All posts by Archaeology World Team

MEXICO, NORTH AMERICA, WORLD

Skeleton With Stone-Encrusted Teeth Found In Mexico Ancient Ruins

Skeleton With Stone-Encrusted Teeth Found In Mexico Ancient Ruins

Archaeologists who found the 1,600-year-old skeleton near Mexico’s ancient Teotihuacan said the woman was 35-40 when she died with an intentionally deformed skull and teeth encrusted with mineral stones

Archaeologists in Mexico have recently uncovered a 1,600-year-old skeleton of a woman who had mineral-encrusted teeth and an intentionally elongated skull – evidence that suggests she was part of her society’s upper class.

While it isn’t uncommon for archaeologists to find deformed remains, the new skeleton is one of the most “extreme” ever recorded.

“Her cranium was elongated by being compressed in a ‘very extreme’ manner, a technique commonly used in the southern part of Mesoamerica, not the central region where she was found,” the team said, according to an AFP report.

The team, led by researchers from the National Anthropology and History Institute in Mexico, found the woman in the ancient ruins of Teotihuacan – a pre-Hispanic civilisation that once lay 50 kilometres (30 miles) north of Mexico City, existing between the 1st and 8th century AD before it mysteriously vanished.

The woman, who the researchers have named The Woman of Tlailotlacan after the location she was found inside the ancient city, not only had an elongated skull, but she had her top two teeth encrusted with pyrite stones – a mineral that looks like gold at first glance.

She also had a fake lower tooth made from serpentine – a feature so distinctive, the team says it’s evidence to suggest that she was a foreigner to the ancient city.

The researchers don’t give any details on how these body modifications were performed 1,600-years-ago, or why they were common in the first place.

But based on other cultures, such as the Mayans, artificial cranial deformation was likely done in infancy using bindings to grow the skull outwards, possibly to signal social status.

While very little is known about the woman’s faux-golden grill, researchers from Mexico did find 2,500-year-old Native American remains with gems embedded in their teeth back in 2009.

In that study, the team said that sophisticated dental practices made the modifications possible, though they were likely used purely for decoration and weren’t symbols of class. 

“It’s possible some type of [herb-based] anaesthetic was applied prior to drilling to blunt any pain,” team member José Concepción Jiménez, from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History, told National Geographic.

It’s also important to note that the current team’s findings have yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, so we will have to take their word on it for now until they can get their report ready for publication.

The Mexican team aren’t the only ones to discover some interesting human remains lately, either. Back in June, researchers from Australia uncovered 700,000-year-old ‘hobbit’ remains on an island in Indonesia.

More recently, just last week, researchers in China what might be a skull bone belonging to Buddha inside a 1,000-year-old shrine in Nanjing, China.

Needless to say, archaeologists all over the world have been quite busy this year, and we can’t wait to see what they uncover next.

BELGIUM, EUROPE, WORLD

Scientists Extract DNA From Ancient Humans Out of Cave Dirt

Scientists Extract DNA From Ancient Humans Out of Cave Dirt

Around 45,000 years ago, in a Belgian cave, a Neanderthal died. As its body decayed, its cells split apart, spilling their contents onto the cave floor.

Becky Miller collects sediment from Trou al’Wesse (Monika V. Knul)

Those remnants included the Neanderthal’s DNA, some of which stuck to minerals in the sediment. There, leashed to the very rock, the DNA persisted, long after its owner’s body had disappeared and its bones had been carted off by scavengers. And in 2015, a group of scientists scooped it up.

Viviane Slon from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and her colleagues have now managed to extract and sequence the DNA of ancient animals from sediment that’s up to 240,000 years old. By doing so, they can infer the presence of Neanderthals, Denisovans, and other extinct hominids without ever having to find their bones. “We were surprised by how well it works,” says Slon. “The success rates were amazing.”

“I absolutely loved this,” says Jennifer Raff, who studies ancient DNA at the University of Kansas, and who was not involved in the study. “Although people have been working on recovering ancient DNA from sediments for a few years now, this is unprecedented in scope and success. My notes on the paper are full of exclamation marks. Woolly rhinoceros! Woolly mammoth! Cave bear! Neanderthal and Denisovans!”

Animals have a vast genetic aura that extends beyond their physical bodies into the world around them. Their DNA falls to the ground in balls of dung, zips through the air in blood-sucking insects, and leaches into the soil during decomposition.

Scientists who study living animals have used this environmental DNA (eDNA) to identify everything from elephants and earthworms. They can conduct a census of the natural world without needing to spot any actual animals—a boon when working with rare or hard-to-spot species in inaccessible habitats.

For about 15 years, palaeontologists have tried to use the same technique to study the creatures of prehistory. Just last year, for example, Beth Shapiro from the University of California, Santa Cruz and her colleagues used sedimentary DNA to figure out when and why the second-to-last group of mammoths, which lived on St. Paul Island in Alaska, went extinct.

Studies like these break the traditional reliance on fossils, which can be hard to find, or may have never formed at all. “If one must rely on finding bones, one will always have incomplete data,” explains Shapiro. “But by isolating DNA directly from sediments, we can dramatically expand what we know about where people (or other species) were, when they got there, and how long they stayed.”

“It’s a solution to a number of ethical conundrums in our field.”

Slon’s team is now the first to successfully recover the DNA of ancient humans directly from sediments. They collected samples from seven sites in Europe and Asia, where Neanderthals or Denisovans are known to have lived, and chemically treated their samples to liberate the trapped DNA. In sediment, the vast majority of DNA will come from bacteria and other microbes in the soil.

Only a small fraction comes from animals. To get at that bit, the team created molecules that specifically recognize mammalian DNA, that they could use to fish those sequences out of the crowd.

They focused on mitochondrial DNA—a small cluster of genes that sits outside the main set, and is easier to find because it’s so abundant. And to check that these DNA strands were genuinely ancient, and not bits of genetic material dropped by the palaeontologists themselves, the team looked for the distinctive types of damage that accumulate as DNA sits around for thousands of years.

In addition to DNA from mammoths, woolly rhinos, and cave bears, Slon recovered the mitochondrial DNA of Neanderthals from four caves— El Sidrón in Spain, the Chagyrskaya and Denisova Caves in Russia, and Trou Al’Wesse in Belgium. That third site is especially interesting. We know Neanderthals used Trou Al’Wesse because of the tools and butchered animal bones that they left behind, but none of their visible remains have ever been found. Their molecular remains, however, are still there.

At Denisova Cave, the team also found the DNA of the site’s namesake—the Denisovans. The only known fossils of these hominids are a finger bone and two teeth from the same cave.

In 2010, Slon’s colleagues, led by Svante Paabo, sequenced the mitochondrial DNA from these specimens and realized that they belonged to a previously unknown hominid. That was how the world discovered the existence of Denisovans, and we have learned more about them through their DNA than through their bones. Slon’s work continues that tradition—she found Denisovan DNA in sediment that’s far older than any of the unearthed fossils. “It’s evidence that Denisovans occupied the cave for tens of thousands of years earlier than we thought,” she says.

Now that they know their techniques work, the team can check for hominid DNA in parts of the world where no fossils have been found, or where the historical presence of humans is unclear. For example, Shapiro wants to look at sediments across the Alaska routes that humans likely took on their way to colonizing the Americas. “This is a fantastically useful tool that will empower future archaeological research,” she says.

Even when fossils are present, it’s hard to extract DNA from them without pulverizing them in the process. Slon’s work gets around that problem. “Some descendant communities are okay with us doing genetics research on their ancestors, but not okay with destroying any part of their remains in order to obtain DNA,” says Raff. “But this approach allows us to recover ancient DNA without having to destroy remains. It’s a solution to a number of ethical conundrums in our field.”

EUROPE, TURKEY, WORLD

Neolithic figurine, over 7,000 years old, unearthed at Turkey’s Çatalhöyük

Neolithic figurine, over 7,000 years old, unearthed at Turkey’s Çatalhöyük

An 8,000-year-old statuette of what could be a fertility goddess has been unearthed at a Neolithic site in Turkey, according to archaeologists.

The 8,000-year-old figurine is notable for its craftsmanship, with fine details likely made with thin tools, like flint or obsidian, by a practised artisan.

The figurine, discovered at Çatalhöyük in central Turkey, was wrought from recrystallized limestone between 6300 and 6000 B.C. That material is rare for an area where most previously discovered pieces were sculpted from clay, the researchers said.

The archaeologists think this figurine, which is conventionally associated with fertility goddesses, is also representative of an elderly woman who had risen to prominence in Çatalhöyük’s famously egalitarian society.

Goddess figurines were common in the Neolithic period, with those found at Çatalhöyük usually depicting a plump woman with her hair tied in a bun, sagging breasts and a pronounced belly, they said. 

The newfound figurine differentiates itself from similar statuettes not only in its material and quality but also in its craftsmanship, according to Ian Hodder, a professor of anthropology at Stanford University who is overseeing the Çatalhöyük site. Hodder said that he “realized immediately that it was a very special find.”

At 6.7 inches tall (17 centimetres) and 4.3 inches (11 cm) wide, the figurine has fine details such as elaborate fat rolls on the limbs and neck.

Unlike other goddess statuettes, the limestone figurine also depicts the woman with her arms separated from her torso and an undercut below the belly to separate it from the rest of the body.

These finer details would have only been possible with thin tools, like flint or obsidian, the researchers said, which suggests that the carving could only have been made by a practised artisan.

With its fine artistry and its discovery in the newer, shallower parts of the site (meaning that it was likely buried later), Hodder said that the figurine might signal a shift from a sharing economy to an exchange economy, where resources could be accumulated unevenly.

“We think society was changing at this time, becoming relatively less egalitarian, with houses being more independent and more based on agricultural production,” Hodder said in a statement.

The archaeologists think that the figurine was made after Neolithic Çatalhöyük, where resources were often pooled, and changed toward a more stratified society.

The fatness of the goddess statue could represent high status rather than an elevated place in a society of equals, Hodder said.

Whatever the shift, it did not happen overnight. Humans first settled in Çatalhöyük around 7500 B.C., with the society reaching its peak around 7000 B.C., according to archaeologists. The ancient settlement was abandoned around 5700 BC.

ASIA, INDIA, WORLD

An Unknown Ancient Civilization in India Carved This Rock Art

An Unknown Ancient Civilization in India Carved This Rock Art

A passion for hiking first brought two engineers into the hills and plateaus of India’s picturesque Konkan coast. But now they return for clues to the identification of a lost civilization.

An Unknown Ancient Civilization in India Carved This Rock Art
One of the human figures depicted in the newly documented petroglyphs

As BBC Marathi’s Mayureesh Konnur reports, the duo, Sudhir Risbood and Manoj Marathe, have helped catalogue hundreds of rock carvings etched into the stone of hilltops in the western part of India’s Maharashtra state.

The depictions include a crocodile, elephant, birds, fish and human figures. They may date back to 10,000 B.C., and they come from the hands of people who belonged to an as-yet-unknown civilization. Some of the petroglyphs were hidden beneath soil and mud deposited during the intervening millennia. Others were well-known by locals and considered holy.

Risbood and Marathe have been hiking for years, leading a small group of enthusiastic explorers to interview locals and rediscover this lost art. “We walked thousands of kilometres,” Risbood tells BBC Marathi.

“People started sending photographs to us and we even enlisted schools in our efforts to find them. We made students ask their grandparents and other village elders if they knew about any other engravings.”

The region had three documented petroglyph sites before the hikers started their search, reported Mayuri Phadnis for the Pune Mirror in 2015.

The duo initially identified 10 new sites home to 86 petroglyphs. “Judging by the crudity, they seem to have been made in the Neolithic era,” Sachin Joshi, a researcher with Pune’s Deccan College of Archeology said.

Just a few months later, in a follow-up story for the Pune Mirror, Phadnis reported that thanks to supporting from the district administration, the hiking group identified 17 more sites, and its petroglyph count had reached above 200.

“We have long feared that these sites would be destroyed before more research could be done on them,” Risbood told Phadnis of the Pune Mirror. “With the administration stepping in, we believe this heritage can be saved.”

The petroglyphs are featured on the Ratnagiri district’s tourism website, and researchers are working to decipher their meanings and figure out who may have carved them.

The director of the Maharashtra state archaeology department, Tejas Gage, tells BBC Marathi that since the petroglyphs primarily show animals and people, he suspects the original artists may have come from a hunter-gatherer society.

“We have not found any pictures of farming activities,” he says. “This man knew about animals and sea creatures. That indicates he was dependent on hunting for food.”

BBC Marathi notes that the state government has allocated 240 million rupees (about $3.3 million) for further study of 400 of the identified petroglyphs.

ENGLAND, EUROPE, WORLD

Bronze Age Pot Discovered in Wales

Bronze Age Pot Discovered in Wales

An archaeological dig has uncovered what could be the earliest house found in Cardiff. Volunteers and archaeologists from the Caerau and Ely Rediscovering (CAER) Heritage Project, found a clay pot which could be about 3,000 years old.

Bronze Age Pot Discovered in Wales
The clay pot found by the CAER could be about 3,000 years old

The group were looking for the missing link between the late Iron Age and the early Roman period.

Co-director of the project Dr David Wyatt said what they found was “much more remarkable.”

The archaeologists said the roundhouse, located near Cardiff West Community High School, could provide the earliest clues on the origins of Cardiff.

Over 300 people have taken part in the dig, at Trelai Park, about half a mile away from the Caerau Hillfort, a heritage site of national significance.

Archaeologists and community members had previously discovered finds of Neolithic, Iron Age, Roman and medieval origins at the hillfort.

Experts believed the settlement dubbed “Trelai Enclosure” could provide the missing link between the late Iron Age and early Roman period, showing what happened to people once they had moved on from the hillfort.

‘Incredible development’

The pot was found and recovered by archaeologist Tom Hicks and volunteer Charlie Adams

But, the roundhouse predates it, a clay pot discovered at the site has given the team a firmer indication of the time period the building can be traced to.

Dr Wyatt added that they believed the roundhouse could have been constructed in the mid to late Bronze Age, going back to between 1500 and 1100 BC.

“The enclosure definitely predates the hillfort, people were living here before the hillfort was built.

“It’s an incredible development and sheds light on the earliest inhabitants of Cardiff,” he added.

Project co-director Dr Oliver Davis said: “What we’ve found is completely unexpected and even more exciting.

“This enclosure could be providing us with the earliest clues on the origins of Cardiff, the pot that’s been found is beautifully decorated and preserved – it is extremely rare to find pottery of this quality.

“It’s also unusual to find a Bronze Age settlement in Wales – there are only one or two other Bronze Age sites in this country.”

‘Opportunity to learn’

It is hoped the ‘remarkable discovery’ will help archaeologists learn more about people living at the site

Nearly 300 volunteers have participated in the dig so far, run by CAER, a partnership between Cardiff University, Action in Caerau and Ely (ACE), local schools, residents and heritage partners.

Archaeologist Tom Hicks and volunteers Charlie Adams both found and recovered the pot during the dig.

Mr Hicks said: This is a very well-preserved example of Bronze Age pottery, and a significant find for the archaeological record in the region.

“It’s a great opportunity for us to learn more about the lives of the people living on the sire around 3,000 years ago.”

He added that further scientific analysis may be able to tell what the pot was used for before it ended up in the enclosure ditch, and how or where the pot was made.

Headteacher at Cardiff West Community High School, Martin Hullard said: “We’re delighted to be involved in this exciting archaeological project, our students have loved learning about the history that’s just a stone’s throw away from their school.”

WORLD

Ancient DNA in East Asia Linked to Native Americans

Ancient DNA in East Asia Linked to Native Americans

For the first time, researchers successfully sequenced the genome of ancient human fossils from the Late Pleistocene in southern China. The data, published July 14 in the journal Current Biology, suggests that the mysterious hominin belonged to an extinct maternal branch of modern humans that might have contributed to the origin of Native Americans.

Ancient DNA in East Asia Linked to Native Americans
The lateral view of the skull unearthed from Red Dear Cave

“Ancient DNA technique is a really powerful tool,” Su says. “It tells us quite definitively that the Red Deer Cave people were modern humans instead of an archaic species, such as Neanderthals or Denisovans, despite their unusual morphological features,” he says.

The researchers compared the genome of these fossils to that of people from around the world. They found that the bones belonged to an individual that was linked deeply to the East Asian ancestry of Native Americans.

Combined with previous research data, this finding led the team to propose that some of the southern East Asia people had travelled north along the coastline of present-day eastern China through Japan and reached Siberia tens of thousands of years ago. They then crossed the Bering Strait between the continents of Asia and North America and became the first people to arrive in the New World. 

The journey to making this discovery started over three decades ago, when a group of archaeologists in China discovered a large set of bones in the Maludong, or Red Deer Cave, in southern China’s Yunnan Province.

Carbon dating showed that the fossils were from the Late Pleistocene about 14,000 years ago, a period of time when modern humans had migrated to many parts of the world.

From the cave, researchers recovered a hominin skull cap with characteristics of both modern humans and archaic humans. For example, the shape of the skull resembled that of Neanderthals, and its brain appeared to be smaller than that of modern humans.

As a result, some anthropologists had thought the skull probably belonged to an unknown archaic human species that lived until fairly recently or to a hybrid population of archaic and modern humans.

In 2018, in collaboration with Xueping Ji, an archaeologist at Yunnan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, Bing Su at Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and his colleagues successfully extracted ancient DNA from the skull.

Genomic sequencing shows that the hominin belonged to an extinct maternal lineage of a group of modern humans whose surviving decedents are now found in East Asia, the Indo-China peninsula, and the Southeast Asia islands.

The finding also shows that during the Late Pleistocene, hominins living in southern East Asia had rich genetic and morphologic diversity, the degree of which is greater than that in northern East Asia during the same period.

It suggests that early humans who first arrived in eastern Asia had initially settled in the south before some of them moved to the north, Su says.

“It’s an important piece of evidence for understanding early human migration,” he says.

Next, the team plans to sequence more ancient human DNA by using fossils from southern East Asia, especially ones that predated the Red Deer Cave people.

“Such data will not only help us paint a more complete picture of how our ancestors migrated but also contain important information about how humans change their physical appearance by adapting to local environments over time, such as the variations in skin colour in response to changes in sunlight exposure,” Su says.

AUSTRALIA, WORLD

Rare coffee beans dating back 167 years ago were found by archaeologists working on the Metro Tunnel project

Rare coffee beans dating back 167 years ago were found by archaeologists working on the Metro Tunnel project

Perfectly preserved coffee beans dating back more than 167 years have been found by archaeologists working on the Metro Tunnel project, confirming that Melbourne has always been Australia’s coffee capital.

The archaeologists were digging up the historic remains of a grocery store near the site of the Young and Jacksons pub on Swanston Street, in Melbourne’s CBD, in 2018 when they discovered the artefacts.

The John Connell general store burnt down in the Gold Rush era, which preserved more than 500 coffee beans along with English biscuits, fruit remains and other perishables that would not ordinarily have lasted the test of time.

Excavation director Meg Goulding said the items had been carbonised and preserved in a similar way to the ancient Roman city of Pompeii when it was buried under volcanic ash.

“This was just a general store that was servicing the gold fields at the time,” she said.

“He was there from the early 1850s, we know that the gold rush started in 1851.”

Artefact manager Jennifer Porter said the beans were a “rare find”.
“It’s such a rare sight to find such a rich assemblage of different types of artefacts,” she said.

Perfectly preserved coffee beans dating back more than 167 years have been found by archaeologists working on the Metro Tunnel project.

Acting Premier Jacinta Allan said the discovery of coffee beans demonstrates Melbourne’s iconic coffee culture goes way back to the 1850s.

“The discovery proving coffee has long been important to Melburnians,” she said.

“Remarkably, the coffee beans have been preserved and they are now part of the rare finds that we are uncovering as we get on and deliver the Metro Tunnel project.”

It’s now hoped all of these items, including the coffee beans, will be put on display for the public to see.

WORLD

The Dispilio Wood Tablet – One Of The Oldest Written Texts In History

The Dispilio Wood Tablet – One Of The Oldest Written Texts In History

According to conventional archaeology, writing wasn’t invented until 3000 to 4000 BC in Sumeria.  However, an artefact was found over a decade ago which contradicts this belief – and perhaps this is the reason why few people know about the discovery.

The Dispilio tablet was discovered by a professor of prehistoric archaeology, George Xourmouziadis, in 1993 in a Neolithic lake settlement in Northern Greece near the city of Kastoria.

A group of people used to occupy the settlement 7,000 to 8,000 years ago. The Dispilio tablet was one of many artefacts that were found in the area, however, the importance of the table lies in the fact that it has an unknown written text on it that goes back further than 5,000 BC.

The wooden tablet was dated using the C12 method to have been made in 5260 BC, making it significantly older than the writing system used by the Sumerians.

The text on the tablet includes a type of engraved writing which probably consists of a form of writing that pre-existed Linear B writing used by the Mycenaean Greeks. As well to the tablet, many other ceramic pieces were found that also have the same type of writing on them.

Professor Xourmouziadis has suggested that this type of writing, which has not yet been deciphered, could be any form of communication including symbols representing the counting of possessions.

More artefacts were discovered that show the economic and agricultural activities of the settlement, proof of animal breeding and their diet preferences as well as tools and pottery, figurines and other personal ornaments.

Decoding the writing is going to be difficult if not impossible unless a new Rosetta stone is found.

Unfortunately, by the moment the tablet was removed out of its original environment, contact with oxygen started the deterioration process and it is now under preservation.

It is impressive to think that the wooden tablet had remained at the bottom of the lake for 7,500 years.

While this artefact predates the Sumerian writing system, I am sure in the future more will be found in other areas of the world that will go even further back in time, until the true history of humanity will be unravelled and completely change what we know about our history.

The Danube civilization is rarely mentioned, yet it is probably the oldest in Europe.