Search results for "hunter-gatherer"

Changing Plant-based Subsistence Practices among Early and Middle Holocene Communities in Eastern Maghreb

2020

The eastern Maghreb is a key area for understanding environmental and cultural dynamics during the early and middle Holocene. Capsian populations from around 10000–7500 cal BP were among the last foragers in the region. Capsian sites are known as escargotières (land shell middens), and locally called rammadiyat (meaning ashy mound). As taphonomic conditions in Capsian open-air sites generally favour the preservation of resistant materials such as shells and bones rather than fragile plant remains, this study integrates macro-botanical and microfossil evidence from phytoliths, calcitic wood ash pseudomorphs and dung spherulites, since each is influenced by different formation and post-deposi…

A tough travesía: Mobility constraints among late Holocene Patagonian hunter-gatherers through oxygen stable isotopes in enamel and water sources

2020

Central-eastern North Patagonia is characterized by a severe environmental fragmentation due to the scarce and heterogeneous distribution of fresh water. The main local wet zones, the Negro and Colorado river valleys in the North and the Somuncura Foothills in the South are separated by a large and harsh dry land, the travesia. In this paper, we assess the effects of this environmental fragmentation in the mobility of the Late Holocene hunter-gatherers through the analysis of the stable isotopes of oxygen in both enamel and water sources. We analyzed the δ18O of the enamel carbonate of 64 human teeth from 42 individuals from the Negro River valley (n = 30) and the Somuncura Foothills (n = 1…

Paleogenetic and morphometric analysis of a Mesolithic individual from Grotta d'Oriente: An oldest genetic legacy for the first modern humans in Sici…

2020

Abstract Grotta d’Oriente, a coastal cave located on the island of Favignana (Sicily, Italy) is a key site for the study of the early human colonization of Sicily. Inside the cave, during different field excavations, three burials attributable to the Late Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic were found. The Mesolithic Oriente B individual, directly dated at 9,377 ± 25 uncal BP, was previously assigned to HV1 haplogroup using a traditional approach. However, it is well known that PCR based methods are prone to erroneous haplotype or haplogroup determination. In order to redefine the mitochondrial lineage of this Mesolithic hunter-gatherer and explore its phylogenetic position, we target-enriche…

Last Interglacial Iberian Neandertals as fisher-hunter-gatherers.

2020

Fruits of the sea The origins of marine resource consumption by humans have been much debated. Zilhão et al. present evidence that, in Atlantic Iberia's coastal settings, Middle Paleolithic Neanderthals exploited marine resources at a scale on par with the modern human–associated Middle Stone Age of southern Africa (see the Perspective by Will). Excavations at the Figueira Brava site on Portugal's Atlantic coast reveal shell middens rich in the remains of mollusks, crabs, and fish, as well as terrestrial food items. Familiarity with the sea and its resources may thus have been widespread for residents there in the Middle Paleolithic. The Figueira Brava Neanderthals also exploited stone pine…

Trophic ecology of a Late Pleistocene early modern human from tropical Southeast Asia inferred from zinc isotopes

2021

Tam Pà Ling, a cave site in northeastern Laos, has yielded the earliest skeletal evidence of Homo sapiens in mainland Southeast Asia. The reliance of Pleistocene humans in rainforest settings on plant or animal resources is still largely unstudied, mainly due to poor collagen preservation in fossils from tropical environments precluding stable nitrogen isotope analysis, the classical trophic level proxy. However, isotopic ratios of zinc (Zn) in bioapatite constitute a promising proxy to infer trophic and dietary information from fossil vertebrates, even under adverse tropical taphonomic conditions. Here, we analyzed the zinc isotope composition (66Zn/64Zn expressed as δ66Zn value) in the en…

The genetic prehistory of the Baltic Sea region

2018

Correction: Nature communications 9 (2018), art. no. 1494 doi:10.1038/s41467-018-03872-y While the series of events that shaped the transition between foraging societies and food producers are well described for Central and Southern Europe, genetic evidence from Northern Europe surrounding the Baltic Sea is still sparse. Here, we report genome-wide DNA data from 38 ancient North Europeans ranging from similar to 9500 to 2200 years before present. Our analysis provides genetic evidence that hunter-gatherers settled Scandinavia via two routes. We reveal that the first Scandinavian farmers derive their ancestry from Anatolia 1000 years earlier than previously demonstrated. The range of Mesolit…

Survival of Late Pleistocene Hunter-Gatherer Ancestry in the Iberian Peninsula

2019

The Iberian Peninsula in southwestern Europe represents an important test case for the study of human population movements during prehistoric periods. During the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), the peninsula formed a periglacial refugium [1] for hunter-gatherers (HGs) and thus served as a potential source for the re-peopling of northern latitudes [2]. The post-LGM genetic signature was previously described as a cline from Western HG (WHG) to Eastern HG (EHG), further shaped by later Holocene expansions from the Near East and the North Pontic steppes [3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]. Western and central Europe were dominated by ancestry associated with the ∼14,000-year-old individual from Villabruna, Italy…

A 5,000-year-old hunter-gatherer already plagued by Yersinia pestis.

2021

Summary A 5,000-year-old Yersinia pestis genome (RV 2039) is reconstructed from a hunter-fisher-gatherer (5300–5050 cal BP) buried at Riņņukalns, Latvia. RV 2039 is the first in a series of ancient strains that evolved shortly after the split of Y. pestis from its antecessor Y. pseudotuberculosis ∼7,000 years ago. The genomic and phylogenetic characteristics of RV 2039 are consistent with the hypothesis that this very early Y. pestis form was most likely less transmissible and maybe even less virulent than later strains. Our data do not support the scenario of a prehistoric pneumonic plague pandemic, as suggested previously for the Neolithic decline. The geographical and temporal distributi…

Hunters and pastoralists in East Africa: The case of the Waata and the Oromo-Borana

1997

The genetic history of Europeans.

2012

The evolutionary history of modern humans is characterized by numerous migrations driven by environmental change, population pressures, and cultural innovations. In Europe, the events most widely considered to have had a major impact on patterns of genetic diversity are the initial colonization of the continent by anatomically modern humans (AMH), the last glacial maximum, and the Neolithic transition. For some decades it was assumed that the geographical structuring of genetic diversity within Europe was mainly the result of gene flow during and soon after the Neolithic transition, but recent advances in next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies, computer simulation modeling, and ancie…