FEFU archaeologists have found the oldest burials in Ecuador
Archaeologists of the Far Eastern Federal University (FEFU) found three burials of the ancient inhabitants of South America dated from 6 to 10 thousand years ago.
The ancient skull excavated in Loma Atahualpa, Ecuador, 2018, by archaeologists of the Far Eastern Federal University (FEFU)
The excavations were carried out in Atahualpa Anton, Ecuador. The findings belong to the Las Vegas archaeological culture of the Stone Age.
Analysis of artefacts will help scientists understand the development of ancient cultures on the shores of the Pacific Ocean and clarify the origin and development of ancient American civilizations.
Research is being jointly conducted by FEFU and Primorsky Polytechnic University in Guayaquil (ESPOL, Ecuador).
Previously, FEFU scientists investigated the famous Neolithic settlement in Real Alto. In 2018, they decided to study an earlier site in order to trace the development of ancient cultures on the Pacific Coast opposite to the Pacific Coast of Russia (Russian Far East).
“The archaeological site of Loma Atahualpa is more archaic than Real Alto, its materials are transitional from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic.
We excavated three burials that were probably made at different times. This will make it possible to compare their materials and retrieve the new information on the development of ancient cultures in the period from 10 to 6 thousand years ago,” said Alexander Popov, director of the Educational and Scientific Museum of The School of Humanities of FEFU.
Expedition materials are processed by experts from several countries. The stone tools found were examined at Tohoku University (Japan) for traces of mechanical activity in order to understand how they were used. There were also sent samples for radiocarbon dating.
Simultaneously, anthropologists from The Kunstkamera (Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, St. Petersburg) and the Institute of the Problems of Northern development, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Tyumen, Russia) began to study the morphological features of the human remains found.
“In the course of working with Ecuadorian colleagues, we have learned that our research attracted the obvious attention of scientists.
Last year’s symposium, which was organized at the Real Alto Museum, was attended by colleagues from the United States, Canada, Brazil, Japan, Poland and other countries.
We also cooperate with partners from several European countries and the Russian Academy of Sciences,” said Alexander Popov.
Machu Picchu in Peru is 20 Years Older Than Previously Thought, Finds Study
The Inca citadel of Machu Picchu in Peru was occupied from around 1420-1530 AD, several decades earlier than previously thought, according to a new study.
A team of researchers, led by Richard Burger, a professor of anthropology at Yale University, used radiocarbon dating to reveal that the emperor Pachacuti, who built Machu Picchu, rose to power earlier than expected, according to a news release published Tuesday.
This means Pachacuti’s early conquests took place earlier, helping to explain how the Inca Empire became the largest and most powerful in pre-Columbian America.
Based on historical documents, it was thought that Machu Picchu was built after 1440, or maybe even 1450. However, Burger and his team used accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dating of human remains to get a more accurate picture.
AMS works on even small amounts of organic material, which enlarges the pool of skeletons that can be studied. The team looked at 26 individuals from cemeteries at Machu Picchu that were recovered from the site during excavations in 1912.
Machu Picchu is pictured in 1911.
The bodies were buried under boulders, overhanging cliffs or shallow caves, sealed with masonry walls, according to the study. There were also grave goods such as ceramics and bronze and silver shawl pins.
“This is the first study based on scientific evidence to provide an estimate for the founding of Machu Picchu and the length of its occupation,” Burger said in the news release.
The historical records were written by Spanish conquistadors following their takeover of the area, and the results of the study question the merit of drawing conclusions based on these kinds of documents, according to researchers.
Although the study acknowledges the “limitations” of radiocarbon dating, the researchers said the documentary evidence is unreliable.
“Perhaps the time has come for the radiocarbon evidence to assume priority in reconstructions of the chronology of the Inca emperors and the dating of Inca monumental sites such as Machu Picchu,” reads the study.
The study was published in the journal Antiquity.
Revered as one of the world’s great archaeological sites, Machu Picchu perches between two mountains.
The site is made up of roughly 200 stone structures, whose granite walls remain in good shape although the thatched roofs are long gone.
These include a ceremonial bathhouse, temples, granaries and aqueducts. One, known as the Hut of the Caretaker of the Funerary Rock, is thought to have been used for embalming dead aristocrats.
Modern crocodile’s ‘grandfather,’ 150 million years old, discovered in Chile fossil
A 150-million-year-old fossilized skeleton discovered in the mountains of southern Chile was determined to be the ancestor of the modern crocodile, the Argentine Museum of Natural Sciences announced on Friday.
Fossilized bones of the Burkesuchus mallingrandensis are pictured, in Buenos Aires
The species, named Burkesuchus mallingrandensis, was found in 2014 in an Andean fossil deposit near the Patagonian town of Mallin Grande by Argentine and Chilean researchers. Since then it has been analyzed at the Argentine Museum of Natural Sciences (MACN) in Buenos Aires.
The specimen is a “grandfather” of current crocodiles and should allow scientists to understand how they evolved, the museum said.
Technicians Marcelo Isasi, Marcela Milani, and palaeontologist Nicolas Chimento work on the excavation of pieces of the Burkesuchus mallingrandensis, in the Aysen region of Chilean Patagonia
Scientists believe the fossil will help them understand how these reptiles went from being terrestrial to aquatic. Along with other fossils, the discovery supports the idea that South America was the cradle of evolution for crocodiles.
About 200 million years ago “crocodiles were smaller and did not live in water. Palaeontologists always wanted to know what that transition was like,” Federico Agnolin, who found the specimen, told Reuters.
“What Burkesuchus shows is a series of unique traits, which no other crocodile has because they were the first that began to get into the water, into freshwater,” Agnolin said.
Palaeontologist Fernando Novas holds the fossil skull of the Burkesuchus mallingrandensis
According to the MACN, crocodiles appeared at the beginning of the Jurassic period, around the time of the first dinosaurs.
In a few million years they got into the water, thanks to the existence of warm and shallow seas. South America is known for its richness in marine crocodile fossils.
This footage shows a 4,500-year-old mummy which has been unearthed by archaeologists in Peru. She is believed to be a noblewoman and can be seen wrapped in burial cloths.
She was buried in the ancient fishing village of Aspero in northern Peru along with objects featuring carved details of both coastal and jungle animals like birds and monkeys.
Experts believe the discovery is hugely significant and will provide insights into the ancient Caral civilisation.
Archaeologists in Peru have unearthed a 4,500-year-old mummy of a noble woman
The images of the coastal and jungle animals indicate possible trade between Aspero and the city of Caral, the most ancient civilisation of its kind in South America and the precursor of the Incas.
The two regions are located 14 miles from each other.
Ruth Shady, director of the Caral Archaeological zone, explained the significance of the discovery
She said: “In the settlements of the Caral civilisation there are sometimes burials.
“The sacrifice of human beings are not regular, they’re very rare.”
“In this case, it is a woman of 40 to 50 years who was buried with evidence and objects that allow us to identify her as a woman of important social status,” she continued.
“Her remains were with offerings of objects brought from different places,” Ruth continued.
“These objects, carvings depict different images from the jungle.”
“What we can infer on the basis of recovered evidence of a society which began the stage of civilisation formation 5,000 years ago in relation to settlement dwellers in the Super Valley,” she added.
She was perfectly preserved
The Caral civilisation dates back to 2,600 BCE and its archaeological site reportedly predates Inca civilisation by some 4000 years.
1,200-Year-Old Telephone, Amazing Invention of the Ancient Chimu Civilization
As a nomadic cultural historian, my subjects have led me in wildly different directions. I spent every Friday for five years in a dim, dusty reading room in West Orange, New Jersey, formerly a laboratory on the second floor of Thomas Edison’s headquarters, deciphering the blunt-pencilled scrawls of the celebrated inventor.
Two years after my biography of Edison appeared, I found myself labouring up vertiginous stairs at daybreak in Mexico, photographing the faded ocher outlines of winged snakes etched into stone temples at the vast ruins of Teotihuacán. The daunting treks led to a book on Mesoamerican myth, Legends of the Plumed Serpent.
Those two disparate worlds somehow collided unexpectedly on a recent afternoon in the hushed, temperature-controlled precincts of the National Museum of the American Indian storage facility in Suitland, Maryland. There, staffers pushing a rolling cart ushered one of the museum’s greatest treasures into the high-ceilinged room.
Nestled in an acid-free corrugated cardboard container was the earliest known example of telephone technology in the Western Hemisphere, evoking a lost civilization—and the anonymous ancient techie who dreamed it up.
The gourd-and-twine device created 1,200 to 1,400 years ago, remains tantalizingly functional—and too fragile to test out. “This is unique,” NMAI curator Ramiro Matos, an anthropologist and archaeologist who specializes in the study of the central Andes, tells me. “Only one was ever discovered. It comes from the consciousness of an indigenous society with no written language.”
We’ll never know the trial and error that went into its creation. The marvel of acoustic engineering—cunningly constructed of two resin-coated gourd receivers, each three-and-one-half inches long; stretched-hide membranes stitched around the bases of the receivers; and a cotton-twine cord extending 75 feet when pulled taut—arose out of the Chimu empire at its height.
Right: A communication device created more than 1,000 years ago by the Chimu people of Peru (Travis Rathbone/Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian) Background: Chan Chan, Peru
The dazzlingly innovative culture was centred in the Río Moche Valley in northern Peru, wedged between the Pacific Ocean and the western Andes.
“The Chimu were a skillful, inventive people,” Matos tells me as we don sterile gloves and peer into the hollowed interiors of the gourds.
The Chimu, Matos explains, were the first true engineering society in the New World, known as much for their artisanry and metalwork as for the hydraulic canal-irrigation system they introduced, transforming desert into agricultural lands.
The god Naymlap on his boat, gold plate, Chimu 1000-1450 AD.
The artefact’s recent past is equally mysterious. Somehow—no one knows under what circumstances—it came into the hands of a Prussian aristocrat, Baron Walram V. Von Schoeler.
A shadowy Indiana Jones-type adventurer, Von Schoeler began excavating in Peru during the 1930s. He developed the “digging bug,” as he told the New York Times in 1937, at the age of 6, when he stumbled across evidence of a prehistoric village on the grounds of his father’s castle in Germany.
Von Schoeler himself may have unearthed the gourd telephone. By the 1940s, he had settled in New York City and amassed extensive holdings of South American ethnographic objects, eventually dispersing his collections to museums around the United States.
The sophisticated culture was eclipsed when the Inca emperor Tupac Yupanqui conquered the Chimu king Minchancaman around 1470.
During its heyday, the urban centre of Chan Chan was the largest adobe metropolis in pre-Columbian America. The central nucleus covered 2.3 square miles.
Chan Chan sculpture and architecture
Today, the angular contours of ten immense compounds, once surrounded by thick, 30-foot-high walls, are visible. The compounds, or ciudadelas, erected successively by ten Chimu kings, were subdivided into labyrinths of corridors, kitchens, courtyard gardens, wells, burial sites, supply rooms and residential and administrative chambers, or audiencias.
Like the Inca, Matos says, the Chimu were organized as “a top-down society; this instrument would have been made only for, and used by, a member of the elite, perhaps a priest.”
Walls within walls and secluded apartments in the ciudadelas preserved stratification between the ruling elite and the middle and working classes. The NMAI telephone, Matos says, was “a tool designed for an executive level of communication”—perhaps for a courtier-like assistant required to speak into a gourd mouthpiece from an anteroom, forbidden face-to-face contact with a superior conscious of status and of security concerns.
Contemplating the brainstorm that led to the Chimu telephone—a eureka moment undocumented for posterity—summons up its 21st-century equivalent. On January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs strode onto a stage at the Moscone Center in San Francisco and announced, “This is the day I have been looking forward to for two and a half years.”
As he swiped the touchscreen of the iPhone, it was clear that the paradigm in communications technology had shifted. The unsung Edison of the Chimu must have experienced an equivalent, incandescent exhilaration when his (or her) device first transmitted sound from chamber to chamber.
Satellite Images Aided the Discovery of an Ancient Civilization Buried in the Amazon
Long before the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, one of the world’s largest rainforests teemed with people who transformed the woods around them, according to archaeologists who have found new evidence of farms, settlements and roads buried beneath the flora of Brazil’s Amazon Basin.
An aerial photo shows an earthwork located in the Upper Tapajos Basin of Mato Grosso Brazil.
A retiree poring over online satellite images led archaeologists to the ancient earthworks, the most recent in a series of finds made possible by satellite imagery, airborne radar, and drone-mounted cameras that are making ecologists and conservationists abandon longstanding notions of the Amazon as a virgin wilderness.
“It is all one type or another of the human-influenced forest,” said anthropologist Michael Heckenberger at the University of Florida in Gainesville, who wasn’t part of the new project. In the Amazon, “they were weaving their cities out of the forest itself.”
The findings include 81 pre-Columbian clusters of earthworks in the Upper Tapajos Basin, located along the southern rim of the Amazon in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso.
Dating to 1250‒1500 A.D., the sites range from small ditched enclosures to large settlements with multiple mounds, plazas and causeways, the archaeologists said.
Francisco Nakahara, a retired financial manager in São Paulo who studies free online satellite photos as a hobby, first spotted the traces of circular earthworks, the researchers said. The archaeologists, who reported their findings in Nature Communications Tuesday, then catalogued the discoveries using Zoom Earth and Google Earth.
To verify the finds, the team surveyed and excavated 24 sites, unearthing potsherds and decorated ceramics. In surrounding fields, they found widespread evidence of distinctive dark enriched soil—a blend of charcoal and nutrients unlike normal Amazon earth—suggesting the land was used for intensive farming.
“It is likely that many of these sites were fortified settlements,” said archaeologist Jonas Gregorio de Souza at the U.K.’s University of Exeter, who was the lead author of the study. “These regions, once considered marginal, were probably very densely populated.”
At their height, the settlements may have been home to as many as one million people. Most of them likely succumbed to diseases brought by European explorers and slavers, while the forest reclaimed their homes, roads and plazas, the scientists said.
“Many parts of the Americas now thought of as pristine forest are really abandoned gardens,” said Colorado State University archaeologist Christopher Fisher, who uses aerial laser radar to explore sites in Central America covered by the forest canopy. “When you are on the ground, you cannot really see the landscape. You need a bird’s-eye view.”
A field archaeologist stands in a ditch that forms part of a large enclosure that once may have encircled a fortified village in the Upper Tapajos Basin.
Last year, researchers from Brazil, the U.K. and Canada led by Jennifer Watling at the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography at the University of São Paulo announced their discovery of 455 huge earthworks spread across hundreds of thousands of acres in the nearby Brazilian state of Acre. They also date to pre-Columbian times.
Outlined by ditches up to 12 yards wide and 12 feet deep, these circular and square enclosures are known as geoglyphs were carved into the soil within woodlands that had been managed for thousands of years, the scientists said. Until exposed by modern deforestation, they had been concealed for centuries by the surrounding rainforest.
And in the headwaters of the Xingu River in the Amazon basin, Dr. Heckenberger and his colleagues discovered remains of broad highways and dozens of fortified pre-Columbian villages. The area between these urban centres had been cultivated or managed as parkland, he said.
Such ancient human disturbances still affect the forests today, altering patterns of growth and the mix of tree species. That in turn can make it difficult for climate scientists to judge how much carbon from greenhouse emissions can be absorbed by the Amazon rainforest every year.
“These forests may be much younger than we think they are,” said ecologist Crystal McMichael at the University of Amsterdam, who wasn’t involved in the latest research.
The oldest civilisation in the Americas: Have you heard of it?
Almost five thousand years ago, humankind came together in a way never seen before. We began to turn our backs on the traditional hunter-gatherer form of survival.
Tribal communities based around families began to form into larger hierarchical systems. The techniques to build permanent structures were developed. And the worship of deities was taken to a new level.
Civilisations were being born – and one of the first was Caral in Peru.
I find it a bit strange the way this happened almost simultaneously (in the grand scheme of human history) around the world – but just in a few select places.
Experts debate whether this happened independently or whether the idea spread across the world. Regardless, it was the dawn of a new era for mankind.
In the Americas, it was on the coast of what is now Peru that the first cradle of civilisation emerged in about 2600BC. On a site called Caral, these ancient people with bountiful food on hand in the rich ocean, rose at around the same time as five other major civilisations.
Caral was eerily similar to some of the other great cultures growing at the same time. They built stone pyramids here, for instance, at exactly the same time that the Egyptians were building their much more famous counterparts.
But there were also differences. No artwork adorned the structures of Caral in Peru. Unlike in Egypt or Mesopotamia, the people of Caral did not seem to have the same aesthetic tastes (or knowledge).
There is no evidence they made or used ceramics, another key utensil and form of artwork in other civilisations. But they did have textiles.
In fact, the textiles were for more than just clothing and decoration. It’s believed the people of Caral also used textiles as their form of writing. Strings of different lengths with knots in various places are one way they could have communicated.
If this new advanced culture was not famous for art or ceramics, it was its architecture that was its strength. The same grand pyramids and temples of worship that were built here thousands of years ago are still partly standing around me on the day I visit.
They don’t just prove that the Caral civilisation was advanced enough to build these large monuments – it also shows that they had an advanced religious ideology.
The pyramids and other important structured would certainly have been used for worship and other ceremonies.
Although Caral-Supe is not one of the most famous sights in the country, I think it’s one of the most interesting places to visit in Peru. There’s a fascinating story behind it and there’s much more to see than you might expected for something that is 5000 years old!
The Mythical Peruvian Giants, Whose Skeletons Were Seen By Conquistadors
There is one special area on our planet where there are especially many stories and legends about people of very large stature. Moreover, these stories are not thousands of years old, but only a few hundred.
Stories about the Peruvian giants have been known since the 16th century when the first Spanish conquistadors reached this region.
One of the earliest reports of the Peruvian giants is the story of conquistador Pedro Cieza de Leon, described in the folio Royal Inca Commentaries, Volume 1. This man apparently did not see the giants with his own eyes but talked with those who saw them.
In his report, he described that once people of great growth sailed on their large rafts from reeds to the shore where the village of local Indians stood. The village was located on the peninsula of Santa Elena, which is now the territory of Ecuador.
The giants landed from the rafts on the peninsula and set up their camp near the conquistadors. They apparently decided to settle here for a long time, because immediately they began to dig deep wells in order to extract water from them.
“Some of them were so tall that a man of ordinary size would barely reach their knees. Their limbs were proportional to the body, but their huge heads with hair to their shoulders were monstrous. Their eyes were huge like plates and their faces had no beards.
Some of them were dressed in animal skins, but some were in their natural state (without clothes). Not a single woman was visible among them. When they set up the camp, they began to dig deep wells for water. They dug them in stony soil and then built strong stone wells. The water in them was excellent, always cool, and tasted good. “
As soon as the giants set up their camp, they immediately made a bloodthirsty raid on the village of local Indians. According to the description of de Leon, they robbed everything they could grab and ate everything they could eat, including people!
It was a terrible sight when these huge people hung over the trees and the Indians fleeing from them, who practically could not defend themselves from them. Then, on the site of the devastated village, the giants built their large huts and stayed here to fish and hunt in the local forests.
This story ended with a completely surreal story when a “shining angel” appeared in the sky and drove all these giants away.
Despite this, de Leon himself believed that this story was completely true and described that he personally saw the huge stone wells constructed by the giants. He also writes that other conquistadors saw the wells and the remains of huge houses that could not be built by local Indians.
Further, de Leon writes about even more curious things. He writes that the conquistadors found in this area human bones of very large sizes, as well as pieces of teeth that were large and heavy.
“In 1550, in the city of Lima, I heard that when His Excellency Don Antonio de Mendoza, the viceroy and governor of New Spain was here, some bones were found of people who were huge and could belong to giants.
I also heard that whole deposits of giants’ bones were found in an ancient tomb in the city of Mexico City or nearby. Since many locals claim to have seen them firsthand, we can assume that these giants really exist and can belong to a single race. “
Another proof of the existence of the Peruvian giants can be found in the records of Captain Juan Olmos, who in 1543 dug up ancient burials in the Trujillo Valley and allegedly discovered bones of people of very large stature there.
Later, another giant skeleton was found in the province of Tucuman by conquistador Augustine de Zarate and his people. In general, similar stories came from the Spaniards who visited Peru throughout the 16th century and continued to appear in the 17th century.
In 1620, the Jesuit priest and missionary Pablo Jose Arriaga in his manuscript “On the Eradication of Idolatry in Peru” wrote the following:
“They (representatives of the Spanish inspectors) led us to the other side of the village, where there was a very large cave and the remains of Giants lay in it. Among them were three giant bodies with deformed heads (elongated skulls) wrapped in combi (ceremonial fabric).
These giants were considered the ancestors of all these people in the village who worshiped and worshiped them, even sacrifices were made in their honor. Then they (Spaniards) burned all these bodies.”
In the 18th and 19th centuries, stories about Peruvian giants also appeared, but they were becoming smaller and they were already perceived as myths and legends, and not something real.
