During the excavations in Derbent in 2014, ceramic round bowlers were found buried in the floor of the premises and filled with ash. The furnaces in the form of pits in which coals were placed for heating are widespread in Central Asia. There they are known from ancient times until the 20th century and are called «Sandal furnaces». Sandal furnaces of ceramic pots are the local Caucasian modification of these heating facilities.
The article presents information about the International Scientific Conference XXXI Krupnov's readings "Archaeological Heritage of the Caucasus: Topical Problems of Study and Conservation," which was held on October 26-31, 2020 in Makhachkala, Republic of Daghestan. The conference was dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the Krupnov's readings and the 50th anniversary of the Derbent archaeological expedition. The conference was attended by scientists from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Ghent, Grozny, Maykop, Makhachkala, Nazran, Nalchik, Oxford, Pushchino, Pyatigorsk, Tyumen, Stavropol, Sukhum, Vladikavkaz. At the beginning of the conference, a collection of conference materials was published, which included 141 publications of reports by more than 210 authors. The subject of the reports reflected a wide range of archaeological studies, covering the chronological range from the Stone Age to the Late Middle Ages.
Hepatitis B virus (HBV) has been infecting humans for millennia and remains a global health problem, but its past diversity and dispersal routes are largely unknown. We generated HBV genomic data from 137 Eurasians and Native Americans dated between ~10,500 and ~400 years ago. We date the most recent common ancestor of all HBV lineages to between ~20,000 and 12,000 years ago, with the virus present in European and South American hunter-gatherers during the early Holocene. After the European Neolithic transition, Mesolithic HBV strains were replaced by a lineage likely disseminated by early farmers that prevailed throughout western Eurasia for ~4000 years, declining around the end of the 2nd millennium BCE. The only remnant of this prehistoric HBV diversity is the rare genotype G, which appears to have reemerged during the HIV pandemic. ; The research was funded by the Max Planck Society, the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (771234–PALEoRIDER, to W.H.; 805268–CoDisEASe to K. Bos; 834616–ARCHCAUCASUS to S.H.), the Slovak Academy of Sciences and the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme and Marie Curie Actions under the Programme SASPRO (1340/03/03 to P.C.R.), the ERA.NET RUS Plus–S&T programm of the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (277–BIOARCCAUCASUS to S.Re. and S.H.), the Werner Siemens Stiftung ("Paleobiochemistry", to CW), the Award Praemium Academiae of the Czech Academy of Sciences (to M.E.), the Institute of Archaeology of the Czech Academy of Sciences (RVO 67985912, to M.Dobe.), the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (19-09-00354a, to M.K.K. and V.V.K.; 19-78-10053 to SSh), the German Research Foundation (DFG-HA-5407/4-1–INTERACT to W.H. and RE2688/2 to S.Re.), the French National Research Agency (ANR-17-FRAL-0010–INTERACT, to M.F.D., M.Ri., S.Ro., S.Sai., D.Bi., and P.Le.), the Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant (9558 to S.Sab.), and the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Kazakhstan (AP08856654 to L.B.D., L.M., and E.Kh. and AP08857177 to A.Z.B.).