Pottery Residues Offer Clues to Malta’s Prehistoric Menu

(Courtesy Davide Tanasi)

RABAT, MALTA—The Times of Malta reports that researchers led by Davide Tanasi of the University of South Florida analyzed residues and traces of proteins found in pottery dated to between 2500 and 700 B.C. at Il-Qlejgha tal-Bahrija, a prehistoric site in Malta’s Northern Region. The study suggests that the residents of Il-Qlejgha tal-Bahrija consumed a porridge made of cow’s milk and cereals such as wheat and barley. Traces of grains were also found in large storage jars similar to those found in Sicily.

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Hominid Footprints on Crete Could Change Evolutionary Theory For Good

Hominid footprints in the stone of Crete could change evolutionary theory altogether. Credit: The Conversation.

He was not looking for hominid footprints from the prehistoric past. Paleontologist Gerhard Gierlinski, from Warsaw, Poland, was just trying to get away from it all in the summer of 2002 and enjoy the warm seas and soft sands on the Greek island of Crete with his girlfriend.

A researcher at the Polish Geological Institute, he was always ready to take samples of interesting things he spied on vacations, and he traveled with a hammer, a camera and a GPS for just such occasions.

What he discovered along the Mediterranean shores of the town of Trachilos would rock his world and send some researchers who were convinced that humans evolved solely in Africa, into angry denial, resulting in many of them casting aspersions on his jaw-dropping find.

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Rare Bronze Age spearhead discovered intact in Jersey

The piece was dated from the remains of the wood shaft it was attached to
JERSEY HERITAGE

A rare and complete metal spearhead dating back thousands of years to the Bronze Age has gone on display in Jersey after being found on the island.

It was discovered on the beach at Gorey by a metal detectorist in August.

Carbon dating on the remains of the wood shaft it was attached to confirmed it was from between 1207BC and 1004BC, Jersey Heritage said.

The "really exciting find" was also "thought to be unique to the Channel Islands and a rare find", it added.

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The World’s Oldest Woman Doesn’t Look Like You’ve Been Told

Almost 50 years ago, on a Sunday morning in late November 1974, a team of archaeologists in Ethiopia unearthed a 3 million-year-old skeleton of an ancient early human. The remains would turn out to be one of the most important fossils ever discovered. That night Donald Johanson, the paleoanthropologist who discovered the fossilized remains, played a cassette tape of the Beatles and as the group listened to the sound of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” reverberate through the campsite a colleague suggested that he name the female hominin Lucy. She represented a new species—Australopithecus afarensis—and a visit to almost any major natural history museum in the world will give you the opportunity to see an artist’s rendition of how she appeared in her own time.

Visit more than one natural history museum or flip through a handful of scientific textbooks, however, and you’ll quickly notice how much disagreement there is about Lucy’s physical appearance. No one can agree on what Lucy or “AL 288-1” looked like. Why is that? In a new article on “Visual Depictions of Our Evolutionary Past,” published this week in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, a team of scientists from the University of Adelaide, Arizona State, the University of Zurich, and Howard University set out to discover why this is and to compile their own, scientifically grounded, reconstruction.

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Moustache on Wimpole Estate statue linked to '1st Century trends'

It is believed the figure could represent Cernunnos, the Celtic god of fertility

NATIONAL TRUST/OXFORD ACHAEOLOGY

A tiny statue's moustache and haircut could be evidence of popular fashion trends from the 1st Century, an archaeologist has said.

The 5cm (2in) figure of a Celtic deity was discovered at the National Trust's Wimpole Estate in Cambridgeshire.

Work in 2018 revealed a late Iron Age to early Roman rural settlement, and artefacts discovered there have since been subject to further analysis.

The "remarkable" detail was revealed when the figurine was cleaned.

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Reversal of Earth's magnetic poles may have triggered Neanderthal extinction -- and it could happen again

During this time, Earth's inhabitants would have been subjected to some dazzling displays -- northern and southern lights, caused by solar winds hitting the Earth's atmosphere, would have been frequent.

The reversal of Earth's magnetic poles, along with a temporary breakdown of the world's magnetic field about 42,000 years ago, could have triggered a raft of environmental changes, solar storms and the extinction of the Neanderthals, according to a new study.

The Earth's magnetic field protects us, acting as a shield against the solar wind (a stream of charged particles and radiation) that flows out from the sun. But the geomagnetic field is not stable in strength and direction, and it has the ability to flip or reverse itself.

Some 42,000 years ago, in an event known as the Laschamp Excursion, the poles did just that for around 800 years, before swapping back -- but scientists were unsure exactly how or if it impacted the world. 

Now, a team of researchers from Sydney's University of New South Wales and the South Australian Museum say the flip, along with changing solar winds, could have triggered an array of dramatic climate shifts leading to environmental change and mass extinctions.

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Zombie infection threat as country unlocks 50,000-year-old viruses

Russia is seeking to unlock unknown prehistoric viruses up to 50,000-years-old by extracting biological material from carcasses of ancient animals frozen in permafrost.
Source: Siberian Times/Australscope

Russia is seeking to unlock unknown prehistoric viruses up to 50,000-years-old by extracting biological material from carcasses of ancient animals frozen in permafrost.

Scientists from the Kremlin’s equivalent of Porton Down are this week taking samples from a collection of beasts preserved in ice which have been found in recent years.

They are working with the remains of extinct woolly mammoths and hairy rhinos, as well as prehistoric dogs, horses, elk, rodents and hares.

The oldest animal is believed to be a 50,000-year-old lemming.

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Hundreds of stone age tools found on Denbighshire housing site

An archaeological dig was carried out before building could begin JEZ HEMMING

An archaeological dig at a site earmarked for housing has uncovered more than 300 stone age tools and artefacts.

The 9,000-year-old site, on Castle Hill, Rhuddlan, Denbighshire, is "on a par with the oldest proven Mesolithic site" in Wales, archaeologists say.

The site was a target for developers for about a decade and planning consent was granted for a house in 2017.

But the need for an archaeological dig was agreed before building could begin.

The site yielded a total of 314 stone artefacts. Experts believe it was a sandy ridge overlooking the flood-plain of the River Clwyd.

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Long-Lost Neanderthal Tooth Reveals a Surprising Unknown Link to Modern Humans

(Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London/Blinkhorn, et al., 2021)

In 1928, the renowned British archaeologist, Dorothy Garrod, excavated the Shukbah Cave in the hills of Palestine, just north of Jerusalem.

This was some of her earliest work in a long and successful career, revealing a rich collection of ancient stone tools, animal bones, and a single fossilised tooth - what looked like a large human molar.

For fifty years the discovery was lost in the private collection of a collaborator, unrecognised and neglected. Then, at the turn of the century, the long-lost tooth landed in the laps of researchers at the British Museum of Natural History.

Looking closely at the large molar, researchers realised it was probably from a young Neanderthal, possibly between the ages of 7 and 12.

To date, the Shukbah tooth is the southernmost example of the Neanderthal range in Arabia.

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Have archaeologists found another Skara Brae on Orkney?

Skara Brae on Orkney. People lived at the Neolithic settlement from around 3,250 BC.

Archaeologists may have discovered another Skara Brae around half a mile from the world-famous Neolithic village.

Skara Brae is considered the best preserved Neolithic settlement in Western Europe with people first making their home there around 3,100BC.

It was discovered in 1850 when a storm exposed part of the coastal site. Now, almost 170 years later, coastal erosion may have uncovered its neighbour.

A section of badly damaged wall has been exposed by the work of the pounding tides at the north end of the Bay of Skaill.

Deer antlers, a boar tooth, a cattle jawbone and a large decorated stone have also been discovered.

Sigurd Towrie, spokesman for the Archaeology Institute at University of Highlands and Islands, said the finds “suggest there is another settlement at the Bay of Skaill – one that, from previous environmental sampling, is likely to be 4,000 to 5,000 years old”.

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Dramatic discovery links Stonehenge to its original site – in Wales

 Prof Alice Roberts in front of Stonehenge for a BBC Two documentary: The Lost Circle Revealed to be screened on Friday. Photograph: Barney Rowe/BBC/PA 

Find backs theory that bluestones first stood at Waun Mawn before being dragged 140 miles to Wiltshire

An ancient myth about Stonehenge, first recorded 900 years ago, tells of the wizard Merlin leading men to Ireland to capture a magical stone circle called the Giants’ Dance and rebuilding it in England as a memorial to the dead.

Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account had been dismissed, partly because he was wrong on other historical facts, although the bluestones of the monument came from a region of Wales that was considered Irish territory in his day.

Now a vast stone circle created by our Neolithic ancestors has been discovered in Wales with features suggesting that the 12th-century legend may not be complete fantasy.

Its diameter of 110 metres is identical to the ditch that encloses Stonehenge and it is aligned on the midsummer solstice sunrise, just like the Wiltshire monument.

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Ancient stone circle discovered in Wales could have been dismantled and rebuilt as Stonehenge

Archaeologists believe the stone circle could have been dismantled and rebuilt / PA

Archaeologists made an “astonishing breakthrough” with the discovery of the remains of an ancient stone in Wales which they believe could have been dismantled and rebuilt as Stonehenge.

Experts believe that “they may have recovered the true origins” of the ancient monument in the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire.

It is the same area where the smaller “bluestones” found at Stonehenge, on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, are known to have come from.

The stone circle, named Waun Mawn, has key elements linking it to Stonehenge, said the team behind the discovery which was made during filming for a BBC programme.

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The Origin of Modern Humans Cannot Be Traced to Any One Single Point in Time or Space

From left to right, the skulls of Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens. (NHM)

Homo sapiens today look very different from our evolutionary origins, the microbes wriggling about in the primordial mud. But our emergence as a distinct species cannot, based on the current evidence, be conclusively traced to a single location at any single point in time.

In fact, according to a team of scientists, who have conducted a thorough review of our current understanding of human ancestry, there may never even have been such a time. Instead, the earliest known appearances of Homo sapiens traits and behaviours are consistent with a range of evolutionary histories.

We simply don't have a large enough fossil record to definitively rule on a specific time and place in which modern humans emerged.

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Researchers suggest Stonehenge’s first stone circle was transplanted from Welsh hillside

Waun Mawn during excavation in 2018, viewed from the north. The stone circle sits on the side of a hill, with distant views of Ireland to the west and the mountains of Snowdonia to the north (A. Stanford).

Professor Colin Richards, of the University of the Highlands and Islands Archaeology Institute, is co-author of a new paper proposing that a stone circle in Wales was the source of the first megaliths erected at the site of Stonehenge.

Previously, the Stones of Stonehenge research project confirmed the Wiltshire monument’s bluestones came from quarry sites in the Preseli Hills in Wales. This prompted the reinvestigation the nearby Waun Mawn stone circle to see whether it also shared links with Stonehenge.

The results, published in the journal Antiquity today, suggest the Welsh stone circle was partially dismantled in prehistory and moved 280km (175 miles) to Salisbury Plain, where it was rebuilt to form the first of Stonehenge’s five distinct phases.

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Evidence St Kilda was inhabited 2,000 years ago

Getty Images

Glasgow-based Guard Archaeology carried out the archaeological excavations between 2017 and 2019.

The work was done ahead of a refurbishment of the MoD's base in Village Bay on Hirta.

Analysis of the finds made by the archaeologists have now been made public.

Radiocarbon dating of carbonised food remains stuck to sherds of pottery indicated "intensive inhabitation" of Village Bay between the early part of the 4th Century BC to almost the end of the 1st Century BC.

The majority of the pottery dated from the Iron Age.

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What Did The Swiss Eat During The Bronze Age?

Tolochenaz – La Caroline (canton of Vaud). Late Bronze Age burial. Photograph taken

during excavation of tomb 1061 [Credit: © Archeodunum SA]

The Bronze Age (2200 to 800 BC) marked a decisive step in the technological and economic development of ancient societies. People living at the time faced a series of challenges: changes in the climate, the opening up of trade and a degree of population growth. How did they respond to changes in their diet, especially in Western Switzerland? A team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, and Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) in Spain has for the first time carried out isotopic analyses on human and animal skeletons together with plant remains. 

The scientists discovered that manure use had become widespread over time to improve crop harvests in response to demographic growth. The researchers also found that there had been a radical change in dietary habits following the introduction of new cereals, such as millet. In fact, the spread of millet reflected the need to embrace new crops following the drought that ravaged Europe during this period. Finally, the team showed that the resources consumed were mainly terrestrial. The research results are published in the journal PLOS ONE.

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Archaeologists unearth bronze age graves at Stonehenge tunnel site

One of the two Beaker-period burials found near the site of the proposed Stonehenge road tunnel. Photograph: Wessex Archaeology

Exclusive: experts also find neolithic pottery and mysterious C-shaped enclosure at A303 excavation site

Bronze age graves, neolithic pottery and the vestiges of a mysterious C-shaped enclosure that might have been a prehistoric industrial area are among the finds unearthed by archaeologists who have carried out preliminary work on the site of the proposed new road tunnel at Stonehenge.

One of the most intriguing discoveries is a unique shale object that could have been part of a staff or club found in a 4,000-year-old grave. Nearby is the resting spot of a baby buried with a small, plain beaker.

Ditches that flank the C-shaped enclosure contain burnt flint, suggesting a process such as metal or leatherworking was carried out there thousands of years ago.

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120,000-Year-Old Bone Etchings Believed To Be Among Oldest Evidence Of Human Use Of Symbols

Researchers uncovered the bone fragments while working at the open air site of Nesher Ramla, which also dates back to the Middle Paleolithic era [Credit Dr. Yossi Zaidner]

A recent discovery by archeologists from the Hebrew University and the University of Haifa alongside a team from the Le Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France have uncovered evidence of what may be the earliest-known use of symbols. The symbols were found on a bone fragment in the Ramle region in central Israel and are believed to be approximately 120,000 years old.

Remarkably the fragment remained largely intact and the researchers were able to detect six similar etchings on one side of the bone, leading them to believe that they were in the possession of something which held symbolic or spiritual significance. The find, which was recently published in the scientific journal Quaternary International, was discovered in a trove of flint tools and animal bones exposed at a site during archaeological excavations.

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Researchers Just Looked at Neanderthal Poop to Understand Their Guts

The site at El Salt, Spain, where ancient poop keeps turning up. (Photo: University of Bologna)

Around 50,000 years ago, a bunch of Neanderthals made a home — and a bathroom — out of what is now a rocky escarpment south of Valencia, Spain. Over the last few years, some of those paleo-poops, the oldest known to come from a human species, have been excavated and analysed. Now, researchers have caught a glimpse of the ecosystems that existed in the guts of those early hominins, from a faecal deposit in the remnants of a fire pit on the site.

Over 200 bacterial microorganisms were extracted from the ancient poop by an interdisciplinary team of archaeologists, microbiologists, and anthropologists. The researchers found a striking amount of consistency between the microbial residents of the Neanderthal gut and the sort of microbes that populate the guts of modern humans. That consistency shows many minuscule denizens of our insides are actually longstanding residents, living in us for hundreds of thousands of years, and have coevolved with the hominins they inhabit. The research was published in the Nature journal Communications Biology.

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Decorated rock discovered at Orkney’s Bay of Skaill

Incised rock surface at the Bay of Skaill, Orkney. (Sigurd Towrie)

The Bay of Skaill in Orkney’s West Mainland is well-known as the location of Skara Brae, a 5,000-year-old Neolithic settlement that sits above the beach at its southern end.

But the bay is equally renowned for the coastal erosion that plagues it and which, in early January, led to the discovery of a large decorated rock on the shoreline.

Sigurd Towrie, from the University of the Highlands and Islands Archaeology Institute, takes up the story.

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Reviving Ousdale Broch

After an almost complete collapse, the Ousdale Broch has been expertly restored.
CREDIT: Caithness Broch Project

A recent conservation project has breathed new life into an Iron Age broch in northern Scotland.

The Ousdale Broch, just south of Berriedale in Caithness, used to be considered one of the best-preserved brochs in the region. At some point between 2013 and 2015, however, a calamitous combination of damage from ill-judged antiquarian repairs – made in 1891 following an excavation of the site by James Mackay – and a tree growing between the broch’s walls led to the complete collapse of one of the buttresses. This subsequently led to the destabilisation of the entire construction.

When Iain Maclean and Kenneth McElroy, both of the Caithness Broch Project (CBP; see CA 322), visited in 2015, they were shocked to see just how much damage had been done. As Kenneth described it: ‘We thought within a few years it might be lost forever.’

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Europe’s Bronze Age Farmers Adapted to Drought Conditions

(© Archeodunum SA)

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND—According to a statement released by the University of Geneva, a team of scientists led by Alessandra Varalli of Spain’s Pompeu Fabra University has analyzed the biochemical composition of plant remains and the collagen in human and animal bones discovered at Bronze Age sites in western Switzerland and southeastern France. The study suggests that between 2200 and 800 B.C., the people of the region ate mostly plants and land animals, despite the presence of nearby lakes and rivers. The amount of nitrogen in the plant remains indicates that the use of manure as a crop fertilizer became widespread.

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Ancient ink: Iceman Otzi has the world's oldest tattoos

This graphic shows the general location of each of the 61 tattoos on the Iceman’s body. 

(Photograph © South Tyrol Museum of Archeology/EURAC/Samadelli/Staschitz.)

The debate about the world’s oldest tattoos is over—they belong to Ötzi, the European Tyrolean Iceman who died and was buried beneath an Alpine glacier along the Austrian–Italian border around 3250 B.C. Ötzi had 61 tattoos across his body, including his left wrist, lower legs, lower back and torso.

Previously, tattoo scholars were divided: Many believed that a mummy from the Chinchorro culture of South America had the oldest tattoo—a pencil-thin mustache. Recovered from El Morro, Chile, the mummy was believed to be about 35–40 years old at the time of his death around 4000 B.C.

In their paper published last month in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, four researchers, including Lars Krutak, research associate in the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, concluded that the Chinchorro mummy is not as old as previously thought.

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Revealed: the Neanderthal secrets hidden in a Channel Islands cave

La Cotte de St Brelade in Jersey, where the findings were made

(lacotte.org.je)

UK-based scientists have discovered the strongest physical evidence ever found for Neanderthal humans interbreeding with our own species, anatomically modern humans (AMH).

For the past 10 years researchers have succeeded in finding genetic evidence for the two species interbreeding, but this is the first time that they have identified compelling physical evidence of prehistoric Neanderthal/AMH hybrids.

The evidence consists of 11 approximately 45,000-year-old teeth studied over recent years by scientists from the Natural History Museum, University College London and the University of Kent.

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UNE SÉPULTURE COLLECTIVE À SAINT-DOULCHARD (CHER)

À Saint-Doulchard, l'Inrap a mis au jour une sépulture collective du Néolithique récent contenant une quarantaine de défunts, un type de structure jusqu’alors inconnu dans le département.

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Earth used to be cooler than we thought, which changes our math on global warming

Earth was cooler than we thought 6,000 years ago.Gerd Altmann/Pixabay

A long-standing mystery about the Holocene has a potential solution.

The last 12,000 years have been much cooler than previously thought, according to research published Wednesday in the journal Nature. And in contrast, human-caused warming of the atmosphere is even more anomalous than we’d realized. That’s because the study’s authors have found a new way to estimate historical temperatures which they say filters out seasonal shifts that had made past millennia seem warmer than they really were.

The findings offer a possible solution to an outstanding riddle about the recent history of climate change. The problem, called the Holocene warming conundrum, is that previous reconstructions of the historical climate showed a warm period from 6,000 to 10,000 years ago, followed by a period of cooling. Climate models of the same period, however, suggest that the planet would have been warming steadily.

By fine-tuning how we interpret the physical evidence of the changing climate, explains Samantha Bova, a paleoclimate researcher at Rutgers University and one of the study authors, “[the data] do show a warming that’s highly consistent with what is predicted by climate models.”

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Seahenge, Norfolk: The ancient Bronze Age circle that lay hidden for 4,000 years

The sacred 4000 year old site of Seahenge exposed briefly by the shifting sands on the Norfolk coast near Hunstanton. Credit: Alamy Stock Photo

Seanhenge lay beneath the shifting sands of the north Norfolk coast almost until the dawn of the 21st century.

In 1998, a man named John Lorimer was walking along the beach at Holme-next-the-Sea when he stumbled upon an extraordinary Bronze Age timber circle that had emerged overnight from East Anglia’s shifting sands.

Archaeologists and druids flocked to see the 55 posts circling an upside-down tree, roots in the air, a relic from 2050 BC.

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Early Bronze Age Necropolis Unearthed In Brittany

View of the necropolis of rue du Plateau [Credit: S. Blanchet, Inrap]

From October 2020, a team from Inrap has been carrying out an excavation in the commune of Plougonvelin (Finistère) on westernmost tip of Brittany, as part of a future property project. The archaeologists have unearthed an important necropolis dating from the Early Bronze Age (between 2000 and 1600 BC). To date, some fifty burials have been excavated over nearly 1800 square metres. Although other funerary complexes of this type most probably exist in Brittany, this is the first time that the opportunity has been given to study a site of this scale. 

It is worth recalling that, at the regional level, work on Early Bronze funerary practices and architectural structures has, since the 19th century, focused mainly on the innumerable Armorican tumuli. Alongside these funerary monuments, burial tombs such as those at Bono in Morbihan (L. Juhel excavation) or Santec in Finistère (Y. Lecerf excavation) are nevertheless known but remain, in the current state of research, less frequent and less documented.

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Ancient Greek Statues Unearthed from Tomb East of Athens

Two ancient Greek statues depicting female figures were uncovered from inside a burial tomb east of Athens, the Greek Ministry of Culture announced on Sunday.

The discovery was made during the construction of the new City Hall of Paiania.

According to a statement by the Ministry of Culture, the tomb is preserved in fragments, and the full-sized female figures were uncovered with their heads missing.

One of the statues, presumably belonging to a wealthy and prominent individual, sits in an elaborate seat and rests her legs on a low footrest.

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How many early human species existed on Earth?

(Image: © Jose A. Bernat Bacete via Getty Images)

We Homo sapiens didn't used to be alone. Long ago, there was a lot more human diversity; Homo sapiens lived alongside an estimated eight now-extinct species of human about 300,000 years ago. As recently as 15,000 years ago, we were sharing caves with another human species known as the Denisovans. And fossilized remains indicate an even higher number of early human species once populated Earth before our species came along.

"We have one human species right now, and historically, that's really weird," said Nick Longrich, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom. "Not that far back, we weren't that special, but now we're the only ones left."

So, how many early human species were there?

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Exploring the Stonehenge Landscape

The Stonehenge Landscape is an estate managed by the National Trust in Wiltshire, England, covering 2100 acres within UNESCO’s Stonehenge, Avebury, and Associated Sites designation.

The Stonehenge Landscape contains over 400 ancient sites, that includes burial mounds known as barrows, Woodhenge, the Durrington Walls, the Stonehenge Cursus, the Avenue, and surrounds the monument of Stonehenge which is managed by English Heritage.

DNA studies of the ancestors who built many of the monuments, suggests they originated in Anatolia on the Aegean coast of modern Turkey, and migrated west across the Mediterranean before reaching Britain around 4,000 BC (details of the studies were published in 2019 in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution). During this period, Britain was already inhabited by small groups of hunter gatherers, that were almost completely supplanted by the migrations.

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New Stone Age: Discovery of massive island ritual site where people gathered 5,500 years ago

The previously unknown large Neolithic ritual site has been found on the Isle of Arran. 

The discovery of a cursus monument site at Tormore on the Isle of Arran, which is more than a kilometre long, is helping to reshape Neolithic history in Scotland with such landmarks usually associated with the east coast.

Cursus monuments were often defined by long lines of timber posts, forming a long rectangle, and were amongst the most spectacular features in the Neolithic landscape. The posts may have served as a procession route, perhaps to honour the dead. Some were burned to the ground in an almighty display which is believed to have been part of the ceremonies associated with these huge monuments.

Dave Cowley, Rapid Archaeological Mapping Programme Manager at Historic Environment Scotland, who discovered the site following a laser scan of Arran, described the cursus monument as a “cathedral of the day”.

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Rare 5,000-year-old crystal dagger is uncovered in Prehistoric Iberian megalithic tomb that may have been used by a high-ranking person to gain 'magical powers'

Ancient tools that once belonged to prehistoric civilizations have been found all over the world, but a discovery in Spain is unlike those traditionally made of stone or flint.

A team excavating the megalithic tomb of Montelirio tholos in 2007 through 2010 uncovered a dagger formed from rock crystal that experts say is the ‘most technically sophisticated’ ever to be uncovered in Prehistoric Iberia and would have taken enormous skill to carve.

The artifact, which is about 5,000 years old, is nearly 8.5 inches long and was found along with 10 arrowheads, four blades and a core for making weapons, all of which were rock crystal.

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Objects suggest Europeans used standardized money 4,000 years ago

Bronze ribs, pictured, as well as rings, axe blades and other objects, suggest people in Central Europe were using standardized currency at the end of the Early Bronze Age.
Photo by M.H.G. Kuijpers

New research suggests groups of farmers living in Central Europe were exchanging standardized money -- in the form of bronze rings and ribs -- during the early Bronze Age, nearly 4,000 years ago.

According to the latest archaeological analysis, described Wednesday in the journal PLOS One, the use of standardized money in Central Europe may have developed independently from money systems that emerged in the Far East and Mediterranean. 

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Iron Age Village Discovered In Essex

Aerial view of the site showing the roundhouses [Credit: Oxford Archaeology East]

The remains of an Iron Age village have been found at Tye Green. Members of Oxford Archaeology East have been investigating the four hectare area for Countryside Properties and RPS Consulting, ahead of work to create new housing.

Their fieldwork suggests the site was important in the late Iron Age and early Roman periods, but could have come to harm - possibly as a result of Boudiccan reprisals

The site has a large defensive enclosure dug in the late 1st century BC, with 17 roundhouses and 17 semi-circular shapes which could have been screens or windbreaks. Smaller semi-circular structures are also associated with hearths.

The depth of the roundhouse gullies has suggested that the buildings were up to 15m in diameter. Archaeologists said the enclosure had an avenue-like entrance and aligned with the central roundhouse. Structures similar to medieval granary stores could have been stored grain taxes.

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Iron Age skeletons uncovered during Navenby dig

 Two Iron Age skeletons have been discovered during excavation works in Lincolnshire.

The bones were uncovered at separate archaeological sites near Navenby, as part of preparation work for a water pipeline project.

Other finds included parts of small buildings and fragments of pottery.

Anglian Water's heritage assessor Jo Everitt said the finds would help archaeologists understand more about the region's past.

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Searching for the people of Doggerland

 

This hammerstone was recently found off the coast of Norfolk. CREDIT: University of Bradford

Around 8,150 years ago, a sudden shift in the seabed created the Storegga tsunami in the North Sea. With all known evidence pointing towards this event greatly affecting, but not completely inundating, Doggerland (the strip of land that once connected Britain to continental Europe – see CA 367), the search is now on for evidence of human occupation. While it is thought that there must have been significant Mesolithic groups living here during the period, without knowing just how populated the area was likely to be it cannot be determined how catastrophic the tsunami may have been. 

As part of the ‘Europe’s Lost Frontiers’ project, researchers from the University of Bradford have been analysing the evolution of Doggerland, tracing its gradual inundation. At the end of the last Ice Age, c.11,700 years ago, Doggerland probably stretched all the way from Yorkshire to Denmark, but by 9000 cal BC the North Sea had begun to flood in, creating an archipelago that predominately included ‘Dogger Island’ (an upland area in the northern reaches of Doggerland) and Dogger Bank off the eastern coast of Great Britain. By the time of the Storegga tsunami, this landmass had shrunk even more, greatly reducing the size of both areas to shallow sandbanks. (More information on this process, along with the full impact of the tsunami, was recently published in Antiquity journal: https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2020.49)

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A warty pig painted on a cave wall 45,500 years ago is the world's oldest depiction of an animal

 

The world's oldest known figurative artwork has been discovered in a cave in Indonesia -- an endearing image of a warty pig.

Archaeologists working on the site on the island of Sulawesi said the cave art was at least 45,500 years old. It is also thought to be the oldest surviving image of an animal. Painted using red ocher pigment, the animal appears to be observing a fight or social interaction between two other warty pigs.

This region is home to many intriguing limestone caves where other discoveries have been made. Cave art depicting a hunting scene dating to 43,900 years ago was also found in Sulawesi in late 2019. The same team of archaeologists in 2014 found human hand stencils, which were dated to 40,000 years ago. 

 

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Iron Age Settlement With Large Roundhouses and Roman Trinkets Found in the UK

 

The footprints of some of the Iron Age roundhouses (vans at top for scale).

Photo: Oxford Archaeology East

Over the course of 2020, a patchwork of circles were dug out from below the topsoil of Tye Green, Cressing in England. The circles—each a ring of polygonal depressions—were the footprints of large structures, all that remained of a settlement that began in the late Iron Age and lasted through the Roman conquest of Britain. The site was recently excavated by Oxford Archaeology East for Countryside Properties with RPS Consulting in advance of residential development there.

The archaeological work, carried out with social distancing and other measures to avoid the spread of covid-19, turned up the remains of at least 17 wattle-and-daub roundhouses, some nearly 50 feet (15 meters) across, and semi-circular structures that the archaeological team say may have served as windbreaks, which would have protected hearths, furnaces, or other fiery elements of life at the time.

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Early humans may have survived the harsh winters by hibernating

The site at Sima de los Huesos was a mass grave 400,000 years ago. Photograph: César Manso/AFP/Getty Images

Bears do it. Bats do it. Even European hedgehogs do it. And now it turns out that early human beings may also have been at it. They hibernated, according to fossil experts.

Evidence from bones found at one of the world’s most important fossil sites suggests that our hominid predecessors may have dealt with extreme cold hundreds of thousands of years ago by sleeping through the winter.

The scientists argue that lesions and other signs of damage in fossilised bones of early humans are the same as those left in the bones of other animals that hibernate. These suggest that our predecessors coped with the ferocious winters at that time by slowing down their metabolisms and sleeping for months.

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Neolithic Scotland: the Big Picture and Detailed Narratives in 2020

Rhind Lectures 2020

December 18 @ 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

The Scottish Neolithic clearly fascinated Alexander Henry Rhind and he made important, and very early, contributions to its understanding. In the 170 years since Rhind’s prehistoric exploits, our understanding and perception of this fascinating period in Scotland’s past have been utterly transformed.

This series of six lectures will offer an in-depth assessment of the current state of our knowledge about the period c.4000-2500 BC, when new ways of living and of making sense of the world appeared and developed in Scotland. This involved the active production of food, as opposed to its procurement from wild resources, which had characterised subsistence strategies over the preceding millennia. Globally, the advent of food production with the possibilities it brought for accumulating surpluses has conventionally been hailed as a revolution, with major long-term consequences for the ways societies operated. 

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Child's Bones Buried 40,000 Years Ago Solve a Longstanding Neanderthal Mystery

We don't know whether it was a boy or a girl. But this ancient child, a Neanderthal, only made it to about two years of age.

This short life, lived about 41,000 years ago, was uncovered at a famous archaeological site in southwestern France, called La Ferrassie. The remains of several Neanderthals have been found there, including the most recent discovery, the child, known only as La Ferrassie 8.

When the ancient remains were first found – most at various stages of the early 20th century – archaeologists had assumed the skeletons represented intentional burials, with Neanderthals laying their departed kin to rest under the earth.

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'Mystery' pit skeleton found during Bishop's Stortford digs

The skull and collarbone of the body had collapsed into the remains of its ribs, while the rest of the body fell into the pit

OXFORD ARCHAEOLOGY EAST

A skeleton discovered leaning against the sides of a pit with its legs outstretched is "a little mystery", an archaeologist has said.

The find was made during an excavation at Whittington Way, Bishop's Stortford in Hertfordshire, along with Bronze Age and Roman burials.

Project manager Louise Moan said the site had evidently been "a sacred place" for centuries.

The skeleton was one of hundreds of finds from two digs in the town.

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Melting ice patch in Norway reveals large collection of ancient arrows

 

An arrow from c. AD 700 as it was found lying on the stones in the scree, close to the melting ice. Credit: Innlandet Fylkeskommune

A team of researchers affiliated with a host of institutions in Norway and one in the U.K., has unveiled their findings after collecting and studying a very large number of ancient arrows they found near a melting ice patch in Norway's Jotunheimen Mountains. In their paper published in the journal The Holocene, the group describes how they kept their research secret to avoid the possibility of others contaminating the site and what they have learned about the arrows thus far.

Back in 2006, archeologist Reidar Marstein found an ancient shoe lying near a melting ice patch (which subsequent recent has shown to have formed approximately around 5600BC) in the Jotunheimen Mountains. The shoe was initially believed to have been from the Viking era, but subsequent study showed it to be approximately 3,300 years old.

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Block excavation of early Celtic tomb near the Heuneburg in southern Germany

The burial chamber can be seen within the bright gravel ring. The burial chamber is filled with humus. The light gravel ring comes from lower altitudes and was excavated by the early Celtic builders when the grave shaft was created [Credit: State Office for Monument Preservation in the Stuttgart Regional Council/Michael Lingnau]

The Heuneburg is a prehistoric hillfort by the river Danube in Hundersingen near Herbertingen, between Ulm and Sigmaringen, Baden-Wurttemberg, in the south of Germany, close to the modern borders with Switzerland and Austria.

Since 2019, the State Office for the Preservation of Monuments (LAD) in the Stuttgart Regional Council has been investigating an early Celtic large burial mound in the Bettelbuhl area in the Danube plain below Heuneburg.

Because it is not possible to uncover the burial on site in a professional manner, the entire burial chamber was recovered en bloc. 

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Study Rewrites History of Ancient Land Bridge Between Britain and Europe

 New research suggests that climate change, not a tsunami, doomed the now-submerged territory of Doggerland

As recently as 20,000 years ago—not long in geological terms—Britain was not, in fact, an island. Instead, the terrain that became the British Isles was linked to mainland Europe by Doggerland, a tract of now-submerged territory where early Mesolithic hunter-gatherers lived, settled and traveled.

Doggerland gradually shrank as rising sea levels flooded the area. Then, around 6150 B.C., disaster struck: The Storegga Slide, a submarine landslide off the coast of Norway, triggered a tsunami in the North Sea, flooding the British coastline and likely killing thousands of humans based in coastal settlements, reports Esther Addley for the Guardian.

Historians have long assumed that this tsunami was the deciding factor that finally separated Britain from mainland Europe. But new archaeological research published in the December issue of Antiquity argues that Doggerland may have actually survived as an archipelago of islands for several more centuries.

Co-author Vincent Gaffney, an archaeologist at the University of Bradford, has spent the past 15 years surveying Doggerland’s underwater remains as part of the Europe’s Lost Frontiers project. Using seismic mapping, computer simulations and other techniques, Gaffney and his colleagues have successfully mapped the territory’s marshes, rivers and other geographical features.

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Archaeologists Discover ‘Amazing’ Iron Age Grave In Lofoten

Norwegian archaeologists have found a remarkably well-preserved skeleton believed to date from the Iron Age during an excavation on the Lofoten Islands.

Earlier this year, a team of archaeologists were surprised to discover a femur and hip bone during a routine excavation on Gimsøya island in Norway's Lofoten.

The work continued, and the team was astonished to discover the entire upper body skeleton completely intact.

 

Archaeologist Anja Roth Niemi from Norway's Arctic University Museum is the project manager. She told NRK that parts of the grave are incredibly well-preserved, which is surprising given the work that went on in the area during the 1950s and 1960s.

“The upper body has not been disturbed by soil levelling or other human activity. It is absolutely amazing,” she said.

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Nächste Runde im Streit um das Alter der Himmelsscheibe von Nebra

 Die Himmelsscheibe von Nebra gilt als die älteste konkrete astronomische Darstellung der Welt. Lange Zeit war sich die Fachwelt einig, dass der Fund der Bronzezeit zugeordnet werden kann. Zwei deutsche Prähistoriker behaupteten in diesem Jahr, dass die Scheibe aus der Eisenzeit stamme und lösten damit eine Kontroverse aus. Nun ist in der von der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften herausgegebenen Fachzeitschrift »Archaeologia Austriaca« eine Erwiderung erschienen - die Autoren bekräftigen die Datierung der Himmelsscheibe in die Bronzezeit.

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Stonehenge

Stonehenge in southern England ranks among the world's most iconic archaeological sites and one of its greatest enigmas. The megalithic circle on Salisbury Plain inspires awe and fascination—but also intense debate some 4,600 years after it was built by ancient Britons who left no written record.

The monument's mysterious past has spawned countless tales and theories. According to folklore, Stonehenge was created by Merlin, the wizard of Arthurian legend, who magically transported the massive stones from Ireland, where giants had assembled them. Another legend says invading Danes put the stones up, and another theory says they were the ruins of a Roman temple. Modern-day interpretations are no less colorful: some argue that Stonehenge is a spacecraft landing area for aliens, and even more say it's a giant fertility symbol in the shape of female genitalia.

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Construction Workers Unearth Ancient Greek Gem in Downtown Athens

credit: Facebook.com/KostasBakoyannis

Α spectacular ancient Greek sculpture was unearthed in the downtown Agia Irini (St Irene) Square of Athens on Saturday during construction work.

The news was shared by Kostas Bakoyannis, the mayor of the city of Athens, through a Facebook post.

There is still not much information about how old the sculpture is or who it depicts.

Some speculate the marble head belongs to an ancient Greek God, probably Zeus, others say it depicts a prominent ancient Athenian.

Others claim that the sculpture is typical of the type of Hermes Propylaeus of Alkamenos, and it is believed to date back to the 4th or 3rd century AD.

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