Category Archives: ASIA

Stash of pure, 24-carat gold coins unearthed in Israel

Stash of pure, 24-carat gold coins unearthed in Israel

During the summer break, two Israeli teens discovered a cache of hundreds of gold coins dated back 1,100 years. In an archaeological excavation in Yavne in central Israel, the cache, buried in a clay pot, was uncovered by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA).

The dig site in central Israel where the coins were unearthed.

The coins date back to the end of the 9th century when the region was under the control of the Islamic Abbasid Caliphate, a dynasty that controlled the area from modern Algeria to Afghanistan, Robert Kool, a coin specialist with the IAA, said. The coins, 425 in total, were made of pure 24-karat gold and weighed 1,86 pounds (845 grams).

“With such a sum, a person could buy a luxurious house in one of the best neighbourhoods in Fustat, the enormous wealthy capital of Egypt in those days,” said Kool.

The haul included pieces of gold dinars cut to be used as small change.

The teenagers, who were taking part in pre-military national service, initially thought they had found some very thin leaves buried in a jar.
“It was amazing. I dug in the ground and when I excavated the soil, saw what looked like very thin leaves,” Oz Cohen, one of the youths who found the coins, said in a statement.

Hiker finds the rare gold coin in Israel

“When I looked again I saw these were gold coins. It was really exciting to find such a special and ancient treasure.”

Finding such a large cache of gold coins is exceedingly rare, said the directors of the excavation site, since gold was often melted down and reused by later civilizations.

“The coins, made of pure gold that does not oxidize in air, were found in excellent condition as if buried the day before.

Their finding may indicate that international trade took place between the area’s residents and remote areas,” said Liat Nadav-Ziv and Elie Haddad from the IAA.

“The person who buried this treasure 1,100 years ago must have expected to retrieve it and even secured the vessel with a nail so that it would not move. We can only guess what prevented him from returning to collect this treasure,” they added.

The collection of gold coins contains full gold dinars, but also smaller cuttings of gold coins — used as small change, said Kool.

One of the cuttings is an exceptionally rare piece, he added, showing a fragment of Byzantine emperor Theophilos, which would have been minted in the neighbouring empire’s capital of Constantinople.

X-rated medieval doodles reveal our ancestors had a sense of humour
Kool said the fragment of a Christian emperor found in an Islamic coin hoard speaks to the connections between the empires, both in times of war and peace.

In 2016, a hiker found a 2,000-year-old gold coin carrying the face of a Roman emperor in eastern Galilee.

The coin is so rare that only one other such example is known to exist, experts said at the time.

And in 2015, divers found a trove of nearly 2,000 gold coins in the ancient Mediterranean harbour of Caesarea, which had languished at the bottom of the sea for about 1,000 years.

The largest hoard of gold coins found in Israel was discovered in the seabed of a harbour in the Mediterranean Sea port of Caesarea National Park.

2,000-year-old seal depicting Greek god Apollo found in Jerusalem

2,000-year-old seal depicting Greek god Apollo found in Jerusalem

Archaeologist Eli Shukron told The Times of Israel that the finding of a rare 2000-year-old signet ring carved with the Greek sun god Apollo provides fresh evidence of a pluralistic Jewry walking the streets of ancient Jerusalem during the Second Temple period.

“It helps us to see a Jerusalem that wasn’t an ultra-Orthodox city of any kind, it was more pluralistic,” said Shukron, who is convinced that the ring must have decorated the finger of a Jew. The fact that a Jew wanted a Greek god’s symbol, “shows the wide variety of practices in Jerusalem. Everyone was a Jew, but there were different groups and perspectives,” he said.

The dark brown jasper gem sealing (intaglio) was recently discovered at the Archaeological Sifting Project at Tzurim Valley National Park during the wet sifting of earth taken from ongoing City of David excavations of the foundations of the Western Wall.

Shukron said there is absolutely no doubt that it is Apollo who is engraved on the tiny, oval-shaped, 13 millimetre-long, 11 millimetre-wide, and 3 millimetre-thick sealing. It would usually have been used as a signature stamp on beeswax to seal contracts, letters, wills, and goods or bundles of money, according to a City of David press release.

The profile of Apollo has long flowing hair spilling over his sturdy neck. He has a large nose, thick lips, and small prominent chin, according to the press release. The styled hair is braided above his forehead, with long curls reaching the shoulder.

All of this adds up to the god Apollo in the eyes of a trained archaeologist. “You cannot miss it,” Shukron said.

Illustrative: Eli Shukron, an archaeologist formerly with Israel’s Antiquities Authority, walks in the City of David archaeological site near Jerusalem’s Old City

The question then arises, what is a nice Jewish neighbourhood such as 1st century CE Jerusalem doing with a pagan Greek god?

2,000-year-old seal with the image of Apollo discovered in the City of David near Jerusalem’s Western Wall.

According to Shukron, there are already a handful of archaeological artefacts dated to the Second Temple period in which Apollo plays a starring role: Two other Apollo gem sealings were discovered at Masada and another two were found in Jerusalem, one also from the Western Wall drainage tunnels excavations and one in a tomb on Mount Scopus.

Shukron noted that whereas during the Roman period, other members of the Greek and Roman pantheon make appearances, for the centuries surrounding the turn of the Common Era, only Apollo has been found. The god symbolized light, health and general well-being and success — something everyone generally aspires to, he said, which is why the symbol was considered “kosher” for these Second Temple Jews.

“It’s important to see that Jerusalem is more than conservatism, there are people like this who [as evidenced by his adoption of a pagan symbol as his signature] would have had more freedom in their thinking,” said Shukron. What is also clear, through his very public use of the symbol, is that there would have been a group of Jews who accepted this usage as well.

Expert of engraved gems Prof. Shua Amorai-Stark made an assessment of the sealing and noted that “at the end of the Second Temple period, the sun god Apollo was one of the most popular and revered deities in Eastern Mediterranean regions.

Apollo was a god of manifold functions, meanings, and epithets. Among Apollo’s spheres of responsibility, it is likely that association with sun and light (as well as with logic, reason, prophecy, and healing) fascinated some Jews, given that the element of light versus darkness was prominently present in Jewish worldview in those days,” he said.

It’s likely that a Jewish person owned this ancient carving about 2,000 years ago.

Amorai-Stark said that this polarization of light versus dark is seen in that the craftsman’s choice of a dark stone layered with yellow-golden and light brown.

“The choice of a dark stone with the yellow colouring of hair suggests that the creator or owner of this intaglio sought to emphasize the dichotomous aspect of light and darkness and/or their connectedness,” he wrote.

Whether the craftsman was going for a cup half empty or half full view of the world in his workmanship on the sealing, for Shukron the fact of its existence and use during the Second Temple period is an anchor between Jews of two millennia ago and today.

A 520-Million-Year-Old Five-Eyed Fossil Reveals Arthropod Origin

A 520-Million-Year-Old Five-Eyed Fossil Reveals Arthropod Origin

Since the Cambrian Period, around 520 million years ago, arthropods have been among the most prolific animals on Earth. They are the most familiar and ubiquitous, and constitute nearly 80 per cent of all animal species today, far more than any other animals.

Ecological reconstruction of Kylinxia zhangi.

So how did arthropods evolve and what did they look like to their ancestors? This has been a major conundrum in animal evolution puzzling generations of scientists for more than a century.

A shrimp-like fossil with five eyes has now been found by researchers from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NIGPAS), giving valuable insights into the early evolutionary  history of arthropods. The study was published in Nature on November 4, 2020.

Anatomical reconstruction of Kylinxia.

The fossil species, Kylinxia, was collected from the Chengjiang fauna in southwest China’s Yunnan Province. The fauna documents the most complete early animal fossils in the Cambrian time.

Prof. HUANG Diying, the corresponding author for the study from NIGPAS, said, “Kylinxia is a very rare chimeric species. It combines morphological features from different animals, which is analogous to ‘kylin,’ a chimeric creature in traditional Chinese mythology.”

“Owing to very special taphonomic conditions, the Kylinxia fossils exhibit exquisite anatomical structures. For example, nervous tissue, eyes and digestive system — these are soft body parts we usually cannot see in conventional fossils,” said Prof. ZHAO Fangchen, co-corresponding author of the study.

Kylinxia shows distinctive features of true arthropods, such as a hardened cuticle, a segmented trunk and jointed legs.

However, it also integrates the morphological characteristics present in very ancestral forms, including the bizarre five eyes of Opabinia, known as the Cambrian “weird wonder,” as well as the iconic raptorial appendages of Anomalocaris, the giant apex predator in the Cambrian ocean.

A 520-Million-Year-Old Five-Eyed Fossil Reveals Arthropod Origin
Holotype of Kylinxia zhangi.

Among the Chengjiang fauna, Anomalocaris is a top predator that can reach two meters in body length and has been regarded as an ancestral form of arthropod.

But huge morphological differences exist between Anomalocaris and true arthropods. There is a great evolutionary gap between the two that can hardly be bridged. This gap has become a crucial “missing link” in the origin of arthropods.

The research team conducted detailed anatomical examinations of the fossils of Kylinxia. They demonstrated that the first appendages in Anomalocaris and true arthropods were homologous.

The phylogenetic analyses suggested that there was an affinity between the front appendages of Kylinxia, small predatory appendages in front of the mouth of Chelicerata (a group that includes spiders and scorpions) and the antennae of Mandibulata (a subdivision of arthropods including insects such as ants and bees).

“Our results indicate that the evolutionary placement of Kylinxia is right between Anomalocaris and the true arthropods. Therefore, our finding reached the evolutionary root of the true arthropods,” said Prof. ZHU Maoyan, a co-author of the study.

“Kylinxia represents a crucial transitional fossil predicted by Darwin’s evolutionary theory. It bridges the evolutionary gap from Anomalocaris to true arthropods and forms a key “missing link” in the origin of arthropods, contributing strong fossil evidence for the evolutionary theory of life,” said Dr. ZENG Han, first author of the study.

Rare Ancient Child Burial Reveals 8,000-Year-Old Secrets of the Dead

Rare Ancient Child Burial Reveals 8,000-Year-Old Secrets of the Dead

Humanity has done a pretty good job of recording its collective history over the past two or three thousand years. Earlier time periods, though, are still very much shrouded in mystery. Now, a groundbreaking new archaeological discovery in Indonesia is revealing secrets from 8,000 years ago.

Entrance to Makpan cave, Alor Island, where the burial was discovered.

Archaeologists from The Australian National University have discovered an ancient child burial site located on Alor Island, Indonesia. While a funeral for a child is no doubt a morose and depressing event in any century, this unearthing is providing some invaluable insight on early mid-Holocene era cultural and burial practices.

Stunning burial practices unearthed

Articulated left foot (bottom left) and right foot (center) excavated in the ANU laboratory.

According to lead researcher Dr Sofia Samper Carro, it’s clear that the child was laid to rest with a formal ceremony of some kind. The research team estimates the child was between four and eight-years-old at the time of death.

Ochre pigment was applied to the cheeks and forehead and an ochre-coloured cobblestone was placed under the child’s head when they were buried,” she says in a university release. “Child burials are very rare and this complete burial is the only one from this time period,”

“From 3,000 years ago to modern times, we start seeing more child burials and these are very well studied. But, with nothing from the early Holocene period, we just don’t know how people of this era treated their dead children. This find will change that.”

Of particular note is the fact that the child’s arms and legs appear to have been removed and stored elsewhere before the rest of the body was buried. This sounds rather odd from a modern perspective, but researchers say it isn’t wholly unprecedented.

“The lack of long bones is a practice that has been documented in several other burials from a similar time period in Java, Borneo and Flores, but this is the first time we have seen it in a child’s burial,” Dr Carro adds.

Why did ancient cultures remove arms and legs before burials?

The answer is probably lost to the sands of time, but researchers theorize some form of religion or spiritual belief is a likely explanation.

“We don’t know why long bone removal was practised, but it’s likely some aspect of the belief system of the people who lived at this time,” Carro adds.

While teeth examinations project the child as being around six to eight-years-old, the full skeleton appears to be closer to four or five-years-old.

“We want to do some further paleo-health research to find out if this smaller skeleton is related to diet or the environment or possibly to being genetically isolated on an island,” the lead researcher comments. “My earlier work from Alor showed adult skulls were also small.

These hunter-gatherers had a mainly marine diet and there is evidence to suggest protein saturation from a single food source can cause symptoms of mal-nourishment, which affects growth. However, they could have been eating other terrestrial resources such as tubers.”

“By comparing other adult burials we have found from the same time period with this child burial in a future project, we hope to build a chronology and general view of burial practices in this region from between 12,000 to 7,000 years ago which at the moment is still scant.”

The first-ever portrait of Jesus Christ in Israel Discovered, 70 ancient books hidden in a cave for nearly 2,000 years

The first-ever portrait of Jesus Christ in Israel Discovered, 70 ancient books hidden in a cave for nearly 2,000 years

The image is eerily familiar: a bearded young man with flowing curly hair. After lying for nearly 2,000 years hidden in a cave in the Holy Land, the fine detail is difficult to determine. But in a certain light, it is not difficult to interpret the marks around the figure’s brow as a crown of thorns.

The extraordinary picture of one of the recently discovered hoards of up to 70 lead codices – booklets – found in a cave in the hills overlooking the Sea of Galilee is one reason Bible historians are clamouring to get their hands on the ancient artefacts.

If genuine, this could be the first-ever portrait of Jesus Christ, possibly even created in the lifetime of those who knew him.

The first-ever portrait of Jesus Christ in Israel Discovered, 70 ancient books hidden in a cave for nearly 2,000 years
Discovery: The impression on this booklet cover shows what could be the earliest image of Christ

The tiny booklet, a little smaller than a modern credit card, is sealed on all sides and has a three-dimensional representation of a human head on both the front and the back. One appears to have a beard and the other is without. Even the maker’s fingerprint can be seen in the lead impression. Beneath both figures is a line of as-yet undeciphered text in an ancient Hebrew script.

Astonishingly, one of the booklets appears to bear the words ‘Saviour of Israel’ – one of the few phrases so far translated.

The owner of the cache is Bedouin trucker Hassan Saida who lives in the Arab village of Umm al-Ghanim, Shibli. He has refused to sell the booklets but two samples were sent to England and Switzerland for testing.

An investigation has revealed that the artefacts were originally found in a cave in the village of Saham in Jordan, close to where Israel, Jordan and Syria’s Golan Heights converge – and within three miles of the Israeli spa and hot springs of Hamat Gader, a religious site for thousands of years.

Precious: This booklet shows what scholars believe to be the map of Christian Jerusalem

According to sources in Saham, they were discovered five years ago after a flash flood scoured away the dusty mountain soil to reveal what looked like a large capstone. When this was levered aside, a cave was discovered with a large number of small niches set into the walls. Each of these niches contained a booklet. There were also other objects, including some metal plates and rolled lead scrolls.

The area is renowned as an age-old refuge for ancient Jews fleeing the bloody aftermath of a series of revolts against the Roman empire in the First and early Second Century AD.

The cave is less than 100 miles from Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, and around 60 miles from Masada, scene of the last stand and mass suicide of an extremist Zealot sect in the face of a Roman Army siege in 72AD – two years after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem.

It is also close to caves that have been used as sanctuaries by refugees from the Bar Kokhba revolt, the third and final Jewish revolt against the Roman Empire in 132AD.

The era is of critical importance to Biblical scholars because it encompasses the political, social and religious upheavals that led to the split between Judaism and Christianity.

It ended with the triumph of Christianity over its rivals as the dominant new religion first for dissident Jews and then for Gentiles.

In this context, it is important that while the Dead Sea Scrolls are rolled pieces of parchment or papyrus containing the earliest-known versions of books of the Hebrew Bible and other texts – the traditional Jewish format for written work – these lead discoveries are in book, or codex, a form which has long been associated with the rise of Christianity.

The codices seen range in size from smaller than 3in x 2in to around 10in x 8in. They each contain an average of eight or nine pages and appear to be cast, rather than inscribed, with images on both sides and bound with lead-ring bindings. Many of them were severely corroded when they were first discovered, although it has been possible to open them with care.

The codex showing what may be the face of Christ is not thought to have been opened yet. Some codices show signs of having been buried – although this could simply be the detritus resulting from lying in a cave for hundreds of years.

Unlike the Dead Sea Scrolls, the lead codices appear to consist of stylised pictures, rather than text, with a relatively small amount of script that appears to be in a Phoenician language, although the exact dialect is yet to be identified. At the time these codices were created, the Holy Land was populated by different sects, including Essenes, Samaritans, Pharisees, Sadducees, Dositheans and Nazoreans.

One lucky owner: Hassan Saida with some of the artefacts that he says he inherited

There was no common script and considerable intermingling of language and writing systems between groups. Which means it could take years of detailed scholarship to accurately interpret the codices.

Many of the books are sealed on all sides with metal rings, suggesting they were not intended to be opened. This could be because they contained holy words which should never be read.

A Scientist Thinks These Ancient Roman Nails May Have Been Used To Crucify Jesus Christ

A Scientist Thinks These Ancient Roman Nails May Have Been Used To Crucify Jesus Christ

According to a new analysis, two corroded Roman-era iron nails which some have claimed pinned Jesus to the cross seem to have been used in an ancient crucifixion. The controversy about the origin of the nails was reignited by this study.

A Scientist Thinks These Ancient Roman Nails May Have Been Used To Crucify Jesus Christ
The two Roman-era iron nails are from an unmarked box delivered to Tel Aviv University; new research suggests they could be the two nails lost from the tomb of the Jewish high priest Caiaphas, who presided over the condemnation of Jesus.

The latest research indicates that the nails of the tomb of the Jewish high priest Caiaphas, who supposedly handed Jesus over for execution to the Romans for execution. Slivers of wood and bone fragments suggest they may have been used in a crucifixion.

The connection to Caiaphas and the new evidence did not completely show that the nails were used to crucify Jesus in Jerusalem in A.D. 33, Geologist Aryeh Shimron, the lead author of the study published in the journal Archaeological Discovery.

“I certainly do not want to say that these nails are from the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth,” Shimron told Live Science. “But are they nails from a crucifixion? Very likely, yes.”

Where did the nails originate?

One of the nails was purportedly found in one of the 12 ossuaries within Caiaphas’ tomb, while the other was found on the ground nearby.

Israel Hershkovitz, a renowned anthropologist at Tel Aviv University, received the nails in an unmarked box from the collection of Nicu Haas, an Israeli anthropologist who died in 1986. According to the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), Haas obtained them from a tomb excavated in the 1970s, decades before the Caiaphas tomb was discovered, according to Haaretz. 

But the IAA doesn’t know which tomb the nails came from, and no records of their provenance have ever been found. In a controversial 2011 documentary called “The Nails of the Cross,” however, filmmaker and journalist Simcha Jacobovici suggested the nails were those lost from the Caiaphas tomb — and that the high priest may have been so overcome with guilt about the crucifixion of Jesus that he kept the nails as a memento. 

Haaretz reported that some scholars, though no names were given, have called the latest research highly speculative.  But Shimron, a geologist based in Jerusalem who’s retired from the Israel Geological Survey, said the new study gave weight to the documentary’s ideas. Shimron has not studied the two nails that are the subject of Jacobovici’s 2011 documentary before now, though he was involved in a 2015 study tied to another of Jacobovici’s controversial documentaries on the archaeology of Jesus.

The nails are long enough to have been driven through a person’s palms — and the fact that they are bent upward is consistent with crucifixion.

Workers widening a road discovered the first-century “Caiaphas” tomb in 1990 in a neighbourhood in the southeast of Jerusalem. The tomb contained 12 ossuaries —– one marked with the name “Qayafa” and another, ornately decorated with motifs of flowers, marked with the Aramaic name “Yehosef Bar Qayafa,” or “Joseph son of Caiaphas” in English. Most archaeologists now accept that the tomb was used to bury the first-century high priest Caiaphas and his family, the study said. 

Caiaphas, who is is mentioned several times in both the Christian New Testament and history of the Jews written in the late first century by Flavius Josephus, presided over a sham trial of Jesus for blasphemy, after which Jesus was handed over to the Roman governor Pontius Pilate for execution, according to the Gospel of Matthew. The execution was reportedly carried out on Friday, April 3, 33, when Jesus was nailed to the cross — a common Roman method of capital punishment.

The two nails discovered at Tel Aviv University match the chemical signature of the ossuaries in the Caiaphas tomb and have traces of an unusual fungus found there.

Jerusalem tomb

In the latest study, Shimron and his co-authors compared samples from the two nails with sediments from the ossuaries in the Caiaphas tombstone chests used to hold the bones of people after they had decayed for about a year on a rock shelf. It found that not only did the physical and chemical signatures of the nails and the ossuaries match, but they also seemed to be unique.

For example, the ratios of isotopes of carbon and oxygen — variants of these elements — in both sets of samples suggested they both came from an abnormally humid environment, and they both had significant “flowstone deposits” —– layers of calcite carbonate formed by flowing water.

These findings match the conditions in the Caiaphas tomb, which is located near an ancient aqueduct and often would have been flooded by its overflow. The researchers also found evidence on both the nails and the ossuaries of a specific fungus — an unusual type of yeast — that grows only in very damp conditions and has been found in no other tomb in Jerusalem. “I think the nails came from that tomb,” Shimron said.

Their analysis of the nails with an electron microscope also found slivers of wood on the nails, which they recognized as cedar, and tiny fragments of bone —– unfortunately now fossilized. Those discoveries heightened the possibility that the nails came from crucifixion, but they did not prove it, Shimron said.

Electron microscopy confirmed the two nails contained tiny bone fragments.

Mysterious nails

The IAA says their records show that two iron nails were also found in the Caiaphas tomb — one inside an unmarked ossuary and another on the ground near the ornate ossuary, possibly where it fell when it was disturbed by tomb robbers — but they were later lost. 

The excavator of that tomb suggested they might have been used to scratch inscriptions on the ossuaries, but that idea was never investigated, Shimron said. The new study indicated the nails from Tel Aviv University were indeed those lost from the Caiaphas tomb, despite the IAA’s denial, he said.

According to the theory presented in Jacobovici’s documentary, they might have been buried with Caiaphas because crucifixion nails were thought to be magical — a belief noted in ancient Jewish writings. And because Caiaphas is only known for his role in the crucifixion of Jesus, it’s possible that the nails are linked with that event — although it can only be a supposition, Shimron said. 

Hershkovitz, who still has possession of the two nails, told Live Science he was not convinced by the latest study, but he did not rule out the possibility that the nails came from the Caiaphas tomb. The nails are long enough to have been used on a person’s hands in a crucifixion, and they are bent upward at the end, — perhaps to prevent the hands being lifted off the cross, he said.

But the presence of bone fragments did not prove the nails were from a crucifixion, because bones from the tomb may have stuck to the nails. “Ossuaries are full of human bones,” he said.

Still, “there is a possibility — and we have to keep an open mind for every possibility, as scientists,” Hershkovitz said. 

Female warrior was buried in the ‘riding position’ as if on a horse journeying into the afterlife 2,400 years ago

Female warrior was buried in the ‘riding position’ as if on a horse journeying into the afterlife 2,400 years ago

The burial of the Amazon with a headdress made of precious metal dated back to the second half of the 4th century BC was found by the members of the Don expedition of IA RAS during the examination of the cemetery Devitsa V of Voronezh Oblast.

The plate of the head dress (stlengis). The barrow №9 of the cemetery Devitsa V.

This is the first-ever found in Middle Don river, and well preserved ceremonial headdress of a rich Scythian woman, earlier archaeologists found only fragments of such headdresses. Valerii Guliaev, the head of Don expedition, announced the first results of the examination on the 6th of December at the session of Academic Council of IA RAS.

“Such headdresses have been found a bit more than two dozen and they all were in “tzar” or not very rich barrows of the steppe zone of Scythia. We first found such headdress in the barrows of the forest-steppe zone and what is more interesting the headdress was first found in the burial of an Amazon”, says Valerii Guliaev.

Cemetery Devitsa V which was called so after the name of the local village has been known since 2000s. It consists of 19 mounds part of which is almost hidden as this region is an agricultural zone which is currently ploughed. Since 2010 the site has been studied by the specialists of the Don expedition of IA RAS.

By the time of the excavation works the barrow №9 of the cemetery Devitsa V was a small hill of 1 m height and 40 m in diameter. Under the centre of the mound, the archaeologists found the remains of the tomb where the narrow entrance-dromos from the eastern side led to. In ancient times the tomb was covered by oak blocks which were laid crisscross and rested on 11 strong oak piles. The grave pit was surrounded by the clay earthwork taken from the ground during the construction of the grave.

One was a matriarch aged between 45 and 50 who was buried wearing her decorative Scythian ceremonial headdress known as a Kalaf with amphora-shaped pendants

In the barrow four women of different age were buried: two young women of 20-29 years old and 25-35 years old, a teenage girl of 12-13 years old and a woman of 45-50 years old. The burial was made simultaneously as one of the piles supported the floor of the tomb was in the dromos and completely overlaid the entrance so that it would be absolutely impossible to overtake it during next burials.

The burial was robbed in ancient times. The robbers broke into the tomb from the north when the floor had already fallen and the sepulchre was buried i.e. in 100 or 200 years after the barrow was filled. However, only northern and eastern parts of the tomb had been robbed where there were the remains of the teenager and one of the young women.

Apart from the spread remains we found in the northern part of the pit more than 30 iron arrowheads, an iron hook in the shape of a bird, fragments of horse harness, iron hooks for hanging harness, iron knives, fragments of moulded vessels, multiple animals’ bones. In filling the robbers’ passage the broken black lacquer lacythus with red-figure palmette dated back to the second –third quarter of the 4th c BC was found.

At the southern and western wall, there were two untouched skeletons laid on the wooden beds covered by grass beddings. One of them belonged to a young woman buried in a “position of a horseman”. As the researches of the anthropologists have shown to lay her in such way the tendons of her legs had been cut. Under the left shoulder of a “horsewoman”, there was a bronze mirror, on the left, there were two spears and on the left hand, there was a bracelet made of glass beads. In the legs, there were two vessels: a moulded cassolette and a black lacquer one hand cantharos which was made in the second quarter of the 4th c BC.

The 2,400-year-old female warrior was discovered at the Devitsa V ancient necropolis in Russia’s Voronezh region

The second buried was a woman of 45-50 years old. For the Scythian time, it was a respectable age as the life expectancy of a woman was 30-35 years old. She was buried in a ceremonial headdress, calathos, the plates of which were preserved decorated with the floral ornament and the rims with the pendants in the shape of amphorae.

As the researches have shown the jewellery was made from the alloy where approximately 65-70% was gold and the rest is the pollution of copper, silver and a small per cent of iron. This is quite a high percent of the gold for Scythian jewellery which was often made in the workshops of Panticapaeum from electrum, the alloy of gold and silver whereas the gold could be approximate of 30%.

Several vessels were found at the burial site including a black lacquer one-handed kanfar (left), a black lacquer ariballic lekif with red-figured palmette (centre) and a molded incense burner (right)
A giant bronze hand mirror the size of a frying pan (left) and iron spearheads (right) were also found buried at the site

“Found calathos is a unique find. This is the first headdress in the sites of Scythian epoch found on Middle Don and it was found in situ on the location on the skull. Of course, earlier similar headdresses were found in known rich barrows of Scythia. However, only a few were discovered by archaeologists.

They were more often found by the peasants, they were taken by the police, landowners and the finds had been through many hands when they came to the specialists. That is why it is not known how well they have been preserved. Here we can be certain that the find has been well preserved”, noted Valerii Guliaev.

Along with the older woman an iron knife was laid wrapped into a piece of fabrique and an iron arrowhead of quite a rare type, tanged with a forked end. These finds and also many details of the weapon and horse harness allow suggesting that the Amazons, women-warriors whose institution was in the Scythian epoch among Iranian nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes of Eastern Europe, were buried in this barrow. Such horsewomen probably were cattle, belonging and dwelling guardians while the men went to long-term warpaths.

“The Amazons are a common Scythian phenomenon and only on Middle Don during the last decade our expedition has discovered approximately 11 burials of young armed women. Separate barrows were filled for them and all burial rites which were usually made for men were done for them. However, we come across burials with four Amazons of such different age for the first time”, said Valerii Guliaev.

The burial was made in autumn at the end of the warm period. The researches done by paleozoologists of IA RAS helped to figure it out. In the grave pit, the bones of six-eight months old lamb were found which some time ago had been in a bronze cooking pot dag into the ground in the centre of the grave.

The robbers took the pot which was of great value and the bones greened from being rested in a bronze dish for a long time had been thrown away. Since the sheep usually lamb in March-April, it was concluded that the burial which the barrow had been filled for was done not later than November.

The finds in the burial have raised questions for scientists who still do not have any answers.

“We have come across an enigma: we have two women in their prime of life, one is a teenager and another is a woman quite old for the Scythian epoch. It is not clear how they could die at the same moment. They do not have any traces of bones injuries. These women’s bones have been spread. There are some marks of tuberculosis and brucellosis, but these illnesses cannot cause death simultaneously. That is why we still cannot understand what the cause of death was and why four women of different age were buried at the same time”, asks Valerii Guliaev.

Provided by Institute of Archaeology of Russian Academy of Sciences

Dogs are humans’ oldest companions, DNA shows

Dogs are humans’ oldest companions, DNA shows

“Dog is a man’s best friend” is the common saying. For thousands of years, dogs have been our companions for hunting, friendship, war, and many more. Dogs have managed to keep up with us humans and have now become ‘a mans best friend’. This could largely be down to a dog and their diet, which is why dog owners are quite particular when it comes to purchasing food for their companions. It’s become a regular activity for pet owners to get online and view recommended foods, such as pet food exposed, and others before choosing the right food for them! In modern times this has been largely reduced down to friendship and some may say our modern dogs lead a spoilt life of luxury, whether that is getting them decorative collars or procuring an orthopedic bed for dogs to help keep their joints healthy. There has been evidence that dogs have been kept as pets as far back as Ancient Egypt, with the finding of jeweled dog collars. But how far back exactly can the roots of our companionship with dogs be traced?

Science Magazine reports that evolutionary biologist Greger Larson of the University of Oxford, paleogenomicist Pontus Skoglund of the Francis Crick Institute, and their colleagues analyzed the genomes of more than 2,000 dogs who lived in Europe, Siberia, and the Near East as early as 11,000 years ago.

Libyan rock art that may date back 7000 years depicts a hunter and his dog.

“This is a very interesting research,” notes the archaeogeneticist Wolfgang Haak at the Max Planck Institute for Human History Sciences. “We’re finally starting to see how the dog story and the human story match up.”

One of the main enigmas of domestication were dogs. Scientists still have not figured out when or where they appeared, much less how or why they emerged, after decades of studies.

A 2016 study concluded that dogs may have been domesticated twice, once in Asia and once in Europe or the Near East, but critics said there wasn’t enough evidence to be sure.

A few years later, researchers reported signs of dogs in the Americas as early as 10,000 years ago, yet those canines appear to have vanished without a genetic trace. Other studies have found evidence of ancient dogs in Siberia and elsewhere, but scientists don’t know how they got there or how they’re related.

To fill in some of the blanks, two big names in dog and human genetics teamed up: Greger Larson, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford, and Pontus Skoglund, a paleogenomicist at the Francis Crick Institute. Larsen, Skoglund, and colleagues sifted through more than 2000 sets of ancient dog remain dating back nearly 11,000 years from Europe, Siberia, and the Near East. In the process, they added 27 ancient dog genomes to the five already on record. They then compared those with the genomes of 17 humans living in the same places and times as the dogs.

The dog DNA alone revealed some surprises. As early as 11,000 years ago, there were already five distinct dog lineages; these gave rise to canines in the Near East, northern Europe, Siberia, New Guinea, and the Americas, the team reports today in Science. Because dogs had already diversified so much by that time, “domestication had to occur long before then,” Skoglund says. That fits with archaeological evidence: The oldest definitive dog remains come from Germany about 15,000 to 16,000 years ago.

Remarkably, pieces of these ancient lineages are still present in today’s pooches. Chihuahuas can trace some of their ancestries to early American dogs, for example, whereas Huskies sport genetic signatures of ancient Siberian dogs, the team found. “If you see a bunch of different dogs in a dog park,” Skoglund says, “they may all have different ancestries that trace all the way back 11,000 years” (see figure below).

Today’s dogs can trace their ancestry to canines that lived up to 11,000 years ago.

When the researchers compared their dog DNA with modern and ancient wolf DNA, they got another surprise. Most domesticated animals pick up genetic material from their wild relatives-even after domestication-because the two species often live in close proximity and can still mate (think pigs and wild boars). But dogs show no such “gene flow” from wolves. Instead, the wolves gained new DNA from the dogs-a one-way street.

Larson chalks this up to the intimate relationship between dogs and humans. If your pig or chicken becomes a bit wilder thanks to an infusion of feral DNA, it doesn’t matter, because you’re going to eat them anyway, he explains. But dogs that go native make bad guards, hunting companions, and friends. “If you’re a dog and you have a bit of wolf in you, that’s terrible,” Larson says. People will “get rid of the dog.”

The wolf-dog analysis also suggests dogs evolved only once, from a now-extinct wolf population. Still, Larson, who led the 2016 study on multiple domestication events, says more data are needed to seal the deal.

Then the scientists brought humans into the mix. They selected human DNA samples from the same places and eras for which they had ancient canine DNA and traced the genetic history of each. “It’s like you have an ancient text in two different languages, and you’re looking to see how both languages have changed over time,” Skoglund says.

In many places, the team found a strong overlap between human and dog genomes. For example, farmers and their pups in Sweden about 5,000 years ago both trace their ancestry to the Near East. This suggests early farmers took their dogs with them as agriculture spread throughout the continent. “Writ large, as humans moved, they moved with their dogs,” Larson says.

But sometimes the stories didn’t match up. Farmers in Germany about 7000 years ago also came from the Near East and also lived with dogs. But those animals seem more similar to hunter-gatherer pups, which came from Siberia and Europe.

That suggests many early migrants adopted local dogs that were better adapted to their new environment, Haak says. The benefits were many, adds Peter Savolainen, a geneticist at the Royal Institute of Technology and an expert on dog origins. “They were cute. You could use them. You could even eat them.”

Savolainen calls the study “very thorough,” and adds it’s “fantastic” that the researchers were able to bring together so many data. But he has long argued that dogs arose in Southeast Asia and says the work is incomplete without samples from that corner of the globe. “Without those, you could be missing an important part of the picture.”

For now, Larson says his team is analyzing “a ton” of wolf and dog genomes. He and his colleagues have also begun to look at ancient skull shape and genetic markers that could give clues to what early dogs looked like. Whatever he finds, he’s counting on being surprised. “We have to expect the unexpected,” he says, “because that’s all ancient DNA ever gives us.”