Perfectly-preserved ‘bog beetles’ nearly as old as Egypt’s pyramids
Two thumb-size beetles found preserved in an English bog may look as though they died as recently as yesterday, but in reality they’re nearly as ancient as Egypt’s pyramids, new research finds.
The two oak capricorn beetles found in the bog.
The two oak capricorn beetles (that belonged to the genus Cerambyx) date back 3,785 years, according to radiocarbon dating. That means these beetles perished inside a piece of bogwood just as the last woolly mammoths were dying out on Siberia’s Wrangel Island, half a world over.
“These beetles are older than the Tudors, older than the Roman occupation of Britain, even older than the Roman Empire,” Max Barclay, curator of beetles at the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London, said in a statement.
“These beetles were alive and chewing the inside of that piece of wood when the pharaohs were building the pyramids in Egypt. It is tremendously exciting.”
The bog beetles have been part of the NHM collection since the late 1970s, after a farmer discovered the lifeless beetles in a piece of wood on his farm in East Anglia, on the eastern coast of England known for its Bronze and Iron Age settlements, as well as its bogs.
These waterlogged bogs have low-oxygen, highly-acidic conditions known for preserving organic matter, including dead bodies, Live Science previously reported.
As far as I know, the story is this: A farmer in eastern England was cutting up wood he’d found while doing some deep ploughing and discovered these insects inside; dead, of course,” Barclay told the BBC. “This was a huge piece of waterlogged oak, and he sent us a sample.”
A farmer found the two beetles in a piece of wood on his farm.
The donation caught the attention of curators, who identified the insects as oak capricorn beetles — named for their long curved antennae, which look like the horns of the alpine ibex (Capra ibex).
Cooling temperatures from climate change may have caused the oak capricorn beetle to go extinct in England, but not in Southern and Central Europe, where they live today, Barclay said in the statement.
“This is a beetle that is associated with warmer climates,” he said. “Possibly it existed in Britain 4,000 years ago because the climate was warmer, and as the climate cooled and the habitats destroyed, it became extinct.”
“Now, with global warming, there are indications that it could return to Britain in the future,” Barclay added.
Granted, the beetles will have to find the right habitat. Oak capricorn beetles, which live for just three to five years, lay their eggs in the deadwood part of very old, unshaded living trees, according to a fact sheet from the European Union. The adults can fly, albeit poorly, and are usually found within one-third of a mile (500 meters) of their tree.
“It is quite extraordinary to hold something in your hand that looks like it was collected yesterday but is actually several millennia old,” Barclay said.
Fossil ‘balls’ are 1 billion years old and could be Earth’s oldest known multicellular life
Scientists have discovered a rare evolutionary “missing link” dating to the earliest chapter of life on Earth. It’s a microscopic, ball-shaped fossil that bridges the gap between the very first living creatures — single-celled organisms — and more complex multicellular life.
Bicellum brasieri holotype specimen.
The spherical fossil contains two different types of cells: round, tightly-packed cells with very thin cell walls at the center of the ball, and a surrounding outer layer of sausage-shaped cells with thicker walls. Estimated to be 1 billion years old, this is the oldest known fossil of a multicellular organism, researchers reported in a new study.
Life on Earth is widely accepted as having evolved from single-celled forms that emerged in the primordial oceans. However, this fossil was found in sediments from the bottom of what was once a lake in the northwest Scottish Highlands. The discovery offers a new perspective on the evolutionary pathways that shaped multicellular life, the scientists said in the study.
“The origins of complex multicellularity and the origin of animals are considered two of the most important events in the history of life on Earth,” said lead study author Charles Wellman, a professor in the Department of Animal and Plant Sciences at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom.
“Our discovery sheds new light on both of these,” Sheffield said in a statement.
Today, little evidence remains of Earth’s earliest organisms. Microscopic fossils estimated to be 3.5 billion years old are credited with being the oldest fossils of life on Earth, though some experts have questioned whether chemical clues in the so-called fossils were truly biological in origin.
Other types of fossils associated with ancient microbes are even older: Sediment ripples in Greenland date to 3.7 billion years ago, and hematite tubes in Canada date between 3.77 billion and 4.29 billion years ago. Fossils of the oldest known algae, ancestor to all of Earth’s plants, are about 1 billion years old, and the oldest sign of animal life — chemical traces linked to ancient sponges — are at least 635 million and possible as much as 660 million years old, previously reported.
The tiny fossilized cell clumps, which the scientists named Bicellum brasieri, were exceptionally well-preserved in 3D, locked in nodules of phosphate minerals that were “like little black lenses in rock strata, about one centimeter [0.4 inches] in thickness,” said lead study author Paul Strother, a research professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Boston College’s Weston Observatory.
“We take those and slice them with a diamond saw and make thin sections out of them,” grinding the slices thin enough for light to shine through — so that the 3D fossils could then be studied under a microscope, Strother .
The researchers found not just one B. brasieri cell clump embedded in phosphate, but multiple examples of spherical clumps that showed the same dual cell structure and organization at different stages of development. This enabled the scientists to confirm that their find was once a living organism, Strother said.
“Bicellum” means “two-celled,” and “brasieri” honors the late paleontologist and study co-author, Martin Brasier. Prior to his death in 2014 in a car accident, Brasier was a professor of paleobiology at the University of Oxford in the U.K., Strother said.
Multicellular and mysterious
In the B. brasieri fossils, which measured about 0.001 inches (0.03 millimeters) in diameter, the scientists saw something they had never seen before: evidence from the fossil record marking the transition from single-celled life to multicellular organisms. The two types of cells in B. brasieri differed from each other not only in their shape, but in how and where they were organized in the organism’s “body.”
“That’s something that doesn’t exist in normal unicellular organisms,” Strother told Live Science. “That amount of structural complexity is something that we normally associate with complex multicellularity,” such as in animals, he said.
It’s unknown what type of multicellular lineage B. brasieri represents, but its round cells lacked rigid walls, so it probably wasn’t a type of algae, according to the study. In fact, the shape and organization of its cells “is more consistent with a holozoan origin,” the authors wrote. (Holozoa is a group that includes multicellular animals and single-celled organisms that are animals’ closest relatives).
The Scottish Highlands site — formerly an ancient lake — where the scientists found B. brasieri presented another intriguing puzzle piece about early evolution. Earth’s oldest forms of life are typically thought to have emerged from the ocean because most ancient fossils were preserved in marine sediments, Strother explained. “There aren’t that many lake deposits of this antiquity, so there’s a bias in the rock record toward a marine fossil record rather than a freshwater record,” he added.
B. brasieri is therefore an important clue that ancient lake ecosystems could have been as important as the oceans for the early evolution of life. Oceans provide organisms with a relatively stable environment, while freshwater ecosystems are more prone to extreme changes in temperature and alkalinity — such variations could have spurred evolution in freshwater lakes when more complex life on Earth was in its infancy, Strother said.
16,700-Year-Old Tools Found in Texas Change Known History of North America
Archaeologists in Texas have found a set of 16,700-year-old tools which are among the oldest discovered in the West. Until now, it was believed that the culture that represented the continent’s first inhabitants was the Clovis culture.
However, the discovery of the ancient tools now challenges that theory, providing evidence that human occupation precedes the arrival of the Clovis people by thousands of years.
According to the Western Digs , archeologists discovered the tools about half an hour north of Austin in Texas, at the site called Gault. They were located a meter deep in water-logged silty clay. The site contained more than 90 stone tools and some human remains including fragments of teeth.
Excavations being carried out at the Gault site, Texas.
The discovery changes everything people have been taught about the history of North America – that is, that the Clovis culture represented the first inhabitants of the continent. The results of the research were presented at the meeting of the Plains Anthropological Conference in 2015.
A hallmark of the toolkit associated with the Clovis culture is the distinctively shaped, fluted stone spear point, known as the Clovis point. These Clovis points were from the Rummells-Maske Cache Site, Iowa
In the 1990s, at the same excavation site near Austin, archeologists unearthed tapered-oval spear heads dating back 13,000 years. Those times, they believed, belonged to the oldest widespread culture of the continent. However, the most recent discovery proves that the pre-Clovis inhabitants came to North America at least three millennia earlier.
The Gault site was identified in the 1920s. However, researches didn’t accomplish any significant discovery until the 1990s. In 2012, researchers were interested in finding new artifacts related to the Clovis culture.
However, they found something even much more impressive – the enamel caps of four adjacent teeth from a young adult female. It allowed them to use the radiocarbon dating method. The results were surprising.
They revealed that the tools and artifacts, found in the same layer as the teeth, which includes more than 160,000 stone flakes left over from the tool-making processs, are evidence of the oldest known inhabitants of America.
To finally confirm how old the artifacts are, Dr. D. Clark Wernecke, director of the Gault School of Archaeological Research, and his colleagues submitted 18 of the artifacts to a lab for optically stimulated luminescence dating. It is a process of analyzing tiny grains in the soils to reveal when they were last exposed to sunlight.
The results proved that the artifacts were up to 16,700 years old. The tools also showed different features to the Clovis tools, which are distinctively shaped.
The pre-Clovis artifacts include more than 90 stone tools, such as bifaces and blades, and more than 160,000 flakes left over from the point-making process.
Many aspects of the technology of this mysterious tribe, like how they made biface blades, were very similar to the Clovis. It seems that the blade technology did not change a lot, the Clovis only improved it. It suggests a mysterious connection between the two cultures.
The discovery brought a lot of important information, including the conclusion that the diversity of artifacts uncovered at the Gault site shows that the continent’s earliest peoples were not a static or monolithic group. Moreover, they shed light on the history of human migration.
The discovery proved that the first peoples in the Americas were more similar to modern people, than we believed. According to Wrencke they were “intelligent, inventive, creative — and they found ways to adapt to a rapidly changing world.”
April Holloway from Ancient Origins reported in 2014 about different evidence of pre-Clovis inhabitants in America. She wrote:
”A fisherman inadvertently dragged up one of the most significant pieces of evidence for the existence of ancient inhabitants of North America prior to the Clovis people, who walked the land some 15,000 years ago.
A small wooden scallop trawler was dredging the seafloor off the coastline of Chesapeake Bay, when he hit a snag. When he pulled up his net, he found a 22,000-year-old mastodon skull and a flaked blade made of a volcanic rock called rhyolite.
A report in says that the combination of the finds may suggest that people lived in North America, and possibly butchered the mastodon, thousands of years before people from the Clovis culture, who are widely thought to be the first settlers of North America and the ancestors of all living Native Americans.
The mastodon and stone tool finding further supports the perspective that there were other inhabitants of America that preceded the Clovis. The ancient fossil and tool were first hauled off the seafloor in 1974, and were donated to Gwynn’s Island Museum in Virginia, where they sat unnoticed for four decades.
However, scientists have now realised the significance of the items after Dennis Stanford, an archaeologist with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., carried out radiocarbon dating on the mastodon tusk and found it was more than 22,000 years old. While the stone tool cannot be dated, the characteristics of the artifact suggest it is also of the same age.”
Archaeological Treasure Trove! 21 Royal Han Tombs Unearthed in China
Archeologists exploring a mountainside in China have discovered 21 tombs dating back 2,000 years. The presence of luxury artifacts and a rare “couple’s grave” suggests this was an ancient royal burial site.
The discovery of the 2,000-year-old royal tombs was made at the Changsha archaeological site, which is located just over 665 miles (1,000 kilometers) southwest of Shanghai. Located in the present-day Hunan district, the ancient Changsha Kingdom was founded in 203 or 202 BC and represented the largest and longest-lasting kingdom of the Han Empire of China.
The discovery of the 21 tombs was announced earlier this week by a team of archaeologists from the Institute of Archaeology , at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and Hunan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology.
Located along a remote mountainside, the researchers said the tombs have laid buried for two millennia and that they “potentially held regal past, but not anymore”.
21 Vertical Pits Loaded with Ancient Artifacts
The imperial Han dynasty of ancient China was established by Liu Bang around 200 BC and was subsequently ruled by the House of Liu. This dynasty was preceded by the short-lived Qin dynasty , and succeeded by the Three Kingdoms period from 220 to 280 AD, which represented the tripartite division of China among the dynastic states of Cao Wei , Shu Han, and Eastern Wu.
On Tuesday this week, via China’s state-affiliated news outlet, Xinhua, the Institute of Archaeology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences announced that a team of archaeologists have excavated “21 vertical pit tombs containing over 200 artifacts.”
One particular tomb was filled with pottery grave goods that dated back 2,000 years to the Western Han Dynasty, which the team of researchers said flourished during the earlier half of the Han dynasty, from about 200 BC to 25 AD.
Photo of the ancient Han tomb after the fill was removed. The Chinese burial tomb contained numerous luxury artifacts.
Rows of Tombs Whispering Ancient Royal Secrets
The archaeologists said they grouped the 21 tombs into two types: “tombs with passageways and tombs without.” Many of the tombs were found side-by-side; at one end of the site, three tombs were found in a row, while at the other end four further tombs were lined up together.
One of the 21 tombs unearthed in Changsha held the remains of five decaying pillars and outer coffins shaped like “Ⅱ” or like double ‘I’s, according to the press release.
The researchers said this type of double layered tomb “is rarely found in the Hunan province.” In this tomb, excavators recovered “two iron relics, walls covered in glaze and a mineral known as talc and a tan-colored talc disk (or bi) with a rhombus and circle pattern.” Furthermore, it is thought that the rare “pair of tombs” may have accommodated the joint burials of a husband and wife.
The picture shows the unearthed talc bi, decorated with lozenge pattern + dotted pattern, recovered from the ancient Han dynasty tomb
After studying the assemblage of 21 tombs, which are all of a similar age, the archaeologists concluded they likely belonged to “a royal family buried together in an ancient mausoleum”.
Looking To Ancient Chinese Texts for Answers
The Lunheng is a wide-ranging classical Chinese classic text written by Wang Chong around 27-100 AD, containing detailed essays about ancient Chinese mythology , natural science, philosophy, and literature.
These texts describe Western Han imperial burial practices as having involved “sacrificial offerings” at ancestral temples, which accounts for the amount of pottery vessels and grave goods discovered among the 21 tombs.
Well-known examples of Western Han tombs have been excavated in the past, including Mawangdui and the tombs of Liu Sheng , prince of Zhongshan and his wife, Dou Wan.
The tomb at Mawangdui was a nested tomb and the “paired tombs” of Liu Sheng and his wife, Dou Wan were cave tombs . It is known that “couple burials” emerged as the standard form of royal burial during the late Han period, along with the pairing of male/female motifs in the styling of the tombs.
This is why the archaeologists point towards their discovery of a rare “paired tomb” as the smoking gun for this being the burial site of a Han “royal” family.
The ornate jade burial suit of Liu Sheng and his wife Dou Wan, the first undisturbed Western Han tomb ever discovered
1,200-Year-Old Telephone, Amazing Invention of the Ancient Chimu Civilization
A 1,200-year-old telephone, a marvel of ancient invention, surprises almost all who hear about it. Reportedly found in in the ruins of Chan Chan, Peru, the delicate communication artifact is known as the earliest example of telephone technology in the Western Hemisphere.
This seemingly out-of-place-artifact is evidence of the impressive innovation of the coastal Chimu people in the Río Moche Valley of northern Peru. Ramiro Matos, curator of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) told Smithsonian, “This is unique. Only one was ever discovered. It comes from the consciousness of an indigenous society with no written language .”
A man dressed as a Chimu elite or priest among the ruins of Chan Chan, Peru.
How was the Chimu Telephone Made?
The early “telephone” appears to be a rudimentary speech transmission device, much like the “lover’s telephone” that has been known for hundreds of years, but which became popular in the 19th century.
The old lover’s telephone was usually comprised of tin cans connected with string, used to speak back and forth; and mostly seen as a novelty. However the ancient Chimu device, described as an instrument, is composed of two gourd tops bound with a length of cord.
The gourds, each 3.5 inches (8.9 centimeters) long are coated in resin and act as transmitters and receivers of sound. Around each of the gourd bases is a stretched-hide membrane. The 75-foot (22.8 meter) line connecting the two ends is made of cotton-twine.The simplicity of the device disguises its archaeological implications.
The enigmatic ancient communication device. Credit: Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian
The Mystery of the Precious Ancient Telephone
This one-of-a-kind artifact reportedly predates the earliest research into telephones from 1833 (which began with non-electric string devices) by more than a thousand years.
The gourd-and-string device is too fragile to physically test, but researchers can piece together how the instrument might have worked. What they must continue to speculate on, however, is how the Chimu used this ancient phone: what was its purpose?
As the Chimu are known to have been a top-down society , it stands to reason that only the elite or priest class would have been in possession of such a valuable instrument, posits Matos. The precious telephone, with the seemingly magical ability to channel voices across space to be heard directly in the ear of the receiver was, “a tool designed for an executive level of communication,” according to Matos.
There might have been many applications for this old phone, such as communication between novices or assistants and their higher-ranking elites through chambers or anterooms. No face-to-face contact would have been needed, preserving status and ensuring security.
Like many other ancient marvels , the Chimu telephone might also have been a device to astound the faithful . Disembodied voices emitting from a hand-held object might have shocked and convinced people of the importance and station of the upper class or priests.
Or, there are some who consider the gourd and twine object as merely a child’s toy. If such novelties are not our modern sacred objects, why must they have been believed to be religious items or priestly tools to humans of the past?
The artifact was in the possession of Baron Walram V. Von Schoeler, a Prussian aristocrat, who is less flatteringly described as a “shadowy Indiana Jones-type adventurer.” He participated in many excavations in Peru in the 1930s, and may have dug up the artifact himself from the ruins of Chan Chan .
He distributed his collection among various museums, and the artifact eventually ended up at the storage facility of the National Museum of the American Indian in Maryland, USA, where it is treated delicately, and preserved in a temperature controlled environment as one of the museum’s greatest treasures.
The god Naymlap on his boat, gold plate, Chimu
Signs of a Skillful, Inventive People
Matos, an anthropologist and archaeologist specializing in the study of the central Andes explained, “The Chimu were a skillful, inventive people,” who were an impressive engineering society. This can be shown by their hydraulic canal-irrigation systems and their highly detailed, elaborate metalwork and artifacts.
Chan Chan sculpture and architecture.
The Chimu were the people of the Kingdom of Chimor, and their beautiful capital city was Chan Chan (translated as Sun Sun ), a sprawling mud brick complex —the largest such adobe site in the world— and it was the largest city in Pre-Columbian South America.
Chan Chan was almost 20 square kilometers (7.7 square miles), and was inhabited by 100,000 residents during its height around 1200 AD. The entire city was made from shaped and sun-dried mud, and was elaborately decorated with sculptures, reliefs, and wall carvings on almost every surface.
The amazing constructions of the Chimu capital city, Chan Chan.
The Chimu culture arose about 900 AD, but it was eventually conquered by the Inca around 1470 AD.The Chimu telephone, and many other amazing ancient technologies, remind us that ancient cultures were capable of marvelous inventions , ideas, and creations long before our ‘sophisticated’ modern societies dreamed them up (sometimes for a second time).
Hundreds of Ornate, Rock-Cut Tombs Discovered in Ancient Turkish City
Some 1,800 years ago, residents of Blaundos buried their dead in highly decorated graves cut into the sides of a surrounding canyon.
The tombs feature images of vines, flowers and geometric patterns, as well as mythological figures.
Excavations at Blaundos in Uşak, Turkey, have revealed 400 rock-cut tombs dated to 1,800 years ago, when the ancient city was under Roman control. Many of the tombs are decorated with images of vine branches, bunches of grapes, flowers, animals and mythological figures, the state-run Anadolu Agency (AA) reports.
Blaundos was located atop a hill and surrounded by a canyon that offered protection from attackers. The tombs were carved into the steep sides of the canyon.
“There are arched sarcophagi carved into the bedrock in front of the walls of each room,” expedition leader Birol Can, an archaeologist at Uşak University, tells AA.
“Apart from these, places that are thought to be used for funeral ceremonies were also found inside the rock tombs. The main door of the tombs was closed with a marble door and reopened during burial or ceremony times in the past.”
The city’s ancient residents carved the tombs into the sides of a canyon.
Some of the tombs have only one chamber, while others are “complex structures formed by arranging rooms one after the other,” Can says to Live Science‘s Laura Geggel.
“These rooms were not created in one go,” he adds. “It is understood from the traces on the walls that these tombs were originally designed as a single room.
However, in time, when there was no place for burial in this single room, the room was expanded inwards and the second, third and then the fourth rooms were added.”
Archaeologists have been aware of the rock-cut necropolis—one of the largest burial sites of its kind in the world—for more than 150 years. But researchers only began systematically excavating Blaundos in 2018. Aside from the tombs, writes Argun Konuk for Daily Sabah, the team has identified temples, a theater, a public bath, aqueducts, a state building, a stadium and more.
“Apart from these, we know that there are many religious, public and civil structures still under the ground”.
Over the centuries, grave robbers partially destroyed some of the tombs while removing jewelry and other precious items. But many objects remain.
They include pottery fragments and coins dated to the second through fourth centuries C.E., as well as grave goods like mirrors, rings, cups and oil lamps presumably intended for use in the afterlife.
Stone ruins at the Blaundos archaeological site
Murals decorating 24 of the chambers remain visible but are in poor shape.
“Some of these tombs were used as animal shelters by shepherds a long time ago,” “The frescoes were covered with a dense and black soot layer due to the fires that were set in those times.”
A conservation team has cleaned some of the paintings, which include motifs of vines, flowers, wreaths and geometric patterns, as well as mythological figures like Hermes, Eros and Medusa and animals including birds and dogs.
Blaundos was founded by a commander of the same name who served under Alexander the Great after his army swept into Asia Minor in the fourth century B.C.E. Originally inhabited by Macedonians, it later became an important Roman city, notes Peta Stamper for “History Hit.” In the later Roman and Byzantine eras, Blaundos was a seat for bishops leading Christian communities in the surrounding area.
The tombs uncovered so far are just a part of the necropolis. Hundreds of other graves have yet to be excavated. The team also plans to conduct DNA and chemical analyses aimed at determining the ancestry, age, sex and diet of those buried in the ancient city.
Hiker stumbles upon 1,200-year-old Viking sword while walking an ancient trail in Norway
A hiker in Norway has discovered an ancient sword while walking an ancient route in the mountains of Haukeli. The well-preserved sword has been dated to the 8 th century and is typical of a sword belonging to the Viking Age.
The discovery was announced by Hordaland County Council , which described the weapon as a double-edged sword that is 30 inches (77 centimeters) long and made of wrought iron. Although in good condition, the sword is missing its handle. It is believed to date back to around 750 AD.
The sword was found by hiker Goran Olsen while walking on an old route that runs between western and eastern Norway. Olsen had stopped for a rest, when he spotted the weapon underneath some rocks.
Goran Olsen was walking in the mountains of Haukeli when he stumbled upon the old Viking sword
County Conservator Per Morten Ekerhovd said that the sword had been preserved by the frost and snow that covers the area for at least 6 months of the year.
A Status Symbol?
After its discovery, the sword was examined by archaeologist Jostein Aksdal of Hordaland County Council. Aksdal told the Mail Online that it was unusual to find a sword of its type today. He speculates that, due to the high cost of extracting iron, the sword likely belonged to a wealthy individual and would have been somewhat of a status symbol, to “show power”.
Viking swords often had handles that were richly decorated with intricate designs in silver, copper, and bronze. The higher the status of the individual that yielded the sword, the more elaborate the grip.
An elaborate Viking sword hilt, 9 th century, Museum of Scotland
While the sword discovery is rare and exciting, it does not bear the mark of a Viking Ulfberht sword. The superstrong Ulfberht swords, of which about 170 have been found, were made of metal so pure that scientists were long baffled as to how they mastered such advanced metallurgy eight centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution.
An Ulfberht sword displayed at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, Germany.
The newly discovered Viking Sword is currently undergoing preservation at the University Museum of Bergen and plans are underway to conduct a research expedition to explore the area further. It is hoped that the sword may be one of many artifacts at the site.
‘Lost’ Viking Village Artifacts Emerge From Norwegian Basement Archive
It isn’t rare for a once prosperous medieval town to be abandoned and slowly get side-lined in the annals of history. Nothing exemplifies this statement better than the lost Viking village of Borgund, on the west coast of southern Norway.
The Discovery of the Viking Village of Borgund, Norway
The Borgund Kaupang Project was launched in 2019 by the University of Bergen to re-examine the countless Viking village artifacts found in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, which have long been housed in a basement archive, according to Science Norway .
This picture shows the Borgund Viking village excavation site in 1954. The Borgund fjord, a rich source of cod, can be seen in the background.
At the time of discovery in 1953, a piece of land near Borgund church had been cleared, uncovering a lot of debris and objects that were immediately traced to the Norwegian Middle Ages . Over the course of that year and the following summer some 45,000 objects were painstakingly put away into storage after a cumbersome excavation.
It was only in 2019 that these items were taken out of storage to piece together the history of a thousand-year-old Norwegian Viking village that the world knows little about.
“The 45,000 objects from the 5,300 square meter excavation area in Borgund have just been lying here,” said Danish archaeologist and project manager Professor Gitte Hansen. “Hardly any researchers have looked at this material since the 1970s.”
What’s particularly interesting is that the town of Borgund is mentioned in Viking sagas and charters from the Middle Ages. Sagas mention the existence of the town as early as at least 985 AD, as this was where Håkon Jarl and his sons journeyed before the battle against the Jomsvikings in 985 AD, states the University of Bergen (UIB) press release . King Håkon was the de facto Norwegian ruler between 975 and 995 AD.
King Håkon the Good, who visited the Viking village of Borgund, during his reign, overseeing a peasant dispute in a painting by Peter Nicolai Arbo.
Reconstructing Borgund’s Viking History From Written Sources
From a historical point of view, sagas are always taken with a pinch of salt. The reasoning for this is twofold.
First, sagas are semi-legendary or legendary in nature, bordering on mythology, and have a tendency to conflate the king’s association with gods. For example, this saga associated King Håkon ’s lineage with Sæming, son of Odin.
Second, revisionist history writing is cautious in accepting verbatim sources that are issued from the perspective of those at the apex of society, who are never fair or judicious with their representations of reality. This is largely due to the assertion of power and prestige that comes with the burden of disparately designed social hierarchies.
Then there is a reference to Borgund in relation to the Battle of Bokn in 1027 AD, which has been accepted by this group of historians and researchers as the oldest written evidence for the existence of the Viking village.
The limited written sources about Borgund in the Middle Ages refer to it as one of the “small towns” ( smaa kapstader ) in Norway. “Borgund was probably built sometime during the Viking Age,” adds Professor Hansen, who is also head of the Department of Cultural History at UIB.
Here lie the remnants of the forgotten Viking village of Borgund.
Difficulty in Reconstruction and Moving Forward
Within a hundred odd years, Borgund became the most expansive Viking village on the western coast between Trondheim and Bergen. It flourished till the mid-14th century AD, when it was actually at its peak.
However, the plague defined Europe in the Middle Ages had a terrible impact on Borgund, to such an extent that by the end of the 14th century AD, Borgund disappears from the annals of history. This coincided with the Little Ice Age which left much of northern Europe much colder and snowier than before.
Unfortunately, the recovered Borgund Viking village textiles (250 pieces in total) have suffered as no conservation effort was made to preserve them, apart from leaving them in storage. Yet, Hansen admits that she is rather grateful for even having the tattered fabrics to hold onto. Credit for the excavation in 1953 and ’54 goes to Asbjørn Herteig, one of the pioneers of modern medieval archaeology.
Herteig’s strength lay in subverting historical interests from important buildings and centers of power like churches, monasteries, and castles. His method was to assemble a meticulous collection of seemingly trivial artifacts. This included shoes’ soles, pieces of cloth, slag, potsherds (ceramic and otherwise), to name a few, that helped piece together the lives of ordinary people.
The unfinished Borgund Viking village investigations indicate a dense settlement of houses and at least three marble churches . The nearby fjord, known as Borgundfjordfisket, was a rich cod fishery that harvested in late February and early March. The inhabitants ate a lot of fish, as proven by the countless fish bones, and fishing gear artifacts found at the site.
The Borgund Viking village was probably created in the 10th century AD, and there is evidence of trade and contact with the rest of Europe, particularly Western Europe. Numerous pieces of English, German, and French tableware were found at the site.
An exchange of art, music, and fashion also occurred. The last official mention of Borgund was from 1384 AD, in a royal decree which instructed the farmers of Sunnmøre to buy their goods in the market town of Borgund.
Financed by the Norwegian Research Council, the ambitious and historically crucial documentation of Borgund Viking village has been captured in detail on the official Facebook page of the BKP and the Per Storemyr Archaeology and Conservation Group page . A five-part documentary series has been prepared by the BKP and can be accessed here . The BKP team includes archaeologists, geologists, osteologists (bone experts), metal scientists, and art historians.
Medieval Coin in Canada Challenges Story of North American Discovery
A gold coin discovered in Newfoundland could “rewrite the history books.” Directly challenging the mainstream narrative of the discovery of North America, this coin suggests Europeans were in Newfoundland earlier than currently believed.
Exciting Discovery of Medieval Coin in Canada
This week the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador published a press release saying the controversial gold coin was found this summer by Edward Hynes, a local amateur historian.
Heralded as the oldest English coin ever discovered in Canada, this quarter noble was minted in London sometime between 1422 AD and 1427 AD, at which time it was valued at one shilling and eight pence, around $81 today.
Because this medieval coin was discontinued around 1470 AD, its discovery on a Canadian beach is presenting archaeologists with “a historical puzzle.” Is this coin the smoking gun proving European occupation in North America earlier than currently thought?
A Henry VI quarter noble, a medieval coin unearthed in Canada which was originally minted in London between 1422 and 1427.
The Big North American Discovery Question
Medieval Icelandic sagas said Leif Erikson rediscovered North America in 1001 AD, but archaeologists always disregarded these accounts as being mythological. However, that all changed in 1978 when archaeologists discovered an 11th century Norse settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in Canada.
According to accepted history, the next European explorer in Newfoundland arrived in 1497 AD. This was John Cabot , the Italian navigator credited with the rediscovery of Newfoundland. However, the newly discovered medieval gold coin found in Canada predates John Cabot’s voyage by 70 years.
Jamie Brake, a Canadian Provincial archaeologist told CBC News that according to the accepted historical narrative, at the time this coin was minted “people in England were not yet aware of Newfoundland or North America,” and that is why the discovery is “so exciting.”
The researcher added that evidence of a pre-16th century occupation of the New World would be “pretty amazing and highly significant in this part of the world.”
This was a humble statement, for, in reality, such a discovery would demand a rewriting of the history, defaming John Cabot, and telling an entirely new origins story.
The Oldest English Medieval Coin Uncovered in Canada
This quarter noble gold coin dates back to the reign of King Henry VI in the 1420s AD. Thus, it is older than the “half groat” coin that was unearthed last year on the beach at the Cupids Cove Plantation provincial historic site, which dates to the 1490s.
The Henry VII “half groat,” or two-penny piece, minted in Canterbury, England sometime between 1493 and 1499 and discovered at the Cupids Cove Plantation Provincial Historic Site in Canada’s Newfoundland in 2021.
Because this is the oldest coin ever discovered in Canada, the location where it was discovered has not been disclosed for security reasons. Brake told CBC News that everyone concerned is being “really vague about the location.” However, he did disclose that it was “found on a beach near a registered archaeological site that dates to the 1700s .”
According to Paul Berry, the former curator of the Bank of Canada’s Currency Museum, the mystery of how the medieval coin came to be where it was discovered “is likely to remain for some time.”
Berry said that while the coin was probably no longer in circulation when it was lost “that doesn’t help provide answers as to how it got there.”
While Paul Berry suggests it was dropped “after” it was out of circulation, archaeologist Brake suggests it might have been dropped by someone “before” Italian explorer Cabot got here in 1479 AD. Who then might have dropped the gold coin before Cabot’s official discovery of North America 1497 AD?
Statue of John Cabot gazing across Bonavista Bay from Cape Bonavista, the place where, according to tradition, he first sighted land on the northeast coast of the island of Newfoundland.
Who Rediscovered North America? Elite Explorers, or Fishermen?
According to Newfoundland Heritage , in 1481 AD English merchant John Day sailed one of two Bristol ships, the George and the Trinity, in search of the mythical island known as Brasile. Suspiciously loaded with salt, it is suspected the two boats had possibly discovered the cod-filled Grand Banks of Newfoundland, one of the world’s richest fishing grounds.
In a letter written by John Day to the anonymous “Lord Grand Admiral,” who many believe was Christopher Columbus , the merchant said the land John Cabot discovered was “the mainland that the Bristol men found” in 1481.
And so far as to why Day didn’t announce his discovery is concerned, it is thought that he might have tried to keep the whereabouts of the bountiful fishing grounds a secret for as long as possible.
Might one of the hundreds of Bristol merchants and navigators who sailed in the western sea before John Cabot have landed in Newfoundland? If so, did they perhaps acquire something from an indigenous trader and leave a gold coin behind?
The questions are many, but for now, there stands a chance this medieval coin is the smoking gun providing evidence of pre-Cabot Europeans in North America .
Oldest Ever Neanderthal Remains Found, Dating Back 116,000 Years!
In 2008 a team of archaeological excavators digging in the Stajnia Cave near Mirów in Poland, unearthed deeply-ancient tools among the remains of Neanderthal hunters. This discovery represented the first Neanderthal remains ever discovered in Poland.
However, a recent shift in the scientific molecular clock indicates that these discoveries are not “55,000 years old,” as was believed, but they are in fact “the oldest remains of Neanderthals in Central Europe,” possibly dating back as far as 116,000 years.
Aerial view of Stajnia Cave in Poland, where the Neanderthal remains were originally discovered.
Doubling Dates in a Heartbeat
When conducting the fieldwork directed by Mikolaj Urbanowski, the archaeologists at Stajnia Cave located north of the Carpathians in Poland discovered a Neanderthal molar in 2007.
At the time, scientists extracted its mitochondrial DNA and dated it to somewhere between 42 and 52 thousand years old. Now, a new study published in the journal Nature demonstrates how this ancient tooth is much older, twice as old in fact.
The new research was conducted by a international team of scientists from the University of Wrocław, the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Polish Geological Institute , who together analyzed the Neanderthal DNA gathered from the Stajnia Cave tooth sample, comparing it with DNA samples found in other caves, such as Scladina Cave in Belgium and Hohlenstein-Stadel Cave in Germany.
The Stajnia Cave DNA was found to be more closely related to the North Caucasus population than with that of Western Europe, which according to the researchers was hard evidence of the “mobility of Neanderthals.”
Furthermore, this new DNA research showed that the Stajnia Cave molar was far older than other Central European Neanderthal remains, and having been recovered in a “Micoquian context” it has been re-dated to “approximately 80,000 – 116,000 years old.” Yup, you read that right. These remains could possibly be “116 thousand years old,” which makes it the oldest Neanderthal remains ever discovered in Central Europe.
Map showing the location of Micoquian (red circles) sites in Europe and indicating specifically the location of the Stajnia Cave in Poland.
Descending Ice Giants: Migration Caused by Climate Change
The initial dates given to the Neanderthal molar, and associated remains and tool, was “approximately 52-42 thousand years ago,” but this new study has now proposed that they date back to around 116 thousand years ago.
At this time, according to an article on PHYS, the climate changed abruptly and caused the Central-Eastern European environment to shift from forested, to open steppe and taiga habitat. These changes also caused the southward dispersal of Arctic wooly mammoths and wooly rhinos .
During this time of great ecological shifts, known to geologists as the “Micoquian,” bifacial stone tools emerged in Central-Eastern Europe across eastern France, Poland and the Caucasus.
These tools were slowly developed until the demise of the Neanderthals. Professor Mateja Hajdinjak, a post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and co-author of the paper published in Nature, said the team used “the molecular genetic clock” to place the fossilized tooth at the beginning of the Last Glacial , when the site could have been “a logistical location settled during forays into the Krakow-Czestochowa Upland.”
3D digital model of the Neanderthal molar found at Stajnia Cave in Poland.
A Thrilling Breakthrough: The Oldest Neanderthal Remains in Central Europe
Scientists generally tend to be ultra-careful when describing any emotional responses to big discoveries, and rightfully so, for there should be no room for such subjective vagaries in logical processes.
But on this occasion, Wioletta Nowaczewska of Wroclaw University, a co-author of the paper, said the team were “thrilled” when the results of their genetic analysis revealed the tooth was “at least 80,000 years old” and maybe even 116,000 years old.
Exemplifying how rare this Neanderthal molar discovered in Poland is within a European context, a July 2016 paper published in Science Daily by a team of scientists from the University of Cologne explains that in Germany there are only “four known settlement sites for the time period between 110,000 to 70,000 years ago.”
Meanwhile, there are “ninety-four” sites dated between 70,000 to 43,000 years ago, with most dating to the later date around the time the Neanderthals disappeared.
Stone tools found at Stajnia Cave in Poland.
The Molecular Clock and Archaeological Paradigm Shifts
Precisely why the Neanderthal species died out is still unclear and it continues to be a hot topic for debate within the scientific community who are currently split between several contrasting models demonstrating how their extinction came about.
In the last decade several papers from leading institutions have claimed: low genetic diversity , decreases in fertility , the rise of Homo sapiens and the current favorite is climate change. All of these, and more, have all been blamed for having bought about the demise of the Neanderthals.
At a molecular level, the tools and human remains discovered in Stajnia Cave are very similar to those discovered at sites in Germany, Crimea, Northern Caucasus and Altai.
This is presented in the new study as further evidence of “increasing mobility” among Neanderthal groups who hunted across the Northern and Eastern European plains, stalking slow moving “cold adapted migratory animals,” according to the scientists.
Thanks to the shift in the molecular clock, this increased mobility has now been identified as having occurred around 100,000 years ago, which is double the previously accepted dates of occupation at Stajnia Cave. What else could the molecular clock technique reveal about our ancient origins?
