An infant burial from Arma Veirana in northwestern Italy provides insights into funerary practices and female personhood in early Mesolithic Europe

The evolution and development of human mortuary behaviors is of enormous cultural significance. Here we report a richly-decorated young infant burial (AVH-1) from Arma Veirana (Liguria, northwestern Italy) that is directly dated to 10,211–9910 cal BP (95.4% probability), placing it within the early Holocene and therefore attributable to the early Mesolithic, a cultural period from which well-documented burials are exceedingly rare. Virtual dental histology, proteomics, and aDNA indicate that the infant was a 40–50 days old female. Associated artifacts indicate significant material and emotional investment in the child’s interment. The detailed biological profile of AVH-1 establishes the child as the earliest European near-neonate documented to be female. The Arma Veirana burial thus provides insight into sex/gender-based social status, funerary treatment, and the attribution of personhood to the youngest individuals among prehistoric hunter-gatherer groups and adds substantially to the scant data on mortuary practices from an important period in prehistory shortly following the end of the last Ice Age

Agent-based least-cost path analysis and the diffusion of Cantabrian Lower Magdalenian engraved scapulae

At the root of numerous archaeological research projects is a need to understand how mobility impacted the lives of our ancestors. Recent technological advances have made it easy for archaeologists to rely on Geographic Information Systems’ least-cost path tools to identify the single easiest path to move between two points set in a realistically rugged landscape; however, least-cost path tools work on the assumption that the whole world is perfectly known, which does not represent human mobility accurately in all cases. Here, we present an agent-based least-cost path (AB-LCP) model, which does not make the assumption of complete landscape knowledge, and allows creating multiple anisotropic least-cost paths that take the traveler’s local perspective and incomplete knowledge into consideration. We demonstrate the model’s potential through a case study of the geographical distribution of Cantabrian (Spain) Lower Magdalenian engraved scapulae, which provides an interesting extension to current understanding of Magdalenian mobility, showcasing the flexibility and potential of this new LCP tool to study archaeological landscapes. The results of our study suggest that the studied engraved scapulae may have been created at El Castillo, and then brought to Altamira for transmission to other sites. The results show that El Castillo was strategically located on a bottleneck for coastal-to-plain mobility, whereas Altamira was located along social paths connecting other contemporaneous sites. This supports the already-accepted notion that both sites may have served for Upper Paleolithic population aggregation. However, our research builds on this idea by explaining why these two sites would have become so important. We suggest that Altamira was strategically placed near the boundary of inter-regional groups, thus taking the role as an aggregation site for unrelated populations, whereas El Castillo would have been used by the intra-regional group population to congregate during the summer and take advantage of the local mosaic of resources

Data and Scripts for A Description and Sensitivity Analysis of the ArchMatNet Agent-based Model

Supplemental information for the paper A Description and Sensitivity Analysis of the ArchMatNet Agent-based Mode

Supplemental Material for Evaluating the Effects of Randomness on Missing Data in Archaeological Networks

Raw data and R code for the paper "Evaluating the Effects of Randomness on Missing Data in Archaeological Networks

Paleoscape shellfish discard

This project uses a modified version of the PaleoscapeABM to document where and how much shellfish likely got discarded in the prehistory of South Africa

Human remains from Arma di Nasino (Liguria) provide novel insights into the paleoecology of early Holocene foragers in northwestern Italy

We report the discovery and analysis of new Mesolithic human remains—dated to ca. 10,200–9000 cal. BP—from Arma di Nasino in Liguria, northwestern Italy, an area rich in Upper Paleolithic and Neolithic attestations, but for which little information on Early Holocene occupation was available. The multi-proxy isotopic profile of the two individuals reveals that—despite the proximity of the site to the Mediterranean seashore and the use of shellfish as decorative elements in burials—the ecology of these foragers was based on the exploitation of high-altitude resources, presumably in the nearby western Alps. This constitutes the first direct evidence in northwestern Italy of a significant ecological shift towards higher altitudes following deglaciation, especially when compared to isotopic data of the Late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers from the nearby site of Arene Candide Cave, who exploited terrestrial resources nearer to the coast and at lower altitudes. While the biochemistry of Nasino’s skeletal assemblage revealed new details on Early Holocene lifeways in the area, the osteobiography of one individual offers glimpses into the life experience of a specific female forager, depicting a scenario of early skeletal trauma, developmental disturbances, long-term impairments, and resilience amongst the last European hunter-gatherers.</p

Human remains from Arma di Nasino (Liguria) provide novel insights into the paleoecology of early Holocene foragers in northwestern Italy

We report the discovery and analysis of new Mesolithic human remains—dated to ca. 10,200–9000 cal. BP—from Arma di Nasino in Liguria, northwestern Italy, an area rich in Upper Paleolithic and Neolithic attestations, but for which little information on Early Holocene occupation was available. The multi-proxy isotopic profile of the two individuals reveals that—despite the proximity of the site to the Mediterranean seashore and the use of shellfish as decorative elements in burials—the ecology of these foragers was based on the exploitation of high-altitude resources, presumably in the nearby western Alps. This constitutes the first direct evidence in northwestern Italy of a significant ecological shift towards higher altitudes following deglaciation, especially when compared to isotopic data of the Late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers from the nearby site of Arene Candide Cave, who exploited terrestrial resources nearer to the coast and at lower altitudes. While the biochemistry of Nasino’s skeletal assemblage revealed new details on Early Holocene lifeways in the area, the osteobiography of one individual offers glimpses into the life experience of a specific female forager, depicting a scenario of early skeletal trauma, developmental disturbances, long-term impairments, and resilience amongst the last European hunter-gatherers.</p

Understanding hunter–gatherer cultural evolution needs network thinking

Hunter–gatherers past and present live in complex societies, and the structure of these can be assessed using social networks. We outline how the integration of new evidence from cultural evolution experiments, computer simulations, ethnography, and archaeology open new research horizons to understand the role of social networks in cultural evolution.This research has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC-CoG-2015) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (grant agreement no. 683018) to J.F.-L.d.P. Additionally, F.R. acknowledges support from the European Research Council (ERC-CoG-2018, grant agreement no. 817564), S.L. acknowledges suport from Generalitat de Catalunya through the grant no. 2017 SGR 1466 , M.D. acknowledges IAST funding from the French National Research Agency (ANR) under grant no. ANR-17-EURE-0010 (Investissements d'Avenir programme), and J.F.-L.d.P. acknowledges the CIDEGENT programme of Generalitat Valenciana (reference no. 2018/040)

Human remains from Arma di Nasino (Liguria) provide novel insights into the paleoecology of early Holocene foragers in northwestern Italy

We report the discovery and analysis of new Mesolithic human remains—dated to ca. 10,200–9000 cal. BP—from Arma di Nasino in Liguria, northwestern Italy, an area rich in Upper Paleolithic and Neolithic attestations, but for which little information on Early Holocene occupation was available. The multi-proxy isotopic profile of the two individuals reveals that—despite the proximity of the site to the Mediterranean seashore and the use of shellfish as decorative elements in burials—the ecology of these foragers was based on the exploitation of high-altitude resources, presumably in the nearby western Alps. This constitutes the first direct evidence in northwestern Italy of a significant ecological shift towards higher altitudes following deglaciation, especially when compared to isotopic data of the Late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers from the nearby site of Arene Candide Cave, who exploited terrestrial resources nearer to the coast and at lower altitudes. While the biochemistry of Nasino’s skeletal assemblage revealed new details on Early Holocene lifeways in the area, the osteobiography of one individual offers glimpses into the life experience of a specific female forager, depicting a scenario of early skeletal trauma, developmental disturbances, long-term impairments, and resilience amongst the last European hunter-gatherers

New human remains from the Late Epigravettian necropolis of Arene Candide (Liguria, northwestern Italy): Direct radiocarbon evidence and inferences on the funerary use of the cave during the Younger Dryas

International audienc