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Prehistoric Cannibalism?! - TAS 294
475 Plays8 days ago
On today’s show we talk about three recent news stories including prehistoric cannibalism in Poland, a WWI era German soldier buried in a 2000 year old Roman villa, and a cutting edge new technology where the mitochondrial DNA of soil is analyzed in Spain.
Links
- Brain-eating cannibalistic community lived in Poland cave 18,000 years ago, bones show
- Archaeologists discover Roman villa in France — then unearth soldier’s wedding ring
- New DNA research examines predecessors of Red Lady of El Mirón
Transcripts
- For rough transcripts head over to https://archpodnet.com/archaeology/294
Contact
- Chris Webster
chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com - Rachel Roden
rachel@unraveleddesigns.com
RachelUnraveled (Instagram)
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Transcript
Introduction and Episode Overview
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. You're listening to The Archaeology Show. TAS goes behind the headlines to bring you the real stories about archaeology and the history around us. Welcome to the podcast.
00:00:16
Speaker
Hello and welcome to The Archaeology Show, Episode 294. On today's show, we talk about prehistoric cannibalism, allegedly. A German soldier in a Roman villa and sedimentary DNA analysis in Spain. Let's dig a little deeper into those tasty bits. Brains. Brains.
00:00:42
Speaker
Welcome to The Archaeology Show.
Prehistoric Cannibalism in Poland
00:00:45
Speaker
Hello. Tacos. This is the archaeology taco show? It is. It's actually not, though. I know. We're just living in Mexico right now. So tacos are on the brain. They are always on the brain here, because it's like, when will I get my next taco? Yes.
00:01:02
Speaker
It's not today, which is kind of sad. Maybe tomorrow. Tomorrow's taco day. It's good tacos. Yeah. You know who didn't get tacos? Maybe they made tacos. We don't know. They didn't get tacos and they were super mad about it. So they just started eating people.
00:01:18
Speaker
all right so Allegedly. Can we just put a big allegedly on this, please? Polish cannibals. yeah i like I like how they got into it and were like, was this ritual? Let's take another look. all right so Anyway, what are we talking about? so Brain eating cannibalistic community lived in Poland Cave 18,000 years ago, Bones Show. and This particular article I'm linking to is from Miami Herald, but it was actually linked in a number of different places, so know go find your favorite. yeah
00:01:49
Speaker
But basically, in prehistoric Europe, the Magdalenian culture, which is about 18,000 years ago, this culture was for many thousands of years. You'll hear about the Magdalenians. They were known for their tool making and rock art left behind on cave walls and rocky outcrops. And they lived for thousands of years in what would become Europe and hunted large game. They also lived together in substantial rock structures in a growing populations.
00:02:16
Speaker
Yeah, and one of these caves that they lived together in was excavated in the 1990s in Poland. And it dates to 18,000 years ago, like you said. And it is called, and you set me up for this note on purpose, didn't you? So I would have to say it. Have fun with all the consonants.
00:02:34
Speaker
mess messy i don't know ma zika Let's go with Mazika. It's probably it's something like Mashika Cave. yeah probably yeah Anyway, it's M-A-S-Z-Y-C-K-A Cave. And they have new research, which they're saying conclusively shows that the people there were cannibals.
00:02:57
Speaker
so 30 years ago when they excavated, archaeologists didn't actually notice cut marks on the human remains that they found made by tools. right because there're i so I feel like I have to say made by tools because they didn't actually get into this in the article and they probably talk about this in the research. but Made by tools is a significant phrase because cut marks made by animals different are different. Those are bite marks as opposed to like sawing or slicing. You can tell the difference because they're generally U-shaped when they're animals because that's how your teeth look and when they're V-shaped, they're generally tools. Right, something sharp yeah to actually make a cutting motion, right a sawing motion, that kind of thing.
00:03:38
Speaker
And you don't generally jump straight to cannibalism when you hear about that? No. Because it could be other things. It could be other things. And initial conclusions did point to cannibalism. Right, cut marks on human bones. Exactly, because like what else are you going to do? But other analysis, later analysis, refuted this, saying the marks could have been to prepare bodies for burial and also to make ceremonial items out of the bones. yeah And this is so interesting that this article is what we're talking about because one of the articles in the third segment, it happens to be from the same time period. And they legitimately talked about how doing things to the body after somebody died was part of like funerary practices for some of these cultures. So yeah.
00:04:21
Speaker
Yeah, not uncommon. Not, it's not uncommon for them. it It sounds weird to our modern brains, but yeah, they could have been like cutting off fingers to yeah turn into jewelry or like do whatever, you know, there's lots of different things they could have been doing. But I'm just saying, of course somebody had a problem with capitalism and was like, it was probably ritual instead.
00:04:40
Speaker
Well, we just don't want to think that people are our ancestors. These are our ancestors. A lot of us descended from the people who engaged in this behavior. I literally just read a book about the sailors on the which boat was that the one that basically The one that basically spawned Moby Dick. Oh, right. Where, you know, cannibalism. And we've got, you know, Brazilian soccer teams, or not Brazilian, was it Argentinian soccer team? I don't know, they crashed down in the Andes. Yeah. I mean, cannibalism happens, right? And it's not uncommon for it to happen way back then. Yeah. So anyway. I feel like it's more common with like a prehistoric population
Debating Cannibalism vs Rituals
00:05:20
Speaker
well because survival was more difficult yeah back then, right? Yeah. So, yeah.
00:05:27
Speaker
Anyway, so this recent study wanted to find out pretty much for sure what was going on here. So they reanalyzed the bones, and they included some more recent finds that weren't in the original analysis. So they didn't really get into this article what more recent meant, whether that was a few years after the excavation or much more recently. But it doesn't matter. They're part of the same part of the same collection. right So they were looking at these for, I guess,
00:05:53
Speaker
Some more, they they originally said they were looking at these for, I guess, from from some more reasons for why cannibalism could be, you know, the case because you don't just eat people, you know, unless it's virtual. yeah But otherwise you don't just eat people typically. Typically. Yeah. But it turns out the cut marks.
00:06:09
Speaker
if you just kind of look at where the cut marks were and what parts of the bones they were on and which bones they were on, were aimed at the most nutritious parts of the bodies and not really the more ceremonial cutaway parts of the bodies, right? From other sites where you know it is ritual and they're doing ceremonial cuttings, they're trying to cut a body in a certain way, these were literally cut and aimed at the nutritious parts of a body and to get at the the tasty bits.
00:06:38
Speaker
I hear it. I hear you. And i I understand where they're coming from. Maybe it's my modern brain just saying that it's unlikely that people would eat people. But but I'm like, if they had a ceremonial reason or a ritualistic reason that they wanted to cut apart their dead loved ones,
00:07:02
Speaker
And they already know how to butcher animals because they're doing it to eat the animals, right? Yeah. Why would they cut differently into a human than they do into an animal, even though the end result is different? Like they were going for, they were cutting for ritualistic reasons into the human, but they were still using the techniques that they know because of the way they butcher animals to eat them.
00:07:30
Speaker
Well, yeah, they're using those techniques, but when they butchered an animal, too, they would butcher animals to get to the tasty bits. Well, yeah, which is why it's why we know how to do it. That's why I'm i'm wondering.
00:07:42
Speaker
if they butchered in the same way a human to get to a specific bone that they wanted or a piece of bone, maybe it was just they needed, it who knows? Who knows why they were doing it? Well, in the article they mentioned, for for example, they completely ignored feet, hands, things like that. There's just no good consumable material on them, right? But in other ceremonial circumstances, fingers and toes and things like that have been shown to be of ceremonial importance. That's true. That is true. yeah And they're easy, small bones that you know can be turned into whatever they might want them to be. So I get that. But I guess I'm just really struggling with this because they don't have actual evidence of humans eating people. They just have evidence of humans cutting other humans.
00:08:30
Speaker
similarly to the way that they would cut an animal for butchering and eating. And I'm like, that similarity could be ah could be for a reason that isn't cannibalism. that's all i'm that's That's the part I'm struggling with. I think what they're matching this up with is that we have a lot of evidence of cannibalism and we have a lot of evidence of the ceremonial mutilation of bodies or mortuary practices of bodies across the world all the way up until now from societies all over the place right cultures all over the place and they're just using but cannibalism is fairly rare I thought
00:09:04
Speaker
rare Rare now, yeah, sure. Not even now, but back then, too. Well, that not according to the article. It was less rare in prehistoric times. Less rare. Less rare, for sure. Anyway. yeah But either way, we have enough have enough empirical evidence of how it was done. It doesn't matter how rare it is. I mean, when you look at the whole of human history, you know how it's done. You know where the tasty bits are. Yeah. And you know you know how to get to it. And when you look at ah a ceremonial,
00:09:33
Speaker
mortuary practices, especially of the Magdalenian cultures, and they have lots of examples of it, it's just different. you know It's just different. It's just really hard for me to get there. It's because you don't want to eat people. I know. Maybe that's it. It's my modern bias. but But yeah, I get it.
Reasons for Prehistoric Cannibalism
00:09:50
Speaker
Well anyway, more than half or 68% of the bones showed evidence of human manipulation. They used 3D microscopy, which is super cool, to make a map of the cuts and found that many ah were indicative of the removal of muscle bundles, the brain, and marrow from inside from insides of the bones. Yeah, that that kind of evidence is really hard to argue with, because like even for a ritualistic purpose, why would you be taking the marrow out of the inside of a bone? you know like and so
00:10:22
Speaker
Removing the brain is fine because they might want the skull for some reason, for some ritualistic reason, but yeah, the marrow. The marrow is is the one that makes me go, okay, well, maybe it was cannibalism. Well, another thing leading towards it, too, is cuts from they can tell that cuts were made shortly after death suggesting they didn't want to wait for decomposition. They didn't wait some graceful period of time. It wasn't like a lay the body out, let the right let nature take its course and then come back. yeah This dude's fresh. yeah Let's eat him now. yeah were Probably. I mean, they got into the wise a little bit, like, you know, the starving piece, right? Yeah. When you're starving, you do crazy things. So yeah.
00:10:59
Speaker
so The biggest issue here, as we were just discussing, is differentiating between butchering related to consumption and other types of preparation related to mortuary practices. That's what they were trying to figure out. so But when they're targeting tasty bits, it seems clear. so so horrible That's horrible. So why eat people? If we think they were targeting tasty bits, why eat people? What could have been the possible reasons? And we've talked about this, but it could have been a means of survival, having that reason rather than symbolic or ritualistic. And cannibalism, they do mention in this time period, was more common in prehistoric contexts than now, obviously, yeah or later contexts.
00:11:37
Speaker
Yeah. and And that makes sense. There's less of the social stigma against it. Obviously there's obviously none of the science about why you shouldn't do it. So yeah, I guess when people are starving, you know, they will do crazy things even back then.
00:11:53
Speaker
Yeah, and they did say that there were competition for resources and people fighting, and it wasn't too uncommon for them to just, you know, hey, we need food, so you're dead now, you're tasty.
Discovering a Roman Villa in France
00:12:08
Speaker
So we're gonna eat you. Like we got into a conflict and now there's all these dead bodies. We're gonna eat the enemy. Yeah, so I think there was just, it seemed like in this,
00:12:16
Speaker
you know cave people type society, there was just less reverence on the human body. The human body, right. Yeah, it was still seen more as a ah resource. do you know And and you know we we killed you, therefore you're no longer important to the world and you're food now. Yeah, well it is really interesting But i do I do think it's important to point out that this is just one site in one place. yeah So I don't think that this was like a ah widespread practice because we have sites that are this age all across Europe and you don't see this behavior at all of them. So it does seem like some kind of extreme circumstance pushed them to this point.
00:13:01
Speaker
whether it was starvation or resource competition, conflict with another group, whatever it was. Maybe it really was a ritual, but a different kind of ritual in that they had a conflict with another group and they won. And as part of finishing the winning, they have to eat their enemies as possible, right? Well, it seems like cannibalism throughout human history has always been an extreme circumstance. Nobody's ever In my knowledge, nobody's ever bred humans for eating. I don't think so. you know like that would
00:13:36
Speaker
That'd be something. that would be That would be something. It's always been some sort of extreme circumstance, right? for sure Some sort of thing that said, hey, we're not you know we're not just messing around here. so yeah Anyway. Very interesting. Yeah. All right, well, now we are going to go check out a 1,500-year-old Roman villa in France where they found a time traveler's wedding ring. All right, back in a minute.
00:14:02
Speaker
Welcome back to Episode 294 of The Archaeology Show. We sounded very but unsure. ah That's because I've incorrectly numbered it. on my i'm just no I'm just noticing that. Oh, on Audition, you incorrectly did it? Yeah. Oh, well. That happens. Well, now I know it's an 84. And you guys do too. But you did already because you've already heard the intro. I have not. Yep, that's true. We do the intro last. That's a little piece of recording trivia that maybe yeah people don't know. Yeah, we always do it last.
00:14:37
Speaker
Incidentally, another little piece of recording inside info, which shouldn't be that inside because otherwise nobody'd know about it. Right. If you're on our Discord server, which you can get there for free and you can find that on the link tree, you can find it on our website too. I'm actually not sure where. I'll have to, I think I don't...
00:14:56
Speaker
I think it's in the show notes, too, for each episode. Oh, it might be in the show notes, yeah. But I know it's on the link tree on our Instagram, our PodNet, too. so yeah But anyway, it's free, and there's a little bit of a process to sign up. like You have to give them your phone number. That's just a Discord thing, because we were getting some bots in there, so we needed a verification process. but Anyway, hopefully you can get in but it's free and it's just a bunch of rooms over there We can talk about the podcast things like that go join. You don't have to be a member But I'm telling you this because there's live rooms over there what rooms with video and we are Down on a beach in Mexico and we're actually gonna do a live recording of this show a live presentation of this show with
00:15:35
Speaker
people from are our RVing friends yes in in attendance. When worlds collide. When worlds collide. yeah I don't know what's going to happen. RV friends, podcasts, live with archeology friends. It's going to be great. It's on the 22nd of February and it's at 10 a.m. Mountain Standard Time.
00:15:55
Speaker
So figure that out. Yeah. Whatever that means for you. Yeah. Yeah. So mountain standard time in the United States. And that's just so it's at a decent time, basically in the United States in the UK. Sorry, Australia. Yeah. I don't know what that means for you. It's garbage for you, probably. Yeah, probably in the middle of the night. But yeah. Yeah. So anyway, hopefully they haven't played Beardarts yet by then. It's pretty early. It's early for Beardarts. If you don't know what Beardarts is, go look it up. Yeah. I don't know if you can even find that on the internet. But Beardarts is a shocking, shocking game.
00:16:25
Speaker
that we don't play, by the way, because we're not in college. We said we don't play. No, we do not. One of us played once. And we'll never play again. Anyway, so. It should be fun, though. So we're in Mexico, obviously. And while we do talk about Mexican prehistory, somewhat often on here it kind of tends to focus on the big cultures and so what we're gonna try to do is deep dive into the area that we're in actually and maybe Baja a little bit because we're sort of connected to we're Baja Sonora area. Yeah the state Sonora that we're in now. Yeah so I think we're gonna focus there and just like see what kind of cool archaeology stuff we can find out about this area so that's the plan. Yeah, there's a lot of cool stuff here, because we're literally right next to Arizona, and the history is going to be extremely similar. Very similar. Because those people didn't know that it was Mexico and the United States. Nope, they didn't have any country boundaries. They had no idea. They just sort of went where the resources were. Yeah, they were all over the place, so very similar, I'm sure. Yep, should be fun. Okay, so time travel in France. Let's talk about it. Are we going with time travel here? We are. OK. All right. We are. Go ahead. And you only find that out at the very end of the article that I'm linking to here. Are you linking to the Miami Herald again? Apparently. I don't know how that even happened. You got some love for Miami Herald today. Ugh. Gross. Anyway.
00:17:43
Speaker
So archaeologists discover a Roman villa in France then unearth soldiers wedding ring. Yeah, so all right The timeline there is not exactly right. Yeah, that is a little bit misleading because it's not a soldier from Somewhere or some time that you would expect but hence the heads to time travel references And they also weren't digging, and then all of a sudden uncovered a soldier's ring. There's like decades separating these things. so Because they were digging that for a long time. yeah Yeah, different time periods. But anyway, aerial surveys in the 1970s originally revealed stone structures below the surface in, I don't know how to pronounce it, Soissons? Soissons? Soissons in northern France. Yeah.
00:18:23
Speaker
And the site has a high level of preservation since it's at the bottom of a slope near a river and near the edge of an important ancient road. yeah So you've got good preservation and also a place where people were, lots of people were over time.
00:18:38
Speaker
It turns out the stones belong to a villa, a Roman villa, dating to about 1,500 years ago, and is near the Gaelic city of Augusta Suisunum.
00:18:49
Speaker
Suisunum? Suisunum, yeah. Suisunum, I don't know. yeah That was captured by Caesar in 30 BC and was occupied by the Romans until the sixth century. Oh, though that's kind of a long time, yeah. yeah so The villa is in a classic layout with a 260 foot long boundary wall of limestone. And that surrounds an internal like courtyard area, which by the way is like house goals for me. I want an internal courtyard. Can you put that on the list for like someday when we want to like give up this RV gig? Okay, cool. I think we could make that happen in the RV. If we just make these slides open into like an internal
00:19:26
Speaker
ah like make the roof open a little bit. so Oh, you want to just like pop this like paneling out of the ceiling and i'll tell you what make it a big skylight? It's sort of a dream for that whole roof to open. It's useless, really. i mean Except for our solar panels that are up there. Wow, we do need this. Anyway, the buildings were well constructed and showed signs of reinforcement over time, so that's kind of cool. yeah The villa was used for housing and agriculture and held items like axes. I said gouges, which I'm not really sure what gouges are. on know this Is this like a plow thing or what? but Yeah, maybe some kind of farming equipment. It also said hippo sandal, which I'm not sure if that was...
00:20:04
Speaker
I'm not sure if that was like a plant or something or what, or some sort of deal. To protect horse hooves, it says specifically. Yeah, it does. They also found coins and slag. Slag is a byproduct of metalworking. I mean, all that was found throughout the property. So cool. People living here, growing crops and stuff. Makes sense.
00:20:23
Speaker
They also found what they called, in archeological terms, combustion structures, which is a so fancy term for ovens and a forge. Right. And then the slag, so if that makes sense. right yeah And even older network of ditches was uncovered, but that didn't have many artifacts in it. so yeah yeah So then right at the end of the article, you find out that also, later on, recently actually, a grave with human remains was found at the site. the person didn't seem that old. They still had shoes and clothing buttons present in their burial. So it's not like all their clothes were there, but they had their shoes on. They had buttons, right? Stuff that would not be present if it was a Roman era burial. Right. Especially if you saw the shoes, you've been in like, those aren't sandals. Yes, that's not what they were. Right. It was a man and he was carrying a silver cross rosary. Another thing you probably wouldn't find in a Roman barrel. A pocket mirror. Nope, definitely wouldn't find that. Paper, coins, a comb. And now I'm reading this and just listening to these things out. yes It literally said a Swiss army knife. yeah
00:21:26
Speaker
and scissors. And I'm like, okay, so the article is going to continue and say some sort of, like, this is the Swiss army knife of the Roman Legion. No, it's legit a Swiss army knife. No, like an actual Swiss army knife. So I'm like, what the hell is going on here? And he was also wearing a wedding ring. And the ring was inscribed with his wedding date of December 25th, 1908.
Mystery of the German Soldier's Grave
00:21:46
Speaker
getting married on Christmas. That is a choice. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, why are you guys celebrating Christmas? It's my wedding day. Yeah. Yeah. So it turns out because they also found an ID placard on him, which all good burials should have. I know. Right. Thank you for that. Right. But like, but by that, did they mean like dog tags or like the German equivalent of dog tags? I think they meant something like that. Oh, sorry. I kind of just spoiled the surprise, but it was a German soldier from World War I who was buried there. So it was just, I think, a stroke of coincidence that he was buried pretty much at a Roman villa. Yeah.
00:22:24
Speaker
You could drop a shovel pretty much anywhere in that area and kind of find a Roman villa. But I don't know. Anyway, yeah, it was just nobody. Nobody knew that was there when he was buried there in World War One. Do you think that maybe there's a chance people knew that there was something there Structures there, and either they've been buried since then. It's 100 years, 100 plus years, so yeah they could have been visible on the surface, and so maybe it was on purpose in some sort of protected way. I don't know. It's also weird to me that, I mean, that's possible, but it's also weird to me that like one soldier was buried there in World War I. What was his story? I know. They're trying to track him down. They're trying to figure out if he's got any modern descendants.
00:23:03
Speaker
What was he doing? What did he do in World War I? You know, you see these stories of people either getting, he probably wasn't shot down. They did have air, they didn't have air resources in World War I, but they were very limited. But was he, did was he a defector? You know, did he just end up there and he befriended a French family and then died? Or was he wounded in and died there and they buried him? It's all possible. Like this is technically and enemy territory, probably. So,
00:23:32
Speaker
either they he was there with other German soldiers and something happened to him and he died and they buried him there and which with the care that sounds like was taken with the burial of his body it seems like somebody went to some effort which makes you think it probably wasn't the people they were fighting against doing that. It seems more likely that the Germans were trying out some sort of technology and he time traveled back to the fifth or sixth century and was literally buried at the bottom. It was literally buried there. That seems more likely. Sure. I mean, we can go with that. You know I love a good time travel. There's got to be a romance in there somewhere too. Oh, wait a minute. He met the love of his life in, you know, the millennium Rome.
00:24:14
Speaker
Actually, I'm sorry, that can't be true because his shoes wouldn't have lasted 1500 years. Shoes would not have lasted. Sorry about that. And paper, true the paper would not have made it that long. So yeah. Well, okay. But maybe he went back in time, found his Roman lady love. They had their life together. And then he went back to modern times and just couldn't, he just couldn't be separated from her.
00:24:40
Speaker
And so he died and then went and buried himself while he had people bury him there. I don't know. Well, I try to be serious on this podcast. If you want to be joking about it, we'll just move to second three. so All right. Wow. just Just shoot down my theories. That's fine. Okay. Well, in segment three, we're going to learn about the DNA of dirt and what that means about the red lady of El Miróm.
Sedimentary DNA Analysis in Spain
00:25:04
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 294 of The Archaeology Show. And now we're going to talk about dirt DNA. Dirt DNA. And the red lady of El Moron. I've never heard about sedimentary DNA. No, I haven't. This whole article was new information. And also, this is really funny, because in retrospect, we failed miserably at this. But we were trying to put together a Valentine's Day episode. We nailed it. So we started with cannibalism. And then we found the guy with the wedding ring. You only eat the ones you love. You only eat the ones you love. And then segment two was about a guy who was wearing a wedding ring, which in retrospect is not really uncommon. Valentine's Day right there. And now we're gonna look at the red lady of El Miran because you know she's red so probably has something to do with Valentine's Day. It all makes perfect sense. This is such a fail of a theme. We're not even gonna acknowledge the theme in like the title or the show notes at this point. All right listen if you want some more behind the scenes information I first found the cannibalism article and I told Rachel we need to find two more articles about people eating things they shouldn't.
00:26:18
Speaker
We couldn't find any. We just could not. Not any recent ones. Because we're trying to find current news articles. Yeah, we're trying to keep it current. And there's so much good news out there, we didn't really feel like we could veer away from current news. But this article is really cool, so I'm glad that we're talking about this. All right, let's get into it. Yeah, OK. So there's a cave in northern Spain called El Mirón, and they found the remains of a female there.
00:26:42
Speaker
And this happened, it well, OK, so excavations have been going on for like ever in this case since 1996. And they have found tons and tons of stuff there, evidence of I think multiple prehistoric groups over time. And it's clearly just a cave that has been occupied by people, you know, for a long time.
00:27:00
Speaker
And then in 2010, they were still excavating there, and researchers, Lawrence Strauss of the University of New Mexico, and one of his students, a Spanish student named David Quenzel Solana, they had this hunch to dig behind an engraved block sort of in the back of the cave. I guess because the block was engraved, they thought, well, people be here, so maybe more people be back here. Sure.
00:27:27
Speaker
I guess that was the yeah the thought process and really glad they did because they uncovered these remains of of the woman and they date to approximately 19,000 years ago.
00:27:38
Speaker
Yeah, she's estimated to have been 35 to 40 years old when she died. And the name Red Lady comes from the fact that her bones were coated with a non-local ochre, which is a red iron oxide pigment that sparkles with specular hematite, which clearly means she was a vampire.
00:27:58
Speaker
Well, I mean, just pause on that for a second. Cause like this article is about her, but it's kind of like not really about her yeah and they don't even go into full detail about anything else that they, cause they've done a lot of, of studies and DNA analysis and they found bacteria in her teeth and stuff like that. So they've done a lot of analysis on her over the years.
00:28:19
Speaker
But I mean, her bones are red, like reddish tint from this substance that they put on it, which means that they somehow got all of the the tissue off of her body and then coated the bones in this color. Either they waited a long period of time yeah or hey, maybe they, you know, butchered a little bit to get the meat off of her bones, um for lack of a better phrase. I think of they snacked on her first. There's no evidence of that. So probably they didn't.
Advanced DNA Techniques and Discoveries
00:28:48
Speaker
But yeah, just so interesting. like and And this is the only one in this cave, I think, that is like this too. So just very, very interesting. I i would love to know the circumstances to that got to the point where they were... Preparing a body like this. Well in the the rest of this article goes more into Really other the DNA and all the other stuff So we don't really get into the red ochre and and how her bones were coated but I really am kind of more interested in that as well, too because
00:29:16
Speaker
There were a number of burials in Spain and I want to also say, was it Israel or something like that? Like that was a Neanderthal burial. I'm thinking of specifically, but there's been a number of burials where the burial was covered in like flowers and other um various plant materials and things like that. You're thinking of the Neanderthal child burial that was covered in flowers. Yeah.
00:29:38
Speaker
But I'm just wondering if the type of burial when she was you know fully skinned up. um Oh, I see where you're going with this. Right. yeah When everything decomposed and the red ochre did not, right and then 19,000 years later, the red ochre had just like... Had stained her bones. Had stained her bones or adhered to her bones in a way. Can they really tell that her bones were coated in this material?
00:30:04
Speaker
post-mortem or did that happen during the burial over the course of thousands of years? Yeah, I wish we had the answer to that because I don't know and they don't really go into it in this article. This is from phys.org, by the way, which is usually pretty good on the science bits of things. And this is from an article that was published in Nature Communications, which to be totally honest, I didn't look at it super closely. So maybe we get more answers there. If you're interested, go look at that, you'll probably get some more answers. I think later on today I'm going to troll this town and see if there's any mechanics that are more popular than others and see what they think. Oh my god. Because I don't want to know what the unpopular mechanics think. I think you should check in with Miami because they're the ones who are doing the hard hitting articles.
00:30:49
Speaker
ah but The Miami Herald really knows what's up these days. This episode is going off the rails. We need to bring it back. So, so a new type of analysis, which they use to basically do this analysis on her, basically to find out all about her is something we'd never heard of before. Never heard of it. Sedimentary ancient DNA or set of DNA. Yeah. Lowercase S-E-D-A DNA. Right. And it uses DNA found in the excavation dirt itself, which I always would have thought would have been contaminated all to hell.
00:31:20
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I, you know, I wrote that sentence in our notes for us as like a talking point, but I wonder, I'm actually wondering if they didn't actually use the dirt that was excavated from around the body. And this is more from.
00:31:35
Speaker
ah a nearby area, so they're they're looking at the the soil in levels as they go down, right? well Because it's below her, too. there No, I understand. Yeah. yeah I mean, you would have to we would have to use samples from around just to get a almost an average. To get the stratigraphy. But also to get almost an average. You couldn't just take one sample of this sedimentary DNA from somewhere and call it good. you'd to You'd have to get a lot of corroborating evidence. Yeah, exactly. yeah so So they have some way that they're taking these samples of the soil to keep it you know organized and and not be all contaminated and mixed up or whatever. Not only that, but my God, you would have to, like I see ah i see a person on the on the wall here in a picture. she's Sure, she's wearing gloves and it looks like she's wearing some sort of a headlamp or something like that. But I feel like if you're taking sedimentary DNA, gloves is not gonna cut it. Like her hair's out. and
00:32:30
Speaker
I mean, you're going to really have to cover yourself up if you know that you're taking DNA from the soil. There's no risk for contamination. They might be excluding modern DNA, too. They could do that, too, because we know that modern people weren't there. Also, this is a sampling procedure on the rear vestibule of the cave.
00:32:52
Speaker
Anyway, they're using this technique to reveal information about the human and animal populations, because I mean, dna's DNA is DNA, that preceded the red lady of Mitterrand. Yeah. And so apparently you can extract human and animal mitochondrial DNA from the sediment sediment. And I guess they were specifically focused on the lower levels of the site in particular below this burial, cause they were trying to figure out what was there or who was there in the cave before her and then how that could have impacted who she ended up becoming. I think that was the idea of the study.
00:33:33
Speaker
Yeah. The results show that several animals not represented by bones from the dig were present, which is interesting. Yeah. And and just because they were present doesn't mean that they were like, ah that you don't know why they were present. You don't know if they were alive or if they crawled in there and died or like, what happened, why their DNA is present. yeah What could cause the animal's DNA to be there? Did it go in there and, you know, take her crap? Was it just hanging out? Yeah. i mean Was it living in the cave or did it, or in there did it, yeah, roll through and like shed a whole bunch of, yeah who knows, right? yeah
00:34:06
Speaker
so But they were there. They were present. They were part of the landscape. And because they were part of the landscape, they could have impacted the humans that were there too. So I think that's sort of what they're getting out with this. this It's almost like a big picture analysis that they're doing.
00:34:22
Speaker
And so they also found the humans who made the salutrian artifacts during the height of the last glacial maximum, which would have been like 25,000 to 21,000 years ago and a few thousand years before our our red lady, they found the presence of their DNA in the in the cave. And also that those people had fornal genetic ancestry.
00:34:45
Speaker
I didn't know. Have you heard of that group before? No. There is such a like crazy network of migrating humans all across Europe. So there's just so many different ones and it's hard to keep them all straight. But this is one that I hadn't heard of before. So just a quick look was it's there are a group of hunter gatherers who lived in Europe during the Ice Age and they basically they were forced south during this last glacial maximum, which is probably how they ended up their DNA and anyway yeah ended up in this cave in Spain.
00:35:15
Speaker
Glacial maximum is, for those that don't know, is basically the furthest extent of the glaciers during the ice age. Yeah. Yeah. So it's the the furthest they went. It's not necessarily the coldest or whatever it probably is, but it's just ah when they're extending down into the continent, it's the furthest that they went. Yeah. so And it's what forces both humans and animals out of the way because it's a glacier, like it's pretty desolate, right? Yeah.
00:35:39
Speaker
Now, this statement here, the presence of their DNA in the cave indicates they likely contributed to her genetic makeup, but the fact that people moved around here so much, yeah I'm not, I'm a little skeptical of that myself. I know, that's where, they kind of lost me with this. i but They have DNA, wouldn't they know? Yeah. If that DNA and her DNA Because they don't really have her DNA, do they? Because her bones are not. They did have, actually, they were able to do some DNA analysis on her. Did they get some of her bones? Yeah, which they don't really talk about in this article. Again, it was kind of like they just went straight to this sedimentary DNA stuff. But they did get some stuff from her teeth. For sure they talked about that. What I'm wondering is if they just couldn't get mitochondrial DNA specifically, which this is mitochondrial DNA from the soil. So maybe they're not able to do like a direct comparison.
00:36:27
Speaker
but I don't know, it felt like kind of a reach to me too, to to say that we have evidence that these people were here 2000 years before her, therefore they likely contributed to her genetics, you know? But there's like, you don't know for sure they stayed around in the area. You don't know for sure that she didn't move in the area from somewhere else. Like people were migrating and moving around all the time. So yeah this is another one of those things where like,
00:36:54
Speaker
Either they're not communicating very well exactly why this does mean that, or it's ah still a bit of a speculation situation. Yeah. Well, the set of DNA shows the presence of carnivores. And I'll tell you what, there's a new dog I want to get.
Concluding Reflections and Future Episodes
00:37:10
Speaker
Apparently, it's a wild dog now confined to the eastern and southeastern Asia. And I don't know how you pronounce this. It's D-H-O-L-E, but I'm going to pronounce it D-hole. I don't think it's D-hole. I think it's probably a dole. No, I'm going to get a D-hole dog.
00:37:24
Speaker
So I want the de-hole. You're a de-hole.
00:37:31
Speaker
There's also leopard and hyena and ungulates like the woolly mammoth, rhinoceros and reindeer. yeah but I can't wait to see reindeer when we go to Sweden in like less than a month. Will we see them there? There's some reindeer everywhere. It's Sweden. Okay. All right. Cool. How do we do?
00:37:46
Speaker
i mean i want to put a damper on this for you, but we're actually going to eat reindeer. It's on the menu. I did see that. Yeah, that's okay. I'm i'm you okay. So yes, we are going to see reindeer and in one way or another. we will eat them we will eat them Great. Perfect. Well, back to these reindeer. so So the reason that it's interesting that they found the DNA of these species in the seda DNA is because they were only minimally represented or not at all represented in the artifacts and the bones that they were that they covered in this cave. so
00:38:19
Speaker
But again, I'm like, so they were there, they existed. But that doesn't mean that they interacted with the human populations either before or after. So what is this actually telling you other than just creating? It's almost like those cores, like the geologic cores you get.
00:38:39
Speaker
where it gives you this like big picture of everything that was going on, environmentally speaking. yeah But you have to take that and then do something with the information. No, I think it's fantastic because it shows you exactly that, right? It shows you, it actually reminds me of the OLAP project in Tanzania. okay So when I was there at Olduvai Gorge, the OLAP project was being run by Rutgers University, and it was called the Olduvai Landscape Paleoanthropology Project, I think. I can't remember, I'm probably missing a couple of letters there, but basically what they were doing is they said that
00:39:15
Speaker
Basically, the Leakey family had excavated vertically through time, and what they were trying to do was... Well, they they had excavated, I guess, horizontally through time in some areas, and they were trying to excavate vertically at those points, right? yeah So they were trying to figure out, well, what else is going on?
00:39:32
Speaker
I guess, horizontally at these individual points vertically. So they would say, here's a here's a spot at 1.2 million years ago. Well, what else was happening here? yeah yeah And that's that's what I think is telling us here is, yeah, sure, we know that these animals live these time periods, but directly in this cave,
00:39:52
Speaker
Who else were these people competing with before and after when they lived there? you know Before is hard to tell i unless we dig down to her. But once you dig down to her, you know you know the before. And you can say layers before that. Okay, great. We know that before they got to this cave, there was this, this, this, and this. And it just adds the pieces to the puzzle, paints a bigger picture. I think so. That really helps me with this because I was kind of struggling to like see how this would ah change what you know about the remains of a single individual, you know. yeah But if you can like step back and look at it in this broader context and see the kinds of animals that were in the area, the kinds of other humans who also occupied this cave before well out and after they already know because of their excavations, but before where they don't have any remains.
00:40:41
Speaker
it is it That is interesting, because it does feed into her story, yeah the people that, and the animals that were there before her. It's just, when they say things like that, that they the presence of this other group of, this older group of humans, you know, contributed to her genetic makeup, that's where they kind of lose me a little bit, because I'm like, well, you can't say that for sure, because of the way human populations were moving around.
00:41:08
Speaker
but yeah But there were fewer humans. There were fewer humans, so it does make it more likely. more likely yeah They say at the end of the article that this particular DNA evidence ranges from 46,000 years ago to 21,000 to 20,000 years ago, which presents more questions for me, just right at the end here, because I'm like, first off,
00:41:27
Speaker
why does it end at 20,000 years ago? Was that the end of the cave? Was there no more sediment accumulation or did they extract it all? Did they dig down to that point and be like, oh crap, we can do this new set of DNA thing and we've ruined all the soil before that. It might be that, but there's gotta be someplace in the cave that's untouched where they could. Maybe, but then also what is the viability of DNA? How far back can you go with this technique? Cause I would have thought even 46,000 years was pushing it. Like it would just be unusable at that point. What kind of preservation conditions have to exist, you know, for this to be viable, right? So, it's crazy. Yeah, it is super crazy. It's very interesting though. I feel like archaeology techniques are, they' they are expanding to create a much bigger picture yeah than they used to, because it used to be so focused on the artifacts and the one site. And now we have all these ways of doing analysis that fill in like a much bigger picture. and
00:42:27
Speaker
Stuff like this, even though I'm still a little unsure about it, it seems like it's a really cool piece that will contribute to the overall context in the future. All right. All right. Well, with that, taco time. Taco time. Bye. Bye.
00:42:53
Speaker
Thanks for listening to The Archaeology Show. Feel free to comment and view the show notes on the website at www.arcpodnet.com. Find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at arcpodnet. Music for this show is called, I Wish You Would Look, from the band C Hero. Again, thanks for listening and have an awesome day.
00:43:17
Speaker
The Archaeology Podcast Network is 10 years old this year. Our executive producer is Ashley Airy, our social media coordinator is Matilda Sebrecht, and our chief editor is Rachel Rodin. The Archaeology Podcast Network was co-founded by Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle in 2014 and is part of CulturoMedia and DigTech LLC. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.