124 research outputs found
Birds in Late Mesolithic Burials at Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov (Lake Onega, Western Russia) - What Do They Tell about Humans and the Environment?
Three-Dimensional Geometric Morphometric Analysis of Fossil Canid Mandibles and Skulls
Acknowledgements We thank C.P. Klingenberg for critical discussion of methodology. A. Drake and R. Losey were supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant (#SSHRC IG 435-2014-0075) and a European Research Council Grant to D. Anderson (#295458). M. Sablin acknowledges participation of ZIN RAS (state assignment № АААА-А17-117022810195-3) to this research. Supplementary information accompanies this paper at doi:10.1038/s41598-017-10232-1Peer reviewedPublisher PD
The tempo of cultural change in the Kostenki Upper Paleolithic : further insights
open access via Cambridge University Press agreement This work was funded by the Leverhulme Trust (AHOB3 and RPG-2012-800). We thank the staff of the ORAU past and present for their careful laboratory work. We also thank the reviewers and Editor-in-Chief for their comments. AB and AS acknowledge Russian Science Foundation grant numbers 20-78-10151 and 18-78-00136, and Russian Foundation of Basic Research grant numbers 18-39-20009, 18-00-00837 and 20-09-00233. We also acknowledge the participation of IHMC RAS (state assignment 0184-2019-0001) and ZIN RAS (state assignment АААА-А19-119032590102-7). We thank the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) for supporting the Oxford node of the National Environmental Isotope Facility (NEIF).Peer reviewedPublisher PD
Consumption of canid meat at the Gravettian Předmostí site, the Czech Republic
Germonpré, Mietje, Lázničková-Galetová, Martina, Jimenez, Elodie-Laure, Losey, Robert, Sablin, Mikhail, Bocherens, Hervé, Van Den Broeck, Martine (2017): Consumption Of Canid Meat At The Gravettian Předmostí Site, The Czech Republic. Fossil Imprint 73 (3-4): 360-382, DOI: 10.2478/if-2017-0020, URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/if-2017-002
Eastern Europe’s “Transitional Industry”? : Deconstructing the Early Streletskian
Acknowledgements We are very grateful to many friends and colleagues for discussions and various help, including Yuri Demindenko, Evgeny Giria, Brad Gravina, Anton Lada, Sergei Lisitsyn and Alexander Otcherednoy. Needless to say, they may or may not agree with our conclusions. We are also thankful to Jesse Davies and Craig Williams for the help with the illustrations and figures. Ekaterina Petrova kindly helped with ID’ing some of the sampled bones. We thank the staff of the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit at the University of Oxford for their support with the chemical preparation and the measurement of the samples. We are also grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive comments, which helped improve the paper. This paper is a contribution to Leverhulme Trust project RPG-2012-800. The research leading to some of our radiocarbon results received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013); ERC grant 324139 “PalaeoChron” awarded to Professor Tom Higham. AB and AS acknowledge Russian Science Foundation grant number 20-78-10151 and Russian Foundation of Basic Research grant numbers 18-39-20009 and 20-09-00233 for support of their work. We also acknowledge the participation of IHMC RAS (state assignment 0184-2019-0001) and ZIN RAS (state assignment АААА-А19-119032590102-7).Peer reviewedPublisher PD
Avifauna at the Neolithic Sites of the Dnieper-Dvina Basin: the role of birds in the culture of ancient hunter-gatherers of the VI–III Millennium BC
The article presents a study of avifauna at the Neolithic sites of the Dnieper-Dvina basin (Serteya I and II sites). Changes of paleo-environmental conditions and biotopes, archaeological cultures and types of campsites might have determined changes in the cultural and economic model of the ancient population, having an influence on avifauna particularity in different time periods. Four biotopic groups of birds: near-water birds, woodside birds, forest and meadow-steppe birds are singled out. Birds from the near-water group dominate. It can be assumed, that birds played an important role in food ration in spring and autumn. Paleo-ecological studies allow us to reconstruct a change of water body types. That may have caused a change in bird species. Changes in bird nesting and migration areas may also be evidence of paleo-ecological changes in the V–III millennium BC. Despite the widespread practice of making tools and ornaments from bones and animals teeth at the Neolithic sites in Dnieper-Dvina basin, bird bones were used rather seldom. Almost the entire collection dates back to the end of IV–III millennium BC and is represented mainly by tube beads and blanks
Human and birds
The paper presents the study of avifauna from the hunter-gatherer sites at the Dnieper-Dvina basin spanning time period from the 6th to 3rd millennia BC. A total of 669 bird bones were identified and attributed to 46 different bird taxa, representing resident and migrant birds. They belong to four habitat groups: waterfowl, forest, woodside and meadow-steppe. The dominance of waterfowl birds follows the common strategy of aquatic resources exploitation. Changes in the procurement strategies, use and symbolic meanings of birds can be envisaged. Reconstructed regional mean temperature fluctuations suggest a particular influence on breeding biology and migration patterns of different species
Seasonality at middle and upper palaeolithic sites based on the presence and wear of deciduous premolars from nursing mammoth calves
Middle and Upper Palaeolithic sites, where mam- moths dominate the faunal assemblages, are mainly found in Central and Eastern Europe. At these sites concentrations of skulls, tusks and long bones, interpreted as deliberate constructions, of- ten occur. Rare instances of weapon tip fragments embedded in mammoth bones provide direct ar- chaeological evidence of human hunting. Indirect evidence, such as the accumulation of mammoth bones from multiple individuals with specific ontogenetic ages, occurs more frequently. Based on the eruption sequence and wear of deciduous premolars from mammoth calves, we examined whether a season of death could be deduced from the characteristics of the dentition. Our results suggest that the mammoth hunt was not restricted to the cold half of the year.The symposium and the volume "Human-elephant interactions: from past to present" were funded by the Volkswagen Foundation
Natural and human-driven selection of a single non-coding body size variant in ancient and modern canids
Domestic dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) are the most variable-sized mammalian species on Earth, displaying a 40-fold size difference between breeds.1 Although dogs of variable size are found in the archeological record,2, 3, 4 the most dramatic shifts in body size are the result of selection over the last two centuries, as dog breeders selected and propagated phenotypic extremes within closed breeding populations.5 Analyses of over 200 domestic breeds have identified approximately 20 body size genes regulating insulin processing, fatty acid metabolism, TGFβ signaling, and skeletal formation.6, 7, 8, 9, 10 Of these, insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF1) predominates, controlling approximately 15% of body size variation between breeds.8 The identification of a functional mutation associated with IGF1 has thus far proven elusive.6,10,11 Here, to identify and elucidate the role of an ancestral IGF1 allele in the propagation of modern canids, we analyzed 1,431 genome sequences from 13 species, including both ancient and modern canids, thus allowing us to define the evolutionary history of both ancestral and derived alleles at this locus. We identified a single variant in an antisense long non-coding RNA (IGF1-AS) that interacts with the IGF1 gene, creating a duplex. While the derived mutation predominates in both modern gray wolves and large domestic breeds, the ancestral allele, which predisposes to small size, was common in small-sized breeds and smaller wild canids. Our analyses demonstrate that this major regulator of canid body size nearly vanished in Pleistocene wolves, before its recent resurgence resulting from human-imposed selection for small-sized breed dogs
Species-specific responses of Late Quaternary megafauna to climate and humans
Despite decades of research, the roles of climate and humans in driving the dramatic extinctions of large-bodied mammals during the Late Quaternary remain contentious. We use ancient DNA, species distribution models and the human fossil record to elucidate how climate and humans shaped the demographic history of woolly rhinoceros, woolly mammoth, wild horse, reindeer, bison and musk ox. We show that climate has been a major driver of population change over the past 50,000 years. However, each species responds differently to the effects of climatic shifts, habitat redistribution and human encroachment. Although climate change alone can explain the extinction of some species, such as Eurasian musk ox and woolly rhinoceros, a combination of climatic and anthropogenic effects appears to be responsible for the extinction of others, including Eurasian steppe bison and wild horse. We find no genetic signature or any distinctive range dynamics distinguishing extinct from surviving species, underscoring the challenges associated with predicting future responses of extant mammals to climate and human-mediated habitat change.This paper is in the memory of our friend and colleague Dr. Andrei Sher, who was a major contributor of this study. Dr Sher died unexpectedly, but his major contributions to the field of Quaternary science will be remembered and appreciated for many years to come. We are grateful to Dr. Adrian Lister and Dr. Tony Stuart for guides and discussions. Thanks to Tina B. Brandt, Dr. Bryan Hockett and Alice Telka for laboratory help and samples and to L. Malik R. Thrane for his work on the megafauna locality database. Data taken from the Stage 3 project was partly funded by Grant #F/757/A from the Leverhulme Trust, together with a grant from the McDonald Grants and Awards Fund. We acknowledge the Danish National Research Foundation, the Lundbeck Foundation, the Danish Council for Independent Research and the US National Science Foundation for financial suppor
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