Stone Pages Archaeo News: December 2019 Archives

December 2019 index:

5 December 2019: 5,000-year-old bones found during excavation in France; In a rare and exceptional discovery, the well-preserved skeletons of some 50 people dating to the Neolithic period have been found during a preventive archaeology excavation in the small town...
: Human teeth as jewellery in ancient Turkey; At the 9,000-year-old archaeological site of Catalhoyuk, (roughly pronounced Cha-TAL-hook), researchers have unearthed human teeth drilled through the root, which must have been part of a necklace or other kind...
: Prehistoric infants found with helmets made from skulls; Archaeologists excavating a pair of 2,100-year-old funerary mounds on the coast of central Ecuador revealed the skeletons of two infants with their heads encased in tight-fitting 'helmets' made from the...
: Only eat oysters in months with an 'r' rule 4,000 years old; Tradition dictates only eating wild oysters in months with names containing the letter 'r' - from September to April - and a new study suggests some people were following this...
: Stone Age artists mesmerised by horses; Of every four animals drawn upon a cave wall in Stone Age France and Spain, at least one is likely to be a horse, yet these images made thousands of...
7 December 2019: Pre-Inca temple dedicated to Water Cult discovered in Peru; Tucked away in northwestern Peru, in the Zana Valley, in an area known as Oyotun, you can find the Huaca El Toro site, where archaeologists from the Royal Tombs of...
: Ancient Hunter-Gatherers teach how to produce thermo-stable paint; Ancient Hunter-Gatherers had used natural materials to create paint and pigments for hundreds of thousands of years but until recently it was not known how they had actually made it....
10 December 2019: Prehistoric ring cairn discovered in Gloucestershire; A previously unknown Bronze Age monument has been discovered hidden in woodland in the Forest of Dean (Gloucestershire, England) following an airborne laser scan. The ritual monument, known as a...
: Ostrich eggshell beads tracks cultural shifts in ancient Africa; Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History's Department of Archaeology present an expanded analysis of African ostrich eggshell beads, testing the hypothesis that larger beads...
: Public help document damage to historic Scottish sites; Members of the public are helping to document the effects of weather and vandalism at some of Scotland's most ancient monuments. As they are uploading images of ancient sites, experts...
: Silk fabrics detected in a Neolithic burial in China; Chinese archaeologists led by Zhao Feng of the China National Silk Museum developed a technique called enzyme-linked-immunosorbent assay (ELISA) to detect the presence of silk in carbonized residue in an...
: Nine Bronze Age carved stones unearthed in Orkney; A team from ORCA Archaeology, carrying out exploratory excavations at the proposed site of an electrical substation development in Orkney (Scotland), has unearthed nine, half-metre tall stone-carved objects. Some of...
15 December 2019: Were Neolithic log boats used in the construction of Newgrange?; A team of researchers from University College Dublin and the University of Ulster's School of Geography have discovered possible clues relating to the construction of Newgrange, the prehistoric monument located...
: Teeth analysis shows how humans migrated to the Levant 40,000 years ago; It has long been postulated that the migration of Homo Sapiens from the Near East into Europe led directly to the massive decline of the Neanderthal. Now a new study...
: Were Neolithic rock axeheads used as currency?; When the African and Eurasian tectonic plates clashed together millennia ago the enormous pressure that went into the formation of The Alps produced extremely hard crystalline basement rock. Similar to...
20 December 2019: Understanding ancient dietary practices in Mexico; Researchers examined plant remains found on ceramic artifacts such as bowls, bottles and jars, and stone tools such as blades and drills, dating to the Early Formative period (2000-1000 BCE),...
: The world's oldest hunting scene discovered in Indonesia; A prehistoric painting depicting what looks to be a hunting scene pushes back the earliest evidence of human storytelling by more than 20,000 years. Discovered on the wall of a...
: Neolithic chewing gum helps recreate image of ancient Dane; At the dawn of the Neolithic era, a young woman discarded a lump of ancient chewing gum made from birch tar into a lagoon near the coast of southern Denmark....
: Scientists identify sinew bowstring used by Oetzi; A length of cord found alongside the body of Oetzi, the Neolithic hunter who was discovered entombed in ice high in the Dolomites, has been identified as a string for...
: New evidence found of Dartmoor's earliest farming communities; Ancient features from 5,500 years ago have been uncovered by archaeologists at two of Dartmoor's most enigmatic sites (southern Devon, England), with guided walks being held at the locations in...
: Prehistoric humans built a wall to keep out the sea - But it failed; A 7,000-year-old seawall has been discovered off the Israeli coast, and it's now the oldest-known defence against rising sea levels. The seawall eventually failed, and the village had to be...
27 December 2019: Comparing the teeth of Denisovans and modern Asians; Until recently, the fossil record for Denisovans consisted of two teeth and a small finger bone, all from one cave in Siberia, so the discovery in mid-2019 of a Denisovan...
: Ancient humans survived longer than previously thought; Homo erectus evolved around two million years ago, and was the first known human species to walk fully upright. New dating evidence shows it survived until just over 100,000 years...
: South Americans began settling the Caribbean 5,800 years ago; The earliest migrations from South America to the Caribbean began 5,800 years ago - not to the more southerly Lesser Antilles islands as many have supposed, but to the larger...
: 8,000-year-old Neolithic settlement in central China; Archaeologists recently discovered a Neolithic settlement in central China's Hunan Province believed to have been inhabited 8,000 years ago - the third excavated site of the Pengtoushan culture, centred primarily...
: Footprints of Ice Age mammoths and prehistoric humans; One of the largest collections of vertebrate animal tracks from the Ice Age can be found preserved on a dried lake bed called Alkali Flat, at White Sands National Monument...
: Lightning strike may have inspired builders of Callanish; A geophysical survey around one of the standing stones on the northwestern Scotland island of Lewis reveals a star-shaped pattern resulting from one or more lightning strikes covering an area...
30 December 2019: Neolithic crops discovered in Tibet; Archaeologists have discovered mixed crops believed to have grown during the Neolithic Age in Tibet. A scientific team found the crops at the Luding site in the southeastern part of...
: Large scale feasts drew crowds from across Iron Age Ireland; According ot a recent research, people transported animals over huge distances for mass gatherings at one of Ireland's most iconic archaeological sites. Dr. Richard Madgwick of Cardiff University led a...
: Prehistoric pottery and bones found in Thailand; A local official, villagers and a Fine Arts Department volunteer stumbled on human bones and ancient pottery fragments while exploring a cave in Khao Ban Pak Chong, a large limestone...
: Babies in the Neolithic were given bone spoons to teethe on; At the Neolithic site of Grad-Starčevo in Serbia, 50 small, spatula-shaped artifacts were discovered in the 1930s. Made out of cow bone and found in domestic contexts, the objects had...