Full title, "Tales teeth can tell: Dental enamel reveals surprising migration patterns in ancient Indus civilizations".
Posted on 05/09/2015 6:20:25 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
When tooth enamel forms, it incorporates elements from the local environment -- the food one eats, the water one drinks, the dust one breathes. When the researchers looked at remains from the ancient city of Harappa, located in what is known today as the Punjab Province of Pakistan, individuals' early molars told a very different story than their later ones, meaning they hadn't been born in the city where they were found...
The text of the Indus Valley Civilization remains undeciphered, and known and excavated burial sites are rare.
A new study, published in today's PLOS ONE, illuminates the lives of individuals buried more than 4,000 years ago in those rare grave sites by providing a novel comparison of the dental enamel and chemical analyses of the water, fauna and rocks of the time, using isotope ratios of lead and strontium.
In its heyday, Harappa held a population of 50,000, although the number of individuals represented by skeletal remains across the entire culture area totals in the hundreds.
The UF research team was led by Benjamin Valentine, who was finishing his doctorate in anthropology at the time (and is now a post doc at Dartmouth); biological anthropologist John Krigbaum, his dissertation adviser; and geological sciences professor George Kamenov, an isotope geologist...
The researchers discovered that the people in the Harappa grave sites weren't born there, but migrated there from the hinterlands. Said Krigbaum, "Previous work had thought the burial sites represented local, middle-class people. There was no notion that outsiders were welcomed and integrated by locals within the city. It's not clear why certain young hinterland people were sent to the city."
(Excerpt) Read more at news.ufl.edu ...
The archeologists look at the lead in a body?
Well, good luck to those archeologists 5000 years from now because my Dad always told me to “Get the lead out of your ass and get moving!”
That’s probably what happened then as well, and why they fled “the hinterlands” and wound up in the city.
Ten thousand years from now they’ll be shaking their heads at how dumb we were to have put so much fluoride in the water and why grills and vampire fangs were so popular in some groups.
Tell the tooth and nothing but the tooth.
Or... “You can’t handle the tooth!”
Interesting.
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