Ancient humans could do some impressive things with elephant bones

In a new study, University of Colorado Boulder archaeologist Paola Villa and her colleagues surveyed tools excavated from a site in Italy where large numbers of elephants had died. The team discovered that humans at this site roughly 400,000 years ago appropriated those carcasses to produce an unprecedented array of bone tools—some crafted with sophisticated methods that wouldn’t become common for another 100,000 years. 

“We see other sites with bone tools at this time,” said Villa, an adjoint curator at the CU Boulder Museum of Natural History. “But there isn’t this variety of well-defined shapes.”

Villa and her colleagues published their results this month in the journal PLOS ONE.

The study zeroes in on a site called Castel di Guido not far from modern-day Rome. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, it was the location of a gully that had been carved by an ephemeral stream—an environment where 13-foot-tall creatures called straight-tusked elephants (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) quenched their thirst and, occasionally, died. 

Castel di Guido’s hominids made good use of the remains, occupying the site off and on over the years. The researchers report that these Stone Age residents produced tools using a systematic, standardized approach, a bit like a single individual working on a primitive assembly line. 

“At Castel di Guido, humans were breaking the long bones of the elephants in a standardized manner and producing standardized blanks to make bone tools,” Villa said. “This kind of aptitude didn’t become common until much later.”

Stone Age toolbox

These feats of ingenuity came at a significant time for hominids in general.

Right around 400,000 years ago, Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) were just beginning to emerge in Europe. Villa suspects that Castel di Guido’s residents were Neanderthals. 

“About 400,000 years ago, you start to see the habitual use of fire, and it’s the beginning of the Neanderthal lineage,” Villa said. “This is a very important period for Castel di Guido.”

It may have been a productive one, too. In their new study, Villa and her colleagues identified 98 bone tools from Castel di Guido, which was excavated from 1979 to 1991. The findings represent the highest number of flaked bone tools made by pre-modern hominids that researchers have described so far. That rich toolbox offered a wide range of useful items: Some tools were pointed and could, theoretically, have been used to cut meat. Others were wedges that may have been helpful for splitting heavy elephant femurs and other long bones. 

“First you make a groove where you can insert these heavy pieces that have a cutting edge,” Villa said. “Then you hammer it, and at some point, the bone will break.”

But one tool stood out from the rest: The team discovered a single artifact carved from a wild cattle bone that was long and smooth at one end. It resembles what archaeologists call a “lissoir,” or a smoother, a type of tool that hominids used to treat leather. The curious thing: Lissoir tools didn’t become common until about 300,000 years ago.

“At other sites 400,000 years ago, people were just using whatever bone fragments they had available,” Villa said.

Useful finds

Something special, in other words, seemed to be happening at the Italian site. 

Villa doesn’t think that the Castel di Guido hominids were any more intelligent than their counterparts elsewhere in Europe. Instead, these early humans simply used the resources they had lying around. She explained that this region of Italy doesn’t have a lot of naturally occurring, large pieces of flint, so ancient humans couldn’t make many large stone tools. 

What the region might have had a lot of, however, were dead elephants. As the Stone Age progressed, straight-tusked elephants slowly disappeared from Europe. During the era of Castel di Guido’s bone-crafters, these animals may have flocked to watering holes at the site, occasionally dying from natural causes. Humans then found the remains and butchered them for their long bones. 

“The Castel di Guido people had cognitive intellects that allowed them to produce complex bone technology,” Villa said. “At other assemblages, there were enough bones for people to make a few pieces, but not enough to begin a standardized and systematic production of bone tools.”

Mystery of the “East Bay” rock walls in California?

There are Remnants of Ancient stone walls all over the East Bay, and no one knows how old they are, who built them, or why?

Though people have been pondering the enigma of the  Berkeley Mystery Walls for well over a hundred years, no conclusions have been reached, and despite wild speculation, no serious scholarly study has ever been undertaken.

Stretching for over 50 miles, the East Bay “Mystery Walls” are found up and down the hills of the East Bay from Berkeley to San Jose.

The stone walls are up to five feet tall in places and are constructed from boulders of varying sizes, some weighing up to a ton.

The walls run in broken sections, anywhere from a few meters to half a mile in length, and are placed in unlikely and inaccessible places. They seem to serve no known purpose.

They are not continuous or high enough to act as an enclosure, or measure of defence. They are clearly, visibly, very old.

The heavy stones have sunk deep into the ground, and they are overgrown with lichen. After meandering throughout the Oakland hills, they head inland towards Mt. Diablo where they lead to mysterious stone circles, up to 30 feet in diameter. In one place the walls form a spiral 200 feet wide that circles a large boulder.

The Spanish settlers in the area reported that the walls were already there when they arrived, and when they asked the local Ohlone American Indians, they said the same thing.

In 1904, the founder of the Contra Costa Club said the walls were clearly of prehistoric origin and could be evidence that an advanced civilization had once settled in the East Bay.

Also in 1904, the professor of Oriental languages at UC Berkeley declared that the walls were surely the work of settlers from Mongolia, as the Chinese tended to wall in their cities, and the mystery walls were reminiscent of the Great Wall of China.

Others have theorized that they were built by the early Missionaries, and still, others wonder if Sir Frances Drake did not leave colonists behind at the site where he completed the circumnavigation of the globe.

While speculations abound, the “Mystery Walls of the East Bay,” or the “Great Wall of California” remains a mystery to this day.

The insect, which is 49 million years old, appears to have been smashed just a few days ago

A beetle that lived about 49 million years ago is so well-preserved that the insect looks like it could spread its strikingly patterned wing coverings and fly away. That is if it weren’t squashed and fossilized. 

Wing cases, or elytra, are one of the sturdiest parts of a beetle’s exoskeleton, but even so, this level of colour contrast and clarity in a fossil is exceptionally rare, scientists recently reported. 

The beautiful design on the ancient beetle’s elytra prompted researchers to name it Pulchritudo attenboroughi, or Attenborough’s Beauty, after famed naturalist and television host Sir David Attenborough. They wrote in a new study that the pattern is “the most perfectly preserved pigment-based colouration known in fossil beetles.”

When the researchers described the beetle beauty, it was already in the collection of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science (DMNS) in Colorado, where it had been on display since it was identified in 1995.

Palaeontologists found the fossil that year in the Green River Formation; once a group of lakes, this rich fossil site spans Colorado, Wyoming and Utah, and dates to the Eocene epoch (55.8 million to 33.9 million years ago). 

Scientists initially classified the fossil as a long-horned beetle in the Cerambycidae genus. But while its body shape resembled those of long-horned beetles, its hind limbs were unusually short and beefy, which led the museum’s senior curator of entomology — Frank-Thorsten Krell, lead author of the new study — to question if the beetle might belong to a different group. 

In the study, the authors described the beetle as a new genus in a subfamily known for its robust and powerful hind legs: frog-legged leaf beetles.

The fossilized insect, a female, is only the second example of a  frog-legged leaf beetle to be found in North America, Krell told Live Science in an email (no modern beetles in this group live in North America today, according to the study).

On P. attenboroughi’s back, dark and symmetrical circular patterns stand out in sharp contrast against a light background. This suggests that bold patterns were present in beetles at least 50 million years ago, the researchers reported. 

For a beetle to fossilize as well as this one did, “you need a very fine-grained sediment,” Krell said. Silt or clay at the bottom of a lake is the best substrate for fossilizing insects, and the beetle must sink quickly into the silty lake bottom before its body disintegrates. “And then it should not rot, so an oxygen-poor environment on the lake floor is helpful,” he said. 

However, questions still remain about how sediments in the lake bottom preserved the beetle’s high-contrast colours so vividly, Krell added.

Visitors to the DMNS can admire P. attenboroughi for themselves, as the renamed fossil is back on display in the museum’s “Prehistoric Journey” exhibit, representatives said in a statement.

6,000-Year-Old Axe Discovered at George Washington’s Estate

About 6,000 years ago, a precious stone axe that had been skillfully carved and shaped by Native Americans was lost on a ridge overlooking the Potomac River in Virginia. The axe, about seven inches long, had been hewed and smoothed and was narrowed at one end where a wooden handle attached. Its loss must have been keenly felt.

Six millennia later, on Oct. 12, 2018, Dominic Anderson and Jared Phillips, 17-year-hold high school seniors from Ohio, were on an archaeological dig at George Washington’s estate at Mount Vernon, when a stone that looked like a big potato turned up in their sifting screen. Not sure what it was, they asked the Mount Vernon archaeologists working nearby.

It was the lost axe, missing for 60 centuries.

Officials at Mount Vernon announced details of the find. They said it was a major discovery that helps take the story of the site far beyond its place as the home of the first president of what would become the United States.

It “provides a window onto the lives of individuals who lived here nearly 6,000 years ago,” said Sean Devlin, Mount Vernon’s curator of archaeological collections. “Artifacts such as this are a vital resource for helping us learn about the diverse communities who shaped this landscape throughout its long history.”

Mount Vernon officials said the axe had been made from a piece of “greenstone” probably taken from a local river. It had been chipped with a hammer stone to create a cutting edge and then further carved with a harder stone to create a smoother cutting surface. It was then worked even further with a grinding stone, and the groove was cut where the handle would attach. The tool was probably highly valuable.

Devlin said the axe was dated through knowledge of when such tools came into use, by comparing it to other tools from the period, and by dating the methods of its construction. It is believed to be the first such artefact found at Mount Vernon in recent years.

The makers of the axe were probably people who migrated by boat up and down the Potomac River seasonally and may not have lived in fixed villages, Devlin said in a telephone interview. The axe would have been a key possession during their travels.

“When you spend the effort to make tools like this axe, you would have probably carried it with you,” he said. “You wouldn’t just make something like this off the cuff . . . and used it once or twice and chucked it. . . . This is something people invested time in. It definitely isn’t something that was just sort of pitched by the side, just by happenstance.”

The axe was probably used for cutting or carving wood, he said. It probably was not a weapon.

“It’s always fantastic to go out there and see something that’s so evocative,” he said.

The axe was found by students from Archbishop Hoban High School, in Akron, Ohio. Fourteen students, headed by archaeology teacher Jason Anderson, were helping to map out the dimensions of what is believed to be a cemetery for Mount Vernon’s enslaved African Americans and their descendants.

But the area is relatively pristine and has many prehistoric artefacts, said Joe Downer, Mount Vernon’s archaeological field research manager. Downer said Dominic Anderson, the teacher’s son, and Phillips, the second student, called out to him when they found the axe.

“Is this anything?” Downer said they asked.

“I was kind of taken aback when I saw it,” he said in a telephone interview. “I looked at it, and I held it for a minute, and I was like, ‘Well, that might be one of the coolest things we found out here.’ “

“It’s pretty unmistakable when you see it,” he said.

Jason Anderson, the teacher, said the school’s students have been doing archaeology work at Mount Vernon for six years.

“It’s not a field trip,” he said in a telephone interview. “The students are working. This isn’t just kind of kickback . . . and have a fun time. It’s a lot of work, but it’s very fulfilling work.”

“The neatest thing is: The whole purpose we do any of this stuff is to get students interested in archaeology,” he said. “I’m really glad I didn’t find it, or any of the adults found it. I was super, super excited when the students were the ones to sift through it and say, ‘Hey, what is this?’