Archaeologists discover a new megalithic monument in the heart of Andalusia in southern Spain – a 5,000-year-old secret
Archaeologists in Spain uncovered a previously overlooked tomb while investigating the formation of La Peña de los Enamorados, also known as the sleeping giant.
The Antequera archaeological site in southern Spain is home to a number of ancient structures dating back to the third and fourth millennia BC, including the Menga, Viera, and El Romeral megaliths.
According to a study that was published on April 15 in the journal Antiquity, the Antequera site contains both man-made and “natural monuments,” but is best known for its prehistoric megaliths.
The “natural monuments” at the site include La Peña de los Enamorados, a stone “sleeping giant” that towers about 2,900 feet above the ground, researchers said.
The Sleeping Giant had a 5000-year-old secret hidden in his chest: Piedras Blancas megalithic grave.
The rectangular stone structure was built at least 5,000 years ago, according to the study. It was used for millennia in three distinct phases before being abandoned between 1950 and 1180 B.C.
General view of the excavated Piedras Blancas tomb or megalithic grave from the east, with the numbering of the stones. At the far end, the two ‘arrow-like’ slabs are attached to the bedrock.
Lead author of the new paper, Leonardo García Sanjuán, a Professor in Prehistory at the University of Seville (Spain), said the location of the Piedras Blancas tomb was “carefully chosen.”
The tomb’s stone slabs were carefully arranged to coincide “with the summer solstice sunrise,” researchers said. Some of the “heavily engraved” slabs “appear to have been precisely placed to ‘funnel’ the light from the rising sun towards the back of the chamber at the summer solstice.”
In Antequera, the oldest megaliths date back to 3,000 BC, and this rectangular stone tomb was built at the same time. Researchers believe that bodies were spread out on a sizable flat stone platform at the time ceramic offerings were left in the tomb. Later, the decomposing corpses were pushed off the stone platform and into the surrounding area, where the researchers discovered “40 teeth and 95 bones.”
A skeleton is buried in the added burial niches at the Piedras Blancas tomb.
Furthermore, the archaeologists identified a “triangular, arrow-like stone” lodged into the floor, oriented in the direction of the rising sun.
The Piedras Blancas tomb was renovated around 2500 B.C., and niches for two burials were added, according to the study. Researchers believe these were high-status individuals, most likely a man and a woman. It’s unclear whether they were buried simultaneously or over the course of a century.
The tomb later “underwent another significant transformation,” according to researchers. Stones were placed at the entrance “as if to block or seal” it, and the bones of at least two children and three women were interred.
According to the study, the tomb was abandoned and has remained untouched ever since.
A surprising discovery in the Lublin countryside! Ancient figurines of Egyptian and Roman gods found
Two ancient figurines depicting the Egyptian god Osiris and a bust of the Roman god Bacchus were found in the Opole district of Lublin, Poland.
An extraordinary discovery was made at the beginning of May by Krzysztof Kozłowski, who, having obtained permission from the Lublin Voivodship Conservator, conducted a search for historical monuments in Kluczkowice (Opole district).
The figurines he found, which at first glance resembled the images of a “pharaoh” and a “goddess”, were handed over to the Lublin conservation office.
Lubelskie Voivodeship Conservatory of Monuments (LWKZ) Facebook post, “The find, so unusual in our area, raised doubts as to the authenticity of the artifacts (…). Thanks to cooperation with the National Museum in Lublin and scientists from the Faculty of Archeology of the University of Warsaw, it was possible to confirm that we are dealing with original objects from ancient Egypt and ancient Rome,” he wrote.
Egyptian statuette of Osiris found in Kluczkowice in 2023.
Thanks to cooperation with the National Museum in Lublin and scientists from the Faculty of Archeology of the University of Warsaw, the ancient record of the finds was confirmed. Osiris was made in the 1st millennium BC and the bust of Bacchus – in the 1st century AD.
Dr. Łukasz Miechowicz of the Institute of Archeology and Ethnology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw determined that the artifacts are part of the Kleniewski family’s former collection, which was kept in the palace in Kluczkowice until World War II.
The Osiris figurine was probably purchased for the collection by Maria Kleniewska during her stay in Egypt in 1904. At that time, she and her daughter spent 4 months in Cairo, which she writes about in her memoirs.
The Roman bust of Bacchus was found in Kluczkowice in 2022. National Museum in Lublin.
“The bronze bust of the Roman god Bacchus was discovered around 1906 by Fr. Antoni Chotyński, chaplain of the Kleniewski family in Dratów (now Zagłoba/Wrzelów). They were found in a richly equipped grave of a deceased person from the Przeworsk culture”.
In April this year, dr Miechowicz led the verification research at the place where the figurines were found. The action was attended by representatives of the Ancient Society in Chodlik and the Opole Association of Explorers “Topór”.
During the search, another Egyptian bronze figurine of Osiris was discovered. It measures 8.5 cm in height and is equipped with two suspension rings. The artifact was discovered by Andrzej Kołodziej.
The Kleniewski family lived in the palace until 1942. Their property was confiscated and transferred to the administration of the SS. The Kleniewskis left hastily for Warsaw, taking only their personal belongings with them, Miechowicz determined.
Egyptian statuette of Osiris found in Kluczkowice in 2022. Photo.
Presumably, the deposit, which included the artifacts discovered in Kluczkowice, could have been hidden in 1942 by the owners leaving their ancestral seat or just after the war when the equipment of the Kleniewskis’ palace was dispersed and plundered.
Google Translate was used to translate the article from Lubelski Wojewódzki Konserwator Zabytków.
This 1,900-year-old statue of the Buddha is 28 inches (71 centimeters) tall and was found at Berenike, an ancient port city in Egypt by the Red Sea.
A 1,900-year-old statue of the Buddha — discovered at the ancient Egyptian port city of Berenike, on the coast of the Red Sea — likely belonged to a transplant from South Asia, according to archaeologists.
The Buddha statue depicts Siddhartha Gautama, who lived in South Asia around 2,550 years ago. Born a prince, he would later renounce his worldly wealth and seek out enlightenment, eventually becoming the Buddha, a Sanskrit-derived word that means “the enlightened one,” according to Buddhist tradition. The religion he founded gradually spread around the world.
The newfound statue dates to between A.D. 90 and 140, said Steven Sidebotham, a history professor at the University of Delaware who is co-director of the Berenike Project, told Live Science in an email.
The 28-inch-tall (71 centimeters) statue shows the Buddha standing and holding parts of his robes in his left hand, representatives from the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said in a statement.
A halo is shown behind him, with sunlight radiating downward. In addition to the statue, a separate Sanskrit inscription was found at Berenike, the ministry noted.
The statue dates to a time when the Roman Empire controlled Egypt. There was considerable trade between Egypt and India during that time, the ministry noted, adding that ships from India would bring ivory, pepper and textiles, among other products, to Egypt.
It’s possible that the Buddha statue was made locally by people from South Asia living in Berenike, Sidebotham said. While the Sanskrit inscription is damaged, it appears to be a dedication of some form and dates back to the time of the Roman emperor Marcus Julius Philippus (better known as “Philip the Arab”), who reigned from A.D. 244 to 249, Sidebotham said.
Sidebotham and his colleagues are now in the process of publishing their finds from Berenike; more information will be released after publication, he noted.
“The new Sanskrit inscription and associated finds now show clearly that there was a settled Indian merchant community, rather than just traders passing through,” Richard Salomon, professor emeritus of Sanskrit at the University of Washington in Seattle who was not involved in the finding, told Live Science.
Philip Almond, emeritus professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at The University of Queensland in Australia who is not involved with the discovery, called it “a very exciting find.” Ancient historical records indicate that there were Indians living in Alexandria, Almond noted, and this discovery indicates that some of the Indians living in Egypt were Buddhists.
The other co-directors of the Berenike Project are Rodney Ast, a researcher at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, and Olaf Kaper(opens in new tab), an Egyptology professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
A permit for the project was granted by the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities through the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology in Cairo.
‘Lost’ microbial genes found in dental plaque of ancient humans
‘Lost’ microbial genes found in dental plaque of ancient humans
About 19,000 years ago, a woman died in northern Spain. Her body was deliberately buried with pieces of the natural pigment ochre and placed behind a block of limestone in a cave known as El Mirón.
When her ochre-dyed bones were unearthed in 2010, archaeologists dubbed her the Red Lady. The careful treatment of her body provided scientists with insights into how people from the time buried their dead.
Now, thanks to the poor oral hygiene of that period, her teeth are helping illuminate a vanished world of bacteria and their chemical creations. From dental calculus, the rock-hard plaque that accumulates on teeth, researchers have successfully recovered and reconstructed the genetic material of bacteria living in the mouth of the Red Lady and dozens of other ancient individuals.
The gene reconstructions, reported today in Science, were accurate enough to replicate the enzymes the bacteria produced to help digest nutrients. “Just the fact that they were able to reconstruct the genome from a puzzle with millions of pieces is a great achievement,” says Gary Toranzos, an environmental microbiologist at the University of Puerto Rico who wasn’t involved in the work. “It’s ‘hold my beer, and watch me do it,’ and boy did they do it.”
Changes in diet and the introduction of antibiotics have dramatically altered the modern human microbiome, says University of Trento computational biologist Nicola Segata, who also wasn’t involved.
Sequencing ancient microbes and re-creating their chemical creations “will help us identify what functions our microbiome might have had in the past that we might have lost,” he says. Resurrecting these “lost” genes may one day help scientists devise new treatments for diseases, adds Mikkel Winther Pedersen, a molecular paleoecologist at the University of Copenhagen.
Within the past few decades, sequencing ancient DNA has illuminated physical and physiological features of long-dead organisms, but researchers have also used the same technique to examine the genes belonging to the teeming bacterial communities, or microbiomes, that once populated the mouths and guts of long-dead people.
That work has given them insights into which microbial species might have coexisted with humans before the advent of antibiotics and processed foods. But such understanding has been limited by the fact that researchers could only use modern microbes as references.
“We were limited to bacteria we know from today,” says Harvard University geneticist Christina Warinner, a co-author of the new study. “We were ignoring vast amounts of DNA from unknown or possibly extinct organisms.”
Breaking that barrier presented a monumental challenge. Reconstructing an oral microbiome—a soup of hundreds of different bacterial species, and millions of individual bacteria—from degraded ancient DNA is “like throwing together pieces of many puzzles and trying to solve them with the pieces mixed up and some pieces missing entirely,” Segata says.
Indeed, it took Warinner’s team nearly 3 years to adapt DNA sequencing tools and computer programs to work with the much shorter fragments of DNA found in ancient samples.
At long last, drawing on dental calculus from 46 ancient skeletons—including a dozen Neanderthals and modern humans who died between 30,000 and 150 years ago—Warinner and colleagues identified DNA from dozens of extinct or previously unknown oral bacteria.
Next, the team equipped modern Pseudomonas protegens bacteria with a pair of ancient genes to make proteins that produce milligrams’ worth of a molecule called a furan.
Modern bacteria are thought to use furans for cellular signaling. The new findings suggest ancient bacteria did, too—something that would have been impossible to predict by simply sequencing their genomes. “It’s wet-lab proof of what ancient genes were capable of,” says Pierre Stallforth of the Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology. “You can predict proteins based on DNA, but not necessarily the molecules those proteins are going to make.”
At first glance, the microbe they reconstructed seemed out of place in an oral microbiome. Identified as a type of bacterium called a chlorobium, its modern relatives use photosynthesis to survive on small amounts of light and live in anaerobic conditions, such as stagnant water. They aren’t found in modern mouths and appear to have vanished from ancient humans about 10,000 years ago.
This chlorobium might have entered the mouths of ancient people because they drank water in or near caves. Or, Warinner says, it might once have been a normal part of some people’s ancient oral microbiome, surviving on faint light penetrating the cheek.
Colleagues say dental calculus was an ideal place to start looking for these ancient microbes. Without regular cleaning, teeth trap leftover food and other organic matter in a mineral lattice, essentially encasing it in stone. That both helps preserve any DNA inside and protect it from contamination as the body decays. “Oral calculus is the perfect example of the best place you can find an uncontaminated sample,” Toranzos says. “There’s absolutely no way anything from the outside will get in.”
Although the researchers succeeded in prodding modern bacteria to express their previously undiscovered or extinct cousins’ genes, it’s a far cry from Jurassic Park, Warinner says. “We haven’t brought [the microbes] back to life, but identified key genes for making chemical compounds we’re interested in,” Warinner says.
The recovery of ancient microbial genes has the potential to illuminate our species’ relationship with bacteria over human evolution. Humans coevolved with their microbial partners and parasites for hundreds of thousands of years. The compounds produced by ancient microbes might have played important roles in digestion and immune responses. “Bacteria are not as charismatic as mammoths or woolly rhinos,” she says, “but they are nature’s chemists, and they’re key to understanding the past.”
Archeologists find remains of an underwater hospital and cemetery
University of Miami graduate student Devon Fogarty examines the headstone of John Greer who died while working at Fort Jefferson on Nov. 5, 1861. The gravesite is now completely underwater.
Archeologists at Dry Tortugas National Park have found remains of a 19th-century quarantine hospital and cemetery on a submerged island. The National Park Service said in a news release that records indicate dozens of people, mostly U.S. soldiers stationed at Fort Jefferson, may have been buried there.
The small quarantine hospital was used to treat patients with yellow fever at the fort between 1890 and 1900, according to the NPS.
Major outbreaks of the disease killed dozens, but the quarantine hospital offered a place to isolate patients, likely saving hundreds of lives.
While most buried in the Fort Jefferson Post Cemetery were military members, several were also civilians.
During a survey of the area, researchers found John Greer’s grave, prominently marked with a large slab of greywacke carved into the shape of a headstone and inscribed with his name and date of death.
According to the NPS, Greer was employed as a laborer at the fort and died there on Nov. 5, 1861.
“This intriguing find highlights the potential for untold stories in Dry Tortugas National Park, both above and below the water,” project director Josh Marano said.
“Although much of the history of Fort Jefferson focuses on the fortification itself and some of its infamous prisoners, we are actively working to tell the stories of the enslaved people, women, children, and civilian laborers.”
Efforts to learn more about those buried in the cemetery are ongoing.
Israeli researchers create AI to translate ancient cuneiform Akkadian texts
Israeli experts have created a program to translate an ancient language that is difficult to decipher, allowing automatic and accurate translation from cuneiform characters into English.
Researchers at Tel Aviv University (TAU) and Ariel University have developed an artificial intelligence model that can automatically translate Akkadian text written in cuneiform into English.
Experts in Assyriology have spent years studying cuneiform, one of the earliest known writing systems, in order to comprehend ancient Mesopotamian texts.
Dr. Shai Gordin of Ariel University and Dr. Gai Gutherz, Dr. Jonathan Berant, and Dr. Omer Levy of TAU trained two versions of the AI model – one that translates Akkadian from representations of cuneiform signs in Latin script and another that translates from unicode representations of the signs.
With a score of 37.47 on the Best Bilingual Evaluation Understudy 4 (BLEU4), the first version—which uses Latin transliteration—produced better results in this study.
This means that the model can produce translations that are on par with those produced by an average machine translation from one modern language to another.
Given that there is a cultural gap of more than 2,000 years in translating ancient Akkadian, this is a noteworthy accomplishment.
An ancient Assyrian tablet with writing in cuneiform from the Library of Ashurbanipal.
Researchers’ findings were published in the journal PNAS Nexus.
This new technology has the potential to revolutionize the study of ancient history by making it more accessible and open to a wider audience. In 2020, the same group of researchers created an AI model called “the Babylonian Engine.” The contemporary model is supposedly a better and reworked version of it.
Historians note that hundreds of thousands of clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia, written in cuneiform, have been found by archaeologists, far more than can be translated by the limited number of experts who can read them.
Assyria was named after the god Ashur, the highest in the Assyrian pantheon. It was located in the Mesopotamian Plain (modern-day Iraq).
Assyria conquered the northern part of what is now Israel in 721 BC, capturing the Ten Tribes. These Jewish exiles coexisted with the Assyrians and used cuneiform writing.”
Possible Greek Tomb Detected in Naples With Cosmic Rays
A 3D view of the site with the four inferred reference points of Chamber 3 shown as green spheres.
Cosmic rays and lasers have revealed that deep underneath the city streets of Naples, Italy, lie the remains of the Greeks who originally settled the area, as well as the catacombs of Christians who lived there during the Roman era nearly two millennia ago, a new study finds.
Researchers have long known that ancient Greek burials were hidden beneath the city, but weren’t able to access all of them. Now, these cutting-edge techniques have enabled researchers to peer into the earth without any digging.
Originally founded as Cumae and later renamed Neapolis (“New City”) around 650 B.C., the area now known as Naples boasted temples, a forum and numerous underground tombs. In the highly populated and picturesque modern district of Rione Sanità, tombs from multiple stages of occupation are known — from the Greek Hellenistic period (sixth to third centuries B.C.), there are burial chambers for the wealthy called hypogea, and from the later Roman period (second to fourth centuries A.D.), there are early Christian catacombs.
But the layers of contemporary buildings make it difficult to access ancient sewers, cisterns and tombs 33 feet (10 meters) underneath the streets, so a group of Italian and Japanese researchers hypothesized that they could identify previously unknown burial hypogea from the Hellenistic period using 21st-century techniques.
Their study, published April 3 in the journal Scientific Reports, details how they used muography to detect underground voids that were unknown to archaeologists.
A schematic drawing of the underground level at the depth of 33 feet (10 meters) with Greek funeral chambers numbered from 1 to 11. Chambers 2 and 3 are unknown and their existence was hinted at by the integrated site topology reconstructed with 3D surveys.
A muon is a subatomic particle similar to an electron but with a greater mass. In 1936, scientists discovered that muons are produced by cosmic rays in Earth’s atmosphere, and that these tiny particles can easily penetrate walls and rocks, scattering in open spaces.
In this study, the muons’ tracks were recorded using nuclear emulsion technology, in which extremely sensitive photographic film is used to capture and visualize the paths of the charged particles.
By measuring muon flux — how many muons arrive in a particular area over time — and direction using a particle detector, researchers can peer into volcanoes, underground cavities and even the Egyptian pyramids through muography.
However, placing the particle detectors requires some strategizing to catch the muons’ movement.
The researchers were most interested in scanning the Hellenistic necropolis, located about 33 feet under the current surface, which meant finding a stable place even deeper than that to set up the equipment, which looks a little like a flatbed scanner.
“The big general limitation for muography is that the detector has to be placed below the target level because the muons come from the sky or the upper hemisphere,” study lead author Valeri Tioukov, a physicist at Italy’s National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), told Live Science in an email. “For archaeology, it’s applicable if there is some space for the detector placement below the target level.”
Tioukov and his colleagues placed the muon tracking devices 59 feet (18 m) underground, in a 19th-century cellar that was used for aging ham, where they recorded the muon flux for 28 days, capturing about 10 million muons.
In order to identify unknown structures, the researchers needed a 3D model of what was already known to exist underground.
The 3D laser scans of the accessible structures can then be compared with the measured muon flux. Anomalies in the muon flux images that are not visible in the 3D model can be confidently assumed to be hidden or unknown cavities.
A nuclear emulsion detector in place at 59 feet (18 meters) below the ground surface.
Muography revealed an excess of muons in the data that can be explained only by the presence of a new burial chamber.
The chamber’s area measures roughly 6.5 by 11.5 feet (2 by 3.5 m), according to the study, and its rectangular shape indicates it is human-made rather than natural.
Given the chamber’s depth, the researchers think it was a part of the Hellenistic necropolis dating to the sixth to the third centuries B.C. Likely the tomb of a wealthy individual, the hypogeum may be similar to those first discovered in the late 19th century, the Hypogeum of the Toga-wearers and the Hypogeum of the Pomegranates, both of which can be visited today as part of underground tours of Naples.
“The prospect of identifying and discovering new tomb chambers is obviously appetizing,” Rabun Taylor, a Roman archaeologist at the University of Texas at Austin who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email.
“Some of these Hellenistic tombs and burials on the north side of town yielded goods made of clay, bronze, and iron” when they were discovered a century ago, Taylor said, “so it would be wonderful to unearth some new chambers using modern methods.” But this would be a challenging archaeological undertaking, he pointed out, due to the expense and effort needed as well as the fact that the area is densely populated.
Muography unfortunately cannot reveal what is inside the chamber. “In this configuration, there is no way to resolve objects of less than 10 cm [4 inches] in size,” Tioukov said. “So we can potentially see the approximate shape of the room, but not small details like bones.”
The hoard of 175 silver Roman coins, worth tens of thousands of dollars in today’s money in just face value alone, was found in 2021 near Livorno in Tuscany.
A hoard of 175 silver coins unearthed in a forest in Italy may have been buried for safekeeping during a Roman civil war.
The coins seem to date from 82 B.C., the year the Roman general Lucius Cornelius Sulla fought a bloody war across Italy against his enemies among the leaders of the Roman Republic, which resulted in Sulla’s victory and his ascension as dictator of the Roman state.
The archaeologists who investigated the hoard of 175 silver Roman denarii — the equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars in today’s money — suggested it may have been buried by a Roman soldier who was then killed in battle.
Archaeologists think the coins were deliberately buried in a small terracotta pot in about 82 B.C. to keep them safe during a time of war.
But historian Federico Santangelo, a professor who heads Classics and Ancient History at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom, said it also could have been buried by a businessman who wanted to keep his money safe during turbulent times. “I don’t think we should trace this money to a soldier, although in principle it is possible,” he told Live Science. Santangelo was not involved in the discovery.
The chronologies of such coin hoards show that many were buried during wars and upheavals. “A number of people at times of crisis buried their stash of money and for whatever reason were prevented from retrieving it,” Santangelo said.
Excavations revealed no other archaeological objects at the site where the coin hoard was found, but the remains of a Roman-era farm had been found in the past about half a mile away.
Coin hoard
Researchers discovered the coin hoard buried in a terracotta pot in 2021 but kept it secret so that the site could be completely investigated.
Lorella Alderighi, an archaeologist with the provincial office for archaeology, told Live Science the coins were discovered by a member of an archaeological group in a newly-cut area of forest northeast of the city of Livorno in Tuscany.
Archaeological investigations revealed the earliest coins dated from 157 or 156 B.C., while the most recent was from 83 or 82 B.C., she said.
The area was probably forested then as it is now, on a small hill overlooking a swamp. The remains of a Roman farm had previously been found about half a mile (1 kilometer) away, she said.
“The coins have definitely been hidden — they constituted a ‘treasure’ or piggy bank,” she said. “The easiest way to hide valuables was to bury them underground, away from homes where no one could find them.”
The coins were first spotted by a member of the Livorno Palaeontological Archaeological Group walking through a new forest cutting.
But whoever buried the coins never returned to recover them, and Alderighi proposed that the owner may have been a Roman soldier caught up in the conflicts.
“These coins may have been the savings of a soldier returning home [during] military service,” she said. “He had hidden them because they constituted a useful sum, perhaps to buy and start his own farm.”
Several such coin hoards have been found in Italy; studies show many of them were buried at times of war or upheaval. Here we see over 100 found coins, all bagged and numbered.
Turbulent times
Alderighi noted that the hoard was buried during a troubled period in Italian history.
A few years earlier, Italy had been gripped by the Social War between Rome and its Italian allies, while in 82 B.C. Sulla had just returned with his legions from Asia to confront his enemies in Rome, having already attacked the city in 88 B.C. and been declared a public enemy in 87 B.C.
“It was a very turbulent historical period,” she said. “Sulla’s soldiers conquered territories as they advanced from south to north. But central Italy and Tuscany had not yet been conquered.”
Santangello added that Sulla’s victory in late 82 B.C. was almost a “blueprint” for later Roman rulers.
His victory was followed about 30 years later by a much larger Roman civil war between Julius Caesar and Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, or Pompey the Great, who rose to power as a deputy to Sulla. And Caesar’s victory in that war led directly to the rise to power of Augustus, the first Roman emperor, in 27 B.C.
“It became abundantly clear to everyone that whoever came out as the winner of the civil war would be — maybe not by law, but certainly in reality — the master of Rome,” Santangello said.
