News by Subject Social & Behavior

A new study in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports suggests beer brewing practices existed in the Eastern Mediterranean over five millennia before the earliest known evidence. In an archaeological collaboration project between Stanford University in the United States, and University of Haifa, Israel, archeologists analyzed three stone mortars from a 13,000-year old Natufian burial cave site in Israel. Their analysis confirmed that these mortars were used for brewing of wheat/barley, as well as for food storage.

The earliest evidence of a drawing made by humans has been found in Blombos Cave in the southern Cape in South Africa. The drawing, which consists of three red lines cross-hatched with six separate lines, was intentionally drawn on a smooth silcrete flake about 73,000 years ago. This predates previous drawing from Africa, Europe and Southeast Asia by at least 30,000 years.

New evidence from the Maya city of Copan, in Honduras, reveals that ancient Mesoamericans routinely captured and traded wild animals for symbolic and ritual purposes, according to a study published Sept. 12, 2018 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Nawa Sugiyama from George Mason University, Va., USA, and colleagues.

Applying a comprehensive analysis of genetic, historical, and archeological factors in two 6th-century barbarian cemeteries, researchers have gleaned new insights into a key era known as the Migration Period that laid the foundation for modern European society. A paper, published today in Nature Communications, seeks to shed new light on how these communities were formed, how people lived, and how they interacted with the local populations they supposedly came to dominate.

A new analysis of human hair taken from the remains of one of the members of the Franklin expedition, is providing further evidence that lead poisoning was just one of many different factors contributing to the deaths of the crew, and not the primary cause, casting new doubt on the theory that has been the subject of debate amongst scientists and historians for decades.

Researchers studying human remains of high-ranked warriors recovered from an Early Medieval Germanic cemetery have finally gleaned insight into these individuals' sex and kinship relationships. These findings offer a unique understanding of the Alemanni, a group of Germanic tribes that occupied a region spanning parts of present-day Germany, France, Switzerland.

In 1962, an Alemannic burial site containing human skeletal remains was discovered in Niederstotzingen (Baden-Württemberg, Germany). Researchers at the Eurac Research Centre in Bozen-Bolzano, Italy, and at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, have now examined the DNA of these skeletal remains.