Tag: lost civilizations

Paleolithic chic: 500,000 years ago, Israel’s ancient toolmakers had a taste for sparkle

Ancient humans who lived in northern Israel around 500,000 years ago intentionally selected special stones with fossilized animals or crystal formations to craft beautiful tools featuring them as decorations, a new study published in the peer-reviewed Tel Aviv Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University (TAU) on Tuesday has shown.

The study presents the results of a survey of the Sakhnin Valley in the Lower Galilee, where hundreds of Lower Paleolithic hand axes have been found, including some 15 that exhibit special features, TAU Prof. Ran Barkai, lead author of the paper, told The Times of Israel in a video interview.

According to Barkai, the number is especially remarkable, since only a handful of individual artifacts with this kind of characteristic had previously been unearthed worldwide.

Barkai believes that these tools prove that those ancient humans were interested in their tools not just for their functionality. Rather, they displayed a sense of aesthetic or symbolic belief system, as the special geological features remain visible in a prominent position at the center of each hand ax, suggesting that the knapping process was carried out in a way to highlight them.

The artifacts were discovered by chance by the co-author of the paper, Muataz Shalata, a resident of the Arab town of Sakhnin in northern Israel.

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A Mysterious Ancient Egyptian Text Reveals Evidence of Advanced Medicine 1000 Years Earlier Than Once Thought

It was 1862, and the American Egyptologist Edwin Smith had just made a fascinating discovery in Luxor, Egypt, the site of ancient Thebes.

This was no archaeological mystery unearthed from the country’s time-worn sands, however. Instead, Smith’s acquisition came from an Egyptian dealer, Mustafa Agha, who sold him an unusual papyrus that seemed to describe medical practices from Egypt’s Second Intermediate Period.

Smith kept the papyrus until his death in 1906, largely unaware of its contents, as his understanding of hieratic was limited and he was unable to translate it. After Smith’s passing, many of the items in his collection, including the mysterious papyrus, were given to the New York Historical Society by his daughter, where they quietly remained for several more years.

It wasn’t until 1920 that the ancient treatise came to the attention of the classical archaeologist and Egyptologist Caroline Ransom Williams, who brought it to the attention of noted archaeologist James Henry Breasted.

“The papyrus is probably the most valuable one owned by the Society,” Williams wrote to Breasted at the time, “and I am ready to waive my interest in it, in the hope that it may be published sooner and better than I could do it.” Recognized as the first chair in Egyptology and Oriental History in the United States at the University of Chicago, Breasted was immediately fascinated by the ancient text and set to work deciphering it.

One decade later, Breasted had finally completed the task of interpreting the obscure ancient document in its entirety, a translation of which was published in 1930. The result was a fundamental shift in our understanding of the ancient history of medical science and its early beginnings, revealing evidence for advanced medical knowledge in ancient Egypt as much as 1000 years before what scholars had commonly accepted at the time.

The Edwin Smith Papyrus: Obscure Origins and a Cliffhanger Ending

The document, known today as the Edwin Smith Papyrus, was cut into one-column pages at some point in the last century. It features Egyptian hieratic written in ink of two different colors: most of the text is black, while some portions with addenda to the primary document appear in red.

Little is known about the author of the papyrus, although scholars agree that the version that exists today is likely the work of a single scholar, and probably also represents a copy of an even older manuscript from Egypt’s Old Kingdom.

Several clues point to this possibility: despite the document’s physical age, scholars note the inclusion of archaic forms of Egyptian words and grammar, suggesting the papyrus is a copy of a much earlier document. Equally tantalizing is that the document ends in mid-sentence, suggesting that, in addition to being a copy, the surviving version is an incomplete work.

From Ancient Magic to Medical Science

Most intriguing of all is the information the document contains. Outlined in an illustrated survey of 48 case histories, the Edwin Smith Papyrus presents a remarkable ancient Egyptian perspective on various injuries and their treatments. Each case details a different region of the body and/or a specific organ and discusses each injury systematically, even including references to the original doctor’s notes on ailments “which I will treat,” suggesting a physician logging their diagnoses of conditions afflicting their patients.

From descriptions of human anatomy to treatments for bleeding, curing infections, and closing wounds, the medical knowledge outlined in the papyrus is remarkably advanced for the period in which it is believed to have originated. Additionally, discussions of medicines featured in the document reveal a level of understanding that exceeds that previously known to have existed at the time by a significant margin, even going beyond medicinal knowledge first recorded by the Greek physician Hippocrates, close to 1000 years later.

Perhaps most significant of all, the document’s precocious discussion of medical knowledge marks a significant shift away from the use of spells and incantations, which are widely believed to have been commonly used for the treatment of a variety of ailments during Egypt’s Old Kingdom. Although the Edwin Smith Papyrus does still contain some references to magic—there are eight magic spells that appear on its “verso” (back left-hand) side—it is believed that these magical references may have represented a sort of “last effort” in cases where all forms of medical treatment had proven ineffective.

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Modern humans arrived in Australia 60,000 years ago and may have interbred with archaic humans such as ‘hobbits’

A new study of nearly 2,500 genomes may have finally settled the debate about when modern humans arrived in Australia. Using a diverse database of DNA from ancient and contemporary Aboriginal people throughout Oceania, researchers have determined that people began to settle northern Australia by 60,000 years ago and that they arrived via two distinct routes.

Experts have long debated the date that humans first arrived in Australia, a feat that required the invention of watercraft. While some researchers have used genetic models to support a “short chronology” of 47,000 to 51,000 years ago for the arrival, others have marshaled archaeological evidence and Aboriginal knowledge in support of the “long chronology,” in which the first arrivals happened 60,000 to 65,000 years ago.

In the new study, published Friday (Nov. 28) in the journal Science Advances, researchers analyzed an “unprecedentedly large” dataset of 2,456 human genomes to answer the question of when humans journeyed from Sunda (the ancient landmass, also known as Sundaland, that included what are today Indonesia, the Philippines and the Malaysian Peninsula) to Sahul (a paleocontinent that included modern-day Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea).

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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.

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Neanderthals may have used birch tar for its anti-bacterial properties, experiments suggest

Neanderthals probably used birch tar for multiple functions, including treating their wounds, according to a study published in the open-access journal PLOS One by a team of researchers led by Tjaark Siemssen of the University of Cologne, Germany, and the University of Oxford, U.K.

Birch tar is commonly found at Neanderthal archaeological sites, and in some cases this tar is known to have been used as an adhesive to assemble tools.

Recently, some researchers have raised the question of whether Neanderthals had multiple uses for this substance. For instance, Indigenous communities in northern Europe and Canada use birch tar to treat wounds, and there is growing evidence that Neanderthals also employed a variety of medical practices.

To investigate the medicinal potential of birch tar, Siemssen and colleagues extracted tar from modern birch tree bark, specifically targeting species known from Neanderthal sites.

They used multiple extraction methods, including distillation of tar in a clay pit and condensation of tar against a stone surface, both of which would have been methods available to Neanderthals. When exposed to different strains of bacteria, all of the tar samples were found to be effective at hindering the growth of Staphylococcus bacteria known to cause wound infections.

These experiments not only support the efficacy of Indigenous medicinal practices, but also reinforce the possibility that Neanderthals used birch tar to treat wounds.

The authors note that there are other potential uses of birch tar, such as insect repellent, as well as other plants to which Neanderthals had access. Further exploration of the multiple potential uses of these natural ingredients will enable a more thorough understanding of Neanderthal culture.

The authors add, “We found that the birch tar produced by Neanderthals and early humans had antibacterial properties. This has important implications for how Neanderthals may have mitigated disease burden during the last Ice Ages, and adds to a growing set of evidence on health care in these early human communities.”

“By bringing together research on indigenous pharmacology and experimental archaeology, we begin to understand the medicinal practices of our distant human ancestors and their closest cousins. Additionally, this study of ‘palaeopharmacology‘ can contribute to the rediscovery of antibiotic remedies while we face an ever more pressing antimicrobial resistance crisis.”

“The messiness of birch tar production deserves a special mention. Every step of the production is a sensory experience in itself, and getting the tar off our hands after spending hours at the fire has been a challenge every time.”

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2,000-year-old artifact may be evidence that Romans found New World — a thousand years before Columbus

Was there a New World order we didn’t know about?

The discovery of a 2,000-year-old Roman artifact in Mexico could upend our understanding of the New World, raising the possibility that Italians arrived in the Americas long before Christopher Columbus.

Dubbed the Tecaxic-Calixtlahuaca Head, this terracotta sculpture of a bearded man was exhumed by Mexican archaeologist José García Payón in 1933 from its eponymous repository near Mexico City, Arkeonews reported.

The figure was buried in a sealed tomb beneath three intact floor layers of the pyramidal structure, alongside pottery shards, gold ornaments, bone artifacts, and pieces of rock crystal.

While these materials were typical of the time period and region, the noggin was anything but, boasting striking features that skewed more ancient Mediterranean than Mesoamerica.

Then, in 1990, German archaeologist Bernard Andreae suggested that the bust was “without any doubt, Roman,” claiming its hairstyle and beard shape harked back to that of the emperors from the Severan period (193–235 BC).

This was more than just a passing resemblance, too. Through thermoluminescence dating — heating an object and measuring the light it emits from energy stored over time — researchers were able to determine that the relic dated back to between the 9th century BC and the 13th century AD, long before Columbus landed in the Americas in 1492.

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Rock art from at least 67,800 years ago in Sulawesi

The Indonesian archipelago is host to some of the earliest known rock art in the world1,2,3,4,5. Previously, secure Pleistocene dates were reported for figurative cave art and stencils of human hands in two areas in Indonesia—the Maros-Pangkep karsts in the southwestern peninsula of the island of Sulawesi1,3,4,5 and the Sangkulirang-Mangkalihat region of eastern Kalimantan, Borneo2. Here we describe a series of early dated rock art motifs from the southeastern portion of Sulawesi. Among this assemblage of Pleistocene (and possibly more recent) motifs, laser-ablation U-series (LA-U-series) dating of calcite overlying a hand stencil from Liang Metanduno on Muna Island yielded a U-series date of 71.6 ± 3.8 thousand years ago (ka), providing a minimum-age constraint of 67.8 ka for the underlying motif. The Muna minimum (67.8 ± 3.8 ka) exceeds the published minimum for rock art in Maros-Pangkep by 16.6 thousand years (kyr) (ref. 5) and is 1.1 kyr greater than the published minimum for a hand stencil from Spain attributed to Neanderthals6, which until now represented the oldest demonstrated minimum-age constraint for cave art worldwide. Moreover, the presence of this extremely old art in Sulawesi suggests that the initial peopling of Sahul about 65 ka7 involved maritime journeys between Borneo and Papua, a region that remains poorly explored from an archaeological perspective.

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Genetic Study Rewrites the Story of Human and Neanderthal Interbreeding, Pointing to Social Interaction, Not Just Survival

Recent genetic research indicates that interbreeding between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals strongly favored female sapiens and male Neanderthal pairs, demonstrating that social interactions guided human evolution, previously believed to be governed solely by the survival of the fittest.

University of Pennsylvania researchers from the lab of Sarah Tishkoff revealed their findings in a study published in Science, which accounts for the tendency of Neanderthal DNA, common among populations of non-African descent, being largely absent from the X chromosome.

Previously, researchers had assumed that natural selection removed Neanderthal DNA from X chromosomes due to incompatibility or potentially harmful interactions with modern human DNA that would have produced less viable offspring.

Neanderthal DNA and X Chromosome

The chromosomal difference is significant because females are more likely than males to pass on an X chromosome to their offspring, suggesting a sex bias in interbreeding. The team also found that Neanderthals carried an excess of modern human DNA on their own X chromosomes, mirroring the pattern observed in modern humans.

These findings on the X-chromosome point to mating pairs consisting primarily of female Homo sapiens and male Neanderthals. The human genome preserves a long record of migrations, encounters, and intermixing between ancient populations, passing on shared ancestry to modern populations.

“Along our X chromosomes, we have these missing swaths of Neanderthal DNA we call ‘Neanderthal deserts,’” said co-first author Alexander Platt, a senior research scientist in the Tishkoff Lab. “For years, we just assumed these deserts existed because certain Neanderthal genes were biologically ‘toxic’ to humans—as tends to be the case when species diverge—so we thought the genes may have caused health problems and were likely purged by natural selection.”

Analyzing the Human and Neanderthal Genomes

The researchers examined alleles—variations in a gene at the same position on a chromosome—and compared human alleles on the X chromosome of three Neanderthals with alleles from an African genome, known to have not encountered Neanderthals.

“What we found was a striking imbalance,” says co-first author Daniel Harris, a research associate in the Tishkoff lab. “While modern humans lack Neanderthal X chromosomes, Neanderthals had a 62% excess of modern human DNA on their X chromosomes compared to their other chromosomes.”

The comparison revealed an unexpected reversal: human DNA appeared preferentially on the X chromosome in both species. This ruled out incompatibility or gene-interaction problems as the primary explanation. If such incompatibilities existed, human DNA would also have been filtered out of the Neanderthal X chromosome.

Instead, researchers concluded that mating patterns best explained the data. Males carry one X and one Y chromosome, while females carry two X chromosomes and therefore contribute X chromosomes more frequently to future generations. If male Neanderthals commonly mated with female Homo sapiens, the result would be fewer Neanderthal X chromosomes and more human X chromosomes in later populations.

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60,000-Year-Old “Highly Unusual” Etchings Could Point to Humanity’s Earliest Use of Geometric Design

Evidence of early human use of geometric concepts in prehistoric art has surfaced in southern Africa, revealed in a series of archaeological discoveries that point to complex patterns and repetition in ancient etchings on ostrich eggshells.

The remarkable finds, uncovered at a series of archaeological sites throughout southern Africa, are believed to have been engraved by early Homo sapiens in the regions close to 60,000 years ago—far earlier than previous examples of organized markings suggestive of the use of geometric rules.

The new findings were made by a research team based at the University of Bologna and reported in a study published in PLOS One.

Echoes of Early Geometry?

As the branch of mathematics that involves spatial properties such as shape, size, and relative position, it is known that the Ancient Babylonians began using geometrical calculations to track the movement of planets like Jupiter at least 1,400 years earlier than previously believed.

To compare the etchings uncovered by the team led by Silvia Ferrara, a Professor at the University of Bologna’s Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies, to the capabilities of the ancient Babylonians would be off base. However, evidence of more rudimentary geometric thinking—obvious repetition, use of parallel lines, presence of angles (orthogonality), and other distinctive geometric organization—in the ancient African discoveries is hard to ignore.

“These signs reveal a surprisingly structured, geometric way of thinking,” Ferrara said in a statement provided to the University of Bologna’s Unibo Magazine.

“We are talking about people who did not simply draw lines,” Ferrara adds, “but organized them according to recurring principles—parallelisms, grids, rotations, and systematic repetitions: a visual grammar in embryo.”

An Ancient Tale Told on Ostrich Eggs

Ferrara and her team have hypothesized that the primary purpose of these ostrich eggs was to transport water. Probing more deeply into the curious markings that covered many of the eggshell fragments recovered from a trio of southern African archaeological sites, the team conducted a quantitative and systematic investigation of 112 samples.

Employing statistical analysis and geometric methods of investigation that had never been used for such artifacts before, Ferrara and her team reconstructed the lines and designs on the eggshells.

The results were surprising: Ferrara’s team discovered that more than 80% of the etchings they analyzed showed signs of “coherent spatial regularities” and evidence of repetitive orthogonality, with angles near 90° and angles resulting from the convergence of groups of lines drawn parallel to each other.

Ferrara and the team also point to the complexity in several of the etchings, which include repetitive hatched bands, geometric shapes such as simple parallelograms, grid-like motifs, and other features, which they argue as evidence of complex cognitive operations. Beyond the etchings themselves, the markings reveal evidence of rotation, translation, and repetition by the ancient designers, who displayed remarkable capabilities 60,000 years ago at sites in South Africa and Namibia.

Geometric “Mastery” in Ancient Southern Africa

“These engravings are organized and consistent,” Ferrara said, “and show mastery of geometric relationships.”

“There is not only a process of repeating signs: there is real visuo-spatial planning, as if the authors already had an overall image of the figure in mind before engraving it,” she adds.

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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.

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