Tag: ancient history

Million-Year-Old Tools Reveal Mystery Human Species

Archaeological excavations on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi have uncovered seven stone tools dating back at least 1.04 million years, potentially extending to 1.48 million years ago. This groundbreaking discovery, published in the journal Nature, represents the oldest evidence of hominin occupation in the Wallacean archipelago and suggests that unknown human relatives were capable of oceanic crossings far earlier than previously imagined. The identity of these ancient toolmakers remains one of archaeology’s most tantalizing mysteries.

The Calio Site Discovery

The seven chert stone artifacts were excavated between 2019 and 2022 at Calio, located in a modern corn field in southern Sulawesi. These simple yet sophisticated tools were manufactured using hard-hammer percussion techniques, where ancient toolmakers struck larger pebbles from nearby riverbeds to create sharp-edged flakes suitable for cutting and scraping tasks. Professor Adam Brumm from Griffith University’s Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, who co-led the international research team, described the artifacts as “simple, sharp-edged flakes of stone that would have been useful as general-purpose cutting and scraping implements.”

The tools demonstrate remarkable technical knowledge despite their straightforward appearance. Evidence suggests a two-step reduction process was sometimes employed, where large flakes were further reduced into smaller, more manageable tools. Some artifacts even showed retouching – deliberate trimming of edges to enhance sharpness. This level of sophistication indicates that the toolmakers possessed expert understanding of fracture mechanics within a pragmatic, “least effort” approach to tool manufacturing.

Keep reading

Mystery of Atlantis deepens as ocean floor discovery hints at ancient catastrophe

A discovery beneath the ocean floor has revealed evidence of a catastrophic event that may be linked to the destruction of the legendary lost city of Atlantis.

Some researchers, including well-known author Graham Hancock, have long proposed that around 12,800 years ago, a giant comet passed through Earth’s atmosphere, triggering devastation that wiped out advanced civilizations worldwide. 

While credible proof of Atlantis itself remains elusive, scientists have now uncovered geochemical clues supporting the theory of this cataclysmic event, known as the Younger Dryas. 

The controversial Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis (YDIH) suggests Earth passed through debris from a disintegrating comet. 

The resulting impacts and shockwaves destabilized massive ice sheets, causing massive flooding that disrupted crucial ocean currents and triggered rapid climate cooling. 

Now, researchers led by the University of South Carolina have uncovered metallic debris, like comet dust and thousands of tiny microspherules, in Baffin Bay seafloor sediments, strengthening the comet impact theory.

Archaeologist Marc Young, co-author of the study, told the Daily Mail: ‘The Younger Dryas onset is associated with significant changes in human population dynamics all over the planet, though mostly in the northern hemisphere. 

‘Several independent studies over the last few years have shown conclusively that most of the megafaunal species that went extinct disappeared precisely at that time.’ 

Keep reading

UCLA library user borrowed rare Chinese manuscripts, returned fakes, DOJ says

A UCLA library user who allegedly took home rare Chinese manuscripts and returned fake ones in their place has been charged with stealing items worth $216,000, the Justice Department said Thursday.

Jeffery Ying used a number of aliases to get access to the classics works, some of them over 600 years old, the DOJ said.

Ying, 38, would check the works out and return days later with dummy manuscripts, and would frequently travel to China shortly thereafter, charging documents say.

“The library noticed that several rare Chinese manuscripts were missing, and an initial investigation revealed the books were last viewed by a visitor who identified himself as ‘Alan Fujimori,'” the DOJ said.

When detectives raided the Los Angeles area hotel where Ying was staying, they found blank manuscripts in the style of the books that had been checked out.

“Law enforcement also found pre-made labels known as asset tags associated with the same manuscripts that could be used to create ‘dummy’ books to return to the library in place of the original books,” the department alleged.

Libraries allow rare, one-of-a-kind works to be examined on-site, but they can’t be taken home like regular paperbacks.

Ying, from Fremont, in the San Francisco Bay Area, was also found to have a number of library cards in different names.

Keep reading

Scientists Uncover New Evidence Supporting Controversial Theory That a Comet Impacted Earth 12,800 Years Ago

Scientists have uncovered compelling new evidence from the ocean floor supporting the controversial theory that a disintegrating comet triggered a dramatic global cooling event 12,800 years ago.

The findings, reported by University of South Carolina scientists, involve the discovery of several examples of direct evidence that Earth experienced a series of impacts from a disintegrating comet 12,800 years ago, which caused a period of cooler global temperatures lasting more than a millennium.

Although no direct evidence of the proposed ancient comet was found during the study effort, the researchers believe their findings offer strong geochemical support for a theoretical series of impacts, or more likely, an airburst event, as the cause of a brief and unexplained reversal in warming at the end of the last ice age.

The results offer strong support for the hypothesis “that the Earth collided with a large comet about 12,800 years ago,” study co-author, Dr. Vladimir Tselmovic, said. “The amount of comet dust in the atmosphere was enough to cause a short-term ‘impact winter,’ followed by a 1,400-year cooling period.”

Previous attempts to explain the 1,200-plus years of cooling that began unexpectedly in the middle of an overall global warming trend, known as the Younger Dryas, have resisted the inclusion of a cometary impact. Instead, most models account for the 10-degree Celsius drop through an increase in cold glacial meltwater that flooded the northern Atlantic Ocean. According to those theories, this meltwater runoff significantly weakened currents responsible for transporting warmer tropical water north.

To locate more concrete evidence for the comet impact hypothesis, study leader Dr. Christopher Moore and colleagues reexamined deep ocean floor core samples that include sediments confirmed by radiocarbon dating as being from this time period. Based on the best theoretical impact sites, the team used cores taken from Baffin Bay near Greenland.

To search for clues of comet impacts in the samples, the team employed multiple tools and techniques. According to the team’s statement, they employed scanning electron microscopy, single-particle inductively coupled plasma time-of-flight mass spectrometry, energy-dispersive spectroscopy, and laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry.

Keep reading

Ancient German Pits Expose Haunting Death Rituals From 5,000 Years Ago

Powerline Project Exposes Ancient Secrets

During preparatory work for Germany’s massive SuedOstLink powerline project (a 105-mile-long high-voltage transmission route), electrical workers near Gerstewitz, Saxony-Anhalt, uncovered twelve circular pits initially hidden beneath farmland. This accidental discovery halted construction and prompted a full archaeological excavation led by the State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology Saxony-Anhalt, in collaboration with energy company 50Hertz. The pits, dating back 5,000 years (3400–3050 BCE), were identified as ritual sites created by the Salzmünde culture—a regional group within the broader Funnelbeaker cultural complex that inhabited the Saale River basin. This discovery adds significantly to understanding this enigmatic Neolithic society known for its complex death rituals.

Inside the Haunting Ritual Pits

Structural Design: Each pit measured 6.5–9.8 feet wide and 6.5–8.2 feet deep (2–2.5 meters), enclosed within a larger ditch system, indicating deliberate, significant construction efforts.

Ceremonial Contents: Archaeologists found a deliberate mix of materials:

  • Charred Building Materials: Burnt remnants of house walls, including daub (loam), suggesting homes were intentionally burned, and rubble ceremonially deposited.
  • Sacrificial Offerings: Intact, carefully placed ceramic vessels found in one pit, indicating their use in rituals rather than daily life .
  • Animal and Human Remains: Dog bones (often found in anatomical order with signs of burning) and human skulls showing no weathering. One pit contained a dog skeleton beside a human skull.
  • Converted Spaces: An ancient oven pit repurposed as a grave held two human individuals who had decomposed elsewhere before burial.

Evidence of Multi-Phase Mortuary Rituals

The arrangement and condition of remains point to prolonged, complex ceremonies:

  • The juxtaposition of anatomically intact dog bones (exposed to fire) alongside an unweathered human skull in the same pit suggests these features were open for extended periods. Researchers propose the dog may have been buried first or preserved elsewhere before being placed alongside the later-added skull.
  • The two bodies found in the repurposed oven pit showed signs of having decomposed at a different location prior to final burial. This indicates a funerary practice involving staged processes—temporary storage or display before internment.
  • These findings align with known Salzmünde practices involving reburials, particularly skulls, and burial under layers of ceramic shards and burnt house debris, hinting at a cosmology deeply connected to ancestral veneration and transformation through fire.

Keep reading

Ancient ‘female-centered’ society thrived 9,000 years ago in Çatalhöyük

Ancient DNA from Stone Age burials in Turkey has finally put to rest a decades-long debate about whether the 9,000-year-old proto-city of Çatalhöyük was a matriarchal society. The research finally confirms what experts have long suspected: Women and girls were key figures in this agricultural society.

“With Çatalhöyük, we now have the oldest genetically-inferred social organisation pattern in food-producing societies,” study co-author Mehmet Somel, an evolutionary geneticist at Middle East Technical University in Turkey, told Live Science in an email. “Which turns out to be female-centered.”

The new research was published Thursday (June 26) in the journal Science.

Located in south-central Turkey, Çatalhöyük was built around 7100 B.C. and was occupied for nearly 1,000 years. The vast settlement — spread over 32.5 acres (13.2 hectares) — is known for its houses that were entered from the roofs, burials beneath the house floors, and elaborate symbolism that included vivid murals and a diverse array of female figurines.

When archaeologist James Mellaart first excavated Çatalhöyük in the early 1960s, he interpreted the numerous female figurines as evidence of a matriarchal society that practiced “mother goddess” worship, perhaps as a way of ensuring a good harvest following a major economic transition from foraging to cereal-based agriculture.

In the 1990s, Stanford archaeologist Ian Hodder took over excavations at Çatalhöyük, and his research suggested instead that the society was largely egalitarian, without meaningful social or economic differences between men and women.

To further investigate the social organization at Çatalhöyük, in a new study, a team of researchers that included both Somel and Hodder analyzed the DNA of 131 skeletons dated to between 7100 and 5800 B.C. that were buried beneath house floors.

The researchers connected 109 people across 31 buildings and found that all first-degree relatives (parents, children and siblings) were buried together in the same building, while second-degree (uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces and grandparents) and third-degree relatives (such as first cousins and great grandparents) were often buried in nearby buildings. This suggests that nuclear or extended families had a role in structuring Çatalhöyük households, the researchers wrote in the study.

Keep reading

7,000-year-old Village Sites Reveal Thriving Life on Remote Alaskan Island

Archaeological discoveries on Shuyak Island in Alaska’s Kodiak Archipelago have unveiled a remarkable chapter in Native American history, with the identification of what may be the island’s oldest known settlement dating back approximately 7,000 years.

The groundbreaking findings, announced by the Alutiiq Museum’s archaeology team, have dramatically expanded our understanding of ancient Indigenous settlement patterns across Alaska’s rugged coastal landscape. Led by Patrick Saltonstall, the museum’s curator of archaeology, the multi-year survey has uncovered dozens of previously undocumented village sites, particularly on the island’s lesser-studied eastern shores, reports Alaska Public Media.

Shuyak Island, known in the Alutiiq language as Suu’aq meaning “rising out of the water,” has long been considered sparsely populated throughout its history. Today, the island is largely encompassed by Shuyak Island State Park, attracting kayakers and wildlife enthusiasts to its pristine wilderness. However, the recent archaeological evidence tells a different story.

“Shuyak Island has always sort of been a place where I think it seems like there were fewer people up there,” Saltonstall explained. “But finding that, you know what your preconceptions are and what you actually find often don’t match” reported Archaeology Magazine.

The survey identified one remarkable village site featuring 11 house pits that researchers believe housed between 200 and 300 people approximately 300 years ago. Even more surprising was the discovery of the 7,000-year-old settlement, which represents the earliest evidence of human habitation ever found on the island.

Keep reading

Researchers Have Cracked the 4,500-Year-Old Genome of a Mummy From Egypt’s First Pyramid Age

An ancient Egyptian genome has finally been unraveled after four decades of study, thanks to a sample collected from a mummy dating back to the time of the first pyramids.

The achievement marks the first complete sequencing of a genome of such antiquity collected from the region. The genetic data revealed information about the movement of people over millennia, as 80% of the individual’s DNA corresponds to ancient North Africans, while 20% is related to ancient West Asians.

The remains reveal a story of a hard life of manual labor, lived by an individual who possibly belonged to an ancient Egyptian pottery community.

A Decades-Long Genetic Quest

Forty years ago, Svante Pääbo, a Nobel Prize-winning Swedish geneticist, conducted the first successful extraction of ancient Egyptian DNA, although his work only resulted in a partial sequence. Now, scientists at the Francis Crick Institute and Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) have conducted the first complete sequencing after working with the oldest Egyptian DNA sample ever collected.

“Forty years have passed since the early pioneering attempts to retrieve DNA from mummies without successful sequencing of an ancient Egyptian genome,” said co-author Pontus Skoglund, Group Leader of the Ancient Genomics Laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute. “Ancient Egypt is a place of extraordinary written history and archaeology, but challenging DNA preservation has meant that no genomic record of ancestry in early Egypt has been available for comparison.” 

“Building on this past research, new and powerful genetic techniques have allowed us to cross these technical boundaries and rule out contaminating DNA, providing the first genetic evidence for potential movements of people in Egypt at this time,” Skoglund added.

Keep reading

6,000-Year-Old Ancient Venus Figurine Discovered in the Polish Baltic, Rewriting History

Deep in the peaceful countryside along Poland‘s Baltic shore, where the Parsęta River flows toward the ocean, a farmer unearthed a find that would rewrite northern Europe’s prehistory. In the sandy ground lay a small, beige sculpture — no more than 12 centimeters tall — given the title of the ‘Kołobrzeg Venus’, a 6,000-year-old limestone statuette.

Now celebrated as one of the most sensational archaeological discoveries in Polish history, the statuette has wide hips, prominent breasts, and absence of facial features. It recalls the ancient Venus figurine convention — female forms sculpted in the Neolithic and Paleolithic eras that have long fascinated and baffled archaeologist, reports  Muzeum Oręża Polskiego w Kołobrzegu.

The figurine was discovered in December 2022 by a farmer working the land near Kołobrzeg, a city that today is better known for its seaside resorts than its ancient past. The farmer passed the object to Waldemar Sadowski of the Parsęta Exploration and Search Group, an amateur archaeological team that collaborates with the Polish Arms Museum.

The discovery was finally shown to professional archaeologist Marcin Krzepkowski of the Relicta Foundation in 2023, who recognised its singularity at once.

“This is the find of the century,” said Aleksander Ostasz, director of the Polish Arms Museum in Kołobrzeg, in an interview with National Geographic. “It absolutely pushes the boundaries of our history of Kołobrzeg.”

Radiocarbon testing established that the figurine is Neolithic in age — around 6,000 years old — which makes it one of the oldest known artifacts associated with settled agricultural communities in this part of Europe. Previously, no such figurines were ever found north of the Carpathians, so Kołobrzeg Venus is a stunning exception and an anomaly in Poland’s archaeological history.

Keep reading

Study Confirms Controversial 23,000-Year-Old Human Footprints, Challenging Past Views on Peopling of the Americas

New radiocarbon dating of purportedly 23,000-year-old footprints discovered in a dried lakebed in White Sands, New Mexico, has confirmed their age, reigniting controversy regarding the earliest arrival of humans in the Americas.

Several scientists have questioned the early dating of the fossil footprints, and have noted the lack of artifacts found at the location. However, the scientists behind the newly confirmed dates say the transitory nature of their location supports the idea that the makers of the 23,000-year-old footprints were likely only passing through and did not leave any objects behind.

23,000-Year-Old Human Footprints Appear 10,000 Years Too Early

For much of the 19th and early 20th  centuries, archaeologists believed humans had not arrived in the Americas until as recently as 3,000-4,000 years ago. In the late 1920s, archaeological discoveries at sites like Folsom and Clovis in New Mexico pushed that date back thousands of years, with the most commonly accepted date for human arrival being extended to 13,000 years ago. This date is supported by geological history, indicating that the land bridge between Asia and North America would not have been passable 10,000 years earlier.

The situation changed in 2019 when researchers from the UK’s Bournemouth University and the U.S. National Park Service unearthed a series of undoubtedly human footprints in White Sands dated to between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago. As noted, those findings, which were published in 2021, remain highly controversial since they seem to go against a relatively well-established timeline.

“The immediate reaction in some circles of the archeological community was that the accuracy of our dating was insufficient to make the extraordinary claim that humans were present in North America during the Last Glacial Maximum,” said study author and U.S. Geological Survey USGS research geologist Jeff Pigati in a later statement.

Even Pigati and colleagues’ 2023 follow-up analysis lending support for the extremely ancient date, as well as a separate study offering evidence of 22,000-year-old transport technology in the same area, and the discovery of an alternate, ancient ice-highway route from Asia to North America still did not manage to settle the debate.

Recently, Vance Holiday, an archaeologist and geologist from the University of Arizona whose 2012 study of the White Sands area just a few yards from the location of the footprints assisted with their initial 2021 dating, returned to perform a new analysis of the footprints. Unlike previous tests that relied on seeds and pollen to date the footprints, Holliday and his team used radiocarbon dating of ancient mud in an independent lab to confirm the controversial dates.

New Soil Radiocarbon Dates Confirm Ancient Origin

Before returning for a new set of tests, Holliday enlisted the help of Jason Windingstad, a doctoral candidate in environmental sciences who worked as a consulting geoarchaeologist for previous research projects at White Sands.

During several outings in 2022 and 2023, the duo dug a new series of trenches in the dried ancient lakebeds. These efforts included collecting ancient mud samples taken from the beds of a stream where the supposedly 23,000-year-old footprints were discovered. Holliday says even more ancient evidence was likely here at one time, but millennia of wind erosion have left scarce material for his team to study.

“The wind erosion destroyed part of the story, so that part is just gone,” he explained. “The rest is buried under the world’s biggest pile of gypsum sand.”

Keep reading