Discovery of oldest known trousers in the world

In 2022, a team of archaeologists excavating tombs in western China uncovered the remains of two nomadic herders and a 3,000-year-old pair of trousers with woven patterns, which are the oldest known pair ever discovered, according to a report in  . The finding gives support to the theory that the transition from tunics to trousers was a practical development for horse-riders of the time. 

It is not known when humans first began making clothing due to the fast deterioration of fabrics and materials, but estimates range between 100,000 and 500,000 years ago.  The first clothes were made from animal skins and furs, grasses, leaves, bones, and shells.

Clothing was often draped or tied however, simple needles made out of animal bone provide evidence of sewn leather and fur garments from at least 40,000 years ago. When settled Neolithic cultures discovered the advantages of woven fibres, the making of cloth emerged as one of humankind’s fundamental technologies. The earliest dyed fibres have been found in a prehistoric cave in the Republic of Georgia and date back to 36,000 BC.

The first clothing made from woven fabrics, in both Europe and Asia, included simple tunics, robes, togas, wraps, and tied cloths. But at some point, this progressed to more sophisticated garments, which included trousers. Researchers have been eager to find out when and why this development occurred and the latest finding has helped to shed light on these questions.

The ancient trousers, which are made of wool, have straight-fitting legs, a wide crotch, and decorative designs on the legs. The trousers were sewn together from three pieces of brown-coloured wool cloth, one piece for each leg and an insert for the crotch.

The tailoring involved no cutting – the pant sections were shaped on a loom in the final size. Finished pants included side slits, and strings for fastening at the waist.

The team led by archaeologists Ulrike Beck and Mayke Wagner of the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin, called the ancient invention of trousers “a ground-breaking achievement in the history of cloth making.” 

The discovery was made within tombs in the Yanghai graveyard in China’s Tarim Basin, where dry climate and hot summers helped preserve human corpses, clothing and other organic material. It is most famous for the Tarim mummies , a set of very well-preserved mummies with distinctly Caucasian features.

Within the tomb, archaeologists found the remains of two middle-aged men, a decorated leather bridle, a wooden horse bit, a battle-axe, a leather bracer for arm protection, whip, decorated horse tail, bow sheath, and bow.  

The grave goods suggest that the men were both warriors and herders, and supports previous research which has suggested that nomadic herders invented trousers to provide bodily protection and freedom of movement for horseback journeys and mounted warfare.

“This new paper definitely supports the idea that trousers were invented for horse riding by mobile pastoralists, and that trousers were brought to the Tarim Basin by horse-riding peoples,” said linguist and China authority Victor Mair of the University of Pennsylvania.

Mair suspects that horse riding began among the nomadic herders about 3,400 years ago and trouser-making came shortly thereafter in wetter regions to the north and west of the Tarim Basin.

Archaeologists Are Surprised to Find a 2,500-Year-Old Cannabis Burial Shroud Found in China

Thirteen cannabis plants were found covering the body of a man who was buried in Turpan, China, around 2,500 years ago. This is the first time archaeologists have discovered a quantity of well-preserved cannabis plants and it provides information on how the plant was used in ancient Eurasian cultures.

National Geographic reports that the plants were placed across the 35-year-old man’s chest with their roots below his pelvis and the tops of the plants reaching up past his chin to the left side of his face – as if they were a shroud. Each plant measures about 3 feet (0.91 meters) long.

A previous example of cannabis found in a burial comes from nearby Yanghai cemetery – where the herb was discovered nearly a decade ago . That grave contained almost two pounds of cannabis seeds and powdered leaves.

Regarding the Altai Mountains region , another grave which was found to contain cannabis belonged to the famous Siberian Ice Maiden, who is also known as the Princess of Ukok and the Altai Princess of Ochi-Bala.

This burial has been dated back about 2,500 years and was found in 1993 in a kurgan (mound) of the Pazyryk culture in the Republic of Altai, Russia. It has been suggested that the cannabis found near the mummified woman’s remains may have been used to help her cope with breast cancer.

But what makes the recently discovered cannabis shroud unique is that it provides the first example of complete cannabis plants found in the archaeological record. This is also the first time that the plant has been found acting as a burial shroud.

According to China Topix , the man with the cannabis shroud was found placed on a wooden bed with a reed pillow beneath his head. He is said to have Caucasian features and his grave is one of 240 burials which were excavated at the Jiayi cemetery of Turpan.

Radiometric dating of the tomb and the archeobotanical remains within it shows an age of about 2800–2400 years old. At that time, the area was occupied by the Gushi Kingdom and the desert oasis was an important location on the Silk Road .

With the importance of the site on the trade route, Hongen Jiang and the rest of the team of researchers wondered if the plant was locally-sourced or came from another location.

National Geographic reports that the fact that the plants were found flat on the man’s body led the archaeologists to decide they were fresh when they were placed in his grave – and therefore were local.

Moreover, a few of the plants had flowering heads which were nearly ripe and had immature fruit. This allowed the researchers to conclude that the man was buried in late summer.

The flowering heads of the cannabis plants also provided inspiration for the researchers in deciding the common purpose of plant in the region at the time of the man’s burial.

It is believed that there were three general uses for the cannabis plant in that location during that time period: as a psychoactive substance, for textiles via hemp fibers, and as a food source with its seeds.

However, as Jiang noted to National Geographic, “no hemp textiles have been found in Turpan burials, and the seeds of the plants in the Jiayi burial are too small to serve as a practical food source.”

The flowering heads that were found on the plants were, however, covered with glandular trichomes that secrete resin containing psychoactive cannabinoids such as THC – supporting the psychoactive substance hypothesis.

Thus, the researchers concluded that the plant was “grown and harvested for its psychoactive resin, which may have been inhaled as a sort of incense or consumed in a beverage for ritual or medicinal purposes.”

In another recent discovery regarding ancient cannabis, it was found that the nomad tribe known as the Yamnaya may have facilitated the first transcontinental trade of the plant.

As Natalia Klimczak wrote “the herb was not first used and domesticated somewhere in China or Central Asia. Rather, it was used in Europe and East Asia at the same time – between 11,500 and 10,200 years ago.”

The tribe of Yamnaya nomads came from the eastern Steppe region, which is nowadays Russia and Ukraine, and entered Europe about 5,000 years ago. And, as Klimczak notes “Carbonized achenes and signs of cannabis burning were discovered at archeological sites which suggests that the Yamnaya brought the practice of cannabis smoking with them as they spread across Eurasia.”

The trade route created by Yamnaya and their neighbors became a part of the Silk Road several millennia later. The researchers in that study suggested that “the fact that cannabis had multiple uses made it an ideal candidate for being a “cash crop before cash.””

Cache in Chinese Mountain Reveals 20,000 Prehistoric Fossils

A giant cache of nearly 20,000 fossil reptiles, shellfish and a host of other prehistoric creatures unearthed from a mountain in China is now revealing how life recovered after the most devastating mass extinction on Earth.

This research could help point out which species might be more or less susceptible to extinction nowadays, and how the world might recover from the damage caused by humanity, scientists added.

Life was nearly completely wiped out approximately 250 million years ago by massive volcanic eruptions and devastating global warming.

Only one in 10 species survived this cataclysmic end-Permian event.
Much was uncertain regarding the steps life took to piece itself back together after this disaster, or even how long it took.

Now the clearest picture yet of this recovery has been discovered by a team of researchers, who excavated away half a mountain in Luoping in southwest China to unearth thousands of marine fossils, the first fully functional ecosystem seen after the end-Permian.

“The pattern and timing of recovery can tell us something about how life today might recover after human-induced crises,” said researcher Michael Benton, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Bristol in England.

A trove of fossils

The 50-foot-thick (16 meters) layer of limestone that held these fossils dates back to when south China was a large island just north of the equator with a tropical climate. A smattering of fossil land plants suggest this marine community lived near a conifer forest.

The fossils are exceptionally well-preserved, with more than half of them completely intact, including soft tissues. Apparently they were protected across the ages by mats of microbes that rapidly sealed their bodies off from decay after death.

“Soft tissues can give us more profound information about larger patterns of evolution and relationships, such as the feathers on dinosaurs,” Benton said. “Soft tissues in some of the marine creatures may help us understand diet and locomotion.”

Ninety percent of the fossils are bug-like creatures, such as crustaceans, millipedes and horseshoe crabs. Fish make up 4 percent, including the “living fossil” known as the coelacanth, which is still alive today nearly 250 million years later.

Snails, bivalves (creatures including clams and oysters), squid-like belemnoids, nautilus-like ammonoids and other mollusks make up about 2 percent of the fossils.

The largest creature the scientists found was a thalattosaur, a marine reptile about 10 feet (3 meters) in length, which would have preyed on the larger fishes there, which reached lengths of about 3 feet (1 m). Other predatory marine reptiles the scientists found include dolphin-bodied ichthyosaurs.

“Every time we find a new site like this, we get closer to what life in the past was really like,” Benton told LiveScience.

A long time to heal

This extraordinarily detailed snapshot of a diverse bygone ecosystem reveals that life took a long time to heal from the massive damage it received — 10 million years, which is even more than it took life to recover after the K-T event that claimed the dinosaurs.

“Recovery after most mass extinctions, including the K-T, seems to have taken 1 million to 4 million years,” Benton said. “The end-Permian event was so profound, killing perhaps 90 percent of species, that ecosystems had nothing left to hang their structure on.”

“The importance of the discovery that ecosystems took 10 million years to recover completely reflects the unequalled severity of the event,” Benton said.

Some marine animals such as the ammonoids did recover fast, within 1 million to 2 million years, but “physical environmental conditions continued to suffer setbacks for the 4 million to 5 million years of the Early Triassic, with four or five pulses of sudden heating and ocean stagnation,” Benton said, referring to severe climate changes and reduced ocean water circulation.

“The Luoping site and evidence from older locations in south China shows that ecosystems in total had not recovered until some 10 million years after the crisis.”

The researchers now plan to explore the recovery over the ecosystem’s entire life span to see which species recovered when and how the food web rebuilt itself. In addition, “we hope to now explore all the amazing fossil organisms from Luoping — this has only just begun and will take many years to document in detail,” Benton said.

500-Million-Year-Old Sea Creature With Limbs Under Its Head Unearthed

Scientists have unearthed extraordinarily preserved fossils of a 520-million-year-old sea creature, one of the earliest animal fossils ever found, according to a new study.

The fossilized animal, an arthropod called a fuxhianhuiid, has primitive limbs under its head, as well as the earliest example of a nervous system that extended past the head.

The primitive creature may have used the limbs to push food into its mouth as it crept across the seafloor. The limbs may shed light on the evolutionary history of arthropods, which include crustaceans and insects.

“Since biologists rely heavily on organization of head appendages to classify arthropod groups, such as insects and spiders, our study provides a crucial reference point for reconstructing the evolutionary history and relationships of the most diverse and abundant animals on Earth,” said study co-author Javier Ortega-Hernández, an earth scientist at the University of Cambridge, in a statement. “This is as early as we can currently see into arthropod limb development.”

Primordial animal

The fuxhianhuiid lived nearly 50 million years before animals first emerged from the sea onto land, during the early part of the Cambrian explosion, when simple multicellular organisms rapidly evolved into complex sea life. [See Images of the Wacky Cambrian Creatures ]

While paleontologists have unearthed previous examples of a fuxhianhuiid before, the fossils were all found in the head-down position, with their delicate internal organs obscured by a large carapace or shell.

However, when Ortega-Hernández and his colleagues began excavating in a fossil-rich region of southwest China around Kunming called Xiaoshiba, they unearthed several specimens of fuxhianhuiid where the bodies had been flipped before fossilization.

All told, the team unearthed an amazingly preserved arthropod, as well as eight additional specimens.

These primeval creatures probably spent most of their days crawling across the seabed trawling for food and may have also been able to swim short distances. The sea creatures, some of the earliest arthropods or jointed animals, probably evolved from worms with legs.

The discovery sheds light on how some of the earliest ancestors of today’s animals may have evolved.

“These fossils are our best window to see the most primitive state of animals as we know them – including us,” Ortega-Hernández said in a statement.

“Before that there is no clear indication in the fossil record of whether something was an animal or a plant – but we are still filling in the details, of which this is an important one.”

A Fossil Spider Discovery Just Turned Out to Be a Crayfish With Some Legs Painted on

When scientists at the Dalian Natural History Museum in China copped a load of a fossil unearthed in the Lower Cretaceous Yixian Formation, they couldn’t believe their eyes. The eight-legged beastie looked like nothing anyone had seen before. Exceptionally preserved.

They described it as a new spider, publishing their analysis in the journal Acta Geologica Sinica, and named the species Mongolarachne chaoyangensis. There was just one problem: the fossil was a big old fake.

The cunning ruse was discovered by invertebrate paleontologist Paul Selden of the University of Kansas, whose spidey senses started tingling when he got his hands on the paper.

“I was obviously very sceptical,” Selden said.

“The paper had very few details, so my colleagues in Beijing borrowed the specimen from the people in the Southern University, and I got to look at it. Immediately, I realised there was something wrong with it – it clearly wasn’t a spider. It was missing various parts, had too many segments in its six legs, and huge eyes.”

The penny dropped, he said, when palaeobiologist Chungkun Shih of Capital Normal University in Beijing remarked that a lot of Cretaceous crayfish are found in the same formation, dating back to around 120 to 130 million years ago.

“I realised what happened,” Selden said, “was I got a very badly preserved crayfish onto which someone had painted on some legs.”

Yep. Those wacky legs that didn’t look right? Not actually fossilised material at all.

To confirm this suspicion, Selden teamed up with University of Kansas geologists Matt Downen and Alison Olcott to analyse the fossil specimen using fluorescence microscopy. Because the fossil was so big, they had to image it in sections.

These images returned four main fluorescence colours: white, which likely indicated a mended crack; blue, which is the mineral composition of the host rock; red, indicating actual fossilised material; and yellow. That yellow fluorescence, the researchers said, is most likely created by oil-based paint.

But it’s a very convincing forgery. You wouldn’t necessarily know parts of it were fake just by looking at it, unless you specifically knew what you were looking for. That, Selden said, is how the Dalian Natural History Museum scientists were taken in.

“These things are dug up by local farmers mostly, and they see what money they can get for them,” he explained.

“They obviously picked up this thing and thought, ‘Well, you know, it looks a bit like a spider.’ And so, they thought they’d paint on some legs – but it’s done rather skilfully. So, at first glance, or from a distance, it looks pretty good.

“It’s not until you get down to the microscope and look in detail that you realise there are clearly things wrong with it. And, of course, the people who described it are perfectly good palaeontologists – they’re just not experts on spiders.”

Fake fossils are nothing new; in fact, recent history – going back the last few centuries – is rife with hoaxes and frauds. And, although we did eventually wise up about the Piltdown Man, a 2010 Science investigation found that fake fossils were finding their way into museums in China in shocking numbers.

Farther afield, the online marketplace for trilobite fossils, for instance, is awash with extremely clever fakes.

“I’ve seen lots of forgeries, and in fact I’ve even been taken in by fossils in a very dark room in Brazil,” Selden said.

“It looks interesting until you get to it in the daylight the next day and realise it’s been enhanced, let’s say, for sale. I have not seen it with Chinese invertebrates before.

“It’s very common with, you know, really expensive dinosaurs and that sort of stuff… They’re not necessarily going to be bought by scientists, but by tourists.”

While it’s less common to find a fake fossil in an academic journal, the case highlights the importance of performing a thorough analysis, and that even the peer-review process can be flawed.

As a result of this new paper, Mongolarachne chaoyangensis no longer exists; the specimen has been reclassified as a common crayfish. As for what will become of the fossil, that’s yet to be decided. Perhaps it will be put on display in a museum.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Chinese Boy Obsessed with Science Discovers 66-Million-Year-Old Dinosaur Eggs While Playing

The young discoverer, Zhang Yangzhe, came across the fascinating find while looking for something to crack walnuts open with on the embankment of Dongjiang River in Heyuan, Guangdong province on 2022.

The 10-year-old, who reportedly loves science, first saw a “strange stone” in the soil but later speculated that it could be a dinosaur egg upon closer inspection.

Having seen one before, Zhang noticed that the “stone” had circles on its surface, prompting him to call his mother to take a look at it as well.

Shortly, experts confirmed that the “stone,” indeed, was a dinosaur egg, later excavating 10 more in the surrounding area.

The eggs, which measure about 3.5 inches (8.89 centimeters) in length, date back to the late Cretaceous period, approximately 66 million years ago.

Speaking to Beijing Youth Daily, Zhang’s mother, Li Xiaofang, shared that her son actually loves science, especially topics on dinosaurs.

And, as a matter of fact, the third-grader has already read many books on the subject.

“I have learned this knowledge from books and from the cultural corridor at school,” Zhang said, according to the Heyuan Radio and Television Station.

 “I have seen them [dinosaur eggs] in museums. Different dinosaur eggs have different shapes.”

Zhang’s discovery, however, may not come as a surprise for most locals, as Heyuan happens to be China’s “home of dinosaurs.”

Since 1996, over 17,000 dinosaur eggs have reportedly been dug out in the city, which erected its very own dinosaur museum to preserve them.

Scientists just found velociraptor’s feathered Chinese cousin

A new species of feathered dinosaur has been discovered in China that is the largest ever found with wings on its arms.

The Zhenyuanlong, as it has been dubbed, is covered in feathers and looks just like a bird of today, complete with three layers of quill features.

This new creature is one of the closest cousins of the well-known velociraptor and is thought to have lived around 125 million years ago.

The Liaoning Province of China, where the Zhenyuanlong was found, is famous for the thousands of feathered dinosaurs that have been found there, and this latest discovery adds even more diversity to the area’s fauna.

Just like other specimens, the fossil of the Zhenyuanlong is a perfectly preserved example of dinosaur life from the Early Cretaceous period.

The etymology of the Zhenyuanlong’s name comes from a combination of the word “long”, which means dragon in Chinese, and “Zhenyuan”, the surname of the man who secured the specimen for study.

Like other creatures discovered in the region the dinosaur “has broad wings on its arms comprised of multiple sets of pennaceous feathers and large pennaceous feathers on the tail”, according to a paper published today in the journal Scientific Reports.

Paleontologists note that unlike its close relatives, the raptor “appears to lack vaned feathers on the hindlimb”.

But it is not these factors that make this dinosaur especially unique. The researchers explain the Zhenyuanlong is “an aberrant and rare animal compared to the vast majority of other Liaoning dromaeosaurids, due to its large body size and proportionally tiny forearms”.

The dino’s relatives are, for the most part, the size of a domestic house cat. The Zhenyuanlong is bigger and has short forearms with large, complex wings.

Another interesting observation about the Zhenyuanlong is that despite the presence of these wings, they do not necessarily seem to be optimised for flight.

The researchers have their suspicions as to why a short-armed creature like the Zhenyuanlong might have evolved with wings, even if it did not fly.

“It may be that such large wings comprised of multiple layers of feathers were useful for display purposes, and possibly even evolved for this reason and not for flight, and this is one reason why they may have been retained in paravians that did not fly,” the researchers claimed.

Archaeologists Find Evidence for 40,000-year-old Modern Culture in China

No sapiens bones were found at Xiamabei, but archaeologists found a pigment-processing industry and miniaturized stone tools far in advance of their broad adoption in prehistoric China

Archaic humans began reaching Eurasia at least 2 million years ago, but the timeline of anatomically modern types spreading out of Africa is not known. In any case, by 40,000 years ago modern humans had reached northern Asia, replacing the archaic populations.

Some modern remains from that time have been found, albeit few, but what their cultural adaptations were like was a mystery. Now an international team of archaeologists reports in Nature on indirect but compelling evidence for Homo sapiens’ presence at Xiamabei, a site in northern China by the Huliu River that dates to at least 40,000 years ago.Moreover, it seems they developed a unique stone technology culture that would only emerge broadly more than 10,000 years later.

The evidence found at Xiamabei includes the earliest discovery of ocher processing in the region – as distinct from ocher use, which has been found even among Neanderthals.

Another aspect is finely wrought stone bladelets of a type not found in China before, some of which bear traces of hafting, write Fa-Gang Wang of China’s Hebei Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, Prof. Michael Petraglia of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and colleagues.

Supporting evidence is the separate discovery of modern human remains dating to about 40,000 years ago at nearby Tianyuan Cave and Zhoukoudian Cave. Also a modern skullcap was unearthed at Salkhit and dated to about 34,000 years ago. These discoveries support the theory that the Xiamabei manufacturers were sapiens.

Theoretically, since no bones have been found in the context of Xiamabei, the finds could be associated with other hominin types such as late Denisovans, or even their cousins the Neanderthals, the team admits.

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But given the unique qualities of the finds in the context of China, and the fact that modern human remains from the same period were discovered in the area, the most parsimonious explanation is that the Xiamabei occupants were Homo sapiens, the authors conclude.

“As soon as I saw the archaeological collections, I knew immediately that this was a significant site,” says Petraglia on how he got involved. He didn’t participate in the excavation, which was in 2013, but is part of the international team analyzing the artifacts.

Spoor of sapiens

Homo sapiens, it seems, had been roaming beyond Africa shortly after our evolution began perhaps 300,000 years ago. Recent discoveries in Israel and Greece indicate that by 200,000 years, early modern humans were out of Africa and about.

Genetic analyses show these early modern humans evidently met and made merry with other human species beyond Africa. But the early modern exiters went extinct, and the Neanderthals and Denisovans and heaven knows who else continued to rule the Eurasian roost – until some point in time.

The exit that succeeded, in the sense that sapiens broke through to Eurasia and survived, was only about 50,000 years ago, give or take quite a few thousand years. Some surmise that sapiens had evolved to another level, which gave it crucial advantages compared with its equally big-brained cousin species.

In the current paper, the team points to three lines of evidence indicating innovations that may have helped sapiens expand, and suggests these are “spoor” of modern sapiens in Xiamabei 40,000 years ago: the micro-blades and their hafting (at least in some cases), the ocher processing, and a finely fashioned tool made of bone.

Pioneers of miniaturization

The stone tool assemblage at this site is generally small, the professor explains. The team found 382 micro-blades, made of local chert and quartz. Almost all measured less than 4 centimeters, or 1 and a half inches; over half were smaller than 2 centimeters: In Petraglia’s view, the inhabitants were intending to create exactly that – small, blade-like pieces.

Seven of the blades show signs of hafting, probably into wood handles or possibly bone. It is even possible that they were affixing these wee blades into a handle to create a sort of prehistoric serrated implement. “These people really seem to be tooling up their industries and doing some very sophisticated things in order to process meat or plants or kill game much more efficiently,” he says.

And they were way ahead of their time. The types of stone tools in China before Xiamabei and even contemporary with it are core and flake, meaning simple, amorphous industries, Petraglia says. Microlithic technology – tiny stone blades – would only become the predominant technology in eastern Asia 29,000 years ago.

“There is no stone tool assemblage like it at the time, approximately 40,000 years ago,” Petraglia says. “Its appearance, therefore, is innovative. We have nothing like this technology beforehand, and there is no precedent. … The hafting evidence is also novel [for that time and place], and no earlier assemblage has shown the same.”

Possibly, the manufacture of microlithics at Xiamabei was a precedent to the broader phenomenon over 10,000 years later. “That said, we do not have a connection between Xiamabei to later microlithic sites. So, it seems that we have a wave of advance of people using innovative technologies at 40,000 years ago, only to disappear and be replaced by another population using microlithics at 29,000 years ago,” he suggests.

What were these fine tools, so ahead of their time, used for? The use-wear analysis of non-hafted pieces runs the gamut from cutting, boring and even use as wedges, the authors contend. Use-wear analysis of the hafted pieces indicates several purposes, including to scrape hides, to scrape and bore into hard matter, probably wood, to whittle wood, and likely use in the course of processing and/or consuming animals.

Which animals? Pollen analysis indicates that Xiamabei was a piney steppe at the time. That environmental characterization fits with the evidence for the occupants’ meals. They ate copiously of the deer – as did all human species, it seems; venison is widely appreciated to this day. The Xiamabei people also doted on roast horse and zokor, that being a relatively large subterranean rodent somewhat like our friend the mole rat. Zokors were probably easy to hunt.

The degree to which animal bones were burned suggests the occupants may have been burning bones for fuel. Apropos of the bones, the archaeologists also found a bone tool – just one, but believe it shows evidence of advanced technique.

Also, ocher residue was found on 10 of the tools. In two cases, the ocher was on the tool’s active edge, suggesting ocher in the glue, or its use in hide processing. But the intriguing aspect isn’t the use made of ocher – it’s the processing.

The earliest paint factory in China

Ocher use has been a hallmark of the Homo line predating our species, it seems. Especially red ocher. The friable colorful stone may have been used by Homo erectus in Kenya 285,000 years ago. There is somewhat more confident identification of its use at an early Neanderthal site in the Netherlands a quarter-million to 200,000 years ago.

But a prehistoric ocher processing facility is another level. The archaeologists believe that at Xiamabei, the occupants were hauling various kinds of ocher to the cave, and grinding and pounding them to produce paints.

What they did with those paints is anybody’s guess – decorate their environs, their bodies, their clothes, their utensils and weapons – but the amount they produced was enough to impregnate the floor where they worked, the team writes.

The archaeologists identified one piece of iron-rich ocher that had been repeatedly abraded to produce a bright dark red ocher powder; one small piece of a different kind of ocher seemingly generated by the crushing of a big piece; and an elongated limestone slab stained with ocher. “A workshop for the production and use of mineral pigments at Xiamabei constitutes a second new cultural element in comparison with earlier and contemporary sites,” the team explains.

“The preservation of this floor [where the ocher facility was found] is literally unprecedented – it’s Pompeii-like, if you will. So we can say a lot about hominin activities. We actually saw an activity area of ocher processing, which is unprecedented for China,” Petraglia explains.

While the habitation floor was infused with different shades of ocher, red predominated. That is in keeping with precedent from other areas, times and sites: hunter-gatherers the world wide use red ocher to daub their selves, garb and adornments, Petraglia points out.

So the bottom line is that others used ocher and small tools, but the pigment-processing industry and the small tools of this sort were firsts of their kind in the region, he underlines.

We repeat that the identification of the species-at-large at Xiamabei is inferred. Tianyuan Cave is just 150 kilometers, or 93 miles, away and housed Homo sapiens specimens showing genetic evidence of cross-breeding with Neanderthals.

Did the people who lived at Xiamabei 40,000 years ago survive? Which means, do they have descendants – or is this another lineage that went extinct? We don’t know, but separate work showed that the lineage of their neighbors at Tianyuan 40,000 years ago may have survived in some Asian and Native American populations – chiefly in South America.

How much light does this shed on modern human development? The archaeological record argues against the notion of linear, continuous cultural innovation, or of a fully formed set of adaptations that enabled early humans to expand out of Africa and conquer the world. It fits with a pattern of mosaic innovations.

A “Made in China” Label Solved The Mystery of an 800-Year-Old Shipwreck

The practice of branding goods with their country of origin has been going on much longer than you might think – and a “Made in China”-style label etched into a 12th century piece of pottery has helped experts accurately date the cargo haul of a mysterious shipwreck.

Discovered in the 1980s by a fisherman in the Java Sea, off the coast of Indonesia, the wreck has been the subject of several studies since then. Archaeologists originally thought the ship set sail in the 13th century, but the new findings have them thinking again.

By analysing these ceramics and the rest of the goods on board – which include elephant tusks for use in medicine and art, and sweet-smelling resin for producing incense and sealing ships – researchers now have a better idea of how the sunken vessel fits in with the broader picture of China’s rich history.

“Initial investigations in the 1990s dated the shipwreck to the mid to late 13th century, but we’ve found evidence that it’s probably a century older than that,” says one of the team, Lisa Niziolek from the Field Museum in Chicago.

“Eight hundred years ago, someone put a label on these ceramics that essentially says ‘Made in China’ – because of the particular place mentioned, we’re able to date this shipwreck better.”

The inscription doesn’t actually say “Made in China”, though the intent is the same: to brand the ceramics with their place of origin. The label states the pots were made in Jianning Fu in the Fujian province of China.

Crucially though, it was renamed Jianning Lu after a Mongolian invasion dated to around 1278. That means the shipwreck may have happened earlier than that, and maybe as early as 1162, based on other tests.

It’s unlikely that ceramics like this would have been stored for very long, according to the researchers, so something carrying the old name would’ve been shipped off for sale pretty soon after it was made.

The team behind the study also looked at other pottery finds from the same era, and consulted with a variety of experts, to try and get a fix on when the ship might have set sail.

Carbon dating techniques can be applied to the tusks and the resin that were on board the ship, and these were initially used to identify the ship as being around 700-750 years old.

Since that analysis, we’ve got better at carbon dating, which is part of the reason for the re-evaluation. A new accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) test, together with the inscriptions on the the ceramics that we’ve already mentioned, suggests the shipwreck is indeed around 800 years old.

And that makes a big difference for archaeologists – the wreck marks a time when Chinese merchants began to be more active across worldwide maritime trade routes, switching from moving goods along the Silk Road to relying more on shipping. Pinning down that date is important for getting an accurate timeline for this period of transition.

It’s another example of how shipwrecks of any type can prove useful to historians, whether it’s to uncover the reading habits of pirates or the way that 17th-century royalty dressed.

“There’s often a stigma around doing research with artefacts salvaged by commercial companies, but we’ve given this collection a home and have been able to do all this research with it,” says Niziolek.

“It’s really great that we’re able to use new technology to re-examine really old materials. These collections have a lot of stories to tell and should not be entirely discounted.”