For Those Interested in Archaeology

"A Canadian scientist's analysis of ancient animal remains found in Ohio — including the leg bone of an extinct giant sloth believed to have been butchered by an Ice Age hunter more than 13,000 years ago — has added weight to a once-controversial argument that humans arrived in North America thousands of years earlier than previously believed.
The discovery of what appear to be dozens of cut marks on the femur of a gargantuan, 1,300-kilogram Jefferson's ground sloth is being hailed as the earliest trace of a human presence in the Great Lakes state.
But the find also represents a significant new piece of evidence in support of the theory that the first inhabitants of Canada, the U.S. and the rest of the Americas were not the so-called Clovis people — known from distinctive tools they left at various archeological sites from about 12,600 years ago — but a much earlier wave of Ice Age migrants ancestral to many of today's New World aboriginal populations."
Butchered sloth bone lends more evidence to early North American settlement


"Madagascar was first settled and founded by approximately 30 women, mostly of Indonesian descent, who may have sailed off course in a wayward vessel 1200 years ago.
The discovery negates a prior theory that a large, planned settlement process took place on the island of Madagascar, located off the east coast of Africa. Traditionally it was thought to have been settled by Indonesian traders moving along the coasts of the Indian Ocean."
Madagascar Founded By Women : Discovery News


'According to the results of a recently completed study published in the March 23, 2012 issue of the journal Science, human hunters were largely responsible for the extinction of Pleistocene-age Australia’s giant herbivores around 40,000 years ago. The extinction, as a result, led to significant changes in the ecological landscape, a cause-and-effect relationship that runs counter to the popular climate-centered theory for ecology shifts suggested by many other scientists.
States Susan Rule of the Australian National University, Canberra and colleagues in their report: "Recent studies from North America [for example] show that megafaunal decline was followed by vegetation change and increased fire. However, these events happened in the latest Pleistocene during a time of rapid climate change, so it is difficult to resolve the contributions to them of megafaunal extinction versus climate."'
Prehistoric Human Hunters the Cause of Giant Herbivore Extinction in Australia, Says Study | Popular Archaeology - exploring the past

 

"Archaeologists from North Yorkshire are racing against the clock to save Britain’s oldest settlement, a mysterious Stone Age site called Star Carr. Emily Flanagan meets some of those tasked with protecting its treasures JUST under the surface of a flat, unremarkable looking field in North Yorkshire lies some archaeological remains that are so significant they are known to archaeology students around the world.
However, the thousands of people passing the Star Carr site on the A64 every day are mostly oblivious to its existence.

It is Britain’s oldest inhabited settlement, pre-dating Stonehenge. When it was built 11,000 years ago, Britain was still connected to the Continent, the Ice Age had just passed and the first hunter-gatherers were beginning to populate the country."
On borrowed time to save Britain's oldest settlement (From The Northern Echo)

These "previously unknown" human species aren't half coming out of the woodwork these days!
"A fossilised foot unearthed by scientists has revealed a previously unknown species of human who walked the Earth almost three-and-a-half million years ago.
Scientists say the find in eastern Africa shows the 'hominin' - a species more closely related to humans than to chimpanzees - retained a 'grasping capacity' which allowed it to climb trees and move through the forest canopy more effectively.
The find is incredibly rare as foot bones are fragile and susceptible to predators and processes of decay."
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ved-half-million-years-ago.html#ixzz1qVZw5jrN

 

"Ash found in a South African cave hints that humans were cooking with fire one million years ago.
The discovery is the earliest evidence yet found for use of this revolutionary technology, say the researchers behind the finding. But some experts caution that more proof is needed before we conclude that humans were cooking regularly at this date.



Francesco Berna, an archaeologist at Boston University in Massachusetts, and his colleagues found ash of burnt grass, leaves, brush and bone fragments in sediments 30 metres inside the Wonderwerk Cave in the Northern Cape province. The cave is one of the oldest known sites of human habitation, showing traces of having been lived in from almost two million years ago."
Million-year-old ash hints at origins of cooking : Nature News & Comment

 

"What is today's sprawling metropolis of Berlin was once a virtually uninhabited, sandy area surrounded by bogs and impenetrable forests. Nevertheless, a margrave and a Slavic nobleman once crossed swords over this unattractive, rather uninviting patch of land.
There were few roads, but that didn't deter those tireless souls who settled in the region sandwiched between Teltow and Barnim more than 800 years ago.
German historian Wolfgang Fritze once said that it is "hard to imagine that the seemingly fanciful plan to build a town in a heavily disputed and sparsely populated border region could ever succeed." And, yet, two towns arose there -- one named Berlin, the other Cölln -- separated by the River Spree, though connected by a bridge -- the Mühlendamm -- which stands to this day."
Berlin's Forgotten Half: Excavations Shed Light on History of Cölln - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International


'Trawlerman Dennis Hunt was crossing Colwyn Bay in his boat in 1995 when its nets snagged on the seabed. Unable to free them, Hunt contacted diver Keith Hurley, who swam 60ft down to the sea floor – and found that the nets were caught on a rusting submarine's conning tower.
Hunt and Hurley had found the Resurgam, one of Britain's first submarines, which sank in 1880. It was a key historical discovery but certainly not a first for fishermen.
Every day hundreds of items, ranging from Spitfire engines to ancient stone tools, are dragged up by fishing vessels while wreck sites are revealed after nets become snagged on sunken craft.
As fishing intensifies, more discoveries are being made this way, a process that threatens to run out of control. As a result, English Heritage will launch a pilot scheme this month that aims to keep in order the avalanche of historical finds now produced by our fishermen.
"There are about 46,000 recorded shipwrecks, crashed aircraft and sites of archaeological finds in English waters that we know of," said archaeologist Simon Davidson. "However, these recorded sites only make up about 10% of the total down there, we estimate."'
How fishermen are bringing lost secrets of UK waters to land | Environment | The Observer

 

"The first Australians hunted giant kangaroos, rhinoceros-sized marsupials, huge goannas and other megafauna to extinction shortly after arriving in the country more than 40,000 years ago, new research claims.A team of scientists from six universities say they have put an end to the long-running debate about the cause of the sudden disappearance of giant vertebrates from the Australian ecosystem, and the dramatic change to the landscape that followed."
Australian hunters wiped out megafauna 40,000 years ago | Archaeology News from Past Horizons

 

"ScienceDaily (Apr. 16, 2012) — University of Cincinnati research is revealing early farming in a former wetlands region that was largely cut off from Western researchers until recently. The UC collaboration with the Southern Albania Neolithic Archaeological Project (SANAP) will be presented April 20 at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA).
Susan Allen, a professor in the UC Department of Anthropology who co-directs SANAP, says she and co-director Ilirjan Gjipali of the Albanian Institute of Archaeology created the project in order to address a gap not only in Albanian archaeology, but in the archaeology in Eastern Europe as a whole, by focusing attention on the initial transition to farming in the region."
One of earliest farming sites in Europe discovered

"Mesolithic artefacts from a lost settlement are coming to light after 6 millennia after currents scoured sand from the seabed just of the coast of Denmark in Horsens Fjord.Science Nordic reports on a chance return to a stretch of coast where Peter Alstrup, now an archaeology PhD student at Aarhus Universit, had spent his childhood.
Alstrup dived on the site (which had been known since the 70s) and noticed how the overlying sediments had been lost and there lying on the seabed he discovered beautifully carved pieces of wood.
He reported this immediately to the local museum, where they soon realised that a unique and perfectly preserved Mesolithic site was now exposed. Archaeologists were soon assembled for urgent excavations.
Finds include a bow, paddles and even antler axes with their handles and have been dated to the Ertebølle culture which is a late Mesolithic hunter-gatherer-fisher culture in Denmark (c.6000-3500 BCE)."
A Mesolithic village beneath the waves | Archaeology News from Past Horizons

"One hallmark of humanity is the rich world of symbols we have constructed to give meaning to our lives.
And when we die, our loved ones mark our passing with symbols of honor and commemoration appropriate to our status and beliefs.
At what point in our evolutionary journey did we become attuned to the potential symbolic significance of objects? When did our imaginations open to the possibility that a drinking cup could be a sacred chalice?
Ultimately, archaeology is the discipline that must provide the answer to these questions. However, distinguishing symbols from merely utilitarian objects represents one of our greatest challenges.
Without guidance from written records or oral traditions, how can you know that a hammer was a judge’s gavel."
http://www.dispatch.com/content/sto...dian-site-might-demonstrate-early-ritual.html

 

"PORTLAND, Ore. — The simple act of walking continues to take strange detours among ancient human ancestors.
To wit, 1.5 million-year-old footprints excavated in Africa, initially thought to reflect a thoroughly modern walking style, were instead made by individuals that walked differently than people today do, researchers reported April 13 at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. And findings presented April 12 at the meeting revealed the surprisingly apelike qualities of foot fossils from a 2 million-year-old species that some researchers regard as the root of the Homo genus.
These reports come on the heels of evidence that a previously unknown member of the human evolutionary family 3.4 million years ago possessed a gorillalike grasping big toe and an ungainly stride (SN Online: 3/28/12).
Depth measurements of the African footprints, discovered at Kenya’s Ileret site, differ at 10 landmarks from the footprints of people who live in that area today, said graduate student Kevin Hatala of George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
“We can infer that the ancient Ileret individuals had a normal, functional gait, but they may have walked differently than we do,” Hatala said. For now, it’s uncertain just how these hominids walked and whether they belonged to Homo erectus, a possibly direct human ancestor, or to the side-branch species Paranthropus boisei. "
Ancient Walking Gets Weirder - Science News

 

"The mastodon was old, its teeth worn to nubs. It was perfect prey for a band of hunters, wielding spears tipped with needle-sharp points made from bone. Sensing an easy target, they closed in for the kill.
Almost 14,000 years later, there is no way to tell how many hits it took to bring the beast to the ground near the coast of present-day Washington state. But at least one struck home, plunging through hide, fat and flesh to lodge in the mastodon's rib. The hunter who thrust the spear on that long-ago day didn't just bring down the mastodon; he also helped to kill off the reigning theory of how people got to the Americas.
For most of the past 50 years, archaeologists thought they knew how humans arrived in the New World. The story starts around the end of the last ice age, when sea levels were lower and big-game hunters living in eastern Siberia followed their prey across the Bering land bridge and into Alaska. As the ice caps in Canada receded and opened up a path southward, the colonists swept across the vast unpopulated continent. Archaeologists called these presumed pioneers the Clovis culture, after distinctive stone tools that were found at sites near Clovis, New Mexico, in the 1920s and 1930s.
As caches of Clovis tools were uncovered across North America over subsequent decades, nearly all archaeologists signed on to the idea that the Clovis people were the first Americans. Any evidence of humans in the New World before the Clovis time was dismissed, sometimes harshly. That was the case with the Washington-state mastodon kill, which was first described around 30 years ago[SUP]1[/SUP] but then largely ignored.
Intense criticism also rained down on competing theories of how people arrived, such as the idea that early Americans might have skirted the coastline in boats, avoiding the Bering land bridge entirely. “I was once warned not to write about coastal migration in my dissertation. My adviser said I would ruin my career,” says Jon Erlandson, an archaeologist at the University of Oregon in Eugene.
But findings over the past few years — and a re-examination of old ones, such as the mastodon rib — have shown conclusively that humans reached the Americas well before the Clovis people. That has sparked a surge of interest in the field, and opened it up to fresh ideas and approaches. Geneticists and archaeologists are collaborating to piece together who came first, when they arrived, whether they travelled by boat or by foot and how they fanned out across the New World."
Ancient migration: Coming to America : Nature News & Comment

 

Glad to see students questioning existing theories. If everyone just nodded their heads and continued without questioning previous "experts", there would be no debate, no advancing. ..Wonder if any revolutionary ideas ever come out of following the standard. It's always the guys who are unconventional that change the world...Can I get a what what?...Good one Mr H.

 

There's been some pretty strong evidence in finds in both North and South America over the last couple decades that the once widely accepted dates were wrong. Better dating and meticulous field work led the way and there are few left from what I understand who now subscribe to the once dominant theory. This illustrates to true strength of the scientific method.

 

A whole fossilized buried Forrest. It may stretch over 100 miles in one dimension.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/01/s...rs-clues-on-climate-change.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

 

That is just fantastic stuff.

 

"Scientists have found a new clue to the lost colony after several years of research. In 1586, more than 400 years ago, a group of people from Britain planned to settle down on Roanoke Island. John White, one of the team members, returned to England to get some supplies, just after three years. He returned to Roanoke Island and found that the whole group had disappeared. He found only a single clue on the island: the word "CROATOAN" was carved into a post.
Now, after several years, researchers from the First Colony Foundation and the British Museum in London have found a clue to the lost colony. They have a 425-year-old "Virginea Pars" map drawn by John White, during his expedition to Roanoke Island - the first English colony.
Researchers, who analysed the map, found some mysterious symbols and unseen lines on two brown patches on the map. The first patch is at the southern end of the map, and the second at the northern end.
Researchers found a large "fort" symbol hidden under the second patch in the map; they believe the Britons might have settled down there."
Scientists Find New Clue to Mysterious Lost Colony

 

"In a major development for the archaeological excavations across Qatar, an unmarked grave has been discovered at Wadi Debayan, an important site with human occupation dating back to about 7,500 years ago.
The exploration of Wadi Debayan, situated on the northwestern side of Qatar to the south of the site of Al Zubara and the Rá’s ‘Ushayriq peninsula, is part of the Remote Sensing and Qatar National Historical Environment Record (QNHER) Project.
“We have come across one burial, probably a full skeleton and though we cannot say that we have a cemetery there, it is a fair possibility,” project co-director Richard Cuttler told Gulf Times during a site visit.
QNHER is being developed as part of the Remote Sensing Project, a joint initiative between the Qatar Museums Authority under the guidance of Faisal al-Naimi (head of antiquities), and the University of Birmingham, where Cuttler is a research fellow.
“The grave was a very surprising find that came out of one of the several test pits. We have seen some pieces of the tibia, one of the two leg bones, which shows the skeleton is in a crouched position typical of Neolithic burials” he explained."
Gulf Times ? Qatar?s top-selling English daily newspaper - First Page

"The smooth curves and fine details in the paintings of bears, rhinoceroses and horses in the Chauvet cave in southern France's picturesque Ardeche region are so advanced that some scholars thought they dated from 12,000 to 17,000 years ago.
That would place them as relics of the Magdalenian culture, in which human ancestors used tools of stone and bone and created increasingly advanced art as time went on.
But scientists have previously shown through radiocarbon dating evidence of rock art, charcoal and animal bones in the Chauvet cave that the drawings are older than that, likely between 30,000-32,000 years old, befuddling some who believed that early art took on more primitive forms.
Now, according to research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a US journal, French scientists believe they have confirmation that the paintings are "the oldest and most elaborate ever discovered.""
Rock analysis suggests France cave art is 'oldest'

"Scientists have used DNA analysis to gain important new insights into how human beings repopulated Europe as the Ice Age relaxed its grip.
[HR][/HR]Dr Maria Pala, who is based at the University of Huddersfield -- now a key centre for archaeo-genetics research -- is the lead author of an article in the latest issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics which shows how the Near East was a major source of replenishment when huge areas of European territory became habitable again, up to 19,000 years ago.

Until the new findings, it was thought that there were two principal safe havens for humans as the Ice Age, or Last Glacial Maximum, descended, approximately 26,000 years ago. They were a "Franco-Cantabrian" area roughly coinciding with northern Spain/southern France, and a "Periglacial province" on the Ukrainian plains."
Refugees from the Ice Age: How was Europe repopulated?

 

"Archeologists have uncovered evidence of pre-farming people living in the Burren more than 6,000 years ago — one of the oldest habitations ever unearthed in Ireland.
Radiocarbon dating of a shellfish midden on Fanore Beach in north Clare have revealed it to be at least 6,000 years old — hundreds of years older than the nearby Poulnabrone dolmen.
The midden — a cooking area where nomad hunter-gatherers boiled or roasted shellfish — contained Stone Age implements, including two axes and a number of smaller stone tools.
Excavation of the site revealed a mysterious black layer of organic material, which archeologists believe may be the results of a Stone Age tsunami which hit the Clare coast, possibly wiping out the people who used the midden.
The midden was discovered by local woman Elaine O’Malley in 2009 and a major excavation of the site is being led by Michael Lynch, field monument adviser for Co Clare. "
6,000-year-old settlement poses tsunami mystery | Irish Examiner




Read more: 6,000-year-old settlement poses tsunami mystery | Irish Examiner

 

The smallest mammoth ever known to have existed roamed the island of Crete millions of years ago, researchers say.

Adults were roughly the size of a modern baby elephant, standing over a metre tall at the shoulders.

Remains were discovered more than a century ago, but scientists had debated whether the animal was a mammoth or an ancient elephant.

A new analysis of the animal's teeth suggests it falls closer to the mammoth lineage.

BBC News - Smallest mammoths found on Crete

 

Only the other day I was reading an article about how most of today's languages would "die out" by the end of this century-
"Evidence for a forgotten ancient language which dates back more than 2,500 years, to the time of the Assyrian Empire, has been found by archaeologists working in Turkey.
Researchers working at Ziyaret Tepe, the probable site of the ancient Assyrian city of Tušhan, believe that the language may have been spoken by deportees originally from the Zagros Mountains, on the border of modern-day Iran and Iraq.
In keeping with a policy widely practised across the Assyrian Empire, these people may have been forcibly moved from their homeland and resettled in what is now south-east Turkey, where they would have been set to work building the new frontier city and farming its hinterland."
Prehistoric Archaeology Blog: Archaeologists discover lost language

 

"In 1980, people began to take notice when workers from a commercial logging company began dredging up pottery fragments and bones in an area near the little village of Pancasila on the island of Sumbawa, Indonesia. Other locals began finding coins, brassware and charred timber in the same region, all buried beneath a thick layer of volcanic deposits. The finds were not far from the foot of the Tambora volcano, a volcano that, in April of 1815, produced the largest eruption in recorded history. In fact, so intense was the eruption, it's atmospheric effects influenced weather patterns across faraway Europe and North America. And in one evening alone, it destroyed at least one entire village kingdom near its feet. "
Archaeologists Excavate a Lost Kingdom Buried Beneath Volcanic Ash | Popular Archaeology - exploring the past

 

"Mas d’Azil is an immense cave and is one of the major prehistoric sites in France. Classed as an historic monument since 1942, it is also a very popular tourist site. The construction of a visitor centre and site path by the commune of Mas d’Azil requires archaeological intervention and two phases have already been completed. The first; a trench to house the buried pipes that traverse the road and the second; the visitor centre located inside the cave."
Prehistoric Archaeology Blog: Layer by layer: the Upper Palaeolithic at Mas d’Azil cave revealed

 

"The first archeological research in Iceland this year will begin at Hafnir in Reykjanes, southwest Iceland, on Monday. Archeologists will continue their study of a hut which may originate from 770-880 AD, the latter part of the Iron Age, and predate the historical settlement of Iceland in 847."
http://www.icelandreview.com/icelan..._Settlement_Hut_in_Iceland_0_390135.news.aspx

"Researchers from Tel Aviv University have recently discovered a collection of gold and silver jewelry, dated from around 1100 B.C., hidden in a vessel at the archaeological site of Tel Megiddo in the Jezreel Valley in northern Israel. One piece — a gold earring decorated with molded ibexes, or wild goats — is "without parallel," they believe."
American Friends of Tel Aviv University: Unique Gold Earring Found in Intriguing Collection of Ancient Jewelry at Tel Megiddo