ALBERT

Description: The corpse of a Late Neolithic individual found in a glacier in Oetztal is unusual because of the intact nature of all body parts that resulted from the characteristics of its mummification process and its protected geographical position with regard to glacier flow. Anthropological data indicate that the man was 25 to 40 years old, was between 156 and 160 centimeters in stature, had a cranial capacity of between 1500 and 1560 cubic centimeters, and likely died of exhaustion.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Seidler, H -- Bernhard, W -- Teschler-Nicola, M -- Platzer, W -- zur Nedden, D -- Henn, R -- Oberhauser, A -- Sjovold, T -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 1992 Oct 16;258(5081):455-7.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Institut fur Humanbiologie, Universitat Wien, Austria.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1411539" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉

Description: Modern humans arrived in Europe ~45,000 years ago, but little is known about their genetic composition before the start of farming ~8,500 years ago. Here we analyse genome-wide data from 51 Eurasians from ~45,000-7,000 years ago. Over this time, the proportion of Neanderthal DNA decreased from 3-6% to around 2%, consistent with natural selection against Neanderthal variants in modern humans. Whereas there is no evidence of the earliest modern humans in Europe contributing to the genetic composition of present-day Europeans, all individuals between ~37,000 and ~14,000 years ago descended from a single founder population which forms part of the ancestry of present-day Europeans. An ~35,000-year-old individual from northwest Europe represents an early branch of this founder population which was then displaced across a broad region, before reappearing in southwest Europe at the height of the last Ice Age ~19,000 years ago. During the major warming period after ~14,000 years ago, a genetic component related to present-day Near Easterners became widespread in Europe. These results document how population turnover and migration have been recurring themes of European prehistory.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Fu, Qiaomei -- Posth, Cosimo -- Hajdinjak, Mateja -- Petr, Martin -- Mallick, Swapan -- Fernandes, Daniel -- Furtwangler, Anja -- Haak, Wolfgang -- Meyer, Matthias -- Mittnik, Alissa -- Nickel, Birgit -- Peltzer, Alexander -- Rohland, Nadin -- Slon, Viviane -- Talamo, Sahra -- Lazaridis, Iosif -- Lipson, Mark -- Mathieson, Iain -- Schiffels, Stephan -- Skoglund, Pontus -- Derevianko, Anatoly P -- Drozdov, Nikolai -- Slavinsky, Vyacheslav -- Tsybankov, Alexander -- Cremonesi, Renata Grifoni -- Mallegni, Francesco -- Gely, Bernard -- Vacca, Eligio -- Morales, Manuel R Gonzalez -- Straus, Lawrence G -- Neugebauer-Maresch, Christine -- Teschler-Nicola, Maria -- Constantin, Silviu -- Moldovan, Oana Teodora -- Benazzi, Stefano -- Peresani, Marco -- Coppola, Donato -- Lari, Martina -- Ricci, Stefano -- Ronchitelli, Annamaria -- Valentin, Frederique -- Thevenet, Corinne -- Wehrberger, Kurt -- Grigorescu, Dan -- Rougier, Helene -- Crevecoeur, Isabelle -- Flas, Damien -- Semal, Patrick -- Mannino, Marcello A -- Cupillard, Christophe -- Bocherens, Herve -- Conard, Nicholas J -- Harvati, Katerina -- Moiseyev, Vyacheslav -- Drucker, Dorothee G -- Svoboda, Jiri -- Richards, Michael P -- Caramelli, David -- Pinhasi, Ron -- Kelso, Janet -- Patterson, Nick -- Krause, Johannes -- Paabo, Svante -- Reich, David -- Nature. 2016 May 2. doi: 10.1038/nature17993.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Key Laboratory of Vertebrate Evolution and Human Origins of Chinese Academy of Sciences, IVPP, CAS, Beijing 100044, China. ; Department of Genetics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA. ; Department of Evolutionary Genetics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, 04103 Leipzig, Germany. ; Institute for Archaeological Sciences, Archaeo- and Palaeogenetics, University of Tubingen, 72070 Tubingen, Germany. ; Department of Archaeogenetics, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, 07745 Jena, Germany. ; Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142, USA. ; Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA. ; School of Archaeology and Earth Institute, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland. ; CIAS, Department of Life Sciences, University of Coimbra, 3000-456 Coimbra, Portugal. ; Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, School of Biological Sciences, The University of Adelaide, SA-5005 Adelaide, Australia. ; Department of Human Evolution, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, 04103 Leipzig, Germany. ; Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, Russian Academy of Sciences, Siberian Branch, 17 Novosibirsk, RU-630090, Russia. ; Altai State University, Barnaul, RU-656049, Russia. ; Dipartimento di Civilta e Forme del Sapere, Universita di Pisa, 56126 Pisa, Italy. ; Department of Biology, University of Pisa, 56126 Pisa, Italy. ; Direction regionale des affaires culturelles Rhone-Alpes, 69283 Lyon, Cedex 01, France. ; Dipartimento di Biologia, Universita degli Studi di Bari 'Aldo Moro', 70125 Bari, Italy. ; Instituto Internacional de Investigaciones Prehistoricas, Universidad de Cantabria, 39005 Santander, Spain. ; Department of Anthropology, MSC01 1040, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87131-0001, USA. ; Quaternary Archaeology, Institute for Oriental and European Archaeology, Austrian Academy of Sciences, 1010 Vienna, Austria. ; Department of Anthropology, Natural History Museum Vienna, 1010 Vienna, Austria. ; Department of Anthropology, University of Vienna, 1090 Vienna, Austria. ; "Emil Racovita" Institute of Speleology, 010986 Bucharest 12, Romania. ; "Emil Racovita" Institute of Speleology, Cluj Branch, 400006 Cluj, Romania. ; Department of Cultural Heritage, University of Bologna, 48121 Ravenna, Italy. ; Sezione di Scienze Preistoriche e Antropologiche, Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici, Universita di Ferrara, 44100 Ferrara, Italy. ; Universita degli Studi di Bari 'Aldo Moro', 70125 Bari, Italy. ; Museo di "Civilta preclassiche della Murgia meridionale", 72017 Ostuni, Italy. ; Dipartimento di Biologia, Universita di Firenze, 50122 Florence, Italy. ; Dipartimento di Scienze Fisiche, della Terra e dell'Ambiente, U.R. Preistoria e Antropologia, Universita degli Studi di Siena, 53100 Siena, Italy. ; CNRS/UMR 7041 ArScAn MAE, 92023 Nanterre, France. ; INRAP/UMR 8215 Trajectoires 21, 92023 Nanterre, France. ; Ulmer Museum, 89073 Ulm, Germany. ; University of Bucharest, Faculty of Geology and Geophysics, Department of Geology, 01041 Bucharest, Romania. ; Department of Anthropology, California State University Northridge, Northridge, California 91330-8244, USA. ; Universite de Bordeaux, CNRS, UMR 5199-PACEA, 33615 Pessac Cedex, France. ; TRACES - UMR 5608, Universite Toulouse Jean Jaures, Maison de la Recherche, 31058 Toulouse Cedex 9, France. ; Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, 1000 Brussels, Belgium. ; Department of Archaeology, School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University, 8270 Hojbjerg, Denmark. ; Service Regional d'Archeologie de Franche-Comte, 25043 Besancon Cedex, France. ; Laboratoire Chronoenvironnement, UMR 6249 du CNRS, UFR des Sciences et Techniques, 25030 Besancon Cedex, France. ; Department of Geosciences, Biogeology, University of Tubingen, 72074 Tubingen, Germany. ; Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment, University of Tubingen, 72072 Tubingen, Germany. ; Department of Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology, University of Tubingen, 72070 Tubingen, Germany. ; Institute for Archaeological Sciences, Paleoanthropology, University of Tubingen, 72070 Tubingen, Germany. ; Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, Saint Petersburg 34, Russia. ; Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Science, Masaryk University, 611 37 Brno, Czech Republic. ; Institute of Archaeology at Brno, Academy of Science of the Czech Republic, 69129 Dolni Vestonice, Czech Republic. ; Department of Archaeology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia V5A 1S6, Canada.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27135931" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉

Description: Community differentiation is a fundamental topic of the social sciences, and its prehistoric origins in Europe are typically assumed to lie among the complex, densely populated societies that developed millennia after their Neolithic predecessors. Here we present the earliest, statistically significant evidence for such differentiation among the first farmers of Neolithic Europe. By using strontium isotopic data from more than 300 early Neolithic human skeletons, we find significantly less variance in geographic signatures among males than we find among females, and less variance among burials with ground stone adzes than burials without such adzes. From this, in context with other available evidence, we infer differential land use in early Neolithic central Europe within a patrilocal kinship system.

Description: In the course of new excavations at the Upper Paleolithic site at Krems-Wachtberg in the loess region near Krems, Lower Austria, a double burial of newborns was discovered in 2005. One year later, a single grave of an infant was excavated nearby. Both graves are associated with the well-preserved living floor of an Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherer camp with distinct archaeological features and a rich Gravettian find assemblage. Several charcoal samples from different stratigraphic positions were 14C dated with the accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) method at VERA. The 14C ages confirm the archaeological assessment of the site to the Gravettian time period. According to the uncalibrated 14C ages, the formation time of the living floor is ~27.0 14C kyr BP. 14C data of ~28.6 14C kyr BP determined for an archaeological horizon below the living floor indicate that the location may have been used earlier by people in the Middle Upper Paleolithic.