Technology Summer 2020
1. DNA research uncovers Dead Sea Scrolls mystery
Tatyana Bitler, a conservator of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), shows fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls at their laboratory in Jerusalem on June 2, 2020. DNA research on the Dead Sea Scrolls has revealed not all of the ancient manuscripts came from the desert landscape where they were discovered, according to a study published today. Numbering around 900, the manuscripts were found between 1947 and 1956 in the Qumran caves above the Dead Sea in the West Bank. The parchment and papyrus scrolls contain Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic and include some of the earliest-known texts from the Bible, including the oldest surviving copy of the Ten Commandments. Research on the texts has been ongoing for decades and in the latest study, DNA tests on manuscript fragments indicate that some were not originally from the area around the caves. MENAHEM KAHANA / AFP.
JERUSALEM (AFP).- DNA research on the Dead Sea Scrolls has revealed that not all of the ancient manuscripts came from the desert landscape where they were discovered, according to a study published Tuesday.
Numbering around 900, the manuscripts were found between 1947 -- first by Bedouin shepherds -- and 1956 in the Qumran caves above the Dead Sea that are today located in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
The parchment and papyrus scrolls contain Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic and include some of the earliest-known texts from the Bible, including the oldest surviving copy of the Ten Commandments.
Research on the texts has been ongoing for decades and in the latest study, DNA tests on manuscript fragments indicate that some were not originally from the area around the caves.
"We have discovered through analysing parchment fragments that some texts were written on the skin of cows and sheep, whereas before we thought they had all been written on goat skin," said researcher Pnina Shor, who heads the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) project studying the manuscripts.
"This proves that the manuscripts do not come from the desert where they were found," she told AFP.
The researchers from the IAA and Tel Aviv University were unable to pinpoint where the fragments came from during their seven-year study, which focused on 13 texts.
The Dead Sea Scrolls date from the third century BC to the first century AD.
'Parts of a puzzle'
Many experts believe the manuscripts were written by the Essenes, a dissident Jewish sect that had retreated into the Judaean desert around Qumran and its caves. Others argue that some of the texts were hidden by Jews fleeing the advance of the Romans.
"These initial results will have repercussions on the study of the life of Jews during the period of the Second Temple" in Jerusalem that was destroyed by the Romans in AD70, said Shor.
Such archaeological research remains a sensitive subject in Israel and the Palestinian territories, as findings are sometimes used by organisations or political parties to justify their claims to contested land.
Beatriz Riestra, a researcher who took part in the study, pointed to "differences at the same time in the content and the style of calligraphy, but also in the animal skin used for the parchment, proving they are of different origin".
In total, some 25,000 parchment fragments have been discovered and the texts have been continuously studied for more than 60 years.
"It's like piecing together parts of a puzzle," said Oded Rechavi, a professor who led the Tel Aviv University team.
"There are many scrolls fragments that we don't know how to connect, and if we connect wrong pieces together it can change dramatically the interpretation of any scroll," he said.
https://artdaily.cc/news/124242/DNA-research-uncovers-Dead-Sea-Scrolls-mystery#.X2ZmmmhKjQU
2. ROME (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- For centuries, in a picturesque Tuscan town near the Mediterranean coast, legions of pilgrims came to venerate one of Christendom’s most treasured relics — an 8-foot tall wooden crucifix known as the “Volto Santo de Lucca.”
According to the legend, “The Holy Face of Lucca” had been sculpted by a divine hand and remained hidden for centuries before an Italian bishop discovered it on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the eighth century. The crucifix was put on a ship with no crew and miraculously set sail to the Tuscan coast, where an angel helped guide the relic to its final home in a cathedral in Lucca.
On Friday, science provided another story — and it is remarkable in its own right.
The crucifix was shown to be the oldest surviving wooden carving in Europe. And it remains in remarkable condition, the downcast eyes of Christ on the cross still captured in dramatic detail.
“A new chapter opens for art history,” said Annamaria Giusti, one of Italy’s best-known art restorers and a consultant for the Cathedral of San Martino, which authorized the study of the crucifix to coincide with the commemoration of the 950th anniversary of its foundation.
Speaking at a news conference in the nave of the cathedral, Giusti said that the dating of the relic to a period between the end of the eighth century and the middle of ninth century raised fresh questions about its origins and its iconography and would lead to new areas of research.
“The Volto Santo was regarded as one of the true icons of Christ,” comparable to the Shroud of Turin, whose devotees believe shows an image of Christ, said Stefano Martinelli, an art historian who is an expert on the icon.
It is also, he said, a “symbol of pride for a city-state that remained an independent republic for seven centuries, with a celestial defender on its side.”
For Lucca, it was not just a devotional question “but also political and of identity.”
Stories, passed from generation to generation, held that the crucifix had been carved by Nicodemus, who is mentioned in the Bible several times, including helping to prepare the body of Christ for burial.
By the late Middle Ages, the image was so well known in Northern Europe that it became an object of devotion of the French nobility. “By the face of Lucca” was an oath sworn by William II of England, and it is mentioned in Dante’s “Inferno.”
And it remains central to two heartfelt religious ceremonies in Lucca every spring and fall.
Though the crucifix had been the subject of many theological discussions given its central place in Christian iconography, it only attracted the attention of art historians about a century ago.
For lack of other works to compare it to, early scholarship saw stylistic similarities with a late 12th-century artist who worked mostly in northern Italy, and though debated, many art historians came to believe that the current crucifix was a 12th-century copy of the lost eighth-century original.
That theory was soundly contradicted by the new radiocarbon results.
In December, experts from the National Institute of Nuclear Physics took three samples of wood from the crucifix — one from each arm and from the lower part of the gown adorning Jesus, as well as a tiny sample of the strata of canvas that allowed paint to better affix to the sculpture.
Radiocarbon dating at an accelerator mass spectrometry lab in Florence dated the wood “to the end of the seventh century and the middle of the ninth,” said Mariaelena Fedi, the researcher from the institute who supervised the scientific investigation. Also known as carbon 14 dating, the technique is mainly used to date organic materials, like wood.
“Generally canvas gives a more accurate dating” because wood can have been cut years before it is carved, Fedi said at the news conference. Finding canvas to test “was a great opportunity.”
Enthusiasm over the new dating should not overshadow the icon’s religious significance, said the Rev. Paolo Giulietti, the archbishop of Lucca.
For 12 centuries untold numbers of pilgrims had come “to pray, to touch, to cry, to rejoice in front of this image.”
But Giusti pointed to the fact that unlike bronze or marble, wood is very perishable, and that 1,000-year-old statues are few and far between.
“The miraculous thing is that it’s managed to survive to our days,” Giusti said.
© 2020 The New York Times Company
https://artdaily.cc/news/124756/A-long-revered-relic-is-found-to-be-Europe-s-oldest-surviving-wooden-statue#.X2Z1AGhKhsA
3. Native Americans and Polynesians Met Around 1200 A.D.
Genetic analysis of their modern descendants shows that people from the Pacific Islands and South America interacted long before Europeans arrived
Easter Island
Sunrise at the Tongariki site on Easter Island (Javier Blanco)
By Brian Handwerk
SMITHSONIANMAG.COM
JULY 8, 2020
3914382
The Pacific Ocean covers almost one-third of the Earth's surface, yet centuries ago, Polynesian navigators were skilled enough to find and populate most of the habitable islands scattered between Oceana and the Americas. Now a new genetic analysis is revealing more about their incredible journeys—and the people they met along the way.
A provocative new study argues Polynesians and Native Americans made contact some 800 years ago. That date would place their first meeting before the arrival of Europeans in the Americas and before the settlement of Easter Island (Rapa Nui), which has been suggested as the site of such an initial encounter.
Researchers, published in Nature, sampled genes of modern peoples living across the Pacific and along the South American coast and the results suggest that voyages between eastern Polynesia and the Americas happened around the year 1200, resulting in a mixture of those populations in the remote South Marquesas archipelago. It remains a mystery whether Polynesians, Native Americans, or both peoples undertook the long journeys that would have led them together. The findings could mean that South Americans, hailing from what’s now coastal Ecuador or Columbia, ventured to East Polynesia. Alternatively, Polynesians could have arrived in the Marquesas alone having already mixed with those South American people—but only if they’d first sailed to the American continent to meet them.
Alexander Ioannidis, who studies genomics and population genetics at Stanford University, co-authored the new study in Nature. “The genes show that the Native Americans who contributed came from the coastal regions of Ecuador and Columbia,” he says. “What they can’t show, and we don’t know, is where exactly it first took place—on a Polynesian island or the coast of the Americas.”
Launching one of history’s great eras of exploration, Polynesians journeyed by canoe across the vast Pacific Ocean. During several centuries of voyaging to the east they found and settled the tiny islands scattered across 16 million square miles from New Zealand to Hawaii, reaching the most distant, like Easter Island (Rapa Nui) and the Marquesas, by perhaps 1200 A.D., They left no written history to chronicle these voyages, but scientists have retraced the trips using various lines of evidence. Striking similarities in languages exist across widely separated island groups, for example, and the remains of structures and stones offer clues to who erected them. Even the spread of foodstuffs like the sweet potato—of American origin but found across the Pacific and nowhere else—could offer evidence of the skills and nerve by which people eventually populated the Pacific (though some scientists suggest that the sweet potato was dispersed naturally.)
Artist's impression of Polynesian individual with genetic roots tracing back to diverse regions across the Pacific and the Americas, denoting the mixed origin of the population. (Ruben Ramos-Mendoza)
Most recently, scientists have tried to chart the paths of these ancient voyagers through the genes of their descendants. "We recapitulate, with genetic evidence, a prehistoric event that left no conclusive trace, except for the one recorded in the DNA of those who had contact 800 years ago in one of the most remote places on Earth,” explains co-author Andres Moreno Estrada, with the National Laboratory of Genomics for Biodiversity (Mexico). For this study Estrada and colleagues did a genome-wide analysis for more than 800 present-day individuals, who hail from 17 islands across the Pacific and also from peoples up and down the Pacific coast of South America, looking for evidence of mixing between the two populations. They added a handful of pre-Columbian, South American DNA samples to help confirm that any indigenous signals identified hadn’t been created by later mixing after European contact.
Their findings revealed a Native American genetic signature among people on some of Polynesia’s easternmost islands. Not only did this signature indicate a common source among Colombia’s indigenous peoples, but it also showed that the people who carry it on different islands shared the same Native American ancestors.
“It is fascinating new evidence,” says Pontus Skoglund, who leads the ancient genomics lab at the Francis Crick Institute and wasn’t involved in the research. Skoglund was particularly intrigued by the evidence that Native Americans would’ve encountered Polynesians before they encountered Europeans, contrary to what some previous studies have shown. “This suggests that the Native American ancestry is not due to events in more recent colonial history where trans-Pacific travel was documented.”
If Native Americans had reached these remote islands by around 1200 they likely did so by following the prevailing currents and winds. In 1947, explorer Thor Heyerdahl famously demonstrated that it was possible to travel the Pacific by drifting on winds and currents on a raft when his famed Kon-Tiki journeyed more than 4,300 miles from South America to Raroia Atoll. Those islands lie in the same region that the genetic study suggests as the likely point of contact between Polynesian and Native American peoples.
“That’s where the winds and currents will take you if you’re drifting,” Ioannidis says. “If people in boats plying coastal trade routes were blown off course or drifting to sea, those same currents and winds might have taken them to these Pacific Islands.”
Paul Wallin, an archaeologist at Uppsala University, Sweden who wasn’t involved in the research, thinks this study may confirm a Native South American contact into the Pacific. “[That’s] the same area DNA studies of sweet potato have indicated, [so] this early mix may explain the existence of sweet potato in East Polynesia,” Wallin says. The date is so early that the Native South Americans may have come to the South Marquesas just before the Polynesians did, he adds.
Despite Heyerdahl’s success, most scientists have pushed back against his ideas that Native Americans settled Polynesian islands in this manner. However, this new DNA research could also support an alternate explanation that some of those dissenting scientists favor: that Polynesians might have sailed to the Americas.
“We can speculate that possibly the Polynesians found the Americas, and there was some interaction with Native Americans,” Ioannidis says. “Then as they go and settle the last of these most remote islands, including Easter Island, they take that genetic ancestry with them because they themselves now carry part of that Native American ancestry.”
There’s little doubt that the Polynesians—gifted mariners who used the night sky, the sun, birds, clouds, and the reading of ocean swells—had the oceanic skills necessary to reach the Americas. As Ioannidis notes, we know they reached Easter Island. “They made it well to the east of where North America begins, although they were in the Southern Hemisphere,” he says. “If they could have made it there, they could have made it all the way. And why would they have stopped?”
David Burley, an archaeologist at Simon Fraser University not involved in the study, finds the explanation of Polynesians visiting America far more likely. "A North American group from Colombia making it to the southern Marquesas and interbreeding with Polynesians seems a stretch,” he says. “Polynesian seafarers had well developed maritime technologies and were quite capable of reaching the Americas. Not sure that is at all the case for Colombia.”
The new study’s genetic results also offer clues to possibly unraveling the history behind Easter Island (Rapa Nui), whose inhabitants erected the famed Moai monoliths before their civilization collapsed. Some researchers have pointed to the island as a possible landing point for any South American peoples venturing into the Pacific, as it is the closest inhabited island to South America’s Pacific Coast, though it lies 2,200 miles away.
Previous studies that sought to untangle the history of Polynesian settlement haven't been conclusive. A 2017 Current Biology study (co-authored by Pontus Skogland) sampled human remains dating from before Europeans reached the island in 1722 and found only Polynesian DNA. However, the study included only five individuals, meaning other ancestries might have been present on the island but not represented in the group. A 2014 paper sampled 27 modern inhabitants and found that they had a significant amount of Native American DNA (about 8 percent). It concluded that Native Americans may have journeyed, alone or with Polynesians, to Easter Island before 1500—before Europeans ventured there.
As part of their new study, Ioannidis and colleagues sampled DNA from 166 inhabitants of Easter Island. They determined that admixture between Native American and Polynesian peoples didn't occur here until around 1380 though the island was settled by at least 1200, perhaps by a Polynesian group that hadn’t had any contact with Native Americans.
“The surprising thing is that the Rapa Nui admixture happened later, although the cultural impact might have been stronger there than in other parts of East Polynesia,” Paul Wallin says. He stresses that it’s too early to make too many sweeping conclusions about this phase of the island’s history. We know South Americans and Polynesians have a shared history on the Pacific Ocean. The exact wheres and whens are mysteries still to be solved.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/native-americans-polynesians-meet-180975269/?utm_source=smithsoniansciandnat&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=202008-science&spMailingID=43183490&spUserID=NzQwNDU3ODAxODcS1&spJobID=1821025165&spReportId=MTgyMTAyNTE2NQS2
