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The article focuses on the discovery of the world's oldest known fortresses in central Siberia, built 8000 years ago by hunter-gatherers. Topics discussed include the forts' sophisticated architecture, their early construction predating monumental structures in the Middle East, and the broader implications for understanding the complexity of societies without relying on agriculture.

The article informs that ancient genome-wide DNA from France highlights the complexity of interactions between Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and Neolithic farmers. Topics discussed include genomes from early European farmers have shown a clear Near Eastern/Anatolian genetic affinity with limited contribution from hunter-gatherers; and data highlight the complexity of the biological interactions during the Neolithic expansion by revealing major regional variations.

A recent study challenges the idea that complex societies and permanent settlements could only arise after the advent of agriculture. In central Siberia, hunter-gatherers built the world's oldest known fortresses 8,000 years ago, complete with elaborate defenses and dwellings sunk deep into the ground for warmth. These fortresses were built thousands of years before agriculture reached some parts of Europe and Asia, suggesting that alternate pathways to complexity exist. The findings in Siberia, along with other archaeological evidence, are prompting a re-evaluation of how complex societies developed and challenging the traditional view that agriculture was the primary driver of cultural complexity. [Extracted from the article]

Environmentally transformative human use of land accelerated with the emergence of agriculture, but the extent, trajectory, and implications of these early changes are not well understood. An empirical global assessment of land use from 10,000 years before the present (yr B.P.) to 1850 CE reveals a planet largely transformed by hunter-gatherers, farmers, and pastoralists by 3000 years ago, considerably earlier than the dates in the land-use reconstructions commonly used by Earth scientists. Synthesis of knowledge contributed by more than 250 archaeologists highlighted gaps in archaeological expertise and data quality, which peaked for 2000 yr B.P. and in traditionally studied and wealthier regions. Archaeological reconstruction of global land-use history illuminates the deep roots of EarthÕs transformation and challenges the emerging Anthropocene paradigm that large-scale anthropogenic global environmental change is mostly a recent phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We assembled genome-wide data from 271 ancient Iberians, of whom 176 are from the largely unsampled period after 2000 BCE, thereby providing a high-resolution time transect of the Iberian Peninsula. We document high genetic substructure between northwestern and southeastern hunter-gatherers before the spread of farming. We reveal sporadic contacts between Iberia and North Africa by ~2500 BCE and, by ~2000 BCE, the replacement of 40% of Iberia’s ancestry and nearly 100% of its Y-chromosomes by people with Steppe ancestry. We show that, in the Iron Age, Steppe ancestry had spread not only into Indo-European–speaking regions but also into non-Indo-European–speaking ones, and we reveal that present-day Basques are best described as a typical Iron Age population without the admixture events that later affected the rest of Iberia. Additionally, we document how, beginning at least in the Roman period, the ancestry of the peninsula was transformed by gene flow from North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study provides evidence that hunter-gatherers were far more sophisticated than archaeologists once assumed, argues co-author Henny Piezonka, an archaeologist at Christian-Albrecht University of Kiel. "Hunter-gatherer pottery existed all along northern Eurasia for 10,000 years", Piezonka says, "but the evidence was mostly published in Russian, and European archaeologists just didn't know about it." Early Europeans didn't simply adopt revolutionary technology from farmers, study finds Broken, charred and still crusted with nearly 8000-year-old food, the remnants of ancient pottery found across northern Eurasia wouldn't be mistaken for fine china. [Extracted from the article]

We sequenced Early Neolithic genomes from the Zagros region of Iran (eastern Fertile Crescent), where some of the earliest evidence for farming is found, and identify a previously uncharacterized population that is neither ancestral to the first European farmers nor has contributed substantially to the ancestry of modern Europeans. These people are estimated to have separated from Early Neolithic farmers in Anatolia some 46,000 to 77,000 years ago and show affinities to modern-day Pakistani and Afghan populations, but particularly to Iranian Zoroastrians. We conclude that multiple, genetically differentiated hunter-gatherer populations adopted farming in southwestern Asia, that components of pre-Neolithic population structure were preserved as farming spread into neighboring regions, and that the Zagros region was the cradle of eastward expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on increased contacts with isolated tribes from Peru's rainforests. It comments that sightings and raids against villages along the rainforests in Peru and Brazil have increased. It mentions efforts by anthropologists and officials to minimize the impact disease pathogens will have on native people and suggests that intertribal conflicts, food shortages, and illegal loggers are forcing isolated tribes from the depths of the rainforests.

Shara Bailey, a paleoanthropologist at New York University, says she wasn't particularly surprised by the paper's findings, because she and others have long suspected the "meat made us human" hypothesis was overly simplistic. Barr and colleagues ran the numbers for these sites and found that evidence for meat eating remained essentially constant between 2.6 million and 1.2 million years ago, they report today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Did a taste for blood help humans grow big brains?. [Extracted from the article]

The social organization of mobile hunter-gatherers has several derived features, including low within-camp relatedness and fluid meta-groups. Although these features have been proposed to have provided the selective context for the evolution of human hypercooperation and cumulative culture, how such a distinctive social system may have emerged remains unclear. We present an agent-based model suggesting that, even if all individuals in a community seek to live with as many kin as possible, within-camp relatedness is reduced if men and women have equal influence in selecting camp members. Our model closely approximates observed patterns of co-residence among Agta and Mbendjele BaYaka hunter-gatherers. Our results suggest that pair-bonding and increased sex egalitarianism in human evolutionary history may have had a transformative effect on human social organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on a study published in a May 2021 issue of "Cell," which showed that the DNA of ancient hunter-gatherers in the north China Plain signified a population turnover in Asia about 19,000 years ago.

To find out whether this problem was more widespread, archaeologist Hans Peter Blankholm of the Arctic University of Norway and colleagues focused on Stone Age humans living on the shores of the Norwegian Arctic, in an area known as Varanger. The scientists may soon be able to shine a light on some of these outstanding questions: They have now acquired the remains of eight individual Stone Age humans from the Varanger region and can explore the potential effects of heavy metals on their health and lifespans. Even if the cod and seal were contaminated by heavy metals, Twiss says, such meat would surely have also been a good source of protein and other key nutrients. [Extracted from the article]

Highlights from the article: "Stature gene" may reveal why these hunter-gatherers are among the world's smallest humans Once called "Pygmies" by outsiders, African rainforest hunter-gatherers live in densely forested environments across Central Africa. What they found surpassed their expectations: All the hunter-gatherer populations showed a strong signal of selection within a short stretch of DNA on chromosome 8, and all the agriculturalists lacked this signal.

The article discusses research which indicates that farming culture changes can alter human beings' smiles and speech, and it mentions how a soft food diet led some human beings to develop jaw-related overbites and variations in smiles and speech. The impact of chewing on a person's teeth is addressed, along with newly favored consonants known as labiodentals and information about languages in farmer and hunter-gatherer societies.

The article reports on findings suggesting that the Botai hunter-gatherers who traveled the area of modern-day Kazakhstan roughly 3700 to 3100 B.C.E. may be responsible for the domestication of horses, not the Yamnaya, Bronze Age pastoralists of the Asian steppes as previously asserted. Topics include genetic testing of ceramic shard, genomic testing of Yamnaya and Botai indicating the groups did not intermingle, and the archaeological steppe hypothesis.

The article focuses on a study, previously published in 2012 issue of the periodical reagrding Hadza hunter-gatherers and Paleo diet. It mentions the impact of Paleo diet on cavities due to high sugar and starch in diet, and states that biological anthropologist Alyssa Crittenden of the University of Nevada researched on oral health of the people. It also presents the views of bioarchaeologist Jim Watson of the University of Arizona on the same.

The article offers information on the hours of sleep that hunter-gatherers had, referencing the journal "Current Biology," the percentage of U.S. citizens who believe in climate science and Americans' attitudes on the conflict between religion and science, referencing a Pew Research Center survey.

The authors reflect on protection of isolated societies in South America. They state government policies of Brazil and Peru, along with support by the United Nations, is to leave isolated societies alone and comments on problems with this strategy due to intermittent interaction with the outside world introducing diseases to the tribes. They recommend controlled contact with isolated tribes and the importance of sustained around-the-clock medical treatment and food.

The article briefly discusses research by anthropologist Mark Dyble and colleagues, reported in the current issue, analyzing the possible role of gender relations in the practice of non-kin living together in hunter-gatherer societies in apparent contradiction to evolutionary theories of behavior.

The article focuses on research into the domestication of dogs and what led wolves to become domesticated. It comments on the theory that wolves domesticated themselves with wolves that were bold enough to eat discarded carcasses near human campsites breeding to produce more human-friendly animals until they evolved into dogs. It mentions animal behaviorist Takefumi Kikusui and colleagues found both dogs and humans experience a rise on oxytocin when they gaze into each other's eyes.