Lost Worlds of Archaeology

In the last three to four years, genetic sampling of ancient and modern individuals has led to some real surprises for the world of prehistory. Many migration events that were dismissed as old hat in the 1990s and 2000s have resurfaced as having an actual basis: the Yamnaya-steppe migrations, the early Neolithic migrations and the Bell Beaker migrations into the British Isles. In the last week, a piece of cutting-edge research has upped the game with a ground-breaking new technique called ASCEND , a simulation program which models the effect of population bottlenecks, introgression and boom-bust cycles on the human genome. The science is still tentative - and the paper has yet to receive a sustained review - but its findings are significant. Published in PLOS Genetics,  Rémi Tournebize and his academic colleagues looked at the sharing of alleles that often happens during 'founder events', or periods where a population contracts and begins to start anew from a bottom floor. The

Sea-crossing began early on in prehistory. Farmers crossed to italy by 6,000 BCE, hunter-gatherers made the voyage to Cyprus around 13,000 BCE. Flores, an island in the east of the Indonesian archipelago, was colonised even earlier by hominids around 700,000 BCE, and the island of Crete saw its first visitors potentially over a million years before the present. There is one island, however, which bears witness to a record that is unlikely to be beaten by any future discovery: Socotra. Situated 100km from the tip of East Africa and 180km from the southern shore of the Arabian peninsula, Socotra is a seemly inhospitable island with a wealth of ecological diversity. During the Pleistocene and earlier, it would have been almost a tropical island, brimming with micro-climates, forest canopies, wetlands and savannahs. It was never part of any mainland, and many miles separated it from the flora and fauna of Africa or Asia. Yet, somehow, around 2 million years ago, Homo Erectus got there. In

The 'lineal script hypothesis', discussed in the previous blog post, was the academic tip of an iceberg of a smorgasbord of claims and reconstructions by Antonio Arnaiz-Villena and his fellow researchers.  Their big idea is a sound one, that the drying of the lush savannah-grassland of the Sahara caused a mass exodus of peoples, languages and cultures, and contributed to a later sub-Saharan migration across the Sahel and into the Aegean. The environment of the prehistoric Sahara could have easily supported hundreds of thousands of herders and their families, and its disappearance must have had a tangible effect on surrounding communities and material cultures.          The postulated migrations of various historically-documented peoples from the lost Green Sahara, from the 4th                                                        millennium BCE onwards. Credit:  Arnaiz-Villena  et al  2021. Leaving the speculation about certain Greek myths and sketchy connections between Berbe

Within the last two years, a team of anthropologists and archaeologists from the  Universidad Complutense, Madrid, have been analysing and drawing interpretations from a handful of rock inscriptions from south-western Spain, the Canary Islands and at the heart of the Sahara Desert, in southern Algeria.  The inscriptions date from the 'Megalithic period', around 5000-3000 BCE, and display a marked similarity in form and context, despite being hundreds or thousands of miles apart, across oceans, deserts, mountain ranges and archipelagos. The symbols themselves seem crude and rudimentary, and in all probability their authors were not taking great pains to ensure their scripts were legible. However, they are incredibly significant for one reason: not only are they the ancestors of later, non-Indo-European scripts such as Tartessian, Raetian (south Alpine) and ultimately the Runic script of Scandinavia, they also seem to be derived from much, much older Palaeolithic incised symbols.

I've covered in detail the potential historical prototypes for the Greek demigod Heracles - from ancient Egypt to the Palaeolithic - but it's worth having a look at the impact of the legend on the classical world itself; in names, places and iconography.   The conquest of the Persian empire in the 330s BCE brought the cult of Heracles to central Asia and India, sticking around in various guises until the 2nd and 3rd century CE. One Heracles is seen in an relief from Gandhara as a guardian of Gautama Buddha. By way of the central Asian trade routes to the Far East, the iconographical features of Heracles and the Dioskouroi were imported to China and even Japan, where an echo of the demigod resurfaces as a macho pair of warrior monks guarding shrines, called Niō or Nioh.  The direct influence of Herakles-worship is illustrated by the Byzantine geographer Stephanus, writing in about the 6th century CE. He provides a list of 17 cities, either existing in his own time or anciently k