Some Results of the Archaeological Study of the Belgorod Defense Line

The article deals with study of the Belgorod line as an archaeological monument. The first attempts at archaeological research of this defense line are considered, the results of research in recent years, when the relevance of this topic was identified at the state level, are summarized. The results of exploration scientific work are analyzed, including large-scale exploration studies, excavations of fortified cities, earthworks and other field fortifications. Some theoretical and methodological problems are touched upon, including issues of systematization and access to reconstruction. According to the authors, the archaeological study of defensive lines can be separated into a separate section of the archeology of the late Middle Ages, since the results obtained during the research have great scientific and social potential

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

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

Performance and automation of ancient DNA capture with RNA hyRAD probes

DNA hybridization-capture techniques allow researchers to focus their sequencing efforts on preselected genomic regions. This feature is especially useful when analys- ing ancient DNA (aDNA) extracts, which are often dominated by exogenous environ- mental sources. Here, we assessed, for the first time, the performance of hyRAD as an inexpensive and design-free alternative to commercial capture protocols to obtain authentic aDNA data from osseous remains. HyRAD relies on double enzymatic re- striction of fresh DNA extracts to produce RNA probes that cover only a fraction ofthe genome and can serve as baits for capturing homologous fragments from aDNA li- braries. We found that this approach could retrieve sequence data from horse remains coming from a range of preservation environments, including beyond radiocarbon range, yielding up to 146.5-fold on-target enrichment for aDNA extracts showing ex- tremely low endogenous content (20%¿30%), while the fraction of endogenous reads mapping on- and off-target was relatively insensi- tive to the original endogenous DNA content. Procedures based on two instead of a single round of capture increased on-target coverage up to 3.6-fold. Additionally, we used methylation-sensitive restriction enzymes to produce probes targeting hypo- methylated regions, which improved data quality by reducing post-mortem DNA dam- age and mapping within multicopy regions. Finally, we developed a fully automated hyRAD protocol utilizing inexpensive robotic platforms to facilitate capture process- ing. Overall, our work establishes hyRAD as a cost-effective strategy to recover a set of shared orthologous variants across multiple ancient samples.This project received funding from: the University Paul Sabatier IDEX Chaire d’Excellence (OURASI); the CNRS Programme de Recherche Conjoint (PRC); the CNRS International Research Project (IRP AMADEUS); the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 797449; the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, project No. 19-59-15001 “Horses and their importance in the life of the ancient population of Altai and adjacent territories: interdisciplinary research and reconstruction”; and the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement 681605)

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

The origins and spread of domestic horses from the Western Eurasian steppes

This is the final version. Available on open access from Nature Research via the DOI in this recordData availability: All collapsed and paired-end sequence data for samples sequenced in this study are available in compressed fastq format through the European Nucleotide Archive under accession number PRJEB44430, together with rescaled and trimmed bam sequence alignments against both the nuclear and mitochondrial horse reference genomes. Previously published ancient data used in this study are available under accession numbers PRJEB7537, PRJEB10098, PRJEB10854, PRJEB22390 and PRJEB31613, and detailed in Supplementary Table 1. The genomes of ten modern horses, publicly available, were also accessed as indicated in their corresponding original publications57,61,85-87.NOTE: see the published version available via the DOI in this record for the full list of authorsDomestication of horses fundamentally transformed long-range mobility and warfare. However, modern domesticated breeds do not descend from the earliest domestic horse lineage associated with archaeological evidence of bridling, milking and corralling at Botai, Central Asia around 3500 BC. Other longstanding candidate regions for horse domestication, such as Iberia and Anatolia, have also recently been challenged. Thus, the genetic, geographic and temporal origins of modern domestic horses have remained unknown. Here we pinpoint the Western Eurasian steppes, especially the lower Volga-Don region, as the homeland of modern domestic horses. Furthermore, we map the population changes accompanying domestication from 273 ancient horse genomes. This reveals that modern domestic horses ultimately replaced almost all other local populations as they expanded rapidly across Eurasia from about 2000 BC, synchronously with equestrian material culture, including Sintashta spoke-wheeled chariots. We find that equestrianism involved strong selection for critical locomotor and behavioural adaptations at the GSDMC and ZFPM1 genes. Our results reject the commonly held association between horseback riding and the massive expansion of Yamnaya steppe pastoralists into Europe around 3000 BC driving the spread of Indo-European languages. This contrasts with the scenario in Asia where Indo-Iranian languages, chariots and horses spread together, following the early second millennium BC Sintashta culture

The Kostenki 18 child burial and the cultural and funerary landscape of Mid Upper Palaeolithic European Russia

Palaeolithic burials are few and far between, and establishing their chronology is crucial to gaining a broader understanding of the period. A new programme of radiocarbon dating has provided a revised age estimate for the Palaeolithic burial at Kostënki 18 in European Russia (west of the Urals). This study reviews the need for redating the remains, and contextualises the age of the burial in relation to other Upper Palaeolithic funerary sites in Europe and Russia. The new date, obtained using a method that avoided the problems associated with previous samples conditioned with glue or other preservatives, is older than previous estimates, confirming Kostënki 18 as the only plausibly Gravettian burial known in Russia

Straight from the horse's mouth: High-resolution proxies for the study of horse diet and its relation to the seasonal occupation patterns at Divnogor'ye 9 (Middle Don, Central Russia)

International audienc

New data for the Early Upper Paleolithic of Kostenki (Russia)

International audienceSeveral questions remain regarding the timing and nature of the Neanderthal-anatomically modern human (AMH) transition in Europe. The situation in Eastern Europe is generally less clear due to the relatively few sites and a dearth of reliable radiocarbon dates. Claims have been made for both notably early AMH and notably late Neanderthal presence, as well as for early AMH (Aurignacian) dispersal into the region from Central/Western Europe. The Kostenki-Borshchevo complex (European Russia) of Early Upper Paleolithic (EUP) sites offers high-quality data to address these questions. Here we revise the chronology and cultural status of the key sites of Kostenki 17 and Kostenki 14. The Kostenki 17/II lithic assemblage shares important features with Proto-Aurignacian material, strengthening an association with AMHs. New radiocarbon dates for Kostenki 17/II of ~41–40 ka cal BP agree with new dates for the recently excavated Kostenki 14/IVw, which shows some similarities to Kostenki 17/II. Dates of ≥41 ka cal BP from other Kostenki sites cannot be linked to diagnostic archaeological material, and therefore cannot be argued to date AMH occupation. Kostenki 14’s Layer in Volcanic Ash assemblage, on the other hand, compares to Early Aurignacian material. New radiocarbon dates targeting diagnostic lithics date to 39–37 ka cal BP. Overall, Kostenki’s early EUP is in good agreement with the archaeological record further west. Our results are therefore consistent with models predicting interregional penecontemporaneity of diagnostic EUP assemblages. Most importantly, our work highlights ongoing challenges for reliably radiocarbon dating the period. Dates for Kostenki 14 agreed with the samples’ chronostratigraphic positions, but standard pre-treatment methods consistently produced incorrect ages for Kostenki 17/II. Extraction of hydroxyproline from bone collagen using prep-HPLC, however, yielded results consistent with the samples’ chronostratigraphic position and with the layer’s archaeological contents. This suggests that for some sites compound-specific techniques are required to build reliable radiocarbon chronologies

Glacial and post-glacial adaptations of hunter-gatherers: investigating the late Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic subsistence strategies in the southern steppe of Eastern Europe

Diverse landscapes and ecosystems stretching across Europe led to diverse hunter-gatherer cultural records during the Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic. In response to abrupt climatic forcing, starting around the Late Glacial Maximum and followed by climatic events such as the Bølling–Allerød and the Younger Dryas in the Terminal Pleistocene, archaeological data pertaining to cultural and behavioral shifts of hunter-gatherers continue to be explored on a regional and pan-regional scale. Here we present an initial summary, which includes new and published data on faunal analyses from multiple open air sites that span the Late Pleistocene to the Holocene, dated between the Late Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic (20,000–6000 uncal 14C BP) in the southern steppe of Eastern Europe. For this area, this is the first study to compile the cultural and faunal data with geo-referenced localization and radiometric dates of the archaeological sites. Taken together, faunal assemblages from the Epigravettian are characterized by low diversity and are often dominated by one species of large game, including bison and equids, whereas the Mesolithic diet is characterized by higher inter-site variability subsisting on large ungulate and greater emphasis on freshwater resources. This study contributes to the general knowledge concerning the last phases in the evolution of the Eurasian hunter-gatherers.</p