Tag: lost civilizations

Dutch unveil 4,000-year-old ‘Stonehenge’-like discovery

Dutch archaeologists on Wednesday revealed an around 4,000-year-old religious site—dubbed the “Stonehenge of the Netherlands” in the country’s media—which included a burial mound serving as a solar calendar.

The burial mound, which contained the remains of some 60 men, women and children had several passages through which the sun directly shone on the longest and shortest days of the year.

“What a spectacular archaeological discovery! Archaeologists have found a 4,000-year-old religious sanctuary on an industrial site,” the town of Tiel said on its Facebook page.

“This is the first time a site like this has been discovered in the Netherlands,” it added in a statement.

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Neanderthal adhesives were made through a complex synthesis process

As Homo sapiens, we often consider ourselves to be the most intelligent hominins. But that doesn’t mean our species was the first to discover everything; it appears that Neanderthals found a way to manufacture synthetics long before we ever did.

Neanderthal tools might look relatively simple, but new research shows that Homo neanderthalensis devised a method of generating a glue derived from birch tar to hold them together about  200,000 years ago—and it was tough. This ancient superglue made bone and stone adhere to wood, was waterproof, and didn’t decompose. The tar was also used a hundred thousand years before modern humans came up with anything synthetic.

A transformation

After studying ancient tools that carry residue from this glue, a team of researchers from the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen and other institutions in Germany found evidence that this glue wasn’t just the original tar; it had been transformed in some way. This raises the question of what was involved in that transformation.

To see how Neanderthals could have converted birch tar into glue, the research team tried several different processing methods. Any suspicion that the tar came directly from birch trees didn’t hold up because birch trees do not secrete anything that worked as an adhesive. So what kind of processing was needed?

Each technique that was tested used only materials that Neanderthals would have been able to access. Condensation methods, which involve burning birch bark on cobblestones so the tar can condense on the stones, were the simplest techniques used—allowing bark to burn above ground doesn’t really involve much thought beyond lighting a fire.

The other methods involved a recipe where the bark was not actually burned but heated after being placed underground. Two of these methods involved burying rolls of bark in embers that would heat them and produce tar. The third method would distill the tar. Because there were no ceramics during the Stone Age, sediment was shaped into upper and lower structures to hold the bark, which was then heated by fire. Distilled tar would slowly drip from the upper structure into the lower one.

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Huge Lost Maya City Has Emerged From the Jungle in Mexico

Mexican archaeologists harnessed the potential of LiDAR drones to undertake an extensive survey of the Yucatan Peninsula, yielding the remarkable discovery of a once-forgotten city. This extraordinary find includes pyramids, a ball court and sacred spaces distinguished by the presence of meticulously crafted stone columns.

Mexico’s National Institute for Anthropology and History ( INAH) has just announced that a team of archaeologists have identified a jungle-locked, ancient Maya city. Discovered deep in southern Mexico, the previously unknown city comprises large pyramids, stone columns, three plazas with “imposing buildings” and other sacred stone structures arranged in concentric circles.

INAH said the city is located in the state of Campeche, in the Balamku Ecological Reserve on the country’s Yucatan Peninsula . Archaeologists have named this lost Maya city in Mexico Ocomtun, which in the Yucatec Maya language means “stone column.” Speculatively, INAH said the city would have been an important Maya center for the entirety of the peninsula’s central lowland region, between 250 and 1000 AD.

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Oldest Signs of Human Ancestors’ Trek to Australia Found in Laotian Cave

In the bowels of a Laotian cave, illuminated by faint sunlight and bright lamps, scientists have unearthed the earliest known evidence of our human ancestors making their way through mainland Southeast Asia en route to Australia some 86,000 years ago.

Any trace of human remains is a delight for archaeologists – but none more so when they dust off a discovery, date it, and realize it could push back timelines of early human migration in an area by more than ten thousand years.

The international team of researchers behind this new discovery dug deeper than others had gone before in a karst cave in northern Laos, unearthing a skull fragment with delicate features, and the shard of a leg bone.

They estimate the two human fossils are between 86,000 and 68,000 years old, by using five different dating techniques to reconstruct the timeline of the cave site in which early humans sheltered on their journeys southward.

Tam Pà Ling Cave, where the bones were found, has a deep history of human occupation, though it is a contested one. A handful of human fossils including two jawbones previously found in shallower layers of sediments – shipped to the United States for study before being returned home to Laos – have dated to between 70,000 and 46,000 years old.

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Ancient Bird Bones May Have Been Fashioned Into Flutes for Catching More Birds

12,000-year-old bird bones found in the far north of Israel may have been used as instruments by prehistoric humans to lure more birds to their death, according to a team of archaeologists that studied the artifacts.

The perforated bones were found in Israel’s Hula Valley, just west of the Golan Heights, which Israel seized from Syria in 1967. The bones were first excavated in 1955 but were recently reexamined.

Seven wing bones from the site belonged to coots and teals. Upon recent inspection, a team of archaeologists found that marks on the bones were actually minuscule holes bored into their sides.

The team posits that the bones were used as flutes (aerophones, to use scientific language) to mimic the calls of birds of prey. These calls would frighten the migratory birds into taking wing, making them easier targets for Natufian hunters, the scientists speculate. The team’s analysis of the bones was published today in Scientific Reports.

“If the flutes were used for hunting, then this is the earliest evidence of the use of sound in hunting,” said Hamudi Khalaily, an archaeologist at the Israel Antiquities Authority and co-author of the paper, in a Hebrew University of Jerusalem release.

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39 Prehistoric Megaliths At ‘The French Stonehenge’ Destroyed by Monumental Error

DIY chain Mr. Bricolage is under fire for ‘accidentally’ destroying a vital part of the deeply ancient historical heritage of Brittany – ‘The French Stonehenge’. The unfortunate destruction of thirty-nine ancient standing stones at the renowned Neolithic site of Carnac in north-west France has caused widespread dismay.

The incredibly significant archaeological site in Brittany, encompasses thousands of standing stones spread across 27 communes, making it one of the most important prehistoric sites in Europe . These ” menhirs,” or single standing stones, constitute one of the largest collections of their kind in the world, famously depicted as the colossal rocks carried by Obelix in the beloved French comic series “Asterix & Obelix”, reports The Local .

Believed to have been erected during the Neolithic period, some of these stones date back thousands of years, originating as early as 4,000 BC. However, the recent construction of a new DIY store on the outskirts of the heritage area has been detrimental to its preservation, to say the least. With so many stones, it seems it has proven difficult to keep account of them all.

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Britain’s Oldest Wooden Artifact Found With Curious Carvings

This special piece of timber was unearthed on a building site in the village of Boxford in Berkshire, England. Decorated with mysterious carvings, this rare wooden artifact has been compared to Shigir Idol, the oldest piece of carved wood in the world.

Until now, the oldest piece of wood discovered in England, known as the “Sweet Track,” was an ancient walkway in the Somerset Levels that dated back to the Neolithic period , around 3807 BC, making it over 5,000 years old. Now, a large chunk of oak has been discovered in England, that was well-preserved in peat, and it has been dated to the European Mesolithic period, “more than 6,000-years-ago”.

This story begins four years ago when landowner, Derek Fawcett, was constructing a new outbuilding. When the builders were digging out a foundation trench for the outhouse, Fawcett spotted timber and contacted the county archaeologist, Sarah Orr. After inspection, Orr determined that the wooden item was located about 1.5 meters (4.92 ft) below the ground level, and that “it was clearly very old and appeared well preserved in peat.”

Fawcett and Orr hosed down the timber and noticed what appeared to be markings that Orr said looked “unnatural and possibly man-made.” Fawcett and Orr have since been working closely with a multidisciplinary team of archaeologists from Historic England , who teamed up with scientists from the Nottingham tree-ring dating laboratory , and the Centre for Isotope Research at the university of Groningen .

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Enigmatic Species Seemingly Buried Dead and Carved Symbols 100,000 Years Before Modern Humans

A groundbreaking series of papers published yesterday proposes that Homo naledi , an ancient human species, engaged in burial practices and created engravings deep within a cave system in southern Africa approximately 300,000 years ago. If these claims are substantiated, they would revolutionize our existing knowledge about the development of human beliefs, culture, and symbolism. However, the study is yet to be peer reviewed and some uncertainties regarding the available evidence remain.

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Newly discovered stone tools drag dawn of Greek archaeology back by a quarter-million years

Deep in an open coal mine in southern Greece, researchers have discovered the antiquities-rich country’s oldest archaeological site, which dates to 700,000 years ago and is associated with modern humans’ hominin ancestors.

The find announced Thursday would drag the dawn of Greek archaeology back by as much as a quarter of a million years, although older hominin sites have been discovered elsewhere in Europe. The oldest, in Spain, dates to more than a million years ago.

The Greek site was one of five investigated in the Megalopolis area during a five-year project involving an international team of experts, a Culture Ministry statement said.

It was found to contain rough stone tools from the Lower Palaeolithic period — about 3.3 million to 300,000 years ago — and the remains of an extinct species of giant deer, elephants, hippopotamus, rhinoceros and a macaque monkey.

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DNA Analysis Reveals Interesting Information About the Origins of Native Americans

Using DNA analysis, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences have made some surprising discoveries about the ancestry of Native Americans. They looked at mitochondrial DNA passed down in females to follow the trail of an ancestral lineage that might link East Asian Paleolithic-age populations to founding populations in Chile, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, and California. What they ended up discovering is that during the Ice Age, humans migrated from northern China to Japan and the Americas.

“The Asian ancestry of Native Americans is more complicated than previously indicated,” explains lead author Yu-Chun Li, a molecular anthropologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “In addition to previously described ancestral sources in Siberia, Australo-Melanesia, and Southeast Asia, we show that northern coastal China also contributed to the gene pool of Native Americans.”

It’s commonly accepted that Native Americans are descendants of Siberians who crossed the temporary Bering Strait land bridge. However, new findings published in Cell, show that these ancestors most likely landed on the Pacific coast. The researchers determined this by analyzing over 100,000 contemporary and 15,000 ancient DNA samples from across Eurasia to eventually identify 216 contemporary and 39 ancient individuals belonging to this rare lineage.

Through genetic mutations, geographic locations, and carbon dating, it appears that these travelers would have landed in America prior to the land bridge being open. In fact, they believe that these intrepid individuals came over in two different waves. The first migration—or radiation—would have occurred between 19,500 and 26,000 years ago. At this time, the ice sheets in northern China would have made conditions inhospitable and forced people to seek out a better climate.

The second radiation would have happened between 11,500 and 19,000 years ago, when the melting of these ice sheets led to a population boom. This fact, coupled with the better climate, may have pushed people to explore new locations.

Interestingly, the genetic research also showed a link between the Native Americans and the Japanese. The researchers hypothesize that during the deicing period, part of the population from northern China migrated to Japan, while others set off for the Americas. This theory is backed up by archeology, as these regions of China, Japan, and the Americas show similarities in how arrowheads and spears were crafted.

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