Social distancing in Neolithic mega-settlements

[Pelican Press 0]

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

Social distancing in Neolithic mega-settlements

Multiple levels of Trypillia settlement clustering. Credit: Journal of The Royal Society Interface (2024). DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2024.0313

The term “social distancing” spread out across the public vocabulary in recent years as people around the world changed habits to combat the COVID pandemic. New research led by UT Professor Alex Bentley, however, reveals the practice of organized elbow room could date back approximately 6,000 years.

Bentley, from the Department of Anthropology,

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

research on “Modeling cultural responses to ******** spread in Neolithic Trypillia mega-settlements” in the Journal of The Royal Society Interface. His co-authors include Simon Carrignon, a former UT postdoctoral researcher who was a research associate at Cambridge University’s McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research while working on this project.

“New ancient DNA studies have shown that ********* such as salmonella, tuberculosis, and plague emerged in Europe and Central Asia thousands of years ago during the Neolithic Era, which is the time of the first farming villages,” said Bentley. “This led us to ask a new question, which is whether Neolithic villagers practiced social distancing to help avoid the spread of these *********.”

Urban planning over the centuries

As computational social scientists, Bentley and Carrignon have published on both ancient adaptive behaviors and the spread of ******** in the modern world. This project brought these interests together. They found that the “mega-settlements” of the ancient Trypillia culture in the ****** Sea region, circa 4,000 BC, were a perfect place to test their theory that boundaries of personal space have long been integral parts of public-health planning.

They focused on a settlement called Nebelivka, in what is now Ukraine, where thousands of wooden homes were regularly spaced in concentric patterns and clustered in neighborhoods.

“This clustered layout is known by epidemiologists to be a good configuration to contain ******** outbreaks,” said Bentley. “This suggests and helps explain the curious layout of the world’s first urban areas—it would have protected residents from emerging ********* of the time. We set out to test how effective it would be through computer modeling.”

Carrignon and Bentley adapted models developed in a

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

. Bentley was co-investigator with research lead Professor Nina Fefferman in this work modeling the effects of social distancing behaviors on the spread of COVID-like pandemics, to study what effects these practices—such as reducing interaction between neighborhoods—might have had on prehistoric settlements.

“These new tools can help us understand what the archaeological record is telling us about prehistoric behaviors when new ********* evolved,” said Bentley. “The principles are the same—we assumed the earliest prehistoric ********* were foodborne at first, rather than airborne.”

Following the trail

Their current study simulated the spread of foodborne ********, such as ancient salmonella, on the detailed plan of Nebelivka.

They teamed with John Chapman and Bisserka Gaydarska, archaeologists from England’s Durham University, who excavated Nebelivka; Brian Buchanan, a researcher at Eastern Washington University researcher who did a detailed digital map of the site; and Mike O’Brien, a cultural evolution expert from Texas A&M in San Antonio.

They ran the archaeological data through millions of simulations to test the effects of different possible ******** parameters.

“The results revealed that the pie-shaped clustering of houses at Nebelivka, in distinct neighborhoods, would have reduced the spread of early foodborne *********,” said Bentley.

“Fighting ******** might also explain why the residents of Nebelivka regularly burned their wooden houses to replace them with new ones. The study shows that neighborhood clustering would have helped survival in early farming villages as new foodborne ********* evolved.”

Applications for today

With their success in modeling from sparse archaeological data, this approach could be applied to contemporary and future situations when ******** data are sparse, even for airborne illnesses.

“In the early 2020 days of the COVID epidemic, for example, few US counties were reporting reliable infection statistics,” said Bentley. “By running millions of simulations with different parameter values, this approach—known as ‘Approximate Bayesian Computation’—can be applied to test different models versus contemporary ******** data, such as infection numbers in US counties over time.”

The team’s mix of ancient solutions and modern applications exemplifies the innovative approaches that volunteer researchers in the College of Arts and Sciences bring to making lives better for Tennesseans and beyond.

More information:
Alexander Bentley et al, Modelling cultural responses to ******** spread in Neolithic Trypillia mega-settlements, Journal of The Royal Society Interface (2024).

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

Provided by
University of Tennessee at Knoxville

Citation:
Healthy elbow room: Social distancing in Neolithic mega-settlements (2024, November 23)
retrieved 23 November 2024
from

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

#Social #distancing #Neolithic #megasettlements

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up