Stone-age toddlers had art lessons, study says

Research on Dordogne cave art shows children learned to finger-paint in palaeolithic age, approximately 13,000 years ago

Stone age toddlers may have attended a form of prehistoric nursery where they were encouraged to develop their creative skills in cave art, say archaeologists.

Research indicates young children expressed themselves in an ancient form of finger-painting. And, just as in modern homes, their early efforts were given pride of place on the living room wall.

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Lost city found in Dardanelles, Turkey : Older than Troy

A group of scientists and archeologists from Canakkale (Dardanelles) University have found traces of a lost city, older than famed Troy, now buried under the waters of Dardanelles strait.

Led by associate professor Rüstem Aslan, the archeology team made a surface survey in the vicinity of Erenkoy, Canakkale on the shore. The team has found ceramics and pottery, what led them to ponder a mound could be nearby. A research on The found pottery showed that the items belonged to an 7000 years old ancient city. The team has intensified the research and discovered first signs of the lost city under the waters of Dardanalles Strait.

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Bronze Age finds at Llangollen's Pillar of Eliseg

Remains dating back to the Bronze Age have been uncovered by archaeologists excavating the site of a 9th Century monument.

The finds were made during the latest dig at the Pillar of Eliseg near Llangollen, Denbighshire.

Possible cremated remains and bone fragments are now being examined.

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Ancestors' lifestyle change probed by archaeologists

Archaeologists are investigating islands around Britain to find out why our ancestors gave up being hunter-gatherers 6,000 years ago and turned to farming. 

Academics from the universities of Southampton and Liverpool are hoping to shed new light on the long-standing debate about whether the change around 4,000BC was due to colonists moving into Britain or if the indigenous population gradually adopted the new agricultural lifestyle themselves. 

The experts will be excavating three island groups in the western seaways - the Channel Islands, the Isles of Scilly and the Outer Hebrides - to understand what sailing across this area would have been like in 4,000BC.

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Excavation of islands around Britain to establish origins of Neolithic period

Archaeologists at the University of Liverpool are investigating three island groups around Britain to further understanding of why, in approximately 4,000 BC, humans altered their lifestyle from hunting and gathering to farming the land.

Some scholars believe that this change occurred due to colonists from the continent moving into Britain, bringing farming and pottery-making skills with them, but others argue that the indigenous population of Britain adopted this new lifestyle gradually on their own terms.

To shed new light on the debate, archaeologists, in collaboration with the University of Southampton, are excavating three island groups in the western seaways and producing oceanographic models to understand what sailing across this area would have been like in 4,000 BC. The team will also construct a database of 5th and 4th millennium occupation sites.

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Leicestershire archaeologists find Iron Age skeleton

A team of archaeologists has unearthed an Iron Age skeleton during excavations in Leicestershire. 

Dr Jermey Taylor, who has been examining the bones at the University of Leicester, said they were providing a wealth of information about how ancient people lived.

He believes the remains, found at Burrough on the Hill, could have belonged to an important young man who lived 200 years before the Romans arrived in Britain.

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First Aboriginal genome sequenced

A 90-year-old tuft of hair has yielded the first complete genome of an Aboriginal Australian, a young man who lived in southwest Australia.

He, and perhaps all Aboriginal Australians, the genome indicates, descend from the first humans to venture far beyond Africa more than 60,000 years ago, and thousands of years before the ancestors of most modern Asians trekked east in a second migration out of Africa.

"Aboriginal Australians are descendents of the first human explorers. These are the guys who expanded to unknown territory into an unknown world, eventually reaching Australia," says Eske Willerslev, a palaeogeneticist at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, who led the study. It appears online today in Science¹.

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Archaeologists Investigate Origins Of Agriculture In Britain

Archaeologists are investigating three island groups around Britain to further understanding of why, in approximately 4,000 BC, humans altered their lifestyle from hunting and gathering to farming the land.

Some scholars believe that this change occurred due to colonists from the continent moving into Britain, bringing farming and pottery-making skills with them, but others argue that the indigenous population of Britain adopted this new lifestyle gradually on their own terms.

To shed new light on the debate, archaeologists at the at the University of Liverpool, in collaboration with the University of Southampton, are excavating three island groups in the western seaways and producing oceanographic models to understand what sailing across this area would have been like in 4,000 BC. The team will also construct a database of 5th and 4th millennium occupation sites.

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Human Skulls Mounted On Stakes Found By Researchers At Stone Age Site In Sweden

Stone Age hunter-gatherers in southeast Sweden mounted the skulls of their dead on stakes and buried them in a lake, according to a team of archaeologists. The researchers unearthed remains and artifacts estimated to be 8,000 years old—including the skulls of 11 individuals—at a site thought to have served as a ceremonial gathering place.

Two years ago, archaeologists found what they believed to be a Stone Age settlement near what was once a shallow lake in Motala, a town in southeast Sweden. Conducted to pave the way for a new railway line, the excavation took an unexpected turn when the researchers discovered skulls and skull fragments from 11 individuals, including men, women, children and infants. Recent carbon dating determined that the items unearthed at the site, which is known as Kanaljorden, are roughly 8,000 years old.


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Major archeological finds made at Wrexham's Borras quarry

HUNDREDS of ancient artefacts have been unearthed at a quarry. Fragments of Neolithic pottery and a rare ancient arrowhead have been discovered in one of the most fruitful archaeological digs yet at Tarmac’s Borras Quarry, near Wrexham. Archaeologists from the Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust (CPAT) said the quarry was slowly giving up its ancient secrets. Read the rest of this article...

Neanderthal man lived on seafood far earlier than previously thought

Neanderthal man lived on a diet of seafood in the caves of southern Spain much longer ago than previously thought, new archaeological findings show. Much as modern day man enjoys tucking into a plateful of seafood paella when visiting the Costa del Sol, Neanderthals living on the Iberian coast 150,000 years ago supplemented their diet with molluscs and marine animals. Archaeological examination of a cave in Torremolinos unearthed early tools used to crack open shellfish collected off rocks along the Iberian coast and found fossilised remains of the early meals. Read the rest of this article...

Bluestone Henge twin?

new digital reconstruction of the monument, discovered by the Stonehenge Riverside Project in 2009 suggests that the circle of Welsh blue stones found at the southern terminus of the avenue may well have been oval, and not round. If this is correct, it echoes the layout of the Bluestone oval at the centre of Stonehenge. Henry Rothwell, Creative Lead at Heritage Data Solutions explains; “The model was created as part of the forthcoming smartphone app ‘Journey to Stonehenge’. When we built the first wire-frame of the circle we ended up with a fairly standard circular representation. We were using a low level aerial image taken by Adam Stanford. It showed the full extent of the excavation, including the socket holes of the blue stones, into which the Stonehenge Riverside Project team had placed upturned black buckets.” Read the rest of this article...

Bulgarian Archaeology Finds Said to Rewrite History of Black Sea Sailing

Massive ancient stone anchors were found by divers participating in an archaeological expedition near the southern Bulgarian Black Sea town of Sozopol. The expedition, led by deputy director of Bulgaria's National Historical Museum Dr Ivan Hristov, found the precious artifacts west of the Sts. Cyricus and Julitta island. The 200-kg beautifully ornamented anchors have two holes in them – one for the anchor rope and another one for a wooden stick. They were used for 150-200-ton ships that transported mainly wheat, but also dried and salted fish, skins, timber and metals from what now is Bulgaria's coast. Read the rest of this article...

Human-Neanderthal coupling was rare: study

Scientists have shown that modern humans have some traces of genes from Neanderthals, but a study out Monday suggests that any breeding between the two was most likely a rare event. The new computational model, based on DNA samples from modern humans in France and China, shows successful coupling happened at a rate of less than two percent. The research suggests that either inter-species sex was very taboo, or that the hybrid offspring had trouble surviving, according to the findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Read the rest of this article...

Iron age hill fort excavation reveals ‘possible suburbia

The most intensive investigation ever undertaken of Britain’s largest iron age hill fort is expected to reveal new details of how Britons lived 2,000 years ago – and maybe even that they were almost as suburban as we are. Stretching across 80 hilltop hectares, behind three miles of ramparts, the fort, at Ham Hill in Somerset, and the outline of its history have been known for many years. The Durotriges tribe, which lived on the hill, was subdued in AD45 by soldiers of the 2nd Legion under the command of the future emperor Vespasian, but what the Romans found there: a street system lined with houses on their own plots of land, is what archaeologists from Cambridge and Cardiff universities hope to uncover more fully in excavations over the next three summers. Read the rest of this article...

Iron Age findings help build picture

AN IRON Age community discovered in the Daventry district has been described as of “regional, if not national importance”. New investigations at the site, which is located at Daventry International Railfreight Terminal (DIRFT), have given a greater insight into what happened at the 2,000-year-old community. The findings, including evidence of settlement such as hut circles, will be discussed at the Community Landscape Archaeology Survey Project (CLASP) annual meeting on Monday (September 12). Read the rest of this article...

Human Ancestor May Put Twist in Origin Story, New Studies Say

Two-million-year-old bones—and possibly skin—from a pair of primate fossils are offering new insight into the apelike species that may have given rise to the first humans. Known as Australopithecus sediba, the ancient human ancestor was discovered in the Malapa region of South Africa in 2008 and was described for the first time last April. Now a suite of five studies, published in this week's issue of the journal Science, is delving deeper into the species' unusual mix of human and apelike traits to help refine A. sediba's place in the time line of human evolution. Read the rest of this article...

Before They Left Africa, Modern Humans Interbred With Archaic Humans, Reports DNA Study

It has become increasingly clear through DNA studies that modern humans may have interbred with Neanderthals in Eurasia following their migration from their ancestral African homeland. Now, based on new DNA research conducted by a team of scientists from the University of Arizona and the University of California, San Francisco, it seems that modern humans had already established a pattern of mixing it up with their more archaic cousins before they even left their southerly African climes. Read the rest of this article...

Ancient humans were mixing it up

Anatomically modern humans interbred with more archaic hominin forms even before they migrated out of Africa, a UA-led team of researchers has found. It is now widely accepted that the species Homo sapiens originated in Africa and eventually spread throughout the world. But did those early humans interbreed with more ancestral forms of the genus Homo, for example Homo erectus, the "upright walking man," Homo habilis, – the "tool-using man" or Homo neanderthalensis, the first artists of cave-painting fame? Direct studies of ancient DNA from Neanderthal bones suggest interbreeding did occur after anatomically modern humans had migrated from their evolutionary cradle in Africa to the cooler climates of Eurasia, but what had happened in Africa remained a mystery – until now. Read the rest of this article...

Could this be the oldest pub in Scotland?

A historic site's true purpose may have been revealed - as an Iron Age boozer. Experts believe that 4600 years ago, thirsty natives may have been enjoying a pie and pint at Jarlshof in Shetland. They say the layout of the stone settlement near Sumburgh Head suggests it may be the oldest pub ever found in Britain. And a dozen or so quernstones - for grinding barley - indicate it may have served as both a drinking den and a bakery. Read the rest of this article...

Volcanic artifacts imply ice-age mariners in prehistoric Greece

Mariners may have been traveling the Aegean Sea even before the end of the last ice age, according to new evidence from researchers, in order to extract coveted volcanic rocks for pre-Bronze Age tools and weapons.

A new technique which dates obsidian -- volcanic glass which can be fashioned into tools -- suggests that people were mining for obsidian in Mediterranean waters and shipping the once valuable rocks from the island of Melos in modern day Greece as far back as 15,000 years ago.

"Obsidian was a precious natural rock-glass found only in Melos, some in [the modern-day Greek areas of] Antiparos and Yali," explained Nicolaos Laskaris of the University of the Aegean in Greece. "From there it was spread all over the Aegean and in the continent too through contacts of trade."

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Iron age hill fort excavation reveals 'possible suburbia'

Size of settlement suggests Ham Hill site was a town rather than a defensive structure, archaeologists believe

The most intensive investigation ever undertaken of Britain's largest iron age hill fort is expected to reveal new details of how Britons lived 2,000 years ago – and maybe even that they were almost as suburban as we are.

Stretching across 80 hilltop hectares, behind three miles of ramparts, the fort, at Ham Hill in Somerset, and the outline of its history have been known for many years.

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Bronze Age excavation project begins in Cornwall

A 10-day excavation project at a Bronze Age site in Cornwall has begun.

Organisers hope they will find more information on a settlement at the site near Lanyon.

Previous excavations have revealed Middle Bronze Age and Iron Age artefacts, said archaeologist, Dr Andy Jones.

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Tomb found at Stonehenge quarry site

The tomb for the original builders of Stonehenge could have been unearthed by an excavation at a site in Wales.

The Carn Menyn site in the Preseli Hills is where the bluestones used to construct the first stone phase of the henge were quarried in 2300BC.

Organic material from the site will be radiocarbon dated, but it is thought any remains have already been removed.

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Stone tools shed light on early human migrations

Hominins with different tool-making technologies coexisted.

The discovery of stone axes in the same sediment layer as cruder tools indicates that hominins with differing tool-making technologies may have coexisted.

The axes, found in Kenya by Christopher Lepre, a palaeontologist at Columbia University in New York, and his team are estimated to be around 1.76 million years old. That's 350,000 years older than any other complex tools yet discovered.

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