Lee Dunn's List: ANCIENT WORLD

• Sixty Headless Skeletons -- 3,000 Years Old -- Discovered in Pacific Ocean Archipelago Vanuatu
• ScienceDaily (Dec. 21, 2009) —
• When a team of archaeologists began excavating an old coral reef in Vanuatu in 2008 and 2009, they soon discovered it had served as a cemetery in ancient times.
• So far, 71 buried individuals have been recorded, giving new information on the islands' inhabitants and their funeral rites.
• "This is a groundbreaking discovery, as it is the oldest and biggest skeleton find ever in the Pacific Ocean; bigger cemeteries found further east are much younger,"
• says Mads Ravn, head of research at the University of Stavanger's Museum of Archaeology in Norway.
• Relatives did not treat their dead gently. Besides being headless, some of them had had their arms and legs broken, in order to fit into the coral reef cavities.
• Ravn suggests they may have been left to rot first, and buried later as skeletons.
• The local museum's staff of the Vanuatu Culture Centre, a range of researchers, lead by Stuart Bedford and Matthew Spriggs from the Australian National University (ANU), forms an international and cross-disciplinary team, working to gather information about the Pacific islands' inhabitants.
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  The archaeologists found that Vanuatu skeletons are headless. The research project "Persistence and Transformation in Ancestral Oceanic Society: the archaeology of the first 1500 years in the Vanuatu archipelago" was initiated by Stuart Bedford and Matthew Spriggs in ANU in collaboration with the Vaunatu cultural Centre in Vanuatu. It aims to find out how Vanuatu was colonised and developed over time. (Credit: Mads Ravn/Courtesy of The University of Stavanger
• Mads Ravn's expertise in migration and colonising over great distances, as well as in digital excavation documentation and recording, makes him an important contributor to this cooperative effort.
• Coral reef tomb
• Vanuatu is a nation of 83 islands, located 1,750 kilometres east of Australia.
• The soil contains remnants from a violent volcano eruption, believed to have taken place exactly 3000 years ago.
• Scientists have found no sign of human activity predating this event.
• "The way these people are buried, bears witness of a body concept which is different from the whole-body concept in Europe the last 5000 years," says Mads Ravn.
• "There was no sharp divide between life and death, and the dead were participating in the present.
• A few decades ago in Bali and other Pacific islands, people were putting their ancestors' skulls on display in their homes," he adds.
• This may explain why the Vanuatu skeletons are headless.
• One skeleton was found with five skulls on his chest, and Ravn believes the heads may have been used in ancestral rituals.
• The islanders usually removed the volcanic ash before burying their dead under ashes and sand.
• Each grave is marked with a pottery jar decorated with intricate patterns, possibly stamped by small pieces of worked bone.
• The ceramic also depicts faces and eyes, perhaps images of their ancestors.
• "I have never seen such beautiful artefacts before. These must be the world's finest pottery jars of that age," says Ravn.
• Long distance voyages
• Vanuatu's first inhabitants probably came from Taiwan and the Philippines,
• having travelled thousands of miles by outrigger canoes equipped with sails and big enough to contain large families.
• The canoers settled on the uninhabited islands, and supported themselves by fishing and cultivating the land.
• Giant tortoises were abundant and easy to catch. Volcanic ashes from 3000 years ago contain many tracks of tortoises, but these are entirely non-existent 100 years on.
• "It is very interesting to observe the consequences of human beings taking possession over virgin land," says Ravn.
• Over a few centuries, several species went extinct -- the giant tortoise among them.
• Traces of mussel shells also bear witness of excessive consumption. The shells diminish in size as the sediments get younger.
• According to Ravn, the inhabitants quite simply overextended their resources.
• Strong and adventurous
• The skeletons' DNA profiles should be ready later this winter, and the scientists hope to uncover kinship links among the dead. But there are already some findings of their health condition.
• "People were suffering from gout and caries -- both diseases associated with the good life.
• But we can tell from our samples that the inhabitants were laborious and strong. They were simply genetically disposed to contracting gout from eating shellfish. And starch in food such as Taro and sweet potatoes induced caries," says Ravn.
• Tooth analyses also revealed what these first islanders looked like.
• "They were most probably fair skinned of Asian origin, unlike the present day Melanesians, whose skin is dark.
• The original settlers probably travelled on, or mixed up with the Melanesians that arrived later," "But future DNA studies and isotopic analyses may later confirm that," Ravn says.
• It is believed that the first Pacific seafarers were spurred on by overpopulation, or by rules of inheritance which granted the first born child the right to inherit land, making it hard for younger siblings to settle down.
• But one should not exclude desire for travelling and a spirit of adventure, says Ravn. The desire to venture out has probably been a driving force at all times.
• The first Vanuatuans remained on the islands for years, until some of them, probably driven by lust for adventure and fortune sat sail further out in the Pacific Ocean again, heading eventually for the Easter Islands.
• Over two short centuries, the Pacific Ocean was colonised all the way to the Tonga Islands. By then, a distance of more than 3000 kilometres had been covered -- by canoe.
• Facts:
• The research project "Persistence and Transformation in Ancestral Oceanic Society: the archaeology of the first 1500 years in the Vanuatu archipelago" was initiated by Stuart Bedford and Matthew Spriggs in ANU in collaboration with the Vaunatu cultural Centre in Vanuatu and sponsored by the Australian Research Council.
• It aims to find out how Vanuatu was colonised and developed over time.
• The University of Stavanger's Museum of Archaeology is one of many research partners.
• Excavations will continue until 2012, expanding to different parts of Vanuatu over the coming years. Scientists expect to find more headless skeletons and other objects which may explain why colonisation took place.

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• Friday, 1 January 2010
• DNA analysed from early European
• By Paul Rincon       
      Science reporter, BBC News 
• Scientists have analysed DNA extracted from the remains of a 30,000-year-old European hunter-gatherer.
• Studying the DNA of long-dead humans can open up a window into the evolution of our species (Homo sapiens).
• But previous studies of this kind have been hampered by scientists' inability to distinguish between the ancient human DNA and modern contamination.
• In Current Biology journal, a German-Russian team details how it was possible to overcome this hurdle.
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  The DNA comes from the skeleton of a male in his twenties
• Svante Paabo, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and colleagues used the latest DNA sequencing techniques to study genetic information from human remains unearthed in 1954 at Kostenki, Russia.
• Excavations at Kostenki, on the banks of the river Don in southern Russia, have yielded large concentrations of archaeological finds from the Palaeolithic (roughly 40,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago). Some of the finds date back as far as 45,000 years.
• The DNA analysed in this study comes from a male aged 20-25 who was deliberately buried in an oval pit some 30,000 years ago.
• Known as the Markina Gora skeleton, it was found lying in a crouched position with fists reaching upwards and a face orientated down towards the dirt.
• The bones were covered in a pigment called red ochre, thought to have been used in prehistoric funeral rites.
• The type of DNA extracted and analysed is that stored in mitochondria - the "powerhouses" of cells.
• This mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is passed down from a mother to her offspring, providing a unique record of maternal inheritance.
• Using technology pioneered in the study of DNA from Neanderthal bones, they were able to distinguish between ancient genetic material from the Kostenki male and contamination from modern people who handled the bones, or whose DNA reached the remains by some other means.
• The new approach, developed by Professor Paabo and his colleagues,
• exploits three features which tend to distinguish ancient DNA from modern contamination.
• One of these is size; fragments of ancient DNA are often shorter than those from modern sources.
• Previous ancient DNA studies used the widespread polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technology. PCR amplifies a few pieces of genetic material, generating thousands to millions of copies of a sequence.
• A second characteristic of ancient DNA was its tendency to show particular changes, or mutations, in the genetic sequence at the ends of DNA molecules.
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  The ancient skeleton was unearthed in 1954 at Kostenki in Russia (Courtesy of Vladimir Gorodnyanskiy)
• A third feature was a characteristic breakage of molecules at particular positions in the DNA strand.
• Trust issues

• The apparent ease with which modern DNA can infiltrate ancient remains has led many researchers to doubt even those studies employing the most rigorous methods to weed out contamination by modern genetic material.

  "The ironic thing is that our group has been one of those that raised this issue," Professor Paabo told BBC News.
• "To take animal studies on cave bears, for example, if we use PCR primers specific for human DNA on cave bear bones, we can retrieve modern human DNA on almost every one. That has made me think: 'how can I trust anything on this'."
• Using the new techniques, the researchers were able to sequence the entire mitochondrial genome of the Markina Gora individual.
• Future studies like the one in Current Biology could help shed light on whether the humans living in Europe 30,000 years ago are the direct ancestors of modern populations or whether they were replaced by immigrants who introduced farming to the continent several thousand years ago.

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  Large concentrations of Palaeolithic finds have come from Kostenki
• The modern gene pool contains a wide variety of mtDNA lineages.
• Studying these maternal lineages provides scientists with clues to the origins and histories of human populations.
• Scientists look for known genetic signatures in order to classify an individual's mtDNA into different types, or "haplogroups".
• These haplogroups represent major branches on the family tree of Homo sapiens.
• Early arrival
• The researchers were able to assign the Kostenki individual to haplogroup "U2", which is relatively uncommon among modern populations.
• U2 appears to be scattered at low frequencies in populations from South and Western Asia, Europe and North Africa.
• Despite its rarity, the very presence of this haplogroup in today's Europeans suggests some continuity between Palaeolithic hunters and the continent's present-day inhabitants, argue the authors of the latest study.
• U2, along with closely related haplogroups such as U5, are among those which could plausibly have arrived in Europe during the Palaeolithic.
• Geneticists use well-established techniques to "date" particular genetic events, such as when a haplogroup first diversified.
• The "U" branch (comprising haplogroups U1, U2, U3 and so on) appears to be more ancient than many other genetic lineages found in Europe.
• A recent study found a very high percentage of U types in the skeletal remains of ancient hunter-gatherers from Central Europe compared with later farming immigrants and modern people from the region.
• Meanwhile, an analysis last year of mtDNA from 28,000-year-old remains unearthed at Paglicci Cave in Italy showed this individual belonged to haplogroup "H" - the most common type found in modern Europeans.

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