scholarly journals Comparing maternal genetic variation across two millennia reveals the demographic history of an ancient human population in southwest Turkey

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 150250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudio Ottoni ◽  
Rita Rasteiro ◽  
Rinse Willet ◽  
Johan Claeys ◽  
Peter Talloen ◽  
...  

More than two decades of archaeological research at the site of Sagalassos, in southwest Turkey, resulted in the study of the former urban settlement in all its features. Originally settled in late Classical/early Hellenistic times, possibly from the later fifth century BCE onwards, the city of Sagalassos and its surrounding territory saw empires come and go. The Plague of Justinian in the sixth century CE, which is considered to have caused the death of up to a third of the population in Anatolia, and an earthquake in the seventh century CE, which is attested to have devastated many monuments in the city, may have severely affected the contemporary Sagalassos community. Human occupation continued, however, and Byzantine Sagalassos was eventually abandoned around 1200 CE. In order to investigate whether these historical events resulted in demographic changes across time, we compared the mitochondrial DNA variation of two population samples from Sagalassos (Roman and Middle Byzantine) and a modern sample from the nearby town of Ağlasun. Our analyses revealed no genetic discontinuity across two millennia in the region and Bayesian coalescence-based simulations indicated that a major population decline in the area coincided with the final abandonment of Sagalassos, rather than with the Plague of Justinian or the mentioned earthquake.

2020 ◽  
Vol 287 (1931) ◽  
pp. 20201206
Author(s):  
Pedro Silva ◽  
Marco Galaverni ◽  
Diego Ortega-Del Vecchyo ◽  
Zhenxin Fan ◽  
Romolo Caniglia ◽  
...  

The grey wolf ( Canis lupus ) is one of the most widely distributed mammals in which a variety of distinct populations have been described. However, given their currently fragmented distribution and recent history of human-induced population decline, little is known about the events that led to their differentiation. Based on the analysis of whole canid genomes, we examined the divergence times between Southern European wolf populations and their ancient demographic history. We found that all present-day Eurasian wolves share a common ancestor ca 36 000 years ago, supporting the hypothesis that all extant wolves derive from a single population that subsequently expanded after the Last Glacial Maximum. We also estimated that the currently isolated European populations of the Iberian Peninsula, Italy and the Dinarics-Balkans diverged very closely in time, ca 10 500 years ago, and maintained negligible gene flow ever since. This indicates that the current genetic and morphological distinctiveness of Iberian and Italian wolves can be attributed to their isolation dating back to the end of the Pleistocene, predating the recent human-induced extinction of wolves in Central Europe by several millennia.


2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (109) ◽  
pp. 147-163
Author(s):  
Youhanna Nessim Youssef

While Egypt was the cradle of monasticism since Antony, the stylite type of monasticism is rarely represented in the Coptic corpus of monastic literature. Hence every text will contribute to our knowledge. In this article, we will highlight the importance of the city of Sakha, in the book of history of the Patriarchs, the book of the Churches and Monasteries (twelfth century). The liturgical texts relating to this saint are exceedingly rare, hence the importance publishing all texts. We will edit, translate all the liturgical texts relating to one of this group, we were able to find a doxology Batos not attested in most of the manuscripts as well as the texts of the Antiphonarion (Difnar). It is important to mention that this saint lived in Lower-Egypt around the sixth-seventh century which means that it was around the time of important events such as the usurper of Phocas, the Persian invasion, the Byzantine reconquest, and the Arabic conquest. He was influenced by the biography of the great Simon the Stylite. Nowadays, no traces of his cult survive in Sakha which explains the rarity of manuscripts containing anything relating to this saint, however Sakha is nowadays known as a step of the journey of the Holy Family.


Author(s):  
Jason Moralee

Rome’s Capitoline Hill was the smallest of the Seven Hills of Rome. Yet in the long history of the Roman state it was the empire’s holy mountain. The hill was the setting of many of Rome’s most beloved stories, involving Aeneas, Romulus, Tarpeia, and Manlius. It also held significant monuments, including the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, a location that marked the spot where Jupiter made the hill his earthly home in the age before humanity. This book follows the history of the Capitoline Hill into late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, asking what happened to a holy mountain as the empire that deemed it thus became a Christian republic. This is not a history of the hill’s tonnage of marble- and gold-bedecked monuments but, rather, an investigation into how the hill was used, imagined, and known from the third to the seventh century CE. During this time, the triumph and other processions to the top of the hill were no longer enacted. But the hill persisted as a densely populated urban zone and continued to supply a bridge to fragmented memories of an increasingly remote past through its toponyms. This book is also about a series of Christian engagements with the Capitoline Hill’s different registers of memory, the transmission and dissection of anecdotes, and the invention of alternate understandings of the hill’s role in Roman history. What lingered long after the state’s disintegration in the fifth century were the hill’s associations with the raw power of Rome’s empire.


Author(s):  
Galit Noga-Banai

This chapter is about representations of contemporary constructions of earthly Christian Jerusalem in fifth-century Rome. Once the apostolic history of Rome had become visible in the city, and Rome had turned into a pilgrimage destination, where the faithful celebrated the commemoration of the local Roman martyrs, Jerusalem was welcomed to perform on stage, embraced by the strong arms of Peter and Paul. Thus, additional translations of relics from Palestine to Rome, as well as distinct appearances of Jerusalem and Bethlehem in mosaic decoration (S. Pudenziana; S. Maria Maggiore) and possibly architecture (S. Stefano Rotondo), will form the core of discussion. I will show how innovative Roman combinations of Rome and Jerusalem, as well as configurations of Rome as the “Promised Land,” were designed to reinforce the supreme position of Rome and its Apostolic See both in the present and at the End of Days.


2021 ◽  
pp. 377-388
Author(s):  
Dominic Perring

The evidence for London’s late fourth century decline is put under the microscope. The paucity and problematic interpretation of dating evidence is discussed, but it is concluded that important elements of London’s urban infrastructure were in serious disrepair from as early as the 380s. Some main roads could no longer have carried regular wheeled traffic. Sites of former public buildings on the margins of towns were converted into small cemeteries in the late fourth century, showing that the city was still populated but on a reduced scale and hinting at a closer relationship between communities of the living and communities of the dead. Rich assemblages recovered from within some wells within the town are thought likely to represent termination rituals, as properties were closed and households departed. Abandonment horizons can also be described from the finds left behind over the latest floors of some houses. These acts of closure and departure may also have begun in the 380s, perhaps under Magnus Maximus who had briefly revived London’s mint but also withdrew troops and administrators from Britain. Whilst the city may still have been occupied into the fifth century, this is far from certain, and there is no evidence of repair and refurbishment of urban properties beyond the last years of the fourth century. This evidence of redundancy and retreat seems consistent with the interrupted history of the diocesan administration. London had become marginal city of relatively little importance to Rome.


Author(s):  
Dora P. Crouch

The agora fulfilled a complex role in the life of Greek cities. In Greek agoras, nearly the whole range of public activities was accommodated: governmental, religious, commercial, military, and social. The market function of the agora was essential to the survival of the city, with the availabilty of everything from imported grain to locally grown lettuce. Services, from haircutting to the teaching of Stoic philosophy, were available. Government offices and officers were readily at hand. Temples, shrines, and monuments to heroes iterated religious, cultural, and moral values from every corner. The agora at Athens is probably the most thoroughly studied of the early ones. In shape it is an irregular quadrilateral, eventually monumentalized with stoas and other public buildings along all four sides. The buildings were placed at the edges of the large open space which therefore was available for many activities. Cisterns and wells of the pre- and postclassical periods were scattered over the surface. Only one well is known, however, from the classical period, that in the shrine in the northwest corner (Athenian Agora Guide,3) suggesting that the sixth century aqueduct was supplying enough water for the population during the fifth and early fourth centuries. Fountains marked important points of entry, and drains led the excess water northwestward toward the city gates (Figs. 16.15, 17.11). As the agora changed over time, being filled in with additional structures, the sources of water and the drains were continually adapted to the new demands. The organic form at Athens contrasts with the more regular but even earlier surviving form—eighth or seventh century B.C.—at Posidonia (Paestum), where a broad strip of public space for temples and agora was set aside at the center of the town (Fig. 5.1B). On this flat site, two sacred precincts flanked the agora (later Forum). The long and varied history of the site precludes our easy understanding of the design of the Greek agora here. Regularity at Posidonia is a function of its status as a colonial city—a city that was planned and laid out all at one time. Careful attention was given to the provision and use of water.


Polar Biology ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (5) ◽  
pp. 877-896 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lubov A. Skurikhina ◽  
Alla G. Oleinik ◽  
Andrey D. Kukhlevsky ◽  
Natalia E. Kovpak ◽  
Sergey V. Frolov ◽  
...  

1902 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 785-812
Author(s):  
H. F. Amedroz

Mayyāfārīqīn, like many a Moslem city, was not without its historian, but hitherto he has been a name only—Ibn al-Azraq al-Fāriqi—known to us by the quotations from his history in the biographies of Ibn Khallikān. Now, however, the British Museum has acquired a nearly complete copy of the Ta'rīkh Mayyāfāriqīn, Or. 5,803. Its date of composition is 572 a.h. The MS. is written in a good hand, and wascopied probably at Damascus, and in the seventh century of the Hijra. It contains 200 folios of about twenty-two closely written lines a side: the first eight folios, to 17 a.h., are wanting; a gap, covering the years 567–9, follows folio 194, and the years 571–2 are wanting at the end.


1975 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 91-100
Author(s):  
Robert H. Hewson

Few peoples of the Middle East have produced as many historical works as the Armenians: their historiography dates back at least to the fifth century A.D. While most medieval Armenian historians have concerned themselves with contemporary history and the immediate past, there have been some who have attempted to trace Armenian history from the earliest times. It is to two of these, Pseudo-Sebeos and Pseudo-Moses of Khoren, that we owe the survival of the body of historical memories now generally referred to as the Primary History of Armenia.This Primary History has come to us in two redactions, a long and a short. The shorter version is attributed to the earliest known Armenian historian, Agathangelos (fourth century A.D.?) and is presented in the opening section of a seventh-century work ascribed-probably wrongly-to a certain bishop named Sebeos. The longer version, much expanded and edited, is contained in Book One of the compilation of Armenian antiquities known as the History of Armenia by Pseudo-Moses of Khoren. While the date of this work has been much disputed, it appears now to be a product of the late eighth or early ninth century.According to Pseudo-Sebeos the short redaction of the Primary History was a work originally written by Agathangelos, secretary to Tiridates HI (298–330), the first Christian king of Armenia, and was based on information contained in a book written by a certain Marab the Philosopher from Mtsurn, a town in western Armenia. Pseudo-Moses, on the other hand, claims that the parallel material in his history (I. 9–32 and II. 1–9) is an extract by Marabas Katiba from a Greek translation of a Chaldean history of Armenia made by order of Alexander the Great.


Histórica ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-175
Author(s):  
Adrián Lerner Patrón

Noble David Cook is a leading historian of the demographic and social history of the Andes and the Atlantic World. In this interview, he discusses the origins of his interest in the histories of Peru, the Andes, and the Iberian Atlantic; the methodological approaches that influenced his work; how he sees the evolution, present and future of the fields of demographic history and Colonial Latin America; the role of the archive in his career; his vital and intellectual links with the city of Sevilla; his collaborations with his wife Alexandra Parma Cook; his long history of engagement with Peruvian scholars; and his perspectives on the current COVID-19 crisis.


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