Eighth-Century Imperial Structure Uncovered in Japan
Archaeologists have excavated one of the largest ruins of a building ever found at the former site of the Heijokyu palace in this ancient capital. The Nara National Research Institute for Cultural Properties announced the findings at the government-designated special historic site on June 30.
It believes the structure was the centrepiece of a residence for emperors and crown princes during the late eighth century.
One expert said the building was likely a residence for female Emperor Koken (718-770).
Remains of a structure unearthed at the former site of the Heijokyu palace in Nara.
Archaeologists began examining a roughly 924-square-meter plot in the northern Toin district in March, according to the institute. Toin is located in the eastern part of the Heijokyu palace, the nerve centre of politics during the Nara Period (710-784).
They unearthed ruins of a rectangular-shaped structure, which spans 27 meters in an east-west direction and 12 meters in a north-south direction. Also found were 50 pits dug in the ground to place pillars into them. The holes are lined up about 3 meters apart.
The building, supported by pillars placed in a grid-like formation, likely served as a living space, according to the institute.
The researchers concluded that the structure stood there between 749 and 770 during the Nara Period, based on the characteristics of a pattern on roof tiles found in the pits.
Part of roof tiles retrieved from the ruins of a building excavated at the former site of the Heijokyu palace in Nara.
Ruins of what appears to be a cooking stove found among the remains of a structure unearthed at the former site of the Heijokyu palace in Nara.
During the building’s roughly 20-year lifespan, Koken ruled from 749 to 758 before abdicating in favour of Emperor Junnin. Koken, known to have favoured a Buddhist monk named Dokyo, again ascended to the throne as Emperor Shotoku from 764 to 770.
“Shoku Nihongi,” the imperially commissioned history text on the Nara Period, notes that Emperor Shomu (701-756), father of Koken, resided in Toin when he was crown prince.
The area was later used as a site to build a residence for emperors.
“Koken particularly liked Toin, according to Shoku Nihongi,” said Akihiro Watanabe, a professor of Japanese ancient history at Nara University. “I believe the (discovered) structure was her living space.”
The institute said it plans to post a video of the ruins on its official YouTube channel in late July.
These ancient weights helped create Europe’s first free-market more than 3000 years ago
Knowing the weight of a commodity provides an objective way to value goods in the marketplace. But did a self-regulating market even exist in the Bronze Age? And what can weight systems tell us about this?
Diffusion of weighing technology in Western Eurasia (circa 3000-1000 BC)
A team of researchers from the University of Göttingen researched this by investigating the dissemination of weight systems throughout Western Eurasia.
Their new simulation indicates that the interaction of merchants, even without substantial intervention from governments or institutions, is likely to explain the spread of Bronze Age technology to weigh goods. The results were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
To determine how different units of weight emerged in different regions, researchers compared all the weight systems in use between Western Europe and the Indus Valley from 3,000-1,000 BC.
Examples of Western Eurasian balance weights of the Bronze Age. A: Spool-shaped weights from Tiryns, Greece (L Rahmstorf). B: Cubic weights from Dholavira, India (E Ascalone). C: Duck-shaped weights from Susa, Iran (E Ascalone). D: flat block weights from Lipari, Italy (N Ialongo).
Analysis of 2,274 balance weights from 127 sites revealed that with the exception of those from the Indus Valley, new and very similar units of weight appeared in a gradual spread west of Mesopotamia.
To find out if the gradual formation of these systems could be due to propagation of error from a single weight system, the researchers modelled the creation of 100 new units.
Taking into account factors such as measurement error, the simulation supported a single origin between Mesopotamia and Europe. It also showed that the Indus Valley probably developed an independent weight system.
The research demonstrated that if information flow in the Eurasia trade was free enough to support a common weight system, it was likely to be sufficient to react to local price fluctuations.
The weight systems that emerged between Mesopotamia and Europe were very similar. This meant that a single merchant could travel, for instance, from Mesopotamia to the Aegean and from there to Central Europe and never need to change their own set of weights.
The type of weighing scales a Bronze Age merchant would have carried with her when moving from one market to another to trade: suspended replica bone balance scale with flax strings and leather pouches, holding two replica weights in equilibrium
The merchant could trade with foreign partners while simply relying on approximating the weights. There was no international authority that could have regulated the accuracy of weight systems over such a wide territory and long time span. In Europe, beyond the Aegean, centralised authorities did not even exist at this time.
The researchers conclude that the emergence of accurate weight systems must have been the outcome of a global network regulating itself from the bottom-up.
“With the results of our statistical analysis and experimental tests, it is now possible to prove the long-held hypothesis that free entrepreneurship was already a primary driver of the world economy even as early as the Bronze Age,” explains Professor Lorenz Rahmstorf from the Institute for Prehistory and Early History, University of Göttingen.
Merchants could interact freely, establish profitable partnerships, and take advantage of the opportunities offered by long-distance trade.
“The idea of a self-regulating market existing some 4,000 years ago puts a new perspective on the global economy of the modern era,” says Dr Nicola Ialongo, University of Göttingen. He adds, “Try to imagine all the international institutions that currently regulate our modern world economy: is global trade possible thanks to these institutions, or in spite of them?”
According to a Science Magazine report, palaeontologist Qiang Ji of Hebei GEO University and his colleagues have examined a hominin skull discovered on the banks of the Songhua River in northeastern China in 1933.
A massive, remarkably complete skull from China may reveal the long-sought face of a Denisovan.
Almost 90 years ago, Japanese soldiers occupying northern China forced a Chinese man to help build a bridge across the Songhua River in Harbin. While his supervisors weren’t looking, he found a treasure: a remarkably complete human skull buried in the riverbank.
He wrapped up the heavy cranium and hid it in a well to prevent his Japanese supervisors from finding it. Today, the skull is finally coming out of hiding, and it has a new name: Dragon Man, the newest member of the human family, who lived more than 146,000 years ago.
In three papers in the year-old journal The Innovation, palaeontologist Qiang Ji of Hebei GEO University and his team call the new species Homo longi. (Long means dragon in Mandarin.) They also claim the new species belongs to the sister group of H. sapiens, and thus, an even closer relative of humans than Neanderthals. Other researchers question the idea of a new species and the team’s analysis of the human family tree.
But they suspect the large skull has an equally exciting identity: They think it may be the long-sought skull of a Denisovan, an elusive human ancestor from Asia known chiefly from DNA.
Paleoanthropologist Marta Mirazón Lahr of the University of Cambridge, who was not involved in the work, says she’s “skeptical of the statements about humans’ long-lost sister lineage.” But she and others are thrilled with the find. “It’s a wonderful skull; I think it’s the best skull of a Denisovan that we’ll ever have,” says paleoanthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
The stunning skull was brought to light by the bridge builder’s grandchildren, who retrieved it from the well after their grandfather told them about it on his deathbed. They donated it to the Geoscience Museum at Hebei GEO University. But before Ji could ask him precisely where he found the fossil, the man died, leaving the researchers uncertain of its geological context.
With no geological context, Ji enlisted several researchers to help date the skull. Griffith University, Nathan, geochronologist Rainer Grün and colleagues linked strontium isotopes in sediment encrusted in its nasal cavities to a specific layer of sediments around the bridge, which they dated to between 138,000 and 309,000 years ago. Uranium-series dating on the bone also gives it a minimum age of 146,000 years.
Next, the researchers tried to identify the skull. Paleoanthropologist Xijun Ni of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Hebei GEO University, who led the effort, was initially puzzled: The massive skull had a brain comparable in size to that of modern humans. But it couldn’t be a member of H. sapiens because it had larger, almost square eye sockets, thick brow ridges, a wide mouth, and a huge molar.
Ni, who is also a palaeontologist who studies fossil dinosaurs and primates, used computational statistical methods to build and analyze a data set of more than 600 traits from the skull, such as measurements of its length and brow size, as well as the presence or absence of traits such as wisdom teeth. He compared 55 traits from 95 other fossilized skulls, jaws, or teeth from the genus Homo from around the world.
The computer model sorted the fossils into family trees, finding the tree that fits best with the data had four main clusters. The new skull nestled in a cluster whose branches included several skulls from China’s Middle Pleistocene, a period 789,000 to 130,000 years ago when several lineages of hominins coexisted.
Within the cluster of Chinese fossils, the new skull was most closely related to a jawbone from Xiahe Cave on the Tibetan Plateau. Proteins in that jawbone, as well as ancient DNA in the sediments of the cave, strongly suggest it was a Denisovan, a close relative of Neanderthals who lived in Denisova Cave in Siberia off and on from 280,000 to 55,000 years ago and left traces of its DNA in modern people.
To date, the only clearly identified Denisovan fossils are a pinkie bone, teeth, and a bit of skull bone from Denisova Cave. But the enormous, “weird” molar from the new find fits with the molars from Denisova, says Bence Viola, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Toronto who analyzed them with Hublin.
The paper authors acknowledge that the find could be a Denisovan. And Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at London’s Natural History Museum and co-author on two of the papers, says so directly: “I think it probably is a Denisovan.”
But the team has not yet tried to extract ancient DNA or proteins from the skull or molar to test that idea. In the meantime, their analysis showed the cluster of Chinese fossils was closer to early H. sapiens than to Neanderthals who were alive at the same time, Ni says. “It is widely believed that the Neanderthal belongs to an extinct lineage that is the closest relative of our own species. However, our discovery suggests that the new lineage we identified that includes Homo longi is the actual sister group of H. sapiens.”
Although other researchers are stunned by the size and completeness of the skull, many are critical of the analysis. “When I saw this analysis, I nearly fell off my chair,” Hublin says.
They question how the skull was found to be closely related to the Xiahe jawbone because there are no overlapping traits to compare as the skull has no jawbone. Also, DNA studies reveal modern humans are more closely related to Neanderthals than Denisovans; if the Xiahe jawbone is indeed from a Denisovan, the new skull’s closest relative is likely a Neanderthal, not H. sapiens. “It’s premature to name a new species, especially a fossil with no context, with contradictions in the data set,” says María Martinón-Torres, a paleoanthropologist at CENIEH, the national centre for research on human evolution in Spain.
For now, the paper authors say they do not want to risk destroying the tooth or other bone to get DNA or protein. But other researchers hope that work happens soon. Viola, for one, says he hopes that one day, “I can finally look into the eyes of a Denisovan.”
The Largest Cave ever found on earth. so big, it has its own ecosystem
The Son Doong Cave in Vietnam is the largest cave passage in the world. This huge and intricate cave system was created by water that percolated down from a rainforest above, ultimately carving into the rock.
Deep inside the cave sits a flourishing jungle, which grows 200 meters below ground level in an area where the cave roof has collapsed.
Home to an impressive ecosystem with a dangerous system of pathways, this rainforest is quite the destination. To date, only explorers and very few tourists have laid eyes on it. Would you dare to be one of them?
An Accidental Discovery
For a cave that’s located inside of an UNESCO listed park, Vietnam’s Phong Nha-Ke Bang, it’s quite shocking that it was first discovered only 3 decades ago – on accident by a local farmer.
In 1990, while seeking shelter from a storm in the jungle, Ho Khanh stumbled upon this 3-million-year-old natural wonder and reported it to the British Caving Research Association.
Unfortunately, however, Khanh lost track of the cave’s exact location and it took almost 2 more decades for Son Doong cave to be rediscovered.
Unbelievably, in 2008, Ho Khanh stumbled upon the elusive cave once again! Luckily he remembered the location this time around and experts finally began exploring, eventually determining Son Doong to be the largest cave in the world.
Inside of a Rainforest, Inside of a Cave
Appropriate to its record-breaking size, Son Doong also houses an impressive ecosystem.
They are formed by a concretion of calcium salts polished by moving water.
Large stalagmites in the passage of Hang Son Doong in Vietnam. The tallest has been measured at 70 meters in height.
Not only does it have its own localized weather system, but this massive cave is home to the largest stalagmite ever found, nicknamed “Hand of Dog,” and a cave floor littered with rare limestone pearls.
But all of that isn’t even close to everything Son Doong has to offer — this fascinating cave system has its very own rainforest, the Garden of Edam.
With time, collapsed ceilings have created holes called dolines, allowing lush foliage to grow and creating a remote and dangerously inaccessible jungle.
Son Doong’s rainforest is home to flying foxes and endangered tigers, as well as rare langurs and trees as tall as buildings.
On bright days sunbeams stream through the dolines, illuminating carpets of moss below on a section of the cave nicknamed “Watch Out for Dinosaurs.”
Since 2012, one tour company called Oxalis has been taking a strict number of tourists per year into Son Doong — a treacherous five-day trek that only a lucky few will ever experience.
New early human discovered in 130,000-year-old fossils at Israeli cement site
Tel Aviv University Professor Israel Hershkovitz, holds what scientists say are two pieces of fossilised bone of a previously unknown kind of early human discovered at the Nesher Ramla site in central Israel.
Researchers in Israel have discovered a previously unknown type of ancient human who coexisted with our species around 100,000 years ago.
They believe the remains discovered near Ramla are those of one of the “final survivors” of a long-extinct human race.
A team from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem excavated prehistoric remains near the city of Ramla that could not be matched to any known species of the Homo genus, which includes contemporary humans (Homo sapiens).
A partial skull and jaw from a person who lived between 140,000 and 120,000 years ago were discovered.
The fragments of a skull and a lower jaw with teeth were about 130,000 years old and could force a rethink of parts of the human family tree, the researchers said.
University of Tel Aviv anthropologists and archaeologists led by Yossi Zaidner called the discovery the “Nesher Ramla Homo type” after the place where the bones were discovered in a paper published in the journal Science.
Dating to between 140,000 and 120,000 years ago, “the morphology of the Nesher Ramla humans shares features with both Neanderthals… and archaic Homo,” the researchers said in a statement.
“At the same time, this type of Homo is very unlike modern humans — displaying a completely different skull structure, no chin, and very large teeth.”
Along with the human remains, the dig uncovered large quantities of animal bones as well as stone tools.
“The archaeological finds associated with human fossils show that ‘Nesher Ramla Homo’ possessed advanced stone-tool production technologies and most likely interacted with the local Homo sapiens,” archaeologist Zaidner said.
“We had never imagined that alongside Homo sapiens, archaic Homo roamed the area so late in human history”.
The researchers believe that early Nesher Ramla Homo group members were already present in the Near East 400,000 years ago.
The new discoveries bear resemblances to ancient “pre-Neanderthal” European populations, according to the researchers.
Remains of a 3000-year-old shark attack victim discovered in Japan
Newspapers regularly carry stories of terrifying shark attacks, but in a paper published today, Oxford-led researchers reveal their discovery of a 3,000-year-old victim – attacked by a shark in the Seto Inland Sea of the Japanese archipelago.
The research in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, shows that this body is the earliest direct evidence for a shark attack on a human and an international research team has carefully recreated what happened – using a combination of archaeological science and forensic techniques.
The grim discovery of the victim was made by Oxford researchers, J. Alyssa White and Professor Rick Schulting, while investigating the evidence for violent trauma on the skeletal remains of prehistoric hunter-gatherers at Kyoto University.
They came upon No24, from the previously excavated site of Tsukumo, an adult male riddled with traumatic injuries.
‘We were initially flummoxed by what could have caused at least 790 deep, serrated injuries to this man,’ say the Oxford pair. ‘There were so many injuries and yet he was buried in the community burial ground, the Tsukumo Shell-mound cemetery site.’
They continue, ‘The injuries were mainly confined to the arms, legs, and front of the chest and abdomen. Through a process of elimination, we ruled out human conflict and more commonly-reported animal predators or scavengers.’
Since archaeological cases of shark reports are extremely rare, they turned to forensic shark attack cases for clues and worked with expert George Burgess, Director Emeritus of the Florida Program for Shark Research. And reconstruction of the attack was put together by the international team.
The team concluded that the individual died more than 3,000 years ago, between 1370 to 1010 BC. The distribution of wounds strongly suggest the victim was alive at the time of the attack; his left hand was sheared off, possibly a defence wound.
Individual No 24’s body had been recovered soon after the attack and buried with his people at the cemetery. Excavation records showed he was also missing his right leg and his left leg was placed on top of his body in an inverted position.
According to the pair, ‘Given the injuries, he was clearly the victim of a shark attack.
The man may well have been fishing with companions at the time, since he was recovered quickly. And, based on the character and distribution of the tooth marks, the most likely species responsible was either a tiger or white shark.’
Co-author Dr Mark Hudson, a researcher with the Max Planck Institute, says, ‘The Neolithic people of Jomon Japan exploited a range of marine resources…
It’s not clear if Tsukumo 24 was deliberately targeting sharks or if the shark was attracted by blood or bait from other fish. Either way, this find not only provides a new perspective on ancient Japan but is also a rare example of archaeologists being able to reconstruct a dramatic episode in the life of a prehistoric community.’
Dirty secrets: sediment DNA reveals a 300,000-year timeline of ancient and modern humans living in Siberia
In Siberia, researchers lay out a grid in Denisova Cave to systematically sample soil layers for DNA.
Science Magazine reports that analysis of more than 700 soil samples from Siberia’s Denisova Cave has detected traces of modern human DNA, which suggests that modern humans may have occupied the cave alongside Denisovans and Neanderthals.
The group was named “Denisovans” in its honour. Now, an extensive analysis of DNA in the cave’s soils reveals it also hosted modern humans—who arrived early enough that they may have once lived there alongside Denisovans and Neanderthals.
The new study “gives [researchers] unprecedented insight into the past,” says Mikkel Winther Pedersen, a molecular paleoecologist at the University of Copenhagen who was not involved with the work. “It literally shows what [before] they have only been able to hypothesize.”
Humans—including Neanderthals and Denisovans—are known to have occupied Denisova Cave for at least 300,000 years.
Selection of stone tools and personal ornaments made from bone, tooth and ivory recovered from the same sediment layers as modern human ancient DNA.
The cave also contains sophisticated stone tools and jewellery at higher, later levels. But no modern human fossils have been found there.
Those artefacts, extensive studies of DNA from these bones, and even one early study of DNA from soils have cemented the cave’s importance for piecing together human evolution.
But eight fossils are not much to go on, so Elena Zavala, a graduate student at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and colleagues teamed up with Russian researchers to see what kind of DNA was present in the soils of the three-chamber cave (see the video, below).
Researchers have been studying DNA isolated from soils for more than 40 years, including sequencing DNA from permafrost, but only in the past 4 years has anyone found DNA from extinct humans in ancient soils.
Working with another team of experts who had previously dated the layers of the cave, the researchers dug out 728 soil samples. After 2 years of analysis, in which they isolated and sequenced the samples, the researchers found human DNA in 175 of them. That makes the study “the largest and most systematic of its kind,” says Katerina Douka, an archaeological scientist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History who was not involved in the work.
The data reveal a complex history of human and animal habitation, with different groups moving in and out of the cave over time, Zavala and her colleagues report today in Nature. Their work confirms that Denisovans were the cave’s first human inhabitants, about 300,000 years ago.
They disappeared 130,000 years ago, only to be followed by a different group of Denisovans, who likely made many of the stone tools, some 30,000 years later. Neanderthals appeared on the scene about 170,000 years ago, with different groups using the cave at various points in time, some overlapping with the Denisovans.
The last to arrive were modern humans, who showed up about 45,000 years ago. The soil layer that corresponds with that period contained DNA from all three human groups, the researchers report.
“The time periods [of each layer] are quite large, so we can’t concretely say if they overlapped or not,” Zavala says. But, Douka adds, “I cannot think of another site where three human species lived through time.”
Given the jewellery and sophisticated artefacts in later layers, some researchers had suspected moderns had been there. But no one knew they had arrived as early as 45,000 years ago—and overlapped with both of our archaic cousins.
“It suggests a more complicated interplay between archaic and modern humans,” says Ron Pinhasi, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Vienna who was not involved with the work.
The soil samples also yielded DNA from many species of animals. About 170,000 years ago, the climate went from warmer to colder, and Neanderthals moved in, so did different species of hyenas and bears.
It’s the combination of genomic data from both the fossils and the soil samples that really makes the new work stand out, Pinhasi says. “It’s a super promising direction [for future work].” Douka agrees, and says the new study should help ancient soil DNA become “a mainstream archaeological tool.”
She is already amazed at the progress that it, combined with other studies, has made possible. “Let’s not forget that as recently as in 2010 we had absolutely no evidence that Denisovans existed, and that these various hominins ever met, let alone that they interbred repeatedly and co-existed for millennia,” she wrote in an email.
Two Historic Shipwrecks Discovered Off Coast of Singapore
Two centuries-old shipwrecks packed with ceramics and other artefacts have been found off Singapore in a rare discovery that will shed light on the city-state’s maritime heritage, archaeologists said Wednesday.
Two centuries-old shipwrecks have been found off Singapore.
The prosperous island nation has long been a key trading hub on global shipping routes connecting the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.
The wrecks were found off Pedra Branca, a rocky outcrop east of Singapore, according to the National Heritage Board and think tank the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, which worked together on the project.
The first wreck, discovered after divers accidentally came across ceramic plates in 2015, was carrying Chinese ceramics that possibly date back to the 14th century when Singapore was known as Temasek.
Some of the items were similar to artefacts found in archaeological digs on land, which showed that Singapore was a trading hub well before the arrival of British colonizers in 1819.
Undersea excavations on the first wreck led to the discovery of the second, which is likely to be the Shah Munchah, a merchant vessel built in India that sank in 1796 while sailing from China to India.
Items recovered from the second wreck ranged from Chinese ceramics to glass and agate objects, as well anchors and cannons, the heritage board and think tank said.
The two wrecks were packed with ceramics.
The survey and recovery of artefacts from the two wrecks was completed this year.
Such cannons were typically mounted on merchant ships used by the East India Company —- the trading behemoth through which the British Empire expanded in Asia—in the 18th and 19th centuries, they added.
The vessel discovered in 2015 was the first ancient shipwreck to be found in Singapore’s waters.
It was carrying “more Yuan dynasty blue-and-white porcelain than any other documented shipwreck in the world,” said Michael Flecker, a visiting fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute’s archaeology unit.
“Many of the pieces are rare, and one is believed to be unique.”
The Yuan dynasty existed in what is now China in the 13th and 14th centuries.
Much of the Chinese cargo in the second wreck was destined for eventual shipping to Britain, said Flecker.
