Archaeology/Paleontology news

[Richard Rathbone]

Time immemorial is a legal phrase.

"We have lived here since time immemorial" is how they formally claim title to the land under US law.

In effect they are saying, it doesn't matter what you found here, it doesn't invalidate our legal rights to it. How long ago that actually is, depends on a judge, not a carbon date. It might be 20 years, it might be 60 years, it might be when Europeans arrived. Time immemorial is however long ago it needs to be to make anything earlier irrelevant in law.

Time immemorial isn't saying they were there when the weir was, its saying that is irrelevant, they own it and taking away bits of it to study without their permission is theft. If they keep saying "Time Immemorial" it might well be because they keep getting stolen from by Europeans and they are reminding the Europeans that European law says that what the Europeans are doing is theft. (and the Europeans are too dumb to realise thats what they are being told, or too confident in the racism of the law to fear being convicted)

[etienne]

Just for fun, a sentence of the book 'Future House of the Living God" by Louise Erdrich :

"My family has been here for six generations." she says with hardened indignation. "probably longer than... oh, forget it. Ha. I forgot you're an Indian."

Not her best book, but I generally enjoy reading hers.

[vox_mundi]

More Evidence Tutankhamun’s Burial Chamber May Contain Door to Nefertiti’s Tomb
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2022/sep/26/tutankhamun-burial-chamber-could-contain-door-to-nefertiti-tomb

The discovery of hidden hieroglyphics within Tutankhamun’s tomb lends weight to a theory that the fabled Egyptian queen Nefertiti lies in a hidden chamber adjacent to her stepson’s burial chamber, a world-renowned British Egyptologist has said

Nicholas Reeves, a former curator in the British Museum’s Department of Egyptian Antiquities, said that while the theory remained unproven after inconclusive radar scans, it has been given fresh impetus following the new clue.

Reeves realised that cartouches depicting Tutankhamun being buried by his pharaonic successor, Ay, had been painted over cartouches of Tutankhamun burying Nefertiti, the legendary beauty, queen of Egypt and wife of King Akhenaten.

Reeves told the Guardian: “I can now show that, under the cartouches of Ay, are cartouches of Tutankhamun himself, proving that that scene originally showed Tutankhamun burying his predecessor, Nefertiti. You would not have had that decoration in the tomb of Tutankhamun.

On the decorated north wall, the later cartouches show Ay holding a ceremonial adze and performing the ritual of “opening the mouth” of the mummy, to restore the deceased’s five senses.

Reeves said: “Close inspection of Ay’s cartouches reveals clear, underlying traces of an earlier name – that of Tutankhamun. In its original version, this scene had shown Tutankhamun performing the funerary ritual for the tomb’s original owner, his immediate predecessor … Nefertiti.”

He added: “This conclusion finds absolute confirmation in the figures’ facial profiles – the snub nose and chubby under-chin of the [figure] currently labelled as Ay follow … precisely the standardised facial outline adopted for official representations of Tutankhamun at the very start of his kingship. The face of the mummy carries the indisputable features of Nefertiti. Demonstrably, the scene had begun its life as a record of Tutankhamun officiating at the burial of his predecessor.”

He said that the new evidence supports the theory that Tutankhamun’s tomb is merely the outer section of a much larger tomb “prepared for and still occupied by” Nefertiti, whose own, independent sequence of funerary chambers lie beyond what can be seen currently.

In 2015, Reeves argued that high-resolution images of Tutankhamun’s tomb showed lines underneath plastered surfaces of painted walls, suggesting unexplored doorways, although other experts felt that the scans were inconclusive.

[kassy]

Oldest Map of The Night Sky Appears Hidden Within Medieval Codex

The lost star catalog of Hipparchus – regarded as the earliest known attempt to map the entire night sky – may have just been discovered on parchment preserved at St Catherine's Monastery on Egypt's Sinai Peninsula.

In 2012, the student of leading biblical scholar Peter Williams noticed something curious behind the lettering of the Christian manuscript he was analyzing at the University of Cambridge.

The student, Jamie Klair, had stumbled across a famous passage in Greek that was often attributed to Eratosthenes; an astronomer and the chief librarian at the Library of Alexandria (one of the most prestigious places of learning in the ancient world).

In 2017, multispectral imaging of the document revealed nine folios of pages containing hints of a text that had been written over. It wasn't an unusual finding in itself – parchment was a valuable commodity in centuries gone, so it wasn't uncommon for scholars to scrape old skins for reuse.

Poring over the results in the second year of the pandemic, Williams noticed some odd numbers in the St Catherine's Monastery folios.

When he passed off the page to scientific historians in France, researchers were shocked. Historian Victor Gysembergh from the French national scientific research centre CNRS in Paris told Jo Marchant at Nature that "it was immediately clear we had star coordinates."

So how do we know who these coordinates were written by?

The short answer is we don't – at least not with full certainty. What experts do know, however, is that the Greek astronomer, Hipparchus, was working on a star catalog of the western world's sky between 162 and 127 BCE.

Several historical texts refer to Hipparchus as 'the father of astronomy' and credit him with the discovery of how Earth 'wobbles' on its axis in what's now known as a precession. He's also said to be the first to calculate the motions of the Sun and Moon.

Looking at the star map buried behind the text of the St Catherine's Monastery parchments, researchers worked backwards to figure out Earth's precession at the time the map was written. The coordinates of the stars roughly matched the precession expected of our planet around 129 BCE, within Hipparchus' lifetime.

Until this map was found, the oldest known star catalog was put together by the astronomer Claudius Ptolemy in the second century AD, three centuries after Hipparchus.

...

Compared to Ptolemy's later work, Hipparchus' mathematics appear to be much more reliable, within one degree of what modern astronomers would later find. This suggests Ptolemy did not simply copy Hipparchus' work

...

https://www.sciencealert.com/oldest-map-of-the-night-sky-appears-hidden-within-medieval-codex

[zenith]

The Human Brain Has been Getting Smaller Since the Stone Age
Yep, brains are shrinking.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-human-brain-has-been-getting-smaller-since-the-stone-age

[morganism]

Interesting new paper in Royal Society on repeated radiation blasts every 250-2500 yrs. Picked up in tree rings and ice and mud cores. Lots of questions and not many answers as some of the blasts lasted more than a year.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.2022.0497

Second paper picked out of refs is a comet from 773 dropping a dust rain reported from china.
N14 pulled out of coral showed lasted longer than a year also.

Radioactive traces in tree rings reveal Earth’s history of unexplained ‘radiation storms’

https://theconversation.com/radioactive-traces-in-tree-rings-reveal-earths-history-of-unexplained-radiation-storms-193080
(...)
As more teams have joined the search, tree ring evidence has been uncovered of further “Miyake events”: from 993 AD and 663 BC, and prehistoric events in 5259 BC, 5410 BC, and 7176 BC."
These have already led to a revolution in archaeology. Finding one of these short, sharp spikes in an ancient sample pins its date down to a single year, instead of the decades or centuries of uncertainty from ordinary radiocarbon dating.

Among other things, our colleagues have used the 993 AD event to reveal the exact year of the first European settlement in the Americas, the Viking village at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland: 1021 AD. "

How do you get such a huge pulse of radiation? A flurry of papers have blamed supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, explosions from magnetised neutron stars, and even comets.

"Our results confirm each event delivers between one and four ordinary years’ worth of radiation in one go. Earlier research suggested trees closer to Earth’s poles recorded a bigger spike – which is what we would expect if solar superflares are responsible – but our work, looking at a larger sample of trees, shows this is not the case.

We also found these events can arrive at any point in the Sun’s 11-year activity cycle. Solar flares, on the other hand, tend to happen around the peak of the cycle. "


Mysterious abrupt carbon-14 increase in coral contributed by a comet

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep03728

[kassy]

Attila The Hun May Have Raided The Roman Empire Because Of Drought


Attila the Hun is one of history’s most notorious warlords – yet while he has traditionally been cast as a bloodthirsty barbarian motivated only by a lust for gold, new research suggests that his constant attacks on the Roman Empire may have been driven by drought. After analyzing 2,000 years’ worth of tree-ring data, the study authors found that many of Attila’s most epic raids occurred during extremely dry years, and may therefore have represented an attempt to mitigate the effects of an unstable climate.

Though the origins of the Huns remain uncertain, they are believed to have crossed into Eastern Europe from Central Asia sometime around 370 CE, before settling on the Great Hungarian Plain to the east of the River Danube. Following Attila’s rise to power in 434 CE, the Huns increasingly pillaged the eastern flank of the Roman Empire, and are largely credited with expediting the fall of Rome.

“Historical sources tell us that Roman and Hun diplomacy was extremely complex,” explained study author Dr Susanne Hakenbeck in a statement. “Initially it involved mutually beneficial arrangements, resulting in Hun elites gaining access to vast amounts of gold. This system of collaboration broke down in the 440s, leading to regular raids of Roman lands and increasing demands for gold.”

However, the researchers say that this diplomatic breakdown alone may not explain Attila’s military incursions, and point out that the period coincided with a series of droughts. Using stable carbon and oxygen isotope data from oak tree rings, the study authors reconstructed the Central European hydroclimate, and found that the most devastating Hun raids of 447, 451 and 452 all occurred during extremely dry years.

...

Based on these findings, the researchers write that “the Huns’ apparently inexplicable violence may have been one strategy for coping with climatic extremes within a wider context of the social and economic changes that occurred at the time.”

This assumption is strengthened by previous isotopic analyses of fifth-century Hunnic skeletons, which revealed sudden changes in diet that may reflect the various strategies employed by the Huns in response to an uncertain climate.

...

Furthermore, an unstable climate may have led to major social restructuring within Hun communities, as herders abandoned their flocks to become raiders. The emergence of these war parties would then have led to a new network of allegiances between warlords, with Attila at the top of the hierarchy.

Such alliances would probably have been maintained with gold subsidies, which may explain Attila’s increasing demands for Roman gold.

“Climate-induced economic disruption may have required Attila and others of high rank to extract gold from the Roman provinces to keep war bands and maintain inter-elite loyalties,” explains Hakenbeck.

...

https://www.iflscience.com/attila-the-hun-may-have-raided-the-roman-empire-because-of-drought-66674

[vox_mundi]

Archaeologists Uncover Oldest Known Projectile Points In the Americas
https://phys.org/news/2022-12-archaeologists-uncover-oldest-projectile-americas.html



Oregon State University archaeologists have uncovered projectile points in Idaho that are thousands of years older than any previously found in the Americas, helping to fill in the history of how early humans crafted and used stone weapons.

The 13 full and fragmentary projectile points, razor sharp and ranging from about half an inch to 2 inches long, are from roughly 15,700 years ago, according to carbon-14 dating. That's about 3,000 years older than the Clovis fluted points found throughout North America, and 2,300 years older than the points previously found at the same Cooper's Ferry site along the Salmon River in present-day Idaho.

The findings were published today in the journal Science Advances.



The Salmon River site where the points were found is on traditional Nez Perce land, known to the tribe as the ancient village of Nipéhe. The land is currently held in public ownership by the federal Bureau of Land Management.

The points are revelatory not just in their age, but in their similarity to projectile points found in Hokkaido, Japan, dating to 16,000–20,000 years ago, Davis said. Their presence in Idaho adds more detail to the hypothesis that there are early genetic and cultural connections between the ice age peoples of Northeast Asia and North America.

"The earliest peoples of North America possessed cultural knowledge that they used to survive and thrive over time. Some of this knowledge can be seen in the way people made stone tools, such as the projectile points found at the Cooper's Ferry site," Davis said. "By comparing these points with other sites of the same age and older, we can infer the spatial extents of social networks where this technological knowledge was shared between peoples."

These slender projectile points are characterized by two distinct ends, one sharpened and one stemmed, as well as a symmetrical beveled shape if looked at head-on. They were likely attached to darts, rather than arrows or spears, and despite the small size, they were deadly weapons, Davis said.

"There's an assumption that early projectile points had to be big to kill large game; however, smaller projectile points mounted on darts will penetrate deeply and cause tremendous internal damage," he said. "You can hunt any animal we know about with weapons like these."



map showing the location of the Cooper’s Ferry site in the context of Pacific Northwest environments at 16,000 years ago



Loren Davis, Dating of a Large Tool Assemblage at the Cooper's Ferry Site (Idaho, USA) Dated ~15,785 cal yr B.P. Extends Age of Stemmed Points in the Americas, Science Advances (2022)
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ade1248

[kassy]

Clickbait title...

Secret to how prehistoric humans survived winter uncovered

Prehistoric humans living in northern Europe over 300,000 years ago used bear skin to survive the harsh winters, a new study reveals.

The study, published recently in the Journal of Human Evolution, examined traces on bones from the archaeological site of Schöningen in Lower Saxony and found cut marks on the foot and toe bone remains of a cave bear discovered at the stone age site.

Researchers, including those from the University of Tubingen in Germany, say the new findings are one of the oldest evidence of this type in the world from early human ancestors, who were still not likely bearing all the same anatomical features as modern people.

“These newly discovered cut marks are an indication that about 300,000 years ago, people in northern Europe were able to survive in winter thanks in part to warm bear skins,” Tubingen researchers Ivo Verheijen explained.

Studies have found previously that winter coats, especially in extinct cave bears, consist of both long outer hairs that form an airy protective layer and short, dense hairs that are highly insulating during hibernation.

While cut marks on bones are interpreted generally in archaeology as a sign of the utilization of meat, researchers say there is hardly any meat recovered from the hand and foot bones.

“In this case, we can attribute such fine and precise cut marks to the careful stripping of the skin,” the Tubingen researcher said.

...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/prehistoric-europeans-surviving-winter-fur-b2255116.html

[kassy]

And to compensate a really cool story. See link for photo examples.


Amateur archaeologist uncovers ‘writing’ system used by Ice Age hunter-gatherers in cave paintings


Ice Age hunter-gatherers used cave paintings to record information about the world around them which helped them to survive, a study has found. The symbolic markings date back 20,000 years and were used to make notes about wild animals and their reproduction cycles. Remarkably, the initial discovery was made by a furniture conservator in the UK.

Ben Bacon spent countless hours looking at examples of cave paintings and analyzing data and then went to academics with his theory, who encouraged him to pursue it. He collaborated with a pair of professors from Durham University and University College London, with whom Bacon published a paper in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal.

Cave paintings of species such as fish and bison have been found across Europe. Alongside these images, mysterious dots and other marks have been found in over 600 Ice Age images on cave walls and portable objects. Archaeologists have long suspected these markings had a meaning but no one had solved the puzzle – until Bacon came along.

“The meaning of the markings within these drawings has always intrigued me so I set about trying to decode them, using a similar approach that others took to understanding an early form of Greek text,” Bacon, who has an English degree, told BBC. “I amassed as much data as possible and began looking for repeating patterns.”

Understanding the markings

Analyzing the total number of marks, either dots or lines, found in sequences across hundreds of cave paintings, the researchers found that none of the series had over 13 marks – consistent with the 13 lunar months each year. “We hypothesize that sequences are conveying information about their associated animal taxa in units of months,” they wrote.

The study of sequences of marks associated with animals suggested correlations between the number of marks and the lunar months in which the specific animals are known to mate. Taking the hypothesis a step further, the researchers believe the inclusion of a “Y” sign, formed by adding a diverging line to another, meant “giving birth”. This means hunter-gatherers were actively monitoring and recording the breeding cycles of wildlife, and probably used this information to time their own migrations and improve their hunting success.

“To say that when Ben contacted us about his discovery was exciting is an understatement. I am glad I took it seriously,” Paul Pettitt, study author, told BBC. “This is a fascinating study that has brought together researchers with expertise in archaeology and visual psychology, to decode information first recorded thousands of years ago.”

Pettitt and his colleagues describe the markings as a “proto-writing system,” an intermediary step before a full-blown symbolic writing system like the alphabet. The findings have encouraged them to do further research, seeking to unlock other pieces of the puzzle that may help them gain an understanding of what information our ancestors valued.

https://www.zmescience.com/science/amateur-archaeologist-uncovers-writing-system-used-by-ice-age-hunter-gatherers-in-cave-paintings/

[trm1958]

3000 years old wooden wishing well discovered in Germany
https://arkeonews.net/3000-years-old-wooden-wishing-well-discovered-in-germany/

In the town of Germering, in the Germany state of Bavaria, archaeologists have unearthed the remains of a well-preserved Bronze Age wooden well filled with ritual deposits.

[kassy]

Nice find.

The team of archaeologists discovered in what was once the base of the fountain: 26 bronze clothing pins, a bracelet, two metal spirals, a mounted animal tooth, amber beads and more than 70 ceramic vessels. The archaeologists emphasize that this filling makes this well fundamentally different from the others on the excavation site.

These expensive items, which were typically discovered in Middle Bronze Age graves, were not items for everyday use (1800-1200 B.C.). The state they were in when discovered at the bottom of the well suggests they were carefully lowered into the water rather than dropped or thrown.

Interesting what you can find out when digging up things.

[vox_mundi]

Phylogenetic Bracketing Suggests Some Dinosaurs' Neuron Density Was Equal to That of Modern Primates
https://phys.org/news/2023-01-phylogenetic-bracketing-dinosaurs-neuron-density.html

Neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel, with Vanderbilt University, has shaken up the paleontology community with a study she conducted that resulted in evidence of some dinosaurs having neuron density in their brains equal to that of some modern primates.

n her paper published in Journal of Comparative Neurology, Herculano-Houzel suggests that some dinosaurs such as T. rex, may have had intelligence similar to that of the modern baboon.

For most of modern science, dinosaurs have been depicted as big, scary and dim witted—like oversized lizards. In more recent years, some in the paleontology community have begun to rethink such assumptions. Some have also noted that it is likely that different types of dinosaurs had different levels of intelligence.

In this new effort, Herculano-Houzel began her study by noting that in recent years, biologists have discovered that birds, which are of course evolved from dinosaurs, are much smarter than has been thought. They make up for their tiny brains by having equally tiny, densely packed neuron clusters. This observation made her wonder if perhaps dinosaurs were smarter than has been assumed too. She thought applying phylogenetic bracketing—where elements of the evolutionary tree are used to look for shared traits in different creatures—might help.

She wondered if such work might allow for estimating how many neurons were likely in the brains of different dinosaurs. Doing so, she noted, would involve making some assumptions about proportionality.

Her work involved first looking at dinosaurs as separate groups, with different levels of intelligence. She then worked on assumptions that the proportion of neurons to brain size in a dinosaur such as T. rex would very likely be approximately the same as for modern large birds, such as emus or ostriches. This allowed her to calculate how many neurons a T. rex might have, if its proportions were the same as modern big birds. In doing so, she found that the numbers approximated those of some modern primates, such as baboons.

Herculano-Houzel notes that dinosaurs like T. rex are believed to have been relatively long-lived—many might have lived for 40 or more years. If they were smart, she suggests, they might have had time to develop problem-solving skills, or to use tools.

Suzana Herculano‐Houzel, Theropod dinosaurs had primate‐like numbers of telencephalic neurons, Journal of Comparative Neurology (2023)
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/cne.25453

----------------------------------------------------------

http://www.cmkosemen.com/dinosauroids.html

[zenith]

highly topical and off-topic but it's certainly compelling and contemporary. they've found european artifacts on oak island, nova scotia (new scotland), canada that are from the 13th century. a norwegian freemason (knights templars---> rosicrucians --->freemasons) claims to have cracked codes in the first folio of the writings of shakespeare, a shakespearean scholar goes on the ride kicking and screaming but has to concede (to a degree) as the evidence mounts. they're still digging on oak island... it's suspected the 2nd temple treasures (jerusalem) are buried there.

Cracking The Shakespear Code | Full Documentary Movie- 2 hours long


in 1925 manly p. hall published "the secret teachings of all ages" and a chapter is dedicated to sir francis bacon and shakespeare - the spear-shaker (consciousness rattle) like apollo and athena.

[kassy]

compelling and contemporary

You mean it´s a video?

[zenith]

that's exactly what i mean, you got me again. never mind that people have been digging there for a couple hundred years and running into bizarre finds like coconut mats and booby-traps, some amazing engineering. a future president of the usa, Franklin D. Roosevelt, took part in excavations there too. it's a genuine mystery with all sorts of strange connotations for the enlightenment, western civ., and the new world.

it's a video - dismissed. it's quite fascinating actually.

[zenith]

btw, it's contemporary as a group of 'muricans has bought the island and have moved in heavy machinery and the latest tech. to try to solve the mystery (as they wear freemason baseball hats). they've made it into a reality show that's very repetitive and tedious but it finances the dig. they're spending big money.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Curse_of_Oak_Island

[kassy]

I am familiar with the story but at best it is a very niche bit of archaeology for the oldest finds and a lot of made up stuff for the rest.

If you are interested in people digging into the past then Time Team is probably better because it has actual archaeologists.

[zenith]

the hubris and condescension are quaint.

[oren]

highly topical and off-topic but it's certainly compelling and contemporary. they've found european artifacts on oak island, nova scotia (new scotland), canada that are from the 13th century. a norwegian freemason (knights templars---> rosicrucians --->freemasons) claims to have cracked codes in the first folio of the writings of shakespeare, a shakespearean scholar goes on the ride kicking and screaming but has to concede (to a degree) as the evidence mounts. they're still digging on oak island... it's suspected the 2nd temple treasures (jerusalem) are buried there.

You post a pseudoscience story on a science thread, and when called on it you attack (as usual).

[zenith]

that they're finding evidence that europeans were active in the 13th century onwards on that island isn't pseudoscience. kassy assumes he knows the story but then he assumes there are no archeologists there either, there was a team of archeologists there until they found first nations artifacts and then the government shut them down. there's major money being poured into it and all the relevant professionals are being consulted.

that video is part of the backstory, there's plenty of evidence explored in that too. i'm not forcing anyone to watch it, nor do you need to comment. i'm certainly not interested in another round of 3 monkeys and kassy advising me which hoops i should jump through.

[Sebastian Jones]

that they're finding evidence that europeans were active in the 13th century onwards on that island isn't pseudoscience. kassy assumes he knows the story but then he assumes there are no archeologists there either, there was a team of archeologists there until they found first nations artifacts and then the government shut them down. there's major money being poured into it and all the relevant professionals are being consulted.

that video is part of the backstory, there's plenty of evidence explored in that too. i'm not forcing anyone to watch it, nor do you need to comment. i'm certainly not interested in another round of 3 monkeys and kassy advising me which hoops i should jump through.

Evidence of European visitation or settlement in the 13th century there would be significant. Did the archeologists write up their findings in a peer reviewed journal?

[zenith]

good question, i've never looked. they were excavating a stone road that was in a manmade swamp (it hadn't been made by anyone in recorded history) that had been drained when they found the first nations artifacts and the plug was pulled. it's an ongoing story so they likely won't be publishing anything for a while, if at all. the guys running the show are after 'treasure', or at least to solve the mystery as to what it's all about. lots of european artifacts from through the centuries are being found, it's clear it was regularly visited for centuries before columbus. wharfs, sunken ships and underground timbers that are layered to a depth of around 90 ft. (?) with booby-trapped underground floodways that go out to the ocean. 6 people have died over the course of two hundred years digging there.

[oren]

it's clear it was regularly visited for centuries before columbus

It's only clear when the information comes from non-scientific sources. The reality is more is unknown than known. I haven't dug into it much though, would appreciate written scientific links, if any are available.

[zenith]

ok, fair enough. they're finding artifacts.
1) the norse were in the area, it's vinland on their maps and l'anse aux meadows, newfoundland confirms they were around pre-columbus.
2) militaries or very early settlers could have brought old objects/artifacts that they're finding.
3) the norse tales were spread and some intrepid, and secretive, people were inspired. or they went looking for plato's atlantis.
4) they have to write reports to the government to have their permits for treasure hunting and archeology renewed so it's all being documented. they're also milking the reality show and there are ndas involved.

regardless there's some bizarre stuff going on there. there are stones with some strange script/code carved into them. there's a strange cross made out of boulders, that seemingly turns into a tree of life. there are the codes in the first folio of shakespeare that, as interpreted by the norwegian, lead to oak island. it's a mystery.

but then i'm arguing with someone that lives in a country whose foundational document is the bible. what does israeli archeologist Israel Finkelstein have to say about that?


archeology is hardly precision engineering, it so full of holes and innumerable errors. archeologists uncover things and then interpretation kicks in. if i had a penny for every nonsense claim archeologists have made i'd be a hermit on mars. has egyptology worked out that the giza pyramid complex is orion's belt yet? the two dimensional, boring, ridiculous interpretations based on our superiority and their primitive savagery is embarrassing. don't upset the apple cart though, you might get cancelled.

[oren]

It's quite clear there is more hype than actual archeological finds here so far. Bear in mind the cross (1200 to 1600m a large range) could have been dropped inadvertently by a later visitor over the centuries.
L'Anse Aux Meadows, a super-interesting archeological find and the only confirmed Viking site in North America identified so far (outside of Greenland and possibly Baffin Island), is about 1000 km away.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Island

Oak Island Mystery
Main article: Oak Island mystery
Oak Island has been a subject for treasure hunters ever since the late 1700s, with rumours that Captain Kidd's treasure was buried there. While there is little evidence to support what went on during the early excavations, stories began to be published and documented as early as 1856. Since that time there have been many theories that extend beyond that of Captain Kidd which include among others religious artifacts, manuscripts, and Marie Antoinette's jewels. The "treasure" has also been prone to criticism by those who have dismissed search areas as natural phenomena.[23]

Areas of interest on the island with regard to treasure hunters include a location known as the "Money Pit", which is allegedly the original searchers’ spot. Located on the east side of Oak Island, the Money Pit is—or was—a shaft more than 100 feet deep. According to island lore, it first drew the attention of a local teenager in 1795, who noticed an indentation in the ground and, with some friends, started to dig—only to find a man-made shaft featuring wooden platforms every 10 feet down to the 90-foot level of depth.

There is also a formation of boulders called "Nolan's Cross", named after a former treasure hunter, and a triangle-shaped swamp. Lastly, there has been searcher activity on a beach at a place called "Smith's Cove". Various objects including non-native coconut fibre have been found there.[15] More recent archaeological discoveries in the Smith's Cove area have included an allegedly pre-15th-century lead cross and various wooden earthworks.[24][25]

More than fifty books have been published recounting the island's history and exploring competing theories.[26] Several works of fiction have also been based upon the Money Pit, including The Money Pit Mystery, Riptide, The Hand of Robin Squires, and Betrayed: The Legend of Oak Island. In January 2014, the History Channel began airing a reality TV show called The Curse of Oak Island about a group of modern treasure hunters. These hunters include brothers Rick and Marty Lagina of the "Michigan Group".[27][28][29] The series has documented finds such as centuries-old coins, an antique brooch, and a lead cross that was allegedly made between 1200 and 1600 A.D.[30]

https://www.distractify.com/p/do-they-ever-find-anything-oak-island

Do They Ever Find Anything on Oak Island? Plus, How to Visit
Amber Garrett - Author
BY AMBER GARRETT
APR. 13 2021, UPDATED 4:52 P.M. ET

The History series The Curse of Oak Island has spent several seasons exploring Oak Island, which is cloaked in mystery and varying tales of buried pirate treasure and other valuable artifacts. Many have tried and failed to find the treasure, with past expedition investors including Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Errol Flynn, and John Wayne.

Since 2014, Rick and Marty Lagina have hoped to finally solve the mystery — but have they had any luck so far? Below, we'll explore what finds — if any — the brothers have uncovered to date — plus how you can visit there yourself to join in the hunt.

Where is Oak Island? Can I go there?
Oak Island is a small private isle on the south shore of Nova Scotia, Canada in Mahone Bay. It is currently privately owned. In 2008, the Lagina Brothers purchased a controlling interest in Oak Island Tours, which owned most of the island.

When they're not treasure hunting themselves, their company leads private and public tours. The bad news is the tours are in such high remand, they're all sold out for the entire year, but cancellations do happen.

But do they ever find any treasure on Oak Island?
The Lagina brothers have been exploring the 140-acre island for years, but they've uncovered fairly little, save for a few artifacts. The focus of much of their searches is to find an entrance to The Money Pit. That's not the 1980s comedy starring Tom Hanks and Shelley Long but rather a shaft dug by early explorers and believed by treasure hunters to be the most likely location of treasure.

AThough the explorers on the show haven't hit pay-dirt yet, they have made some interesting discoveries over the years. In Lot 21, one of the dig sites, Rick and Gary found an antique brooch of copper and gold that was at least 500 years old with a gem they had hoped would be ruby but turned out to be garnet. Still, not bad!ccording to an account written in 1862, the pit became flooded with seawater when an expedition called the Onslow Company bored a second hole to more easily cart out any treasure. Instead, as the Oak Island Tours site puts it, they ended up with "two shafts full of water and no treasure."

They've also found several coins that are more than 200 years old, bone fragments, and a lead cross that was made between 1200 and 1600 A.D. While that doesn't seem like much for the years of work the Laginas and their crew have sunk into their expedition, they don't seem to see it that way.

Every discovery provides more possible clues to the Money Pit and more background in this mysterious island. Plus, the thrill of the hunt seems to be keeping them going.

The Curse of Oak Island airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET on History.

[oren]

but then i'm arguing with someone that lives in a country whose foundational document is the bible. what does israeli archeologist Israel Finkelstein have to say about that?

Zenith, always looking for some personal attack angle, when things get tough.
But you might be surprised I have read two books by Prof. Israel Finkelstein, including The Bible Unearthed, great archeological stuff that looks at the differences between archeological finds and the bible stories, based on established science. I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in Archeology (and the bible). The full name is "The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of its Sacred Texts".
Finkelstein is considered somewhat of a controversy, and has been criticized by archeologists who strongly stick to the bible narrative, but religion will usually stick to its given knowledge regardless of scientific evidence, so that's hardly surprising.

[zenith]

vinland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinland
"was an area of coastal North America explored by Vikings. Leif Erikson landed there around 1000 AD, nearly five centuries before the voyages of Christopher Columbus and John Cabot.[5] The name appears in the Vinland Sagas, and describes Newfoundland and the Gulf of Saint Lawrence as far as northeastern New Brunswick. Much of the geographical content of the sagas corresponds to present-day knowledge of transatlantic travel and North America."

edit - "Cabot went to Bristol to arrange preparations for his voyage. Bristol was the second-largest seaport in England. From 1480 onward it had supplied several expeditions to look for the mythical Hy-Brasil. According to Celtic legend, this island lay somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean.[28] There was a widespread belief among merchants in the port that Bristol men had discovered the island at an earlier date but had then lost track of it.[29][30] In a private letter to a colleague (Quinn), Ruddock maintained that she had found evidence in Italian archives that Bristol men had discovered North America before 1470.[31] As the island was believed to be a source of brazilwood (from which a valuable red dye could be obtained), merchants had economic incentive to find it."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cabot

they've found a lot more than two artifacts, the swamp was drained after that article was written as well. the stones that make up the cross are split, somebody placed them. the stones with the writing/code carved in are very unusual.

Prof. Israel Finkelstein is controversial but that's the story with so much about archeology. gobekli tepe completely blew up the story mainstream archeology was telling. that's why it's important to keep an open mind.

[trm1958]

RE: Oak Island
https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4129

And as with so many other subjects, the older the account you read, the less specific and impressive the details. The contemporary newspaper accounts of Daniel McGinnis and his two friends make no mention of a tackle block or of regularly spaced log platforms, only that logs were found in the pit, and that the tree branch showed evidence of a block and tackle having been used. Armed with proper skepticism and the willingness to look deeper than the modern sensationalized retellings, the Money Pit's intrigue and enchantment begin to fade.

[ivica]

Scanning a Predynastic Granite Vase to 1000th of an Inch - Changing the Game for Ancient Precision!
puzzling Egypt, isn't it? more scans of other artefacts too, please! enjoy <

[kassy]

2.9-million-year-old butchery site is the oldest evidence of human ancestors consuming very large animals


Early human ancestors were using some of the oldest stone tools in the palaeontological record 2.9 million years ago to butcher hippos and pound plant material.

The findings come from a site on the shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya.

The horn of Africa is known as the “cradle of humanity” because it is so rich in early hominin fossils and artefacts, suggesting it as the birthplace of the primate lineage from which humans evolved.

...

Though not the oldest stone tools ever discovered, the recent Lake Victoria finds are the oldest of a particular kind of stone tool belonging to what is called the “Oldowan toolkit.”

Oldowan tools are extremely significant in the development of early hominin production. They include simple flaked tools like choppers, scrapers and rudimentary cutting instruments.

The handaxes that were to replace Oldowan tools emerged hundreds of thousands of years later, around 1.7 million years ago.

There are three types of Oldowan tools: hammerstones, cores and flakes.

Hammerstones are used for hitting. Cores are typically angular or oval in shape. When a core is struck with a hammerstone, it creates flakes that can be used as a cutting or scraping edge.

“With these tools you can crush better than an elephant’s molar can and cut better than a lion’s canine,” says palaeoanthropologist Dr Rick Potts, head of the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program. “Oldowan technology was like suddenly evolving a brand-new set of teeth outside your body, and it opened up a new variety of foods on the African savannah to our ancestors.”

...

To date the tools, scientists used radioactive decay measurements of the sediment; reversal of Earth’s magnetic field; and other fossil finds in the same layer.

These multiple dating techniques place the tools from Lake Victoria at around 2.9 million years old, but more conservative estimates give a range of their construction between 2.58 million and 3 million years ago.

The site holds the fossil remains of at least three hippopotamus individuals – two of which bear the tell-tale signs that they were butchered. Similarly, antelope remains at the site show indications that the flesh was sliced off the bone, and that bones were crushed to get at the marrow inside.

“What’s really interesting is that here at this site you have some of the earliest evidence of butchery of megafauna, even before the advent of the use of fire,” says Associate Professor Julien Louys from Australia’s Griffith University. “This indicates that exploitation of megafauna began millions of years before the so-called megafauna extinction event.”

Fire hadn’t been invented for another two million years, so the meat may have been cut up to make it easier to chew.

Wear patterns on 30 of the stone tools discovered show they were also used to pound plants.

But which early hominins made the tools?

The site, and nearby sites, have produced molars belonging to close revolutionary relatives of humans, Paranthropus.

“The assumption among researchers has long been that only the genus Homo, to which humans belong, was capable of making stone tools,” Potts said. “But finding Paranthropus alongside these stone tools opens up a fascinating whodunnit.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/stone-tools-butcher-site-kenya/

[kassy]

We thought the first hunter-gatherers in Europe went missing during the last ice age. Now, ancient DNA analysis says otherwise


Hunter-gatherers took shelter from the ice age in Southwestern Europe, but were replaced on the Italian Peninsula according to two new studies, published in Nature and Nature Ecology & Evolution today.

Modern humans first began to spread across Eurasia approximately 45,000 years ago, arriving from the near east. Previous research claimed these people disappeared when massive ice sheets covered much of Europe around 25,000–19,000 years ago. By comparing the DNA of various ancient humans, we show this was not the case for all hunter-gatherer groups.

Our new results show the hunter-gatherers of Central and Southern Europe did disappear during the last ice age. However, their cousins in what is now France and Spain survived, leaving genetic traces still visible in the DNA of Western European peoples nearly 30,000 years later.

Two studies with one intertwining story
In our first study in Nature, we analysed the genomes – the complete set of DNA a person carries – of 356 prehistoric hunter-gatherers. In fact, our study compared every available ancient hunter-gatherer genome.

In our second study in Nature Ecology & Evolution, we analysed the oldest hunter-gatherer genome recovered from the southern tip of Spain, belonging to someone who lived approximately 23,000 years ago. We also analysed three early farmers who lived roughly 6,000 years ago in southern Spain. This allowed us to fill an important sampling gap for this region.

...

Our results show the special role the Iberian peninsula played as a safe haven for humans during the ice age. The genetic legacy of hunter-gatherers would survive in the region after more than 30,000 years, unlike their distant relatives further east.

Post ice-age interaction
Some 2,000 years after the end of the ice age, there were again two genetically distinct hunter-gatherer groups. There was the “old” group in Western and Central Europe, and the “more recent” group in Eastern Europe.

These groups showed no evidence of genetic exchange with southwestern hunter-gatherer populations for approximately 6,000 years, until roughly 8,000 years ago.

At this time, agriculture and a sedentary lifestyle had begun to spread with new peoples from Anatolia into Europe, forcing hunter-gatherers to retreat to the northern fringes of Europe.

https://theconversation.com/we-thought-the-first-hunter-gatherers-in-europe-went-missing-during-the-last-ice-age-now-ancient-dna-analysis-says-otherwise-200899

Paper of second study:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-023-01987-0

[vox_mundi]

Reassessment of Storegga Event: Second Major Landslide Recognized
https://phys.org/news/2023-03-reassessment-storegga-event-major-landslide.html



The Storegga event is one of the largest submarine landslides known in the world and is located off the coast of Norway. It occurred about 8,150 years ago, after the end of the last ice age, and triggered a massive tsunami that devastated the coasts of the North Atlantic and what was then the North Sea.

Previously, it was assumed that the slide displaced all of the sediments deposited during the last ice age, along a distance of about 300 kilometers. The volume of sediments moved during the slide has been estimated at around 2,400 to 3,200 cubic kilometers—a mass that would be enough to cover all of Germany with seven to nine meters of sediment.

Now, scientists from GEOMAR Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research Kiel and the University of Bergen, Norway have discovered that much of the seafloor sediment had moved 12,000 years earlier, after the peak of the last Ice Age. Thus, the Nyegga landslide, named by the researchers after the Nyegga area where they discovered the first evidence of the event, had already occurred about 20,000 years ago.

The geophysicists and geologists are able to demonstrate that about one-third of the material that slid, about 1,000 cubic kilometers, can be attributed to the Nyegga landslide. They published this surprising finding in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

The Storegga landslide is therefore smaller than previously thought. Above all, however, submarine mass movements on the central Norwegian shelf are more complex and more frequent than previously thought. Conventional wisdom was that such large submarine sope failures occurred in connection with glacial cycles. According to this view, the unstable material deposited by the melting glaciers was removed by a single landslide and transported into the deep sea. This assessment must now be reevaluated.

"The results of our study show that some previous concepts might be too simplistic and are therefore of great importance for the assessment of geohazards related to landslides at continental margins."

The new findings are based on ship-based echosounder surveys collected during a 2012 research cruise and the examination of dozens of sediment cores at the University of Bergen.

Age dating and sedimentological investigations revealed unusual depositional profiles in seven of the sediment cores that could not be explained by the previous landslide history. Evidence of an earlier landslide event in the echosounder data has now allowed the researchers to explain the depositional layers with the Storegga event and the much earlier Nyegga landslide.



Jens Karstens et al, Revised Storegga Slide reconstruction reveals two major submarine landslides 12,000 years apart, Communications Earth & Environment (2023)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-023-00710-y

[kassy]

Sometimes you get to dig around in unexpected places.

The Notre Dame fire revealed a long-lost architectural marvel

Investigations into the cathedral’s construction during its renovation found that the 860 year’s old building is the first known cathedral of Gothic-style architecture that used iron to bind the stones together when it was initially constructed. The use of iron in this manner was a huge technological advancement for the time and the discovery is detailed in a study published March 15 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

When it was built in the middle of the 12th century, Notre Dame was the tallest building ever built, towering about 104 feet over Paris. Earlier studies suggested that it was able to soar to these heights by combining a number of architectural innovations such as ribbed crossing and thin vaults, but the role that iron played in the cathedral’s initial construction was unclear.

The restoration of the cathedral after the 2019 fire allowed a team to study previously hidden parts of Notre Dame, where they obtained samples of material from 12 iron staples that were used to bind stone together. The staples were in different parts of the building, including the nave aisles, upper walls, and tribunes.

The team studied the samples using radiocarbon dating to estimate how old they were.  Microscopic, chemical, and architectural analyses  suggest that the iron staples were used during the earliest phases of the cathedral’s construction in the 1160s. This makes it the first building of its type to rely on these iron staples throughout its structure.

Reinforcement of the building’s stones with iron was key to creating the cathedral’s Gothic style, the authors add. Compared with stone architecture used in Roman times, such as the Roman Colosseum, Gothic architecture, dated back to around the 12th to 16th centuries in Europe, used innovations in ironwork to build structures with more detail and that appear lighter.

“Radiocarbon dating reveals that Notre-Dame de Paris is indisputably the first Gothic cathedral where iron was thought of as a real building material to create a new form of architecture. The medieval builders used several thousand of iron staples throughout its construction,” the authors wrote in a statement.

...

https://www.popsci.com/science/notre-dame-fire-iron-gothic-architecture/

[kassy]

SHIPWRECKS REVEAL ORIGINS OF METAL USED TO CAST THE BENIN BRONZES

THE BENIN BRONZES CONSIST OF THOUSANDS OF METAL SCULPTURES AND PLAQUES WHICH ADORNED THE ROYAL PALACE OF THE KINGDOM OF BENIN, PRESENTLY LOCATED IN EDO STATE, NIGERIA.
The objects collectively represent the finest examples of Benin art crafted by Edo artists between the 16th century up until the 19th century. In addition to the plaques, the Benin Bronzes also comprises of smaller brass or bronze sculptures such as portrait heads, jewellery, and other decorative pieces.

The majority of the plaques and other objects were seized by British forces during the Benin Expedition of 1897, which aimed to consolidate imperial control in Southern Nigeria. Two hundred pieces were taken to the British Museum in London, while the rest were taken to other institutions and museums across Europe.

Although the collection is commonly referred to as the Benin Bronzes, the pieces are predominantly crafted from brass of varying compositions using the lost-wax casting method, a process by which a duplicate sculpture is cast from an original sculpture.

Edo artisans used manillas, meaning bracelet, as a metal source for making the Benin Bronzes. Manillas were also used as decorative objects and currency across parts of Western Africa.

In a new study published in the journal, PLOS ONE, researchers have conducted an ICP-MS geochemical analysis of 67 manillas, which were recovered from 16th and 19th century shipwrecks found in African, American, and European waters.

According to the study: “Comparing trace elements and lead isotope ratios of manillas and Benin Bronzes, the study identifies Germany as the principal source of the manillas used in the West African trade between the 15th and 18th centuries before British industries took over the brass trade in the late 18th century.”

...

https://www.heritagedaily.com/2023/04/shipwrecks-reveal-origins-of-metal-used-to-cast-the-benin-bronzes/146777

[vox_mundi]

[kassy]

Homo sapiens likely arose from multiple closely related populations

n testing the genetic material of current populations in Africa and comparing against existing fossil evidence of early Homo sapiens populations there, researchers have uncovered a new model of human evolution -- overturning previous beliefs that a single African population gave rise to all humans. The new research was published today, May 17, in the journal Nature.

Although it is widely understood that Homo sapiens originated in Africa, uncertainty surrounds how branches of human evolution diverged and how people migrated across the continent, said Brenna Henn, professor of anthropology and the Genome Center at UC Davis, corresponding author of the research.

"This uncertainty is due to limited fossil and ancient genomic data, and to the fact that the fossil record does not always align with expectations from models built using modern DNA," she said. "This new research changes the origin of species."

Research co-led by Henn and Simon Gravel of McGill University tested a range of competing models of evolution and migration across Africa proposed in the paleoanthropological and genetics literature, incorporating population genome data from southern, eastern and western Africa.

The authors included newly sequenced genomes from 44 modern Nama individuals from southern Africa, an Indigenous population known to carry exceptional levels of genetic diversity compared to other modern groups. Researchers generated genetic data by collecting saliva samples from modern individuals going about their everyday business in their villages between 2012 and 2015.

The model suggests the earliest population split among early humans that is detectable in contemporary populations occurred 120,000 to 135,000 years ago, after two or more weakly genetically differentiated Homo populations had been mixing for hundreds of thousands of years. After the population split, people still migrated between the stem populations, creating a weakly structured stem. This offers a better explanation of genetic variation among individual humans and human groups than do previous models, the authors suggest.

"We are presenting something that people had never even tested before," Henn said of the research. "This moves anthropological science significantly forward."

"Previous more complicated models proposed contributions from archaic hominins, but this model indicates otherwise," said co-author Tim Weaver, UC Davis professor of anthropology. He has expertise in what early human fossils looked like and provided comparative research for the study.

The authors predict that, according to this model, 1-4% of genetic differentiation among contemporary human populations can be attributed to variation in the stem populations. This model may have important consequences for the interpretation of the fossil record. Owing to migration between the branches, these multiple lineages were probably morphologically similar, which means morphologically divergent hominid fossils (such as Homo naledi) are unlikely to represent branches that contributed to the evolution of Homo sapiens, the authors said.

...

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/05/230517121424.htm

Similar but related to animals:

What did the earliest animals look like?
Chromosome analysis resolves debate about sister group of all animals. It's comb jellies, not sponges

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/05/230517122111.htm

[morganism]

Accelerating the discovery of new Nasca geoglyphs using deep learning

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440323000559

(...)
Therefore, we developed a pipeline of DL to mine such data and address the challenges unique to archaeology. With this approach, we identified four new geoglyphs in the northern area of the Nasca Pampa, namely: a humanoid, a pair of legs, a fish, and a bird. The geoglyphs got verified through on-site surveys. We could identify new geoglyph's candidates approximately 21 times faster than with the naked eye alone. The approach would be beneficial for the future of archaeology in a new paradigm of combining field survey and AI."

[morganism]

An Upper Palaeolithic Proto-writing System and Phenological Calendar

Abstract

In at least 400 European caves such as Lascaux, Chauvet and Altamira, Upper Palaeolithic Homo sapiens groups drew, painted and engraved non-figurative signs from at least ~42,000 bp and figurative images (notably animals) from at least 37,000 bp. Since their discovery ~150 years ago, the purpose or meaning of European Upper Palaeolithic non-figurative signs has eluded researchers. Despite this, specialists assume that they were notational in some way. Using a database of images spanning the European Upper Palaeolithic, we suggest how three of the most frequently occurring signs—the line <|>, the dot <•>, and the <Y>—functioned as units of communication. We demonstrate that when found in close association with images of animals the line <|> and dot <•> constitute numbers denoting months, and form constituent parts of a local phenological/meteorological calendar beginning in spring and recording time from this point in lunar months. We also demonstrate that the <Y> sign, one of the most frequently occurring signs in Palaeolithic non-figurative art, has the meaning <To Give Birth>. The position of the <Y> within a sequence of marks denotes month of parturition, an ordinal representation of number in contrast to the cardinal representation used in tallies. Our data indicate that the purpose of this system of associating animals with calendar information was to record and convey seasonal behavioural information about specific prey taxa in the geographical regions of concern. We suggest a specific way in which the pairing of numbers with animal subjects constituted a complete unit of meaning—a notational system combined with its subject—that provides us with a specific insight into what one set of notational marks means. It gives us our first specific reading of European Upper Palaeolithic communication, the first known writing in the history of Homo sapiens."

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeological-journal/article/an-upper-palaeolithic-protowriting-system-and-phenological-calendar/6F2AD8A705888F2226FE857840B4FE19


(this was also noted on N Am native petroglyphs 6 months ago. Typical use was a snake or star emblem w 13 curves/lines, and a dot to mark when local ungulates or rabbits dropped newborns. An amateur figured it out.)

[kassy]

Interesting stuff. And very useful information to keep track of.

[morganism]

‘One-in-a-million’ fossil may show mammal about to chow down on a dinosaur
The extraordinary 125-million-year-old scene was preserved in China’s “Dinosaur Pompeii”

https://www.science.org/content/article/one-million-fossil-may-show-mammal-about-chow-down-dinosaur

Some 125 million years ago in a verdant forest in what today is northern China, a furry, badger-size mammal and a scaly dinosaur three times its size were locked in mortal combat. The small yet savage mammal appears to have had the upper hand and may have been moments away from devouring its dino dinner when suddenly, an avalanchelike flow of volcanic debris swept over the combatants, instantly killing and entombing them both. Cemented in stone, their skeletons intertwined and the mammal’s teeth chomping down onto two of the dinosaur’s ribs, they lay together through the ages until a discovery in 2012 by a farmer.

The researchers who have analyzed the fossil assert today in Scientific Reports that it is rare evidence of a mammal preying on a dinosaur. This finding challenges the popular perception that early mammals tended to cower in the shadows of their dinosaur contemporaries, they say. Other paleontologists are impressed, but caution that more work is needed to verify the fossil’s authenticity.

“This is the kind of specimen that paleontologists dream of—a pristine snapshot of ancient behavior and ecology,” says Raymond Rogers, a geologist at Macalester College who was not involved in the study. “If this remarkable specimen is the real deal, it is a one-in-a-million find.”

doi: 10.1126/science.adj8313

[kassy]

Researchers extract ancient DNA from a 2,900-year-old clay brick, revealing a time capsule of plant life

Currently housed at the National Museum of Denmark, the clay brick originates from the palace of Neo-Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II, in the ancient city of Kalhu. Known today as the North-West palace in Nimrud (modern-day northern Iraq), its construction began around 879 BCE. The brick has a cuneiform inscription (written in the now extinct Semitic language Akkadian) stating that it is 'The property of the palace of Ashurnasirpal, king of Assyria.' This makes it possible to date the brick precisely to within a decade (879 BCE to 869 BCE).

During a digitalization project at the Museum in 2020, the group of researchers were able to obtain samples from the inner core of the brick -- meaning that there was a low risk of DNA contamination since the brick was created. The team extracted DNA from the samples by adapting a protocol previously used for other porous materials, such as bone.

After the extracted DNA had been sequenced, the researchers identified 34 distinct taxonomic groups of plants. The plant families with the most abundant sequences were Brassicaceae (cabbage) and Ericaceae (heather). Other represented families were Betulaceae (birch), Lauraceae (laurels), Selineae (umbellifiers) and Triticeae (cultivated grasses).

With the interdisciplinary team comprising assyriologists, archaeologists, biologists, and geneticists, they were able to compare their findings with modern-day botanical records from Iraq as well as ancient Assyrian plant descriptions.

The brick would have been made primarily of mud collected near the local Tigris river, mixed with material such as chaff or straw, or animal dung. It would have been shaped in a mould before being inscribed with cuneiform script, then left in the sun to dry. The fact that the brick was never burned, but left to dry naturally, would have helped to preserve the genetic material trapped within the clay.

...

In addition to the fascinating insight this individual brick revealed, the research serves as a proof of concept and method which could be applied to many other archaeological sources of clay from different places and time periods around the world, to identify past flora and fauna. Clay materials are nearly always present in any archaeological site around the world, and their context means they can often be dated with high precision.

This study only described the plant DNA extracted, as these were the most prevalent and best-preserved specimens. However, depending on the sample, all taxa could potentially be identified, including vertebrates and invertebrates. The ability to provide accurate descriptions of ancient biodiversity would be a valuable tool to better understand and quantify present day biodiversity loss, and to gain a deeper understanding of ancient and lost civilisations.

...

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/08/230822111659.htm

[John_the_Younger]

Review in Earth Logs: a book on archaeology, radiocarbon dating, ancient DNA, and how modern humans evolved: The World Before Us: How Science is Revealing a New Story of Our Human Originsby Higham, Tom, 2022

from Dr. Steve Drury's review:

The World Before Us is not only comprehensive and eminently clear for the lay-reader, but it is more exciting than any science book that I have read. For the moment, it is the latest ‘word’ on early, anatomically modern humans and on the closely related Neanderthals and Denisovans.
...
One reviewer commented ‘The who, what, where, when and how of human evolution’.

I've just ordered the book...

[vox_mundi]

Archaeologists Discover World's Oldest Wooden Structure
https://phys.org/news/2023-09-archaeologists-world-oldest-wooden.html

Half a million years ago, earlier than was previously thought possible, humans were building structures made of wood, according to new research by a team from the University of Liverpool and Aberystwyth University.

The research, published in the journal Nature, reports on the excavation of well-preserved wood at the archaeological site of Kalambo Falls, Zambia, dating back at least 476,000 years and predating the evolution of our own species, Homo sapiens.

Expert analysis of stone tool cut-marks on the wood show that these early humans shaped and joined two large logs to make a structure, probably the foundation of a platform or part of a dwelling.

This is the earliest evidence from anywhere in the world of the deliberate crafting of logs to fit together. Until now, evidence for the human use of wood was limited to its use for making fire, digging sticks and spears.

This discovery challenges the prevailing view that Stone Age humans were nomadic. At Kalambo Falls these humans not only had a perennial source of water, but the forest around them provided enough food to enable them to settle and make structures.

Lawrence Barham, Evidence for the earliest structural use of wood at least 476,000 years ago, Nature (2023)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06557-9

[vox_mundi]

Prehistoric Cosmic Airburst Preceded the Advent of Agriculture In the Levant
https://phys.org/news/2023-10-prehistoric-cosmic-airburst-advent-agriculture.html



Agriculture in Syria started with a bang 12,800 years ago as a fragmented comet slammed into the Earth's atmosphere. The explosion and subsequent environmental changes forced hunter-gatherers in the prehistoric settlement of Abu Hureyra to adopt agricultural practices to boost their chances for survival.

That's the assertion made by an international group of scientists in one of four related research papers, all appearing in the journal Science Open: Airbursts and Cratering Impacts. The papers are the latest results in the investigation of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, the idea that an anomalous cooling of the Earth almost 13 millennia ago was the result of a cosmic impact.

"In this general region, there was a change from more humid conditions that were forested and with diverse sources of food for hunter-gatherers, to drier, cooler conditions when they could no longer subsist only as hunter-gatherers," said Earth scientist James Kennett, a professor emeritus of UC Santa Barbara . The settlement at Abu Hureyra is famous among archaeologists for its evidence of the earliest known transition from foraging to farming. "The villagers started to cultivate barley, wheat and legumes," he noted. "This is what the evidence clearly shows."

... Before the impact, the researchers found, the inhabitants' prehistoric diet involved wild legumes and wild-type grains, and "small but significant amounts of wild fruits and berries." In the layers corresponding to the time after cooling, fruits and berries disappeared and their diet shifted toward more domestic-type grains and lentils, as the people experimented with early cultivation methods.

By about 1,000 years later, all of the Neolithic "founder crops"—emmer wheat, einkorn wheat, hulled barley, rye, peas, lentils, bitter vetch, chickpeas and flax—were being cultivated in what is now called the Fertile Crescent. Drought-resistant plants, both edible and inedible, become more prominent in the record as well, reflecting a drier climate that followed the sudden impact winter at the onset of the Younger Dryas.



And what an impact it must have been.

https://phys.org/news/2020-03-evidence-cosmic-impact-destruction-world.html

In the 12,800-year-old layers corresponding to the shift between hunting and gathering and agriculture, the record at Abu Hureyra shows evidence of massive burning. The evidence includes a carbon-rich "black mat" layer with high concentrations of platinum, nanodiamonds and tiny metallic spherules that could only have been formed under extremely high temperatures—higher than any that could have been produced by man's technology at the time.

The airburst flattened trees and straw huts, splashing meltglass onto cereals and grains, as well as on the early buildings, tools and animal bones found in the mound—and most likely on people, too.

The black mat layer, nanodiamonds and melted minerals have also been found at about 50 other sites across North and South America and Europe, the collection of which has been called the Younger Dryas strewnfield.



Because the impact appears to have produced an aerial explosion there is no evidence of craters in the ground. "But a crater is not required," Kennett said. "Many accepted impacts have no visible crater." The scientists continue to compile evidence of relatively lower-pressure cosmic explosions—the kind that occur when the shockwave originates in the air and travels downward to the Earth's surface.

"Shocked quartz is well known and is probably the most robust proxy for a cosmic impact," he continued. Only forces on par with cosmic-level explosions could have produced the microscopic deformations within quartz sand grains at the time of the impacts, and these deformations have been found in abundance in the minerals gathered from impact craters.

This "crème de la crème" of cosmic impact evidence has also been identified at Abu Hureyra and at other Younger Dryas Boundary (YDB) sites, despite an absence of craters.

... Between the shocked quartz at the nuclear test sites and the quartz found at Abu Hureyra, the scientists found close associations in their characteristics, namely glass-filled shock fractures, indicative of temperatures greater than 2,000 degrees Celsius, above the melting point of quartz.

"For the first time, we propose that shock metamorphism in quartz grains exposed to an atomic detonation is essentially the same as during a low-altitude, lower-pressure cosmic airburst," Kennett said. However, the so-called "lower pressure" is still very high—probably greater than 3 GPa or about 400,000 pounds per square inch, equivalent to about five 737 airplanes stacked on a small coin.

Andrew M.T. Moore, James P. Kennett and Malcolm A. LeCompte et al. Abu Hureyra, Syria, Part 1: Shock-fractured quartz grains support 12,800-year-old cosmic airburst at the Younger Dryas onset. Airbursts and Cratering Impacts (2023)
https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14293/ACI.2023.0003

Andrew M.T. Moore, James P. Kennett and William M. Napier et al. Abu Hureyra, Syria, Part 2: Additional evidence supporting the catastrophic destruction of this prehistoric village by a cosmic airburst ~12,800 years ago. Airbursts and Cratering Impacts (2023)
https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14293/ACI.2023.0002

Andrew M.T. Moore, James P. Kennett and William M. Napier et al. Abu Hureyra, Syria, Part 3: Comet airbursts triggered major climate change 12,800 years ago that initiated the transition to agriculture. Airbursts and Cratering Impacts. (2023)
https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14293/ACI.2023.0004

Robert E. Hermes, Hans-Rudolf Wenk and James P. Kennett et al. Microstructures in shocked quartz: linking nuclear airbursts and meteorite impacts. Airbursts and Cratering Impacts (2023)
https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14293/ACI.2023.0001

----------------------------------------------------------------------
https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14293/ACI.2023.0004

... A large comet, >100 km in diameter, the progenitor of the Kreutz sungrazing comets, entered the planetary system from the Centaur region during the late Pleistocene/early Holocene and fragmented, as confirmed by its still-visible debris [86]. It is currently disintegrating in a high-inclination, retrograde orbit. Another is now seen as a cometary debris field known as the Taurid Complex, composed of Comet Encke, an array of meteor streams, and ~90 asteroids with diameters of 1.5 to 5 km in similar orbits [83]. The measured light curves of 34 of the associated asteroids [87] and the mass and spread of the Complex, when the derivative zodiacal dust and its possible loss rate are estimated, indicate that the Complex represents the remains of a ~100-km-wide progenitor comet whose disintegration and dispersion has continued for at least the last ~20,000 years [88–91]. These data confirm and strengthen an early proposal by Whipple that Comet Encke is the progenitor of much of the meteoroid population in the inner solar system [92].

Comet Encke, a relatively small comet (~5 km) with a short orbital period (3.3 years), is in an orbit whose perihelion, q = 0.34 au, is closer to the Sun than the orbit of Mercury and whose aphelion, Q = 4.1 au, is just short of Jupiter’s sphere of influence (1 au is roughly the distance between the center of the Earth and the Sun). We determined the past evolution of Comet Encke by backtracking from its AD 2007 orbital characteristics given in the Minor Planet Center, using the Mercury orbital integration package [93] and considering gravitational perturbations produced by all the planets. This analysis revealed five “double jeopardy” high-risk episodes during the past 14,000 years, separated by intervals of ~2500 years when the modeled orbit intersected that of the Earth while passing north to south through the Earth’s orbital plane. This intersection was followed a few centuries later by another intersection during its orbit south to north (Figure 3A). The orbital inclination oscillates between about 3° and 21° from Earth’s orbital plane (i.e., the plane of the ecliptic) (Figure 3B) with the low inclinations occurring when the orbit of comet and Earth intersect.

Comet destruction proceeds largely through random splittings, with sublimation as a minor process [94]. The disintegration history of short-period comets is varied but may be modeled statistically either by frequent splitting events with a slight mass loss per event or by fewer events with larger mass losses [82]. Simulations of the progenitor comet’s disintegration over the past 14,000 years have been carried out in accordance with these models, with the fragments dispersing at velocities of 2 to 10 m/s, producing debris trails whose fragments spread along the orbital track [94]. A comet in an Encke-like orbit may undergo substantial fragmentation every few orbits, and many hundreds of fragment clusters may be produced, yielding an expectation that Earth would have intersected a few of them over the lifetime of the comet. In addition, the 2:7 orbital resonance with Jupiter’s orbit produces long-lived concentrations of Taurid dust swarms [95, 96].

Modeling of Taurid disintegration leads to an estimation that during the last 20,000 years, Earth possibly experienced several “meteor hurricanes” with kinetic energies between 3,000-40,000 megatons (Mt) and durations of a few hours to a few days [94]. The bolides colliding with Earth are a mixture of ice, dust, boulders, and larger bodies. Observations show that the comet fragments often have dimensions of tens to hundreds of meters [97], and the encounters can be hemispheric to global in scope. One of many scenarios assumes that if the incident energy is in the form of 1-3-Mt bolides, the mean distance of any point on an exposed hemisphere from such an airburst event is in the range of 50-300 km. Thus, adequate energy was available at Abu Hureyra to transform terrestrial sediments into meltglass, ignite local fires, and destroy the village, whether by a radiation pulse from the bolide or the subsequent blast wave [98, 99].

The probability of Earth passing through a trail of fragments is highest at low orbital inclinations, varying roughly as the inverse sine of the inclination. The episode at ~12,800 years yields a combination of an orbital intersection coupled with low orbital inclination when the orbits of Earth and the modeled orbit of Comet Encke were almost coplanar (Figure 3B). Between ~12,800 and 12,200 years ago (before AD 2007), the orbit of the modeled Comet Encke was at a shallow inclination (3–6°). Given that a debris trail dense enough to produce the YDB airburst proxies may be 1000 to 10,000 Earth radii in length, Earth may have passed through such a debris trail multiple times, approximately once per century near 12,800 cal BP [94]. This episode is shown in high resolution in Figure 3C. The intersection of the orbits of Earth and the comet coincides closely with the YD boundary.

There is a near overlap between the intersection dates of the progenitor comet with Earth that produced the YDB airburst proxies. However, when extrapolating back in time, there are a few decades of uncertainty about the current orbital elements of Comet Encke and the non-gravitational forces produced by material ejected from the comet [100]. Within that range, the YDB occurs within the highest risk interval of encountering the comet fragments. For more details, see Appendix, Text S1.

[vox_mundi]

Further Evidence Points to Footprints In New Mexico Being the Oldest Sign of Humans In Americas
https://phys.org/news/2023-10-evidence-footprints-mexico-oldest-humans.html



New research confirms that fossil human footprints in New Mexico are likely the oldest direct evidence of human presence in the Americas, a finding that upends what many archaeologists thought they knew about when our ancestors arrived in the New World.

The footprints were discovered at the edge of an ancient lakebed in White Sands National Park and date back to between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago, according to research published Thursday in the journal Science.

The estimated age of the footprints was first reported in Science in 2021, but some researchers raised concerns about the dates. Questions focused on whether seeds of aquatic plants used for the original dating may have absorbed ancient carbon from the lake—which could, in theory, throw off radiocarbon dating by thousands of years.

The new study presents two additional lines of evidence for the older date range. It uses two entirely different materials found at the site, ancient conifer pollen and quartz grains.

The reported age of the footprints challenges the once-conventional wisdom that humans didn't reach the Americas until a few thousand years before rising sea levels covered the Bering land bridge between Russia and Alaska, perhaps about 15,000 years ago.

"If three totally different methods converge around a single age range, that's really significant,"

... While other archeological sites in the Americas point to similar date ranges—including pendants carved from giant ground sloth remains in Brazil—scientists still question whether such materials really indicate human presence.

https://phys.org/news/2023-07-pendants-giant-sloths-earlier-people.html

"White Sands is unique because there's no question these footprints were left by people, it's not ambiguous," said Jennifer Raff, an anthropological geneticist at the University of Kansas, who was not involved in the study.

Bente Philippsen et al, Dating the arrival of humans in the Americas, Science (2023)
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk3075

[sidd]

If true, which is looking likely, this is huge. Thanks for the links.

sidd

[John_the_Younger]

There are lots of former Pleistocene lake beds in the U.S. Southwest.  I'm sure many people are out walking them now.  Two years ago if I saw old footprints, I'd assume they were a year old or something.  Now I'd ask a paleontologist to have a look.  24,000 years, anybody? 25,000?  How about 26? [asked the auctioneer]

The next question I have is, where did they live?  There must be caves nearby (maybe one that collapsed 14,000 years ago?).  I suspect once paleontologists start looking in 23,000 year old sediments, they start finding things.  (Why bother looking in 23,000 year old sediments if people didn't get here before 14,000 or 12,000 years ago?)

[greylib]

The next question I have is, where did they live?  There must be caves nearby (maybe one that collapsed 14,000 years ago?).  I suspect once paleontologists start looking in 23,000 year old sediments, they start finding things.  (Why bother looking in 23,000 year old sediments if people didn't get here before 14,000 or 12,000 years ago?)

Probably not. Yes, we call them cave-men. And yes, if there were nearby caves they'd have wanted to use them. Mostly, though, they'd have made primitive teepees with sticks and hides like other hunter-gatherer nomads.

[vox_mundi]

... “This obviously shows that people were in what is now Southern New Mexico 23,000 years ago, well south of the coalesced Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets,” USGS research geologist Kathleen Springer, a coauthor of both studies, told Ars Technica. “So that means they had to have been there before those big walls of ice closed, or they got there some other way.”

The ice sheets sealed off the northern third of the continent around 26,000 years ago.

It’s possible that people simply walked into North America (it’s not Mordor, after all) sometime before 26,000 years ago, and a group of their descendants eventually ended up squelching through the mud in a cooler, wetter version of what’s now New Mexico. That scenario could also explain the stone tools unearthed from a 30,000-year-old layer of sediment in Chiquihuite Cave, Mexico. And it doesn’t rule out another wave of people venturing onto the continent later once the ice started to recede.

... One question archaeologists will definitely be wrestling with in the coming years is why, if people have been in the Americas since 30,000 or even 23,000 years ago, there aren’t more sites with similar ages scattered across the continent. And one possible answer is that many of them are underwater, swamped by sea levels that rose as the gargantuan ice sheets melted.

... Pigati and his colleagues are now working on the west side of the Tularosa Basin at White Sands, on the opposite side of the ancient lakebed from the tracks in their recent study, and they’re also reconstructing the ancient environment that might have drawn people and animals to the tracksite on the eastern side of the basin.

Meanwhile, Pigati and Springer told Ars, there are hundreds of similar dry lakebeds all over the Western US that haven't been studied. "In terms of finding a new archive of archaeological data that's really almost untapped, we're going to see really some neat stories come out in the coming years," said Pigati.

More Evidence That Humans Were In North America Over 20,000 Years Ago
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/10/theres-more-evidence-that-people-walked-at-white-sands-23000-years-ago/

People May Have Lived In North America By 30,000 Years Ago
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/07/people-may-have-lived-in-north-america-by-30000-years-ago/

In Chiquihuite Cave, archaeologists found 240 stone tools buried in 30,000-year-old layers of muddy sediment. Archaeologist Ciprian Ardelean and his colleagues collected 46 radiocarbon dates from bone, charcoal, and sediment near the tools. According to a statistical model—which used those dates to predict the most likely starting date for the layer of sediment and artifacts—the oldest layers at the site date back 33,000 to 31,000 years ago.

If the archaeologists are right, that means people were making a living high in the mountains of north-central Mexico well before most people in the field thought North America was inhabited by humans.

... The stone tools Ardelean and his colleagues found there don’t look like the stone tools made by any other known culture in North America. They used mostly green and black recrystallized limestone, which has a texture similar to chert. Their tools and projectile points were mostly made with flakes that had been chipped sideways off stone cores, so the flake’s long axis is perpendicular to the direction in which it was removed from the core.

Unlike the precursors of the Clovis and Western Stemmed cultures, the Chiquihuite points have neither stems nor flutes; instead, their bases tend to be round or tapered. According to Ardelean and his colleagues, “its qualitative traits suggest a mature technology, possibly brought in from elsewhere before the Last Glacial Maximum.”