Tag: ancient history

Accountant Takes An Accurate Shot At Cracking Bronze Age Script, Linear A

The enigmatic script Linear A has long been one of antiquity’s most enduring mysteries. Emanating from Bronze Age Crete, its undecipherable cryptic symbols have frustrated researchers, historians, and archaeologists for over a century, but now, a British accountant in what has been called a “bold new theory” claims to have cracked the code and lifted the veil of mystery that has long hung over the script.

Mark Cook, a British forensic accountant realized the Linear A Tablets are partially complete accounting and argues that Linear A is a form of ancient Egyptian shorthand, similar in form to later Graeco-Roman shorthand (which evidently derived from the earlier Egyptian form). “ It actually seemed odd to me that an accountant had never looked at the Linear A tablets before. Linguists had pored over them, but numbers formed a large proportion of what was written, as well as the characters of whatever language was being conveyed, and it seemed that a large proportion of the information on the tablets was almost being ignored ,” says Cook.

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The Amazon may contain thousands of undiscovered ancient structures

There are probably more than 10,000 undiscovered pre-Columbian archaeological sites hidden in the Amazon, researchers have concluded after surveying a fraction of the sprawling rainforest.

The study adds to growing evidence suggesting that the region isn’t a pristine tropical forest, but has been significantly altered by Indigenous societies that have inhabited it for more than 12,000 years.

Luiz Eduardo Oliveira e Cruz de Aragão at the National Institute for Space Research in Brazil and his colleagues surveyed 5315 square kilometres of the Amazon using lidar, a technology that uses reflected laser light to create a 3D representation of a landscape.

By beaming pulses of light into the rainforest, usually from planes or drones, lidar records slight variations in topography and has uncovered numerous archaeological sites in recent years.

The team discovered 24 previously unknown earthworks in the areas it surveyed, which are thought to be the remnants of civilisations that lived between 1500 and 500 years ago.

The discoveries include a fortified village in the southern Amazon, a region known to have been densely populated due to the high concentration of earthworks that were connected by ancient roads.

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Study Finds Out Those Barbaric Vikings Had…Stained Glass Windows?!

It is no secret that the portrayal of Vikings in popular culture has done more than its fair share to distort our ideas of what and who the Vikings were. This distortion extends across various domains, including clothing, language, culinary choices and even habitation, to name but a few. Now, another myth-busting study, dating fragments of windows from Scandinavia, shows us that  Viking Age  windows were created using  stained glass  as the 9th century, contrary to popular belief that stained-glass windows only emerged during the construction of medieval churches and castles in Denmark.

In a new study published in the  Danish Journal of Archaeology , a conservation expert from the National Museum of Denmark and their research team arrived at this conclusion after conducting a thorough re-examination of 61 glass fragments recovered from six different Viking-age sites. This means that  Norse dignitaries likely sat in rooms lit up by Viking Age windows with colored  glass, and adds another nail in the coffin of a “savage” or “ barbaric” Viking who swings his sword around.

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Human Use Of Cannabis—For Food, Fiber And Psychoactive Effects—Stretches Back Millennia, New Report Says

A new paper in the European Journal for Chemistry traces the history of cannabis through “thousands of years of contact with mankind,” noting the plant’s legacy as a source of fiber, nutrition, medicine, spirituality and pleasure.

At the same time, it notes that cannabis “is perhaps one of the greatest controversies in contemporary humanity” and a key driver of the modern war on drugs.

The paper, “From ancient Asian relics to contemporaneity: A review of historical and chemical aspects of Cannabis,” was written by Gabriel Vitor de Lima Marques and Renata Barbosa de Olivera, of the pharmacy department at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil.

The cannabis plant appears to have first been used for its fiber, as a material for ropes and other manufactured goods, the authors wrote. Use of hemp fiber dates back to approximately 10,000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia and to roughly 6,000 and 5,000 years ago in China and Kazakhstan, respectively.

Ancient peoples considered cannabis one of the five main grains, along with rice, soy, barley and millet, the paper continues. And once stalks were processed into hemp fibers, they became durable materials for ropes, sails and boat rigging, clothing, paper, animal husbandry and more.

“Used as a stunner to facilitate the capture of fish,” it says, “Cannabis is possibly the first plant to be cultivated for non-food purposes.”

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Further evidence points to footprints in New Mexico being the oldest sign of humans in Americas

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.

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9 Mysterious Undeciphered Codes and Inscriptions in History

From Neolithic tablets containing the oldest known system of writing, to a series of letters scrawled on the back of a dead man’s book, some of the most legendary undeciphered codes and texts remain a challenge for even the world’s best cryptographers, code breakers and linguists. Yet unravelling these mysterious puzzles remains as important as ever, since many of these enigmatic inscriptions could hold the keys to understanding civilizations that have long since faded into historic oblivion. Here we feature nine of the most fascinating undeciphered codes and inscriptions throughout history.

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Previously Unknown Language Found on Ancient Hittite Tablets in Turkey

In the midst of artificial intelligence and cutting-edge language models, a significant archaeological discovery has unfolded in Boğazköy-Hattusha ( Hattusa), the old Hittite capital in Turkey. Archaeologists have unearthed a previously unknown ancient language in a cultic ritual text, adding a fresh dimension to our understanding of Late Bronze Age Anatolia.

The Hattusa archaeological site in north-central Turkey is an ancient Hittite rock sanctuary and open-air shrine. Boasting impressive rock reliefs depicting deities and mythological scenes, the earliest settlement dates back to the Late Bronze Age (1650 to 1200 BC), when the Hittite Empire dominated the region.

Hattusa was an ancient capital of the Hittite Empire , and until now, among the most impressive discoveries at this UNESCO World Heritage Site, was a representation of the Storm God “Tarhunt,” who symbolized the Hittite pantheon’s strength and power. However, a recent excavation has unearthed a hitherto unknown Indo-European language.

Excavations at Hattusa have been undertaken for over a century, mostly under the direction of the German Archaeological Institute . Under the watch of the current site director, Professor Andreas Schachner of the Istanbul Department of the German Archaeological Institute, numerous cuneiform tablets have been unearthed.

In total, around 30,000 clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform writing have been recovered from this site. While these tablets offer archaeologists insights into Hittite cultural traditions, Professor Daniel Schwemer, head of the Chair of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg in Germany, said the recent discovery of “a previously unknown Indo-European language,” reaches new archaeological heights.

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Biblical sin city Sodom destroyed by asteroid stronger than nuke – expert

An ancient city that met a fiery end in what could be described as an asteroid impact more powerful than an “atomic explosion” has been identified as the biblical city of Sodom, according to a biblical studies expert. Dr. John Bergsma, a prominent theologian, contends that excavations in Jordan provide substantial proof that one of the Bible’s most dramatic and improbable narratives may indeed be factual.

Bergsma asserts that archaeological findings in Jordan corroborate the existence of the biblical city of Sodom. Prior research had already indicated that the ancient city of Tell el-Hammam, located in the southern Jordan Valley, suffered a catastrophic fate—a revelation that Dr. John Bergsma, a theology professor at Ohio’s Franciscan University, believes aligns with the biblical account.

As per the Book of Genesis, God unleashed brimstone and fire upon the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah in response to the sins of their inhabitants, resulting in their complete obliteration. Similar destruction patterns were uncovered at Tell el-Hammam, leading Bergsma to reevaluate the credibility of the biblical narrative. He pointed to signs of extreme heat detected on skeletons and pottery fragments unearthed by archaeologists, suggesting a possible impact from an asteroid. 

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These ancient whittled logs could be the earliest known wooden structure

Some 500,000 years ago in central Africa, ancient human relatives chopped down trees and transformed the wood into digging tools, wedges and what might just be the world’s earliest-known wooden structure.

Now, remnants of this ancient woodworking have been found at an archaeological site in Zambia called Kalambo Falls. Researchers can’t definitively identify the possible structure, which might have been a raised platform, a shelter or something else entirely. Whatever it was, it pre-dates the evolution of Homo sapiens by more than 100,000 years, hinting that hominins that lived long before our own species were already working wood.

Wood tends to decay quickly in the ground. If it was preserved at archaeological sites as faithfully as materials such as stone or bone, “we would probably use the term wood age rather than stone age”, says archaeologist Larry Barham at the University of Liverpool, UK. He and his colleagues describe the finds in Nature1 on 20 September.

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Manipulated Human Remains Found at Cave Site in Spain

The Iberian Peninsula witnessed a particular form of human burials in caves, which were later manipulated and modified, over thousands of years! In the southern Iberian Peninsula, this practice became common around the 4th millennium BC, though the cultural connotations for manipulating the dead are still not fully understood. A new study zeroed in on the manipulated human remains of 12 individuals from a cave called Cueva de los Marmoles, in southern Spain.

Cueva de los Marmoles: Dating and Understanding Contemporaneous Finds

Radiocarbon dating has pinpointed the burials within a fairly wide timeframe spanning from the 5th to the 2nd millennium BC. The research team meticulously recorded deliberate post-mortem alterations to the skeletal remains, which included evidence of fractures and abrasions, possibly indicating attempts to extract marrow and other tissues.

Among these modified human remains, a single tibia showed signs of adaptation for use as a tool, while an intriguing cranium appeared to have been fashioned into a ” skull cup ,” suggesting potential adaptations for dietary or practical purposes.

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