All posts by Archaeology World Team

ENGLAND, EUROPE, WORLD

Industrial-Sized Tannery Detected at Medieval Abbey in England

Industrial-Sized Tannery Detected at Medieval Abbey in England

It is Britain’s biggest and most famous monastic ruin and one that conjures up bucolic images of peace, reflection and very little noise apart, perhaps, from the occasional waft of Gregorian chanting.

In reality, archaeologists have revealed, Fountains Abbey near Ripon was as busy, noisy and industrialised as anywhere in 12th- and 13th-century Britain.

The National Trust has announced the discovery of the foundations of a medieval tannery at the abbey, part of a world heritage site. Experts were astonished.

The purpose of a long, bowling alley-type extension close to the River Skell had long puzzled archaeologists.

This really is a wonderful discovery, it is very important,” said Mark Newman, a trust archaeologist.

Fountains are probably the most investigated Cistercian abbey in Britain, “so when you discover a major building on this scale, that was completely unknown … you don’t get many of those in a career.

Industrial-Sized Tannery Detected at Medieval Abbey in England
Radar image highlighting the two substantial buildings found by the bank of the River Skell.

Newman said many assumed there was nothing more to be discovered about Fountains but one puzzle had always been what a long, bowling alley-type extension, close to the River Skell, was used for.

Ground-penetrating radar has made discoveries of previously unknown monastic buildings, including one 16 metres wide and 32 metres long. They have lined pits and tanks around them. These and the close proximity to water have led to the firm conclusion that it is the remains of a tannery, a place for producing materials for clothing, belts, bedding and book bindings.

It is the scale of the tannery and how close it is to the monks that have further surprised archaeologists. “A tannery of this size, spanning such a large area of the site, reveals an operation on an industrial scale,” said Newman.

Illustration of man sorting skins after drying.

A medieval tannery was a horrible place. Animal skins and hides would first have hooves and horns removed before they were washed to remove dung, dirt and blood. Fat, hair and flesh were then removed, usually by being submerged into a lime or urine solution and being scraped with knives.

Newman said the noise, activity and stench of tanneries had led to an assumption it would be sited much further away from monks and their worship. “We see now that the tannery was much closer and a far cry from the idea of a quiet, tranquil abbey community,” he said.

Newman said people would have been astonished at the number of people who lived and worked so industriously at Fountains, with Cistercian monks being “the first ones to apply themselves to these industrial scales of living and managing the landscape”.

He said the findings also showed the importance of lay brothers at the site. Lay brothers were not literate, like the monks, and were often recruited to do more physical jobs. That left monks more time to study, pray and worship.

The lay brothers, considered “separate but equal” to monks, were provided with weatherproof animal skin capes for outdoor work and slept under sheepskins. “Fountains recruited hundreds of lay brothers in its early decades, all of whom needed to be equipped this way,” said Newman. “This tannery provided the means for that.”

He said though he was taken aback by the scale of the operations that had been discovered, it all made sense. The monks at Fountains were, by necessity, “pioneering farmers and land managers on an industrial scale”.

The radar research was carried out with partners including the University of Bradford. Chris Gaffney, a professor of archaeological sciences, said the technology provided “stunning, unexpected and intriguing glimpses” into life at the abbey.

The trust said it was the largest tannery discovered at a monastic site in Britain and was being seen as a kind of “missing link” in the history of the abbey, which operated from the early 12th century to 1539 and the dissolution of the monasteries.

“It is so easy with a place like Fountains to think this is exactly as the monks saw it,” said Newman. “What we are finding is that there is a whole unrecognised history.”

GUATEMALA, SOUTH AMERICA, WORLD

A private collector is returning a Mayan artefact to Guatemala

A private collector is returning a Mayan artefact to Guatemala

A private collector has returned a Mayan artefact to Guatemala after it was initially slated for auction in 2019. The stone fragment depicts a bird headdress belonging to an ancient ruler of Piedras Negras, the capital of a Mayan kingdom that flourished between the 4th century BC and 9th century AD and is located in what’s now northwestern Guatemala.

A private collector is returning a Mayan artefact to Guatemala
The artefact disappeared from the Mayan site of Piedras Negras in the 1960s

Hundreds of Mayan artefacts were discovered along train construction routes in Mexico.

The object was likely looted from a Mayan archaeological site in the 1960s and eventually ended up in the hands of a prominent Los Angeles art dealer, the Los Angeles Times reported.

From there, it was bought by another art dealer in Paris and ultimately acquired by private collectors Manichak and Jean Aurance, according to the newspaper. Then in 2019, it was included as part of an auction of pre-Columbian artefacts in Paris, estimated to fetch $27,000 to $39,000.

Guatemala and Mexico objected to some of the items in the auction being put up for sale, arguing that they had been stolen and demanding their return.

Though the auction continued mostly as planned, the carving of the bird headdress was withdrawn from the sale after Guatemala was able to prove its provenance with drawings and pictures dating back to its discovery in 1899, a spokesperson for UNESCO wrote in an email to CNN.

Negotiations took place between Guatemala, the French government, UNESCO and the private collector, the spokesperson said, and the collector ultimately decided to return the artefact to Guatemala. On Monday, UNESCO held a ceremony to mark the return.

The artefact disappeared from the Mayan site of Piedras Negras in the 1960s

“The voluntary handover of this fragment of a Mayan stela to its homeland in Guatemala showcases the evolution of the international environment in favour of the return of emblematic cultural objects and artefacts to their homelands under UNESCO’s guidance over the last 50 years,” UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay said in a statement.

“It also shows the importance of the UNESCO 1970 Convention in fighting the illicit trafficking of cultural objects. This success story has been possible thanks to international cooperation and a private collector’s goodwill; it is a model for others to follow.”

The artefact will soon be sent to the National Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology of Guatemala City where visitors will be able to view it and learn about its history, according to UNESCO.

The stone carving’s return to Guatemala comes at a time of wider reckoning for museums, galleries and other institutions.

In recent years, several such institutions have taken steps to repatriate historical objects to their places of origin — Cambridge University is set to return a Benin bronze looted during British colonial rule to Nigeria this week, while the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York announced earlier this year it was returning three treasures of African art to Nigeria as well.

Meanwhile, the pressure on museums continues to mount — Cambodia recently began pushing the Met to review the provenance of a number of items, asserting that they were looted from the country’s ancient sites during decades of war and tumult.

EUROPE, SLOVAKIA, WORLD

Man finds ancient grave and remains while digging the foundation for the garage

Man finds ancient grave and remains while digging foundation for garage

The Slovak Spectator reports that a man digging a foundation for a new garage in western Slovakia alerted the authorities when he discovered human remains. Further investigation revealed a grave containing the bones of two women.

Man finds ancient grave and remains while digging foundation for garage
A grave containing two female skeletons was uncovered by archaeologists in the town of Gbely, Trnava Region, in early October 2021.

A man was digging the foundations for his new garage in the town of Gbely, western Slovakia when he discovered a human skull. He immediately reported it to the police.

Upon further inspection, the police and an anthropologist came across another skull. They discovered that the remains were older than half a century so they informed the Regional Monuments Board (KPÚ) Trnava about the discovery in early October.

The area in the town of Gbely where two female skeletons were uncovered.

Archaeologists and other experts have dated the discovered grave, using radiocarbon analysis, to 421-541 CE. This period is also known as the Migration Period.

Pathological change

They found two women, aged 20-25 and 25-40, in the grave. Both were placed in an upright position on their backs with their heads facing west and their feet pointed east.

“An interesting pathological change was found on one skeleton,” said the KPÚ archaeologist Matúš Sládok. “The coccyx stood significantly asymmetrically.”

He added that this may be due to a post-traumatic condition that results in the coccyx growing into the sacrum following a strong hit during a fall, for example.

Grave robbery

In the Migration Period, the Quadi, Huns, Heruli, Lombards, and perhaps other tribes such as the Goths and Rugians inhabited the territory of what is now western Slovakia.

Sládok noted that a few graves with several individuals buried in each of them were found in the past and were attributed to the Lombards. Some of these known burial sites in western Slovakia are located in Devínska Nová Ves, Rusovce, Šamorín, and Gáň.

The Lombards lived in the area in the years 488-560/568, which is why experts think the recently uncovered grave was dug in the years 488-541.

READ ALSO: IN 1980, WHILE CLEANING OUT HER GARAGE, A WOMAN FOUND THE HIDDEN MUMMIES

Moreover, during the Migration Period, grave robbery was common, and the absence of any personal objects found in the Gbely grave, including jewellery, suggests this grave was robbed too, the archaeologist said, further supporting his argument by noting that the upper part of one skeleton was damaged.

Housing estate

This recent discovery is the first of its kind in Gbely, and experts are convinced there are more graves to be uncovered as human bones were found in several places on the plot. Bones had been found in the area before, but they were not archaeologically recorded.

“The findings of daub and ceramic shards from vessels from different periods of prehistory and Roman times suggest there was also a housing estate or several housing estates in the locality,” added Sládok.

EUROPE, GERMANY, WORLD

Blackened mummy cake found intact 79 years after WWII air raid

Blackened mummy cake found intact 79 years after WWII air raid

A cake baked 79 years ago has been found in the Old Town district of the city of Lübeck, which is located near the coast of northern Germany, according to a Live Science report.

Blackened mummy cake found intact 79 years after WWII air raid
A 79-year-old nutcake lies on a table in the workshop of the Department of Archaeology for the Hanseatic City of Lübeck Historic Monuments Protection Authority.

Though the charred delicacy hasn’t been edible for a very, very long time, it’s still recognizable as a cake, representatives of the Hanseatic City of Lübeck said in a statement.

The cake’s overall shape, nut fillings, details in the sugar icing decorations and even its wax-paper wrappings remained intact after the pastry was burned into a crisp, cake-shaped charcoal briquette during a World War II air raid.

Archaeologists have previously discovered the burnt remains of long-ago meals, but they rarely find food that’s a whole and well-preserved as this cake was, according to the statement. It offers a glimpse into a dark moment in Germany’s history and illuminates the fragility of life during wartime, Lübeck representatives said. 

On the night of March 28, 1942 (and into the early morning hours of March 29), the British Royal Air Force bombed Lübeck, a historic city and a nonmilitary target, in retaliation for the Nazi blitz of Coventry, England, in 1940, said Dirk Rieger, head of the Department of Archaeology for the Hanseatic City of Lübeck Historic Monuments Protection Authority.

The nut-filled cake had recently been unwrapped when the bombs landed, and all of the building’s stories collapsed into the cellar, Rieger told Live Science. Somehow, the cake escaped being crushed, and the intense heat of the flames rapidly scorched and carbonized the confection amid the wreckage.

Founded in 1143, Lübeck is one of the best-preserved medieval urban sites in northern Europe, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which added Lübeck to its World Heritage List of protected sites in 1987.

From 1230 until 1535, Lübeck — a port city on the Baltic Sea — served as the capital of an international merchants’ organization known as the Hanseatic League, and much of the city’s extraordinary medieval architecture remains intact to this day, UNESCO says.

Artefacts and other remains deep underneath the buildings, in Lübeck’s sediments, are also exceptionally well preserved, Rieger said. 

Restorer Sylvia Morgenstern cleans the preserved nutcake with a brush and vacuum cleaner.

“The subsoil is made of clay, so the preservation for organic material is awesome,” he explained. “You dig down like 7 meters [23 feet], and you are in the 1100s.

We have every single feature of urban and mercantile activity throughout eight or nine centuries, which is absolutely unique in the way it’s been preserved.” 

To date, more than 4 million objects have been recovered from excavations around Lübeck — “everything from tiny children’s shoes to whole medieval ships,” Rieger said. 

Workers found the cake in April during infrastructure work in Lübeck’s Old Town district, “close to the town hall and the main market area,” Rieger said. In the ruined parts of the city that the British had bombed, “the town left the cellars within the soil and built new houses on top of them,” he said. Because of Lübeck’s important historic status, archaeologists supervise all of the city’s construction work.

Experts were already present when the workers opened the cellar and discovered the blackened cake, along with plates, knives, spoons and vinyl records that included Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” according to the statement.

Scientists brought the cake to the city’s restoration laboratory, where conservators carefully cleaned it with delicate picks, brushes and vacuums, and then collected samples to identify the nutty filling, Rieger said. But their work to preserve the rare carbonized confection has just begun.

Bombs that the British Royal Air Force dropped on Lübeck contained incendiary chemicals, such as phosphorus, and the archaeologists need to make sure that there are no traces of such materials on the cake that could react when exposed to chemicals used in the preservation of valuable artefacts.

“This cake is like a window into 80 years ago,” Rieger said, and the view is bittersweet. When the cake is finally ready for public display and people can peer through that window, “they will hopefully see not only the destruction of the war but also the joy that people had,” he added.

“Because this was a family celebration, they listened to music, they wanted to have a nice cup of tea, they wanted to have this cake. It’s a very intimate situation that was immediately destroyed by this war.”

MEXICO, NORTH AMERICA, WORLD

Archaeologists Map Nearly 500 Mesoamerican Sites and See Distinct Design Patterns

Archaeologists Map Nearly 500 Mesoamerican Sites and See Distinct Design Patterns

Gizmodo reports that lidar technology was used to create 3-D maps of some 30,000 square miles of Mexico, revealing more than 475 archaeological sites dating from 1400 B.C. to A.D. 1000.

A lidar image of the sites of San Lorenzo (left) and Aguada Fénix (right) show striking similarities, with a long rectangular platform and 20 edge platforms.

The 478 sites included in the new research were inhabited from around 1400 BCE to 1000 CE, and the way they were constructed appears to be linked to cosmologies important to the communities that lived there.

Settlements that align with nearby mountain peaks or the Sun’s arc across the sky suggest there may have been symbolic importance to the orientation of the architecture.

The team categorized the sites into five distinct types of architectural arrangements, which they think might correspond to different time periods and indicate more egalitarian societies.

All the sites had rectangular or square features, which the archaeologists say may have been inspired by the famous Olmec site of San Lorenzo, which had a central rectangular space that was likely used as a public plaza. The team’s survey and analysis were published today in Nature Human Behavior.

“The main point of this study is the discovery of nearly 500 standardized complexes across a broad area, many of them having rectangular shapes,” wrote lead author Takeshi Inomata, an archaeologist at the University of Arizona, in an email to Gizmodo. “Until three years ago, we had no idea about the presence of such complexes. They really force us to rethink what was happening during this period.

The team used an aerial scanning technology called lidar to map hidden structures at these sites. With lidar, archaeologists can get precision measurements of ground elevation change, even through dense tree coverage, thanks to lasers that penetrate the surface and then bounce back to a detector.

Lidar is “revolutionary for archaeology,” Robert Rosensweig, an archaeologist at the University of Albany-SUNY who didn’t work on the recent paper, wrote in an accompanying News & Views article for Nature

“The study foreshadows the future for archaeology as lidar reveals ancient architecture at an unprecedented scale that will reach into remote and heavily vegetated regions the world over,” Rosensweig added.

In 2020, Inomata and his colleagues reported their discovery of the monumental site of Aguada Fénix using lidar imaging. Now, they’ve looked at 2,000 years of architecture in the region through aerial lidar surveys.

A lidar-based illustration of the site Buenavista, which appears to be aligned with the sunrise on certain days of the year.

The people who designed these settlements are broadly called the Olmec and Maya, though there are better, more specific names for communities that fall under those labels, such as the Chontal-speaking residents of eastern Tabasco and the Zoke-speaking people of western Tabasco and Veracruz.

The Olmec site maps are particularly handy; the centre of San Lorenzo is the oldest capital in the area (it’s the home of those colossal heads you might be familiar with), and as such, archaeologists believe it may have set the standard for how to layout a settlement.

But San Lorenzo was well known already; part of the value of this new research is highlighting the structures of smaller settlements. “Although this part of Mexico is fairly open and populated, most of those sites were not known before,” Inomata added. “They were literally hiding in plain sight.”

Together, the nearly 500 sites give archaeologists a sense of how communities in the area are organized. Inomata said the research impacts are two-fold: One, archaeologists now have a better idea as to the development of monumental building projects in the region over time. Two, based on the site layouts, it appears that communities didn’t have a highly stratified social hierarchy.

READ ALSO: LIDAR REVEALS NETWORK OF ANCIENT VILLAGES IN BRAZIL’S RAINFOREST

“Traditionally, archaeologists thought large constructions were done by hierarchical societies with elites and rulers,” Inomata said. “But we now see that those large and standardized spaces could be built by people without pronounced inequality.” That determination is in part based on the lack of large permanent residences at many of the sites.

The archaeological team’s next steps are to visit the sites in person, to verify that the patterns represented from the air are the reality on the ground. That’s an extremely important step, as evidenced by a situation in 2016 in which a teenager thought he found a lost city in satellite imagery, only for archaeologists to disagree, saying it was probably a fallow maize field.

So far, only about 20% of the sites the team surveyed have been studied on the ground. While those ground survey results are promising, more data needs to be collected for researchers to know the extent of architectural similarities and differences in the region.

ASIA, IRAQ, WORLD

Archaeologists in Iraq find ancient wine press, carvings

Archaeologists in Iraq find ancient wine press, carvings

According to an AFP report, researchers working at the site of Khinis in northern Iraq uncovered stone-cut pits dated to the eighth century B.C. and the reign of the Assyrian king Sennacherib.

Archaeologists in Iraq find ancient wine press, carvings
The carvings, from 2,700 years ago, show gods, kings and sacred animals.

The stone bas-reliefs, showing kings praying to the gods, were cut into the walls of a nearly nine-kilometre-long (5.5-mile) irrigation canal at Faida in northern Iraq, the joint team of archaeologists from the Department of Antiquities in Dohuk and colleagues from Italy said.

The carvings, 12 panels measuring five metres (16 feet) wide and two metres tall, show gods, kings and sacred animals. They date from the reigns of Sargon II (721-705 BC) and his son Sennacherib.

“There are other places with rock reliefs in Iraq, especially in Kurdistan, but none are so huge and monumental as this one,” said Italian archaeologist Daniele Morandi Bonacossi.

“The scenes represent the Assyrian king praying in front of the Assyrian gods,” he said, noting that the seven key gods are all seen, including Ishtar, the goddess of love and war, who is depicted on top of a lion.

Ancient ‘propaganda scene’

The irrigation canal was cut into limestone to carry water from the hills to the fields of farmers, and the carvings were made to remind people of the king who ordered its construction.

The carvings were made to remind people of the king who ordered the construction of an irrigation canal.

“It was not only a religious scene of prayer, but it was also political, a sort of propaganda scene,” Morandi Bonacossi added.

“The king, in this way, wanted to show to the people living in the area that he was the one who has created these massive irrigation systems, so… the people should remember this and remain loyal.”

At Khinis, also near Dohuk, the team unearthed giant stone basins cut into the white rock that was used in commercial wine-making during the reign of Sennacherib, in the late 8th or early 7th century BC.

“It was a sort of industrial wine factory,” said Morandi Bonacossi, professor of Near Eastern archaeology at the Italy’s University of Udine, adding this was the first such discovery in Iraq.

“We have found 14 installations, that were used to press the grapes and extract the juice, which was then processed into wine.”

Some of the most famous carvings that have survived from the Assyrian period are the mythical winged bulls, with examples of the monumental reliefs seen in the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, as well as the Louvre in Paris and the British Museum in London.

Iraq was the birthplace of some of the world’s earliest cities. As well as Assyrians it was once home to Sumerians and Babylonians, and to among humankind’s first examples of writing.

Archaeologists in Iraq also discovered stone-cut pits used to press the grapes and extract the juice, which was then processed into wine.

But it is also now a location for smugglers of ancient artefacts. Looters decimated the country’s ancient past, including after the 2003 US-led invasion.

Then, from 2014 and 2017, the Islamic State group demolished dozens of pre-Islamic treasures with bulldozers, pickaxes and explosives. They also used smuggling to finance their operations.

READ ALSO: ISRAEL WINERY: 1,500-YEAR-OLD BYZANTINE WINE COMPLEX FOUND

However, some countries are slowly returning stolen items.

Earlier this year, the United States returned about 17,000 artefacts to Iraq, pieces that mostly dated from the Sumerian period around 4,000 years ago.

Last month, a 3,500-year-old tablet recounting the epic of Gilgamesh was returned to Iraq after being stolen three decades ago and illegally imported to the US.

CANADA, NORTH AMERICA, WORLD

Wreck of US ship that hunted Nazi spies in the Arctic finally discovered

Wreck of US ship that hunted Nazi spies in the Arctic finally discovered

Live Science reports that the wreckage of the U.S. Revenue Cutter Bear has been found in Canadian waters by the U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and other researcher groups.

Wreck of US ship that hunted Nazi spies in the Arctic finally discovered
The US Revenue Cutter Bear was capable of sailing through Arctic ice.

The Bear has a storied history: It started working as a commercial sealer in 1874. Then, because the ship could travel through ice-filled waters, the government purchased it in the 1880s to use for rescue work in the Arctic. It also served as a relief ship during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1919, a floating museum, a film set for a Hollywood movie and an expedition ship on Adm. Richard Byrd’s Antarctic explorations.

It also patrolled Arctic waters for the U.S. Navy in both world wars, and in 1941 it helped capture the Norwegian trawler Buskø, which was being used by the German military intelligence service Abwehr to report on weather conditions in the North Atlantic.

The Bear was decommissioned in 1944 and tied up at a wharf in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It finally sank after a storm in 1963, somewhere south of Nova Scotia and east of Boston, as it was being towed to Philadelphia.

“The Bear has had such an incredible history, and it’s so important in many ways in American and global maritime heritage because of its travels,” said Brad Barr, the mission coordinator for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Maritime Heritage Program, who has led the search for the wreck for several years.

A scan of the wreck is believed to be the Bear.

Historic ship

In the late 1970s, a group started searching for the Bear. It included the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Harold Edgerton, who invented side-scan sonar — a technology widely used today to detect and image objects on the seafloor.

The group tested out the new side-scan technology in 1979, but they didn’t find the wreck — possibly because the location of its sinking had been misreported by its tow ship, Barr told Live Science..

A secret Navy submersible — the nuclear-powered NR-1 —— carried out a second search in 2007, but it too was unsuccessful. Finally, the U.S. Coast Guard and NOAA joined forces with other partners and began another search in 2019.

After mapping 62 square miles (160 square kilometres) of seafloor with sonar, they identified two submerged objects in the search area. In September, they returned on a Coast Guard ship equipped with a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to take underwater video and confirm that the largest object is the wreck of Bear, Barr said.

The wreck now lies on the seafloor at a depth of about 200 feet (60 meters), in Canadian waters about 90 nautical miles (167 km) south of Nova Scotia’s Cape Sable. The exact location is being kept confidential in the hopes of deterring technical divers from trying to reach it, Barr said. The search partners are discussing with the Canadian government how the wreck can be protected.

The ageing wooden hull has been badly damaged by nets from fishing trawlers and strong currents on the seafloor. But the researchers identified several distinctive features of the Bear, including the “bow staples” that strengthened its hull to allow the ship to handle heavy ice in polar waters, Barr said. 

An image of the wreck taken by a remotely controlled vehicle.

Steamship to diesel

Although the Bear was equipped with three masts for sailing, it was built as a steamship for its role as a sealer in the 1870s. In the 1930s, the boiler was taken out and the steam engine was replaced with a diesel engine as it was refitted for its Antarctic service with Byrd. 

As a result, several piles of metal can be seen among the remaining wood of the wreck, which includes sailing-ship technologies, Barr said. 

“There’s a pile of metal rubble with a deadeye [a fixed wooden pulley] sticking up out of it,” he said. “These deadeyes have been around since the 1700s, but they were used on the Bear to attach the standing rigging.”

Among the Bear’s most famous exploits was its part in the 1884 rescue fleet for the Greely Expedition to the Arctic, which had become lost in 1881 near Ellesmere Island, northwest of Greenland. Several members of the expedition died of starvation and disease before the Bear rescued Greely and the other survivors. 

After serving for many years as a government revenue cutter in Arctic waters — intercepting and inspecting ships at sea, and often rescuing commercial ships trapped in ice — the Bear was transferred to the Navy; it patrolled around Alaska during World War I, and it delivered supplies there during the Spanish flu pandemic.

In 1929, the decommissioned ship was given to the city of Oakland in California, where it became a floating museum and then a film set for the 1930 movie “The Sea-Wolf,” an adaption of a Jack London novel. 

READ ALSO: ARCHAEOLOGISTS DISCOVER 2200-YEAR-OLD EGYPTIAN SHIPWRECK IN THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA

The Bear was recommissioned for Arctic patrols during World War II, when it helped capture the Buskø; but it was mostly tied up in Halifax after that until it sank in 1963 on its final voyage to Philadelphia, where it was destined to become a floating restaurant.

“These are incredibly compelling stories,” Barr said. “When you read the details of what the Bear did, how many lives it saved, how many incredible missions it was on — it is really the kind of history that people should be aware of.”

To commemorate its discovery, Barr has compiled years of historical research into several website posts detailing the many exploits of the Bear. “One of the reasons why we wanted to find it is because it allows us to tell all these stories,” he said. 

WORLD

Humans did not cause woolly mammoths to go extinct, climate change did

Humans did not cause woolly mammoths to go extinct, climate change did

According to a statement released by the University of Cambridge, humans did not cause the extinction of the woolly mammoths, even though they are known to have hunted mammoths for food and used the skeletons and hides for shelter, weapons, and artwork.

For five million years, woolly mammoths roamed the earth until they vanished for good nearly 4,000 years ago – and scientists have finally proved why.

The hairy cousins of today’s elephants lived alongside early humans and were a regular staple of their diet – their skeletons were used to build shelters, harpoons were carved from their giant tusks, artwork featuring them is daubed on cave walls, and 30,000 years ago, the oldest known musical instrument, a flute, was made out of a mammoth bone.

A trio of woolly mammoths trudges over snow-covered hills. Behind them, mountains with snow-covered peaks rise above dark green forests of fir trees.

Now the hotly debated question about why mammoths went extinct has been answered – geneticists analysed ancient environmental DNA and proved it was because when the icebergs melted, it became far too wet for the giant animals to survive because of their food source – vegetation – was practically wiped out.

The 10-year research project, published in Nature today (20 October 2021), was led by Professor Eske Willerslev, a Fellow of St John’s College, University of Cambridge, and director of The Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre, University of Copenhagen.

The team used DNA shotgun sequencing to analyse environmental plant and animal remains – including urine, faeces and skin cells – taken from soil samples painstakingly collected over a period of 20 years from sites in the Arctic where mammoth remains were found.

The advanced new technology means scientists no longer have to rely on DNA samples from bones or teeth to gather enough genetic material to recreate a profile of ancient DNA. The same technique has been used during the pandemic to test the sewage of human populations to detect, track and analyse Covid-19.

Professor Willerslev said: “Scientists have argued for 100 years about why mammoths went extinct. Humans have been blamed because the animals had survived for millions of years without climate change killing them off before, but when they lived alongside humans they didn’t last long and we were accused of hunting them to death.

“We have finally been able to prove was that it was not just the climate changing that was the problem, but the speed of it that was the final nail in the coffin – they were not able to adapt quickly enough when the landscape dramatically transformed and their food became scarce.

“As the climate warmed up, trees and wetland plants took over and replaced the mammoth’s grassland habitats. And we should remember that there were a lot of animals around that were easier to hunt than a giant woolly mammoth – they could grow to the height of a double-decker bus!”

The woolly mammoth and its ancestors lived on earth for five million years and the huge beasts evolved and weathered several Ice Ages. During this period, herds of mammoths, reindeer and woolly rhinoceroses thrived in the cold and snowy conditions.

Despite the cold, a lot of vegetation grew to keep the various species of animals alive – grass, flowers, plants, and small shrubs would all have been eaten by the vegetarian mammoths who probably their tusks to shovel snow aside and are likely to have used their trunks to uproot tough grasses. They were so big because they needed huge stomachs to digest the grass.

Mammoths could travel a distance equivalent to going around the world twice during their lifetime and fossil records show they lived on all continents except Australia and South America. Populations were known to have initially survived the end of the last Ice Age in small pockets off the coasts of Siberia and Alaska – on Wrangel Island and St Paul Island – but the research found they actually lived longer elsewhere too and the breeds of mammoths on both the islands were closely related despite being geographically separated. As part of the project, the team also sequenced the DNA of 1,500 Arctic plants for the very first time to be able to draw these globally significant conclusions.

Dr Yucheng Wang, first author of the paper and a Research Associate at the Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, said: “The most recent Ice Age – called the Pleistocene – ended 12,000 years ago when the glaciers began to melt and the roaming range of the herds of mammoths decreased. It was thought that mammoths began to go extinct then but we also found they actually survived beyond the Ice Age all in different regions of the Arctic and into the Holocene – the time that we are currently living in ­– far longer than scientists realised.

“We zoomed into the intricate detail of the environmental DNA and mapped out the population spread of these mammals and show how it becomes smaller and smaller and their genetic diversity gets smaller and smaller too, which made it even harder for them to survive.

“When the climate got wetter and the ice began to melt it led to the formation of lakes, rivers, and marshes. The ecosystem changed and the biomass of the vegetation reduced and would not have been able to sustain the herds of mammoths. We have shown that climate change, specifically precipitation, directly drives the change in the vegetation – humans had no impact on them at all based on our models.”

READ ALSO: OLDEST CIRCULAR STRUCTURE DISCOVERED – AND IT’S MADE OF MAMMOTH BONES

Humans lived alongside woolly mammoths for at least 2,000 years – they were even around when the pyramids were being built. Their disappearance is the last big naturally occurring extinction story. Our fascination with the huge beasts continues today with ‘Manny’ the woolly mammoth starring as the main character in five Ice Age animated films, and scientists hoping to resurrect them from the dead.

Professor Willerslev said: “This is a stark lesson from history and shows how unpredictable climate change is – once something is lost, there is no going back. Precipitation was the cause of the extinction of woolly mammoths through the changes to plants. The change happened so quickly that they could not adapt and evolve to survive.

“It shows nothing is guaranteed when it comes to the impact of dramatic changes in the weather. The early humans would have seen the world change beyond all recognition – that could easily happen again and we cannot take for granted that we will even be around to witness it. The only thing we can predict with any certainty is that the change will be massive.”