"Study belies claims on Harappan tools" The Tribune (India)
"Patiala-based anthropologist Vidwan Soni and his son Anujot Singh have discovered that people in the late Harappan civilisation used stone tools even till 4,000 years ago instead of earlier established 8,000 years.
The father-son duo worked for several years collecting the relatively 'young' stone tools from Shivalik Hills for the last several years.
In their paper, the father-son duo has challenged the eminent pre-historians on the later Harappan life.
'Due to long droughts the late-Harappans got shifted towards Shiwaliks for search of water.
Due to non availability of metal, they started fabricating and using stone tools', he said."
[Read The Full Story]
[Excellent story in The Tribune! It seems that, yet again, ancient climate changes have majorly contributed to decline of civilisation in yet another part of the world - as it did for the Mayan and other civilisations in the Americas.
Yet we are still being told by some quarters that the current problems we have with our climate is 'unique'. Never happened before... Oh really! I wonder why these folk never even consider Space Weather when they develop their 'climate models'? I think we should be told.
It's well worth a visit to read the full story, and do make the effort to track down the original paper which has been published in several places - Ed.]
A cave, located 2.7 kilometers to the east under the Temple of Kukulcán, was discovered in 1966 but remained intact for 50 years as the archaeologist who was informed of the discovery decided to block the entrance.
The cave named "Balamkú" will help to better understand and perhaps rewrite the history of Chichen Itzá, in Yucatan.
'The hundreds of archaeological artifacts, belonging to seven offerings documented so far, are in an extraordinary state of preservation' commented Guillermo de Anda, Director of the Great Maya Aquifer Project, the underwater exploration of the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) at a press conference."
[Read The Full Story]
[There is surely much, much more to be discovered in the Yucatan Peninsula, and discoveries such as this serve to inform us as to the extent of what might still remain to be discovered.
It's well worth a visit to read the full story and see the images of the site and finds - Ed.]
"Everyone knows an asteroid strike wiped out the dinosaurs, right?
Lots of evidence shows that the Chicxulub impact event had terrible consequences for the dinosaurs.
But the picture is a little more complicated than that. Extreme volcanic activity may have contributed to the extinction.
At the end of the Cretaceous period, about 66 million years ago, the dinosaurs went extinct.
And not just the dinosaurs; about 75% of all plants and animals went extinct.Avian dinosaurs survived.
At the same time, a massive asteroid or comet slammed into Earth's Yucatan peninsula, in present-day Mexico."
[Read The Full Story]
[An excellent story in Universe Today! It has been known since the late 1990s that the Chicxulub impact triggered massive volcanic activity, and it is good to see this extra confirmation of that. Between the imapact and the eruptions 75% or more of all species of life - animals and plants - were unable to survive the resultant toxic atmosphere, and went extinct.
It's well worth a visit to read the full story and access the many images and diagrams. You can also access the original Press Release
HERE - Ed.]
"A taste for fat may have made us human, says study" Popular Archaeology (USA)
"Long before human ancestors began hunting large mammals for meat, a fatty diet provided them with the nutrition to develop bigger brains, posits a new paper* in Current Anthropology.
The paper argues that our early ancestors acquired a taste for fat by eating marrow scavenged from the skeletal remains of large animals that had been killed and eaten by other predators.
The argument challenges the widely held view among anthropologists that eating meat was the critical factor in setting the stage for the evolution of humans.
'Our ancestors likely began acquiring a taste for fat 4 million years ago, which explains why we crave it today', says Jessica Thompson, the paper's lead author and an anthropologist at Yale University.
'The reservoirs of fat in the long bones of carcasses were a huge calorie package on a calorie-poor landscape. That could have been what gave an ancestral population the advantage it needed to set off the chain of human evolution.'"
[Read The Full Story]
[This is a really excellent story from Popular Archaeology! The whole hypothesis makes perfect sense, and the author is of course correct that eating meat without its fat can cause a dangerous level of protein poisoning - something ancient peoples would have soon realised.
But the methods used to get fat from marrow while scavenging dead animal bones by breaking them with rocks make perfect sense as well, and let us hope this paper will trigger more investigations along this line.
It's well worth a visit to read the full story. You can access the original paper
here - Ed.]
"KU team unearths early Harappan artefacts" The Hindu (India)
"Artefacts believed to be around 5,000 years old, dating back to the early Harappan phase, have been unearthed during an excavation jointly being held by archaeologists from the University of Kerala and Kachchh University in Khatiya village of Kutch in Gujarat.
A 47-member team comprising researchers and postgraduate students stumbled upon several pieces, including mud pots, conch-shell bangles, beads, and stone blades, during the excavation, being undertaken in burial sites in the region.
'The pottery shards recovered bore similarities with the ones unearthed from ancient settlements in Harappan sites, including Kot Diji and Amri of Pakistan, and Nagwada, Santhali, Moti Pipli, Datrana, Surkotada, and Dhaneti in North Gujarat', says S.V. Rajesh, Assistant Professor, Department of Archaeology, University of Kerala, one of the coordinators of the excavation.
The project is believed to be the first such excavation to be undertaken at Harappan sites by a university based in south India."
[Read The Full Story]
[It's always good to hear of more investigations into the very ancient Harappan civilisation which was likely far more influential in its time than is generaly appreciated.
Well worth a visit to read the full story and see the image of the site- Ed.]
"New species belonging to the genus Homo are discovered more and more frequently.
Paleoanthropological research has revealed that our own family lineage is far more complex than once thought, yet it is also true that through time this diversity has been whittled down to one remaining species, Homo sapiens.
Understanding why our species has survived when others did not is key to determining what makes us "human" and where we fit into the natural world.
Reconstructing landscapes use patterns, hunting, and foraging behaviors, and the mobility of early modern humans and our closest fossil relatives the Neandertals can help tease apart ecological factors that contributed to our success."
[Read The Full Story]
[This is a notice of a conference in Denver, Ohio, USA, held on January 23 2019. We put this link up as the material to be discussed is of great importance for our understanding of why our species, Homo Sapiens sapiens, survived whilst other branches of early hominid species did not.
The answer seems to have been ancient climate change.
Something we may be able to learn from given current climatic changes evident not only on Earth but also other planets and the larger moon of the gas giants.
We highly recommend reading the short introduction and please visit the
conference program site for further details- Ed.]
"Strange carvings greeted early West Virginia explorers" West Virginia Explorer (USA)
"When pioneers and other explorers first ventured into what would become West Virginia, they encountered artifacts of a much earlier age - carvings, burial mounds, and stone walls, the origins of which natives could not explain with certainty.
Petroglyphs inscribed in rock and featuring human and animal figures were perhaps the most striking and inexplicable finds.
Mounds and earthworks could be practically accounted for as defensive or monumental - but carvings? They were certainly communications.
With whom were the creators attempting to communicate and why? Were the carvings inspired by ritual or sheerly as human expression?
Archaeologists can only speculate. Without written records, we may never know with certainty."
[Read The Full Story]
[A brilliant story in the West Virginia Explorer! The petroglyphs were 'obviously' created to communicate something. and it is such a great pity that the stone itself is now drowned in the Ohio River so that further exploration is difficult if not impossible.
This means we may never know what they represent, but the fact that local indigenous peoples also have no idea who created them suggests there were peoples in that area long before current archaeological paradigms have even suspected.
It will be worth local people monitoring developments.
We highly recommend reading the full story and seeing the images of the petroglyphs - Ed.]
When he was carefully sweeping off dust from layers of earth around the tomb, he noticed coal dust.
In the same tomb, he saw terra-cotta chips that date back to the Bronze Age, according to Guangming Daily.
'According to historical records, people in the Han Dynasty had been making use of coal for production and in their daily life. But it was incredible to see coal at a Bronze Age site', Wang recalled to the newspaper.
As the excavation continued, coal dust, cinder and a coal pile were discovered. Carbon-14 dating showed the site is 3,600 years old."
[Read The Full Story]
[An excellent story reported in Global Times! It would be surprising if ancient peoples had not noticed the properties of coal when lightning strikes set it ablaze, so it is unsurprising that its use is now confirmed much earlier than previously believed.
In this cave, stalagmites and stalactites are growing slowly over millennia and preserve in them clues about past climate events.
Changes in stalagmite chemistry from this cave have now linked the collapse of the Akkadian Empire to climate changes more than 4,000 years ago.
Akkadia was the world's first empire.
It was established in Mesopotamia around 4,300 years ago after its ruler, Sargon of Akkad, united a series of independent city states."
[Read The Full Story]
[Of the 30+ carvings they found most were of 'recurring geometric patterns' and others of 'monstrous faces'. These are recurring themes in the petroglyphs of many ancient cultures worldwide, all clustered within the same period 3,500 - 1500 BC, and would seem to represent celestial phenomena witnessed globally by those ancient peoples.
Well worth a visit to read the full story, and follow the links embedded in it. The original paper published in PNAS is listed immediately below - Ed.]
"China’s beastly bronze designs found in stone carvings at prehistoric settlement" South China Morning Post (Hong Kong)
"The distinctive, often beastly, patterns found on classical Chinese bronzeware may be thousands of years older than first thought, archaeologists said after finding similar designs carved into the stone walls of a prehistoric settlement in the country's northwest.
A team working at the Shimao archaeological site in Shaanxi province made the discovery during a recent excavation of the city's Neolithic ruins, which are thought to date back to about 2,000BC, state broadcaster CCTV reported on Monday.
'The beast-face patterns found in Shimao might have had a significant influence on the motifs of China's Bronze Age', Sun Zhouyong, president of the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology, said in the report."
[Read The Full Story]
[Of the 30+ carvings they found most were of 'recurring geometric patterns' and others of 'monstrous faces'. These are recurring themes in the petroglyphs of many ancient cultures worldwide, all clustered within the same period 3,500 - 1500 BC, and would seem to represent celestial phenomena witnessed globally by those ancient peoples.
It's well worth a visit to read the full story - Ed.]
"The Antikythera Mechanism Research Project" Cardiff/Athens Universites (Cymru/Greece)
[In October 1900, Captain Dimitrious Kondos was leading a team of sponge divers near the the island of Antikythera off the coast of Greece. They noticed a shipwreck about 180 feet below the surface and began to investigate. Amongst the artifacts that they brought up was a coral-encrusted piece of metal that later archaeologists found was some sort of gear wheel.
The rest of the artifacts, along with the shape of the boat, suggested a date around 2000 years ago, which made the find one of the most anomalous that had ever been recovered from the Greek seas. It became known as The Antikythera Mechanism.
In 2006 the journal "Nature" published a letter, and another paper about the mechanism was published in 2008, detailing the findings of Prof. Mike G. Edmunds of Cardiff University. Using high-resolution X-ray tomography to study the fragments of the anomalous Antikythera Mechanism, they found that it was in fact a bronze mechanical analog computer that could be used to calculate the astronomical positions and various cycles of the Moon - as seen from the Earth: - Ed]
"Since the late 1980s the dominant theory of human origins has been that a 'cognitive revolution' (C.50,000 years ago) led to the advent of our species, Homo sapiens.
As a result of this revolution our species spread and eventually replaced all existing archaic Homo species, ultimately leading to the superiority of modern humans.
Or so we thought.
As Clive Finlayson explains, the latest advances in genetics prove that there was significant interbreeding between Modern Humans and the Neanderthals.
All non-Africans today carry some Neanderthal genes.
We have also discovered aspects of Neanderthal behaviour that indicate that they were not cognitively inferior to modern humans, as we once thought, and in fact had their own rituals and art.
Finlayson, who is at the forefront of this research, recounts the discoveries of his team, providing evidence that Neanderthals caught birds of prey, and used their feathers for symbolic purposes."
"In this provocative collaboration from two Egyptology outsiders, Robert M. Schoch, Ph.D., and Robert Bauval combine their decades of research to show how the Sphinx is thousands of years older than the conventional Egyptological timeline and was built by a long forgotten pre-Pharaonic civilization.
They examine the known history of the Sphinx, contrasting what Egyptologists claim with prominent historical accounts and new research, including updates to Schoch’s geological water weathering research and reanalysis of seismic studies.
Building on Bauval’s Orion Correlation Theory, they investigate the archaeoastronomical alignments of the monuments of the Giza Plateau and reveal how the pyramids and Sphinx were built to align with the constellations of Orion and Leo.
Analyzing the evidence for a significantly older construction phase at Giza and the restoration and recarving of the Sphinx during the Old Kingdom era, they assert that the Sphinx was first built by an advanced pre-Pharaonic civilization that existed circa 12,000 years ago on the Giza Plateau, contemporaneous with the sophisticated Göbekli Tepe complex."
