Tag: archaeology

Bronze Age Artifact Made from ‘Space Metal’ Unearthed at a Sacrificial Site is Confirmed as the Oldest of Its Kind

A curious Bronze Age artifact unearthed at a ceremonial site in southwestern China has now been identified as the earliest known and the largest of its kind, according to newly published research.

Crafted from meteoritic iron, the rare discovery, described as resembling an “axe-like” instrument, was found at the Sanxingdui site in China’s Sichuan Province, one of the country’s most famous archaeological areas. The confirmation of the artifact’s age offers unique new perspectives on metallurgical practices that occurred early in Bronze Age China.

Discovery at Sanxingdui

Sanxingdui, which archaeologists believe was active from 2800 to 600 BCE, is renowned for the early evidence of industrial practices they have uncovered there, as well as its ancient sacrificial pits and other ceremonial features.

A range of items crafted from bronze have been recovered as well, and in the case of the meteoritic iron blade, analysis has shown that the object was crafted in a period that predates the use of iron smelting in this part of the world.

A key indication of the extraterrestrial origin of the metal used to craft the artifact is its high concentrations of nickel and iron, which appear to rule out the use of early smelting techniques.

While this strongly supports that the object was crafted from meteoritic iron, Dr. Zishu Yang, the co-author of a recent study detailing the discovery, recently said in a statement that current analysis is “insufficient to definitively classify the specific type of meteorite,” and that the exact variety of meteorite the material was sourced from remains unknown.

Going forward, additional analysis that Yang and his colleagues plan to undertake may help reveal further clues, including possible correlations between the unique artifact, its discovery location, and ancient Chinese historical records that may document meteorite impacts from which the iron could have been sourced.

Keep reading

Archaeologists achieve a historic milestone by dating French cave paintings with carbon-14 for the first time

A team led by a researcher from the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) has achieved a milestone in prehistoric archaeology by confirming through absolute dating the age of several parietal representations from the Font-de-Gaume cave, located in Dordogne, France.

The results, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), represent the first time precise dates have been obtained for Paleolithic rock art in this region using the carbon-14 technique, something that until now had been considered unfeasible due to the chemical composition traditionally attributed to the pigments.

Until this study, there had been a widespread technical impossibility in reliably dating the cave paintings of the region, including the famous ones from Lascaux. The main reason lay in the assumption that the black lines had been made exclusively using iron and manganese oxides, mineral compounds that do not contain carbon and therefore cannot be dated through radiocarbon methods.

However, the research team found that no systematic empirical verification had ever been carried out to confirm the complete absence of carbon-based materials in those paintings. To resolve this uncertainty, the scientists decided to apply a non-invasive analysis protocol to two specific black motifs from the Font-de-Gaume cave: the figure of a bison and a design interpreted as a possible anthropomorph or mask.

The methodology used combined two advanced chemical characterization techniques. On the one hand, the researchers employed Raman microspectrometry, a technique that allows the identification of the molecular composition of materials through the interaction of light with the chemical bonds of the sample. On the other hand, hyperspectral imaging was used, a technology that measures the reflectance of light at every point on the analyzed surface and makes it possible to deduce the chemical composition of the coloring compounds present.

Keep reading

Controversial Study Challenges Age of Famous Monte Verde Site, Reigniting One of Archaeology’s Greatest Debates

It began like many archaeological discoveries in the Americas: woodcutters working along the banks of Chinchihuapi Creek, a tributary of the Maullín River about 36 miles from the Pacific coast of southern Chile near Puerto Montt, observed the bones of very large animals protruding from an eroded bank.

The investigations that followed, however, beginning in the 1970s at what became known as the Monte Verde archaeological site, revealed more than just the dwelling place of some of Chile’s earliest residents. Findings there, including radiocarbon dates indicating a human presence as early as 14,500 years ago, led to a controversy that shook the foundations of American anthropology, upending past thinking on not only who had been the first to arrive at sites like this one—now a proposed UNESCO World Heritage Site—but more fundamentally, whether people initially migrated into the Americas far earlier than previously ever imagined.

For many years, the debate over whether sites like Monte Verde provided unequivocal evidence that there were people in the New World prior to the appearance of the Clovis culture—long recognized as the oldest confirmed cultural manifestation in the Americas, and dating to no earlier than around 13,500 years ago—remained one of American archaeology’s most challenging questions.

With time, however, and a growing number of similar discoveries at sites in North and South America that would follow, the debate appeared to have been settled: pre-Clovis had become the accepted paradigm, and the scientific data first uncovered by archaeologist Tom Dillehay, Ph.D, at Monte Verde clearly showed it.

However, that doesn’t mean there haven’t been a few holdouts who continue to argue that the once widely accepted “Clovis horizon” may still be closer to the mark, in terms of when the first large-scale migrations into the Americas began. While their numbers have diminished somewhat within the 21st century, some archaeologists like Dr. Todd Surovell, a Professor and Department Head of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wyoming, have kept the debate alive by challenging what he and a few colleagues view as a kind of new orthodoxy that has slowly emerged out of what was once considered a fringe idea in American archaeology.

Now, as evidenced by a recent study by Surovell and several co-authors published in Science, not only is the debate still burning after many decades, but the enigmatic Monte Verde archaeological site appears to have maintained its place at the center of the controversy.

Keep reading

Did Archaeologists Uncover Evidence of a Neanderthal “Skull Cult” in This Ancient Spanish Cave?

Archaeologists in central Spain report the puzzling discovery of a collection of ancient animal skulls found deep within an ancient cave near Madrid.

The unusual find is believed to represent evidence of repeated activity carried out tens of thousands of years ago by Neanderthals who once lived in the region, and may offer compelling evidence of symbolic behavior previously thought to be unique to modern humans.

The discovery was detailed in recent research published in Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences.

Discovery at the “Valley of the Neanderthals”

During excavations beginning in 2009, archaeologists uncovered a rich layer of Middle Paleolithic artifacts within Des-Cubierta Cave, located in Pinilla del Valle near Madrid, Spain. Since that time, the area has been dubbed the “Valley of the Neanderthals” for the remarkable ancient discoveries there.

Such finds include the recovery of several Mousterian stone tools—the primary culture of Middle Paleolithic Europe, as recognized by archaeologists—and a technological manifestation widely associated with Neanderthals in Europe.

Stone tools were not all that the cave had shielded against the elements for several tens of thousands of years: the additional presence of a concentration of animal crania added a layer of archaeological significance unlike those found at other European sites linked to the mysterious Neanderthals.

An Accumulation of Ancient Mammal Skulls

Altogether, portions of skulls associated with 35 large animals, including 28 cattle, five species of deer, and two ancient Ice Age rhinoceroses, were discovered in the cave. Curiously, no other skeletal remains from these animals were present, which included even jaws and facial bones that might normally be associated with the discovery of skulls from such animals under other circumstances.

Several questions lingered about whether natural conditions, such as flooding, might have carried the remains into the cave. However, the seemingly obvious implication, based on the very specific selection of only upper crania present within the cave, had been that the skulls were placed there intentionally at some point in the remote past. If so, why had the cave’s ancient visitors done this, and what might it potentially mean?

Evidence of a Neanderthal Skull Cult?

To answer such questions, the research team behind the investigation, led by archaeologist Lucía Villaescusa of the University of Alcalá, closely examined deposits in the cave, ranging from geological debris to fragmented bones. By mapping the distribution of artifacts and reconstructing bone fragments, the team discerned and analyzed preservation patterns to determine how the remains were brought to the cave.

During their investigations, the team found evidence of an ancient rockfall event that created a sloping, conical debris area. Significantly, it was only after this that evidence of skulls began to appear within the cave.

Keep reading

‘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.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

Archaeologists: Half a Million-Year-Old Elephant Bone Hammer Wasn’t Made by Modern Humans

Archaeologists from the University of Central London and the city’s Natural History Museum studying a nearly 500,000-year-old elephant bone hammer have determined the ancient tool was made by Neanderthals or another early human ancestor, Homo heidelbergensis, millennia before the first modern humans (Homo sapiens) walked the Earth.

The research team behind the new analysis said that the unexpectedly sophisticated craftsmanship of the elephant bone hammer, the oldest such prehistoric tool ever found in Europe, offers an “extraordinary glimpse” into humanity’s earliest ancestors.

Elephant Bone Hammer Hundreds of Thousands of Years Older Than Previous Finds

According to a statement detailing the new analysis, the tool was originally discovered in the early 1990s at an archaeological site in Boxgrove, near Chichester in West Sussex, England. Numerous ancient tools made from flint, none and antlers have been found at the site, but the hammer is the only tool made from elephant bone.

Elephant bone tools have been discovered in Tanzania, dating back 1.5 million years. The oldest elephant bone tools found in Europe are tens of thousands of years younger, and those were discovered in southern Europe.

To date, very few elephant bone tools older than 43,000 years have been previously identified. As a result, researchers didn’t immediately identify the Boxgrove artefact as a tool until it was studied in detail.

3D Microscopic Analysis Reveals Ancient Tool’s Manufacture and Use

In the team’s published study, the elephant bone hammer is described as triangular, measuring 11 centimeters long, 6 meters wide, and 3 centimeters thick. The researchers said the tool also bears marks that suggest it was “intentionally shaped” for specific utility.

It is mostly composed of cortical bone, which is the dense outer layer of bone tissue. The tool’s density suggests it may have been made from a mammoth, but the fragment is too incomplete to identify the exact species or body part the bone comes from.

Keep reading

The earliest elephant-bone tool from Europe: An unexpected raw material for precision knapping of Acheulean handaxes

Organic knapping tools made from bone, antler, and wood were essential to early human toolkits but are rarely preserved in the archeological record. The earliest known soft hammers, dating to ~480,000 years ago, come from Boxgrove (UK), where modified antlers and large mammal bones were used alongside flint hard hammers. These tools facilitated complex knapping techniques, such as platform preparation and tranchet flake removal, contributing to the production of finely worked ovate handaxes typical of the Boxgrove Acheulean industry. This study presents a cortical bone fragment from an elephant, deliberately shaped into a percussor for resharpening flint tools. It represents the earliest known use of elephant bone in Europe and the first documented case of its use as a knapping hammer. Reconstructing its life history offers further insights into Middle Pleistocene hominin technological adaptations, resourcefulness, and survival strategies that enabled humans to endure harsh northern environments.

Keep reading

50,000-Year-Old Artifacts Unearthed at Controversial Archaeological Site Could Rewrite the Early Prehistory of the Americas

American archaeology is a discipline in constant flux. Over the last half-century, conventional attitudes about the arrival of humans in North America have undergone repeated shifts, with estimates of the earliest human activity continually pushed back to more distant times.

However, discoveries stemming from one controversial archaeological site in the American Southeast, if confirmed, could extend present timelines for human arrival in the New World by several tens of thousands of years, adding to a growing number of findings in recent years that are reshaping our understanding of the early Americas.

The First Americans

For many decades, the long-established chronological marker for America’s first arrivals centered on discoveries made near Clovis, New Mexico, including expertly crafted “fluted” spear points and other artifacts, which served as the type site for America’s earliest definitive cultural manifestation. The resulting “Clovis First” theory reigned for most of the 20th century, arguing that America’s first inhabitants made their way across an ice-free Beringian land corridor somewhere around 13,000 years ago.

However, by the 1970s, a new phenomenon in American archaeology had begun to emerge: sites suggesting that even earlier arrivals may have occurred. With time, locations like Meadowcroft Rock Shelter in Washington County, Pennsylvania, the Monte Verde site in Chile, and several others in North and South America would carry the idea of a “pre-Clovis” presence in the Americas from being an anachronistic gadfly for archaeologists, to eventually becoming an accepted reality.

Today, more recent discoveries, including ancient human fossil footprints at sites like White Sands in New Mexico, have extended the now well-accepted earlier-than-Clovis timeline even further back, with confirmed dates revealing a human presence there by as early as 21,000 to 23,000 years ago. This, along with growing genetic evidence, new models of possible coastal migration routes, and other data, continues to help archaeologists assemble a broader picture of America’s first inhabitants and a far deeper timeline for their arrival than most would have ever expected.

Yet while discoveries like those at White Sands unequivocally demonstrate a human presence in the Americas by around 23,000 years ago, there are still other sites that challenge even those remarkably early dates for human arrivals in the New World—dates which, if ever confirmed, would introduce even greater challenges to our existing knowledge of the ancient Americas.

The Topper Site

Few other proposed pre-Clovis archaeological sites have aroused as much controversy as the Topper Site in Allendale County, South Carolina.

An ancient chert quarry, the site was initially identified by Albert Goodyear, Ph.D., now a semi-retired professor of archaeology at the University of South Carolina, more than four decades ago. During the late Pleistocene American Paleoindian period, some of America’s earliest inhabitants relied on the abundant Allendale Coastal Plain chert rock nodules at the location for crafting ancient stone tools, which included the distinctive fluted projectiles now associated with the Clovis cultural manifestation.

Keep reading