All posts tagged: archeology

Ancient Britons likely transported Stonehenge’s Altar Stone 700 kilometers from Scotland

Ancient Britons likely transported Stonehenge’s Altar Stone 700 kilometers from Scotland

Published by Jenni Sidey

Stonehenge has always invited big questions, but one of its most stubborn mysteries sits low to the ground. The Altar Stone, a six-ton sandstone block at the monument’s center, appears to have come from northeast Scotland, about 700 kilometers away, and new research suggests that even ice could not have finished the job. That matters because the stone’s journey has often been pulled between two explanations. Either people moved it across Britain, or glaciers did most of the work during the Ice Age. The new analysis does not entirely erase ice from the picture, but it sharply narrows what glaciers could have done and leaves human effort at the center of the story. The research team, led in part by Curtin University, combined two approaches to revisit the puzzle. One traced the stone’s likely birthplace by comparing the ages of mineral grains inside it with rock samples from across Scotland. The other used ice-sheet modelling to test whether shifting glacial flows could have carried a massive sandstone block south toward Salisbury Plain. Their answer is …

Stonehenge’s Altar Stone Was Hauled 430 Miles From Northeast Scotland

Stonehenge’s Altar Stone Was Hauled 430 Miles From Northeast Scotland

Published by Jenni Sidey

Once thought to have originated in Wales, like the rest of the 4,500-year-old monument’s bluestones, Stonehenge’s altar stone has recently been traced through geological fingerprinting to Scotland. The question of how the megalith made the 435-mile journey from there to Salsbury Plain in England is now the focus of a study by scientists at Curtin University in Australia in collaboration with experts from Sheffield Hallam University, the University of Sheffield, Wessex Archaeology, and the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom.  Their findings were published June 4 in the Journal of Quaternary Science. Related Articles Stonehenge was built in stages by Neolithic and Bronze Age peoples between around 3,000 BC and 1,500 BCE. It consists of an outer circle and inner horseshoe of sandstone trilithons with inner arcs of smaller bluestones. The altar stone at its heart is thought to have been placed there during the second period of Stonehenge’s construction, between 2,620 and 2,480 BCE. Geological evidence has confirmed that the monument’s sandstone boulders came from the Marlborough Downs, 20 miles away, while its …

Newly Excavated Egyptian Tomb Sheds Light on Greco-Roman Era

Newly Excavated Egyptian Tomb Sheds Light on Greco-Roman Era

Published by José Betancourt

A newly excavated Roman-era tomb found at Al-Bahnasa, site of the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus, offers insights into Egyptian funerary practices during the Greek and Roman periods (332 BCE–641 CE). The find, announced by the Egyptian Tourism and Antiquities Ministry, was made by a team of Egyptian and Spanish researchers led by archeologists Esther Pons of Spain’s National Archaeological Museum and Maite Mascort of the University of Barcelona.   Among the contents of the tomb were several mummies elaborately wrapped in decorated linen; alongside them the team found three gold amulets shaped like tongues and one made of copper, objects that would allow the dead to speak in the afterlife. The archaeologists also noted traces of gold leaf on some of the mummies, suggesting elaborate funerary rituals. Related Articles In a statement, Sherif Fathy, Egypt’s Minister of Tourism and Antiquities, said the discovery adds to a growing list of important finds at the site; other Greco-Roman-era objects unearthed at Al-Bahnasa by the same team have included terracotta statuettes of Isis-Aphrodite, a form of the Egyptian …

New scan data of Turkish formation is reviving the Noah’s Ark debate

New scan data of Turkish formation is reviving the Noah’s Ark debate

Published by Jenni Sidey

Four meters below the surface, researchers say they are seeing something that has changed the conversation around one of the world’s oldest mysteries. New scan data from a boat-shaped formation in eastern Turkey appear to show tunnel-like spaces running through the structure, along with features that may resemble walls, support beams, and interior divisions. For a team that has spent years trying to prove the site is more than an odd hill, the findings have become their strongest argument yet. Andrew Jones, who works with the Noah’s Ark Scans project, said the latest results have only deepened his conviction. “I do believe that this is the real, decayed, buried remains of Noah’s Ark, the famous ship,” he said in a recent TV interview on “Fox & Friends First“. “And we’re doing our best to convince the skeptics and show the world this site.” Located less than 2 miles from the Iran-Turkey border, in the Doğubayazıt district of Ağrı lies the Durupinar formation. (CREDIT: CC BY-SA 4.0) The formation, known as the Durupinar site, lies in …

DNA evidence points to a massive stone age population collapse

DNA evidence points to a massive stone age population collapse

Published by Jenni Sidey

A stone tomb near Paris held generations of dead, but the people buried there did not all belong to the same world. That is the striking picture emerging from new genetic work on 132 individuals buried at Bury, a large Neolithic megalithic site about 50 kilometers north of Paris. The tomb was used in two separate phases, first around 3200 to 3100 BC. Then it was used again across much of the third millennium BC until about 2450 BC. Between those periods, something appears to have gone badly wrong. The break is not subtle. The people buried in the earlier phase were not closely related to the later group. Instead, the DNA points to a major population turnover. This fits into a broader pattern of demographic upheaval that seems to have affected much of northwestern Europe at the end of the fourth millennium BC. “We see a clear genetic break between the two periods,” said Frederik Valeur Seersholm, an assistant professor at the Globe Institute at the University of Copenhagen and one of the study’s …

Ruins of a ‘Unique’ Temple Complex Discovered in Northern Sinai

Ruins of a ‘Unique’ Temple Complex Discovered in Northern Sinai

Published by Jenni Sidey

An Egyptian archeological mission has announced their discovery of a temple complex at Tell el-Farama, the site of the ancient city of Pelusium in northern Sinai. The ruin feaures a large circular basin, around 100 feet in diameter, once attached to an easternmost branch of the Nile (now long dry). Surrounding the basin, which would have been filled with water, is a complex system of drainage channels; at its center is a square plinth that may have supported a statue of the local deity Pelusius. The archeologists—working under the Supreme Council of Antiquities—first discovered the complex in 2019, unearthing a Greco-Roman structure with benches inside it that they originally thought was a civic building. But according to Dr. Hisham Hussein, head of the Central Department for Maritime Antiquities and Sinai and supervisor of the excavation, ongoing excavation and comparative studies have changed their understanding of the site. Related Articles “We now know this was a sacred water installation used in religious rituals,” said Hussein in a statement, “not a political structure.” Stratigraphic evidence suggests that …

Native Americans Used Dice Earlier Than Previously Known, Study Shows

Native Americans Used Dice Earlier Than Previously Known, Study Shows

Published by José Betancourt

Native Americans were using dice for gaming long before Bronze Age societies in the Old World, according to a new Colorado State University study. Research published in the journal American Antiquity by Robert J. Madden, a PhD student at CSU, presents evidence that dice were made by hunter-gatherers on the western Great Plains more than 12,000 years ago. Dice games are considered humanity’s earliest structured engagement with the idea of randomness, the intellectual precursor to probabilistic thinking. Until now, dice games were thought to have originated in the complex societies of Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley beginning around 5,500 years ago. Related Articles Aware that Native Americans have a long history of dice games, Madden created a checklist of specific attributes of historic Native American dice to reclassify older artifacts. “We had a body of literature that carried [the use of dice] all the way back to about 2,000 years before the present,” Madden told CSU’s The Audit podcast, “but it broke down at that point. That got me interested in seeing what I could do to trace this back. How …

Rome’s Colosseum Gets a New Pedestrian Plaza

Rome’s Colosseum Gets a New Pedestrian Plaza

Published by José Betancourt

A restoration of the Roman Colosseum’s southern piazza has been completed after four years of construction, according to Artnet News. The project, led by Stefano Boeri Interiors, has recreated the travertine-paved pedestrian plaza outside the amphitheater’s southern façade, where spectators once waited to enter the arena. Built between 70 and 80 CE, the Roman Colosseum remains one of the engineering marvels of the world. At four stories high and with 80 arched entrances, the amphitheater could seat 50,000 or more people, equal to a modern stadium. Even more impressive, it was completely freestanding, supported by a complex vault system. Related Articles It had a retractable awning system to shade spectators, and a complement of latrines and water fountains. Its most famous use was for gladiator games, in which enslaved people or prisoners of war fought each other or wild animals to the death. It also presented public executions and mock naval battles, for which the amphitheater could reportedly be filled with water. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the Colosseum was used as a …

3.67 million year old fossil provides new insight into the evolution of the human face

3.67 million year old fossil provides new insight into the evolution of the human face

Published by Jenni Sidey

Little Foot’s face looks like it has been through a slow-motion car crash, because it has. For millions of years, rock pressure and shifting sediments pushed and twisted the fossil’s facial bones until the front of the skull no longer fit together in a way scientists could safely fix by hand. Now, a new digital rebuild of that face is offering a sharper view of how early hominin faces varied across Africa around 4 to 3 million years ago. Little Foot, formally cataloged as StW 573, comes from the Sterkfontein Caves about 40 kilometers northwest of Johannesburg, inside South Africa’s Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site. It is described as the most complete early hominin skeleton ever found. The skeleton has fueled research for years, but the face remained a stubborn problem. A face rebuilt without touching the bone An international team led by Dr. Amelie Beaudet and Professor Dominic Stratford digitally reassembled the face using high-resolution synchrotron scanning at the Diamond Light Source in the United Kingdom and virtual reconstruction methods. The work was …

40,000-year-old Paleolithic carvings may be the precursor to human writing

40,000-year-old Paleolithic carvings may be the precursor to human writing

Published by Jenni Sidey

Rows of tiny crosses and dots run along the flank of a mammoth no bigger than your palm. Someone carved it from a tusk around 40,000 years ago, then went back and added the marks with care. They show up again on other Aurignacian objects from southwestern Germany, on ivory plates and figurines and bones. For a long time, it was easy to treat them as decoration, or as something too fragmentary to take seriously. A new computational analysis argues otherwise. Linguist Christian Bentz of Saarland University and archaeologist Ewa Dutkiewicz of Berlin’s Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte say the repeated sign sequences on Ice Age objects carry a measurable “statistical fingerprint,” and that fingerprint looks unexpectedly close to the earliest proto-cuneiform tablets from ancient Mesopotamia. Their work appears in PNAS. They do not claim these marks are writing in the modern sense. Still, the numbers suggest the marks were more than idle doodles. Examples of Uruk protocuneiform tablets from Uruk V. (CREDIT: PNAS / CC-BY-SA 4.0, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Vorderasiatisches Museum/Olaf M. Teßmer) …