Ancient Treasures
Trade and the rise of ancient Greek city-states
Jordan Adamson
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, July 2025
Abstract:
In this paper, I examine the role of comparative advantage in the rise of city-states. After compiling a new dataset on ancient Greece and the natural environment, I provide evidence that the spatial covariance of natural vegetation endowments amongst potential trading partners is important for explaining the development of silver coin money, battles, and city-state formation. I also provide statistical evidence against “key factors” previously emphasized. These findings are consistent with a general model of comparative advantage that I develop, which clarifies how the spatial covariance of factor endowments affects multiple development outcomes.
Whole-genome ancestry of an Old Kingdom Egyptian
Adeline Morez Jacobs et al.
Nature, forthcoming
Abstract:
Ancient Egyptian society flourished for millennia, reaching its peak during the Dynastic Period (approximately 3150–30 BCE). However, owing to poor DNA preservation, questions about regional interconnectivity over time have not been addressed because whole-genome sequencing has not yet been possible. Here we sequenced a 2× coverage whole genome from an adult male Egyptian excavated at Nuwayrat (Nuerat, نويرات). Radiocarbon dated to 2855–2570 cal. BCE, he lived a few centuries after Egyptian unification, bridging the Early Dynastic and Old Kingdom periods. The body was interred in a ceramic pot within a rock-cut tomb, potentially contributing to the DNA preservation. Most of his genome is best represented by North African Neolithic ancestry, among available sources at present. Yet approximately 20% of his genetic ancestry can be traced to genomes representing the eastern Fertile Crescent, including Mesopotamia and surrounding regions. This genetic affinity is similar to the ancestry appearing in Anatolia and the Levant during the Neolithic and Bronze Age. Although more genomes are needed to fully understand the genomic diversity of early Egyptians, our results indicate that contacts between Egypt and the eastern Fertile Crescent were not limited to objects and imagery (such as domesticated animals and plants, as well as writing systems) but also encompassed human migration.
Headmen, shamans, and mothers: Natural and sexual selection for computational services
Edward Hagen, Zachary Garfield & Aaron Lightner
Evolution and Human Behavior, January 2025
Abstract:
Computer engineers face a dilemma. They must build systems with sufficient resources to solve the most complex problems the systems are expected to solve, but the systems will only need to solve such problems intermittently, resulting in inefficient use of expensive computational resources. This dilemma is commonly resolved with timesharing, networking, multitasking, and other technologies that enable computational resources to be shared with multiple users. The human brain, which evolved to acquire, store, and process information to make beneficial decisions in situations that were periodically complex, is likewise energetically expensive to build and maintain yet plausibly has idle capacity much of the time. We propose that humans evolved to use advantages in information or computational resources to provide computational services to others via a language-based “network” in exchange for payments of various sorts that helped subsidize the energetic costs of the brain. Specifically, we argue that with the Pleistocene transition of Homo to a niche in open habitats with a more meat-based diet, four major selection pressures for knowledge specialists began to act on the human lineage: (1) the need to resolve conflicts and maintain cooperation in larger multilevel societies, which lead to the rise of knowledge-based leaders as decision-making and conflict resolution specialists who were “paid” with increased mating success or resources; (2) the need for greater defense against zoonotic pathogens, which lead to the rise of shamans as medical knowledge specialists, who were “paid” with increased mating success or resources; (3) the greater complexity of mothering with shorter interbirth intervals and longer periods of juvenile dependency, which led to mothers as both decision-making and medical specialists, who were “paid” with increased inclusive fitness; and (4) the need to make more efficient use of an increasingly large and energetically expensive brain.
300,000-year-old wooden tools from Gantangqing, southwest China
Jian-Hui Liu et al.
Science, 3 July 2025, Pages 78-83
Abstract:
Evidence of Early and Middle Pleistocene wooden implements is exceptionally rare, and existing evidence has been found only in Africa and western Eurasia. We report an assemblage of 35 wooden implements from the site of Gantangqing in southwestern China, which was found associated with stone tools, antler billets (soft hammers), and cut-marked bones and is dated from ~361,000 to ~250,000 years at a 95% confidence interval. The wooden implements include digging sticks and small, complete, hand-held pointed tools. The sophistication of many of these tools offsets the seemingly “primitive” aspects of stone tool assemblages in the East Asian Early Paleolithic. This discovery suggests that wooden implements might have played an important role in hominin survival and adaptation in Middle Pleistocene East Asia.
Ancient DNA reveals the prehistory of the Uralic and Yeniseian peoples
Tian Chen Zeng et al.
Nature, forthcoming
Abstract:
The North Eurasian forest and forest-steppe zones have sustained millennia of sociocultural connections among northern peoples, but much of their history is poorly understood. In particular, the genomic formation of populations that speak Uralic and Yeniseian languages today is unknown. Here, by generating genome-wide data for 180 ancient individuals spanning this region, we show that the Early-to-Mid-Holocene hunter-gatherers harboured a continuous gradient of ancestry from fully European-related in the Baltic, to fully East Asian-related in the Transbaikal. Contemporaneous groups in Northeast Siberia were off-gradient and descended from a population that was the primary source for Native Americans, which then mixed with populations of Inland East Asia and the Amur River Basin to produce two populations whose expansion coincided with the collapse of pre-Bronze Age population structure. Ancestry from the first population, Cis-Baikal Late Neolithic–Bronze Age (Cisbaikal_LNBA), is associated with Yeniseian-speaking groups and those that admixed with them, and ancestry from the second, Yakutia Late Neolithic–Bronze Age (Yakutia_LNBA), is associated with migrations of prehistoric Uralic speakers. We show that Yakutia_LNBA first dispersed westwards from the Lena River Basin around 4,000 years ago into the Altai-Sayan region and into West Siberian communities associated with Seima-Turbino metallurgy -- a suite of advanced bronze casting techniques that expanded explosively from the Altai. The 16 Seima-Turbino period individuals were diverse in their ancestry, also harbouring DNA from Indo-Iranian-associated pastoralists and from a range of hunter-gatherer groups. Thus, both cultural transmission and migration were key to the Seima-Turbino phenomenon, which was involved in the initial spread of early Uralic-speaking communities.