Experiments show why early humans began adding handles to tools
A team of researchers at the University of Liverpool has tested the assumption that hafted tools (those with handles) provided early humans with enough benefit to warrant their construction and use.
Figure 1. Hafted (a) and hand-held (b) chopping tools and hafted (c) and hand-held (d) scraping tools used in experimental conditions.
In their paper published in Journal of the Royal Society Interface, the group describes how they enlisted the assistance of several volunteers to help them learn more about the types of benefits to be gained from hafted tools.
For many years, the wheel has been named as the most important invention humans have ever come up with due to the major impact it had on the development of so many early activities such as industry, transport and agriculture.
In this new effort, the researchers suggest the invention of hafted tools might have been equally important.
By adding a handle to tools, humans stabilized their existence—handled tools made cutting down trees much easier, which led to the development of wooden structures.
They also made hunting more efficient by making it a lot easier to sharpen spears.
In this new effort, the researchers noted that little work has been done to learn more about the advantages given to early humans by hafted tools. And that led them to conduct tests of their own.
The work by the researchers entailed enlisting the assistance of 24 male and 16 female adult volunteers to conduct early human type activities using both hafted and unhafted tools—each was fitted with a suit holding sensors that measured motion, muscle contractions, oxygen consumption and the speed at which tools were moving through the air.
The volunteers were asked to attempt to chop down a simulated tree using axes with and without handles and to try to scrape away fibres on a carpet that simulated an animal hide using scrapers with and without handles.
In looking at the data from the tests, the researchers found that the hafted tools allowed for a greater range of motion, the use of more muscle and a greater impact speed, which resulted in more force.
And while the use of the hafted tools required much more exertion, the payoff more than outweighed the cost.
The researchers conclude by suggesting that their tests showed that the benefits obtained from hafted tools almost certainly contributed to their invention and spread in early civilizations.
Remains of man who was ‘vaporized’ by Mount Vesuvius 2,000 years ago discovered
The skeletal remains of a man whose flesh disintegrated in the heat from Mount Vesuvius almost 2,000 years ago have offered a new glimpse into one of history’s most famous volcanic eruptions.
The man was between 40 and 45 years old when he died. Archaeologists think he may have been a Roman citizen from the seaside town, which was popular with the wealthy.
Archaeologists released pictures of the skeleton found at the ancient site of Herculaneum — which along with Pompeii was utterly destroyed by the eruption in 79 A.D. — the first human remains to be found there in decades.
The man, discovered in October and thought to be around 40 to 45 years old, was surrounded by carbonized wood. Preliminary work has also found traces of fabric and what appears to be a bag. Painstaking work is continuing to analyze the remains.
The bones were tainted red, a mark of the stains left by the victim’s blood, Francesco Sirano, director of the Herculaneum Archaeological Park, told the Italian news agency ANSA.
The site of archaeological excavations of the city of Herculaneum in Ercolano, Italy.
“It’s helped enormously to understand both the last moments of the site, but also the 100 years running up to it,” professor Andrew Wallace-Hadrill from the United Kingdom’s Cambridge University and a former director of the Herculaneum Project which collaborates on the ongoing excavations, told NBC News.
“The power of nature is absolutely awesome and to be under a volcanic eruption is just unimaginably violent. The site sits there peacefully in the sunshine and it seems so idyllic, and you have to explain to people that this has been through the most violent eruption.”
Wallace-Hadrill said that a previous excavation cut off the feet of the skeleton.
“Initially they found a couple of leg bones sticking out of the edge of the escarpment. And indeed the excavation through the escarpment had cut off the feet of this skeleton — a bit like finding a mafia killing,” he said.
The skeleton was found face up. Archaeologists think the man had turned to face the onrushing cloud of hot gas and debris from the volcanic eruption when he was killed.
The victims’ soft tissue was either vaporized in that heat or has decayed over centuries. In one case, researchers said the heat was enough to vitrify the brain of a body in Herculaneum, turning it into a hard glass-like substance, as the temperature reached 968 degrees Fahrenheit.
Known as Ercolano in modern-day Italy and situated to the south of Naples, Herculaneum was a seaside town favoured by wealthy Romans. In 1709, ancient remains were revealed during the digging of a well. Previous excavations in the 1980s and the 1990s exposed more than 300 skeletons there.
Modern forensic techniques can reveal far more than previous generations of archaeologists could: Earlier this year, scientists said one skeleton found in the 1980s likely belonged to a Roman soldier sent on a doomed rescue mission to Pompeii and Herculaneum.
“You feel that you are in immediate contact with ancient life, not the blurred contact you get from typical archaeological sites. Because the process of destruction is 24 hours, you have this extraordinary immediacy,” Wallace-Hadrill said.
Pompeii and Herculaneum were situated in different directions from Vesuvius, meaning the effect of the eruption was different on both.
Wallace-Hadrill added that many of the people killed by the eruption — their charred remains often show them cowering for shelter — could have survived had they left the area.
“The wise ones, one realizes in retrospect, simply walked away from the eruption the moment it started,” he said. “If they’d all known this, they all could have escaped, they just had to walk away… But hundreds and thousands did not.”
207-year-old whaling ship discovered in the Gulf of Mexico
The wreck of a 19th-century whaling ship has been identified on the sea bottom in the Gulf of Mexico. Its discovery was announced Wednesday (March 23) in a statement released by representatives of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and their partners in the expedition.
This image of the try-works was taken from the shipwreck site of the whaler Industry by an NOAA ROV. The try-works was a cast-iron stove with two deep kettles that were used to render whale blubber into oil.
Researchers onboard NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer spotted the wreck on Feb. 25 at a depth of 6,000 feet (1,800 meters).
They used a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to explore a seafloor location where the shipwreck had previously been glimpsed, but not investigated, in 2011 and 2017, and their search received additional guidance via satellite communication with a scientific team onshore, according to the statement.
A team of experts then confirmed that the vessel was the Industry, which sank May 26, 1836, while the crew was hunting sperm whales. It was built in 1815, and for 20 years, the 64-foot-long (19.5 meters) ship had pursued whales across the Gulf, the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean, until a storm breached its hull and snapped its masts.
Though 214 whaling voyages crisscrossed the Gulf from the 1780s until the 1870s, this is the only known shipwreck in the region, NOAA representatives said.
The crew list for Industry’s last voyage was lost at sea, but past ship records show that among Industry’s essential crew were Native American people and free Black descendants of enslaved African people.
The discovery of the wreck could offer important clues about the role that Black and Native American sailors played in America’s maritime industry at the time, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Commerce Don Graves said in the statement.
“This 19th-century whaling ship will help us learn about the lives of the Black and Native American mariners and their communities, as well as the immense challenges they faced on land and at sea,” Graves said.
Life on a whaling ship would certainly have been challenging, with long hours, hard physical labour and poor food that was likely to be infested with vermin, according to the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts.
Living conditions could also be extremely unpleasant; a whaler’s account from 1846 described the crew’s quarters, known as the forecastle, as “black and slimy with filth, very small and hot as an oven,” J. Ross Browne wrote in the book “Etchings of a Whaling Cruise,” according to the museum.
“It was filled with a compound of foul air, smoke, sea-chests, soap-kegs, greasy pans, [and] tainted meat,” Browne wrote.
This image of an anchor was taken from the 1836 shipwreck site of the whaler Industry in the Gulf of Mexico by the NOAA ROV deployed from NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer, on Feb. 25, 2022.
A deep dive
NOAA’s Okeanos Explorer collects data on unknown or little-explored seafloor regions of the deep ocean, mapping seamounts and discovering mysterious forms of elusive marine life at depths from 820 to 19,700 feet (250 to 6,000 m), according to NOAA.
Past expeditions have revealed “mud monsters” in the Mariana Trench, the “most bizarre squid” an NOAA zoologist had ever seen, and a real-life SpongeBob and Patrick living side by side on the seafloor, Live Science previously reported.
Video from the ROV combined with Industry records enabled the scientists to confirm that they had discovered the long-lost whaling brig.
A mosaic of images from the NOAA video of the brig Industry wreck site shows the outline in sediment and debris of the hull of the 64-foot by 20-foot whaling brig.
Another clue that helped experts to identify Industry was that there was little onboard evidence of its whaling activities; when the ship was sinking, another whaling vessel visited the foundering Industry and salvaged its equipment, removing 230 barrels of whale oil, as well as parts of the rigging and one of the ship’s four anchors, according to the NOAA statement.
“We knew it was salvaged before it sank,” Scott Sorset, a marine archaeologist for the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and a member of the expedition’s shore team, said in the statement. “That there were so few artefacts on board was another big piece of evidence it was Industry.”
New research has also shed light on what happened to Industry’s crew on that final voyage.
Robin Winters, a librarian at the Westport Free Public Library in Massachusetts, unearthed an 1836 article from The Inquirer and Mirror (a Nantucket weekly newspaper) reporting that Industry’s crew was rescued by another whaling ship and brought to Westport.
That was a lucky turn of events for Industry’s Black whalers in particular, who could have been jailed under local laws had they reached shore with no proof of identity, said expedition researcher James Delgado, a senior vice president at the archaeology firm SEARCH.
“And if they could not pay for their keep while in prison, they would have been sold into slavery,” Delgado said in the statement.
How the ancient Greeks proved Earth was round over 2,000 years ago
Long before NASA was sending satellites up into space, the ancient Greeks developed a way to determine the world was spherical over 2000 years ago.
Despite it being obvious that the world is has a round spherical shape, ‘flat-earthers’ will live and die by their convictions under the belief Planet Earth is well and truly falt.
While it may seem futile to engage in such debates if you do happen to be drawn into a discussion that makes you question your own logic/common sense just remembered – the Greeks proved the Earth was around 2000 years ago.
And they did it without leaving the comfort of their own home.
By the mid-20th century, we discovered the Earth’s circumference was exactly 40,030 km but over 2000 years earlier in ancient Greece, a mathematician by the name of Eratosthenes arrived at the same exact figure and all he had on him was a stick.
As well as being a mathematical savant Eratosthenes was head of the library at Alexandria – the capital of the Greek empire, he came to upon his discovery when he found out the city of Syene, a neighbouring metropolitan to the south, cast no vertical shadows during noon on the summer solstice.
This was because the sun was directly overhead, at its highest point so to speak. Eratosthenes wanted to find out if this was the same for Alexandria as well, so on June 21, he planted a stick into the ground and waited to see if a shadow would be cast at noon. It happened to show one shadow, which measured at seven degrees.
By this logic, if rays from the sun are coming at the same exact angle at the same exact time of the day, with a stick showing a shadow in Alexandria but not in Syene it means the Earth is curved. It’s something which Eratosthenes, and later his contemporaries, already knew.
The concept of a ‘spherical Earth’ was theorised by Greek philosopher Pythagoras around 500 BC and later validated by the great philosopher Aristotle a few centuries later.
So this is where the hardcore maths come into play, if the Earth was round it meant Eratosthenes could use his discovery to determine the ‘circumference of the entire planet’.
Because the difference in shadow length between Alexandria and Syene is seven degrees it means the two cities are seven degrees apart on Earth’s 360-degree surface. To confirm this Eratosthenes hired a man to walk the distance between Alexandria and Syene, he later learned ‘they were 5,000 stadia apart’ from each other, which equates to 800 kilometres
Eratosthenes could use simple measurements to discover Earth’s circumference – which is ‘7.2 degrees is 1/50 of 360 degrees’ according to The Independent. If you multiply 800 by 50 you get 40,000 kilometres.
So without any fancy technology or huge government funding, a man from Ancient Greece discovered the circumference of our little green planet. All he required was his brains and a stick.
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Mummies uncovered in Portugal date back 8,000 years and could be oldest in the world
Archaeologists are set to rewrite the history books after they uncovered new evidence that suggests the oldest instances of mummification occurred 8,000 years ago.
Researchers have taken a second look at photographs snapped 60 years ago of several skeletons that were buried in southern Portugal.
A new analysis of these photos has led them to believe that the oldest evidence of mummification actually originated in Europe, not Egypt or Chile as previously thought. During excavations in the 1960s, archaeologists discovered nearly a dozen ancient bodies in Portugal’s Sado Valley.
Analysing previously undeveloped photos, researchers now believe that at least one of those bodies had been mummified.
They theorise that this was done to possibly make it easier to transport before its burial.
Experts also found evidence that suggests that other bodies that were buried at the site may have been similarly preserved as mummies, implying that this was a widespread practice in the region.
Mummification is most commonly associated with Ancient Egypt, where elaborate burial procedures were used more than 4,500 years ago.
Archaeology breakthrough as world’s oldest mummy found in Portugal rewrites history
Archaeologists were able to reconstruct the burial sites from photographs
Other evidence of mummification outside Egypt is found in other parts of Europe, dating from about 1000 BC.
However, archaeologists have now dated this person as the oldest mummy ever discovered, predating all previous instances by a long time.
This newly identified mummy in Portugal pushes back the previous record by about 1,000 years, then held by mummies found in the coastal region of Chile’s the Atacama Desert.
When it comes to hot and dry regions like Egypt and the Atacama desert, mummification is a relatively straightforward process.
However, it is generally difficult to find evidence of mummies in Europe, where much wetter conditions mean that mummified soft tissues rarely stay preserved, according to Rita Peyroteo-Stjerna, a bioarchaeologist at Uppsala University in Sweden.
Speaking to Live Science, Ms Peyroteo-Stjerna, the lead author of the study said: “It’s very hard to make these observations, but it’s possible with combined methods and experimental work.”
Other authors of the study added: “These burials generally conform to the pattern characteristic of the mortuary practices known for these hunter-gatherer communities, but aspects of the treatment of the body, including its transformation and curation before burial, are new elements.
One of the bodies was in a hyperflexed state
The remains are believed to be 8000 years old
“New insights into the use of burial places, such as a very tight clustering of burials, and the proposed cases of mummification and the subsequent internment of hyperflexed, intact bodies highlight the significance of both the body and the burial place in the wider hunter-gatherer landscape of south-western Portugal.”
After observing the photographs, the archaeologists noted that the bones of the buried skeletons were “hyperflexed”, meaning that their limbs have been bent far beyond their natural limits.
This indicates that after the person’s death, the body had been tied up with bindings that have disintegrated since then.
The team also found that the bones of the skeleton were in excellent condition, particularly the small bones of the feet, which generally fall apart completely from the skeleton as the body decomposes.
Archaeology breakthrough as experts retrace human roots with 518 million year-old rocks
The new study is based on an analysis of 518 million-year-old rocks that contain the oldest collection of fossils that researchers have on record.
The researchers believe that Chengjian, a city in the mountainous Yunnan Province of China, is the origin of many of today’s species, including humans. This site is where complex organisms first developed, an event known as the ‘Cambrian Explosion’, a major time period in the history of the Earth.
The Cambrian explosion is the 13-25 million year-long period where all major animal species began to develop. The collection of fossils includes 250 different lifeforms that range from the first worms to primitive arthropods which led to shrimps, insects, spiders and scorpions.
The researchers, who published their findings in Nature Communications, have also discovered some of the earliest vertebrates, including the ancestors of modern fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. Senior author Dr Xiaoya Ma, of Exeter University, said: “The Cambrian Explosion is now universally accepted as a genuine rapid evolutionary event.
“But the causal factors have been long debated – with hypotheses on environmental, genetic or ecological triggers.”
Archaeology breakthrough as expert retrace human roots with 518-million-year-old rocks.
The rocks contain the oldest collection of fossils that researchers have on record.
At the time, the area was a vast wetland feeding the mouth of a river – ideal for organisms to thrive.
Dr Ma said: “The discovery of a deltaic environment shed new light on understanding the possible causal factors for the flourishing of these Cambrian bilaterian animal-dominated marine communities and their exceptional soft-tissue preservation.
“The unstable environmental stressors might also contribute to the adaptive radiation of these early animals.”
Some key prehistoric discoveries
Only true animals are ‘bilaterian’ – with both a front and back, two symmetrical sides and openings at either end connected by a gut.
An analysis of ancient sediment samples identified evidence of marine currents. The area was a shallow, nutrient-rich delta affected by storm-floods – shedding fresh light on evolution.
Co-lead author Dr Farid Saleh, of Yunnan University, said: “We can see from the association of numerous sedimentary flows the environment hosting the Chengjiang Biota was complex.
The Cambrian explosion is the 13-25 million year-long period where all major animal species began.
“It was certainly shallower than what has been previously suggested in the literature for similar animal communities.”
The era was a key period when the diversity of life began to resemble that of today. Most organisms were simple until then – composed of individual cells occasionally assembled into colonies.
Co-lead author Dr Changshi Qi, also from Yunnan, said: “Our research shows that the Chengjiang Biota mainly lived in a well-oxygenated shallow-water deltaic environment.
The collection of fossils includes 250 different lifeforms
“Storm floods transported these organisms down to the adjacent deep oxygen-deficient settings, leading to the exceptional preservation we see today.”
The study also confirms a long-held theory that a large spike in oxygen triggered the burst.
Co-author Professor Luis Buatois, of Saskatchewan University in Canada, said: “The Chengjiang Biota – as is the case of similar faunas described elsewhere – is preserved in fine-grained deposits.
“Our understanding of how these muddy sediments were deposited has changed dramatically during the last 15 years.
“Application of this recently acquired knowledge to the study of fossiliferous deposits of exceptional preservation will change dramatically our understanding of how and where these sediments accumulated.”
Analysis Links the Origins of the Maya and Corn Cultivation
In Maya creation myths, the gods created humans out of corn. Now, a new study from a site in Belize suggests corn really was important in the origin of the ancient Maya: More than half of their ancestry can be traced to migrants who arrived from South America sometime before 5600 years ago, likely bringing with them new cultivars of the crop that sustained one of Mesoamerica’s great cultures.
These previously unknown migrants “were the first pioneers who essentially planted the seeds of Maya civilization,” which emerged about 4000 years ago, says archaeologist and co-author Jaime Awe.
A native Belizean now at Northern Arizona University, he, like many people in Belize, has some Maya ancestry. “Without corn, there would have been no Mayans.”
Archaeologists found human remains at this rock shelter in the Maya Mountains of southwestern Belize.
The discovery reveals a significant new source of ancestry for the Maya, whose civilization spanned one-third of Central America and Mexico, dotting the region with cities and monuments at its height more than 1000 years ago.
Today, the Maya are an ethnolinguistic group of at least 7 million Indigenous peoples in Central America.
The study also suggests that as in Europe, where farming arrived with immigrants from the Middle East, farming in the Americas spread as least in part with people on the move, rather than simply as know-how passed between cultures.
“This paper is really groundbreaking,” says Mary Pohl, a Maya archaeologist at Florida State University. “This is a dramatic revelation and is really stirring things up.”
Awe, a Maya archaeologist and former director of the Belize Institute of Archaeology, had long wondered how the Maya were related to the hunter-gatherers and early farmers who brought maize, manioc, and chiles to what is now Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala. But poor preservation of bones and DNA in the hot and humid climate had left few clues.
The new study analyzes remain from two rock shelters on the steep slopes of old-growth rainforest in the Bladen Nature Reserve in southwestern Belize, a 2.5-kilometre hike from the nearest road.
Since 2014, archaeologist Keith Prufer of the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, wildlife biologist Said Gutierrez of the Ya’axché Conservation Trust, and their colleagues have unearthed more than 85 skeletons from shallow graves in the rock shelters’ dry dirt floors.
The archaeologists directly dated 50 individuals with radiocarbon, finding they lived between 1000 to 9600 years ago. Then, population geneticist David Reich of Harvard University and his team managed to extract high-quality ancient DNA from the inner ear bones of 20 individuals—“the oldest human DNA from a tropical rainforest site,” Reich says.
They analyzed 1.2 million nucleotide bases across the genomes and compared them to DNA from ancient and living people from the Americas.
The comparisons showed the earliest people buried at the rock shelters, 9600 to 7300 years ago, closely resembled that of hunter-gatherers descended from an ancient migration from North to South America. But after 5600 years ago, the DNA recorded a major shift: All 15 individuals tested were most closely related to another group of Indigenous people who today live from northern Colombia to Costa Rica and who speak Chibchan languages. “It’s clearly a major movement into the Maya region of people related to Chibchan speakers,” Reich says.
The migration had a lasting impact: Reich’s team found that living Maya has inherited more than half of their DNA from this influx from the south, they reported today in Nature Communications. Half of the remainder came from the ancient hunter-gatherers who were first in the region, the rest from ancestors of people in the Mexican highlands.
The population shift eventually led to a new diet. Prufer and archaeologist Douglas Kennett at the University of California, Santa Barbara, had previously analyzed carbon isotopes from the teeth of the people in the rock shelters, which shows the kind of food they ate. As reported in Science in 2020, they found a steady increase in maize consumption over time. The ancient hunter-gatherers got less than 10% of their diet on average from maize. The first migrants from the south also ate relatively little corn. But then, between about 5600 years ago and 4000 years ago the proportion of maize surged, from 10% to 50%, providing “the earliest evidence of maize as a staple grain,” Prufer says.
The shift to maize happened hundreds of years after the influx of migrants, but the team says its results fit with the emerging story of maize cultivation. The plant was partially domesticated as early as 9000 years ago in southwest Mexico, but over the past 8 years, genetic and archaeological evidence has shown that it wasn’t fully domesticated until 6500 years ago—at sites in Peru and Bolivia. There, farmers developed larger, more nutritious cobs than the partially domesticated maize still found in Mexico 5300 years ago, says archaeologist Logan Kistler of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History (NMNH).
Together, the evidence suggests the migrants brought improved maize plants from the south by 5600 years ago, perhaps with methods for growing corn in small gardens, says Kennett, a co-author. By 4000 years ago it had become the keystone crop. That scenario could explain why one early Maya language incorporates a Chibchan word for maize, says linguist and co-author David Mora-Marín of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
In tracing the origin of one of Mesoamerica’s great peoples, the genetic and isotopic work also illuminates the evolutionary roots of one of the world’s most successful crops, says archaeobotanist Dolores Piperno of NMNH and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. “It really transforms our knowledge of how maize dispersed.”
Egypt uncovers the 4,000-year-old painted tomb of a royal palace official
Five painted tombs were recently unearthed in Saqqara, an ancient Egyptian necropolis just outside of Cairo, according to a report by Reuters.
The Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said that a recent excavation of burial shafts resulted in the finding of the tombs, along with more than 20 sarcophagi, toys, wooden boats, masks, and more.
The tombs are at least 4,000 years old, dating back to the Old Kingdom and First Intermediate period, a so called dark period in ancient Egyptian history as the regime of the Old Kingdom collapsed and political instability led to the destruction of monuments, artworks, and more. As such, not much remains from this time.
Mostafa Waziri, head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities.
These tombs, however, are well-preserved and particularly well-decorated, with the additional inclusion of small statues and pots. Some of the paintings seem to represent food offerings.
The tombs, which reside near the pyramid of King Merenre I, are believed to have belonged to senior officials and court advisors.
The identity of two of those buried in the tombs has been ascertained. One was a top official named Iry, whose tomb included a limestone sarcophagus.
The other was occupied by a woman named Petty, who was both a priest of Hathor and a kind of beautician for Menere I.
Menere I is believed to be the father of Pepi II, the most notable pharaoh of this age whose reign is said to have lasted for more than 90 years.
The Egyptian government has been actively excavating Saqqara over the past several months.
In November, the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced that it had found the tomb of a treasurer to the New Kingdom pharaoh Ramses II, which included several intact murals, in Saqqara.
These recent discoveries come amid the government’s “Follow the Sun” campaign that is aimed at attracting tourists to come see the archaeological wonders of ancient Egypt, both those well-known and recently discovered.
The country’s economy largely depends on this tourism, which has been impacted for over a decade beginning with the Arab Spring protests there.
More recently, the pandemic’s slowing down on international travel and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—a large portion of tourists to Egypt are Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian—have also affected the tourism industry there.
