A 6,000-year-old skull found in a cave in Taiwan possibly confirms the legend of an Indigenous tribe
A team of researchers with members from Australia, Japan, Taiwan and Vietnam found a 6,000-year-old skull and femur bones in a cave in a mountainous part of Taiwan that might prove the existence of an ancient Indigenous tribe.
The preceramic human remains from No. 5 Cave (1) and representative stone tools from the preceramic layer, including the cobble chopping tools (2), flake tools (3), and fine-material lithic tools made of quartz (4) of Xiaoma (after Huang and Chen 1990).
In their paper published in the journal World Archaeology, the group describes the skull, where it was found and what it might represent.
In Taiwan, there have been stories passed down through the generations about a tribe of short, dark-skinned people that once lived in mountainous parts of the island. But until now, there has been no physical evidence of them.
In this new effort, the researchers found skull and leg bones in a cave that have been dated back to approximately 6,000 years ago—a time before the ancestors of people who are alive on the island arrived.
In studying DNA from the skull, the researchers found it close to African samples from around the same time period. But they also found that its size and shape resemble that of Negritos, who lived in parts of what is now South Africa and in the Philippines.
A study of bones left behind in those areas showed them to be quite short with small body size. Femur bones found near the skull were from the same person as the skull, a young woman.
The researchers estimate she stood approximately 1.3 meters tall.
The researchers suggest their findings confirm the existence of the ancient people in Taiwan but they do not explain what might have happened to them.
They were apparently gone by the time other early Austronesian groups of people began arriving.
The researchers also note that the mention of small, dark-skinned people was made in documents from the Quin Dynasty, and all but one of the 16 Austronesian groups living in Taiwan today have stories that describe small, dark-skinned people who once lived in the mountains.
Such tales differ, however, between groups, the researchers note, with some believing that the earlier people were ancestors of theirs. Others see them as former enemies.
One group claims to have killed off the last of the ancient people 1,000 years ago.
Banana Domestication More Complex Than Previously Thought
People like to know where their food comes from, but even experts are throwing up their hands when it comes to the origins of the modern banana.
Breeding helped get rid of wild bananas’ seeds to create the fleshy fruit cherished today.
An extensive genetic analysis of more than 100 varieties of wild and cultivated bananas unpeels the fruit’s tangled history of domestication and reveals the existence of three previously unknown—and possibly still living—ancestors.
Banana experts want to track down those mysterious forebears to see whether their genes might help keep modern banana crops healthy.
“Banana domestication is much more complicated than I had realized previously,” says Loren Rieseberg, an evolutionary biologist at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, who was not involved in the study.
About 7000 years ago, bananas were not the seedless, fleshy fruits we know today. The flesh was pitted with black seeds and nearly inedible. Instead, people ate the banana tree’s flowers or its underground tubers. They also stripped fibres from the trunklike stem to make rope and clothes. Banana trees back then were “very far from the bananas we see in people’s fields today,” says Julie Sardos, a genetic resources scientist at the Alliance of Bioversity International, which stockpiles banana varieties.
Scientists do know the banana’s predominant wild ancestor is a species named Musa acuminata, which occurs from India to Australia. Most researchers agree that Papua New Guinea is where domesticated bananas as we know them first appeared. Today, there are many banana varieties—more than 1000 at the last count.
Over the course of their domestication, the modern bananas available in supermarkets lost their seeds and became fleshier and sweeter. But it’s been hard to pin down exactly how and when that domestication occurred.
Complicating matters, some bananas have the usual two sets of chromosomes, whereas others have three sets or more, suggesting at least some modern bananas are hybrids that resulted from the interbreeding of two or more varieties, or even different species.
There’s good reason to try to tap into the modern banana’s deep historical gene pool: The $8 billion banana industry, which produces 100 billion bananas annually, is threatened by diseases such as Panama disease and banana bacterial wilt.
Banana breeders are scrambling to find ways to combat such pathogens, particularly the ones that attack the Cavendish banana, which accounts for more than half of all the bananas exported to the United States and Europe.
Some are collecting wild relatives and obscure varieties that are more resistant to disease. But introducing genes from distant ancestors could also help steel modern-day bananas. Genetic analyses can help piece together the history of domestication and pin down living members of those ancestral fruits.
Nabila Yahiaoui, a banana genomics scientist at the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development in Montpellier, and colleagues previously compared DNA from 24 collected samples of wild and domestic bananas.
In a few of them, they found something puzzling: DNA that didn’t match that from any of the other samples. Based on that finding, they proposed in 2020 that, in addition to M. acuminata and other known wild relatives, two unknown species contributed DNA to the modern banana.
In the new study, Sardos and her colleagues expanded on that work, focusing on banana varieties with two sets of chromosomes, as they are likely more closely related to the first domesticated bananas. (The Cavendish has three sets.) They sampled the DNA of 68 samples of wild relatives and of 154 types of cultivated bananas, including 25 varieties Sardos’s team collected in Papua New Guinea. That’s an impressive number of cultivars, some of which can be hard to obtain, says Tim Denham, an archaeologist at Australian National University who was not involved with the work.
The comparison provided more evidence that bananas were originally cultivated on New Guinea and suggested an M. acuminata subspecies named “banksia” was the first to be domesticated.
The same subspecies subsequently contributed to more widespread cultivated varieties, Sardos and colleagues report this month in Frontiers in Plant Science. “This [conclusion] is significant,” Denham says. “It confirms previous archaeological, botanical, linguistic, and genetic studies.”
The samples also pointed to the existence of a third unknown source of banana genetic material, the team reported. Scientists have yet to identify the three species; their data suggest one came from New Guinea, one from the Gulf of Thailand, and the third from somewhere between northern Borneo and the Philippines.
Denham was surprised to find that the modern banana varieties on New Guinea are more genetically diverse than their wild ancestor. “This runs counter to most genetic arguments that speculate that initial domestication results in a bottleneck,” he says. He suspects that even as banana growers worked to improve bananas, there was rampant interbreeding with wild relatives, leading to bunches of varieties with different genetic ancestries.
“This work further confirms the importance of hybridization in the evolution of [certain] crops,” says Rieseberg, whose work with sunflowers has demonstrated that interbreeding can be important for evolution.
The field remains ripe with possibility: Sardos and other banana aficionados are hoping to visit small farms and other sites in the ancestral bananas’ homelands to see whether they can find more modern descendants. They, too, may yield a stock resistant to disease that can be crossbred with commercial bananas. “There is a lot of unsampled banana diversity out there,” Rieseberg says.
The ancient Golden Belt Discovered in the Czech Republic
A small farmer in the Opava region in the northeast of Czechia made a unique discovery while working in a field, unearthing a golden belt dating back to the Bronze Age. The ornamented piece, which is exceptionally well-preserved, should go on display at the Bruntál museum at the end of next year.
The golden belt had been lying underground for thousands of years before being unearthed by a farmer while he was harvesting beetroots.
The founder, who wishes to remain in anonymity, discovered the ancient piece of apparel at the end of September and immediately contacted archaeologists from the Silesian Museum in Opava.
Jiří Juchelka, head of the museum’s archaeology department, says that as soon as he saw a photo of the item, he knew it was something exceptional.
The first hypothesis was that the thin golden sheet of metal, which is around 50 centimetres long, was a tiara. However, after examining the object in greater detail, experts now believe it was actually part of a belt:
“It is decorated with raised concentric circles and topped with rose-shaped clasps at the ends. We realized that it was too long to fit on someone’s head. So we actually think it is not a tiara, but something much rarer – a part of a belt.
“Belts at the time were made of leather and this was strapped to its front part. It was crumpled when the finder found it, probably as a result of agricultural activity, so it is a miracle it has been so well preserved. It may be missing a few tiny parts, but otherwise, it is in perfect condition.”
The thin metal sheet is made mostly of gold, along with some silver and traces of copper and iron. A preliminary analysis places its origin around the 14th century BC, says Tereza Alex Kilnarová, conservator at the Museum of Bruntál.
“It is estimated to be from the middle to the late Bronze Age, but it is only a preliminary determination based on the decoration.
“Similar decorative ornaments appear in more than one prehistoric culture and therefore more detailed research and analysis of the metal is needed.
“It probably belonged to someone in a high position in society, because items of such value were rarely produced at the time. That’s why we are talking about someone more esteemed.”
While the monetary value of the belt is yet to be determined, it is already clear that the object has an incalculable cultural and historical value, says Ms Kilnarová:
“Such objects are rarely found even during excavations, so it is a really unique discovery, not only in our region but all over Czechia. I think it is safe to say that it will be one of the most valuable objects that will have on display in our museum.”
The rare item, which will become part of the Museum of Bruntál collections, will now be thoroughly examined and conserved, before going on display for the public.
Connemara-based archaeologist Michael Gibbons now says there is conclusive evidence the Carraig á Mhaistin stone structure at Rostellan on the eastern shore of Cork Harbour is a megalithic dolmen.
New research looks set to answer a long-standing question about the status of a mysterious tomb-like structure uncovered in Cork Harbour many years ago.
Archaeologists have been split as to whether it was prehistoric or a more recent 19th-century “folly”.
However, Connemara-based archaeologist Michael Gibbons now says there is conclusive evidence the Carraig á Mhaistin stone structure at Rostellan on the eastern shore of Cork Harbour is a megalithic dolmen.
Mr Gibbons has also discovered a previously unrecognised cairn close to the dolmen which would have been concealed by rising sea levels, and which he is reporting to the National Monuments Service.
The Carraig á Mhaistin dolmen at Rostellan is listed by some guides as Ireland’s only inter-tidal portal tomb.
In fact, there are two such inter-tidal tombs, Mr Gibbons says.
The small chamber at the tomb stands at the western end of the cairn, which is 25m long and 4.5m wide.
He says doubt about Carraig á Mhaistin’s age meant it was not included in the State’s survey of megalithic tombs of Ireland conducted by Professor Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin over 40 years ago.
“At that time, it was suggested that it could have a folly or type of ornamental structure commissioned by local gentry at the nearby Rostellan Castle estate, and dating from the 19th century,” Mr Gibbons says.
The small chamber at the tomb stands at the western end of the cairn, which is 25m long and 4.5m wide. Picture: Michael Gibbons
His recent field trip to Rostellan has thrown up additional details, including the discovery that the small chamber at the tomb stands at the western end of the cairn, which is 25m long and 4.5m wide.
This is significant, as a portal and court tombs “occasionally have intact long cairns which are both intended to provide structural support to the chamber itself, and to enhance visual presence in the landscape”, he says.
The cairn is “partially entombed in estuarine mud” and it is probable a great deal more of the structure is concealed below the surface, Mr Gibbons says in a report he has written on the monument.
He notes it is not known for certain when the area was inundated by rising sea levels, but levels at this part of the Cork Harbour shoreline are believed to have been stable for 2,000 years.
Mr Gibbons says the only other known inter-tidal portal tomb on the island is at “the Lag” on the river Ilen, between Skibbereen and Baltimore in West Cork.
Portal tombs or dolmens were often known as “Diarmuid and Gráinne’s bed”, being associated in folklore as resting places for the fugitive couple who were pursued by Fionn mac Cumhaill, Gráinne’s husband.
Mr Gibbons says many were built close to the coast, but the two known tombs in the inter-tidal zone may have been part of a wider network which did not survive the “high energy environment” of the Atlantic seaboard.
He says recent extreme weather has destroyed Sherkin Island’s sole megalithic tomb on Slievemore townland, just 3m to 4m above the high water mark.
Mr Gibbons says the Sherkin structure had been an example of a “very fine wedge tomb”, but it was initially severely hit by the storms of 2014, which caused substantial damage to coastal archaeology in a number of locations.
What remains of the Sherkin wedge tomb has been almost entirely eroded away by recent storms, but there are some structural stones remaining which would warrant a rescue excavation, he says.
Possible Burial Place of St. Nicholas Uncovered in Turkey
A fresco of Jesus in a church in Turkey’s Antalya region hinted at the exact location of Saint Nicholas’ burial.
Archaeologists in southern Turkey have just uncovered the original burial place of Father Christmas himself, formally known as St. Nicholas, but whose modern nicknames of Santa Claus, Saint Nick and Kris Kringle are known by children the world over.
While researchers already knew that the saint’s body was buried in the fourth century A.D. church in Turkey’s Antalya province, the holy man’s remains were stolen around 700 years after he died, so the specific spot where he was originally interred was a mystery.
Now, clues gathered during a new excavation of this church, including the ecclesiastical building’s similarity to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and the placement of a fresco depicting Jesus, hint at exactly where St. Nick’s body was likely laid to rest.
Located on Turkey’s southern coast, the modern town of Demre boasts the Church of St. Nicholas, built in A.D. 520 on top of an older church where the Christian saint served as bishop in the fourth century A.D. Then known as Myra, the small town was a popular Christian pilgrimage spot following St. Nicholas’ death and burial there in A.D. 343.
Very little is known about Nicholas’s life, but legends abound — he is said to have rescued three girls from prostitution, to have chopped down a demon-possessed tree, to have resurrected three murdered children who were pickled in brine, and to have gotten into a fist-fight during the First Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325, according to Britannica(opens in new tab). And, of course, Nicholas was said to have frequently given away his inherited wealth anonymously to the poor, eventually leading to the legend of St. Nick as Santa Claus.
Unfortunately, in A.D. 1087, “some wise and illustrious men of Bari [Italy]… discussed together how they might take away from the city of Myra… the body of the most blessed confessor of Christ, Nicholas,” according to a contemporaneous manuscript translated from Latin by late medievalist Charles W. Jones.
Their plan was to “break open the floor of the church and carry away the holy corpse.” The group succeeded, carting off most of the skeletal remains of St. Nicholas, and leaving just a few bones and a broken sarcophagus in Myra.
In spite of this desecration, the church of St. Nicholas in Demre itself has survived for more than a millennium, with archaeological excavation beginning at the end of the 20th century.
Through this work, researchers discovered the foundations of the earliest church, covered by many feet of sand and silt. Last week, Osman Eravşar, chairman of the Antalya Cultural Heritage Preservation Regional Board, announced the discovery of the location of St. Nicholas’s tomb at the base of a fresco of Jesus.
In an interview(opens in new tab) with the Turkish news organization DHA (Demirören Haber Ajansı), Eravşar noted that the current excavations have revealed “the floor on which St. Nicholas’s feet stepped” from the original church.
“This is an extremely important discovery, the first find from that period,” DHA’s English coverage quoted Eravşar as saying.
The sarcophagus of Saint Nicholas is located in a church named after the saint in the down of Demre, Turkey. The saints’s bones were stolen centuries ago, but the sarcophagus survived. New research has pinpointed the exact burial spot where St. Nick was originally interred.
The original burial place of St. Nicholas has also been found, according to Eravşar. When the Bari contingent removed the saint’s bones in the 11th century, they also shoved some sarcophagi aside, obscuring their original location. Eravşar told DHA that “his sarcophagus must have been placed in a special place, and that is the part with three apses covered with a dome.
There we have discovered the fresco depicting the scene where Jesus is holding a Bible in his left hand and making the sign of blessing with his right hand.” A marble floor tile with the Greek words for “as grace” could mark his exact grave.
Supporting that hypothesis is the shape of the church itself. Just as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre has an unfinished dome on top, so does the Church of St. Nicholas at Myra.
When it was restored by Emperor Alexander II of Russia in the 1860s, the dome was never completed. This unfinished dome may have been a purposeful attempt to link St. Nicholas with the story of Jesus’s crucifixion and ascension into the sky.
“It’s not unusual for churches to be built atop one another,” William Caraher, an archaeologist at the University of North Dakota with a speciality in early Christian architecture, who was not involved in the excavation, told Live Science in an email. “In fact, the presence of an earlier church on a site has been a reason to build a church since Early Christian and Byzantine times.”
But Caraher thinks that the marble floor tile with Greek letters could be from some other context, reused possibly in antiquity because of the common word “charis” (grace) etched into it.
Caraher noted that St. Nicholas is significant in Orthodox and Catholic traditions, with churches and chapels dedicated to him throughout the Mediterranean. “I think many people — from eager kiddos on Christmas Eve to world-weary science reporters and grizzled archaeologists — have at some point in their lives hoped to get a little glimpse of the real St. Nick,” Caraher said.
New Thoughts on Fish Consumption in Iron Age Britain
A woman who lived in Orkney 1,800 years ago had a diet that was unusually rich in seafood, say archaeologists. Very little evidence has been found of fish being consumed in Iron Age Britain, despite the abundance of marine life, according to the UHI Archaeology Institute.
Possible reasons for this may have included social restrictions or taboos around eating seafood.
The bone appeared to have been carefully placed inside a container made from a whale vertebra, and studies of the tooth have revealed the woman had eaten “fish suppers” all through her life.
Archaeologists suggest she may have had a special role or status and have nicknamed her The Elder.
The jawbone was found inside a vessel made from a whale vertebra
A tooth from the woman’s jawbone was analysed
The UHI Archaeology Institute has been working with the University of York and the British Geological Survey’s National Environmental Isotope Facility in analysing the tooth.
The studies have involved looking at layers of dentine laid down over time as the tooth grew, and of dietary isotopes – evidence of foods – embedded in those layers.
Archaeologists said the tooth was sampled multiple times when the woman was estimated to have been three, seven, nine, 11, 13 and 15 years old.
The results showed seafood had been a fairly consistent part of her diet during her childhood.
Earlier analysis had already shown she was eating fish towards the end of her life.
Martin Carruthers, site director of The Cairns excavations and a lecturer in archaeology at the UHI Archaeology Institute, said: “It’s remarkable to be able to reach back and solve a problem like the question over her diet, which was previously unclear.
“Now we can see that the marine foodstuffs that she ate were after all a normal part of life for her, and this allows us to move on with the further investigation of the mystery over the apparent lack of seafood in Iron Age society at this time.”
76 child sacrifice victims with their hearts ripped out found in Peru excavation
The remains of dozens of child sacrifice victims have been unearthed in Peru, and many more are likely waiting to be found, archaeologists say.
Seventy-six child sacrifices were found recently as part of ongoing excavations near Huanchaco, Peru.
The skeletons show evidence that the children’s hearts were removed, said Gabriel Prieto, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Florida who directs the excavations at Pampa La Cruz, the site near Huanchaco where the remains were found.
All 76 skeletons had a “transversal clean cut across the sternum,” Prieto said, which suggests that “they possibly opened up the rib cage and then they possibly extracted the heart.”
“They were buried on an extended position, with the feet toward the east,” Prieto told Live Science in an email. “They were buried on top of an artificial mound.” It’s not clear why the sacrifices were located in this position in this place. “We thought that the area, and particularly the mound, was free of Chimu child sacrifices, but we found the opposite,” Prieto said.
Excavations have been underway at Pampa La Cruz for several years. So far, 323 child sacrifice victims have been found at the site, and another 137 child and three adult sacrifice victims were found at a nearby site called Las Llamas. These remains also show that the children’s hearts had been removed.
The child sacrifices were buried on top of this artificial mound seen here.
Based on the archaeological finds found so far, there are likely many more child sacrifices waiting to be discovered near Huanchaco, Prieto said. “It could be more [than] 1,000 victims, as crazy as it sounds,” he said.
Radiocarbon dating needs to be done on the 76 newly uncovered skeletons, but previously found victims at Pampa La Cruz dated to between A.D. 1100 and 1200, Prieto said. Around this time, the Chimu people, known for their fine metalwork and the city Chan Chan, flourished in the area.
Why the Chimu would have engaged in child sacrifice in this area on such a large scale is unclear, Prieto said, but the Chimu also built an artificial irrigation system and new agricultural fields nearby, and some of the sacrifices may have been done to “sanctify” this agricultural system.
People who lived in Huanchaco during the first millennium A.D. also practiced human sacrifice in the area, said Richard Sutter, an anthropology professor at Purdue University Fort Wayne, who is part of the team working at Huanchaco. This means that the Chimu may have been carrying on a long-running practice in the area, Sutter said in an email.
There are likely many more child sacrifices waiting to be found in the area.
Why were children sacrificed?
Scholars who were not involved with the excavations told Live Science that the finds at Huanchaco are important. While other cases of child sacrifices are known from the Andean area, “what is striking here is the scale, of course,” Peter Eeckhout, a professor of pre-Columbian art and archaeology at the Université libre de Bruxelles in Belgium, told Live Science in an email.
Why the child sacrifices were carried out is difficult to tell, Eeckhout said, noting that writing was not used in Peru at this time and thus there are no written records detailing the youngsters’ deaths. Problems with climate or environmental changes that may have disrupted agriculture in the area could have played a role in the sacrifice, Eeckhout said.
“It’s an amazing site with the potential to help us understand much better what was going on at this time in prehistory,” Catherine Gaither, an independent bioarchaeologist, told Live Science in an email. “I think the reason for the sacrifices was likely related in some way to a cultural response to environmental changes that brought about significant cultural upheaval. There may have been associations with environmental events like an El Niño, for example,” a climate cycle in which warm water in the Pacific Ocean shifts closer to South America causing changes in the weather, she said.
The team is requesting permission from Peru’s Ministry of Culture to transport some samples abroad so that the specimens can undergo testing to determine more exact dates.
Archaeologists unearth 1,300-year-old statue of Mayan God in Mexico
Archaeologists have unearthed an approximately 1,300-year-old statue representing the head of the Mayan god in southeast Mexico.
Archaeologists were excavating in the Mayan city-state of Palenque, near Mexico’s Chiapas Usumacinta River. The artefact found symbolizes the birth of the maize plant with the first rays of the sun. The work was placed in an east-west direction.
Originally thought to be just a head, the statue was placed on a tripod by the Mayans and placed in an east-west position to symbolize the rise of the corn plant with the first rays of the Sun.
Similar iconography has been found at sites in the Tikal region of the Late Period (600-850 AD) and Early Classical Period (150-600 AD), and in manuscripts in which the god appears with the head severed in Dresden and Madrid.
Also known as Lakamha (“Flat-Earth-River”) in Itza, Palenque is mostly known for having some of the best architecture, sculpture, roof scallops and bas-reliefs in the world of Maya civilization.
While removing the fill in a corridor connecting House B and House F in the palace complex, researchers uncovered a vessel with a severed plaster head in a small pond.
The teams believe that this setting was to mimic the entrance to the Maya underworld. Crews believe that this setting was to mimic the entrance to the Mayan civilization’s underworld.
The Mayan civilization believed that the universe was divided into the sky, earth, and the underworld. Venerated places such as caves and sinkholes served as a portal or gateway to Xibalba, an underground kingdom ruled by the Mayan death gods and their helpers.
“The statue was part of an offering placed over a pond in an aquatic environment that mimicked the god’s entrance to the underworld,” says the National Institute of Anthropology and History in a statement.
“This discovery allows us to better understand how the ancient Palenque Mayas relived the legendary transition of the birth, death, and resurrection of the Mayan god,” said Arnoldo Gonzaalez Cruz, INAH Chiapas Center researcher says.
Because the sculpture was found in damp conditions, it was put through a slow drying process before being restored.
