and children who were sheltering inside rooms were mutilated, as evidenced by the discovery of hacked bones on the floors. The temples were burned and the statues were decapitated.” This place clearly carries a dark shadow of all-round extreme cruelty. New Zealand Herald, Guardian, 19 Jan 2021.
BRINGING HOME THE MEAT
We all too readily think of men being the hunters in ancient hunter-gatherer societies, yet this turns out not to be always the case. A research team from University of California, Davis, analysing 429 archæological records of burials throughout North and South America dating from between c.14,000 and 8,000 years ago, found evidence of 27 individuals
– 11 female,16 male – buried with biggame hunting tools. The team estimated that 30-50 per cent of big-game hunters living several thousand years ago in the Americas may have been women. This is further supported by a 2018 excavation in Peru in which the remains of a teenage girl who lived around 9,000 years ago was discovered. She was buried alongside “a well-stocked, big-game hunting toolkit” including “stone projectile points for felling large animals, a knife and flakes of rock for removing internal organs, and tools for scraping and tanning hides”. New York Times, 5 Nov 2020. Original paper: Science Advances 4 Nov. 2020. DOI: 10.1126/s.
ARCHÆOLOGICAL DEATH THREAT
At 5,000 years old, Caral, in Peru’s Supe Valley, over 100 miles (160km) north of Lima, is the oldest city complex yet found in the Americas, and was constructed by an unknown civilisation. Its core area contains 32 monumental structures, of which six are terraced pyramids or “platform mounds”, the largest of which is some 60ft (18m) high. Other features include amphitheatres, temples, and dwellings, all apparently constructed in a single phase, indicating sophisticated planning and large-scale organisation. (Many of Caral’s architectural features were the forerunners of designs that re-appeared in various Andean and Mesoamerican civilisations millennia later.)
The 200-acre complex, originally dunesmothered, was rediscovered only in 1994 by Peruvian archæologist Dr Ruth Shady, when she began to excavate it. But squatters claimed, without evidence, that the site’s land belonged to them and destroyed parts of the complex. Moreover, they issued death threats to the site’s lawyer (it has UNESCO designation) and to Shady and her team via telephone calls and voice messages. “Then they killed our dog as a warning,” she says. It wasn’t idle stuff, because back in 2003 they actually shot her in the chest! After nine invasions of the site, and repeated requests to the authorities, Caral has now received a modicum of police protection. Guardian, 2 Jan 2021.