Day: December 20, 2023
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When did archery arise in the Americas? And what were the effects of this technology on society?
These questions have long been debated among anthropologists and archaeologists. But a study led by a University of California, Davis, anthropologist, is shining light on this mystery.
Focusing on the Lake Titicaca Basin in the Andes mountains, anthropologists found through analysis of 1,179 projectile points that the rise of archery technology dates to around 5,000 years ago. Previous research held that archery in the Andes emerged around 3,000 years ago.
The new research indicates that the adoption of bow-and-arrow technology coincided with both the expansion of exchange networks and the growing tendency for people to reside in villages.
“We think our paper is groundbreaking because it gives us a chance to see how society changed throughout the Andes throughout ancient times by presenting a huge number of artifacts from a vast area of South America,” said Luis Flores-Blanco, an anthropology doctoral student and corresponding author of the paper. “This is among the first instances in which Andean archaeologists have investigated social complexity through the quantitative analysis of stone tools.”
The study was published online in November in Quaternary International.
Researchers said increasing social complexity in the region is usually investigated through analysis of monumental architecture and ceramics rather than projectile points, which are historically linked to foraging communities.
Pooling from 10,000 years of history
For the study, the team examined more than a thousand projectile points created over 10,000 years. Each projectile point originated in the Lake Titicaca Basin, specifically the Ilave and Ramis valleys, which are located southwest and northwest of the basin, respectively.
Flores-Blanco said it’s among the highest plateau lands explored and conquered by humans, with Lake Titicaca sitting at an elevation of 12,500 feet.
“At Titicaca, Andeans accomplished the remarkable achievement of domesticating plants like the potato, leaving behind a nutritious legacy that is still appreciated today,” he said. “On top of that, the Tiwanaku were one of the major Andean civilizations that built their vast territory here. Even the Inca Empire claimed this territory was their mythical place of origin. Our study digs even deeper and goes to the roots of this Andean civilization.”
In their analysis, Flores-Blanco and his colleagues considered each projectile’s date of origin and then measured its length, width, thickness and weight. They noticed that older projectile points — from the Early Archaic through the Late Archaic — were larger. A significant decrease in size occurred during the Terminal Archaic period, around 5,000 years ago. The team hypothesized that this size shift indicates a change in preference from spear-throwing technology to bow-and-arrow technology, but without abandoning the old technologies.
In addition, the team compared their projectile data to archaeological data from the region concerning settlement sizes, raw material availability and cranial trauma data. During the Terminal Archaic period, settlement sizes increased but the total number of settlement sites decreased, researchers said. Not only that, but the inhabitants lacked signs of social violence, even though they had access to exotic raw materials.
“Based on our discovery, we can suggest that bow-and-arrow technology could have maintained and ensured adherence to emerging social norms that were crucial, such as those observed in the development of new social institutions, like obsidian exchange hubs or among individuals establishing residence in expanding villages,” Flores-Blanco said.
An international team of scientists has found the first direct evidence linking seemingly random weather systems in the ocean with climate on a global scale. Led by Hussein Aluie, an associate professor in the University of Rochester’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and staff scientist at the University’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics, the team reported their findings in Science Advances.
The ocean has weather patterns like what we experience on land, but on different time and length scales, says lead author Benjamin Storer, a research associate in Aluie’s Turbulence and Complex Flow Group. A weather pattern on land might last a few days and be about 500 kilometers wide, while oceanic weather patterns such as swirling eddies last three to four weeks but are about one-fifth the size.
“Scientists have long speculated that these ubiquitous and seemingly random motions in the ocean communicate with climate scales, but it has always been vague because it wasn’t clear how to disentangle this complex system to measure their interactions,” says Aluie. “We developed a framework that can do exactly that. What we found was not what people were expecting because it requires the mediation of the atmosphere.”
The group’s goal was to understand how energy passes through different channels in the ocean throughout the planet. They used a mathematical method developed by Aluie in 2019, which was subsequently implemented into an advanced code by Storer and Aluie, that allowed them to study energy transfer across different patterns ranging from the circumference of the globe down to 10 kilometers. These techniques were then applied to ocean datasets from an advanced climate model and from satellite observations.
The study revealed that ocean weather systems are both energized and weakened when interacting with climate scales, and in a pattern that mirrors the global atmospheric circulation. The researchers also found that an atmospheric band near the equator called the “intertropical convergence zone,” which produces 30 percent of global precipitation, causes an intense amount of energy transfer, and produces ocean turbulence.
Storer and Aluie say that studying such complex fluid motion happening at multiple scales is not easy, but that it has advantages over previous attempts to link weather to climate change. They believe the team’s work creates a promising framework for better understanding the climate system.
“There’s a lot of interest in how global warming and our changing climate is influencing extreme weather events,” says Aluie. “Usually, such research efforts are based on statistical analysis that require expansive data to have confidence in the uncertainties. We are taking a different approach based on mechanistic analysis, which alleviates some of these requirements and allow us to understand cause and effect more easily.”
Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers have identified the most energy-efficient 2024 model year vehicles available in the United States, including electric and hybrids, in the latest edition of the Department of Energy’s Fuel Economy Guide.
The annual online resource compares fuel costs for two-seaters up to large sedans, small and midsize station wagons, minivans, small and standard sport utility vehicles and small and standard pickup trucks. A quick reference top 10 list is searchable for make, model and class, too.
“With the national average of gasoline over $3 per gallon, drivers need to know how much they can save by choosing a fuel-efficient vehicle,” said Stacy Davis, ORNL’s group leader for Transportation Analytics and Decision Sciences.
An ORNL-developed tool, the Trip Calculator, also allows consumers to estimate the savings for driving a certain model of vehicle on a specified trip. Users can enter the origin and destination and select up to three different vehicles. The best route is mapped with directions and estimates on fuel use and cost.