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Early in human history, people were willing to make enormous sacrifices in order to satisfy their deities. Some cave dwellers even cut off their own fingers, according to new research.

These are examples of negative hand images with missing fingers on calcite draperies in Cosquer Cave, located in Calanque de Morgiou, France [Credit: Jean Clottes]

It was a mystery archaeologists couldn’t figure out for decades. Cave paintings nearly 27,000 years old sometimes depicted hands with missing fingers — but why?

A team of anthropologists and archaeologists from British Columbia’s Simon Fraser University now believe humans in the Upper Palaeolithic era amputated their fingers in religious rituals and that the incredibly painful experience might have helped groups of humans form intensely strong bonds.

Master’s student Brea McCauley and supervisors David Maxwell and Mark Collard combed through records dating back to the 1600s for examples of researchers and travellers who noted the practice of finger amputation.

McCauley, who led the team, was surprised to find examples of finger amputation on every continent humans inhabit.

“We did not expect, in the slightest, to find 121 societies that engaged in finger amputation,” McCauley said in an interview.

Closwer view of hand images in Cosquer Cave [Credit: Fanny Broadcast/ Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images]

In one instance, a cave in France featured hand paintings from 50 different individuals, including men, women and children. Many had fingers missing.

The team posited that finger amputation was likely done as either a sign of mourning or as a sacrifice in order to appeal to a deity for assistance. And the ritual may have helped, but likely not in the way early humans thought.

Group amputations of people’s fingers in a highly ritualized practice probably had the “side effect” of creating powerful bonds among participants, said Collard, an archaeology professor at SFU.

Existing research suggests deeply uncomfortable experiences can in fact make people more loyal to others who share the same trauma, explained McCauley.

“These rituals that might be painful or might cause emotional distress create really strong communities. They bind people as though they are family,” she said.

“So that means they are really likely to look out for one another and that means they might be hostile to other groups because they are so bounded inward.”

While these rituals were happening during the Upper Palaeolithic era, modern humans spread across much of the world and out competed neanderthals.

The research is published in the Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology.

Author: Wanyee Li | Source: The Star Vancouver [December 07, 2018]

Scientists are painting the clearest picture yet of what life may have been like for Neanderthals living in Southern France some 250,000 years ago, and to do it, they're using an unlikely day-to-day record of what their environment was like—their teeth.

Teeth may be an important new resource for understanding the lives of our extinct relatives, said Daniel Green, a postdoctoral fellow at the Forsyth Institute, an affiliate of Harvard Dental School of Medicine [Credit: Kris Snibbe/Harvard University]

A team of researchers showed that examining the teeth of Neanderthal infants could yield insight into nursing and weaning behavior as well as winter and summer cycles. The study even found evidence that the Neanderthals had been exposed to lead—the earliest such exposure ever recorded in any human ancestor.

The study from researchers Daniel Green, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-affiliated Forsyth Institute; Tanya Smith, a former Harvard professor now at Griffith University in Australia; and Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai researchers Christine Austin and Manish Arora, who is also a former postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, was recently published in Science Advances.

"Humans are very different from other apes," said Green, one of the first authors of the study. "We are curious to understand what made us different in evolutionary history, and a lot of people have looked to the climate to understand those differences.

"Obviously, we are changing the climate today, but in the past the climate was shaping us, and a number of theories suggest that changes in the seasonal availability of water drove us to take one part of our behavioral repertoire—stone-tool-making—and use that much more frequently," he continued.

"But that idea is hard to test … because we don't know what rainfall was like 2, 3, or 4 million years ago. It turns out teeth are a really good way of addressing this problem because they grow in rings, like a tree, but those rings are formed every day."

And much like tree rings, he said, changes in the environment—such as winters and summers—are recorded in the chemical composition of teeth, giving modern scientists a window into the seasonal patterns with which Neanderthals contended.

The study builds partly on research Green conducted several years ago as part of his Ph.D., in which he raised a flock of 10 sheep at Harvard's Concord Field Station.

"What we did was collect 700 gallons of glacial melt water from Montana, so we could give it to the sheep and contrast it with Boston water as a way to create these artificial, experimental seasons," Green said. "Everything was carefully controlled—we were measuring their body chemistry in real time, their environmental chemistry in real time, and we built a computational and statistical model to predict, based on measurements we can make in the teeth, what the seasons were like when they were living."

The technique proved to be so effective, Green said, that not only could he identify the seasonal differences between the two water supplies, he was even able to spot short-lived environmental changes like snowstorms.

"Everything was working, but we were seeing one small blip," he said. "When we went back to the animals' lives … it turned out that there had been two big snow storms that were not a planned part of the experiment. The sheep had eaten snow from the ground, and that was reflected in their tooth chemistry. So the system worked so well that it actually ended up re-creating storm events, and teaching us about our own experiment."

Informed by these findings, and adding barium and lead measurements to the oxygen isotope analyses in teeth, Smith and her international team of archaeologists, biological anthropologists, Earth scientists, and public health specialists were able to identify a similar seasonal pattern in Neanderthal teeth.

"We can see that one of the Neanderthals was born in the spring and weaned from mother's milk in the fall, and we can see they were exposed to lead a number of discrete times in the winter," Green said. "That was a striking result, and there is still a lot of mystery about it. We don't actually know where that lead comes from … but we do know that later, during the Roman period and onward, there were lead mines in the area, so it's possible that lead in the ground had contaminated some water or food sources."

What is known, Green said, is that teeth may be an important new resource for understanding the lives of our extinct relatives.

"The oxygen analysis used in this study is a new type that has been used only a few times previously," Green said. "So to validate that work, and show we can pick out these seasonal cycles from Neanderthal teeth, we looked at some of the analyses I had done for my Ph.D., used them to validate the technique, and we then applied it to Neanderthals."

Going forward, Green hopes to trace the source of lead exposure found in the Neanderthal teeth, but also believes the finding may set other scientists on the path to searching for similar exposures in other early populations. The ability to track these exposures in teeth opens the door to using the technique in contemporary populations as well, he said.

"If people are saying they have been exposed to lead or that their water isn't clean, we could go to that community and look at the teeth children are losing naturally," Green said. "We could use this type of analysis to understand who has been exposed, by how much, and what kind of interventions are needed to deal with those issues."

Green also said he hopes to see researchers apply the technique to other early human ancestors, particularly those in Africa, in an effort to understand the environmental challenges they faced as they evolved.

"I didn't expect that the very detailed and technical geochemical work I did would apply to such a salient question about the lives of Neanderthals and in Europe, so this has been very rewarding for me," he said. "It's very exciting to have these cousins who are so closely related to us, and who contributed to our DNA, and to see these very precise moments in their lives and place them in some sort of environmental and seasonal context."

Author: Peter Reuell | Source: Harvard University [December 04, 2018]

Stretching over four sandy kilometres Almanarre beach in southern France is a mecca for sun lovers and kite surfers. But its greatest treasure -- a 2,000-year-old underwater archaeological site -- lies just a few feet offshore.

The ancient Roman city of Olbia fell victim to a slow rise in Mediterranean waters, but is still open for visits from explorers equipped with a snorkel mask and flippers [Credit: AFP]

Welcome to the port of the ancient Roman city of Olbia, which fell victim to a slow rise in Mediterranean waters, but is still open for visits from explorers equipped with a snorkel mask and pair of flippers.

A collection of rectangular limestone blocks, some perfectly aligned, others scattered about on the seafloor, make up the watery remains of the dock of the city of Olbia, a fortified trading post founded by the Greeks in the 4th Century BC on the outskirts of the modern-day Riviera town of Hyeres.

After the capture of nearby Marseille by Julius Caesar in 49 BC the region gradually came under the control of the Roman empire, which endowed Olbia with a port in the 1st Century AD.

Many of the blocks were looted by locals to build homes, so the port went into decline as the sea level rose [Credit: AFP]

The 100-metre (yard) dock was only used for 80 years, according to marine archaeologist Lenaic Riaudel, who guides visits of the remains which lie close to the shore, in some places just inches deep.

"The port suffered from its location, fully exposed to the (strong northwesterly) mistral wind but especially to competition from Toulon," a city 20 kilometres to the west, Riaudel told AFP.

With many of the blocks looted by locals to build homes, the port went into decline and as the sea level rose -- nearly a metre in 2,000 years -- so the port gradually sank.

Marine archaeologist Lenaic Riaudel guides visits of the remains which lie close to the shore [Credit: AFP]

Today, visitors can tour the remains of Olbia (meaning 'happy' in ancient Greek), including its thermal baths, shops, dwellings and fortifications, on a headland overlooking the sea.

The city was inhabited for nearly 1,000 years before being abandoned during Frankish rule (450-751 AD) when the last residents moved further inland.

While the land site, revealed a century ago, is visible to the naked eye, few are aware that a part of Olbia's history lies beneath Almanarre's iridescent waters, covered in mother-of-pearl and colonised by sea urchins and sea bream.

The 100-metre dock was only used for 80 years, according to Riaudel [Credit: AFP]

Those who visit that part of the beach usually do so "because the water is always warmer here", said 39-year-old Riaudel, who has carried out hundreds of dives at the site.

"I've been exploring this area for years and had never heard of it," Yves Corlobe, an instructor from a local surf school admitted.

Author: Olivier Lucazeau | Source: AFP [November 30, 2018]

When President Emmanuel Macron of France received a report he had commissioned on the restitution of African treasures, he wasted no time in announcing that the Quai Branly Museum in Paris would return 26 objects, looted by French colonial forces in 1892, to Benin.

Three large royal statues of the Kingdom of Dahomey on display at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris. President Emmanuel Macron of France announced on Friday that 26 items taken by force from the kingdom would be returned to Benin [Credit: Philippe Wojazer/Reuters]

But that was as far as the president went in publicly endorsing the report on Friday. Its authors, Bénédicte Savoy of France and Felwine Sarr of Senegal, recommend that all objects removed without consent from Africa and sent to France be permanently returned if the countries of origin ask for them.

Mr. Macron instead assigned his culture and foreign ministers to help fulfill an objective he set a year ago: to ensure that the cultural treasures of sub-Saharan Africa be accessible in Africa through restitutions, but also exhibitions, exchanges and loans. He also called for an international conference in early 2019 on the return of African artifacts.

In Europe, the restitution announcement drew tepid reactions from museum directors, as it sets a tricky precedent. Leaders of cultural institutions were quick to emphasize that Mr. Macron was speaking for France and France alone, but acknowledged that his actions and pronouncements on African heritage had energized and accelerated discussions on the subject elsewhere.

In Africa, the announcement was met with a mix of enthusiasm and caution.

The restitution of 26 objects to Benin “does not change the policy of the British Museum, nor legislation in Great Britain,” said Hartwig Fischer, the director of the London institution, which has 73,000 objects from sub-Saharan Africa in its collections, many obtained in colonial times. The museum has been in a decades-long dispute with Greece over the so-called Elgin marbles, which came from the Parthenon, and the governor of Easter Island requested last week the return of Hoa Hakananai’a, a statue that is among the British Museum’s most popular items.

Mr. Fischer said that while the British Museum’s trustees were open to all forms of cooperation, “the collections have to be preserved as whole.”

He recognized that Mr. Macron’s announcement would “intensify the debate” about access, and would contribute to “the next dimension of cooperation” as African countries develop their cultural and museum infrastructure.

King Ghezo’s throne from Abomey, which dates from the early 19th century, is among the items France will return, Mr. Macron said [Credit: Gerard Julien/AFP/Getty Images]

Hartmut Dorgerloh, the director of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, a giant museum of non-Western art set to open next year, said in an interview that Mr. Macron’s pledge to return the 26 objects had made issues of Africa’s heritage “more obvious, more visible and also more urgent.” In the future, he said, European museums would “have to return” objects in some cases, while in others, the inclusion of artifacts in collections would have to be viewed as “the result of European or global history.”

“How far back will you go? Until Roman times?” he said. “Because many items in Rome were robbed somewhere in Greece or in ancient Egypt.”

The objects that Mr. Macron is giving back to Benin are a star attraction of the Quai Branly Museum. Seized when French colonial forces ransacked the capital of the 300-year-old Kingdom of Dahomey, they were royal treasures that the fleeing king left behind: statues, thrones, and even the carved polychrome doors of his palace.

Although the report by Ms. Savoy and Mr. Sarr advises against measures such as long-term loans, Mr. Macron has spoken favorably in the past of “temporary restitution.” One example of the kind of cooperation that Mr. Macron could be looking for is the Benin Dialogue Group, which includes representatives from Nigeria and from major European museums that own treasures of the Kingdom of Benin, in what is now southern Nigeria.

Those artifacts — mostly sculptures and relief plaques — were looted from royal palaces during a British expedition in 1897. They were taken to Britain or sold on the open market, and eventually ended up in museums in Europe and the United States. Some are now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Edo State in Nigeria hopes to open a museum by 2021 to house several hundred of the artifacts, lent short-term by the British Museum, among others.

Doors from a Kingdom of Dahomey palace, on display at the Quai Branly Museum. The items had been buried underground when the kingdom was ransacked by French colonial forces in the 19th century [Credit: Michel Euler/Associated Press]

Prince Kum’a Ndumbe III of the Duala people in Cameroon, who runs AfricAvenir International, a nonprofit that calls for the restitution of artifacts taken without consent, said that the French report was “the first step in the right direction.” He added that such a political commitment had been awaited since Cameroon and much of the rest of Francophone Africa gained independence from France in 1960.

“This is not just about the return of African art,” he said. “When someone’s stolen your soul, it’s very difficult to survive as a people.”

He invited Britain and Germany to follow the French example and commission their own restitution reports.

Stéphane Martin, president of the Quai Branly Museum, which has 70,000 objects from sub-Saharan Africa in its collections, said in an interview with the French daily Le Figaro that last week’s report was “a bad answer to the courageous question posed by the president.” While restitution was “not a word that I’m scandalized by,” he added, there are “other ways to engage in cultural cooperation with Africa.”

In a separate interview with Europe 1 radio on Sunday, Mr. Martin said it was he who had suggested that the 26 objects from his museum be returned to Benin. “Museums must not be hostages to the painful history of colonization,” he said.

Mr. Martin did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this article.

Plaques that form part of the Benin Bronzes on show at the British Museum in London. The plaques were taken by British troops in 1897 [Credit: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images]

Mr. Fischer of the British Museum described the French report as “a radical proposal” that made a “moral argument” against colonialism, whereby “everything that took place under the conditions of colonialism is eligible for restitution.” He also noted that Mr. Macron’s statement on Friday was “much more nuanced” than the report, and left open the door for options other than returning objects.

The ball is now in the court of France’s culture minister and foreign minister, who have been asked to bring together African and European museum managers and cultural professionals to ensure that works of art circulate not only among the major museums of the world — which hold 90 percent to 95 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s cultural heritage, according to the report — but also on the African continent.

The Paris conference next year will be a test of that process.

Sindika Dokolo, a businessman from the Democratic Republic of Congo who runs an art foundation in Angola and who has bought back looted African art, said the French president’s restitution offer had “no precedent.”

“Macron has opened a Pandora’s box,” he said.

At the same time, Mr. Dokolo urged African leaders to respond quickly, before a change of government or mood in France — to “put their foot in the door before it closes.”

Author: Farah Nayeri | Source: The New York Times [November 27, 2018]