NON (sempre) UNA CULTURA EGALITARIA

I ricercatori di buon senso sanno che devono avere uno schema di riferimento, per non perdersi nel corso di ricerche talvolta totalizzanti. Ma sanno anche che detti schemi non possono e non devono essere mai considerati assoluti in modo rigido: si corre il rischio di avere una visione troppo cristallizzata degli ambienti umani che - lo si sa anche troppo bene - sono sempre in continua evoluzione. Secondo una ricercatrice spagnola (forse lei preferirebbe la definizione "basca"), è questo anche il caso della presunta 'uguaglianza assoluta' durante il neolitico. Dallo studio di alcuni resti umani (148 individui in totale) reperiti in strutture dolmeniche comunitarie (sette deposizioni megalitiche in totale), ha formulato l'ipotesi che tombe di così grande impegno fossero riservate solamente ad alcuni e con certezza non a tutti (sono esclusi bimbi al di sotto dei 5 anni, anziani e donne). E' ancora sotto indagine il criterio di esclusione. Si pensa che lo studio in corso (presso l'Oxford University) degli isotopi stabili dei resti potrà fornire ulteriori indizi.


Research challenges view that Neolithic societies 

were egalitarian 


The data obtained by Teresa Fernández-Crespo in seven megalithic graves in La Rioja and Araba-Álava suggest that certain individuals were excluded from burial on the basis of age and sex.

 A megalithic grave in La Cascaja (Rioja, Spain)

 [Credit: Vallenajerilla.com] 

The research Demographic evidence of selective burial in megalithic graves of northern Spain by Teresa Fernández-Crespo and Concepción de la Rúa of the Department of Genetics, Physical Anthropology and Animal Physiology of the UPV/EHU-University of the Basque Country challenges the widely-held view that societies were egalitarian during the late Neolithic and Chalcolithic ages.

This work, published in the leading Journal of Archaeological Science, comes from Fernández-Crespo's PhD thesis entitled Antropología y prácticas funerarias en las poblaciones neolíticas finales y calcolíticas de la región natural de La Rioja (Anthropology and funeral practices in late Neolithic and Chalcolithic populations in the natural region of La Rioja). 

The data obtained by Teresa Fernández-Crespo in seven megalithic graves in La Rioja and Araba-Álava suggest that certain individuals were excluded from burial on the basis of "criteria relating to age and possibly sex." 

So the existence of a funerary recruitment system that marginalised a considerable proportion of the population, according to the UPV/EHU researcher, could be pointing to the fact that the collective use of a shared burial area, which has often been understood as an egalitarian sign of megalithic societies, could in actual fact be masking the privileges of communities that were starting to become hierarchized. 

"In the article we propose that the people buried were intentionally selected. 

We do so by basing ourselves on the fact that the demographic composition of the megaliths displays significant anomalies with respect to a natural population of an ancient type. 
The bias identified, which almost systematically affects children under five, but certain adults as well, above all female ones, could be indicating that access to graves was restricted to those people who enjoyed certain rights and privileges only, against what is usually maintained in the traditional archaeological literature," says Teresa Fernandez-Crespo. 

The work signed by Teresa Fernández-Crespo and Concepción de la Rúa has studied seven dolmens: two of them located in a municipality of the current province of Araba-Álava (Alto de la Huesera and San Martín, both in Laguardia) and five in localities in the Autonomous Community (region) of La Rioja (La Cascaja in Peciña, Collado del Mallo in Trevijano, Peña Guerra II in Nalda, Collado Palomero I in Viguera and Fuente Morena in Montalvo de Cameros). 

The number of individuals found in these seven megalithic graves varies and ranges between less than ten (in the case of Fuente Morena, for example) and over a hundred subjects (in the case of Alto de la Huesera), making a total of 248.

 Isotope analysis  

With respect to the idea that the monuments were burial spaces reserved for a specific group of the population, one possible explanation, although not the only one, concludes Fernández-Crespo, could be related to the existence of different statuses within the population.

 "If we accept this hypothesis, it would be plausible that the remains of those who had a lower social position (and for that reason may not have met the access requirements to be included in the dolmens) were laid to rest in other burial structures the building and maintenance of which would require less effort, like, for example, natural caves, sheltered spaces under rock or pits. 

However, the current state of the research does not allow the refutation that other causes relating to the population or culture could account for this selection of those buried. In this respect, it is possible that the analysis of stable isotopes that we are currently carrying out at Oxford University on the skeletal remains from some of these graves could shed some light on the matter." 

Source: University of the Basque Country

 [April 30, 2015]

Archeoacustica

L'Archeoacustica è di diritto una branca speciale dell'Archeologia: ma non sempre i suoi 'sviluppi' hanno ricevuto il consenso generale.
Pensando a quanti appassionati autodidatti affollano il campo, sarebbe per lo meno strano che ancora nessuno si sia imbarcato con serio intento organizzativo e associativo nell'argomento dell'Archeoacustica... 
Infatti, lo hanno fatto, sia all'estero sia in Italia. (Ma - per quanto strano possa sembrare - il fenomeno non ha ancora interessato la Sardegna).



Ancient auditory illusions reflected in prehistoric art? 


Some of humankind's earliest and most mysterious artistic achievements -- including prehistoric cave paintings, canyon petroglyphs and megalithic structures such as Stonehenge -- may have been inspired by the behaviors of sound waves being misinterpreted as "supernatural." 

Prehistoric paintings of hoofed animals in a cave with thunderous reverberations located in Bhimbetka, India 

[Credit: S. Waller] 

During the 168th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), to be held October 27-31, 2014 at the Indianapolis Marriott Downtown Hotel, Steven J. Waller, of Rock Art Acoustics, will describe several ways virtual sound images and absorbers can appear supernatural. 

"Ancient mythology explained echoes from the mouths of caves as replies from spirits, so our ancestors may have made cave paintings in response to these echoes and their belief that echo spirits inhabited rocky places such as caves or canyons," explained Waller. 
Just as light reflection gives an illusion of seeing yourself duplicated in a mirror, sound waves reflecting off a surface are mathematically identical to sound waves emanating from a virtual sound source behind a reflecting plane such as a large cliff face. 
"This can result in an auditory illusion of somebody answering you from within the rock," Waller said. 
Echoes of clapping can sound similar to hoof beats, as Waller pointed out, while multiple echoes within a cavern can blur together into a thunderous reverberation that mimics the sound of a herd of stampeding hoofed animals. 
"Many ancient cultures attributed thunder in the sky to 'hoofed thunder gods,' so it makes sense that the reverberation within the caves was interpreted as thunder and inspired paintings of those same hoofed thunder gods on cave walls," said Waller. 
"This theory is supported by acoustic measurements, which show statistically significant correspondence between the rock art sites and locations with the strongest sound reflection." 
Other acoustical characteristics may have also been misinterpreted by ancient cultures unaware of sound wave theory. 

Waller noticed a resemblance between an interference pattern and Stonehenge, so he set up an interference pattern in an open field with just two flutes "droning the same note" to explore what it would sound like.

"The quiet regions of destructive sound wave cancellation, in which the high pressure from one flute cancelled the low pressure from the other flute, gave blindfolded subjects the illusion of a giant ring of rocks or 'pillars' casting acoustic shadows," Waller said. 
He traveled to England and demonstrated that Stonehenge does indeed radiate acoustic shadows that recreate the same pattern as interference.

"My theory that musical interference patterns served as blueprints for megalithic stone circles -- many of which are called Pipers' Stones -- is supported by ancient legends of two magic pipers who enticed maidens to dance in a circle and turned them all into stones," Waller noted.

There are several important implications of Waller's research. 
Perhaps most significantly, it demonstrates that acoustical phenomena were culturally significant to early humans -- leading to the immediate conclusion that the natural soundscapes of archaeological sites should be preserved in their natural state for further study and greater appreciation. 

"Even today, sensory input can be used to manipulate perception and lead to illusions inconsistent with scientific reality, which could have interesting practical applications for virtual reality and special effects in entertainment media," Waller said. 
"Objectivity is questionable, because a given set of data can be used to support multiple conclusions."

The history of humanity is full of such misinterpretations, such as the visual illusion that the sun moves around the earth.

"Sound, which is invisible and has complex properties, can easily lead to auditory illusions of the supernatural," he added. "This, in turn, leads to the more general question: what other illusions are we living under due to other phenomena that we are currently misinterpreting?" 

Presentation #2aAA11, "Virtual sound images and virtual sound absorbers misinterpreted as supernatural objects," by Stephen J. Waller will take place on Tuesday, October 28, 2014. 

The abstract can be found by searching for the presentation number here:

 https://asa2014fall.abstractcentral.com/planner.jsp 

Source: Acoustical Society of America [October 28, 2014]

Somiglianze genetiche

La saggezza popolare italiana esprime da sempre il medesimo concetto anche attraverso i suoi vari dialetti: "Nessuno si piglia, se non s'assomiglia". Il fenomeno è preferibilmente riferito alle coppie di sposi, ma la scienza sta dimostrando che  il principio resta valido anche nel modo in cui scegliamo gli amici.

Genome-wide analysis reveals 

genetic similarities among

 friends 

 If you consider your friends family, you may be on to something. 

A study from the University of California, San Diego, and Yale University finds that friends who are not biologically related still resemble each other genetically. 
Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study is coauthored by James Fowler, professor of medical genetics and political science at UC San Diego, and Nicholas Christakis, professor of sociology, evolutionary biology, and medicine at Yale.

 "Looking across the whole genome," Fowler said, "we find that, on average, we are genetically similar to our friends. 

We have more DNA in common with the people we pick as friends than we do with strangers in the same population." 
The study is a genome-wide analysis of nearly 1.5 million markers of gene variation, and relies on data from the Framingham Heart Study. The Framingham dataset is the largest the authors are aware of that contains both that level of genetic detail and information on who is friends with whom. 
The researchers focused on 1,932 unique subjects and compared pairs of unrelated friends against pairs of unrelated strangers. The same people, who were neither kin nor spouses, were used in both types of samples. The only thing that differed between them was their social relationship. The findings are not, the researchers say, an artifact of people's tendency to befriend those of similar ethnic backgrounds. 
The Framingham data is dominated by people of European extraction. 
While this is a drawback for some research, it may be advantageous to the study here: because all the subjects, friends and not, were drawn from the same population. The researchers also controlled for ancestry, they say, by using the most conservative techniques currently available. 
The observed genetic go beyond what you would expect to find among people of shared heritage - these results are "net of ancestry," Fowler said.

Kissing Cousins

How similar are friends? On average, Fowler and Christakis find, friends are as "related" as fourth cousins or people who share great-great-great grandparents. That translates to about 1 percent of our genes. "One percent may not sound like much to the layperson," Christakis said, "but to geneticists it is a significant number. And how remarkable: Most people don't even know who their fourth cousins are! Yet we are somehow, among a myriad of possibilities, managing to select as friends the people who resemble our kin." In the study, Fowler and Christakis also develop what they call a "friendship score," which they can use to predict who will be friends at about the same level of confidence that scientists currently have for predicting, on the basis of genes, a person's chances of obesity or schizophrenia. 
Friends With Benefits Shared attributes among friends or "functional kinship" can confer a variety of evolutionary advantages. In the simplest terms: If your friend feels cold when you do and builds a fire, you both benefit. It is also the case that some traits only work if your friend also has them, Fowler said: "The first mutant to speak needed someone else to speak to. The ability is useless if there's no one who shares it. These types of traits in people are a kind of social network effect." 
Beyond the average similarities across the whole genome, Fowler and Christakis looked in the study at focused sets of genes. 
They find that friends are most similar in genes affecting the sense of smell. 
The opposite holds for genes controlling immunity. That is, friends are relatively more dissimilar in their genetic protection against various diseases. 
The immunity finding supports what others have recently found in regards to spouses. And there is a fairly straightforward evolutionary advantage to this, Fowler and Christakis say: Having connections to people who are able to withstand different pathogens reduces interpersonal spread. 
But how it is that we select people for this benefit of immunity? The mechanism still remains unclear. 
Also open to debate and also needing further research is why we might be most similar in our olfactory genes. It could be, Fowler said, that our sense of smell draws us to similar environments. It is not hard to imagine that people who like the scent of coffee, for example, hang out at cafes more and so meet and befriend each other. But the researchers suspect there is more to the story than that. They note, too, that most likely there are several mechanisms, operating both in concert and in parallel, driving us to choose genetically similar friends. 

With a Little Help From our Friends 

Perhaps the most intriguing result in the study is that genes that were more similar between friends seem to be evolving faster than other genes. Fowler and Christakis say this may help to explain why human evolution appears to have speeded up over the last 30,000 years, and they suggest that the social environment itself is an evolutionary force. "The paper also lends support to the view of human beings as 'metagenomic,'" Christakis said, "not only with respect to the microbes within us but also to the people who surround us. It seems that our fitness depends not only on our own genetic constitutions, but also on the genetic constitutions of our friends." 


Author: Inga Kiderra | Source: University of California, San Diego [July 14, 2014]

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Cambiamento: veramente in meglio?

Sappiamo che anticamente l'uomo viveva "molto peggio": c'era meno  conoscenza in ogni campo, meno possibilità, meno libertà, meno piacere e contemporaneamente molto più 'dovere'. 
I nostri tempi evoluti e tecnologici vedono oggi atteggiamenti libertari e ampia libertà d'espressione, che permettono quasi indistintamente ogni tipo di pratica.

Homo Sapiens anticamente limitava determinate attività esclusivamente alla ricerca del 'contatto' con il Sacro e con la Medicina, (spesso identificate in un'unica Entità) per potere raggiungere condizioni migliori di benessere e di salute. Tra queste sono incluse pratiche oggi diffuse quali: tatuaggio, raggiungimento di stati alterati di coscienza a mezzo varie sostanze ed altro ancora... Va da sé, che -trattandosi di materia religiosa - tali pratiche erano misteriche e limitate a coloro che fossero degni di fare da 'ponte' tra l'umano e il divino (l'archeologia ne ha dimostrato la presenza solo nelle tombe di elite).

E' fuori discussione che - genericamente - oggi "si stia meglio" che nel Neolitico. 

Certi studi antropologici e archeologici - però - lasciano bene comprendere tra le righe che, forse, alcune pratiche oggi ritenute da alcuni 'moderna espressione d'avanguardia' e imprescindibile espressione di libertà ed indipendenza, al contrario moderne non siano affatto (anzi, sono antichissime) e possano essere anche discutibili da molti punti di vista (non escluso quello medico). 

Proprio come in quella vecchia barzelletta sul tatuaggio: "Vorrei conoscere il giapponese, per poter leggere quell'annuncio che dice: Rosticceria tipica - aperto ad agosto"...

The 'anthropology of intoxication' in prehistoric European societies 

Unlike most modern humans, the prehistoric people of Europe did not use mind-altering substances simply for their hedonistic pleasure. 

The use of alcohol and plant drugs -- such as opium poppies and hallucinogenic mushrooms -- was highly regulated and went hand-in-hand with the belief system and sacred burial rituals of many preindustrial societies. 
Elisa Guerra-Doce of the Universidad de Valladolid in Spain contends that their use was an integral part of prehistoric beliefs, and that these substances were believed to aid in communication with the spiritual world. 
Guerra-Doce's research appears in Springer's Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory. 

Rock painting of shaman in Moab, Utah [Credit: AncientOrigins] 

Despite the fact that the consumption of these substances is as ancient as human society itself, it is only fairly recently that researchers have started to look into the historical and cultural contexts in which mind-altering products were used in Europe.

 To add to the body of literature about the anthropology of intoxication in prehistoric European societies, Guerra-Doce systematically documented the cultural significance of consuming inebriating substances in these cultures.

In the research, four different types of archaeological documents were examined: 

1) the macrofossil remains of the leaves, fruits or seeds of psychoactive plants; 

2) residues suggestive of alcoholic beverages; 

3) psychoactive alkaloids found in archaeological artifacts and skeletal remains from prehistoric times; and 

4) artistic depictions of mood-altering plant species and drinking scenes. 

These remnants include 

- bits of the opium poppy in the teeth of a male adult in a Neolithic site in Spain,

-  charred Cannabis seeds in bowls found in Romania, 

- traces of barley beer on several ceramic vessels recovered in Iberia, and 

- abstract designs in the Italian Alps that depict the ritual use of hallucinogenic mushrooms.

Because Guerra-Doce mainly found traces of sensory-altering products in tombs and ceremonial places, she believes such substances are strongly linked to ritual usage. They were consumed in order to alter the usual state of consciousness, or even to achieve a trance state. The details of the rituals are still unclear, but the hypothesis is that the substances were either used in the course of mortuary rites, to provide sustenance for the deceased in their journey into the afterlife, or as a kind of tribute to the underworld deities. She adds that the right to use such substances may have been highly regulated given that they were a means to connect with the spirit world, and therefore played a sacred role among prehistoric European societies. "Far from being consumed for hedonistic purposes, drug plants and alcoholic drinks had a sacred role among prehistoric societies," says Guerra-Doce. "It is not surprising that most of the evidence derives from both elite burials and restricted ceremonial sites, suggesting the possibility that the consumption of mind-altering products was socially controlled in prehistoric Europe." 


Source: Springer [May 12, 2014]

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Lessico degli odori

Le lingue occidentali sono  carenti in vocaboli per descrivere gli odori. Basta farci caso: esse   
ricorrono a metafore, a similitudini e mancano di espressioni astratte dedicate agli aromi.

I linguisti dell'Istitutp Max-Plank hanno trovato che in una tribù di cacciatori- raccoglitori (in cui è molto più importante descrivere correttamente gli odori), esistono 15 differenti espressioni astratte riferite agli odori.
Tra i Maniq ed i Jahai tailandesi gli odori sono classificati secondo la loro piacevolezza e il loro grado di pericolosità, la loro capacità di calmare e di eccitare. 
In un ambiente più primitivo e naturale, gli odori sono di capitale importanza per ogni cosa, a partire dalla salute e passando per la possibilità di cacciare e quindi per la sopravvivenza in generale.
Negli ambienti occidentali - invece - gli odori hanno perso la loro importanza, tant'è che persino la frutta e la verdura si producono per l'aspetto e non per l'odore. 
Invece, in una società nella quale gli odori sono una componente centrale, la partecipazione psico-affettiva è molto più grande, tanto da proibire - addirittura - di parlare dei cattivi odori. 
C'è da chiedersi quanto abbiamo perduto.
Non si tratta solamente di avere la disponibilità, l'uso e sentire la necessità di alcuni vocaboli (come per la neve degli esquimesi, che è il fattore dominante nel loro ambiente).

Il Latino Classico aveva poco meno del doppio dei vocaboli per definire i Valori Morali: questo vuol dire che l'elemento morale non ci appartiene più.


An odour lexicon: 

Nomadic hunter-gatherers in Thailand

 have multiple words for smells 




"A sweet, flowery and oriental composition of scents with jasmine and May rose absolute" – this is how a well-known cosmetics manufacturer describes one of its most successful women's perfumes.
 A very sophisticated means of expression, one might think. 
Far from it: Western languages appear to lack vocabulary devoted to express the variety of existing smells. 
They rely on metaphors and similes. 

Odours play a central role in the everyday life of the Maniq. The langue researcher Ewelina Wnuk visited the Maniq over several years and compiled a lexicon of olfactory language of this hunter-gatherer tribe in the Thai tropical rainforest 
[Credit: © E. Wnuk] 

According to linguists at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen in the Netherlands, however, there are languages that have a specific vocabulary for odours. 

The Maniq, a group of hunter-gatherers in southern Thailand, can describe smells using at least 15 different abstract expressions. 
They categorise odours according to their pleasantness and dangerousness. 
The linguists' results show that human language is perfectly capable of expressing the variety of smells in our environment. 
This probably reflects how important a sense of smell was for survival over the course of human history, something that is greatly underestimated today. 
Faced with the choice of having to do without one of their five senses, most people consider the sense of smell dispensable. 

Many scientists believe that the sense of smell is a relic of evolution and attribute little importance to it. This belief is reflected in the fact that many languages do not have a dedicated repertoire for describing smells. 
Flowery, earthy, vanilla or musky – most languages in the Western world use objects that have particular smells as the basis for expressions to describe odours; they do not have abstract terms to describe the smells. 

On the other hand, in the world of colours, for example, words like red or green do not refer to specific objects. Other cultures clearly have more options for describing smells: the Maniq, for example, a population of a few hundred hunter-gatherers in southern Thailand, whose language has been largely unexplored. 
Two linguists, Ewelina Wnuk and Asifa Majid, have drawn up a list of 15 abstract terms that the Maniq use to describe odours – more than in almost any other known language. The expressions do not belong to a single word class. They include nouns and so-called stative verbs, the closest translation of which would be "smell like X, Y, Z, ...", e.g. "smell like a mushroom, old shelter, rotten wood, etc.". 

Unlike other languages, such as German or English, these expressions are not derived from one single specific object. Instead, the Maniq language contains terms that represent a smell that can originate from several sources. Thus, the Maniq have an expression for the smell of the sun, but the same expression also refers to the air or smoke coming from the sun. 
The word for the smell of an old shelter is also the same word used for the smell of mushrooms, the skin of a dead animal or drinking from a bamboo tube. "Their language encompasses a rich vocabulary with which they can describe smells. These terms express only smells and are not applicable across other sensory domains," explains Ewelina Wnuk, who visited the Maniq over several years in the Thai tropical rainforest and studied their olfactory language. 
According to the researchers' results, the Maniq lexicon of smells has a two-dimensional structure. Odours are differentiated along two dimensions: pleasantness and dangerousness. 

"It thus has a structure that is quite similar to the lexicon for expressions of feelings, in which a distinction is also made between pleasant/unpleasant and exciting/calming. 

This correlation probably expresses the close connection between smells and feelings," says Wnuk. The extensive vocabulary and structure of the lexicon indicates the importance of odours for the Maniq. 
They evaluate their surroundings through their nose; after all, in an environment that is still largely untouched by humans, they are surrounded by smells at all times. 
They use their sense of smell to identify animals that they can hunt, and to recognise objects or events, such as spoiled food, that can pose a danger. 
Odours are also very important to the Maniq from a medical perspective. 
Many of their medicinal herbs have an intense aroma, on which the healing success is based: the pleasant scent of the plant penetrates into the body and drives out disease.

Jewellery therefore frequently consists of necklaces, headbands and wristbands made of fragrant-smelling herbs. The Maniq also make sure that they are surrounded by positive smells and avoid negative odours. 
These findings are not only interesting for linguists, neuroscientists can also draw valuable conclusions from the information. The structure of the Maniq lexicon of smells could indicate, for example, that pleasant and dangerous smells are processed differently in the brain. 
In addition to Maniq, researchers have also analysed a second language – Jahai, spoken by a neighbouring hunter-gatherer population – in which odours also play a key role. It is certainly no coincidence that in both cases the languages are spoken by populations in tropical rainforest regions with a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, as smells are vital in order to survive in nature. 
"People in Western societies have demoted olfaction. Fruit and flowers, for example, are cultivated for their appearance, not their fragrance," says Asifa Majid, a professor at the Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen, who compares how different cultures express smells in their languages. 
It can even be an absolute taboo in some cases to talk about bad smells. 
"The world of odours was perhaps more significant earlier in human history, but today there do not appear to be any remnants of it in Western languages," says Majid. 
The study has been published in the jounal Cognition. 


Source: Max Planck Society 

[May 05, 2014]

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Effetto della prima agricoltura sull'umanità

Early agriculture had dramatic effects on 

humans

The introduction of agriculture in Europe was followed by regional population crashes despite trends of demographical growth, reports research published in Nature Communications this week. Sean Downey, assistant professor in the University of Maryland's Department of Anthropology, was co-author of the paper. The work suggests that these sharp population decreases weren't due to changing climatic conditions, and therefore the authors propose internal causes. The research represents a major revision to our understanding of how the introduction of agricultural technology impacted humans.

Map of Central and North Western Europe. Points indicate archaeological site locations and colours delineate the sub-regions used to estimate demographic patterns [Credit: Nature Communications/doi:10.1038/ncomms3486]

Stephen Shennan, professor of theoretical archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, received grant funding from the European Research Council to study early agriculture and its impact on populations across Europe. His multidisciplinary team of researchers includes co-author Downey, and Mark Thomas, Research Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment, University College London, who designed the statistical analysis necessary to produce the findings.

Agriculture was introduced in the Aegean (modern day Turkey) around 8,500 years ago and steadily spread across Europe, reaching France around 7,800 years ago, and Britain, Ireland and northern Europe approximately 6,000 years ago. In all instances, the introduction of agriculture meant a drastic change in food production and consumption patterns, which led to a population boom. Utilizing radiocarbon dating, and an innovative new method for improving the accuracy of this data, the study's authors examined how population levels changed over time across Europe during the late Mesolithic, ("Middle Stone age") and Early Neolithic ("New Stone age").

The research team discovered that, in all of the 12 different European regions studied, from the South of France to Scotland and Denmark, drastic population fluctuations can be observed. In fact, they note that in some cases population declines were as significant as 30-60 percent from the highest levels achieved after the introduction of agriculture. These dramatic changes in population are of similar scale to the decrease estimated for the much later "Black Death".

The authors found that those fluctuations cannot be associated with climatic factors; however, the exact reasons for this population decline remains unknown.

"It's striking that the development of agriculture – one of humanity's major evolutionary steps – failed to buffer against widespread social collapse during this early period of rapid population growth in Europe," explains Downey. "At this point in the research we can only speculate at the direct causes, but the study demonstrates that agriculture-based societies in the past were vulnerable to population collapse on a broad scale." Downey continues by explaining the study's finding: "There were no correlations between the collapse of regional populations and known climate shifts. It wasn't the climate, so we think it must have been the long-term impact new agricultural technologies had on local environments in reducing resources. The stress this caused among farmers was likely exacerbated by other well-known consequences of living in higher-density populations: increased incidence of social conflict and of disease."

Source: University of Maryland [October 01, 2013]