Simpler Times
More than language: Mental time travel, mentalizing, executive attention, and the left-hemisphere interpreter in human origins
Ronald Kellogg
Psychological Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
The ensemble hypothesis proposes that language is but one of five cognitive capacities that separate human cognition qualitatively from other animal cognition as a result of their interactions. The ensemble consists of an episodic memory capable of mental time travel, mentalizing to augment social cognition, language for overt communication, advanced executive attention for governing working memory, and inner speech for thinking in the form of causal inference. The order in which each of these components arose in hominin evolution is addressed here. It is proposed that the flourishing of symbolic artifacts during the Upper Paleolithic occurred because, for the first time, all five components were in place and interacting in anatomically modern Homo sapiens.
Human Y chromosome sequences from Q Haplogroup reveal a South American settlement pre-18,000 years ago and a profound genomic impact during the Younger Dryas
Paula Paz Sepúlveda et al.
PLoS ONE, August 2022
Abstract:
The settlement of the Americas has been the focus of incessant debate for more than 100 years, and open questions regarding the timing and spatial patterns of colonization still remain today. Phylogenetic studies with complete human Y chromosome sequences are used as a highly informative tool to investigate the history of human populations in a given time frame. To study the phylogenetic relationships of Native American lineages and infer the settlement history of the Americas, we analyzed Y chromosome Q Haplogroup, which is a Pan-American haplogroup and represents practically all Native American lineages in Mesoamerica and South America. We built a phylogenetic tree for Q Haplogroup based on 102 whole Y chromosome sequences, of which 13 new Argentine sequences were provided by our group. Moreover, 1,072 new single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that contribute to its resolution and diversity were identified. Q-M848 is known to be the most frequent autochthonous sub-haplogroup of the Americas. The present is the first genomic study of Q Haplogroup in which current knowledge on Q-M848 sub-lineages is contrasted with the historical, archaeological and linguistic data available. The divergence times, spatial structure and the SNPs found here as novel for Q-Z780, a less frequent sub-haplogroup autochthonous of the Americas, provide genetic support for a South American settlement before 18,000 years ago. We analyzed how environmental events that occurred during the Younger Dryas period may have affected Native American lineages, and found that this event may have caused a substantial loss of lineages. This could explain the current low frequency of Q-Z780 (also perhaps of Q-F4674, a third possible sub-haplogroup autochthonous of the Americas). These environmental events could have acted as a driving force for expansion and diversification of the Q-M848 sub-lineages, which show a spatial structure that developed during the Younger Dryas period.
Collapse of terrestrial mammal food webs since the Late Pleistocene
Evan Fricke et al.
Science, 26 August 2022, Pages 1008-1011
Abstract:
Food webs influence ecosystem diversity and functioning. Contemporary defaunation has reduced food web complexity, but simplification caused by past defaunation is difficult to reconstruct given the sparse paleorecord of predator-prey interactions. We identified changes to terrestrial mammal food webs globally over the past ~130,000 years using extinct and extant mammal traits, geographic ranges, observed predator-prey interactions, and deep learning models. Food webs underwent steep regional declines in complexity through loss of food web links after the arrival and expansion of human populations. We estimate that defaunation has caused a 53% decline in food web links globally. Although extinctions explain much of this effect, range losses for extant species degraded food webs to a similar extent, highlighting the potential for food web restoration via extant species recovery.
The genetic history of the Southern Arc: A bridge between West Asia and Europe
Iosif Lazaridis et al.
Science, 26 August 2022
Abstract:
By sequencing 727 ancient individuals from the Southern Arc (Anatolia and its neighbors in Southeastern Europe and West Asia) over 10,000 years, we contextualize its Chalcolithic period and Bronze Age (about 5000 to 1000 BCE), when extensive gene flow entangled it with the Eurasian steppe. Two streams of migration transmitted Caucasus and Anatolian/Levantine ancestry northward, and the Yamnaya pastoralists, formed on the steppe, then spread southward into the Balkans and across the Caucasus into Armenia, where they left numerous patrilineal descendants. Anatolia was transformed by intra–West Asian gene flow, with negligible impact of the later Yamnaya migrations. This contrasts with all other regions where Indo-European languages were spoken, suggesting that the homeland of the Indo-Anatolian language family was in West Asia, with only secondary dispersals of non-Anatolian Indo-Europeans from the steppe.
A genetic probe into the ancient and medieval history of Southern Europe and West Asia
Iosif Lazaridis et al.
Science, 26 August 2022, Pages 940-951
Abstract:
Literary and archaeological sources have preserved a rich history of Southern Europe and West Asia since the Bronze Age that can be complemented by genetics. Mycenaean period elites in Greece did not differ from the general population and included both people with some steppe ancestry and others, like the Griffin Warrior, without it. Similarly, people in the central area of the Urartian Kingdom around Lake Van lacked the steppe ancestry characteristic of the kingdom’s northern provinces. Anatolia exhibited extraordinary continuity down to the Roman and Byzantine periods, with its people serving as the demographic core of much of the Roman Empire, including the city of Rome itself. During medieval times, migrations associated with Slavic and Turkic speakers profoundly affected the region.
Economy, sharing strategies and community structure in the early Neolithic village of Chahai, Northeast China
Dongdong Tu, Gideon Shelach-Lavi & Ying-Tung Fung
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The transition to agriculture and sedentary life are two processes that have shaped the history of humankind and catalyzed not only subsistence strategies and dietary habits, but also meaningful transformations of social relations and cultural formations. However, while questions about where and when the earliest domesticated plants and animals emerged have received much attention, anthropologically-oriented research on early sedentary communities is much less developed. In this paper we analyze the abundant archaeological data excavated at one early Neolithic site – the Chahai site – in Northeast China. The rich data published in the Chahai site report enables us to address such issues as economic adaptation, internal community organization, the economic activities and sharing strategies of household members, and mechanisms of community integration. This analysis suggests that during the formative phases of sedentism and cultivation, households in Northeast China were relatively independent production and consumption units. Differences in the activities conducted at the household level suggest incipient processes of specialization, but no evidence of socio-economic stratification or centralized leadership was identified. At the community level, non-economic activity, such as group rituals and communal feasting, suggests the development of collective leadership that organized small-scale public construction and rituals serving as integrative mechanisms.