Transitions In Human History Research Articles

Waterfowl Eggshell Refines Palaeoenvironmental Reconstruction and Supports Multi-species Niche Construction at the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition in the Levant

Utilising multiple lines of evidence for palaeoenvironmental reconstruction improves our understanding of the past landscapes in which human populations interacted with other species. Illuminating such processes is key for a nuanced understanding of fundamental transitions in human history, such as the shift from hunting and gathering to farming, and allows us to move beyond simple deterministic interpretations of climate-driven innovation. Avifaunal remains provide detailed indications of complex multi-species interactions at the local scale. They allow us to infer relationships between human and non-human animals, but also to reconstruct their niche, because many bird species are sensitive to specific ecological conditions and will often relocate and change their breeding patterns. In this paper, we illustrate how novel evidence that waterfowl reproduced at Levantine wetlands, which we obtained through biomolecular archaeology, together with modern ornithological data reveals conditions of wetlands that are conducive for breeding waterfowl. By understanding the interplay between wetland productivity cycles and waterfowl ecology, we argue that human modifications to the environment could have promoted wetland productivity inviting waterfowl to remain year-round. Within this landscape of “mutual ecologies”, the feedback resulting from the agency of all species is involved in the construction of the human niche.

Residential Fuel Transition and Fuel Interchangeability in Current Self-Aspirating Combustion Applications: Historical Development and Future Expectations

To reduce greenhouse gases and air pollutants, new technologies are emerging to reduce fossil fuel usage and to adopt more renewable energy sources. As the major aspects of fuel consumption, power generation, transportation, and industrial applications have been given significant attention. The past few decades witnessed astonishing technological advancement in these energy sectors. In contrast, the residential sector has had relatively little attention despite its significant utilization of fuels for a much longer period. However, almost every energy transition in human history was initiated by the residential sector. For example, the transition from fuelwood to cheap coal in the 1700s first took place in residential houses due to urbanization and industrialization. The present review demonstrates the energy transitions in the residential sector during the past two centuries while portending an upcoming energy transition and future energy structure for the residential sector. The feasibility of the 100% electrification of residential buildings is discussed based on current residential appliance adoption, and the analysis indicates a hybrid residential energy structure is preferred over depending on a single energy source. Technical considerations and suggestions are given to help incorporate more renewable energy into the residential fuel supply system. Finally, it is observed that, compared to the numerous regulations on large energy-consumption aspects, standards for residential appliances are scarce. Therefore, it is concluded that establishing appropriate testing methods is a critical enabling step to facilitate the adoption of renewable fuels in future appliances.

Essential changes in the composition of copper alloys reveal technological diversities in the transition from the Earliest Iron Age to the Early Roman period in Lithuania

In the context of archaeometallurgical studies of copper alloys, it is relevant to record the essential changes in the elemental composition of copper alloys that occur during changes in technology and transitions in human history. This article presents the shift in the elemental composition of copper alloy from bronze-based alloys to brass ones during essential changes in archaeological material which happened at the turn of the Earliest Iron Age (500–1 BC) and the Early Roman period, from the 1st century BC to the middle of the 1st century AD. As early as the 2nd and 1st centuries BC, in the Antique world and the Roman Empire and its provinces, brass was already starting to partly replace bronze. Even if the Earliest Iron Age is the least knowable period in Lithuanian prehistory, the few pieces of jewellery attributed to this period show the changes in the composition of the copper alloy. The territorial growth of the Late Antique world and internal contacts within the Barbaricum led to the expanding strength of commodities, including raw materials, technologies, cultural ideas and ideological attitudes. Goods and ideas spread throughout the vast barbarian lands, and eventually reached the forest zone of northeast Europe. Sudden changes during the Early Roman period were first of all connected with the development of settlement structure, and this has therefore made it possible to identify some major places of the production of artefacts and partly changed directions of exchange. All this was accompanied by the emergence of new jewellery types produced by skilled jewellers according to sophisticated techniques. These changes are clearly visible in Early Roman period Lithuanian archaeological material, including the elemental composition of copper alloys. The present article uses X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectrometry to investigate the composition of copper alloys. Radiography was used to understand the construction of artefacts, and to assess the degree of their inner corrosion and sophisticated manufacturing techniques. Solder samples were taken from the surfaces of several finds, and were analysed by qualitative microchemical analysis.

How Changes in Functional Demands Associated with Captivity Affect the Skull Shape of a Wild Boar (Sus scrofa)

The process of animal domestication is a key evolutionary transition in human history, within which the control of wild populations is considered a crucial first step. Yet, phenotypic changes associated with animal captivity remain challenging to document. Here, we investigated the craniofacial changes in wild boar (Sus scrofa) associated with a lifetime of growth in captivity under conditions of controlled mobility and diet. Using three-dimensional landmark-based geometric morphometrics, we assessed cranial and mandibular size and shape differences between captive and wild-caught wild boar, their link with masticatory forces, and how these plastic changes relate to traits selected in domestic pigs. We observed shape divergence associated with greater masticatory forces in captive wild boar (e.g., wider zygomatic arches, more upright mandibular rami, and reduced gonial angle) corroborating the fundamental role of biomechanical loading and constructional constraints in the skull shape changes associated with captivity. Despite their resemblance with domestic traits, these localised plastic changes follow a different phenotypic trajectory, suggesting that they did not contribute to the setup of the craniofacial morphology of current domestic breeds. A parallel increase of masticatory force in captive wild boars and domestic pigs may explain this phenotypic convergence but needs to be further explored.

“Hume’s Guillotine” in the Interdisciplinary Context

The authors deal with the classic paradox of ethical theories, “Hume’s guillotine,” based on the contradiction in morality between what is and what should be. At the same time, the theological justification of moral principles is beyond this criticism, because the sacred commandments “by definition” combine what is and what should be, overcoming the “secular” gap between being and duty, and thus “the problem of transition from description to evaluation is removed.” Modern ways of removing this contradiction, revealed by Hume, are considered from several points of view. Special attention is paid to the analogy between the development of ethical and mathematical theories, a synergistic approach to the formation of ethics, as well as to the ethical choice associated with the development of digital reality, which humanity will face soon. A synergistic approach can be viewed as a bridge “over the abyss of two cultures - natural science and humanities.” Now it has become clear that there can be many logics, geometries, versions of analysis of infinitely small, etc. Ethics can also be constructed and then put into practice. A classic example is the ethical code of King Lycurgus. Separate ethical systems are not able to ensure the survival of humanity under extreme conditions. Existence of general ethical rules in global crises allows many to survive. Without them, everyone would die. True amazement is the fact that the eight Dyakonov phase transitions in human history completely coincide with the crises periodicity presented in the text of the Apocalypse, where crises are figuratively called “beasts.” Then a vivid picture is given, a picture of the civilization transformation into a post-singular state, which goes beyond the horizon of scientific forecast.

Arctic Undergoing Most Unprecedented Transition in Human History

The Arctic Report Card, released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, outlines vast changes taking place in the Arctic region. Here are some major findings.

How Captives Changed the World

The article reports that spread of technologies and ideologies played key roles in the creation of status, inequality and wealth in the groups that abducted them. It mentions that the traumatic destruction of the social and cultural identity of captives in Southeast Asia, including a Dutch sea captain taken by Iranun slavers from the Philippines. It states that captives on the cultures plays important role in one of the fundamental social transitions in human history.

Natural Selection at the Brush-Border: Adaptations to Carbohydrate Diets in Humans and Other Mammals.

Dietary shifts can drive molecular evolution in mammals and a major transition in human history, the agricultural revolution, favored carbohydrate consumption. We investigated the evolutionary history of nine genes encoding brush-border proteins involved in carbohydrate digestion/absorption. Results indicated widespread adaptive evolution in mammals, with several branches experiencing episodic selection, particularly strong in bats. Many positively selected sites map to functional protein regions (e.g., within glucosidase catalytic crevices), with parallel evolution at SI (sucrase-isomaltase) and MGAM (maltase-glucoamylase). In human populations, five genes were targeted by positive selection acting on noncoding variants within regulatory elements. Analysis of ancient DNA samples indicated that most derived alleles were already present in the Paleolithic. Positively selected variants at SLC2A5 (fructose transporter) were an exception and possibly spread following the domestication of specific fruit crops. We conclude that agriculture determined no major selective event at carbohydrate metabolism genes in humans, with implications for susceptibility to metabolic disorders.

A Comparison of Niche Construction Theory and Diet Breadth Models as Explanatory Frameworks for the Initial Domestication of Plants and Animals

The initial domestication of plants and animals and the subsequent emergence of agricultural economies in different world regions represent a major evolutionary transition in human history. Here, two alternative and antithetical explanatory frameworks for initial domestication are compared—one based on diet breadth modeling and the other on niche construction theory. This side-by-side comparison of these two alternative explanations follows them through the basic sequence of stages involved in the scientific method: hypothesis formulation, plausibility consideration, and actual testing of the two hypothetical explanations by measuring their relative strengths with the available archaeological and paleoenvironmental data from two independent centers of domestication in the Americas—eastern North America and the Neotropics. Although focused on the question of initial domestication, this comparative analysis also addresses the broader issues of the appropriate role of theory in the development of hypotheses of past human behavior and the proper use of the scientific method in archaeological inference. Explanations based on diet breadth modeling are found to have a number of conceptual, theoretical, and methodological flaws; approaches based on niche construction theory are far better supported by the available evidence in the two regions considered.

Core questions in domestication research

The domestication of plants and animals is a key transition in human history, and its profound and continuing impacts are the focus of a broad range of transdisciplinary research spanning the physical, biological, and social sciences. Three central aspects of domestication that cut across and unify this diverse array of research perspectives are addressed here. Domestication is defined as a distinctive coevolutionary, mutualistic relationship between domesticator and domesticate and distinguished from related but ultimately different processes of resource management and agriculture. The relative utility of genetic, phenotypic, plastic, and contextual markers of evolving domesticatory relationships is discussed. Causal factors are considered, and two leading explanatory frameworks for initial domestication of plants and animals, one grounded in optimal foraging theory and the other in niche-construction theory, are compared.

DNA analyses of wild boar remains from archaeological sites in Guangxi, China

The shift from hunting and gathering to farming is one of the most important transitions in human history. Pig domestication has long been an issue of interest in archaeology and genetics. As the real-time carrier of the genetic information for dead or extinct animals, ancient DNA provides continuous molecular evidence for tracing the history of domestication. We collected 30 Late Pleistocene wild boar fossils from three caves in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region (Guangxi ZAR), Southern China. Through the use of the fragmented ancient DNA sequences and the homologous sequences of both domestic pigs and wild boars across Asia and Europe, we reconstructed phylogenetic trees of the pig family. The results show that most wild boar individuals from Guangxi have a closer phylogenetic relationship to Asian pigs than European ones. The data provide additional geographic and temporal evidence for a genetic continuity between ancient Chinese wild boars and the domestic pigs. Moreover, we obtained preliminary evidence for genetic similarity between the ancient wild boar in Guangxi and the European pigs. We suggest that further ancient DNA investigation of the Chinese wild boar samples is essential for revealing the historical process of pig domestication.

Recent advances in understanding the role of nutrition in human genome evolution.

Dietary transitions in human history have been suggested to play important roles in the evolution of mankind. Genetic variations caused by adaptation to diet during human evolution could have important health consequences in current society. The advance of sequencing technologies and the rapid accumulation of genome information provide an unprecedented opportunity to comprehensively characterize genetic variations in human populations and unravel the genetic basis of human evolution. Series of selection detection methods, based on various theoretical models and exploiting different aspects of selection signatures, have been developed. Their applications at the species and population levels have respectively led to the identification of human specific selection events that distinguish human from nonhuman primates and local adaptation events that contribute to human diversity. Scrutiny of candidate genes has revealed paradigms of adaptations to specific nutritional components and genome-wide selection scans have verified the prevalence of diet-related selection events and provided many more candidates awaiting further investigation. Understanding the role of diet in human evolution is fundamental for the development of evidence-based, genome-informed nutritional practices in the era of personal genomics.

A Conversation on Agricultural Origins

Placed within a relatively informal and free-flowing context of “conversation,” this issue of Current Anthropology offers an opportunity to step outside of the strictures of formal scholarly discourse, with its requirements of lengthy supporting arguments and exhaustive literature citation and to debate, in a more relaxed fashion, what general form our explanations for agricultural origins should take. Our basic position as we join in this dialogue is that because of the rapid and still accelerating accumulation of relevant new information over the past quarter-century, many of the extant universalist explanations for agricultural origins now represent more of a distraction than an advance in understanding of what is increasingly recognized as a set of long, complex, and independent developmental trajectories in different regions of the world. Universal explanations for major transitions in human history that draw much of their support or authority from overarching theoretical covering laws or assumptions about how the world works tend to flourish in contexts of limited relevant information. But as the amount of available information increases and our view of the past comes into clearer focus, such universal explanations are unable to accommodate a wealth of new data that run counter to their predictions. In this discussion, we focus on what appears to be an everwidening disjuncture between a number of the most popular universal explanatory models for agricultural origins and the steadily growing empirical record of relevant information. Rather than proposing any particular all-encompassing alternative theoretical model or covering laws of our own, our purpose here is to encourage frameworks of explanation that pay close and careful attention to existing relevant archaeological information, that are scaled at the regional level, and that focus on the complex interplay of a range of different environmental and social preconditions, prompts, and factors of various kinds. The essays in this special section provide a comprehensive sampling of the various prime-mover forces championed as universal levers of agricultural emergence. Mark Cohen, the convener of this conversation, began his discourse on this topic in the early 1970s with his book The Food Crisis in Prehistory (Cohen 1977). In that influential book, Cohen argued that because the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture occurred at roughly the same time in many different world regions, there must be a single universal cause for this major turning point in human history. He maintained that during the Early Holocene a worldwide demographic threshold was crossed, resulting in an imbalance between human populations and their chosen subsistence base. Agriculture arose in areas where the pressure was most acute (and where there were domesticable plants and animals) as a means of resolving this demographically induced resource pressure. Cohen (2009) and others in this issue (i.e., Bellwood 2009; Gage and DeWitte 2009; Lambert 2009) revisit the role of demography in the origin and dispersal of agriculture, demonstrating that population pressure continues to hold strong appeal as a universal explanatory lever for agricultural origins. Other voices advocating different universal prime-mover forces have also been heard from in the 30 years since the publication of Cohen’s book, several of which contribute to the conversation taking place in this collection of papers. Climate change, a deus ex machina of agricultural origins since Childe formulated his Oasis Hypothesis in the 1930s, has resurfaced in the intervening years as a prime candidate for causation in agricultural origins. The ice age flashback that occurred during the Younger Dryas at about 12,500–11,500 cal. BP has been featured as a primary causal agent in agricultural origins in both the Near East and in China (Bar-Yosef 2002; Bettinger et al. 2007; Harris 2003; Moore and Hillman 1992), while the climatic amelioration that followed in the Early Holocene and the accompanying rise in CO have been argued to have made the origin of agriculture “compulsory” (Richerson, Boyd, and Bettinger 2001). Snippets of this part of the ongoing conversation can be heard in Bettinger, Richerson, and Boyd’s (2009) contribution to this issue. More recently, a number of researchers working within the

Fiber nanotechnology: a new platform for “green” research and technological innovations

The eve of the twenty first century brought the promise of a myriad of technological advancements, not only because of the symbolism of the year 2000, but also because of the possibilities inherent in the ever burgeoning interdisciplinarity of the sciences. Indeed, almost every transition in human history occurring at the beginning of a century or millennium was ripe with the advent of new findings, breakthroughs, and technological advances. The nineteenth century was the dawn of the mechanical age in which machines burdened the labor of humans; the twentieth century was characterized by the juggernaut concepts of relativity and quantum physics that lead to computer manufacture and communication, and finally the 21st century is becoming, as many are realizing, the age of advances in nanotechnology and the biological sciences. Nanotechnology may be loosely defined as a multidisciplinary field overseeing the manipulation of structures at the atomic, molecular and nanometric levels to perform discrete functions such as memory storage, data (electrons) flow, stimuli-triggered (pH, temperature) events, etc. In fact, the marriage of nanotechnology to the arena of biology has become an inevitable reality based on our needs to improve the quality and longevity of life. As an illustration we can cite the development of smart drug delivery vehicles and biomimetic applications based on the principles of self-assembly, convergent synthesis, and the precise control of functionality of cellular sub-structures. Many new advances in DNA molecular science, AFM biologically modified probes, and biosensing enabled scientists to make great contributions to genomics, proteonomics, gene therapy, PCR, and recombinant DNA technologies. One sub-discipline that is currently gaining momentum is the field of biobased fiber nanotechnology. The area of fiber science encompasses not only relevant macroscopic structures but their constitutive polymeric assemblies at the nanoscale (5–500 nm). In general, biopolymers such as cellulose, hemicellulose, lignin, chitosan, hylauronic acid, lactic acid, etc., composed of distinct monomeric units (e.g., glucose residues in cellulose) fall under this umbrella. Interestingly, a focus on the nanotechnological aspects of these materials has not been realized until the last few years in which we have witnessed a virtual explosion of symposia, conferences, and workshops on the subject. In the following text, we wish to point out the salient features of the subjects contained in this special issue, and stress the value of natural biopolymers and biochemicals from forests and crops as precursors for nanotechnological applications. Four general realms in this area are covered here which we L. A. Lucia (&) O. J. Rojas Department of Wood and Paper Science, North Carolina State University, Campus Box 8005, Raleigh, NC 276958005, USA e-mail: lucian.lucia@ncsu.edu

Human Population Grows Up

Focuses on world population and transitions in human history. Analysis of population growth; How couples have limited the number of children they have; Problems with population; Question of sustainability for future populations; Speculation on how many people the earth can carry safely. INSETS: CROSSROADS FOR POPULATION;THE MIGRATION WILD CARD.