Thing of the Past
The human fear paradox: Affective origins of cooperative care
Tobias Grossmann
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Already as infants humans are more fearful than our closest living primate relatives, the chimpanzees. Yet heightened fearfulness is mostly considered maladaptive, as it is thought to increase the risk of developing anxiety and depression. How can this human fear paradox be explained? The fearful ape hypothesis presented herein stipulates that, in the context of cooperative caregiving and provisioning unique to human great ape group life, heightened fearfulness was adaptive. This is because from early in ontogeny fearfulness expressed and perceived enhanced care-based responding and provisioning from, while concurrently increasing cooperation with, mothers and others. This explanation is based on a synthesis of existing research with human infants and children, demonstrating a link between fearfulness, greater sensitivity to and accuracy in detecting fear in others, and enhanced levels of cooperative behaviors. These insights critically advance current evolutionary theories of human cooperation by adding an early-developing affective component to the human cooperative makeup. Moreover, the current proposal has important cultural, societal and health implications, as it challenges the predominant view in WEIRD societies that commonly construe fearfulness as a maladaptive trait, potentially ignoring its evolutionary adaptive functions.
Walruses on the Dnieper: New evidence for the intercontinental trade of Greenlandic ivory in the Middle Ages
James Barrett et al.
Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 13 April 2022
Abstract:
Mediaeval walrus hunting in Iceland and Greenland — driven by Western European demand for ivory and walrus hide ropes — has been identified as an important pre-modern example of ecological globalization. By contrast, the main origin of walrus ivory destined for eastern European markets, and then onward trade to Asia, is assumed to have been Arctic Russia. Here, we investigate the geographical origin of nine twelfth-century CE walrus specimens discovered in Kyiv, Ukraine — combining archaeological typology (based on chaîne opératoire assessment), ancient DNA (aDNA) and stable isotope analysis. We show that five of seven specimens tested using aDNA can be genetically assigned to a western Greenland origin. Moreover, six of the Kyiv rostra had been sculpted in a way typical of Greenlandic imports to Western Europe, and seven are tentatively consistent with a Greenland origin based on stable isotope analysis. Our results suggest that demand for the products of Norse Greenland's walrus hunt stretched not only to Western Europe but included Ukraine and, by implication given linked trade routes, also Russia, Byzantium and Asia. These observations illuminate the surprising scale of mediaeval ecological globalization and help explain the pressure this process exerted on distant wildlife populations and those who harvested them.
Ancient DNA gives new insights into a Norman Neolithic monumental cemetery dedicated to male elites
Maïté Rivollat et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 21 April 2022
Abstract:
The Middle Neolithic in western Europe is characterized by monumental funerary structures, known as megaliths, along the Atlantic façade. The first manifestations of this phenomenon occurred in modern-day France with the long mounds of the Cerny culture. Here, we present genome-wide data from the fifth-millennium BCE site of Fleury-sur-Orne in Normandy (France), famous for its impressively long monuments built for selected individuals. The site encompasses 32 monuments of variable sizes, containing the burials of 19 individuals from the Neolithic period. To address who was buried at the site, we generated genome-wide data for 14 individuals, of whom 13 are males, completing previously published data [M. Rivollat et al., Sci. Adv. 6, eaaz5344 (2020)]. Population genetic and Y chromosome analyses show that the Fleury-sur-Orne group fits within western European Neolithic genetic diversity and that the arrival of a new group is detected after 4,000 calibrated BCE. The results of analyzing uniparentally inherited markers and an overall low number of long runs of homozygosity suggest a patrilineal group practicing female exogamy. We find two pairs of individuals to be father and son, buried together in the same monument/grave. No other biological relationship can link monuments together, suggesting that each monument was dedicated to a genetically independent lineage. The combined data and documented father–son line of descent suggest a male-mediated transmission of sociopolitical authority. However, a single female buried with an arrowhead, otherwise considered a symbol of power of the male elite of the Cerny culture, questions a strictly biological sex bias in the burial rites of this otherwise “masculine” monumental cemetery.
Food and Power in Early Medieval England: A Lack of (Isotopic) Enrichment
Sam Leggett & Tom Lambert
Anglo-Saxon England, forthcoming
Abstract:
This work tackles long held assumptions in both archaeology and history surrounding elite diets in early medieval England i.e., that higher status individuals had a more meat-heavy diet and that this was especially true for males. We utilise the largest isotopic dataset on early medieval diets to date to show that not only were high protein diets extremely rare in England before Scandinavian settlement, but that dietary differences cannot be linked to gender or social status from the funerary record. Comparisons with the calculations made in our companion article and the bioarchaeological evidence demonstrate further that the lists of food demanded by eighth-century kings were not the basis for regular elite diet, and that these texts probably represent the supplies for infrequent feasts.
Community practice and religion at an Early Islamic cemetery in highland Central Asia
Elissa Bullion et al.
Antiquity, forthcoming
Abstract:
Archaeological studies of Early Islamic communities in Central Asia have focused on lowland urban communities. Here, the authors report on recent geophysical survey and excavation of an Early Islamic cemetery at Tashbulak in south-eastern Uzbekistan. AMS dating places the establishment of the cemetery in the mid-eighth century AD, making it one of the earliest Islamic burial grounds documented in Central Asia. Burials at Tashbulak conform to Islamic prescriptions for grave form and body deposition. The consistency in ritual suggests the existence of a funerary community of practice, challenging narratives of Islamic conversion in peripheral areas as a process of slow diffusion and emphasising the importance of archaeological approaches for documenting the diversity of Early Islamic communities.