Researchers say fossil shows humans, dogs lived in C. America in 10,000 BC
San Jose, Costa Rica: The fossil of a jaw bone could prove that domesticated dogs lived in Central America as far back as 12,000 years ago, according to a study by Latin American scientists. The dogs, and their masters, potentially lived alongside giant animals, researchers say.
The presence of dogs is a sign that humans were also living in a place (Representational)
A 1978 dig in Nacaome, northeast Costa Rica, found bone remains from the Late Pleistocene. Excavations began in the 1990s and produced the remains of a giant horse, Equus sp, a glyptodon (a large armadillo), a mastodon (an ancestor of the modern elephant) and a piece of the jaw from what was originally thought to be a coyote skull.
“We thought it was very strange to have a coyote in the Pleistocene, that is to say, 12,000 years ago,” Costa Rican researcher Guillermo Vargas told AFP.
“When we started looking at the bone fragments, we started to see characteristics that could have been from a dog.
“So we kept looking, we scanned it… and it showed that it was a dog living with humans 12,000 years ago in Costa Rica.”
Researchers believe this fossil of a jaw bone found in Costa Rica belongs to a dog that lived 12,000 years ago.
The presence of dogs is a sign that humans were also living in a place.
“We thought it was strange that a sample was classified as a coyote because they only arrived in Costa Rica in the 20th century.”
– First of its kind –
The coyote is a relative of the domestic dog, although with a different jaw and more pointed teeth.
“The dog eats the leftovers from human food. Its teeth are not so determinant in its survival,” said Vargas.
“It hunts large prey with its human companions. This sample reflects that difference.”
Humans are believed to have emigrated to the Americas across the Bering Strait from Siberia to Alaska during the last great ice age.
“The first domesticated dogs entered the continent about 15,000 years ago, a product of Asians migrating across the Bering Strait,” said Raul Valadez, a biologist and zooarcheologist from the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
“There have never been dogs without people,” Valadez told AFP by telephone.
The presence of humans during the Pleistocene has been attested in Mexico, Chile and Patagonia, but never in Central America, until now.
“This could be the oldest dog in the Americas,” said Vargas.
So far, the oldest attested dog remains were found in Alaska and are 10,150 years old.
Oxford University has offered to perform DNA and carbon dating tests on the sample to discover more genetic information about the animal and its age.
The fossil is currently held at Costa Rica’s national museum but the sample cannot be re-identified as a dog without validation by a specialist magazine.
“This dog discovery would be the first evidence of humans in Costa Rica during a period much earlier” than currently thought, said Vargas.
“It would show us that there were societies that could keep dogs, that had food surpluses, that had dogs out of desire and that these weren’t war dogs that could cause damage.”
Historic First Baptist Church Original Permanent Structure Discovered During Archaeological Dig
Inside the small barrier fence that encircled the S. Nassau Street dig site, there was a buzz of excitement. Because they couldn’t be certain of their latest discovery, the archaeologist team working there resisted the enthusiasm. An older 16-by-20-foot foundation extended along the eastern wall, almost to the asphalt street, sandwiched between the walls of an 1856 building.
Colonial Williamsburg Foundation has announced the discovery of what archaeologists believe to be the permanent structure of the original Historic First Baptist Church (Courtesy of Colonial Williamsburg Foundation)
For Colonial Williamsburg’s Director of Archaeology Jack Gary, it was a good sign that the team had uncovered First Baptist Church’s first permanent church structure dating back to the early 1800s — after a year of excavating at the site of one of the nation’s oldest Black churches.
But Gary and his team had to be sure it was the original structure.
Jack Gary, Director of Archaeology at Colonial Williamsburg, stands near the First Baptist Church’s first permanent church structure brick building foundation Thursday morning October 7, 2021.
The team got to work digging up a portion of the foundation near the front steps of where the original building would have sat. There, the team uncovered an 1817 coin, hairpins, buttons and furniture tacks. For Gary, the discoveries solidified the team’s assumptions. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s Archaeology team had discovered the original early 1800s church building that First Baptist Church’s original congregation worshipped in.
Katie Wagner, the project archaeologist, works in the area of the First Baptist Church’s location Thursday morning October 7, 2021.
For Connie Harshaw, the president of the Let Freedom Ring Foundation, an organization aimed at the preservation and conservation of Williamsburg’s historic Black churches, the discovery is one the descendants of the church never anticipated.
Harshaw is among other living descendants who can trace their lineage to the church’s first congregation. In recent years, the descendants have worked alongside Colonial Williamsburg and other community partners to ensure the church’s legacy is historically preserved and to reconcile past injustices.
“Never in our wildest imagination did we think that we would find intact burials or even the foundation of an 1818 structure. That is just mind-blowing,” Harshaw said. “It’s a pretty remarkable discovery.”
1776 beginnings
As the Founding Fathers stood in a Philadelphia statehouse and declared the nation’s independence, in direct defiance of the king, another group of individuals was reclaiming a piece of their own independence. In 1776, a group of free and enslaved Black men and women met in secrecy with the sole purpose of worshipping together. Despite the risks, as laws forbid them to congregate, they became the original First Baptist Church congregation.
From there, the congregation has become one of the oldest Black churches in the country, creating a community that has continued its legacy for centuries. While the original congregation continued to meet, it would not have a permanent structure until the 1800s when a Williamsburg man, Jesse Cole, moved by the congregation’s hymns and prayer, offered them a building on what is now Nassau Street in the Historic Area. The structure on the property was referred to as the Baptist Meeting House.
Its existence was short-lived, however, as a tornado destroyed it. The 1856 building was constructed over top of it, then it was paved over into a parking lot, remaining buried for 165 years. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation announced Thursday that its archaeological team discovered the structure which will bring the organization one step closer to its final goal: preservation, recreation and interpretation.
In order to better understand the site, Gary said the team is working to better understand the people who used to congregate within its walls. By uncovering artefacts, relics from the past, the team can paint a better picture of what their life was like.
“We’ve gone from being able to say, this is the first church building to being able to say a little bit about the people themselves,” Gary said. “Any church will tell you that the church is the people. It’s not the physical evidence, it’s the people and we have both here.”
The artefacts that were uncovered underneath the original structure, hairpins, buttons and furniture tacks, reveal a lot about what the original congregation was wearing at the time, according to Gary. The items were uncovered in front of where the church steps would have been located. As the church was swept, the inside contents made their way over the front steps and into the ground only to be uncovered nearly 165 years later, Gary said.
“It was an exciting day when we made that discovery,” Gary said. “Now, we can start to better understand the building and the people who congregated there. That’s what makes this project so special.”
Colonial Williamsburg archaeologists, under the guidance of First Baptist Church, first began digging at the site in September 2020. The team has been working in phases since then in hopes of uncovering the previous church structures, including Thursday’s discovery of the 1818 Meeting House.
Jack Gary, Director of Archaeology at Colonial Williamsburg, stands near the First Baptist Church’s first permanent church structure brick building foundation Thursday morning October 7, 2021.
In addition to the original structure, the archaeologists have discovered at least 25 confirmed human burials with the first bone fragments uncovered in February. During Phase II of the dig, one of the first priorities was to determine how many individuals may be buried in the west end of the South Nassau Street lot after discovering evidence of grave shafts during the first phase.
By July, the team had uncovered 21 grave shafts. The most recent grave was discovered just last week, likely predating the church building, inside the foundation of the 1856 church. A community meeting is scheduled for Oct. 30 for the church’s descendants to discuss the next steps and make decisions regarding the investigation of the burial sites.
The discovery of the 1818 structure comes ahead of the church’s community-wide 245th-anniversary celebration that will begin Saturday and conclude mid-November.
When the church was relocated in 1956 to 727 Scotland St., some of the descendants remember worshipping, as children, in the 1856 building. The recent discoveries, for many, have been a long time coming, Harshaw said.
“It has been more than a year for them, it has been since 1956. They were disappointed and hurt when the church on Nassau Street, was levelled and paved over with a parking lot,” Harshaw said. “They’ve carried the history of that church and their memories with them.”
Excavations at the Nassau Street site will continue from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on weekdays, weather permitting. The public is welcome to view the site. This is an ongoing multi-year project funded primarily by individual donors.
Scientists discover “once-in-a-generation” fossilized water bear in 16-million-year-old amber
Scientists have discovered a new species of tardigrade almost perfectly preserved in 16-million-year-old amber. Also known as water bears, the creatures are a group of microscopic invertebrates that are best known for their ability to survive extreme conditions.
Due to their microscopic size and non-biomineralising body, the chance of them becoming fossilised is small. In the new paper, researchers describe a modern-looking tardigrade fossil that represents a new genus and new species.
They were able to obtain higher resolution images of important anatomical characteristics that helped them to analyse the fossil. Researchers say the new fossil, Paradoryphoribius chronocaribbeus, is only the third tardigrade amber fossil to be fully described and formally named to date.
Scientists have discovered a new species of tardigrade almost perfectly preserved in 16-million-year-old amber
On a 2007 trip to space, tardigrades were exposed to the space vacuum and harmful solar radiation but still managed to survive and reproduce after returning to Earth. The tiny eight-legged animals are found on all the continents and in different environments including marine, freshwater, and terrestrial.
While they have survived all five Phanerozoic Great Mass Extinction events, the earliest modern-looking tardigrades are only known from the Cretaceous period – around 80 million years ago. Despite their long evolutionary history and global distribution, there is a lot lacking in their fossil record.
Paradoryphoribius is the first fossil to be found embedded in the Miocene (approximately 16 million years ago) Dominican amber and the first fossil representative of the tardigrade superfamily Isohypsibioidea.
Lead author Marc Mapalo, from the department of organismic and evolutionary biology, Harvard University, said: ‘The difficulty of working with this amber specimen is that it’s far too small for dissecting microscopes, we needed a special microscope to fully see the fossil.’
Researchers say the new tardigrade has a total body length of only 559 micrometres – or slightly over half a millimetre.
On such a small scale, a dissecting microscope can only reveal the external morphology of the fossil.
Fortunately, Tardigrade’s cuticle is made of chitin, a fibrous glucose substance that is a primary component of cell walls in fungi and the exoskeletons of some other invertebrates.
Chitin is fluorescent and easily excited by lasers, making it possible to fully visualise the tardigrade fossil using a specific method.
The use of confocal laser microscopy instead of transmitted light to study the fossil created degrees of fluorescence allowing a more clear view of the internal morphology.
This method allowed researchers to visualise two very important characters of the fossil – the claws and the buccal apparatus, or the foregut of the animal which is also made of the cuticle.
Paradoryphoribius is the first fossil to be found embedded in Miocene (approximately 16 million years ago) Dominican amber and the first fossil representative of the tardigrade superfamily Isohypsibioidea
Beorn leggi, the first fossil tardigrade, was recovered in 1964 from Campanian-age Canadian amber (78 ~Ma.). Milnesium swolenskyi (92 ~Ma.) was found in Turonian-age amber from New Jersey and described 36 years later. A putative ancestral sister of tardigrades, the so-called ‘Orsten tardigrade’ from the middle Cambrian period, was recovered in Siberia and evaluated in 1995
Senior author Professor Javier Ortega-Hernandez, also of the department of organismic and evolutionary biology, Harvard, said: ‘Tardigrade fossils are rare.
‘With our new study, the full tally includes only four specimens, from which only three are formally described and named, including Paradoryphoribius.
‘This paper basically encompasses a third of the tardigrade fossil record known to date.
The use of confocal laser microscopy instead of transmitted light to study the fossil created degrees of fluorescence allowing a more clear view of the internal morphology
‘Furthermore, Paradoryphoribius offers the only data on a tardigrade buccal apparatus in their entire fossil record.’
The authors note there is a strong preservation bias for tardigrade fossils in amber due to their small size and habitat preferences.
Therefore amber deposits provide the most reliable source for finding new tardigrade fossils, even though that does not mean finding them is an easy task.
The findings are published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Ancient Americans made art deep within the dark zones of caves throughout the Southeast
A group of recreational cavers explored a small, muddy stream tunnel south of Knoxville, Tennessee, on a cold winter day in 1980. They navigated a slippery mud slope and a tight keyhole through the cave wall, trudged through the stream itself, ducked through another keyhole and climbed more mud. Eventually, they entered a high and relatively dry passage deep in the cave’s “dark zone” – beyond the reach of external light.
Human figure from Mud Glyph Cave with raised right hand and Chunkey game piece in the left hand
On the walls around them, they began to see lines and figures traced into remnant mud banks laid down long ago when the stream flowed at this higher level. No modern or historic graffiti marred the surfaces. They saw images of animals, people and transformational characters blending human characteristics with those of birds, and those of snakes with mammals.
Ancient cave art has long been one of the most compelling of all artefacts from the human past, fascinating both to scientists and to the public at large. Its visual expressions resonate across the ages as if the ancients speak to us from deep in time. And this group of cavers in 1980 had happened upon the first ancient cave art site in North America.
Since then archaeologists like me have discovered dozens more of these cave art sites in the Southeast. We’ve been able to learn details about when cave art first appeared in the region, when it was most frequently produced and what it might have been used for. We have also learned a great deal by working with the living descendants of the cave art makers, the present-day Native American peoples of the Southeast, about what cave art means and how important it was and is to Indigenous communities.
Cave art in America?
Few people think of North America when they think about ancient cave art. A century before the Tennessee cavers made their own discovery, the world’s first modern discovery of cave art was made in 1879, at Altamira in northern Spain. The scientific establishment of the day immediately denied the authenticity of the site.
Subsequent discoveries served to authenticate this and other ancient sites. As the earliest expressions of human creativity, some perhaps 40,000 years old, European palaeolithic cave art is now justifiably famous worldwide.
But similar cave art had never been found anywhere in North America, although Native American rock art outside of caves has been recorded since Europeans arrived. Artwork deep under the ground was unknown in 1980, and the Southeast was an unlikely place to find it given how much archaeology had been done there since the colonial period.
Nevertheless, the Tennessee cavers recognized that they were seeing something extraordinary and brought archaeologist Charles Faulkner to the cave. He initiated a research project there, naming the site Mud Glyph Cave. His archaeological work showed that the art was from the Mississippian culture, some 800 years old, and depicted imagery characteristic of ancient Native American religious beliefs. Many of those beliefs are still held by the descendants of Mississippian peoples: the modern Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Coushatta, Muscogee, Seminole and Yuchi, among others.
After the Mud Glyph Cave discovery, archaeologists here at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville initiated systematic cave surveys. Today, we have catalogued 92 dark-zone cave art sites in Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia. There are also a few sites known in Arkansas, Missouri and Wisconsin.
What did they depict?
There are three forms of southeastern cave art.
Mud glyphs are drawings traced into pliable mud surfaces preserved in caves, like those from Mud Glyph Cave.
Petroglyphs are drawings incised directly into the limestone of the cave walls.
Pictographs are paintings, usually made with charcoal-based pigments, placed onto the cave walls.
Sometimes, more than one technique is found in the same cave, and none of the methods seems to appear earlier or later in time than the others. Some southeastern cave art is quite ancient. The oldest cave art sites date to some 6,500 years ago, during the Archaic Period (10,000-1000 B.C.). These early sites are rare and seem to be clustered on the modern Kentucky-Tennessee state line. The imagery was simple and often abstract, although representational pictures do exist.
Archaic Period pictograph of a hunter and prey dated to 6,500 years ago.
Woodland Period petroglyph of a box-shaped human-like creature with a long neck and u-shaped head.
Cave art sites increase in number over time. The Woodland Period (1000 B.C. – A.D. 1000) saw more common and more widespread art production. Abstract art was still abundant and less worldly. Probably more spiritual subject matter was common. During the Woodland, conflations between humans and animals, like “bird-humans,” made their first appearance.
The Mississippian Period (A.D. 1000-1500) is the last precontact phase in the Southeast before Europeans arrived, and this was when much of the dark-zone cave art was produced. The subject matter is clearly religious and includes spirit people and animals that do not exist in the natural world. There is also strong evidence that Mississippian art caves were compositions, with images organized through the cave passages in systematic ways to suggest stories or narratives told though their locations and relations.
Mississippian Period pictograph showing an animal with talons for feet, a blunt forehead and long snout, with a long curving tail over the back.
Cave art continued into the modern era
In recent years, researchers have realized that cave art has strong connections to the historic tribes that occupied the Southeast at the time of the European invasion. In several caves in Alabama and Tennessee, mid-19th-century inscriptions were written on cave walls in Cherokee Syllabary.
This writing system was invented by the Cherokee scholar Sequoyah between 1800 and 1824 and was quickly adopted as the tribe’s primary means of written expression.
On a cave wall in Alabama, an 1828 Cherokee syllabary inscription relating to a stickball ceremony.
Cherokee archaeologists, historians and language experts have joined forces with nonnative archaeologists like me to document and translate these cave writings. As it turns out, they refer to various important religious ceremonies and spiritual concepts that emphasize the sacred nature of caves, their isolation and their connection to powerful spirits. These texts reflect similar religious ideas to those represented by graphic images in earlier, precontact time periods.
Based on all the rediscoveries researchers have made since Mud Glyph Cave was first explored more than four decades ago, cave art in the Southeast was created over a long period of time.
These artists worked in ancient times when ancestral Native Americans lived by foraging in the rich natural landscapes of the Southeast all the way through to the historic period just before the Trail of Tears saw the forced removal of indigenous people east of the Mississippi River in the 1830s.
As surveys continue, researchers uncover more dark cave sites every year – in fact, four new caves were found in the first half of 2021. With each new discovery, the tradition is beginning to approach the richness and diversity of the Paleolithic art of Europe, where 350 sites are currently known. That archaeologists were unaware of the dark-zone cave art of the American Southeast even 40 years ago demonstrates the kinds of new discoveries that can be made even in regions that have been explored for centuries.
El Pital: A Massive Ancient Port City Home to 150 Pyramids
The remains of a huge, ancient port city believed to have flourished for 500 years during the decline of the Roman Empire have been discovered on Mexico’s Gulf Coast, the National Geographic Society announced Thursday.
With more than 150 earthen pyramids and other buildings, the biggest 100 feet high, the port seems to have been North America’s largest coastal city 1,500 years ago. The site, in the state of Veracruz, has been named El Pital for a nearby town.
Although digging has not begun at the site, an examination of the surface has already yielded artefacts and information that establish the city’s importance as a multiethnic political, commercial and agricultural centre from AD 100 to 600.
El Pital could provide important clues to gaps in ancient Mexican history in areas bordering the seats of the Mayan and Aztec empires, said American archaeologist S. Jeffrey K. Wilkerson of the Institute for Cultural Ecology of the Tropics in Tampa, Fla. He is directing the exploration, which is partly funded by National Geographic.
El Pital residents probably traded with their contemporaries at Teotihuacan, the site of the famous pyramids north of the capital that was built by a civilization that predated the Aztecs.
The city is likely to have been an early rival of El Tajin, a later city 40 miles away that until now was the biggest archaeological site in northern Veracruz. El Pital appears to have been larger than El Tajin, controlling an area that included more than 40 square miles of suburbs and farmland and probably influencing an area several times that large.
The discovery could also have significant ecological implications because the ancient civilization seems to have supported more than 20,000 people–similar to the population of the area today–using farming techniques less harmful to the environment than the intensive chemical agriculture now practised there.
“The (population) density we’re seeing far exceeds anything that preceded it in this area and even those that follow until the end of the 20th Century,” Wilkerson said. “Something special was going on technologically that allowed that to happen and that has not occurred in the intervening 1,500 years.”
The fields around El Pital were made highly productive by some of the largest earth-moving projects of their time. Canals were dug to drain wetlands or to channel fresh water into rich estuaries that brackish water would otherwise have left infertile.
Residents also appear to have constructed an artificial island to guard the two slow-moving rivers that provided access to their city from the Gulf of Mexico. One of those rivers is the Nautla, Mexico’s 26th-largest river, notable because it floods every year, like the ancient Nile, leaving farmers a layer of rich silt.
The city’s demise may have been connected to a megacycle of El Nino, a climatic phenomenon that resulted in six months a year of the cold, windy rains known as nortes , Wilkerson theorized.
Some cocoa farmers still lived in the region at the time of the Spanish conquest, but the disease had mainly wiped them out by the end of the 16th Century. The jungle reclaimed the area until plantation owners cleared it again in the 1930s and 1940s.
Today’s farmers rely on chemicals to fertilize plantations in what is now one of Mexico’s most important banana and citrus regions. Those chemicals have stained ancient ceramic fragments–whose varied patterns led scientists to believe that the area was multiethnic–and even obsidian, an extremely dense volcanic material seldom penetrated, Wilkerson said.
Besides everyday ceramics, archaeologists have found a mask that resembles the image of the ancient rain god Tlaloc and a four-inch clay head believed to depict a sacrificed ballgame player. Residents of El Pital seem to have been major fans of ballgames: Eight courts have already been identified in the area.
“This is an extensive site with huge monuments for that period,” said Enrique Nalda, technical secretary of Mexico’s National Institute of Archeology and History, which granted Wilkerson a permit to explore the El Pital area.
Some of the pyramids at El Pital.
Ironically, Wilkerson discovered El Pital because the institute nearly two years ago refused to allow him to continue working in an area farther upriver, where he has carried out investigations over the last three decades.
‘Hellboy’ horned dinosaur species discovered in Canada
The prehistoric creature, named Regaliceratops peterhewsi, is a close relative of the familiar Triceratops and belongs to Ceratopsidae, a group of large-bodied, plant-eating dinosaurs that evolved in the Cretaceous period and were largely restricted to western North America.
Artistic life reconstruction of Regaliceratops peterhewsi.
Ceratopsid dinosaurs are divided into two subgroups: chasmosaurines, which include Triceratops and the new species, and centrosaurines.
Centrosaurines went extinct several million years before the chasmosaurines, which went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous along with all the other dinosaurs.
Characteristically, chasmosaurines have a small nose horn, large horns over their eyes, and shield-like frills with simple scalloped edges.
Regaliceratops peterhewsi is unexpected because it shows the exact opposite pattern: large nose horn, small horns over the eyes, and elaborately decorated frills similar to centrosaurines. This demonstrates that at least one group of chasmosaurines evolved ornamentation similar to centrosaurines following their extinction.
“This new species is a chasmosaurine, but it has ornamentation more similar to centrosaurines. It also comes from a time period following the extinction of the centrosaurines,” said Dr Caleb Brown, lead author on the study published in the journal Current Biology.
“Taken together, that makes this the first example of evolutionary convergence in horned dinosaurs, meaning that these two groups independently evolved similar features.”
Citizen palaeontologist Peter Hews with the skull of Regaliceratops peterhewsi that he found.
The nearly intact skull of Regaliceratops peterhewsi was discovered by Calgary resident Peter Hews, a geologist in the petroleum industry, in southeastern Alberta in 2005.
“The specimen comes from a geographic region of Alberta where we have not found horned dinosaurs before, so from the onset we knew it was important,” Dr Brown said.
Despite the formal name, Dr Brown and his co-author, Dr Donald Henderson, said they’ve taken to calling this dinosaur by the nickname ‘Hellboy’ (after the comic book character).
“It’s due to the difficulty collecting the specimen and for the challenging preparation process to remove it from the very hard rock in which it was encased,” the scientists said.
“Upon discovery, it was instantly noticeable that this specimen was something that had never been seen before, especially considering its unlikely location and unique features.”
The palaeontologists said they hope to uncover more specimens of Regaliceratops peterhewsi.
Dr Brown added: “This discovery also suggests that there are likely more horned dinosaurs out there that we just have not found yet, so we will also be looking for other new species.”
1,800-Year-Old Offering to the Gods Discovered Beneath Pyramid of Teotihuacan
Several bouquets of offering flowers have been discovered 59 feet below the temple of the god Quetzalcóatl – a pyramid that still stands in the Mexican ruined city of Teotihuacan.
Quetzalcóatl, or ‘Plumed Serpent’ was an important god during ancient Mesoamerica, a historical region that included central Mexico through Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and northern Costa Rica.
This deity was said to have given maize to humanity and was responsible for the creation of mankind, which may be why offering flowers were uncovered under the god’s temple.
Sergio Gómez, an archaeologist at Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History, said the stems are in good condition and still tied with the original cotton-made cords.
‘In total there are four bouquets of flowers in very good condition, they are still tied with ropes, probably cotton,’ Gómez told Mexican news outlet La Jornada.
‘This is a very important find because it speaks of the rituals that were carried out in this place.’
Gómez says it is too early to determine what kind they are – but he hopes to solve that mystery soon.
‘Although we do not know the exact date of when they were deposited, because we just took them out this week, they must be very old and correspond to the first phases of Teotihuacan, between 1,800 and 2,000 years ago,’ Gómez explained.
The stems are in good condition and still tied with the original cotton-made cords
Teotihuacan, with its huge pyramids of the sun and moon, is made up of a labyrinth of palaces, temples, homes, workshops, markets and avenues. The city is thought to have been built in 100BC and existed until the 8th century
‘We have found complete objects that were placed in this shot; the ceramics are also from the Zacuali and Miccaotli phases, from the beginning of our era, between years zero and 200 after Christ.’
Gómez has been working in the ruined city for nearly 12 years, sifting through ancient soil, rocks and pyramids looking for clues about those who once called the area home.
Some 30 miles (50km) north of Mexico City, Teotihuacan, with its huge pyramids of the sun and moon, is made up of a labyrinth of palaces, temples, homes, workshops, markets and avenues.
The city is thought to have been built in 100BC and existed until the 8th century. Archaeologists consider it one of the most influential in pre-Hispanic North America, with a population of 200,000 at its peak.
However, only 5 per cent of Teotihuacan has been excavated despite more than 100 years of exploration. During excavations, Gómez as recovered more than 100,000 artifacts within the ancient city and specifically under the three pyramids that are still standing.
However, the offering flowers are the first intact botanical materials every to be found at the site.
‘It is very relevant because it will give us indications of the flora that was used for ritual purposes,’ Gómez said.
In 2011, archaeologist uncovered other offerings at the base of the pyramid, including animal remains, three human figurines and a haunting, green mask that was used in rituals 2,000 years ago
The mask was carved from a single jade stone and is the only one of its kind to be discovered in thee ancient city
‘In this same context, while sifting the earth, several kilos of charcoal were found as a result of a ritual ceremony that included the burning of seeds and fruits.’
In 2011, archaeologists uncovered other offerings at the base of the pyramid, including animal remains three human figurines and a haunting, green mask that was used in rituals 2,000 years ago.
Perez Cortez, an investigator with the Zacatecas INAH Center, said in a statement when the mask was discovered: ‘We know [the offerings were] deposited as part of a dedication ceremony.’
The mask was carved from a single jade stone and is the only one of its kind to be discovered in the ancient city.
A photo shared by park officials shows one such tree was recently found lodged in rocks, its bark and limbs scraped away by centuries locked in ice.
Remnants of a grand forest that vanished 1,300 years ago have begun to reappear in Alaska’s Kenai Fjords National Park, and the return is so subtle that it is largely going unnoticed.
“The log pictured here might at first seem to be just another piece of driftwood coming down Exit Creek, but it tells a much more interesting story,” the park wrote in a Sept. 8 Facebook post.
“This section of wood was once part of an ancient forest that was entombed by Exit Glacier around 1300 years ago, sometime between AD 641-771. As the glacier has continued to melt back these pieces of wood are slowly being uncovered.”
Scientists refer to such debris as interstadial wood, from forests that “thrived prior to the last ice age.” The forests grew over decades-long periods “between glacial advances when local conditions were temporarily conducive to forest growth,” NPS officials say.
The driftwood is often dismissed by tourists as recently fallen trees, but it offers “a unique opportunity to experience and understand the dynamic power of glaciers,” the park says.
Kenai Fjords National Park, created in 1980, describes itself as “a land where the ice age lingers.” “Nearly 40 glaciers flow from the Harding Icefield, Kenai Fjords’ crowning feature.
Wildlife thrives in icy waters and lush forests around this vast expanse of ice,” the park says. “Today, shrinking glaciers bear witness to the effects of our changing climate.”
“Now the glacier is retreating faster, much faster, in winter and summer,” the site reported. The glacier is now receding nearly 300 feet annually, exposing sections of land that were covered for centuries, the NPS reports.
