For Those Interested in Archaeology

"Researchers have unearthed a mammoth "graveyard" filled with the bony remains of five individuals — an infant, two juveniles and two adults — that died during the last ice age at what is now a quarry in Swindon, a town in southwest England.
Alongside the mammoth remains, researchers discovered stone tools crafted by Neanderthals, including a hand ax and small flint tools known as scrapers, which were used to clean fresh animal hides, according to DigVentures, the crowdsourced archaeological outfit in the U.K. that led the excavation. However, the team has yet to analyze the mammoth bones to determine whether they have Neanderthal tool marks on them.
"Finding mammoth bones is always extraordinary, but finding ones that are so old and well preserved, and in such close proximity to Neanderthal stone tools is exceptional," Lisa Westcott Wilkins, the co-founder of DigVentures, said in a statement.
Two amateur fossil hunters, Sally and Neville Hollingworth, discovered the graveyard and Neanderthal tools. Soon after, DigVentures organized two field seasons in 2019 and 2020 to excavate the site. The archaeologist-led work uncovered more ice age remnants, including delicate beetle wings, fragile freshwater snail shells and mammoth remains, such as tusks, leg bones, ribs and vertebrae belonging to a species of Steppe mammoth, a group whose descendants include the wolly mammoth. Although early Steppe mammoths stood up to 13.1 feet (4 meters) high at the shoulders, the five mammoth individuals at the graveyard were small, an indication that the species might have shrunk during an especially cold spell during the ice age, according to DigVentures.
Researchers dated the site to between 220,000 and 210,000 years ago, toward the end of an interglacial, or warm period, when Neanderthals still lived in Britain. Once temperatures dropped, however, the Neanderthals moved farther south."
www.livescience.com/ice-age-mammoth-graveyard-uk

 

It's a two-fer!
"ANALYSIS of ancient DNA has revealed that a mass migration from France to England and Wales between 1000 and 875 BC and could be how Celtic languages were brought to Britain.
In what was the largest analysis of ancient DNA that has ever been done, it was discovered that two large migrations of people into Britain that were previously known, first started to take place around 6,000 years ago. Their ancestry was mostly from a group known to archaeogenetics as Early European Farmers, with around 20 percent from a different group who are referred to as Western European Hunter-Gatherers.
This migration led to the replacement of most of the existing local hunter-gatherer ancestry.
And about 4,500 years ago, just at the beginning of the Bronze Age, a second migration took place which saw descendants of livestock farmers from the Pontic-Caspian steppe – grassland that spans from present-day Bulgaria to Kazakhstan.
Ancestry from this group ended up forming at least 90 percent of the genetic make-up in Scotland, England and Wales."
www.express.co.uk/news/science/1540375/archaeology-news-bronze-age-celtic-language-britain-dna

"ARCHAEOLOGISTS have drawn up what they believe is the world's oldest family tree - showing relatives from more than 5,000 years ago.
An international team studied ancient DNA from one of the best-preserved Neolithic tombs in Britain. They found that most of the people buried there were from five generations of a single extended family. DNA extracted from the bones and teeth of the 35 individuals showed that 27 of them were close biological relatives. The team used this to map their relationships and produce the ancient family tree.
The tomb was discovered in Hazleton, near Cheltenham, Glos. Chris Fowler, lead archaeologist of the study, said that "just one extraordinary finding" is that two separated chambers in the tomb were used to place the remains from one of two branches of the same family. Dr Fowler, of Newcastle University, said: "This study gives us an unprecedented insight into kinship in a Neolithic community."
www.express.co.uk/news/science/1540409/neolithic-tomb-world-oldest-family-tree-discovered

 

Scientists say they have discovered the largest-ever fossil of a giant millipede on a beach in Northumberland, totally by chance.

Largest-ever millipede fossil found on Northumberland beach

One thing that can be said with certainty is, that in common with almost all millipedes, it did not have 1,000 legs - the researchers believe it had at least 32, but it may have been up to 64.

The fossil is due to go on public display in Cambridge in the new year.

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Perfectly preserved dinosaur embryo found in China



It is believed to be a toothless theropod dinosaur, or oviraptorosaur, and has been named Baby Yingliang.

Perfectly preserved dinosaur embryo found in China

The discovery has also given researchers a greater understanding of the link between dinosaurs and modern birds. The fossil shows the embryo was in a curled position known as "tucking", which is a behaviour seen in birds shortly before they hatch.

 

In 1050 AD, the Native American cosmopolis of Cahokia was bigger than Paris.

The US' lost, ancient megacity

In the ancient Mississippian settlement of Cahokia, vast social events – not trade or the economy – were the founding principle.

Pity the event planners tasked with managing Cahokia's wildest parties. A thousand years ago, the Mississippian settlement – on a site near the modern US city of St Louis, Missouri – was renowned for bashes that went on for days.

Things are quieter these days at Cahokia, now a placid Unesco site. But towering, earthen mounds there hint at the legacy of the largest pre-Columbian city north of Mexico. A cosmopolitan whir of language, art and spiritual ferment, Cahokia's population may have swelled to 30,000 people at its 1050 AD peak, making it larger, at the time, than Paris.

 

"ARCHAEOLOGISTS have discovered what they believe is the oldest piece of jewellery found anywhere on the continent of Eurasia.
Human have been creating jewellery for thousands of years. But, it has often proved challenging to find out exactly how long ago prehistoric humans started decorating items and using them as fashion accessories. One way for archaeologists to determine the date of an object is to look around the surrounding excavation site.
Here, the deeper layers are older and items close to each other usually prove to be the same age.
This is not always an accurate way to go about dating items: sometimes buried materials can move with changing climates or geological events, and so archaeologists more and more use the technique of radiocarbon dating to pinpoint the exact age of a piece of the past.
This is what researchers from Germany, Italy and Poland did in a study looking at the discovery of a decorated ivory pendant found in a cave among animal bones, finding that the ancient bling was 41,500 years old."
www.express.co.uk/news/science/1547163/archaeology-breakthrough-earliest-evidence-ancient-human-jewellery-spt

 

"Ancient human fossils discovered in Ethiopia are much older than previously thought, experts claim, saying they could be as much as 230,000 years old.
The remains – known as Omo I – were discovered in Ethiopia in the late 1960s, and are one of the oldest known examples of Homo sapiens fossils, with earlier attempts to date them placing them at just under 200,000 years old.
However, a new study by the University of Cambridge found that the remains have to pre-date a colossal volcanic eruption in the area, which happened 230,000 years ago.
To make the discovery the team dated the chemical fingerprints of volcanic ash layers, found above and below sediment where the fossils were discovered.
The team said that while this pushes the minimum age for Homo sapiens in eastern Africa back by 30,000 years, future studies may extend the age even further.
In 2017, archaeologists announced the discovery of the world's oldest Homo Sapiens fossils — a 300,000-year-old skull at Jebel Irhoud in Morocco."
www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-10391337/Ancient-human-remains-discovered-Ethiopia-OLDER-thought.html

 

And more on the fossil front-
"A human vertebra uncovered in Israel that dates back 1.5 million years suggests our ancient relatives migrated from Africa to Eurasia in waves, a new study reveals.
Scientists have analysed the vertebra fossil, referred to as UB 10749, that was unearthed at the archeological site of Ubeidiya, Jordan Valley, Israel in 1966.
The vertebra likely came from a boy aged between six and 12 years at time of death, who was tall for his age and could have reached 6.5 foot tall had he survived, the researchers now reveal.
It's not known how or why he died, but his remains offer the earliest evidence of ancient man discovered in Israel.
Differences in size between the fossil and other finds in Dmanisi, another archeological site in Georgia, suggest two different hominin populations arrived in Europe from Africa several hundreds of thousands of years apart.
The first wave of ancient human migration reached Georgia approximately 1.8 million years ago, while the second reached Israel 1.5 million years ago. "
www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-10467883/Human-vertebra-uncovered-Israel-dates-1-5-MILLION-years.html

 

"Archaeologists have found evidence that Europe’s first Homo sapiens lived briefly in a rock shelter in southern France — before mysteriously vanishing.
A study published on 9 February in Science Advances1 argues that distinctive stone tools and a lone child’s tooth were left by Homo sapiens during a short stay, some 54,000 years ago — and not by Neanderthals, who lived in the rock shelter for thousands of years before and after that time.
The Homo sapiens occupation, which researchers estimate lasted for just a few decades, pre-dates the previous earliest known evidence of the species in Europe by around 10,000 years.
But some researchers are not so sure that the stone tools or tooth were left by Homo sapiens. “I find the evidence less than convincing,” says William Banks, a palaeolithic archaeologist at the French national research agency CNRS and the University of Bordeaux."
www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00389-9

 

Some new stuff on the Black Death-
"The Black Death (1347–1352 CE) is the most renowned pandemic in human history, believed by many to have killed half of Europe’s population. However, despite advances in ancient DNA research that conclusively identified the pandemic’s causative agent (bacterium Yersinia pestis), our knowledge of the Black Death remains limited, based primarily on qualitative remarks in medieval written sources available for some areas of Western Europe. Here, we remedy this situation by applying a pioneering new approach, ‘big data palaeoecology’, which, starting from palynological data, evaluates the scale of the Black Death’s mortality on a regional scale across Europe. We collected pollen data on landscape change from 261 radiocarbon-dated coring sites (lakes and wetlands) located across 19 modern-day European countries. We used two independent methods of analysis to evaluate whether the changes we see in the landscape at the time of the Black Death agree with the hypothesis that a large portion of the population, upwards of half, died within a few years in the 21 historical regions we studied. While we can confirm that the Black Death had a devastating impact in some regions, we found that it had negligible or no impact in others. These inter-regional differences in the Black Death’s mortality across Europe demonstrate the significance of cultural, ecological, economic, societal and climatic factors that mediated the dissemination and impact of the disease. The complex interplay of these factors, along with the historical ecology of plague, should be a focus of future research on historical pandemics."
www.nature.com/articles/s41559-021-01652-4

 

Drinking beer saved people from the plague, for a number of reasons...the best being that the water used to make beer was boiled in the process...Its thought it might have started today's "pub culture" (bar culture).

 

Wonder if the preparation of Food saved lives. They used a lot of Salt in keeping the Food eatable, for instance in castles to guard the front in Finland towards Russia they drank five litres of beer daily to be able to eat the salted meat. This might be a couple of hundreds years later but you needed the Salt and the beer...

 

Beer was definitely safer than the water! That was still true in the Victorian era.
The Black Death provoked this reaction from the English Crown, although it wasn't generally successful-
Statute of Labourers 1351 - Wikipedia
Think it's interesting that rat fleas continue to be blamed for the spread, despite evidence that human fleas might also play a part-
www.pnas.org/content/115/6/1304

 

"An ancient mausoleum with the largest illegal silversmithing site in Roman Britain has been discovered.
Archaeologists found a huge amount of litharge - a lead oxide and by-product of silver extraction - which suggests a clan was melting down metal to get at its precious material.
The 15 kilos of litharge discovered at Grange Farm, an excavation site in Gillingham, Kent, is the largest amount ever uncovered at a Roman Britain site.
The 15-year research project was triggered following excavations in 2005 and 2006, prior to a house-building.
The earliest evidence for occupation at Grange Farm occurs during the Late Iron Age, about 100BC, before the site grew into a small Roman rural settlement in the late first century AD, and the settlement evolved until the 5th Century AD when it was abandoned.
Metal extraction took place at one end of a building, with fireplaces in the middle, and at the other end high status domestic use.
Researchers say that it was likely a large clan who were also working the land, hunting, raising animals and metal working."
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10532853/Treasures-ancient-crypt-home-largest-illegal-silversmithing-site-Roman-Britain.html

 

*ignore*

 

Some new episodes coming up apparently-
https://www.youtube.com/c/TimeTeamOfficial