Why Rice Farmers Don't Sail: Coastal Subsistence Traditions and Maritime Trends in Early China

The Lower Yangtze River Valley is a key region for the early development of rice farming and the emergence of wet rice paddy field systems. Subsistence evidence from Neolithic sites in this area highlights the importance of freshwater wetlands for both plant and animal food resources. Early Neolithic rice cultivators looked inland, especially to wetlands and nearby woodlands, for their main protein sources. Links to the sea among these Neolithic populations are notably scarce. Due to the high yields of wet rice, compared with other staple crops as well as dryland rice, the wetland rice focused subsistence strategy of the Lower Yangtze would have supported high, and increasing, local population densities. Paddy agriculture demands labor input and water management on a large scale, which would have stimulated and reinforced trends towards more complex societies, such as that represented by Liangzhu in the lower Yangtze region. Population growth could have been largely absorbed locally, suggesting that population packing, not migration, was the dominant trend. Other case studies of agricultural dispersal, for the Korean Peninsula and Japan further illustrate the lack of correlation between the spread of rice agriculture and wet rice cultivation. Although wet rice cultivation was a pull factor that drew local populations towards increased density and increased social complexity, it did not apparently push groups to migrate outwards. Instead, the transition from wetland to rain fed rice cultivation systems and/or the integration of rice with rain fed millet crops are much more likely to have driven the demographic dynamics that underpin early farmer migrations and crop dispersal

The Oldest Case of Decapitation in the New World (Lapa do Santo, East-Central Brazil)

We present here evidence for an early Holocene case of decapitation in the New World (Burial 26), found in the rock shelter of Lapa do Santo in 2007. Lapa do Santo is an archaeological site located in the Lagoa Santa karst in east-central Brazil with evidence of human occupation dating as far back as 11.7-12.7 cal kyBP (95.4% interval). An ultra-filtered AMS age determination on a fragment of the sphenoid provided an age range of 9.1-9.4 cal kyBP (95.4% interval) for Burial 26. The interment was composed of an articulated cranium, mandible and first six cervical vertebrae. Cut marks with a v-shaped profile were observed in the mandible and sixth cervical vertebra. The right hand was amputated and laid over the left side of the face with distal phalanges pointing to the chin and the left hand was amputated and laid over the right side of the face with distal phalanges pointing to the forehead. Strontium analysis comparing Burial 26's isotopic signature to other specimens from Lapa do Santo suggests this was a local member of the group. Therefore, we suggest a ritualized decapitation instead of trophy-taking, testifying for the sophistication of mortuary rituals among hunter-gatherers in the Americas during the early Archaic period. In the apparent absence of wealth goods or elaborated architecture, Lapa do Santo's inhabitants seemed to use the human body to express their cosmological principles regarding death

ICAR: endoscopic skull‐base surgery

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An introduction to a class of matrix cone programming

10.1007/s10107-012-0619-7Mathematical Programming1441-2141-17