Stone Pages Archaeo News: June 2011 Archives

June 2011 index:

1 June 2011: Laser study to reveal secrets of Texan prehistoric paintings; A complex and colourful mural 45 metres wide and 4 metres high painted on canyon walls some 4,000 years ago, is being scanned with lasers to produce a high-resolution 3-D...
2 June 2011: No fresh milk for Neolithic humans in France; Excavation of a southern French burial site from about 3,000 BCE shows that the modern humans who expanded into the area from the Mediterranean lived in patrilocal communities (where couples...
: Marlborough Mound is a truly prehistoric monument; The Wiltshire landscape around Avebury and Silbury Hill (southwest England) is the heart of prehistoric Britain, and has World Heritage designation. Now another monument can be added to its archaeological...
6 June 2011: Stone Age camp site found in Canada; Evidence of a Stone Age temporary hunting and skinning camp has been found in Eastern Ontario, Canada, on a site destined for use as a new housing estate. Under the...
7 June 2011: Ancient axe head unearthed in Scotland; Archaeologists have uncovered some interesting finds at a Moray dig - just as their long-running excavation work draws to a close. Fraser Hunter's team from Edinburgh were visiting Birnie near...
: Prototype of European towns unearthed in Bulgaria; Bulgarian archaeologists discovered what they believe to be the oldest town in Europe. Dubbed a 'proto-town', the site is located near the town of Pazardzhic, in the center of the...
8 June 2011: Ancient hominid males stuck close to home; A new study of the teeth of 19 australopithecines from two famous cave sites in South Africa suggests that, when it came time for members of the human family to...
: Guernsey prehistoric site to be excavated; A major new excavation is being carried out ahead of work to extend the runway safety areas at Guernsey Airport (Channel Islands, UK). Dr Philip de Jersey said the Neolithic...
: Traces of ancient aboriginals found in a Canadian lake; In a discovery which pioneers a novel method of detecting the presence of ancient remains in what are now drowned landscapes, a team of Canadian scientists has used geology-style drill...
: Egyptian Neolithic site 'virtually untouched'; Only 70km from Cairo, Egypt - in a nature reserve along the shore north of Lake Qarun - lies a virtually untouched Neolithic site which holds the country's oldest evidence...
: Were ancient human migrations two-way streets?; Dmanisi, in the Republic of Georgia (a long-studied archaeological site in a mountainous region between Europe and Asia), was occupied by early humans as long as 1.85 million years ago...
9 June 2011: Are these the real King Solomon's Mines?; A new dig, scheduled for late September 2011, could yield fresh evidence on the enduring story of King Solomon's Mines. The mines in question are located at a place called...
: New dating techniques reveal a Stone Age construction boom; A computer programme has been developed which uses a combination of radiocarbon dating and the sequencing of other finds on a particular site, to greatly reduce the previous levels of...
: Alaskan dig offers a glimpse of the Ice Age; Archaeologists will be continuing work at a 12,000-year-old prehistoric site called Raven Bluff this summer. Discovered in 2007 by Bureau of Land Management archaeologist Bill Hedman, the site is yielding...
: Asphalt may have poisoned ancient Americans; On the beaches of southern California you can sometimes find clumps of a sticky black substance with a texture halfway between molasses and rubber. These tarballs are made of an...
10 June 2011: Stone circle found by amateur archaeologists on Ilkley Moor; Amateur archaeologists are celebrating discovering another prehistoric stone circle on Wharfedale's moors. The identification of the previously undocumented cairn on Ilkley Moor (West Yorkshire, England) marks the latest in a...
11 June 2011: A comet carved on a reconstructed stone circle in Wales?; Plas Newydd stone circle is a relic of the 19th Century Llangollen Eisteddfod, a Welsh festival famous for its revival of the 'Bardic Tradition' and therefore is not an ancient...
: Prehistoric rice farmers started first 'green revolution'; The 1960s 'green revolution' in rice production in Asia selected for variants of a single gene that boosted yields across the continent. A new study finds that prehistoric farmers harnessed...
12 June 2011: Bronze Age discovery by University of York students; Students have discovered a rare 4,000 Bronze Age urn at the University of York's new campus (North Yorkshire, England). The students, from the Department of Archaeology, found the collared urn,...
: Half of all Aboriginal rock art could disappear soon; While Australia has some of the world's most outstanding and abundant rock art, experts say half of it could disappear over the next 50 years unless it is better protected....
: Ancient ritual clue to mysterious broken figurines; On the six-square-mile island of Keros, a rocky Greek island part of the Cycladic chain of the Aegean Sea, thousands of broken sculptures and pottery dating to about 2,500 BCE...
17 June 2011: North American copper smelting re-created; Researchers from Northwestern University in the USA have recently tried to re-create the copper working techniques of the Cahokia Native Americans, from over 600 years ago. Using discarded fragments of...
28 June 2011: Early French had a taste for beer; Archaeologists have uncovered evidence that the occupants of southeastern France were brewing beer during the Iron Age, some 2,500 years ago. Beer brewing's heritage stretches back to the Bronze Age...
: Ancient henge severely damaged in England; The UK's Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act 1979 makes it a criminal offence to destroy or damage a scheduled monument. Scheduled Ancient Monuments still sometimes get 'trashed', however, and...
: Knocked down menhirs discovered in France; Archaeologists working at the site of 'Basses Coutures', Champagne-sur-Oise (north of Paris), France, have uncovered a Iron Age settlement and two menhirs pushed over into a pit, probably dating to...
: Arrow origins traced to Africa; "The invention of the bow and arrow used to be closely linked to the late Upper Paleolithic (Stone Age) in Europe," less than 30,000 years ago, says anthropologist Marlize Lombard...
: Spearhead crafting allowed human brain to develop new abilities; Archaeologists at Lund University (Sweden) believe that the advanced crafting of stone spearheads contributed to the development of new ways of human thinking and behaving, leading to the human brain...
29 June 2011: 1,000 human bones discovered in the Tomb of the Otters; Archaeologists revealed recently the discovery of more than 1,000 human bones in a prehistoric burial chamber in Orkney (Scotland). The 5,000-year-old human bones were found in just one of the...
: 18,000 people gathered at Stonehenge for Midsummer rituals; British police praised the crowds who descended on Stonehenge after a night of 'good natured' Midsummer festivities with only 20 arrests. Clouds blocked out the sight of the sun rising...
: Iron Age artifacts unearthed in the Philippines; Archaeological artifacts dating back more than 2,000 years were unearthed in San Remigio (Philippines) this month. Jose Eleazar Bersales, co-director of the University of San Carlos and University of Guam...
: Early human remains unearthed in Ukraine; Ancient remains uncovered in Ukraine represent some of the oldest evidence of modern people in Europe. Archaeologists found human bones and teeth, tools, ivory ornaments and animal remains at a...
: Ryedale Windy Pits skeletons were ritually killed; A new investigation has revealed that human skeletons discovered in the 19th Century in caves known as the Ryedale Windy Pits on the North York Moors (England) were likely to...
: 7500-year-old skeleton found in Bulgaria; Bulgarian archaeologists have found the remains of what seems to be a 7500-year-old prehistoric skeleton in the region of Koriyata, near the town of Suvorovo in northeast Bulgaria. The skeleton...
30 June 2011: Coconut genetics speak of prehistoric migrations; The coconut (the fruit of the palm Cocos nucifera) provides a high-calorie food, potable water, fibre that can be spun into rope, a hard shell that can be turned into...
: Communal burials in ancient Turkish settlement; Human remains discovered beneath the floors of houses at one of the world's first permanent settlements were not biologically related to one another - a finding that paints a new...
: Ancient Irish stone tools go on display; Stone tools used by the first builders in Galway (Ireland) thousands of years ago will soon go on display. Rare polished axeheads used by prehistoric Galwegians more than 6,000 years...
: The lost civilizations of the Amazon; In recent years archaeologists have uncovered evidence of ancient, densely populated settlements throughout the Amazon basin, hinting at societies far larger and more advanced than previously thought. Archaeologist Denise Schaan...
: Homo erectus did not live alongside modern humans in Indonesia; Homo erectus, an ancient human ancestor that lived from 1.8 million to 35,000 years ago, is said by theorists of human evolution to have lived alongside Homo sapiens (modern humans)...
: Rows of prehistoric wooden posts found in Suffolk; The mystery surrounding the discovery of prehistoric wooden posts on the marshes in Waveney (Suffolk, England) has deepened following the discovery of a third site. Three rows of Iron Age...