Archaeology Excavation

The serial site, situated in the state of Rajastahan, includes six majestic forts in Chittorgarh; Kumbhalgarh; Sawai Madhopur; Jhalawar; Jaipur, and Jaisalmer. The ecclectic architecture of the forts, some up to 20 kilometres in circumference, bears testimony to the power of the Rajput princely states that flourished in the region from the 8th to the 18th centuries. Enclosed within defensive walls are major urban centres, palaces, trading centres and other buildings including temples that often predate the fortifications within which developed an elaborate courtly culture that supported learning, music and the arts. Some of the urban centres enclosed in the fortifications have survived, as have many of the site's temples and other sacred buildings. The forts use the natural defenses offered by the landscape: hills, deserts, rivers, and dense forests. They also feature extensive water harvesting structures, largely still in use today.

Buddhist Monuments at Sanchi (1989), Madhya Pradesh

The Greenish Warbler, long considered an idealized example of a single species that diverged into two as it expanded its range, has a much more checkered family history than biologists previously realized.

Ring species are a continuous loop of related populations, each adapted to its local environment, with two terminal populations in the loop meeting but now unable to mate. But an in-depth genomic analysis published today in Nature by University of British Columbia researchers reveals that the Greenish Warbler's genetic migration through central Asia involved periods of geographic separation and hybridization.

"We've shown that the evolution of ring species is much more complex than the smooth and continuous divergence envisioned by the classic model," says UBC zoologist Miguel Alcaide, the paper's lead author.
"If you view the ring of Greenish Warbler subspecies as a river, over the years the flow of populations has experienced periods of isolation--as if forming ponds during a draught--which accelerated genetic differences. This would have been interspersed with periods of flooding, or rapid exchange between populations. Interbreeding after range expansion has been, however, much more restricted among neighboring populations exhibiting substantial differences in morphology and behavior."

Originally expanding out of southern Asia, subspecies of greenish warbler have diverged around the expanse of the Tibetan plateau over thousands of years, with two distantly related populations meeting again in the north, in central Siberia. Since early observations in the 1930s, biologists have thought the terminal sub-species incapable of mating. The new analysis shows that small regions of the western Siberian genome can be found in some of the eastern Siberian birds, indicating some successful hybridization between those forms.
"Given the new genomic evidence for historical breaks in gene flow, it's remarkable that traits such as plumage and song show such gradual change around the ring," says UBC researcher Darren Irwin, senior author on the paper and an expert who has studied greenish warblers since the 1990s. "And despite the small amount of hybridization between the most distantly related forms in central Siberia, they remain highly distinct in songs, plumage and genomic patterns."


"Overall, despite the complex patterns of gene flow, the Greenish Warbler still has the central characteristics of a ring species: two mostly distinct populations connected by a chain of populations in which traits and genes change progressively from one species to the other," says Irwin.

Following questions about the validity of using a genetic sample from a modern day relative of Richard III to help identify his remains, Dr Turi King of the University of Leicester guides us through the process she used.

I’m afraid I must start with a quick DNA primer! I promise to keep it short. Our DNA can be divided into two different sorts: nuclear DNA (which is so called because it’s found in the nucleus of our cells) which is made up of 23 pairs of chromosomes, and mitochondrial DNA (which is found outside the nucleus of the cell).

The DNA being used in this analysis is primarily (more about that later!) mitochondrial DNA. Indeed this is the DNA of choice for two reasons. The first of these is that after death the usual mechanisms which keep our DNA molecules long and healthy (and easy to analyze) no longer work. Our DNA begins to break down into tiny fragments and it becomes increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to retrieve any DNA to analyze. While there is only one copy of our nuclear DNA in each cell, there are many hundreds of copies of our mitochondrial DNA, so if any DNA has survived that is sufficient to be analyzed, it will be mtDNA. The other reason that mitochondrial DNA is so useful in this case is that it’s passed down the female line: from mothers to children – but only daughters pass it on. Richard III would have inherited his mitochondrial DNA from his mother – as would any of his siblings – and his sisters would have passed it on too, down through the generations to any of their female-line descendants.

We are fortunate to have a female-line relative of Richard III in the form of Michael Ibsen. Some years ago,
the historian John Ashdown-Hill was researching Richard III’s family tree and he discovered an unbroken female line from Anne of York to Joy Ibsen – Michael’s mum. Within weeks of the remains being found, Professor Kevin Schürer, Pro Vice Chancellor for Research at the University, who is also an expert in surnames and genealogy, managed to find another female-line relative of Richard III, who wishes to remain anonymous. Anne of York and Richard will both have inherited their mtDNA from their mum Cecily, who passed her mtDNA type down through the maternal line to Michael and this second lineage. So essentially I was able to compare the mitochondrial DNA from the skeletal remains with that of his two female-line relatives and see if there is a match consistent with them being related – which there was.

Now, I say primarily mitochondrial DNA was being used as there is one of our chromosomes (found in the nucleus) which could be used to help identify the remains as well. Our 23rd pair of chromosomes is our sex chromosome pair. Women have two copies of the X chromosome (XX) and men have an X chromosome but also a Y chromosome (XY). The Y chromosome has the gene for maleness it can only be passed down the male line. As part of this project, genealogical evidence has been used to identify putative modern-day male-line only relatives, a number of whom have been kind enough to take part in our study. Should it be possible to retrieve Y chromosome DNA from the skeletal remains, this will be analyzed and compared with the modern relatives to see if there is a match down the male line as well.

Recently discovered rock art on the walls of a cave in the Egyptian Western Desert has been provisionally dated by a Cambridge University archaeologist as between 6,000 and 7,000 years old, created at least 1,000 years before the building of the pyramids. The drawings add weight to the argument that Egyptian culture drew on cultural influences from Africa and not only from the Near East.
Spotted by a tourist to Wadi el Obeiyid, north of Farafra Oasis, drawings of a giraffe, a bovid (cow-like mammal) and two boats, plus the outline of a human hand, were examined last month by Dr Giulio Lucarini who co-leads a team of archaeologists looking at the pathways, and timings, by which domestic animals and plants from the Levant arrived in Egypt. The engravings are thought to have been discovered in 2010. The onset of revolution in Egypt meant that they were not investigated for some time.

Based at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at Cambridge University, Lucarini is an expert
in the transition from foraging to farming in North Africa. With Professor Barbara Barich of ISMEO in Rome, he is co-director of a project (the Archaeological Mission in the Farafra Oasis) that has been studying the archaeology of this region of the Eastern Sahara since the late 1980s.
Earliest artistic evidence
The site of the newly-identified images – which are engraved into the white chalk surface – has been dubbed the Boats Arch, a reference to the shape of the shallow cave. The location is 600 km southwest of Cairo and 50 km into the desert from the nearest paved road at Farafra  – a journey across a desert track surrounded by beautiful sand dunes.
Boats Arch is about 3 km from another site – known as Wadi el Obeiyid Cave – where examples of rock art were first examined by Barich in 1995. The art in this first cave features representations of engraved boats and animals as well as painted hand stencils.  “What’s really exciting is that these drawings are among the earliest artistic evidence of the people who lived in the Farafra and possibly in the whole Eastern Sahara,” said Lucarini.
Rock art is notoriously tricky to date. “The marked similarity in style seen in the bovid, which is probably an oryx, and giraffe in the Boats Arch and the animals in Wadi Obeiyid Cave, dated to around 6000/5500 BC, suggests a similar period for the two sites. In style the boat images correlate to those found on decorated pots from Predynastic sites along the Nile Valley, dated around 3500 BC. But we can presume from the regrowth of calcite crystals along their engravings, possible under humid conditions, that they could be even older,” said Lucarini.

Farafra’s rock art sites are 600 km from the Red Sea, 400 km from the Mediterranean and 300 km from the Nile.

“The location is another important for another aspect of the find,” said Lucarini.  “Representations of boats in the Egyptian Western Desert are rare in comparison to those in the Eastern Desert, a region which connects the Nile valley with the Red Sea. They could have been created by people who were moving across very long distances and could have visited the sea or the Nile Valley. In the sites we investigated we did not find any faunal remains belonging to giraffe so, like the images of boats, the drawing of the giraffe may represent not a local element but something seen somewhere else and considered exotic.”

Building a picture of the transition
The Archaeological Mission in the Farafra Oasis is building a picture of the transition from foraging societies to communities based on the exploitation of domestic species. Today the Wadi el Obeiyid landscape is arid and characterised by white limestone formations and high sand dunes, but thousands of years ago the region was a savannah-like environment with grasslands offering subsistence to human groups and animals.

“Since 1987, we have had permission from the Egyptian Ministry of State for Antiquities to survey some 10,000 square kilometres of desert. Our starting point in the research is the use of satellite images which enable us to identify past sources of water and therefore where settlements may have been located. We then carry out detailed walking surveys of these areas to try to locate the presence of old seasonal lacustrine basins, shallow pools, around which people used to live,” said Lucarini.

Over the past years Lucarini and team have been studying the remains of Sheikh el Obeiyid village, a slab structure site with stone circles that were once the foundations of huts made with animal skin and vegetation. “We’ve also found tumuli containing corridor structures. They weren’t dwellings, burials or storage spaces. They may have had a religious or symbolic function,” he said.
“In the past archaeologists have tended to see Africa as somehow lagging ‘behind’ Europe and the Near East, but our work shows that people living in the Eastern Sahara had a significant and developed culture – which fed into the development of the Pharaonic civilization and beyond.”
Lucarini is keen to develop training programmes for Egyptian Antiquities inspectors, teachers and school children in order to share the team’s research into the region’s archaeological and environmental significance and underline the importance of preserving the cultural heritage, which is, at present, vulnerable to damage.