1,800-year-old Headless Greek Statue Found at Turkey’s Metropolis Site
Archaeologists in western Turkey have unearthed a 1,800-year-old marble statue from the ancient ruins of Metropolis, known as the ‘City of the Mother Goddess’ during the Roman period.
Earlier this month, the Turkish Culture and Tourism Ministry’s Department announced the discovery of the Roman-era statue, a robed female figure with her head and both arms missing.
The limbs were probably attached separately, according to Art News, though more work needs to be done to uncover the identity of the figure, researchers say.
The current excavation is a collaboration between the ministry and Celal Bayar University in Manisa, Turkey.
Metropolis (Greek for ‘mother state’) was a name bestowed on various cities, though this one is in Western Turkey’s Torbali municipality, about 25 miles from modern-day Izmir, the country’s third-largest city.
Humans have occupied the land for at least 8,000 years, since the Neolithic period.
Artifacts indicate it was inhabited by Hittites during the Bronze Age (when it was known as Puranda) and were also active during the Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman periods.
It was founded as Metropolis by the Greeks in roughly 300 BC and, despite its matriarchal name, was home to one of only two known temples devoted to Ares, the Greek god of War.
The sculpture dates to the Metropolis Roman era—when the empire controlled Anatolia, the portion of Turkey located on the Asian continent.
Roman scientist-philosopher Ptolemy described the town as an important trading post in Lydia, about halfway along the ancient trade routes between Smyrna and Ephesus.
Though the figure’s head and arms are missing archaeologists say she is otherwise quite well-preserved
Fieldwork began in the region in the 1970s, with excavations at Metropolis starting in the mid-1980s.
Since then, archaeologists have uncovered more than 11,000 artifacts, according to Art News, including coins, ceramics, glass, ivory and metal objects.
The city ‘has a deep-rooted history dating back to prehistoric times,’ Celal Bayar University archaeologist Serdar Aybek told the Turkish-language Demirören News Agency in January, according to an English-language report in Arkeonews.
‘It has the fertility brought by the Küçük Menderes River. It is a region that has always been settled.’
Notable finds include a Hellenistic marble seat of honour uncovered in the outdoor theatre, elaborate Roman baths featuring sculptures of Zeus and Thyke, goddess of good fortune, as well as other Roman-era buildings including a sports complex, government building, various shops, galleries and public toilets.
More recently, four massive interlocking cisterns big enough to hold 600 tons of water were uncovered in the city’s acropolis last year. It’s believed they were used during the Late Roman period and may have been helpful when the city was under siege by invaders.
In the 12th and 13th centuries, when the cisterns were no longer used to provide water, they became a garbage dump, with animal bones, broken ceramics and other detritus of daily life found on the site, according to the Daily Sabah.
Humans were in South America at least 25,000 years ago, giant sloth bone pendants reveal
Humans were living in Brazil earlier than previously thought, prehistoric sloth-bone pendants suggest.
The date that humans arrived in South America has been pushed back to at least 25,000 years ago, based on an unlikely source: bones from an extinct giant ground sloth that were crafted into pendants by ancient people.
An artist’s interpretation of a human crafting a pendant from a giant ground sloth bone around 25,000 years ago in what is now Brazil.
Discovered in the Santa Elina rock shelter in central Brazil, three sloth osteoderms — bony deposits that form a kind of protective armor over the skin of animals such as armadillos — found near stone tools sported tiny holes that only humans could have made.
The finding is among the earliest evidence for humans in the Americas, according to a paper published Wednesday (July 12) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Researchers in Brazil found three giant ground sloth osteoderms that were polished and had holes in them.
The Santa Elina rock shelter, located in the Mato Grosso state in central Brazil, has been studied by archaeologists since 1985. Previous research at the site noted the presence of more than 1,000 individual figures and signs drawn on the walls, hundreds of stone tool artifacts, and thousands of sloth osteoderms, with three of the osteoderms showing evidence of human-created drill holes.
The newly published study documents these sloth osteoderms in exquisite detail to show that it is extremely unlikely that the holes in the bones were made naturally, with the implication that these bones push back the date humans settled in Brazil to 25,000 to 27,000 years ago.
These dates are significant because of the growing — but still controversial — evidence for very early human occupation in South America, such as a date of 22,000 years ago for the Toca da Tira Peia rock shelter in eastern Brazil.
Using a combination of microscopic and macroscopic visualization techniques, the team discovered that the osteoderms, and even their tiny holes, had been polished, and noted traces of stone tool incisions and scraping marks on the artifacts. Animal-made bite marks on all three osteoderms led them to exclude rodents as the creators of the holes.
“These observations show that these three osteoderms were modified by humans into artefacts, probably personal ornaments,” the researchers wrote in their paper.
The osteoderms had traces of stone tool incisions and scraping marks, which suggests they were modified by humans.
In an email to , study co-author Mírian Pacheco, a lecturer in paleontology at the Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil, noted that “it is virtually impossible to define the real meaning these artifacts had for the occupants of Santa Elina.”
However, the shape and large number of osteoderms “may have influenced the making of a specific type of artifact such as a pendant,” she said.
The presence of human-modified sloth bones in association with stone tools from geological layers that date to 25,000 to 27,000 years ago is strong evidence that people arrived in South America far earlier than previously assumed.
It’s possible that ancient humans wore these bones as pendants.
Our evidence reinforces the interpretation that our colleagues working on Santa Elina have been talking about for 30 years,” Thaís Pansani, a paleontologist at the Federal University of São Carlos in Brazil, said in an email to Live Science — namely, that “humans were in Central Brazil at least 27,000 years ago.”
The finding shows that ancient people used sloth remains in a variety of ways, said Matthew Bennett, a geologist at Bournemouth University in the U.K. who has researched human-sloth interactions in North America but was not involved in this project.
“This is an exciting piece of work which may, in time, support the idea of peopling of the Americas during the Last Glacial Maximum,” the coldest part of the last ice age, Bennett in an email.
However, many sites in South America have not yet been fully studied, meaning the debate about humans’ arrival in the Americas is far from over.
“We believe that there should be more evidence waiting to be found in the rock shelters and caves of Brazil in places little or not explored,” Pansani said.
5,000-Year-Old Tavern With Food Still Inside Discovered in Iraq
Archaeologists have unearthed the remains of an ancient tavern that’s nearly 5,000 years old in southern Iraq, the University of Pennsylvania announced last week.
Researchers discovered an ancient tavern at Lagash in southern Iraq.
The find offers insight into the lives of everyday people who lived in a non-elite urban neighborhood in southwest Asia around 2700 B.C.E.
Inside the public eating space—which included an open-air area and a kitchen—researchers with the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Pisa found an oven, a type of clay refrigerator called a zeer, benches and storage containers that still held food.
They also found dozens of conical-shaped bowls that contained the remains of fish, reports CNN’s Issy Ronald.
The tavern was discovered at Lagash, a 1,000-acre archaeological site that was a bustling industrial hub with many inhabitants during the Early Dynastic period. Researchers say Lagash was one of the largest and oldest cities in all of southern Mesopotamia.
An aerial view of the Lagash site in southern Iraq
“The site was of major political, economic and religious importance,” says Holly Pittman, an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania and the Lagash project director, in a statement from the university.
“However, we also think that Lagash was a significant population center that had ready access to fertile land and people dedicated to intensive craft production.”
Researchers have been conducting the most recent round of Lagash excavations since 2019, but work at the site dates back to the 1930s. Over the past four years, researchers have used an array of high-tech techniques to better understand the site, including capturing drone imagery and conducting magnetometry analysis.
They’ve also collected and studied sediment samples from as deep as 80 feet below the surface to understand the site’s geological and geophysical evolution over the years.
“It’s not like old-time archaeology in Iraq,” says Zaid Alrawi, project manager for the Lagash project at the Penn Museum, in the statement.
“We’re not going after big mounds expecting to find an old temple. We use our techniques and then, based on scientific priority, go after what we think will yield important information to close knowledge gaps in the field.”
To investigate the ancient tavern just 19 inches below the surface, the archaeologists used a technique that involves excavating thin horizontal sections one by one. Discovering the tavern suggests that the society at Lagash included a middle class, in addition to enslaved individuals and elites.
Archaeologists have also unearthed pits that held clay at Lagash.
“The fact that you have a public gathering place where people can sit down and have a pint and have their fish stew, they’re not laboring under the tyranny of kings,” says Reed Goodman, an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania, to CNN. “Right there, there is already something that is giving us a much more colorful history of the city.”
The researchers’ other discoveries at the site include an area where the city’s ancient inhabitants once made pottery, complete with six ceramic kilns, benches and a table. They also found a domestic dwelling that contained a toilet and a kitchen.
“As you excavate, you analyze and create a story that we hope gets closer and closer to the reality of the past,” says Alrawi in the statement.
Why were dozens of people butchered 6,200 years ago and buried in a Neolithic death pit?
Around 6,200 years ago, 41 people in what is now Croatia were killed and buried in a mass grave, and members of their own community may have murdered them, according to new analysis of the remains.
Blunt force cranial injuries that occurred at or near the time of death in two individuals from Potočani: (left) a boy age 11 to 17 years old, and (right) a young adult female.
Adult men and women were among the dead, but ages in the group ranged from 2 years old to 50 years old, and about half of the skeletons belonged to children. Many of the killing blows were strikes to the skull that landed from behind, and there were no marks on the arm bones that indicated the victims tried to defend themselves from their attackers, scientists reported in a new study.
Genetic analysis showed that about 70% of the deceased were not closely related to other victims, but all shared common ancestry. Researchers suspect that the massacre may have been prompted by a sudden population boom or shift in climate conditions that depleted resources and led to indiscriminate mass murder.
The grave was discovered in 2007, when a man who lived in a small village in the hills of Potočani, Croatia, was digging a foundation for a garage, and heavy rains exposed a pit holding dozens of skeletons.
Archaeologists with the University of Zagreb happened to be conducting a survey nearby, and they were able to start investigating the mass grave on the day it was discovered, said Mario Novak, lead author of the new study and head of the Laboratory for Evolutionary Anthropology and Bioarchaeology at the Institute for Anthropological Research in Zagreb, Croatia.
The pit is small, measuring about 6.5 feet (2 meters) in diameter and 3 feet (1 m) deep, and at least 41 bodies had been unceremoniously dumped there. At first, the archaeologists thought that the remains were modern, either from World War II or the Croatian War of Independence in the 1990s, Novak .
But there were no contemporary objects in the pit — just fragments of pottery that looked to be prehistoric. And when researchers inspected the victims’ teeth, they found no dental fillings. Radiocarbon dating of bones, soil and pottery fragments confirmed the age of the burial, dating it to around 4200 B.C.
The researchers identified 21 of the victims as children between the ages of 2 years and 17 years old, and 20 as adults between 18 years and 50 years old; 21 of the dead were male and 20 were female.
The Potočani mass burial, with the upper layers of the pit showing numerous commingled skeletons.
“Just random killing”
But how did they end up buried together? For the new study, Novak and his colleagues sampled DNA from remains and analyzed the bones of 38 individuals. When the researchers inspected the bodies, they found that most had at least one traumatic injury at the back of the skull, and some skulls had as many as four punctures.
Mass graves in medieval Europe frequently contained people of all ages and sexes who succumbed to the Black Death, but the victims in the Potočani pit died by violence, not of infectious disease, Novak explained.
“The only plausible scenario was a massacre,” he said.
Distribution of men and women, and of adults and children, was roughly equal, and there were no wounds to their limbs or faces, so they likely weren’t killed in a skirmish during combat. It is unknown if the victims were restrained or otherwise incapable of defending themselves — “if someone attacks you with a club or a sword, you reflexively raise up your forearm to protect the head,” which would have left at least some remains with cut marks on the arm bones, Novak said. “But we didn’t see any facial injuries, and no defensive injuries whatsoever.”
Genetic data showed that only 11 of the victims were close relatives, so the massacre wasn’t targeting a specific family group. Neither did it look like a planned discriminatory killing, in which foes tended to murder older men while taking women captive.
“In this case, it was just random killing, without any concern for sex and age,” Novak said.
A Neolithic death pit that was recently described in Spain also held a jumble of skeletons — male and female, young and old. DNA showed that the victims were recent arrivals to the region, so they may have been slaughtered by locals protecting their territory, previously reported. But genetic evidence from the site in Potočani indicated that even though most of the dead weren’t closely related, they shared common ancestry.
This means that they weren’t newcomers; rather, they came from a local population that was homogenous and stable, “so we can exclude that this massacre was associated with the influx of new immigrants,” Novak said.
The most likely explanation is one that archaeologists and climatologists have suggested for other ancient massacre sites in Germany and Austria dating to about 5,000 years ago, in which adults and children were also killed indiscriminately and thrown into shallow mass graves. In those scenarios, prolonged climate change that caused flooding or droughts — perhaps combined with an unexpected population boom — could have led to squabbles over precious resources.
And in Potočani, one of those struggles turned deadly.
“By studying such ancient massacres, we might try to get a glimpse into the psychology of these people, and maybe try to prevent similar events today,” Novak said. “We have evidence of ancient massacres going back to 10,000 years ago, at least. Today, we also have modern massacres — the only thing that’s changed is we now have more efficient means and weapons to do such things. But I don’t think human nature or human psychology has changed much.”
Archaeological El Dorado: Stunning Golden Sun Bowl Found in Austria
“A discovery of a lifetime” is what archaeologist Dr. Michal Sip termed the find: a golden sun bowl dated to 3,000 years ago, unearthed during ongoing excavations in a prehistoric settlement in Ebreichsdorf, Austria.
Work at this ancient settlement dated to 1300-1000 BC, has been in full flow since September 2019. Researchers at the site are focused on the “urn field culture” found here, a reference to their funeral rites and ceremonial cremation, reports Heritage Daily .
The Golden Bowl with the Sun Motif
This latest find is that of a golden bowl, decorated with a beautiful motif that depicts the rays of the sun. The bowl is 20cm (7.8”) in diameter and 5cm (2”) high, and made of a very thin sheet metal consisting of 90% gold, 5% silver, and 5% copper.
Inside there is coiled golden wire wrapped around organic material clumps, originally fabric sewn with gold thread. This is possibly the remnants of decorative scarves attached to the bowl, used during the sun worship ceremonies and rituals.
The sun rays on the bowl interior, and the wire found in the bowl
Archaeologist Dr. Michal Sip, from Novetus, termed it a kind of “archaeological Eldorado” and considered it one of the most important archaeological discoveries ever made in Austria.
A first of its kind discovery in this region, only 30 such bowls have been scattered across the entirety of the vast European continent. “This is the first find of this type in Austria, and the second to the east of the Alpine line,” said the archaeologist.
He added that single vessels of this kind have been found in France, Switzerland and Spain, but the production probably occurred in northern Germany, Scandinavia, and Denmark, reports PAP.
The “golden” finds, particularly the golden bowl, indicate extensive trade relations between western and northern Europe.
A Routine Excavation
The excavation was routine, and the discoveries purely accidental. At this site, 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) south of Vienna, the Austrian Federal Railways (the OBB) plans to build a railway station.
These plans required an archaeological survey before they could be approved, prompting archaeologists to check what was underground.
Franz Bauer, CEO of ÖBB-Infrastruktur AG, stated that archaeological excavation work as part of “such a major project” is also required as part of the environmental impact assessment. “Building new things and preserving the old is one of our premises when implementing construction projects.”
Apart from the golden bowl, in the 70 hectares (173 acres) excavated, 5,000 finds have been listed in total, including hundreds of items made of bronze items, and many dozens made of gold. This includes the remains of residential, work, and storage buildings.
These finds have sparked debate amongst historians, who are now asking probing questions into the living conditions and life of the late Bronze Age .
“We now have a very clear picture of this prehistoric settlement from 3,000 years ago. We were able to reconstruct where the economic area was and where the residential area was,” Dr. Sip told noe.ORF.at.
The southern boundary had a dry riverbed, 25 meters (82 feet) wide, which was either a swamp or a seasonal, flowing waterbody. This entire stretch has revealed pins, daggers, knives, all of which were in great condition. This indicates that it was definitely not a refuse pit.
Weapon blades found at the site
Hundreds of kilos of animal bones, clay vessels, and ceramic shells have also been found in this area of the site. This has led Dr. Sip and his colleagues to speculate that this swamp was likely part of the larger religious ceremony involving the sun.
The Bronze Age “Urn Field Culture”
The “urn field culture” community led a sedentary lifestyle, and were proficient in animal domestication and breeding, particularly that of sheep. Echoes of this culture survive in contemporary Poland with the Lusatian culture, centered around their famous settlement at Biskupin, in northern Poland.
Well-Preserved Remains of Two Vesuvius Victims Found in Pompeii
When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D., a wealthy man of 30 or 40 and a younger enslaved man survived the immediate impact, only to die in a second volcanic blast the following day.
Archaeologists made plaster casts of the pair, who are thought to be a high-status older man and a younger enslaved individual.
Two millennia later, reports Angela Giuffrida for the Guardian, archaeologists excavating a villa on the outskirts of the ancient Roman city have found the pair’s remains, eerily frozen in their final death throes.
Based on traces of the older man’s clothing, which included a woolen cloak, researchers from the Archaeological Park of Pompeii say he was probably a person of high status. The body of the younger man, aged 18 to 25, had several compressed vertebrae, suggesting he was a manual laborer.
Likely enslaved by his companion, the second individual wore a short, pleated tunic possibly made out of wool. The team found the remains in an underground corridor of the ruined structure beneath more than six feet of ash.
“The victims were probably looking for shelter in the cryptoporticus, in this underground space, where they thought they were better protected,” Massimo Osanna, director general of the archaeological park, tells the Associated Press’ Frances D’Emilio.
Instead, the duo died in a rush of heat and volcanic debris that flowed into the building
“It is a death by thermal shock, as also demonstrated by their clenched feet and hands,” Osanna tells Angelo Amante of Reuters.
Archaeologists preserved the newly discovered remains using a variation of a technique developed by Italian archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli in 1863.
The process involves pouring liquid chalk into cavities left by decomposing bodies; this plaster fills gaps in preserved bones and teeth, creating a cast of the bodies as they looked at the moment of death.
The bodies were found under more than six feet of ash in a ruined villa.
A close-up view of one of the victim’s clenched hands
A close-up view of one of the victim’s clenched hands
“It is impossible to see those deformed figures, and not feel moved,” wrote Italian author Luigi Settembrini in his 1863 “Letter to the Pompeians,” as quoted in a statement from the archaeological park.
“They have been dead for eighteen centuries, but they are human beings seen in their agony. This is not art, it is not imitation; these are their bones, the remains of their flesh and their clothes mixed with plaster, it is the pain of death that takes on body and form.”
Pompeii now contains the bodies of more than 100 people preserved as plaster casts. Osanna tells the Times that the technique captured fascinating details of the newly discovered bodies, including the “extraordinary drapery” of their wool garments.
“They really look like statues,” he says.
The new find is located in Civita Giuliana, about 750 yards northwest of Pompeii’s city walls. The villa is on private property, and government-commissioned excavations only began there in 2017, when archaeologists stepped in to help prevent looters from tunneling into the site and stealing artifacts.
This isn’t the first impressive find made at the villa: In 2018, archaeologists unearthed the preserved remains of three horses, still saddled and harnessed as if ready to depart at a moment’s notice. Research teams also found a whole street of large houses lined with balconies.
The ruins of Pompeii, a city of about 13,000 people at the time of its destruction, have fascinated people around the world for centuries. Roman magistrate Pliny the Younger, who witnessed the destruction from a neighboring city, described it as “an extraordinary and alarming” scene.
Spanish king Charles III of Bourbon began the first official excavations of the site in 1748. Work has continued ever since. (Launched in 2012, the $140 million Great Pompeii Project seeks to conduct the most extensive scientific investigation of the site to date.)
The preserved city, with its inhabitants forever caught in the middle of daily activities, has yielded much information about life in ancient Rome, from Pompeiians’ culinary habits to their fertility and love rituals.
Remarkably Massive Viking Longhouse Discovered in Norway
While excavating near the ruins of a 17th century royal estate near the village of Sem in the Eiker district of southeastern Norway, archaeologists unearthed dozens of ancient postholes spread around the faint but unmistakable outline of a Viking longhouse.
The architectural structure would have been of tremendous size. Early indications suggest it was probably constructed during the Viking Age , which in Norway lasted from approximately 800 AD to the year 1066.
Postholes Provide Clues to the Viking Longhouse’s Distinctive Architecture
Postholes were a standard feature of longhouses, regardless of when they might have been built. Heavy wooden posts were needed to support the walls and roofs of these massive construction projects and the posts had to be firmly anchored in the ground. But the placement of the postholes at the newly discovered Viking longhouse is curious and unique, since they were only set up to support the walls.
Outside the outline formed by the first set of postholes, about 11 feet (3.5 meters) away, there were more postholes dug in straight lines. According to the Norwegian archaeologists, these would have supported separate roofing material that covered passageways running along the outside of the main structure. Given the distance between the outer and inner postholes, the archaeologists think the outer posts may have been slanted inward, bracing the outer walls to keep them from bowing under the weight of the structure’s roof.
An overview picture of the extraordinary house. Poles have been placed in the post holes. This is, however, only a small part of the house according to the archaeologists.
With the wood used to make the walls and roof of the house long gone, there is no way to know for sure what the house looked like when it was in use and how exactly it was designed. But the one thing the archaeologists can determine with certainty is the size of the house and they know it was huge by ancient standards.
From one outer posthole line to another, the longhouse measured 52 feet (16 meters) across. As for its length, that is yet to be determined—but there is no doubt the house was much longer than it was wide.
“It’s an extraordinary building, and we haven’t excavated the whole thing,” Løchsen Rødsrud explained. He noted that the outline of the house is currently bisected by a road, and that no digging will take place in the field on the other side of the road until next year.
“I expect the house is much longer,” Løchsen Rødsrud said. “Twice or three times as long as it is wide.” If this estimate is correct, it means the house could be as much as 150 feet (45 meters) long from end to end. This would make it a true long house, by the standards of any place or time.
Excavation work documenting the postholes which are providing clues about the architecture of the supposedly Viking longhouse.
The Hoen Hoard and Viking History in Southeastern Norway
The area around the newly discovered longhouse and the former royal estate in Sem has been famous since the 19th century. Or since 1834, to be more exact. That was the year that a stunned farmworker from the village of Hokkslund found a solid gold ring while digging in a bog on the plantation of his employer.
After the excited worker informed the landowner what he’d found the two of them dug down further. In the end, they recovered what would turn out to be the largest and most valuable Viking Age gold treasure ever found in Scandinavia.
The so-called Hoen Hoard , named for the owner of the farm who generously decided to split the treasure with the laborer who found it, included 5.5 lbs (2.5 kg) of golden coins and golden jewelry of different types and sizes. The hoard is believed to have been buried between 875 to 890, which coincides with the time when Viking ships were most active raiding and trading up and down the European coast.
There are approximately 50 jewelry pieces, 200 coins and more than 200 pearls and semi-precious stones in this priceless collection. While this gold could have been acquired through legitimate trading activity, it may also have been plundered from elite European homes during ninth century Viking raids. The gold and stones have been identified as coming from continental Europe and the Middle East, so there is no doubt it was not locally sourced.
The village of Hokkslund, where the Hoen Hoard was found, was a prominent port city in the Viking Age . The spot where the farmers dug up the gold is just 1.5 miles (2.5 kilometers) from the excavated 17th century royal estate at Sem, which highlights how much wealth circulated through the Eiker district of southeastern Norway between the peak of the Viking Age and the time when the country was ruled by hereditary monarchs.
Experts believe there were approximately 120 farms and about 3,000 people living in this region during the ninth century. The presence of a huge Viking longhouse and the most valuable Viking treasure ever found shows that wealthy and influential people were well-represented among that number.
There were definitely fortunes to be made in Eiker, thanks to the abundance of fertile farmland and to the ease with which large merchant ships could travel up and down the Drammen River, which had a water level that was 18 to 20 feet (five to six meters) higher 1,000 years ago than it is today. So perhaps the Hoen Hoard was imported to the region and then sold to an ultra-wealthy aristocrat or landowner by the Viking traders or raiders who’d acquired it. Or maybe such a person financed some Viking trading or raiding missions and was entitled to take possession of the most valuable items they recovered.
The Hoen treasure, which was found in 1834, is the largest treasure find from the Viking Age in Norway.
But Was This Really a Viking Longhouse?
At the moment, the archaeologists who found the supposed “Viking longhouse” near the royal estate in Sem are most concerned with figuring out its exact age. “We are very excited about which part of prehistoric or historical times it belongs to,” Løchsen Rødsrud said.
As of now, the house has been tentatively identified as a Viking Age construction project. This is because of its architectural style, which is consistent with other Viking fortresses that were built in Denmark in the late first millennium.
The design of those buildings was customized to produce tall, long and wide structures, like the longhouse discovered at the Sem site. Such an approach to construction was most convenient for Viking Age farmers, since Viking longhouses were multi-purpose buildings that contained living spaces, workshops, cattle barns and crop storage areas all under one roof.
But the linking of the expansive longhouse to the Viking Age remains in question. This is because pottery shards have been found inside some of the postholes, and these ceramics were apparently manufactured several centuries earlier, during the Scandinavian Iron Age (500 BC to 800 AD).
The postholes could have been dug during the Viking Age on top of a much older settlement, which left pottery pieces littered across the landscape. But that is only one possibility. “If these shards are not random, the house is much older than the aforementioned houses from the Viking Age. In that case, it’s quite a sensation,” Christian Løchsen Rødsrud stated.
To definitively discover the age of the structure, the archaeologists will have to wait for the results of radiocarbon dating tests that are currently being performed on seeds and charcoal recovered during the longhouse excavation. Once they know for sure when the house was built and by whom, they will gain some new and valuable insights into the construction practices of at least some ancient Norwegians, be they Vikings or earlier occupants of the Eiker region.
Human Genome Recovered From 5,700-Year-Old Chewing Gum
The piece of Birch tar, found in Denmark, also contained the mouth microbes of its ancient chewer, as well as remnants of food to reveal what she ate.
A 5,700-year-old piece of birch tar, chewed as gum, contains the genome, mouth microbes, and even dietary information about its former chewer.
Modern chewing gums, which often contain polyethylene plastic, could stick around for tens or even hundreds of years, and perhaps much longer in the right conditions. Some of the first chewing gums, made of birch tar and other natural substances, have been preserved for thousands of years, including a 5,700-year-old piece of Stone Age gum unearthed in Denmark.
For archaeologists, the sticky stuff’s longevity can help piece together the lives of ancient peoples who masticated on the chewy tar. The ancient birch gum in Scandinavia preserved enough DNA to reconstruct the full human genome of its ancient chewer, identify the microbes that lived in her mouth, and even reveal the menu of a prehistoric meal.
“These birch pitch chewing gums are kind of special in terms of how well the DNA is preserved. It surprised us,” says co-author Hannes Schroeder, a molecular anthropologist at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. “It’s as well-preserved as some of the best petrous [skull] bones that we’ve analyzed, and they are kind of the holy grail when it comes to ancient DNA preservation.”
Birch pitch, made by heating the tree’s bark, was commonly used across Scandinavia as a prehistoric glue for attaching stone tools to handles. When found, it commonly contains toothmarks. Scientists suspect several reasons why people would have chewed it: to make it malleable once again after it cooled, to ease toothaches because it’s mildly antiseptic, to clean teeth, to ease hunger pains, or simply because they enjoyed it.
The gum’s water-resistant properties helped to preserve the DNA within, as did its mild antiseptic properties which helped to prevent microbial decay. But the find was also made possible by the conditions at the site, named Syltholm, on an island in southern Denmark, where thick mud has perfectly preserved a wide range of unique Stone Age artifacts. Excavations began at the site in 2012 in preparation for the construction of a tunnel, affording the Museum Lolland-Falster a unique chance for archaeological field work.
No human remains have yet been found at Syltholm—unless you count the tiny strands of DNA preserved in the ancient gum Schroeder and colleagues described today in Nature Communications.
The discarded gum yielded a surprising amount of information about its 5,700-year-old chewer. She was a female, and while her age is unknown, she may have been a child considering similar birch pitch gums of the era often feature the imprints of children’s teeth.
From the DNA, researchers can start to piece together some of the ancient woman’s physical traits and make some inferences about the world she lived in. “We determined that she had this striking combination of dark skin, dark hair, and blue eyes,” Schroeder says. “It’s interesting because it’s the same combination of physical traits that apparently was very common in Mesolithic Europe. So all these other ancient [European] genomes that we know about, like La Braña in Spain, they all have this combination of physical traits that of course today in Europe is not so common. Indigenous Europeans have lighter skin color now but that was apparently not the case 5,000 to 10,000 years ago.”
An artist’s illustration of what the Scandinavian person who chewed the ancient piece of gum may have looked like.
The gum-chewers’ family ties may also help to map the movement of peoples as they settled Scandinavia.
“The fact that she was more closely related genetically to people from Belgium and Spain than to people from Sweden, which is just a few hundred kilometers farther north, tells us something about how southern Scandinavia was first populated,” Schroeder says. “And it looks like it was from the continent.”
This interpretation would support studies suggesting that two different waves of people colonized Scandinavia after the ice sheets retreated 12,000 to 11,000 years ago, via a southern route and a northeastern route along today’s Norwegian coast.
The individual was part of a world that was constantly changing as groups migrated across the northern regions of Europe. “We may expect this process, especially at this late stage of the Mesolithic, to have been complex with different groups, from south, west or even east, moving at different times and sometimes intermingling while perhaps other times staying isolated,” Jan Storå, an osteoarchaeologist at Stockholm University, says via email.
Additional archaeological work has shown that the era was one of transition. Flaked stone tools and T-shaped antler axes gave way to polished flint artifacts, pottery and domesticated plants and animals. Whether the region’s turn to farming was a lifestyle change among local hunter-gatherers, or spurred by the arrival of farming migrants, remains a matter of debate.
“This is supposed to be a time when farming has already arrived, with changing lifestyles, but we find no trace of farmer ancestry in her genome, which is fairly easy to establish because it originated in the Near East. So even as late as 5,700 years ago, when other parts of Europe like Germany already had farming populations with this other type of ancestry present, she still looked like essentially western hunter-gatherers, like people looked in the thousands of years before then,” Schroeder says.
“The ‘lack’ of Neolithic farmer gene flow, at this date, is very interesting,” adds Storå, who wasn’t involved in the research. “The farming groups would probably have been present in the area, and they would have interacted with the hunter-gatherer groups.”
The era’s poor oral hygiene has helped add even more evidence to this line of investigation, as genetic bits of foodstuffs were also identifiable in the gum.
Presumably not long before discarding the gum, the woman feasted on hazel nuts and duck, which left their own DNA sequences behind. “The dietary evidence, the duck and the hazel nuts, would also support this idea that she was a hunter-gatherer and subsisted on wild resources,” Schroeder says, noting that the site is littered with physical remains which show reliance on wild resources like fish, rather than domesticated plants or animals.
“It looks like in these parts maybe you have pockets of hunter-gatherers still surviving, or living side-by-side with farmers for hundreds of years,” he says.
Scientists also found traces of the countless microbes that lived in the woman’s mouth. Ancient DNA samples always include microbial genes, but they are typically from the environment. The team compared the taxonomic composition of the well-preserved microbes to those found in modern human mouths and found them very similar.
Satisfied that genetic signatures of ancient oral microbes were preserved in the woman’s gum, the researchers investigated the specific species of bacteria and other microbes. Most were run-of-the-mill microflora like those still found in most human mouths. Others stood out, including bacterial evidence for gum disease and Streptococcus pneumoniae, which can cause pneumonia today and is responsible for a million or more infant deaths each year.
Epstein-Barr virus, which more than 90 percent of living humans carry, was also present in the woman’s mouth. Usually benign, the virus can be associated with serious diseases like infectious mononucleosis, Hodgkin’s lymphoma and multiple sclerosis. Ancient examples of such pathogens could help scientists reconstruct the origins of certain diseases and track their evolution over time, including what factors might conspire to make them more dangerous.
“What I really find interesting with this study is the microbial DNA,” Anders Götherström, a molecular archaeologist at Stockholm University, says in an email. “DNA from ancient pathogens holds great promise, and this type of mastics may be a much better source for such data than ancient bones or teeth.”
Natalija Kashuba, an archaeologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, and colleagues have also extracted human DNA from ancient birch gum, from several individuals at a 10,000-year-old site on Sweden’s west coast.
“It’s really interesting that we can start working on this material, because there’s a lot of it scattered around Scandinavia from the Stone Age to the Iron Age,” she says, adding that gums may survive wherever birches were prevalent—including eastward toward Russia, where one wave of Scandinavian migration is thought to have originated.
The fact that the discarded artifact survived to reveal so much information about the past isn’t entirely due to luck, Kashuba says. “I think we have to thank the archaeologists who not only preserved these gums but suggested maybe we should try to process them,” she says. “If it hadn’t been for them, I’m not sure most geneticists would have bothered with this kind of material.”
Denisovan DNA in Tibetan Cave Changes History of Early Humans in Asia
An international team has found evidence that could change our understanding of a mysterious species of early humans, the Denisovans. They have found DNA from these humans in a Buddhist cave on the Tibetan Plateau in China.
These finds are adding to experts’ knowledge of the mysterious Denisovans and how they interacted with modern humans as they migrated into Asia.
The Baisiya Karst Cave is approximately 10,400 feet (3,200 m) high on the rugged Tibetan Plateau. For the local Buddhist monks, the cave is a sacred site. Many years ago, a mysterious lower jawbone (mandible) was found in the cave and it has recently been re-examined. In 2019 researchers proposed it belonged to a Denisovan, but this was disputed.
The Xiahe mandible is the first Denisovan fossil to have been discovered outside of the Denisova Cave in Siberia. Unearthed in the Baishiya Karst Cave by a Tibetan monk in 1980, scientists used protein analysis in 2019 to identify the ancient human from this ancient jawbone.
Denisovans: Relatives of Modern Humans
About 40,000 years ago, this species of archaic human lived across Asia. A close relative of Neanderthals, the Denisovans even interbred with our ancestors.
Many modern Australasians and Asians have Denisovan ancestry. Almost no remains of the hominins have been found outside of the Denisova Cave in Siberia, after which the species is named.
Because of the scarcity of remains, the jawbone could provide precious insights into the extinct archaic human species. However, the only evidence that it was Denisovan was “based on a single amino acid position,” reports Cosmos.
Archaeologist Dongju Zhang of Lanzhou University and her colleagues wanted to prove once and for all that the jawbone was from a Denisovan and sought DNA which would be used as conclusive proof.
The Baishiya Karst Cave on the Tibetan Plateau in China has been exceptionally challenging for archaeologists. A sacred Buddhist site, the team was forced to work at night so as not to disturb worshipers.
Excavations in Sub-Zero Temperatures
In the winter of 2018, they worked with an international team on an intensive investigation of the cave. This excavation was terribly challenging. Because the cave is sacred to local Buddhists, the team could only work at night so as not to disturb the faithful during the day. They also had to remove all traces of their work before the morning and often worked in temperatures as low as –18°C (-0.4°F).
The experts dug deep into the soil of the cave. While they did not find any hominin bones, they found something even better: traces of mitochondrial DNA. This is a hugely important discovery. According to Science “Zhang’s team reports the first Denisovan ancient DNA found outside the Denisova Cave : mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) gleaned not from fossils, but from the cave sediments themselves.”
This is the first time that genetic evidence for the Denisovans has been found outside Siberia. The DNA was extracted from human remains in the topsoil. This was probably left behind in the poop and urine of the Denisovans.
In September 2019 scientists used epigenetics to work out the possible physical makeup of a Denisovan face. Their reconstruction won the 2019 Science magazine’s People’s Choice for Breakthrough of the Year.
Early Humans in Tibet
Bo Li of the Australian University of Wollongong told Cosmos that they have “detected ancient human fragments that matched mitochondrial DNA associated with Denisovans in four different layers of sediment deposited.” The sediment where the DNA has been dated to around 100,000 and 60,000 years ago and possibly as “recently as 45,000 years back, the time when modern humans were migrating to the eastern part of Asia,” reports News Click .
These findings change the history of early humans in Asia. The researchers wrote in Science that the DNA “extends the time of occupation of the Tibetan plateau by hominins.” Li and his colleagues were able to date the finds by using optical dating, which works by showing when they had been exposed to light.
By showing that DNA and dates can be gathered from sediment, this groundbreaking research is paving the way for “a new era of molecular caving,” explains Katerina Douka of the Max Planck Institute in Science.
The find is important because it is the first DNA to have been found outside the Denisovan Cave in Siberia. Unearthed some 1200 km from Siberia, the discoveries in the soil of the cave end a long search for Denisovan DNA outside of Siberia. They also provide further evidence that Denisovans were once widespread across Asia.
Scientists analyze sediment samples from the Baishiya Karst Cave at the lab. Their research has identified Denisovan DNA from as far back as 100,000 years ago.
Denisovan “Superathlete” Gene
But DNA wasn’t all they found. The team also unearthed several artifacts and other remains in the holy cave, as well as a great deal of charcoal which proves that the Denisovans used fire. Moreover, the experts found over 1,300 rudimentary tools and many animal bones, including some from hyenas and rhinos, both of which once roamed Tibet. It has also been speculated that they used the cave as a lookout from which to watch out for prey on the meadows below.
Finding the remains of Denisovans at such an altitude shows that the ancient species could cope with a range of environments and that they were highly adaptable. This ability was inherited by modern Tibetans, allowing them to survive in one of the world’s toughest environments.
Modern Tibetans inherited from the Denisovans “a ‘superathlete’ variant of a gene, called EPAS1,” explains Science. However, it only spread widely in the last 5,000 years and may indicate that the extinct archaic humans only lived seasonally in the cave.
More finds are expected to be made at the Baishiya Karst Cave site. Li told Cosmos that their “next target is to date more samples from the cave and try to answer when Denisovans started to occupy the cave and when they ‘disappear’ from the cave.” This could be crucial in understanding modern humans’ interactions with the archaic hominins and perhaps even solve the mystery of their extinction.
3,000-Year – old wooden wheel discovered in Doomed Bronze Age town
In the ruins of a prehistoric town in eastern England, a 3000-year-old wooden wheel was discovered. Archaeologists said the Bronze Age wheel is the largest and best-preserved of its kind, dating back to 1100-800 B.C.
The wheel was extracted during a dig at the Must Farm in Peterborough, measuring approximately 3 feet(1 meter) and with a hub still intact. According to an announcement from Historic England, a heritage organization that is partly funding the excavation.
“This remarkable but fragile wooden wheel is the earliest complete example ever found in Britain,” Duncan Wilson, chief executive of Historic England, said in a statement.
He added that the discovery expands the understanding of the technological sophistication of people living in the region 3,000 years ago.
Must Farm, which was first discovered in 1999, has been described as “Peterborough’s Pompeii.” Pompeii was a Roman city that was destroyed when Mount Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79.
Ash from that volcanic eruption left the town extraordinarily well-preserved, with elaborate murals and graffiti still intact on the walls of its buildings. Like Pompeii, the Must Farm site was frozen in time through catastrophe.
The circular wooden houses of the Must Farm site were built on stilts above a river channel, the old course of the River Nene. But a devastating fire caused the dwellings to plunge into —and become preserved in —the sandy water below, archaeologists said.
In addition to finding the wooden houses, excavators uncovered some rare items that might not normally survive in the archaeological record: a wooden platter, wooden utensils, clothing made from the fiber of lime trees and even jars containing the remains of food, perhaps abandoned when the fire broke out, the researchers said.
The Must Farm was partially excavated in 2006, but the site is currently undergoing a larger, £1.1-million ($1.58 million U.S.), eight-month excavation.
The archaeologists said they plan to dig trenches across nearly 12,000 square feet (1,100 square meters) of the site. They’re about halfway done with the project, according to Historic England.
In another clue that people of this era were quite savvy about transportation, eight Bronze Age boats were recovered from the same river in 2011. The discovered wheel suggests the people at the Must Farm site traveled to and had ties with the dry land beyond the river.
Technically, the new find isn’t the oldest Bronze Age wheel found in Britain. That distinction still belongs to the Flag Fen wheel, which was found at a nearby site and dates back to about 1300 B.C. However, that artifact is less complete than the newly discovered wheel and is smaller, at about 2.6 feet (0.8 m) in diameter.
