China Daily reports that a tomb dated to the Sui Dynasty (A.D. 581–618) has been unearthed in central China’s Henan Province.
The tomb, which contains a coffin bed and screen made of white marble carved with patterns resembling those found in Zoroastrianism and Buddhism, belonged to a previously unknown couple named Qu Qing.
An epigraph unearthed from the tomb records the life experience of the tomb owners, a couple with the name Qu Qing, who never appeared in any historical files before.
This is a copy of an epigraph that was unearthed from a Sui Dynasty (581-618) tomb in Anyang, Central China’s Henan province.
The epigraph provides new evidence for character evolution and the art of calligraphy during the Sui Dynasty, according to the Anyang Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, adding that it also has great value as complementing the institute’s history section.
Various patterns strongly in the style of Zoroastrianism were carved on the coffin bed and the screen, showing the daily life of the tomb owners and some religious allusions.
“The Qu family lived in the Longxi area, which occupied the main part of the Silk Road for a long time, so they were deeply influenced by European, West Asian and Central Asian cultures,” said Kong Deming, head of the institute.
The discovery of the coffin bed and dozens of relief patterns carved in Buddhist and Zoroastrian styles can be seen as a witness to the exchanges and mutual learning between Eastern and Western civilizations along the Silk Road, Kong said.
Furthermore, a large number of exquisite white Xiangzhou kiln porcelain was unearthed at the site.
Several porcelain tomb figures were unearthed from a Sui Dynasty (581-618) tomb in Anyang, Central China’s Henan province
These two tomb figures were unearthed from a Sui Dynasty (581-618) tomb in Anyang, Central China’s Henan province.
According to Kong, the porcelain shows the high production level of the Xiangzhou kiln in Anyang during the Sui Dynasty.
It can also fill in the blanks in the research on Xiangzhou kiln porcelains and provide valuable materials for the origin and development of Chinese white porcelain.
Prehistoric people developed a technique for making a play dough-like material from mammoth ivory
It is stated in The Siberian Times that Evgeny Artemyev of the Russian Academy of Sciences has studied 12,000-year-old archaeological objects that have been found some 20 years ago at the Afontova Gora-2 archaeological site, which is situated on the banks of the Yenisei River in south-central Siberia.
The items include objects made from the spongey parts of woolly mammoth bones.
The finds were made in early 2000 but were re-examined recently by Dr Evgeny Artemyev who said that the figurines can be either Ice Age toys made by people who populated this area of the modern-day Siberia, or a form of primaeval art.
‘When you look at them at different angles, they resemble different types of animals.
‘It is possible that this is the new form of Palaeolithic art, that the international scientific community is not aware of yet’, the archaeologist said.
These animal-like figurines were made from spongy parts of woolly mammoth bones, and could have been either toys, or some form of premieval art.
The two prehistoric figurines appear similar to a bear and a mammoth, says Dr Artemyev, who has worked at the site since the 1990s.
Looked at from another angle, one of the figurines maybe a sleeping human.
The ivory bars, some of them phallic-shaped, discovered at the same site were created with a technique which made them almost ‘fluid-like’.
‘The mammoth tusk was softened to the extent that it resembled modern-day playdough. We don’t know yet how ancient people achieved that’, Dr Artemyev said.
‘On the items, we can see traces of stone implements and the flows of the substance before it stiffened. This means that the tusk was softened significantly, the consistency was viscous.
‘Most likely it was not for the entire tusk, but its upper part which was processed’, explained Artemyev.
Dr Evgeny Artemyev and Afontova Gora-2 archeological site in Krasnoyarsk.
The archaeologist said that he didn’t come across similar finds on other Palaeolithic sites.
‘Perhaps we don’t get to see reports about such finds because scientific teams rarely publish about items that can’t be properly explained. These elongated ivory bars could be blanks prepared to make making implements, or tools, or future toys – or anything else, we can only guess’, Dr Artemyev said.
While scientists can’t yet fathom why these shapes were made, the ‘playdough’ crafting technique helps them realise that these ancient people had much greater skills than they have imagined.
‘We tend to think of them as more primitive than they were. Yet they had technologies we cannot properly understand and describe, such as this softening of the tusks’, the archaeologist said.
Temple Dated to Fifth Century B.C. Found in Turkey
According to a Hurriyet Daily News report, a team of researchers led by Elif Koparal of Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University identified the sites of hundreds of Neolithic settlements and a 2,500-year-old temple dedicated to the goddess Aphrodite during a survey of the Urla-Çeşme peninsula, which is located on Turkey’s western coastline.
A team of Turkish scientists and archaeologists have discovered the remains of a 2,500-year-old Aphrodite Temple in the Urla-Çeşme peninsula in Turkey’s west.
During the middle of the Neolithic Era, 35 villages, of which 16 belong to the Late Neolithic period, have been discovered during the studies of an area of around 1600 square kilometers, bearing traces of the Ionian civilization.
In the region, about 460 settlements and landscape elements have been uncovered, including sacred areas, tumuli, roads, terraces, villages, and farms used in ancient times. During the study, information was also gathered about the economic and social ties of the people living in the area, whose history dates back to 6,000 B.C.
Speaking to the state-run Anadolu Agency, Koparal said that the surveys in the area started in 2006. Stating that it is known that the peninsula is a Neolithic period settlement, Koparal said that thanks to this study, an important social and economic network emerged in the whole region.
Explaining that in the findings they obtained, they noticed that people settled at a certain distance from each other at that time, Koparal said, “During our surveys, we found the Temple of Aphrodite belonging to the fifth century B.C.”
Noting that the temple is an exciting find and that its ruins are very impressive, Koparal said: “It is a rural temple. Aphrodite was a very common cult at that time.
The finds that we have indicate that there is the Temple of Aphrodite in this region. It is not common to find a temple during a surface survey. The area was not within reach by car. It can be reached with a one-and-a-half-hour walk from the alley.”
“We found a statue piece of a woman on the floor, and then a terracotta female head figure. From the findings, we understood that there must have been a cult area in the region. As we scanned the epigraphic publications, we understood that it was most likely the Temple of Aphrodite.
There is also an inscription around the temple. It sets the border with the statement, ‘This is the sacred area,’” Koparal said, adding that they also revealed the temple plan by scanning through the soil.
Stating that they came across the first find about the temple in 2016, Koparal said that they announced this to the world with an article.
Stating that the figurine got damaged due to erosion and rain, Koparal said, “But what it tells us is very important.”
Pointing out that the surveys are quite arduous, Koparal said that it was very exciting to get findings and information from the past.
Koparal said they also obtained important information about tumuli where the graves of notable people of the society were located, and caves, which were almost entirely used as sacred areas.
He also emphasized that the biggest threats to historical sites were from treasure hunters and urbanization.
Efforts are being made with the local people to preserve the historical artifacts, Koparal said, adding that they also have guards to protect the artifacts against the treasure hunters in the region.
Roman road pre-dating Hadrian’s Wall discovered in Northumberland
An ancient Roman road (formerly) linking north to south has been discovered off the coast of Northumberland. The discovery, which was almost two thousand years old, was made at one of the Settelingstone sites during construction on the water network.
They are thought to be from the road’s foundations and built by Agricola or his successors about AD80, although no evidence of its exact date was found. Archaeologists said given its location it was an “important part” of the early northern Roman frontier.
The ancient remains were discovered by Northumbrian Water when it began improvement works at the site of The Stanegate road, which linked Corbridge and Carlisle. It is a £55,000 investment scheme at Stanegate Roman Road, near Settlingstones, Hexham.
Brian Hardy, Northumbrian Water project manager, said: “We are delighted to have uncovered this important piece of hidden heritage and play our part in helping to protect it.
“We have successfully delivered our investment work, through the use of alternative methods and techniques, to not only enhance and futureproof our customers’ water supplies but also protect this suspected integral part of surviving Roman archaeology.”
The utility company called in its own experts and notified relevant authorities to record and help preserve this important heritage finding.
The relic remnants of the road itself, monitored by Archaeological Research Services Ltd, pre-dates Hadrian’s Wall and had forts along its length – within one day’s march of each other.
This is why the well-known fort at Vindolanda is sited south of Hadrian’s Wall on the course of the Stanegate.”
Philippa Hunter, senior projects officer at Archaeological Research Services Ltd, said: “While monitoring the excavation pit, our archaeologist identified a deposit of compacted cobbles thought to be the remains of the Roman road’s foundations – it is believed to have been built by Agricola or his successors around 80 AD.
The remains are part of The Stanegate – a Roman road which ran east-west south of Hadrian’s Wall
“Here, the road was constructed using rounded cobbles set in a layer measuring around 15cm deep, with around 25cm of gravel surfacing laid on top.
“Unfortunately no dating evidence or finds have been recovered to confirm the precise date of the archaeological remains.
“However, given the location of the cobbles along the projected route of the Roman road and its depth below the modern road surface, we are confident the remains identified form an important part of the early northern Roman frontier.”
The remains are part of The Stanegate – a Roman road which ran east-west south of Hadrian’s Wall
Roman settlements, garrisons, and roads were established throughout the Northumberland region after Gnaeus Julius Agricola was appointed Roman governor of Britain in 78 AD.
Hadrian’s Wall was completed by about 130 AD, to define and defend the northern boundary of Roman Britain with Stanegate and Dere Street the major road links.
200,000-year-old tools from Stone Age unearthed in Saudi Arabia
A team of Saudi scientists from the Heritage Authority recently discovered stone tools used by the inhabitants of Assyrian civilization in the Paleolithic time period that date back to 200,000 years.
While exploring the site near Shuaib Al-Adgham in the Al-Qassim area, the Heritage Authority found a range of Neolithic tools: iron knives, scrapers, axes, and stone pierce tools from the Middle Paleolithic period.
These are unique and rare stone axes that were characterized by the high precision in manufacturing that these human groups used in their daily life.
The abundance of stone tools discovered from this site indicated the numerical density of prehistoric communities that lived in this region.
It is also a clear indication that the climatic conditions in the Arabian Peninsula were very suitable for these human groups as they benefited from the natural resources available therein.
The satellite images showed that the Shuaib Al-Adgham and other sites were connected with passages of rivers to confirm that humans used rivers to reach deep into the interior regions of the Arabian Peninsula in ancient times.
According to the wide spatial distribution of the Assyrian sites, they were the largest concentrations of human inhabitance worldwide.
It also indicates that human groups in the Arabian Peninsula were able to cross through vast swathes of geographical distances, while the large number of sites centered around ancient valleys and rivers indicated that these groups were gradually spreading and discovering new sites when they needed them.
These sites were characterized by the spread of broken stone fragments and manufactured tools.
The authority stated that a huge amount of new environmental and cultural information has been collected, and the results showed that there were significant changes in the environments, ranging from very arid to humid.
The current evidence strongly supports the assertions of the existence of the “Green Arabian Peninsula” many times in the past.
During the wet phases of human civilizations, there were rivers and lakes throughout the Arabian Peninsula, which led to the spread and expansion of these human groups.
This confirms that the Arabian Peninsula was a major crossroads between Africa and the rest of Asia throughout prehistoric times and that it was one of the places of settlement in the period of the Stone Ages.
It is believed that the ancient migrations of these human groups were through two main passages — the Bab Al-Mandab Strait and the Sinai Peninsula Corridor.
3-Billion-Year-Old Spheres Found in South Africa: How Were They Made?
In the small town of Ottosdal, in central North West Province of South Africa, miners working in pyrophyllite mines have been digging up mysterious metal spheres known as Klerksdorp Spheres.
This dark reddish-brown, somewhat flattened spheres range in size from less than a centimetre to ten centimetres across, and some of them have three parallel grooves running around the equator.
The most striking examples have the uncanny appearance of being something manufactured. But here is the kicker — these metallic objects have been dated to 3 billion years old, a time when the Earth was too young to host intelligent life capable of creating these spheres.
No wonder, these objects have attracted attention and speculation from not only the scientific community but various fringe groups including creationists and advocates of “ancient astronauts theory”.
Klerksdorp Spheres are often classified as “Out-of-Place Artifacts”, a term coined by an American naturalist and cryptozoologist to indicate objects of historical, archaeological, or paleontological interest found in a very unusual or seemingly impossible context that could challenge conventional historical chronology by being “too advanced” for the level of civilization that existed at the time.
These objects claim to provide evidences that suggest the presence of intelligent beings well before humans were supposed to exist. Klerksdorp Spheres, however, aren’t out-of-place. Neither they are mysterious.
These spheres are actually concretion formed by the precipitation of volcanic sediments, ash, or both after they accumulated 3 billion years ago. Concretions are often ovoid or spherical in shape because of which they are commonly mistaken to be dinosaur eggs, or extraterrestrial debris or human artefacts, in this case.
Examples of calcareous concretions, which exhibit equatorial grooves, found in Schoharie County, New York.
The latitudinal ridges and grooves exhibited by Klerksdorp Spheres are also natural and are known to occur in concretions found elsewhere on earth.
Notable examples include “Moqui marbles” found within the Navajo Sandstone of southern Utah and carbonate concretions found in Schoharie County, New York. Similar concretion as old as 2.8 billion years were also found in Hamersley Group of Australia.
Many false claims have been made regarding these objects. An often-repeated claim is that testing by NASA found the spheres to be so precisely balanced that they could have only been made in zero-gravity.
Not only there is no record of NASA ever saying that the objects aren’t spherical at all as evident from these images.
Another claim is that the spheres are manufactured of a metal “harder than steel”, a statement which is rather meaningless as steel can vary in hardness depending on the type of alloy and treatment.
Specimens of Klerksdorp Spheres are housed in Klerksdorp Museum in Klerksdorp, a city about 70 km away from Ottosdal.
Moqui Marbles, hematite concretions, from the Navajo Sandstone of southeast Utah show similar grooves and shape.
Moeraki Boulders in New Zealand is another example of spherical concretion.
Scientists discover 280-million-year-old fossil forest in Antarctica
Antarctica wasn’t quite a region of ice for most of the year. It is widely believed that millions of years ago, when the planet earth was already a massive landmass called Gondwana, trees flourished near the South Pole.
Now, newfound, intricate fossils of some of these trees are revealing how the plants thrived — and what forests might look like as they march northward in today’s warming world.
“Antarctica preserves and ecologic history of polar biomes that ranges for about 400 million years, which is basically the entirety of plant evolution,” said Erik Gulbranson, a paleoecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
A reconstruction of what the ancient forest look liked 385 million years ago, drawn by Dr. Chris Berry, co-author of the study describing the fossil trees.
TREES IN ANTARCTICA?
It’s hard to look at Antarctica’s frigid landscape today and imagine lush forests. To find their fossil specimens, Gulbranson and his colleagues have to disembark from planes landed on snowfields, then traverse glaciers and brave bone-chilling winds. But from about 400 million to 14 million years ago, the southern continent was a very different, and much greener place.
The climate was warmer, though the plants that survived at the low southern latitudes had to cope with winters of 24-hour-per-day darkness and summers during which the sun never set, just like today.
Partial tree trunk with the base preserved, at the site in Svalbard (left) and a reconstruction of what the ancient forest look liked 380 million years ago (right)
During this event, as many of 95 per cent of Earth’s species died out. The extinction was probably driven by massive greenhouse gas emissions from volcanoes, which raised the planet’s temperatures to extreme levels and caused the oceans to acidify, scientists have found.
There are obvious parallels to contemporary climate change, Gulbranson said, which is less extreme but similarly driven by greenhouse gases.
Prior to the end-Permian mass extinction, the southern polar forests were dominated by one type of tree, those in the Glossopteris genus, Gulbranson told Live Science. These were behemoths that grew from 65 to 131 feet (20 to 40 meters) tall, with broad, flat leaves longer than a person’s forearm, Gulbranson said.
Erik Gulbranson on site in Antarctica.
A photograph taken by Captain Scott on his final expedition of Dr Edward Wilson sketching on Beardmore Glacier.
Before the Permian extinction, Glossopteris dominated the landscape below the 35th parallel south to the South Pole. (The 35th parallel south is a circle of latitude that crosses through two landmasses: the southern tip of South American and the southern tip of Australia.)
BEFORE AND AFTER
Last year, while fossil-hunting in Antarctica, Gulbranson and his team found the oldest polar forest on record from the southern polar region.
They haven’t dated that forest precisely yet, but it probably flourished about 280 million years ago before being rapidly buried in volcanic ash, which preserved it down to the cellular level, the researchers said.
On Thanksgiving Day, Gulbranson will return to Antarctica for more excavations at two sites. Those sites contain fossils from a period spanning from before to after the Permian extinction.
Scientists have since uncovered further evidence of plant life on the continent, including this fossilized fern from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) fossil collection.
This partial trunk fossil was cracked near its base, but two distinct patterns are still visible in the rock: oval leaf bases at the bottom and diamond-shaped leaf bases moving up the trunk toward the top.
After the extinction, Gulbranson said, the forests didn’t disappear, but they changed. Glossopteris was out, but a new mix of evergreen and deciduous trees, including relatives of today’s gingkoes, moved in.
“What we’re trying to research is what exactly caused those transitions to occur, and that’s what we don’t know very well,” Gulbranson said.
The plants are so well-preserved in the rock that some of the amino acid building blocks that made up the trees’ proteins can still be extracted, said Gulbranson, who specializes in geochemistry techniques. Studying these chemical building blocks may help clarify how the trees handled the southern latitudes’ weird sunlight conditions, as well as the factors that allowed those plants to thrive but drove Glossopteris to its death, he said.
This season, the field team will have access to helicopters, which can land closer to the rugged outcrops in the Transantarctic Mountains where the fossil forests are found.
Subsequent expeditions to the Antarctic Peninsula have unearthed hundreds of amphibian and reptile fossils. This lobster fossil (Hoploparia stokesi) from the BAS fossil collection was found in the Upper Cretaceous (100.5 – 66 million years ago) when the dinosaurs disappeared from the Earth.
The team (members hail from the United States, Germany, Argentina, Italy and France) will camp out for months at a time, hitching helicopter rides to the outcrops as the fickle Antarctic weather allows. The 24-hour sun allows for long days, even middle-of-the-night expeditions that combine mountaineering with fieldwork, Gulbranson said.
Treasures dating back some 9,500 years is uncovered in Alpine glaciers as climate change causes ice to melt
The group climbed the steep mountainside, clambering across an Alpine glacier, before finding what they were seeking: A crystal vein filled with the precious rocks needed to sculpt their tools. That is what archaeologists have deduced after the discovery of traces of an ancient hunt for crystals by hunters and gatherers in the Mesolithic era, some 9,500 years ago.
It is one of many valuable archaeological sites to emerge in recent decades from rapidly melting glacier ice, sparking a brand-new field of research: glacier archaeology. Amid surging temperatures, glaciologists predict that 95 per cent of some 4,000 glaciers dotted throughout the Alps could disappear by the end of this century.
While archaeologists lament the devastating toll of climate change, many acknowledge it has created “an opportunity” to dramatically expand understanding of mountain life millennia ago.
“We are making very fascinating finds that open up a window into a part of archaeology that we don’t normally get,” said Marcel Cornelissen, who headed an excavation trip last month to the remote crystal site near the Brunifirm glacier in the eastern Swiss canton of Uri, at an altitude of 2,800 metres (9,100 feet).
‘Truly exceptional’
Up until the early 1990s, it was widely believed that people in prehistoric times steered clear of towering and intimidating mountains. But a number of startling finds have since emerged from melting ice indicating that mountain ranges like the Alps have been bustling with human activity for thousands of years.
Early humans are now believed to have hiked up into the mountains to travel to nearby valleys, hunt or put animals out to pastures, and to search for raw materials. Christian Auf der Maur, an archaeologist with Uri canton who participated in the crystal site expedition, said the find there was “truly exceptional.”
Laced shoe found with the remains of a prehistoric man dating to around 2,800 BCE.
“We know now that people were hiking up to the mountains to up to 3,000 metres altitude, looking for crystals and other primary materials.”
The first major ancient Alpine find to emerge from the melting ice was the discovery in 1991 of “Oetzi,” a 5,300-year-old warrior whose body had been preserved inside an Alpine glacier in the Italian Tyrol region. Theories that he may have been a rare example of a prehistoric human venturing into the Alps have been belied by findings since of numerous ancient traces of people crossing high altitude mountain passes.
One of the most famous discovers in the Alpine was ‘Otiz’ (pictured) in 1991, which was the preserved body of a 5,300-year-old warrior found in the Italian Tyrol region
Rare organic materials
The Schnidejoch pass, a lofty trail in the Bernese Alps 2,756 metres (9,000 feet) above sea level, has for instance been a boon to scientists since 2003, with the find of a birch bark quiver – a case for arrows – dating as far back as 3,000 BCE. Later, leather trousers and shoes, likely from the same ill-fated person, were also discovered, along with hundreds of other objects dating as far back as about 4,500 BCE.
“It is exciting because we find stuff that we don’t normally find in excavations,” archaeologist Regula Gubler told AFP. She pointed to organic materials like leather, wood, birch bark, and textiles, which are usually lost to erosion but here have been preserved intact in the ice.
This blackened braided basket from the Neolithic Age is from the Bernese Alps.
Just last month, she led a team to excavate a fresh finding in Schnidejoch: a knotted string of bast – or plant – fibres believed to be over 6,000 years old. It resembles the fragile remains of a blackened bast-fibre, braided basket from the same period, brought back last year.
While climate change has made possible such extraordinary finds, it is also a threat: if not found quickly, organic materials freed from the ice rapidly disintegrate and disappear.
‘Very short window’
“It is a very short window in time. In 20 years, these finds will be gone and these ice patches will be gone,” Gubler said. “It is a bit stressful.”
Cornelissen agreed, saying the understanding of glacier sites’ archaeological potential had likely come “too late”.
“The retreat of the glaciers and melting of the ice fields has already progressed so far,” he said. “I don’t think we’ll find another Oetzi.”
The problem is that archaeologists cannot hang out at each melting ice sheet waiting for treasure to emerge. Instead, they rely on hikers and others to alert them to finds. That can sometimes happen in a roundabout way.
When two Italian hikers in 1999 stumbled across a wood carving on the Arolla glacier in southern Wallis canton, some 3,100 metres above sea level, they picked it up, polished it off, and hung it on their living room wall. It was only through a string of lucky circumstances that it 19 years later came to the attention of Pierre Yves Nicod, an archaeologist with the Wallis historical museum in Sion, where he was preparing an exhibition about glacier archaeology.
In 1999, Italian hikers found a wood carving on the Arolla glacier in southern Wallis canton and instead of alerting experts, they hung it on their living room wall
He tracked down the 52-centimetre-long human-shaped statuette, with a flat, frowning face, and had it dated. It turned out to be over 2,000 years old – “a Celtic artefact from the Iron Age,” Nicod told AFP, lifting up the statuette with gloved hands. Its function remains a mystery, he said.
Another unknown, Nicod said, is “how many such objects have been picked up throughout the Alps in the past 30 years and are currently hanging on living room walls.
“We need to urgently sensibilise populations likely to come across such artifacts.” “It is an archaeological emergency.”
