5,000-year-old ‘bog body’ found in Denmark may be a human sacrifice victim
Archaeologists have discovered the ancient skeletal remains of a so-called bog body in Denmark near the remnants of a flint ax and animal bones, clues that suggest this person was ritually sacrificed more than 5,000 years ago.
The archaeologists first found the bones from a human leg, and then a pelvis and a lower jaw with some teeth still attached.
Little is known so far about the supposed victim, including the person’s sex and age at the time of death. But the researchers think the body was deliberately placed in the bog during the Neolithic, or New Stone Age.
“That’s the early phase of the Danish Neolithic,” said excavation leader Emil Struve, an archaeologist and curator at the ROMU museums in Roskilde. “We know that traditions of human sacrifices date back that far — we have other examples of it.”
Dozens of so-called bog bodies have been found throughout northwestern Europe — particularly in Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Britain, where human sacrifices in bogs seem to have persisted for several thousand years.
“In our area here, we have several different bog bodies,” Struve told. “It’s an ongoing tradition that goes back all the way to the Neolithic.”
The archaeologists hope that wear on the teeth could indicate the person’s age when they died, and that the teeth themselves may contain ancient DNA.
Ancient bones
The ROMU archaeological team found the latest set of bones in October ahead of the construction of a housing development. The site, which has now been drained, had been a bog near the town of Stenløse, on the large island of Zealand and just northwest of the Danish capital Copenhagen.
Danish law requires archaeologists to examine all land that’s to be built on, and the first bones of the Stenløse bog body were found during a test excavation at the site, Struve said.
The site near Stenløse was originally a bog, but it’s been drained for use as farmland. A housing development is due to be built there next year.
The archaeologists will now fully excavate the site in the spring, when the ground has thawed after winter. But the initial excavations have revealed leg bones, a pelvis and part of a lower jaw with some teeth still attached. The other parts of the body lay outside a protective layer of peat in the bog and were not preserved, he noted.
Several animal bones found near the human remains indicate this was an area of the bog used for rituals.
Struve hopes that the sex of the body can be determined based on the pelvis and that wear on the teeth may indicate the individual’s age. In addition, the teeth could be sources of ancient DNA, which might reveal even more about the person’s identity, he said.
Archaeologists from the ROMU museums supervised the digger making the initial test trench at the site near Stenløse.
Bog bodies
Struve said the flint ax-head found near the body was not polished after it was made and may have never been used, and so it seems likely that this, too, was a deliberate offering.
A flint axe head found next to the human remains seems never to have been used; its in a style that dates to about 3600 B.C.
The oldest bog body in the world, known as Koelbjerg Man, was found in Denmark in the 1940s and may date to 10,000 years ago, while others date to the Iron Age in the region from about 2,500 years ago.
One of the most famous and best preserved bog bodies is Tollund Man, who was found on Denmark’s Jutland Peninsula in 1950 and is thought to have been sacrificed in about 400 B.C.
A few of the bog bodies seem to have been accident victims who drowned after they fell in the water, but archaeologists think most were killed deliberately, perhaps as human sacrifices at times of famines or other disasters.
Miranda Aldhouse-Green, a professor emeritus of history, archaeology and religion at Cardiff University in the U.K. and the author of the book “Bog Bodies Uncovered: Solving Europe’s Ancient Mystery” (Thames & Hudson, 2015), said ancient people were likely well aware that bogs could preserve bodies.
World’s Oldest Wine Found – Imbued with a Cremated Roman Aristocrat!
When archaeologists excavated an ancient Roman tomb in Spain, they found a funerary urn with a strange mixture inside: In addition to cremated bones, it was filled with a reddish-brown liquid.
The wine, made of crushed white grapes 2,000 years ago, turned red-brown with age.
After conducting laboratory analyses, the researchers concluded that the fluid was once a white wine—though it had been browned beyond recognition in the 2,000 years since its creation. It’s the oldest liquid wine ever found.
Located in Carmona (near Seville), the tomb was discovered in 2019 during construction on a nearby house. According to a study recently published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, the Romans likely built the chamber in the first half of the first century C.E.
“Romans were proud, even in death, and used to build funeral monuments, such as towers, over their tombs so people could see them,” study co-author José Rafael Ruiz Arrebola, an organic chemist at Spain’s University of Córdoba, tells the Guardian’s Sam Jones.
But this particular tomb was hidden, protecting it against looters for millennia. “It’s a sunken tomb that was excavated from the rock, which allowed it to remain standing for 2,000 years,” Ruiz Arrebola adds.
The underground chamber was discovered in 2019 during construction work in southern Spain.
Inside, researchers found eight burial niches, or loculi, carved into the tomb’s walls. According to the study, six of those niches held urns made of glass, lead, limestone or sandstone.
Each urn contained the remains of a single person, and two were inscribed with the names of their occupants: Senicio and Hispanae. In one of the pots, they found a small jar once filled with patchouli-scented perfume.
The researchers found the wine in another urn, which was made of glass. Learning that this urn was “full of liquid” was “an even greater surprise,” Ruiz Arrebola tells the Guardian.
Sunken inside the urn’s nearly five liters of red-brown fluid were the cremated bones of a man, as well as a gold ring decorated with the two-headed Roman god Janus.
“We did not expect it to contain liquid, much less the quantity found,” Rhttps://articlerewritertool.com/uiz Arrebola tells All That’s Interesting’s Kaleena Fraga.
“This was the first time something like this had been discovered. Until now, all the funerary urns found contained only cremated bone remains and various objects related to funerary offerings.”
In the lab, the researchers found that the liquid had a pH of 7.5, similar to water’s. Meanwhile, its chemical composition resembled wine’s.
Eight cubbies, or loculi, carved into the chamber’s walls held funerary urns.
“We looked for biomarkers, which are chemical compounds that unequivocally tell you what a particular substance is,” Ruiz Arrebola tells the Guardian.
“In this case, we looked for polyphenols exclusively from wine, and we found seven wine polyphenols. We compared those polyphenols with those from wines from this part of Andalucía, and they matched. So that confirmed it was wine.”
Due to the absence of syringic acid—a byproduct of red wine’s decomposition—researchers determined that this wine was made from white grapes.
Before this discovery, the world’s oldest known liquid wine was a bottle found in another Roman tomb near Speyer, Germany, in 1867. Made around 325 C.E., it had been buried with the dead to ensure their thirst would be quenched in the afterlife, per Food & Wine’s Jelisa Castrodale. The oldest wine remnants ever found are some 8,000 years old, but they’re merely chemical traces extracted from Georgian pottery.
One tiny container found in the tomb contained the remnants of patchouli-scented perfume.
The Carmona liquid is technically drinkable, researchers say.
“It’s not in the least bit toxic,” Ruiz Arrebola tells the Guardian. “We’ve done the microbiological analysis.” Still, the researcher resisted a celebratory glass, as the wine “has spent 2,000 years in contact with the cremated body of a dead Roman.”
His colleague, co-author Daniel Cosano, another organic chemist at the university, did opt to sample the ancient wine. “The flavor is salty, which is not surprising given its chemical composition.”
1,600-Year-Old Roman Merchant Ship Cargo Discovered off Caesarea Coast
In recent times, divers have discovered some rarity of archaeological artifacts on the bottom of the sea off the coast of Israel in Caesarea.
The objects that seem to have been part of a Roman merchant ship cargo that sank some 1,600 years ago include coins, bronze statues, equipment used in running the ship, such as anchors, and numerous decorative items.
The treasure trove was discovered by accident by two amateur divers from Ra’anana, Ran Feinstein, and Ofer Ra’anan, who were swimming in the ancient harbor.
Upon emerging from the sea, they immediately contacted the Israel Antiquities Authority. Since then, the IAA’s marine archaeology unit has been conducting an underwater excavation of the site, in cooperation with the Rothschild Caesarea Foundation.
Among other finds, the cargo of the ship, which sank in the latter years of the Roman Empire (27 B.C.E. – 476 C.E.), included a bronze lamp depicting the image of the Roman sun god Sol; a figurine of the moon goddess Luna; a lamp resembling the head of an African slave; parts of three life-size bronze statues; a bronze faucet in the form of a wild boar with a swan on its head; and other objects in the shape of animals.
Also unearthed were shards of large containers used for carrying drinking water for the ship’s crew.
The rare bronze artifacts that were discovered in Caesarea
One of the biggest surprises was the discovery of two metallic lumps each composed of thousands of coins, in the shape of the ceramic vessel in which they were transported before they oxidized and became stuck together.
The coins bear the images of Constantine, who ruled the Western Roman Empire (312 – 324 C.E.) and was later known as Constantine the Great, ruler of the entire Roman Empire (324 – 337 C.E.), and of Licinius, a rival of Constantine’s who ruled the eastern part of the empire and was slain in battle in the year 324 C.E.
According to Jacob Sharvit, director of the IAA’s marine archaeology unit, and his deputy Dror Planer, “These are extremely exciting finds, which apart from their extraordinary beauty, are of historical significance.
The location and distribution of the ancient artifacts on the seabed indicate that a large merchant ship was carrying a cargo of metal slated to be recycled, which encountered a storm at the entrance to the harbor and drifted until it smashed into the seawall and the rocks.”
An Ancient Roman figurine was discovered in the shipwreck.
A preliminary study of the iron anchors unearthed at the site suggests that there was an attempt to stop the drifting vessel before it reached shore by casting them into the sea; however, the anchors broke, which constitutes “evidence of the power of the waves and the wind in which the ship was caught up,” say the researchers.
The discovery comes just a year after a trove of over 2,000 gold coins, dating to the Fatimid era about 1,000 years ago, was found nearby by divers and IAA staff. The coins are currently on public display in the Caesarea marina.
“A marine assemblage such as this has not been found in Israel in the past 30 years,” Sharvit and Planer explain. “Statues made of metallic materials are rare archaeological finds because they were always melted down and recycled in antiquity.
Lumps of coins were discovered at sea, weighing a total of around 20 kilograms.
When we find bronze artifacts it usually occurs at sea. Because these statues were wrecked together with the ship, they sank in the water and were thus ‘saved’ from the recycling process.”
The archaeologists said the underwater treasures were discovered because of the diminishing amount of sand in the Caesarea harbor as a result of construction along the coastline south of the site, and due to the increased mining of sand – as well as the growing number of amateur divers in the area.
The IAA praised the two amateur divers for their good citizenship in reporting their findings and announced that they would accordingly be awarded certificates.
The World’s Smallest Elephants Led Unusually Long Lives
Ancient elephants that would have been born the size of a puppy lived for decades more than previously thought. Researchers studying an ancient miniature elephant that lived on Mediterranean islands found it could have lived for over 68 years, which is unusually long for a mammal of its size. The smallest-ever elephant took a leisurely approach to growing up, with a drawn-out development lasting up to 15 years.
Though it was barely a meter tall, a team of European scientists found that Palaeoloxodon Falconeri grew much more slowly than its modern relatives, with modern African bush elephants entering adulthood four years earlier than their extinct relatives despite being much bigger.
Their findings contradict previous studies which suggest P. Falconeri would only have lived for 26 years, suggesting that the species would have lived for at least seven decades, and perhaps even longer.
Professor Meike Köhler, the paper’s lead author, says, ‘Traditionally this species had been considered to have a rapid development, reaching sexual maturity early and having a short life. Our work reveals that the life history of this elephant was much slower.
‘Organisms that grow at slower rates have fewer errors in biosynthesis which leads to an extended lifespan.’
Dr Victoria Herridge, who researches fossil elephants at the Museum and co-wrote the paper, says, ‘It’s hard to know why these elephants grew so slowly. There is an idea that the islands had limited resources and predators, so on the one hand food is scarce, but on the other, there is very low mortality.
‘This would allow for a slower investment in growth over a longer period, but without paying the price that smaller individuals pay on the mainland, such as a death in the jaws of a predator. However, the reasoning behind that is still debated.
‘There’s a lot we don’t know about this species, but its slower growth shifts our thinking a little bit on how these elephants evolved.’
The findings, led by the Miquel Crusafont Catalan Institute of Paleontology, were published in Scientific Reports.
Bigger is better
It’s been known for some time that when it comes to mammals and birds, larger animals live longer. While some shrews live for little more than a year, mammals at the other end of the weight spectrum can live for centuries.
The bowhead whale, which can grow up to 18 meters long or about the length of a bowling alley, has been estimated to have been over for over 200 years. Some bowheads have lived so long that they still contain Victorian harpoons used to try and kill them over a century ago.
While the relationship between size and lifespan generally holds across mammals and birds, lifestyle can have an impact. For instance, flying animals generally live longer than their ground-dwelling relatives, with small bats living for much longer than rats and shrews of a similar size.
However, there are a few notable exceptions. Naked mole rats can live for around 30 years, while humans have used technological innovations and medicine to allow us to live for longer too. Previously, it had been thought that the miniature elephants fitted well with the overall pattern.
After diverging from the largest elephant to ever live, the straight-tusked elephant, it was thought that P. Falconeri would have shortened its lifespan as it dwarfed over the millennia it was isolated on what is now the island of Sicily.
‘Palaeoloxodon Falconeri is the smallest elephant ever to have existed, living on both Malta and Sicily,’ says Victoria. ‘At the time, we didn’t know if the area was one large island or an archipelago in the Mediterranean.
‘They are remarkable animals. They were around a meter tall, which is about the same size as a newborn African elephant but they were adults. As babies, they would only have been the size of a puppy.’
While little is known about the species’ life, it is assumed to have grown smaller through a process of miniaturization which is common to many island species due to a lack of resources, predators and competitor species. Looking at the overall trend in life history for mammals, it was estimated that an elephant of this size would live for at least 26 years.
The new study analyzed the growth of teeth, bones and tusks from Spingallo Cave, near Siracusa in southeast Sicily, to provide a more accurate estimate, which shows the species is an exception to the rule.
Professor Antonietta Rossa, from the University of Catania, Sicily, where the fossils are housed and coauthor of the study, says, ‘Spinagallo Cave is outstanding for the number of remains. This abundance of bones provides enough material for analyzing specimens of different ages and growth stages.’
Good things come to those who wait
The researchers found that across the different types of remains studied, P. Falconeri grew very slowly. Though elephants are generally already slow-growing, this species was even more so. While most species grow rapidly as an infant before slowing down after reaching adulthood, the Sicilian elephants grew at a fairly constant rate throughout their entire lives.
Even the oldest specimens grew only two millimeters a year more slowly than the youngest, while the difference for African bush elephants is around a centimeter a year.
However, this slow growth was compensated for by a much longer developmental period, with some bones not showing signs of adulthood even by the age of 22. The age of sexual maturity was similarly delayed, with all evidence pointing towards 15 years in P. Falconeri, compared with 12 years in living African elephants.
‘Given the later age of sexual maturity, their gestation period may also have been longer or similar to large African elephants,’ says Victoria. ‘And of course, those newborns would also take a long time to grow up, leading to long generation times.’
Researchers have suggested that this long period of development could have resulted from a lack of predators in Sicily. This would allow the elephant to grow more slowly as there was little danger of infants being hunted.
As it was less likely to die, this meant that there was less evolutionary pressure for P. Falconeri to grow up fast and reproduce. As a result, selection pressures instead drove it to grow slowly, allowing more time for learning and development over decades rather than years.
However, this slow development would have put it at a disadvantage when it came to sudden changes. Longer development means that evolution acts more slowly, requiring many generations to make significant changes.
‘By taking the inferred age of sexual maturity we can see their gestation period may have been similar to large African elephants,’ Victoria says.
‘Even though it’s a lot smaller than a full-sized elephant, it’s behaving like a very large animal in terms of its generation time which makes it more vulnerable to extinction.
‘Island populations are already vulnerable to extinction because they are often unique and not very numerous so it all adds up.’
The period in which P. Falconeri lived was one of dramatic environmental and climatic change, with Sicily changing tectonic activity and sea level. This could have put even more pressure on the elephant’s limited resources and may have led to its extinction around 400,000 years ago.
Hercules Head Unearthed in 2,000-Year-Old Shipwreck Treasure Trove
The Roman ship is thought to have sunk near Antikythera, a Greek island in the southern Aegean Sea in the second quarter of the first century B.C. While divers first found several stunning artifacts from the wreck 100 years ago, a wealth of new treasures has been discovered after experts created the first phases of a precise digital 3D model of the shipwreck.
Scientists made the model using thousands of underwater photographs of the seafloor site in a technique known as photogrammetry.
More discoveries are likely on the way thanks to this new model, but this is not the only thing that helped experts to uncover the treasure trove.
An earthquake is thought to have occurred sometime after the sinking of the ship, and archaeologists had to remove several large boulders that were strewn over the wreck as a result of the event.
In May and June this year, experts used underwater lifting equipment of pressurized airbags to remove the boulders, some of which weighed about 9.5 tons (8.5 metric tonnes).
After this, the huge wealth of treasure that was contained within what was once the ship’s hull was then revealed. While carrying this out, the marine archaeologists were reportedly working at depths of 50 meters so they could access the areas that had never been explored before.
The ship is thought to have once been around 180ft long, but experts say the wooden hull has since rotted away. Amongst the treasure was a huge marble head of a sculpture likely depicting the Greek/Roman demigod Hercules.
Prof Lorenz Baumer, an archaeologist at the University of Geneva, said: “It’s a most impressive marble piece. “It is twice lifesize, has a big beard, a very particular face and short hair. There is no doubt it is Hercules.”
Experts suspect that this head was once attached to a sculpture with the rest of Hercules’ body that was first found by divers way back in 1900.
During this time, they also discovered the Antikythera Mechanism – a mechanical model of the sun, moon and planets that is now on display in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.
Prof Lorenz Baumer said that both finds were likely made in the same area of the ship. He told Live Science: “The site is quite big.
“It’s some 50 meters [164 feet] across, and it’s covered by rocks. It’s possible that [more fragments] are hiding in the rocks, but they could be anywhere.”
The ship also contained Greek artworks, several bronze statues, and over 38 marble sculptures. The research team also discovered two human teeth inside marine deposits and fragments of copper and wood.
Archaeologists had to remove several large boulders that were strewn over the wreck
Now, experts are hoping to analyze isotopes in the enamel of the teeth as this can help uncover the geochemistry of the environment at the time that the teeth were formed.
This can help to reveal things such as a person’s diet or place of origin, and they can also contain DNA.
Stratos Charchalakis, the mayor of Kythira, said: “The ship could have gone down anywhere but, that said, every discovery puts us on the map and is exciting.
“The truth is that for an island with just 30 inhabitants, the wreck has had a huge social and economic impact. It has helped keep its shops and people going.”
Priceless Ancient Bronze Statues Unearthed in Etruscan Baths of San Casciano dei Bagni, Italy
An “exceptional” trove of bronze statues preserved for thousands of years by mud and boiling water has been discovered in a network of baths built by the Etruscans in Tuscany.
The 24 partly submerged statues, which date back 2,300 years and have been hailed as the most significant find of their kind in 50 years, include a sleeping ephebe lying next to Hygeia, the goddess of health, with a snake wrapped around her arm.
Archaeologists came across the statues during excavations at the ancient spa in San Casciano dei Bagni, near Siena. The modern-day spa, which contains 42 hot springs, is close to the ancient site and is one of Italy’s most popular spa destinations.
Close to the ephebe (an adolescent male, typically 17-18 years old) and Hygeia was a statue of Apollo and a host of others representing matrons, children and emperors.
Believed to have been built by the Etruscans in the third century BC, the baths, which include fountains and altars, were made more opulent during the Roman period, with emperors including Augustus frequenting the springs for their health and therapeutic benefits.
Alongside the 24 bronze statues, five of which are almost a metre tall, archaeologists found thousands of coins as well as Etruscan and Latin inscriptions. Visitors are said to have thrown coins into the baths as a gesture for good luck for their health.
Massimo Osanna, the director general of museums at the Italian culture ministry, said the relics were the most significant discovery of their kind since two full-size Greek bronzes of naked bearded warriors were found off the Calabrian coast near Riace in 1972. “It is certainly one of the most significant discoveries of bronzes in the history of the ancient Mediterranean,” Osanna told the Italian news agency Ansa.
The excavation project at San Casciano dei Bagni has been led by the archaeologist Jacopo Tabolli since 2019. In August, several artefacts, including fertility statues that were thought to have been used as dedications to the gods, were found at the site. Tabolli, a professor at the University for Foreigners of Siena, described the latest discovery as “absolutely unique”.
The Etruscan civilisation thrived in Italy, mostly in the central regions of Tuscany and Umbria, for 500 years before the arrival of the Roman Republic. The Etruscans had a strong influence on Roman cultural and artistic traditions.
Initial analysis of the 24 statues, believed to have been made by local craftsmen between the second and first centuries BC, as well as countless votive offerings discovered at the site, indicates that the relics perhaps originally belonged to elite Etruscan and Roman families, landowners, local lords and Roman emperors.
Tabolli told Ansa that the hot springs, rich in minerals including calcium and magnesium, remained active until the fifth century, before being closed down, but not destroyed, during Christian times. The pools were sealed with heavy stone pillars while the divine statues were left in the sacred water.
The treasure trove was found after archaeologists removed the covering. “It is the greatest store of statues from ancient Italy and is the only one whose context we can wholly reconstruct,” said Tabolli.
The recently appointed Italian culture minister, Gennaro Sangiuliano, said the “exceptional discovery” confirms once again that “Italy is a country full of huge and unique treasures”.
The relics represent an important testament to the transition between the Etruscan and Roman periods, with the baths being considered a haven of peace.
“Even in historical epochs in which the most awful conflicts were raging outside, inside these pools and on these altars the two worlds, the Etruscan and Roman ones, appear to have coexisted without problems,” said Tabolli.
Excavations at the site will resume next spring, while the winter period will be used to restore and conduct further studies on the relics.
The artefacts will be housed in a 16th-century building recently bought by the culture ministry in the town of San Casciano. The site of the ancient baths will also be developed into an archaeological park.
“All of this will be enhanced and harmonised, and could represent a further opportunity for the spiritual growth of our culture, and also of the cultural industry of our country,” said Sangiuliano.
800,000-Year-Old Human Footprints Discovered in UK
Archaeologists today announced the discovery of a series of footprints left by a group of adults and children about 800,000 years ago. The prints were first discovered and recorded on the foreshore at Happisburgh in Norfolk, England, in May 2013.
Human footprints, thought to be more than 800,000 years old, discovered at Happisburgh, England
“At first we weren’t sure what we were seeing, but as we removed any remaining beach sand and sponged off the seawater, it was clear that the hollows resembled prints, perhaps human footprints,” said Dr Nick Ashton of the British Museum, the lead author of a paper published in the open-access journal PLoS ONE.
Footprint surface.
Using a technique called photogrammetry, Dr Ashton and his colleagues recorded the surface as quickly as possible before the sea eroded it away. The analysis of images confirmed that the elongated hollows were indeed ancient human footprints, perhaps of five individuals.
The analysis showed that the prints were from a range of adult and juvenile foot sizes and that in some cases the heel, arch and even toes could be identified, equating to modern shoes of up to U.S. size 9-10 (European 39-41).
800,000-year-old human footprint.
“In some cases we could accurately measure the length and width of the footprints and estimate the height of the individuals who made them. In most populations today and in the past foot length is approximately 15 percent of height,” explained co-author Dr Isabelle De Groote of Liverpool John Moores University.
“We can therefore estimate that the heights varied from about 0.9 m to over 1.7 m. This height range suggests a mix of adults and children with the largest print possibly being a male.”
Model of footprint surface produced from photogrammetric survey with enlarged photo of a footprint showing toe impressions.
Over the last ten years the sediments at Happisburgh have revealed a series of sites with stone tools and fossil bones, dating back to over 800,000 years. This latest discovery is from the same deposits.
“Although we knew that the sediments were old, we had to be certain that the hollows were also ancient and hadn’t been created recently,” said co-author Dr Simon Lewis from Queen Mary University of London.
“There are no known erosional processes that create that pattern. In addition, the sediments are too compacted for the hollows to have been made recently.”
Model of footprint surface generated from photogrammetric survey.
The age of the site, 800,000 years ago, is based on its geological position beneath the glacial deposits that form the cliffs, but also the association with extinct animals.
The site also preserves plant remains and pollen, together with beetles and shells, which allows a detailed reconstruction of the landscape. At this time Britain was linked by land to continental Europe and the site at Happisburgh would have been on the banks of a wide estuary several miles from the coast. There would have been muddy freshwater pools on the floodplain with salt marsh and coast nearby.
Deer, bison, mammoth, hippo and rhino grazed the river valley, surrounded by more dense coniferous forest. The estuary provided a rich array of resources for the early humans with edible plant tubers, seaweed and shellfish nearby, while the grazing herds would have provided meat through hunting or scavenging.
Fossil remains of our forebears are still proving elusive.
“The humans who made the Happisburgh footprints may well have been related to the people of similar antiquity from Atapuerca in Spain, assigned to the species Homo antecessor. These people were of a similar height to ourselves and were fully bipedal.
They seem to have become extinct in Europe by 600,000 years ago and were perhaps replaced by the species Homo heidelbergensis.
Neanderthals followed from about 400,000 years ago, and eventually modern humans some 40,000 years ago,” said co-author Prof Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum, UK.
The importance of the Happisburgh footprints is highlighted by the rarity of footprints surviving elsewhere.
Only those at Laetoli in Tanzania at about 3.5 million years and at Ileret and Koobi Fora in Kenya at about 1.5 million years are more ancient.
“These footprints provide a very tangible link to our forebears and deep past,” Dr Ashton concluded.
135-Year-Old Message In A Bottle Found In Floorboards – Amazing Victorian Time Capsule
A rather incredible discovery occurred in Edinburgh, Scotland, where a woman found a 135-year-old message in a bottle under her floorboards.
Everything started in October 1877 when two local workers left a note under the floorboards at a Morningside villa. The message was placed in a bottle and left untouched until now when Eilidh Stimpson, a mother of two found it in her Morningside home in Edinburgh!
“Stimpson couldn’t believe her eyes as she read out the hand-written message on the withered note, which had been rolled up inside an empty whisky bottle since the day the floor was laid.
The Victorian time capsule was discovered on Monday by local plumber Peter Allan who just happened to cut through the exact place in the floorboards where it had been left on October 6, 1887,” the Edinburgh Live reports.
The message in a bottle left mum Eilidh Stimpson stunned on Monday
“It’s pretty cool,” Eilidh, who works as a GP, told Edinburgh Live. “And so lucky as well, because we were meant to be moving a radiator from one side of the wall to the other. The plumber came and started cutting a hole and said it was going to be a bit of a nightmare as there was a floor on top of a floor.
“Then he came down the stairs going, ‘Look at what I just found in the hole I just made!’. It was quite exciting.”
Peter and Eilidh decided to until her children came home from school, and Eilidh’s partner returned from work before opening the bottle and reading the old message.
Together they tried to get the message out of the bottle, but it was easier said than done. There was no way to remove the old note without tearing it, so they had no other option than to break the bottle.
“Eilidh explained: “We were desperately trying to get the note out with tweezers and pliers, but it started to rip a little bit. We didn’t want to damage it further, so regrettably had to smash the Bottle.”
As reported by Edunburgh Live, “untouched for an astonishing 7,049 weeks and four days, the message written on the mysterious parchment was finally revealed.
Signed and dated by two male workers, the message read: “James Ritchie and John Grieve laid this floor, but they did not drink the whisky. October 6th, 1887. Whoever finds this bottle may think our dust is blowing along the road.”
Intrigued to find out more about the workers, a friend of Eilidh’s conducted a bit of research and found that there were two men registered as living in the Newington area by the same names in the 1880s.
Following his incredible discovery, plumber Peter Allan, who works with Bruntsfield firm WF Wightman, told us: “It’s all a bit strange, but what a find! Where I cut the hole in the floor, is exactly where the bottle was located, which is crazy and so random.”
On Wednesday, Eilidh took to social media to share her family’s incredible find with the community.
Eilidh added: “We’ve just been amazingly lucky, and I’m glad everyone thinks it’s as interesting as we do. It feels quite nice to have a positive news story amid all this doom and gloom that’s around at the moment.
The note contained a message from the two workers who laid the floor in 1887
“Now, I’m thinking we need to preserve the note and replace it with a message of our own for future generations to discover.”
Responding to Eilidh’s post on the I Love Morningside page on Facebook, Lucie McAus commented: “I don’t think they ever could have predicted when they wrote it that you would be able to take a photograph using a device no bigger than your hand and put it instantly on a platform that could reach the entire community in a few seconds. Incredible.
“If you place one for the next person who knows how it would be discovered and the information shared? What a lovely timeframe from the past.”
2,000 Years of Genetic History in Scandinavia: Unraveling the Viking Age to Modern Times
A new study published in the journal Cell on January captures a genetic history across Scandinavia over 2,000 years, from the Iron Age to the present day.
This look back at Scandinavian history is based on an analysis of 48 new and 249 published ancient human genomes representing multiple iconic archaeological sites together with genetic data from more than 16,500 people living in Scandinavia today.
Among other intriguing findings, the new study led by Stockholm University and deCODE genetics (Reykjavik) offers insight into migration patterns and gene flow during the Viking age (750–1050 CE). It also shows that ancestries that were introduced into the area during the Viking period later declined for reasons that aren’t clear.
“Although still evident in modern Scandinavians, levels of non-local ancestry in some regions are lower than those observed in ancient individuals from the Viking to Medieval periods,” said Ricardo Rodríguez-Varela of Stockholm University.
“This suggests that ancient individuals with non-Scandinavian ancestry contributed proportionately less to the current gene pool in Scandinavia than expected based on the patterns observed in the archaeological record.”
“Different processes brought people from different areas to Scandinavia,” added Anders Götherström, Stockholm University.
The researchers hadn’t originally planned to piece together Scandinavian history over time and space. Rather, they were working on three separate studies focused on different archaeological sites.
“When we were analyzing the genetic affinities of the individuals from different archaeological sites such as the Vendel period boat burials, Viking period chamber burials, and well-known archaeological sites like the Migration period Sandby borg ringfort, known for the massacre that occurred there in 500 CE, and individuals from the 17th-century royal Swedish warship Kronan, we start to see differences in the levels and origin of non-local ancestry across the different regions and periods of Scandinavia,” Rodríguez-Varela explained.
“Initially, we were working with three different studies,” Götherström said. “One on Sandby Borg, one on the boat burials, and one on the man-of-war Kronan. At some point, it made more sense to unite them to one study on the Scandinavian demography during the latest 2,000 years.”
The goal was to document how past migrations have affected the Scandinavian gene pool across time and space to better understand the current Scandinavian genetic structure.
As reported in the new study, the researchers found regional variation in the timing and magnitude of gene flow from three sources: the eastern Baltic, the British Irish Isles, and southern Europe.
British Irish ancestry was widespread in Scandinavia from the Viking period, whereas eastern Baltic ancestry is more localized to Gotland and central Sweden.
In some regions, a drop in current levels of external ancestry suggests that ancient immigrants contributed proportionately less to the modern Scandinavian gene pool than indicated by the ancestry of genomes from the Viking and Medieval periods.
Finally, the data show that a north-south genetic cline that characterizes modern Scandinavians is mainly due to differential levels of Uralic ancestry. It also shows that this cline existed in the Viking Age and possibly even earlier.
Götherström suggests that what the data reveal about the nature of the Viking period is perhaps most intriguing. The migration from the west impacted all of Scandinavia, and the migration from the east was sex-biased, with the movement primarily of female people into the region.
As the researchers write, the findings overall “indicate a major increase [in gene flow] during the Viking period and a potential bias toward females in the introduction of eastern Baltic and, to a lesser extent, British-Irish ancestries.
“Gene flow from the British-Irish Isles during this period seems to have had a lasting impact on the gene pool in most parts of Scandinavia,” they continued.
“This is perhaps not surprising given the extent of Norse activities in the British-Irish Isles, starting in the 8th century with recurrent raids and culminating in the 11th century North Sea Empire, the personal union that united the kingdoms of Denmark, Norway, and England.
The circumstances and fate of people of British-Irish ancestry who arrived in Scandinavia at this time are likely to have been variable, ranging from the forced migration of slaves to the voluntary immigration of more high-ranking individuals such as Christian missionaries and monks.”
Overall, the findings show that the Viking period in Scandinavia was a very dynamic time, they say, with people moving around and doing many different things. In future work, they hope to add additional genetic data in hopes of learning more about how the ancestries that arrived during the Viking period were later diluted. They’d also like to pinpoint when the north-south cline was shaped based on a study of larger ancient datasets from the north.
“We need more pre-Viking individuals from north Scandinavia to investigate when the Uralic ancestry enters this region,” Rodríguez-Varela said. “Also, individuals from 1000 BCE to 0 are very scarce, [and] retrieving DNA from Scandinavian individuals with these chronologies will be important to understand the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age in this part of the world.
Finally, more individuals from the Medieval period until the present will help us to understand when and why we observe a reduction in the levels of non-local ancestry in some current regions of Scandinavia.”
“There is so much fascinating information about our prehistory to be explored in ancient genomes,” Götherström said.
Ancient Expensive Roman Domus With Beautiful Mosaic Unearthed In Rome
Archaeologists working within the Colosseum Archaeological Park’s research project, have unearthed some rooms of a luxurious domus dated to the late Republican age.
The discovery was made in close vicinity of the Horrea Agrippiana warehouse complex along the Vicus Tuscus (commercial road that connected the river port on the Tiber and the Roman Forum built by Augustus’ son-in-law, Marco Vipsanio Agrippa.)
The domus is spread over several floors, probably divided into terraces, and characterized by at least three building phases dating back to the second half of the 2nd century BC and the end of the 1st century BC.
Distributed around an atrium/garden, the domus presents, as its main environment (the specus aestivus) a banquet hall that imitates a cave, used during the summer season and originally animated by spectacular games of water thanks to the passage of some lead fistulas (pipes) between the decorated walls.
An extraordinary wall decorated with the so-called “rustic” mosaic, characterized by the complexity of the scenes depicted and chronology, makes this discovery unique, researchers say in a press release.
The mosaic – dated to the last decades of the 2nd century BC – is made up of different types of shells, Egyptian blue tiles, precious glass, minute flakes of white marble or other types of stone, tartars (fragments of spongy travertine), and all this is bound by mortar and warps. The mosaic presents a complex sequence of figurative scenes.
In the four aedicules, defined by pilasters and decorated with vases from which shoots of lotus and vine leaves emerge, stacks of weapons are depicted with Celtic-type trumpets (carnyx), prows of ships with tridents, rudders with triremes which allude, perhaps , to a double triumph, land and naval, of the owner of the domus.
The large lunette above also presents a fascinating depiction of a landscape with, in the centre, a city, with a cliff simulated with travertine tartars, overlooking the sea crossed by three large ships, one of which with raised sails; a city wall with small towers surrounds the city equipped with porticoes, gates, and a large public building; on one side a pastoral scene.
The representation of a coastal city could allude to a war conquest by the owner of the domus, belonging to an aristocratic figure, presumably of senatorial rank, according to researchers.
In an adjoining reception room, however, the careful restoration work has brought to light a white stucco covering with landscapes within fake architecture and figures of the highest quality.
“The discovery of a new domus with an environment decorated with a truly extraordinary mosaic represents an important result which demonstrates, once again, how much the Colosseum Archaeological Park and the Ministry of Culture are constantly committed to promoting research, knowledge, protection and enhancement of our extraordinary cultural heritage.
The discovery then has an important scientific value which makes the domus even more relevant.
After the reopening of the Domus Tiberiana and the improvement of the accessibility of the Flavian Amphitheater, with the inauguration of the elevator which now reaches the third level, the heart of Romanity has therefore revealed an authentic treasure, which it will be our responsibility to safeguard and make accessible to the public”, according the Minister of Culture, Gennaro Sangiuliano.
The archaeological excavation will end in the first months of 2024 and then, this specacular ancient structure will be prepared to finally welcome the public.
