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In the complex story of human migration out of Africa, Homo sapiens are believed to have travelled steadily eastwards to Asia – eventually reaching Australia by around 50,000 years ago – but seem not to have moved into Europe for a period of 20,000 years. A new study published in Nature Communications (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-46161-7) addresses this crucial period between approximately 70,000 and 45,000 years ago, and reaches the conclusion that early migrants simply stayed put once they found an ideal environment, with no need to keep moving westwards.
A team of geneticists, environmental scientists, and archaeologists reached this conclusion first by using climate and palaeoecological data to look for a region capable of sustaining a large hunter-gatherer population. They decided that the Persian Plateau – an area surrounding modern-day Iran, including parts of Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait – would be the best candidate for this land of plenty.
They then analysed ancient genomes from the region and concluded that present-day Eurasians were largely descended from the people of the Plateau. Lead author Leonardo Vallini, of the University of Padova, Italy, describes the Plateau as the hub from which future populations moved on to settle all of Eurasia.
These findings are based on deductions from genetic and environmental conditions. Researchers now need to find ancient human remains in the area to test the theory. ‘There’s a lot of work yet to do; I hope this paper will help stimulate further investigations in the region’, said co-author, Michael Petraglia, of the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, Griffith University, Brisbane.
These results are consistent with those of another study of ancient genomes published in 2023 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2213061120), which identified an ‘Arabian Standstill’ period, during which the ancestors of all non-African humans underwent genetic adaptation to colder environments, preparing them for the cool Eurasian environments they would eventually encounter. One of the authors of that study, Dr Yassine Souilmi from the University of Adelaide and the Australian National University, described the Persian Plateau population as being ‘at the root of the Eurasian family tree’.
Garden of Eden
Living in their ‘Garden of Eden’, the people of the Persian Plateau probably led happy and contented lives, if another study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2311703121) is to be believed. The authors of the report interviewed 2,966 people in 19 indigenous and small-scale remote communities across the world and found that, despite having very little money, they were on average at least as happy – and in many cases much happier – than people in high-income consumer societies.
Lead author Eric Galbraith, of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, said that ‘many populations with very low monetary incomes report very high average levels of life satisfaction… learning more about what makes life satisfying in these diverse communities might help many others to lead more satisfying lives while addressing the sustainability crisis’.
Four of the small communities (in Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, and the Western Highlands of Guatemala) reported average happiness scores of more than 8 out of 10, while Finland, deemed the happiest country in the world in OECD research, has an average score of 7.9. In the Western Highlands, where the average annual income is $560 (£450), 30 out of 70 people interviewed gave 10 out of 10 when asked about their life satisfaction. Co-author Victoria Reyes-García said the study showed that ‘wealth – as generated by industrialised economies – is not fundamentally required for humans to lead happy lives’, which is good news for sustainability as it shows that ‘resource-intensive economic growth is not required to achieve high levels of subjective wellbeing’.
Reviving ‘extinct beer’
For some people, beer is an important component of human happiness, and there have been several attempts in the past to revive ancient brewing techniques based on archaeological evidence. The latest comes from a Michigan-based company called Archival Brewing, which aims to recreate historic styles of beer. One of these is Scottish heather ale brewed in earthenware pots. The recipe uses ingredients detected in the fabric of ceramic jars dating from the Scottish Iron Age. It joins an interesting drinks menu that includes Wagner’s Best, based on the lager recipe brought to America by Bavarian brewer John Wagner in 1840; Ægir’s Wreath, made with fresh juniper berries to a Finnish farmhouse recipe; and Spontaneously Fermented Cider.
In Irish communities around the world, much beer is traditionally consumed in honour of St Patrick on his feast day, 17 March, but a more appropriate occasion for celebrating ale in all its forms is surely the Feast of St Brigid, 1 February. Brigid (c.AD 451-525) is noted for her many miracles in which she turned muddy ponds and even bathwater into a sweet and potable brew, at a time when water was often polluted and alcohol (made from boiled water) was potentially healthier. For that reason, Brigid is the patron saint of beer (as well as of healing). An ancient Celtic prayer attributed to the saint begins with the words ‘I should like a great lake of finest ale for the King of Kings. I should like a table of the choicest food for the family of heaven’. Clearly in Brigid’s conception, heaven was an eternal banquet.
Finger amputation
That is a much more pleasing idea of divinity than one finds in societies where the gods require sacrificial appeasement. Evidence for this was presented last year to a conference hosted by the European Society for Human Evolution by Professor Mark Collard of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, who pointed out that fingers are missing from 200 of the hand silhouettes depicted in 25,000-year-old cave paintings in France and Spain. Collard believes this is ‘compelling evidence that these people may have had their fingers amputated deliberately in rituals intended to elicit help from supernatural entities’.
Working with PhD student Brea McCauley, Collard has found examples of finger amputation in cave paintings at sites in Africa, Australia, North America, and South and Southeast Asia. ‘This form of self-mutilation has been practised by groups from all inhabited continents’, he says. A modern parallel can be found in the practices of the Dani people of the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, where women sometimes have one or more fingers cut off following the death of loved ones, including sons or daughters. He sees such amputations as being comparable to the efforts of devotees to show devotion or atone for misdeeds through extreme body piercing at the Malaysian Thaipusam festival.
Disappearing tongues
Such practices survive from the deep and ancient past despite the creeping homogenisation of global cultures, something that is particularly evident in the world of linguistics. In Language City: the fight to preserve endangered mother tongues, the author Ross Perlin, co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, describes New York City through the experiences of six speakers of threatened languages and their cultural histories. Those languages include Seke, spoken by just 700 people from five ancestral villages in Nepal, a hundred of whom live in a single Brooklyn apartment building. Another is Lenape, New York’s original indigenous language and the source of the name Manhattan (supposedly, ‘the place where we get bows’). There is just one fluent native speaker left, and a handful of revivalists.
Perlin’s wider point is that half of the 7,000-plus languages currently spoken across the world’s 200 or so nation-states will disappear over the next century, many of them without record, as linguistic diversity fades in favour of universal languages, such as English, Spanish, and Standard Chinese. Half of all these languages are now spoken by 10,000 or fewer people, and hundreds have just ten speakers or fewer.
Perlin accuses fellow linguists of focusing too much on language, not languages – that is, on theoretical questions about universal linguistic principles, often based on the dominant languages they know best. He quotes Michael Krauss, who warned in 1992 that linguistics would ‘go down in history as the only science that presided obliviously over the disappearance of 90% of the very field to which it is dedicated’.
The growing movement for indigenous rights is a sign of hope, and new technologies are being harnessed to record and preserve as much as possible of the world’s vanishing linguistic heritage. Ideally, Perlin argues, every language should have a substantial dictionary, a detailed grammatical description, and a representative corpus of recorded stories, oral histories, and other texts showing the language in action, and at least partially transcribed, translated, analysed, and archived.
‘Forget Siri, speech recognition, automatic translation, spellcheck, and other nifty tools,’ he says. ‘This is about the ways of seeing, understanding, and living that should form part of any meaningful account of what it is to be human: the poetry, literature, jokes, proverbs, and turns of phrase, the community histories, the local and environmental knowledge, the wisdom, and the lifeways, only a fraction of which can ever be conveyed in another language.’
Chris Catling is an archaeologist and writer, fascinated by the off-beat and the eccentric in the heritage world.
