A river runs through it - ancient DNA data on the neolithic populations of the Great Hungarian Plain

This thesis was part of a multidisciplinary research project funded by the German Research Foundation (“Bevölkerungsgeschichte des Karpatenbeckens in der Jungsteinzeit und ihr Einfluss auf die Besiedlung Mitteleuropas”, grant no. Al 287/10-1) aimed at elucidating the population history of the Carpathian Basin during the Neolithic. The Carpathian Basin was an important waypoint on the spread of the Neolithic from southeastern to central Europe. On the Great Hungarian Plain (Alföld), the first farming communities appeared around 6000 cal BC. They belonged to the Körös culture, which derived from the Starčevo-Körös-Criş complex in the northern Balkans. Around 5600 cal BC the Alföld-Linearbandkeramik (ALBK), so called due to its stylistic similarities with the Transdanubian and central European LBK, emerged in the northwestern Alföld. Following a short “classical phase”, the ALBK split into several regional subgroups during its later stages, but did not expand beyond the Great Hungarian Plain. Marking the beginning of the late Neolithic period, the Tisza culture first appeared in the southern Alföld around 5000 cal BC and subsequently spread into the central and northern Alföld. Together with the Herpály and Csőszhalom groups it was an integral part of the late Neolithic cultural landscape of the Alföld. Up until now, the Neolithic cultural succession on the Alföld has been almost exclusively studied from an archaeological point of view, while very little is known about the population genetic processes during this time period. The aim of this thesis was to perform ancient DNA (aDNA) analyses on human samples from the Alföld Neolithic and analyse the resulting mitochondrial population data to address the following questions: is there population continuity between the Central European Mesolithic hunter-gatherer metapopulation and the first farming communities on the Alföld? Is there genetic continuity from the early to the late Neolithic? Are there genetic as well as cultural differences between the regional groups of the ALBK? Additionally, the relationships between the Alföld and the neighbouring Transdanubian Neolithic as well as other European early farming communities were evaluated to gain insights into the genetic affinities of the Alföld Neolithic in a larger geographic context. 320 individuals were analysed for this study; reproducible mitochondrial haplogroup information (HVS-I and/or SNP data) could be obtained from 242 Neolithic individuals. According to the analyses, population continuity between hunter-gatherers and the Neolithic cultures of the Alföld can be excluded at any stage of the Neolithic. In contrast, there is strong evidence for population continuity from the early to the late Neolithic. All cultural groups on the Alföld were heavily shaped by the genetic substrate introduced into the Carpathian Basin during the early Neolithic by the Körös and Starčevo cultures. Accordingly, genetic differentiation between regional groups of the ALBK is not very pronounced. The Alföld cultures are furthermore genetically highly similar to the Transdanubian Neolithic cultures, probably due to common ancestry. In the wider European context, the Alföld Neolithic cultures also highly similar to the central European LBK, while they differ markedly from contemporaneous populations of the Iberian Peninsula and the Ukraine. Thus, the Körös culture, the ALBK and the Tisza culture can be regarded as part of a “genetic continuum” that links the Neolithic Carpathian Basin to central Europe and likely has its roots in the Starčevo -Körös-Criş complex of the northern Balkans.

Description of an ancient social bee trapped in amber using diagnostic radioentomology

The application of non-invasive imaging technologies using X-radiation (diagnostic radioentomology, ‘DR’) is demonstrated for the study of amber-entombed social bees. Here, we examine the external and internal morphology of an Early Miocene (Burdigalian) stingless bee (Apinae: Meliponini) from the Dominican Republic using non-destructive X-ray microtomography analysis. The study permits the accurate reconstruction of features otherwise obscured or impossible to visualize without destroying the sample and allows diagnosis of the specimen as a new species, Proplebeia adbita Greco and Engel.

The Divine Eye in Ancient Egypt and in the Midrash Interpretation of Formative Judaism.

This paper studies the “eye” as a religious phenomenon from the multiple traditions of ancient Egypt compared with rabbinic Judaism in late antiquity using a semiotic approach based upon the theories of Umberto Eco. This method was chosen because the eye is a graphic as well as a linguistic sign which both express religious concepts. Generally, the eye represented an all-seeing and omnipresent divinity. In other words, the god was reduced to an eye, whereby the form of the symbol suggests a meaning to the viewer or religious practitioner. In this manner the eye represented the whole body of a deity in Egyptian and the power of a discerning God in rabbinic texts. By focusing upon the semantic aspect of the eye metaphor in both Egyptian and rabbinic texts two religious traditions of the visually perceivable are analyzed from a semiotic perspective.

Ancient Calendars and Bolivian Modernity: Tiwanaku’s Gateway of the Sun, Arthur Posnansky, and the World Calendar Movement of the 1930s

Tourists to the archaeological site of Tiwanaku are presented with ancient calendars, of which the Gateway of the Sun is the most important, famous, and beautiful. Arthur Posnansky and other early 20th-century archaeologists claimed that its inscriptions constituted a written calendar. These claims were intimately connected to narratives of Tiwanaku as a central source of knowledge in both pre-Columbian times and the contemporary world. Posnansky presented his interpretation of Tiwanaku’s calendars as a response to the debates of the World Calendar Movement, which in the 1930s was attempting to rationalize the Gregorian calendar. In the Gateway, Posnansky found a uniquely Bolivian response to the international, North Atlantic-dominated scientific community’s search for a rational way to keep time in the world economy. Bolivian intellectuals merged their interest in the indigenous past with their concerns about the role of the modernist Bolivian state in the global system.