Kept Crying and Crying (Rebay-Salisbury et al, 2020)

This five-year-old boy was buried in Schleinbach near Vienna, Austria in an Early Bronze Age Únětice Culture setting. He was a bit small for his age and he had an ear infection that stressed the bones on one side of his face. He was murdered.

 

 

 

 

The area where he was buried is a few farm houses and a few dozen graves, women with jewelry, so on. The abstract tells the story.

 

The identification of sex-specific peptides in human tooth enamel by nanoflow liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry ( nano LC-MS/MS ) represents a quantum leap for the study of childhood and social relations more generally. Determining sex-related differences in prehistoric child rearing and mortality has been hampered by the insufficient accuracy in determining the biological sex of juveniles. We conducted mass spectrometric analysis to identify sex-specific peptides in the dental enamel of a child from a settlement pit of the Early Bronze Age settlement of Schleinbach, Austria (c. 1950–1850 BC). Four perimortal impression fractures on the skull of a 5–6-year-old child indicate an intentional killing, with a co-buried loom weight as possible murder weapon. Proteomic analysis, conducted for the first time on prehistoric teeth in Austria, determined the child’s sex as male. While we cannot conclusively determine whether the child was the victim of conflicts between village groups or was slain by members of his own community, we suggest that contextual evidence points to the latter. A possible trigger of violence was the follow-on effects of an uncontrolled middle ear infection revealed by an osteological analysis. The boy from Schleinbach highlights the potential for further investigation of gender-biased violence, infanticide and child murder based on the recently developed method of proteomic sex identification.

Let's get to the disturbing part.  Who kills with a loom weight??  Whoever it was, she faced the child when striking him. Two smaller punctures made with a different instrument might be interpreted as a coup de grace, perhaps by someone else? No idea what the fourth blow was.

 

 

 

 

The authors discuss the other folks in the cemetery and other contemporary child murders for the age before going over some interesting statistics on family violence. They make a fairly compelling case that this child was killed either as an act of mercy, or with some combination of frustration and malevolence. 

I think Rebay-Salisbury et al don't really believe it was a mercy killing though.  The reason is the stack of forensic statistics on child murders and perpetrators at different ages, male, female and so forth.  For example, we all know that a poor soul stabbed 100 times was likely the victim of a "crime of passion" where the victim actually knew the assailant.  Usually this happens face to face.  Muggings and carjackings bring different types of traumas.  Assassinations something else, etc.

The Schleinbach boy was obviously killed (probably) by a woman and she looked into his eyes as she killed him.  The problem with a mercy killing of the young and incompetent is that, if we loved them, we would never let them see our evil deed.  I doubt that changed in four thousand years.

"Child murder in the Early Bronze Age: proteomic sex identification of a cold case from Schleinbach, Austria"  Katharina Rebay-Salisbury1 & Lukas Janker2 & Doris Pany-Kucera1,3 & Dina Schuster2 &Michaela Spannagl-Steiner1,3 & Lukas Waltenberger1 & Roderick B. Salisbury1,4 & Fabian Kanz5  Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences (2020) 12:265 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-020-01199-8

Mihaela is married!

This video has nothing to do with nothing.  Well, at least for now.  Folk music is soul-food musically.

I think she's from Western Moldovia, Romania.  How can the people go wrong with a little folk love?  

A few of my favorite songs.

Bucovina is half in Romania and half in the Ukraine.  It has influences from Germany, Poland, Transylvania.

Happy Halloween!

You'll notice one of the skeletons is wearing a Cubbies jersey.  Probably died of drinking and being generally foolish; I didn't notice if he was holding a koozie.  (Krefter, I think you can appreciate)

One of the houses we trick-o-treated.  There was a few good ones but COVID kind of was like a wet rag this year.  Luckily, it was a full-fanged moon and we met our quota.

And below, a few jack-o-lanterns in the drive of the Haunted Beaker Manor.  Sorry, did even think to put some candles in bell beakers and put those in the driveway.  Would have been a nice touch.  Next year.

18th Dynasty R1b, Tutankhamun mtdna K? (Gad et al, 2020)

This has been the subject of speculation for a long time, but now there is a peer-reviewed paper confirming the last rulers of the 18th Dynasty belonged to paternal haplogroup R1b.  

Gad et al. seem to suggest the reason for the delay publicizing results has been due to controversy surrounding contamination.  Seeing how remains are moved by a bunch of sweaty guys raining over a mummy being moved coffin to gurney, it's easy to understand the reservations.

I'm going to guess that subsequent papers are queued up with more 17th and 18th Dynasty profiles.  Just guessing.

As we've seen with the two papers on the German Beaker farmstead genealogies, there is potential to really expand the knowledge on relationships spanning hundreds of years in Egypt.  New questions will emerge, such as, what was driving the chaos of the whole 2nd Intermediate Period, what role did mercenaries play in forming new social classes, who were the barbarians invading?

I will assume for now (barring cuckoldry somewhere along the way) that Ahmose I was also R1b of the Atlantic type.  But then the question, how many generations into the 17th dynasty?  

Ahmose I

For some reason I had it imprinted on my mind that Tut had a Sub-Saharan mtdna profile, like L-something.  Not the case here.  He's a Near Eastern K-boy.  That's unexpected, at least for me. 

 

Gad, Y. Z., Hassan, N. A.-M., Mousa, D. M., Fouad, F. A., El-Sayed, S. G., Abdelazeem, M. A., … Ismail, S. (2020). Insights from ancient DNA analysis of Egyptian human mummies: clues to disease and kinship. Human Molecular Genetics.doi:10.1093/hmg/ddaa223 

Beaker-like H4a1 in Southern Egypt (Takabuti, the priest's daughter)

This slightly built woman named Takabuti has yielded an H4a1 result at around 90% certainty.

Unlikely most Egyptian women, her reddish-auburn hair was not shaved during the preparations, instead it was styled and curled.  I'll assume this is due to the religious significance of red hair in ancient Egypt and the broader Near East.  (things like dwarfism, gigantism, blue eyes, twins seemed to attract bug-eyed people holding snakes)

You will remember that "Ginger" from outside Heliopolis in a pre-dynastic setting was also a redhead.  So the question you may have, and I have had for a long time, is when exactly did these lineages and phenotypes enter Southern Egypt.  It may be a mistake to believe that this and other atypical lineages were only recently introduced in Bronze Age.  

While Tutakhamen's paternal lineage is more plausibly due to (*update *what the hell was I thinking?) potential mercenary lineage in the army, that may not necessarily be the case.  It's quite possible, as I've suspected since the beginning of this blog, that the mid-4th millennium circum-Pontic region was spinning immigrants out in all directions, including the North Africa and the entire Middle East.  This is not to say that these were PIE, most certainly not, probably Upper Mesopotamians here.  (apparently you can not utter these words in a university without getting kicked in the balls and beaten like a brand new chimpanzee)

This reminds me of the original Rostaluu paper concerning the origin of H mtdna sequences.  Probably worth a review.  We're not talking about a lot of people in relation to the population density

*I teased this back some time ago.  I think the Tutankhamun paternal lineage probably extends through the entire 18th dynasty at least past Ahmose I.  The question I want to know is how far back it went into the 17th.