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Tag: archaeology

  • Queen Nefertiti Finally Found?

    Queen Nefertiti Finally Found?

    Queen Nefertiti is one of the most famous and mysterious characters in the study of ancient Egypt.

    The story of Queen Nefertiti has captured the imaginations of generations of historians, archaeologists and simple history lovers alike for thousands of years.

    Queen Nefertiti disappeared over 3,000 years ago, after ruling Egypt alongside her husband Amenhotep IV, in a fog of mystery.

    Did Queen Nefertiti die? Did she take another name and rule as co-regent? No one knows for sure, but after a recent discovery inside the tomb of none other than the famed Tutankhamen, we may be closer to at least knowing where her final resting place is.

    British archaeologist Nicolas Reeves, after studying high-resolution images published last year, noticed cracks in the walls disguised by the iconic Egyptian art covering the inside of King Tut’s tomb.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9BHVD4Iloo

    He believes they could be the remnants of former passageways to a tomb on the other side of the wall.

    That, combined with the fact that the artistic depictions seem similar to others which have been identified as Tutankhamen and Queen Nefertiti, leads Reeves to believe that perhaps the famous queen is buried there in Tut’s tomb.

    Queen Nefertiti could be just on the other side of the wall.

    Speaking of the wall, Reeves said, “Without all this distracting color you can see all sort of things. You can see lines that indicate corners of cut walls, and these are the things that I noticed first.”

    He added, “If I’m right, this is simply part of the entrance to the tomb of Nefertiti. The tomb, I think, continues beyond this wall. There will be a burial chamber beyond there.”

    So exciting! However, we may have to wait to find out for sure if Queen Nefertiti is indeed buried on the other side of the wall.

    First, Reeves will scan the proposed tomb of Queen Nefertiti using radar and thermal imaging. Then, a structural problem must be solved.

    Egyptian Antiquities Minister Mamdouh El Damati said, “We must find a way to protect the tomb of Tutankhamen. Does that mean we will dig from above, below or from the side? We don’t know.”

    Are you excited to find out if Queen Nefertiti’s burial place has actually been found?

  • Iron Age Coins Unearthed in Britain

    Iron Age Coins Unearthed in Britain

    Over two dozen of rare Roman and Iron Age coins were discovered inside of a cave in Dovedale, Derbyshire, United Kingdom.

    Four of the coins were initially discovered by a random cave dweller in the Peak district, which lead to a full-scale excavation by archaeologists. In what has been described as an extremely rare occurrence, 26 coins from two civilizations, which experts believe haven’t been touched for roughly 2,000 years, were unearthed in all.

    The gold and silver coins, the first of their kind to be found in a cave, are said to have belonged to the Corieltauvi tribe, a group that lived in Britain before the Roman conquest. The coins were dug up in Reynard’s Kitchen Cave, which is located outside the Corieltauvi’s usual boundaries.

    Rachel Hall of the National Trust commented, “It might be that we have a member of the tribe living beyond the boundary that is more usually associated with the territory.” Hall added, “it’s just so special and they’re incredibly beautiful. I think it’s the most exciting site I’ve ever worked on in my life so far.”

    The find included 20 Iron Age coins, three Roman coins and three coins from much later eras, according to a report complied by Ian Leins, curator of Iron Age and Roman coins at the British Museum. As the coins predated the Roman conquest of the region, archaeologists aren’t exactly sure how they were used, but interestingly, it is highly unlikely that they were utilized as a form of currency. It is believed that the coins were presented as gifts, used to store wealth or offered as sacrifices.

    The 26 coins are worth roughly $3,400, and officially qualify as “treasure” under the United Kingdom’s 1996 Treasure Act, which means they need to be reported to authorities. The coins will be put on display later this year at the Buxton Museum in Derbyshire.

    Image via Youtube

  • 3,600-Year-Old Mummy Unearthed In Luxor Egypt

    A routine dig in Luxor, Egypt has resulted in the discovery of a sarcophagus – with a mummy inside and intact. The team of Egyptian and Spanish archeologists that led the excavation were working on a tomb when they unearthed an elaborately painted and well preserved sarcophagus carved with a human face. It is believed to be 3,600 years old.

    According to Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, the burial took place in 1600 BC during the reign of the Pharaonic 17th Dynasty. The country’s Antiquities Minister, Mohamed Ibrahim, added that the mummy used to be a government official based on the titles etched in the 6 ½-foot sarcophagus. In addition, the ornate design and detailed inscriptions may signify that the official held a high position. Archeologists have yet to determine the precise identity of the mummy.

    Sarcophagi are common burial vessels used by Ancient Egyptians to protect their dead royals. They were carved and decorated according to the physical attributes of the deceased so that they can be distinguished from one another. Alabaster and limestone are common materials used to make sarcophagi in Ancient Egypt. Other ancient cultures like the Greeks and Romans made use of sarcophagi to commemorate their dead.

    The same Spanish-Egyptian team conducted another dig at the Draa Abul-Naga necropolis also in Luxor, and discovered two additional burials. However, both sarcophagi were empty. Al-Ahram, the country’s state-run newspaper,  says that the tombs may have been robbed in ancient times.

    Egyptian prosecution has been addressing the problem of smuggling and damaging ancient relics by charging both local and foreign thieves. Three German nationals have recently been brought to criminal court for conspiring with six Egyptians in smuggling antiquities. The Germans pretended to be researchers to gain easier access to the stolen relics. They have since fled back to Germany although Egyptian authorities plan to work with the German government in order to recover the pieces.

    Image via YouTube

  • Cat Domestication Traced to China, Shows Study

    Though it had long been assumed that cats were domesticated by the Egyptians, researchers have now discovered that the animals were first tamed into pets at least one thousand years earlier.

    A new study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, traces cat domestication to the Chinese villiage of Quanhucun some 5,300 years ago. Researchers believe that cats were drawn into close proximity with humans by the rodents that were attracted to the village by its agriculture.

    “Results of this study show that the village of Quanhucun was a source of food for the cats 5,300 years ago, and the relationship between humans and cats was commensal, or advantageous for the cats,” said Fiona Marshall, a co-author of the study and an archaeologist at Washington University. “Even if these cats were not yet domesticated, our evidence confirms that they lived in close proximity to farmers, and that the relationship had mutual benefits.”

    The study involved examining the bones from cats found during an excavation of Quanhucun. By dating and analyzing the bones, researchers were able to determine that one of the cats found was older, suggesting that it lived comfortably in the villiage. Another can was found to have eaten significant amounts of grain millet, suggesting that it may have been fed.

    The study’s authors still do not know whether the cats found at Quanhucun are descended from the Near Eastern Wildcat, the ancestor to modern domestic cats. This has implications for whether the cats were domesticated in China or were introduced to the area at some other point.

    “We do not yet know whether these cats came to China from the Near East, whether they interbred with Chinese wild-cat species, or even whether cats from China played a previously unsuspected role in domestication,” said Marshall.

  • Tunnels Under Rome Being Mapped to Prevent Further Damage to City

    An extensive series of ancient tunnels and quarries under Rome are threatening parts of the city that has been built atop them.

    Many years ago, Rome’s earliest architects discovered that tuff, or rock made of consolidated volcanic ash, was a perfect building material. It was strong, yet easily carved into blocks. The soil beneath Rome was layered atop this tuff, so ancient Romans began to mine the rock, creating an intricate system of tunnels and quarries beneath the city.

    Throughout the years, the tunnels have been used for a variety of purposes, from catacombs to mushroom farms to – during World War II – bomb shelters.

    Despite the fact that the first Romans wisely kept the tunnels narrow in order to support of the ground above, the tunnels have deteriorated over time.

    Giuseppina Kysar Mattietti of George Mason University says that part of this deterioration is due to the fact that the rock begins to weather and break down the moment it’s exposed to air. The other factor is human error, if you will. Subsequent generations of Romans continued mining the quarries for building materials, increasing the width beyond what could adequately support the structures being built above.

    The result? The streets of Rome, and portions of some of its buildings have been collapsing into the ancient quarries at an alarming rate: 44 incidents in 2011, 77 in 2012, and 83 so far in 2013.

    City officials have engaged Kysar Mattietti and a team of geoscientists from Center for Speleoarchaeological Research (Sotterranei di Roma) to map the tunnels, pinpointing areas that are at high risk of collapse. They hope this will be a more effective solution to the problem than the one Roman citizens have employed in the past: plugging tunnels with plastic bags of cement.

    The research team uses laser 3D scanning to identify hidden weaknesses in the tunnels. When they’re sure a tunnel is safe to enter, they do so via a manhole and map it by hand.

    “There might be cracks, so they will be showing as veins almost, or openings, so we map the openings and map any kind of detachment,” said Kysar Mattietti.

    She revealed that in some areas, collapses have left very little ground between the surface and the tunnel: “It’s interesting, because at times when you are down there, you can hear people on top.”

    Once the mapping is complete, Roman officials will decide how to proceed and what kind of intervention is necessary to prevent future collapses of buildings and streets.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • Conehead Skull Found in Multicultural Necropolis

    The site of Obernai in France was occupied by one people or another for the last 6000 years. Now, a series of graves found there date from 4000 years ago to 2000 years ago. These 38 tombs span a fantastic portion of human history: from the Stone Age to the Dark Age.

    LiveScience reports that the tombs were first discovered in 2011 during an excavation that was leading to a large industrial project, but archaeologist Philippe Lefranc went back to do more detailed excavations this year.

    The tombs were excellently preserved by the surrounding limestone. Lefranc said the bodies were discovered on their back, heads pointing west, with legs outstretched. Abundant flint tools and artifacts were found, among them some stone vases, and a mother-of-pearl elbow bracelet. Lefranc believes these artifacts to be attributed to the Grossgartach culture, a Neolithic animal-herding people that lived there in longhouses around 4750 BCE.

    The archaeological remnants of a Gallic farm were also found just north of the Neolithic tombs. Some amphorae, coins, pottery, and glass ornaments indicate the Gauls who lived there were quite wealthy. The Gallic culture probably lived there between 150 and 130 BC, and Gauls extended their encampment south to what archaeologists believe was a religious sanctuary. To make that conclusion, they extrapolated from the human skull fragments, weapons, children, and animals buried throughout that particular site.

    The conehead skull, in particular, appears to have come from a people entirely different from the previous two, as indicated by the deformity. Four graves were found that dated to about 1650 years ago; the richest of the decedents was a woman who wore a series of objects on her belt that are similar to those used by the Alan-Samartian populations from the Caucasus region. The conehead skull belonged to this particular woman.

    In an email to LiveScience, Lefranc said “The deformation of the skull with the help of bandages (narrow strips of cloth) and small boards is a practice coming from central Asia. It was popularized by the Huns and adopted by many German people.”

    Graves have been found containing similar skulls in Northern Gaul, Germany, and Eastern Europe, usually accompanied by a lot of grave goods. Archaeologists reasonably concluded that these individuals were eastern dignitaries to the Roman Empire who were incorporated into the legion during the great migrations.

    [Image via Inrap]

  • The Earliest Life Form Found So Far is in Australia

    The Guardian is reporting that Earth’s earliest life form has been found in Australia. An Aussie research team accompanied by some U.S. scientists discovered a series of “complex microbial ecosystems” they date to 3.5 billion years ago.

    The find was made in Australia’s western Pilbara region in rock sediments considered to be some of the oldest found. In a rock body called the Dresser formation, the scientists found entire microbe communities. Slivers of ancient rock were sampled in order to search for the microscopic life.

    Team leader and professor David Walcey of the University of Western Australia told the Guardian that the radical find “pushes back evidence of life on Earth by a few more million years.” The simpler organisms (bacterium and archaea) ruled for millions of years before evolutionary leaps led to more complex, multi-celled lifeforms.

    He added, “The Pilbara has some of the best, least deformed rocks on Earth; there aren’t many rocks older than there… I would say this is the most robust evidence of the oldest life on Earth. My team has found evidence dated at 3.45bn years in the past, so we have gone further back by a few million years.”

    Walcey’s work is slowly painting a looking-glass view into lifeforms that existed eons before the evolution of man. “Microbes and bacteria like to live in communities. Think about the bacteria in your stomach, for example. These microbes lived in layers that required different chemical gradients to survive. So bacteria that liked light would be towards the top while those that didn’t were towards the bottom.”

    Earth was so radically different in almost every way, from higher temperatures to even higher sea levels. Bacteria like those the team discovered would have been the predominant form of life for several billion years.

    “Bacteria ruled the world back then [and] it would’ve been a very smelly world indeed,” Walcey observed. “It would’ve been pretty hostile for us. There was essentially no oxygen, a lot of CO2 and methane and much warmer oceans.”

    The ramifications of the discovery could impact how we view the entire solar system. “These kinds of ecosystems could be viewed by a rover, such as the one that visited Mars,” Walcey said. “We wouldn’t know the age, of course, as we couldn’t date them. But we would know that there was life at some point on another planet, which would be pretty exciting.”

    If you’re interested in the elementary basics of life on Earth, here’s a BBC2 clip describing the evolution of the first microorganisms on our planet:

    [Image via this BBC2 clip on YouTube]

  • Global Warming Causes Shrinking Mammals, Enlarged Reptiles

    Phys.org noted a study published earlier this week by a University of Michigan paleontologist and his research team. They claim to have discovered a process of mammalian “dwarfing” that occurred during multiple climate warming events between 50 and 53 million years ago, and they say that it will probably happen again.

    Paleontologists were relatively aware of the 55-million-year-old Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), after which the fossils of deer, horses, and primates became noticeably smaller. Professor of earth, environmental science, and team leader Philip Gingerich rewrote biological history when they discovered a second event, 2 million years after the PETM, that also affected body size.

    “The fact that it happened twice significantly increases our confidence that we’re seeing cause and effect, that one interesting response to global warming in the past was a substantial decrease in body size in mammalian species,” he said. The Eocene Thermal Maximum 2 (ETM2) period lasted roughly 80,000 to 100,000 years, and the earth’s peak temperature rose about 5 degrees during that time.

    Additionally, a report from NBC News about the impact of the study notes that a second, reptile-focused paleontologist studying the PETM found 60-million-year-old turtles the size of breakfast tables, and a snake referred to as a “Titanoboa” that stretched as long as a school bus.

    Jonathan Bloch of the Florida Museum of Natural History paints a picture: “Imagine that the snake would have to squeeze through the door, and come up to your waist,” he said, all while horses were the size of housecats.

    The terrifying conclusion of their study: because it’s happened not once but twice, it could absolutely happen again, and maybe a lot sooner than anyone would like. “You have to go back tens of millions of years before you get close to or higher than what we’re talking about for the next couple of hundred years,” Bloch said, referring to rising temperatures around the globe.

    But Bloch remains confident that humanity might utilize tactics that the Earth herself used to rid the atmosphere of excess carbon dioxide. Who knows? Maybe, he suggests, the records of the PETM period could function as a “user’s manual for [Planet] Earth.”

    [Image via Danielle Byerly/University of Florida]

  • Archaeologist: King Tut Died… While Chariot Racing

    Archaeologist: King Tut Died… While Chariot Racing

    His discovery captivated the world, and from 1922 on, discoverers Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter would become the most famous (and, allegedly, accursed) Egyptologists until their mysterious deaths. Over 20 people associated with the famous discovery of King Tutankhamen’s earthly remains died in mysterious ways, often attributed to “the curse of Tutankhamen” and the supernatural power of the ancient Egyptian people.

    Now, a new team has examined King Tut’s mummy, and those researchers have concluded based on his injuries that he died in a chariot-racing accident. Beyond that, the mummy’s terrible condition can be attributed to a chemical fire that resulted from a botched mummification effort.

    The UK’s Independent and Telegraph both report Dr. Chris Naunton, director of the Egypt Exploration Society, making the claim based on references to Tut’s remains in Carter’s original notes.

    In those notes, Carter wrote about how scorched certain parts of the body appeared to be. X-ray images and samples of Tut himself taken in the late 1960’s by anthropologist Dr. Robert Connolly assisted Naunton in his conclusions. When one of those samples (the only known piece of flesh belonging to Tut that wasn’t located in Egypt) was put into a scanning electron microscope, it was revealed to have indeed been burned.

    Chemical tests confirmed that the fire took place while Tut was inside the sarcophagus. The team hypothesizes that embalming oils, mixed with linen and oxygen, caused a chemical reaction that “cooked” Tut’s corpse at over 200 degrees C.

    “The charring and possibility that a botched mummification led the body spontaneously combusting shortly after burial was entirely unexpected, something of a revelation,” Naunton said.

    As to the cause of Tutankhamen’s actual death, illness and accident were common speculations, based on a 2005 CAT scan showing a fractured and infected left leg and a 2010 DNA analysis showing malaria. The chariot-racing conclusion arrived when Tut’s injuries were examined by car crash investigators who applied a series of variables to a computer simulation.

    The simulation itself told a story of the accident that robbed him of life. According to the results, Tut was on his knees when he was struck by a fast-moving chariot; it shattered his ribs and pelvis, and his heart was crushed by the impact.

    [Image via Wikimedia Commons]

  • Five Cannons Recovered From Blackbeard’s Ship

    In 1718, the legendary pirate Edward Teach, AKA Blackbeard, sank the Queen Anne’s Revenge off the coast of Beaufort, NC after the flagship accidentally ran aground in the shallows. For nearly 300 years, the ship rested and rusted, until 1996 saw the beginnings of an archaeological excavation to recover the vessel and its contents.

    In 1997 when the team began their excavations, they had eliminated virtually every other sunken ship from the era on the basis of the cannons; in historical reports, no other ship carried as many cannons of the size they observed as Blackbeard’s.

    As the years went by and the excavations slowly continued, 2011 saw another big discovery from the wreck: a series of improvised missiles and weaponry designed to inflict terror rather than damage. At that time, dives had yielded bags of grape shot, chained cannonballs used to disable rigging, and improvised anti-personnel charges.

    The latest update from the site, with assistance from the U.S. Coast Guard, has the archaeological team recovering the largest collection of artifacts yet from the wreck of the Queen Anne’s Revenge.

    To date, Popular Archaeology reports that the team has recovered 29 of the ship’s 40 guns, and over a quarter of a million artifacts, including but hardly limited to: a bronze bell; an English blunderbuss barrel; a lead cannon apron; 2 huge anchors, and 2 cannonballs.


    [The North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources]

    The additional discovery of 20 cannons, medical instruments, gold grains, glass wine bottles, and pieces of ceramic led researchers to succinctly conclude they were dealing with the wreck of the Queen Anne’s Revenge.


    [The North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources]

    Project director Billy Ray Morris speculated about the origins of the cannons in a press release. “We think the largest of the four cannons may be of Swedish origin since the only other recovered gun this size was made in Sweden,” he said, “We also hope to recover two large concretions each the size of a twin bed. They may contain barrel hoops, cannon balls and other treasures.”


    [The North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources]

    Four cast-iron guns recovered on Oct. 28 weighed 2,000 pounds, and a fifth weighed 3,000. The team expects to recover the rest of the wreck by 2014. Be sure to check out the pictures featured in the online Blackbeard/Queen Anne’s Revenge museum!

    [Main Image via Wikimedia Commons]

  • Study: Pollen Tells Us What Killed Bronze Age Civilizations

    Study: Pollen Tells Us What Killed Bronze Age Civilizations

    The New York Times reported that a recent study of pollen may explain the sudden collapse of what were, at the time, highly successful civilizations like the Egyptians, the Babylonians, and the Hittites.

    3200 years in the distant past, Tel Aviv was a major trading center in Israel, Ramses II ruled over a vast Egyptian empire, and many other cultures from Mycenaean Greece to Canaan engaged in trade and commerce along the Mediterranean Sea. 150 years later, every empire would be either dead or a mere fragment of their former glory.

    What caused this sudden collapse, until now, was the subject of much historical debate. A variety of theories cast blame on bloody warfare, unpredictable earthquakes, or perhaps one of a variety of plagues.

    But today, a study conducted in Tel Aviv and Bonn, Germany on fossilized pollen and published in Tel Aviv: Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University is suggesting that between the years of 1250 and 1100 B.C.E., a terrible drought took place that wiped out several civilizations.

    The new theory is due, in no small part, to massive advances in climate science that permitted the researchers to make such a precise conclusion. Similar studies that examine long-term processes like pollen buildup often require analysis of strata roughly 500 years apart, but this particular study analyzed strata at 40-year intervals as opposed to 500, which Professor Israel Finkelstein of the Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv says is the most precise resolution of study yet performed in the region.

    Finkelstein and another professor, Steve Weiner from Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, had previously received a grant from the European Research Council to attempt a reconstruction of ancient Israel.

    A Tel Aviv University pollen researcher, Dafna Langgut, was brought in alongside Professor Thomas Litt of the Institute of Geology, Mineralogy and Paleontology at the University of Bonn in Germany to conduct the climate-side of the research. The entire project was initiated in 2010, and has taken the full three years to complete.

    The research team had to extract nearly 60 feet of soil core samples from the Sea of Galilee, going deep enough to reach sediments from the last 9,000 years. They performed the same extraction in the Dead Sea.

    Their final conclusion: the Mediterranean area suffered a sharp decrease in trees like oaks, pines, carobs, and olive trees. Since olive trees were essential for local cultivation, the experts believe repeated droughts were required to achieve this result. The consequences would have been apocalyptic, particularly for city-states like Megiddo.

    In the historical record, the first hint of the problems to come was a letter from a Hittite queen to Ramses II circa-1250 B.C.E., which read, “I have no grain in my lands.”

    “Understanding climate is key to understanding history,” Finkelstein added. “The authors of the Bible knew very well the value of precipitation and the calamity that may be inflicted on people by drought.”

    Read the full Times piece here.

    [Image via a YouTube lecture on the Bronze Age]

  • Study Confirms Humans Came From Africa Using… Herpes

    Scientists have debated, since such discussions were made permissible, the origins of the human species: did we come from Asia? Africa? Maybe even the Middle East?

    Until very recently, many of these theories had equal merit. However, a study of the complete genetic code of the herpes simplex virus type one (HSV-1), notorious for its oral cold sores, has confirmed the theory that the human species emigrated out of one location: Africa.

    The study is available online in the journal PLOS-ONE and was conducted by several specialists, including two professors of Ophthalmology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Medicine and Public Health: Aaron W. Kolb (who also does Visual Sciences), Curtis R. Brandt (who specializes in microbiology and immunology), and Cécile Ané of the Departments of Botany and Statistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

    The three authors compared 31 different strains of HSV-1 that were sampled all across the world from North America to Eurasia and Africa. “The result was fairly stunning,” Brandt said. “The viral strains sort exactly as you would predict based on sequencing of human genomes. We found that all of the African isolates cluster together, all the [sic] virus from the Far East, Korea, Japan, China clustered together, all the viruses in Europe and America, with one exception, clustered together.”

    He continued: “What we found follows exactly what the anthropologists have told us, and the molecular geneticists who have analyzed the human genome have told us, about where humans originated and how they spread across the planet.”

    The scientists hope the technology they used in analyzing 31 complete viral genomes may help us to understand why certain diseases can have a sudden lethal turn. “We’d like to understand why these few viruses are so dangerous, when the predominant course of herpes is so mild. We believe that a difference in the gene sequence is determining the outcome, and we are interested in sorting this out,” Brandt said.

    Oh, and that “one exception” that Brandt mentioned? A single strain of HSV-1 sampled in Texas came out of the gene sequencer looking Asian. “How did we get an Asian-related virus in Texas?” Aaron Kolb pondered. Since some Native American ancestors traveled across the Bering Land Bridge to settle in modern North America, Brandt believes that to settle the mystery.

    “We found support for the land bridge hypothesis because the date of divergence from its most recent Asian ancestor was about 15,000 years ago,” Brandt says. “The dates match, so we postulate that [the exception] was an Amerindian virus.”

    If you want to read the release, you can find it here.

    [Image via the study and its authors on PLOS-ONE]

  • Skeletons Found in Georgia Shine Light on Evolution

    NPR reports that for the first time, the former Soviet state of Georgia unveiled an archaeological display of skulls and skeletons of five ancient humans they unearthed in 2005 in Dmanisi.

    One skull, being simply named “Skull 5,” is being hailed as one of the most complete proto-human skulls ever recovered. The findings will be published in the journal Science.

    Team member and senior researcher from the Anthropological Institute of Switzerland, Marcia Ponce de Leon, said “For the first time, we can see a population. We only had individuals before.”

    What makes this discovery so important is the proximity and variability of the skeletons: they were found together, and they all date to roughly 1.8 million years ago, which confuses archaeologists because the skeletal features of the bones are radically different.

    One of the skeletons, an adult male, had a small brain case, a huge protruding jaw and accompanying giant teeth. The “Dmanisi Five” almost looked like different species living in close proximity to one another. Another research associate, Christoph Zollikofer, acknowledged that “We are pretty sure that the variation that we see is… within a species… [like] a single evolving lineage.”

    Anthropologists conventionally subscribed to the idea that several variations of proto-humans evolved and migrated out of Africa, among them Homo habilis and Homo erectus, but previously discovered fossils of those species were found alone. The new study suggests that there may not have been the various different groups, but rather one human species.

    To substantiate the radical finding, the team examined modern chimps and modern humans, comparing their findings to the Dmanisi Five. The researchers discovered that the amount of variation between the Dmanisi Five and modern descendants is the same: “The five Dmanisi individuals are no more different from each other than any five modern humans or chimpanzees,” Zollikofer said.

    William Jungers, a professor of anatomy from Stony Brook University who was uninvolved in the research, commented that “There may have been one very successful species that emerges from Africa, and rapidly spreads to Southeast Asia. That’s a picture of a very successful, cosmopolitan species… I think there are going to be people who won’t like this.”

    [Image via this AFP News video]

  • Fossilized Mosquito Found; Sadly Lacks Dino Blood

    Smithsonian Magazine just put out a blog that chronicles the strange journey of a fossilized mosquito with ancient blood still contained in its stomach, reminiscent of Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster Jurassic Park.

    The ancient mosquito was unearthed in Montana’s Glacier National Park by a geology graduate student named Kurt Constenius, who picked it up during a fossil-hunting trip with his parents and left it in a basement for a couple decades. A retired biochemist named Dale Greenwalt rescued it as part of his fossil collection efforts for the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.

    Greenwalt’s fascinating collection of insect fossils includes thousands of samples from 14 different orders of the insect world. In order to retrieve some of his older samples, he had to raft the Flathead River to a special location that features shale formations dating to the Eocene epoch, or roughly 46 million years ago.

    For those unfamiliar, the plot of Jurassic Park revolves around a fossilized mosquito, preserved in amber, that happened to have fed on dinosaurs such as the massive Tyrannosaurus rex and the Velociraptor. A wealthy entrepreneur collected the mosquito and had the dinosaurs resurrected through cloning technology.

    The research regarding the mosquito fossil was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Greenwalt and entomologist Ralph Harbach.

    The Smithsonian Museum’s mineral science lab conducted the analysis using energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy. Unfortunately for movie fans, and although they did detect the presence of heme (the compound that serves our red blood cells’ functions), the mosquito is contained in shale rock rather than amber, and it’s slightly too young (at 46 million years) to realistically contain dinosaur blood. Even worse, scientists can make no determination as to what creature’s blood the mosquito contains, because DNA degrades far too much to survive being caged inside the rock.

    Even if such a mosquito were discovered under the most optimistic conditions, recently conducted research has placed the half-life of DNA at 521 years, which is a rapid rate of degradation. So don’t go expecting your own personal dinosaur ecosystem any time soon.

    [Image via Dale Greenwalt/The Smithsonian Magazine]

  • Study: First Cave Painters Were Mostly Female

    Like many disciplines, archaeology suffers from an overtly masculine bias in the literature; however, a recent study of ancient cave art could overturn at least some of that bias.

    National Geographic reported this week that Pennsylvania State University archaeologist Dean Snow traveled to eight sites famous for cave paintings in France and Spain. After analyzing the hand stencils and comparing relative lengths of fingers, he discovered that at least three of four hands was that of a woman.

    “People have made a lot of unwarranted assumptions about who made these things, and why,” he said of the find, which was supported by the National Geographic Society’s Committee for Research and Exploration. His study will be published in the journal American Antiquity.

    Those assumptions were made by researchers who saw the hand stencils in close proximity to paintings of game animals such as bison, reindeer, and woolly mammoths; while their conclusions led them to believe that male hunters were keeping “kill diaries” or conjuring magic hunting spells, this latest study contradicts those conclusions.

    “In most hunter-gatherer societies, it’s men that do the killing. But it’s often the women who haul the meat back to camp, and women are as concerned with the productivity of the hunt as the men are… It wasn’t just a bunch of guys out there chasing bison around,” Snow said of the antiquated research.

    Hand prints have been found in caves all over the world from South America to Australia, but the most famous examples include 12,000- to 40,000-year-old paintings in northern Spain and southern France. Snow collected sample measurements from 32 hand stencils and ran them through a algorithm that referenced the hands of European descendants living near Penn State. Of the 32 ancient hand prints, 24 were found to be those of women.

    Although the algorithm had some overlap due to human hand similarities, it predicted the sex of modern humans with 60 percent accuracy. To Snow’s surprise, when he ran the ancient hand prints through the algorithm, the ancient hands were sexually dimorphic, which means there was not as much overlap due to hand similarities. Or, as Snow put it, “Twenty thousand years ago, men were men and women were women.”

    [Image via Dean R. Snow]

  • Archaeologists Uncover Skeletal Victims of Ancient Raid

    NBC News reports that Swedish archaeologists have discovered a terrifying scene that is being called the “Swedish Pompeii.” An island off the Swedish coast named Öland held the remains of a 5th century fort, and after discovering the foundations of a house, the scientists discovered a horrific scene.

    Five people, all unearthed from the same ruined house, had been suddenly and brutally killed. As the digging continued, more bodies were discovered throughout the fort, which causes the researchers to believe that there may be hundreds of skeletons yet to be seen

    “It’s more of a frozen moment than you normally see in archaeology. It’s like Pompeii: Something terrible happened, and everything just stopped,” said Helene Wilhelmson, a researcher with a specialty in bones from Lund University. “There are so many bodies, it must have been a very violent and well-organized raid.”

    The skeletons date to a period referred to as the Migration Period, when Scandinavian tribes migrated to other parts of Europe and encroached on the declining Roman Empire, which split into Eastern and Western halves near beginning of the 4th century CE.

    The conditions of the skeletons puzzled the Swedish researchers because Scandinavian barbarian tribes generally cremated their dead; the few uncremated skeletons that have ever been recovered cause the archaeologists to ask questions about the conditions of the fort at Öland. Were there no survivors left to cremate the dead?

    The 2010 discovery of gold, gilded brooches (pictured above) at the site is also strange in the context of a violent raid. Wouldn’t raiders, who plundered for riches and gold, have taken them along with the rest of their loot?

    In any case, the archaeologists are using advanced 3-D modeling to recreate the crime scene. Nicolo Dell’Unto, an archaeologist from Lund University, said “[With] this specific site, I found extremely interesting the relation between the bodies and the reconstruction of the events. I want to [utilize these new techniques] to help us to understand these events in terms of what actually happened, minute-by-minute.”

    [Images via a YouTube video of the Lund University discovery]

  • British Archaeologists Uncover Mesolithic Tools, Roman Skulls

    National Geographic reported on Friday that tunnelers who were contracted with expanding the London Underground have discovered over 20 Roman-era skulls, probably dated to the first century C.E. The beheaded Romans have been suggested to be possible victims of the famed Warrior Queen Boudicca, who led her Iceni tribe in a rebellion against Roman rule.

    Speaking with National Geographic about possibility of the Romans being victims of Queen Boudica, archaeologist and discovery team member Don Walker said “It has been suggested that previous finds of skulls dating to this period may belong to victims of the rebellion… Even if this was part of a massacre, and there is no evidence that it was, it would be difficult to link it directly to the Boudicca rebellion. Of course, we will keep an open mind for now.”

    The skulls were discovered roughly 20 feet underneath Liverpool Street as part of a $23 billion engineering project conducted by Crossrail. The workers uncovered the find as they dug through dirt containing ancient sediments from the Walbrook River, a dried up tributary of the Thames River. Archaeologists believe the artifacts collected in a riverbend they washed downstream from a burial ground.

    The Roman skulls are not the only artifacts uncovered by the Crossrail project. Finds include a 9000-year-old Mesolithic “tool factory,” medieval plague pits, and a 16th century graveyard related to the infamous mental asylum, Bedlam Hospital. The artifacts will be donated to the Museum of London and the Natural History Museum for Londoners to study and enjoy.

    When asked about the Roman skulls’ origins, Walker had several comments. “It is never a surprise to find the remains of burials in London! The size of the city and its long history mean that you are never very far away from a burial ground, whether it be Roman or later,” he said.

    “However, whilst we knew that we would encounter burials from the 16th-century Bedlam burial ground, it was not at all certain whether Roman graves would turn up. he added. “The sheer number of skulls we have found, currently more than two dozen, has indeed surprised us.”

    [Image via the official archaeology story of Crossrail on YouTube]

  • Archaeologists Unearth Ancient Leopard Trap

    LiveScience wrote earlier this week that archaeologists have discovered a 5000-year-old-leopard trap in the Negev Desert, a region in Israel. The study is to be published in the British archaeology journal Antiquity.

    Initially believed to be made earlier due to the trap’s proximity to more recent sites, the technology used is almost identical to the kind of traps used by Bedouin herders and nomads. The traps were found near ancient animal enclosures believed to hold the first sheep and goats herded by Bedouins. The traps would be placed to ward off predators such as leopards, wolves, foxes, hyenas, and caracals.

    Naomi Porat, a co-author of the study and a geochronologist with the Geological Survey of Israel, said of the find that “The most exciting thing is the antiquity of these carnivore traps, which is totally unexpected.”

    The traps shed new light on humanity’s technological progress. Right around the time the Bedouin nomads would have first begun domesticating animals, they also would have been creating traps to lure carnivores away from their livestock.

    Recognizing an ancient predator trap is not easy. Scattered throughout the Negev Desert, they are deliberately constructed to blend into the landscape. “They look like a pile of stones, like a cairn, and you need a good eye and also some digging around to realize what it is,” Porat said to LiveScience.

    The trap’s design was rather ingenious: a piece of meat was placed inside attached to a rope, which was creatively fastened to a stone slab. Porat describes the function: “When the carnivore pulls at the bait the rope is attached to a slab door and it just closes, so the animal is trapped inside this carnivore box trap.”

    Because a similar trap nearby was dated to about 1600 years ago, researchers initially assumed the ancient trap was just another modern innovation. The similarity in design tells researchers that the same technology was used for thousands of years.

    The traps’ ages were determined by a process called optical dating, which measured the radiation that the traps absorbed from their environment. Those radiation levels are compared to the background radiation in the area, and because the background radiation endures relatively no change over the last thousand years, an age could then be pinpointed.

    [Image via Google Maps]

  • Vikings Beheaded Their Slaves Before Burial

    In a study published last week in the Journal of Archaeological Science, a team of researchers from the University of Oslo in Norway have discovered that the Vikings distinguished among social classes, much like every other ancient society (Mayans, Aztecs, Egyptians, Mesopotamians) and that slaves who were buried with their masters were beheaded and offered as “grave gifts.”

    Discovered in the 1980s by a farmer who was plowing a field, at least three of seven skeletons recovered were missing their heads. Archaeologists are suggesting that the intact skeletons represent nobles, and that any accompanying headless bodies were their servants.

    While it is not uncommon to discover a tomb containing a master and the slaves they possessed while alive, Viking burials don’t always make it clear who the master is. To make those conclusions, researchers used stable isotope analyses to examine the diet and lifestyle led by the skeletons. 10 skeletons discovered in the Norwegian archaeological dig at Flakstad were analyzed, and after ruling out maternal relationships through mitochondrial DNA, they found that beheaded corpses ate like commoners while intact skeletons had an entirely different diet.

    In order to gauge the dietary differences, scientists examined the ratios of certain kinds of nitrogen and carbon atoms that would accompany certain diets. While it may not be able to say what foods were the skeletons’ favorites, it can indicate that a person ate lots of land-based protein; the servant bodies were discovered to have lived on a primarily seafood diet, as was a dog who was buried at the site.

    Elise Naumann, a Ph.D. student in archaeology with the University of Oslo and the leader of the research, said “These are people who had values very different from our own… There were probably a very few people who were the most privileged, and many people who suffered.”

    The current theory suggests that those who ate meat and dairy were rich and powerful, or at least a kind of religious elite. Although the study sheds some light on social structures of the region, Jette Arnebourg, an official with the National Museum of Denmark, has said that the diets of the skeletons are not conclusive evidence of social status distinctions. Naumann concedes on that point, but says that they’ve proven that the people who were buried together ate vastly different foods, which if nothing else indicates that they held different standing in the community from one another.

    [Image via an episode of History Channel’s Vikings on YouTube, specifically from a scene where a servant is buried at sea with her nobleman master]

  • 2,000+ Year-Old ‘Biblical’ Town Discovered

    Archaeologist Dr. Ken Dark of the University of Reading (Berkshire, England) and a team currently in the midst of a field survey study, have claimed to have potentially discovered the location of an ancient city known as Dalmanutha in modern day Israel. Dark and his team have managed to unearth artifacts leading to this assertion in a location slightly north of the present-day city of Tiberias, Israel. The primary bulk of evidence has been collected on the northwest coast of the Sea of Galilee in what is known as the Ginosar valley (Israel).

    The discovery is not quite set in stone (so to speak), and the claim is still under scrutiny among those familiar with the area and the history of this alleged biblical city. Although the current findings can only be deemed speculative, the mass of data recorded by the team has many people asking if this could indeed be the location of the archaic township they are presenting it as. To date, Dalmanutha has yet to have any objective link to a specific location making Dark’s contention completely plausible. Many who have commented about the find have stated that it is unlikely that this hypothesis will ever be validated as fact. Regardless of whether or not anyone will ever be able to prove that this was the site of the city, the items the team have presented are said to be over 2,000 years old.

    Throughout history Dalmanutha was a city who’s existence was only truly discussed in the Bible. Dalmanutha is mentioned in a few verses throughout the New Testament as the city Jesus sailed to after “feeding the five thousand people” (by performing the miracle of multiplying fish and bread – the only “miracle” described in all four gospels). The city is mentioned in both the Gospel of Matthew and of Mark. In both instances of scripture, Dalmanutha is implied as a naval/port community which is what directed Dr. Dark and his team to think that this was in fact it’s location.

    The artifacts found at the site included: pottery remains, tiles, weights, and stone anchors – insinuating that the location was pretty certainly a fishing/boating based district. In addition to supporting the naval theories, the pottery items found suggest that throughout history, the location was probably home to Jewish people and others who may have held polytheistic beliefs, both coexisting at the same time periods.

    These items were said to have “clearly” been from a thriving economical area around the 1st century A.D. Dark and his team found samples of “vessel glass and amphora”, both entities commonly associated with a prosperous region. Dr. Dark, who obtained his PhD from the University of Cambridge in England, stated, “the vessel glass and amphora hint at wealth.” Dark continued to mention more of his findings in his article recently published in the Palestine Exploration Quarterly Journal, “Weights and stone anchors, along with the access to beaches suitable for landing boats – and, of course, the first-century boat.”

    (image)

    Biblically speaking, Dalmanutha is associated with the vicinity of Magdala according to scripture. Magdala, or Magadan, is allegedly said to have been the home and birthplace of Mary Magdalene. Matthew 15:39 speaks of Jesus’ departure to Magadan (more specifically the city of Dalmanutha): “After Jesus had sent the crowd away, he got into the boat and went to the vicinity of Magadan.” It is again, later discussed in Mark 8-10, “he got into the boat with his disciples and went to the region of Dalmanutha.”

    Photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons: Map of the Sea of Galilee, First-Century Boat Artificat

  • Mayan Mass Grave Uncovered at Uxul

    LiveScience reported last week that an excavation of an ancient Mayan city has yielded a 1400-year-old mass grave with 24 skeletons inside.

    Nicolaus Seefield, the dig’s coordinator and archaeologist at the University of Bonn in Germany, found the site after he was working on two massive reservoirs meant to store Mayan drinking water, also recently discovered.

    Seefield wrote an email to LiveScience: “Right before 24 victims were buried, the cave’s interior had doubtlessly still been used [as] a water reservoir, since the cave’s floor was perfectly clean… After the 24 victims had been buried, the pre-Hispanic Maya covered the remains with a coarse layer of gravel and sealed it with a clay layer. Due to this sealing layer, the documented bones were found in an extraordinarily good state of preservation.”

    NatureWorldNews also covered the discovery. Spatial patterns on the bones indicate that all 24 people were decapitated and dismembered, with noticeable hatchet marks on the cervical vertibrae, and many of the skulls show signs of being hacked on by a sharp object, most likely a stone hatchet.

    The bones were preserved in clay, so anthropologists were able to determine the ages and sexes of 15 of the skeletons, which included 13 men and two women who were between the ages of 18 and 42 at the time of death. Several of the corpses had malnutrition and some missing teeth.

    The jade inserts in some of the skulls’ teeth have been interpreted as high social status, but researchers are not certain whether the dead are nobles from Uxul or prisoners of war who were brought to Uxul for sacrifice.

    Regardless of the skeletons’ social standing, the discovery of physically mutilated remains at Uxul will have implications for studies of the Mayan civilization.

    Prof. Dr. Nikoali Grube, also of the University of Bonn, said of the find that “The discovery of the mass grave proves that the dismemberment of prisoners of war and opponents often represented in Maya art was in fact practiced.”

    You can read the University of Bonn’s press statement regarding the find here.

    [Image via Nicolaus Seefeld/Uni Bonn]