Philippa Kaur

The Matarrubilla stone at Valencina in Spain was transported more than 5300 years agoL. García Sanjuán
A 2-tonne megalith in southern Spain was transported to its present location by a hitherto-unknown group of ancient seafarers over 5300 years ago.
The Matarrubilla stone is a solid slab of gypsum about 1.7 metres long by 1.2 m wide, sitting within a tomb-like structure at the Copper Age site of Valencina, near Seville.

It is located within a circular chamber called a tholos, with just enough room to stand around it. Given its unique composition and size, it is thought that the stone was used in rituals, but its provenance has been a mystery until now.
Luis Cáceres Puro at the University of Huelva in Spain and his colleagues performed chemical analysis on the slab and optically stimulated luminescence dating – which approximates the last time light struck sediments – on the soil beneath it to better determine its age and site of origin.
The results suggest the megalith was dragged to its current location between 4544 and 3277 BC, which is hundreds of years – possibly even 1000 years – earlier than previously thought. The new dates also suggest the rock was moved to Valencina long before the tunnel structure was built around it.

The stone’s composition most closely matches a quarry 55 kilometres away on the other side of the Guadalquivir river. At the time, there was a wide estuary between the two sites, suggesting the stone must have been transported by boat.
This is the first evidence of a megalithic stone being transported by boat in the Iberian peninsula, but large stones at other megalithic sites in Europe, such as Stonehenge in the UK and Carnac in France, are also thought to have been transported this way.
“The 4th millennium BC saw rapid evolution in coastal navigation,” says team member Leonardo García Sanjuán at the University of Seville. “The Matarrubilla stone basin is a good piece of indirect evidence, which, in our opinion, proves that these people had advanced raft, canoe or sailing-boat technology.”
Archaeological discoveries from other sites show that communities in the Mediterranean were already building sophisticated, seaworthy boats, he adds.

“The crossing of the formerly existing sea with such a huge stone proves once again the technical savoir-faire of the Matarrubilla builders,” says Ramón Fabregas Valcarce at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, who wasn’t involved in the study.
Valencina is one of the largest prehistoric sites in Europe, covering an area of more than 460 hectares. Among the site’s rarer artefacts are materials imported from far-flung regions, including amber, flint, cinnabar, ivory and ostrich egg.
“[Valencina] contains megalithic monuments, massive ditches, extensive burial records and refined material culture that reveals connections across Iberia, North Africa and the Mediterranean,” says Cáceres Puro.
Prior work in the area has unearthed numerous details indicating the site’s historical significance, including a centuries-long period from 2900 to 2650 BC when it was largely ruled by women.
“The current study adds intriguing further detail for one of Valencina’s major monuments,” says Alasdair Whittle at Cardiff University, UK.

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Neanderthal culinary skills were more sophisticated than we thoughtGREGOIRE CIRADE/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
Neanderthals were processing animal bones to extract fat from them 125,000 years ago, nearly 100,000 years before modern humans were known to do anything similar.
The evidence comes from an extraordinary lakeside site at Neumark-Nord in eastern Germany, where over 100,000 fragments of bones from at least 172 individual animals have been found. The remains include horses, bovids, deer, foxes, big cats and an extinct two-horned rhinoceros.

The bones had clear signs of being smashed into small pieces and heated to liberate the grease from the spongy tissue inside them. This fat would have provided a less-perishable, easily transportable, high-calorie food that would have been highly prized by hunter-gatherer groups.
Wil Roebroeks at Leiden University in the Netherlands and his colleagues, who carried out the study, describe the location as a “fat factory” that seems to have been used intensively for only a short period. “The fragmentation of the bones is clearly anthropogenic, not the result of carnivores or geological processes,” he says.
While there is no direct evidence that Neanderthals were responsible for the butchery, they were the only known humans in Europe at that time, says Roebroeks.

Previously, the oldest site where grease rendering had been confirmed was in Portugal 28,000 years ago.
Breaking the bones of large mammals into such a vast amount of small fragments is labour-intensive and time-consuming. “This only makes sense if the fragmentation served a purpose,” says Roebroeks.
Although the team doesn’t have direct evidence of boiling, it is clear that the bones were heated. “Judging from the presence of clearly heated bones, heated flint artifacts and stones, fires burnt at the site,” he says.

The earliest known pottery dates from around 20,000 years ago, so the Neanderthals must have used other kinds of vessels to boil the bones. Recent experiments have shown that containers made out of perishable materials such as deer skin or birch bark, placed directly on a fire, are capable of heating water sufficiently to process food, says Roebroeks.
“It is another addition to the cultural repertoire of these distant cousins and underlines the possibility that these hunter-gatherers did engage in some form of food storage,” he says.

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A fresco from the Theban necropolis depicting potters in ancient EgyptDeAgostini/Getty Images
For the first time, the complete genome of a person from ancient Egypt has been sequenced. The DNA was collected from the remains of an older man, possibly a potter, who lived over 4500 years ago.
The ancient Egyptian inherited about a fifth of his DNA from ancestors living in the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East, more than 1000 kilometres east of Egypt. This suggests that the societies in Egypt and Mesopotamia were connected, despite their distance.
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The body was excavated in the early 1900s from Nuwayrat, a necropolis near Beni Hasan in Egypt. It was found in a pottery vessel, which had been placed in a rock-cut tomb. Today, the remains are kept at the World Museum in Liverpool, UK.
“We could actually directly radiocarbon date the remains of this individual,” says Adeline Morez Jacobs at Liverpool John Moores University. He died sometime between 2855 and 2570 BC. That means he lived fairly early in the history of ancient Egypt, which spanned from around 3150 to 30 BC.
The skeleton and DNA both showed the individual was male. Based on the man’s arthritis and other signs, he was estimated to be between 44 and 64 years old – probably on the older side. “He’s probably in his 60s at the time of death, which is incredibly old for that time period,” says Joel Irish, also at Liverpool John Moores University.

The social position of the man is unclear. “He was in what would have been an upper-class burial,” says Irish. But his skeleton shows that he had a hard, physical life. Based on the specific damage, he spent a lot of time looking down, leaning forward and holding his arms out in front of him, says Irish. He also sat for long periods of time on hard surfaces. Based on preserved images of different Egyptian occupations, the researchers think his most likely occupation was a potter.
Using samples from the roots of his teeth, the team was able to sequence the man’s entire genome. Previously it had only been possible to obtain partial genomes from three ancient Egyptians, who lived over 1000 years more recently.
“We have so little genetic sequencing from ancient Egypt,” says Shirly Ben-Dor Evian at the University of Haifa in Israel.
This is because the region’s warm climate degrades DNA more quickly. “It’s just way too hot,” says team member Pontus Skoglund at the Francis Crick Institute in London, who calls the sequencing “a long shot”.
“We hypothesised that the pot burial, in combination with the rock-cut tomb into which the pot burial was placed, provided a stable environment,” says Linus Girdland-Flink at the University of Aberdeen in the UK.

About 80 per cent of the man’s genetic ancestry was North African, as might be expected. But the remaining 20 per cent matched people from the eastern Fertile Crescent, a geographical area that encompasses present-day Iraq, western Iran and parts of Syria and Turkey.
There are several possible explanations, says Ben-Dor Evian. “I’m thinking that explorers were always a thing,” she says. Also, long after farming became commonplace, “there were always populations that continued to be nomadic or semi-nomadic,” she says. Those peoples may have carried DNA between the Fertile Crescent and Egypt.
Archaeologists have already found links between ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. “There was quite a bit of cultural connections with Mesopotamia based on sharing artistic motifs,” says Irish, and goods like lapis lazuli were traded.
There could even be implications for the origin of writing. “The first writing systems emerged almost contemporaneously in the two regions,” says Morez Jacobs: cuneiform in Mesopotamia and Egyptian hieroglyphics just 300 years later.
“Was it a local invention of writing in both places, [or] were they, in some way, affecting each other?” asks Ben-Dor Evian. If one society invented writing, “the idea could have been transmitted through this movement of people,” she says. However, she stresses that one genome is nowhere near enough to draw such a sweeping conclusion: “I would like to see more Egyptian material in Mesopotamia in this time and vice versa.”

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A modern recreation of garum, a fermented fish sauce dating back to Roman timesAlexander Mychko / Alamy
Fermented fish sauce, or garum, was an incredibly popular condiment throughout the Roman Empire. For the first time, ancient DNA – scraped from vats used to produce the sauce – has revealed exactly which fish species went into the culinary staple.

Roman fish sauce was prized for its salty and umami flavours – although the philosopher Seneca famously described one version as “the overpriced guts of rotten fish”. It came in several forms, including a liquid sauce called garum or liquamen, as well as a solid paste known as allec. To prepare the condiment, fish-salting plants crushed and fermented fish, a process that can make visual identification of the species difficult or impossible.
“Beyond the fact that bones are extremely small and fractured, the old age and the acidic conditions all contribute to degradation of DNA,” says Paula Campos at the University of Porto in Portugal.
Campos and her colleagues ran DNA sequencing tests on bony samples from roughly the 3rd century AD, extracted from a Roman fish-salting plant in north-west Spain. They were able to compare multiple overlapping DNA sequences and match them to a full fish genome, giving the team “more confidence that we identify the correct species”, says Campos.
The effort identified the fish remains as European sardines – a finding that aligns with previous visual identification of sardine remains in other Roman-era fish-salting plants. Other garum production sites have also contained remnants of additional fish species such as herring, whiting, mackerel and anchovy.

This proof that “degraded fish remains” can yield identifiable DNA “might help identify with more precision some regional variations in the main ingredients of the ancient fish sauces and pastes”, says Annalisa Marzano at the University of Bologna in Italy, who did not participate in the study.
The study also compared the DNA of ancient and modern sardines to show there was less genetic mixing of sardine populations from different ocean regions in ancient times. That insight could help “assess the effects of human-environment interaction over the centuries”, says Marzano.
For their next step, Campos and her colleagues plan to analyse other fish species from additional Roman-era garum production sites. “We are expanding the sampling locations to see if the results are consistent across the entire Roman Empire,” she says.

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3D models of the skulls from a modern human and from a NeanderthalCourtesy of Kimberly Anne Plomp
A skull abnormality that squeezes the lower brain, often causing headaches and other neurological problems, might be part of our genetic inheritance from Neanderthals.
People with Chiari malformations have a smaller and flatter base of the skull around the area where it connects to the spine. As a result, part of the brain – the cerebellum – is squashed into the spinal canal in the neck.

Type 1 Chiari malformations, the mildest form, are thought to affect up to 1 in 100 people. They can cause symptoms like headaches, neck pain, sleep apnoea and numbness, but some people never show signs at all.
About 15 years ago, Yvens Barbosa Fernandes, a neurosurgeon at the State University of Campinas in Brazil, noticed that the base of his Chiari patients’ skulls resembled those he had seen in Neanderthal specimens in European museums, especially in the mild slope of the occipital bone, where the cerebellum rests. While Neanderthal brains were larger than modern humans’ are, they slanted back more from the forehead and across the base, giving them a flatter shape compared with the rounder form of modern human skulls.
In 2013, Barbosa Fernandes published a hypothesis proposing that the Chiari skull shape might have been inherited from extinct humans who interbred with Homo sapiens. “I started to think there was a lost link between anthropology and medicine in Chiari cases,” he says.

Inspired by this suggestion, Kimberly Plomp at the University of the Philippines Diliman in Quezon City and her colleagues built digital 3D models of the skulls of 46 people with Chiari type 1 and 57 without Chiari, based on their CT scans. Their detailed mathematical analyses confirmed that the Chiari-affected skulls had a smaller occipital bone with a flatter angle, and more brain compression at the base of the skull where the cerebellum sits.
Next, the team examined how those modern skulls compared with digital models of eight fossil heads from Homo neanderthalensis, Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis and ancient Homo sapiens.
They found that the skull bases of Neanderthal heads had remarkably similar measurements to those of modern humans with Chiari, while all the other ancient cranial bases resembled those of modern humans without Chiari. “It highlights the idea that these are Neanderthal traits – not just early traits,” she says. “It looks like this is just another way that Neanderthal genes might be influencing our health – and in this case, in a negative way.”

For Barbosa Fernandes, the study provides strong evidence in support of his theory. “It makes sense: if you have less angulation, you have less space for the modern human brain,” he says. “I didn’t have the science to prove my hypothesis. This paper is a big step closer towards that proof.”
As a next step, the team hopes to analyse the DNA of people with Chiari malformations to look for Neanderthal genes, Plomp says.
Other types of Chiari malformations – types 2 to 4 – are thought to have different causes. Type 2 is linked to a severe form of spina bifida, while types 3 and 4 are extremely rare and may be life-threatening.

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