Stone Pages Archaeo News: December 2016 Archives

December 2016 index:

4 December 2016: Stone Age could be when Brits first brewed ale; How far back does beer-making go in Britain? One 1980s archaeological dig at Kinloch on Scotland's Outer Hebrides Isle of Rhum found apparent residue from a long-evaporated beverage in pottery...
6 December 2016: Southwestern clay figurines may be fertility symbols; Curious clay figurines that have been found in southern Arizona (USA) appear to be fertility symbols used by desert farmers as much as 3,000 years ago, according to new research....
: Fires set by Ice Age hunters destroyed forests throughout Europe; An international team, including climate researcher Professor Jed Kaplan of the University of Lausanne and archaeologist Professor Jan Kolen of Leiden UniversityLarge - discovered that scale forest fires started by...
: Ancient Americans mutilated corpses in funeral rituals; Ancient people ripped out teeth, stuffed broken bones into human skulls and de-fleshed corpses as part of elaborate funeral rituals in South America, an archaeological discovery has revealed. The site...
: First polluted river from before Bronze Age; An international team of researchers may have discovered what could be the world's first polluted river, contaminated approximately 7,000 years ago. In this now-dry riverbed in the Wadi Faynan region...
: Bone objects discovered in ancient cremated remains; Archaeologists studying Neolithic and Early Bronze Age human remains in the Manx Museum collection for the 'Round Mounds of the Isle of Man' project have made an exciting discovery. Contained...
13 December 2016: Bronze Age 'Thinker' figurine discovered in Israel; Archaeologists have unearthed an 18-centimetre tall 3,800-year-old Middle Bronze Age ceramic statue of a figure sitting on top of the remains of a pot that was shattered sometime after it...
: Burnt Iron Age house unearthed in Denmark; Whether the fire was accidental or purposeful, it was fierce. "Virtually nothing survived," says Mikkel Kieldsen, an archaeologist with Viborg Museum (Denmark), who is leading the excavation. "They would have...
: Paleo diet was a veggie feast; Archaeologists tend to emphasise the role of meat in ancient human diets, largely because the butchered bones of wild animals are likely to be preserved at dig sites, but excavations...
14 December 2016: Clues to life of an Orcadian Iron Age man; A human jaw with two teeth was discovered centrally placed in a large, carved whalebone vertebra within the ruins of a broch earlier this year by researchers from The University...
15 December 2016: Origins of cereal production traced back to Neolithic Syria; Before the escalation of the current war in Syria, back in 2009 and 2010, a combined team from the Spanish National Research Council and the Universities of Cantabria and the...
: Australian rock art dated more accurately; Up until now, normal radiocarbon dating, using accelerator mass spectrometry, has been unable to accurately date most Australian rock art. This is due to the fact that the paint used...
: Post Mortem carried out on 2,500 year old remains; New analysis carried out on pottery sherds found at an established archaeological Iron Age hillfort site at Heuneburg, Germany, have led to an amazing discovery. Previously, when analysing possible human...
16 December 2016: Early Neolithic houses found at site in Wales; Previous work at Llanfaethlu, on Anglesey, in the extreme northwest of Wales, uncovered three 6000-year-old Early Neolithic houses, two of which were almost twice the size of other examples found...
: Underwater Stone Age settlement mapped out; A now-submerged Stone Age settlement has been mapped in the Baltic Sea, revealing how its ancient inhabitants lived along what was once a lagoon on the coast of Sweden some...
: Grant to restore two standing stones in Cambridgeshire; Castor Parish Council has received a £10,000 (about €12,000 or US$12,500) Heritage Lottery Fund Sharing Heritage grant to carry out archaeological investigations and restoration of some ancient standing stones in...
: Early humans began cooking over 800,000 years ago; Early humans may have started cooking their food at some point between 800,000 and 1.2 million years ago, according to scientists who have found the earliest evidence of raw food...
19 December 2016: Were Neanderthals religious?; Inside a cave in Spain, prehistoric people gather around the grave of a toddler, which is surrounded by fires, and 30 horns of animals including bison and red deer. A...
: Late Bronze Age crown found in Greece; A rare crown dated to the later Bronze Age (1,500-1,200 BCE) was discovered on the skull of a young girl in a grave in a large prehistoric cemetery in central...
: Sex of prehistoric hand-stencil artists determined; Hands are some of the most enduring images at Upper Palaeolithic rock art sites across the world. They have been recorded across the Americas, Africa, Arabia, Australia, East and South...
20 December 2016: Look into the eyes of a Neolithic man; The face of a man who lived 9,500 years ago has been reconstructed based on extensive new analysis of the 'Jericho Skull' - a face modeled in plaster over a...
: Neanderthals visited seaside cave for 180,000 years; New evidence suggests that Neanderthals visited a cave on what is now one of the Channel Islands near the present coast of Normandy, France, for at least 180,000 years. Previous...
22 December 2016: Two unique 8,000-year-old figurines discovered in Turkey; Two very well preserved 8000-year-old stone figurines depicting naked women were discovered by Polish archaeologists this year in one of the oldest cities in the world - Catalhoyuk [pronounced Chatalhoeyuek]...
23 December 2016: First pots for plant cooking found; Prehistoric people may have cooked wild grains and plants in pots as early as 10,000 years ago, according to new evidence. Scientists say the food was 'a kind of porridge',...
: Ancient underwater garden discovered in Canada; Archaeologists have discovered the earliest known garden in the Pacific Northwest-and it was underwater. Located about 30 km east of Vancouver (Canada), the garden is thought to have belonged to...
: Newgrange 'sun trap' might be a modern invention; Every year at the winter solstice, people gather at Newgrange, an ancient Irish round tomb that dates back to the Stone Age, to watch the first sunrise of winter stream...
: 5,000-year-old nativity scene found in Egypt; Italian researchers have discovered what might be the oldest nativity scene ever found - 5,000-year-old rock art that depicts a star in the east, a newborn between parents and two...