A small piece of jawbone unearthed in a cave in Spain is the oldest known fossil of a human ancestor in Europe and suggests that people lived on the continent much earlier than previously believed, scientists say.
The researchers said the fossil found last year at Atapuerca in northern Spain, along with stone tools and animal bones, is up to 1.3 million years old. That would be 500,000 years older than remains from a 1997 find that prompted the naming of a new species: Homo antecessor, or Pioneer Man, possibly a common ancestor to Neanderthals and modern humans.
When archaeologists excavated brick tombs outside a ceremonial site for an early king of Egypt, they expected to find the remains of high officials who had been sacrificed to accompany the king in his posthumous travels.
Instead, they found donkeys.
No other animals have ever been found at such sites. Even at the tombs of the kings themselves, the only animals buried alongside were ones full of symbolism like lions.
But at this funerary complex, overlooking the ancient town of Abydos on the Nile about 300 miles south of Cairo, the archaeologists discovered the skeletons of 10 donkeys that had been buried as if they were high-ranking human officials.
One of the most important archaeological finds for decades has been uncovered during a sewer improvement project in Poulton.
The remains of a Roman roundhouse, thought to date back to the second century, have been discovered on grazing land close to the town.
The find was made by workers from United Utilities who were involved in preliminary excavations at the start of a £10 million sewer improvement scheme for the area.
In the fall of 2006, a history devotee named Dean Thomas was surprised by something he saw on eBay, the online auction house. Someone was offering 144-year-old letters sent by munitions companies to Philadelphia's Frankford Arsenal, a major supplier of the Union Army during the Civil War. How had he missed these? Thomas wondered. Hadn't he combed the records of that very arsenal in that very conflict? "Boy, am I a dummy," he thought.
One of the most fascinating aspects of archaeology is dealing with the unexpected.
Archaeologists with the Coastal Heritage Society have been digging in Emmet Park and Madison Square. They’re looking for evidence from the Revolutionary War era, but are encountering surprises from other periods of history along the way.
“We’ve found an Indian site, a midden or trash heap,” says Rita Elliott, curator of exhibits and archaeology for the CHS, says. “We’ve found oyster shells, animal bones and pottery.”
DROGHEDA Port Company`s plans for a new deep water port at Bremore near Balbriggan have run into controversy after a leading Meath archaeologist said that the chosen site was of huge archaeological and historical significance and could have been the place where St Patrick first landed in Ireland.
The company plans to build the major new port at a cost of €300 million. However, Meath archaeologist Professor George Eogan, known for his work on the Newgrange, Knowth, and Dowth archaeological sites, says that the area contains a unified prehistoric cemetery of mounds that extends for over a mile, from Gormanston, north of the Delvin river, to Bremore, which is to the south of the river. The river marks the boundary between Meath and Fingal.
He said that Bremore had the appearance of being a landing place for early people coming to Ireland and that passage tombs were the likely burial places for people coming from the Iberian peninsula.
Corn has long been known as the primary food crop in prehistoric North and Central America. Now it appears it may have been an important part of the South American diet for much longer than previously thought, according to new research by University of Calgary archaeologists who are cobbling together the ancient history of plant domestication in the New World.
In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, U of C PhD student Sonia Zarrillo and archaeology professor Dr. Scott Raymond report that a new technique for examining ancient cooking pots has produced the earliest directly dated examples of domesticated corn (maize) being consumed on the South American continent. Their discovery shows the spread of maize out of Mexico more than 9,000 years ago occurred much faster than previously believed and provides evidence that corn was likely a vital food crop for villages in tropical Ecuador at least 5,000 years ago.
One of the enduring mysteries of world history is whether the Americas had any contact with the Old World before Columbus, apart from the brief Viking settlement in Newfoundland. Many aspects of higher civilisation in the New World, from the invention of pottery to the building of pyramids, have been ascribed to European, Asian or African voyagers, but none has stood up to scrutiny.
The one convincing piece of evidence for pre-Hispanic contact has been the humble sweet potato, which is of tropical American origin but widely cultivated across the Pacific islands. Until a few years ago it was assumed that this was the result of Spanish transmission, dating to the early colonial period, but archaeological discoveries in the Cook Islands show this to be wrong: excavations at Mangaia yielded carbonised remains of sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) dating to AD1000, five centuries before Europeans entered the Pacific Ocean.
A University of Louisville research team recently helped the Louisville Science Center learn more about an old friend — a 2,600-year-old friend.
Actually, the friend, a mummy called Then-Hotep, is more like a family member, having been one of the most popular attractions at the science center and its forerunner, the Natural History Museum, since the early part of the last century. But throughout all of those years, it kept one big secret: Nobody knew its gender.
Until now. Under the leadership of professor Aly Farag, director of the Computer Vision and Imaging Process lab at J.B. Speed School of Engineering, the UofL team applied technological and forensic expertise to verify that Then-Hotep is a female.
A series of discoveries of ancient bison bones on Vancouver Island and nearby Orcas Island in Washington state is fuelling excitement among researchers that the Pacific coast offered a food-rich ecosystem for Ice Age hunters some 14,000 years ago -- much earlier than the prevailing scientific theory pegs the arrival of humans to the New World.
Fourteen separate finds of remains of the extinct species bison antiquus -- an ancestor of the plains buffalo that would become a staple much later for Midwest natives -- show the islands were once part of a coastal grassland refuge from the glaciers that enveloped the rest of Canada and the northern U.S. at that time.
And among the relics found in areas including the Saanich Peninsula is a particularly tantalizing piece of evidence: a leg bone from Orcas Island that appears to have been butchered by a human -- hundreds of years before humans were thought to have migrated to North America.
Archaeologists in Egypt have found a giant statue of an ancient queen at the site of two already huge Colossi of Memnon in southern Egypt. Reports indicate that the statue represents Queen Tiy, the wife of 18th dynasty Pharaoh Amenhotep III.
It is approximately 12 feet tall (3.62 meters). The entire site is expected to be excavated over the next five years, archaeologists said on Saturday.
The colossi's twin statues stand at the entrance to the road that leads to Luxor's famous Valley of the Kings.
The messy past of the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum grounds is coming to the surface, and it’s getting in the way of the future.
For 40 years it has been known as Fort Fisher, a tree-shaded riverside park that centers around Waco’s most popular museum. Until recent years, the 35-acre site also housed a major RV park and was the grounds of the Brazos River Festival.
It now appears Fort Fisher may sit atop hundreds of deceased Wacoans, including rich and poor, Confederate soldiers, a World War II veteran and a former slave who became a Texas legislator. Burials range from 1856 to 1966, archives show, contradicting city leaders’ speculations that the cemetery was abandoned since the early 20th century.
Archaeologists want to use light to recreate the brilliant colors once seen on Trajan's Column in Rome.
The chaste white of Roman temples and monuments is a product of centuries of wear that has removed the original paint. The archaeology department in Rome is discussing the technical details of creating a light beam that would temporarily repaint the column, with the power company Acea and researchers at Rome University, the Italian news agency Ansa reported.
Although it is a well-established scientific fact, evolution remains a controversial subject in the United States, and especially the issue of teaching evolution or creationism in public schools. An argument that appears to be increasingly popular among creationists is based on a postmodernist notion that science is simply one among many different but equal "ways of knowing," and that its ascendancy over other methods is due to conflicts between social power structures rather than any objective superiority. Several creationist writers have argued that science's exclusive reliance on natural causes (so called "methodological naturalism") is an a priori assumption, or an arbitrary preference, and therefore that both it and religion are equally valid epistemologies. In addition, they argue that the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment prohibit government from endorsing or granting "preferences" to science over supernaturalism.
This article is a response to these theories. In Part I, I argue that science is an objectively superior means of knowing, and that methodological naturalism is not an a priori assumption, but both an a posteriori preference and one that is necessary for any valid epistemology. I also reject the argument that naturalism or "humanism" are "religions" or that science requires a "leap of faith." In Part II, I address whether the First Amendment requires the government to remain "neutral" between supernatural and naturalistic worldviews. I conclude with some general observations on the conflict between science and supernaturalism.
Archaeologists recently announced what they call a “remarkable find” – the discovery of a relatively intact Mycenaean settlement, dating from 3,500 years ago, in the southern part of Greece.
The site, called Korphos-Kalamianos, is partly underwater and lies along an isolated and rocky shoreline in the Saronic Gulf in the western Aegean Sea, about 100 kilometres southwest of Athens. Considered by archaeologists to have been a military outpost, the entire town’s plan is preserved and consists of more than 900 walls, as well as building remains and alleyways and streets.
Archaeologists today removed the skeleton that was found beneath the floor of a south valley home earlier this week. Early indications are that the bones are hundreds of years old and Native American.
The experts from the Museum of Archaeology in Cedar Crest were asked by the state to examine the remains and the property where they were discovered, when they uncovered numerous artifacts.
Archaeologist, Deborah Sweat said the wheel barrel looks to contain the whole body.
IT is the 14,000-year-old version of a snow dome.
Travellers during the late Ice Age would pick up an etched horse jawbone as a souvenir of their time in Europe.
Arriving in Wales they would then display the trinket in their cave as a memento of their time abroad.
And now experts believe this 11,500BC example is the “oldest ever piece of Welsh artwork”.
The work of archaeologists reminds us of our own mortality and tells us that we must preserve our cultural heritage, not just for ourselves but also for future generations. That is the reason why I believe archaeology has to be given a higher prominence and status in government thinking than perhaps it occupies now.
There are big issues facing archaeology. The most important is to see that the teaching of history is related to the archaeological dimension, so that students can see history not as a list of dates and events, but as an understanding how people and societies lived in the past. Secondly, there needs to be more attention paid to seeing that local people can help unearth the past of their own community.
The key factor in the work Steve Sherlock undertook at Loftus was that it involved Loftus people acting as volunteers in the discovery of their past.
ARCHAEOLOGISTS working on the site of a planned shopping and leisure complex have unearthed an historic ditch.
A team from Onsite Archaeologists working at the Friarsgate development in Lichfield for the last six months made the discovery after removing concrete and tons of earth.
The ditch was found in the District Council House car park on Frog Lane.
The experts believe it would have been used to stop traders entering the city without paying the toll at the city gates. It may also have been used for defensive purposes.
On most days, the job of the state’s archaeologist is anything but riveting.
Dennis Griffin spends the bulk of his daylight hours sorting through permit applications to ensure that developments don’t disturb sensitive historical grounds. He does some research, looks for signs of historic or prehistoric stuff in the vicinity and then signs off.
Yawn.
But a few weeks ago Griffin’s job became just about the most interesting vocation in Oregon, especially if you’ve got any affinity for all things ancient. Phone calls started pouring into the State Historical Preservation Office about strange things that were “washing up” on Oregon beaches — things that, as it turned out, had been there for decades, waiting to be rediscovered by harsh winters that munch beaches and anemic summers that fail to replace that sand.
An 18th century greenhouse heating system and a 15th century boundary wall are among various findings at the ongoing Ayscoughfee Hall dig.
At the end of January Norfolk Archaeology Unit workers moved into the grounds of the Spalding hall to delve into the rich history of the building, excavating near the well and digging trenches into the grass.
The work aims to gain a better understanding of the history and archaeology of the gardens and the way in which they developed over time and several schools from the area have toured the grounds.
A shape comparison of the most complete fossil femur (thigh bone) of one of the earliest known pre-humans, or hominins, with the femora of living apes, modern humans and other fossils, indicates the earliest form of bipedalism occurred at least six million years ago and persisted for at least four million years. William Jungers, Ph.D., of Stony Brook University, and Brian Richmond, Ph.D., of George Washington University, say their finding indicates that the fossil belongs to very early human ancestors, and that upright walking is one of the first human characteristics to appear in our lineage, right after the split between human and chimpanzee lineages. Their findings are published in the March 21 issue of the journal Science.
A team led by two Texas A&M University anthropologists now believes the first Americans came to this country 1,000 to 2,000 years earlier than the 13,500 years ago previously thought, which could shift historic timelines.
The team's findings are outlined in a review article in the journal Science entitled "The Late Pleistocene Dispersal of Modern Humans in the Americas," which synthesizes new data suggesting the migration from Alaska started about 15,000 years ago.
“Don’t go into blogging to make a living,” Mr. Cuban warned in an e-mail message. Still, he and other top bloggers with day jobs agree most people could attract a following on the Web. And whether a person blogs to make a little money, to influence opinion or just for sheer ego gratification, amassing a large audience is the goal.
Here’s what a number of successful bloggers with successful nonblogging careers say are the ways to think about getting into the business of blogging.
PART of Colchester's ancient Roman wall has been uncovered.
Parts of the South Gate were discovered while gas mains were being laid by Morrisons in Queen Street, Colchester.
Philip Crummy, director and chief archaeologist of the Colchester Archaeological Trust, said the remains found showed the original Roman gate had been remodelled in medieval times.
Azhii peralai: from the deep … large waves.
This is the expression for ‘tsunami’ in Tamil, the oldest language in southern India.
For an ancient dialect to have its own phrase for destructive waves triggered by earthquakes, the people of Tamil Nadu likely experienced tsunamis periodically through the centuries, says Halifax scientist Alan Ruffman.
Clovis-age natives, often noted for overhunting during their brief dominance in a primitive North America, deserve clemency in the case of California's flightless sea duck. New evidence says it took thousands of years for the duck to die out.
A team of six scientists, including Jon M. Erlandson of the University of Oregon, pronounced their verdict in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (online, March 13) after holding court on thousands of years of archaeological testimony taken from bones of the extinct sea duck uncovered from 14 sites on islands off the California Coast and 12 mainland sites from southern California northward.
This work establishes that people coexisted with, and fairly obviously preyed on, a flightless, ground-nesting bird for some 8,000 years. In the Greater Antilles, there is strong evidence that people coexisted with ground sloths for 1,000 years (14). We are thus now learning that rapid extinction is not the only possible outcome for such vulnerable species as flightless ducks and huge sloths, even if it is a common one. We are also learning that late Pleistocene species that became stranded on islands did not always require a human presence to end their existence. Mammoths became extinct on St. Paul Island in the Bering Sea after 5,700 14C years ago even though people did not arrive there until historic times (15, 16). A similar event occurred in Ireland and on the Isle of Man, where the giant deer Megaloceros was lost shortly after 11,000 14C years ago, again before people arrived (17).
It is all so much more complicated than we thought only a few years ago. What has made the difference is the construction of individual species histories. Rather than assuming that everything was lost at the same time and for the same reason, an assumption that is still routinely made for North America, focusing on the histories of individual species takes into explicit account the fact that, as Henry Gleason (18) once put it, every species "is a law unto itself." Paleoecologists and ecologists alike now recognize that "Gleasonian individualism" is the general rule, not the exception. If that is the case, the knotty problem of understanding the North American extinctions is not likely to be solved until each species involved has been provided with its own history. This process is well under way in Eurasia, but has barely begun in North America (19).
The bird’s persistence into the Holocene was generally
attributed to a relatively recent development of watercraft by
Native Californians (10). Once good boats became available,
California Indians were able to reach the islands, islets, and
offshore rocks the birds used as breeding colonies—then exploit
them into extinction.
Archaeological data from the last decade provide new insights
into the antiquity of watercraft use along the California coast
that have important implications for the chronology and duration
of Chendytes’ exploitation.
Our archaeological chronology for the extinction of Chendytes shows
that exterminating even such a vulnerable species from continental settings took millennia of hunting by Native Americans. In contrast, Clovis peoples show no sign of such prolonged exploitation on a larger continental stage.
. . .
Along the continental mainland of North America, the protracted span of hunting that led to the extermination of Chendytes lawi contrasts with both the insular situations and megafaunal extinctions as envisioned in the Pleistocene overkill hypothesis. The Chendytes record is consistent with the Eurasian situation in suggesting that the extermination of entire populations from continents, particularly multiple species, should have been protracted and archaeologically visible if overhunting was the sole or primary cause.
The skeleton was "crouched" which was typical of the time
A 4,000-year-old Bronze Age skeleton has been unearthed by archaeologists working on a site in east Kent.
Canterbury Archaeological Trust said the curled-up skeleton was an example of a "Beaker" burial because of the pottery vessel placed at its feet.
Education officer Marion Green said the "beautifully decorated" pot could have been "a type of beer mug".
Fast evolution, in fact, probably drove the initial Neanderthal/human divergence, which likely began as genetic drift -- random changes in DNA. As the two groups parted ways, their changing environments likely drove more substantial changes in body shape and size, in response to differing needs.
Weaver and colleagues Charles Roseman and Chris Stringer created a model to determine how long it would have taken genetic drift to create the cranial differences observed between Neanderthal and modern human skeletons.
The model used prior information on how microsatellites, aka "junk DNA," can change, or drift, over time in a species. Over time, those changes can accumulate enough for an entirely new species to evolve.
New technologies seem to make almost everyone's job easier, and archaeology is no exception. One of the newest and most exciting tools in the archaeologist's kit is aerial laser scanning, sometimes referred to as Light Detection And Ranging, or LiDAR. It works a bit like radar, but instead of using radio waves, it uses infrared laser pulses. The echoes can "see" through trees and shrubs, revealing the precise contours of the ground surface.
In the April issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, University of Vienna archaeologist Michael Doneus and colleagues report the results of a LiDAR survey of the Iron Age hill fort of Purbach in eastern Austria.
In 2004 Andrew Chugg published the hypothesis that the corpse identified as St Mark the Evangelist, which was shipped to Venice from Alexandria in the early ninth century, might actually be the remains of Alexander the Great. At that time this suggestion rested mainly on circumstantial evidence, but now a large block of sculpture found embedded in the foundations of St Mark's Basilica in Venice just a few metres from the Saint's tomb has been independently identified as a funerary relief from a high status Macedonian tomb of the 3rd century BC. Stone tests have revealed a fossil mix which seemed at first to suggest a Roman quarry near Trieste, but it has recently transpired that the stone used for the core blocks of the pyramid of Cheop's son at Abu Roash in Egypt is also remarkably similar. This pyramid began to be quarried for sculptural stone by Alexander's successors in Egypt, probably in order to embellish their monuments in Alexandria, including Alexander's tomb. Alexandria lies just 100 miles down the Nile from this mostly destroyed pyramid, which would have been the most convenient source of good quality stone for the city at the time.
Archaeologists have found what they think is the remains of an Iron Age settlement under part of a Wearside school.
The surprising discovery was made by experts carrying out a study for contractors Balfour Beatty, who are working on the new £17.3m Northumbrian Water-sponsored academy to replace Castle View School.
The study is part of planning conditions laid down by Sunderland Council because school is on the site of the historic Hylton Dene, but archaeologist Dr Andy Towle said he did not expect to find Iron Age remains.
A group accused of operating clandestine mines across an important but sparsely guarded complex of neolithic Chinese culture is now facing criminal trial, Chinese government officials say.
The illicit iron-ore mines, accompanied by crude on-site refining facilities, seriously defaced the Niuheliang site, which holds some of China's earliest known temples, altars, sacred sculptures, and stargazing structures, according to the officials.
The state, which has ultimate say about what happens to prehistoric bones found at a construction site this week, will try to bury the remains as close as possible to where they were found.
The recommendations of the Seminole and Miccosukee tribes will play a large part in the ultimate decision, said Ryan Wheeler, state archaeologist.
"Their recommendations are very important to us," Wheeler said.
ARCHAEOLOGISTS found signs of the old Wesleyan Chapel, but no signs of Bradley Old Hall, when they excavated the grounds of the soon-to-be demolished Nelson Youth Centre.
There are plans to build a new youth and community centre, as well as provide facilities for homeless young people, on the site as part of the Bradley Masterplan.
This has identified the area around the bottom of Hilldrop as the "hub" in the plan to brighten up that area.
The five-acre lot in Japantown seems as flat and innocuous as can be. Yet historians and neighbors haven't been so palpably excited about a construction site in two decades.
Or, more accurately, about what lies beneath it: Heinlenville. It was San Jose's last Chinatown.
Starting on Tuesday, historians, archaeologists and two community members will spend 10 days digging on the block bounded by Jackson, Sixth, Taylor and Seventh streets. Their hope? To find a trove of post-1887 artifacts from the lost community that provided a rare sanctuary amid the anti-Chinese hostility gripping California.
Utah State University's luminescence geochronology laboratory is helping archaeologists and geologists study ancient sites threatened by erosion by the Colorado River.
Last month, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation awarded $2.3 million to study archaeological sites below Glen Canyon Dam, including at least one that may have been in danger of further erosion during the recent high-flow experiment.
In the test, bureau officials released about 41,500 cubic feet of water per second for 60 hours. The experiment is to check whether spring flooding, curtailed since construction of Glen Canyon Dam began in 1963, would benefit native fish, rebuild sandbars and return fine sediment to the Colorado River system.
While there is a certain grand mystery to some aspects of human behavior, others can be easily explained. Just find yourself a garden-variety house cat, along with a $10 laser pointer.
Many cat owners know that the lasers are the easiest way to keep the pet amused. The cats will ceaselessly, maniacally chase it as it's beamed about the room, literally climbing the walls to capture what they surely regard as some form of ultimate prey.
Obviously, cats are hard-wired to hunt down small, bright objects, like birds. But since nothing in nature is as bright as a laser, they are powerless to resist its charms.
Cats and lasers are useful in explaining some of the more addictive aspects of Web use. . .
In other words, coming across what Dr. Biederman calls new and richly interpretable information triggers a chemical reaction that makes us feel good, which in turn causes us to seek out even more of it. The reverse is true as well: We want to avoid not getting those hits because, for one, we are so averse to boredom.
For most of human history, there was little chance of overdosing on information, because any one day in the Olduvai Gorge was a lot like any other. Today, though, we can find in the course of a few hours online more information than our ancient ancestors could in their whole lives.
Researchers have found the ruins of an Inca temple built for religious ceremonies in the Andes mountains, at a park in the archeologically rich region of southern Peru that includes Machu Picchu.
The temple measures 2,700 sq feet, includes 11 rooms of various sizes and an area in the shape of a Chacana, an Incan religious symbol.
"This was an adoration center," said Oscar Rodriguez, a researcher at the Sacsayhuaman archeological park that, like the ancient Incan citadel of Machu Picchu, is a popular tourist destination.
Long considered a modern invention, animation has apparently been lying about its age. A 5,200-year-old bowl found in Iran’s Burnt City in the 1970s features a series of five images that researchers have only recently identified as being sequential, much like those in a zoetrope. Giving the bowl a spin, one would see a goat leaping to snatch leaves from a tree, as seen in the video clip below.
Archaeologists say instead of discovering a crime scene, a construction crew in Tampa unearthed an apparent historical site earlier this week.
On Tuesday, deputies were called to the site, which is located off of U.S. Highway 301 near Martin Luther King Boulevard. They say a construction crew was digging for a septic tank when they found human bones buried between five and six feet underground.
At first, investigators thought the bones could be related to some sort of criminal activity, but archeologists from the University of South Florida and the Hillsborough County Medical Examiners Office say the bones are likely more than 1,000 years old.
Nearly all of today's Native Americans in North, Central and South America can trace part of their ancestry to six women whose descendants immigrated around 20,000 years ago, a DNA study suggests.
Those women left a particular DNA legacy that persists to today in about about 95 percent of Native Americans, researchers said.
The finding does not mean that only these six women gave rise to the migrants who crossed into North America from Asia in the initial populating of the continent, said study co-author Ugo Perego.
The women lived between 18,000 and 21,000 years ago, though not necessarily at exactly the same time, he said.
Archaeologists have unearthed the skull of a young woman in northern Greece who is believed to have undergone head surgery in the third century, Greek news media reported Wednesday.
A Greek team discovered the skeleton at an ancient cemetery in Veria, with the skull including an injury that led them to conclude the surgery had been performed.
"We think that there was a complex surgical intervention that only an experienced doctor could have performed," said Ioannis Graikos, the head of the archaeological dig.
The El Hibeh tell — a mound of ancient human architecture, artifacts and debris — is so rich with the remnants of human life in central Egypt that shards of pottery literally crunch under a visitor’s feet. Beads, jug handles, and even bits of fabric are visible to the naked eye, making collection and cataloging both an exciting and daunting task.
The discovery of the remains of a Roman villa in Cambridgeshire has left archaeologists "blown away".
The villa, hidden deep in more than a square mile of ancient woodland at Bedford Purlieus, near Peterborough, had gone unnoticed over the centuries.
Experts believe the remains at the site, just off the A47 at Wansford, probably date back to between the second and fourth centuries AD.
More bones of unusually small-bodied people who lived long ago have been found on another Pacific island, and some scientists say this calls into question claims that the first such specimens, from Indonesia, represent a separate human species.
In a report released Monday, Lee Berger, a paleoanthropologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, described finding the skulls and bones of at least 25 individuals in two caves in Palau, in the Western Caroline Islands of Micronesia. The people apparently lived there 1,400 to 3,000 years ago.
. . .
“Based on the evidence from Palau,” Dr. Berger’s team concluded, “we hypothesize that reduction in the size of the face and chin, large dental size and other features noted here may in some cases be correlates of extreme body size reduction in H. sapiens.”
Greek workers discovered around 1,000 graves, some filled with ancient treasures, while excavating for a subway system in the historic city of Thessaloniki, the state archaeological authority said Monday.
Some of the graves, which dated from the first century B.C. to the 5th century A.D., contained jewelry, coins and various pieces of art, the Greek archaeological service said in a statement.
Thessaloniki was founded around 315 B.C. and flourished during the Roman and Byzantine eras. Today it is the Mediterranean country's second largest city.
A long time ago - a very long time ago - obsidian was all the rage. Abundant in Oregon and relatively easy to craft, Native American cultures used the volcanic rock to make prehistoric tools: knives, spear tips and the like.
"They're razor sharp, sharper than any steel could be ground," said Dennis L. Jenkins, Ph.D., senior staff archaeologist at the University of Oregon, who presented Friday at Tamastslikt Cultural Institute.
In his lecture, entitled "Obsidian: History Through the Volcanic Glass Window," Jenkins touched on the wealth of information contained in the rock artifacts found all over the state, and how archaeologists can trace the movement of those artifacts from their original source.
The cache was found 8 miles off Great Yarmouth and is the most northerly point in the North Sea that Neanderthal tools have been discovered. It had been feared that the ice sheets that destroyed most pre-ice age Brit-ish landscapes had done the same to the land surfaces which existed where the North Sea is now.
But archaeologists now suspect that some Neanderthal landscapes have survived under the North Sea. What's more, they are now certain that hundreds or even thousands of square miles of post-ice age prehistoric landscapes do survive there. On land they have largely been destroyed or degraded by centuries of agriculture, later human settlement and natural erosion.
Ned Kelly, the 19th-century bushranger who eluded police for two years before being caught in a hail of bullets, has been tracked down again. His bones, which were feared lost, are believed to be among human remains dug up at a former prison site.
An archaeological firm that was fired from a job excavating human bones at the city’s Texas Ranger museum expansion site is claiming the city has mismanaged the project.
The city this week terminated a $437,000 contract with American Archaeology Group to relocate human remains from the site, a former burial ground. Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum director Byron Johnson said the city chose to “part ways” with the firm over differences of opinion about the archaeological process, but he said he can’t say much more because the firm has threatened a lawsuit.
Officials with the archaeology group, which is based in Lampasas, say the city hasn’t told them why they were axed. However, they believe the contract was canceled because their work was too thorough for the city’s liking.
In one picture, the skeleton of a woman lies under a blue water pipe. Her dress is still intact, and the material is synthetic, suggesting the burial was as late as the 1950s or ’60s, Bradle says.
Archaeologists have found what they describe as a remarkable Iron Age waterhole on the site of an extension to York University.
The waterhole complete with a preserved wickerwork lining was revealed during excavations in Heslington village.
The structure also contains fragments of wood giving clues to the landscape of the time, about 2,500 years ago.
A sixth-century copper factory, medieval kitchens still stocked with pots and pans, and remains of Renaissance palaces are among the finds unveiled Friday by archaeologists digging up Rome in preparation for a new subway line. Archaeologists have been probing the depths of the Eternal City at 38 digs, many of which are near famous monuments or on key thoroughfares.
Over the last nine months, remains — including Roman taverns and 16th-century palace foundations — have turned up at the central Piazza Venezia and near the ancient Forum where works are paving the way for one of the 30 stations of Rome's third subway line.
"The medieval and Renaissance finds that were brought to light in Piazza Venezia are extremely important for their rarity," said archaeologist Mirella Serlorenzi, who is working on the site.
Beware the underdog narrative in science journalism. This narrative severely misrepresents how science really works. It's designed to elicit our sympathy for a not-yet-established theory, maybe one that is socially attractive, and to arouse our indignation against the staid community of eggheaded scientists. This underdog narrative plays on our emotions, it makes for a good read, and helps us feel good about ourselves when we stand up for our convictions.
What gets lost is the scientific method, the idea that novel proposals need to be thoroughly vetted and tested, no matter how intuitively attractive they are.
Arctic Alaskan ceramics offer several interpretive challenges for the archaeologist. In contrast to most cross-cultural patterns, these cooking vessels were produced by hunter-gatherers living in a cool and humid environment and were used to cook meat rather than starchy seeds. Additionally, when compared to cooking vessels and techniques from other areas of the world, their shapes and textures are atypical and appear poorly suited for their intended use. At first impression, these vessels might appear to reflect simply a lack of technological expertise. However, we argue that when considered in relation to the local social and environmental context under which these vessels were produced and used, these apparent contradictions can be understood.
most of our consultants had never witnessed pots being made or used, two brothers we interviewed (both in their later 60s) remember being shown by their mother how to make a ceramic cooking pot. According to one of the brothers, she made the cooking pot not because she intended to use it (according to the elders, they never saw her cook in anything other than a metal utensil), but because she wanted them to have the knowledge just in case it was ever needed.
Although the replacement of clay cooking pots by metal utensils had begun as early as 1833 when Russian cast iron kettles and sheet iron pots were introduced into the region (Nelson 1983 [1889]:317; Oswalt and VanStone 1967:4; Ray 1975), elder recollections suggest that at least some clay cook pots continued to be used into the late 1800s. For instance, Joe Friday (1983), who was born around 1897, witnessed his kinswomen making ceramic vessels and reported that the food was good when cooked in them.
As has been noted many times before, every decision in pottery manufacture entails a series of trade-offs. While selection of a particular tempering agent or production technique may improve some aspect of the vessel's production or use, at the same time it may worsen others. Therefore, in choosing how to manufacture a particular pot, the potter must decide which of the many desired characteristics she considers most important.
Prehistoric fiction gives me the creeps. In fact, prehistoric fiction--that is to say, stories set in the prehistoric past, whether books or movies--has always given me the creeps, but I hadn't realized the broader implications of that until I started reading Rob Swigart's newest 'teaching novel', Stone Mirror.
Archaeologists unearthed a medieval belt buckle in Perth following work to repair a collapsed sewer.
The group were allowed to examine the area in the Kirkgate as Scottish Water repaired the network.
The copper alloy buckle is believed to date back to the 12th Century and was found along with animal bones, shells and pottery.
A LEADING historian has criticised BBC Scotland over their choice of presenter for a new ten-part series on Scottish history.
Best-selling Scottish writer Professor Tom Devine has questioned why the BBC picked Neil Oliver to front the show which promises to "explode the myths" of Scotland's romantic past.
. . .
He asked: "Why are they using an archaeologist as a presenter? There surely is an army out there of young and telegenic historians."
SAUCERS & ALIENS e-Magazine published by www.theUFOstore.com today announced the details on the long rumored Roswell Archaeologist said to have found a second Roswell UFO crash site in 1947 on the plains of San Augusta, a few miles from the original location.
“We are very pleased to be breaking this story. UFO researcher and lecturer Art Campbell has done extensive on-site investigation at San Augusta” says publisher Randy Haragan. “His extensive book UFO Crash on the Plains of San Augusta 1947 featuring complete details of the crash including the report of bodies found.”
"There's a great debate on whether Spanish Mount is a ring or a midden,"
Judge says. It's an important distinction because middens appear to be little more than trash heaps, while rings show an architectural element that signifies something greater than simply a dumping site.
"The question becomes is this garbage, or are they building their midden from nearby middens?" Judge asks. "Is the landfill being utilized for architectural material?"
Today, only a small portion of Spanish Mount remains. The rest has eroded into Scott Creek.
Anthropologists have fired another salvo in a feud about diminutive "hobbit" people whose fossilised remains were found in a cave on a remote Indonesian island four years ago.
Combatting a bid to have the hobbits enshrined as a separate branch of the human family tree, they argue the tiny cave-dwellers were simply Homo sapiens who became stunted and retarded as a result of iodine deficiency in pregnancy.
Dubbed after the wee folk in J.R.R. Tolkien's tale, the hominids -- just a metre (3.25 feet) tall and with a chimp-sized brain -- lived around 18,000 years ago on the island of Flores.
Several teeth of mouse-sized primitive primates have been unearthed in Mississippi that are older than any other such fossils found in Europe or North America.
The record-breaking tiny chompers suggest that the creatures travelled from Asia to North America across the Bering land bridge between Siberia and Alaska, and then later journeyed on to Europe across another land bridge linking North America to Greenland and Scotland.
Throughout the 12th and 13th centuries - during the time of the Crusades �ceramic vessels reached Acre from: Mediterranean regions, the Levant, Europe, North Africa, and even China � reveals new research, which examined trade of ceramic vessels, conducted at the University of Haifa.
This research, conducted by Dr. Edna Stern under the direction of Prof. Michal Artzy and Dr. Adrian Boasz, examined pottery found during excavations conducted by the Israel Antiquities Authority of Crusader period Acre and pottery found in shipwrecks around the Mediterranean coast. According to Dr. Stern, during these centuries, Acre � in addition to being the gateway for Christian pilgrims into the Land of Israel, was one of the busiest commercial ports in the Latin East that had commercial links to Europe, the Islamic world and the Byzantine Empire.
Some archeological digging is in store for a couple of areas on the Fraser Bench Lands.
As part of the process of developing the 107-hectare site, an archeological survey was conducted, and two sites were found to be of significance, L&M Engineering planning director Heather Oland confirmed Tuesday.
She said the sites will be excavated once the snow has melted and prior to development taking place in the vicinity.
A SKELETON, which has been on prominent display in Salisbury Museum for nearly a decade, could hold the secret to Stonehenge's mysterious past and show the site to be an arena of gladiatorial combat, an archaeological expert has claimed.
The skeleton, that of a man who had been killed by arrows in 2,300 BC, was discovered in the ditch surrounding the stones during excavation work, carried out by Professor Richard Atkinson and J.G Evans in 1978.
After being analysed, the skeleton was donated to Salisbury museum, where it has been on display as a key part of the museum's Stonehenge exhibit under the title of "the body from the ditch".
Road construction on the western Greek island of Lefkada has uncovered and partially destroyed an important tomb with artifacts dating back more than 3,000 years, officials said on Wednesday.
The find is a miniature version of the large, opulent tombs built by the rulers of Greece during the Mycenaean era, which ended around 1100 B.C. Although dozens have been found in the mainland and on Crete, the underground, beehive-shaped monuments are very rare in the western Ionian Sea islands, and previously unknown on Lefkada.
In the year 10,000 B.C., a hunter (Steven Strait) loses his woman (Camilla Belle) to an evil warlord, so he gathers together a massive army to cross the wilderness fighting all manner of man and beast to find a lost civilization and mount a daring rescue.
Rumours that the fire in a Bulgarian train that killed eight was an assassination attempt against a famous archeologist have spread in his hometown of Shumen.
Professor Rasho Rashev, director of the National Archaeological Institute with the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, was among those who died in the Sofia-Kardam night train fire.
The 64-year-old renowned expert and lecturer in Bulgaria's Middle Age history was identified following an autopsy and DNA analyses.
Rashev's colleagues local 24 Hours daily an assassination attempt might have been provoked by his efforts against treasure looters.
Imagine future archaeologists trying to understand Illinois, California or New York based on a few excavations in each of those states. They might excavate small areas in city centers, since those sites would probably be the first ruins they would come across. Meanwhile, the archaeologists they might fail to notice or study farms, suburbs, shopping malls, canals and airports.
Although still relatively unknown to the general public, an archaeological method that is being practiced at several locations around the world helps scientists overcome such bias toward large, readily noticeable sites. The method is called a regional settlement pattern survey. It involves walking systematically over a large landscape to find traces of archaeological sites on the surface of the ground. This field procedure can yield a holistic, integrated view of how settlement has shifted in a region over the course of history.
A Waycross man went fishing in a South Georgia river two years ago and caught a 17-footer. It goes on display today at the Fernbank Museum of Natural History.
The catch is a dugout canoe, possibly created more than 300 years ago from a longleaf pine. It turned up in the shallows of the Satilla River one July day in 2006 when a fisherman noticed something odd just underneath his johnboat. What looked like an old log turned out to be a canoe, formed by fire and hand. It is one of just a handful of dugouts known to exist in Georgia.
Severe cutbacks in researchers' freedom to study bones and skeletons from ancient graves have been imposed without warning by the Ministry of Justice. The move has caused consternation among archaeologists, who say that the restrictions will badly damage their ability to study Britain's past.
The ruling means permission for digs at burial grounds and old churchyards will be denied in some cases, while in others excavated human remains will have to be reburied within two months of their discovery.
To the untrained eye, what lies in the burned-out shell of Dyar House does not look like much. White ash, charred debris and twisted metal, orange with rust, cover the floor of the building, which was gutted during the 2003 Cedar fire that burned nearly all of Cuyamaca Rancho State Park's 25,000 acres.
But to the state archaeologists excavating the site, the rubble is priceless. Amid the wreckage lie thousands of artifacts, including Kumeyaay pottery, lanterns and scales once used in a historic gold mine.
An excavation is about to start at one of the most important Roman villas in Western Europe. Its spectacular mosaics were saved by readers of The Times five years ago after being placed on the World Monuments Fund’s list of the most endangered sites.
One of Britain’s leading archaeologists is to explore the 1.6hectare (4acre) site around Brading Roman Villa on the Isle of Wight. Barely 15 per cent of it has been excavated and the dig is expected to last five years.
Sir Barry Cunliffe, Emeritus Professor of European Archaeology at Oxford University, said that the north side appeared to suggest a large assembly hall with side aisles.
Artifacts from City of David excavations in Jerusalem reveal an interesting tidbit of information about the ancient postal system in Israel.
In an archaeological excavation being carried out at the “Spring House,” near the Gihon Spring in the City of David – in the valley east of Jerusalem’s Old City, soil was excavated which contained pottery shards that date to the Iron Age 2 (eighth century BCE).
“Whereas during the ninth century BCE, letters and goods were dispatched on behalf of their senders without names, by the eighth century BCE the clerks and merchants had already begun to add their names to the seals,” concluded the Antiquities Authority.
Fragments of an ancient wall painting dating back to medieval times have been discovered during restoration work at 13th century Stuston church.
Last year villagers rallied to the cause when it emerged that £185,000 was needed for urgent repairs to make the nave, porch and vestry roofs watertight.
English Heritage and other funding bodies promised £165,000 towards the project - on condition that the small community of 140 souls met a December 2007 deadline to prove their commitment to making up the shortfall.
Archaeologists from Durham University will be returning to a London borough site where a 19th century historian once found flint tools and animal bones.
This time, however, the latest sonic drilling equipment will be used to take samples from the earth, for the ongoing Ancient Human Occupation of Britain II project (AHOB).