Niels Nørkjær Johannsen
Aarhus University, Culture and Society, Faculty Member
- Aarhus University, Interacting Minds Centre, Faculty Memberadd
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Mental recruitment of previous technological experience in conceptualizations of non-technological phenomena constitutes a specific kind of unintended cognitive effect of human technological activity. This paper discusses particular... more
Mental recruitment of previous technological experience in conceptualizations of non-technological phenomena constitutes a specific kind of unintended cognitive effect of human technological activity. This paper discusses particular conceptual takes on a significant epistemic challenge faced by people in the Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean: that of understanding the factors and dynamics governing and allowing the most important celestial body (the sun) to travel across the sky during the day. Textual sources, iconography and artefactual evidence in combination provide an outline of concrete conceptual solutions to this challenge, which centre on charioteering, i.e., the employment of light, horse-drawn vehicles for high-speed transport. These sources also inform on the actual, practical role played by this technological genre in the context of the eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age. The paper specifies a connection between the actual, mundane and social role of this form of vehicular technology in Bronze Age society, and the conceptualizations of an astronomical phenomenon to which it is recruited. This provides a specific case demonstrating how aspects of concrete, sensorimotor experience of technological activities, here the dynamics of vehicular transport, may ground associative conceptualization of empirically ill-specified phenomena. This, in turn, provides support for the general observation that the conceptual repertoires of individuals and collectives in particular historical contexts are influenced substantially by the experiential spectra associated with the specific ways of life into which they are born.
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Due to postmortem DNA degradation and microbial colonization, most ancient genomes have low depth of coverage, hindering genotype calling. Genotype imputation can improve genotyping accuracy for low-coverage genomes. However, it is... more
Due to postmortem DNA degradation and microbial colonization, most ancient genomes have low depth of coverage, hindering genotype calling. Genotype imputation can improve genotyping accuracy for low-coverage genomes. However, it is unknown how accurate ancient DNA imputation is and whether imputation introduces bias to downstream analyses. Here we re-sequence an ancient trio (mother, father, son) and downsample and impute a total of 43 ancient genomes, including 42 high-coverage (above 10x) genomes. We assess imputation accuracy across ancestries, time, depth of coverage, and sequencing technology. We find that ancient and modern DNA imputation accuracies are comparable. When downsampled at 1x, 36 of the 42 genomes are imputed with low error rates (below 5%) while African genomes have higher error rates. We validate imputation and phasing results using the ancient trio data and an orthogonal approach based on Mendel’s rules of inheritance. We further compare the downstream analysis ...
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How did human symbolic behavior evolve? Dating up to about 100,000 y ago, the engraved ochre and ostrich eggshell fragments from the South African Blombos Cave and Diepkloof Rock Shelter provide a unique window into presumed early... more
How did human symbolic behavior evolve? Dating up to about 100,000 y ago, the engraved ochre and ostrich eggshell fragments from the South African Blombos Cave and Diepkloof Rock Shelter provide a unique window into presumed early symbolic traditions of Homo sapiens and how they evolved over a period of more than 30,000 y. Using the engravings as stimuli, we report five experiments which suggest that the engravings evolved adaptively, becoming better-suited for human perception and cognition. More specifically, they became more salient, memorable, reproducible, and expressive of style and human intent. However, they did not become more discriminable over time between or within the two archeological sites. Our observations provide support for an account of the Blombos and Diepkloof engravings as decorations and as socially transmitted cultural traditions. By contrast, there was no clear indication that they served as denotational symbolic signs. Our findings have broad implications f...
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A stone heap grave at Kvorning: finds, context and significanceSince their archaeological discovery in the mid-20th century, the Middle Neolithic stone heap graves of northwest Jutland have remained somewhat of a puzzle. These graves,... more
A stone heap grave at Kvorning: finds, context and significanceSince their archaeological discovery in the mid-20th century, the Middle Neolithic stone heap graves of northwest Jutland have remained somewhat of a puzzle. These graves, which date from the Late Funnel Beaker culture (c. 3100‑2750 BC), only rarely contain preserved organic material – partly because they occur primarily on sandy soils, but in particular because, as their name suggests, they were originally covered with large heaps of stones rather than mounds of earth or turf. This constructional feature allowed relatively easy access to carrion-consuming organisms, greater fluctuations between wet and dry conditions and a generally higher oxygen level in the structures – all factors that contribute to a relatively rapid breakdown of organic material. Organic material is, by and large, only encountered in stone heap graves that were covered by later mounds, while they still had remnants of their original organic content...
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SummarySeveral major migrations and population turnover events during the later Stone Age (after c. 11,000 cal. BP) are believed to have shaped the contemporary population genetic diversity in Eurasia. While the genetic impacts of these... more
SummarySeveral major migrations and population turnover events during the later Stone Age (after c. 11,000 cal. BP) are believed to have shaped the contemporary population genetic diversity in Eurasia. While the genetic impacts of these migrations have been investigated on regional scales, a detailed understanding of their spatiotemporal dynamics both within and between major geographic regions across Northern Eurasia remains largely elusive. Here, we present the largest shotgun-sequenced genomic dataset from the Stone Age to date, representing 317 primarily Mesolithic and Neolithic individuals from across Eurasia, with associated radiocarbon dates, stable isotope data, and pollen records. Using recent advances, we imputed >1,600 ancient genomes to obtain accurate diploid genotypes, enabling previously unachievable fine-grained population structure inferences. We show that 1) Eurasian Mesolitic hunter-gatherers were more genetically diverse than previously known, and deeply diver...
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The Gjerrild burial provides the largest and best-preserved assemblage of human skeletal material presently known from the Single Grave Culture (SGC) in Denmark. For generations it has been debated among archaeologists if the appearance... more
The Gjerrild burial provides the largest and best-preserved assemblage of human skeletal material presently known from the Single Grave Culture (SGC) in Denmark. For generations it has been debated among archaeologists if the appearance of this archaeological complex represents a continuation of the previous Neolithic communities, or was facilitated by incoming migrants. We sampled and analysed five skeletons from the Gjerrild cist, buried over a period of c. 300 years, 2600/2500–2200 cal BCE. Despite poor DNA preservation, we managed to sequence the genome (>1X) of one individual and the partial genomes (0.007X and 0.02X) of another two individuals. Our genetic data document a female (Gjerrild 1) and two males (Gjerrild 5 + 8), harbouring typical Neolithic K2a and HV0 mtDNA haplogroups, but also a rare basal variant of the R1b1 Y-chromosomal haplogroup. Genome-wide analyses demonstrate that these people had a significant Yamnaya-derived (i.e. steppe) ancestry component and a clo...
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Weapons technology is a key factor contributing to cultural evolution because it enables humans actively to protect themselves from a variety of natural threats and expand their access to resources. In contrast to non-military... more
Weapons technology is a key factor contributing to cultural evolution because it enables humans actively to protect themselves from a variety of natural threats and expand their access to resources. In contrast to non-military technologies, the purpose of which is to subordinate and shape inanimate, non-intentional or trivial, regular states, weapons primarily serve to assert one’s own will against self-determined, intentional and non-trivially acting organisms. This functional idiosyncrasy establishes the basis for a continuous arms race, which begins with the need to anticipate phenotypical and mental abilities of animals and other humans through weapons technology before leading to the anticipation of attack and defence capacities of groups and, ultimately, the anticipation of accumulated intelligence and productive accomplishments of entire political states. The dynamics of development in weapons technology prove that weapons are simultaneously an index and a motor of cultural a...
Research Interests: History of Science and Technology, Military History, Cultural History, Archaeology, Military Science, and 15 morePhilosophy of Technology, Philosophical Anthropology, Posthumanism, Coevolution, Political Science, Critical Posthumanism, Cultural Evolution, Identities, Evolution of Cognition, Futurology, Weapons, Prosthesis (posthumanism), Generativity, Cognitive Archeology, and Preemption
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In this contribution, we address a major puzzle in the evolution of human material culture: If maturing individuals just learn their parental generation's material culture, then what is the origin of key innovations as documented in... more
In this contribution, we address a major puzzle in the evolution of human material culture: If maturing individuals just learn their parental generation's material culture, then what is the origin of key innovations as documented in the archeological record? We approach this question by coupling a life-history model of the costs and benefits of experimentation with a niche-construction perspective. Niche-construction theory suggests that the behavior of organisms and their modification of the world around them have important evolutionary ramifications by altering developmental settings and selection pressures. Part of Homo sapiens' niche is the active provisioning of children with play objects - sometimes functional miniatures of adult tools - and the encouragement of object play, such as playful knapping with stones. Our model suggests that salient material culture innovation may occur or be primed in a late childhood or adolescence sweet spot when cognitive and physical ab...
Research Interests: Ancient History, Evolutionary Biology, Cognitive Science, Archaeology, Prehistoric Archaeology, and 15 moreAnthropology, Creativity, Cognition, Evolutionary Anthropology, Archaeology of Childhood, Cultural Evolution, Adolescent, Humans, Child, Niche Construction, Biological evolution, Adult, Archaeology of children and childhood, Arkeologi, and Innovation
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Dating back as far as 100 ka, the Blombos ochre and the Diepkloof ostrich egg engravings are considered among the earliest fossilized evidence of human symbolic behavior. Of special interest to this study is the temporal trajectory... more
Dating back as far as 100 ka, the Blombos ochre and the Diepkloof ostrich egg engravings are considered among the earliest fossilized evidence of human symbolic behavior. Of special interest to this study is the temporal trajectory spanning more than 30 thousand years from earlier simpler parallel line patterns to later complex cross-hatchings suggesting adaptive compositional development. Through a series of three psychophysical experiments we test the hypotheses that the line engravings at each site evolved to become 1) more salient to the human perceptual system, 2) more discriminable from each other, and 3) increasingly associated with symbolic intent. Our findings suggest that just as instrumental tools have been found to undergo cumulative refinements in adaptation to their function, the ochre and egg shell engravings evolved adaptively to become more fit for their cognitive function as signs.
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Weapons technology is a key factor contributing to cultural evolution because it enables humans actively to protect themselves from a variety of natural threats and expand their access to resources. In contrast to non-military... more
Weapons technology is a key factor contributing to cultural evolution because it enables humans actively to protect themselves from a variety of natural threats and expand their access to resources. In contrast to non-military technologies, the purpose of which is to subordinate and shape inanimate, non-intentional or trivial, regular states, weapons primarily serve to assert one's own will against self-determined, intentional and non-trivially acting organisms. This functional idiosyncrasy establishes the basis for a continuous arms race, which begins with the need to anticipate phenotypical and mental abilities of animals and other humans through weapons technology before leading to the anticipation of attack and defence capacities of groups and, ultimately, the anticipation of accumulated intelligence and productive accomplishments of entire political states. The dynamics of development in weapons technology prove that weapons are simultaneously an index and a motor of cultur...
Research Interests: History of Science and Technology, Military History, Cultural History, Archaeology, Military Science, and 14 morePhilosophy of Technology, Philosophical Anthropology, Posthumanism, Coevolution, Political Science, Critical Posthumanism, Cultural Evolution, Evolution of Cognition, Futurology, Weapons, Prosthesis (posthumanism), Generativity, Cognitive Archeology, and Preemption
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Bokanmeldelse av Kristin Armstrong Oma’s The Sheep People: The Ontology of Making Lives, Building Homes and Forging Herds in Early Bronze Age Norway
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Research Interests: Anthropology and Ethos
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This paper considers the possible etiology of a group of commonly observed but poorly researched pathologies found in archaeological assemblages of animal bones: depressions on the articular surfaces of cattle (Bos taurus) phalanges.... more
This paper considers the possible etiology of a group of commonly observed but poorly researched pathologies found in archaeological assemblages of animal bones: depressions on the articular surfaces of cattle (Bos taurus) phalanges. Prevalence data from medieval and early modern domestic cattle from England and Neolithic domestic cattle from Denmark are presented, and the explanatory power of associations between lesion