Latest news with #NeolithicRevolution
Metro
03-07-2025
- Science
- Metro
How one skeleton upended how historians view Ancient Egypt
A skeleton found in a 4,500-year-old ceramic pot has rewritten the history of Ancient Egypt. A DNA test on the man's bones has upended how historians could view the rise of Ancient Egyptian civilisation. The skeleton, found 165 miles south of Cairo at Nuwayrat, belongs to a 60-year-old potter who lived between 2855–2570 BC. However, researchers have revealed that a fifth of his DNA came from ancestors living 9,000 miles away in Mesopotamia, in modern-day Iraq. It is the first direct evidence that the two legendary cultures influenced each other through migration as far back as 10,000 years ago. Mesopotamia is the site of the earliest developments of the Neolithic Revolution from around 10,000 BC, when people began to farm and domesticate animals. This led to the formation of an agricultural society. Egyptologists had theorised that this revolution contributed to similar development in Egypt, with this DNA now proving their case. This is because it shows migration from West Asia towards Egypt, meaning information could have been passed on when migrants arrived at the Nile. This new information could explain how Egypt went from simple farming communities to becoming one of the most powerful civilisations on Earth. Adeline Morez Jacobs, who analysed the remains as part of her PhD at Liverpool John Moores University, told BBC News: 'You have two regions developing the first writing systems, so archaeologists believe that they were in contact and exchanging ideas. Now we have the evidence that they were. 'We hope that future DNA samples from Ancient Egypt can expand on when precisely this movement from West Asia started and its extent.' While researchers did caution that this study only considered the case of one man, who could have been an anomaly due to his high-status burial, they say their findings support other evidence that Mesopotamian culture had reached Egypt, likely through migration. Egypt specialists have unearthed a lot more information about this Egyptian potter than just his migrant heritage. Despite his job, his body was placed in a large pot inside a rock-cut tomb, usually reserved for the Egyptian upper class. This burial, which took place before mummification was the norm, likely helped preserve his DNA, which was taken from bone in his inner ear. He is predicted to have had brown eyes, brown hair and dark to black skin and was 5ft 2in (1.57m). The Nuwayrat man also lived to an advanced old age, with his worn teeth and osteoarthritis indicating he could have died as late as 64 years. Experts believe certain skeletal features point to his work as a potter, including an enlarged hook-shaped bone at the back of his skull, meaning he looked down a lot. Professor Joel Irish at Liverpool John Moores University said: 'He worked his tail off. He's worked his entire life. 'What I wanted to do was to find out who this guy was, learn as much about him as possible. What his age was, his stature was, what he did for a living and to try and personalise the whole thing rather than treat him as a cold specimen.' More Trending The Nuwayrat man's life also coincided with the beginning of the legendary Old Kingdom in Egypt's history, which witnessed the building of the 'Great Pyramid of Giza' by King Khufu. The ability of scientists to extract and read DNA from ancient bones could trigger a wave of discoveries about Ancient Egypt. Prof Pontus Skoglund at the Francis Crick Institute explained: 'If we get more DNA information and put it side by side with what we know from archaeological, cultural, and written information we have from the time, it will be very exciting.' It also allows experts to look at history from the perspective of ordinary people, through written records from rich and powerful people. Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@ For more stories like this, check our news page. MORE: Man stabbed through armour during historic re-enactment gone wrong MORE: Cabin crew calls on passengers to subdue air rage woman demanding upgrade MORE: Moment cargo ship crashes into Suez Canal port as workers flee
Yahoo
16-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
The Biggest Technological Development in Human History Happened All Across the World Around the Same Time, by Groups of People With Zero Contact With One Another
Around the world, on separate continents that had no contact with each other, multiple groups of ancient humans invented farming more or less simultaneously — and scientists still don't know how or why. Known to archaeologists and anthropologists as the Neolithic Revolution, the discovery of this historical head-scratcher is by no means new. Nevertheless, it continues to fascinate folks like Michael Marshall, an author at New Scientist who pondered this phenomenon in a new piece about this quantum leap in human development. As a 2023 PNAS paper cited by Marshall suggests, the things scientists do know about this incredible happenstance are what make it so captivating. After the great ice sheets age of the Pleistocene Epoch began to retreat about 11,700 years ago, humans who had gradually migrated to at least four continents — Africa, Eurasia, and North and South America — moved from hunting and gathering to domesticating plants. In as many as 24 separate sites of origin, the paper explained, people began farming within a few thousand years of each other, with no means of contact between them. Across scientific disciplines, researchers have long been trying to figure out why this leap in evolutionary behavior occurred with so many groups simultaneously. Anthropologist Melinda Zeder, the senior scientist emeritus at the Smithsonian Institute, told PNAS in 2023 that some of her colleagues even argue that humans may have been "tricked into it by plants" — but still, there's nothing near consensus about why, exactly, our ancestors all picked up farming around the same time. In his more recent musings, Marshall, the New Scientist writer, pointed out that agriculture may have emerged as a response to any number of external factors: food shortages, climate change, or even sociopolitical reasons as evidenced by research suggesting that a rudimentary form of property rights may have begun around the same time that farming emerged. He then went on to hypothesize something that hasn't been studied outright before: that Neanderthals, or any other early hominin groups, may have "tried their hands at gardening, if only in a small way." "If they were lacking some crucial cognitive or physical capability to enable gardening, I'm not sure what it was," Marshall wrote. "And if they did enjoy tending their own small gardens, that would have given our species a head start on creating full-blown farms." Even if Neanderthals did make early attempts at agriculture, however, it wouldn't explain why subsequent evolutionary groups wouldn't have immediately followed suit, or why there was suddenly a global explosion of farming activity more than 100,00 years after the first known deforestation projects took place in modern-day Germany. Like many worthwhile mysteries, this one doesn't have a neatly-packaged answer — and unless something unprecedented about our ancestors' agricultural practices is uncovered, it may never be explained at all. More on our origins: Something Mysterious Swept Over Our Entire Solar System, Scientists Say
