![]() We called in Matthew Curtis and together we were awarded our first NSF grant in 2006 and a second in 2010. We were wondering what the history of that was. We were doing ethnoarchaeology-looking at potters and stone-tool using leatherworkers-and we noticed that there's a lot of social stratification in Gamo society. John and I have been working in the Gamo highlands of Ethiopia for 20 years studying artisans. How did you and your collaborators find Bayira?Ī. Kathryn Arthur discussed the work she and research team members-including Mauro Coltorti and Pierluigi Pieruccini of the University of Siena, and Jay Stock of the University of Cambridge-performed in Ethiopia, and some of the mysteries of Bayira that researchers are still working to solve. "We know that he had brown hair and brown eyes. If he were alive today, "He'd probably be a little smaller than we are in height," she said. The skeleton is thousands of years old, but he is a Homo sapiens-a modern human. It was very surprising, and very exciting." "When we started working on this project, we had no real conception that it would turn out like this," Kathryn Arthur said. ![]() ![]() Petersburg, and their colleagues, including SBE-funded archaeologist Matthew Curtis of Ventura College and UCLA Extension, found the skeletal remains unexpectedly during a research trip to study the culture history of living residents of Ethiopia's Gamo highlands. ![]() Kathryn Arthur and John Arthur, archaeologists at the University of South Florida St. And they were able to show that the Eurasian migrations into Africa left a larger genetic signature-and reached a broader geographic area-than previously thought. But such reconstructions can be complicated by the fact that many modern African populations have some non-African genes, in large part due to genetic admixture with Eurasians who migrated back into Africa during the last 3,000 years.īayira, however, predates those recent Eurasian migration events, making him an even better baseline for making inferences about human population history.īy comparing Bayira's DNA to that of ancient Europeans and modern populations, the researchers were able to demonstrate that the Eurasians who migrated to Africa descended from populations of Early Neolithic farmers that colonized Europe roughly 7,000 years ago. They use African populations as the baseline to compare against populations whose ancestors migrated out of Africa. Traditionally, population geneticists have reconstructed past human population expansions using genetic information from living populations. The genome has the potential to provide new clues about how ancient African populations lived and interacted with humans in other parts of the world. Using DNA extracted from the bones, geneticists working with the researchers have been able to provide the first ancient human genome sequence from Africa. Today, in an article in the journal Science, that research team, supported in part by the National Science Foundation's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences directorate (SBE), revealed that there was another kind of treasure within the skeleton. The team named the man "Bayira," which means "firstborn" in the Gamo language, a common name in the region. ![]() Three years ago, a group of researchers found a cave in Ethiopia with a secret: it held the 4,500-year-old remains of a man, with his head resting on a rock pillow, his hands folded under his face, and stone flake tools surrounding him. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |