Tag: lost civilizations

Copper Age Settlement Shows Evidence of Accidental Ritual Mercury Abuse

Getting high off toxic insolvents and chemicals to induce mind-altering effects, is a public health concern today. Dial back 5,000 years ago, in the Iberian Peninsula, groups of women adorned in immaculate ceremonial attire would participate in a ritual dance before an audience, inhaling a vibrant red powder, or mixing it an elixir. This powder, derived from the mineral cinnabar, induced a fevered trance accompanied by tremors and delirium, and its users, visited different astral planes. But the dark side of this tradition was it necessitated a lifetime of dangerous and lethal mercury abuse.

What the users were unlikely to be aware of was that the ‘trip’ was a byproduct of the toxic metal mercury, today one of the most widely banned substances by public health departments all over the world. This usage and more have been wonderfully documented in a study published in late 2023 in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory.

“Western medicine has basically banned mercury … [like] public health enemy No. 1,” says Leonardo García Sanjuán, the study’s lead author and an archaeologist at the University of Seville in Spain. “But the truth is, the history of the relationship of humans with mercury has been quite complex.”

Repeated exposure to these rituals led to the accumulation of mercury in the women’s bodily tissues over their lifetimes. Millennia later, archaeological analysis revealed significantly elevated levels of mercury in the bones of these women and others from their community, far surpassing modern health tolerances.

It appears that at the Copper Age settlement of Valencina, between approximately 2900 and 2650 BC, ritual leaders purposefully ingested mercury-rich cinnabar for ceremonial or magical purposes. Meanwhile, other community members may have inadvertently consumed it while working with the pigment or through environmental contamination.

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40,000 YEARS AGO, NEANDERTHALS DEVELOPED THIS STICKY TECHNOLOGY TO HELP THEM CRAFT STRONGER TOOLS

According to a new study, Neanderthals were using an ochre-based compound as a glue-like adhesive at the Mousterian type site in Le Moustier, France, around 40,000 years ago.

Led by Patrick Schmidt at Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen in Germany, and published in Science Advances, the study documents the earliest known use of a multi-component adhesive in Europe, indicating complex cognitive abilities and technological innovation among Neanderthals.

A STICKY SITUATION

The research team reexamined stone tools from Le Moustier, which had been untouched since the 1960s, and found traces of a mixture of ochre and bitumen on several artifacts, including scrapers, flakes, and blades. Ochre, a naturally occurring reddish earth pigment, and bitumen, a common component of asphalt, were combined to create a sticky glue-like mass for tool making. 

This mixture was found to be more than 50% ochre, which was surprising to the team because air-dried bitumen alone can serve as an adhesive, but loses its adhesive properties when mixed with such large proportions of ochre. So the team ran some tests.

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ANCIENT DISCOVERIES IN SOUTH AMERICAN CAVE REVEALED TO BE THOUSANDS OF YEARS OLDER THAN EXPERTS THOUGHT

Throughout the world, ancient artistic depictions that were long ago applied to the walls of caves and other stone surfaces offer a window to the past, and into the minds of those who crafted such imagery.

Now, recent research into the emergence of rock art in Patagonia has revealed that imagery depicted at the Cueva Huenul 1 cave is thousands of years older than archaeologists previously estimated.

The findings, detailed in Science Advances, offer new insights into both the evolution of rock art in the region and the ancient humans who resided there, but also have broader implications for our understanding of the sociocultural conditions that might have helped propel the emergence of ancient art.

Unlike other parts of South America, explorations of Patagonia’s prehistory were comparatively recent and remain limited in many respects, with much of its rock art and other archaeological offerings still undated using modern techniques.

Some of the most striking art in the region exists at the Cueva Huenul 1 cave, whose walls and ceiling feature almost 900 paintings that past studies have grouped into 446 motifs.

“CH1 is the most notable place for pigment-based rock art production in northwestern Patagonia and neighbor areas of central-western Argentina and central Chile,” the authors of the new study write, who now say they are among the oldest anywhere in the region, dating to thousands of years earlier than previous studies had placed them.

“We report the earliest set of directly radiocarbon-dated rock art motifs from the archaeological site Cueva Huenul 1,” some of which the authors say appeared “8.2 thousand years before the present (ka B.P.), predating previous records by several millennia,” and having been created over close to 130 generations during a 3,000-year period.

According to the study, this mid-Holocene gallery coincides with a “rock art emergence” phase that dovetails with arid conditions in the region and a temporary decline in the region’s human population.

“We suggest that this diachronic rock art emerged as part of a resilient response to ecological stress by highly mobile and low-density populations,” the authors report.

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Mysterious Ancient Language Revealed on Bronze Hand From 2,100 Years Ago

Abronze hand from 2,100 years ago has revealed rare evidence of a mysterious ancient language, with researchers determining that the inscription is the oldest and longest example of Vasconic to date.

A team of researchers analyzed the artifact, found at the site of an Iron Age hillfort known as Irulegi in Navarre, northern Spain, for a newly published study in the journal Antiquity—and also suggested the words written on it could be linked to modern-day Basque.

Vasconic was spoken by a pre-Roman people known as the Vascones, who once inhabited the western Pyrenees in an area that corresponds primarily with modern-day Navarre, as well as parts of the Spanish regions of La Rioja and Aragon. And as one of only a few known examples of it, the inscription offers fascinating insights into one of Europe’s least understood ancient languages.

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MASSIVE STONE WALL BUILT MORE THAN 10,000 YEARS AGO FOUND HIDDEN BENEATH THE BALTIC SEA

Researchers from the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research in Warnemünde report the discovery of an ancient, 10,000-year-old massive stone wall that has remained submerged beneath the Baltic Sea for millennia.

At nearly a kilometer in length, the Stone Age megastructure hidden beneath the waters of the Bay of Mecklenburg in Germany is not only one of the oldest man-made hunting structures in Europe but likely one of the oldest pieces of construction in the entire world.

“It was likely constructed by hunter–gatherer groups more than 10000 y ago and ultimately drowned during the Littorina transgression at 8500 y B.P.,” the researchers explain in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Since then, it remained hidden at the seafloor, leading to a pristine preservation that will inspire research on the lifestyle and territorial development in the larger area.”

CROSS DISCIPLINES OF ARCHAEOLOGY AND MARINE GEOSCIENCE REVEAL DETAILS OF ANCIENT MASSIVE STONE WALL

When describing the discovery and early excavation of the submerged site, the researchers behind the historic find say that studying sites that have been underwater for this length of time is both rewarding and challenging. For instance, remaining underwater for thousands of years likely helped preserve much of the ancient site. However, studying something that is over 21 meters below the surface also has challenges that archaeologists don’t always face.

“The Baltic Sea basins, some of which only submerged in the mid-Holocene, preserve Stone Age structures that did not survive on land,” they explain. “Yet, the discovery of these features is challenging and requires cross-disciplinary approaches between archeology and marine geosciences.”

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MYSTERIOUS JADE MASK AND OTHER ARTIFACTS IN 1700-YEAR-OLD TOMB REVEAL THE EXISTENCE OF AN UNKNOWN MAYA RULER

Artifacts unearthed in a 1,700-year-old Maya tomb in Guatemala, which include a jade mask and incised human remains, could point to an undocumented chapter in the history of the Maya Empire according to researchers involved with the discovery.

The tomb was discovered by researchers with Tulane University at the Chochkitam site, located near Guatemala’s borders with Belize and Mexico.

Among the remarkable discoveries at the site were a curious jade mosaic mask, as well as carved human femur bones, one of which appears to convey a man believed to be a Maya king holding such a mask.

According to researchers, hieroglyphs that accompany the carvings are believed to identify his ancestors and describe the lineage of rulers extending to the Maya states of Tikal and Teotihuacan.

Other findings within the tomb included 16 rare spondylus shells, a variety of oysters whose shell was revered by the Maya, and often worn as jewelry or used as currency, in addition to having been used in ceremonies.

The artifacts, which are believed to date to 350 CE, offer additional links to Tikal and Teotihuacan, which were highly influential on Maya rulers during this period.

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Scientists Are Racing to Unearth the Secrets of an Ancient Underwater World

Around 8,000 to 6,000 BCE, the North and Baltic seas … weren’t seas at all. Instead, they were vast plains that were home to ancient human civilizations. But as the curtain drew to a close on the last Ice Age, water levels rose and inundated these low-lying areas, wiping away any trace of prospering civilizations. Well—almost any trace.

The University of Bradford’s Submerged Landscapes Research Centre in the U.K., TNO Geological Survey of the Netherlands, Flanders Marine Institute, and the University of York will soon explore these long-lost civilizations as part of a research collaboration known as SUBNORDICA. One of the ancient lands the project aims to explore is Doggerland, which is thought to have thrived in North Sea region some 8,200 years ago.

“Twenty-thousand years ago, the global sea level was 130 metres lower than at present. With progressive global warming and sea-level rise, unique landscapes, home to human societies for millennia, disappeared,” Vincent Gaffney, leader of the Submerged Landscapes Research Centre, said in a press statement. “We know almost nothing about the people who lived on these great plains. As Europe and the world approaches net zero, development of the coastal shelves is now a strategic priority. SUBNORDICA will use the latest technologies to explore these lands and support sustainable development.”

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HOMO SAPIENS ARRIVING IN NORTHERN EUROPE OVER 45,000 YEARS AGO ENCOUNTERED THIS ENIGMATIC HUMAN SPECIES

A genetic analysis of bones found in Northern Europe shows that anatomically modern humans, aka Homo sapiens, first arrived in the area when it was already home to another enigmatic human species, Homo neanderthalensis.

Although advances in genetic analysis had already shown that early Europeans engaged and interbred with Neanderthals, the latest findings show that those first encounters took place during much earlier times before the extinction of this ancient offshoot of humanity.

BONE FRAGMENTS OF HOMO SAPIENS DATED FROM 47,500 TO 45,000 YEARS AGO

Performed by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and supported by the Max Planck Society, the new analysis involved numerous bone fragments collected at the Ilsenhöhle cave site near Ranis, Germany. Previous excavations at the site had revealed finely-flaked, leaf-shaped stone tools, placing it among the oldest known sites of Stone Age human culture in north-central and northwestern Europe.

According to a press release announcing the findings, “the stone blades at Ranis, referred to as leaf points, are similar to stone tools found at several sites in Moravia, Poland, Germany, and the United Kingdom. These tools are thought to have been produced by the same culture referred to as the Lincombian–Ranisian–Jerzmanowician (LRJ) culture or technocomplex.”

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Archaeologists Have Uncovered a Bronze Age Civilization Completely Lost to Time

The world already knew that the largest structures in the world (prior to the Iron Age) were the Bronze Age megaforts of Central Europe. What they didn’t know—at least, until it was unveiled by new satellite and aerial images—is that those megaforts were connected in a previously unknown network of 100 massive sites that stitched together to form a complex society.

Archaeologists found that the “massive sites did not stand alone, they were part of a dense network of closely related and codependent communities,” Barry Molloy—one of the authors of the new study describing these structures, published in the journal PLOS One—said in a statement. “At their peak, the people living within this lower Pannonian network of sites must have numbered into the tens of thousands.”

Some of the largest megaforts—like Gradište Iđoš, Csanádpalota, Sântana, or Corneşti Iarcuri—were enclosed by over 20 miles of ditches and were the largest of the Bronze Age. They were located in the Carpathian Basin, which extends across central and southeast Europe and is cut through by the Danube River.

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Hunting Instruments Dating Back 1,900 Years Discovered in Mexican Cave

In a small gallery of the Cueva del Tesoro, in Cadereyta de Montes, Querétaro, authorities have recovered one of the few sets of hunting tools from pre-Hispanic times discovered so far in Mexico. It is an  atlatl (spear) and two wooden darts, used in the first century AD.

The discovery was recorded by members of the Association of Cavers of Querétaro who were exploring a cave located the in the community of Rancho Quemado. When they found the ancient objects, they notified the INAH Querétaro Center to ensure its safeguarding, conservation, and research.

In April 2023, a team from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) working under the auspices of the federal Ministry of Culture archaeologists including Carlos Viramontes Anzures, Jesús Eduardo Medina Villalobos and Ricardo Leonel Cruz Jiménez, ascended an intricate ravine, under the supervision of the members of said caving association and the guide of the Portuguese speleologist Paulo Campos.

The cave is located 200 meters (656 feet) up from the bottom of the ravine, and from the entrance they entered a further 200 meters (656 feet), through a narrow passage, until reaching the gallery.

Within this underground area, with an average height of just 80 centimeters (31.5 inches), the specialists came across an  atlatl 51.5 centimeters (20.3 in) long, two fragmented darts of 66 and 79 centimeters (26 & 31.1 inches) long and a pair of culturally modified logs of 135 and 172 centimeters (53.15 & 67.7 inches) in length, which are probably digging sticks, although they were likely used as multifunctional tools.

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