A pair of lynx-shaped gold earrings have been unearthed near the ruins of Ani, the once great metropolis known as the “city of a thousand and one churches”, on Turkey’s eastern border, across the Akhuryan River from Armenia.
The Medieval earrings, which weigh 22 grams and have engraved star, droplet, and crescent motifs, are now preserved in the Kars Archaeology and Ethnography Museum.
The priceless artifacts, which astounded archaeologists with their exquisite engravings, are scheduled to be displayed briefly at the Kars Archaeology and Ethnography Museum in 2023 after having been carefully stored in a warehouse up until then.
Yavuz Çetin, director of Kars Archaeology and Ethnography Museum, told Anadolu Agency (AA) that Kars has hosted many civilizations throughout history as it is located on the border of countries and is on the historical Silk Road’s route.
A pair of lynx-shaped gold earrings was discovered near the Ani Ruins, in Kars, Türkiye.
Stating that it is possible to see the cultural assets of many civilizations in Kars, Çetin said that there are many historical immovable pieces of cultural heritage such as the Köşevenk and Mağazberk archaeological sites in and around the Ani Ruins.
Çetin noted that people have benefited from animals throughout history and attributed physical or characteristic meanings to them.
“The lynx from the feline family is one of these animals. People were influenced by the ferocity and power of this animal and used it in artistic elements,” he said.
“The existence of the lynx is also known in our Kars region. A couple of lynx-shaped earrings in our museum were found in the village of Subatan, about 16 kilometers (9.9 miles) north of Ani, and brought to us in 1994.”
Çetin said that they would exhibit the earrings next year.
A pair of lynx-shaped gold earrings was discovered near the Ani Ruins, in Kars, Türkiye.
“Our earrings are kept in the warehouse. We plan to temporarily display them to our public in 2023. I invite everyone to see this magnificent work. Our earrings are lynx-shaped, highly decorated earrings … The motifs on them show the artistic elegance of the earrings.”
Ani, which was founded more than 1,600 years ago, was located on several trade routes and grew to become a walled city with over 100,000 residents by the 11th century.
Ani was in steep decline by the 1300s, and it was completely abandoned by the 1700s.
Stone Points Found in Idaho Dated to 15,700 Years Ago
Stone projectile points discovered buried inside and outside of pit features at the Cooper’s Ferry site, Area B. Credit: Loren Davis
Oregon State University archaeologists have uncovered projectile points in Idaho that are thousands of years older than any previously found in the Americas, helping to fill in the history of how early humans crafted and used stone weapons.
The 13 full and fragmentary projectile points, razor sharp and ranging from about half an inch to 2 inches long, are from roughly 15,700 years ago, according to carbon-14 dating. That’s about 3,000 years older than the Clovis fluted points found throughout North America, and 2,300 years older than the points previously found at the same Cooper’s Ferry site along the Salmon River in present-day Idaho.
The findings were published today in the journal Science Advances.
“From a scientific point of view, these discoveries add very important details about what the archaeological record of the earliest peoples of the Americas looks like,” said Loren Davis, an anthropology professor at OSU and head of the group that found the points. “It’s one thing to say, ‘We think that people were here in the Americas 16,000 years ago’; it’s another thing to measure it by finding well-made artifacts they left behind.”
Previously, Davis and other researchers working the Cooper’s Ferry site had found simple flakes and pieces of bone that indicated human presence about 16,000 years ago. But the discovery of projectile points reveals new insights into the way the first Americans expressed complex thoughts through technology at that time, Davis said.
The Salmon River site where the points were found is on traditional Nez Perce land, known to the tribe as the ancient village of Nipéhe. The land is currently held in public ownership by the federal Bureau of Land Management.
The points are revelatory not just in their age, but in their similarity to projectile points found in Hokkaido, Japan, dating to 16,000–20,000 years ago, Davis said.
Their presence in Idaho adds more detail to the hypothesis that there are early genetic and cultural connections between the ice age peoples of Northeast Asia and North America.
“The earliest peoples of North America possessed cultural knowledge that they used to survive and thrive over time. Some of this knowledge can be seen in the way people made stone tools, such as the projectile points found at the Cooper’s Ferry site,” Davis said. “By comparing these points with other sites of the same age and older, we can infer the spatial extents of social networks where this technological knowledge was shared between peoples.”
Overview of the Area B excavations at the Cooper’s Ferry site in 2017. Credit: Loren Davis
Excavator at work recording artifacts excavated from a pit feature at the Cooper’s Ferry site. Credit: Loren Davis
These slender projectile points are characterized by two distinct ends, one sharpened and one stemmed, as well as a symmetrical beveled shape if looked at head-on. They were likely attached to darts, rather than arrows or spears, and despite the small size, they were deadly weapons, Davis said.
“There’s an assumption that early projectile points had to be big to kill large game; however, smaller projectile points mounted on darts will penetrate deeply and cause tremendous internal damage,” he said. “You can hunt any animal we know about with weapons like these.”
These discoveries add to the emerging picture of early human life in the Pacific Northwest, Davis said. “Finding a site where people made pits and stored complete and broken projectile points nearly 16,000 years ago gives us valuable details about the lives of our region’s earliest inhabitants.”
Overview of the Cooper’s Ferry site in the lower Salmon River canyon of western Idaho, USA.
Overview of pit feature 78 during the process of excavation.
(A) map showing the location of the Cooper’s Ferry site in the context of Pacific Northwest environments at 16,000 years ago; (B) aerial image (from Google Earth) showing the Cooper’s Ferry excavations; (C) site map showing the locations of excavation Area A and Area B.
The newly discovered pits are part of the larger Cooper’s Ferry record, where Davis and colleagues have previously reported a 14,200-year-old fire pit and a food-processing area containing the remains of an extinct horse. All told, they found and mapped more than 65,000 items, recording their locations to the millimeter for precise documentation.
The projectile points were uncovered over multiple summers between 2012 and 2017, with work supported by a partnership held between OSU and the BLM. All excavation work has been completed and the site is now covered. The BLM installed interpretive panels and a kiosk at the site to describe the work.
Stratigraphic model of the Cooper’s Ferry site, showing the distribution of cultural features (e.g., fire hearths, pits), radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence ages, sediment layers and buried soils as exposed by excavations in Area A and Area B.
Davis has been studying the Cooper’s Ferry site since the 1990s when he was an archaeologist with the BLM. Now, he partners with the BLM to bring undergraduate and graduate students from OSU to work the site in the summer.
The team also works closely with the Nez Perce tribe to provide field opportunities for tribal youth and to communicate all findings.
Possible Funerary Structures Uncovered at Peru’s Huaca Bandera
Culture Ministry’s researchers digging at Huaca Bandera —located in the district of Pacora in Lambayeque region— have found architectural structures of the Mochica elite, as well as human remains linked to important ancestral iconography.
These resources created 95 jobs for professional and working-class people, mostly people from the aforementioned Lambayeque’s district.
According to Fernandez, the work at Huaca Bandera included archaeological research studies —both field and desktop— preventive conservation practices, archaeometry research, and dating using radiocarbon techniques.
Walled Complex
Archaeologist Manuel Curo, the project’s director, commented that at this stage the team continued to study Walled Complex 2 —one of the areas used by ruling elites in the lower valley of La Leche-Motupe in 850 B.C. during the transition from the Mochica to Lambayeque periods.
Moreover, the specialist explained that it has been possible to document the design of the pyramidal platform at Walled Complex 2 and its main architectural elements, particularly those found in its upper platform.
“Here, we have found a red and cream-colored ceremonial bench, a wall pierced with rows of niches —with the same colors— in reverse order, and a burial place located in the central part of these structures,” he noted.
These elements were also present in a Mochica vessel, whose iconography consists of a burial ceremony for an elite person, in a coffin that is placed into a grave by means of ropes, led by two mythological figures.
The scene takes place in settings similar to those of Huaca Bandera.
Thus, the researchers believe that this could confirm that said structures were a symbol of power, as they would be the environments where Huaca Bandera leaders operated, as well as the place where they met death.
‘Complete lack of sunlight’ killed a Renaissance-era toddler, CT scan reveals
The child mummy, a member of the Austrian aristocracy, was found wrapped in a silk-hooded coat.
A “virtual autopsy” of the mummified remains of a toddler buried inside a family crypt in Austria reveals that the child died from a lack of sunlight, a new study finds.
Believed to be Reichard Wilhelm, the first-born son of a Count of Starhemberg, a prominent member of the Austrian aristocracy, the young boy lived during the Renaissance (between the 14th and 17th centuries) and died when he was just 10 to 18 months old.
Yet despite his privileged upbringing, a team of scientists from Germany concluded that he experienced “extreme nutritional deficiency and a tragically early death from pneumonia,” according to a statement.
Scientists made the discovery while performing a CT scan and radiocarbon dating of the mummy, which was found wrapped in a hooded silk coat, his left hand draped across his abdomen.
The scans showed malformations on his ribs, classic signs of malnutrition, which “points to rickets,” according to the study, published on Oct. 26 in the journal Frontiers in Medicine.
Known as a rachitic rosary, those malformations occur when knobs of rib bone begin to resemble rosary beads due to a vitamin D deficiency.
The boy’s remaining soft tissues showed that he was also overweight when he died, eliminating the possibility that he was underfed.
Detail of the mummy, his left hand placed on his abdomen.
“The combination of obesity along with a severe vitamin deficiency can only be explained by a generally ‘good’ nutritional status along with an almost complete lack of sunlight exposure,” Andreas Nerlich, the study’s lead author and a pathologist from the Academic Clinic Munich-Bogenhausen in Germany, said in the statement. “We have to reconsider the living conditions of high aristocratic infants of previous populations.”
Researchers found the child buried inside a wooden coffin that proved to be too small for him, based on a deformation of his skull.
The crypt was reserved exclusively for descendants of the Counts of Starhemberg, specifically their first-born sons who would have been titleholders, as well as the men’s wives.
Radiocarbon dating of a skin sample suggested he was buried between 1550 and 1635, however, building records indicate that the crypt underwent a renovation around 1600, so he likely was buried after that date. He was the youngest person buried in the crypt, according to the statement.
A vast tunnel found beneath an ancient Egyptian temple
The tunnel is about 6.6 feet (2 meters) high and is similar to another ancient tunnel built at Samos in Greece.
Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered a vast tunnel beneath a temple in the ancient city of Taposiris Magna, west of Alexandria.
The 4,281-foot-long (1,305 meters) tunnel, which brought water to thousands of people in its heyday, was discovered by an Egyptian-Dominican Republic archaeological team, the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said in a statement.
Ancient Egyptian builders constructed the 6.6-foot-high (2 m) tunnel at a depth of about 65 feet (20 m) beneath the ground, Kathleen Martínez, a Dominican archaeologist and director of the team that discovered the tunnel, told Live Science in an email. “
It is an exact replica of the Eupalinos Tunnel in Greece, which is considered one of the most important engineering achievements of antiquity,” Martinez said.
The Eupalinos tunnel, in Samos, a Greek island in the eastern Aegean Sea, also carried water.
Archaeologists found two alabaster heads in the tunnel.
The archaeology of the Taposiris Magna temple is complex. Parts of it are submerged under water and the temple has been hit by numerous earthquakes over the history of its existence, causing extensive damage. The tunnel at Taposiris Magna dates to the Ptolemaic period (304 B.C. to 30 B.C.), a time when Egypt was ruled by a dynasty of kings descended from one of Alexander the Great’s generals.
Finds within the tunnel included two alabaster heads: one of which likely depicts a king, and the other represents another high-ranking person, Martinez said.
Their exact identities are unknown. Coins and the remains of statues of Egyptian deities were also found in the tunnel, Martinez said.
At the time the tunnel was built, Taposiris Magna had a population of between 15,000 and 20,000 people, Martinez said.
The tunnel was built beneath a temple that honored Osiris, an ancient Egyptian god of the underworld, and Isis, an Egyptian goddess who was Osiris’s wife.
Previous work in the temple uncovered a hoard of coins minted with the face of Cleopatra VII. Excavations at Taposiris Magna and analysis of artifacts from the site are ongoing.
During the ongoing archaeological excavations in the ancient city of Aizanoi in the Çavdarhisar district of the western province of Kütahya, which is on the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List, the heads of the Greek mythology gods Eros and Dionysus and the demigod Herakles have come to light.
Another find was the statue of a man with a height of 2 meters and 10 centimeters.
The statues date back 2,000 years ago, stated Gökhan Coşkun, a professor from Kütahya Dumlupınar University and also the excavation director. “Only half of its pedestal and one foot is missing in the male statue, while other parts are completely preserved.”
Excavations in the ancient city of Aizanoi have been carried out particularly in the Penkalas Stream, with a team of 80 workers and 20 technical staff.
The ancient city, which dates back to 3,000 B.C., is believed to be one of the metropolises of the period with its historical structures, such as theater, stadium, agora and Zeus Temple.
Noting that the restoration of the Roman-era marble bridge, called No: 2, was completed during the excavations in Penkalas Stream, Coşkun said that works have been continuing on the completely ruined bridge, called No: 3.
Stating that new artifacts are found every day, Coşkun said, “This year, we found surprising finds that made us very excited during our work in the area where the bridge is located.
Since the previous season, we have been finding many large and small pieces of marble sculptures in this area, some of which, if complete, would reach 3 to 3.5 meters in height. This season, we uncovered many blocks of bridge No: 3. Also, we found a sundial and many marble statue pieces.”
Expressing that they were very excited about the statue they found in the recent excavations, Coşkun said, “This statue is almost the only intact statue we have found so far.
It is a statue of a man with a height of 2 meters and 10 centimeters, missing only half of its pedestal and one foot. Other parts are completely preserved. I hope that we will find this missing piece in 2023.”
As for the other statue heads belonging to Greek mythology, Coskun said, “Among these is a Dionysus head with a height of approximately 40 centimeters. We also found a Herakles head.
In 2020, we found the body of a Herakles statue. But this head does not belong to this body.
Apart from this, there are also statue heads of various gods and goddesses of the Ancient Greek pantheon. One of the prominent examples is the Eros head, which is about 20 centimeters high.
The artifacts we found in this area are from different periods, but we can say that the statue pieces date back 1,800-2,000 years ago.”
Study Suggests Europe’s Hunter-Gatherers Produced Pottery
Researchers conducted experiments to see how hunter-gatherers might have used early pottery to cook food.
Broken, charred and still crusted with nearly 8000-year-old food, the remnants of ancient pottery found across northern Eurasia wouldn’t be mistaken for fine china.
But the advent of this durable technology—used to cook and store abundant plant and animal resources—was a huge step forward for hunter-gatherers in this part of the globe. It was also home-grown, new research suggests.
For decades, researchers believed pottery arrived in Europe along with agriculture and domesticated animals, as part of a “package” of technologies that spread northward from Anatolia beginning about 9000 years ago.
Pots found in Northern Europe dating around the same time were thought to be mere knockoffs by hunter-gatherers copying their more sophisticated farmer neighbors, says Thomas Terberger, an archaeologist at the University of Göttingen who was not involved with the new research. “A generation ago, nobody looked to the East.”
But a study published today in Nature Human Behaviour tells a different story. Beginning about 20,000 years ago, the know-how needed to make and use pottery spread among groups of hunter-gatherers in the Far East.
This containers replaced less durable vessels made of hide and skin, and were better able to withstand fire than wood bowls. Starting about 7900 years ago, clay pots became common from the Ural Mountains to southern Scandinavia within just a few centuries.
To map pottery’s spread, Rowan McLaughlin, an archaeologist at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, and colleagues analyzed broken shards collected from 156 sites around the Baltic Sea and across the European part of the former Soviet Union—many stored in museums in modern-day Russia and Ukraine.
By sampling burned crusts of food stuck to the broken pots—remnants of bygone meals—they were able to get hundreds of new radiocarbon dates.
Fat residues revealed whether meat from ruminants like deer or cattle was on the menu, or whether people were boiling fish soup, pork, or plants instead. And comparing decorations and pot shapes helped the team map how pottery trends spread from community to community.
Though the raw material to make clay pots was widely available, the technical knowledge needed to shape and fire them must have been passed from person to person. New cooking and food preparation techniques had to be learned as well.
Put together, the data suggest pottery spread across parts of northern Eurasia rapidly, the team reports. Within a few hundred years, the technology swept north and west from the Caspian Sea, all the way to the eastern shore of the Baltic and southern Scandinavia.
The speed of the spread suggests potterymaking knowledge passed from group to group, rather than being introduced by new people migrating into the region. “There’s no way a population could grow that fast,” McLaughlin says.
Burned crusts of food on a pot used by early hunter-gatherers in northeastern Europe about 7500 years ago
Lucy Kubiak-Martens, an archaeobotanist at BIAX Consult, a commercial archaeology company in the Netherlands who was not involved with the paper, agrees with that interpretation. “It seems the knowledge traveled, not people,” she says.
If so, that would contrast with how similar technology spread out from Anatolia: Recent genetic evidence suggests that around the same time, farmers from Anatolia brought their own pottery styles and traditions with them as they expanded into southern Europe.
More research could help unravel exactly how it spread. For example, if hunter-gatherer societies were patrilocal—with women leaving home to marry men from other communities—“pottery could be a female craft that spread from village to village through marriage,” McLaughlin says.
The study provides evidence that hunter-gatherers were far more sophisticated than archaeologists once assumed, argues co-author Henny Piezonka, an archaeologist at Christian-Albrecht University of Kiel. In fact, she says, mobile hunter-gatherer societies from prehistoric Japan to the shores of the Baltic adopted new technologies without abandoning their roving lifestyles: Rather than being a step behind farmers, they were simply on a different path altogether.
“Hunter-gatherer societies are not backwards or simple, but were innovators in their own right,” Piezonka says.
The Iron Curtain, meanwhile, may have further obscured the narrative of prehistoric pottery’s spread west across Asia. “Hunter-gatherer pottery existed all along northern Eurasia for 10,000 years,” Piezonka says, “but the evidence was mostly published in Russian, and European archaeologists just didn’t know about it.” The result was a Euro-centric tale of triumphant farmers and pastoralists introducing important technologies to Europe, she says.
That began to change in the late 1990s, when researchers from Western Europe joined forces with colleagues in Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltics. The new study reflects this more recent legacy of collaboration. Submitted before Russia invaded Ukraine in February, it includes co-authors from Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, although the authors say several Ukrainian scholars withdrew their names from the final publication to avoid copublishing with Russian academics.
“It’s a very nice example of how cooperation between colleagues in Eastern and Western Europe emerged in the last 20 years,” Terberger says. “It’s extremely sad all these contacts have been so damaged by the Russian war in Ukraine.”
Humans have been using bear skins to protect themselves from cold weather for at least 300,000 years. This is suggested by cut marks on the metatarsal and phalanx of a cave bear discovered at the Lower Paleolithic site of Schöningen in Lower Saxony, Germany.
This makes it one of the oldest examples of this type in the world.
The research was conducted by an archaeological team from the University of Tübingen, the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment (SHEP) in Tübingen, together with a colleague from Leiden University.
This study was published in the Journal of Human Evolution.
“Cut marks on bones are often interpreted in archaeology as an indication of the utilization of meat,” explains Tübingen researcher Ivo Verheijen. “But there is hardly any meat to be re-covered from hand and foot bones. In this case, we can attribute such fine and precise cut marks to the careful stripping of the skin.”
A bear’s winter coat consists of both long outer hairs that form an airy protective layer and short, dense hairs that provide particularly good insulation. Bears, including extinct cave bears, needed a highly insulating coat for hibernation.
“These newly discovered cut marks are an indication that about 300,000 years ago, people in northern Europe were able to survive in winter thanks in part to warm bear skins,” says the researcher, a doctoral student in the Schöningen research project and employee of the State Heritage Office of Lower Saxony.
Strong indication for hunting
But how were the bear skins obtained? “Schöningen plays a crucial role in the discussion about the origin of hunting, because the world’s oldest spears were discovered here,” Ivo Verheijen continues. Did the people of that time also hunt bears? “There are some indications for this,” says the researcher.
“If only adult animals are found at an archaeological site, this is usually considered an indication of hunting—at Schöningen, all the bear bones and teeth belonged to adult individuals.” In addition, he said, bear skin must be removed shortly after the animal’s death, otherwise the hair is lost and the skin becomes unusable. “Since the animal was skinned, it couldn’t have been dead for long at that point,” Verheijen explains.
The find opens up a new perspective, says Tübingen Professor Nicholas Conard, head of the Schöningen research project. The location of the cut marks indicates that the cave bears were also exploited for their skins.
“So animals were not only used for food, but their pelts were also essential for survival in the cold,” Conard says. The use of bear skins is likely a key adaptation of early humans to the climate in the north.
