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Creative ancestors
Europe’s museums are full of the work of the ancient Etruscans (8th to 1st centuries BC), including bronzes of such accomplishment that they were admired and copied by Renaissance artists – the mythical Chimera (part-lion, part-goat, and part-snake) found in Arezzo in 1553 and now in the Archaeological Museum in Florence, being the supreme example of the Etruscan art of lost-wax casting. However, the origins of the Etruscans has long been the subject of debate, with some arguing that they were metal-working migrants who settled in central Italy because of its mineral resources, bringing a fully-fledged technology with them, along with a language that is unlike any other and is still not fully translatable.
The Picts (c.AD 300 to 900) of northern and eastern Scotland, including Orkney, are equally enigmatic, and for them we do not even have surviving evidence of their language. Instead, they are known for remarkable stone stelae, carved with depictions of fish, snakes, sea monsters, deer, and wolves in low relief – symbols that might represent personal names or scenes from Pictish mythology. The name by which these peoples are known in medieval records comes from the Latin picti for ‘painted’, and is taken as a sign that they were tattooed with similar designs. Like the ancient Etruscans, it has previously been speculated that they came to Scotland from some other part of the world.
DNA evidence
Two recent DNA studies have shown that the Etruscans and the Picts were not from ‘somewhere else’, but had purely local roots. The Pictish study was carried out by an international team of researchers at the University of Aberdeen, Liverpool John Moores University, and Stockholm University. One of the authors, Dr Adeline Morez, summed up the results: ‘our findings indicate that the Picts were local to the British Isles in their origin, as their gene pool is drawn from the older Iron Age, and not from large-scale migration from exotic locations’. Dr Linus Girdland Flink, another member of the team, said that Pictish genomes have much in common with the people of modern Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Northumbria.
A similar conclusion was drawn by a recent DNA study headed by Professor Cosimo Posth of the University of Tübingen in Germany, which looked at samples from 82 people who lived from 800 BC to AD 1000 across central and southern Italy. It found that the ancient Etruscans were no different in genetic profile to their neighbours.
If Etruscan and Pictish civilisation evolved from indigenous populations, it surely makes sense to question models that assume innovation is always introduced by outsiders – an idea that, in a more extreme form, was promoted by the likes of Carl Sagan and Erich von Däniken in the mid-1960s, when they claimed that human culture had been influenced by extraterrestrials (an idea memorably portrayed in Stanley Kubrick’s film, 2001: A Space Odyssey). Migration continues to be a dominant model for explaining cultural innovation, but perhaps we just need to accept that human beings are creative.
Ancient diets
We are no less creative today: the ability to isolate and analyse ancient DNA is itself a major feat of human ingenuity, and every day brings new insights. For example, the journal Scientific Reports has recently published a paper (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-48762-6) looking at the DNA from birch-bark mastic found in graves dating from 9,700 years ago at Huseby Klev, in western Sweden.
Small lumps of this black-brown tar-like mastic are regularly found on archaeological sites in Scandinavia. They often bear tooth-imprints, indicating that they were chewed, perhaps as a way to make the substance pliable again for use as an adhesive for tool- and weapon-making. Alternatively, it might have been used as an antiseptic for dental ailments or for treating other medical conditions, or as a hunger suppressant – or just because people liked the taste.
Discovered 30 years ago, these mastic samples were first used to map the genetic profile of the individuals who had chewed them, but the latest study succeeded in extracting and identifying non-human DNA as well. As a result, the researchers were able to say that the Mesolithic diet included red fox, Arctic fox, wolf, red deer, duck, limpets, and trout, as well as hazelnuts and apples.
This study suggests that in Mesolithic Scandinavia, at least, meat or fish were major components of the diet. The general assumption that this was universally true has led to the modern Paleo Diet, based on the idea that our bodies evolved to eat animal proteins rather than the starchy plant-based foods of post-farming societies.
A study of bone isotopes from the Peruvian Andes suggests otherwise. In a paper published in the journal PLOS ONE (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0296420), Dr Jennifer Chen, of Penn State University, and Dr Randy Haas, of the University of Wyoming, show that plants dominated the diets of the foragers of the Andean Altiplano to the extent that we probably ought to call them gatherer-hunters rather than hunter-gatherers.
Analysing stable isotopes from the remains of 24 individuals from two burial sites dating from 9,000 to 6,500 years ago, Dr Chen, Dr Haas, and their colleagues found that plants composed 80% of their diets and meat just 20%. Wild potatoes and other tuberous vegetables were the main source of nutrition, with vicuña and taruca meat playing a secondary role, while small mammals, fish, and birds appear to have been consumed in negligible quantities.
The authors ask how typical this might be of Mesolithic diets. It is possible, they say, that the emphasis on plant foods among this early highland population might have been forced on them because the region’s animal population had been over-hunted by earlier humans who had been present in the region for 2,000 years. Even so, the authors conclude that these findings highlight the need to re-evaluate our understanding of early forager diets more generally.
Measuring magnetic fluctuations
Babylon’s Ishtar Gate is one of the most spectacular exhibits in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum, a huge structure that was once the main gate to the city of Babylon, covered in glazed ceramic tiles depicting bulls and dragons in gold against a deep-blue background. The bricks used in its construction bear an inscription that records the construction of the gate during the 43-year reign of Nebuchadnezzar II (r. 605-562 BC).
In the absence of more precise dating, it has been assumed that the gate was built to commemorate the siege of Jerusalem, the destruction of Solomon’s Temple, and the enslavement of Jews in 589 to 587 BC. Using the newly developing technique of archaeomagnetism, researchers have concluded (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0293014) that the gate complex was actually built nearly two decades after the conquest of Jerusalem, towards the end of Nebuchadnezzar’s reign, in 569 BC.
As well as providing a date for the gate, the research team, led by Professor Erez Ben-Yosef of Tel Aviv University, set out to explore the potential for bricks, which are relatively common in ancient Mesopotamia (south-central Iraq), to yield dates based on the way that iron particles in clay become mobile during firing and then solidify in ways that indicate the strength and direction of the earth’s magnetic field at the time (see Special Report).
The researchers analysed 32 bricks from museums in Iraqi Kurdistan and from Yale University’s Babylonian Collection to build a picture of magnetic fluctuations between 2000 and 550 BC. The resulting data confirmed previous findings from research in Jordan and Israel that identified the phenomenon known as the Levantine Iron Age geomagnetic Anomaly, a period during which the magnetic field fluctuated frequently and reached record levels of intensity of more than twice today’s values.
Professor Ben-Yosef says that he has received invitations from other institutions to sample their ancient Mesopotamian artefacts, and that we can expect increasingly precise dates for archaeological materials in future. The development of an archaeomagnetic dating reference for one of the key regions in the history of human civilisations would be an important contribution to knowledge, especially for periods when radiocarbon dating cannot be used or is too general. Equally important is understanding the behaviour of the Earth’s magnetic field, which varies over time in intensity and direction, and is vital to life on Earth because it protects us from solar radiation.
Chris Catling is an archaeologist and writer, fascinated by the off-beat and the eccentric in the heritage world.
