Above. The excavation crew in 2012 included Ethiopian natives and scientists from around the world.
Meet Bayira: The first pure ancient African genome.
They know he was about 5 feet tall, 30 to 50 years old, lactose intolerant, and well adapted to a low-oxygen environment 6,000 feet above sea level.
When an archeological team led by professors Kathryn and John Arthur of USF St. Petersburg found his remains in a cave in southern Ethiopia in June 2012, they named him Bayira (BI-ruh), which means “first born” in the African language of Gamo.
But what they didn’t know until later, after study by geneticists, was that Bayira was 4,500 years old and held the first complete ancient African genome ever discovered.
When the archeological team published its findings in the journal Science earlier this month, the Arthurs found themselves in a global spotlight.
The New York Times and an estimated 250 news outlets published stories about the Arthurs’ team and its work in finding a complete assemblage of DNA in an ancient African.
Elizabeth Southard, an anthropology student who accompanied the Arthurs in Ethiopia conducts fieldwork.
“I have been here 20 years, and in my mind this serves as among the top one or two scientific discoveries of any faculty on our campus in that time,” said Jay Sokolovsky, chairman of the USFSP anthropology department.
“This will put our program on the map, especially for students looking for a first-rate undergraduate program which stresses student participation in faculty research.”
The Arthurs said they are proud that their work involves both scholars from other countries and students from USFSP.
“Every year we have gone (to Ethiopia) we’ve taken two students with us from our anthropology program, juniors and seniors,” said Kathryn, 49. “They’re working on a research project. This is not a field school, this is not study abroad. This is three months of intense field work.”
“It gives them the opportunity to meet other scholars and to learn how they do their work – geologists, botanists, all kinds of things.”
The Arthurs also take another student – their 12-year-old daughter, Hannah.
“She started (going to Africa) when she was 3,” said John, 50. “She’s been six times, as soon as she could get her vaccines.”
Kathryn knew what she wanted to do pretty early in life –essentially by middle school, when she took a history class on Egyptology and was fascinated.
That’s when Africa came in.
“My mom was studying Africa and African-American literature,” Kathryn said. “I was really interested in Africa, so she would give me books to read all the time. And a cohort of hers, an Afrocentric poet, told me a lot about Africa that I never knew – how amazing the people and the culture was.”
Bayira’s burial was found under a rock cairn in the Mota Cave keeping the DNA preserved in a cool setting.
From that point on, it became Kathryn’s goal to expose those cultures and help reveal how amazing she knew the place really was.
John Arthur’s story is a bit different.
A typical student, he didn’t know he was going to be archaeologist right away and tested a few different areas of study before finding it.
“I started off as a marine biologist and then I switched to botany. Then I wandered around for a year taking random classes, and then I wandered into a class on global archaeology in the summer of 1985 and I fell in love with it,” John said.
They met at the University of Texas during an archaeology project in downtown Austin in 1990 and married three years later.
Both moved to Florida for higher education and earned their doctorates at the University of Florida. A job was offered to John at USFSP and the university indicated there was a chance a position could open for Kathryn.
They don’t regret their decision.
“At USF St. Petersburg, we might be small but we have really good scholars here and a good support system,” said Kathryn. “They have these new researcher grants for young faculty when we first came here. It let’s you do a little fieldwork so you can create a baseline to build something up so you’re more competitive for the federal grants. And that was really great.”
In 2001, Kathryn became the first woman to have a research project in Ethiopia.
When she and John went back to Ethiopia in 2005, “we started by working with the community,” Kathryn said. “And that’s my part in the project, working with the community and learning about their histories.
And one of the places they brought me to were caves – places that protect people, shelter people. So, women, children and elderly would go there during periods of conflict. It was important historically.”
When Kathryn first went to a place scientists call the “Mota cave,” she was astonished to see a dirt floor. According to Kathryn, most caves have rock floors with no potential for archaeological deposits.
“I thought it had great potential,” she said. “ So I told John and Matthew Curtis, our other colleague who is one of the leaders on our project, and they excavated it the next year.”
Due to Africa’s hot and humid weather, John said, many people assume ancient DNA cannot be found in the area. However, the Mota cave is 6,000 feet above ground, providing a cool atmosphere that helped preserve Bayira’s DNA.
Bayira was buried “under a rock cairn” and the DNA stayed preserved.
They took the remains to the National Museum in Ethiopia and brought Jay Stock from Cambridge University, a bioarcheologist who studies skeletal remains, the following year to take a look.
“He talked to some of the geneticists and they said, ‘Try to get the petrous bone because we think that’s the best place to get DNA,’” John said. “So we asked the Ethiopian government and they granted us permission.
They were able to get the DNA from the petrous bone, which is the ear bone, one of the densest bones in the body. So, that was a new discovery, too. It showed that it’s really the best place to look for ancient DNA.”
Stock took it back to Cambridge and the DNA extraction began.
Bayira’s remains contained a pure ancient African genome, as opposed to a Eurasian mixture.
According to the Arthurs, there is no scientific evidence of what is widely thought of as a massive migration from Eurasia into Africa. Societies within the Mediterranean and Red Sea area –Egypt, Ethiopia, northeast Africa and the Near East–actually interacted over time. Through trade, shared culture and even marriage – which is the most likely way this Eurasian genome can be found in modern African populations.
For the USFSP students who have accompanied the Arthurs, the experience was exhilarating and rewarding, said Elizabeth Southard, who was with them in the summer of 2012.
“As a college student you should experience things completely foreign to you, because it is how you grow and learn things about yourself and the world. The classroom environment can only go so far, actually going out into the world and applying what you have learned is what it is all about, and there isn’t a better opportunity than to study abroad with amazing USFSP professors,” she said.
The Arthurs said the Ethiopian experience can be a culture shock for their students.
Ethiopia was never really colonized, so seeing white Americans walking around was quite unusual.
“I’ll change a tire and have 40 people staring at me,” said John. “I’ve gotten used to it, but the students have to adjust when they first get there.”
