Archaeologists Discover 1,500-year-old Skeletons Of Couple Buried Together In China
Archaeologists in China have discovered a rare double burial, or “lovers’ tomb,” featuring the skeletons of a man and woman locked in an eternal embrace.
This ancient Chinese couple buried embracing, dates to the Northern Wei dynasty (386-534).
Though the grave is 1,500 years old, she still wears a plain silver band on her ring finger.
“The message was clear—husband and wife lay together, embracing each other for eternal love during the afterlife,” a group of ten scholars wrote in a study published in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology.
“This joint burial could be direct evidence of a full display of love and the importance of the rings in love.”
The tomb was one of 600 found in an ancient cemetery unearthed at a construction site in Datong, in Shanxi province. The excavation was carried out in 2020.
An illustration of the ancient Chinese couple buried embracing during the Northern Wei dynasty (386-534).
The couple likely lived during the Northern Wei dynasty (386–534), a politically turbulent time. Buddhism was spreading rapidly, with cultural diffusion helping shape ideas about death and the afterlife.
“This discovery is a unique display of the human emotion of love in a burial,” Qun Zhang, an associate professor at the Institute of Anthropology at Xiamen University, told the South China Morning Post.
“[It] offer[s] a rare glimpse of concepts of love, life, death, and the afterlife in northern China during a time of intense cultural and ethnic exchange.”
Pathological and trauma signs on the lovers’ skeletons: (a) An unhealed ulnar fracture and missing part of the fourth digit on the right hand of the male individual. Slight development of the marginal osteophytes on the lumbar vertebrae could be detected in the female skeleton; (b) Osteophytosis on the distal end of the lower limbs of the male individual; (c) Antemortem tooth loss in the female individual.
Researchers believe it is likely that the man—whose body showed signs of an unhealed traumatic injury on his right arm—died, and that the woman died by suicide to be buried with him.
Other possibilities include a double death by suicide, or that they both died of illness at the same time.
This is the first known double burial from Chinese antiquity.
Another famous dual grave, Italy’s Lovers of Modena of two skeletons holding hands, was discovered to be two men, rather than a man and a woman, as previously believed.
Extensive Hyper-Violence in Japan’s Ancient Yayoi Period Revealed by Researcher
The human capacity for warfare and whether it is an inescapable part of human nature is a hot button issue at the heart of various disciplines like anthropology, archaeology, philosophy, and so on.
Researchers have posited a range of ideas about why humans engage in war, and the running list of various triggers for inter-group violence is long, be it the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture, the development of weapons, ecological constraints, or population pressures.
Among these, the population pressure hypothesis has become more prominent recently as people globally experience climatic changes and environmental breakdown.
The hypothesis states that population increase can result in resource scarcity, leading to competition and conflict over resources. While there is wide acceptance of this claim, there are very few studies that have quantitatively backed up the origin of inter-group violence due to population pressure based on actual archaeological data.
To correct this gap, Professor Naoko Matsumoto from Okayama University and her team surveyed the skeletal remains and jar coffins, called kamekan, from the Middle Yayoi period (350 BC to AD 25 CE) in northern Kyushu, Japan.
These images from the recent study show evidence of violence in the cut mark on this Yayoi period man just above his right eye socket.
This region has been the focus of inter-group violence investigations because the skeletal remains in the Yayoi period indicate a significant increase in the frequency of violence compared to those living in the preceding Jomon period.
“The inhabitants of the Yayoi period practised subsistence agriculture, in particular wet rice cultivation,” says Professor Matsumoto. “This was introduced by immigrants from the Korean peninsula along with weapons such as stone arrowheads and daggers, resulting in enclosed settlements accompanied by warfare or large-scale inter-group violence. However, those living during the Jomon period were primarily pottery-makers who followed a complex hunter-gatherer lifestyle and had low mortality rates caused by conflict.”
Professor Matsumoto and her team inferred demographic changes using the numbers of well-dated burial jars as a proxy for population size and estimated population pressure from the ratio of population to arable land.
The team calculated the frequency of violence by using percentages of injured individuals identified within the skeletal population, followed by a statistical analysis between population pressure and the frequency of violence.
Analyses of the human skeletal remains excavated at the Middle Yayoi period Doigahama site (near Shimonoseki, Japan; the closest point on Honshu island to Kyushu island) showed that Yayoi people skulls (upper two) were relatively longer and flatter than those of the earlier Jomon people (lower two).
The results of the investigation were published in the Journal of Archaeological Science. The researchers uncovered 47 skeletal remains with trauma, in addition to 51 sites containing burial jars in the Itoshima Plain, 46 in the Sawara Plain, 72 in the Fukuoka Plain, 42 in the Mikuni Hills, 37 in the east Tsukushi Plain, and 50 in the central Tsukushi Plain, encompassing all six study sites.
They found that the highest number of injured individuals and the highest frequency-of-violence levels occurred in the Mikuni Hills, the east Tsukushi Plain, and the Sawara Plain. Interestingly, the Mikuni Hills and the central Tsukushi Plain also showed the highest overall values for population pressure. Overall, statistical analyses supported that population pressure affected the frequency of violence.
However, the peak population did not correlate with the frequency of violence. High levels of population pressure in the Mikuni Hills and the central Tsukushi Plain showed low frequency-of-violence values, while the relatively low population pressures of the east Tsukushi Plain and Sawara Plain were linked to higher frequency-of-violence levels.
Professor Matsumoto reasons there may be other factors that could have indirectly influenced such high levels of violence in the Middle Yayoi period. “I think that the development of a social hierarchy or political organization might also have affected the level of violence.
We have seen stratified burial systems in which certain members of the ruling elite, referred to as ‘kings’ in Japanese archaeology, have tombs with large quantities of prestige goods such as weapons and mirrors,” she says.
“It is worth noting that the frequency of violence tends to be lower in the subregions with such kingly tombs. This suggests that powerful elites might have a role in repressing the frequency of violence.”
The evidence collected by Professor Matsumoto and her team undeniably confirms a positive correlation between population pressure and higher levels of violence and may help devise mechanisms to avoid seemingly never-ending conflicts in motion today.
Further research based on these insights could identify other variables at play in determining the root causes of inter-group violence and actively prevent them.
DNA from a teenage girl who died 7,200 years ago reveals previously unknown humans
The bones of a teenage hunter-gatherer who died more than 7,000 years ago on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi tell the story of a previously unknown group of humans. This distinct human lineage has never been found anywhere else in the world, according to new research.
The study was published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
The skeletal remains of an ancient teenage Toalean woman were nestled among large rocks, which were placed in the burial pit discovered in a cave on Sulawesi.
“We have discovered the first ancient human DNA in the island region between Asia and Australia, known as ‘Wallacea’, providing new insight into the genetic diversity and population history of early modern humans in this little-understood part of the world,” said the study co-author Adam Brumm, a professor of archaeology at Griffith University’s Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, via email.
The Leang Panninge cave is where researchers uncovered the remains of a young hunter-gatherer from 7,000 years ago.
The first modern humans used the Wallacea islands, mainly Indonesian islands that include Sulawesi, Lombok and Flores, as they crossed from Eurasia to the Australian continent more than 50,000 years ago, researchers believe. The exact route or how they navigated this crossing, however, is unknown.
“They must have done so using relatively sophisticated watercraft of some kind, as there were no land bridges between the islands, even during the glacial peaks of the last ice age, when global sea levels were up to 140 meters (459 feet) lower than they are today,” Brumm said. Tools and cave paintings have suggested that humans were living on these islands by 47,000 years ago, but the fossil record is sparse and ancient DNA degrades more rapidly in the tropical climate.
However, researchers uncovered the skeleton of a female between the ages of 17 and 18 in a cave on Sulawesi in 2015. Her remains were buried in the cave 7,200 years ago. She was part of the Toalean culture, only found in a pocket of Sulawesi’s southwestern peninsula. The cave is part of an archaeological site called Leang Panninge.
Maro’s points are associated with the Toalean culture.
“The ‘Toaleans’ is the name archaeologists have given to a rather enigmatic culture of prehistoric hunter-gatherers that lived in the forested plains and mountains of South Sulawesi between around 8,000 years ago until roughly the fifth century AD,” said Brumm via email. “They made highly distinctive stone tools (including tiny, finely crafted arrowheads known as ‘Maros points’) that are not found anywhere else on the island or in wider Indonesia.”
The young hunter-gatherer is the first largely complete and well-preserved skeleton associated with the Toalean culture, Brumm said. Lead study author Selina Carlhoff was able to retrieve DNA from the wedge-shaped petrous bone at the base of the skull.
“It was a major challenge, as the remains had been strongly degraded by the tropical climate,” said Carlhoff, also a doctoral candidate at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, in a statement.
Secrets hiding in DNA
The work to retrieve the genetic information was well worth it. The young woman’s DNA showed that she descended from the first wave of modern humans to enter Wallacea 50,000 years ago. This was part of the initial colonization of “Greater Australia,” or the combined ice age landmass of Australia and New Guinea. These are the ancestors of present-day Indigenous Australians and Papuans, Brumm said.
Fragmentary remains of the girl’s skull were used to retrieve her DNA.
And it turns out that the oldest genome traced to the Wallacea islands revealed something else: previously unknown ancient humans. She also shares ancestry with a separate and distinct group from Asia who likely arrived after the colonization of Greater Australia — because modern Indigenous Australians and Papuans don’t share ancestry with this group, Brumm said.
“Previously, it was thought that the first time people with Asian genes entered Wallacea was around 3,500 years ago when Austronesian-speaking farmers from Neolithic Taiwan swept down through the Philippines and into Indonesia,” he said.
“It suggests that there might have been a distinct group of modern humans in this region that we really had no idea about up until now, as archaeological sites are so scarce in Wallacea and ancient skeletal remains are rare.”
No descendants of this lineage remain.
Her genome included another trace of an enigmatic and extinct group of humans: Denisovans. The handful of fossils signifying that these early humans ever existed are largely from Siberia and Tibet.
“The fact that their genes are found in the hunter-gatherers of Leang Panninge supports our earlier hypothesis that the Denisovans occupied a far larger geographical area” than previously understood, said study co-author Johannes Krause, a professor of archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, in a statement.
But when her DNA was compared with that of other hunter-gatherers who lived west of Wallacea at the same time, their DNA didn’t contain any traces of Denisovan DNA.
“The geographic distribution of Denisovans and modern humans may have overlapped in the Wallacea region. It may well be the key place where Denisova people and the ancestors of indigenous Australians and Papuans interbred,” said study coauthor Cosimo Posth, a professor at the University of Tübingen’s Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment in Frankfurt, Germany, in a statement.
Researchers don’t know what happened to the Toalean culture, and this latest discovery is one piece of the puzzle as they try to understand the ancient genetic history of humans in Southeast Asia. Brumm hopes that more ancient DNA from the Toalean people can be recovered to reveal its diversity “and its wider ancestral story.”
1,500-Year-Old Industrial Agriculture Site Unearthed in Israel
Archaeologists in Israel have discovered a wine press, a rare gold coin and other artefacts linked to a settlement that stood in what’s now the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Ha-Sharon some 1,500 years ago.
The wine press dates to the Byzantine period.
Paved with a mosaic floor, the large wine press is a key indicator that the site was home to agricultural-industrial activity during the Byzantine period, reports i24 News. Archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) also found the foundations of a large structure that may have served as a warehouse or farmstead.
“Inside the buildings and installations, we found many fragments of storage jars and cooking pots that were evidently used by labourers working in the fields here,” says excavation leader Yoel Arbel in a statement. “We also recovered stone mortars and millstones that were used to grind wheat and barley and probably also to crush herbs and medicinal plants.”
Arbel adds that most of the stone implements were made of basalt from the Golan Heights and Galilee, located 50 to 100 miles northeast of Ramat Ha-Sharon.
As Stuart Winer reports for the Times of Israel, the coin was minted in 638 or 639 C.E. under the authority of Byzantine emperor Heraclius. One side shows the emperor and his two sons.
The hill of Golgotha in Jerusalem, identified as the site of the crucifixion of Jesus in Christian gospels, appears on the reverse. Someone scratched an inscription, likely the name of the coin’s owner, onto its surface in Greek and possibly Arabic, according to Robert Kool, a coin expert with the IAA.
“The coin encapsulates fascinating data on the decline of Byzantine rule in the country and contemporary historical events, such as the Persian invasion and the emergence of Islam, and provides information on Christian and pagan symbolism and the local population who lived here,” says Kool in the statement.
The coin shows Emperor Heraclius and his sons.
Among the discoveries made at the site was a bronze chain that may have been used to suspend a chandelier—an artefact typically found in churches, writes Rossella Tercatin for the Jerusalem Post.
Other items dated to the early Islamic period, which began in the seventh century C.E. These included oil lamps, a glass workshop, and a warehouse with large vessels used to store grain and produce.
“In this period, people were not only working at the site but also living there, because we discovered the remains of houses and two large baking ovens,” says Arbel in the statement.
Archaeologists think the site remained in use until the 11th-century C.E.
The team conducted excavations in advance of the construction of a neighbourhood at the site.
“This is the first archaeological excavation ever conducted at the site, and only part of it was previously identified in an archaeological field survey,” says IAA Tel Aviv District archaeologist Diego Barkan in the statement. “The Israel Antiquities Authority views this as an excellent opportunity to integrate the ancient remains into plans for the future municipal park.”
Ramat Ha-Sharon’s mayor, Avi Gruber, says in the statement that local authorities are working with the new neighbourhood’s developers to integrate the archaeological site into the development.
“I want all our residents to enjoy learning about life here in antiquity and in the Middle Ages,” he adds.
Preserved in poop: 1,000-year-old chicken egg found in Israel
It’s been said that the elegant egg is the perfect food, and that just might be true as eggs have been a staple of human diets for millions of years before chickens were domesticated for both eggs and meat some 8,000 years ago.
Israel Antiquities Authority discovered a fully intact 1,000-year-old chicken egg
In a remarkably rare discovery involving one of these ovoid essentials, scientists in Israel have cracked the archaeological case on a 1,000-year-old petrified egg that remained intact for centuries without breaking. This is an extraordinary event in that only a handful of ancient chicken eggs have ever been located undamaged.
During a recent excavation at an ancient Islamic cesspit dating back roughly 1,000 years ago, Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologists in Yavne unearthed a single unbroken chicken’s egg.
This expansive dig site, directed by Dr. Elie Haddad, Liat Nadav-Ziv, and Dr. Jon Seligman, had been the location of a diverse industrial settlement dating from the Byzantine period.
Intact chicken egg dating from roughly 1,000 years ago was revealed during archaeological excavations in Israel
“Eggshell fragments are known from earlier periods, for example in the City of David and at Caesarea and Apollonia, but due to the eggs’ fragile shells, hardly any whole chicken eggs have been preserved.
Even at the global level, this is an extremely rare find,” says Dr. Lee Perry Gal of the Israel Antiquities Authority in an official press statement provided to SYFY WIRE. “In archaeological digs, we occasionally find ancient ostrich eggs, whose thicker shells preserve them intact.”
Domesticated poultry farming first emerged in Israel 2,300 years ago, during the Hellenistic and Early Roman periods.
“Even today, eggs rarely survive for long in supermarket cartons. It’s amazing to think this is a 1,000-year-old find!” notes Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologist Alla Nagorsky in the same press release.
“The egg’s unique preservation is evidently due to the conditions in which it lay for centuries, nestled in a cesspit containing soft human waste that preserved it.”
Unfortunately, even with careful handling, researchers found that the shell of the egg had been slightly cracked. Back in the Israel Antiquities Authority’s organics lab, conservationist Ilan Naor was able to restore the egg for further study.
“Families needed a ready protein substitute that does not require cooling and preservation, and they found it in eggs and chicken meat,” adds Dr. Gal in the statement.
“Unfortunately, the egg had a small crack in the bottom so most of the contents had leaked out of it. Only some of the yolk remained, which was preserved for future DNA analysis.”
Ancient coins dating to 1,700 years ago were discovered by a family during a camping trip on an Israeli beach near Atlit on Tuesday. Yotam Dahan, a tour guide from Klil in northern Israel, found a bundle of antique coins during a family camping trip in Habonim beach.
The ancient bundle of coins was found on Habonim beach in Israel.
The bundle of coins, weighing a total of 6 kg., agglutinated after years of lying underwater. They were determined to have been used in the fourth century CE, following an inspection by expert Dr Donald Tzvi-Ariel.
After posting photos of the coins to Facebook, Dahan was contacted by Israel Antiquities Authority’s (IAA) Haifa District director Karem Said to identify the exact location of the discovery on the beach.
IAA marine archaeology department head Yaakov Sharvit noted the coins might have belonged to an ancient ship sailing the Mediterranean Sea.
“Archaeological sites are prevalent all along the Habonim beach strip,” Sharvit said. “Archaeological records show vessels were often washed ashore along with all their cargo,” he added.
“The bundle of coins found shows they were packed together and agglutinated due to oxidation of the metals,” Sharvit noted.
Dahan generously handed the coins to IAA’s Treasures of the State Department and was subsequently given a certificate of appreciation by the IAA.
The Taliban destroyed Afghanistan’s ancient treasures.
First, they destroyed television sets. Then they destroyed heritage sites. Since 1992, the Taliban’s war on art is the most revolting and senseless crusade anyone has ever accomplished. That feat is only rivalled by the destruction of ancient relics and artefacts by Alexander the Great more than 2,300 years ago.
The purge of thousand-year-old artefacts is the result of the Taliban’s mission of eliminating all that is “un-Islamic” from the world.
Afghanistan lies on the edge of what is known as the Fertile Crescent, an area in the Middle East that birthed the earliest civilizations. It is also called the “Cradle of Civilization.”
This region boasts some of the world’s oldest artefacts and heritage sites dating back to at least 5,000 years ago.
Afghanistan was a crossroad that connected Central Asia to East Asia, which is why the country shares some of the most prized and outstanding evidence of high culture and civilization from thousands of years ago.
Many of these treasures were destroyed by the Taliban, including 2,750 ancient works of art found nowhere else in the world.
The twin Colossi dated back to the 7th century B.C. The Taliban fired grenade launchers into the statues and bombed the top of the mountain to erase the images from the mountainside.
Before and After Destruction: Giant Buddha of Bamiyan
In 1998, they razed the Puli Khumri Library, which housed some of the oldest books in the world. At least 55,000 old manuscripts, scrolls, and books burned.
New clue to human evolution’s biggest mystery emerges in Philippines
Denisovans are an elusive bunch, known mainly from ancient DNA samples and traces of that DNA that the ancient hominids shared when they interbred with Homo sapiens. They left their biggest genetic imprint on people who now live in Southeast Asian islands, nearby Papua New Guinea and Australia.
Ayta people in the Philippines, shown here, belong to a group of ethnic communities that includes one with the highest level of Denisovan ancestry in the world, a new study finds.
Genetic evidence now shows that a Philippine Negrito ethnic group has inherited the most Denisovan ancestry of all. Indigenous people known as the Ayta Magbukon get around 5 per cent of their DNA from Denisovans, a new study finds.
This finding fits an evolutionary scenario in which two or more Stone Age Denisovan populations independently reached various Southeast Asian islands, including the Philippines and a landmass that consisted of what’s now Papua New Guinea, Australia and Tasmania.
Evolutionary geneticists Maximilian Larena and Mattias Jakobsson, both at Uppsala University in Sweden, and their team describe the new evidence on August 12 in Current Biology.
Even as the complexities of ancient interbreeding in Southeast Asia become clearer, Denisovans remain a mysterious crowd. “It’s unclear how the different Denisovan groups on the mainland and on Southeast Asian islands were related [to each other] and how genetically diverse they were,” Jakobsson says.
Papua New Guinea highlanders — estimated to carry close to 4 per cent Denisovan DNA in the new study — were previously thought to be the modern record-holders for Denisovan ancestry. But the Ayta Magbukon display roughly 30 per cent to 40 per cent more Denisovan ancestry than Papua New Guinea highlanders and Indigenous Australians, Jakobsson says.
That calculation accounts for the recent mating of East Asians with Philippine Negrito groups, including the Ayta Magbukon, that diluted Denisovan inheritance to varying degrees.
Genetic analyses suggest that Ayta Magbukon people retain slightly more Denisovan ancestry than other Philippine Negrito groups due to having mated less often with East Asian migrants to the island around 2,281 years ago, the scientists say.
Their genetic analyses compared ancient DNA from Denisovans and Neandertals with that of 1,107 individuals from 118 ethnic groups in the Philippines, including 25 Negrito populations. Comparisons were then made to previously collected DNA from present-day Papua New Guinea highlanders and Indigenous Australians.
The new report underscores that “still today there are populations that have not been fully genetically described and that Denisovans were geographically widespread,” says paleogeneticist Cosimo Posth of the University of Tübingen in Germany, who was not part of the new research.
But it’s too early to say whether Stone Age Homo fossils found on Southeast Asian islands come from Denisovans, populations that interbred with Denisovans or other Homo lineages, Posth says. Only DNA extracted from those fossils can resolve that issue, he adds. Unfortunately, ancient DNA preserves poorly in fossils from tropical climates.
Fossils from the Philippines initially classed as H. luzonensis, dating to 50,000 years ago or more (SN: 4/10/19), might actually represent Denisovans. But a lack of consensus on what Denisovans looked like leaves the evolutionary identity of those fossils uncertain.
Larena and Jakobsson’s findings “further increase my suspicions that Denisovan fossils are hiding in plain sight” among previously excavated discoveries on Southeast Asian islands, says population geneticist João Teixeira of the University of Adelaide in Australia, who did not participate in the new study.
Denisovans may have genetically encompassed H. luzonensis and two other fossil hominids found on different Southeast Asian islands, H. floresiensis on Flores and H. erectus on Java, Teixeira suspects. H. floresiensis, or hobbits, survived from at least 100,000 years ago to around 60,000 years ago (SN: 6/8/16). H. Erectus arrived on Java about 1.6 million years ago and died out between 117,000 and 108,000 years ago (SN: 12/18/19).
Geographic ancestry patterns on Southeastern Asian islands and in Australia suggest that this region was settled by a genetically distinct Denisovan population from southern parts of mainland East Asia, Teixeira and his colleagues reported in the May Nature Ecology & Evolution.
