For Those Interested in Archaeology

There's a large underwater forest like that off Dublin bay and along the coast southwards towards Bray and Bray Head. Part of the land in the middle of what's now the Irish Sea that was inundated around the same time as Doggerland...and thus just within the edge of human "legend" memory. It's said that that land is the origin of the "Lyonesse" legends that became inextricably mixed up with Arthurian legend in the Middle Ages...and also the legends of "undersea" cities and "lands beneath the western seas" buried in Celtic myth.

 

Haven't had any "missing link" controversies for a while, so here ya go=-
"Fishermen working off the coast of Taiwan have dredged up the jawbone of an ancient human ancestor that lived in the area around 200,000 years ago.
The short, thick mandible has unusually large teeth and a strong jaw compared to other human fossils found in East Asia, according to anthropologists.
The discovery suggests that it belonged to an previously unknown ancient human lineage.
Experts say it means that there may have been several species of early human living in Asia until modern humans arrived 55,000 years ago.
The fossilised jawbone is the first ancient hominin remains to be found in Taiwan.
It was dredged up in a fishing net from the Penghu submarine channel, about 15 miles (25km) off the west coast of Taiwan.
During the Pliestocene between 2.5 million and 11,000 years ago, periods of low sea level would have meant the area was part of the mainland of Asia.
Anthropologists from the National Museum of Natural Science in Taiwan and the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo who studied the newly discovered fossils say it is unlike any of the other fossilised ancient humans that spread through out Asia.
Homo erectus, remains of which have been found in Java, Indonesia, and mainland China, tended to have much narrower jawbones and smaller teeth.
Researchers say that this suggests the robust-jawed 'Penghu man' had a different evolutionary origin from the 'classic' Homo erectus found in the area.
It could mean that it is either an entirely new species or a rare subgroup of Homo erectus.
Dr Chun-Hsiang Chang, who led the research at the National Museum of Natural Science, said the fossil appeared to have quite a primitive jaw but belonged to a now extinct species that most likely lived at a time when more anatomically modern humans were around.
Dr Chang said the fossil either belonged to a new type of ancient hominin not previously identified or was the result of more robustly jawed immigrants from Africa moving into the region.
He added that the discovery also suggests that the traditional view of Homo erectus as the only ancient human species living on the eastern Asian continent until the arrival of modern man is incorrect and it may have in fact shared the area with many other human lineages."
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2928549/Have-fishermen-discovered-new-species-ancient-man-Chunky-jawbone-fossil-dredged-coast-Taiwan.html#ixzz3Q4mqlMxX

 

"The partial skull of an anatomically modern human who lived alongside the Neanderthals about 55,000 years ago has been unearthed from a cave in northern Israel, scientists say.



It is one of the oldest non-African skulls of Homo sapiens and comes close to the date when modern humans migrated out of Africa, eventually to colonise Asia, Europe, Australia and the Americas.
Scientists unearthed the cranial fragments from Manot Cave in West Galilee, a prehistoric site with an impressive archaeological record of flint and bone artefacts. Dating has placed the skull within the period 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, a time when Neanderthals were also known to have inhabited the same region.
“It has been suspected that modern man and Neanderthals were in the same place at the same time, but we didn’t have the physical evidence. Now we do have it in the new skull fossil,” said Bruce Latimer, a palaeontologist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, who took part in the study.
“Modern humans and Neanderthals likely encountered each other foraging for food,” Dr Latimer said."
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/human-skull-discovery-in-israel-proves-humans-lived-sidebyside-with-neanderthals-10008717.html

 

Probably walked to the same carcass...we were probably carion eaters before we became hunters...

 

"Until a few months ago different scientific articles, including those published in 'Nature', dated the disappearance of the Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) from Europe at around 40,000 years ago. However, a new study shows that these hominids could have disappeared before then in the Iberian Peninsula, closer to 45,000 years ago.
A scientific article published in 'Nature' in August 2014 revealed that the European Neanderthals could have disappeared between 41,000 and 39,000 years ago, according to the fossil remains found at sites located from the Black Sea in Russia to the Atlantic coastline of Spain.
However, in the Iberian Peninsula the Neanderthals may have disappeared 45,000 years ago. This is what has now been revealed by data found at the El Salt site in the Valencian Community (Spain).
"Both conclusions are complementary and not contradictory," confirms Bertila Galván, lead author of the study published in the Journal of Human Evolution and researcher at the Training and Research Unit of Prehistory, Archaeology and Ancient History at the University of La Laguna (ULL) (Tenerife, Spain).
Until now, there was no direct dating in Spain on the Neanderthal human remains which produced recent dates. "The few that provided dates before 43,000 and 45,000 years ago in all cases," points out Galván, who says that there are more contextual datings. "Those which offer recent dates are usually labelled as dubious or have very small amounts of lithic material that can tell us little," he observes.
The study in 'Nature' proposes that the point of departure was 40,000 years as "there is almost no evidence of these human groups in the Eurasian region," but it also recognises that the process of disappearance is "complex and manifests itself in a regionalised manner with peculiarities in the different places," adds Galván, who also worked on the 'Nature' research."
http://phys.org/news/2015-02-neanderthals-iberian-peninsula-rest-europe.html#jCp

 

That one makes no less than sense; if a Hono Sapiens population crossed the straits of Gibraltar into the peninsula at some point then slowly progressed north into Europe...I note the comment about almost no sign of these groups in Eurasia...then Spain would be the area where Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals mixed the firest and longest. Whatever reason the Neanderthals died out, those factors would thus have been at work in the Iberian Peninsula first - and what do we see?

 

Yet this article says the climate may well have been the cause-
"This gradual disappearance coincided with a change in the climate creating colder and more arid environmental conditions, "which must have had an effect on the lives of these diminishing populations," adds Hernández. The anatomically modern humans had no role in this disappearance, unlike "the significant worsening of the climate, given that their presence in these lands was much later," reveals the researcher.
The new dating establishes depopulation in this region between the last Neanderthals and the first anatomically modern humans. This fact has been archaeologically proven in a sedimentary hiatus that was found not only in El Salt, "but also in other sites on the Iberian Peninsula," conclude the researchers."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150205083518.htm

 

"A shocked diver has found an incredible 10,000-year-old pre-historic forest under the North Sea"

There was an interesting discovery after Katrina off the coast of Alabama.
A Cypress forest that had been burried in sedement for 50 000 years.
http://www.livescience.com/37977-underwater-cypress-forest-discovered.html

Looks like the climate changes with or without Man.

 

That was never the debate.

 

Possibly now the catch phrase has changed to "climate change" where previously it was " man made global warming", then "global warming".
Don't tax me bro...Taxed to the nuts already.
C'mon GS. You used to spit fire.

 

No, it hasn't changed too much in scientific literature and an Archaeology thread isn't the place. Start your own thread over in the stump.

 

That's more like it.

 

Hasn't really been much of interest recently.
"Post-excavation analysis of the results of an excavation carried out by GUARD Archaeology in 2011 in advance of a housing development in Monkton, Ayrshire (south-west Scotland), has revealed evidence of intermittent human occupation of this landscape from the Mesolithic through the Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age, right up into the medieval and post-medieval periods.
‘The earliest identifiable activity on the site,’ said Christine Rennie, who led the excavation and subsequent analyses, ‘was an accumulation of charcoal-rich material that overlay a circular pit, dated to the seventh millennium BC. However, despite the number of pits and post-holes found across the site, no particular pattern or structures could be identified. Botanical analysis by Susan Ramsay suggests that some Mesolithic occupation took place here, although the quantity of carbonised material indicates that the location was re-visited on more than one occasion.‘"
http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/02/2015/pits-pots-and-pitchstone-a-palimpsest-of-prehistory-in-one-corner-of-scotland

 

"Recent archaeological digs at Barrow Island and the Montebello Islands off the Pilbara coast have revealed a number of artefacts which have helped build a unique record of coastal habitation by early humans.
Recent archaeological digs at Barrow Island and the Montebello Islands off the Pilbara coast have revealed a number of artefacts which have helped build a unique record of coastal habitation by early humans."
http://phys.org/news/2015-02-pilbara-debunk-timeline-ancient-tool.html#jCp

And I love this one-
"We might think of state supported health care as an innovation of the 20th century, but it's a much older tradition than that. In fact, texts from a village dating back to Egypt's New Kingdom period, about 3,100-3,600 years ago, suggest that in ancient Egypt there was a state-supported health care network designed to ensure that workers making the king's tomb were productive.
The village of Deir el-Medina was built for the workmen who made the royal tombs during the New Kingdom (1550-1070 BCE). During this period, kings were buried in the Valley of the Kings in a series of rock-cut tombs, not the enormous pyramids of the past. The village was purposely built close enough to the royal tomb to ensure that workers could hike there on a weekly basis.
These workmen were not what we normally picture when we think about the men who built and decorated ancient Egyptian royal tombs – they were highly skilled craftsmen. The workmen at Deir el-Medina were given a variety of amenities afforded only to those with the craftsmanship and knowledge necessary to work on something as important as the royal tomb.
The village was allotted extra support: the Egyptian state paid them monthly wages in the form of grain and provided them with housing and servants to assist with tasks like washing laundry, grinding grain and porting water. Their families lived with them in the village, and their wives and children could also benefit from these provisions from the state.
Among these texts are numerous daily records detailing when and why individual workmen were absent from work. Nearly one-third of these absences occur when a workman was too sick to work. Yet, monthly ration distributions from Deir el-Medina are consistent enough to indicate that these workmen were paid even if they were out sick for several days."
http://phys.org/news/2015-02-paid-sick-days-physicians-ancient.html#jCp

 

To go back to the poor, put-upon neanderthals for a moment...

Maybe....but not in the sense that you think

Just the other day I happened to read an brief article that noted that the beginning of the disappearance of the Neanderthals of Europe conincided exactly with the beginning of the die-off of Austraila's prehistoric "mega fauna"...! And that scientists and archeologists invovled with the so-called "Bosnia Pyramid" complex are ALSO dating a number of visiable changes made by humans to that complex....which now turns out to include an very complex...um..."complex" of undergrund tunnels linking major components of the site...to that same time window...

Which appears to ALSO linked with a huge spike in solar activity! For a time, Earth would have been bathed in very high levels of solar radiation.

 

Wow! Can you find that link?

 

Here's an interesting one-
"STOKKE, NORWAY—A skeleton found south of Oslo may be the oldest human remains ever found in the country. Dating to perhaps 8,000 years ago, the skeleton, dubbed “Brunstad Man,” is a “sensational discovery in a Norwegian, and indeed even in a north European context,” archaeologist Almut Schülke told The Local. Found in a fetal position, as is common for Mesolithic period (10,000-4000 B.C.) burials, Brunstad Man will be carefully studied at a laboratory in Oslo to determine his age at the time of his death and to search for evidence of his diet. "
http://www.archaeology.org/news/3019-norway-skeleton-oldest-mesolithic-brunstad-stone-age

 

"Early humans carried pebbles shaped like babies' faces and appeared to care for disabled children in a sign they developed kindness and compassion millions of years before intelligence, researchers have claimed.
Evidence has been found that humans living more than 3million years ago may have looked after and even helped each other to survive before they learned to speak, and these emotions may have actually helped intelligence and reasoning evolve.
Researchers point to a skull, dating back 1.5 million years, found with no teeth, suggesting people in the group may have helped this early human find soft food to survive. And evidence of tracks found in east Africa - dating back 3.5million years - appear to show adults being followed by a child.
The findings, revealed in a study by Penny Spikins of York University, undermine current theories that early humans were characterised by violence and competition, killing each other in a desperate battle to survive.
'Evolution made us sociable, living in groups and looking after each one another, even before we had language, ' Spikins, a human origins researcher, told the Sunday Times.
'Our success since then, including the evolution of intelligence, all sprang from that.' "
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2963807/Early-humans-developed-kindness-compassion-3million-years-ago-speak.html#ixzz3SUlhzLzl

 

Obviously not archaeology, but still interesting.
"BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA—Linguists at the University of California, Berkeley, have used data gathered from more than 150 languages to show that the common ancestor of many of today’s languages, including English, first emerged 5,500-6,500 years ago in the Pontic-Caspian steppe. Using sets of words from both living and dead Indo-European languages, the researchers found evidence to support what is known as the “Steppe Hypothesis,” as opposed to the interpretation that suggests that these languages evolved from a common ancestor in Anatolia (modern Turkey) as much as 9,500 years ago."
http://www.archaeology.org/news/3026-indo-european-english-language-history-steppe

 

...and we're back in the room.

Anatolia...

See under Gobleki Tepe and Çatalhöyük.

Is it just me....or is it merely coincidence that the approximate date for the emergence of this proto-language is right in the middle BETWEEN the dates of the "closure" of Gobleki Tepe and the setlement at Çatalhöyük?

As was discussed some months ago now...it seems that the very early Neolithic society...can't really say civilisation at that point!...that built and used Gobleki Tepe eventually changed away from a central geographical core to their "religion" and moved instead to a representation - although more primitive - of the Gobleki Tepe style of temple in each individual community...and with that change, Gobleki Tepe was "clean closed".

It wuld NOW therefore look as it more than just religious practices changed right around then. A language change too?

Would that hint at a new population in the area? Which might also be why the change in the practice of the religion of the region.