All posts by Archaeology World Team

WORLD

In regards to a possible threat to Earth, ancient cuneiform tablets prove historically accurate

In regards to a possible threat to Earth, ancient cuneiform tablets prove historically accurate

Some 3,000 years ago, astrologers working for the king of the Assyrian empire kept a close eye on the skies, and what they found and recorded on cuneiform tablets can give us incredibly valuable insights into things such as solar flares and other cosmological happenings that are just as relevant today as they were when first recorded.

A solar flare

Ancient Origins notes that approximately 2,700 years ago, astrologers observed something that caught their eye, and they recorded the event on stone tablets:

“(The astrologers) wrote about an unusual red glow in the sky. A University of Tsukuba team found that there are at least three ancient cuneiform tablets that mention such an event, sometimes described as a ‘red cloud’ or with text saying ‘red covers the sky.’”

According to Science Daily, those observations were compared against carbon-14 concentrations in tree rings from that same time period, and what they found is nothing short of incredible:

“These were probably manifestations of what we call today stable auroral red arcs, consisting of light emitted by electrons in atmospheric oxygen atoms after being excited by intense magnetic fields. While we usually think of aurorae as confined to northern latitudes, during periods of strong magnetic activity, as with a solar mass ejection, they may be observed much further south. Moreover, because of changes in the Earth’s magnetic field over time, the Middle East was closer to the geomagnetic pole during this period in history.”

In regards to a possible threat to Earth, ancient cuneiform tablets prove historically accurate
A cuneiform tablet such as the ones used in Assyria

A Helping Hand From the Ancient Assyrians

It turns out that the Assyrians may be able to lend a helping hand to modern-day scientists who are also studying the sun.

Researchers writing in the Astrophysical Letters Journal explain that solar events are an even bigger threat now than they were thousands of years ago:

“These space weather events constitute a significant threat to a modern civilization, because of its increasing dependency on an electronic infrastructure.”

Think about it: A massive solar flare such as the one described by the Assyrians could negatively impact cell phone towers and internet connections. We already know that satellites and spacecraft are highly vulnerable to such happenings. How long could our modern, interconnected world last without the telecommunications devices we all rely on?

In a sense, we can learn a great deal from the Assyrians, and that knowledge may allow us to prepare for future solar events:

“From a historical point of view, it’s interesting because these cuneiform tablets are believed to be the earliest records of this kind of solar events, pushing information back on that phenomena by at least a century. So, the ancient Assyrian astrologers who wrote the texts have provided another example of how learning about the past can help enhance the present, and sometimes even ‘predict’ the future.”

Other Celestial Events

Ancient astrologers did more than just watch the sun and its effects on Earth. They also tracked comets, meteors, and planetary movements, or other celestial events that might portend good or bad omens for their societies.

The job of being an astrologer was very serious and highly respected, Sarah Roberts writes:

“When reading these signs, the priests were primarily concerned with what was happening in the state as a whole and in the life of the king as the central figure of the state. They also believed that they could undertake rituals to appease the gods and mitigate any negative warnings revealed by the stars.”

Astronomers or astrologists at work in the 14th century

The Path to Scientific Exploration

It may sound ridiculous to suggest that astrology led the way to scientific knowledge, but in many ways that just so happens to be exactly what transpired with the work of the ancient Assyrian astrologers:

“Babylonian astronomers had developed an empirical approach to predicting planetary movement by the 8th century BC. Their studies were later adopted and developed by the ancient Greeks and included some good illustrations of ancient Babylonians using advanced mathematical methods. For example, they used calculus to track Jupiter – a key planet in their minds due to the link they created between Jupiter and their key god, Marduk.”

Man has been contemplating his place in the universe for centuries, and eventually, our interest in the stars led to the space program which has taken us to places in our solar system which were once little more than a dream. Our ancient forefathers laid the path for what would later come to pass, and we owe them a debt of gratitude for taking the time to record what they saw as they too stared into the night sky.

AFRICA, EGYPT, WORLD

43 million-year-old fossil of previously unknown four-legged whale found in Egypt

43 million year old fossil of previously unknown four legged whale found in Egypt

Scientists said on Wednesday they had discovered the 43 million-year-old fossil of a previously unknown amphibious four-legged whale species in Egypt that helps trace the transition of whales from land to sea.

43 million-year-old fossil of previously unknown 4-legged whale found in Egypt

The newly discovered whale belongs to the Protocetidae, a group of extinct whales that falls in the middle of that transition, the Egyptian-led team of researchers said in a statement.

Its fossil was unearthed from middle Eocene rocks in the Fayum Depression in Egypt’s the Western Desert — an area once covered by the sea that has provided a rich seam of discoveries showing the evolution of whales — before being studied at Mansoura University Vertebrate Palaeontology Centre (MUVP).

The new whale, named Phiomicetus Anubis, had an estimated body length of some three meters (10 feet) and a body mass of about 600 kg (1,300 lb), and was likely a top predator, the researchers said. Its partial skeleton revealed it as the most primitive protocetid whale known from Africa.

Laid out on a tray are parts of the 43 million-year-old fossil of a previously unknown four-legged amphibious whale called “Phiomicetus Anubis”, which helps trace the transition of whales from land to sea, which were discovered in the Fayum Depression in the Western Desert of Egypt.

“Phiomicetus Anubis is a key new whale species, and a critical discovery for Egyptian and African palaeontology,” said Abdullah Gohar of MUVP, lead author of a paper on the discovery published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The whale’s genus name honours the Fayum Depression and the species name refers to Anubis, the ancient canine-headed Egyptian god associated with mummification and the afterlife.

Despite recent fossil discoveries, the big picture of early whale evolution in Africa has largely remained a mystery, the researchers said.

Work in the region had the potential to reveal new details about the evolutionary transition from amphibious to fully aquatic whales.

With rocks covering about 12 million years, discoveries in the Fayum Depression “range from semiaquatic crocodile-like whales to giant fully aquatic whales”, said Mohamed Sameh of the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency, a co-author.

The new whale has raised questions about ancient ecosystems and pointed research towards questions such as the origin and coexistence of ancient whales in Egypt, said Hesham Sellam, founder of the MUVP and another co-author.

ASIA, JAPAN, WORLD

Extensive Hyper-Violence in Japan’s Ancient Yayoi Period Revealed by Researcher

Extensive Hyper-Violence in Japan’s Ancient Yayoi Period Revealed by Researcher

The human capacity for warfare and whether it is an inescapable part of human nature is a hot button issue at the heart of various disciplines like anthropology, archaeology, philosophy, and so on.

Researchers have posited a range of ideas about why humans engage in war, and the running list of various triggers for inter-group violence is long, be it the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture, the development of weapons, ecological constraints, or population pressures.

Among these, the population pressure hypothesis has become more prominent recently as people globally experience climatic changes and environmental breakdown.

The hypothesis states that population increase can result in resource scarcity, leading to competition and conflict over resources. While there is wide acceptance of this claim, there are very few studies that have quantitatively backed up the origin of inter-group violence due to population pressure based on actual archaeological data.

To correct this gap, Professor Naoko Matsumoto from Okayama University and her team surveyed the skeletal remains and jar coffins, called kamekan, from the Middle Yayoi period (350 BC to AD 25 CE) in northern Kyushu, Japan.

These images from the recent study show evidence of violence in the cut mark on this Yayoi period man just above his right eye socket.

This region has been the focus of inter-group violence investigations because the skeletal remains in the Yayoi period indicate a significant increase in the frequency of violence compared to those living in the preceding Jomon period.

“The inhabitants of the Yayoi period practised subsistence agriculture, in particular wet rice cultivation,” says Professor Matsumoto. “This was introduced by immigrants from the Korean peninsula along with weapons such as stone arrowheads and daggers, resulting in enclosed settlements accompanied by warfare or large-scale inter-group violence. However, those living during the Jomon period were primarily pottery-makers who followed a complex hunter-gatherer lifestyle and had low mortality rates caused by conflict.”

Professor Matsumoto and her team inferred demographic changes using the numbers of well-dated burial jars as a proxy for population size and estimated population pressure from the ratio of population to arable land.

The team calculated the frequency of violence by using percentages of injured individuals identified within the skeletal population, followed by a statistical analysis between population pressure and the frequency of violence.

Analyses of the human skeletal remains excavated at the Middle Yayoi period Doigahama site (near Shimonoseki, Japan; the closest point on Honshu island to Kyushu island) showed that Yayoi people skulls (upper two) were relatively longer and flatter than those of the earlier Jomon people (lower two).

The results of the investigation were published in the Journal of Archaeological Science. The researchers uncovered 47 skeletal remains with trauma, in addition to 51 sites containing burial jars in the Itoshima Plain, 46 in the Sawara Plain, 72 in the Fukuoka Plain, 42 in the Mikuni Hills, 37 in the east Tsukushi Plain, and 50 in the central Tsukushi Plain, encompassing all six study sites.

They found that the highest number of injured individuals and the highest frequency-of-violence levels occurred in the Mikuni Hills, the east Tsukushi Plain, and the Sawara Plain. Interestingly, the Mikuni Hills and the central Tsukushi Plain also showed the highest overall values for population pressure. Overall, statistical analyses supported that population pressure affected the frequency of violence.

However, the peak population did not correlate with the frequency of violence. High levels of population pressure in the Mikuni Hills and the central Tsukushi Plain showed low frequency-of-violence values, while the relatively low population pressures of the east Tsukushi Plain and Sawara Plain were linked to higher frequency-of-violence levels.

Professor Matsumoto reasons there may be other factors that could have indirectly influenced such high levels of violence in the Middle Yayoi period. “I think that the development of a social hierarchy or political organization might also have affected the level of violence.

We have seen stratified burial systems in which certain members of the ruling elite, referred to as ‘kings’ in Japanese archaeology, have tombs with large quantities of prestige goods such as weapons and mirrors,” she says.

“It is worth noting that the frequency of violence tends to be lower in the subregions with such kingly tombs. This suggests that powerful elites might have a role in repressing the frequency of violence.”

The evidence collected by Professor Matsumoto and her team undeniably confirms a positive correlation between population pressure and higher levels of violence and may help devise mechanisms to avoid seemingly never-ending conflicts in motion today.

Further research based on these insights could identify other variables at play in determining the root causes of inter-group violence and actively prevent them.

EUROPE, SPAIN, WORLD

In Madrid, a 76,000-year-old Neanderthal hunting camp was discovered

In Madrid, a 76,000-year-old Neanderthal hunting camp was discovered

In Madrid, archaeologists have uncovered an ancient camp where Neanderthals conducted ‘hunting parties’ 76,000 years ago to chase down big bovids and deer. Archaeologists think it is the largest such camp in the Iberian Peninsula region, with a total area of 3,200 square feet (300 square meters).

They think it may have acted as an intermediary between Neanderthals hunting their prey and the place of final consumption, where the whole group would take advantage of the resources that the hunting parties had gathered.

An analysis of fauna at the Abrigo de Navalmaíllo site in Pinilla del Valle, Madrid helped researchers make the discovery.

Findings: An ancient camp where Neanderthals hosted ‘hunting parties’ to track down large bovids and deer 76,000 years ago has been found in Madrid. Animal remains (pictured) recovered from the site helped archaeologists identify the camp
In Madrid, a 76,000-year-old Neanderthal hunting camp was discovered.
Covering a space of 3,200 sq ft (300m2), archaeologists believe the Abrigo de Navalmaíllo site in Pinilla del Valle, Madrid (pictured) could be the largest such camp in the Iberian Peninsula region
Faunal remains from the Navalmaíllo site include a) jaw of a large bovid; b) rhinoceros molar; c) horse molar; d) molar hyena; e) stone tool cutting marks, and f) percussion mark to access the medulla of a long bone
A taphonomic study of fauna at the Abrigo de Navalmaíllo site showed that it matched remains found at similar hunting camps but not those at previously identified Neanderthal residential camps (pictured above)

This looks at the entire process of what happens after an organism dies and eventually becomes a fossil.

‘We have been able to demonstrate with great certainty that the Neanderthals of Navalmaíllo hunted mainly large bovids and deer that they processed at the site and that they would later move to a second referential place,’ said Abel Moclán, the study’s lead author and a researcher at the National Center for Research on Human Evolution.

‘This aspect is very interesting since there are very few deposits in the Iberian Peninsula where this type of behaviour has been identified. 

‘For all this, we have used very powerful statistical tools, such as Artificial Intelligence.’

Archaeologists have previously found evidence of other Neanderthal activity in the region, including the making of stone tools or the use of fire.

With this latest discovery, researchers think it was used as a short-term base by Neanderthal groups.

Animals were captured locally, transported to the camp, and following their processing, parts of them would have been transported elsewhere.

All phases of butchery were identified, along with the extraction of marrow from long bones, revealing an interest in obtaining this nutritious food.

Human use of animal resources at the site reflects a focus on hunting large bovids and cervids, or deer, while horses, rhinoceroses and small-sized animals were much less frequent, the researchers said. 

The activity of carnivores was also identified, but these animals, including hyenas, mostly left behind the remains of small prey or fed upon carcasses abandoned at the camp by human hunters.

‘Navalmaíllo is one of the few archaeological sites in Iberia that can be interpreted as a hunting camp,’ the study’s authors said, but added that ‘it is probable that more hunting camps are present in the Iberian Peninsula but are yet to be found.’

This map of the Iberian Peninsula shows the location of the Abrigo de Navalmaíllo excavation sites as well as those sites dated in the Upper Pleistocene
These graphs show the types of very large, large, medium and small-sized animals found at the site. Human use of animal resources at the site reflects a focus on primary access to large bovids and cervids. Access to horses, rhinoceroses and small-sized animals was much less frequent, the researchers said

Earlier this month separate research claimed that cave paintings drawn by Neanderthals of swirling dots, ladders, animals and hands show our distant cousins were more artistic than first thought. 

A flowstone formation at the Cueva de Ardales, Málaga in Spain is stained red, originally thought to be a natural coating of iron oxide deposited by flowing water.

However, samples of the red residue allowed a team from Barcelona University to re-examine its origins and confirm it was created by Neanderthals 65,000 years ago. 

They found the ochre-based pigment was intentionally applied by Neanderthals, as modern humans had yet to make their appearance on the European continent. 

EUROPE, IRELAND, WORLD

‘Extraordinary’ 800-year-old chain mail found in Co Longford

‘Extraordinary’ 800-year-old chain mail found in Co Longford

In 1169 AD, Norman invaders arrived in County Wexford, Ireland. Now, a rare and complete, 800-year-old Norman “hauberk” (chainmail vest) has been discovered in County Longford thought to date to when the Normans arrived there in 1172.

The “hauberk” was a coat of upper body armour that was often referred to as a “byrnie.” Made of chain mail, the wearable metal material was much more flexible and lightweight compared with the stiffer and heavier plate armour.

It was an almost perfectly preserved hauberk that was recently discovered in a shed at an undisclosed location in Ireland. According to a report in RTE the ancient armour is currently being held by the local tourist attraction, “ Granard Knights & Conquests,” prior to being exhibited to the public at the National Museum of Ireland.

‘Extraordinary’ 800-year-old chain mail found in Co Longford
The chainmail vest or hauberk at the Granard Knights & Conquests Heritage Center, Longford.

A Real Ancient Treasure For Heritage Week

The piece of rare, and almost complete, ancient Norman armour, that is soaked with the history of 800 years, was recently found rusting in a garden shed.

The discoverer only realized what he had in his shed after attending a ‘Norman People’ event at Granard Knights & Conquests, as part of National Heritage Week. When the finder went home and recognized the item in his shed was virtually the same as those worn by the actors earlier they came forward and informed Irish antiquary authorities.

Tourism and Education Officer for Granard Knights & Conquests, Deirdre Orme, told RTE that the hauberk is an “absolutely amazing discovery.” Furthermore, General Manager of Granard Knights & Conquests, Mr Bartle D’Arcy, explained that while the artefact was not discovered in Granard, or at Granard Motte, it was dug up from a drain nearby. Now, the National Museum of Ireland has announced that their restorers will preserve the rare piece of Norman armour.

A modern replica of Norman chainmail armour.

An Origin Story As Grand As The Discovery, Perhaps?

Deirdre Orme of Granard Knights & Conquests said the team were “completely blown away” when the finder presented their team of history lovers with the 800-year-old hauberk. The reason for her excitement was because the whole scenario “completely links into what we’re doing here at the centre – tapping into our Norman history and heritage.”

The hauberk dates back to approximately 1172 AD when the Normans first arrived in Ireland. This is why the archaeologists at the National Museum of Ireland are associating the discovery with the story of Richard De Tuite, Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, who in 1199 AD built a timber-frame castle and motte.

Whether or not the armour was indeed linked with the story of Richard De Tuite, or not, Mr D’Arcy said that for the finder to have discovered the almost whole, original Norman hauberk. “is just beyond belief.” And the Norman culture specialist added that the whole discovery was amplified because it coincides with Heritage Week.

Apart from rust, the armour is almost flawless.

Changing The Face Of Ireland Forever

The history of Ireland is greatly composed of stories of ancient invasions. The native Fir Bolg were defeated by the Tuatha De Dannan and they themselves were banished to the mounds to exist only as faeries.

However, none of the mythological invasions was so near-genocidal as were the real-life Norman invasions. For while several waves of giants and semi-divine armies have attacked Ireland in ancient legends, none of them aimed to eradicate Irish culture so much as did the Normans, backed by forces of Rome. 

According to the New World Encyclopedia, the Norman invasion of Ireland led to “the eventual entry of the Lordship of Ireland into the Angevin Empire.” This meant the Normans had the blessing of the Pope, which was a way to punish the island’s Christianity that had failed to conform to Rome’s strict rules of worship.

The immediate consequences were the end of the ancient linage of Irish High Kings and all of the timeworn ways of living and dying, and the onset of English rule in Ireland, which continued until 1922.

The Norman hauberk is an artefact from the first days of these cataclysmic changes that would entirely change the destiny of the Emerald Isle.

ASIA, INDONESIA, WORLD

DNA from a teenage girl who died 7,200 years ago reveals previously unknown humans

DNA from a teenage girl who died 7,200 years ago reveals previously unknown humans

The bones of a teenage hunter-gatherer who died more than 7,000 years ago on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi tell the story of a previously unknown group of humans. This distinct human lineage has never been found anywhere else in the world, according to new research.

The study was published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

DNA from teenage girl who died 7,200 years ago reveals previously unknown humans
The skeletal remains of an ancient teenage Toalean woman were nestled among large rocks, which were placed in the burial pit discovered in a cave on Sulawesi.

“We have discovered the first ancient human DNA in the island region between Asia and Australia, known as ‘Wallacea’, providing new insight into the genetic diversity and population history of early modern humans in this little-understood part of the world,” said the study co-author Adam Brumm, a professor of archaeology at Griffith University’s Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, via email.

The Leang Panninge cave is where researchers uncovered the remains of a young hunter-gatherer from 7,000 years ago.

The first modern humans used the Wallacea islands, mainly Indonesian islands that include Sulawesi, Lombok and Flores, as they crossed from Eurasia to the Australian continent more than 50,000 years ago, researchers believe. The exact route or how they navigated this crossing, however, is unknown.

“They must have done so using relatively sophisticated watercraft of some kind, as there were no land bridges between the islands, even during the glacial peaks of the last ice age, when global sea levels were up to 140 meters (459 feet) lower than they are today,” Brumm said.
Tools and cave paintings have suggested that humans were living on these islands by 47,000 years ago, but the fossil record is sparse and ancient DNA degrades more rapidly in the tropical climate.

However, researchers uncovered the skeleton of a female between the ages of 17 and 18 in a cave on Sulawesi in 2015. Her remains were buried in the cave 7,200 years ago. She was part of the Toalean culture, only found in a pocket of Sulawesi’s southwestern peninsula. The cave is part of an archaeological site called Leang Panninge.

Maro’s points are associated with the Toalean culture.

“The ‘Toaleans’ is the name archaeologists have given to a rather enigmatic culture of prehistoric hunter-gatherers that lived in the forested plains and mountains of South Sulawesi between around 8,000 years ago until roughly the fifth century AD,” said Brumm via email. “They made highly distinctive stone tools (including tiny, finely crafted arrowheads known as ‘Maros points’) that are not found anywhere else on the island or in wider Indonesia.”

The young hunter-gatherer is the first largely complete and well-preserved skeleton associated with the Toalean culture, Brumm said.
Lead study author Selina Carlhoff was able to retrieve DNA from the wedge-shaped petrous bone at the base of the skull.

“It was a major challenge, as the remains had been strongly degraded by the tropical climate,” said Carlhoff, also a doctoral candidate at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, in a statement.

Secrets hiding in DNA

The work to retrieve the genetic information was well worth it.
The young woman’s DNA showed that she descended from the first wave of modern humans to enter Wallacea 50,000 years ago. This was part of the initial colonization of “Greater Australia,” or the combined ice age landmass of Australia and New Guinea. These are the ancestors of present-day Indigenous Australians and Papuans, Brumm said.

Fragmentary remains of the girl’s skull were used to retrieve her DNA.

And it turns out that the oldest genome traced to the Wallacea islands revealed something else: previously unknown ancient humans.
She also shares ancestry with a separate and distinct group from Asia who likely arrived after the colonization of Greater Australia — because modern Indigenous Australians and Papuans don’t share ancestry with this group, Brumm said.

“Previously, it was thought that the first time people with Asian genes entered Wallacea was around 3,500 years ago when Austronesian-speaking farmers from Neolithic Taiwan swept down through the Philippines and into Indonesia,” he said.

“It suggests that there might have been a distinct group of modern humans in this region that we really had no idea about up until now, as archaeological sites are so scarce in Wallacea and ancient skeletal remains are rare.”

No descendants of this lineage remain.

Her genome included another trace of an enigmatic and extinct group of humans: Denisovans. The handful of fossils signifying that these early humans ever existed are largely from Siberia and Tibet.

“The fact that their genes are found in the hunter-gatherers of Leang Panninge supports our earlier hypothesis that the Denisovans occupied a far larger geographical area” than previously understood, said study co-author Johannes Krause, a professor of archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, in a statement.

But when her DNA was compared with that of other hunter-gatherers who lived west of Wallacea at the same time, their DNA didn’t contain any traces of Denisovan DNA.

“The geographic distribution of Denisovans and modern humans may have overlapped in the Wallacea region. It may well be the key place where Denisova people and the ancestors of indigenous Australians and Papuans interbred,” said study coauthor Cosimo Posth, a professor at the University of Tübingen’s Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment in Frankfurt, Germany, in a statement.

Researchers don’t know what happened to the Toalean culture, and this latest discovery is one piece of the puzzle as they try to understand the ancient genetic history of humans in Southeast Asia. Brumm hopes that more ancient DNA from the Toalean people can be recovered to reveal its diversity “and its wider ancestral story.”

WORLD

An Advanced Civilization Could Have Ruled Earth Millions of Years Ago, Says the Silurian Hypothesis

An Advanced Civilization Could Have Ruled Earth Millions of Years Ago, Says the Silurian Hypothesis

Have you ever wondered if a different animal would evolve to have human-level intelligence, long after humans have passed away from this planet? We don’t know about you, but we always like to imagine raccoons in that role.

Maybe 70 million years from now, a family of masked fuzzballs will be gathering in front of Mt. Rushmore, building a fire with their opposable thumbs and wondering about what creatures carved that mountain.

But wait, would Mt. Rushmore even survive that long? And what if we’re the raccoons? In other words, if a technologically advanced species dominated the planet around the time of the dinosaurs, would we even have any record of their existence? And if not, then how do we know that didn’t happen?

Mt. Rushmore

The Land Before Time

It’s called the Silurian Hypothesis (and lest you think scientists aren’t nerds, it’s named after a bunch of Doctor Who aliens). Basically, it states that human beings might not be the first intelligent life forms to have evolved on this planet and that if there really were precursors some 100 million years ago, virtually all signs of them would have been lost by now.

In case you get the wrong idea, physicist and study co-author Adam Frank cleared things up in an Atlantic article by saying, “It’s not often that you write a paper proposing a hypothesis that you don’t support.”

In other words, they don’t really believe that there was an ancient civilization of Time Lords and/or Lizard People. Instead, their goal is to discover the ways that we might find the signs of ancient civilizations on other planets.

It might seem obvious that we’d see the signs of such a civilization — after all, there were dinosaurs 100 million years ago, and we know that because we’ve found their fossils. But they were around for more than 150 million years.

That’s important because it’s not just about how old the ruins of this hypothetical civilization would be, nor how widespread it was. It’s also about how long it was around.

Humanity has spread across the globe in a remarkably short amount of time — over the course of about 100,000 years. If another species did the same, then our chances of spotting it in the geological record would be a whole lot smaller. Frank and his climatologist co-author Gavin Schmidt’s paper is meant to pinpoint the methods of spotting deep-time civilizations.

A Needle in Time’s Haystack

We probably don’t have to tell you that humanity is already having a long-term effect on the planet. Even as it breaks down, plastic will degrade into microparticles that integrate themselves into the sediment for eons to come. But while they might hang around for a long time, it could still be difficult to count on actually finding that miniscule strata of plastic shards. Instead, it could be more fruitful to go looking for periods of heightened carbon in the atmosphere.

Right now, the planet is in the Anthropocene period, which is characterized by the widespread dominance of human beings. It’s also characterized by an unprecedented spike in airborne carbons. That’s not to say that there is more carbon in the atmosphere than ever before.

56 million years ago, the planet went through the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a period of extremely high temperatures around the world. We’re talking 70 degrees Fahrenheit (21 degrees Celsius) at the poles warm.

There’s also evidence of heightened fossil carbons in the air at the same time — and the exact reasons for that aren’t fully known. So was it an ancient civilization? In a word: no, absolutely not, don’t be ridiculous.

That increase of carbon unfolded over the course of a couple of hundred thousand years. The spike that we’re currently undergoing is a fresh-faced 300 years old.

The takeaway from this fascinating study is that there is, in fact, a way to look for ancient civilizations. All you have to do is comb through ice cores for signs of carbon dioxide in short, sharp bursts — but the “needle” they’d be looking for in this haystack would be easy to miss if the researchers don’t know what they were looking for.

EUROPE, ITALY, WORLD

Tourists dive into an underwater archaeological Roman party town

Tourists dive into underwater archaeological Roman party town

Fish dart across mosaic floors and into the ruined villas, where holidaying Romans once drank, plotted and flirted in the party town of Baiae, now an underwater archaeological park near Naples.

Statues which once decorated luxury abodes in this beachside resort are now playgrounds for crabs off the coast of Italy, where divers can explore ruins of palaces and domed bathhouses built for emperors.

Rome’s nobility were first attracted in the 2nd century BC to the hot springs at Baiae, which sits on the coast within the Campi Flegrei — a supervolcano known in English as the Phlegraean Fields.

Seven emperors, including Augustus and Nero, had villas here, as did Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony. The poet Sextus Propertius described the town as a place of vice, which was a “foe to virtuous creatures”.

It was where “old men behave like young boys, and lots of young boys act like young girls,” according to the Roman scholar Varro.

But by the 4th century, the porticos, marble columns, shrines and ornamental fish ponds had begun to sink due to bradyseism, the gradual rise and fall of land due to hydrothermal and seismic activity.

The whole area, including the neighbouring commercial capital of Pozzuoli and military seat at Miseno, were submerged. Their ruins now lie between four and six metres (15 to 20 feet) underwater.

‘Something unique’

“It’s difficult, especially for those coming for the first time, to imagine that you can find things you would never be able to see anywhere else in the world in just a few metres of water,” said Marcello Bertolaso, head of the Campi Flegrei diving centre, which takes tourists around the site.

In this photograph taken on August 18, 2021 a dive guide shows tourists a copy of the original statue preserved at the Museum of Baiae, representing Dionysus with ivy crown in the Nymphaeum of punta Epitaffio, the submerged ancient Roman city of Baiae at the Baiae Underwater Park.

“Divers love to see very special things, but what you can see in the park of Baiae is something unique.”

The 177-hectare (437-acre) underwater site has been a protected marine area since 2002, following decades in which antiques were found in fishermen’s nets and looters had free rein.

Divers must be accompanied by a registered guide.

A careful sweep of sand near a low wall uncovers a stunning mosaic floor from a villa which belonged to Gaius Calpurnius Pisoni, known to have spent his days here conspiring against Emperor Nero.

Explorers follow the ancient stones of the coastal road past ruins of spas and shops, the sunlight on a clear day piercing the waves to light up statues. These are replicas; the originals are now in a museum.

“When we research new areas, we gently remove the sand where we know there could be a floor, we document it, and then we re-cover it,” archaeologist Enrico Gallocchio told AFPTV.

“If we don’t, the marine fauna or flora will attack the ruins. The sand protects them,” said Gallocchio, who is in charge of the Baiae park.

“The big ruins were easily discovered by moving a bit of sand, but there are areas where the banks of sand could be metres deep. There are undoubtedly still ancient relics to be found,” he said.