The bog bodies of Europe

Yde Girl

This is one of Europes bog bodies, found in 1897 by peat cutters by the village of Yde in the Netherlands.  Carbon dating on the body dated her to the first century AD. She had been killed by strangulation; a woolen belt was wrapped around her neck three times and was she then strangled. A small stab wound was found at the base of her throat, suggesting this was some kind of ritual killing.

She is estimated to have been about 16 years old at the time of her death, and in rather poor health, with curvature of the spine, and some trouble from her right foot. She was only about 4’5” tall.

The skull reconstruction was achieved using a CT scan and a polystyrene skull overlaid with a wax skin.

Tolland man

This exceptionally well preserved body was found in Denmark, and dated to about 2,000 years old. He is thought to have been hanged or strangled by the rope around his neck, and he had eaten a drugged meal, a kind of vegetable and cereal porridge containing high levels of ergotamine, a strong hallucinogen.

He was so well preserved that the local police believed he was a recent murder victim when they first found him. Only his head and one hand are not still with us, as in 1950 when he was found preservation techniques weren’t so advanced.

 

Graubelleman man

Is another mummy from Denmark, found in 1952. He’s thought to have died about 55 BC. He was killed by having his throat cut. he had also suffered a blow to the skull and a leg fracture. His body showed no signs of manual labour.

Clonycavan man

This is the most recent find, from Ireland in 2003. He is believed to have died about 200 BC, and killed by a powerful axeblow to his head. He had also been hit in the chest, and disembowled.

He is thought to have been very short even by ancient standards, only 5’2” tall, and was in his twenties when he died. One of the most interesting things about the body is his hair, which showed a lot of lice, and it was welded into a tall style using a hair gel made from vegetable oil and pine resin imported either from Southern Spain or France. This maintained his hair in a kind of mohawk stle that survived over 2,000 years in a bog, so in life it must have been welded into place by the mixture. The fact that he could afford imported cosmetics suggestes he was fairly wealthy.

 

A lot of these bodies have flaming red hair. It wasn’t because red heads were singled out for ritual sacrifice. Although human hair will usually maintain its hair well if kept in a dark dry place, the acid condition of peat bogs attacks the brown- black pigment in the hair (eumelanin), but is leaves the naturally red-brown pigment (pheomelanin) in the hair alone, over thousands of years turning the hair red

Mummy reconstruction of two Egyptian ‘brothers’

At the Manchester museum.

The two mummies were found by Flinders Petrie in 1907 at Rifeh in middle Egypt. They date to the middle Kingdom

These are the coffins of and Nekht-Ankh. Oddly, the black brother was found in the lighter faced coffin, which suggests there may have been a mix up at some point.

Upon examination, the ‘brothers’ who are named as brothers, having the same mother. However, Khnum-Nakht was a negroid and Nekht-Ankh a Caucasian, and it seemed very unlikely they were blood brothers, as the skulls and bodies showed no similarity to each other. It’s thought possible that one was possibly adopted.

The skulls and reconstructions.

Khnum-Nakht  and  Nekht-Ankh .

The full museum item is more complete.

A fascinating insight into on-line mate selection.

A random attack on Google unearthed this little gem…

 What Makes You Click? — Mate Preferences and Matching Outcomes in Online Dating.

Some of the insights it gives you into the dating behavior of on-line Americans is fascinating. I’ll give you a few of the highlights now though.

• A 5’6” tall man needs to earn an extra $175,000 dollars to be as attractive as a man 6′ tall.
• Men really don’t like tall women.
• Men don’t care much about a womans educational level or income is. In fact they prefer a slighlty less educated woman.
• Women prefer men who are slightly more educated than themselves.
• Men prefer an underweight BMI of 17 (emaciated, technically) at least in photos.
• Women prefer men to be slighlty too heavy with a BMI of 27.
• Asians seem to be the least picky about interracial dating.
• White women seem to be the most picky about interracial dating
• Genderwise, women are less likely to be interest in interracial dating.
• Black males were the most open to interracial dating.
• Asian men seem to be rated as the least attractive by women (sorry).
• A woman with long blond hair is considered more attractive than one with short dark hair.
• Red haired men are at a disavantage.
• Women prefer the standard male haircut (reasonably short). Long and curly does worst.
• Money really does make men more attractive. But not women.

So, no major surprises there then. It’s worth a read. Some of the more interesting observations are about the income increases needed tp make Black, Hispanic and Asian men equally attractive to white women: $154,000, $77,000 and $247,000 respectively. What women have against Asian men I’m not sure!

Oldest Egyptian farming site found in Lower Egypt.

Egypt’s Earliest Farming Village Found

 Steven Stanek in Cairo for National Geographic Magazine

The 7,000-year-old farming-village site includes evidence of domesticated animals and crops—providing a major breakthrough in understanding the enigmatic people of the Neolithic, or late Stone Age, period and their lives long before the appearance of the Egyptian pharaohs.

 The discoveries were made as a team of Dutch and U.S. archaeologists dug deeper into a previously excavated mound of sand concealing the ancient village in the Faiyum depression, a fertile oasis region about 50 miles (80 kilometers) southwest of Cairo.

Just centimeters beneath the modern plowed surface, in an area that had been used until recently to grow grapes, the researchers discovered evidence of structures, such as clay floors, and hearths containing homegrown wheat grain and barley. Also unearthed were the remains of sheep, goats, and pigs—which, along with the grains, were imported from the Middle East.

These finds could add a new chapter to the history of Egypt’s contact with foreign cultures in pre-pharaonic times.

Radiocarbon dating places the occupation of the site to around 5200 B.C. But details about the lifestyle of the farmers who used those granaries and tools remained a mystery until now.

The Faiyum “is important because it provides the first evidence of farming that we have in Egypt,” said the excavation’s co-director Willeke Wendrich, an associate professor of Egyptian archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“For the first time, we have domesticated wheat and barley in a domestic context.”

This would place the entry of agriculture into Northern Egypt at something like 8,000 years or less, a little later than areas like Serbia and Bulgaria. This would seem to support a more Northerly origin for agriculture than the Levant, as you’ll often see in print. Turkey is now considered to be more likely to be the birthplace of Western farming, as the DNA studies of domesticates generally lead back to there.

BTW, there is a good link to a named map of Egyptian sites if you click on the map.

Bakt en Hor and the bodiless man.

Both of these mummies are the subject of some forensic investigation for a tv program called ‘Mummy Forensics’, headed up by Dr Joann Fletcher, an Egyptologist with a speciality in mummy hair.

This is the mummified head of a young man circa 600 BC from ancient Egypt.

This is the CT scan of Bakt Hor Nekht, bought in an Egyptian market, and now a resident of the Hancock museum in England. She’s about 3,000 years old.

She was 5 ft tall and had a full set of teeth. Her bones show no signs of arthritis or bone disease, suggesting that she was aged between 21 and 35 when she died; and she is wrapped in elaborate cartonnage (fibres) indicating that she was most likely middle class.

I’m looking forward to the show.

Temporal variation in prehistoric Nubian crania

Temporal variation in prehistoric Nubian crania
David S. Carlson
Center for Human Growth and Development, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109
 
Abstract
Much of the earlier work on the prehistory of Sudanese Nubia has emphasized discontinuity between early Nubian populations. However, recent investigations suggest the converse – that a remarkable degree of cultural and biological continuity exists among indigenous Nubian groups, perhaps as far back as the Paleolithic. Thus, cultural and biological differences between Nubian populations can be most effectively perceived as the result of in situ evolutionary development.
The present analysis has two major purposes: (1) to describe the morphological differences in the craniofacial complex between indigenous Nubian populations extending from the A-Group (c. 3,400 B.C.) through the Christian (c. 1,500 A.D.) horizons; and (2) to account for these differences within an evolutionary framework. The multiple discriminant analysis of radiographically derived variables revealed a trend from a substantially lower and more elongated cranial vault to a shorter and taller vault throughout the almost 5,000 year time span. Associated with this pattern was a tendency for the face to become more inferiorly-posteriorly located with respect to the vault in the latter groups. Finally, the masseter and temporalis muscles underwent a reduction and slight relocation through time. We speculate that this trend may be associated with behavioral changes associated with transition from a hunting and gathering to a totally agricultural subsistence pattern.

Is this mummy Tutankhamun’s brother or father?

This is  a scan of mummy from KV 55. Last year National Geographic  ran an item on the possibility that it was Akhenaten (Amenhotep IV). King Tut is the set of images below.

Apparently it shares a lot of the features with the young king. A curiously elongated skull, thin face.. apparently it also had scoliosis of the spine and a cleft palate. However, the age of the mummy is estimated at no more than 18, so it makes it more likely he is a brother, also supported by the fact that some of the artifacts in the tomb where from Tutankhamun’s reign. However, this one is really up for debate. Particularly as Tut has been classified as a North African Caucasian by every anthropologist who’s had a good look at him, while this guy seem to be slightly prognathic, possibly having a Southern mother.. a half brother? If the body really is that of an 18 year old, it can’t be of Akhenaten, who reigned sixteen years and fathered a whole brood of children with Nefertiti. If it is a brother, it is probably Smenkhkare.

This is the defaced mummy case of KV55

Gender based division of labour may have given modern humans an advantage.

Gendered division of labor gave modern humans advantage over Neanderthals
Diversified social roles for men, women, and children may have given Homo sapiens an advantage over Neanderthals, says a new study in the December 2006 issue of Current Anthropology. The study argues that division of economic labor by sex and age emerged relatively recently in human evolutionary history and facilitated the spread of modern humans throughout Eurasia.

“The competitive advantage enjoyed by modern humans came not just from new weapons and devices but from the ways in which their economic lives were organized around the advantages of cooperation and complementary subsistence roles for men, women, and children,” write Steven L. Kuhn and Mary C. Stiner (University of Arizona).

Kuhn and Stiner note that the rich archaeological record for Neanderthal diets provides little direct evidence for a reliance on subsistence foods, such as milling stones to grind nuts and seeds. Instead, Neanderthals depended on large game, a high-stakes resource, to fuel their massive body mass and high caloric intake. This lack of food diversity and the presence of healed fractures on Neanderthal skeletons—attesting to a rough-and-tumble lifestyle—suggest that female and juvenile Neanderthals participated actively in the hunt by serving as game drivers, beating bushes or cutting off escape routes.

The Middle Paleolithic Neanderthal record also lacks the artifacts commonly used to make weather-resistant clothing or artificial shelters, such as bone needles. Thus, it was the emergence of “female” roles – subsistence and skill-intensive craft – that allowed H. sapiens in ecologically diverse tropical and sub-tropical regions to take advantage of other foods and live at higher population densities.

“Earlier hominins pursued more narrowly focused economies, with women’s activities more closely aligned with those of men with respect to schedule and ranging patterns,” write the authors. “It is impossible to argue that [Neanderthal] females and juveniles were fulfilling the same roles—or even an equally diverse suite of economic roles—as females and juveniles in recent hunter-gatherer groups,” they add.

While some degree of niche specialization between adult male and females is documented for many large-mammal species, recent humans are remarkable for cooperative economies that combine pervasive sharing and complementary roles for individuals of different ages and sexes.

Well, something suddenly gave modern humans the edge. Prior to about 40,00 years ago we couldn’t penetrate Neanderthal-dominated Europe. In circumstances where two groups are competing over the long term, even a 1% advantage can be the cause of one group overwhelming another.

Certainly, stopping females of reproductive age getting in the way of danger is good idea, as a tribe’s reproductive future is totally dependent on how many breeding females it has (you can get by with a lot fewer males). Female Neanderthals seemed to join in the hunt, judging by the kinds of injuries they sustained.

Modern humans also seemed to have a much wider diet, always a good call in any circumstance. If the hunt fails, there will still be nuts and berries to tide you over.

Assuming each group has a stable population to start with (2 surviving children per woman)… Let’s assume  modern humans had a survival advantage of 1%  for their children, starting with a population of 10,000; this would translate as a population growth of.. ( I hope my maths is right)

1. 10,000
2. 10,415 (100 years)
3. 10,945 (200 years)

Assuming that the area can only support 20,000 people, population B will find itself down to 9585 people, in just 100 years (five average generations). Over a few thousand years, this would effectively wipe out the Neanderthals. Even a very slight advantage will win out in a time scale of tens of thousands of years.

There’s also the possibility that modern humans were just a bit sharper mentally too, or became so about the point they began to expand into Neanderthal territory. The likelihood of this been a ‘single gene’ trait is probably very slim, as polygenic traits like intelligence don’t pass along easily into new populations. It’s much easier for the new population who have all the genes to just expand. There does seem to be a small technology boom about the time of the modern human expansion into Europe, adding weight to the increased intelligence theory.

None of this excludes that Neanderthals contributed something to the gene pool, it just means that they were most likely a small minority contributor, and that it would mostly have been female mediated- a standard pattern in a people who are being wiped out. The lack of any Neanderthal Y chromosomes isn’t any kind of a surprise, as one South American country couldn’t find any native Y chromosomes to be found in one Y DNA study.

Add to this that any half-Neanderthal children wouldn’t have had the full set of intelligence increasing/behaviour modifying genes, putting them at a disadvantage to the all modern human offspring, and you’re looking at a dwindling contribution yet again. And, at a later date, another modern human population swept into Europe from the SE, almost totally replacing the hunter gatherers of the Mesolithic in places like Bulgaria and Greece.

Repeated waves of expanding human populations that nearly entirely replace the prior occupants of an area seem to be the norm in human evolution, it’s just that the Neanderthals were so long ago we are only finding faint traces of them in DNA studies that show ancient genes in Eurasia with non-African origin.

Will some one tell the white supremacists to stop using the word Aryan incorrectly!

I keep seeing the word Aryan used to describe Northern Europeans, like the British, Germans and Scandinavians.

THEY ARE NOT ARYAN.

The Aryan/Indo European only describes South Eastern Europeans, Persians, and people into the Northern part of India. They had a population expansion starting about 10,000 years ago, which spread the Indo European languages all over. They only made up a minority of the ancestry in populations North of central Europe. Europeans do speak Indo European languages, but most of us have a different genetic legacy. Ancient Mesolithic hunter-gatherer in the far North, and from the Western Atlantic coast people in England and the West of Europe.

GET IT RIGHT…

Indo-Europeans/Aryans

From Greece to Pakistan

Not Aryans

From Norway, Sweden and Germany

It is kind of funny that the Aryan pride types mostly come from non-Aryan ancestry. I always have a chuckle when I see that one in print. I want to see a street full of the Iranians and Pakistanis next time there’s an Aryan pride march. That would make my day.

A full skeletal reconstruction of a Neanderthal

 

A complete Neanderthal was reconstructed using mostly La Ferrassie man as a base, but filling out some of his missing bits with some from Kebara 2. This was done by two Americans, Gary Sawyer (anthropologist) and Blaine Maley.

This reconstruction has lead to the observation that Neanderthals were very stumpy, and totally lacking in a waist. They also had wider hips, which would have made them pretty slow runners. The consensus now is that they probably didn’t run down their prey (endurance hunting), but attacked them up close with stabbing spears, which would account for the high number of serious injuries they sustained.

A reconstruction I saw of a Neanderthal inner ear suggested their sense of balance was a lot less developed than a modern humans. They probably didin’t get up to any gymnastics, and were poor runners.