Ancient human remains found in Mayo date back over 5,000 years

Ben Gorm Mountain, Mayo

Image: T Kahlert via Department of Culture

THE DEPARTMENT OF CULTURE, Heritage and the Gaeltacht has revealed that ancient human remains, which were discovered by a local hillwalker on a Mayo mountainside in 2016, date back as early as 3,600 BC.

The research found that the natural boulder chamber in which the remains were found was used for human burial practice through the Neolithic period.

A least 10 individuals – adults, teenagers and children – were placed in the chamber over a period of up to 1,200 years, according to the research. One of the adult bones dated to 3,600 BC, while a bone of a child skeleton dated to 2,400 BC.

In August 2016, local hillwalker Michael Chambers discovered a cave-like chamber among some large boulders on Ben Gorm Mountain in Newport, Mayo.

He found human bones scattered over the rock floor of the chamber and contacted gardaí in order to have them tested.

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Unusually sophisticated prehistoric monuments and technology in the heart of the Aegean

Excavations underway on Dhaskalio, off Keros 

[Credit: Cambridge Keros Project]

New work at the settlement of Dhaskalio, the site adjoining the prehistoric sanctuary on the Cycladic island of Keros, has shown this to be a more imposing and densely occupied series of structures than had previously been realised, and one of the most impressive sites of the Aegean during the Early Bronze Age (3rd millennium BC).

Until recently, the island of Keros, located in the Cyclades, south of Naxos, was known for ritual activities dating from 4,500 years ago involving broken marble figurines. Now new excavations are showing that the promontory of Dhaskalio (now a tiny islet because of sea level rise), at the west end of the island next to the sanctuary, was almost entirely covered by remarkable monumental constructions built using stone brought painstakingly from Naxos, some 10km distant.

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Bronze Age Arrows and a Viking Sword – The 2017 Fieldwork Was Awesome!

The Storfonne ice patch, photographed in September 2014 during a major melt. Notice the light grey lichen-free zone surrounding the ice. This area was exposed by ice melt in the last 15-20 years. Photo: Lars Pilø, Secrets of the Ice/Oppland County Council.

Both sites had only seen short visits prior to this field-season. This had resulted in a number of artifact recoveries, especially arrows, found close to the melting ice. However, we knew that there were other finds on these sites, and that they were lying on the surface, exposed to the elements. The main job would be to rescue these artefacts. To achieve this, we planned to conduct a systematic and thorough survey of the lichen-free zone (where the ice has melted recently) surrounding the ice on both sites.

The Lauvhøe ice patch

The Lauvhøe ice patch was up first. The earliest finds from this site were reported in 2007: three arrows, dating to the Iron Age and the medieval period. Even with these remarkable finds, the site had to wait ten years for a proper systematic survey. This may sound harsh, but with the short time window available for surveys each year, other sites with more and older finds had to be surveyed first. Lauvhøe’s turn had finally come this year.

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LES FOUILLES ARCHÉOLOGIQUES PRÉVENTIVES DÉMARRENT SUR LA ZAC ODE ACTE 2 SUR LES COMMUNES DE LATTES ET DE PÉROLS (HÉRAULT)

Les fouilles préventives du site des « Hauts de Lattes » s’inscrivent dans la poursuite de l’aménagement de la « Zac Ode Acte 2 », dans le cadre du projet urbain Ode à la Mer qui s’étend depuis la Lironde jusqu’au Parc des Expositions, sur les communes de Lattes et de Pérols.

8 HECTARES DE FOUILLES SUR LE SITE « HAUTS DE LATTES »
À la suite d’un diagnostic archéologique réalisé fin 2015 - début 2016, l’État (Drac Occitanie) a prescrit la réalisation d’une fouille préventive de 8 hectares, situés à l’extrémité nord de la « butte de Pérols », entre la vallée de la Lironde et l’étang de l’Estanel. La SA3M ( Société d’Aménagement de Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole), ainsi que deux autres maîtres d’ouvrage (les sociétés Pitch Promotion et Pégase Immobilier) ont choisi de confier ces recherches à l’Inrap, qui s’est associé au service archéologique de la SAM (Sète Agglopole Méditerranée) pour cette opération.

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Menschheitsgeschichte muss nicht neu geschrieben werden

Der »Fall Untermaßfeld«

In einer kürzlich im Fachjournal »Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology« veröffentlichten Studie widerlegt der Senckenberg-Wissenschaftler Prof. Dr. Ralf-Dietrich Kahlke gemeinsam mit einem internationalen Team renommierter Steinzeitexperten eine kürzlich erschienene Veröffentlichung zur Ausbreitung des Menschen in Europa. In dieser wird die These aufgestellt, dass die ersten Menschen schon vor etwa einer Million Jahre in Nord- und Mitteleuropa lebten – gut 200.000 Jahre früher als bisher belegt. Das Team zeigt zudem, dass die »Belegstücke« der archäologischen Untersuchung vermutlich aus der Forschungsgrabung Untermaßfeld gestohlen wurden.

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Neolithic girl's reconstructed face unveiled at Athens Acropolis Museum on January 19th

Myrtis is the reconstructed head of a girl that once lived in Classical-era ancient Athens and died during the plague in Athens in the 5th century BC

An 18-year-old girl who lived in Greece 7,000 years ago and was unearthed by archaeologists in Theopetra cave, near the city of Trikala, has had her face reconstructed and is about to officially introduce herself to the public.

Eight years after the revelation of Myrtis, the reconstructed head of a girl that once lived in Classical-era ancient Athens and died during the plague in Athens in the 5th century BC and following the international sensation that it caused, the Acropolis museum is ready to to introduce Dawn’s new face from an even earlier past, to Greek and international audiences.

Dawn (Avgi in Greek) is a woman from the Mesolithic era (7,000 BC) who lived in the Theopetra cave, according to Athens University professor Manolis Papagrigorakis; who has invested a great deal of time and learning in order to bring Greeks “face to face” with their ancestors.

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Ancient highland ruins probed by archaeologists

ARCHAEOLOGISTS are probing an ancient mystery uncovered by workers deep in a Highland forest.

The crumbling ruins are believed to have been an Iron Age fort, or possibly the home of a local chief or lord, and date back to about 2,400 years ago.

The site was known about from a survey taken in the 1940s, but had been forgotten about until it was spotted by loggers clearing the land.

Now researchers are unravelling its tantalising mystery, with evidence showing the structure may have a violent past and was burnt down twice and rebuilt before finally being abandoned.

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Evidence of 'special site' for Bronze Age burials near Loch Ness

The latest grave to be found is pictured before and after soil was removed from inside it

Archaeologists say they are finding increasing evidence that a site near Loch Ness was important for burials in the Bronze Age.

A second 4,000-year-old grave has been located in an area being developed in Drumnadrochit where a stone-lined grave known as a cist was found in 2015.

The discovery two years ago included human remains.

The latest grave had filled with soil causing degradation to the pit, but a single Beaker pot was found.

Archaeologists said the decorated pot may have held an offering to the person who was buried in the cist.

The first grave was discovered during work constructing the new Drumnadrochit Medical Centre and excavated by AOC Archaeology Group.

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Prehistoric women's arms 'stronger than those of today's elite rowers'

Katherine Grainger and Anna Watkins celebrate Olympic victory in 2012. Neolithic women’s arm bones were about 30% stronger than those of women today. 

Photograph: Francisco Leong/IOPP Pool/Getty Images

Prehistoric women had stronger arms than elite female rowing teams do today thanks to the daily grind of farming life, researchers have revealed, shedding light on their role in early communities.

The study of ancient bones suggests that manual agricultural work had a profound effect on the bodies of women living in central Europe between about the early neolithic and late iron age, from about 5,300BC to AD100.

“We think a lot of what we are seeing is the bone’s response to women grinding grain, which is pretty much seated but using your arms really repetitively many hours a day,” said Dr Alison Macintosh, co-author of the research from the University of Cambridge.

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Ancient sword and other incredible items discovered during dig at Glenfield Park

Archeologists have discovered an unprecedented collection of artefacts from the Iron Age at Glenfield Park in Leicestershire.

Prehistoric cauldrons, a complete ancient sword and third century BC brooch, and dress pins are among the nationally significant findings discovered by University of Leicester archaeologists.

The Iron Age site is believed to have been a ritual and ceremonial centre for a community that also hosted large feasts, while the findings represent the most northerly discovery of such objects on mainland Britain and the only find of this type of cauldron in the East Midlands.

Evidence also suggests the site was used over a long period of time by multiple generations and underwent striking changes in character.

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Bronze Age Burial Of 'Shaman' Discovered In Slovakia

Archaeologists found an interesting discovery when researching the area of the transport infrastructure for Jaguar Land Rover and accompanying industrial park in Nitra. They found a human skeleton from the Bronze Age that was probably a shaman. He was not buried in a standard grave but placed in hole serving a food storage.

“When the hole was not used anymore, people backfilled it with soil and this person was placed or thrown inside later. We don’t know whether he was thrown in or placed in, because the human was lying on his stomach,” said Klaudia Daňová, a scientific secretary from the Archaeological Institute in Nitra, as cited by the SITA newswire.

“Bronze decorations were placed near his ears. They were connected by little ear bones,” added Daňová for SITA. Archaeologists suggest that those are poultry bone but an analysis will be done to make sure.


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Fairy Tales Are Much Older Than You Think

How does the same story come to be known as “Beauty and the Beast” in the U.S. and “The Fairy Serpent” in China?

As Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm collected Germanic folktales in the 19th century, they realized that many were similar to stories told in distant parts of the world. The brothers Grimm wondered whether plot similarities indicated a shared ancestry thousands of years old.

Folktales are passed down orally, obscuring their age and origin. “There’s no fossil record [of them] before the invention of writing,” says Jamie Tehrani, an anthropologist at Durham University.

To test the Grimms’ theory, Tehrani and literary scholar Sara Graça da Silva traced 76 basic plots back to their oldest linguistic ancestor using an international folktale database. If a similar tale was told in German and Hindi, the researchers concluded its roots lay in the languages’ last common ancestor. “The Smith and the Devil,” a story about a man who trades his soul for blacksmith skills, was first told some 6,000 years ago in Proto-Indo-European. Now we tell a similar tale about the blues guitarist Robert Johnson.

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When the Gloves Come Off – Why We Do Not Use Gloves to Handle Artifacts in the Field

Ever since we started publishing pictures of our crew holding artifacts without using gloves, we have taken some heat in the Facebook comment sections. People have been worrying (or even cringing) about bad effects of touching the artifacts with bare hands. Their worry is that this could contaminate the artifacts with body oils or DNA. This blogpost explains why using gloves in the field is not necessary.

Body oils and other residues

When artefacts are handled in museums, you will see the museum staff wearing gloves while holding the objects. This is done to protect the artifacts from getting into contact with body oils and other residues on the person’s hand. It may seem like an obvious conclusion that the artifacts should also be handled wearing gloves in the field. However, this is rarely seen in practice. Why is there a difference in procedures?

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Living With Gods review – 40,000 years of religious art, and this is it?

 Chosen for content over aesthetic merit … six Zoroastrian tiles, Parsi shrine, 1989-90, India. Photograph: © Trustees of the British Museum

After a few minutes in the exhibition that accompanies Neil MacGregor’s new BBC Radio 4 series on the power of religion, my skin started to sizzle and my blood to boil. I truly felt branded inside, marked out as a reprobate, for the premise of the show is that belief in God(s) is such a universal human trait that if you lack it, you may not be human.

That is signalled by a large wall text at the start, suggesting that the correct name for our species may not be homo sapiens, but “homo religiosus”. As someone who doesn’t believe in God and doesn’t miss her, I felt a bit left out. Is belief really the all-pervasive force this exhibition claims?

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Fossil of 'our earliest ancestors' found in Dorset

The mammals ventured out at night to hunt insects

Fossils of the oldest-known ancestors of most living mammals, including human beings, have been unearthed in southern England.

Teeth belonging to the extinct shrew-like creatures, which scampered at the feet of dinosaurs, were discovered in cliffs on the Dorset coast.

Scientists who identified the specimens say they are the earliest undisputed fossils of mammals belonging to the line that led to humans.

They date back 145 million years.

''Here we have discovered from the Jurassic coast a couple of shrew-like things that are to date unequivocally our earliest ancestors,'' said Dr Steve Sweetman of Portsmouth University, who examined the ancient teeth.

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'Big, bad wolf' image flawed - scientists

Wolves are good at working together to get food rewards

New research casts doubt on the idea that dogs are naturally more tolerant and friendly than wolves.
In tests of cooperation skills, wolves outperformed their domesticated relatives.

Scientists say the findings challenge assumptions about how dogs were tamed from wolves and came to live alongside humans.
Previous evidence has suggested that the domestication process may have given dogs a more tolerant temperament.

"We still have very much this idea of the big, bad wolf and the cuddly pooch on your sofa," Dr Sarah Marshall-Pescini, who led the research, told BBC News.

"But, I think the simplest message is that the story is not quite as clear as that."

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Whisper it – Greek amphitheatre's legendary acoustics are a myth

Epidaurus. Ancient Greeks might have used all manner of devices to amplify sound, including placing hollow vessels at strategic locations.

Photograph: DEA / S. VANNINI/De Agostini/Getty Images

It has been held up as a stunning example of ancient Greek sound engineering, but researchers say the acoustics of the amphitheatre at Epidaurus are not as dazzling as they have been hailed.

Dating from the fourth century BC, and seating up to 14,000 spectators, the amphitheatre has long been admired for its sound quality, with claims that audiences are able to hear a pin drop, or a match being struck, at any seat in the house. Even the British archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler raved about the amphitheatre, declaring in clipped tones in a 1958 broadcast: “Even a stage whisper could be picked up by the furthest spectator with the cheapest ticket.”

But new research suggests such assertions are little more than Greek myth.

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Prehistoric humans are likely to have formed mating networks to avoid inbreeding

Early humans seem to have recognized the dangers of inbreeding at least 34,000 years ago, and developed surprisingly sophisticated social and mating networks to avoid it, new research has found.

Detail of one of the burials from Sunghir, in Russia. The new study sequenced the genomes of individuals from the site and discovered that they were, at most, second cousins, indicating that they had developed sexual partnerships beyond their immediate social and family group.

Credit: By José-Manuel Benito Álvarez (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Early humans seem to have recognised the dangers of inbreeding at least 34,000 years ago, and developed surprisingly sophisticated social and mating networks to avoid it, new research has found.

The study, reported in the journal Science, examined genetic information from the remains of anatomically modern humans who lived during the Upper Palaeolithic, a period when modern humans from Africa first colonised western Eurasia. The results suggest that people deliberately sought partners beyond their immediate family, and that they were probably connected to a wider network of groups from within which mates were chosen, in order to avoid becoming inbred.

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Ax Linked to Ötzi the Iceman Found North of the Alps

Apart from a few scratches, the 2.6-inch-long (6.5 centimeters) blade is undamaged. 

Credit: Res Eichenberger

Archaeologists found a copper blade in Switzerland that's just like the ax Ötzi the famous "Iceman"was carrying when he died.

Like Ötzi's ax, this tool was made with copper that came from hundreds of miles away, in present-day Tuscany in central Italy. The discovery could shed light on Copper Age connections across Europe.

Bad fortune eventually made Ötzi the Iceman famous. About 5,300 years ago, he was shot with an arrow, struck in the head and left to die near a mountain pass high in the Alps. He was entombed in a glacier until 1991, when hikers near the Italian-Austrian border discovered his body.

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Mysterious Stone Tools Unearthed at Bronze-Age Site in Wales

The stone tools found by the CRAG team vary in size, from around 220 millimeters (8.5 inches) in length, down to about 50 millimeters (2 inches).

Credit: Ian Brooks/CRAG

Amateur archaeologists excavating a Bronze Age site in the United Kingdom have discovered a cache of unusual stone tools unlike any that have been found before.

The tools appear to have been deposited deliberately — perhaps ceremonially — in what would have been a stream around 4,500 years ago, according to the researchers.

Around 20 of the roughly triangular stone hand tools, of various sizes, were found at the excavation site in the Clwydian Range, a series of hills in Denbighshire in northeast Wales, by the Clwydian Range Archaeological Group (CRAG) during four weeks of excavations in July and August. [See More Photos of the Stone Tools at the Bronze-Age Site]

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