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AbstractMovement of resources was essential to the survival and success of early complex societies. The sources and destinations of goods and the means of transportation – be it by boats, carts and/or foot – can often be inferred, but the logistics of these movements are inherently more difficult to ascertain. Here, we use strontium isotopic analysis to test hypotheses about the role of animal and animal-powered transport in medium and long-distance movement and exchange, using the Indus Civilization as a case study. Across the wide geographical spread of the Indus Civilisation, there is strong evidence for long-distance exchange of raw materials and finished objects and this process is presumed to involve boats and animal-driven transport, although there is little evidence as to the relative importance of each mode of movement. Strontium isotopic analysis of animal remains from four sites analysed for this study combined with results from nine other sites indicates limited long-distance animal movement between different geological zones within the Indus Civilisation. These findings suggest that individual animals primarily moved short- or medium-distances, though there are several significant exceptions seen in some pigs and cattle found at two large urban sites. We infer that long-distance transport of goods, be it raw materials, finished objects, other goods, or the animals themselves, could have occurred through the use of boats and waterways, by traction animals moving over long distances that did not end up in the archaeological record, and/or by different animals participating in many short to medium-distance movements.

The Oldowan lithic industry represents the earliest known evidence of efficiently and expeditiously produced flake stone tools (Toth, 1985; Braun et al., 2019; Reti, 2016; Stout et al., 2019). Complex technological strategies were employed to produce these artefacts compared to earlier hominin stone tools, and potential organic tool-use behaviors inferred via parsimony with non-human primates (Braun et al., 2019; Boesch et al., 2020; Delagnes and Roche, 2005; Gürbüz and Lycett, 2021; Harmand et al., 2015; Lombard et al., 2018; Plummer et al., 2023; Proffitt et al., 2023a, 2023b; Stout et al., 2010; Toth and Schick, 2009). Consequently, the emergence of the Oldowan can still (cf. Leakey, 1971) be argued to reflect a behavioral and evolutionary shift within the hominin lineage, although the nature and species-associations of any changes have become less clear in recent years (Bobe and Wood, 2021; Braun et al., 2019; Hovers, 2012; Lewis and Harmand, 2016; Plummer et al., 2023). Nyayanga, located in the Homa Peninsula of Kenya, has recently emerged as an important archaeological and paleontological site yielding evidence of Oldowan stone tools and butchered fauna dating to between 2.595 and 3.032 Ma (Plummer et al., 2023). These findings not only represent the earliest currently known occurrences of the Oldowan but also greatly expand our understanding of its early geographic distribution. Further, some lithics at Nyayanga were found alongside Paranthropus molars, challenging prevailing assumptions regarding Oldowan species-associations and providing a rare instance of Early Stone Age (ESA) hominin fossil and lithic remains in close association. The co-occurrence of cut marked fauna and flakes, including those excavated in direct contact with hippopotamid remains, further distin guishes Nyayanga as an exceptional ESA occurrence extending hominin dietary and technological behaviors “similar to other Oldowan assem blages” into the Pliocene (Plummer et al., 2023: 563). info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Abstract Background With more clinical trials are offering optional participation in the collection of bio-specimens for biobanking comes the increasing complexity of requirements of informed consent forms. The aim of this study is to develop an automatic natural language processing (NLP) tool to annotate informed consent documents to promote biorepository data regulation, sharing, and decision support. We collected informed consent documents from several publicly available sources, then manually annotated them, covering sentences containing permission information about the sharing of either bio-specimens or donor data, or conducting genetic research or future research using bio-specimens or donor data. Results We evaluated a variety of machine learning algorithms including random forest (RF) and support vector machine (SVM) for the automatic identification of these sentences. 120 informed consent documents containing 29,204 sentences were annotated, of which 1250 sentences (4.28%) provide answers to a permission question. A support vector machine (SVM) model achieved a F-1 score of 0.95 on classifying the sentences when using a gold standard, which is a prefiltered corpus containing all relevant sentences. Conclusions This study provides the feasibility of using machine learning tools to classify permission-related sentences in informed consent documents.

Despite the extensive literature on the retrieval of digestible starches from archaeological contexts, there are still significant concerns regarding their genuine origin and durability. Here, we propose a multi-analytical strategy to identify the authenticity of ancient starches retrieved from macrolithic tools excavated at Upper Paleolithic sites in the Pontic steppe. This strategy integrates the morphological discrimination of starches through optical microscopy and scanning electron microscopy with single starch chemo-profiling using Fourier transform infrared imaging and microscopy. We obtained evidence of aging and biomineralization in the use-related starches from Palaeolithic sites, providing a methodology to establish their ancient origin, assess their preservation status, and attempt their identification. The pivotal application of this multidisciplinar approach demonstrates that the macrolithic tools, from which starches were dislodged, were used for food-processing across the Pontic Steppe around 40,000 years ago during the earliest colonization of Eurasia by Homo sapiens. Nanyang Technological University Published version This work was supported by NTU (Singapore) SUG grant M4081669.090 Unfolding the complexity of nutrition at the dawn of modern humans—a multi-layered digital 3D storytelling approach and by the research carried out as Visiting Professor at L. Vanvitelli-University of Campania Multi-proxy approach to starchy food diet and consequences for contemporary diseases of civilization, granted to L.L., and Patto per lo Sviluppo della Città di Venezia (Comune di Venezia, Italy) (A.M. and E.B.). The study of the stone tools from: Brinzeni I was performed within the project 20.80009.7007.02 at the Institute of Zoology, Republic of Moldova; Kostenki 14 was allowed by A. Sinytsin, recipient of the RSF № 20-78-10151 project and in the frame of the state assignment FMZF-2022–0019 of IHMC RAS, Surein I was allowed by G. Klopachev (MAE RAS) and carried out in collaboration with N. Skakun and V. Terekhina, recipients of the RFBR and RPF according to the research project No 19-59-25002.

AbstractThe 1st millennium BCE in Italy was a time of agricultural intensification of staple cereal production which shaped sociocultural, political, and economic spheres of pre-Roman groups. The lifeways and foodways of the Etruscans, the greatest civilization in western Europe before Roman hegemony, are traditionally inferred from secondary written sources, funerary archaeology, archaeobotany, and zooarchaeology. However, no direct data extrapolated from the study of human skeletal remains are available to evaluate the extent to which agricultural intensification and decreased dietary diversity impacted health and the expression of skeletal indicators of metabolic disease. Macroscopic and radiological analyses were conducted on an archaeological skeletal sample of non-adults (n = 29) recovered from Pontecagnano (southern Italy) dating to the Orientalizing period (730–580 BCE). This allowed us to identify five cases of scorbutic non-adults and to assign diagnostic values to skeletal lesions of scurvy that have not been previously described in the literature. The onset of scurvy in the examined sample is related to the increased reliance of Etruscans on crops lacking vitamin C in this period of agricultural intensification. The skeletal expression of scurvy varied among the non-adults, with differences in location and disease severity; these were interpreted considering the age-at-death of the individuals coupled with feeding behaviors and interindividual variability.

The technical and intellectual capabilities of past societies are reflected in the monuments they were able to build. Tracking the provenance of the stones utilised to build prehistoric megalithic monuments, through geological studies, is of utmost interest for interpreting ancient architectures as well as to contribute to their protection. According to the scarce information available, most stones used in European prehistoric megaliths originate from locations near the construction sites, which would have made transport easier. The Menga dolmen (Antequera, Malaga, Spain), listed in UNESCO World Heritage since July 2016, was designed and built with stones weighting up to nearly 150 tons, thus becoming the most colossal stone monument built in its time in Europe (c. 3800-3600 BC). Our study (based on high-resolution geological mapping as well as petrographic and stratigraphic analyses) reveals key geological and archaeological evidence to establish the precise provenance of the massive stones used in the construction of this monument. These stones are mostly calcarenites, a poorly cemented detrital sedimentary rock comparable to those known as 'soft stones' in modern civil engineering. They were quarried from a rocky outcrop located at a distance of approximately 1 km. In this study, it can be inferred the use of soft stone in Menga reveals the human application of new wood and stone technologies enabling the construction of a monument of unprecedented magnitude and complexity. This research was supported by the Spanish Government (MICINN) project: Biografías Megalíticas: El Paisaje Monumental de Antequera en su Contexto Temporal y Espacial (HAR2017-87481-P) 2018-2021. Dirección General de Investigación. Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Secretaría General de Investigación. Plan Nacional I+D; Playas Ricas en Olivino de Tenerife: Efectos sobre el ciclo del carbono e influencia sobre los organismos marinos (2022CLISA30) Caja Canarias Fundación y Fundación "La Caixa"; Proyectos Intramurales Especiales CSIC: GRANULO (2022301209). Peer reviewed

AbstractUltraviolet-induced Luminescence (UVL) is the property of some materials of emitting light once illuminated by a source of UV radiation. This feature is characteristic of some mediums and pigments, such as some red lakes, widely used for the realisation of works of art. On the one hand, UVL represents a like strike for a researcher in the cultural heritage field: in fact, UVL allows to characterise the state of conservation of the paintings and, in some cases, to recognize at glance some of the materials used by the artists. On the other hand, the contribution of UVL to the study of the artefacts is almost always limited to qualitative observation, while any speculation about the cause of the luminescence emission relies on the observer’s expertise. The aim of this paper is to overcome this paradigm, moving a step toward a more quantitative interpretation of the luminescence signal. The obtained results concern the case study of pictorial materials by Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo (1868–1907, Volpedo, AL, Italy) including his iconic masterpiece Quarto Stato (1889–1901), but the method has general validity and can be applied whenever the appropriate experimental conditions occur. Once designed an appropriate set-up, the statistical comparison between the acquisitions performed on Quarto Stato, on a palette belonged to the master, on drafts made by the author himself and on a set of ad hoc prepared samples both with commercial contemporary pigments and prepared with the traditional recipe, shed some light on which materials have been employed by the artist, where they have been applied and support some intriguing speculations on the use of the industrial lakes in the Quarto Stato painting.