Londoner solves 20,000-year Ice Age drawings mystery
Researchers concluded 20,000-year-old markings on drawings could refer to a lunar calendar.
Ancient cave paintings, like animal figures and handprints, are generally thought to have meanings, however, the specifics of these drawings have long eluded experts. But now, British scientists have claimed to have decoded why Ice Age hunter-gatherers drew cave paintings.
Independent researcher Ben Bacon took an interest in cave art drawings. “The meaning of the markings within these drawings has always intrigued me so I set about trying to decode them,” he told the BBC.
Mr Bacon spent hours at the British library searching for photos of cave art online and collected “as much data as possible and began looking for patterns”.
He analysed 20,000-year-old markings on the drawings and concluded that they could refer to a lunar calendar.
As his research and idea progressed, Mr Bacon reached out to academics to collaborate with them. He published a study in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal along with senior academics from Durham University and University College London (UCL), which revealed that Ice Age hunter-gatherers were using markings combined with drawings of their animal prey to store and communicate “sophisticated” information about the behaviour of species crucial to their survival at least 20,000 years ago.
In the study, the researchers explained that as the marks, found in more than 600 images on cave walls and objects across Europe, record information numerically and reference a calendar rather than recording speech, they cannot be called “writing” in the sense of the pictographic and cuneiform systems of early writing that emerged in Sumer from 3,400 BC onwards.
Instead, the team refers to them as a “proto-writing system” – pre-dating other token-based systems that are thought to have emerged during the Neolithic period by at least 10,000 years.
The researchers in particular examined a ‘Y’ sign on some paintings, which they felt might be a symbol for “giving birth” as it showed one line growing out from another.
Their study showed that the sequences record mating and birthing seasons and found a “statistically significant” correlation between the number of marks the position of the ‘Y’ sign and the months in which modern animals mate and birth respectively.
Professors Paul Pettitt of Durham University said, “This is a fascinating study that has brought together independent and professional researchers with expertise in archaeology and visual psychology, to decode information first recorded thousands of years ago.”
“The result show that Ice Age hunter-gatherers were the first to use a systematic calendar and marks to record information about major ecological events within that calendar. In turn, we’re able to show that these people – who left a legacy of spectacular art in the caves of Lascaux and Altamira – also left a record of early timekeeping that would eventually become commonplace among our species,” Mr Pettitt added.
Post a commentIn the study, the researchers showed that despite the difficulties, researchers can crack the meaning of at least some of the symbols. For Bacon, the findings had even more significance. “As we probe deeper into their world, what we are discovering is that these ancient ancestors are a lot more like us than we had previously thought,” he said. “These people, separated from us by many millennia, are suddenly a lot closer,” Mr Bacon added.
Digital Reconstruction Depicts Face of “Jericho Skull”
The latest research gives a new face to the most famous of the plaster-covered skulls discovered near Jericho in 1953, showing a man who died about 9,500 years ago.
A famous, 9,000-year-old human skull discovered near the biblical city of Jericho now has a new face, thanks to efforts by a multi-national team of researchers.
The so-called Jericho Skull — one of seven unearthed by British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon in 1953 and currently housed in the British Museum in London — was found covered in plaster and with shells for eyes, apparently in an attempt to make it look more lifelike.
This prehistoric design was “the first facial reconstruction in the world,” Brazilian graphics expert Cícero Moraes, the leader of the project, told Live Science in an email.
In 2016, the British Museum released precise measurements of the Jericho Skull, based on a micro-computed tomography, or micro-CT — effectively a very detailed X-ray scan. The measurements were then used to create a virtual 3D model of the skull, and the model was used to make an initial facial approximation.
But the new approximation, published online on Dec. 22 in the journal OrtogOnline, uses different techniques to determine how the face may have looked, and goes further by artistically adding head and facial hair.
Although the skull was initially thought to be female, later observations determined it belonged to a male individual, Moraes said, so the new approximation shows the face of a dark-haired man in his 30s or 40s. (Based on how a lesion on the skull has healed, archaeologists suggest he was “middle-aged” by today’s standards when he died.)
An initial facial reconstruction was made from the anatomy of the skull in 2016, but the new reconstruction uses advanced digital techniques.
An unusual feature of the British Museum’s Jericho Skull is that the cranium, or upper skull, is significantly larger than average, Moraes said.
In addition, the skull seems to have been artificially elongated when the man was very young, probably by tightly binding it; some of the other plastered skulls found by Kenyon also show signs of this, but the reason isn’t known.
Jericho skulls
Jericho, now a Palestinian city in the West Bank, is thought to be one of the oldest settlements in the world.
It appears in the biblical Book of Joshua as the first Canaanite city attacked by the Israelites after they crossed the Jordan River in about 1400 B.C. According to the biblical story, Jericho’s walls collapsed after Joshua ordered the Israelites to circle the city for seven days while carrying the Ark of the Covenant, and then to blow their trumpets and shout.
But archaeological research has failed to find any evidence of this event, and it’s now thought to be Judean propaganda, according to historians writing in Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (Eerdmans, 2000).
The new facial reconstruction used new techniques developed by the researchers and derived from new anatomical studies and statistical projections from 3D X-ray scans of living people.
Archaeologists have determined, however, that Jericho has been continually inhabited for about 11,000 years; and in 1953 Kenyon excavated seven skulls at a site near the ancient city.
Each had been encased in plaster, and the spaces inside the skulls were packed with earth. They also had cowrie seashells placed over their eye sockets, and some had traces of brown paint.
Kenyon speculated that the skulls might be portraits of some of Jericho’s earliest inhabitants; but more than 50 plastered skulls from about the same period have since been found throughout the region, and it’s now thought they are relics of a funerary practice, according to a study by Denise Schmandt-Besserat, a professor emerita of Art and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
The skull is one of seven discovered by the British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon near the ancient city of Jericho in 1953. It’s now thought to be a relic of a common funerary practice at the time it was made, about 9,500 years ago
The skull is now held by the British Museum in London, and the latest facial reconstruction is based on precise photographs of it published in 2016.
The techniques used by the researchers are also used to plan plastic surgeries and manufacture artificial body parts.
New approximation
Moraes said he’s been unable to find many details of the 2016 facial approximation, but it seems to have used what’s known as the Manchester method, which has been developed since 1977 and is based on forensic analyses.
It is now widely used for facial approximations, especially of the victims of crimes.
The latest approximation, however, used a different approach, which is based on anatomical deformation and statistical projections derived from computed tomography (CT) scans— thousands of X-ray scans knitted together to create a 3D image — of living people, he said.
The techniques are also used to plan plastic surgeries and in the manufacturing of prostheses (artificial body parts), but neither were used in the 2016 study, he said.
“I wouldn’t say ours is an update, it’s just a different approach,” he said. But “there is greater structural, anatomical and statistical coherence.”
Moraes hopes to carry out digital approximations of other plastered skulls from the region, but so far only the precise measurements of the Jericho Skull in the British Museum have been published. “There is a lot of mystery around this material,” Moraes said. “Thanks to new technologies we are discovering new things about the pieces, but there is still a lot to be studied.”
2,000 years of genetic history in Scandinavia elucidates Viking age to modern day
Underwater Kronan excavations.
A new study published in the journal Cell on January 5 captures a genetic history across Scandinavia over 2,000 years, from the Iron Age to the present day.
This look back at Scandinavian history is based on an analysis of 48 new and 249 published ancient human genomes representing multiple iconic archaeological sites together with genetic data from more than 16,500 people living in Scandinavia today.
Among other intriguing findings, the new study led by Stockholm University and deCODE genetics (Reykjavik) offers insight into migration patterns and gene flow during the Viking age (750–1050 CE). It also shows that ancestries that were introduced into the area during the Viking period later declined for reasons that aren’t clear.
“Although still evident in modern Scandinavians, levels of non-local ancestry in some regions are lower than those observed in ancient individuals from the Viking to Medieval periods,” said Ricardo Rodríguez-Varela of Stockholm University.
“This suggests that ancient individuals with non-Scandinavian ancestry contributed proportionately less to the current gene pool in Scandinavia than expected based on the patterns observed in the archaeological record.”
“Different processes brought people from different areas to Scandinavia [at different times],” added Anders Götherström, Stockholm University.
The researchers hadn’t originally planned to piece together Scandinavian history over time and space. Rather, they were working on three separate studies focused on different archaeological sites.
Sandby borg archaeological excavations.
“When we were analyzing the genetic affinities of the individuals from different archaeological sites such as the Vendel period boat burials, Viking period chamber burials, and well-known archaeological sites like the Migration period Sandby borg ringfort, known for the massacre that occurred there [in] 500 CE, and individuals from the 17th-century royal Swedish warship Kronan, we start to see differences in the levels and origin of non-local ancestry across the different regions and periods of Scandinavia,” Rodríguez-Varela explained.
“Initially, we were working with three different studies,” Götherström said. “One on Sandby borg, one on the boat burials, and one on the man-of-war Kronan. At some point it made more sense to unite them to one study on the Scandinavian demography during the latest 2,000 years.”
The goal was to document how past migrations have affected the Scandinavian gene pool across time and space to better understand the current Scandinavian genetic structure.
As reported in the new study, the researchers found regional variation in the timing and magnitude of gene flow from three sources: the eastern Baltic, the British Irish Isles, and southern Europe.
British Irish ancestry was widespread in Scandinavia from the Viking period, whereas eastern Baltic ancestry is more localized to Gotland and central Sweden.
In some regions, a drop in current levels of external ancestry suggests that ancient immigrants contributed proportionately less to the modern Scandinavian gene pool than indicated by the ancestry of genomes from the Viking and Medieval periods.
Finally, the data show that a north-south genetic cline that characterizes modern Scandinavians is mainly due to differential levels of Uralic ancestry. It also shows that this cline existed in the Viking Age and possibly even earlier.
Underwater Kronan excavations.
Götherström suggests that what the data reveal about the nature of the Viking period is perhaps most intriguing. The migration from the west impacted all of Scandinavia, and the migration from the east was sex biased, with movement primarily of female people into the region.
As the researchers write, the findings overall “indicate a major increase [in gene flow] during the Viking period and a potential bias toward females in the introduction of eastern Baltic and, to a lesser extent, British-Irish ancestries.
“Gene flow from the British-Irish Isles during this period seems to have had a lasting impact on the gene pool in most parts of Scandinavia,” they continued. “This is perhaps not surprising given the extent of Norse activities in the British-Irish Isles, starting in the 8th century with recurrent raids and culminating in the 11th century North Sea Empire, the personal union that united the kingdoms of Denmark, Norway, and England.
The circumstances and fate of people of British-Irish ancestry who arrived in Scandinavia at this time are likely to have been variable, ranging from the forced migration of slaves to the voluntary immigration of more high-ranking individuals such as Christian missionaries and monks.”
Overall, the findings show that the Viking period in Scandinavia was a very dynamic time, they say, with people moving around and doing many different things. In future work, they hope to add additional genetic data in hopes of learning more about how the ancestries that arrived during the Viking period were later diluted. They’d also like to pinpoint when the north-south cline was shaped based on study of larger ancient datasets from the north.
“We need more pre-Viking individuals form north Scandinavia to investigate when the Uralic ancestry enter in this region,” Rodríguez-Varela said. “Also, individuals from 1000 BCE to 0 are very scarce, [and] retrieving DNA from Scandinavian individuals with these chronologies will be important to understand the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age in this part of the world. Finally, more individuals from the Medieval period until the present will help us to understand when and why we observe a reduction in the levels of non-local ancestry in some current regions of Scandinavia.”
“There is so much fascinating information about our prehistory to be explored in ancient genomes,” Götherström said.
Archaeologists have made a detailed three-dimensional model of the surviving timbers of the hull using laser scans and digital photography.
Much of the wooden hull of a rare Elizabethan-era ship has been found in a flooded quarry in southeast England, hundreds of yards from the nearest coast.
Few vessels from this time have survived, so an analysis of the find may shed new light on a key period in seafaring, when the country rapidly expanded its trading links throughout Europe through its control of the English Channel.
“To find a late-16th-century ship preserved in the sediment of a quarry was an unexpected but very welcome find indeed,” said Andrea Hamel, a marine archaeologist for Wessex Archaeology, which investigated the discovery on behalf of Historic England, a government agency dedicated to historical preservation.
“The ship has the potential to tell us so much about a period where we have little surviving evidence of shipbuilding, but yet was such a great period of change in ship construction and seafaring,” she said in a statement from Wessex Archaeology.
The remains of the ship were found in April in a flooded quarry being dredged for gravel on the Dungeness headland in Kent, about 60 miles (100 kilometers) southeast of London.
Workers from the quarry firm CEMEX reported the discovery to local government officials, who then contacted Historic England to arrange specialist support and emergency funding to recover the remains, according to the statement.
Analysis shows that the ship was built from trees felled in the late 16th century, a transitional time for shipbuilding and seagoing trade.
Moving coastline
The quarry site now lies about 1,000 feet (300 meters) from the nearest coast, but archaeologists think that the site formed part of the coastline in the 16th century and that the ship may have been abandoned there after it was wrecked on the rocky headland or discarded after it was no longer seaworthy.
The vessel has not been identified, but dendrochronological analysis of more than 100 timbers from the hull — based on the patterns of tree growth rings — show it was built from trees of English oak (Quercus robur) felled between 1558 and 1580.
The ship was built in the “carvel” style of flush planks nailed to an internal frame, which made stronger but heavier ships than those built in the traditional “clinker” style of overlapping planks.
According to the Wessex Archaeology researchers, that date estimate places the ship during a transitional period in shipbuilding in northern Europe, when the traditional “clinker” construction of overlapping hull planks was replaced by the stronger but heavier “carvel” construction developed in the Mediterranean, which used flush hull planks nailed to an internal frame.
The remains of the ship found at Dungeness had this newer carvel type of construction, and its introduction led to much heavier ships than had been built before, including those that would explore the Atlantic coastline of the New World in later decades, the researchers said.
The hull timbers were found in April in a flooded quarry being dredged for gravel. The quarry is now half a mile from the sea, but it is thought to have been on the coast 400 years ago.
When the archaeological analysis is complete, the timbers will be reburied in the flooded quarry so that they will be protected by a layer of silt.
Rare find
Wood quickly rots away in both air and water, and it usually lasts only a few years unless it is protected by an anaerobic layer of sediment — that is, a layer that protects it from oxygen. That means the wrecks of very few old wooden ships have survived to be found. And in the case of the Dungeness ship, the remaining hull timbers may have been covered by an anaerobic layer of silt beneath the floor of the quarry lake.
“The remains of this ship are really significant, helping us to understand not only the vessel itself but the wider landscape of shipbuilding and trade in this dynamic period,” Antony Firth, head of marine heritage strategy at Historic England, said in the statement.
Using laser scanning and digital photographs, archaeologists are documenting what’s left of the ship, and when the analysis is finished, the timbers will be carefully reburied in the quarry lake so they can continue to be protected by the silt layer.
High-Tech Tools Offer a Glimpse Into a Medieval Reliquary
An interdisciplinary research team led by the Leibniz Center for Archeology (LEIZA) has revealed the secret of a gold-plated pendant that was found in 2008 in a medieval rubbish pit in the old town of Mainz.
Thanks to non-destructive investigations at the research neutron source Heinz Maier-Leibnitz (FRM II) of the Technical University of Munich (TUM), the researchers were able to locate the smallest bone splinters inside the object, which are probably relics.
The restored reliquary. Outside it is decorated with images of Jesus and Mary.
Analysis of the tomography and Prompt Gamma Activation Analysis (PGAA) with neutrons revealed five individual packets made of silk and linen – bone splinters were packed in each. “Neutron non-destructive testing was particularly helpful because we couldn’t just open the trailer and look inside.
The object and above all the locking mechanism are severely damaged by centuries of corrosion, and opening it would mean destroying it irrevocably,” explains restorer Matthias Heinzel from LEIZA.
During the restoration, Heinzel discovered a cord fragment in the suspension eyelet which, on closer examination, was identified as silk. “This is the first evidence that such pendants may have been worn around the neck on a silk cord.
Using neutron tomography at the TUM, we were also able to measure the thread thickness and thread spacing of the textiles on the inside,” adds the restorer.
Neutron analysis makes organic substances visible
In 500 hours of work, Heinzel freed the found object from corrosion deposits. Initial investigations showed that the pendant, which is about six centimeters high and wide and one centimeter thick, was probably a storage container for relics.
Since the organic content of the object was not recognizable on the first X-ray images, the investigation using neutrons from the FRM II was used: Dr. Burkhard Schillinger from TUM conducted the ANTARES instrument performed a neutron tomography, which made the individual textile packages with the bone splinters inside visible. Unlike X-rays, the neutrons can penetrate metals and make organic substances visible.
The researchers determined individual elements of the sample by using neutrons to excite them to emit characteristic gamma radiation during the PGAA.
“It is not possible to find out whether the bones belong to saints and which saints the bone splinters can be assigned to. A strip of parchment with the name of the saint is usually attached to a relic parcel. In this case, unfortunately, we cannot see it.
As an archaeological research institute of the Leibniz Association, we see it as our task to preserve the historical authenticity of the object for posterity in the best possible way and use the modern possibilities of non-destructive examination at the Technical University of Munich,” explains Heinzel.
Only three other reliquaries of this type, called phylactery, are known so far. Phylacterium translates from Greek as means of preservation or protection. Their owners wore them on their bodies, usually around their necks.
On the outside, the gilded copper pendant is enameled with images of Jesus, the four evangelists, Mary and four female saints.
The researchers date it to the late 12th century and assign it to a workshop in Hildesheim, Lower Saxony. The find is in the possession of the General Directorate of Cultural Heritage, Directorate of State Archeology Mainz and can be viewed until further notice in the medieval exhibition “AUREA MAGONTIA – Mainz in the Middle Ages” of the State Museum Mainz.
20,000-year-old cave painting ‘dots’ are the earliest written language, study claims. But not everyone agrees.
A 21,500-year-old cave painting depicting an aurochs, an extinct cattle species, in the Lascaux caves in France. Notice the four dots (within the digital yellow circle), which may have had a special meaning for ice age peoples.
At least 20,000 years ago, humans living in Europe created striking cave paintings of animals that they paired with curious signs: lines, dots and Y-shaped symbols. These marks, which are well known to researchers, might relate to the seasonal behavior of prey animals, making the signs the first known writing in the history of humankind, a new study claims.
Although Paleolithic cave art is better known for its graceful horses and ghostly handprints, there are thousands of nonfigurative or abstract marks that researchers have begun studying only in the past few decades. In a study published Jan. 5 in the Cambridge Archaeology Journal, a team of scholars suggests that these seemingly abstract dots and lines, when positioned near animal imagery, actually represent a sophisticated writing system that explains early humans’ understanding of the mating and birthing seasons of important local species.
Other researchers, however, are not convinced by the study’s interpretations of these human-made marks.
Melanie Chang, a paleoanthropologist at Portland State University who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email that she agrees with the researchers’ assessment that “Upper Palaeolithic people had the cognitive capacity to write and to keep records of the time.” However, she cautioned that the researchers’ “hypotheses are not well-supported by their results, and they also do not address alternative interpretations of the marks they analyzed.”
This image of an 17,000-year-old engraved salmon, from Pindal cave in Asturias, Spain, has three lines placed within.
What do the painted marks mean?
Early humans in Europe were hunter-gatherers who ate a lot of meat from species such as horses, deer and bison. When those animals came together seasonally in herds, they would have been vulnerable to slaughter by humans.
“It follows that knowledge of the timing of migrations, mating and birthing would be a central concern to Upper Paleolithic behaviour,” study first author Bennett Bacon, an independent researcher and furniture conservator based in London, and colleagues wrote in their study.
Looking at the total number of marks — either dots or lines — found in sequences across hundreds of caves, the researchers discovered that none of the series contained more than 13 marks, consistent with the 13 lunar months in each year.
“We hypothesize that sequences are conveying information about their associated animal taxa in units of months,” they wrote, noting that spring, “with its obvious signals of the end of winter and corresponding faunal migrations to breeding grounds, would have provided an obvious, if regionally differing, point of origin for the lunar calendar.”
An annotated image of a roughly 23,000-year-old painting showing four dots associated with a red ochre drawing of an aurochs in La Pasiega cave in Cantabria, Spain.
The researchers’ statistical analysis of more than 800 sequences of marks associated with animals supports their idea — they found strong correlations between the number of marks and the lunar months in which the specific animal is known to mate.
Taking their hypothesis a step further, Bacon and colleagues focused on a Y-shaped sign that they think refers to a particular event in an animal’s life cycle. The similar statistical analysis supports their conclusion that the placement of the Y-shaped sign within a series of marks signals an animal species’ birthing season.
“The ability to assign abstract signs to phenomena in the world,” they wrote, “to record past events and predict future events, was a profound intellectual achievement.”
Writing or proto-writing?
But is this the earliest known writing? Bacon and colleagues demur, suggesting that “it is best described as a proto-writing system, an intermediary step between a simpler notation/convention and full-blown writing.”
April Nowell, a Paleolithic archaeologist at the University of Victoria in Canada who was not involved in this study, told Live Science by email that “any study that explores non-figurative signs in more detail is welcome, but I think there are a number of assumptions being made here that have yet to be proven.” Nowell questioned the Y sign, in particular. “The majority of animals considered in this study are quadrupeds, and humans normally squat giving birth,” she said. “If this sign is supposed to be iconic of the birth process, it is not obvious to me.”
Chang, the paleoanthropologist who is also an equestrian and horse owner, posed two alternative explanations for the Y sign. In some cases, it could represent the edge of the brachiocephalic muscle, a prominent landmark on a horse’s neck. “In other cases,” she said, “it is possible that what they recorded as Y’s represent what modern horsepeople refer to as ‘primitive markings’ such as leg bars that are associated with wild-type horse colors, or they may represent hair patterns, or other anatomical features.”
Study co-author Robert Kentridge, a professor in the Department of Psychology at Durham University in the U.K., told Live Science in an email that one of the strengths of their study is that they “have formally tested Ben [Bacon’s] hypotheses about the meaning of the Y-sign’s position in sequences of marks and the lengths of sequences of dots and lines and shown that these do convey meaning, indeed meaning that would be important in the lives of Palaeolithic hunters.”
In summarizing their conclusions, Bacon and colleagues wrote that they have “proposed the existence of a notational system associated with an unambiguous animal subject relating to biologically significant events” and that this allows them “for the first time to understand a Palaeolithic notational system in its entirety.”
Nonfigurative signs dating to 15,000 years ago that hunter-gatherers drew in black manganese and red ochre in Niaux Cave in the French Pyrenees.
A decade ago, however, Nowell and then-graduate student Genevieve von Petzinger co-created a database of dozens of signs and repeating motifs from more than 200 caves in southern France and Spain. Von Petzinger’s thesis detailed patterns of cave wall symbols across time and space in order to better understand what these signs meant for ice age people.
“There are at least 32 different recurring signs,” Nowell explained. “The authors have chosen to study three of them in a very specific context.”
But the authors defended their decision to focus on the trio.
“It seemed sensible to focus first on the most common markings associated with figurative images,” study co-author Paul Pettitt, a professor of archaeology at Durham University, told Live Science in an email. “Simple dots and lines are by far the most common. Of the more elaborate signs, the Y sign is the most common.”
The researchers plan to expand on their work. “We are analyzing other signs,” Bacon told Live Science in an email. “Rather than searching for the meaning of individual signs, what we are looking for is the linguistic and cognitive bases that underpin the ‘writing’ system.”
Nowell agreed with the study authors that the symbols were likely not randomly chosen and that it is possible the lines and dots represent numbers. Even if the authors are correct, she noted, that leaves 90% of the signs without any known meaning.
“There is still a lot about graphic communication in the Paleolithic that we do not understand,” Nowell said.
3000 years old wooden wishing well discovered in Germany
In the town of Germering, in the Germany state of Bavaria, archaeologists have unearthed the remains of a well-preserved Bronze Age wooden well filled with ritual deposits.
People may have sunk jewelry and ceramics as offerings in the special water spring, similar to how coins are still thrown into so-called wishing wells today, according to the archaeologists.
The area of today’s town of Germering in Upper Bavaria was a settlement area early on. Numerous finds from prehistory and early history bear witness to this.
Many new ones have been added since the beginning of 2021: In the run-up to construction work, numerous traces of settlements from the Bronze Age to the early Middle Ages were discovered on an excavation area of around seven hectares.
This also includes the remains of wells that were used by people of different eras to supply water. But one of the wells discovered on the site differed significantly from the others, reports the Bavarian State Office for the Preservation of Monuments (BlfD).
This wooden water point is dated to be more than 3000 years old and, at around five meters (16.4 feet), reached particularly deep into the ground compared to others.
“It is extremely rare for a well to survive more than 3,000 years so well. Its wooden walls have been completely preserved at the bottom and are still partly damp from the groundwater. This also explains the good condition of the finds made from organic materials, which are now being examined more closely. We hope this will provide us with more information about the everyday life of the settlers of the time,” adds Dr. Jochen Haberstroh, a responsible archaeologist at the Bavarian State Office for the Preservation of Monuments.
Medieval pottery from well fill.
The team of archaeologists discovered in what was once the base of the fountain: 26 bronze clothing pins, a bracelet, two metal spirals, a mounted animal tooth, amber beads and more than 70 ceramic vessels.
The archaeologists emphasize that this filling makes this well fundamentally different from the others on the excavation site.
These expensive items, which were typically discovered in Middle Bronze Age graves, were not items for everyday use (1800-1200 B.C.). The state they were in when discovered at the bottom of the well suggests they were carefully lowered into the water rather than dropped or thrown.
“Even today, fountains have something magical about them for many people. They drop coins in the hope that their wishes will be granted. We cannot exactly explain what motives our ancestors 3000 years ago made to offer jewelry and other valuable gifts. But it can be assumed that they were intended as sacrifices for a good harvest,” explains Mathias Pfeil from the BlfD.
Among other things, the archaeologists discovered numerous bronze clothing pins at the bottom of the well.
There may also be a clue in the unusual features of the well: “The depth of this well shows that it was used at a time when the groundwater level had dropped considerably, which indicates a long drought and certainly poor harvest yields.
One can possibly see a reason why the people who lived here at that time sacrificed part of their possessions to their gods in this well,” says Marcus Guckenbiehl, city archaeologist and archivist of Germering.
Archaeologists have been working in advance of construction work for a letter distribution center on the site where the well has now been discovered since the beginning of 2021.
The excavations are among the largest area excavations in Bavaria this year. In the meantime, scientists have documented approximately 13,500 archaeological finds, primarily from the Bronze Age and early Middle Ages.
Some of the discoveries are currently being examined and conserved at the Bavarian State Office for Monument Preservation.
A Little Girl From London Finds a 700,000-Year-old Ancient Bear Tooth
Eagle-eyed Etta spotted the bear tooth on a family holiday – and experts were blown away by the discovery. BBC
Etta, from Hackney in London, made her discovery while on a family holiday on 22 July on Norfolk beach at West Runton.
While she was looking down she found something that she thought it was a fossilised bit of wood so she put it in her pocket, and when they got back to the car park they showed it to a fossil expert and she fell off her chair.
Etta initially thought the tooth was a piece of ancient wood, but it has since been confirmed as a bear’s tooth. BBC
“She said, ‘People search for 20 years and don’t find anything this good’ and told them it was a bear tooth.”
The nine-year-old, and her sisters aged seven and five, “really got into fossils” after attending a Norfolk Wildlife Trust fossil hunting course earlier in the year, their mother Thea Ferner explained.
Etta has loaned the tooth, which is about 9cm long (3in) from tip to root, to Norfolk Museums Service geologist David Waterhouse after meeting him at a fossil identification event at Cromer Museum.
About 1km (0.6 miles) of West Runton beach has been excavated by Norfolk Museums Service experts. BBC
“To find a perfect massive bear canine is a first for me in 16 years working here,” the senior curator of natural history said.
“We normally find lots of deer fossils, for example, but as you go up the food chain, you find fewer and fewer carnivores like the bear.”
He has identified it as an ancestor of the common brown bear.
Dr Waterhouse said “more extreme weather” is speeding up coastal erosion, which is “a double-edged sword – people’s homes and livelihoods are at risk, but it also means that amazing finds such as the Happisburgh footprints are being discovered”.
The Norfolk landscape 700,000 years ago would have had hyenas, lions, deer and mammoths. BBC
Norfolk’s Deep History Coast is a 22-mile (35km) stretch of coastline between Weybourne and Cart Gap.
Some of the more spectacular discoveries include the oldest archaeological site in northern Europe at Happisburgh, where 800,000-year-old human footprints were revealed in 2013. West Runton is also home to the oldest and largest fossilised mammoth ever found in the UK.
They are being unearthed in the Cromer Forest Bed geological layer, which at West Runton is 600,000 to 700,000 years old, said Dr Waterhouse.
The discoveries have pushed back archaeologists’ understanding of life by hundreds of thousands of years – and they have kept coming over the past 10 years, Dr Waterhouse explained.
These revealed the climate would have been like modern Poland’s, with similar summers but much colder winters than today.
About 1km (0.6 miles) of West Runton beach has been excavated by Norfolk Museums Service experts. BBC
“All these little nuances are building up to this rich picture of what animals and plants were thriving 700,000 years ago,” he said.
The earliest humans were Homo antecessor or Pioneer Man and they migrated across a landmass known as Dogger Land, which joined the British coast to present-day Germany and the Netherlands.
Dr Waterhouse said humans were still “a rare species… but everything was just right in Norfolk” for them, from wildfowl, game, shellfish “and crucially flint” to turn into sharp tools.
The nine-year-old said she planned to keep on fossil hunting.
