Neolithic figurine, over 7,000 years old, unearthed at Turkey’s Çatalhöyük
An 8,000-year-old statuette of what could be a fertility goddess has been unearthed at a Neolithic site in Turkey, according to archaeologists.
The 8,000-year-old figurine is notable for its craftsmanship, with fine details likely made with thin tools, like flint or obsidian, by a practised artisan.
The figurine, discovered at Çatalhöyük in central Turkey, was wrought from recrystallized limestone between 6300 and 6000 B.C. That material is rare for an area where most previously discovered pieces were sculpted from clay, the researchers said.
The archaeologists think this figurine, which is conventionally associated with fertility goddesses, is also representative of an elderly woman who had risen to prominence in Çatalhöyük’s famously egalitarian society.
Goddess figurines were common in the Neolithic period, with those found at Çatalhöyük usually depicting a plump woman with her hair tied in a bun, sagging breasts and a pronounced belly, they said.
The newfound figurine differentiates itself from similar statuettes not only in its material and quality but also in its craftsmanship, according to Ian Hodder, a professor of anthropology at Stanford University who is overseeing the Çatalhöyük site. Hodder said that he “realized immediately that it was a very special find.”
At 6.7 inches tall (17 centimetres) and 4.3 inches (11 cm) wide, the figurine has fine details such as elaborate fat rolls on the limbs and neck.
Unlike other goddess statuettes, the limestone figurine also depicts the woman with her arms separated from her torso and an undercut below the belly to separate it from the rest of the body.
These finer details would have only been possible with thin tools, like flint or obsidian, the researchers said, which suggests that the carving could only have been made by a practised artisan.
With its fine artistry and its discovery in the newer, shallower parts of the site (meaning that it was likely buried later), Hodder said that the figurine might signal a shift from a sharing economy to an exchange economy, where resources could be accumulated unevenly.
“We think society was changing at this time, becoming relatively less egalitarian, with houses being more independent and more based on agricultural production,” Hodder said in a statement.
The archaeologists think that the figurine was made after Neolithic Çatalhöyük, where resources were often pooled, and changed toward a more stratified society.
The fatness of the goddess statue could represent high status rather than an elevated place in a society of equals, Hodder said.
Whatever the shift, it did not happen overnight. Humans first settled in Çatalhöyük around 7500 B.C., with the society reaching its peak around 7000 B.C., according to archaeologists. The ancient settlement was abandoned around 5700 BC.
An archaeological dig has uncovered what could be the earliest house found in Cardiff. Volunteers and archaeologists from the Caerau and Ely Rediscovering (CAER) Heritage Project, found a clay pot which could be about 3,000 years old.
The clay pot found by the CAER could be about 3,000 years old
The group were looking for the missing link between the late Iron Age and the early Roman period.
Co-director of the project Dr David Wyatt said what they found was “much more remarkable.”
The archaeologists said the roundhouse, located near Cardiff West Community High School, could provide the earliest clues on the origins of Cardiff.
Over 300 people have taken part in the dig, at Trelai Park, about half a mile away from the Caerau Hillfort, a heritage site of national significance.
Archaeologists and community members had previously discovered finds of Neolithic, Iron Age, Roman and medieval origins at the hillfort.
Experts believed the settlement dubbed “Trelai Enclosure” could provide the missing link between the late Iron Age and early Roman period, showing what happened to people once they had moved on from the hillfort.
‘Incredible development’
The pot was found and recovered by archaeologist Tom Hicks and volunteer Charlie Adams
But, the roundhouse predates it, a clay pot discovered at the site has given the team a firmer indication of the time period the building can be traced to.
Dr Wyatt added that they believed the roundhouse could have been constructed in the mid to late Bronze Age, going back to between 1500 and 1100 BC.
“The enclosure definitely predates the hillfort, people were living here before the hillfort was built.
“It’s an incredible development and sheds light on the earliest inhabitants of Cardiff,” he added.
Project co-director Dr Oliver Davis said: “What we’ve found is completely unexpected and even more exciting.
“This enclosure could be providing us with the earliest clues on the origins of Cardiff, the pot that’s been found is beautifully decorated and preserved – it is extremely rare to find pottery of this quality.
“It’s also unusual to find a Bronze Age settlement in Wales – there are only one or two other Bronze Age sites in this country.”
‘Opportunity to learn’
It is hoped the ‘remarkable discovery’ will help archaeologists learn more about people living at the site
Nearly 300 volunteers have participated in the dig so far, run by CAER, a partnership between Cardiff University, Action in Caerau and Ely (ACE), local schools, residents and heritage partners.
Archaeologist Tom Hicks and volunteers Charlie Adams both found and recovered the pot during the dig.
Mr Hicks said: This is a very well-preserved example of Bronze Age pottery, and a significant find for the archaeological record in the region.
“It’s a great opportunity for us to learn more about the lives of the people living on the sire around 3,000 years ago.”
He added that further scientific analysis may be able to tell what the pot was used for before it ended up in the enclosure ditch, and how or where the pot was made.
Headteacher at Cardiff West Community High School, Martin Hullard said: “We’re delighted to be involved in this exciting archaeological project, our students have loved learning about the history that’s just a stone’s throw away from their school.”
Investigations Continue at Warsaw’s World War II Jewish Ghetto
Archaeological excavations in the former Warsaw ghetto – at a site where the Jewish underground resistance was based – have unearthed items including children’s shoes and pages from books in Hebrew and Polish.
The excavations, which began in early June and are scheduled to continue until the end of July, are being coordinated by Christopher Newport University and Vistula University together with the Warsaw Ghetto Museum.
They are centred on the Miła, Dubois, Niska and Karmelicka streets in the Muranów district of Warsaw around a memorial mound named after Mordechai Anielewicz.
On June 7, another round of archaeological research and excavations was conducted in the area of the former ghetto by the Warsaw Ghetto Museum together with a team of scientists from Christopher Newport University and the Academy of Aleksander Gieysztor in Pułtusk – a branch of AFiB Vistula.
He was head of the Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB), which was based at 18 Miła Street, and was among those thought to have died there in May 1943, during the ghetto uprising that had begun the previous month.
“This is a unique place because of the history that played out here in 1943,” Jacek Konik, an archaeologist and historian from the Warsaw Ghetto Museum who is leading the excavations, told TVN24.
“It was here that the soldiers of the Jewish Combat Organisation, surrounded by the Germans, probably committed mass suicide. Only a small group of people survived,” Konik explained. The archaeologists hope to learn about how people lived in the ghetto through the artefacts they find.
A shoe found at the site probably belonged to a Jewish child aged around 10, although nothing is known about its owner.
It is “a symbol of this place and the entire tragedy that took place here – both in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943 and later in 1944 in the whole of Warsaw [during the Warsaw Uprising]…a symbol of all the children whom somebody did not allow to grow up”, said Konik.
The brown leather slipper, made of cheap material, was found early on in the excavations An even smaller shoe was later discovered, reports Gazeta Wyborcza. They have been sent for conservation.
Among the other items the team have found are written accounts of the events that took place on the site, the remains of a burnt book collection, tableware, and ceramic tiles.
The archaeologists have managed to preserve pages from some books – “after the charred pages came into contact with the air, letters appeared” – including texts in Hebrew – probably passages from the Talmud – as well as a Jewish prayer book and an as-yet-unidentified Polish novel.
They are also investigating the possible size of a hidden shelter stretching under a number of townhouses and with six entrances. The team have managed to excavate down to the level of the floor of the cellars, which is where they have found the artefacts.
Konik said that any volunteers “interested in research and…who would like to help to regain and restore memory” are welcome to join the excavations by emailing jkonik@1943.pl or b.jozefow-czerwinska@vistula.edu.pl.
“We treat it as a kind of social obligation for as many people as possible who perhaps are not necessarily professional archaeologists to see and understand what type of history we are dealing with…history that affects us directly,” Konik added.
Warsaw’s ghetto was the largest of all those established by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. At one point it held around 460,000 Jews captive in an area of 3.4 square km (1.3 square miles).
The vast majority of those victims died in the gas chambers of Treblinka and Majdanek following deportation from the ghetto. In April 1943, the ghetto uprising – the largest single act of Jewish resistance during the war – temporarily halted the deportations.
The uprising was brutally suppressed by the German occupiers, with tens of thousands of Jews killed in the ghetto or after capture and deportation to extermination camps.
A visualisation showing the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto superimposed on the modern city.
Gold coins emerged when the earth was full; Ancient hoard of gold Roman coins discovered in plowed UK field
A cache of gold coins found buried on farmland in the United Kingdom has caught the attention of coin experts, who have linked the treasure trove to the Roman Empire.
One of the gold coins from the Roman empire was found in the English countryside. Augustus Caesar is featured on the front, and his grandson Gaius on horseback is depicted on the back.
So far, metal detectorists have discovered 11 coins on a remote stretch of cultivated field located in Norfolk, a rural county near England’s eastern coast, and experts remain hopeful that more could be unearthed in the future.
Damon and Denise Pye, a pair of local metal detectorists, found the first of several gold coins in 2017 after local farmers finished plowing the soil at the end of the harvest season, which made the land prime for exploration. The haul has been dubbed “The Broads Hoard” by local numismatists (coin specialists and collectors), for its geographic location near The Broads, a network of rivers and lakes that run through the English countryside.
“The coins were found scattered around in the plow soil, which has been churned up year after year, causing the soil to be turned over constantly and led to them eventually coming to the surface,” said Adrian Marsden, a numismatist at Norfolk County Council who specializes in ancient Roman coins.
“The first year, [the Pyes] found four coins, and the following year one more, and then they found a few more the year after that. They’ve said to me that they think they found the last one, and I always say, ‘I bet not.’ They’re slowly coming to the surface; I think there’s more.”
Marsden dated the “exceptional” bounty of gold coins to sometime between the first century B.C. and the first century A.D. Interestingly, all of the coins were minted before the Roman conquest, when Britain became occupied by Roman forces starting in A.D. 43 after an invasion launched by Rome’s fourth emperor, Claudius.
Which raises the question: How did the coins end up in a field years before the arrival of Roman forces? While Marsden said that there’s no way of knowing for sure, he thinks there could be a couple of logical explanations for the stockpile of riches.
“It’s apparent that [the coins] went into the ground before the invasion,” Marsden told Live Science. “It’s possible that they could’ve been part of some type of offering to the gods, but more likely someone buried them with the intention of recovering them later. Gold was often used as trade, so it’s possible that a local tribe could’ve gotten ahold of the coins and perhaps planned to use them for other things, such as melting them down to make jewellery.”
The fronts and backs of six of the 11 gold coins from the Roman Empire were found in the English countryside.
The farmland where the coins were found sits on land once occupied by the Iceni, a tribe of British Celts. During the Roman invasion, the tribe’s leader, Queen Boudica, led a revolt against Roman forces, attempting to drive them off their land in A.D. 60. However, despite their initial success, the queen’s army was no match for the Romans, who ultimately won the fight in what is known as the Battle of Watling Street.
The defeat led the queen to kill herself, according to the ancient Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus. However, another ancient Roman historian, Cassius Dio, reported that Boudica died of illness.
In an article written by Marsden and published in a recent issue of The Searcher, a metal detectorist publication, he described there being two types of gold coins in the stash: one type was marked with the portrait of Augustus Caesar, the first emperor of Rome, with Gaius and Lucius, his grandsons and heirs to the throne, on the back of the coin. (However, both grandsons died before they could don the purple and become emperor.) The other also featured Augustus in profile on one side, but with Gaius on horseback on the reverse.
“In the second half of Augustus’ reign, when his position was consolidated, the types [of coins] with dynastic reference increased as an indication of his succession, as is the case here with the extensive coinage for his grandsons, Gaius and Lucius Caesar,” Marjanko Pilekić, a numismatist and research assistant at the Coin Cabinet of the Schloss Friedenstein Gotha Foundation in Germany, who wasn’t involved with the new findings, told Live Science. “They are depicted as the chosen successors of Augustus on the coins, which is indicated by the inscription PRINC(ipes) IVVENT(utes): ‘the first among the young.'”
Each of the coins also features a small indentation at the top, likely indicating that someone tested the coins for their purity, perhaps after they had been minted. Otherwise, “they’re high quality, 20-karat gold,” Marsden said. “If they had been churned around in the soil a lot, I would expect for them to be more scuffed up, but these are not.” Pilekić added that cutting “knicks” into the faces of gold coins was common practice in the Roman Empire, where forgeries were abundant.
“[Some can be seen] even on the portrait of Augustus,” Pilekić said. “This made it possible to check whether the coin was really a gold coin and not a gilded bronze coin, for example. The distrust must have been great, which could indicate many forgeries in circulation.”
In addition to the newfound gold coins, over the years metal detectorists have discovered a treasure trove of Roman possessions in the region, including 100 copper alloy coins, two denarii (Roman silver coins), brooches and more. According to Marsden’s estimate, the gold coins together are valued at approximately $20,000 pounds ($25,000 USD). The British Museum recently acquired the coins as part of its permanent collection.
The findings were published in the May issue of the magazine The Searcher.
“[Some can be seen] even on the portrait of Augustus,” Pilekić said. “This made it possible to check whether the coin was really a gold coin and not a gilded bronze coin, for example. The distrust must have been great, which could indicate many forgeries in circulation.”
In addition to the newfound gold coins, over the years metal detectorists have discovered a treasure trove of Roman possessions in the region, including 100 copper alloy coins, two denarii (Roman silver coins), brooches and more. According to Marsden’s estimate, the gold coins together are valued at approximately $20,000 pounds ($25,000 USD). The British Museum recently acquired the coins as part of its permanent collection.
19th-Century Industrial Site Uncovered in Southwest England
Archaeologists digging up a car park in South Bristol have unearthed the full extent of one of the city’s most ‘secretive’ companies – less than 60 years after it closed down. The team from Wessex Archaeology were given access to the old NCP car park on Dalby Avenue in Bedminster – and discovered, almost entirely intact at ground level, what was left of the site of the Bedminster Smelting Works.
And the below ground discoveries are now helping to shed more light on what was one of South Bristol’s darkest – and dirtiest – chapters, when a highly-polluting chemical work operated for more than 100 years, surrounded by people’s houses.
Just a couple of feet beneath the surface of the car park just off the A38 at Dalby Avenue in Bedminster, the archaeologists found the foundations and ground-level footprint of all the huge smelting work chimneys, furnaces, underground furnaces and stoking cellars, where generations of Bedminster residents worked in often unbearable heat and fumes. The profits from the business meant that, by the third generation of the Capper Pass family-run business, the family was able to buy a huge country estate in Dorset, far away from the fumes, smoke and stench that characterised the smelting works which stood opposite Bedminster’s main tobacco factory at the bottom of Bedminster Parade.
Wessex Archaeology carried out an excavation there between January and March this year, as work began to dig up the car park, clear the site and build huge blocks of student accommodation that will eventually house up to 837 students, as part of the massive Bedminster Green development project. One of the reasons the archaeologists were called in was because little was known about the company and how it was set up – the site was quickly demolished and covered over when it eventually closed in 1963, and the car park, Dalby Avenue and the St Catherine’s Place shopping centre was built over the top of it.
According to Simon Cox, from the Bristol and Bath Heritage Consultancy, who worked on the dig too, what went on in the smelting works was a closely-guarded secret.
“This excavation shows us that there is still a great deal to be learned about our relatively recent industrial heritage from archaeological investigations in advance of urban regeneration projects. Documentary research undertaken by Bristol & Bath Heritage Consultancy in preparation for the planning application uncovered much about the history of Capper Pass, but it was clear that they were very secretive about their processes, many of which were highly experimental and unpredictable in nature,” he said.
“The firm originated in Bedminster in the early 19th century and had premises there until the 1960s when its operations moved to its premises in Melton, Yorkshire. It ultimately became globally important as a world-leading producer of tin from secondary sources, and a wholly-owned subsidiary of Rio Tinto Zinc by the late 20th century.
The archaeological excavation of the Bedminster Smelting Works at Dalby Avenue, Bedminster
“The excavation has helped us to better understand the origins and plan form of the 19th and 20th-century works through various phases of redevelopment – information that was largely kept secret and was therefore not available through documentary sources such as historic maps and plans.
“Along with analysis of samples taken of industrial residues, this information should help us to further refine our understanding of the function of the different furnaces, solder pans and pots revealed during the work by Wessex Archaeology, and therefore the evolution of this internationally important Bedminster-based company,” he added.
The archaeologists found most of the excavated remains date from the later 19th and early 20th centuries and comprise the foundations of industrial buildings containing numerous coal-fired metal smelting furnaces with associated underground flues and stoking cellars, and the bases of three huge Lancashire boilers that provided the steam for the steam engines that powered the works.
“This has been a fascinating site to excavate,” said Wessex Archaeology’s fieldwork director Cai Mason. “It’s hard to imagine what a different place Bedminster must have been in the 19th and early 20th centuries – a densely populated area full of heavy industry, noise, and smoke.
The archaeological excavation of the Bedminster Smelting Works at Dalby Avenue, Bedminster
“Capper Pass & Sons was a very innovative and secretive company – this was the best way of preventing your competitors from stealing your ideas – and before we started our excavation, we really had no idea how the smelting works was laid out inside, or how it developed over time.
“One of the things our excavations have shown is that the company seems to have been constantly rebuilding the works. New furnaces were built, then a few years later, they’d be knocked down and replaced with a new – presumably more efficient – design. In the early days of the company it seems to have been very much a case or trial and error – were literally making it up as they went along!” he added.
The 200-year history of smelting in Bedminster
The smelting works was established 182 years ago by a local metal refiner called Capper Pass II, who had learnt his trade from his father, who had been transported to Australia for 14 years for handling stolen metal in 1819.
The junior Capper Pass bought a plot of land in Bedminster’s sprawling slums in 1840 on the new Coronation Street – a street that no longer exists, but was laid out and named after the coronation of William IV and Queen Adelaide in 1832. He built a house for his family and a small smelting work around the back, which was experimental, but not particularly successful.
The archaeological excavation of the Bedminster Smelting Works at Dalby Avenue, Bedminster
Capper Pass II tried extracting gold and silver from Sheffield plate and gilded buttons, then refining lead, copper and zinc from cheap waste products like metal ashes, slags and poor-quality ores – it didn’t exactly work and for more than 20 years the smelting works barely broke even.
But in the 1860s, the company discovered a new and highly profitable thing to manufacture – solder, the multi-purpose metal glue that was used to stick metal objects together, especially the new invention of mass-produced tin cans.
The production of solder took off, and as soon as they made enough money, the by now old Capper Pass moved the family away from the smelting works to a new large house in the new and genteel suburb of Redland, high above the stench of industrial South Bristol.
He died in 1870, but his son Alfred Capper Pass took over and expanded the business massively, moving north and south of the existing site and occupying much of the area between the ancient main road through Bedminster and the parallel railway line.
“Pass was a typical Victorian paternalistic industrialist, who used some of his wealth to help fund the Bristol General Hospital and Bristol University College and gave land for the building of St Michael’s Church on Windmill Hill,” said a Wessex Archaeology spokesperson.
From 1870 until Alfred Capper Pass’s death in 1905, the company employed more and more men in the dirty and unhealthy work in the smelting yards, and gave some money to local good causes, including helping to fund the Bristol General Hospital in Redcliffe and the University College, as well as giving land for the building of St Michael’s Church on Windmill Hill. Most of the money the family kept, however, and they were able to move out of Redland and Bristol altogether, moving to a succession of bigger and bigger homes, ending up with the purchase of a large country estate at Wootton Fitzpaine in Dorset.
The Bedminster Smelting Works, on a map dating from the 1880s
The demand for solder continued to increase into the 20th century, with the new development of electrical goods, circuit boards and cars, and the works needed to expand more – but the site was now surrounded by tightly-packed terrace homes, with space in Bedminster also in demand from the growing tobacco factories and a number of tanneries.
The company found a new site in Melton, near Hill, and from 1937 onwards, production gradually shifted there. The Bedminster Smelting Works closed in 1963 and the site was levelled, and covered with the car park and St Catherine’s Place shopping centre, with a new bypass of East Street – Dalby Avenue and Malago Road – put through the middle of it.
Now the next generation of use for the area – the Bedminster Green regeneration project – will see huge blocks of flats built in the area, including at the car park off Dalby Avenue.
Archaeologists find a skeleton in Alexander the Great-era tomb
Archaeologists in Greece have uncovered a skeleton from a tomb dating back to the era of Alexander the Great. The excavation has refuelled rumours about the Greek conqueror, whose final resting place remains a mystery.
Greece’s Culture Ministry confirmed on Wednesday that an excavation site in the country’s north had once again produced exciting results, namely, that of a skeleton.
The remains would “be studied by researchers,” the Culture Ministry announced in a statement.
Archaeologists discovered the skeleton under the third chamber
An archaeological team digging roughly 600 kilometres (370 miles) north of Athens near the city of Amphipolis in recent months discovered the bones in the third chamber of the massive tomb.
According to preliminary information, parts of the skeleton were strewn around a rectangular wooden casket, which had been buried under the floor (pictured) of the cavernous room.
The occupant was probably some “outstanding personality, a great general,” head archaeologist Katerina Peristeri said.
Peristeri is to disclose the findings in detail at the end of November.
Nearly intact statues and expansive mosaics have fascinated the team, which is gradually making its way through the mysterious tomb. While the opulence points to a final resting place for an important person, the archaeologists on site still do not know to whom it belonged.
The discovery of a skeleton was “a very important find because it will help us learn the sex of the person buried there, and possibly their approximate age,” University of Thessaloniki archaeology professor Michalis Tiverio, who is not participating in the dig, told the Associated Press news agency.
The tomb houses intricate mosaics including one of the Rape of Persephone
Tomb fuels speculation
The tomb dates back to the time during which Alexander the Great ruled much of the surrounding region. Born in 356 BC, the young king of Macedon launched a successful military campaign through the Middle East, pushing into Asia to modern-day India, as well as into northeastern Africa.
Following his death in 323 at the age of 32, his wife, Roxana, and their son, Alexander, were exiled to Amphipolis. They, along with his mother, brother and sister-in-law were later murdered there.
Alexander the Great’s final resting place is believed to be in Alexandria, Egypt.
However, the findings of the current excavation in northern Greece have re-fuelled speculation that perhaps he had been buried closer to his home after all.
8,200-year-old burials in Russia contain pendants crafted from human bone
Nearly a century ago, archaeologists excavating an 8,200-year-old graveyard in northwestern Russia took note of a number of bone and animal-tooth pendants buried with the Stone Age people entombed there. But when researchers recently began to re-analyze the bone pendants to determine which species of animal each came from, they were in for a shock.
An illustration depicting the burial of an adult male on the island of Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov in Russia.
Some of the pendants weren’t made from the animal bone at all. They were human.
“When we got the results, I was first thinking that there must be some mistake here,” said Kristiina Mannermaa, an archaeologist at the University of Helsinki in Finland, who led the research.
But it was no mistake, Mannermaa told Live Science. Mixed in with ornaments made of bear, elk and beaver teeth were grooved fragments of human bone, including at least two pendants made from the same human femur, or thighbone.
A surprising discovery
These bits of bone were found at a site called Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov, a cemetery with 177 burials from around 6200 B.C. in the Karelia region of Russia. The people here were hunter-fisher-gatherers, Mannermaa said, with a diet centred primarily around fish.
While some were buried unadorned, others were found with many teeth and bone ornaments, some of which seem to have been sewed onto the hems of long-decayed cloaks or coats or used as noisemakers in rattles.
As part of a large project seeking to understand how these Stone Age people interacted with animals, Mannermaa and her team had some of these ornaments analyzed with a method that looks at molecular differences in the bone collagen between species.
Of 37 pendants crafted from fragments of bone from 6 different graves, 12 turned out to be human, the analysis showed. (Another two returned results indicating that they, too, might be human, but the findings were uncertain.) These dozen pendants came from three different graves: two holding single adult men and one of an adult man buried with a child. There may be other human bone pendants in the graveyard, Mannermaa said, but those artefacts are still being analyzed.
These two pendants are crafted from the same human femur.
Using human bones
Interestingly, the bones didn’t seem to be treated differently than other materials by the people who turned them into decorations. They were carved rather quickly, Mannermaa said, with simple grooves notched into their ends where a cord could be wrapped. They were also similar in size and shape to the animal teeth that were found nearby, perhaps indicating that they were used as a replacement for animal teeth that had been lost from the hem of a garment, Mannermaa and her team reported in the June issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports(opens in new tab). Wear patterns on the ornaments suggest they were worn by their owners before being buried with them.
“It gives an impression that when a human or animal died, they didn’t see so much difference in the body and the parts,” Mannermaa said.
This apparent interchangeability doesn’t mean that people viewed human bone as meaningless, said Amy Gray Jones, a senior lecturer in archaeology at the University of Chester in the U.K. who was not involved in the study.
Animal bone pendants and tools from Stone Age Europe are often treated with care and disposed of in particular ways after being used, Gray Jones told Live Science. Unlike today, when an animal bone is largely unvalued in Western culture, ancient Europeans may have infused both animal and human bone with great symbolism.
“It means not necessarily that the human bone and the pendant is just another material, but that perhaps it also has an importance or a meaning like the animal bone,” Gray Jones said.
The archaeological record is thin, however. This is the first such use of human bone from northeastern Europe, Mannermaa said, though human tooth pendants(opens in new tab) from about 6000 B.C. have been found at a site called Vedbaek Henriksholm Bøgebakken in Denmark. In 2020, a couple of human-bone arrowheads were discovered in the Netherlands. There are also a few other scattered examples of carved human bones from around Stone Age Europe, including an arm bone from Serbia with notches cut in it.
“We’re probably only getting a partial glimpse into what human bone was used for,” Gray Jones said.
The method of analyzing collagen molecules used in the current study is relatively new, and it’s likely that more already-discovered bone fragments would be identified as human if they were tested, she said.
Mannermaa and her team are now studying the animal bone pendants found at Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov to confirm that they were, indeed, worked in similar ways to the human bone. It would be interesting, she said, to try to extract DNA from the pendants to see if the people the bone came from were related to the people who were buried with the pendants. But those studies require the destruction of large amounts of bone, she said, so it’s not likely that researchers will pursue that research at this time.
The Crimean Pyramids — Built Before Dinosaurs Roamed The Earth?
Ukrainian researchers have come across one of the most important discoveries in recent years as they accidentally discovered a set of megalithic constructions and pyramids in the peninsula of Crimea, well-known in ancient history for archaeological and historical treasures from different cultures and ancient civilizations ranging from the Greeks and Romans to the Genoese and Ottoman Turks.
Crimea is an autonomous republic of Ukraine, it is located on the northern coast of the Black Sea.
The series of formations was discovered for the first time in 1999 by Vitalij Gokh who worked for the Soviet military for over thirty years.
After his long career in the Soviet military, Gokh decided to become a researcher which led him to the discovery of the Pyramids.
Gokh claimed that just like there were submerged towns in the region, there were buried pyramids and other megalithic structures in the Crimean peninsula.
Gokh was a former engineer thus he had very good knowledge with magnetic resonance instruments. Gokh even built a device to search for subterranean deposits of water since the area of Sevastopol had very poor water supplies.
According to Gokh’s website, the devices, invented by Vitaly A. Gokh (Method of geoholography and geo hydro diagnostics) enable the detection of elements of the Mendeleev Periodic Table; oil and gas deposits, mechanisms and devices of various kinds, material objects both in the Earth and in the areas of remote Space.
The devices use analogs or models in order to record structural fields or the snapshots of the planets, stars, constellations, and areas of Space, executed by means of satellites or telescopes.
Thanks to these instruments, Gokh was able to discover several limestone blocks which had regular dimensions, ca. 2.5 by 1.5 meters and Goks and his team “assumed” these were of artificial origin.
Interestingly, the instrument invented by Gokh also revealed that from the top of one of the structures, three beams of energy emanated, at frequencies 900×109 Hz, 700×109 Hz and 500×109 Hz.
Around the pyramid, a field of 10×109 Hz was found. Gokh and his team state that the surrounding layers of one of the structures reveal that the “underground pyramid” was originally above the surface in “open-air” but due to flooding, the whole area sank together with the structures.
According to ICTV and the Crimean News agency; Ukrainian scientist Vitalij Gokh discovered an underground unknown object, which proved to be a giant pyramid of 45 meters in height and a length of about 72 meters. Goh said that the pyramid was built during the time of the dinosaurs.
“Crimean pyramid” has a truncated top, like a Mayan pyramid, but its appearance is more like an Egyptian. It is hollow inside, and a mummy of an unknown creature is buried under the foundation.
So far the information regarding the veracity and existence of the pyramids has not been proven nor accepted by archaeologists.
In an interview with ICTV, researcher Vitaliy Gokh stated that he doesn’t know who built the megalithic structures in the Crimean peninsula, but the pyramids could prove to be the oldest structures on the planet to date.
So far around 7 pyramids have been registered forming a straight line which travelled from Sarych to Baia Kamyshovaia, and which runs northwest-southeast, one of these “pyramids” is located underwater in the vicinity of the city of Foros.
In total, Gokh believes that there are around 39 pyramidal structures and monolithic buildings in the entire Crimean peninsula.
