Ancient tomb of Pharaoh Ramesses II official discovered at Saqqara
Archaeologists in Cairo have discovered the 3,200-year-old tomb of the chief treasurer of King Ramses II, one of Egypt’s most powerful pharaohs.
The final resting place of Ptah-M-Wia was unearthed in Saqqara, which had been used a necropolis for the Egyptian capital of Memphis for more than 3,000 years.
Saqqara includes other funereal marvels, including the Pyramid of Userkaf and the 4,700-year-old Step Tomb of Djoser, the oldest known pyramid in Egypt.
Archaeologist Ola Al-Ajezi said Ptah-M-Wia’s tomb typifies monumental gravesites in the region, known as tomb-temples, which include an ornate edifice followed by one or more courtyards.
Numerous engraved stone blocks were found buried deep in the sand, she added, as well as columns shaped like Osiris, the Egyptian god of the dead.
Archaeologists unearthed the 3,200-year-old tomb of Ptah-M-Wia, chief treasurer of Ramses the Great. Inside wall paintings showing people leading cattle and other animals to the slaughter (above) relate to his role as chief supervisor of livestock and offerings at the pharaoh’s temple
‘All these pieces will be studied to be put back in their original places inside the tomb,’ Al-Ajezi said, according to Ahram Online. No human remains have been uncovered in the tomb so far.
Inscriptions in Ptah-M-Wia’s tomb indicate he held several positions under Ramses II, who reigned from 1279–1213 B.C., including chief treasurer and chief supervisor of livestock and offerings at the pharaoh’s temple in Thebes.
Archaeologists also found wall paintings showing people leading cattle and other animals to the slaughter, which may relate to the latter role.
Since minted coins weren’t invented yet, Live Science reported, as head of the treasury he would have overseen payments made in goods, precious metals and animals.
The third pharaoh in Egypt’s 19th Dynasty, Ramses II, also known as Ramses the Great, expanded the borders of the empire as far as Syria and was known for monumental construction projects like enlarging the temples at Luxor and Karnak.
Inscriptions in Ptah-M-Wia’s tomb indicate he held several positions under Ramses II, who reigned from 1279–1213 BC and is considered one of Egypt’s greatest pharaohs
The same excavation team has also turned up tombs of other 19th Dynasty statesmen, a period that lasted from 1292 BC to 1189 BC, including those of Ptah-Mas, mayor of Memphis and Basir, a royal ambassador; and Eurkhi, the supreme commander of the army during the reign of Ramses II and his father, Seti I.
Exploration of Saqqara began in the mid-1800s but major discoveries started in the 1970s and 1980s, under Sayed Tawfik, Egypt’s chief archeologist and chairman of antiquities.
In 2011, an excavation team in the necropolis uncovered almost eight million dog mummies next to a temple devoted to Anubis., the canine-headed god of the underworld
Seven years later, archaeologists discovered the tomb of Wahtye, a high priest, decorated with hieroglyphs and statues dating back more than 4,400 years.
In September 2020, archaeologists at Saqqara discovered a cavern filled with more than 100 wooden coffins, the most ever found in Egypt.
Sarcophagi that are around 2,500 years old were among the dozens discovered in 2020 near Egypt’s Saqqara necropolis
New Discoveries Imply Man Arrived in the Americas 26,500 Years Ago
The early inhabitants of North America left behind precious few clues of their existence – a footprint here, a weapon and a mummy there – leading scientists to wonder exactly when the first people arrived on the continent.
Now, two new studies report a stunningly early date: Humans may have been living on the continent at least 30,000 years ago.
Archaeologists explore the vast Chiquihuite Cave in the Chiapas Highlands of northwest Mexico.
That would mean that the first North Americans may have arrived before the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), between about 26,500 and 19,000 years ago, when ice sheets covered much of what is now the northern U.S. and Canada.
However, humans didn’t become widespread on the continent until about 14,700 years ago, when the population boomed.
“These are fascinating studies,” said William Harcourt-Smith, a paleoanthropologist at Lehman College and the American Museum of Natural History, both based in New York City, who wasn’t involved with the research.
“It’s now very clear that modern humans were in the Americas far earlier than we used to think. There have been other sites and scholars suggesting this, but it is rigorous studies like this that really seals the deal.”
In one study(opens in new tab), archaeologists analyzed a remote cave in northwestern Mexico containing human-made stone tools that are up to 31,500 years old, according to dating models. This would push back dates for human dispersal into North America to as early as 33,000 years ago, the researchers said.
Study co-researcher Mikkel Winther Pedersen, an assistant professor in the Section for Geogenetics at the University of Copenhagen, samples cave sediments for DNA. However, the group found only animal and plant DNA, not human DNA.
In the other study(opens in new tab), archaeologists took already-published dates from 42 archaeological sites in North America and Beringia and plugged them into a model that analyzed human dispersal. This model found an early human presence in North American dating to at least 26,000 years ago.
Both studies, published on July 2020 in the journal Nature, go against the “Clovis-first” model, a decades-old hypothesis that early humans arrived in the Americas via Beringia as the last ice age was ending, about 13,000 years ago.
However, scientists have been chipping away at this model for years, as even older sites, including the newly analyzed cave in Mexico, are discovered and dated.
Cave in the mountains
In 2010, researchers found ancient stone tools in Chiquihuite Cave, a site in the mountains that sits 9,000 feet (2,740 meters) above sea level and about 3,200 feet (1,000 m) above the valley floor, the researchers wrote in the study.
The terrain at the cave is challenging to navigate – the roof at the cave’s entrance collapsed about 12,000 years ago, sealing it off – so the team did excavations about 165 feet (50 m) inside the cave.
It was so hard to travel to and from the cave, that the archaeologists ended up living at the site for two seasons – a total of 80 days – in 2016 and 2017.
During that time, the team worked steadily, collecting bone, charcoal and sediment. They used two techniques to date the roughly 1,900 stone tools in the cave: radiocarbon dating and optically stimulated luminescence (OSL).
Archaeologists found what appear to be human-made stone tools dating to the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) layer of the cave.
With OSL, researchers assessed when quartz grains in the sediment had last been exposed to sunlight. To avoid biasing the results, “when we extracted the samples, it had to be in complete darkness,” said study lead researcher and director of the excavation, Ciprian Ardelean, an archaeologist at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas.
The radiocarbon dating and the OSL dates matched, suggesting that the dating was accurate, Ardelean said. Then, the researchers divided the layers into two main sections – a younger layer dating to between 16,600 and 12,200 years ago, which contained about 88% of the stone tools, and an older layer that was about 16,600 to 33,000 years old, which held about 12% of the stone tools.
Ardelean noted that the stone tools show clear signs of human sculpting, including signs that ancient humans hit one type of rock with another to make a sharp, pointed edge, known as a flake.
“You can also see repeated blows on the same spot from different angles when it was harder for them to separate the flakes and they are trying again and again,” Ardelean told Live Science.
However, a hunt for genetic material in the cave yielded only plant and animal DNA (including junipers, firs and pines, bats, bears, voles, deer mice and marmots), but not human DNA.
The tools were of a style never seen before by archaeologists, but this style didn’t change much over the thousands of years. Also, there weren’t many tools given how long the cave was used, so it appears that the cave was used sparsely, he said.
More evidence of human activity may lie closer to the entrance of the cave, but that area would be challenging to excavate because of the collapsed entrance, he said.
In addition, the team found evidence of sulfur, potassium and zinc, elements that could be signs of human activities, such as butchering animals or urination, although it’s also possible that these elements were left by carnivores using the cave, Ardelean said.
Chiquihuite Cave is one of the few analyzed sites indicating that humans lived in North America before the beginning of the LGM, said Justin Tackney, an associate researcher in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Kansas, who was not involved in the study.
“If the authors are correct, Chiquihuite Cave would represent a very significant discovery in our field,” because the site was used up to about 30,000 years ago, Tackney told Live Science.
“This would then lead to questions of which physical routes would these humans have taken to get that far south at such an early date, particularly during the maximal extent of the ice sheets.”
These dates are so early, “the focus now will be on the veracity of those few older lithic artifacts,” Tackney said.
However, the analysis of all of these stone tools shows that the humans who used the cave were flexible enough to deal with the elements so high above sea level, Harcourt-Smith said.
What’s more, “it shows that Mexico is an important region to be focusing on in relation to understanding the earliest humans in the Americas,” Harcourt-Smith told Live Science.
Archaeologists Discover and Crack an Intact, 1,000-Year-Old Chicken Egg
Israel Antiquities Authority has discovered a fully intact 1,000-year-old chicken egg during recent excavations in a town named Yavne.
Though researchers repaired the crack, much of the egg’s contents leaked out.
The archaeologists said the thousand-year-old egg was perfectly preserved by being initially pillowed in soft human poop inside the cesspit.
According to IAA, “the egg had a small crack in the bottom so most of the contents had leaked out of it. Only some of the yolk remained, which was preserved for future DNA analysis”.
Alla Nagorsky and her colleagues examined the ancient egg.
The archeologists said that despite the extreme caution with which the egg was removed, the shell of the egg was cracked by picking it up. However, in the IAA’s organics laboratory, a conservationist restored the egg to the state in which it was found.
“Eggshell fragments are known from earlier periods, for example in the City of David and at Caesarea and Apollonia, but due to the eggs’ fragile shells, hardly any whole chicken eggs have been preserved. Even at the global level, this is an extremely rare find,” says Dr. Lee Perry Gal,” said Dr Lee Perry Gal of the IAA.
Gal said, “In archaeological digs, we occasionally find ancient ostrich eggs, whose thicker shells preserve them intact”.
“The egg’s unique preservation is evidently due to the conditions in which it lay for centuries, nestled in a cesspit containing soft human waste that preserved it,” IAA said.
According to Gal, ancient chickens found in the region, as well as their eggs, were smaller than modern ones. “Chickens were domesticated in southeast Asia relatively recently, around 6,000 years ago, but it took time for them to enter the human diet,” Gal noted.
Alongside the egg, three typical Islamic-period bone dolls used as playthings were also discovered, Gal added.
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.
A fossil of the dolphin-bodied marine reptile known as an ichthyosaur.
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.
Stone Age village dating back 12,000 Years uncovered beside the Sea of Galilee
Archaeologists have discovered the remains of a prehistoric village in the Jordan Valley dating from around 12,000 years ago, The Hebrew University revealed on february 2016.
The site, named NEG II, is located in Wadi Ein-Gev, west of the Sea of Galilee and south of the Golan Heights town of Katzrin, and is estimated to cover an area of roughly 1,200 square meters (three acres).
The NEG II site in the Jordan Valley where archaeologists from The Hebrew university have discovered the remains of a 12,000 year old settlement.
In a series of excavations, archaeologists found numerous artifacts pointing to a vast human settlement including burial remains, flint tools, art manifestations, faunal assemblage and stone and bone tools.
Items uncovered at the NEG II dig site in the Jordan Valley where archaeologists from The Hebrew university have discovered the remains of a 12,00 year old settlement.
While other sites from the same period have been unearthed in the area, the Institute of Archaeology at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem said that NEG II was unique in that it contains cultural characteristics typical of both the Old Stone Age – known as the Paleolithic period – and the New Stone Age, known as the Neolithic period.
“Although attributes of the stone tool kit found at NEG II place the site chronologically in the Paleolithic period, other characteristics – such as its artistic tradition, size, thickness of archaeological deposits and investment in architecture – are more typical of early agricultural communities in the Neolithic period,” said chief excavator Dr. Leore Grosman.
“Characterizing this important period of potential overlap in the Jordan Valley is crucial for the understanding of the socioeconomic processes that marked the shift from Paleolithic mobile societies of hunter-gatherers to Neolithic agricultural communities,” she added.
The Paleolithic period is considered the earliest period in the history of mankind. The end of that era is marked by the transition to agricultural societies with the emergence of settled villages and domestication of plants and animals.
According to Grosman, NEG II was likely occupied in the midst of the cold and dry global climatic event known as the Younger Dryas, when temperatures declined sharply over most of the northern hemisphere around 12,900–11,600 years ago.
Affected by climatic changes, groups in the area became increasingly mobile and potentially smaller in size, she said.
NEG II, however, shows that some groups in the Jordan Valley may have become larger in size and preferred town-like settlements to a nomadic existence.
Researchers said this shift in settlement pattern could be related to climate conditions that provided the ingredients necessary for prehistoric man to take the final steps toward agriculture in the southern Levant.
“It is not surprising that at a number of sites in the Jordan Valley we find a cultural entity that bridges the crossroads between Late Paleolithic foragers and Neolithic farmers,” Grosman said.
Palaeontologists unearth fossil from the day dinosaurs wiped out by asteroid 66 million years ago
Scientists now know that a massive Yucatan asteroid struck the earth 66 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous Period, ultimately causing most species of dinosaur to go extinct.
Unearthed fossil from the day dinosaurs wiped out by asteroid 66 million years ago
It was the sudden change in climate that accompanied this disastrous astronomical collision that made the earth unlivable for these cold-blooded reptiles, leading to the complete disappearance of creatures that had roamed the earth for more than 100 million years.
But there were some dinosaurs who didn’t meet their demise as a result of catastrophic post-asteroid climate change. These dinosaurs lived in what are now known as the Americas, within the range of the impact zone of the Chicxulub strike, which occurred in the Gulf of Mexico just off the northern coast of the Yucatan Peninsula.
These hapless creatures would have been destroyed immediately or soon after the earth-shattering Yucatan asteroid impact, unable to withstand the unimaginably destructive forces unleased in the wake of this planet-killing calamity.
Now, for the first time, paleontologists have uncovered fossilized remains from one of these dinosaurs, an animal killed by the direct physical effects of the Yucatan asteroid, the single most destructive event in the earth’s history.
The Chicxulub Yucatan asteroid hit the Caribbean Sea and somehow cleanly severed the dinosaur’s leg on the same day 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles) away.
Skin-covered Dino Leg Severed by Yucatan Asteroid Blast!
While excavating at the Tanis fossil site in the state of North Dakota, in what is known as the Hell Creek Formation, a team of explorers working under the direction of University of Manchester paleontologist Robert DePalma uncovered the fossilized leg of a Thescelosaurus, a small lizard-like herbivore from the late Cretaceous Period .
Amazingly, the leg was intact and still covered by fossilized skin, suggesting that whatever force had removed the leg had been incredibly powerful and concentrated.
“This looks like an animal whose leg has simply been ripped off really quickly,” Professor Paul Barrett of the Natural History Museum in London, told the BBC.
“There’s no evidence on the leg of disease, there are no obvious pathologies, there’s no trace of the leg being scavenged, such as bite marks or bits of it that are missing.”
The Hell Creek Formation , and the Tanis fossil site it contains, were created in the aftermath of the Chicxulub asteroid strike , 66 million years ago.
The Yucatan asteroid created an impact creator that was 93 miles (150 kilometers) wide, and its collision with the earth sent out echoes of mass destruction radiating in every direction from ground zero.
North America was hit by seismic waves equivalent to those generated in a magnitude 11 earthquake, and soon after by inland waves that were as powerful as those created by the most destructive tsunami.
The Thescelosaurus was apparently killed in a sudden and exceedingly violent fashion, even though the asteroid’s point of impact was approximately 1,900 miles (3,000 kilometers) away.
Putting all the pieces together, it seems clear that the Thescelosaurus was an early and immediate victim of the Yucatan asteroid impact event, which ultimately killed off not only the dinosaurs but up to 75 percent of the animal species living on the planet at that time.
The discovery of the severed dinosaur leg is groundbreaking, paleontologists say, because no other dinosaur fossil has ever been linked directly to the most catastrophic event in earth’s history.
“This is the most incredible thing that we could possibly imagine here, the best case scenario, the one thing that we always wanted to find in this site and here we’ve got it,” Robert DePalma told the BBC .
“Here we’ve got a creature that was buried on the day of impact—we didn’t know at that point yet if it had died during the impact but now it looks like it probably did.”
The paleontologists have been able to reconstruct what happened at Hells Creek Formation after the Yucatan asteroid hit. Following the asteroid strike, rising sea levels and tsunamis would have created an inland sea to the north.
The process that created this sea also would have spawned at least two massive, towering waves that moved so far inland that they actually reached what are now the lands of North Dakota. These enormous waves washed over the Tanis site, and eventually covered the animals that died there with up to six feet (1.8 meters) of sediment.
Between the first and second of these waves, glass beads called tektites would have been raining down from the sky like tiny ballistic missiles, reaching speeds in excess of 200 miles (320 kilometers) per hour.
It is possible one of these tiny but deadly glass pieces struck the ill-fated Thescelosaurus with enough force to slice off its leg and kill it, although this is just one possible explanation for the creature’s death.
Tellingly, the sediment layer at the Tanis site eventually turned into a type of clay rich in iridium. This substance is rare on earth, but asteroids and meteors have it in abundance.
University of Manchester paleontologist Robert DePalma working at the Hell Creek site, where the Yucatan asteroid impact cleanly severed the dinosaur’s leg.
The Dinosaurs’ Final Day, Revealed in Terrifying Detail
The amazing story of the Tanis site will be introduced to the British public on April 15, when BBC One will broadcast a new documentary entitled “Dinosaurs: The Final Day with David Attenborough.”
The documentary was filmed over the course of three years, and as its narrative unfolds Sir David Attenborough will introduce viewers to many of the fossil finds that have been unearthed at Hell Creek Formation since the site was discovered in 2008.
“We’ve got so many details with this site that tell us what happened moment by moment, it’s almost like watching it play out in the movies,” DePalma explained. “You look at the rock column, you look at the fossils there, and it brings you back to that day .”
DePalma and the other paleontologists involved in the research at the Tanis site have yet to submit their latest findings for peer review and publishing. Nevertheless, they chose to reveal what they’d discovered now, to help generate more interest in the upcoming documentary.
Early Christian Pilgrimage Site Excavated in Israel
Archaeologists have unveiled pilgrims’ lamps and other finds from the ”tomb of Salome”, a burial site named after a woman said to have assisted at the birth of Christ.
Inscriptions engraved in stone in ancient Greek including the name of Salome, inside a burial chamber west of Jerusalem.
The tomb was discovered by grave robbers in what is now Tel Lachish national park, west of Jerusalem, in the 1980s.
Subsequent excavations by archaeologists have uncovered a Jewish burial chamber dating back to the Roman period that was taken over by a Christian chapel in the Byzantine era and was still drawing worshippers into the early Islamic period.
An inscription found on the walls of the grotto led the excavation team to conclude it was dedicated to Salome, a figure associated with the birth of Jesus in Eastern Orthodox tradition.
“In the cave, we found tonnes of inscriptions in ancient Greek and Syriac,” said the excavation director, Zvi Firer.
“One of the beautiful inscriptions is the name Salome … “Because of this inscription, we understand this is the cave of holy Salome.”
One of the clay lamps was discovered during the excavations.
Salome’s role as an assistant to the midwife at Christ’s birth is recounted in the Gospel of James, a text dropped from the versions of the New Testament used by most western churches.
“The cult of Salome … belongs to a broader phenomenon, whereby the fifth-century Christian pilgrims encountered and sanctified Jewish sites,” the excavation team said.
Outside the grotto, the team found the remains of a colonnaded forecourt spanning 350 sq metres (3,750 sq ft), suggesting Salome was then a revered figure.
A man shines a light in a cave at the site.
Shops selling clay lamps and other items intended for pilgrims were found around the courtyard, dating from as late as the ninth century, 200 years after the Muslim conquest.
“It is interesting that some of the inscriptions were inscribed in Arabic, whilst the Christian believers continued to pray at the site,” the team said
Two Viking Ships Unearthed Reveal Extremely Rare Viking Burial Practices
Incredibly revealing burials found inside two viking ships have been unearthed in Sweden. Archaeologists are never entirely certain what they will find when they begin digging in any given location.
History lends them clues, of course, about the settlements established nearby and what may be found deep within the earth. But it’s always something of a science-based lottery, one that sometimes rewards their dedication to discovery, but just as often does not.
That wasn’t the case for a team in Sweden recently, who knew precisely what they were going to find under a section of modern homes in this rural area. This past summer, a team of experts were thrilled to come upon unique Viking burial ships near the village of Gamla Uppsala.
When a nearby parish decided to build a new hall for the community, they discovered, instead, extremely rare Viking burial remains. Experts were called in, and a dig proceeded immediately.
Imprint of one of the Viking ships.
The team discovered two burial boats, a unique burial ritual used by the Vikings during the period from 550 — 1000 A.D. One boat was in remarkably good shape, although the other was less well preserved.
Nonetheless, Anton Seiler, a spokesman for the dig, was delighted by the items recovered. He told CNN that the folks buried belonged to a select few in the community, probably well-off individuals who were respected.
“It’s a small group of people who were buried in this way,” he explained in an interview last July. “You can (assume) that they were distinguished people in the society of the time, since burial ships in general are very rare.”
The horse skeleton.
The one boat that was in good shape contained within it — and beneath it — important objects from the period, including a spear and pieces of one shield. Also discovered in the boat were the remains of a dog, a horse, and other animals and birds, including falcons and pigs.
“This is a unique excavation,” said Anton Seiler of Swedish archaeology firm The Archaeologists. “The last excavation of this grave type in Old Uppsala was almost 50 years ago.”
Excavating the horse and dog skeletons.
These finds were even more striking, the experts said. Seiler told CNN, “It is exciting for us since boat burials are so rarely excavated. We can now use modern science and methods that will generate new results, hypotheses, and answers.”
The site was kept out of the news initially, said Johan Anund, a member of The Archaeologists, part of the state-run National Historical Museums, because the team was concerned about vandalism.
In a July interview with the New York Times, Anund confirmed that the find was highly significant in part, because the remains proved that the common custom at the time, cremation, wasn’t undertaken.
“Uncremated boat graves are extremely rare,” he stated in the interview, “and the chance to excavated them is even scarcer.” He added that the dig represents a “once in a lifetime opportunity for archaeologists.”
He added that Gamla Uppsala was an important place during the Viking era, one of political and economic importance.
Anund went on to explain why animal remains were buried. Although the burials were “very pagan,” he said, the fact that they were not cremated, demonstrates that the edicts of Christianity were taking hold.
“It was a message to the ‘other side’ about who was coming there,” he continued. Burying the man with his animals was a way of telling the ‘powers that be’ that a man of significance was resting there. (To strict Catholics, cremation is not an accepted practice even today.)
Kayakers find 8,000-year-old human skull in Minnesota
The skull belonged to a Native American man who likely lived a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
Water flows into the Minnesota River from a pipe connected to the Blue Lake treatment plant in Shakopee, Minnesota.
When a pair of kayakers spotted a skull fragment near the Minnesota River in 2021, local authorities thought they might have a new clue to a missing-persons case. But a forensic examination revealed something much more surprising: The bone was 8,000 years old.
The kayakers had discovered not the remains of a modern murder victim, but a clue to Native American life in the Archaic period, which spanned approximately 8,000 to 1,000 years ago. The examination of the skull revealed that it belonged to a man who lived between 5,500 B.C. and 6,000 B.C.
“To say we were taken back is an understatement,” Renville County Sheriff Scott Hable told the Washington Post(opens in new tab). “None of us were prepared for that.”
The sheriff’s office originally posted a photograph of the skull fragment on social media, but took down the picture after objections from the Minnesota Indian Affairs Council.
The group objected both to the fact that the council and state archaeologist were not first made aware of the discovery, as required by state law, and that the remains were displayed online, MPR News reportedwill not reproduce the photograph here. The remains will be turned over to Upper Sioux Community tribal officials, according to MPR News.
The kayakers discovered the skull in September 2021 near the city of Sacred Heart in southwestern Minnesota. According to the New York Times, the spot where the bone was discovered would normally have been underwater, but a severe drought had lowered the river level.
The forensic examination included a chemical analysis of the amount and type of carbon found in the skull. The decay of an isotope, or variation, of carbon called carbon-14 revealed the age of the skull.
The balance of other isotopes revealed the diet of the individual. This analysis showed that the man it belonged to ate a diet of fish, maize, pearl millet or sorghum.
Little is known about the time period during which the man lived in this region, Kathleen Blue, a professor and department chair of anthropology at Minnesota State University, told the New York Times, but he probably foraged locally, living off a diet of plants, deer, turtles, fish and mussels.
There is evidence of blunt force trauma on the skull fragment, but the injury would not have killed the man, Blue said. The bone shows signs of regrowth and healing, indicating that the man survived whatever caused the damage.
Few human remains from this period have been found in the upper Midwest. In the 1930s, road construction unearthed the skull and partial skeleton of a Native American teenage girl, now known as Minnesota Woman(opens in new tab), who is also thought to be 8,000 to 10,000 years old.
The girl was found with an antler dagger and a conch shell believed to have come from the Gulf of Mexico, indicating an early network of trade among Native American peoples.
ARCHAEOLOGISTS DISCOVER ANCIENT OCHRE MINE THAT UNLOCKS THE LIVES OF EARLY AMERICANS
A team from CINDAQ had been exploring a cave system in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, navigating several kilometres of underwater passages when they came across features within the subterranean landscape that had been unnaturally altered.
They conducted nearly 100 expeditions and collected samples, captured more than 20,000 photographs and gathered hours of 360-degree video footage to enable researchers to study the unnatural formations and archaeological remains in situ.
The CINDAQ divers brought the discovery to the attention of Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) as well as the experts from academia to fully understand its significance.
Researchers have determined that the cave system was inhabited from between 12,000-10,000 years ago, predating the rise of Maya culture and was occupied for around 2,000 years.
During this period, the cave was mined for ochre, a natural clay earth pigment which is a mixture of ferric oxide and varying amounts of clay and sand often used in rock paintings, mortuary practices, painted objects, and for personal adornment.
Hammerstone Tool
Remains of ochre extraction beds and pits have been identified, along with digging tools, navigational markers, and fire pits. In some parts of the cave complex, the cave ceiling is still visibly blackened by what appears to be soot caused by small fires.
Eduard Reinhardt from the School Of Geography & Earth Sciences at McMaster University said: “Most evidence of ancient mining on the surface has been altered through natural and human processes, obscuring the record.
These underwater caves are a time capsule. With all the tools left as they were 10,000 – 12,000 years ago, it represents a unique learning opportunity. It took advanced expertise to work in the caves recovering ochre, so we know it was very valuable for the earliest peoples of the Americas.”
Navigation Marker
Brandi MacDonald from the Archaeometry Laboratory at the University of Missouri said: “What is remarkable is not only the preservation of the mining activity, but also the age and duration of it.
We rarely, if ever, get to observe such clear evidence of ochre pigment mining of Paleoindian age in North America, so to get to explore and interpret this is an incredible opportunity for us. Our study reinforces the notion that ochre has long been an important material throughout human history.”
