Dozens of Extinct Ice Age Animal Remains Found During Construction of a New Town in England
Archeologists found bones from a woolly mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, wolf, hyena, horse, reindeer, mountain hare, red fox and various small mammals
This partial woolly rhinoceros mandible remarkably still has several teeth attached.
These remains included the tusk, molar tooth, and other bones of a woolly mammoth. Experts also found the lower jaw and partial skull of a woolly rhinoceros, with a complete wolf skeleton to follow. Other findings include partial remains of a hyena, horse, reindeer, mountain hare, and red fox, plus the bones of bats and shrews.
Led by AC Archaeology and Orion Heritage, the ongoing excavations took place in a cave near old lime kilns and a local quarry. According to Sherford officials, the animals died at some point between 30,000 and 60,000 years ago. For the experts involved, these extinct megafauna from Britain’s last Ice Age speak a thousand words.
“This is a major discovery of national significance — a once-in-a-lifetime experience for those involved,” said lead archaeologist Rob Bourn. “To find such an array of artifacts untouched for so long is a rare and special occurrence. Equally rare is the presence of complete or semi-complete individual animals.”
The researchers documented the remains at the site before carefully removing them for further off-site analysis.
Fortunately for scientists and historians, requesting heritage institutions to thoroughly search an area prior to construction is commonplace in the United Kingdom. Sherford Consortium developers did so from the very beginning — thereby preventing the destruction of these priceless remains.
The team has since taken the remains off-site for thorough examination. While they’ve dated them to the Middle Devensian period, it’s unclear if all the animals involved lived during the same timeframe or died millennia apart. For Victoria Herridge, an expert in fossil elephants at the Natural History Museum in London, much is left to learn:
“Devon then would have been a bitterly cold and dry place to be, even in summer,” she said. “However, it was also a huge open grassland, capable of supporting vast herds of cold-tolerant animals like the woolly mammoth, the woolly rhino and reindeer, as well as the big carnivores like hyena and wolf that preyed upon them.”
This ancient wolf skull was found alongside its complete skeleton.
“This is vital knowledge. Scientists are still unraveling what role climate and humans played in the extinction of the woolly mammoth and the woolly rhino — and what we can learn from that to protect species threatened by both today.”
While the fact that these bones were preserved for millennia is astounding, Bourn was more impressed that they stayed intact during human activity of the modern age: “Construction happening at Sherford is the sole reason these findings have been discovered and it is remarkable that they have laid undisturbed until now.”
On the other hand, the discovery site itself isn’t particularly easy to access for regular folk. It’s likely precisely because of this that the bones remained so well-preserved.
The Sherford Consortium has since guaranteed that this underground area will be closed off, with no public access allowed — or construction atop to follow.
The remains will be put on display at Plymouth’s new museum
“To have found partial remains of such a range of species here in Devon gives us a brilliant insight into the animals which roamed around Ice Age Britain thousands of years ago, as well as a better understanding of the environment and climate at the time,” said Duncan Wilson, the chief executive of Historic England.
As for the future of these ancient remains themselves, it’s been decided that Plymouth’s new museum The Box will put them on display. With the history of the region safeguarded by those who inhabit it today, museum CEO Victoria Pomery hopes locals will gain warranted insight into their heritage.
“Once all the analysis work is completed it will be a huge honor to care for and display these newly discovered finds, and to play an ongoing part in the public’s understanding of Plymouth and the animals that were here during the Ice Age,” said Pomery.
This woolly mammoth tusk is estimated to be between 30,000 and 60,000 years old.
Whether the animals in question all fell into the pit and died together or merely washed into the cave over time is still a mystery. What is clear, however, is that Devon’s Joint Mitnor cave discovered in 1939 yielded over 4,000 animal bones — and was robbed in 2022 by thieves who stole a 100,000-year-old elephant tooth.
Fortunately, that’s unlikely to occur again, as those in charge appear to be determined to properly guard the newfound site.
Ancient dog-headed statue found during Roman road excavation
Archaeologists in Rome recently unearthed an ancient terracotta statue with a dog’s head that was buried below an urban road. The statue, which is palm-size, shows a pointy-eared pup with long, wavy fur flowing over its head and neck.
The canine figurine may have been a decorative structure for a tomb’s rooftop.
It appears to be wearing a collar dangling a small emblem over its chest, and a circular object rests between its carved paws.
Experts with the archaeology branch of the Italian Ministry of Culture were inspecting a site at Via Luigi Tosti in the city’s Appio Latino district, in preparation for a waterway replacement project.
They discovered the dog-headed statue about 1.6 feet (0.5 meters) below street level, among other funerary artifacts dating from the first century B.C. to the first century A.D., Roma Today reported on Jan. 1. Officials identified three mausoleums that were part of a larger burial complex on the Via Latina, an important ancient Roman road that is more than 2,000 years old.
“Once again, Rome shows important traces of the past in all its urban fabric,” representatives of the Special Superintendency of Archeology, Fine Arts and Landscape of Rome wrote on Instagram (translated from Italian).
In addition to the dog-headed statue, archaeologists at the site also discovered an intact ceramic funerary urn containing bones and the remains of a young man who was buried “in the bare earth,” according to the post.
Charred marks in one of the tombs hinted that there had been a fire, which may have led Roman citizens to abandon the burial complex, ArtNews reported.
While the dog statue superficially resembles carved objects that were added to sloping rooftops as part of drainage systems, it lacks any kind of opening for draining water and its purpose was likely ornamental, according to Roma 2022.
The Via Latina, which was built during the fourth century B.C., ran from Rome’s Porta Latina to the southeast for approximately 124 miles (200 kilometers), and it likely served as an important military highway, according to a study published in 2022 in the journal Papers of the British School at Rome.
Other funerary buildings and catacombs that have been excavated along this once-major thoroughfare are open to the public as part of the Archaeological Park of the Tombs of the Via Latina in Rome.
Visitors can inspect underground tombs decorated with mosaic and frescoed scenes from ancient myths and legends, according to the park website.
3,000-Year-Old Gold Mask, Silk Linked to Enigmatic Civilization Found in China
Archaeologists have uncovered a trove of 3,000-year-old artifacts—including fragments of a gold mask—at Sanxingdui, an excavation site in China’s Sichuan province.
Fragment of a gold mask unearthed at Sanxingdui, an archaeological site in southwest China
As Stephen Chen reports for the South China Morning Post, the researchers, who began digging at the site in 2022, found more than 500 objects, most of which were crafted out of gold, bronze, jade and ivory.
Experts are unsure who made the artifacts, but they speculate that the cache’s creators belonged to the Shu state, a highly skilled civilization conquered by the neighboring state of Qin in 316 B.C. Because the people of Shu left behind few written records, notes Oscar Holland for CNN, historians’ knowledge of their culture is limited.
A major highlight of the find is a 0.6-pound fragment of a gold mask that may have been worn by a priest during religious ceremonies, reports the Global Times’ Chen Shasha.
About 84 percent pure gold, the piece likely weighed close to one pound in its entirety, making it one of the heaviest gold masks from that time period discovered in China to date. The Sanxingdui team found the mask, along with an array of other ornate items, in six rectangular sacrificial pits.
Bird-shaped gold ornament China’s National Cultural Heritage Administration
According to a statement from China’s National Cultural Heritage Administration, other discoveries made at the site included two kinds of silk. The first was found scattered among the ashes in one of the pits, while the second was found wrapped around bronze objects.
Silk has played an important role in China’s millennia-old history. As the statement points out, the ancient inhabitants of Sanxingdui probably wore silk garments during sacrificial ceremonies.
The fiber was thought to serve “as a carrier and medium for communication between heaven, earth, man and god,” notes the statement, per Google Translate. Outside of these religious rituals, silk was used to make fine clothing, fans, wall hangings and banners, as Mark Cartwright wrote for Ancient History Encyclopedia in 2022.
Civilizations across the ancient world, from Rome to Persia to Egypt to Greece, similarly revered Chinese silk, sending traders along the Silk Road to obtain the highly sought-after fabric.
As Tang Fei, head of the excavation team and chief of the Sichuan Provincial Cultural Relics and Archaeology Research Institute, tells state-run news agency Xinhua, the presence of silk at Sanxingdui indicates that “the ancient Shu Kingdom was one of the important origins of silk in ancient China.”
Bronzeware found at the site China’s National Cultural Heritage Administration
Other key discoveries included bronzeware adorned with depictions of beasts and birds, ivory carvings, and gold ornaments. Some of the artifacts bear distinct similarities to objects found along the Yangtze River and in Southeast Asia, suggesting that the enigmatic Shu civilization engaged in “broad exchanges with many areas,” says Zhao Congcang, an archaeologist at Northwest University in Xian, to the Post.
A local farmer stumbled onto jade and stone artifacts at Sanxingdui while repairing a sewage ditch in 1929, wrote Tia Ghose for Live Science in 2022. Since then, researchers have uncovered more than 50,000 ancient items at the site: A major excavation in 1986, for example, revealed two ceremonial pits containing more than 1,000 items, including intricate, well-kept bronze masks, according to CNN.
Experts uncovered a third pit in 2022 and five more last year. Scholars posit that ancient people used these ditches for ritual sacrifices, as many of the items were burned before they were interred.
Song Xinchao, deputy director of the National Cultural Heritage Administration, tells Xinhau that the findings are poised to “enrich and deepen our understanding of the Sanxingdui culture.”
Though Sanxingdui, which has yielded finds dated as far back as the 12th and 11th centuries B.C., isn’t currently acknowledged as a Unesco World Heritage Site, it remains in consideration on a “tentative list.”
4.6-Billion-Year-Old Meteorite Is The Oldest Magmatic Rock Ever Found
A lonely meteorite that landed in the Sahara Desert in 2022 is older than Earth. The primeval space rock is about 4.6 billion years old, and is the oldest known example of magma from space.
The EC 002 meteorite is “relatively coarse grained, tan and beige,” with crystals that are green, yellow-green and yellow-brown
Its age and mineral content hint that the rock originated in our early solar system from the crust of a protoplanet — a large, rocky body in the process of developing into a planet, according to a new study.
The meteorite, called Erg Chech 002 (EC 002), is likely a rare surviving chunk of a lost baby planet that was destroyed or absorbed by bigger rocky planets during our solar system’s formation.
Pieces of EC 002 were found in Adrar, Algeria, in 2022, and the fragments were “relatively coarse grained, tan and beige,” sporadically studded with crystals that were “larger green, yellow-green and less commonly yellow-brown,” according to a description by the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI).
EC 002 is an achondrite, a type of meteorite that comes from a parent body with a distinct crust and core, and lacks round mineral grains called chondrules, according to the Center for Meteorite Studies at Arizona State University.
Approximately 3,100 known meteorites originated in crust and mantle layers of rocky asteroids, but they reveal little about protoplanet diversity when our solar system was young. About 95% come from just two parent bodies, and around 75% of those originated from one source — possibly the asteroid 4 Vesta, one of the largest objects in the asteroid belt, the researchers reported.
A meteoritic rarity
Among the thousands of rocky meteorites, EC 002 stood out. Radioactive versions, or isotopes, of aluminum and magnesium indicated that the meteorite’s parent was an ancient body dating to 4.566 billion years ago, and EC 002’s chemical composition revealed that it emerged from a partly-melted magma reservoir in the parent body’s crust.
Most rocky meteorites come from sources with basaltic crusts — rapidly cooled lava that is rich in iron and magnesium(opens in new tab) — but EC 002’s composition showed that its parent’s crust was made of andesite, which is rich in silica.
“This meteorite is the oldest magmatic rock analyzed to date and sheds light on the formation of the primordial crusts that covered the oldest protoplanets,” the study authors reported.
While EC 002 is highly unusual, other studies have found that such silica-infused andesite crusts were likely common during our solar system’s protoplanet-forming stage, “contrary to what the meteorite record suggests,” the researchers wrote.
“It is reasonable to assume that many similar chondritic bodies accreted at the same time and were capped by the same type of primordial crust,” the study authors said.
Yet, when the scientists peered at distant cosmic objects’ spectral “fingerprints” — wavelength patterns in the light they emit or reflect — and compared them to EC 002, they found no matches. Even after comparison with 10,000 objects in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey database, EC 002 was “clearly distinguishable from all asteroid groups,” the scientists reported.
“No object with spectral characteristics similar to EC 002 has been identified to date.”
Where are all the protoplanets with andesite crusts today? During our solar system’s volatile period of planetary birth, most of these protoplanets likely didn’t make it past infancy, according to the study.
Either they were smashed to bits in collisions with other rocky bodies, or they were absorbed by bigger and more successful rocky planets, such as Earth, Mars, Venus and Mercury, leaving few traces behind to spawn meteorites such as EC 002.
“Remains of primordial andesitic crust are therefore not only rare in the meteorite record, but they are also rare today in the asteroid belt,” the scientists wrote.
Gilded Scythian Sword Found At Mount Mamai Excavations In Ukraine
An intact grave of a Scythian warrior was the main find of the 2022 season at the excavation site at Mount Mamai burial grounds in Zaporizhzhia Oblast.
Gold-plated akinakes (Scythian dagger/short sword) with a leaf-ribbed grip, a cross-guard
In 2022, during excavations and exploration of a small mound on Mount Mamai, archaeologists came across a trench with remains of animal bones and small fragments of amphorae.
These constitute clear signs of a mourning celebration characteristic of the Scythians and other ancient cultures.
The leaf-ribbed grip, cross-guard and scabbard of the Scythian short sword
Further excavation revealed two graves – a larger central burial pit and a smaller one. At first, the archaeological team decided to clear the smaller one. It took almost three days.
Excavation of the warrior’s grave in which the sword was found
While dusting and cleaning the contours of the pit, the archaeologists came across a rare gray clay amphora. In the pit lay a skeleton, which, as later revealed by anthropologists, belonged to a young man aged 18-20 years.
The gilded sword as it was found
Judging by the objects lying nearby, he was a Scythian warrior and horseman. The archaeologists also discovered an iron axe, bronze and bone arrows, and bridle buckles.
The most interesting artifact is a gold-plated akinakes (Scythian dagger/short sword) with a leaf-ribbed grip, a cross-guard and a scabbard for the blade tip.
The gilded sword as it was found
Not only had the young warrior been buried together with his weapons, but also with some ornaments; the archaeological team found beads made of glass paste, a red deer tooth necklace, a gold earring and a gold pendant with chalk inlay.
In total, more than 700 burial sites have been found during excavations at Mamai Hora. 400 are Scythian.
“This grave was adjacent to another, much larger tomb, which had been looted some time ago. We found an arrow tip and bone fragments. An elderly man had been buried here.
It’s quite possible that this 18-20-year-old warrior could have been escorting a prominent leader.” say the archaeologists.
The basis of the Scythian army was lightly armed infantry. But the main strike force was detachments ofheavily armed riders, protected by armour, helmets and shields.
Not only is the dig important because of its ancient treasures and weapons, but it also brings more specific information on the dating of Scythian findings in Mount Mamai area.
Experts date this burial site further back in time – from the 6th century BC, whereas previous Scythian findings were dated from the 4th-3rd century BC.
View of the excavation site
For some time, the excavations work was kept secret as experts and researchers restored artifacts and conducted further studies.
The 32nd archaeological season at Mount Mamai has been called the most successful of all. The artifacts will be preserved in the Museum of Local History in Kamianets-Dniprovsky.
5000-Year-Old Water System Discovered In Western Iran
A 5000-year-old water system has been unearthed during the second season of a rescue excavation project at the Farash ancient historical site at the Seimareh Dam reservoir area in western Iran.
The pipeline of a 5000-year-old water system is seen in a trench dug by anarchaeological team during a rescue excavation project on the beach
An archaeological team led by Leili Niakan has been carrying out a second season of rescue excavation since March after the Seimareh Dam came on stream, the Persian service of CHN reported on 2022.
The team plans to save ancients artifacts and gather information about the ancient sites, which are being submerged by the dam that became operational in early March.
This system, which comprises a small pool and an earthenware pipeline, was discovered on the eastern beach of the dam on the border between Ilam Province and Lorestan Province, Niakan said.
The pipeline of a 5000-year-old water system is seen in a trench dug by an archaeological team during a rescue excavation project on the beach
Part of the water system has been submerged as the water level has risen. However, the team covered that part of the system beforehand to save it for more archaeological excavations while the dam is out of commission.
Each earthenware conduit measures about one meter in length and it is likely that they were made and baked in this region, Niakan stated.
The team is still working on the site to unearth the rest of pipeline, which may lead the archaeologists to the source of pipeline, she added.
An aerial photo of the Seimareh Dam region
Over 100 sites dating back to the Neolithic, Bronze Age, Copper Age, Stone Age, Parthian, Sassanid, and early Islamic periods were identified at the dam’s reservoir in 2022.
Afterwards, 40 archaeological teams from the Iranian Center for Archaeological Research (ICAR) were assigned to carry out Iran’s largest rescue excavation operation on the 40 ancient sites at the reservoirs of the dam in the first season.
Signs of the Mesopotamians’ influence in the region were also identified by studies carried out on the ancient strata at the reservoir.
Most of the sites have been flooded by the dam and the rest will go under water after the filling of the dam is completed.
1,300-year-old fortress-like structure on Siberian lake continues to mystify experts
At first glance, Por-Bajin’s rectangular island, with its regular structure and ruined parts, looks like a foreboding fortress or jail.
what the rectangular island and its labyrinthine ruins, situated in a lake deep in Siberia, were actually used for when it was built 1,300 years ago, But it is unknown for certain.
The mysterious island, Por-Bajin, was found in the centre of a remote lake high in the mountains of southern Siberia
Historians and scientists are divided, but some experts believe that the isolated area may have been constructed to attract people and suggest that it was a summer palace, monastery, or astronomical observatory instead of imprisoning them.
In the Tuvan language, the name Por-Bajin is translated as “clay house,” and the island sits between the Sayan and Altai ranges, near the Mongolian border, about 3,800 km from Moscow.
The location was first discovered in 1891, and the purpose of island has still not been explained over a century later.
Inside the complex of Por Bajin.
More in-depth research took place in 2022 with archaeologists discovering clay tablets of human feet, faded coloured drawings on the plaster of the walls, giant gates and fragments of burnt wood.
Experts say the island was built during the period of the Uighur Khaganate (744-840 AD) but it is not clear what their motive would be for constructing a fortress for in such a solitary place – as it is far from big settlements and trade routes.
The plot thickens as the way it was built, along with the construction materials use, hint at Chinese architectural tradition.
Scientists were able to use laser mapping to create a 3D image of what the 3.5 hectare plot could have been used for.
Por-Bajin reconstruction seen from the east.
Although it is said to be around 1,300 years old, many walls were intact and well preserved with a main structure in the inner courtyard being separated into two parts, covered by a tiled roof walkway supported by 36 wooden columns on stone bases.
Even more confusing than the debate of why it was created is the question of why it was abandoned.
One of the tiles found at Por Bajin.
Researches have noted the lack of heating systems on the island, despite it enduring harsh Siberian weather and being located 7,545 feet above sea level.
Russian president Vladimir Putin visited the island with Prince Albert of Monaco in 2007 and echoed the confusion.
Small yards (left) running along Por-Bajin’s walls each had a building in the center. A digital reconstruction (right) based on excavations shows that each building could have functioned as a dwelling, perhaps for monks if the site were a monastery .
‘I have been to many places, I have seen many things, but I have never seen anything of the kind,’ he said.
A 3.8-million-year-old skull reveals the face of Lucy’s possible ancestors
The cranium of a male Australopithecus anamensis, a close relative of Lucy, provides clues about one of the earliest hominins to walk on two legs
The remarkably complete skull of a human ancestor of the genus Australopithecus fills in some of the gaps in the human evolutionary tree.
Spotting the intact Australopithecus skull in the Ethiopian dirt caused paleoanthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie to literally jump for joy. “It was something that I’ve never seen before, and I’ve seen a lot of cranial fossils,” he says.
The chance discovery by Haile-Selassie and an Ethiopian shepherd has created a captivating portrait of 3.8-million-year-old face, providing an unprecedented look at a hominin species from a key stage of human evolution. Experts say the extraordinary fossil can help redefine the branches of humans’ evolutionary tree during a time when our ancestors had just evolved efficient ways to walk upright.
“This cranium looks set to become another celebrated icon of human evolution,” Fred Spoor, a human evolution researcher at the Natural History Museum in London, writes in a News & Views article that accompanied Haile-Selassie and colleagues’ new study in the journal Nature.
The amazingly complete skull surfaced at Woranso-Mille, in Ethiopia’s Afar region, back in 2022. But it has taken 3 and a half years of hard work to answer the first question that arose—just what kind of skull is it?
Composite image of human hands holding “MRD” by Jennifer Taylor.
Haile-Selassie and colleagues compared the skull (dubbed MRD after part of its collection ID number) with a wide variety of hominin fossils from across Africa. They sized up different morphological features to see what species the cranium represents and where it fits in the interconnected lineages of our family tree. The results identify the skull as belonging to a male Australopithecus anamensis. The hominin species is theorized to have vanished a bit earlier than 3.8 million years ago after giving rise to a later lineage, Australopithecus afarensis, to which the famed fossil Lucy belongs. A. anamensis has traits of both apes (climbing arms and wrists) and humans (changes in the ankles and knee joints to facilitate walking on two feet).
Most previous fossil specimens of A. anamensis are limited to small bits of bone, such as a tooth, partial jaw, or fragment of arm or shin. The opportunity to study a nearly complete braincase and face confirms the “southern ape” as a unique species and shines light on the differences between two of our most ancient hominin ancestors, A. anamensis and A. afarensis.
“Most of A. anamensis’ own traits are quite primitive,” Haile-Selassie says, noting the individual’s small brain, protruding face and large canine teeth. “There are a few features exclusively shared with A. afarensis, like the orbital region in the frontal area. But everything else is really primitive. If you look at it from the back, it looks like an ape. This is something that I never expected to see in a species that is hypothesized to be the ancestor of A. afarensis. So it changed the whole gamut of ideas in terms of the relationship between those two.”
The skull also casts doubt on prevailing ideas that the older lineage directly gave rise to the younger, instead suggesting that the two lived together, coexisting for at least 100,000 years. But the study authors stress that it’s still quite possible that early populations of A. anamensis gave rise to A. afarensis perhaps 4 million years ago—they just didn’t die out immediately afterwards.
“Probably a small population of A. anamensis isolated itself from the main population, underwent major changes, and over time distinguished itself from the parent species of A. anamensis. That’s probably how A. afarensis appeared,” Haile-Selassie says.
A reconstruction of the facial morphology of the 3.8 million-year-old ‘MRD’ specimen of Australopithecus anamensis
The research team argues that the relationship between the two ancient hominin species, believed to be ancestors to our own genus Homo, may be a prime example of a nonlinear evolutionary scenario common in other non-human species. Anagenesis, when one species evolves so completely into another species that the progenitor disappears, is not the primary way the branches on our family tree diverged.
“Just because one species gave rise to another, it doesn’t mean that the source species (ancestor) disappeared,” Rick Potts, head of the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program who was not involved in the new study, says via email from a dig in Kenya. “We’ve known for some time that the human family tree is branching and diverse, like the evolutionary trees of almost all other species. The new cranium is significant because it illustrates this pattern of biodiversity in a poorly known period of hominin evolution, just as our ancestors evolved a stronger and stronger commitment to walking on two legs.”
Paleoanthropologist Meave Leakey and colleagues reported in 1995 that A. anamensis was the first known species to evolve an expanded knee joint that allowed each of its legs to briefly bear all of its body weight during bipedal walking. Bipedalism set our ancestors apart from the apes, enabling ancient hominins to take advantage of a wider range of habitats than those available to tree climbers.
A second, related study helped to more precisely date the cranium fossil by investigating minerals and volcanic layers where it was found. The work also helped describe the long-vanished world in which A. anamensis and his kin lived.
The 3.8 million-year-old cranium of the ‘MRD’ specimen of Australopithecus anamensis.
The skull was buried in sand that was deposited in a river delta on the shores of an ancient lake. The sediment deposits also held botanical remains, revealing that the environment around the ancient lake was predominantly dry shrubland, but there was a mixture of other local ecosystems as well.
“There were forests around the shores of the lake and along the river that flowed into it, but the surrounding area was dry with few trees,” Beverly Saylor, a geologist at Case Western Reserve University and lead author of the second study, said at a press conference. The evidence suggests that, like contemporaries from other sites, the male hominin likely dined on a tough, ape-like diet of seeds, grasses and similar fare.
Haile-Selassie and colleagues have been working in the area of Woranso-Mille, Ethiopia, for 15 years. When a local shepherd showed up in camp to announce the find of some intriguing fossils, Haile-Selassie was skeptical, especially because locals had often dragged him to visit supposed fossil sites simply because they needed a ride somewhere. He asked Habib Wogris, the local chief who organizes fieldwork in the region each year, to take an hour-long walk with the shepherd to visit the site of his find.
“The chief has seen a lot of teeth of hominins from the site and he realized that this tooth looked like a hominin tooth,” Haile-Selassie says. “As soon as he returned and opened his hand and I saw the tooth, I said, ‘Where did you find it?’ They said, ‘let’s go and we’ll show you.’”
The fossil site was in the region’s high ground, where the shepherd had moved his flock to escape seasonal flooding in lower areas. “He’s been living there like three months with his goats, and he saw the fossil when he was digging a hole for his newborn goats to make a protection for them from jackals and hyenas,” Haile-Selassie says.
Yohannes Haile-Selassiewith “MRD” cranium.
On site, the shepherd showed him where the tooth had been lying, and Haile-Selassie surveyed the surroundings looking for other fragments.
“Three meters from where I was standing there was this round thing, just like a rock, and I said oh my goodness,” Haile-Selassie’s recalls. His reaction, literally jumping up and down with excitement, made the shepherd remark that the doctor had gone crazy. “I speak their language, and I said no the doctor is not going crazy. He’s just excited,” Haile-Selassie laughs.
With the rare fossil’s formal unveiling today, the excitement of the initial find three years ago has spread throughout the community of scientists looking to put a human, or hominin, face on our distant ancestors.
9,000-Year-Old Stone Houses Found On Australian Island
Archaeologists working on the Dampier Archipelago, just off the West Australian coast, have found evidence of stone houses dated to shortly after the last ice age, between 8,000 and 9,000 years ago – making them the oldest houses in Australia.
The Dampier Archipelago is a group of 42 islands, and on one of the islands, the team uncovered knee-high rock walls.
“Excavations on Rosemary Island, one of the outer islands, have uncovered evidence of one of the earliest known domestic structures in Australia, dated between 8,000 and 9,000 years ago,” said lead researcher Jo McDonald, from the University of Western Australia.
“This is an astounding find and has not only enormous scientific significance but will be of great benefit to Aboriginal communities in the area, enhancing their connections to their deep past and cultural heritage.”
The researchers suggest that the structures’ inhabitants used branches or other plant materials to make the roofs. The houses are also quite sophisticated, with multiple ‘rooms’.
“Inside the houses, you have separate areas – it could have been a sleeping area and a working area. There is evidence of people grinding seeds on the rock floors inside the houses as well as shell food remains,” McDonald told Paige Taylor from The Australian.
“We don’t really know what they were used for as these types of structures were not used in the historic periods.”
This particular structure should help researchers to investigate how Aboriginal groups lived after the ice age – a time when sea levels rose 130 metres, at a rate of 1 metre every five to 10 years. This would have eventually cut the Archipelago islands off from the mainland.
“We assume they were a way of marking out social space for groups living close together as the sea level rose after the ice age, pushing groups inland into smaller territories,” says McDonald.
“While these people were hunter-gatherers, these structures suggest people were developing social strategies to be more sedentary, to cope with environmental change.”
The team discovered the houses back in 2022, but they have only recently been dated using shells of edible mangrove gastropods found inside.
Although the researchers haven’t yet published a paper, so we can’t get too excited until then, there should be more information released as the team find it, and they will hopefully publish a paper in the next few months.
Murujuga, which includes the islands and the nearby Burrup peninsula, are also hugely culturally important to the Aboriginal people in the area, and important for researchers trying to understand the past. A number of interest groups are pushing for Murujuga to become World Heritage listed.
“As well as containing more than one million rock engravings of great scientific and cultural significance, the Archipelago is home to one of the country’s largest industrial ports,” McDonald said in a statement today.
She says that research from the last 12 months indicates that there was a human occupation in the area dating back 21,000 years, even before the last ice age.
Just 100 km west, on Barrow Island, researchers have also found evidence of human occupation dating back 50,000 years.
According to McDonald, although there are similar structures around Australia, the houses on Rosemary Island are the oldest found.
We hope this valuable area will be protected for many years to come.
What Prompted the Mass Sacrifice of Hundreds of Children and Llamas in Ancient Peru?
Archaeologists think the ritual, which felled 137 children and 200 llamas, might have been motivated by recent natural disaster.
Without a time capsule, it’s impossible to know what exactly prompted this mass sacrifice. But recent flooding may have prompted leaders to organize a mass ritual that brought together sacrificial victims from across the vast Chimú empire
The Peruvian archaeologist had been midway through a dig on the outskirts of his hometown of Huanchaco when a local business owner contacted him with alarming news: His two children had trudged home from a long day of play carrying a cache of what looked like human bones.
Prieto dropped everything. Shortly after seeking permission from Peru’s Ministry of Culture to conduct an emergency excavation, he and his team began to dig. “From the very beginning, I realized this was something big,” Prieto says.
He was right to follow his hunch. Within hours of breaking ground, the researchers had uncovered the skeletal remains of dozens of bodies dating back some 550 years—evidence of what would become known as one of the largest mass child sacrifices unearthed in history.
Eight years later, Prieto and his colleagues chronicle their years-long excavation in a study published today in the journal PLOS ONE. According to the researchers, around 140 children and 200 young llamas were among those sacrificed around 1450 CE, near the capital of what was then Peru’s Chimú Empire. Though the motivations behind the ritual remain mysterious, it’s possible the massacre occurred in response to a destructive bout of heavy rainfall and coastal flooding.
“This is unprecedented,” says Sara Juengst, a bioarchaeologist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who was not involved in the study. “I’ve been working in South America for 10 years, and I have never heard of anything like this before.”
The sacrificial site, known as Huanchaquito-Las Llamas, dates back to the later years of the Chimú Empire, Peru’s most prominent pre-Incan civilization. Today, Las Llamas is located on the outskirts of the city of Trujillo, home to nearly 2 million people. In recent years, Trujillo’s rapid urban expansion has encroached on several archaeological sites, inadvertently revealing occasionally gruesome artifacts.
Such was the case with Las Llamas when, in 2022, the now infamous collection of human and animal bones began to erode out of a roadside dune. It didn’t take long for the site and its artifacts to draw the attention of an international group of researchers, including John Verano, a biological anthropologist at Tulane University. “I’ve worked in this area for 33 years, but we really had no idea that anything at this scale had ever happened,” Verano says. “Globally, there is nothing comparable. It’s a pretty dramatic and unexpected discovery.”
In one of the largest mass child sacrifices ever documented, 137 children, 3 adults, and 200 young llamas lost their lives.
The brutal final tally yielded the remains of at least 137 children, 3 adults, and 200 young llamas. Early on in the excavation, consistent motifs among the dead indicated that the researchers had stumbled upon a sacrificial event, rather than a typical burial ground.
Among the children, boys and girls alike were selected for the ritual, and appeared to encompass several different ethnic groups within the Chimú Empire which, at its peak, held dominion over a 600-mile-long territory from just south of Ecuador down to central Peru. All the children appeared healthy at time of death, with most in the range of eight to 12 years old, though several might have been as young as five or as old as 14.
These stunning numbers highlight a purposeful cultivation of youth for a clear sacrificial event, says Tiffiny Tung, a bioarchaeologist at Vanderbilt University who was not involved in the study. “This was not a weird demographic blip,” she says. “There was a very clear, conscious decision that this ritual had to be enacted through the bodies of children.”
Among the Chimú, children were likely considered transitional beings, hovering between human and godlike, celestial and earthly. On the cusp of adulthood, their bodies were more androgynous, their societal roles not yet crystallized. Lost to sacrifice, those futures would never come to be, Prieto says. This could have been the Chimú peoples’ way of offering up the most precious thing they could conceive of.
In light of this, the llamas might seem an afterthought. But as a source of food, transportation, and fiber for textiles, these animals represented a valuable commodity in pre-Hispanic Peru. Such a culling would have amounted to significant economic loss for the ancient Chimú, Verano says.
Bolstering the case for sacrifice, close examination of the remains revealed that the children and llamas were probably killed by expert hands. Many of the bodies showed the same patterns of damage to the breast bones and ribs, hinting that their chests had been sliced open and pulled apart so their hearts could be removed, perhaps for a separate rite.
No written records from Chimú society survive, so the significance of the heart, like much else, remains an open question. But Verano has theories. “The heart beats—it’s the thing we can feel in our chests,” he says. “That’s a very dramatic thing, and many ancient societies considered it an important organ. It may have been something seen as related to life and strength.”
The victims’ bodies were then placed in what seem to be purposeful arrays, with most of the children interred facing the sea to the northwest and the llamas looking to the Andes in the east. Whatever symbolism underlies this sacrificial choreography isn’t entirely clear, but the consistency of the arrangement indicates it had some significance.
“This is a phenomenal contribution to our understanding of ritual practices in the Andes,” Tung says. “These were not isolated one-offs. This was a very premeditated, sanctified, ritually codified practice.”
The three adults—two women and a man—pose more of a puzzle, however. While their chests weren’t opened, all three were buried close to the children and llamas, and appear to have been part of the ritual. Prieto thinks that the women might have been caretakers for the children during the extended congregation that likely preceded such a large, coordinated ritual. The man, on the other hand, might have been the executioner himself.
Most of the victims of the sacrifice appear to have had their hearts removed in the process. Their bodies were then buried in specific arrangements that put the remains of human and llama side by side.
lso unveiled during the excavation was a series of footprints preserved in a layer of dried mud. The imprints paint a grim portrait of barefooted children, sandaled adults, and leashed llamas, all hailing from different locales, but converging on a single sacrificial site—a macabre, unifying march to the death.
In this soil might also lie some of the only clues about the motivations behind this grisly assembly. Under normal conditions, the landscape of Las Llamas featured a series of sandy dunes. But at the time of the sacrifice, the area had recently been blanketed by a thick, impressionable layer of heavy mud, clay, and gravel, possibly due to a recent climate event related to El Niño.
Uncharacteristically warm ocean waters might have taken their toll on marine food sources, while the torrential downpour and flooding could have ravaged the Chimú peoples’ extensive infrastructure of agricultural canals. In light of such devastation, the sacrifice might have been a desperate attempt to quell the onslaught.
It’s hard to know for sure if natural disaster was truly enough to prompt such a strong reaction, Verano says, but it wouldn’t be the first time two such events were linked. For leaders who ruled under the guise of near-omnipotence, inclement weather could give the impression that they’d lost their edge, he explains.
Others, however, have noted that the sacrifice occurred somewhat close to the cataclysmic conquest of the Chimú by the Inca around 1470 CE. Verano has “a hard time making a logical sense out of killing your children to stop a military conquest,” but it’s still possible the urgency of both situations built off each other.
Either way, the sacrifice might have served several purposes—an effort to appease the gods, perhaps, or a timely display of power. “This tells us about the authority of the Chimú state,” Tung says. “A ritual like this sends a strong message. It’s a way to subjugate and create social control [amongst your own people] without even touching the flesh of others.”
The sacrifice may have been the Chimús’ desperate attempt to appease the gods in the wake of recent rains and flooding.
Going forward, this excavation might not be unique: The researchers are already hard at work at another site nearby, where the numbers are so far looking similarly staggering. But the final chapter on Las Llamas itself has yet to be written. The researchers are still conducting additional testing on these remains, including more in-depth DNA analysis that might help determine if any of the victims were related to each other.
In the meantime, the researchers stress that they don’t want these findings to be taken the wrong way. Dark though this display was, there was probably an element of honor in participating in the sacrifice, Juengst says. “It may be something that’s hard for us to conceive of, but the belief may have been that this would help society in some way,” she says. “It wasn’t necessarily malevolent or violent. And unless we’re within that cultural context, it’s hard to judge.”
And while child sacrifice is a taboo topic in the modern world, it’s important not to deny the reality of a culture’s past, says Vera Tiesler, a bioarchaeologist at the University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States who was not involved in the study. “We shouldn’t deny these societies their real history,” she says. “We need to comprehend it in an objective way—interpret the evidence, understand it, and go as deeply as we can.”
