Tuesday, February 16, 2021

Sunday, February 14, 2021

A Small, Human Valentine

1663 Vincenzo Ferdinando Ranuzzi as Amor by Elisabetta Sirani

HOLIDAYS Who was Saint Valentine?

Pair of Lovers, c 1480 Attributed to the Master of the Amsterdam Cabinet or theMaster of the Housebook (German artist, fl c 1470-1500)

It is said that on February 14, somewhere around the year 270 A.D., Valentine, a priest in Rome in the days of Emperor Claudius II, was executed. Well, Chaucer said it was February 14th, and that's good enough for me.

Rome's emperor was called Claudius the Cruel for good reason. During his reign, he involved his empire in many unpopular & bloody campaigns. Claudius needed to maintain a strong, loyal army, but he was having a difficult time enticing soldiers to join his traveling troops. Claudius believed that strong, young Roman men were unwilling to join the army, because they wanted to stay close to their loves.

To get rid of the problem, Claudius banned all marriages & engagements in Rome. If he could have banned sex between lovers, I suppose he would have. Priest Valentine, incensed by his emperor's cold decree, defied Claudius continuing to perform marriages for young lovers in secret.

When the disobedient priest's actions were discovered, Valentine was arrested & dragged before the Prefect of Rome, who condemned him to be beaten to death with clubs, so that he might suffer a little for his disloyalty to his supreme emperor, & then to have his head cut off. The sentence was said to be carried out on February 14.

Legend has it that, while in jail Valentine became enamoured with his jailer’s daughter, who was blind. The jailer asked Valentine if his God could restore daughter’s sight. They prayed together & the young woman regained full sight. Reportedly, Valentine left a farewell note for the jailer's daughter signing it "From Your Valentine." No, I do not know the extent of the priest's relationship with the jailer's daughter, & I do not wish to know.

For his great service to loyalty & truth & love, the church named Valentine a saint after his death.

Well, now, there is some debate about how the date February 14th came about; and there also seems to be some question about the exact identity of St. Valentine. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, "At least three different Saint Valentines, all of them martyrs, are mentioned in the early martyrologies under the date of 14 February." One was a priest in Rome, the 2nd was a bishop of Interamna (now Terni, Italy), & the 3rd St. Valentine was a martyr in the Roman province of Africa.

Perhaps it is just coincidence, but probably not,that the date of his death may have become mingled with the Feast of Lupercalia, a pagan festival of love. During these popular celebrations, the names of young women were placed in a box, from which they were drawn by the men as chance directed. In 496 AD, Pope Gelasius decided to put an end to all the silliness of the Feast of Lupercalia, & he declared that February 14 be celebrated as St Valentine's Day.And to this day, February 14 became a date for exchanging love messages, poems, & beautiful gifts such as flowers.

Monday, January 25, 2021

Farmers Discover Rare Statue of Pre-Hispanic Woman in Mexican Citrus Grove


 Farmers Discover Rare Statue of Pre-Hispanic Woman in Mexican Citrus Grove

On New Year's Day, farmers in Mexico uncovered a sculpture dated to between roughly 1450 and 1521 A.D. (INAH)  By Isis Davis-Marks in Smihsonianmag.com 1/14/2021

On New Year’s Day, farmers in the Huasteca region of Mexico’s Gulf Coast were ploughing soil in a citrus grove when they discovered something strange. After hitting an object they initially assumed was a rock, the group shoveled deeper, ultimately unearthing a six-foot-tall limestone statue of a Mesoamerican woman, according to a statement from the country’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).

As the Associated Press reports, the statue likely dates to between roughly 1450 and 1521 A.D. After examining the artifact, INAH experts determined that it was the first of its kind to be found in the region.  The area where it was found was not previously known to be an archeological site, and the stone statue may have been moved from some unknown original site.

Locals excavated the figurine between the pre-Hispanic Haustec ruins of El Tajín and the Aztec city of Tuxpan, in an area not previously identified as an archaeological site. Given the absence of similar historical objects in the grove, the team suggests the sculpture, which appears to shows Aztec influences, truly may have been moved there from its original location.

In the statement, as translated by the AP, archaeologist María Eugenia Maldonado Vite says the work could depict “a ruler, based on her posture and attire, [rather] than a goddess.”  Maldonado adds that she could also be “a late fusion of the Teem goddesses with the representations of women of high social status or politician in the Huasteca.”

The supine subject wears an ornate headdress, a necklace with a circular adornment known as an oyohualli, a long shirt and a skirt that grazes her ankles. (As Live Science’s Laura Geggel points out, the headdress is reminiscent of one worn by Star Wars character Ahsoka Tano.) The statue may depict an elite ruler or a fusion of a goddess and ruler. (INAH)

“The style of the young woman from Amajac is similar to representations of Huastec goddesses of the Earth and fertility, but with an external influence, possibly [the indigenous group] Nahua,” says Maldonado in the statement, as translated by Live Science.

Though she’s shown resting in a peaceful position, the woman’s open-mouthed, wide-eyed expression is closer to a scream than a smile. Originally, Maldonado notes, the statue probably had obsidian inlays in place of its now-hollow eye sockets.

As Nathan Falde writes for Ancient Origins, the Huastec people who likely created the sculpture originally descended from the Maya. The group settled in the northeast region of the Gulf Coast around 1500 B.C. and created their own distinct culture—albeit with some Maya influences, according to a 2006 Arqueología Mexicana article by Felipe Solís Olguín.

Around the 15th century A.D., the neighboring Aztec civilization began encroaching on Huastec land in a series of military campaigns that ultimately resulted in the latter’s defeat, per Ancient Origins. (The Spanish conquest later decimated both Indigenous groups.) As a result of this contact, Aztec culture may have had some influence on Huastec artisans. Aztec sculptors also created stone figurines, many of which depicted deities connected to fertility or agricultural rites, as Mark Cartwright pointed out in a 2014 Ancient History Encyclopedia article.

If the newly unearthed statue does, in fact, portray an elite woman, not a goddess, she will join the ranks of quite a few female rulers depicted in pre-Hispanic artifacts.

In 1994 in the Mayan ruin site of Palenque, archaeologists found the tomb of a woman dubbed The Red Queen because of the red pigment covering her tomb. But it has never been firmly established that the woman, whose tomb dates from between 600 and 700 A.D., was a ruler of Palenque.

Susan Gillespie, an anthropology professor at the University of Florida, said there “there are quite a few pre-Hispanic depictions of elite women and female rulers elsewhere, best known among the Classic Maya but also in Classic Zapotec bas-reliefs and Postclassic Mixtec codices. Colonial era Aztec documents mentioned women ‘rulers’ or at least holders of the crown to pass on to their successors … so that is not a surprise,” Gillespie added. Women were highly valued in the pre-Hispanic era, drastically losing their status only after the conquest.

However, she noted that “if there is only one such find, it’s hard to say whether it is significant, or even correctly identified. Archaeology works best with repeated occurrences, to show a pattern."

Saturday, January 23, 2021

PLANT HISTORY Ancient DNA Unearths The Americas Corn’s A-maize-ing History


How Ancient DNA Unearths Corn’s A-maize-ing History 
Smithsonian Magazine, December 14th, 2020 by Erin Malsbury 

 Sequencing entire genomes from ancient tissues helps researchers reveal the evolutionary & domestication histories of species. (Thomas Harper, The Pennsylvania State University) In the early 2000s, archeologists began excavating a rock shelter in the highlands of southwestern Honduras that stored thousands of maize cobs & other plant remains from up to 11,000 years ago. Scientists use these dried plants to learn about the diets, land-use & trading patterns of ancient communities.

After years of excavations, radiocarbon dating & more traditional archaeological studies, researchers are now turning to ancient DNA to provide more detail to their insights than has ever before been possible. In a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists used DNA from 2,000-year-old corn cobs to reveal that people reintroduced improved varieties of domesticated maize into Central America from South America thousands of years ago. 

Archeologists knew that domesticated maize traveled south, but these genomes provide the first evidence of the trade moving both directions. Researchers at the Smithsonian & around the world are just beginning to tap into the potential of ancient DNA. This study shows how the relatively recent ability to extract whole genomes from ancient material opens the door for new types of research questions & breathes new life into old samples, whether from fieldwork or forgotten corners of museum collections.

DNA, packed tightly into each of our cells, holds the code for life. The complex molecule is shaped like a twisting ladder. Each rung is made up of two complementary molecules, called a base pair. As humans, we have around three billion base pairs that make up our DNA. The order of these base pairs determines our genes, & the DNA sequence in its entirety, with all the molecules in the correct position, is called a genome. Whole genomes provide scientists with detailed data about organisms, but the process of acquiring that information is time sensitive.

“In every cell, DNA is always being bombarded with chemical & physical damage,” said lead author Logan Kistler, curator of archeobotany & acheogenomics at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. “In live cells, it’s easily repaired. But after an organism dies, those processes that patch things up stop functioning.” As a result, DNA begins breaking down into smaller & smaller fragments until it disappears entirely. This decomposition poses the greatest challenge for scientists trying to sequence entire genomes from old or poorly-preserved tissue.

Researchers wear protective suits & work in sterile conditions in the ancient DNA lab to prevent contamination. (James DiLoreto, Smithsonian) You have to take these really, really small pieces of DNA — the length of the alphabet in some cases – & try to stitch them back together to make even a 1000 piece long fragment,” said Melissa Hawkins, a curator of mammals at the Smithsonian who works with ancient DNA. “It’s like trying to put a book back together by having five words at a time & trying to find where those words overlap.”

This laborious process prevented researchers from sequencing whole genomes from ancient DNA until around 2008, when a new way to sequence DNA became available. Since then, the technology & the ability to reconstruct ancient DNA sequences has grown rapidly.

Friday, January 22, 2021

10,000-year-old Jewelry among Artifacts Found while Clearing Land for NC Highway Project

Artifacts including pottery, tools and jewelry from more than 10,000 years ago were found during digging for the last leg of the Triangle Expressway.

10,000-year-old Jewelry among Artifacts Found 

while Clearing Land for NC I-540 project

By Ed Crump Thursday, January 14, 2021 Raleigh, NC (WTVD)  

Before the North Carolina Department of Transportation began clearing land for the last leg of the Triangle Expressway, its archeology unit fanned out looking for sites used by North Carolina's original inhabitants.

The scientists found something significant.

"As a result of the survey for this entire corridor, we identified, I believe, it's over 155 sites," said Matt Wilkerson who heads up the NCDOT's archeology unit.

Anytime NCDOT plans to build a road, federal law requires that it documents historic or even prehistoric sites in the construction corridor.

"NCDOT takes its stewardship responsibility very seriously," Wilkerson told ABC11.

He said that is why NCDOT formed the archeology unit more than 30 years ago, deciding it would be the most efficient way to handle that responsibility.

In the case of the Triangle Expressway, which will complete the 540 outer loop around Raleigh, most of the sites that archeologists found were not in the direct path of the asphalt.

There was one exception -- an area in southeastern Wake County below Garner near Williams Crossroads.

So, the team got to work.

For three months, they dug up a large area in 540's path and sifted every inch through large screens.

There was so much work that they contracted with other archeologists such as Susan Bamann with Commonwealth Heritage Group.

She showed us pieces of a pot that was apparently dropped and broken.

"It probably dates to somewhere around 500 A.D., something like that," she said. "We'll probably be able to reconstruct much of the pot."

The inside of that pot could provide a trove of information.

"We'll probably do some chemical analysis on it. It's possible to extract residues from the wall of the ceramic vessel and determine the kinds of foods that were being cooked in the vessel," Bamann said. "That's really exciting,"

Those artifacts and many others, including tools, all date from about 1,500 years ago and were found about 12 inches below the surface.

The archeologists surmise this was a popular campsite for the nomadic natives who were North Carolina's first inhabitants.

But the campsite's origins apparently came thousands of years earlier because as they went deeper, the archeologists found more artifacts including what they call "points."

Bamann showed us a collection of those "points" -- stone tools with sharp edges.

"These are from the archaic period," she said. "This one's from the early archaic period, so 6,000 to 8,000 B.C."

The excavation has just ended but when we visited, the scientists were sifting the last of the dirt removed from the site.

As they worked, heavy equipment rumbled nearby and blasting occasionally sent shock waves through the air and ground.

But the archeologists never flinched.

One of the most exciting finds unearthed on the dig was a broken and once polished piece of stone with holes drilled in it from about 10,000 years ago.

"Probably a piece of personal adornment, jewelry, if you will," Bamann said, and she added, "it's a two-holed item that someone would have suspended as a piece of personal decoration or ornamentation. At least that's what we believe these items are. So, finding something that's a personal item from someone who lived here, and camped here is, I think, is just one of those things that makes all of this extra interesting because it's a little bit of a glimpse into the past."

Bamann said this was obviously a popular camp for hunter-gatherers.

Some of the items found here revealed just how far those people may have roamed.

Bamann pointed at the projectiles, noting that some were made from materials that wouldn't have been found in the area near the campsite.

"These are all fashioned from stone, some of these from the stone source that we associated with the Uwharrie Mountains," she said.

Those mountains are in Montgomery County nearly 100 miles west of Wake County.

The artifacts collected at the site will eventually end up at the North Carolina Office of State Archeology.

Be sure to click on the link in the title above to learn much more...

Thursday, January 21, 2021

Earliest Evidence of Humans Living in South America


Monte Verde: Our Earliest Evidence of Humans Living in South America
By Bridget Alex November 1, 2019 

As the Ice Age began to wane, people from northeastern Asia spread to the Americas, some of the last uninhabited continents on Earth. The pioneers traveled south of mile-high ice sheets covering Canada and found vast lands, abounding with mammoth, giant sloth and other now-extinct megafauna.

This much has been known for decades. But when it comes to the details, debates have raged over precisely when and how humans populated the New World. Today, the story is beginning to take shape, thanks to well-dated archaeological sites, DNA analysis and geological work to understand when ice and sea levels permitted entry to the Americas. It’s clear that people occupied the continents by about 15,000 years ago, probably taking a route along the Pacific coast.

And one site, perhaps more than any other, helped scholars reach this conclusion: Chile’s Monte Verde. During excavations begun in the 1970s, archaeologists unearthed numerous artifacts, including remnants of 14,000-year-old huts, food scraps from megafauna and wads of masticated seaweed, likely chewed for medicinal purposes. The preservation was so exceptional, it cleared any doubt that humans had reached the New World by this time, and earned Monte Verde a place in every archaeology textbook to come.

Meanwhile, recent research on the site’s surroundings and deeper layers suggests humans inhabited this patch of South America as early as 19,000 years ago. While the claim remains controversial, it’s clear there’s still more to discover at Monte Verde.

Creekside Campsite
Buried under a peat bog, Monte Verde is near South America’s tip and about 30 miles from the Pacific in present-day Chile. Excavations began in 1976, led by archaeologist Tom Dillehay. Although no human skeletons were found, an excavated layer — radiocarbon dated to about 14,000 years ago — held clear evidence of human inhabitants, including a child-sized footprint.

At Monte Verde, the researchers discovered the ruins of a forager campsite, about as large as a football field, on the bank of a meandering creek. Still surviving were the wooden foundations of a long, rectangular building, which was subdivided into a dozen rooms, each containing food remains and clay-lined fire pits. It seems to have been a communal residence divided into personal dwellings. About 100 feet from these living quarters stood a wishbone-shaped structure accompanied by tools and butchered animal parts — likely a work area.

The archaeologists also recovered spun grass rope, wooden lances, animal hides and human feces from the site. Perishable items like these are rarely preserved at archaeological sites. But because Monte Verde is below peat deposits, organic materials were protected from decomposition. Food scraps also survived, revealing the people gathered at least 60 species of edible and medicinal plants, including a variety of seaweed species brought from the coast. And they hunted now-extinct creatures such as paleocamelids (an ancestor of llama and alpaca) and elephant-like gomphotheres.

Breaking the Clovis Barrier
Just as significant, though, is what the excavators did not find: Monte Verde lacked Clovis points — distinctive stone tools found at North American sites dating to roughly 13,000 years ago. Through much of the 20th century, many archaeologists supported “Clovis First” — the hypothesis that the people who made these artifacts were the first inhabitants of the Americas. Reports of older pre-Clovis sites were dismissed on the grounds that they were incorrectly excavated or dated.

But Monte Verde was remarkably well-preserved, meticulously excavated and analyzed with state-of-the-art methods. It convinced the archaeological community that non-Clovis peoples reached South America by at least 14,000 years ago. Clovis was not first.

Since then, numerous pre-Clovis sites have been reported between 13,300 and 15,000 years old. North America holds about 10 of them. But in South America, besides Monte Verde and its surrounding area, there are only two others: Huaca Prieta in Peru and Arroyo Seco in Argentina. With so few comparative sites, it’s difficult to say who and how widespread the Monte Verde people were.

Older Occupations
Dillehay and colleagues also reported potentially older artifacts from Monte Verde in a 1988 Nature paper. From a deeper layer dated to 30,000 years ago, they found three clay-lined burned areas and at least six stones that appear to have been shaped into tools. However, the finds were considered too meager to constitute a strong case for human presence.

Decades later, in 2013, Dillehay returned to the site to lead a team that dug 80 probes and test pits in the land around Monte Verde. The work, published in a 2015 PLOS One paper, identified 12 discrete spots with signs of a campfire (charcoal, ash, burned clay), stone tools and animal bones. Radiocarbon analysis dated the finds between 14,500 and 19,000 years ago.

The results suggest even earlier peopling of the Americas. Future work at Monte Verde may prove it.

Thursday, January 14, 2021

Claim that Evidence shows 1st Americans came from the Pacific Coast

New Evidence Bolsters Theory That 1st Americans Arrived by the Pacific Coast
Gizmodo.com  by George Dvorsky  8/29/19

Archaeological evidence excavated in western Idaho suggests humans were in the region well over 15,000 years ago—prior to the opening of the massive ice sheets that blocked entrance into North America via the Bering land bridge. It’s further evidence that the continent’s first people arrived by traveling along the Pacific coast.


Prior to the Late Upper Paleolithic, humans had established a presence on every habitable continent on the planet—except North and South America. A gigantic and impenetrable obstruction known as the Cordilleran Ice Sheet blocked entry from Siberia into Alaska, preventing human migration into the New World.


But as the last great Ice Age ended, so too did this colossal barrier. Around 14,800 years ago, the Cordilleran Ice Sheet separated from its neighboring Laurentide Ice Sheet, creating an ice-free corridor that extended from Beringia through to what is now the Dakotas. This dramatic change in the environment has led archaeologists to surmise that the earliest migrants to North America arrived by traversing this corridor, in what’s referred to, appropriately enough, as the Ice-Free Corridor Hypothesis.


Trouble is, emerging archaeological and genetic evidence is increasingly pointing to an arrival date in North America prior to 14,800 years ago, leading to the Coastal Migration Hypothesis. Instead of traveling through the interior, this theory proposes a route in which the first settlers of North America traveled south along the Pacific coast, eventually surpassing the southernmost extent of the ice sheets.


New research published today in Science offers some of the earliest archaeological evidence of humans in North America, further bolstering the Coastal Migration Hypothesis. Working at the Cooper’s Ferry site in western Idaho, a team led by Loren Davis, a professor of anthropology at Oregon State University, uncovered stone tools, animal bones, traces of fire pits, and other signs of human occupation dated to between 16,560 and 15,280 years ago—several centuries prior to the appearance of the ice-free corridor.


“This is so cool,” Christiana Scheib, an archaeologist and paleogeneticist from the University of Cambridge, told Gizmodo. “This is a great example of the kind of archaeology we need happening in order to better understand the First Peoples in the Americas,” said Scheib, who wasn’t involved with the new study.


Archaeologist Alia Lesnek from the Department of Geology at the University at Buffalo, also not affiliated with the new study, said the new paper “presents an exciting new dataset that provides convincing evidence of human presence in modern-day Idaho as early as 15,300 years ago,” and that these results “add to a growing body of research suggesting that the First Americans arrived in North America by traveling along the Pacific coast.”


Last year, Lesnek and her colleagues uncovered potential geological evidence of an Alaskan coastal migration route that could have allowed humans to cross over from Eurasia into North America during the Ice Age.


But not everyone is convinced by the new evidence. One archaeologist we spoke to said more work will be required to validate the results presented in the new paper. The study describes findings from one of two excavation sites at Cooper’s Ferry, which has been investigated by archaeologists since the late 1990s.


“The Cooper’s Ferry site is located along the Salmon River, which is a tributary of the larger Columbia River basin,” said Davis in a press release. “Early peoples moving south along the Pacific coast would have encountered the Columbia River as the first place below the glaciers where they could easily walk and paddle in to North America. Essentially, the Columbia River corridor was the first off-ramp of a Pacific coast migration route.” To which he added: “The timing and position of the Cooper’s Ferry site is consistent with and most easily explained as the result of an early Pacific coastal migration.”




Buried within the deepest layers of the site, Loren’s team found hundreds of artifacts, including stone tools, fire-cracked rocks used in hearths, bone fragments from possibly prey, and other evidence of human occupation, such as areas used for processing food. Tooth fragments from an extinct horse were also uncovered, though its connection to the settlement is not entirely clear.


Radiocarbon dating of animal bone fragments and burnt charcoal suggests the site was repeatedly occupied between 16,560 and 15,280 years ago. “Prior to getting these radiocarbon ages, the oldest things we’d found dated mostly in the 13,000-year range, and the earliest evidence of people in the Americas had been dated to just before 14,000 years old in a handful of other sites,” explained Davis. “When I first saw that the lower archaeological layer contained radiocarbon ages older than 14,000 years, I was stunned but skeptical and needed to see those numbers repeated over and over just to be sure they’re right. So we ran more radiocarbon dates, and the lower layer consistently dated between 14,000-16,000 years old.”


The new paper subsequently challenges the longstanding “Clovis First” theory of North American colonization, which proposes that the first migrants to the continent arrived via the interior ice-free route, eventually reaching the Dakotas. What’s more, the authors presented evidence showing that the tools used by the Cooper’s Ferry migrants were of a distinctly non-Clovis-like nature. Specifically, these people employed unfluted and stemmed projectile points, and not the fluted, broad-based points indicative of Clovis culture. Loren and his colleagues also argued that the tools used by the Cooper’s Ferry people bear a striking resemblance to those found in contemporaneous cultures living in northeastern Asia, including Japan. This would seem to suggest that these early migrants retained knowledge of this technology as they settled into North America.


“My perspective is that Cooper’s Ferry is intriguing, but not paradigm-shifting.” Ben Potter, an archaeologist from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, had some issues with the new paper. “My perspective is that Cooper’s Ferry is intriguing, but not paradigm-shifting,” Potter told Gizmodo. “Much more work needs to be done to establish the nature and age of the occupations.”


Potter expressed concerns about the layer itself, which he described as a hodge-podge of “multiple potentially overlapping components over four thousand years.” He also didn’t love the fact that the majority of dates established within the investigated layer were less than 13,800 years old (10 out of the 18 ages reported). There is “no good reason to hypothesize occupation” at more than 16,000 years ago “because of a few widely scattered charcoal fragments not directly linked to cultural feature, and one from a feature with much later ages,” he said. The date presented in the study most closely linked with stemmed points at other sites, around 11,600 years old, or the oldest hearth with a few flakes between 15,000-14,000 years old, he said, do not “preclude passage through the Ice Free Corridor and/or the Pacific coast,” and by “no means do these data refute the [ice-free corridor] hypothesis. Both interior and coastal routes remain viable,” he said.


On a similar note, Lesnek thought it important to point out that the oldest age established for the site, at over 16,500 years old, was not established directly from material that was actually dated. “Rather, that age comes from a statistical modeling program that uses dates from the entire sediment layer to estimate when the event—in this case occupation by humans—began,” Lesnek told Gizmodo. “However, the statistical modeling program the authors employ is robust and widely used in archeology and earth sciences. In addition, even if the authors used the oldest radiocarbon date to determine the age of the site, that would put humans in North America by 15,300 years ago, which precludes that the initial migration to the Americas took place through the ice-free corridor.”


Potter described the comparisons of the stemmed points with Japanese tools as being “superficial and unconvincing,” without “any technological analysis to support the hypothesized connections.” Similarly, Scheib said this connection was “interesting,” but it “doesn’t mean that these people came directly from there,” she told Gizmodo.


Scheib, who studies the DNA of America’s first people, said an early genetic split occurred among North America’s first settlers, and it may have happened around the time of the Cooper’s Ferry settlement. “One group is associated with Clovis tools and related to modern Central and South Americans and the other is related to modern North Americans,” Scheib told Gizmodo. “It would be very interesting to know whether the early people at Cooper’s Ferry are genetically more like one or the other. Or if this is the time when these two groups are actually becoming distinct entities.” Genetic evidence from Cooper’s Ferry—which has yet to be uncovered—could tell us more about how and where these two populations diverged, she said. Finding DNA could be tough but not impossible.


“The cultural material at Cooper’s Ferry was only accessible due to the construction of a road in the 1930s, which removed about 15 feet of sediment,” Lesnek told Gizmodo. “It may very well be that other ancient archeological sites are buried across North America, but we haven’t found them yet.”


Wednesday, January 13, 2021

Did an Agricultural Society become dominant 5,000-10,000 Years Ago


From the Associated Press By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP Science Writer Randolph E. Schmid, Ap Science Writer – Monday, March 7, 2011 

WASHINGTON – Thousands of years ago, our ancestors gave up foraging for food and took up farming, one of the most important and debated decisions in history.

Was farming more efficient than foraging? Did the easily hunted animals die out? Did the environment change? A new study by Samuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico argues that early farming was not more productive than foraging, but people took it up for social and demographic reasons.

In Monday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Bowles analyzed what it would take to farm under primitive conditions. He concluded farming produced only about three-fifths of the food gained from foraging.

But, Bowles notes, farming became the most common way of living between 10,000 and 5,000 years ago because of its contribution to population growth and military power.

Without the need for constant movement, child-rearing would have been easier and safer, leading to a population increase, Bowles said. And since stored grain might be looted, farmer communities could have banded together for defense and would have eventually pushed out neighboring foragers, he suggests.

Brian Fagan, a professor emeritus of archaeology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, called Bowles' ideas "provocative and fascinating." It had been suspected that the earliest farming was not necessarily more productive, said Fagan, who was not part of the research. "What he does is to draw attention to the social and demographic factors that contributed so importantly to the spread of farming," Fagan said. "This is a useful contribution to a debate about agricultural origins that has been under way for generations."

Samuel Bowles Abstract:

Cultivation of cereals by the first farmers was not more productive than foraging
Did foragers become farmers because cultivation of crops was simply a better way to make a living? If so, what is arguably the greatest ever revolution in human livelihoods is readily explained. To answer the question, I estimate the caloric returns per hour of labor devoted to foraging wild species and cultivating the cereals exploited by the first farmers, using data on foragers and land-abundant hand-tool farmers in the ethnographic and historical record, as well as archaeological evidence. A convincing answer must account not only for the work of foraging and cultivation but also for storage, processing, and other indirect labor, and for the costs associated with the delayed nature of agricultural production and the greater exposure to risk of those whose livelihoods depended on a few cultivars rather than a larger number of wild species. Notwithstanding the considerable uncertainty to which these estimates inevitably are subject, the evidence is inconsistent with the hypothesis that the productivity of the first farmers exceeded that of early Holocene foragers. Social and demographic aspects of farming, rather than its productivity, may have been essential to its emergence and spread. Prominent among these aspects may have been the contribution of farming to population growth and to military prowess, both promoting the spread of farming as a livelihood.

Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM, 87501; and University of Siena, Siena 53100, Italy
Edited by Henry T. Wright, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, & approved February 2, 2011 (received for review July 26, 2010)

Full article from The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences for the United States of America.

Monday, January 11, 2021

Ancient DNA retells Story of Caribbean's First People, with a few Plot Twists...

Ancient DNA retells Story of Caribbean's First People

Florida Museum of Natural History 3 Dec 2020

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- "The history of the Caribbean's original islanders comes into sharper focus in a new Nature study that combines decades of archaeological work with advancements in genetic technology.

"An international team led by Harvard Medical School's David Reich analyzed the genomes of 263 individuals in the largest study of ancient human DNA in the Americas to date. The genetics trace two major migratory waves in the Caribbean by two distinct groups, thousands of years apart, revealing an archipelago settled by highly mobile people, with distant relatives often living on different islands.

"Reich's lab also developed a new genetic technique for estimating past population size, showing the number of people living in the Caribbean when Europeans arrived was far smaller than previously thought - likely in the tens of thousands, rather than the million or more reported by Columbus and his successors.

"For archaeologist William Keegan, whose work in the Caribbean spans more than 40 years, ancient DNA offers a powerful new tool to help resolve longstanding debates, confirm hypotheses and spotlight remaining mysteries. "This "moves our understanding of the Caribbean forward dramatically in one fell swoop," said Keegan, curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History and co-senior author of the study. "The methods David's team developed helped address questions I didn't even know we could address."

"Archaeologists often rely on the remnants of domestic life - pottery, tools, bone and shell discards - to piece together the past. Now, technological breakthroughs in the study of ancient DNA are shedding new light on the movement of animals and humans, particularly in the Caribbean where each island can be a unique microcosm of life.

"While the heat and humidity of the tropics can quickly break down organic matter, the human body contains a lockbox of genetic material: a small, unusually dense part of the bone protecting the inner ear. Primarily using this structure, researchers extracted and analyzed DNA from 174 people who lived in the Caribbean and Venezuela between 400 and 3,100 years ago, combining the data with 89 previously sequenced individuals.

"The team, which includes Caribbean-based scholars, received permission to carry out the genetic analysis from local governments and cultural institutions that acted as caretakers for the human remains. The authors also engaged representatives of Caribbean Indigenous communities in a discussion of their findings.

"The genetic evidence offers new insights into the peopling of the Caribbean. The islands' first inhabitants, a group of stone tool-users, boated to Cuba about 6,000 years ago, gradually expanding eastward to other islands during the region's Archaic Age. "Where they came from remains unclear - while they are more closely related to Central and South Americans than to North Americans, their genetics do not match any particular Indigenous group. However, similar artifacts found in Belize and Cuba may suggest a Central American origin," Keegan said.

"About 2,500-3,000 years ago, farmers and potters related to the Arawak-speakers of northeast South America established a second pathway into the Caribbean. Using the fingers of South America's Orinoco River Basin like highways, they travelled from the interior to coastal Venezuela and pushed north into the Caribbean Sea, settling Puerto Rico and eventually moving westward. Their arrival ushered in the region's Ceramic Age, marked by agriculture and the widespread production and use of pottery.

"Over time, nearly all genetic traces of Archaic Age people vanished, except for a holdout community in western Cuba that persisted as late as European arrival. Intermarriage between the two groups was rare, with only three individuals in the study showing mixed ancestry.

"Many present-day Cubans, Dominicans and Puerto Ricans are the descendants of Ceramic Age people, as well as European immigrants and enslaved Africans. But researchers noted only marginal evidence of Archaic Age ancestry in modern individuals.

"That's a big mystery," Keegan said. "For Cuba, it's especially curious that we don't see more Archaic ancestry."

"During the Ceramic Age, Caribbean pottery underwent at least five marked shifts in style over 2,000 years. Ornate red pottery decorated with white painted designs gave way to simple, buff-colored vessels, while other pots were punctuated with tiny dots and incisions or bore sculpted animal faces that likely doubled as handles. Some archaeologists pointed to these transitions as evidence for new migrations to the islands. But DNA tells a different story, suggesting all of the styles were developed by descendants of the people who arrived in the Caribbean 2,500-3,000 years ago, though they may have interacted with and took inspiration from outsiders.

"That was a question we might not have known to ask had we not had an archaeological expert on our team," said co-first author Kendra Sirak, a postdoctoral fellow in the Reich Lab. "We document this remarkable genetic continuity across changes in ceramic style. We talk about 'pots vs. people,' and to our knowledge, it's just pots."

"Highlighting the region's interconnectivity, a study of male X chromosomes uncovered 19 pairs of "genetic cousins" living on different islands - people who share the same amount of DNA as biological cousins but may be separated by generations. In the most striking example, one man was buried in the Bahamas while his relative was laid to rest about 600 miles away in the Dominican Republic.

"Showing relationships across different islands is really an amazing step forward," said Keegan, who added that shifting winds and currents can make passage between islands difficult. "I was really surprised to see these cousin pairings between islands."

"Uncovering such a high proportion of genetic cousins in a sample of fewer than 100 men is another indicator that the region's total population size was small," said Reich, professor of genetics in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS and professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard. "When you sample two modern individuals, you don't often find that they're close relatives," he said. "Here, we're finding relatives all over the place."

"A technique developed by study co-author Harald Ringbauer, a postdoctoral fellow in the Reich Lab, used shared segments of DNA to estimate past population size, a method that could also be applied to future studies of ancient people. Ringbauer's technique showed about 10,000 to 50,000 people were living on two of the Caribbean's largest islands, Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, shortly before European arrival. "This falls far short of the million inhabitants Columbus described to his patrons, likely to impress them," Keegan said.

"Later, 16th-century historian Bartolomé de las Casas claimed the region had been home to 3 million people before being decimated by European enslavement and disease. While this, too, was an exaggeration, the number of people who died as a result of colonization remains an atrocity," Reich said. "This was a systematic program of cultural erasure. The fact that the number was not 1 million or millions of people, but rather tens of thousands, does not make that erasure any less significant," he said.

"For Keegan, collaborating with geneticists gave him the ability to prove some hypotheses he had argued for years - while upending others. "At this point, I don't care if I'm wrong or right," he said. "It's just exciting to have a firmer basis for reevaluating how we look at the past in the Caribbean. One of the most significant outcomes of this study is that it demonstrates just how important culture is in understanding human societies. Genes may be discrete, measurable units, but the human genome is culturally created."

Daniel Fernandes of the University of Vienna and the University of Coimbra in Portugal was also co-first author of the study. Other co-senior authors are Alfredo Coppa of the Sapienza University of Rome, Mark Lipson of HMS and Harvard and Ron Pinhasi of the University of Vienna.

An earlier article from June 2020

Illustration of one of the early settlers in the Caribbean. Image credit: Tom Björklund.

Humans Colonized Caribbean Islands in Three Waves: Study

Jun 5, 2020 Sci News

An international team of researchers has sequenced and analyzed the genomes of 93 ancient Caribbean islanders and found evidence of at least three separate population dispersals into the region: two early dispersals into the Western Caribbean, one of which seems connected to earlier population dispersals in North America; and a third, more recent wave from South America.

The Caribbean Islands were one of the last regions in the Americas to be settled by humans.

The earliest archeological evidence suggests that the Caribbean’s first residents arrived roughly 8,000 years ago, and by 5,000 years ago, were widely dispersed.

However, how, when and from where the region’s first colonists came to the islands of the Antilles isn’t well understood.

Much of the Caribbean’s settlement history has heavily relied on interpretations from archaeological findings, such as the stylistic comparison of artifact collections between Caribbean sites and those from the surrounding mainland.

While these approaches have illuminated broad-scale population movements, many of the more nuanced aspects of Caribbean population history remain unknown.

To fill these gaps, Kathrin Nägele from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and colleagues analyzed genome-wide data from 93 ancient Caribbean islanders who lived between 400 and 3,200 years ago using bone fragments excavated from 16 different archaeological sites across the Caribbean.

The analysis provided new genetic evidence of at least three separate colonization events, including two early dispersals into the Western Caribbean – one of which was previously unknown and may have been connected to radiation events in North America that predate the diversification of Central and South American populations.

Afterward, a later expansion of groups from South America arrived and brought new technologies, including pottery, supporting previous archaeological interpretations.

“The new data give us a fascinating glimpse of the early migration history of the Caribbean,” said senior co-author Dr. Hannes Schroeder, a researcher in the Globe Institute at the University of Copenhagen. “We find evidence that the islands were settled and resettled several times from different parts of the American mainland.”

“Big bodies of water are traditionally considered barriers for humans and ancient fisher-hunter-gatherer communities are usually not perceived as great seafarers,” Nägele said. “Our results continue to challenge that view, as they suggest that there was repeated interaction between the islands and the mainland.”

“The new data support our previous observations that the early settlers of the Caribbean were biologically and culturally diverse, adding resolution to this ancient period of our history,” said co-author Dr. Yadira Chinique de Armas, a researcher at the University of Winnipeg.

The team’s results also revealed distinct genetic differences between the ancestors of the region’s earliest settlers and the newcomers from South America.

Despite coexisting for centuries, the scientists found almost no evidence of admixture, raising intriguing new questions about their interactions.

“Although different groups were present in the Caribbean at the same time, we found surprisingly little evidence of admixture between them,” said co-author Dr. Cosimo Posth, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.

“The results of this study provide yet another layer of data that highlights the diverse and complex nature of pre-Columbian Caribbean societies and their connections to the American mainland prior to the colonial invasion,” said co-author Professor Corinne Hofman, a scientist at Leiden University.

The findings were published in the journal Science. Kathrin Nägele et al. Genomic insights into the early peopling of the Caribbean. Science, published online June 4, 2020

Sunday, January 10, 2021

Idaho Researchers look for Links between Clovis People & large Mammals on the Snake River Plain

By IDAHO STATE UNIVERSITY  Nov 28, 2019  

About 13,000 years ago on the banks of the Pleistocene American Falls Lake on the Snake River Plain, large “megafauna” mammals now extinct — such as mammoths, mastodons, camels, short-faced bears, dire wolves & saber-toothed tigers — lived alongside the Clovis people.

However, Clovis artifacts have never been recovered side-by-side with fossil remains of these extinct megafauna mammals, even though they’ve been found near each other.

Charles Speer, an Idaho State University anthropology assistant professor, along with colleagues at the Idaho Museum of Natural History, other universities & soon with ISU students, is engaged in research to document the link between the artifacts of the Clovis people & these extinct animals that populated the area during the same time period.
Charles Speer holds part of a mammoth fossil recovered at the 2018 ISU Archaeology Field School site in the Magic Valley near Kimberly. Next summer, Speer & the school will be working closer to home near American Falls Reservoir.

In a recently published paper on Clovis technology from American Falls on the Eastern Snake River Plain in the journal “North American Archaeologist,” Speer & colleagues detailed the potential for making new scientific findings that can shed light on this period of history in eastern Idaho. This potential includes discovering new information on the area’s climate, animals & people; all of which provides the rationale for thoroughly excavating a site in the area.

“We don’t have a connection in the Snake River Plain between Clovis stone tools, some of the earliest in North America, & the megafauna we have at the time,” Speer said. “We haven’t found any kill, butchering, or scavenging sites where we have the stone tools & animals in the same place. At the American Falls (reservoir) site, it is highly likely that we will find this connection. This next summer during the ISU archaeology field school in June, that is exactly what we are going to be looking for.”

The ISU researchers will be excavating a site down 8 to 10 feet below the surface. “The primary reason we are excavating is that the whole area is in danger of eroding away,” Speer said, noting the group has been tasked by the Bureau of Reclamation to recover as much as they can.

Speer explained that the climate on this portion of the Snake River Plain was likely colder & wetter 13,000 years ago. The climate was affected by the large glaciers to the north extending down from Canada only a few hundred kilometers away. Though the climate was cooler, this area was a magnet for the animals mentioned above, as well as familiar species still making the region home like mule deer, antelope, bison & elk.

“People camped out there, made their tools & hunted the animals. We really just want to make that connection showing they were exploiting these extinct animals because that is a big missing piece,” Speer said.

Studying the climate at the time & potential kill sites can help answer a host of questions about this area’s history.  “We are interested in the animals that died off right when this Clovis culture was at its peak,” Speer said. “We ask questions like ‘did these people kill all these animals, was it climate change or was it both?’ In North America alone, 90 genera of animals over 100 pounds died off during the Clovis period at the close of the Pleistocene 11,700 years ago,” Speer said. This included horses, that flourished when re-introduced 500 years ago by Europeans.

The researchers also are interested in how human beings reacted to climate change during this period, which was right at the end of the Pleistocene period, after which the climate warmed & dried considerably.

In addition, the researchers will be looking for evidence of a culture older than the Clovis living in eastern Idaho.  “Clovis for the longest time was thought to be the oldest culture in North America but know we know it is not,” Speer said. “Researchers in western Idaho have been excavating the Cooper’s Ferry site that is associated with a projectile point style called ‘Western Stemmed’ that is both contemporaneous & potentially older than Clovis. Additionally, they have recovered artifacts several thousands years older which we hope to also discover & fill in the missing pieces with here.”

“We are hoping to see an overlap & connection between the two,” Speer continued, “because we are right on this boundary where to the east you have Clovis in abundance & to the west we have Western Stemmed in abundance, but we don’t have any sites where the two are mixed up. We are also hoping to see the site stretch back in time to 17,000 or 18,000 years ago.”

The researchers will turn over any artifacts found at the site to the Idaho Museum of Natural History, which already has more than 10,000 specimens of megafauna that lived in the area & a collection of Clovis artifacts from the American Falls area.

Friday, January 8, 2021

Terms associated with Researching Peoples in the Prehistoric Americas


As a historian of North America during the period when Europeans began to colonize the area now the USA, I am intrigued with, almost obsessed with, when mankind 1st appeared in The Americas, in North America, & especially in the Atlantic coast area later settled by European colonists. 

How did these early peoples try to gain some control over the weather patterns & geography? Did they create physical spaces to meet their basic needs for shelter, food, family, health, & safety. How did they organize their society & culture? Did they migrate on foot or water to these sites? Did they create myths & religions? 

Mankind has a history of constant migration, confrontation, & adaptation for hundreds of thousands of years. And, of course, different populations around the planet adapted to different conditions in different ways. If we are trying to trace early inhabitants of the Americas, we need to become familiar with the terms used to describe the period before written history. BWS

Arable: Land favorable to the cultivation of crops or land upon which crops are grown.

Archaic: The Archaic cultural period (7500 B.C. to 1000 B.C) is divided into subperiods
Early Archaic (7500 B.C. - 6000 B.C.),
Middle Archaic (6000 B.C. – 3500 B.C.) and
Late Archaic (3500 B.C. – 1000 B.C.) sub periods.

Archaeobotany: Or Paleoethnobotany is the study of archaeologically-recovered plant artifacts to
interpret how people in the past used and interacted with plants.

Clovis: A distinct Paleoindian group originally named for a distinctively shaped fluted stone spearpoint used to hunt megafauna. The Clovis people are generally regarded as the earliest human inhabitants of the New World.

Cultivation: The act of growing plants.

Dichotomous Key: Is a tool that allows the user to determine the taxomonic identity of items in the natural world, such as plants and animals. The key is a written device constructed from a series of organized statements which represent mutually exclusive choices. Identification is made by selecting choices based on the user’s comparisons with unknown specimen until a conclusion is reached.

Domestication: The process through which a plant (or animal) is adapted to life in close association with and to the benefit of humans.

Eastern Woodlands: The temperate forests zones of eastern North America stretching from the
Mississippi River east to the Atlantic ocean, and excluding the tropical forests of the south.

Extinct: A plant or animal species which no longer exists.

Extirpated: A local extinction, where a species ceases to exist in one area, but still exists elsewhere.

Flotation: A process to separate organic remains from archaeological soils.

Holocene: Is a geological epoch which began approximately 10,000 years ago and continues into the
present.

Horticulture: The art and science of growing plants.

Husbandry: The act of caring for or managing plants and animals for human benefit.

Little Ice Age: A modest cooling of the northern hemisphere following a warmer era (the Medieval
Warm Period) and spanning from the 1500’s through the mid 19th century.

Ice Age: A geologic period of long-term reduction in the Earth’s temperature which results in an
expansion of the continental and polar ice sheets.

Light Microscope: Or optical microscope is a type of microscope which uses visible light and a system of lenses to magnify images of small specimens.

Mantle: A thick layer of molten rock on which the earth’s crust floats.

Megafauna: Specifically, the Pleistocene Megafauna, the giant land animals of the last ice age like
mammoth, mastodon and giant bear which are now extinct.

Morphology: The form (structure, shape, color, pattern) of an organism or of a part of an organism.

Non-Indigenous: A plant or animal species that is introduced to a geographical area. Not native, an alien or exotic species.

Paleoethnobotany: Or Archeobotany is the study of archaeologically-recovered plant artifacts to
interpret how people in the past used and interacted with plants.

Paleoindian: The Paleoindian cultural period (10000 B.C. to 7500 B.C.) was a time of radical climatic change at the transition of the Pleistocene to the Holocene at the end of the last ice age.

Palynology: Is the science that studies fossil pollen and other palynomorphs (tiny organic-walled
micro-fossils).

Phytolith: Or plant opal silica bodies are rigid microscopic structures that occur in many plants. Silica Phytoliths vary in size and shape based on the plant taxon and plant part (root, stem, seed) from which they derive.

Radiocarbon Dating: A method of radiometric dating that uses the naturally occurring radioisotope carbon-14 to determine the age of carbon-rich itens. Raw (or uncalibrated) radiocarbon ages are reported in radiocarbon years Before Present (BP) (1950). Raw ages can be calibrated to give calendar dates in years A.D. (Anno Domini) or B.C. (Before Christ).

Reference Collection - Botanical: A collection of botanical specimens arranged and maintained in a herbarium for comparative purposes to aid in the identification of archeobotanical artifacts. Materials in an Archeobotanical Reference Collection are often treated to simulate archaeological conditions such as carbonization or water-logging.

Scanning Electron Microscope: A type of microscope that uses electrons to illuminate a specimen and create an enlarged image. Electron Microscopes can obtain much higher magnifications than light microscopes.

Starch Grain Analysis: A methodology that uses microscopic starch residues preserved on artifacts (and in soils) to understand past plant use.

Tidewater: Applies to all geographic areas of Maryland where waterways are affected by tidal influence.

Wisconsin Glaciation: The most recent glacial period which began about 110,000 years ago, reached its maximum extent between 18,000 and 20,000 years ago, and ended between 10,000 and 15, 000 years ago.

Woodland: The Woodland cultural period (1000 B.C. - A.D. 1600) is divided into subperiods
Early Woodland (1000 B.C. – A.D. 200),
Middle Woodland (A.D. 200 – A.D. 900)
Late Woodland (A.D. 900 – A.D. 1650)

Thanks to Maryland's Jefferson-Patterson Park & Museum for their assistance.

Thursday, January 7, 2021

Flight into Egypt - by Boat!!

1600, attributed to Ludovico Carracci, Flight into Egypt
Luca Giordano (Italian artist, 1634–1705) The Flight into Egypt
Maarten de Vos (Flemish painter, 1532-1603) Return from the Flight into Egypt

Flight into Egypt - Paintings

 Guido da Siena, (1225-1280) Flight into Egypt
 Guido da Siena, (1225-1280) Flight into Egypt
 1308 Duccio di Buoninsegna, Flight into Egypt
 1398 Melchior Broederlam (fl. 1381–1409) Flight into Egypt
1423 Toppling of the Pagan Idols (Bedford Master). 
 1432 Flight into Egypt, altarpiece from Verdu, 1432-34, by Jaume Ferrer II known as The Younger (active between 1430 and 1460-1470)
 1450 Fra Angelico (1395–1455) Flight into Egypt
 1465 Vittore Carpaccio (Italian painter, c 1465–1526) Flight into Egypt
1494 Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) Flight into Egypt
 1500 Fra Bartolomeo or Fra Bartolommeo (di Pagholo) (1472–1517), The Rest on The Flight into Egypt
 1501 Jörg Breu the Elder (1475–1537) Flight into Egypt
 1515 Antonio da Correggio (1490–1534) Flight into Egypt
 1515 Master of the Mansi Magdalen (Netherlandish, active 1510-1525) Rest on the Flight into Egypt c 1515
1516 Hans Baldung (1485–1545) Flight into Egypt
 1520 The Rest on The Flight into Egypt by Anonymous, Northern Italy
 1525 Wolf Huber (1480–1553) Flight into Egypt
 1530 Master AB German School Flight into Egypt
 1530 Paris Bordone (Italian High Renaissance Painter, 1500-1571) Rest on the Flight into Egypt with St Catherine and Angels
 1545 Jacopo Bassano (Italian painter, 1510-1592) Flight into Egypt
 Francesco Bassano the Younger (1563-1570) Flight into Egypt
Francesco Bassano the Younger (1563-1570) Flight into Egypt
 1563 Orazio Lomi Gentileschi (Italian artist, 1563–1639) Madonna and Child The Rest on the Flight into Egypt
1596 Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio 1571-1610 Flight into Egypt
 1598 Francisco de Zurbarán (Spanish painter, 1598–1664) Flight into Egypt
 1600s Russian icon of the Flight into Egypt; the bottom section shows the idols of Egypt miraculously crumbling down before Jesus
 1616 Jacob Jordaens Return of the Holy Family from Egypt
 1700 Mancini, Francesco (1679 - 1758) Flight into Egypt
 1720 Giovanni Odazzi (Italian, 1663-1731) Rest on the Flight to Egypt
1828 Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (1794–1872) Flight into Egypt

1480 Hans Memling (circa 1433–1494) Flight into Egypt