Bone fragment reveals humans wore leather clothes 39,000 years ago

A study of an ancient bone from Spain with a strange pattern of notches hints that it was used by early Homo sapiens in Europe as a punch board for making holes in leather

This piece of bone from 39,600 years ago has multiple puncture marks on it that seem to have been made by puncturing leather F. d'Errico and L. Doyon

By Alison George 12 April 2023 Original source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2368783-bone-fragment-reveals-humans-wore-leather-clothes-39000-years-ago/

An analysis of a 39,600-year-old bone containing strange indentations claims it was used as a punch board for making holes in leather, revealing how Homo sapiens in Europe made clothes to help them survive cold climates at that time.

“We do not have much information about clothes because they’re perishable,” says Luc Doyon at the University of Bordeaux, France, who led the study. “They are an early technology we’re in the dark about.”

The bone, from the hip of a large mammal such as a horse or bison, was discovered at a site called Terrasses de la Riera dels Canyars near Barcelona, Spain. It has 28 puncture marks on its flat surface, including a linear sequence of 10 holes about 5 millimetres apart from each other, as well as other holes in more random positions.

This pattern was “highly intriguing”, says Doyon, because it didn’t appear to be a decoration or to represent a counting tally – the usual explanations for deliberate patterns of lines or dots on prehistoric objects. Microscopic analysis revealed that the line of 10 indents was made by one tool and the other dots were made at different times by five different tools. “Why do we have different types of arrangements on the same bone?” says Doyon.

The researchers used an approach called experimental archaeology, in which you try out different ancient tools to see how marks were made. “We’re attempting to replicate the gestures that were used by prehistoric people to produce a specific modification on the bone,” says Doyon.

They found that the only way to recreate the type of indents on the Canyars bone was to knock a chisel-like stone tool called a burin through a thick hide, a technique called indirect percussion. The same method is still used by modern-day cobblers and in traditional societies to pierce leather.

The most likely explanation for the indents is that they were made during the manufacture or repair of leather items, say the researchers. After punching a hole in the animal hide, a thread could be pushed through the material with a pointed tool to make a tight seam, says Doyon.

“It’s a very significant discovery,” says Ian Gilligan at the University of Sydney, Australia. “We have no direct evidence for clothes in the Pleistocene, so finding any indirect evidence is valuable. The oldest surviving fragments of cloth in the world date from around 10,000 years ago.”

This discovery helps solve a mystery about the emergence of fitted clothing. Homo sapiens reached Europe around 42,000 years ago, yet eyed needles haven’t been found in this region from earlier than around 26,000 years ago and these aren’t strong enough to repeatedly puncture thick leather – raising the question of how these ancient people managed to make garments to fit them.

“The knowledge about making fitting clothing without bone needles is something we didn’t have access to before,” says Doyon.

“The location and date are interesting: southern Europe nearly 40,000 years ago,” says Gilligan. “That’s quite soon after the arrival of Homo sapiens, during some rapid cold swings in the climate. It’s when and where we’d expect our ancestors to need good clothes for protection.”

Doyon and his colleagues argue that this punch board marks a crucial cultural adaptation to climate change that helped modern humans expand to new regions.

The punch board was one of six artefacts found at the Canyars site, they say, and could have been part of a repair kit.

Journal reference

Science Advances DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adg0834

All credits to original source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2368783-bone-fragment-reveals-humans-wore-leather-clothes-39000-years-ago/

3,000-year-old hairs hold the oldest clues about psychoactive drug use in Europe

By Mindy Weisberger, CNN Original source: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/10/world/ancient-drug-use-hair-europe-scn/index.html

Oriol Garcia i Quera/ASOME-Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

An illustration depicts the hair-dyeing ritual that occurred in the funerary chamber of a cave in Menorca.

CNN —

Scientists have discovered direct evidence that people in Europe used psychoactive drugs during the Bronze Age, possibly as part of ancient rituals.

Traces of alkaloid substances that originate in plants and are known to affect perception and cause delirium and euphoria were preserved in strands of human hair dating to around 3,000 years ago. Researchers found the hairs, along with other funerary artifacts, in the burial cave Es Càrritx in Menorca, one of the Balearic Islands off Spain’s eastern coast in the Mediterranean Sea.

Chemical analysis revealed the stimulant ephedrine in the hairs. Analysis also detected atropine and scopolamine — both are psychoactive compounds that can cause disorientation, sensory disruption and vivid hallucinations, researchers reported Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports.

Drug use among humans is a practice known to be thousands of years old, based on clues that were previously uncovered in Eurasia and the Americas. But in Europe, the presence of mind-altering plants at prehistoric sites offered archaeologists an incomplete picture; until now, they lacked evidence that people in ancient communities ingested the plants, said lead study author Elisa Guerra-Doce, an associate professor of prehistory at the University of Valladolid in Spain.

With these new findings, “we are presenting the earliest evidence of drug consumption in European prehistory,” Guerra-Doce told CNN.

ASOME-Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Ancient communities buried their dead in the Es Càrritx cave. Here is one of its inner chambers.

Es Càrritx was discovered in 1995; its entrance is about 82 feet (25 meters) from the top of a cliff, and there are seven chambers within the cavern. From 1400 BC to 800 BC it was a funerary site, and more than 200 adults and children — male and female — were buried there.

However, some corpses received special treatment. After they were brought to the funeral cave, locks of their hair were tinted red, and strands were carefully combed, cut and then sealed inside tubes made of antler or wood. At other burial sites where this ritual was performed, these receptacles were placed near the bodies. But in Es Càrritx, 10 of these containers — along with other funerary artifacts — were hidden in another chamber, the study authors reported.

Locks of hair in the tubes were reddish and measured up to 5.1 inches (13 centimeters) long, and the researchers analyzed the strands by chemically separating components in the hairs, then identifying molecules by the mass of their ions. The compounds that they detected are all produced by plants that grow on Menorca, such as devil’s snare (Datura stramonium), white henbane (Hyoscyamus albus), mandrake (Mandragora automnalis) and joint pine (Ephedra fragilis).

ASOME-Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Locks of hair were tinted red, and strands were combed, cut and then sealed inside tubes.

Visions produced by ingesting scopolamine and atropine can be “violent and unpleasant,” according to Dagmara Socha, a researcher at the University of Warsaw’s Center for Andean Studies in Poland. Socha, who was not involved in the study, investigates the ancient use of mind-bending compounds and recently described the discovery of psychoactive drugs in an ancient trophy head of a sacrificed Nazca child from Peru.

Scopolamine and atropine are found in plants in the genera Datura and Brugmansia — both are in the nightshade family and were used in pre-Columbian South America, Socha told CNN in an email.

For example, the Chibcha people, an Indigenous group from what is now Colombia, “used an infusion of Brugmansia for slaves and wives of dead lords to dull their senses while they were buried alive during the funeral ceremony,” Socha said.

In the Indigenous Shuar communities of the Amazon, disobedient children were disciplined by giving them a juice called maikua, made from Brugmansia flowers. During the ensuing trance, wayward youngsters would commune with their ancestors and learn respect for their elders, Socha said.

But drug use in prehistoric times could be a pleasurable experience, too. Mayans and Aztecs in Mesoamerica used Datura stramonium as an aphrodisiac, she added.

Because the tubes in Menorca’s Es Càrritx cave containing the hair were found in a sealed chamber — untouched since 800 BC — it’s unlikely that the compounds were introduced by modern contamination of the site, Guerra-Doce said. Rather, the hair absorbed the chemicals after ingestion. Drug consumption took place for nearly a year before death, based on analysis along the length of the strands.

Discoveries from Es Càrritx could also shed light on how ritual drug use may have defined certain roles in prehistoric European societies. As only a fraction of the individuals in the burial chamber had their hair dyed, cut and preserved, they may have held special status linked to their use of psychoactive plants, Guerra-Doce said.

“We suggest that maybe there were certain people — religious specialists — who controlled their use of these drugs,” she said. “All this evidence made it seem that maybe certain individuals deserved this hair treatment, and those individuals were the ones who consumed the drugs.”

But for now, that conclusion is just a hypothesis, she added.

“In order to prove it we’d have to carry out more analysis on different individuals,” Guerra-Doce said.

Mindy Weisberger is a science writer and media producer whose work has appeared in Live Science, Scientific American and How It Works magazine.

All credits to Original source: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/10/world/ancient-drug-use-hair-europe-scn/index.html

Medieval accounts of eclipses shine light on massive volcanic eruptions

Descriptions of lunar eclipses by monks and other scholars help scientists to pinpoint effects of ancient eruptions.

Lunar eclipses were chronicled in medieval accounts (left to right) by Beatus of Liébana, Johannes de Sacrobosco and Fujiwara no Teika.Credit, L to R: British Lib. Board (Add. MS 11695, f108r); New York Public Lib. (De Sphaera, MssCol 2557, f112v); Meigetsuki 4, 517 (2000)/Reizei-ke Shiguretei Bunko/Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha

By Jeff Tollefson Original source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00939-9

The great Japanese poet Fujiwara no Teika wrote in his diary of an unusually long and dark lunar eclipse in December 1229, observing that it was as if the Moon had entirely “disappeared”. Now climatologists have used Teika’s account and dozens of other lunar observations made by medieval scholars, clerics and monks to help pin down the timing and impact of volcanic eruptions from 1100 to 13001.

The research, published in Nature on 5 April, corroborates data extracted from ice cores and could help scientists to understand the run-up to the cold period known as the Little Ice Age, as well as the effects of a controversial technique proposed for manipulating the climate.

“If we really want to understand how past volcanic eruptions have impacted climate and societies, I think we need to combine historical archives, where they are available, with ice cores and tree rings,” says Sébastien Guillet, a palaeoclimatologist at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and a co-author of the study. “None of these methods can work alone.”

Dark Moon rising

The authors identified nearly 400 accounts documenting a total of 119 lunar eclipses. Of those, 37 included information about Moon colouration and darkness; scientists can use both traits to determine whether and to what extent a volcanic haze was present at the time.

The team documented six dark lunar eclipses, which are indicative of massive eruptions that pushed volcanic aerosols high into the stratosphere, which starts roughly 10 kilometres above Earth’s surface. By combining those accounts with model simulations, modern satellite observations and tree-ring data, the team estimated that the eruptions took place 3 to 20 months before the observations were made. The team identified another five reddish eclipses indicative of eruptions that injected aerosols into the layer below the stratosphere; these aerosols would have had a relatively small impact on the climate.

Dust on ice

The new record aligns with earlier estimates based on dust layers found in ice cores from Antarctica and Greenland2,3. Seeing an independent record confirm the ice-core chronology “is very comforting”, says Elsa Gautier, a glaciologist at the University of Grenoble Alpes, France, who co-authored the analysis of the Antarctic cores.

The work could also further scientists’ understanding of the climate in 1100–1300, which could be key to understanding the development of the exceptionally cold period that followed, called the Little Ice Age.

Knowing more about what happened in the past could also help to clarify the potential impacts of a controversial proposal known as solar geoengineering, in which particles would be injected into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight back into space. Some scientist argue that such efforts could serve as an emergency backstop to cool the planet and avert the worst effects of runaway global warming.

“Volcanic eruptions are our only — albeit imperfect — analogue for how the Earth’s climate might respond to future solar geoengineering,” says Kevin Anchukaitis, a palaeoclimatologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Understanding the precise timing of eruptions can help scientists to improve their models, he says, and “better models should lead to a better understanding of the benefits and risks of geoengineering”.

For Guillet, who spent a decade poring over historical records in his free time before finishing the project during pandemic lockdowns, the study is also a nod to the medieval observers whose accounts historians have long used to document social and political trends. “If they are able to provide such an accurate record about social and political events, why not about natural events?” he says.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-00939-9

References

1. Guillet, S. et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-05751-z (2023). Article Google Scholar

2. Sigl, M. et al. Nature 523, 543–549 (2015). Article PubMed Google Scholar

3. Gautier, E. et al. Nature Commun. 10, 466 (2019). Article Google Scholar

All credits to original source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00939-9