Tag: ancient history

‘Absolute surprise’: Homo erectus skulls found in China are almost 1.8 million years old — the oldest evidence of the ancient human relatives in East Asia

Three Homo erectus skulls previously unearthed in China are almost 1.8 million years old, around 600,000 years older than originally thought, a new study finds.

This revelation has made the Yunxian skulls from Hubei province the oldest evidence of our early human relatives, known as hominins, in East Asia, according to research published Wednesday (Feb. 18) in the journal Science Advances.

Study co-author Christopher Bae, a professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, told Live Science in an email that he felt “absolute surprise” when he first saw the results of the analysis. This more ancient age may force experts to rethink the date that H. erectus first emerged, which is believed to have occurred around 2 million years ago in Africa.

“What this means is that we need to consider pushing the origin of Homo erectus back” to around 2.6 million years ago, Bae said in an email.

H. erectus has long been considered the first human relative to leave Africa, with 1.78 million to 1.85 million-year-old fossils found at the Dmanisi site in Georgia being the earliest evidence of humans in Asia. But stone tools discovered at two sites in China dated to 2.1 million and 2.43 million years ago have complicated that picture, since they predate experts’ theory of when H. erectus originated.

The exact date of the three Yunxian skulls, which were found between 1989 and 2022, has long been debated, but they were previously considered to be around 1 million years old based on the age of animal teeth found close by, although one study dated them to around 1.1 million years ago using electron spin resonance and uranium-series dating. So when the opportunity arose to try a new dating technique at the site, Bae and his colleagues thought it was a good chance to revisit the debate.

Their team used a technique called cosmogenic nuclide burial dating to determine the age of the quartz found in the sediment layers where the skulls were found. This dating technique measures the half-life of two chemical variants — Aluminum-26 and Beryllium-10 — to determine how much time has passed since the quartz was exposed to cosmic rays.

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5,300-Year-Old Egyptian Artifact Confirms Existence of “Mechanically Sophisticated” Drilling Technology Before the Age of the Pharaohs

Close to a century ago, researchers unearthed a small, unusual metal object during excavations at a cemetery in Upper Egypt. Now, a reinvestigation into the curious find has identified it as the earliest known rotary drill ever found in association with ancient Egyptian archaeology.

The small artifact, which measures less than 64 millimeters across and weighs under two grams, is crafted from copper-alloy and dates to the late 4th millennium BCE, which coincides with Egypt’s Predynastic period, a remote era that predates the reign of the earliest pharaohs.

The remarkable discovery, which experts now characterize as “a mechanically sophisticated drilling tool,” was recently detailed in a study published in the journal Egypt and the Levant.

 An Ancient Curiosity Comes into Focus

The small artifact, retrieved from the burial of an ancient predynastic Egyptian man identified as Grave 3932, was first documented in the 1920s. At that time, the object was described as “a little awl of copper, with some leather thong wound round it,” a description that offered researchers little to go on as to what its potential use might have been.

Now, according to a team of archaeologists at Newcastle University, working in collaboration with the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, re-examination of the object under magnification has revealed wear patterns that are consistent with drilling devices from later periods in Egyptian history.

Specifically, the team points to evidence of edges rounded from wear, as well as striations and other features that are clear indicators of rotary motion.

“The ancient Egyptians are famous for stone temples, painted tombs, and dazzling jewelry, but behind those achievements lay practical, everyday technologies that rarely survive in the archaeological record,” said Dr. Martin Odler, a Visiting Fellow in Newcastle University’s School of History, Classics and Archaeology, in a statement.

According to Odler, the lead author of the recent study that reassessed the artifact, one of the most important technologies behind such famous achievements afforded us by the ancient Egyptians was the drill, which had uses in everything from woodwork to shaping stone for construction and the creation of decorative pieces.

Evidence of a Bowstring Emerges

Intriguingly, the early 20th-century references to “some leather thong” have proven correct, as the Newcastle team and their Italian collaborators say that six coils of a very fragile piece of leather cordage appear to represent clear evidence of a bowstring which would have been used to power the drill.

Such ancient bow drills served as an early form of rotary tool, which one could liken to an ancient counterpart to modern hand drills. To function, these bow drills featured a small length of leather wrapped around a shaft, which spins the drill very quickly as the string is moved back and forth.

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Did modern humans wipe out the Neanderthals? New evidence may finally provide answers.

About 37,000 years ago, Neanderthals clustered in small groups in what is now southern Spain. Their lives may have been transformed by the eruption of the Phlegraean Fields in Italy a few thousand years earlier, when the caldera’s massive explosion disrupted food chains across the Mediterranean region.

They may have gone about their daily life: Crafting stone tools, eating birds and mushrooms, engraving symbols on rocks, and creating jewelry out of feathers and shells.

They likely never realized they were among the last of their kind.

But the story of their extinction actually begins tens of thousands of years earlier, when the Neanderthals became isolated and dispersed, eventually ending nearly half a million years of successful existence in some of the most forbidding regions of Eurasia.

By 34,000 years ago, our closest relatives had effectively gone extinct. But because modern humans and Neanderthals overlapped in time and space for thousands of years, archaeologists have long wondered whether our species wiped out our closest relatives. This may have occurred directly, such as through violence and warfare, or indirectly, through disease or competition for resources.

Now, researchers are solving the mystery of how the Neanderthals died out — and what role our species played in their demise.

“I think the fact is, we do know what happened to Neanderthals, and it is complex,” Shara Bailey, a biological anthropologist at New York University, told Live Science.

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12,000-Year-Old Discovery in an Oregon Cave Reveals First Evidence of a “Complex” Ancient American Technology

Two small pieces of animal hide recovered from an ancient dwelling place within a cave in Oregon could represent the earliest known evidence of sewing among America’s early inhabitants.

The remarkably well-preserved artifacts include portions of hide stitched together with handwoven cord and believed to have been crafted more than 12,000 years ago.

If confirmed, this possible evidence of sewn materials could offer archaeologists a rare look at the emergence of complex technologies employed by America’s early inhabitants to ward off the extreme temperatures that still prevailed during the final years of the last Ice Age.

A Discovery at Cougar Mountain Cave

The discoveries were made within Cougar Mountain Cave, an ancient rock shelter in Oregon’s Great Basin. This vast region is best known for its arid landscape and sagebrush valleys, which lie between isolated mountains that have helped craft the very unique ecosystems that were home to significant prehistoric human activity.

An international research team, led by Richard Rosencrance of the University of Nevada and Katelyn McDonough of the University of Oregon, reported their discovery of what appears to be cordage, bone needles, and wooden artifacts alongside remnants of botanical materials in a recent paper featured in Science Advances.

The discovery of artifacts made from such materials that date to this early period of North American occupation is extremely rare, since they are highly perishable, leaving many questions about what kinds of garments and cordage were employed by some of the earliest arrivals in the New World.

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4,700-Year-Old Discovery Reveals Clues to Cult of Ishtar’s Spread Throughout the Ancient World

Hidden beneath an ancient temple in Assur, Iraq, archaeologists have made a discovery that holds potentially crucial evidence for the cult of Ishtar’s origins in the area.

The researchers behind the discovery date the temple’s foundation to between 2896 BCE and 2702 BCE, saying that it provides crucial evidence for the spread of Mesopotamian ritual practice to northern Iraq and urban life at Assur over 4,700 years ago, revealing the growth of cult worship.

The findings were published in The Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

Assur’s Ishtar Temple

Assyria was a major Mesopotamian civilization that began as Assur—initially a meager city-state—and eventually expanded into a much larger empire.

The city itself is located on the western bank of the Tigris River, and during the first millennium BCE, the Neo-Assyrian empire became well established, leaving a rich corpus of well-preserved records about these later periods. Yet, earlier records are murkier or nonexistent, leaving Assur’s beginnings shrouded in mystery.

German archaeologist Walter Andrae first excavated the Ishtar Empire between 1903 and 1914.  However, the deepest layers remained covered until the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich’s Assur Excavation Project in 2024. Modern coring technology has enabled archaeologists to access the temple cella.

“The excavators of the Ishtar temple simply didn’t report it, so we assume they didn’t see it,” lead author Mark Altaweel told The Debrief in an email. “The sand is below the last floor level of the temple, so it is possible they just didn’t dig far enough or reach the bedrock. We basically cored until we hit the bedrock.”

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New Analysis Suggests That The Great Pyramid Of Giza Is Potentially 20,000 Years Older Than Experts Thought

The Great Pyramid of Giza, generally believed to have been built as the tomb of Pharaoh Khufu around 2575 B.C.E., is one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. But what if it’s even older than that?

Alberto Donini, an engineer from the University of Bologna, recently applied a new dating system that he calls the “Relative Erosion Method” (REM) to the pyramid. Now, he’s claiming that his research suggests the famous landmark may have actually been built nearly 25,000 years ago.

When Was The Great Pyramid Of Giza Built? The Origins Of Egypt’s Ancient Wonder

Scientific studies of the pyramids at Giza have been ongoing for centuries, so the current timeline of their construction is widely accepted. As it stands, the Great Pyramid was seemingly built during the reign of Pharaoh Khufu, who ruled over Egypt from roughly 2589 B.C.E. to 2566 B.C.E. The Pyramid of Khafre came shortly thereafter, followed by the Pyramid of Menkaure.

This timeline was determined using both historical records and scientific study. Ancient authors like Herodotus wrote that Khufu had the Great Pyramid constructed as his tomb, noting that he “brought the people to utter misery” by making them transport impossibly heavy limestone blocks from quarries — possibly located hundreds of miles away — in order to erect the 481-foot structure. Exactly how they managed this remains a mystery to this day, though several promising theories have been put forth, such as the use of a ramp system.

Then, in the 1800s, archaeologists discovered graffiti inside the Great Pyramid that mentioned Khufu by name. It was seemingly scrawled by the workers who built the monument, adding another layer of evidence that the structure was built during that pharaoh’s reign.

Archaeologists later used scientific methods to date the pyramid. They radiocarbon dated the mortar used to secure the stone blocks, which was made using ashes and thus contained organic matter. These results suggested that the mortar was likely mixed between 2620 and 2484 B.C.E., once again aligning with the reign of Khufu.

With so much proof pointing to a construction date of roughly 2575 B.C.E., it seems unlikely that there’s any additional information out there that could significantly change the timeline. However, Alberto Donini claims that his research could completely rewrite this story.

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Hidden for Centuries, “Lost” Portions of a Mysterious Ancient Star Map Have Been Revealed Using X-Rays

Researchers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California, have used X-ray beams to reveal once-hidden references to an ancient star map from a centuries-old document.

The ancient palimpsest—a portion of the Codex Climaci Rescriptus—has been revealed to contain fragmentary references to an ancient star catalog once used by the Greek astronomer Hipparchus. The ancient star maps in question were created by the astronomer as early as 150 B.C., copies of which were made several centuries later.

Now, the “lost” ancient writing has been made discernible as bright orange markings the X-rays have revealed, according to Minhal Gardezi, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who was involved in the research.

A “Phaenomena” Emerges

The text revealed by SLAC researchers comprises portions of the poem “Phaenomena,” which dates to around 275 B.C. and is attributed to the Greek poet Aratus of Soli. The copies of the poem the SLAC team studied had likely been made sometime in the 6th century, at which time the unknown scribe also included sections comprising appendices relating to the positions of stars in various constellations, which were a perfect match for work known to have been undertaken by Hipparchus.

Originally transcribed on portions of animal hide, the remnants of the ancient poem were held within Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt’s Sinai desert for centuries. At some point between the 9th and 10th centuries, the original text on the palimpsest appears to have been erased and reused to record a series of monastic treatises, seemingly destroying the ancient scientific information the ancient record once contained.

SLAC’s particle accelerator has now revealed these “lost” portions of the ancient poem using powerful X-rays, making the invisible records from long ago visible again for the first time in centuries (images of which can be seen here).

In the past, very little from Hipparchus’s writings has been recovered, and most of our knowledge of the ancient Greek astronomer stems from secondhand sources. Based on such information, scholars are aware that he can be credited with the creation of one of the earliest star catalogs, as well as early mathematical innovations that include the invention of trigonometry.

The team’s discovery is important, since it offers a rare glimpse at such records from the ancient world, which were often recorded on perishable materials like papyrus, which seldom survive through the ages.

Going beyond even the surprise discovery of these ancient astronomical records, the SLAC team’s process reveals a promising new means by which researchers may be able to retrieve similar “lost” information from surviving ancient records, especially those kept on more rugged materials that were often reused throughout time.

The recent discovery represents a veritable cornucopia of ancient information related to a crucial period in the emergence of science close to two millennia ago. However, this is not the first indication that traces of earlier ancient writing had been present on the palimpsest. In the past, earlier use of advanced imaging techniques had already shown that some form of writing was discernible.

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Resurfaced 3,300-year-old Egyptian document hints at biblical giants being real

Historians are scratching their heads at a resurfaced Egyptian scroll held by the British Museum that might support the claim that biblical giants were, in fact, real.

Genesis chapter 6 of the Bible is about God’s response to the widespread human “wickedness” and corruptness, which was supposedly caused by Nephilim, powerful beings that were the sons of “fallen angels” and human women.

It was these sons who were described as giant beings and referred to as “men of reknown” that caused widespread chaos which prompted God to cleanse the earth by “destroying all creatures under the sky” with “flood waters.”

Fast forward to now, Anastasi I, a 3,300-year-old document that’s been in the British Museum since 1839 and has reignited the interest of the Associates for Biblical Research, a religious organization in Pennsylvania, has historians and researchers believing that these “men of reknown” giants may have actually been real.

The ancient document, that is believed to be from the 13th century, BCE, mentions run ins with the Shosu people, who were supposedly eight feet tall, which scared Israelites, as originally reported by the Daily Mail.

To connect the dots that Anastasi I is proof beyond what is said in the Bible that giants existed, Numbers 13:33, a verse from the Old Testament, also hints at Israelites coming across these large figures, “And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.”

The scroll, which reseachers believe to be a letter written by a scribe says, “The narrow defile is infested with Shosu concealed beneath the bushes; some of them are of four cubits or of five cubits, from head to foot, fierce of face, their heart is not mild, and they hearken not to coaxing.”

“Four cubits or five cubits” tall, translates to a figure close to 8 feet tall.

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430,000-Year-Old Wooden Tools Are the Oldest Ever Found 

Early hominins in Europe were creating tools from raw materials hundreds of thousands of years before Homo sapiens arrived there, two new studies indicate, pushing back the established time for such activity. From a report:The evidence includes a 500,000-year-old hammer made of elephant or mammoth bone, excavated in southern England, and 430,000-year-old wooden tools found in southern Greece — the earliest wooden tools on record.

The findings suggest that early humans possessed sophisticated technological skills, the researchers said. Katerina Harvati, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tubingen in Germany and a lead author of the wooden-tool paper, which was published on Monday in the journal PNAS, said the discoveries provided insight into the prehistoric origins of human intelligence. Silvia Bello, a paleoanthropologist at London’s Natural History Museum and an author on the elephant-bone study, which was published last week in Science Advances, concurred.

The artifacts in both studies, recovered from coal-mine sites, were probably produced by early Neanderthals or a preceding species, Homo heidelbergensis. Homo sapiens emerged in Africa more than 300,000 years ago, and the oldest evidence of them in Europe is a 210,000-year-old fossil unearthed in Greece. By the time Homo sapiens established themselves in Britain 40,000 years ago, other hominins had already lived there for nearly a million years.

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160,000-year-old sophisticated stone tools discovered in China may not have been made by Homo sapiens

Archaeologists have found that early humans in what is now China were using sophisticated stone tools as far back as 160,000 years ago.

“This discovery challenges the perception that stone tool technology in Asia lagged behind Europe and Africa during this period,” the research team wrote in a statement about the discovery.

At the site of Xigou, discovered in 2017 in Henan province in central China, the archaeological team found the remains of more than 2,600 stone tools and determined that some of them were “hafted,” or attached to a piece of wood or other form of stick.

“The identification of the hafted tools provides the earliest evidence for composite tools in Eastern Asia, to our knowledge,” the team wrote in a study published Tuesday (Jan. 27) in the journal Nature Communications.

Researchers already knew of extremely early tool use in East Asia, with the oldest known wooden tools there dating to 300,000 years ago. However, the new findings, which were excavated between 2019 and 2021, are the earliest known tools consisting of two materials, as is evidenced by the hafted artifacts.

Hafting “is a new technological innovation whereby the stone tool is inserted or bound to a handle or a shaft,” Michael Petraglia, director of the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution at Griffith University and a co-author of the paper, told Live Science in an email. “This improved tool performance by allowing the user to increase leverage and providing more force for actions such as boring.”

It appears that the tools were used to process plant materials. “Microscopic analysis on the edges of the stone tools indicate boring actions, used against plant material, likely wood or reeds,” Petraglia said.

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