The medieval cemetery of Atlit is a vast burial ground located on the Levantine Mediterranean coast, near Château-Pèlerin, which was built in 1217-1218 and remained occupied until 1291. Located south of Haifa (Israel), this cemetery offers valuable insights into the cultural practices and populations of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem during the Crusades. Within this context, an important question arises: was this cemetery reserved exclusively for Latin populations, or was it open to a broader community? Is this so-called 'Crusader cemetery' truly the reflection of a solely Western medieval culture? The diversity of funerary practices suggests otherwise. Here, we present a body of data that highlights the complexity of the issue. While some funerary markers bear resemblance to those found in Western Europe, other burial customs raise further questions. Ceramic analysis of vessels recovered from the graves reveals a wide range of production origins across the Mediterranean world. Additionally, preliminary isotopic data (δ13C, δ15N, δ34S) suggest variability in dietary sources among the individuals buried there. These initial findings point to a burial space used by groups situated at the intersection of multiple cultures. This interdisciplinary research underscores the complexity of cultural interactions in the Latin East and opens new perspectives on understanding exchanges during the Crusades in Asia.
The origin of Homo sapiens >233 ka in Africa (Vidal et al., 2022) is part of a complex evolutionary process that gave rise to numerous hominin species in the last 5 Ma. The Turkana depression in the East African Rift has yielded vast archaeological and palaeontological evidence documenting this process. Nevertheless, the archaeological potential of some areas of the basin has been overlooked. The Trans-Evol project carries out interdisciplinary fieldwork around the Kalapata River, southwest of Lake Turkana, focusing on akey period for human evolution: the transition from the Early to the Middle Pleistocene (i.e., EMPT, 1.25-0.75 Ma). Indeed, the impact of the major climatic upheavals of the EMPT on the evolution of hominin populations remains poorly understood, as there are few well-preserved sites in Africa of this age. Trans-Evol aims at contributing to remedy this situation by a two-fold strategy: first, by mapping all archaeological and palaeontological localities in a still largely unexplored area, and second, by excavating selected new archaeological sites from the EMPT. Since 2021, the project has identified 12 localities of interest. Among those, Kanyimangin, preliminarily dated to ~1 Ma, has yielded a large faunal sample and over 400 lithic artefacts which are consistent with an EMPT occupation of the area. A new locality, Kamilikol, is located 10 km further south and has yielded a large sample of Acheulean lithic artefacts. Seventy of those artefacts are handaxes, making Kamilikol a unique archaeological site with no counterparts in West Turkana.
Understanding the causes and consequences of dominance hierarchies is one of the main goals of studies on social evolution, primatology, and anthropology. Several theories have been proposed to explain dominance hierarchies in primates, each attracting a considerable number of empirical tests. However, there is still debate, and lack of consistency across these tests, on what socio-ecological and evolutionary forces shape dominance hierarchies and on their associated benefits and costs for dominant and subordinate individuals. In this review, we briefly present the main theories on dominance hierarchies and discuss the factors that may affect the limited support that some of these theories receive from different empirical studies. Our review is not quantitative, so we do not aim to weigh the relative explanatory power of each theory. Instead, we aim to discuss the possible 'embedded' factors that may affect the support that each theory receives and the (in)consistency across studies. One main factor is clearly the high degree of social flexibility observed in primates, across individuals, groups, populations, and species, which constrains the applicability of a theory to a wide range of social dynamics. Logistical and methodological factors, such as time spent collecting data, the visibility of animals in the field, and the sampling method used, can make it difficult to compare findings across studies. Finally, the large literature on the topic is sometimes characterised by an inconsistent use of key terms for the study of primate dominance hierarchies.
Throughout prehistory, humans inhabited the Scheldt basin in northern Belgium, though few prehistoric human remains have been found there compared to the Meuse basin, where many caves contain human remains from various prehistoric phases. The poor preservation in the area is due to the region’s high soil acidity, decalcification, and dryness, which degrade bones. Until now, little effort had been made to identify human remains in the Scheldt basin.This paper documents human remains from six prehistoric sites and explores their radiocarbon dates to better understand the region’s occupation history. The scarcity of remains prior to the Neolithic is attributed to diagenetic processes, and a lack of Late Neolithic remains might indicate a population decline, though flint mines and Meuse basin burials suggest otherwise. Another possibility is a shift in burial practices towards collective burials in megaliths or caves, unsuitable for the wet floodplains of the Scheldt basin.Most bones from the Scheldt basin were found in secondary contexts, likely through fluvial activity. They were retrieved from former river channels and gullies, complicating interpretations of whether they originated from primary inhumation graves or from secondary burials. The absence of defleshing marks suggests the bones were not part of secondary burials, pointing instead to the erosion of primary graves from earlier settlements. Settlement debris, including pottery and stone tools, supports this theory.
Early primatology studies have been criticized for promoting a biased, male-centric view of primate power structures – depicting societies in which males compete fiercely for alpha status while females are portrayed as passive and subordinate. Drawing primarily, though not exclusively, from our own work, we highlight some recent advances in understanding male-female power relationships in primate societies. We begin by examining power relations in the sexual sphere, showing how sexual coercion – long neglected – has emerged as a central focus in contemporary research on sexual relationships. We then turn to the social sphere, where new evidence shows that dominance relations between males and females are far more balanced and context-dependent than previously assumed. Overall, the past three decades have seen a major shift in our understanding of primate power structures. A once simplistic narrative has given way to a richer, more nuanced and empirically grounded perspective – one that reveals male-female power relations to be both more conflictual and more equitable than suggested by earlier models.
Phylogenetic analyses of fossil hominins are central to our understanding of human evolution. This paper reviews the methodological foundations of analyses carried out, and aims to encourage and/or propose methodological improvements. Major tendencies are brought to light, such as the widespread use of individual specimens or populations as Operational Taxonomic Units (OTUs) for recent periods, or the use of model-based methods in recent years. That endostructural and postcranial characters are rarely used is obvious, although numerous published analyses provide a great deal of information on how to integrate these in future matrices. Some methods already developed and applied, sometimes routinely, outside the field of paleoanthropology, such as the use of truly continuous characters, the integration of geometric morphometric data or the use of frequencies to take intra-taxonomic variability into account, deserve to be more extensively applied to hominins. The supertree generated from all the analyses we review here highlights the lack of consensus over the phylogenetic relationships of recent Homo species, further emphasising the need for exhaustive analyses using all anatomical parts and newly available methodological improvements.
