Monday, February 28, 2011

Prehistoric Dog Lived, Died Among Humans

Burial remains of a dog that lived over 7,000 years ago in Siberia suggest the male Husky-like animal probably lived and died similar to how humans did at that time and place, eating the same food, sustaining work injuries, and getting a human-like burial.

"Based on how northern indigenous people understand animals in historic times, I think the people burying this particular dog saw it as a thinking, social being, perhaps on par with humans in many ways," said Robert Losey, lead author of a study about the dog burial, which has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.

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How Stone Age man kept his pores clean... in the SAUNA

The remains of a 4,500-year-old sauna have been discovered by archaeologists excavating a Stone Age temple.

They unearthed the foundations of the building at Marden Henge, near Devizes in Wiltshire.

Located close to the River Avon, the neolithic ‘sauna’ was in a key position overlooking a ceremonial area at the site.

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Britain may pull out of funding heritage sites

Britain is threatening to withdraw its support for the United Nations agency responsible for designating world heritage sites such as Stonehenge after a government review found it unable to justify the millions it receives from British taxpayers.

The UN Educational and Cultural Organisation, Unesco, was established in 1945 to promote peace and culture and academic corporation, but accusations of anti-Western bias and financial mismanagement led to Margaret Thatcher pulling Britain out of the agency in 1985. Tony Blair rejoined it in 1997.

But now an investigation into how effectively £3billion of British aid is spent is understood to have shown Unesco the 'yellow card'. The review found it was wasting money and failing to show concrete outcomes in return for the £12m it receives each year from the UK.

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Saturday, February 26, 2011

Garden dig leads to a grave discovery

Pat Tiernan is a keen fan of television's 'Time Team' and amateur archaeology. But he never thought a dig in his back garden would unearth items up to 4,000 years old.

After starting work on an extension to his home in Collinstown, Co Westmeath, he was astonished to discover a skeleton and other items.

Pretty soon a team from the National Museum was excavating and evaluating his find which included human remains and a Bronze Age bowl.

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New Discovery ‘will rewrite Stonehenge’s history’

Researchers from Leicester and Wales have shed new light on the origins of bluestones at Stonehenge- long believed to have come from ‘sacred hills’ in Wales.

Geologists from the National Museum Wales, University of Leicester and Aberystwyth University, have uncovered new evidence of its origins - which brings into question how the rocks were brought to the Salisbury Plain.

One type of bluestone at Stonehenge, the so-called ‘spotted dolerite’, was convincingly traced to the Mynydd Preseli area in north Pembrokeshire in the early 1920s. However, the sources of the other bluestones - chiefly rhyolites (a type of rock) and the rare sandstones remained, until recently, unknown.

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The Iceman Mummy: Finally Face to Face

Brown-eyed, bearded, furrow faced, and tired: this is how Ötzi the Iceman might have looked, according to the latest reconstruction based on 20 years of research and investigations.

Realized by two Dutch experts, Alfons and Adrie Kennis, the model was produced with the latest in forensic mapping technology that uses three-dimensional images of the mummy's skull as well as infrared and tomographic images.

The new reconstruction shows a prematurely old man, with deep-set eyes, sunken cheeks, a furrowed face and ungroomed beard and hair.

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Ancient Britons: Iron Age riches in Cornwall

The South West has more ancient monuments than anywhere else in the country providing a rich history of how people used to live.

As part of our continuing series on Ancient Britons, BBC Spotlight's David George, helped by archaeologists, and enthusiasts, has been looking at bronze age sites in Cornwall.

Many of these ancient monuments have survived because the high places have not been developed.

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Oldest subarctic North American human remains found

Fairbanks, Alaska—A newly excavated archaeological site in Alaska contained the cremated remains of one of the earliest inhabitants of North America. The site may provide rare insights into the burial practices of Ice Age people and shed new light on their daily lives.

University of Alaska Fairbanks archaeologist Ben Potter and four colleagues published their discovery in the Feb. 25 edition of the journal Science.

The skeletal remains appear to be that of an approximately three-year-old child, found in an ancient fire pit within an equally ancient dwelling at the Upward Sun River site, near the Tanana River in central Alaska. Radiocarbon dating of wood at the site indicates the cremation took place roughly 11,500 years ago, when the Bering Land Bridge may still have connected Alaska and Asia. Initial observations of the teeth by UAF bioarchaeologist Joel Irish provide confirmation that the child is biologically affiliated with Native Americans and Northeast Asians.

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11,500-Year-Old Remains of Cremated 3-Year-Old Discovered

An archaeological dig in Alaska has uncovered the oldest human remains ever found in Arctic or Subarctic North America – the cremated skeleton of a 3-year-old.

The chlid's burned bone fragments were found in a fire pit in the remains of an ancient house near the Tanana River in central Alaska. Researchers date the cremation to 11,500 years ago. After the child's body was burned, researchers report in the Feb. 25 issue of the journal Science, the house and hearth were buried and abandoned.

"The fact that the child was cremated within the center of the house … this was an important member of society," said study author Ben Potter, an archaeologist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

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Pictures: Otzi the Iceman's New, Older Face Unveiled

Prematurely aged, with leathery, wrinkled skin, deep-set eyes, and a shaggy beard, this new reconstruction of "Ötzi" the Iceman is a far cry from past reconstructions that showed him as a strapping middle-aged man.

Notably, the new model, developed by Dutch artists Alfons and Adrie Kennis, has brown eyes based on recent research that showed the 5,000-year-old Iceman did not have blue eyes, as previously thought.

The latest Iceman reconstruction is based on new 3-D scans of Ötzi's body and will be the focus of an exhibition called "Ötzi 20," which will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the naturally mummified body's discovery in the Italian Alps. "Ötzi 20" will run from March 1 to January 15, 2012, at the South Tyrol Museum of Archeology in Bolzano, Italy.

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Thursday, February 24, 2011

Origins of Farming in Europe Result of Human Migration and Cultural Change, Study Suggests

It has long been debated as to whether the transition from a largely hunter-gatherer to an agricultural subsistence strategy in Europe was the result of the migration of farmers from the Near East and Anatolia, or whether this transition was primarily cultural in nature. A new study, co-authored by researchers at University College Cork and the University of Kent suggests that the prehistoric adoption of farming practices in outlying regions of Europe, Scandinavia, the Baltic, European Russia and the Ukraine, was the result of cultural diffusion.

The new study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, uses measurements of skulls of hunter-gathering (Mesolithic) and early farming (Neolithic) prehistoric populations from Europe, Near East and Anatolia to find answers.

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Wednesday, February 23, 2011

New discovery throws further light on the origins of famous bluestones of Stonehenge

The ongoing debate surrounding the source of the famous bluestones formimg the distinctive inner circle and horseshoe of Stonehenge has taken another turn after new findings emerged from Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales.

One type of bluestone, the so-called spotted dolerite, was convincingly traced to the Mynydd Preseli area of North Pembrokeshire in the 1920s, but the origins of many of the others have remained a mystery. Now geologists at the museum in Cardiff believe they have identified the source of one of the rhyolite types.

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Researchers Map Out Ice Sheets Shrinking During Ice Age

A set of maps created by the University of Sheffield have illustrated, for the first time, how our last British ice sheet shrunk during the Ice Age.


Led by Professor Chris Clark from the University´s Department of Geography, a team of experts developed the maps to understand what effect the current shrinking of ice sheets in parts of the Antarctic and Greenland will have on the speed of sea level rise.

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Decorated sandstone boulder found after dig

ARCHEOLOGISTS have discovered that an artefact found during last year’s dig at Eddisbury Hill is a decorated sandstone boulder dated between the late Neolithic and late Bronze Age.

The old red sandstone boulder, which has multiple engravings on one of its surfaces, was found in the entrance area of Eddisbury Hillfort.

The series of motifs are usually associated with Neolithic or Bronze Age burial ritual found in or close to cairns and barrows.

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Too hot, too cold, just right: Testing the limits of where humans can live

On an isolated segment of islands in the Pacific Ring of Fire, residents endure volcanoes, tsunamis, dense fog, steep cliffs and long and chilly winters.

At least it might be for inhabitants of the Kuril Islands, an 810-mile archipelago that stretches from Japan to Russia. The islands, formed by a collision of tectonic plates, are nearly abandoned today, but anthropologists have learned that thousands of people have lived there on and off as far back as at least 6000 B.C., persevering despite natural disasters.

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Giving Lucy a foot to walk on

New fossil evidence from Hadar, Ethiopia suggests that Australopithecus afarensis, the humanoid species thought to have existed between about 2.9 and 3.7 million years ago, had the first modern feet. The fossilized bone researchers found is the fourth metatarsal, a bone that connects a human’s heel with the fourth toe. According to Carol Ward, an anthropologist at the University of Missouri, the fossil supports the claim that the foot of Australopithecus, the group the famous Lucy came from, was human-like and therefore that Lucy and her kind had given up living in trees.

Commenting on the study, Prof. Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at London’s Natural History Museum, said although this bone provides evidence that Australopithecus had a similar foot anatomy to humans, the bone’s function is highly debatable. Stringer claimed that even if the bone’s purpose were similar to that of Homo sapiens, Australopithecines were only at the very beginning of the evolution of the modern foot.

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Why early man could have done with a dose of aspirin

Back pain is often blamed on lazy lifestyles – watching television and eating too much.

But debilitating backache dates back millions of years, according to a Cambridge University researcher who is looking at fossil records of human bones.

His research also paints a picture of early man being more caring than some envisage – with those suffering from disability being looked after.

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Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Unlocking Noord-Holland's Late Neolithic Treasure Chest

About the Project

The project Unlocking Noord-Holland's Late Neolithic Treasure Chest was initiated by Hans Peeters (then Dutch Cultural Heritage Agency, now University of Groningen) and received a € 500,000.- grant by the Dutch Research Foundation NWO. On the basis of this grant and subsidiary grants from the universities of Leiden and Groningen and the unpaid involvement of various specialists from the Cultural Heritage Agency a multidisciplinary project on the Single Grave Culture of Noord-Holland saw its official start in September 2009. The project combines the research expertise from researchers from the Cultural Heritage Agency, two universities and various firms. All participants are introduced in this first newsletter.

This project aims to unlock and integrate cultural/ecological information and research data in order to provide a sound basis for cultural modeling and development of heritage management strategies. We will thereby obtain a better understanding of site variability in relation to landscape use, subsistence strategies and the material world of the inhabitants.

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Structures of Roman fort defences never before seen in Britain have been unearthed during an excavation in Wales. Archaeologists have uncovered sect

Italy has ruled the fashion world for longer than we thought. That, at least, is the claim of archaeologists who say they have evidence that Neanderthals were using feathers as ornaments 44,000 years ago. The tenuous claim adds fuel to the debate over whether our distant cousins were simple brutes or as cultured as Homo sapiens.

Marco Peresani at the University of Ferrara in Italy found 660 bird bones mixed in with Neanderthal bones in Fumane cave in northern Italy. Many of the wing bones were cut and scraped where the flight feathers were once attached, suggesting the feathers had been systematically removed.

Just like the shells which Neanderthals may have worn as jewellery, Peresani thinks the feathers were used as ornaments. He dismisses other explanations on the grounds that many of the species are poor food sources and fletched arrows had not been invented at the time. João Zilhão at the University of Barcelona in Spain says it is more evidence that Neanderthals were as cultured as H. sapiens. On the other hand, Thomas Higham at the University of Oxford says Peresani has pushed his data too far.

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Stonehenge and Avebury World Heritage Site Revised Research Framework (SARRF)

Wessex Archaeology is pleased to announce that we are co-ordinating the revision and updating of the Avebury and Stonehenge resource assessments, and will also be writing a single revised research framework uniting both parts of the World Heritage Site into a harmonised volume with a five year currency.

The resource assessment aims to be complete by June 2011, and regular updates regarding the progress of the project will be posted on the SARRF website. The revised research agenda will be open to public consultation in September 2011, with both the resource assessments and research agendas publicly accessible online via the project website. Following public consultation and comment, there will also be a public seminar at the end of the year, to discuss the research agenda and develop the strategies to make the agenda achievable, as well as encourage wide stakeholder participation and community ownership of the product.

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Feather ornaments used by Neanderthals?

New evidence has been put forward in the debate over whether our distant Neanderthal cousins were simple brutes or as cultured as Homo sapiens, researchers say.

An Italian archaeologist says he's found evidence Neanderthals were using feathers as ornaments 44,000 years ago, NewScientist.com reported Monday.

Marco Peresani at the University of Ferrara says he has discovered 660 bird bones mixed in with Neanderthal bones in a cave in northern Italy, and the bird wing bones had been cut and scraped where the large flight feathers would have been attached, suggesting the feathers had been purposefully removed.

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Sunday, February 20, 2011

Brain food: the history of skull drinking

The Cheddar cave dwellers who used skulls as drinking cups were in good company – many have gone much further

It is now more than 15 years since I paid a visit to the sleepy town of Sedlec, just outside Prague. But I can still vividly recall the strangeness of leaving the sunlit graveyard to descend into a church where huge bell shapes had been formed from human skulls and bones, along with a skeletal coat of arms and a chandelier fashioned from every bone in the human body. The skeletons had been disinterred because the site was so popular as a burial place, having been supposedly sprinkled with earth from Golgotha in about 1278. The Kostnice ossuary is a striking example of how the sacred can legitimise seemingly macabre or taboo uses of the body.

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Biological anthropologists question claims for human ancestry

"Too simple" and "not so fast" suggest biological anthropologists from the George Washington University and New York University about the origins of human ancestry. In the upcoming issue of the journal Nature, the anthropologists question the claims that several prominent fossil discoveries made in the last decade are our human ancestors. Instead, the authors offer a more nuanced explanation of the fossils' place in the Tree of Life. They conclude that instead of being our ancestors the fossils more likely belong to extinct distant cousins.

"Don't get me wrong, these are all important finds," said co-author Bernard Wood, University Professor of Human Origins and professor of Human Evolution Anatomy at GW and director of its Center for the Advanced Study of Hominid Paleobiology. "But to simply assume that anything found in that time range has to be a human ancestor is naïve."

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Iceman Oetzi gets a new face for 20th anniversary

BOLZANO, Italy — Iceman Oetzi, whose mummified body was famously found frozen in the Italian Alps in 1991, will get a new face for the 20th anniversary of his discovery.

As part of a new exhibit at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano (www.iceman.it), two Dutch experts -- Alfons and Adrie Kennis -- have made a new model of the living Oetzi, this time with brown eyes.

Indeed, recent research has shown the Iceman, now approaching the tender age of 5,300 years, did not have blue eyes as previously believed.

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Subtle Shifts, Not Major Sweeps, Drove Human Evolution

The most popular model used by geneticists for the last 35 years to detect the footprints of human evolution may overlook more common subtle changes, a new international study finds.

Classic selective sweeps, when a beneficial genetic mutation quickly spreads through the human population, are thought to have been the primary driver of human evolution. But a new computational analysis, published in the February 18, 2011 issue of Science, reveals that such events may have been rare, with little influence on the history of our species.

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Cave of Forgotten Dreams in 3D

Werner Herzog gained exclusive access to film inside the Chauvet caves of southern France, capturing the oldest known pictorial creations of humankind in their natural setting. He puts 3-D technology to a profound use, taking us back in time over 30,000 years.

Werner Herzog has previously created unforgettable films, from the ship dragged over the mountain in Fitzcarraldo to the Antarctic landscape in Encounters at the End of the World. Now he brings us the earliest known visions of mankind: the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc cave art of southern France, created more than thirty thousand years ago. By comparison, the famous cave art of Lascaux is roughly half as old.

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Friday, February 18, 2011

Ice Age cups crafted from crania

An English cave serves up the oldest known vessels made from human skulls

Ice Age folk who lived in what’s now southwestern England gruesomely went from heads off to bottoms up. Bones excavated at a cave there include the oldest known examples of drinking cups or containers made out of human skulls, says a team led by paleontologist Silvia Bello of the Natural History Museum in London.

Measurements of a naturally occurring form of carbon in the skulls places them at about 14,700 years old, Bello and her colleagues report in a paper published online February 16 in PLoS ONE. Prehistoric cave denizens cleaned the skulls before using stone tools to shape the upper parts of the brain cases into containers, the researchers say.

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Thursday, February 17, 2011

Blood-thirsty Brits first to drink from ancient skulls

Had you attended a dinner party fifteen thousand years ago, you might have been served blood in a cup like this - constructed from a human skull.

At 14,700 years old, it is one of the earliest known examples of human skull-cups in the world. Along with other human bones, the macabre cups were discovered by palaeoanthropologists at Gough's Cave in Somerset, UK.

Analysis of marks on the three skull-cups has revealed some of the steps in the manufacture process.

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Bronze Age settlement found at NE Hungary construction site

Remains of a Bronze Age settlement and a former Sarmatian burial ground have been found at a construction site in the city of Nyiregyhaza in northeast Hungary, daily Magyar Nemzet said on Wednesday.

Several thousand metal objects, Roman bronze, silver and golden coins, and jewellery were excavated by archaeologists in the Oros district of the city, said the head of the excavation. One old pot contained as many as 34 bracelets, project leader archaeologist Eszter Istvanovits told the newspaper.

Some sixty dwellings have been excavated in the 56-hectare area and among the curiosities found has been a bone flute, she said.

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Ancient Britons 'drank from skulls'

Ancient Britons were not averse to using human skulls as drinking cups, skeletal remains unearthed in southwest England suggest.

The braincases from three individuals were fashioned in such a meticulous way that their use as bowls to hold liquid seems the only reasonable explanation.

The 14,700-year-old objects were discovered in Gough's Cave, Somerset.

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Monday, February 14, 2011

The heat was on at Marden Henge

A building whose foundations were unearthed during an excavation at Marden Henge near Devizes last summer could have been a Neolithic sauna.

Archaeologist Jim Leary told his audience at Devizes town hall on Saturday that the chalk foundations contained a sunken hearth that would have given out intense heat.

“It brings to mind the sweat lodges found in North America,” he said. “It could have been used as part of a purification ceremony.”

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The moment Britain became an island

Ancient Britain was a peninsula until a tsunami flooded its land-links to Europe some 8,000 years ago. Did that wave helped shape the national character?

The coastline and landscape of what would become modern Britain began to emerge at the end of the last Ice Age around 10,000 years ago.

What had been a cold, dry tundra on the north-western edge of Europe grew warmer and wetter as the ice caps melted. The Irish Sea, North Sea and the Channel were all dry land, albeit it land slowing being submerged as sea levels rose.

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Sunday, February 13, 2011

Mesolithic beads found at Welsh dolmen site

A recent excavation led by archaeologist George Nash in November 2010 at the Trefael Stone in south-west Wales - originally a portal dolmen transformed in later times in a standing stone - has revealed a small assemblage of exotic artefacts including three drilled shale beads, identical to those found at a nearby Early Mesolithic coastal habitation site.
Until recently, little was known about the stones use and origin. A geophysical survey undertaken in September 2010 revealed the remains of a kidney-shaped cairn and it was within this clear feature that the three perforated shale beads were found. These items, each measuring about 4.5 centimetres in diameter, were found within a disturbed cairn or post-cairn deposit.
Based on the discovery of 690 perforated beads found at the coastal seasonal camp of Nab Head in southern Pembrokeshire, it is possible that the three Trefael beads are contemporary. Microware analysis on one of the beads was inconclusive but the perforation appeared to have the same micro-wear abrasions as beads from the Nab Head site.
The beads from the Nab Head site were oval-shaped and water worn. Each disc was uniform in shape and thickness and had been drilled using an awl-type flint tool, referred to as a Meches-de-foret. It is probable that the Nab Head beads and those from Trefael were made for adornment, either sewn into clothing or forming bracelets/necklaces. In association with the perforated beads a number 'blanks' were found suggesting that The Nab Head site was a production centre for bead making.

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Lucy's feet were made for walking

Toe bone puts a humanlike arch in ancient hominid's step

A tiny 3.2-million-year-old fossil found in East Africa gives Lucy’s kind an unprecedented toehold on humanlike walking.

Australopithecus afarensis, an ancient hominid species best known for a partial female skeleton called Lucy, had stiff foot arches like those of people today, say anthropologist Carol Ward of the University of Missouri in Columbia and her colleagues. A bone from the fourth toe — the first such A. afarensis fossil unearthed — provides crucial evidence that bends in this species’ feet supported and cushioned a two-legged stride, the scientists report in the Feb. 11 Science.

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Lucy Had a Spring in Her Step

The petite 3.2-million-year-old skeleton called Lucy is one of the most famous and most complete of human ancestors. But she was found without her foot bones, so researchers have debated whether she walked as we do or retained some apelike adaptations for climbing in trees that altered her gait. Now, a 3.2-million-year-old foot bone from a member of Lucy's species, Australopithecus afarensis, reveals that this hominin was no flat foot: It had already evolved arches and a stiff midfoot similar to living humans. That means if Lucy were alive today, she could fit in high heels or march for miles without breaking her feet. "This discovery puts the spring back into afarensis's step," says co-author Donald Johanson of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University (ASU), Tempe.

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Monday, February 7, 2011

Early humans won at running; Neandertals won at walking

New research has compared the performance of the heels of modern-day distance runners to the heels of Neandertals and ancient Homo sapiens. The results show the Neandertals' heels were taller than those of modern humans and Homo sapiens, and more adapted to walking than running over long distances, while those of Homo sapiens were more adapted to endurance running.

Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Dr David Raichlen of the University of Arizona in Tucson, and colleagues, found that unlike modern humans, the Neandertal heel was taller would have provided less spring during running, and speculated that the heel probably stabilized the ankle and helped in jumping and walking uphill. In modern humans the heel is lower and stretches the Achilles tendon and increases its ability to act like a spring and reduce the consumption of energy.

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Thursday, February 3, 2011

New Excavation Of Important Neolithic Site On The Channel island of Guernsey

A team of archaeologists have applied for permission to excavate a gallery grave at Delancey Park n the Channel island of Guernsey later this year.


The park is situated in the north east of the Island. It is thought that the park was named after Oliver Delancey (1749-1822) who was the Lieutenant Governor of New York in 1733 and Barrack Master General in Guernsey from 1794 until 1804.

The aim of the planned excavation is to help unlock the mysteries of Guernsey's Neolithic Age, which occurred over five thousand years ago.

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Pictures: Ancient Bog Girl's Face Reconstructed .

"Moora" stares across millennia, thanks to a digital reconstruction based on the Iron Age girl's fragmented skull—one of several interpretations released January 20.

Along with the nearly complete corpse of the teenager, peat bog workers found her 2,600-year-old skull bones—mangled by peat-harvesting machinery—in Germany's Lower Saxony state (map) in 2000.

At first, "the police thought it was a criminal case"—perhaps the remains of Elke Kerll, a young woman who disappeared in 1969—said Andreas Bauerochse, a paleoecologist with the Lower Saxony State Office for Cultural Heritage.

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Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Stone Age artefacts 'could be under Delancey Park'

A Guernsey park could be home to artefacts dating back to the Stone Age, according to a Bristol University archaeologist.

Dr George Nash has asked the States for permission to excavate an area of Delancey Park in St Sampson.

Dr Nash has already carried out some test digs in the area and believes a Neolithic gallery grave, with some intact artefacts, is located there.

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Norway’s secret petroglyphs

It looked to be a routine excavation of what was thought to be a burial mound. But beneath the mound, archaeologists from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s Museum of Natural History and Archaeology found something more: unusual Bronze Age petroglyphs. 

“We believe these are very special in a Norwegian context,” says museum researcher and project manager Anne Haug.

The excavation in Stjørdal, just north of Trondheim, was necessitated by the expansion of a gravel pit. Initially the project archaeologists anticipated that the dig would be uncomplicated, and museum researchers allowed just three weeks for completion of the works.

Petroglyphs under a cremation site

Then came the surprises. Firstly, the mound builders had used an existing hill as a starting point – which of course saved them time and effort. The hill made the burial mound appear even larger and more monumental than it might have otherwise been.

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A new henge discovered at Stonehenge

An archaeology team led by the University of Birmingham and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology in Austria discovered a major ceremonial monument less than one kilometre away from the iconic Stonehenge.

History is set to be rewritten after an archaeology team led by the University of Birmingham and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology in Austria discovered a major ceremonial monument less than one kilometer away from the iconic Stonehenge.

The incredible find has been hailed by Professor Vince Gaffney, from the University’s IBM Visual and Spatial Technology Centre, as one of the most significant yet for those researching the UK’s most important prehistoric structure.

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New ‘henge-like’ monument unearthed at Stonehenge

Archaeologists have discovered a major ceremonial monument less than one km away from the iconic Stonehenge.

The team led by the University of Birmingham and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology, Austria, unearthed the prehistoric 'henge-like' late Neolithic monument, reports Physorg.com.

Professor Vince Gaffney, from Birmingham University, hailed the incredible discovery as one of the most significant yet for those researching the UK's most important prehistoric structure.

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