Yersinia pestis, the etiologic agent of plague, is a bacterium associated with wild rodents and their fleas. Historically it was responsible for three pandemics: the Plague of Justinian in the 6th ...century AD, which persisted until the 8th century 1; the renowned Black Death of the 14th century 2, 3, with recurrent outbreaks until the 18th century 4; and the most recent 19th century pandemic, in which Y. pestis spread worldwide 5 and became endemic in several regions 6. The discovery of molecular signatures of Y. pestis in prehistoric Eurasian individuals and two genomes from Southern Siberia suggest that Y. pestis caused some form of disease in humans prior to the first historically documented pandemic 7. Here, we present six new European Y. pestis genomes spanning the Late Neolithic to the Bronze Age (LNBA; 4,800 to 3,700 calibrated years before present). This time period is characterized by major transformative cultural and social changes that led to cross-European networks of contact and exchange 8, 9. We show that all known LNBA strains form a single putatively extinct clade in the Y. pestis phylogeny. Interpreting our data within the context of recent ancient human genomic evidence that suggests an increase in human mobility during the LNBA, we propose a possible scenario for the early spread of Y. pestis: the pathogen may have entered Europe from Central Eurasia following an expansion of people from the steppe, persisted within Europe until the mid-Bronze Age, and moved back toward Central Eurasia in parallel with human populations.
•Six Late Neolithic–Early Bronze Age European Y. pestis genomes were reconstructed•All Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Y. pestis form a single phylogenetic branch
Andrades Valtueña et al. present the first six European Y. pestis genomes dating from the Late Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age. These data suggest that Y. pestis entered Europe during a human migration around 4800 BP, persisted in Europe, and traveled back to Central Eurasia.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
The flanks of the Caucasus Mountains and the steppe landscape to their north offered highly productive grasslands for Bronze Age herders and their flocks of sheep, goat, and cattle. While the ...archaeological evidence points to a largely pastoral lifestyle, knowledge regarding the general composition of human diets and their variation across landscapes and during the different phases of the Bronze Age is still restricted. Human and animal skeletal remains from the burial mounds that dominate the archaeological landscape and their stable isotope compositions are major sources of dietary information. Here, we present stable carbon and nitrogen isotope data of bone collagen of 105 human and 50 animal individuals from the 5.sup.th millennium BC to the Sarmatian period, with a strong focus on the Bronze Age and its cultural units including Maykop, Yamnaya, Novotitorovskaya, North Caucasian, Catacomb, post-Catacomb and late Bronze Age groups. The samples comprise all inhumations with sufficient bone preservation from five burial mound sites and a flat grave cemetery as well as subsamples from three further sites. They represent the Caucasus Mountains in the south, the piedmont zone and Kuban steppe with humid steppe and forest vegetation to its north, and more arid regions in the Caspian steppe. The stable isotope compositions of the bone collagen of humans and animals varied across the study area and reflect regional diversity in environmental conditions and diets. The data agree with meat, milk, and/or dairy products from domesticated herbivores, especially from sheep and goats having contributed substantially to human diets, as it is common for a largely pastoral economy. This observation is also in correspondence with the faunal remains observed in the graves and offerings of animals in the mound shells. In addition, foodstuffs with elevated carbon and nitrogen isotope values, such as meat of unweaned animals, fish, or plants, also contributed to human diets, especially among communities living in the more arid landscapes. The regional distinction of the animal and human data with few outliers points to mobility radii that were largely concentrated within the environmental zones in which the respective sites are located. In general, dietary variation among the cultural entities as well as regarding age, sex and archaeologically indicated social status is only weakly reflected. There is, however, some indication for a dietary shift during the Early Bronze Age Maykop period.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
The recent advances in microscopy and scanning techniques enabled the image analysis of archaeological objects in a high resolution. From the direct measurements in images, shapes and related ...parameters of the structural elements of interest can be derived. In this study, image analysis in 2D/3D is applied to archaeological ceramics, in order to obtain clues about the ceramic pastes, firing and shaping techniques. Images were acquired by the polarized light microscope, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and 3D micro X-ray computed tomography (µ-CT) and segmented using Matlab. 70 ceramic sherds excavated at Ransyrt 1 (Middle-Late Bronze Age) and Kabardinka 2 (late Bronze–early Iron Age), located in in the North Caucasian mountains, Russia, were investigated. The size distribution, circularity and sphericity of sand grains in the ceramics show site specific difference as well as variations within a site. The sphericity, surface area, volume and Euler characteristic of pores show the existence of various pyrometamorphic states between the ceramics and within a ceramic. Using alignments of pores and grains, similar pottery shaping techniques are identified for both sites. These results show that the image analysis of archaeological ceramics can provide detailed information about the prehistoric ceramic production technologies with fast data availability.
Sheep were one of the first livestock species domesticated by humans. After initial domestication in the Middle East they were spread across Eurasia. The modern distribution of endogenous Jaagsiekte ...sheep retrovirus insertions in domestic sheep breeds suggests that over the course of millennia, successive introductions of improved lineages and selection for wool quality occurred in the Mediterranean region and most of Asia. Here we present a novel ancient DNA approach using data of endogenous retroviral insertions in Bronze and Iron Age domestic sheep from the Caucasus and Pamir mountain areas. Our findings support a secondary introduction of wool sheep from the Middle East between the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age into most areas of Eurasia.
Archaeogenetic studies have described the formation of Eurasian 'steppe ancestry' as a mixture of Eastern and Caucasus hunter-gatherers. However, it remains unclear when and where this ancestry arose ...and whether it was related to a horizon of cultural innovations in the 4
millennium BCE that subsequently facilitated the advance of pastoral societies in Eurasia. Here we generated genome-wide SNP data from 45 prehistoric individuals along a 3000-year temporal transect in the North Caucasus. We observe a genetic separation between the groups of the Caucasus and those of the adjacent steppe. The northern Caucasus groups are genetically similar to contemporaneous populations south of it, suggesting human movement across the mountain range during the Bronze Age. The steppe groups from Yamnaya and subsequent pastoralist cultures show evidence for previously undetected farmer-related ancestry from different contact zones, while Steppe Maykop individuals harbour additional Upper Palaeolithic Siberian and Native American related ancestry.
The firing behavior of illite-based archaeological ceramics and corresponding firing conditions were investigated, in order to identify the pyrotechnology of ceramic production at archaeological ...sites in the North Caucasus (Russia, Bronze and Iron Age). Direct observations of the pyrometamorphic degree in the objects by scanning electron microscope (SEM), X-ray powder diffraction (XRD), Raman and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) revealed the thermally induced localization of the redox state within a single object and its influence on the structural distortion, dehydroxylation and total collapse of illite in the ceramics. Fundamental approaches to illite dehydroxylation kinetics and numerical simulations of oxygen diffusion and heat transfer revealed that the firing temperature and time and thickness of the sample, reactivity between oxygen and ceramic pastes and porosity evolution played a decisive role in the firing behavior of the ceramics during the firing at the sites.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZRSKP
Until recently, surveys in mountainous areas were focused on traditional survey techniques such as field walking. Remote sensing data, however, has become more and more important in this field. This ...article will evaluate several methods of remote sensing such as aerial photography, satellite images or images from un-manned aerial vehicles (UAV) as instruments for detecting archaeological sites in mountains. It will discuss the origin of site visibility such as relief, crop-marks or snow-markers, and the related archaeological features underground. It will also discuss internal difficulties of remote sensing data in terrain with heterogeneous height structure. On the basis of a case-study from the North Caucasus (Russia), the potential and the limits to the application of a research strategy using remote sensing in mountain archaeology will be discussed. Cross-checking with non-destructive prospection methods such as geophysics and soil sciences allows the evaluation of the percentage of the sites detectable from above ground.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZRSKP
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