Blue-Eyed Immigrants Transformed Ancient Israel 6,500 Years Ago

Thousands of years ago in what is now northern Israel, waves of migrating people from the north and east — present-day Iran and Turkey — arrived in the region. And this influx of newcomers had a profound effect, transforming the emerging culture.

What's more, these immigrants not only brought new cultural practices; they also introduced new genes — such as the mutation that produces blue eyes — that were previously unknown in that geographic area, according to a new study.

Archaeologists recently discovered this historic population shift by analyzing DNA from skeletons preserved in an Israeli cave. The site, in the north of the tiny country, contains dozens of burials and more than 600 bodies dating to approximately 6,500 years ago, the scientists reported. [The Holy Land: 7 Amazing Archaeological Finds]

DNA analysis showed that skeletons preserved in the cave were genetically distinct from people who historically lived in that region. And some of the genetic differences matched those of people who lived in neighboring Anatolia and the Zagros Mountains, which are now part of Turkey and Iran, the study found.

Ancient Israel (then called Galilee) belonged to a region known as the southern Levant, part of a larger area, the Levant, which encompasses today's eastern Mediterranean countries. The southern Levant experienced a significant cultural shift during the Late Chalcolithic period, around 4500 B.C.E. to 3800 B.C.E, with denser settlements, more rituals performed in public and a growing use of ossuaries in funerary preparations, the researchers reported.

Though some experts had previously proposed that cultural transformation was driven by people who were native to the southern Levant, the authors of the new study suspected that waves of human migration explained the changes. To find answers, the scientists turned to a burial site in Israel's Peqi’in Cave, in what would have been Upper Galilee 6,500 years ago.

Unraveling an ancestry puzzle
Peqi'in is a natural cave, measuring around 56 feet (17 meters) long and about 16 to 26 feet (5 to 8 m) wide. Inside the cave are decorated jars and burial offerings — along with hundreds of skeletons — suggesting that the location served as a type of mortuary for Chalcolithic people who lived nearby.

However, not all of the cave's contents appeared to have local origins, study co-author Dina Shalem, an archaeologist with the Institute for Galilean Archaeology at Kinneret College in Israel, said in a statement.

"Some of the findings in the cave are typical to the region, but others suggest cultural exchange with remote regions," Shalem said. The artistic styles of these artifacts bear closer resemblance to styles common to more-northern regions of the Near East, lead study author Eadaoin Harney, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, told Live Science in an email.

The scientists sampled DNA from bone powder from 48 skeletal remains and were able to reconstruct genomes for 22 individuals found in the cave. That makes this one of the largest genetic studies of ancient DNA in the Near East, the researchers reported.

Blue eyes and fair skin
The scientists found that these individuals shared genetic features with people from the north, and those similar genes were absent in farmers who lived in the southern Levant earlier. For example, the allele (one of two or more alternative forms of a gene) that is responsible for blue eyes was associated with 49 percent of the sampled remains, suggesting that blue eyes had become common in people living in Upper Galilee. Another allele hinted that fair skin may have been widespread in the local population as well, the study authors wrote.

"Both eye and skin color are traits that are controlled by complex interactions between multiple alleles, many — but not all — of which have been identified," Harney explained.

"The two alleles that we highlight in our study are known to be strongly associated with light eye and skin color, respectively, and are often used to make predictions about the appearance of various human populations in ancient DNA studies," she said.

However, it is important to note that multiple other alleles can influence the color of eyes and skin in individuals, Harney added, so "scientists cannot perfectly predict pigmentation in an individual." 

The scientists also discovered that genetic diversity increased within groups over time, while genetic differences between groups decreased; this is a pattern that typically emerges in populations after a period of human migration, according to the researchers.

A dynamic past
By presenting DNA from the distant past, these findings offer exciting new insights into the dynamic ancient world and the diverse human populations that inhabited it, said Daniel Master, a professor of archaeology at Wheaton College in Illinois.

"One of the key questions of the Chalcolithic has always been to what extent the groups in Galilee were connected to the groups in the Be'ersheva Valley or the Jordan Valley or the Golan Heights," Master, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email.

"The publication of the artifacts from Peqi'in has shown many cultural links between these regions, but it will be interesting to see, in the future, whether those links are genetic as well," Master said.

The researchers' results also resolve a long-standing debate about the pivotal factor that changed the trajectory of the Chalcolithic peoples' unique culture, Shalem said in the statement.

"We now know that the answer is migration," she said.

The findings were published online Aug. 20 in the journal Nature Communications.

https://www.livescience.com/63396-ancient-israel-immigration-turkey-iran.html

The great Texas emu bubble: An investment that never took off

What if tulips had been six feet tall and ran at 50km an hour?

The sun is a giant, gleaming emu egg in the sky, and if you gaze long enough at the Milky Way, you can see the long body of an emu formed from the stars. The world’s second largest bird after the ostrich, the emu is native to Australia and has long been a source of mythical inspiration—and sustenance—for Aboriginals. The big bird claims a place on Australia’s coat of arms, stamps and 50-cent coin. It even sparked a military deployment, the Great Emu War of 1932, when soldiers were sent to Western Australia to kill them and thereby save the farmers’ crops. The emus won.

From the 19th century, the three-toed bird started to spread its flightless wings and became a prized oddity in zoos worldwide. A century on, the emu was also seen as a potential source of red meat—a healthier version of beef. It was in this guise, as livestock, that the emu came to Texas in the 1980s. It did not end well for most of the emus, or most of their owners.

Enthusiasm and emu-friendly regulations saw the price of a breeding pair of emus, just a few hundred dollars in the late 1980s, rise to a whopping $28,000 by 1993. The next year it doubled again. The American Emu Association, an industry group, saw its membership rise 27-fold between 1988 and 1994, to 5,500 members, most of them in Texas.

The rationale for bringing the emu to Texas was that Americans wanted healthier meat, that the state has a long history of raising cattle for slaughter, and that, heck, it was the 1980s, and all sorts of weird stuff was happening. Some boosters also heralded the potential of ostriches, but emus won out over their ratite cousins. In its fundamentals, though, the Texas “emu bubble” of the 1990s was, like all investment bubbles, stoked by exuberance and greed. “Men, it has been well said, think in herds,” wrote the Scottish journalist Charles Mackay in 1841 in his book “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”. Had Mr Mackay travelled to Lubbock or Midland a century and a half later, he would have believed that men think in mobs, as groups of emus are sometimes known.

From flowers to feathers

As in all bubbles, from 17th-century Dutch “tulipmania” to 21stcentury bitcoin, word of the wonders of the emu spread by all the social networks available, from word of mouth to small ads in local papers. Their boosters were keen to point out that there was more to emus than steak. They provided oil for lotions, skin for leather, feathers for clothes and enormous emerald eggs for four-person omelettes. Best of all, in terms of inflating a bubble, emus provided you with more emus, and thus an incentive to spread the word yet further and sell emus on to other would-be ratite-ranchers.

The state government also played a role in helping the emu market take flight. Between 1992 and 1995 the Texas department of agriculture reportedly gave out $400,000 in loans to encourage emu ranching. The state also offers tax breaks to people who use their land for agricultural purposes, which is enough of an incentive for some people to find animals to graze on their property even if they have no intention of farming; emus fitted the bill. And Texas law was, and is, extremely lax when it comes to the import of exotic animals. The state is believed to have more tigers living in captivity in backyards than exist in the wild worldwide.

The new emu owners were not experienced investors—or emu raisers. “We were clueless. We had never even raised chickens,” says Gina Taylor, who bought a pair of emus with her husband in 1995, soon after they moved from Dallas to a rural town called La Rue. They used a laundry basket with a heat lamp over it to incubate eggs in their kitchen.

Such a rough-and-ready approach seems quite appropriate for emus, which are somewhat scruffy beasts. But even if not sleek, they do have some redeeming features. They need much less land to graze than cows. They are quieter, too, except during the breeding season, when the females make booming noises and males grunt. Though this was not necessarily a selling point in Texas, the birds have a powerfully proto-feminist attitude to the patriarchy. Females choose males, rather than vice versa, sometimes going so far as to fight over them. Males take on the responsibility of incubating the eggs, refusing to leave the nest to eat or drink for weeks at a time, and then raising their chicks as single parents.

Divorced from the mob

However, those who anticipated a life of gentle emu-care and handsome profits found themselves disappointed. One challenge was that emus were not easy to handle. They are as tall as human beings, growing up to 190cm (6 feet 2 inches) and easily weighing 55kg (120lb). Being the only birds with calf muscles helps them sprint at up to 50kph (30mph), prompting some dramatic highspeed chases when they escaped. They can also kick. A young Hispanic man who had crossed one came into an emergency room in Austin in the mid-1990s with bad cuts and bruises shouting “Pollo gigante!” (Giant chicken!).

And raising the birds was not cheap. People ploughed tens of thousands of dollars into it. The emus required fencing and feed. The most forward-thinking emu owners bought expensive equipment to microchip their flocks, because emu rustling became a problem as values rose. So did emu fraud. Some retirees and speculators put their savings into emus that were sold to them but never delivered, sparking lawsuits over avian Ponzi schemes.

A few dozen restaurants in Texas briefly added emu to their menus, including Dunston’s, a popular steak house in Dallas, but consumers were hard to win over. Emu claims lower cholesterol and fat, and higher iron, but it is more expensive than beef and less familiar. Small farmers never co-ordinated to get the distribution or quality control they needed to make it a profitable, large-scale enterprise. Even emu enthusiasts did not make the meat a staple of their diets. “We occasionally ate an emu burger, but never ate any of our own,” says Ms Taylor.

As the hoped-for demand failed to materialise, the supply continued to increase. Emus lay 5-15 eggs in each clutch and can keep doing so for more than 16 years. With 12 surviving chicks a year, a single breeding pair can spawn 133 breeding pairs within five years and nearly 36,000 within ten years. The population boomed at precisely the moment it was becoming clear that Americans had no appetite for a new red meat.

The bubble popped painfully. By 1998 emus were worthless. Rather than keep paying to feed them, many owners just abandoned them. Some farmers cut their own fences, hoping their emus would leave and become someone else’s problem. When Parker county, west of Fort Worth, auctioned off 211birds it had rounded up in 1998, they fetched only $2-4 each. You can sometimes find emu-burgers at Twisted Root, a chain in Dallas, alongside elk-burgers. But not often.

One result is that there are mobs of feral emus in parts of Texas—farm survivors and their descendants. Occasionally they show up in small towns or nearly cause crashes as they cross country roads. Animalcontrol officers and police struggle to catch them. When they do, they often have no way to transport them, because they are too tall to fit into dog kennels.

Your correspondent went to visit a female emu that had been successfully corralled and now resides at the Wildlife Rescue & Rehabilitation, a non-profit centre outside of San Antonio. This one is probably descended from a farm emu hatched in the 1990s, but no one can be sure. Emus can live 30 years. She has been there for several years and spends her days walking the perimeter, like a watchman making constant rounds, although she is shy and does not want to come close, even for a treat of a sweet pumpkin offered freely through the fence. She seems to know that humans are fickle and untrustworthy.

The emus that were freed were the fortunate ones.

Some despairing farmers simply stopped feeding them, starving them to death. Others shot them. Two brothers outside Fort Worth decided to eliminate their emus with baseball bats to the head. They had killed 22 of their 100-strong mob before the police came, summoned by appalled neighbours. Some lobbied to charge the brothers with animal cruelty, but no charges were ultimately filed. “Texas likes to think of itself as the wild, untamed West, where man can do what he wants to do, to hell with who he’s doing it to,” explains Lynn Cuny, founder of Wildlife Rescue & Rehabilitation. “Animals are viewed as property, which people can discard or destroy like old pieces of furniture.”

The emu was not the last species to fall foul of human greed. Since the 1990s, many Texans have pinned their hope for riches on new animals, such as whitetail deer and long-horn cattle. And just as Texans have not learned from their experience with emus, nor has the world. More recently India experienced its own emu boom, with farmers piling into raising the big birds. They made the same mistake Texans did by focusing on hatching new birds instead of creating demand for the meat. The market collapsed in 2013.

From the human point of view, this is a tale of never learning. From the emu’s, it is adaptation in action, every economic fiasco an evolutionary opportunity. From the plains of Texas to the streets of India, emus are flapping those tiny wings they do not really have and making the most of wherever it is they find themselves. Let the wild emus roam.


https://blendle.com/i/the-economist/an-investment-that-never-took-off/bnl-economist-20181219-ee637710125