Child mummies in Sicily’s Capuchin Catacombs to be X-rayed
The mummified and skeletal remains of more than 160 children lie preserved in the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo in northern Sicily, and soon, scientists hope to uncover some of the mysteries surrounding their lives and deaths using X-ray technology.
The catacombs contain at least 1,284 mummified and skeletonized corpses of varying ages, according to the new research project’s website.
The catacombs were in use from the late 1590s to 1880, although two additional bodies were buried there in the early 20th century, according to the Palermo Catacombs website.
The upcoming investigation, funded by the U.K.’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, will be the first to exclusively focus on children housed in the underground crypts and corridors.
Specifically, the investigators will examine child mummies that were buried in the catacombs between 1787 and 1880, and they’ll begin by X-raying the 41 mummies housed in the crypts’ “children’s room,” or “child chapel,” The Guardian reported.
“We will take a portable X-ray unit and take hundreds of images of the children from different angles,” Kirsty Squires, the project’s principal investigator and an associate professor of bioarchaeology at Staffordshire University in the U.K., told The Guardian.
The team hopes to better understand the children’s identities and health statuses, as well as examine cultural artefacts such as the garb they were buried in, she said.
The researchers will use X-rays to determine each child’s sex and age, as well as reveal any signs of developmental defects or disease.
These findings will be compared with each child’s clothing, associated funerary artefacts and their placement within the chapel, as well as the method of mummification that was used to preserve them, according to the project website.
The team will also utilize death records they have from the time, although these contain limited information, such as the deceased’s names and dates of death.
Together, these clues should provide an insight into the identities, health and lifestyles of children who were mummified in 18th- and 19th-century Palermo. At the time, being turned into a mummy was a “status symbol” and “a way to preserve status and dignity even in death,” according to the Palermo Catacombs website.
When first built in the late 1590s, the Capuchin Catacombs were used as a private burial site for friars. But in 1783, the Capuchin order began allowing laypeople in the region to be buried there as well, the catacombs website said. And by making a donation to the order, families could pay to have their deceased relatives mummified and put on display in the catacombs.
Corpses could be mummified in one of three ways: through natural mummification, where the bodies were allowed to completely dehydrate in a special room called the “colatoio;” through a process that involved bathing the bodies in arsenic; or by the chemical embalming of the bodies, when a trained person injects the corpse with preservatives.
These processes could create astonishingly well-preserved mummies. Regarding the soon-to-be-scanned child mummies, “Some of them are superbly preserved,” Dario Piombino-Mascali, co-investigator for the project and scientific curator of the Capuchin Catacombs, told The Guardian. “Some really look like sleeping children. They are darkened by the time but some of them have got even fake eyes so they seem to be looking at you. They look like tiny little dolls.”
Read more about the Palermo juvenile mummy project in The Guardian.
No animals have experienced a more dramatic makeover in the past few decades than the nonavian dinosaurs. Animals we used to think had nothing but drab grey and brown scales are now believed to have flaunted feathers in bright colours and patterns.
Borealopelta, a nodosaur dinosaur, looked like an armoured tank, but it still needed countershading to elude predators during the Cretaceous period.
So what colours were the dinosaurs, really? And how do we know?
One scientist we have to thank for the answers to both questions is Jakob Vinther, an associate professor in macroevolution at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. Ever since the first fossilized dinosaur feathers were reported in 1996, scientists had noticed round microscopic structures within them — structures that many had assumed were fossilized bacteria.
But as a doctoral student studying a completely different animal, Vinther realized that these structures might be something more.
“I was looking at fossilized ink in squid- and octopus-like ancestors,” Vinther told Live Science. “It was remarkably well preserved.
“You can take ink from a squid you bought down at the fishmonger and put it under an electron microscope, and you see perfect little round balls,” Vinther said. “And then when you take fossilized ink, it looks exactly the same: perfect little round balls.”
Those balls are melanosomes — microscopic blobs of melanin, the pigment that colours hair, skin, feathers and eyes across the animal kingdom. These round structures turned out to be the same ones being mistaken for bacteria in dinosaur feathers.
Scientists had largely believed that pigment couldn’t survive the fossilization process, but discoveries by scientists such as Vinther have shown not only that pigment survives but that it can tell us the actual colours of extinct animals. That’s because melanin comes not only in “perfect little round balls” but also in many different shapes, each of which produces a different colour.
“If you look at a person with black hair or a bird with black feathers, [those melanosomes] are sausage-shaped,” Vinther said. “Whereas if you’re ginger — if you’re a North American robin with a ginger chest or you’ve got ginger hair like Carrot Top — they’re shaped like little meatballs.
“So basically, you just look for sausages and meatballs, and then you can actually put colours on extinct animals,” Vinther said.
Big, fat melanosomes indicate grey or blue pigment. Melanosomes that are long and skinny, flat or hollow are a sign of iridescence.
“That’s actually generated by ordering melanin in a specific way inside the feather in order to create structures that can interact with light,” Vinther said. The flat or hollow shape of the individual melanosomes helps them fit together in a way that creates the metallic sheen of iridescence.
The crow-size Anchiornis had black and white wings and a red crest atop its head when it was alive during the Jurassic period.
The small bipedal dinosaur Sinosauropteryx had a raccoon-like face mask and countershading when it hunted prey during the Cretaceous period.
The Labrador-size dinosaur Psittacosaurus was counter-shaded, with a light underbelly and tail and a more pigmented chest during its lifetime in the Cretaceous period.
Once you know the shape of the melanosomes in a fossil, you can learn all sorts of things about the animal. For example, some dinosaurs with fearsome reputations were incredibly showy.
“Many of the close relatives of Velociraptor — you know, that was chasing the kids around in the kitchen [in “Jurassic Park”]?” Vinther said. “First of all, that was covered in feathers. It was really bird-like, not like this naked thing that we see there. But furthermore, most of the relatives that we looked at that were close to it, were iridescent. So they would have had a metallic sheen, like hummingbirds or peacocks.”
Other dinosaurs had complex camouflage. The first dinosaur Vinther ever studied was a small, bird-like animal called Anchiornis. Based on the melanosomes, Vinther and his team concluded that it had a grey body, white wing feathers with black splotches at the tips and a red crown like a woodpecker’s.
Another dinosaur called Sinosauropteryx — the first dinosaur to be discovered with feathers — had a striped tail and a bandit mask, sort of like a raccoon. It also had countershading, a kind of natural camouflage in which the parts of an animal that would usually be in shadow have a lighter pigment than the parts that would usually be in sunlight. A classic example of this is the white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), which has a white belly and a brown backside.
This colouring tells scientists about the creatures’ habitat; if the countershading is sharp and high on the body, as it was in Sinosauropteryx, the animal probably lives out in the open. Countershading that’s more gradual and low on the body suggests a forest environment where the light is more diffuse.
Camouflage also distinguishes predators from prey. The huge armoured dinosaur Borealopelta mark Mitchell seems like it would have had zero predators, but its countershading suggests otherwise.
“If you look at large animals today, they don’t have any colour patterns, like elephants [and] rhinos,” Vinther said. “And that’s because nobody messes with them.”
“So, based on the fact that this animal was covered in armour, really huge, but it was counter-shaded tells us that ‘Jurassic Park’ would have been scary,” Vinther said. “You’re still vulnerable even if you’re that big and that armoured.”
Evidence For Biggest Earthquake In Human History That Caused 66-Ft Tall Tsunamis Found In Chile
Archaeologists have found evidence of the largest known earthquake in human history — a terrifying magnitude-9.5 megaquake that caused a 5,000-mile-long (8,000 kilometres) tsunami and prompted human populations to abandon nearby coastlines for 1,000 years, a new study finds.
The earthquake sent waves as high as 66 feet and 5000 miles across the Pacific Ocean.
The earthquake struck about 3,800 years ago in what is now northern Chile when a tectonic plate rupture lifted the region’s coastline. The subsequent tsunami was so powerful, that it created waves as high as 66 feet (20 meters) and travelled all the way to New Zealand, where it hurled car-size boulders hundreds of miles inland, the researchers found.
Until now, the largest earthquake ever recorded was the 1960 Valdivia earthquake, which hit southern Chile with a magnitude between 9.4 and 9.6, killing up to 6,000 people and sending tsunamis barreling across the Pacific Ocean.
The rupture that caused the Valdivia earthquake was enormous, extending as far as 500 miles (800 km) in length. But, as scientists detail in research published April 6 in the journal Science Advances, the newly discovered ancient megaquake was even bigger, coming from a rupture roughly 620 miles (1,000 km) long.
“It had been thought that there could not be an event of that size in the north of the country simply because you could not get a long enough rupture,” study co-author James Goff, a geologist at the University of Southampton in England, said in a statement.
Like the Valdivia earthquake, the ancient quake was a megathrust earthquake, the most powerful type of earthquake in the world. These earthquakes occur when one of Earth’s tectonic plates gets forced, or subducted, underneath another.
The two plates eventually get locked into place by friction, but the forces that caused the plates to collide continue to build. Eventually, so much strain gathers that the point of contact between the plates rips apart, creating a gigantic rupture and releasing energy in the form of devastating seismic waves.
Evidence for the giant quake was found in marine and coastal items — such as littoral deposits (boulders, pebbles and sand native to coastal regions) and marine rocks, shells and sea life — that the researchers discovered displaced far inland in Chile’s the Atacama Desert.
“We found evidence of marine sediments and a lot of beasties that would have been living quietly in the sea before being thrown inland,” Goff said in the statement. “And we found all these very high up and a long way inland, so it could not have been a storm that put them there.”
To get a better sense of what brought these deposits so far from the sea, the researchers used radiocarbon dating. This method involves measuring the quantities of carbon 14, a radioactive carbon isotope, found inside a material to determine its age.
As carbon 14 is everywhere on Earth, deposits easily absorb it while they form. The half-life of carbon 14, or the time it takes for half of it to radioactively decay, is 5,730 years, making it ideal for scientists who want to peer back into the last 50,000 years of history by checking how much-undecayed carbon 14 a material has.
After dating 17 deposits across seven separate dig sites over 370 miles (600 km) of Chile’s northern coast, the researchers found that the ages of the out-of-place coastal material suggested that it had been washed inland some 3,800 years ago.
Further evidence also came in the form of ancient stone structures that the archaeologists excavated. These stone walls, built by humans, were found lying beneath the tsunami’s deposits, and some were lying backwards, pointing toward the sea, suggesting that they had been toppled by the strong currents of the tsunami’s backwash.
“The local population there were left with nothing,” Goff said. “Our archaeological work found that a huge social upheaval followed as communities moved inland beyond the reach of tsunamis. It was over 1,000 years before people returned to live at the coast again, which is an amazing length of time given that they relied on the sea for food.”
As this is the oldest known discovery in the Southern Hemisphere of an earthquake and tsunami devastating human lives, the researchers are excited to probe the region further. They think their research could better inform us of the potential dangers of future megathrust quakes.
“While this had a major impact on people in Chile, the South Pacific islands were uninhabited when they took a pummeling from the tsunami 3,800 years ago,” Goff said. “But they are all well-populated now, and many are popular tourist destinations. So when such an event occurs next time, the consequences could be catastrophic unless we learn from these findings.”
Researchers discover huge “Dinosaur dance floor” in China
In China, researchers have found many dinosaur footprints in an area of 1,600 square meters described in the literature as a “dinosaur dance floor.” So far, 8 kinds of dinosaur footprints have been seen on the dinosaur dance floor.
It was determined that the dinosaurs that left their footprints were between 20 meters and 1 meter.
The dinosaur dance floor was found in Shanghang County, Fujian Province, China.
The “dance floor” was an excavation site measuring 100 square meters and approximately 200 dinosaur tracks have been identified there, said Xing Lida, a palaeontologist at the China University of Geosciences and a member of the research team.
The concentration of dinosaur footprints indicates that it could have been a pathway for dinosaurs roaming the area in a relatively short period of time during the Late Cretaceous, he added.
The footprints were first spotted last November when over 240 fossilized dinosaur footprints were identified, and another 364 dinosaur tracks were found in early April.
So far over 600 dinosaur footprints have been discovered in the dinosaur track site, which covers an area of about 1,600 square meters. The site is located in the county’s Longxiang Village.
Over 600 dinosaur footprints were found on the 1,600 square meter dinosaur dance floor.
The number of dinosaur footprints is expected to exceed 1,000 as the excavation works proceed, said Xing, noting that the 80-million-year-old tracks were believably left by at least eight types of dinosaurs including sauropods, large and small theropods, and ornithopods.
The newly discovered tracks include imprints left by large sauropods, which were herbivorous creatures with long necks and tails and a body that could span up to 20 meters.
The site also revealed footprints measuring less than 10 centimetres in length, which Xing said, belong to bird-footed dinosaurs about 1 meter long.
According to the scientists, it is the largest and the most diverse site of its kind discovered in China so far dating back to the Upper Cretaceous period.
The site boasts abundant geological sedimentary structures, indicating that it used to be adjacent to a water source where dinosaurs used to consume food and water, said Chen Runsheng, deputy director of Fujian Geological Survey and a member of the research team.
Chen added that more dinosaur fossils other than footprints could be found in the area as the research progresses.
Hoard of 5,500 Roman-era Silver Coins Unearthed in Germany
Archaeologists in Augsburg, Germany, revealed unearthed a historical hoard including 15 kg of silver coins from the Roman Empire’s era. In a historic Roman camp in Augsburg, more than 5,500 coins from the first and second century AD were uncovered.
According to the local newspaper emphasis, it comprises swords, tools, jewellery, and tableware and is the greatest Roman treasure of silver in Germany thus far.
Archaeologists in Augsburg made a Roman-era find for the second time in a few months, and experts said the more than 5,500 silver coins discovered at a disused manufacturing site were among the most important findings of this type in Germany.
Coins from Roman times: The silver treasure of Augsburg
The coins were found individually distributed in a construction pit in the Oberhausen district.
Rare silver coins discovered in Germany
The coins were discovered separately scattered in a construction trench near Oberhausen, the city’s core. Around 15 BC, Emperor Augustus’ stepsons built the city.
A military camp that eventually became a supply depot. That is why, behind Trier, Augsburg is Germany’s second-oldest city. Later, Emperor Hadrian awarded city powers to the “Augusta Vindelicum” town that had grown up around the military camp.
A period in Augsburg’s history about which virtually little is known.
The oldest coins date back to the reign of the Roman Emperor Nero, making them more than 1950 years old, and the wealth is worth 11 times the yearly income of a Roman soldier during this time period.
For his part, German archaeologist Sebastian Gerhaus said: “What makes this treasure particularly important is that it is dinars dating back to the first and second centuries AD, and they still contain a very large amount of silver, and weapons, tools, jewellery.”
Stefan Krmnicek from the Institute for Classical Archeology at the University of Tübingen, “This amount of money must have been enormous by ancient standards. It is certainly not owned by someone who belonged to the lower social pyramid. This is most likely to think of people who were active in the military or in trade,” he said.
Augsburg, is a city that is richer in Roman history than almost any other in Germany. For this reason, where the found coins will be exhibited will be determined after the research.
Gaza farmer finds a 4,500-year-old statue of the Canaanite goddess
A farmer in the city of Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip, found a rare 4,500-year-old stone sculpture while working on his land. The Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said Monday that the 22-centimetre-tall limestone head is believed to represent the Canaanite goddess Anat and is estimated to be dated to around 2,500 B.C.
The sculpture is 22 cm tall, made of limestone, with a head but without a body, and attached to the head was the crown of the snake, which was used by the gods as a symbol of strength and invincibility.
“Anat was the goodness of love, beauty, and war in the Canaanite mythology,” said Jamal Abu Rida, the ministry´s director, in a statement.
Anat, Anath, or Anatha is a major northwest Semitic goddess. Syria, particularly Ugarit and Mount Lebanon. Canaanites, Amorites, Egyptians (Elephantine), Libyans, and Hebrews all worshipped him.
Gaza, which was on important trade routes for ancient civilisations, is home to numerous ancient treasures
Goddess Anat of fertility, sexual love, hunting, and war. From the fertile agricultural area along the eastern Mediterranean coast, her cult spread throughout the Levant by the middle of the third millennium BC.
Her attributes vary widely among different cultures and over time, and even within particular myths. She likely heavily influenced the character of the Greek goddess Athena.
Gaza, a narrow enclave on the Mediterranean, boasts a trove of antiquities and archaeological sites as it was a major land route connecting ancient civilizations in Egypt, the Levant, and Mesopotamia.
However, unearthed artefacts regularly vanish, and development projects are given priority over the preservation of archaeological sites.
Bulldozers working for an Egyptian-funded housing project discovered the remnants of a Roman-era tomb in January, Gaza.
Flammable Residues Detected in Medieval Vessels from Jerusalem
A new analysis of residue in ancient ceramic vessels from 11th and 12th century Jerusalem has found that the jars may have had a more sinister purpose than storage.
Previous research into the iconic vessels, which are held in museums around the world, identified them as vessels for beer drinking, and containers for mercury, oil and medicines.
The jars are easily identifiable, spherical in shape with conical bases, and have been found in all sorts of archaeological contexts throughout the Middle East between the 9th and 15th centuries.
Conico-spherical jars are found throughout the Middle East in archaeological contexts dating from the 9th-15th centuries.
But a new study, led by Carney Matheson, of Griffith University in Queensland, has found that while some of the vessels were indeed used for these purposes, others contained a flammable and likely explosive material, suggesting they may have been used as a kind of crude hand grenade – an explanation supported by evidence from ancient texts.
The sherds studied were excavated from the Armenian Garden in Jerusalem in the 1960s, and analysed for trace residue to determine their contents.
“These vessels have been reported during the time of the Crusades as grenades thrown against Crusader strongholds, producing loud noises and bright flashes of light,” says Matheson.
The Crusades (1095-1291), were a series of violent religious wars initiated by the Latin Church during the Medieval period, culminating most famously in the attempted seizure of Jerusalem from Islamic rule. Jerusalem’s inhabitants, it seems, found ingenious ways to fight back.
So, what were these ancient grenades made from?
“Some researchers had proposed the vessels were used as grenades and held black powder, an explosive invented in ancient China and known to have been introduced into the Middle East and Europe by the 13th century,” Matheson says. “It has been proposed that black powder may have been introduced to the Middle East earlier, as early as these vessels from the 9th to 11th century.”
But the new study rules out black powder: “This research has shown that it is not black powder and likely a locally invented explosive material.”
The research also found that some of the vessels had been sealed with a resin.
“More research on these vessels and their explosive content will allow us to understand ancient explosive technology of the medieval period and the history of explosive weapons in the Eastern Mediterranean,” says Matheson.
Neanderthals Produced Symbolic Objects More than 115,000 Years Ago
At least 70,000 years ago Homo sapiens used perforated marine shells and colour pigments. From around 40,000 years ago he created decorative items, jewellery and cave art in Europe. Using Uranium-Thorium dating an international team of researchers co-directed by Dirk Hoffmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, now demonstrates that more than 115,000 years ago Neanderthals produced symbolic objects and that they created cave art more than 20,000 years before modern humans first arrived in Europe. The researchers conclude that our cousins’ cognitive abilities were equivalent to our own.
La Pasiega, section C, cave wall with paintings. The ladder shape composed of red horizontal and vertical lines (centre left) dates to older than 64,000 years and was made by Neanderthals.
Symbolic material culture, a collection of cultural and intellectual achievements handed down from generation to generation, has so far been attributed to our own species, Homo sapiens.
“The emergence of symbolic material culture represents a fundamental threshold in the evolution of humankind. It is one of the main pillars of what makes us human,” says Dirk Hoffmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “Artefacts whose functional value lies not so much in their practical but rather in their symbolic use are proxies for fundamental aspects of human cognition as we know it.”
Dating cave art in La Pasiega: Using Uranium-Thorium dating an international team of researchers co-directed by Dirk Hoffmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, demonstrates that more than 115,000 years ago Neanderthals produced symbolic objects and that they created cave art more than 20,000 years before modern humans first arrived in Europe.
Dating cave art in La Pasiega: Using Uranium-Thorium dating an international team of researchers co-directed by Dirk Hoffmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, demonstrates that more than 115,000 years ago Neanderthals produced symbolic objects and that they created cave art more than 20,000 years before modern humans first arrived in Europe.
Early symbolic artefacts, like pigment-coloured shells that possibly served as body ornamentation, are documented for the Middle Stone Age in North and South Africa at around 70,000 years ago and are associated with anatomically and behaviourally modern humans.
There is evidence in Europe of cave art, sculpted figures, decorated bone tools and jewellery made of bone, tooth, ivory, shell or stone that dates back to the so-called “Upper Palaeolithic Revolution” around 40,000 years ago. These artefacts, researchers concluded, must have been created by modern humans who were spreading all over Europe after their arrival from Africa.
More than body and tool ornamentation, cave art is a particularly impressive example of symbolic behaviour. However, it has so far been attributed to modern humans only, and claims of a possible Neanderthal origin have been hampered by a lack of precise dating. However, the creators of cave art can usually not be identified directly, but only indirectly by determining the age of the objects. “Dating cave art accurately and precisely, but without destroying it, has so far been difficult to accomplish,” says Hoffmann. “Thanks to recent technical developments we can now obtain a minimum age for cave art using Uranium-Thorium (U-Th) dating of carbonate crusts overlying the pigments.”
U-Th dating, a very precise dating technique based on the radioactive decay of Uranium isotopes into Thorium, determines the age of calcium carbonate formations up to an age of 500,000 years. It thus goes back considerably further in time than the radiocarbon method.
Calcite crust on top of the red ladder shape sign. The U-Th method dates the formation of the crust which gives a minimum age for the underlying painting.
Dating of carbonate crusts
The researchers from Germany, the UK, France and Spain analysed more than 60 carbonate samples that consisted of less than ten milligrams each from three different cave sites in Spain: La Pasiega in north-eastern Spain, Maltravieso in western Spain and Ardales in southern Spain. All three sites contain paintings mostly in red, sometimes in black, that show groups of animals, dots and geometric signs, hand stencils, handprints and engravings.
“Our dating results show that the cave art at these three sites in Spain is much older than previously thought”, says team member Alistair Pike from the University of Southampton. “With an age in excess of 64,000 years, it predates the earliest traces of modern humans in Europe by more than 20,000 years.
The cave art must thus have been created by Neanderthals.” This early cave art was created in red pigments and comprises lines, dots, discs and hand stencils. According to the researchers, their creation involved planning a light source, mixing pigments for colouring and choosing a proper location.
Stencil of a Neanderthal hand on a cave wall in Maltravieso (colour enhanced), almost completely covered with calcite. It is older than 66,000 years.
Symbolic thinking in Neanderthals
“Neanderthals created meaningful symbols in meaningful places”, says Paul Pettitt from the University of Durham, also a team member and cave art specialist. In the Cueva Ardales, where excavations are currently being conducted by a German-Spanish team, the presence of Neanderthals has also been proven by analysing occupation layers. “This is certainly just the beginning of a new chapter in the study of ice age rock art”, says Gerd-Christian Weniger of the Foundation Neanderthal Museum Mettmann, one of the leaders of the Ardales excavations.
In the Iberian Peninsula, Neanderthal symbolic behaviour may actually have a long-term tradition. In a second study, also published this week by Hoffmann and colleagues, the researchers determined the age of an archaeological deposit located at the Cueva de Los Aviones, a sea cave in Southeast Spain. This cave contained perforated sea shells, red and yellow colourants and shell containers including complex mixes of pigments.
The researchers used U-Th dating to determine the age of the flowstone that was covering and protecting the deposit. “We dated the deposit underlying the flowstone to an age of about 115,000 years,” says Hoffmann. These dates are even older than similar finds in the south and north Africa associated with Homo sapiens, but at this time Neanderthals were living in western Europe.
A shell with remnants of pigments found in sediments in Cueva de Los Aviones. It dates to between 115,000 and 120,000 years.
Ancient origins of shared cognitive abilities
“According to our new data Neanderthals and modern humans shared symbolic thinking and must have been cognitively indistinguishable”, concludes João Zilhão, a team member from the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies in Barcelona and involved in both studies.
“On our search for the origins of language and advanced human cognition, we must therefore look much farther back in time, more than half a million years ago, to the common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans.”
