All posts by Archeology worldwide team

EUROPE, GERMANY, WORLD

Nazi ‘Enigma’ machine found at the bottom of the Baltic Sea

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Nazi ‘Enigma’ machine found at the bottom of the Baltic Sea

Nazis may have tossed this code-making machine overboard during WWII.

Divers trying to remove old fishing nets from the Baltic sea have accidentally stumbled on a Nazi code-making machine.  

The Enigma machine, as it’s called, looks a bit like a typewriter. In fact, the diver who found the device on the ocean floor initially thought that’s what the artifact was, according to AFP.

But the diving team, on assignment for the conservation group World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), quickly realized that they had something much stranger. 

During World War II, Enigma machines were used to encode German military messages, in hopes of preventing Allied powers from learning about troop movements and other plans. The devices consisted of a keyboard and a series of rotors that did the encoding.

The rotors substituted different letters for the ones typed in; different Enigma machines used between three and eight rotors, which moved independently after each keystroke so that the same initial letter typed into the machine would appear as multiple different letters in the final code. 

While searching for abandoned fishing nets, German divers discovered this Enigma machine in the Baltic Sea.

To decode the message at the other end, an operator just needed to know the starting position of the rotors and the routers between them. Once the encoded message was entered into an Enigma machine with the right configuration, the machine would spit out the original text. 

Cracking the Enigma code was an enormous part of the Allied war effort. Polish mathematicians Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Różycki made the first attempts in 1939 and were able to recreate a mock-up of the Enigma machine, explain its basic functioning and decode many messages.

They then handed this information over to British intelligence, according to the BBC, because the Germans were changing the codes daily, making it more difficult for the Polish team to decipher their messages.

British mathematician Alan Turing was crucial to the effort to decode the German Navy’s Enigma messages, which were more complex, according to the Imperial War Museums. Cracking those codes was crucial for saving Allied ships from German U-boats, the submarines that sank more than 5,000 ships during World War I and more than 2,700 during World War II. 

The Enigma machine found by the WWF diving crew was at the bottom of the Bay of Gelting in northeast Germany. It had three rotors, making it the type used on warships, not U-boats.

That suggests that the machine may have been tossed overboard in the final days of World War II, in an attempt to keep the technology out of enemy hands, historian Jann Witt of the German Naval Association told the DPA news agency.

The divers turned the machine over to the archaeology museum of the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, where archaeologists are restoring it.

That project should take about a year, according to Ulf Ickerodt, head of the state archaeological office. The Enigma machine will then go on display at the museum. 

EUROPE, GREECE, WORLD

Archaeologists Hunting For Cleopatra’s Tomb Uncover a “Geometric Miracle” Tunnel

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Archaeologists Hunting For Cleopatra’s Tomb Uncover a “Geometric Miracle” Tunnel

The tunnel beneath the temple at Taposiris Magna.

Underneath a temple in the ancient ruined city of Taposiris Magna on the Egyptian coast, archaeologists have uncovered a vast, spectacular tunnel that experts are referring to as a “geometric miracle”.

During ongoing excavations and exploration of the temple, Kathleen Martinez of the University of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic and colleagues uncovered the structure 13 meters (43 feet) below the ground. The 2-meter tall tunnel had been hewn through an incredible 1,305 meters (4,281 feet) of sandstone.

Its design, according to the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, is remarkably similar to the 1,036-meter Tunnel of Eupalinos – a 6th century BCE aqueduct on the Greek island of Samos. Often referred to as a marvel of engineering, the conduit was unprecedented in design and construction in its day.

While the Taposiris Magna tunnel isn’t without equal, its engineering is nonetheless just as impressive.

The tunnel resembles another, older tunnel from ancient Greece that was used to transport water.

Parts of the Taposiris Magna tunnel are submerged in water, though putting aside its resemblance to the Eupalinos Tunnel, its purpose is currently unknown.

Martinez, who has been working in Taposiris Magna since 2022 in search of the lost tomb of Cleopatra VII, believes that the tunnel could be a promising lead. Previously, the excavations have yielded clues that seem to point to the famous queen and the last of the Ptolemies.

Taposiris Magna was founded around 280 BCE by Ptolemy II, the son of Alexander the Great’s renowned general and one of Cleopatra’s forebears (she herself ruled from 51 BCE until her death by suicide in 30 BCE).

The temple, the team believes, was dedicated to the god Osiris and his queen, the goddess Isis – the deity with whom Cleopatra courted a strong association. Coins bearing the names and likenesses of Cleopatra and Alexander the Great have been found there, as well as figurines of Isis.

The tunnel is hewn from the Egyptian bedrock.

Burial shafts containing Greco-Roman burials have also been found in the temple. It’s possible that – if they’re to be found there at all – Cleopatra and her husband Mark Antony may have been interred in similar tombs.

It’s too early to tell if the new tunnel could lead to these long-lost tombs, but future work could yield more information.

The next stage will be exploring the nearby Mediterranean sea. Between 320 and 1303 CE, a series of earthquakes hit the coast, causing part of the temple to collapse and be swallowed by the waves.

In addition, excavations had previously revealed a network of tunnels stretching from Lake Mariout to the Mediterranean.

Alabaster heads were also found at the temple site.

Whether or not the tombs are found, a thorough excavation of these ruins could tell us more about the mysterious ancient city. The tunnel has already yielded some treasures: pieces of pottery, and a rectangular block of limestone.

As then-Minister for Antiquities Zahi Hawass said 13 years ago, “If we discover the tomb of Cleopatra and Mark Antony, it will be the most important discovery of the 21st century. If we did not discover the tomb of Cleopatra and Mark Antony, we made major discoveries here, inside the temple and outside the temple.”

ASIA, ISRAEL, WORLD

Archaeologists in Israel Unearth 3,800-Year-Old Skeleton of Baby Buried in a Jar

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Archaeologists in Israel Unearth 3,800-Year-Old Skeleton of Baby Buried in a Jar

Researchers are unsure of the unusual funerary practice’s purpose, but one theory posits that the vessel serves as a symbolic womb

Researchers found the jar while conducting excavations in the ancient city of Jaffa.

Archaeologists excavating a site in Jaffa, Israel, recently made a macabre discovery: a 3,800-year-old jar containing the skeleton of a baby.

As Ariel David reports for Haaretz, researchers from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) uncovered the poorly preserved remains, which were buried in a shallow pit about ten feet below street level, while surveying the ruins of the 4,000-year-old city ahead of construction.

The practice of burying babies in jars dates back to the Bronze Age and continued until as recently as the 20th century, IAA archaeologist Yoav Arbel tells Live Science’s Laura Geggel. But while evidence of such funerary rituals regularly appears in the archaeological record, scholars remain unsure of the practice’s purpose.

“You might go to the practical thing and say that the bodies were so fragile, [maybe] they felt the need to protect it from the environment, even though it is dead,” says Arbel. “But there’s always the interpretation that the jar is almost like a womb, so basically the idea is to return [the] baby back into Mother Earth, or into the symbolic protection of his mother.”

Speaking with Ashley Cowie of Ancient Origins, archaeologist Alfredo Mederos Martin, who was not involved in the IAA research, notes that people across the ancient world entombed children in jars as early as 4,500 B.C. Methods varied from place to place, with civilizations adapting the process to reflect their unique conceptions of death.

In a 2019 article published in the Biblical Archaeology Review, scholar Beth Alpert Nakhai suggested that the jars’ burial beneath the home signified “a desire on the part of [the] dead infant’s mother to care for her child in death, as she would have cared for that child in life.”

These kinds of burials could also reflect a change in ancient societies’ attitude toward the young; previously, prehistoric humans had only buried adults in jars, “indicating that children were [thought] to be of little importance,” as Ruth Schuster pointed out for Haaretz in 2022.

A map of the streets in Jaffa where the digs took place

Over the past decade, officials have conducted digs at five locations across Jaffa. They detailed their impressive array of discoveries in the IAA’s journal, ‘Atiqot, last month.

Highlights of the finds include 30 Hellenistic coins; the remains of at least two horses and pottery dated to the late Ottoman Empire; 95 glass vessel fragments from the Roman and Crusader periods; 14 fifth-century B.C. rock-carved burials featuring lamps, juglets and other funerary offerings; and the strangely interred infant.

Jaffa has a storied history that spans some four millennia. One of the world’s earliest port cities, the ancient settlement is now part of Tel Aviv, Israel’s second-most populated metropolis.

According to Haaretz, Jaffa experienced at least three periods of major expansion. The first took place in Hellenistic times, while the second stretched across the Byzantine, Islamic and Crusader eras.

Finally, Arbel tells Haaretz, “[f]rom the mid-19th century to the end of the Ottoman era there was huge population growth. Jaffa grew exponentially and became a cosmopolitan city.”

The researcher adds that experts hadn’t realized the full extent of the city’s archaeological wealth until recently.

“There were those who told us there was no point to excavate around the mound,” or central stretch of high ground on which Jaffa is situated, he says.

But subsequent archaeological work revealed that Jaffa, like many other ancient cities, expanded into the surrounding lowlands during periods of prosperity and tightened up its boundaries in times of strife.

Though researchers covered up many of the archaeological sites after recording their overlooked histories, several—from Crusader-era walls preserved in a hospital-turned-hotel to the ruins of an Ottoman-era soap factory—remain accessible to the public.

EUROPE, ITALY, WORLD

Archaeologists Solve Mystery of 5,600-Year-Old Skull Found in Italian Cave

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Archaeologists Solve Mystery of 5,600-Year-Old Skull Found in Italian Cave

Natural forces moved a Stone Age woman’s bones through the cavern over time

Some of the marks seen on the woman’s skull predated her death, while others were likely left by natural forces following her burial.

Around 5,600 years ago, a Stone Age woman died in what is now northern Italy. Archaeologists found her skull deep in the Marcel Loubens cave, at the top of a vertical shaft only accessible with special climbing equipment, in 2022.

But while ancient people in the area occasionally buried their dead in caves, no other bones—whether hers or someone else’s—were recovered nearby.

Now, reports Laura Geggel for, researchers say they’ve discovered how the woman’s head ended up in that hard-to-reach space. As detailed in the journal PLOS One, the team suggests that natural forces, including opening sinkholes, mudslides and floods of water, moved it through the cave system over time.

The new findings offer a remarkable amount of detail about the ancient woman, as well as the fate of her skull after her death. Led by Maria Giovanna Belcastro, an archaeologist at the University of Bologna, the researchers found that the 24- to 35-year-old died sometime between 3630 and 3380 B.C., during Italy’s Eneolithic period, or Copper Age. As George Dvorsky notes for Gizmodo, she suffered from health problems, including nutritional deficiencies and an endocrine disorder.

Humans living in the region during the Copper Age shifted to an agricultural lifestyle marked by rising population density and an increasingly grain-based diet. This change meant more exposure to pathogens and parasites, as well as less varied sources of sustenance.

Reports that the skull’s owner had underdeveloped tooth enamel, suggesting childhood health problems, and cavities that may have been the result of her high-carbohydrate diet. She also had dense spots on her skull that may have been benign tumors.

The researchers had to use special climbing equipment to reach the skull.

Other than a missing jawbone, the skull was incredibly well preserved, enabling the authors to study it in detail with the help of microscopes, a CT scanner and a 3-D replica.

The analysis found evidence of some kind of procedure, possibly a surgery, performed on the woman when she was alive. The team posits that someone applied a red ocher pigment around the injury, possibly for therapeutic or symbolic purposes.

Many of the marks on the skull date to after the woman’s death. Some seem to come from the removal of flesh from the skull—a common procedure in many ancient societies.

As Garry Shaw reported for Science magazine in 2022, farmers living on Italy’s east coast 7,500 years ago removed muscle tissue from the deceased’s bones and transported them to caves for burial, possibly as part of a year-long mourning ritual.

Other damage to the skull appears to have occurred through natural processes, which also left the bones encrusted in sediment.

“After being treated and laid to rest in a burial place, the skull of this corpse rolled away, most likely moved by water and mud down the slope of a sinkhole and into the cave,” say the authors in a statement. “Later, continued sinkhole activity created the modern structure of the cave, with the bone still preserved within.”

The researchers add that the new find extends scientists’ understanding of the varied funerary practices of ancient people in the area.

Christian Meyer, a specialist in the archaeology of violence at the OsteoArchaeological Research Center in Germany who was not involved in the research, tells  that “case studies like this are important to show the huge variety of postmortem episodes that can actually happen to skeletal remains, initiated by natural or anthropogenic [human-caused] factors.”

ASIA, EGYPT, WORLD

2,400-Year-Old Baskets Still Filled With Fruit Found in Submerged Egyptian City

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2,400-Year-Old Baskets Still Filled With Fruit Found in Submerged Egyptian City

Wicker vessels recovered from the ruins of Thônis-Heracleion contain doum nuts and grape seeds

Researchers excavating the sunken ruins of Thônis-Heracleion have discovered an array of archaeological treasures.

Researchers investigating the submerged metropolis of Thônis-Heracleion, in the Egyptian bay of Abū Qīr, have discovered wicker fruit baskets dated to the fourth century B.C.E.

Incredibly, the vessels still contain doum nuts—the fruit of an African palm tree considered sacred by the ancient Egyptians—and grape seeds.

“Nothing was disturbed,” marine archaeologist Franck Goddio tells Dalya Alberge of the Guardian. “It was very striking to see baskets of fruits.”

Goddio and his colleagues at the European Institute for Underwater Archaeology (IEASM) uncovered the containers in collaboration with Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. Researchers have been surveying the ancient Mediterranean port city of Thônis-Heracleion since its rediscovery in 2001, according to Egypt Independent.

The baskets were stored in an underground room and may have been funerary offerings, reports the Greek City Times. Nearby, the researchers found a 197- by 26-foot tumulus, or burial mound, and an extravagant array of Greek funerary goods likely left by merchants and mercenaries living in the area.

“Everywhere we found evidence of burned material,” says Goddio in a statement, as quoted by CNN’s Radina Gigova. “Spectacular ceremonies must have taken place there. The place must have been sealed for hundreds of years as we have found no objects from later than the early fourth century B.C.E., even though the city lived on for several hundred years after that.”

Other objects found on or surrounding the tumulus included ancient pottery, bronze artifacts and figurines depicting the Egyptian god Osiris.

“We found hundreds of deposits made of ceramic,” Goddio tells the Guardian. “One above the other. These are imported ceramic, red on black figures.”

Thônis-Heracleion was founded around the eighth century B.C.E. According to Goddio’s website, the city served as the “obligatory port of entry to Egypt for all ships coming from the Greek world” prior to the establishment of Alexandria around 331 B.C.E.

An Egyptian-French mission found the 80-foot-long ship beneath roughly 16 feet of hard clay.

The bustling trade hub reached its peak sometime between the sixth and fourth centuries B.C.E. Buildings radiated around a central temple, with a system of canals connecting different parts of the city. Homes and other religious structures stood on islands near the heart of Thônis-Heracleion.

Once an epicenter for maritime commerce, the city sank into the Mediterranean in the eighth century C.E. Some historians attribute the metropolis’ downfall to rising sea levels and collapsing, unstable sediment, as Reg Little wrote for Oxford Mail in 2022. Others posit that earthquakes and tidal waves caused a 42-square-mile segment of the Nile Delta to collapse into the sea, per CNN.

As the Art Newspaper’s Emily Sharpe reported in 2022, experts once thought that Heracleion—referenced by Greek historian Herodotus in the fifth century B.C.E.—was a separate city from Thônis, which is actually the site’s Egyptian name. A tablet found by Goddio’s team in 2001 helped researchers conclude that the two locations were one and the same.

Recovering objects from the ruins of Thônis-Heracleion is a grueling task due to the layers of protective sediment covering them.

“The goal is to learn as much as possible from our excavation without being intrusive,” Goddio told the Art Newspaper in 2022.

Previous discoveries at Thônis-Heracleion include more than 700 ancient anchors, gold coins and weights, and dozens of tiny limestone sarcophagi containing the remains of mummified animals, according to Oxford Mail. Last month, archaeologists found a well-preserved, second-century B.C.E. military vessel in a different part of the city.

Experts expect to unearth more artifacts at the site in the future. Speaking with the Guardian, Goddio estimates that just 3 percent of the sunken city has been studied in the 20 years since its rediscovery.

ENGLAND, SCOTLAND, WORLD

Face of ‘ordinary poor’ man from medieval Cambridge graveyard revealed

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Face of ‘ordinary poor’ man from medieval Cambridge graveyard revealed

New facial reconstruction of a man buried in a medieval hospital graveyard discovered underneath a Cambridge college sheds light on how ordinary poor people lived in medieval England.

The audience of an event at this year’s Cambridge Science Festival found themselves staring into the face of a fellow Cambridge resident – one who spent the last 700 years buried beneath the venue in which they sat.

The 13th-century man, called Context 958 by researchers, was among some 400 burials for which complete skeletal remains were uncovered when one of the largest medieval hospital graveyards in Britain was discovered underneath the Old Divinity School of St John’s College, and excavated between 2021 and 2022.

The bodies, which mostly date from a period spanning the 13th to 15th centuries, are burials from the Hospital of St John the Evangelist which stood opposite the graveyard until 1511, and from which the College takes its name. The hospital was an Augustinian charitable establishment in Cambridge dedicated to providing care to members of the public.

“Context 958 was probably an inmate of the Hospital of St John, a charitable institution which provided food and a place to live for a dozen or so indigent townspeople – some of whom were probably ill, some of whom were aged or poor and couldn’t live alone,” said Professor John Robb, from the University’s Division of Archaeology.

The face of Context 958. Credit: Dr. Chris Rynn, University of Dundee

In collaboration with Dr Chris Rynn from the University of Dundee’s Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification, Robb and Cambridge colleagues have reconstructed the man’s face and pieced together the rudiments of his life story by analysing his bones and teeth.

The work is one of the first outputs from the Wellcome Trust-funded project ‘After the plague: health and history in medieval Cambridge’ for which Robb is principle investigator. The project is analysing the St John’s burials not just statistically, but also biographically.

“Context 958 was over 40 when he died, and had quite a robust skeleton with a lot of wear and tear from a hard working life. We can’t say what job specifically he did, but he was a working class person, perhaps with a specialised trade of some kind,” said Robb.

“One interesting feature is that he had a diet relatively rich in meat or fish, which may suggest that he was in a trade or job which gave him more access to these foods than a poor person might have normally had. He had fallen on hard times, perhaps through illness, limiting his ability to continue working or through not having a family network to take care of him in his poverty.”

Facial reconstruction of Context 958. Credit: Dr. Chris Rynn, University of Dund

There are hints beyond his interment in the hospital’s graveyard that Context 958’s life was one of adversity. His tooth enamel had stopped growing on two occasions during his youth, suggesting he had suffered bouts of sickness or famine early on. Archaeologists also found evidence of a blunt-force trauma on the back of his skull that had healed over prior to his death.

“He has a few unusual features, notably being buried face down which is a small irregularity for medieval burial. But, we are interested in him and in people like him more for ways in which they are not unusual, as they represent a sector of the medieval population which is quite hard to learn about: ordinary poor people,” said Robb.

“Most historical records are about well-off people and especially their financial and legal transactions – the less money and property you had, the less likely anybody was to ever write down anything about you. So skeletons like this are really our chance to learn about how the ordinary poor lived.”

The focal point of the ‘After the Plague’ project will be the large sample of urban poor people from the graveyard of the Hospital of St John, which researchers will compare with other medieval collections to build up a picture of the lives, health and day-to-day activities of people living in Cambridge, and urban England as a whole, at this time.

Dr Sarah Inskip examines the skull of Context 958.

“The After the Plague project is also about humanising people in the past, getting beyond the scientific facts to see them as individuals with life stories and experiences,” said Robb.

“This helps us communicate our work to the public, but it also helps us imagine them ourselves as leading complex lives like we do today. That’s why putting all the data together into biographies and giving them faces is so important.”

The Old Divinity School of St John’s College was built in 1877-1879 and was recently refurbished, now housing a 180-seat lecture theatre used for College activities and public events, including last week’s Science Festival lecture given by Robb on the life of Context 958 and the research project.

The School was formerly the burial ground of the Hospital, instituted around 1195 by the townspeople of Cambridge to care for the poor and sick in the community. Originally a small building on a patch of waste ground, the Hospital grew with Church support to be a noted place of hospitality and care for both University scholars and local people.

ontext 958 buried face-down in the cemetery of St John’s.
ASIA, SAUDI ARABIA, WORLD

Archaeologists Discover 2,550-Year-Old Carving of the Last King of Babylon

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Archaeologists Discover 2,550-Year-Old Carving of the Last King of Babylon

Found in northern Saudi Arabia, the inscription depicts sixth-century B.C.E. ruler Nabonidus holding a scepter

The four symbols seen in front of the king—a crescent moon, the sun, a snake and a flower—may hold religious significance.

As Arab News reports, archaeologists from the Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage spotted the 2,550-year-old inscription engraved on a basalt stone in the Al-Hadeed Governorate, in the country’s northern Hail region.

Per a statement, the carving contains 26 lines of cuneiform writing, making it the longest cuneiform inscription discovered in Saudi Arabia to date. The find could shed light on the history of the Arabian Peninsula and its ancient residents’ ties to neighboring Mesopotamia.

The etching shows the Babylonian king standing with a scepter in his hand. Four symbols—a crescent moon, the sun, a snake and a flower—hover in front of him.

Scholars suspect that these images hold religious significance but are still comparing the carving with similar ones to determine its meaning, notes Arab News. 

According to the History Blog, the markings may be linked to deities in the Mesopotamian pantheon, representing the star of Ishtar, the winged disc of the sun god Shamash and the crescent of the moon deity Sin.

Experts found the inscription in the town of Al Hait. Known as Fadak in ancient times, Al Hait is home to the ruins of fortresses, rock art and water installations, writes Owen Jarus .

The site holds “great … significance,” boasting an early history that spans the first millennium B.C.E. through the beginning of the Islamic era, notes the commission on Twitter.

Researchers in the area have previously discovered inscriptions and obelisks mentioning Nabonidus, who ruled Babylonia from 556 to 539 B.C.E., when the kingdom fell to Cyrus of Persia, reports Arab News.

At its height, the Babylonian Empire stretched from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea. When Nabonidus began his reign, he conquered portions of what is now Saudi Arabia.

Four years after assuming power, the king named his son Belshazzar coregent and went into exile in Tayma, a city some 160 miles north of Al Hait. He remained there until around 543 B.C.E.

Historians are unsure why Nabonidus left Babylon, but as Arkeonews points out, his “self-imposed exile from political and religious authority” may have been the result of a coup.

Disputes between the clergy and Babylon’s elite could also have led to the king’s departure. According to the History Blog, Nabonidus attempted to change his people’s religious hierarchy by declaring the moon god superior to all other deities—a move that may have aggravated the nobility.

Much about the last Babylonian king—including his fate following the fall of Babylon—remains unknown. Enyclopedia Britannica suggests that he was captured by one of Cyrus’ generals and exiled.

ASIA, WORLD

Archaeologists Discover 200,000-Year-Old Hand & Footprints That Could Be the World’s Earliest Cave Art

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Archaeologists Discover 200,000-Year-Old Hand & Footprints That Could Be the World’s Earliest Cave Art

Researchers discovered the impressions on the Tibetan Plateau in 2018.

A group of fossilized handprints and footprints found in Tibet, dating back roughly 200,000 years, could be the earliest examples of human art. And they were made by children.

Every parent knows that children love to get their hands and feet into mud. Such seems to be the case long ago at what used to be a hot spring at Quesang, high on the Tibetan Plateau at an altitude of 4,269 metres (14,000 feet) above sea level.

A report in the journal Science Bulletin suggests these impressions were intentionally placed, not just the result of wandering in the area. The foot and hand prints fit exactly within a space, arranged close together like a mosaic. Their size indicates they were made by two children, one the size of a 7-year-old, and the other the size of a 12-year-old. 

Researchers discovered what is possibly the world’s oldest artwork, rendered here in a 3D scan, on a rocky promontory at Quesang on the Tibetan Plateau in 2018.

During that time, travertine, which is a type of limestone formed by hot mineral springs, formed a pasty mud which was perfect for making handprints. Later, when the hot spring dried up, the mud hardened into stone, preserving the prints over time. 

The rocks have been dated to between 169,000 and 226,000 years ago. It is not known exactly who the people were that lived on the Tibetan Plateau at that time, but one possibility is the Denisovans, a branch of our early ancestors who lived in Asia and resembled modern humans. Tibetans living today still carry Denisovan genes.

Two ethnic Tibetan children play chess at a Tibetan village at the feet of Kalong Mountain in Tongren County.

Whether the imprints can be considered art or just kids playing in the mud is up for interpretation, although the authors of the paper  it may be art in the same way that parents hang scribbles from children on their refrigerators and call it art.

The authors describe the medium the prints are in as intentionally altered, which they suggest could have been a kind of performance to show like, “Hey, look at me, I’ve made my handprints over these footprints.”

Or perhaps these impressions represent the human desire to leave marks behind on the landscape that say, “I was here.”

It’s a tradition that continues today with graffiti on walls in back alleys and famous actors and actresses who leave impressions of their hands and feet in cement along Hollywood Boulevard.

A makeshift memorial appeared for late comedian, actor and legendary entertainer Jerry Lewis around his hand and feet prints on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Los Angeles when he died in 2017.

Little did these prehistoric kids know their handiwork would be preserved for hundreds of thousands of years.

If the carefully made prints are considered art, it pushes the history of rock art back more than 100,000 years. The oldest stencil-type handprints, where a hand is placed on a wall and coloured powder is blown around it to make an outline, have been found along with other cave paintings in Sulawesi, Indonesia and El Castillo, Spain dating back between 40,000 to 45,000 years ago.

This is known as parietal art because it is not meant to be moved, unlike paintings or statues that can be displayed anywhere and traded. And the oldest statues also only go back to about the same time period.

The children of ancient Tibet could be considered among the world’s first artists, or maybe they were just playing in the mud like all kids do. But the question of whether the impressions are art or not is almost moot because handprints and footprints from the deep past provide valuable scientific information.

An international team of researchers describe ancient hand and footprints made deliberately which they argue represent art.

Archeology usually deals with fragments from past cultures, such as pieces of pottery, building foundations, monuments and bones. It is up to the scientists to infer, to fill in the gaps and try to determine what the people were actually like. But handprints are the direct signature of a person.

Tourists on Hollywood Boulevard squat down to place their hands in the prints of their favourite actors to get a sense of what it might be like to shake their hand, sort of a virtual handshake. Imagine a handshake that reaches across millennia into an actual moment in time, to a couple of kids who were just messing in the mud.

ASIA, SAUDI ARABIA, WORLD

4,500 year-old avenues lined with ancient tombs discovered in Saudi Arabia

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4,500 year-old avenues lined with ancient tombs discovered in Saudi Arabia

Archaeologists have discovered a 4,500-year-old highway network in Saudi Arabia lined with well-preserved ancient tombs.

Researchers from the University of Western Australia have carried out a wide-ranging investigation over the past year, involving aerial surveys conducted by helicopter, ground survey and excavation and examination of satellite imagery.

In findings published in the Holocene journal in December, they said the “funerary avenues” spanning large distances in the northwestern Arabian counties of Al-‘Ula and Khaybar had received little examination until quite recently.

A dense “funerary avenue” flanked by Bronze Age tombs, leading out of Khaybar Oasis in northwest Saudi Arabia.

“The people who live in these areas have known about them for thousands of years,” researcher Matthew Dalton told CNN. “But I think it wasn’t really known until until we got satellite imagery that just how widespread they are.”

Dalton said the funerary avenues, which he had seen from a helicopter, stretched for hundreds, “maybe even thousands of kilometers” and that the same routes were often followed by those traveling along the main roads of 2022.

“Often you’ll find main roads tend to follow the same routes as the avenues because they tend to be the shortest route between between the two places they’re going to,” Dalton said. “And actually, in some cases, the the tombs themselves are so dense that you can’t help but walk on the ancient route itself, because you’re sort of hemmed in by the tombs.”

A 3rd millennium BC pendant burial on the southern edge of the Khaybar Oasis in northwest Saudi Arabia.

The tombs themselves are mostly either pendant-shaped or ring burials. Ring tombs involve a cairn surrounded by a wall of up to two meters in height, while pendant tombs have “beautiful tails.”

Using radiocarbon dating, the researchers determined that a concentrated group of samples dated back to between 2600 and 2000 BC, although the tombs continued to be reused until around 1,000 years ago.

“These tombs are 4,500 years old, and they’re still standing to their original height, which is really unheard of,” researcher Melissa Kennedy told CNN. “So I think that’s what particularly marks Saudi Arabia out from the rest of the region — just the level of preservation is unbelievable.”

Kennedy believes either single individuals or small groups were buried in the tombs, and the team have observed around 18,000 tombs along the funerary avenues while 80 of those have been sampled or excavated for research.

An infilled ringed cairn from the Khaybar Oasis in northwest Saudi Arabia.

The researchers think the use of the routes long preceded the tombs, and are still not sure exactly why the tombs were built along the route — although Kennedy pointed to similar customs linked to land ownership in Greece and Rome in later history.

“A way of showing ownership perhaps, could be one reason the tombs were built,” Dalton said. “And there may be an element of, you bury your nearest and dearest alongside the route, because you’ll be passing them frequently, and you have a place to remember them.”

A dense “funerary avenue” flanked by Bronze Age tombs, leading out of al Wadi Oasis near Khaybar in northwest Saudi Arabia.

The next step for the team will be to do more radiocarbon dating and go back out on the field, before analyzing their data. And more discoveries are likely to follow, with Dalton saying the avenues may even stretch across into Yemen, especially as similar tombs are found in both that country and northern Syria.

“The third millennium is such an important period of time,” Kennedy said. “It’s when the Pyramids are built. And it’s where lots of different cultures are interacting with each other for the first time on a wide scale. So to see the appearance of this monumental funerary landscape in this period is really exciting. And huge new avenues of research to basically follow.”

ASIA, CHINA, WORLD

REMAINS OF HORSES FROM 2,700 YEARS AGO FOUND IN CHINESE FAMILY TOMB

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Remains of horses from 2,700 years ago found in Chinese family tomb

In central China, a tomb complex containing the remains of horses thought to belong to an ancient royal household was discovered.

Excavation of the surrounding land yielded 21 large tombs, six horse pits, and 500 copper, ceramic, and jade relics.

A 2,700-year-old tomb complex containing the remains of horses believed to belong to a member of an ancient royal household has been unearthed in central China

The tomb, which could date back 2,700 years, is thought to belong to a royal family from the Spring and Autumn Period.

Chinese archaeologist made the discovery in the city of Sanmenxia, in central China’s Henan Province on Saturday, according to Xinhua News.

Skeletons of 28 horses were found in the six pits. The horses were lying on their sides and were accompanied by dogs.

Out of the 21 large tombs, 20 of them contained coffins, according to archaeologists.

According to preliminary analysis, the Shangshihe village tomb complex is thought to be the burial site of nobles from the middle Spring and Autumn Period

According to preliminary analysis, the Shangshihe village tomb complex is thought to be the burial site of nobles from the early to the middle Spring and Autumn Period (771-476 BC).

The tomb was arranged in an orderly manner and all the relics were very well preserved, the experts said. This shows that the household had a clear layout planned and a strict burial system in place.

Other bronzeware, ceramics and anicent food vessels were also unearthed from the complex, indicating the owner’s noble status, according to Yang Haiqing, a researcher at the Sanmenxia Municipal Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology.

Experts say the discovery will provide valuable material for the study of funeral rituals of the period in central China

Four dings (鼎), which were prehistoric and ancient Chinese cauldrons that stand upon legs with a lid and two facing handles were discovered along with four guis (簋), a type of bowl-shaped ritual bronze vessel used to hold offerings of food, usually grain, for ancestral tombs.

Experts said these reveal details about the technology and production methods used by noble households at the time, as well as the social status of the family and funeral customs of the period.

The site was discovered in July last year, when a local chemical enterprise was expanding construction.

Experts said the relics reveal details about the technology and production methods used by noble families at the time

This is not the first time that such burials have been uncovered in China.

Last November, archaeologists discovered a 2,400-year-old tomb in Xinzheng city in the same province, thought to hold the remains of noble families of the Zheng State, who ruled the region intermittently between 770 and 221 BC.

Excavation of the surrounding land had uncovered 18 large pits containing horses and chariots and more than 3,000 tombs.

Around 500 pieces of burial objects such as bronzeware, pottery and jade were excavated from the tomb complex

In 2022, archaeologists uncovered the almost 3,000-year-old remains of horses and wooden chariots in a Zhou Dynasty tomb in Luoyang city, also in Henan province.

The pits also contained well-preserved evidence of bronzeware and ceramics from the Early Western Zhou dynasty.