Skulls show women moved across medieval Europe, not just men
The newcomers who arrived in the little farming villages of medieval Germany would have stood out: They had dark hair and tawny skin, spoke a strange language and had remarkably tall heads.
Now scientists who investigated the unusually shaped skulls say they provide evidence that women also migrated long distances across medieval Europe, not just men. A genetic analysis showed the women traveled from what is now Romania, Bulgaria and northern Greece at a time when the continent was being reshaped by the collapse of the Roman Empire.
In a study published Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers say the women’s elongated heads—a result of binding done after birth—suggest they might have been high-class individuals.
“These women looked extremely different to the local women, very exotic if you will,” said one of the researchers, Joachim Burger, a population geneticist at the University of Mainz, Germany. Read more.
Modern humans interbred with Denisovans twice in history
Modern humans co-existed and interbred not only with Neanderthals, but also with another species of archaic humans, the mysterious Denisovans. While developing a new genome-analysis method for comparing whole genomes between modern human and Denisovan populations, researchers unexpectedly discovered two distinct episodes of Denisovan genetic intermixing, or admixing, between the two. This suggests a more diverse genetic history than previously thought between the Denisovans and modern humans.
In a paper published in Cell on March 15, scientists at the University of Washington in Seattle determined that the genomes of two groups of modern humans with Denisovan ancestry—individuals from Oceania and individuals from East Asia—are uniquely different, indicating that there were two separate episodes of Denisovan admixture. Read more.
Famed Archaeologist 'Discovered' His Own Fakes at 9,000-Year-Old Settlement
A famed archaeologist well-known for discovering the sprawling 9,000-year-old settlement in Turkey called Çatalhöyük seems to have faked several of his ancient findings and may have run a “forger’s workshop” of sorts, one researcher says.
James Mellaart, who died in 2012, created some of the “ancient” murals at Çatalhöyük that he supposedly discovered; he also forged documents recording inscriptions that were found at Beyköy, a village in Turkey, said geoarchaeologist Eberhard Zangger, president of the Luwian Studies Foundation. Zangger examined Mellaart’s apartment in London between Feb. 24-27, finding “prototypes,” as Zangger calls them, of murals and inscriptions that Mellaart had claimed were real.
“He used the same approach for over 50 years,” Zangger told Live Science. “He would first acquire a tremendously broad and deep knowledge [about the area he was interested in]. Then, he would try to use this knowledge to develop a coherent historic panorama,” Zangger said. Read more.
New paper links ancient drawings and the origins of language
When and where did humans develop language? To find out, look deep inside caves, suggests an MIT professor.
More precisely, some specific features of cave art may provide clues about how our symbolic, multifaceted language capabilities evolved, according to a new paper co-authored by MIT linguist Shigeru Miyagawa.
A key to this idea is that cave art is often located in acoustic “hot spots,” where sound echoes strongly, as some scholars have observed. Those drawings are located in deeper, harder-to-access parts of caves, indicating that acoustics was a principal reason for the placement of drawings within caves. The drawings, in turn, may represent the sounds that early humans generated in those spots.
In the new paper, this convergence of sound and drawing is what the authors call a “cross-modality information transfer,” a convergence of auditory information and visual art that, the authors write, “allowed early humans to enhance their ability to convey symbolic thinking." Read more.
Oldest Dutch work of art found at the bottom of the North Sea
The oldest Dutch work of art is a 13,500 year-old carved bison bone dredged up from the bottom of the North Sea, archaeologists write in an article published in Antiquity magazine earlier this week.
Late Ice Age hunter gatherers roamed the area that became the North Sea but very little evidence of their presence has been found. But sometimes the sea floor yields treasures that shed light on the period. This is a confirmation, the article says, of ‘the importance of continental shelves as archaeological archives’.
In 2005 a Dutch fishing vessel caught a bison bone in its nets on the border of the Dutch part of the continental shelf. The bone, which had a distinctive zigzag pattern carved in it, ended up in the hands of a collector who, the NRC writes, ‘had good contacts with fishermen’ and agreed to let experts at the Leiden archaeological museum take a look at it. Carbon isotope analysis showed the bone to be 13,500 years old and part of a culture that decorated animal bones with zigzag and herringbone motives. Read more.
This Roman 'gate to hell' killed its victims with a cloud of deadly carbon dioxide
Is it possible to walk through the gates of hell and live? The Romans thought so, and they staged elaborate sacrifices at what they believed were entrances to the underworld scattered across the ancient Mediterranean. The sacrifices—healthy bulls led down to the gates of hell—died quickly without human intervention, but the castrated priests who accompanied them returned unharmed. Now, a new study of one ancient site suggests that these “miracles” may have a simple geological explanation.
Rediscovered just 7 years ago, the gate to hell at the ancient city of Hierapolis, in modern-day Turkey, is a stone doorway leading to a small cave-like grotto. The gate was built into one wall of a rectangular, open-aired arena, topped by a temple and surrounded by raised stone seating for visitors. The city itself sits in one of the region’s most geologically active areas; 2200 years ago, its thermal springs were believed to have great healing powers. Read more.
Indian stone tools could dramatically push back date when modern humans first left Africa
by Patrick Randolph-Quinney
Middle Palaeolithic artefacts emerged during excavation at Attirampakkam. Sharma Centre for Heritage Education, India
We are all children of Africa. As members of the hominin species Homo sapiens, you and I are the product of millions of years of shared evolutionary history of life on Earth. But as a species we are relatively recent, emerging between 400,000 and 300,000 years ago in East Africa from indigenous archaic populations.
Currently, some of the biggest questions facing palaeoanthropology involve trying to work out how and when early humans left the continent. Was it a single dispersal? Or multiple? A recent discovery of a jawbone fossil in Israel suggests that there could have been a migration as early as about 180,000 years ago. But a new study, published in the journal Nature, suggests early humans may have left Africa much earlier than that.
The new research reports the discovery of tools from the Middle Palaeolithic (200,000 to 40,000 years ago) in Tamil Nadu, India. Surprisingly, the tools date back to 385,000 years ago – which is around the same time as this technology is thought to have first developed by archaic or possibly modern humans in Africa. This challenges the view, backed by most researchers, that modern humans brought these technologies to India less than 140,000 years ago.
Sirius and Orion were the most important stars in the sky to many ancient civilizations including the Ancient Egyptians who gave extreme importance to these stars. But not only did the Ancient Egyptians worship these stellar objects, so did ancient civilizations in North, Central and South America and even in Asia.
According to Astronomers in the mysterious cloud of dust and gas called Orion, stars and planets may have been formed millions of years ago, basically it is Orion the place in the universe attributed to the birth of stars, but is there a possibility that ancient civilizations knew this before us? Before great technological advancements, spaceships and telescopes?
Sirius is the brightest star in the sky, shining proudly and powerfully earning rightfully the title as the brightest star in the astronomers magnitude scale. Sirius has a very long history in ancient civilizations and as Orion, is regarded as a very important place in the sky. This star has been sacred for civilizations in ancient Babylonia and Mesopotamia among others.
The original insignia for Apollo 13 depicted the constellation Orion in the background. The insignia was later changed but we know that most of NASA’s planned events coordinate in various fashions with Orion, Sirius, and their positions in the sky. An example of coordinated events from NASA and the stars is the Moon landing.
DIABOLICAL IMAGES OF HELL AND ITS DEMONS FROM THE 15TH CENTURY
For such a beautiful book containing such rich and powerful religious iconography there is surprisingly little known about Livre de la Vigne Nostre Seigneur other than it is a French book written circa 1450-70 and is an illustrated treatise “on the Incarnation, Passion, and Resurrection of Christ” and “the Antichrist, Last Judgement, Hell, and Heaven.”
The book’s title Livre de la Vigne Nostre Seigneur is an “allusion” to:
...a vineyard often evoked in the Old Testament, planted by Yahweh and symbolizing the people of Israel. The image is taken up in the New Testament [Matthew 20-21], Jesus comparing the Kingdom of God to a vine whose Christians are the winegrowers.
The manuscript is illustrated throughout with stunning miniatures produced by many different hands depicting a diverse range of demons carrying out their dastardly deeds in Hell.
These “medieval demons”:
...undertake a much broader variety of activities—none of them good—and as observable here and elsewhere in the Livre de la Vigne imagery, their physiognomies often incorporate a baroque set of negative pictorial signs, which may include dark skin; deformity; bestial features such as fangs or beaks, horns, hooves, and tails; ugly grimaces; and supernumerary bodily orifices.
Thousands of years before cats took up residence in 37 percent of American households, and managed to outnumber dogs by roughly 75 million across the globe, they were hopping continents with farmers, ancient mariners, and even Vikings, scientists have found.
The first large-scale study of ancient feline DNA has finally been completed, and the results reveal how our inscrutable friends were domesticated in the Near East and Egypt some 15,000 years ago, before spreading across the globe and into our hearts.
The study was presented at the International Symposium on Biomolecular Archaeology in Oxford, UK last week, and sequenced DNA from 209 cats that lived between 15,000 and 3,700 years ago - so from just before the advent of agriculture right up to the 18th century.
Found in more than 30 archaeological sites in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, these ancient feline specimens are helping researchers to finally piece together the beginnings of an animal that we share our beds with, but know surprisingly little about.
"We don’t know the history of ancient cats. We do not know their origin, we don't know how their dispersal occurred," one of the team, Eva-Maria Geigl, an evolutionary geneticist from the Institut Jacques Monod in France, told Ewen Callaway at Nature.
Norwegian Forest Cat
Analysing the DNA of cats found in ancient Egyptian tombs, burial sites in Cyprus, and an old Viking settlement in Germany, the team found that cats likely experienced not one, but two, waves of expansion during their early history.
The first wave is a story you’re probably familiar with.
When the team looked the mitochondrial DNA - genetic information that’s passed on from the mother only - they found that wild cats from the Middle East and the fertile eastern Mediterranean shared a similar mitochondrial lineage.
This suggests that small wild cats spread through early agricultural communities, because they were attracted to the mice that were attracted to the grains. The farmers likely encouraged their presence, because, let’s face it, those rodent-killing machines would have been mighty cute company.
Then, thousands of years after this, the research points to a separate mitochondrial connection between cats descended from those in Egypt to ones in Eurasia and Africa.
"A mitochondrial lineage common in Egyptian cat mummies from the end of the 4th century BC to the 4th century AD was also carried by cats in Bulgaria, Turkey and sub-Saharan Africa from around the same time," Callaway reports.
This second wave of expansion has been attributed to ancient sea-faring people - farmers, sailors, and Vikings - because the cats were likely encouraged to stay on board to keep their rodent problem in check.
Geigl cites cat remains with this same maternal DNA connection found at a Viking site in northern Germany, and dated to between the 8th and 11th century AD.
"I didn’t even know there were Viking cats."
"I didn’t even know there were Viking cats," Pontus Skoglund, a population geneticist from Harvard Medical School, who wasn't involved in the study, toldNature.
It's important to note that the results have yet to be presented in a peer-reviewed paper, so these are just the team's initial findings, and they could be subject to change as the analysis goes deeper.
But that's an exciting prospect, because while we have the history of dog domestication pretty well mapped out, we're only just beginning to figure out the mystery behind our feline friends. Although, let's be honest, they probably prefer it that way.
A wall painting from the House of the Golden Bracelet in Pompeii dating to the 1st-century B.C. or the 1st-century A.D. depicts a garden filled with dozens of local species of plants and birds, a birdbath, herms supporting plaques showing sleeping women, and theater masks | Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples, Italy/De Agostini Picture Library/L. Pedicini/Bridgeman Images
By JARRETT A. LOBELL
Giving new life to some of Pompeii’s dead
The three-story House of the Golden Bracelet on the Vicolo del Farmacista was one of the most opulent in Pompeii, its walls covered with vibrant frescoes depicting theatrical scenes and imitating expensive marble paneling, its floors paved with intricate black-and-white geometric mosaics. At the rear of the house lay a verdant garden with a splashing fountain and quiet pools, its natural beauty echoed by wall paintings depicting oleander, viburnum, arbutus, bay, palm trees, irises, roses, daisies, and poppies, home to doves and house sparrows, a swallow, a golden oriole, and a jay. From the terrace was a view of the sea, whose breezes cooled the house during hot Mediterranean summers.
A bracelet weighing more than a pound, composed of a two-headed snake holding a medallion depicting the moon goddess Selene, gives the House of the Golden Bracelet its name | By Araldo de Luca
The morning of August 24, A.D. 79, was relatively quiet in Pompeii, perhaps disturbed only slightly by a series of earthquakes common enough to the region. But by just past noon things drastically changed, when, according to the first-century Roman writer Pliny the Younger, a cloud of “unusual size and appearance” spewed from nearby Mount Vesuvius. Soon ash, pumice, and stone began to fall, flames could be seen leaping from the mountain, buildings shook and swayed, and, in places, although it was still day, there was “darkness blacker and denser than ordinary night.”
For two days, the volcano erupted ferociously, on the first day expelling millions of tons of debris, burying Pompeii at a rate of roughly six inches an hour. Thousands of people were trapped: “You could hear the shrieks of women, the wailing of infants, and the shouting of men; some were calling to their parents, others their children or their wives, trying to recognize them by their voices,” writes Pliny. On the second day, surges of superheated rock, ash, and gases, called pyroclastic flows, rushed down the mountain at speeds of more than 100 miles per hour, flattening the buildings that remained standing, and scalding or perhaps suffocating those who had not already been buried. By the end of August 25, more than 2,000 people likely had died in Pompeii, and at least 15,000 had probably perished in the region. [...]
Experts are set to start digging for another missing English king.
After Richard III was found buried under a car park in Leicester, details have emerged of other unusual possible resting places famous monarchs. Now, Bury St Edmunds believes it may have the remains of Saint Edmund, a Saxon monarch, buried beneath one of its tennis courts. St Edmund was a Saxon king who ruled in the ninth century. As a saint, his remains were kept in a shrine in Bury St Edmunds.
The Tennis courts in the grounds of Abbey Gardens Bury St Edmunds where archaeologists could be set to look for King Edmund's remains CREDIT: SWNS
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