A 7,800-year-old female figurine discovered in Ulucak Höyük in western Turkey
A 7,800-year-old female figurine was found in the Ulucak Höyük (Ulucak Mound) in the Kemalpaşa district of Izmir.
It was stated that the figurine made of clay was used in various rituals such as increasing abundance and fertility. Generally, such artefacts are found broken and the number of artefacts found as a whole is quite low. A very rare artefact. Third work ever found as a whole.
With the support of the Turkey Ministry of Culture and Tourism, İzmir Metropolitan Municipality, Kemalpaşa Municipality, and Kemalpaşa Organized Industrial Zone, excavations in İzmir’s oldest settlement, the 8,850-year-old Ulucak Höyük, started this year as well.
Trakya University Faculty of Letters Protohistory and Near Eastern Archaeology Faculty Member of the Department Professor Dr. Özlem Çevik took over the excavation directorship in 2009, and the first find of this year was unearthed during the work on the mound.
Earlier excavations revealed that Ulucak Mound hosted the first farmers of the Aegean Region; It had revealed that the first settlers built their houses on top of each other along the 7.5-meter cultural layer and settled in the same place for 1150 years without interruption.
Professor Özlem Çevik said the female figurine was 8 cm tall and about 7,800 years old.
Ulucak Mound, located in the Ulucak district of Kemalpaşa county on the 15th km of Bornova-Ankara road, was the location of one of the oldest settlements of Western Anatolia and it illuminates cultural history both by its architectural structure and its foundlings.
Excavations were started in 1995 and three cultural layers were identified.
These are the Late Roman period at the top; the Early Bronze Age layers underneath Early Byzantine settlements and the Late Neolithic settlement at the bottom.
In the excavations, a large number of ceramic pots, tools made of ganister, stone weapons, mother goddess figurines, and anthropomorphic pots were unearthed, some of which are exhibited in the Izmir Archeology Museum.
The oldest grave in northern Germany is 10,500 years old
Archaeologists have discovered the oldest known human remains in northern Germany in a 10,500-year-old cremation grave in Lüchow, Schleswig-Holstein.
The remains were discovered in the Duvensee bog, a prehistoric inland lake that contains more than 20 Mesolithic and Neolithic archaeological sites.
The bog’s anaerobic environment preserves organic remains, including burned bones, but there was so little left that it wasn’t until the team discovered a human thigh bone that they were able to confirm they had discovered a burial.
Burials of hunter-gatherer-fisher people who lived in Europe during the early Mesolithic period are extremely rare. Mesolithic burials have previously been discovered in northern Germany and southern Scandinavia, but only from the Late Mesolithic period (7th-6th millennia B.C.).
The only burial that was comparable in time was discovered in Jutland, Denmark. It, too, is a cremation burial, an indication that cremation may have been the preferred method of burial among Mesolithic hunter-gatherers.
Archaeologists unearth the oldest burial site to date in northern Germany.
Several bone fragments that were not completely charred were found during the excavation. Excavation director Harald Lübke hopes to recover archaeological DNA from them.
The entire grave was raised in a soil block for additional excavation and laboratory study.
Archaeologists have been excavating Duvensee Moor since 1923 and have also discovered the shelter of Stone Age hunters and gatherers.
The oldest known North German raises a lot of questions. For example, according to the circumstances of death. In the case of burned bones, it is difficult to determine the cause of death, says Harald Lübke.
For archaeologists, the entire Duvenseer Moor is a hotspot. “We’ve only opened a new door here at the moment. But behind it, there are only dark rooms at the moment.”
Due to their spectacular cremation find, they will probably continue digging there in the coming year.
Babylonians used the Pythagorean theorem 1,000 years before it was ‘invented’ in ancient Greece
The tablet was used by a surveyor to accurately divide up the land.
A 3,700-year-old clay tablet has revealed that the ancient Babylonians understood the Pythagorean theorem more than 1,000 years before the birth of the Greek philosopher Pythagoras, who is widely associated with the idea.
The tablet, known as Si.427, was used by ancient land surveyors to draw accurate boundaries and is engraved with cuneiform markings which form a mathematical table instructing the reader on how to make accurate right triangles. The tablet is the earliest known example of applied geometry.
A French archaeological expedition first excavated the tablet, which dates to between 1900 and 1600 B.C in what is now Iraq in 1894, and it is currently housed in the Istanbul Archeological Museum. But it is only just now that researchers have discovered the significance of its ancient markings.
“It is generally accepted that trigonometry — the branch of maths that is concerned with the study of triangles — was developed by the ancient Greeks studying the night sky,” in the second century B.C., Daniel Mansfield, a mathematician at the University of New South Wales in Australia and the discoverer of the tablet’s meaning, said in a statement.
“But the Babylonians developed their own alternative ‘proto-trigonometry’ to solve problems related to measuring the ground, not the sky.”
According to Mansfield, Si.427 is the Old Babylonian period’s only known example of a cadastral document, or plan surveyors used to define land boundaries. “In this case, it tells us legal and geometric details about a field that’s split after some of it was sold off,” Mansfield said.
The tablet details a marshy field with various structures, including a tower, built upon it. The tablet is engraved with three sets of Pythagorean triples: three whole numbers for which the sum of the squares of the first two equals the square of the third. The triples engraved on Si.427 are 3, 4, 5; 8, 15, 17; and 5, 12, 13. These were likely used to help determine the land’s boundaries.
The tablet’s significance went unrecognized for more than 100 years until it was tracked down.
Though the tablet does not express the Pythagorean theorem in the familiar algebraic form it’s expressed in today, coming up with those triples would have required understanding the general principle that governs the relationship between the length of the sides and the hypotenuse.
In 2017, Mansfield had discovered a tablet from the same period, named Plimpton 322, which he identified as containing another trigonometric table. But it wasn’t until he saw the triples on Si.427 that he was able to piece together that the ancient Babylonians were using rudimentary trigonometric theory to split up parcels of land.
Si.427 is thought to pre-date Plimpton 322 — and may have even inspired it, Mansfield said.
“There is a whole zoo of right triangles with different shapes. But only a very small handful can be used by Babylonian surveyors. Plimpton 322 is a systematic study of this zoo to discover the useful shapes,” Mansfield said, referring to the fact that different types of right triangles can have different interior angles.
“This is from a period where land is starting to become private — people started thinking about the land in terms of ‘my land and your land’, wanting to establish a proper boundary to have positive neighbourly relationships. And this is what this tablet immediately says. It’s a field being split, and new boundaries are made.”
Although the reasons behind the calculations of land boundaries on the tablet aren’t entirely clear, Si.427 does mention a dispute over date-palms on the border between the properties of a prominent individual called Sin-bel-apli and a wealthy female landowner, according to Mansfield. “It is easy to see how accuracy was important in resolving disputes between such powerful individuals,” he said.
Even though 1,000 years would pass between the creation of the tablets and the birth of Pythagoras of Samos in 570 B.C. — leading to the formalized Pythagorean rule students are taught in school today — experts have long known that the Greeks inherited mathematical teachings from Egyptians, and the Egyptians in turn from the Babylonians.
What is surprising to Mansfield, however, is the level of theoretical sophistication the tablets reveal the ancient Babylonians to have had at such an early stage of human history.
“Nobody expected that the Babylonians were using Pythagorean triples in this way,” he said. “It is more akin to pure mathematics, inspired by the practical problems of the time.”
Excavation of a development site at Herne Bay, Kent, on the southeastern coast of England, has unearthed a rare medieval bone flute.
The instrument was discovered within the bounds of a rectangular enclosure bounded by a ditch. It was found in a layer with pottery dating to between the 12th and 15th centuries.
It’s a fipple or duct flute, an end-blown flute like a recorder or slide whistle.
The form is an ancient one — the world’s oldest confirmed flute was carved from the bone of a griffon vulture 40,000 years ago, and the Neanderthal Flute, a partial flute carved from a bear bone is 20,000 years older than that — but there are long gaps on the archaeological record between the prehistoric flutes and the ones that emerged in the early Middle Ages and the latter are still rare finds.
Only around 120 archaeological examples have ever been discovered in Britain, ranging in date from the 5th century to the 16th.
The flute was carved from the tibia shaft of a sheep or goat. Five finger holes were bored out of the top, and a thumb hole was out of the bottom of the shaft.
Archaeologists believe it may have had a mouthpiece of some kind that is now lost, but other than that, the flute is intact and in excellent condition.
A cave complex with hieroglyphs and Varangian symbols was discovered in the centre of Ukraine
An ancient cave complex thought to date from Kievan Rus’ has been discovered in central Kyiv at Voznesensky Uzvoz.
Dmytro Perov, a conservationist at Kyiv’s Center for Urban Development, told Radio Kultura that the caves were discovered next to a demolished house that Kyiv housing authorities had deemed unsafe for habitation.
Actually, Dmytro Perov followed his grandmother’s clues. Perov’s grandmother used to talk about a large stone house next to an old cave, but no one knew its location. According to Perov, who had previously examined the area several times, only the front facia of the house remained, concealed by bushes.
The conservationist told reporters that he and his friends decided to go to the old house “on a small expedition to look for caves,” and they discovered an entrance. The first archaeological explorations in the Voznesensky Caves were carried out by Perov and a group of researchers from the Institute of Archaeology last Saturday.
Timur Bobrovskyi, an archaeology professor at the Sofia Kyivska reserve, said he was “amazed that such a treasure was found in the centre of Kyiv” after spending three hours exploring the cave.
A unique discovery in the centre of Kyiv.
The team discovered pottery fragments from the Late Kyivan Rus’ era, an Eastern and Northern European state that existed from the late ninth to the middle of the thirteenth century, in the cave’s northern section.
Perov wrote on Facebook that the team scoured around 40 meters (131 feet) of caves, including the lower cave complex, which he claims is twice as long as the upper passage and has a series of “radial branches.” The most significant discovery, according to Petrov, was “a set of Kyivan Rus hieroglyphs and Varangian symbols from the Early Rus period,” when the region was under the control of Varangian rulers.
While more investigation is required to confirm it, according to Dmytro Perov, they think that some of the carved symbols may date all the way back to the fifth or sixth centuries BC. He says that “animistic images of animals and graffiti” from the Varyaz period, including the rune Algiz (“chicken’s foot”), were also discovered on the walls. This was an ancient Varangian charm, a symbol of safety and longevity.
Several Hellenic Greek colonies were established on the northern coast of the Black Sea, on the Crimean Peninsula, and along the Sea of Azov between the 7th and 6th centuries BC.
The steppe hinterland was occupied by the Cimmerians, Scythians, and Sarmatians. They traded with the Greek/Roman colonies after a period of control by the Roman empire during the first millennium BC.
Rurik, a Varangian or Viking prince, established the Kyivan state in the latter part of the ninth century.
Up until the 13th century, his descendants established and controlled a global trade route to the west.
However, the Kyivan state comprised East Slavic, Norse, and Finnic peoples, making it difficult to determine who left the carved symbols on the cave walls.
2 Viking swords buried upright might have connected the dead to Odin and Valhalla
This sword has a preserved pommel (a knob at the end of the handle) with a “button” on top.
Archaeologists in Sweden have unearthed two Viking swords in neighbouring graves that were buried upright as if they were standing on their points.
Whoever installed the iron swords perpendicular to the surface about 1,200 years ago clearly did so on purpose, as it would have taken a lot of effort — possibly involving a rock or hammer — to wedge the weapons roughly 16 inches (40 centimetres) into the ground, archaeologists told Live Science.
“The placement of the swords reflects an action with a lot of symbolism,” Anton Seiler, Fredrik Larsson and Katarina Appelgren, archaeologists at Arkeologerna, an archaeology firm in Sweden that is part of the government agency National Historical Museums, told Live Science in an email. “When you find swords in graves — which you don’t do very often — they often lie beside the buried individual, as a faithful companion on the voyage to the next world.”
It’s unknown why these two swords were buried upright, but there are a variety of possibilities, one of which is that the standing swords served as a connection to the Norse warrior god Odin and his domain Valhalla, where slain warriors reportedly resided under Odin’s leadership, the Arkeologerna team that helped uncover the sword said.
The archaeologists, who were excavating ahead of a highway construction project, discovered the two sword burials early this fall in Västmanland county in central Sweden. The team found a large grave field covering an area just under 1 acre (60 by 60 meters) and containing at least 100 cremated burials. At the time of its use, the grave field was bordered by two farms, the archaeologists said.
An archaeologist excavates one of the swords in Sweden.
Most of the burials date to the late Iron Age (A.D. 600 to 1000) and were made with stones forming graves up to 23 feet (7 m) in diameter. The two burials bearing swords are each about 16 feet (5 m) across and date to the ninth or 10th centuries A.D., during the Viking Age. However, both of those graves, as well as a third burial containing glass beads, were placed on top of an earlier grave mound that dates to the seventh or eighth centuries A.D., meaning that each of these individuals was part of a “multi-chronological grave monument,” the team said.
It was very uncommon to incorporate old graves into new ones during the late Iron Age, Seiler, Larsson and Appelgren said. “This shows that the construction of the two stone settings with swords were done deliberately, perhaps to create a connection to a certain individual, ancestor, or social group.”
One of the swords is raised, after spending centuries in the ground.
Viking Age swords were expensive objects, so it was a “huge investment” to bury these weapons in graves, as it rendered them “unavailable for future use,” the team added. Both swords are about 35 inches (90 cm) long, and are broken. “They shattered when pressed into the ground, and more than 1,000 years has also contributed to degradation,” the team explained.
The archaeologists plan to piece the fragments together “to determine the exact length and shape of the swords,” and it’s possible that traces of decayed remains, such as wooden or leather sheaths known as scabbards, or inlays of silver on the handles “will become visible during conservation,” Seiler, Larsson and Appelgren said.
In addition to the swords, the two burials contained cremated human and animal bones — including those from horses, dogs and birds that were possibly sacrificed for the burial ceremony — as well as game pieces that were crafted from whale bone, silver knot work, pottery vessels, iron nails and iron rivets, which may reflect Viking boats or other wooden structures. The team also found bear claws, possibly from pelts that have since decayed, and grain, perhaps as fare to the next world, the archaeologists said.
One of the swords, standing upright in the grave before its full excavation.
Why were the swords buried upright?
It’s a mystery why the swords were placed standing up, but one possible explanation is that it was a way of consecrating the deceased to Odin; ground-stuck swords (and in some cases, spears and arrowheads) may have been thought to facilitate the transition to Valhalla, the archaeologists said.
However, some researchers suggest that sharp objects stuck into graves were “a way to prevent the dead from rising,” the team said. “We do not think that applies to these graves, as the swords were such precious objects. Instead, knives or arrowheads could have been used, which would have been significantly cheaper.”
The archaeologists also found bear claws, which were probably from a pelt used during the funeral.
Whatever the reason, it’s likely that the swords also served as a reminder of the dead to the living. The pommels of the swords “lay superficially in the graves and must have been visible during the Viking Age,” Seiler, Larsson and Appelgren said. “Perhaps it was the case that the relatives sometimes visited the graves, and by touching the swords made connections with the dead.
The archaeologists plan to soon analyze the human remains in the sword burials, which will help them determine each person’s sex, age at death, and if just one or multiple people were interred in each grave. It’s tempting to think that these graves all contain men, but “we cannot be sure of this,” as female Vikings have been found buried with weapons, they said.
While the team still has to radiocarbon date the burials, “one can suspect that the graves with swords were built at the same time,” Seiler, Larsson and Appelgren said. “They were next to each other, built in the same burial mound and with similar grave goods. Perhaps they reflect two brothers/sisters in arms who died in the same battle? This is of course hypothetical but certainly represents a breath-taking possibility.”
See the face of an 18th century ‘vampire’ buried in Connecticut
Using DNA extracted from a skull, a forensic artist created a facial reconstruction of a man believed to be a vampire from the 18th century.
In the late 18th century, a man was buried in Griswold, Connecticut, with his femur bones arranged in a criss-cross manner — a placement indicating that locals thought he was a vampire. However, little else was known about him.
More than 200 years later, DNA evidence is revealing what he may have looked like. (And yes, he was genetically human.)
After performing DNA analyses, forensic scientists from a Virginia-based DNA technology company named Parabon NanoLabs, and the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory (AFDIL), a branch of the U.S. Armed Forces Medical Examiner System based in Delaware, concluded that at the time of death, the deceased male (known as JB55) was about 55 years old and suffered from tuberculosis.
Using 3D facial reconstruction software, a forensic artist determined that JB55 likely had fair skin, brown or hazel eyes, brown or black hair and some freckles, according to a statement.
Based on the positioning of the legs and skull in the grave, researchers suspect that at some point the body was disinterred and reburied, a practice often associated with the belief that someone was a vampire. Historically, some people once thought that those who died of tuberculosis were actually vampires, according to the statement.
“The remains were found with the femur bones removed and crossed over the chest,” Ellen Greytak, director of bioinformatics at Parabon NanoLabs and the technical lead for the organization’s Snapshot Advanced DNA Analysis division, told Live Science. “This way they wouldn’t be able to walk around and attack the living.”
To perform the analyses, forensic scientists began by extracting DNA from the man’s skeletal remains. However, working with bones that were more than two centuries old proved challenging.
“The technology doesn’t work well with bones, especially if those bones are historical,” Greytak said. “When bones become old, they break down and fragment over time. Also, when remains have been sitting in the environment for hundreds of years, the DNA from the environment from things like bacteria and fungi also end up in the sample. We wanted to show that we could still extract DNA from difficult historical samples.”
A common practice was to bury suspected vampires with their legs crossed so that way they couldn’t rise from the dead.
In traditional genome sequencing, researchers strive to sequence each piece of the human genome 30 times, which is known as “30X coverage.” In the case of the decomposed remains of JB55, the sequencing only yielded about 2.5X coverage.
To supplement this, researchers extracted DNA from an individual buried nearby who was believed to be a relative of JB55. Those samples yielded even poorer coverage: approximately 0.68X.
“We did determine that they were third-degree relatives or first cousins,” Greytak said.
Archaeologists originally unearthed the supposed vampire’s remains in 1990.
In 2019, forensic scientists extracted his DNA and ran it through an online genealogical database, determining that JB55 was actually a man named John Barber, a poor farmer who likely died of tuberculosis.
The nickname JB55 was based on the epitaph spelled out on his coffin in brass tacks, denoting his initials and age at death.
Pyramid and Hundreds of New Kingdom Coffins Found in Egypt
A pyramid built for Queen Neith was one of the many discoveries archaeologists made during the excavation.
Just a stone’s throw from King Tut’s tomb, archaeologists have unearthed the pyramid of a never-before-known ancient Egyptian queen; a cache of coffins, mummies and artefacts; and a series of interconnected tunnels.
For the past two years, archaeologists have been working at Saqqara, an archaeological site in Giza, about 20 miles (32 kilometres) south of Cairo. Recently, they discovered a trove of coffins and mummies, which may belong to some of King Tut’s closest generals and advisors during his reign (1333 B.C. until his death in 1323 B.C.).
Archaeologists also focused their attention on a nearby pyramid, which belonged to Teti, the first king of the Sixth Dynasty of Egypt.
“Teti was worshipped as a god in the New Kingdom period, and so people wanted to be buried near him,” Zahi Hawass(opens in new tab), an Egyptologist who is working on the dig and who formerly served as Egypt’s Minister of Antiquities, told Live Science in an email.
“However, most burials known in Saqqara previously were either from the Old Kingdom or the Late Period. Now we have found 22 [interconnected] shafts, ranging from 30 to 60 feet [9 to 18 meters deep], all with New Kingdom burials.” (Also known as the Egyptian Empire, the New Kingdom period lasted from the sixth century B.C. to the 11th century B.C.)
Buried within these shafts, archaeologists found a “huge limestone sarcophagus” along with “300 beautiful coffins from the New Kingdom period,” Hawass said.
“Burials from the New Kingdom were not known to be common in the area before, so this is entirely unique to the site,” Hawass said. “The coffins have individual faces, each one unique, distinguishing between men and women, and are decorated with scenes from the Book of the Dead [an ancient Egypt funerary text]. Each coffin also has the name of the deceased and often shows the Four Sons of Horus, who protected the organs of the deceased.”
Egyptologist Zahi Hawass and one of the mummies discovered at Saqqara, a dig site outside of Cairo.
If discovering the coffins wasn’t astonishing enough when the researchers lifted the coffins’ lids they were surprised to find the mummies in good condition, even after all these centuries.
“This shows that mummification reached its peak in the New Kingdom,” Hawass said. “Some coffins have two lids, and the most amazing coffin so far has a mask of a woman made completely of solid gold.”
He added, “Inside the coffins and tomb shafts are also various artefacts, including games such as the ancient game of Senet, shabtis [small figurines], statues of the god Ptah-Sokar and even a metal axe found in the hand of an army soldier.
In addition, researchers found a pyramid commemorating a queen whose identity was previously unknown.
“We have since discovered that her name was Neith and she had never before been known from the historical record,” Hawass said. “It is amazing to literally rewrite what we know of history, adding a new queen to our records.”
A selection of the coffins and antiquities found at the excavation site will be on display at the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza, which is slated to open next year.
