Aaron Jonas Stutz

Congratulations on surpassing the funding goal!!! This is a thoughtful and important project. And y'all throw down the gauntlet for my Emory students to organize and fund their scientific research :)

Hi Gregory. First of all, thank you for choosing our project to support. We're making great progress, so we're optimistic we'll reach our funding goal and be ready to send all of our backers updates on research milestones and lab notes from the research station in the Jordan Valley this July. Your comment is a great one. Ötzi was such an important find because his body was in natural cold storage for 5000 or so years, preserving stomach contents, among other amazing intact traces of what he did and how he interacted with his environment over his lifetime, as well as how he died. We definitely can't rule out finding a frozen Paleolithic-age body in the ice or buried in the permafrost somewhere in the Alps or Greenland, what we're more likely to get is evidence of how groups of hunter-gatherers from the last Ice Age interacted with and consumed plant resources over multiple generations or even--as in our case--millennia. My colleague John Hawks has a nice overview of recent research on plant and animal DNA trapped in Neandertal tooth calculus. That work shows just how far lab techniques are now taking us toward getting a more detailed picture of our ancestors' omnivorous diets. For instance, Neandertals in Spain nearly 50,000 years ago were eating pine nuts and wild mushrooms. Here's the link to John's blog about the new dental calculus/dietary DNA research (you might need to copy and paste it): http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/neandertals/diet/mushroom-neandertals-2017.html

We're so grateful for your support, Sarah. We are also already looking forward to sharing the updates with you over the summer. Please share the link to this page and tell friends and colleagues. What I originally talked to Randy about concerning our common interests is that we have interesting evidence for a lot of care for injured, sick or aging group members, even though getting food and resources depended on high average activity levels. There's a medical humanities angle here, I promise you. :)

Pat, we welcome both the support. Of course animal teeth are one of the many important sources of information about how hunter-gatherers survived and often thrived in the Paleolithic. And appropos your welcome pun, Pat, I'll say this. The southern Levant--from the Mediterranean Coast to eastern Jordan--was the first stop from which modern human populations continued to grow as they spread out of Africa. For reasons we may never know, the hunter-gatherers settling in the Levant--sometimes joining Neandertal groups and forming "mixed families"--had offspring who grew up and dispersed toward Siberia. One of the oldest anatomically modern human fossils outside of Africa and the southern Levant is, wait for it, from Siberia. Geek out about the Siberian fossil and ride the "Molar Express" here: https://bioculturalevolution.net/2014/10/30/neandertals-early-modern-humans-and-us/ --Old professor stutz