Drug Use Detected in Hair Found in Mediterranean Island Cave
Hair strands found among a stash of objects in this cave on the island of Menorca have provided Europe’s oldest direct evidence of psychoactive drug use, dating to about 3,000 years ago.
By around 3,000 years ago, visitors at Es Càrritx cave on Menorca — perhaps shamans who performed spiritual and healing rituals — consumed plants containing mind-altering and vision-inducing substances, say archaeologist Elisa Guerra-Doce of the University of Valladolid in Spain and colleagues.
Signs of human activity at the cave, including more than 200 human graves arrayed in a chamber at the entrance, were previously dated to between around 3,600 and 2,800 years ago.
Researchers had also found a hoard of objects in a small pit within an inner cave chamber, including six wooden containers, each containing locks of human hair.
Chemical analyses of one container’s locks, possibly from more than one person, detected three psychoactive plant substances that had been ingested and absorbed into the hair over nearly a year, the scientists report on April 6 in Scientific Reports.
A chemical analysis of human hairs, shown here entangled with bits of animal bones after removal from a wooden container found in a Mediterranean island cave, revealed the presence of mind-bending plant substances.
Two substances, atropine, and scopolamine from nightshade plants, induce disorientation, hallucinations, and altered physical sensations. Another, ephedrine, boosts energy and alertness.
Shamans would have known how to handle and consume these potentially toxic plants safely, the investigators say.
Individuals intent on preserving ancient traditions hid hair and other ritually significant objects at Es Càrritx as Menorca’s growing population spurred social changes between 3,000 and 2,800 years ago, the researchers speculate.
Burial rituals included dyeing strands of hair on corpses a reddish color and later cutting off some locks to be put in containers left near graves.
Other hair analyses have found that Inca kids slated for sacrifice more than 500 years ago ingested hallucinogenic drinks and coca leaves and alcohol (SN: 5/13/22; SN: 7/29/13). And a 2005 study found chemical signs of coca-leaf chewing in the hair of two human mummies from Chile dating to around 3,000 years ago. Indirect evidence of drug use in various parts of the world, such as artistic depictions, go back further.
Researchers Study Severed Hands Uncovered in Egypt
Severed hands found outside an ancient Egyptian palace confirm accounts of a trophy-taking custom called the “gold of honor.”
In 2011, archaeologists excavating a site in northern Egypt known as Tell el-Dab’a came across a grisly scene. As they probed a series of pits outside the city’s palace walls, 12 skeletal hands reached back at them.
The dismembered hands, researchers reported last week in Scientific Reports, are likely a cache of battlefield trophies—prizes lopped from enemies’ bodies and exchanged for gold in a ritual known as the “gold of honor.” Egyptian texts and wall carvings describe the custom, the researchers note, but these hands represent the first physical evidence of it.
“It’s very nice evidence,” says Isabelle Crevecoeur, a physical anthropologist at CNRS, the French national research agency, who was not involved with the study. “From the biological and anthropological evidence, there’s no doubt it was part of a ritual.”
The hands were dated to 1500 B.C.E., when Tell el-Dab’a was known as Avaris and briefly served as the capital of ancient Egypt. When Manfred Bietak, an archaeologist at the Austrian Academy of Sciences who has led digs at Tell el-Dab’a for decades, first saw the remains, he immediately thought of the trophy-taking ritual.
According to ancient accounts, Egyptian warriors presented the hands of slain enemies to the pharaoh, who rewarded them with gold necklaces or golden pendants in the shape of flies.
Some researchers had an alternative explanation: that the severed appendages represented a brutal punishment for criminals, perhaps thieves. There is no written or pictorial evidence of such punishments in ancient Egypt, however, and the new analysis of the Tell el-Dab’a hands supports the trophy-ritual hypothesis. For one, the hands were carefully cut from the arm. Any bones below the wrist had been removed, leaving just the hand and fingers.
“They were all prepared properly to look just like a hand should,” says German Archaeological Institute paleopathologist Julia Gresky, who led the study.
She and colleagues found no cutmarks on the bones, suggesting an almost surgical effort went into preparing them. That makes a convincing case for ritualistic amputation, not barbaric punishment, Crevecouer says. “No signs of cutting is a sign that they did it very carefully, not with an ax or something. It’s delicate work. That, for me, is a good argument they did it for a ritual.”
The care also suggests the hands were removed after death, not hacked from living prisoners. They were probably severed after rigor mortis–a tightening of the tendons in the hours after death–had passed, Gresky argues. Otherwise, it would have been difficult to cut the tendons connecting hand to arm without leaving marks on the bones.
After they were removed and modified, eight of the hands were placed carefully in a shallow pit, with several more hands laid into another pit less than 1 meter away. “If it was punishment, the hand would have just been thrown away,” Gresky says. “But they really took care with them and placed them nicely.” Located just in front of the city’s central palace, the pits would have been visible from the throne room, suggesting the pharaoh prized the hands—and supporting the notion that they were a war trophy, the researchers note.
Fingers are among the first parts of the body to decompose and fall apart, so finding intact hands suggests they were all deposited in a single event or ceremony, rather than one at a time. “Finding articulated bones means the deposits must have been made very quickly, and then protected,” Crevecoeur says. “The hand was still fleshy when it was buried–otherwise it would have fallen apart.”
The “gold of honor” ritual was probably introduced to Egypt by interlopers known as the Hyksos, Bietak says. These invaders–who perhaps came from the eastern Mediterranean–conquered Egypt around 1640 B.C.E. and controlled the region for about a century, ruling from Avaris. They introduced Egyptians to chariots and new types of weapons, such as slings and distinctive battleaxes.
Bietak thinks they also introduced the custom of taking enemies’ hands as trophies. Later in Egypt, the ritual appears to have become standard practice. Ahmose I, the pharaoh who eventually forced the last of the Hyksos out of Egypt, “had a heap of hands depicted on the wall of his temple at Abydos,” Bietak says.
The custom both honored the pharaoh and inflicted punishment beyond the grave. Since the ancient Egyptians believed one’s body had to be intact in order to pass into the next world, severing the right hand would have disfigured their enemies’ souls as well as their bodies, barring them from the afterlife.
Mysterious mosaics depicting Medusa uncovered at 2nd-century Roman villa
Restorers Maria Teresa and Roberto Civetta work on a mosaic at the Villa of the Antonines archaeological project, directed by Deborah Chatr Aryamontri and Timothy Renner of the Center for Heritage and Archaeological Studies at Montclair State University.
While excavating a villa used by ancient Roman emperors in Italy, archaeologists uncovered something unexpected: two mosaics that depict the Greek mythological figure Medusa, whose hair was made of snakes and whose gaze was said could turn people into stone.
The team found the mosaics in a circular room in the Villa of the Antonines, so called because it was used by members of the Antonine dynasty who ruled the Roman Empire from A.D. 138 to 193.
The mosaics likely date to the second century A.D. the researchers said at a presentation at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America, which was held in New Orleans in January.
In both mosaics, Medusa is looking off into the distance, perhaps leaving observers to wonder, “What are these ladies thinking?” Timothy Renner, a professor of classics and general humanities at Montclair State University in New Jersey and co-director of the team that is excavating the site, said during the presentation.
The team found the Medusa mosaics within two niches cut into a circular room at the villa — one in the northwest part of the room and another in the southeast part. The room had two other niches, but no mosaic remains were found in them.
It’s still a mystery what this room was used for and why it contained Medusa mosaics. However, it “definitely must have been quite impressive to enter the room,” Deborah Chatr Aryamontri an associate professor of classics and general humanities at Montclair State University and co-director of the team, said during an interview with Live Science, noting that the room is around 69 feet (21 meters) in diameter.
“Finding those mosaics [was] a pleasant surprise,” Chatr Aryamontri said, noting that many of the villa’s most impressive decorations were removed during the 18th and 19th centuries.
In the second century, Medusa heads were popular decorative features in the Roman world, the researchers said. It’s not certain if the villa’s owners ordered them specifically or whether they were created on the whim of the artist who worked on the room.
The Antonine dynasty ruled the Roman Empire between the reigns of Emperors Antoninus Pius (reign A.D. 138-161) and Commodus (reign A.D. 177-192) The villa is immense and even has what appears to have been an amphitheater used by Emperor Commodus for gladiator practice and the killing of wild beasts. (Commodus sometimes participated in gladiator fights.)
The circular room appears to be in an area where people resided in the villa. One possibility is that it was a reception room. Chatr Aryamontri and Renner told Live Science that this is uncertain and they are not even sure if the circular room had a roof.
Site disturbance
One challenge for modern archaeologists is that there is a large amount of damage and disturbance at the site. In the past, the area where the villa is located in Italy was looted and used for dumping. Also, during World War II, the site was in a strategic location that saw considerable movement of troops. “We actually find some World War II artifacts” during excavation of the villa, Chatr Aryamontri said.
A photograph of the area taken in the early 20th century shows Roman concrete walls that are above ground, but they have since suffered damage or are now destroyed, Renner said.
A small portion of the circular room with mosaics was first found in 2014, and excavation and analysis have continued since then. The team hopes to help create an archaeological park at the villa’s location someday.
Researchers created two facial approximations of an ancient Egyptian man using photogrammetry.
A lifelike facial approximation of a man who lived 30,000 years ago in what is now Egypt may offer clues about human evolution.
In 1980, archaeologists unearthed the man’s skeletal remains at Nazlet Khater 2, an archaeological site in Egypt’s Nile Valley. Anthropological analysis revealed that the man was between 17 and 29 years old when he died, stood approximately 5 feet, 3 inches (160 centimeters) tall and was of African ancestry.
The skeleton is the oldest example of Homo sapiens remains found in Egypt and one of the oldest in the world, according to a study published March 22.
However, little else was known about him other than that he was buried alongside a stone ax.
Now, more than 40 years later, a team of Brazilian researchers has created a facial approximation of the man using dozens of digital images they collected while viewing his skeletal remains, which are part of the collection at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
“The skeleton has most of the bones preserved, although there have been some losses, such as the absence of ribs, hands, [the] middle-inferior part of the right tibia [shin bone] and [the] lower part of the left tibia, as well as the feet,” first aut, an archaeologist with the Ciro Flamarion Cardoso Archaeology Museum in Brazil, told Live Science in an email. “But the main structure for facial approximation, the skull, was well preserved.”
One characteristic of the skull that stood out to the researchers was the jaw and how it differed from more modern mandibles. A portion of the skull was also missing, but the team copied and mirrored it using the opposite side of the skull and used data points from computerized tomography (CT) scans from living virtual donors.
“The skull, in general terms, has a modern structure, but part of it has archaic elements, such as the jaw, which is much more robust than that of modern men,” study co-researcher Cícero Moraes, a Brazilian graphics expert, told Live Science in an email. “When I observed the skull for the first time, I was impressed with that structure and at the same time curious to know how it would look after approaching the face.”
By digitally stitching together the images in a process known as photogrammetry, the researchers created two virtual 3D models of the man.
The first was a black-and-white image with his eyes closed in a neutral state, and the second was a more artistic approach featuring a young man with tousled dark hair and a trimmed beard.
“In general, people think that facial approximation works like in Hollywood movies, where the end result is 100% compatible with the person in life,” Moraes said. “In reality, it’s not quite like that. What we do is approximate what could be the face, with available statistical data and the resulting work is a very simple structure.
“However, it is always important to humanize the individual’s face when working with historical characters, since, by complementing the structure with hair and colors, the identification with the public will be greater, arousing interest and — who knows — a desire to study more about the specific subject or archeology [and] history as a whole,” he added.
The researchers hope that providing a look at this ancient man could help archaeologists better understand how humans have evolved over time.
“The fact that this individual is over 30,000 years old makes it important for understanding human evolution,” Santos said.
Python May Have Been on the Neolithic Menu in Southern China
This undated file photo shows a discovery site of prehistoric snake bones in the Zuojiang River basin, south China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.
Snake bones that date back to the Neolithic period, around 6,000 years ago, have been discovered in the Zuojiang River basin, south China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.
The longest single vertebra unveiled at the site represents an individual snake belonging to the species Python bivittatus. The vertebra indicates the snake’s overall body length exceeded 4.58 meters, surpassing the previous record in China for this species of 3.56 meters.
The new discovery has also helped shed light on on the history of hunting snakes in south China, which can be traced back to about 6,000 years ago.
Most of the unearthed snake bones had suspected burn marks on the surface, and the mammalian bones piled up alongside also showed signs of manual cutting or striking, said Yang Qingping with the Guangxi Institute of Cultural Relic Protection and Archaeology.
It has not been ruled out that prehistoric human beings in the area roasted food to process the meat, Yang added.
The research was jointly carried out by the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Guangxi Institute of Cultural Relic Protection and Archaeology.
The relevant results have been published online in the international journal Historical Biology.
The Zuojiang River basin boasts rich animal and plant resources with complex and diverse landforms and multiple prehistoric cultural heritages. A group of rock paintings dating back over 2,000 years in the basin was included into UNESCO’s world heritage list in 2016.
Was Stonehenge an ancient calendar? A new study says no
A new paper reports that Stonehenge wasn’t a prehistoric calendar but a part of a prehistoric ceremonial landscape built in memory of the ancestral dead, a new paper reports.
Stonehenge wasn’t a prehistoric solar calendar but served mainly as a memorial to the dead, according to new research by scientists who study ancient astronomy.
The first stones at Stonehenge were emplaced in southern England about 5,000 years ago, and the monument was constructed in stages over roughly 1,000 years. But researchers have debated its purpose for centuries. The new study, published March 23 in the journal Antiquity, disputes claims made last year that it functioned as a solar calendar with 356.25 days — almost exactly the measurement used for the solar calendar today, according to that study’s author, Timothy Darvill, a professor of archaeology and Stonehenge expert at Bournemouth University in the U.K.
Darvill’s interpretation has been rejected by two scientists — mathematician Giulio Magli of the Polytechnic of Milan and astronomer Juan Antonio Belmonteof the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands — who say Stonehenge wasn’t accurate enough to serve as a solar calendar.
Darvill told Live Science in an email that he still stands by the interpretation. But Magli and Belmonte say in their latest study that last year’s finding is “based … on “a series of forced interpretations, numerology, and unsupported analogies with other cultures.”
“From a symbolic point of view, Stonehenge is of course related to celestial phenomena,” Magli told Live Science, noting its celebrated alignments with the midwinter and midsummer solstices. But “this is far from saying it was used as a giant calendar,” he said.
The first stone megaliths at Stonehenge were placed about 5,000 years ago.
Ancient stones
In his March 2022 study in the journal Antiquity, Darvill wrote that the ring of giant “sarsen” stones (derived from the medieval English word “saracen,” meaning “pagan”) emplaced at Stonehenge in about 2500 B.C. may have functioned as a solar calendar, perhaps for determining feast days or for reinforcing political power by demonstrating a “control” of the cosmos.
For example, archaeologists think there were originally 30 standing stones in the main circle at Stonehenge — although only 17 now remain — and Darvill argued they could have corresponded to a “month” of 30 days; while the inner five “trilithons” — two standing stones capped by a lintel stone — may have represented the five days of each year left over after counting off 12 months.
The design of Stonehenge could have been influenced by solar calendars used at that time in the Near East — the ancient Egyptian calendar among them — which would imply a cultural connection between them, perhaps by long-distance travelers, Darvill added.
But Magli and Belmonte argue that the circle of standing stones wasn’t accurate enough to determine the length of the year; that nothing at Stonehenge embodies the 12 months of the year; and that there is no evidence of a cultural exchange between ancient Britain and the ancient Near East.
Archaeologist Michael Parker Pearson of University College London, a Stonehenge expert who wasn’t involved in the research, agrees with the authors of the latest study that there’s no good evidence of cultural connections between Stonehenge and ancient solar cults in the Near East. “Ideas like this about long-distance links have been around for over a century [but] are not taken seriously anymore,” he told Live Science in an email.
Megalithic monument
Archaeologists now think Stonehenge’s main purpose was as part of a prehistoric ceremonial landscape built in memory of ancestral dead; excavations show that many different parts of the vast megalithic complex were used for burials for hundreds of years. Magli said this may explain its alignment with the winter solstice, which seems to have been an important annual date relating to the dead in some prehistoric religions. But while the annual solstice alignment is evident, the relatively low number of stones and their imprecision meant Stonehenge would have been too inaccurate to use as a calendar, he said.
Darvill said that the latest criticisms do not refute the suggestions made in his 2022 paper.
“What they say does not undermine the essential model of the sarsen structures at Stonehenge being constructed as a manifestation of a perpetual solar calendar,” he told Live Science in an email.
But some archaeologists share some of the reservations of Magli and Belmonte and are unconvinced by Darvill’s idea.
Matt Leivers, a consultant archaeologist at Wessex Archaeology in the U.K., has studied Stonehenge for decades but wasn’t involved in either study. “All this really shows is how easy it is to read calendrical divisions into Stonehenge’s architecture, and how unprovable any of it is,” he told Live Science in an email.
Genomic study reveals signs of tuberculosis adaptation in ancient Andeans
Graphical Abstract.
People have inhabited the Andes mountains of South America for more than 9,000 years, adapting to the scarce oxygen available at high altitudes, along with cold temperatures and intense ultraviolet radiation.
A new genomic study published in the journal iScience suggests that Indigenous populations in present-day Ecuador also adapted to the tuberculosis bacterium, thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans.
The study was led by scientists at Emory University.
“We found that selection for genes involved in TB-response pathways started to uptick a little over 3,000 years ago,” says Sophie Joseph, first author of the paper. “That’s an interesting time because it was when agriculture began proliferating in the region.
The development of agriculture leads to more densely populated societies that are better at spreading a respiratory pathogen like TB.”
The investigators had originally set out to investigate how the Indigenous people of Ecuador adapted to living at high altitude.
“We were surprised to find that the strongest genetic signals of positive selection were not associated with high altitude but for the immune response to tuberculosis,” says John Lindo, senior author of the study. “Our results bring up more questions regarding the prevalence of tuberculosis in the Andes prior to European contact.”
Previously published research found evidence of the tuberculosis bacterium in the skeletal material of 1,400-year-old Andean mummies, contradicting some theories that TB did not exist in South America until the arrival of Europeans 500 years ago.
The current paper provides the first evidence for a human immune-system response to TB in ancient Andeans and gives clues to when and how their genomes may have adapted to that exposure.
“Human-pathogen co-evolution is an understudied area that has a huge bearing on modern-day public health,” Joseph says. “Understanding how pathogens and humans have been linked and affecting each other over time may give insights into novel treatments for any number of infectious diseases.”
The researchers sequenced whole genomes using blood samples from 15 present-day Indigenous individuals living at altitudes above 2,500 meters in several different Ecuadorian provinces.
They performed a series of scans to look for signatures of positive selection for genes in their ancestral past.
“Computational techniques for sequencing genomes and modeling ancestral selection keep improving,” Joseph says. “The genomes of people living today give us a window into the past.”
83 ancient Mexican artifacts returned from Italy, Germany, France
A pre-Hispanic carving of a bird recently returned by German authorities to the Mexican government.
The National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) has announced the return of 40 historical artifacts from Italy, as well as another 40 from Germany and three from France.
Some of the artifacts are nearly 1,700 years old.
Culture Minister Alejandra Frausto telling reporters about the recovery of 83 pre-Hispanic artifacts returned to Mexico by Italian, German and French authorities.
The artifacts arrived safely back in Mexico thanks to Aeromexico, who collected them in Rome, Culture Minister Alejandra Frausto reported during President López Obrador’s daily press conference on Tuesday.
Frausto traveled to Rome to repatriate the articles in person.
“There was joy, applause, and a lot of pride,” amongst the team on the return journey, she said. Videos on Twitter showed the group jubilantly celebrating the loading of the items into the aircraft in Rome.
“Not only do we announce the recovery of heritage but also the recovery of dignity in this country,” she told the assembled press.
Forty of the artifacts being repatriated on an Aeromexico flight from Rome.
The artifacts were confiscated in 2021 by the Carabinieri group for the Protection of Cultural Heritage — and Italian enforcement agency tasked with identifying cultural items that may have been removed without permission from their countries of origin.
Some of the pieces in question were in private hands at the time of the seizure.
It is not the first time Italy has returned missing cultural artifacts to Mexico: as recently as July, it returned 30 artifacts found by Italian authorities being offered for sale online and at auction. At the time, Mexico gave Italy custody of 1,271 documents in its possession that were connected to the Italian sculptor Ettore Ferrari in exchange.
Italy has returned to Mexico at least 70 pre-Hispanic artifacts confiscated in its nation in less than a year. These three were returned to Mexico in July.
The Italian government has been directly advising Mexico on how to create a similar cultural protection enforcement organization that could further recover more missing items and has sent an attaché to Mexico to assist.
The recovery of historical artifacts has been a key element of foreign policy under the López Obrador government, and foreign embassies have been instructed to advertise repatriation services.
“Binational cooperation is experiencing a happy moment,” said Giorgio Silli, the Italian Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs.
Las piezas sustraídas del país, que la casa Millon Maison de ventes aux enchères pretende vender, son parte de la identidad y riqueza invaluable del pueblo de 🇲🇽
President López Obrador has prioritized the recovery of pre-Hispanic artifacts, and through the Culture Ministry, launched an education campaign aiming at getting owners to repatriate such items. In this tweet, pre-Hispanic items being offered for sale outside Mexico are highlighted.
In addition to the artifacts recovered from Italy, INAH says that a further 40 pieces have been returned by Germany, as well as 3 from France, several of which date from 400 B.C.
The French pieces were part of a private inheritance that had been delivered to an auction house. According to the newspaper El Pais, the owner delisted and returned the objects to the Mexican embassy in Paris after learning of the government repatriation scheme, according to El País.
The Mexican government is now targeting the return of 83 Olmec artifacts from France that are set to be sold at a private auction on April 3. Frausto has slammed the auction of these pre-Hispanic pieces and at the press event, she challenged people who would buy such artifacts to appreciate works being made by modern artisans throughout Mexico.
“They are put up for sale as if they were a luxury item to decorate a house as if they were merchandise. This is not only illegal but it is also immoral…
“We call for potential buyers to set their eyes on the art in towns today. There are extraordinary pieces that may be adorning the most luxurious houses in the world. Contemporary art in Mexico is also a power. Visit and see this art that is being created right now,” she said.
INAH reports that a total of 11,505 archaeological pieces have now been repatriated under President López Obrador’s government.
