Adulis and the transshipment of baboons during classical antiquity
- University of Konstanz, Germany
- German Primate Center, Germany
- Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier, France
- Musée des Confluences, France
- Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, France
- State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart, Germany
- University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy
- Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, Belgium
- Dartmouth College, United States
Abstract
Adulis, located on the Red Sea coast in present-day Eritrea, was a bustling trading centre between the first and seventh centuries CE. Several classical geographers--Agatharchides of Cnidus, Pliny the Elder, Strabo-noted the value of Adulis to Greco--Roman Egypt, particularly as an emporium for living animals, including baboons (Papio spp.). Though fragmentary, these accounts predict the Adulite origins of mummified baboons in Ptolemaic catacombs, while inviting questions on the geoprovenance of older (Late Period) baboons recovered from Gabbanat el-Qurud ('Valley of the Monkeys'), Egypt. Dated to ca. 800-540 BCE, these animals could extend the antiquity of Egyptian-Adulite trade by as much as five centuries. Previously, Dominy et al. (2020) used stable istope analysis to show that two New Kingdom specimens of P. hamadryas originate from the Horn of Africa. Here, we report the complete mitochondrial genomes from a mummified baboon from Gabbanat el-Qurud and 14 museum specimens with known provenance together with published georeferenced mitochondrial sequence data. Phylogenetic assignment connects the mummified baboon to modern populations of Papio hamadryas in Eritrea, Ethiopia, and eastern Sudan. This result, assuming geographical stability of phylogenetic clades, corroborates Greco-Roman historiographies by pointing toward present-day Eritrea, and by extension Adulis, as a source of baboons for Late Period Egyptians. It also establishes geographic continuity with baboons from the fabled Land of Punt (Dominy et al., 2020), giving weight to speculation that Punt and Adulis were essentially the same trading centres separated by a thousand years of history.
Data availability
Raw sequencing data are deposited in the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA, project accession no. PRJEB60261), mitochondrial genomes on Genbank (accession numbers: OQ538075-OQ538089). Code used for data processing and analysis is available on OSF via https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/D5GX3.
Article and author information
Author details
Nathaniel J Dominy
Funding
Universität Konstanz (Young Scholar Fund)
- Gisela H Kopp
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Centre of Excellence 2117 Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour" ID: 422037984")
- Gisela H Kopp
Universität Konstanz (Zukunftskolleg)
- Nathaniel J Dominy
- Gisela H Kopp
Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (Open Access Fund)
- Gisela H Kopp
Hector Stiftung II (Hector Pioneer Fellowship)
- Gisela H Kopp
Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina - Nationale Akademie der Wissenschaften (Die Junge Akademie)
- Gisela H Kopp
Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (Excellence Strategy of the German Federal and State Governments)
- Benjamin Hume
- Gisela H Kopp
Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kunst Baden-Württemberg (bwHPC)
- Franziska Grathwol
- Benjamin Hume
- Gisela H Kopp
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (INST 37/935- 1 FUGG)
- Franziska Grathwol
- Benjamin Hume
- Gisela H Kopp
Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-11-LABX-0032-01)
- Stéphanie M Porcier
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2023, Grathwol et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 2,835
- views
-
- 415
- downloads
-
- 2
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Adulis and the transshipment of baboons during classical antiquity
eLife 12:e87513.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.87513
Further reading
-
- Developmental Biology
- Ecology
Organisms require dietary macronutrients in specific ratios to maximize performance, and variation in macronutrient requirements plays a central role in niche determination. Although it is well recognized that development and body size can have strong and predictable effects on many aspects of organismal function, we lack a predictive understanding of ontogenetic or scaling effects on macronutrient intake. We determined protein and carbohydrate intake throughout development on lab populations of locusts and compared to late instars of field populations. Self-selected protein:carbohydrate targets declined dramatically through ontogeny, due primarily to declines in mass-specific protein consumption rates which were highly correlated with declines in specific growth rates. Lab results for protein consumption rates partly matched results from field-collected locusts. However, field locusts consumed nearly double the carbohydrate, likely due to higher activity and metabolic rates. Combining our results with the available data for animals, both across species and during ontogeny, protein consumption scaled predictably and hypometrically, demonstrating a new scaling rule key for understanding nutritional ecology.
-
- Ecology
Advances in tracking technologies have revealed the diverse migration patterns of birds, which are critical for range mapping and population estimation. Population trends are usually estimated in breeding ranges where birds remain stationary, but for species that breed in remote areas like the Arctic, these trends are often assessed in over-wintering ranges. Assessing population trends during the wintering season is challenging due to the extensive movements of birds in these ranges, which requires a deep understanding of the movement dynamics. However, these movements remain understudied, particularly in the mid-latitudes, where many Arctic breeders overwinter, increasing uncertainty in their ranges and numbers. Here, we show that the Arctic breeding raptor Rough-legged buzzard, which overwinters in the mid-latitudes, has a specific wintering strategy. After migrating ca. 1500 km from the Arctic to mid-latitudes, the birds continue to move throughout the entire over-wintering period, traveling another 1000 km southwest and then back northeast as the snowline advances. This continuous movement makes their wintering range dynamic throughout the season. In essence, this movement represents an extension of the quick migration process, albeit at a slower pace, and we have termed this migration pattern ‘foxtrot migration’, drawing an analogy to the alternating fast and slow movements of the foxtrot dance. These results highlight the potential errors in range mapping from single mid-winter surveys and emphasize the importance of this migration pattern in assessing the conservation status of bird species. Understanding this migration pattern could help to correctly estimate bird populations in over-wintering ranges, which is especially important for species that nest in hard-to-reach regions such as the Arctic.
