Tag: ancient history

Fossils suggest even smaller ‘hobbits’ roamed an Indonesian island 700,000 years ago

Twenty years ago on an Indonesian island, scientists discovered fossils of an early human species that stood at about 3 1/2 feet (1.07 meters) tall — earning them the nickname “hobbits.”

Now a new study suggests ancestors of the hobbits were even slightly shorter.

“We did not expect that we would find smaller individuals from such an old site,” study co-author Yousuke Kaifu of the University of Tokyo said in an email.

The original hobbit fossils date back to between 60,000 and 100,000 years ago. The new fossils were excavated at a site called Mata Menge, about 45 miles from the cave where the first hobbit remains were uncovered.

In 2016, researchers suspected the earlier relatives could be shorter than the hobbits after studying a jawbone and teeth collected from the new site. Further analysis of a tiny arm bone fragment and teeth suggests the ancestors were a mere 2.4 inches (6 centimeters) shorter and existed 700,000 years ago.

“They’ve convincingly shown that these were very small individuals,” said Dean Falk, an evolutionary anthropologist at Florida State University who was not involved with the research.

The findings were published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.

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Carvings at ancient monument may be world’s oldest calendar

Markings on a stone pillar at a 12,000 year-old archaeological site in Turkey likely represent the world’s oldest solar calendar, created as a memorial to a devastating comet strike, experts suggest.

The markings at Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey – an ancient complex of temple-like enclosures adorned with intricately carved symbols – could record an astronomical event that triggered a key shift in human civilisation, researchers say. 

The research suggests ancient people were able to record their observations of the sun, moon and constellations in the form of a solar calendar, created to keep track of time and mark the change of seasons. 

Fresh analysis of V-shaped symbols carved onto pillars at the site has found that each V could represent a single day. This interpretation allowed researchers to count a solar calendar of 365 days on one of the pillars, consisting of 12 lunar months plus 11 extra days. 

The summer solstice appears as a separate, special day, represented by a V worn around the neck of a bird-like beast thought to represent the summer solstice constellation at the time. Other statues nearby, possibly representing deities, have been found with similar V-markings at their necks.

Since both the moon’s and the sun’s cycles are depicted, the carvings could represent the world’s earliest so-called lunisolar calendar, based on the phases of the moon and the position of the sun – pre-dating other known calendars of this type by many millennia. 

Ancient people may have created these carvings at Göbekli Tepe to record the date a swarm of comet fragments hit Earth nearly 13,000 years ago – or 10,850 BC – researchers say. 

The comet strike is suggested to have ushered in a mini ice age lasting over 1,200 years, wiping out many species of large animals. It could also have triggered changes in lifestyle and agriculture thought to be linked to the birth of civilisation soon afterwards in the fertile crescent of West Asia.

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Strange ‘Stonehenge’ discovered in US lake that’s 5,000 years older than the British landmark

There’s much we may never know about our earliest ancestors, like why we started to walk upright and how we managed to create structures that seem to defy the engineering capabilities of the time.

Stonehenge remains one of these great mysteries, with experts around the world divided over why exactly the prehistoric monument was built.

Now, to add to this age-old confusion, it has emerged that a similarly enigmatic stone structure has been found beneath the waters of Lake Michigan in the US.

Not only that, but this underwater creation is around 5,000 years older than its British counterpart.

The site was discovered in 2007 by a team of archaeologists led by Mark Holley, a professor of underwater archaeology at Northwestern Michigan College.

Holley and his colleagues were conducting a survey of the lake bed when they chanced upon a series of large stones, arranged in a circular pattern, just off the coast of Traverse City, Michigan.

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Researchers Claim Long-Lost Technology Used to Build Iconic Pyramid of Djoser

The magnificent step pyramid standing tall in the ancient Egyptian necropolis of Saqqara is truly one of the wonders of the ancient world.

Erected some 4,500 years ago, the tomb of the pharaoh Djoser is the earliest known example of Egypt’s colossal stone structures; a monument not just to the king but to the engineering ingenuity of the people who inhabited the land thousands of years ago.

How this architectural marvel was constructed – especially given its sharp departure from any building that came before – has been of intense interest to archaeologists and historians.

Now a team led by Egyptologist Xavier Landreau of Paleotechnic in France may have uncovered a significant clue.

A previously unexplained structure in Saqqara, they argue, is in fact a check dam, supporting the hypothesis a water-powered lift helped move materials used in the pyramid’s construction.

This is bolstered by the discovery of several other features, including what the researchers interpret as the remains of a novel kind of hydraulic lift: a central shaft through which water channeled from below might flow like lava in a volcano, raising a floating platform which would be capable of transporting large rocks to the pyramid’s summit.

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Mysterious 2,500-Year-Old Graveyard Found Filled With Young Children

Ancient archaeological discoveries can be confusing, exciting, intriguing, educational – and occasionally just a little creepy, as a new excavation of a 2,500-year-old graveyard site in Norway has proved.

Here’s the creepy part: the main cluster of graves, comprising 39 individual bodies, were all for children under the age of six – based on a close study of the fragments of bones that had escaped being cremated.

There were two other graves containing adult bodies but these were separate from the main group.

However, it’s not certain that anything sinister has gone on. This would’ve been a time when the infant mortality rate was relatively high – though questions remain about why the graves were separate, rather than communal.

“There was something special about the whole site,” excavation leader Guro Fossum, an archaeologist from the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, told Mette Estep of Science Norway.

“Cooking pits and fireplaces around the site suggest that gatherings and ceremonies were held in connection with burials.”

The graves span a long time in history, across the transition between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age.

When the excavation in Østfold county first began – to clear the ground for the expansion of a local quarry – archaeologists were expecting to find artifacts from the Stone Age, rather than graves from two millennia later.

Most of the burials would’ve happened between 800 and 200 BCE, the researchers say, and were placed close to thoroughfares in terms of their location – so it’s something the whole community would’ve known about. It doesn’t look like these were secret burials.

“Additionally, all the graves were so nice and meticulously crafted,” Fossum told Science Norway. “Each stone was sourced from a different location and placed precisely in the formation. We wondered who put in so much effort.”

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Ancient Egyptians used a hydraulic lift to build their 1st pyramid, controversial study claims

The ancient Egyptians may have used an elaborate hydraulic system to construct the world’s first pyramid, a controversial new study claims.

Known as the Pyramid of Djoser, the six-tiered, four-sided step pyramid was built around 4,700 years ago on the Saqqara plateau, an archaeological site in northern Egypt, according to research posted to ResearchGate on July 24. The research has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Archaeologists have long wondered how ancient workers accomplished such an architectural feat — the structure contains 11.7 million cubic feet (330,400 cubic meters) of stone and clay — before the advent of large machinery like bulldozers and cranes.

Because the pyramid sits near a long-gone branch of the Nile River, researchers hypothesize that the ancient Egyptians utilized the water source to build the 204-foot-tall (62 m) pyramid by designing a “modern hydraulic system” comprising a dam, a water treatment plant and a hydraulic freight elevator, all of which were powered by the river, according to a translated statement from the CEA Paleotechnic Institute, a research center in France. They posit that the mysterious Gisr el-Mudir enclosure near the pyramid worked as a structure that captured sediment and water.

“This is a watershed discovery,” lead author Xavier Landreau, CEO of Paleotechnic, told Live Science. “Our research could completely change the status quo [of how the pyramid was built]. Before this study, there was no real consensus about what the structures were used for, with one possible explanation being that it was used for funerary purposes. We know that this is already subject to debate.”

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Complex Life on Earth May Be 1.5 Billion Years Older Than We Thought

There’s still some scientific debate over when exactly complex life forms appeared on Earth, and the latest research suggests previous estimates need to be revised – by about 1.5 billion years, in fact.

That’s based on a new analysis of marine sedimentary rocks in the Franceville Basin off the west coast of Africa that were deposited some 2.1 billion years ago.

The general consensus is that animals first showed up around 635 million years ago. Now, an international team of researchers has discovered that the rock samples indicate increased phosphorus and oxygen in the seawater, which has previously been linked to accelerations in evolution.

“We already know that increases in marine phosphorus and seawater oxygen concentrations are linked to an episode of biological evolution around 635 million years ago,” says Earth scientist Ernest Chi Fru from Cardiff University in the UK.

“Our study adds another, much earlier episode into the record, 2.1 billion years ago.”

An unusually substantial number of fossils large enough to be seen without a microscope have been discovered in the Franceville Basin, and it’s not clear what we’re to make of them. Earlier studies have also suggested these macrofossils point to the first complex life on the planet.

Here, the researchers link the nutrient enrichment of the water to the collision of two ancient continents, which then created a shallow inland sea and the conditions for cyanobacterial photosynthesis, a chemical process that would’ve led to an underwater environment more conducive to biological complexity.

This would have created a natural laboratory for organism diversity and evolutionary leaps in size and structure, the researchers contend. However, because the body of water was isolated, these more sophisticated forms of life wouldn’t have spread elsewhere or survived to the next jump forward.

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Archaeologists Uncovered a Mysterious Ancient Tablet With Major Historical Implications

Most of us can do all of our shopping with the click of a few buttons, and while that’s certainly convenient, it can make it difficult to keep track when exactly that new armoire or bookshelf will show up at your doorstep. If you’re really struggling, it might help to take a page out of ancient Turkey’s proverbial book and keep the details written down—on a palm-sized piece of clay.

An excavation at the Aççana Mound—the site of the ancient Anatolian city of Alalah, which served as the capital of the Mukis Kingdom and lives on in ruins that date as far back as 4,000 years ago—recently unearthed a small clay tablet covered in inscribed cuneiform, according to a statement by Mehmet Ersoy, Turkey’s minister of culture and tourism. Researchers studying the tablet have narrowed its origins to some time in the 15th century B.C., during the Late Bronze Age.

Representatives from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism are conducting the research on the find, along with Johns Hopkins University associate professor Jacob Lauinger and doctoral student Zeynep Türker.

The initial readings of the tablet’s Akkadian cuneiform include details of a major furniture purchase. Linguists are still working through the writing, according to the ministry’s statement, but the deciphered lines detail purchases of an ample number of wooden tables, chairs, and stools. The experts are slowly putting together more information about the buyers and sellers involved with the exchange, making headway towards deciphering a window into the city’s economic processes.

The small piece of clay measures only 4.2 centimeters by 3.5 centimeters, it’s just 1.6 centimeters thick, and it weighs 28 grams. But despite its diminutive size, the tablet will help paint a much larger picture of Bronze Age Turkey as it undergoes more study, providing helpful insight into “the economic structure and state system of the Late Bronze Age,” according to Ersoy.

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Plato’s Dialogs at Edfu?

Did Plato lie about the Egyptian origin of the Atlantis story when he composed his famous dialogs Timaeus and Critias? Classicists say he had good reasons to make up a persuasive tale to prove an important point about ancient Greek society and politics. This, so-called, Noble Lie Thesis is the lens through which scholars of ancient Greece look when they read what Plato has Socrates, Critias, Timaeus, and Hermocrates say to each other about divine law and human corruption, cosmos and soul, Atlantis and Athens, and the rise and fall at the hands of the gods of these once mighty city states. In this article, I put the Noble Lie Thesis to a test by examining Egyptian cosmogonical texts for substantial congruences with Plato’s dialogs.

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New Dating Places the First European Hominids in Southern Iberia

One of the most significant controversies in the study of human evolution and migration is determining when and by what route the first hominids arrived in Europe from Africa. Recent geological dating techniques applied to the Orce sites in the Baza basin, Granada, Spain, have discovered human remains that are approximately 1.3 million years old. This finding supports the hypothesis that humans may have entered Europe through the southern Iberian Peninsula via the Strait of Gibraltar, rather than returning to the Mediterranean through Asia. 

New Dating Techniques Reveal Ancient Hominids 

According to a report by the University of Barcelona, the study, led by Luís Gibert of the University of Barcelona’s Faculty of Earth Sciences, in collaboration with researchers from the Berkeley Geochronology Centre and Murray State University in the United States, utilized paleomagnetism to date the Orce region. Paleomagnetism studies the inversion of the Earth’s magnetic poles, recorded in minerals, to establish time periods. The new dating involved an area of Orce that had never been sampled before and was protected from erosion. 

“The uniqueness of these sites is that they are stratified and within a very long sedimentary sequence, more than eighty meters (262 feet) long,” explained Gibert. 

This extensive sequence allowed the identification of a magnetic polarity sequence with five magnetic events, placing the Orce sites between the Olduvai and Jaramillo subchron, approximately between 1.77 and 1.07 million years ago. Through a statistical age model, the researchers refined the chronology to a margin of error of only 70,000 years. 

The oldest site, Venta Micena, dates back to 1.32 million years ago, followed by Barranco León at 1.28 million years, and Fuente Nueva 3 at 1.23 million years. 

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