Tag: archaeology

Neanderthals

Pääbo may have the entire Neanderthal genome sequenced in the next 18 months.

2009-02-13: Draft Genome is announced. Bookmarked also for the nice facial reconstruction.

2009-05-17: We ate them

Neanderthals met a violent end at our hands and in some cases we ate them

2010-09-28: The cloning arguments are nothing new, but I was struck by

There were no cities when the Neanderthals went extinct, and at their population’s peak there may have only been 10k of them spread across Europe. A cloned Neanderthal might be missing the genetic adaptations we have evolved to cope with the world’s greater population density, whatever those adaptations might be. But, not everyone agrees that Neanderthals were so different from modern humans that they would automatically be shunned as outcasts.

2013-08-16: Neanderthal leather-working

Excavations of Neanderthal sites 40 ka BP have uncovered a kind of tool that leather workers still use to make hides more lustrous and water resistant. The bone tools, known as lissoirs, had previously been associated only with modern humans. The latest finds indicate that Neanderthals and modern humans might have invented the tools independently.

2016-05-25: 176 ka ago is unimaginably old. This is more than 15x older than Gobekli Tepe.

After drilling into the stalagmites and pulling out cylinders of rock, the team could see an obvious transition between 2 layers. On one side were old minerals that were part of the original stalagmites; on the other were newer layers that had been laid down after the fragments were broken off by the cave’s former users. By measuring uranium levels on either side of the divide, the team could accurately tell when each stalagmite had been snapped off for construction.

Their date? 176 ka ago, give or take a few millennia. “When I announced the age to Jacques, he asked me to repeat it because it was so incredible”. Outside Bruniquel Cave, the earliest, unambiguous human constructions are just 20 ka old. Most of these are ruins—collapsed collections of mammoth bones and deer antlers. By comparison, the Bruniquel stalagmite rings are well-preserved and far more ancient.

2016-05-27: More Neanderthal than human

In some spots of our genome, we are more Neanderthal than human. the sequences we inherited from archaic hominins helped us survive and reproduce

2017-01-15: Neanderthals Were People, Too

For millenniums, some scientists believe, before modern humans poured in from Africa, the climate in Europe was exceptionally unstable. The landscape kept flipping between temperate forest and cold, treeless steppe. The fauna that Neanderthals subsisted on kept migrating away, faster than they could. Though Neanderthals survived this turbulence, they were never able to build up their numbers. (Across all of Eurasia, at any point in history, “there probably weren’t enough of them to fill a stadium.”) With the demographics so skewed, even the slightest modern human advantage would be amplified tremendously: a single innovation, something like sewing needles, might protect just enough babies from the elements to lower the infant mortality rate and allow modern humans to conclusively overtake the Neanderthals. And yet Stringer is careful not to conflate innovation with superior intelligence. Innovation, too, can be a function of population size. “We live in an age where information, where good ideas, spread like wildfire, and we build on them. But it wasn’t like that 50 ka ago.” The more members your species has, the more likely 1 member will stumble on a useful new technology — and that, once stumbled upon, the innovation will spread; you need sufficient human tinder for those sparks of culture to catch.

2017-09-05: 200 ka Neanderthal Glue

As far back as 200 ka ago Neanderthals were using a tar-based adhesive to glue axe heads and spears to their handles. Researchers have attempted to recreate the Neander-glue, which could help scientists figure out just how technologically sophisticated the species was. Archaeologists have found lumps of adhesive tar likely made from birch bark at Neanderthal sites in Italy and Germany. But just how they made the substance puzzled researchers, especially because they did it without the aid of ceramic pots, which were used by later cultures to produce large quantities of tar.

2019-06-12: Did Neanderthals Speak?

Neanderthals had the anatomical properties to create the sounds that could form the basis of speech, though any words they produced would have sounded a bit unfamiliar to modern human ears

2020-03-04: long distance Neanderthals

Their intercontinental odyssey over 1000s of kilometers is a rarely observed case of long-distance dispersal in the Paleolithic and highlights the value of stone tools as culturally informative markers of ancient population movements.

2022-11-19: Interbreeding in Africa

The human-like Y chromosome entered the Neanderthal gene pool well before the migration out of Africa 80ka BP – perhaps 270ka BP. Which means that many of the Neanderthals that those migrants encountered must have already had human-like Y chromosomes! The Neanderthal Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA are 2 new lines of evidence that point to a much more complex and ancient relationship between us and our closest cousins than we otherwise would have known.

2023-12-15: A new book, The Naked Neanderthal, looks interesting

Next, he explores evidence from skeletal remains for butchery and cannibalism of the dead in Neanderthal communities at Moula Guercy. Some researchers have proposed that such findings are a sign of starvation — evidence that Neanderthals were not able to adapt to the warm Eemian forests. Slimak concludes instead that these behaviors were a natural part of hominin social interactions, citing growing evidence from both archaeology and primatology that such practices were relatively common among humans right through prehistory.
Humans temporarily replaced local Neanderthals 54ka BP over an extraordinarily short time — potentially less than 1 year. The author uses this to argue that extermination, rather than assimilation, is the most likely explanation for the Neanderthals’ eventual extinction.

Takla Makan Mummies

In the late 1980’s, perfectly preserved 3000-year-old mummies began appearing in a remote Chinese desert. They had long reddish-blond hair, European features and didn’t appear to be the ancestors of modern-day Chinese people. Archaeologists now think they may have been the citizens of an ancient civilization that existed at the crossroads between China and Europe.

2021-10-28: Ancient North Eurasians

The Tarim Basin mummies do not resemble modern inhabitants of the region, leading different groups of researchers to posit that they may have hailed from near the Black Sea, or been related to a group hailing from the Iranian Plateau. Recently, researchers analyzed the genomes of some of the earliest mummies from the Tarim Basin. They found that the people buried there did not migrate from the Black Sea steppes, Iran, or anywhere else—rather, the analysis suggests that they were direct descents of the Ancient North Eurasians (ANE), a human population widespread during the Pleistocene that is now mostly represented in genetic fragments in some populations’ genomes.

Google Earth Archaeology

I found more in the first 5, 6, 7 hours than I’ve found in 25 years of traditional field surveys and aerial archaeology.

2007-01-07: overview article. a bit thin on detail, unfortunately.
2014-05-05: holy shit:

A study of Cold War spy-satellite photos has tripled the number of known archaeological sites across the Middle East, revealing 1000s of ancient cities, roads, canals, and other ruins.

Flooded Ice Age Kingdoms

17-7 ka ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, terrible things happened to the world our ancestors lived in. Great ice caps over northern Europe and north America melted down, huge floods ripped across the earth, sea-level rose by more than 100m, and 25m km2 of formerly habitable lands were swallowed up by the waves. Marine archaeology has been possible as a scholarly discipline for 50 years – since the introduction of scuba. In that time, only 500 submerged sites have been found worldwide containing the remains of any form of man-made structure or of lithic artifacts. Of these sites only 100 are more than 3 ka old.

you’ll definitely need UAV to scour millions of square kilometers

Translation

hmm

GT now gets 55% accuracy on English to Arabic. Human agreement on human translations is 60%. After this point they have no standard by which to measure their progress

2016-09-27: Getting amazingly close to human level performance. it’s interesting that for all languages, the gap between human and perfect translation is much much larger than between human and machine.

Neural Machine Translation: Much better translation quality
Full technical report (23 exciting pages of bedtime reading)

Research blog post

I’m very excited to announce that our new neural machine translation system closes the quality gap between the existing Google Translate production system and human quality translations by 58% to 87% for a variety of different language pairs (see table below, from the technical report we published today). This work has been a close collaboration between the Google Brain team and the Google Translate team.

Thanks to lots of hard engineering work and the computational efficiency of our Tensor Processing Units (see report), we are also rolling these benefits out to users of Google Translate, starting today with Mandarin to English as the first language pair live in production that uses this new system. We’ll be rolling out many more language pairs over the coming weeks.

This highlights the success of neural models at more accurately capturing the complexities of real human language, and is a powerful demonstration of the research our group has been doing on language understanding.

2016-11-15: Nice behind the scenes article on the recent translation breakthrough.

With this update, Google Translate is improving more in a single leap than we’ve seen in the last 10 years combined.

3 overlapping stories converge in Google Translate’s successful metamorphosis to A.I. — a technical story, an institutional story and a story about the evolution of ideas. The technical story is about 1 team on 1 product at 1 company, and the process by which they refined, tested and introduced a brand-new version of an old product in only about a quarter of the time anyone, themselves included, might reasonably have expected. The institutional story is about the employees of a small but influential artificial-intelligence group within that company, and the process by which their intuitive faith in some old, unproven and broadly unpalatable notions about computing upended every other company within a large radius. The story of ideas is about the cognitive scientists, psychologists and wayward engineers who long toiled in obscurity, and the process by which their ostensibly irrational convictions ultimately inspired a paradigm shift in our understanding not only of technology but also, in theory, of consciousness itself.

2023-07-08: Akkadian translation, with modest BLEU scores.

In its transliteration to English test, the AI model scored 37.47. In its cuneiform to English test, it scored 36.52. Both scores were above their target baseline and in the range of a high-quality translation. The model was able to reproduce the nuances of each test sentence’s genre. The AI model works best when it is translating short- to medium-length sentences. It also does better with more formulaic genres, like royal decrees and administrative records, than literary genres such as myths, hymns, and prophecies. With more training on a larger dataset, they aim to improve its accuracy. “100s of 100s of clay tablets inscribed in the cuneiform script document the political, social, economic, and scientific history of ancient Mesopotamia. Yet, most of these documents remain untranslated and inaccessible due to their sheer number and limited quantity of experts able to read them”

Robot Exploration

A fleet of 100 robotic submarines could in 5 years’ time be roaming the vast unexplored stretches of the world’s seafloors and helping unlock their mysteries. “The pace of exploration in the ocean is going a little too slowly”. Only 5% of the ocean floor has been explored in detail, which means there may be numerous new species and geothermal processes waiting to be discovered.

NOAA plans to map the oceans floors with unmanned vehicles.
2010-10-25: Antarctica Ocean UAV. Such a baby step. we should have fleets of fully autonomous ocean robots by now, mapping the sea floors.

Gavia, a bullet-shaped robot developed by the University of British Columbia, is currently in Antarctica on a mission to explore heretofore uncharted areas of the ocean.

2013-04-21: Some speculation

excavating the past will mean deploying teams of remote-sensing robotic machines semi-autonomously flying, crawling, gridding, scanning, squeezing, and non-destructively burrowing their way into lost rooms and buried cities, perhaps even translating ancient languages along the way.

2018-11-20: Robot Wreck Discovery

The wreckage of the ARA San Juan (S-42) was found by Ocean Infinity. Ocean Infinity used 5 Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) to carry out the search. Ocean Infinity’s ocean search capability is the most advanced in the world. Their AUV’s are capable of operating in depths from 5 meters to 6000 meters and covering vast areas of the seabed at unparalleled speed. The AUVs are not tethered, allowing them to go deeper and collect higher quality data. They are equipped with side scan sonar, a multi-beam echo-sounder HD camera, and synthetic aperture sonar. Ocean Infinity is able to deploy 2 work class ROVs and heavy lifting equipment capable of retrieving objects weighing up to 45T from 6000 meters.

Digital Unroll

Multi-spectral imaging technology is bringing a hoard of texts from antiquity back to life. I wonder if the hoard contains a copy of the second book of Aristotle’s Poetics, his missing treatise on comedy? Hopefully, it also contains ‘lesser works’ that would shed light on scenarios that were seriously considered by the relevant historical personalities, leading to possible alternative courses of history.

2013-12-19: Over 100 years ago, archaeologists discovered a 2 ka old trash dump near Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, chock full of 1000s of ancient documents, and preserved by the desert and pure chance. From Wikipedia on Oxyrhynchus:

Because Egyptian society under the Greeks and Romans was governed bureaucratically, and because Oxyrhynchus was the capital of the 19th nome, the material at the Oxyrhynchus dumps included vast amounts of paper. Accounts, tax returns, census material, invoices, receipts, correspondence on administrative, military, religious, economic, and political matters, certificates and licenses of all kinds—all these were periodically cleaned out of government offices, put in wicker baskets, and dumped out in the desert. Private citizens added their own piles of unwanted paper. Because papyrus was expensive, paper was often reused: a document might have farm accounts on one side, and a student’s text of Homer on the other. The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, therefore, contained a complete record of the life of the town, and of the civilizations and empires of which the town was a part.

In the century since they were uncovered, only a small fraction of the 1000 briefcase-sized storage boxes of papyrus fragments have been edited and published. There are ongoing efforts to speed this up using multispectral imaging, high resolution CT scanning, and transcription by crowdsourcing.

2013-12-23: Using CT imaging at the micron instead of a millimeter scale to virtually unroll a scroll and bring the libraries of Herculaneum back to life.

However, unraveling was still a problem so scientists kept searching for a mechanism by which to examine the scrolls while they remained closed.

A computer science professor from the University of Kentucky thought he had the answer. Working with 2 preserved Herculaneum scrolls, Brent Seales used micro-CT imaging techniques to attempt to “virtually unroll a scroll.” Micro-CT works at a higher resolution than regular CT scans, operating on the much-smaller micron scale instead of a millimeter scale. Experiments on similar objects seemed promising.

2015-11-17: X-ray phase-contrast tomography

Hundreds of papyrus rolls, buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD and belonging to the only library passed on from Antiquity, were discovered 260 years ago at Herculaneum. These carbonized papyri are extremely fragile and are inevitably damaged or destroyed in the process of trying to open them to read their contents. In recent years, new imaging techniques have been developed to read the texts without unwrapping the rolls. Until now, specialists have been unable to view the carbon-based ink of these papyri, even when they could penetrate the different layers of their spiral structure. Here for the first time, we show that X-ray phase-contrast tomography can reveal various letters hidden inside the precious papyri without unrolling them.

2022-03-09: Now combine this with ML to make sense of text fragments.

Ancient history relies on disciplines such as epigraphy—the study of inscribed texts known as inscriptions—for evidence of the thought, language, society and history of past civilizations. However, over the centuries, many inscriptions have been damaged to the point of illegibility, transported far from their original location and their date of writing is steeped in uncertainty. Here we present Ithaca, a deep neural network for the textual restoration, geographical attribution and chronological attribution of ancient Greek inscriptions. Ithaca is designed to assist and expand the historian’s workflow. The architecture of Ithaca focuses on collaboration, decision support and interpretability. While Ithaca alone achieves 62% accuracy when restoring damaged texts, the use of Ithaca by historians improved their accuracy from 25% to 72%, confirming the synergistic effect of this research tool. Ithaca can attribute inscriptions to their original location with an accuracy of 71% and can date them to less than 30 years of their ground-truth ranges, redating key texts of Classical Athens and contributing to topical debates in ancient history. This research shows how models such as Ithaca can unlock the cooperative potential between artificial intelligence and historians, transformationally impacting the way that we study and write about one of the most important periods in human history.

2023-04-04: What we might find at Herculaneum

There would have been a great deal else. Literature, history, science. Epistolaries, miscellanies, essays. Memoirs, novels, biographies. Satires. The work of orators and poets. Philosophy and mathematics. Scientific studies and technical manuals. Dictionaries and encyclopedias; and more. For example, a prominent Latin collector near to Rome is likely to have had the epistolaries (published letter collections) of Cicero. While we already have copies of those, finding editions scribed within decades of his death would still be of considerable use. More importantly, medieval Christians chose not to preserve almost all ancient literature; so there could be epistolaries from other authors here, famous and obscure. And even poets and orators and novelists, besides being priceless to recover just in respect to the history of art, would also have commented on various subjects of importance, such as popular religion and events.

Tutankhamun


what they don’t say in the amazing exhibit about old boy tut and his gold treasure: how he may have looked like.
2015-08-16:

this is Nefertiti’s tomb. Tutankhamun has been sleeping on the couch in his mother-in-law’s living room.

2022-02-14:

More than 170 pharaohs ruled across 30 dynasties for more than 3 ka; Tutankhamun ruled for only 10 years, starting at age 8. The King’s accomplishments, many of them undertaken by one of his advisers, who succeeded Tutankhamun as pharaoh, amounted to reversing his father’s cultural reforms: he restored Thebes (now Luxor) as the capital of the New Kingdom and returned to polytheism after Akhenaten had promoted the worship of Aten above all other gods. (Born Tutankhaten, he changed his name to reflect his renewed worship of Amun-Ra.) Before the discovery of his tomb, he was rarely mentioned in histories of Egypt. Today, many more people can recount his biography than that of Neferkare, thought to have reigned the longest of any pharaoh, for between 64 and 94 years, starting when he was 6; or that of Khufu, who was buried in the Great Pyramid of Giza; or even that of Ramses II, who is regarded as the most powerful of all the ancient rulers of Egypt. More children have worshipped Tutankhamun during the past 100 years than ever did in his lifetime; whatever his authority in the ancient world, he now rules over the kingdom populated by dinosaurs and pirates, horses and astronauts.