Some four to five thousand years ago, interesting folk populated the southern Swedish shore. The peoples of the Pitted Ware culture provided for themselves through hunting and small-scale plant gathering.

Unlike most ordinary hunters, they also made pottery, which they decorated with pits pressed into the clay.

Usually in history, agrarian communities have spread in fairly linear fashion to replace hunter-gatherer societies.

On the southern Swedish shore, however, early farming communities had already previously  existed before the appearance of the Pitted Ware hunter-gatherer culture. After around a thousand years of coexistence, the latter were eventually ousted by agrarian cultures arriving from various directions.

– We know that the Pitted Ware community were not farmers who had returned to hunting, but a separate society, explains population geneticist and researcher, Dr Tiina Mattila.

She is now using ancient DNA to explore the mystery of these late hunters, during a stay of at least a couple of years at Uppsala University in Sweden. The big mystery is what happened when the hunter-gatherers and farmers came into contact with each other.

Perhaps the technologically advanced farmers displaced the hunters, or maybe the cultures merged peacefully so that the hunters adopted the farmers’ technology and they procreated together.

Gender differences are an issue of note. If the farmers took over by force, they might have taken wives from the hunter-gatherer society, but the men would have met with an untimely end. This means that the findings from the switchover period should contain a lot of male Y chromosome DNA from the farmers and female mitochondrial DNA from the hunters.

– Even that does not necessarily signify violence. It is possible that lone men from the farmer community set out to these new areas.

Roughly speaking, the farmers were genetically close to modern Europeans, whereas the hunters’ heredity is less like ours. Modern Scandinavians probably possess a mixture of both in their heritage, and the project will help to build a clearer picture of this.

Ancient DNA can be found mostly in recovered teeth and bones. In old remains, DNA chains are broken into very short segments, but by comparing and combining them using computers, geneticists can reconstruct individuals’ original gene sequences.

DNA is composed of different combinations of four nucleobases: adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine. Ancient DNA chain segments have a lot of thymine on the ends, because cytosine converts into thymine over time.

– Those chain segments are useless. On the other hand, they help us to easily distinguish the ancient DNA from modern DNA coming, for example, from the researchers themselves.

Tiina Mattila, PhD, received a 45,000 euro grant from the Finnish Cultural Foundation’s post doc pool in 2018 for conducting ancient DNA analysis on Scandinavian hunter-gatherers’ remains in Sweden. Applications for the post doc pool are accepted twice a year. For further information, see postdocpooli.fi.

The sun shines when it shines, and the wind blows when it blows. Natural gas, on the other hand, can be turned into electricity at any time: all you have to do is to switch on the gas turbines.

As the world strives for eco-friendliness, one aim is to increasingly replace natural gas with renewable energy. This is an admirable intention, but what does it actually mean technically and judicially?

– The increase in renewables is diversifying the system, which means that fewer customers can completely trust the electrical network, explains Tade Oyewunmi, a legal researcher at the University of Eastern Finland.

– Expensive batteries and other energy storage systems, as well as increasingly accurate measurement devices are required in order for a financially viable balance to be found between supply and demand.

Oyewunmi is now on his second year as a visiting researcher at Tulane University in New Orleans, USA. His project looks at the benefits and costs of increasing the proportion of renewables in energy production using public funding, at the expense of natural gas.

New Orleans is an excellent location for this research. The state of Louisiana is the United States’ fifth-largest natural gas producer, and the shore of the Gulf of Mexico is home to important terminals that supply liquefied natural gas (LNG) to other areas, particularly Europe and Asia.

– USA is the world’s leading natural gas producer. Since 2017 it has been a net exporter of gas thanks to the shale gas business and an increase in demand.

There is high demand for gas because it is the least polluting fossil fuel, and also simply because total energy demand is growing around the world. At the same time there is high political pressure to switch to renewables.

Oyewunmi intends to create a kind of highly complex “road map” of the legal aspects that operators in the sector should keep in mind amid these changes. 

– I don’t mean to question the replacement of gas with renewables in itself, but to figure out how it can be done. The various operators in the changing energy market can only make rational decisions if they have a clear understanding of the pros and cons.

Oyewunmi was born in Nigeria and obtained a Bachelor of Laws degree there. After completing a Master’s degree in Scotland, he defended his doctoral thesis at the University of Eastern Finland in 2017. His entire career thus far has focused on energy law, and he would be happy to stick to the subject for the rest of his life.

He is accompanied in New Orleans by his wife and two children. The grant he received also covers some of the costs of childcare, schooling and family insurance.

Tade Oyewunmi, LLD, received a 70,000 euro grant from the Finnish Cultural Foundation’s post doc pool for his post-doctoral research on the role of law and institutions in the changing energy market, which he is carrying out in the United States. Applications for the post doc pool are accepted twice a year, in autumn and spring.

Text: Antti Kivimäki
Pic: Tade Oyewunmi and Tulane University