Burial Mounds in Serbia reveal skeletons of 5,000-year-old painted men
Archaeologists have discovered dye-coloured bones dating back around 5,000 years at a burial site in southeastern Europe where unusually tall men were laid to rest.
A reconstruction of the tomb and one of the immigrants from the northeast steppes was found in the sacred burial mounds on the plains of Serbia.
The burial site, located in Vojvodina in northern Serbia, was excavated by researchers between 2016 and 2018. However, only recently was expert analysis carried out.
The burial site consisted of two large mounds 131 feet across and between 10 and 13 feet tall.
Inside, the researchers found that some bones were marked with red colouring, thought to be due to “the use of ochre on the bodies of the dead,” according to Piotr Włodarczak from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, one of the excavation supervisors, in a statement to the government-affiliated Science in Poland public information service.
Ochre is a type of earth that has been coloured by iron oxide. This can give it a red hue and it has been used as a colouring pigment. Red in particular was considered sacred by some, Włodarczak said.
Another thing the researchers noticed about the remains is that the deceased men were over 1.8 meters tall, or around 5 ft. 11 in. This would have been an above-average height for the time—it’s thought that the men were buried around 3,000 BCE, and men living in this part of Europe then would usually have been about 1.6 meters or 5 ft. 3 in. tall, according to Science in Poland.
The height of the men, as well as the use of ochre, led the researchers to believe that they were newcomers to the region and had probably come there from the steppes of what would be south Russia or Ukraine today.
Genetic analysis of the remains suggested the men had themselves come from this region or were immediate descendants of people who did.
The influx of nomads from eastern to more western parts of Europe in this period would have had a significant impact on the culture of Europe, Włodarczak said.
It’s not the only significant archaeological finding to be reported recently. In the United Kingdom last week, a Roman mosaic hidden beneath the streets of London for more than 1,500 years was discovered.
The 26-foot-long mosaic was found at a construction site near the capital’s largest building, The Shard. It’s set to be transported for preservation later this year and there are hopes it will be publicly displayed in future. It’s thought that the mosaic may have been part of a large dining room called a triclinium.
A stock photo shows an archaeologist using a brush to carefully examine something in the ground. Archaeologists in Serbia have found burial sites of people who are thought to have travelled there thousands of years BCE.
Pottery Analysis Offers Clues to Caribbean Island Trade Routes
With some 7,000 islands and cays and 7,000-year history of human habitation, the Caribbean Sea is practically synonymous with maritime travel. The very word “canoe” is derived from the term “kana:wa,” used by the Indigenous Arawakans of the Caribbean to describe their dugout vessels.
Without clear road signs to indicate where native islanders were travelling, however, the task of reconstructing ancient trade routes relies on subtle clues locked away in the archaeological record. Researchers at the Florida Museum of Natural History recently turned to pottery to tease apart the navigational history of the Caribbean, analyzing the composition of 96 fired clay fragments across 11 islands.
The study, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, is the broadest of its kind yet conducted in the Greater Antilles and marks the first time that pottery artefacts from the Lucayan Islands — The Bahamas plus the Turks and Caicos Islands — have been analyzed to determine their elemental composition and origin.
Pottery from the Caribbean are relatively durable and are often the most common artifacts unearthed from archaeological sites.
“Our methods mark a big improvement over other studies that mostly look at a single site or single island, where you might see differences but not know what it means because you’re looking at the results in isolation,” said co-author Lindsay Bloch, a courtesy faculty member with the Florida Museum’s Ceramic Technology Lab.
People have lived on the Caribbean islands on and off for more than 7,000 years, migrating in waves from Central and South America. As early as 800 B.C., new groups arrived from Venezuela and established a trading network among islands, which they used to exchange food, tools and jewellery. But the most common artefacts that survived to the present are the pottery vessels these objects were carried in.
“Most materials don’t preserve well in the Caribbean because of the warm, humid environment, but pottery is durable, so it ends up being one of the most common things we find,” said lead author Emily Kracht, a collections assistant in the Ceramic Technology Lab.
Over the ensuing millennia, different Caribbean cultures developed unique styles and techniques for constructing their pottery. Some artefacts are simple and unadorned, while others are highly decorated, with a lattice of incised lines, punctuations, raised ridges and flared rims.
Indigenous Caribbean islanders developed elaborate and ornate pottery styles that varied across time and between cultures.
Many studies have relied almost entirely on similarities in style to distinguish between different cultures and infer their movements. But, as Bloch explains, this method has often left more questions than answers and excludes material with potentially valuable information.
“The vast majority of pottery that we find anywhere in the world is going to be undecorated. It’s going to be things used for cooking or storage, which are typically plain and often get ignored because they’re seen as generic,” she said.
Rather than studying the minutiae of varying styles, the researchers focused instead on what the pottery was made of. Using a laser to etch microscopic lines into their samples, the researchers determined the exact amounts and identities of each element in the clay used to make the pottery. Their final analysis included more than seven decades’ worth of archaeological collections that span over 1,000 years of Indigenous Caribbean history.
“One of the advantages of elemental analysis is that we’re explicitly looking for differences, which allows us to see where a pot was made and compare that to where it ended up,” Bloch said.
The researchers removed small fragments from pottery vessels and embedded them in resin before analyzing their elemental composition.
Lead author Emily Kracht prepares the resin blocks and embeds pottery fragments for elemental analysis.
Such detailed comparisons are possible due to the complexity of the Caribbean’s underlying geology. The largest islands in the archipelago likely got their start as an ancient underwater plateau in the Pacific Ocean. After the breakup of the supercontinent Pangaea, the Caribbean plate drifted east in a flurry of volcanic eruptions that elevated the plateau above sea level before ultimately reaching its current position in the Atlantic.
Millions of years of weathering reduced these volcanic outcrops into fine-grained clays with differing concentrations of elements like copper, nickel, chromium and antimony. These differences mean that even the smallest Caribbean pottery sherd bears the elemental signature of the region it was made in.
The results of researchers’ comparative analysis aren’t what might be expected by simply looking at a map. The Lucayan Islands were initially used only temporarily for harvesting resources, and the people who travelled to them would have set sail from the larger islands to the south that supported permanent population centres.
Cuba might initially seem like it’s the perfect staging ground for these operations, being by far the largest Caribbean island and the closest to The Bahamas. While people did make the trek across open water from Cuba, the results of the study indicate the Caribbean’s cultural hub was instead centred on the northwest coast of Hispaniola, from which people imported and exported goods for hundreds of years.
“At least some of the pottery would have been used to ferry goods out to these islands, and people would potentially carry back a variety of marine resources,” Bloch said.
People eventually struck up permanent settlements in The Bahamas and Turks and Caicos, becoming collectively known as the Lucayans, or the People of the Islands. They began making their own pottery from claylike soils deposited by African dust plumes blown in from the Saharan Desert, but the results didn’t quite hold up to the pottery from Hispaniola — literally. Lucayan pottery, called Palmetto Ware, is most often thick and soft and crumbles over time due to the poor quality of the grainy Saharan soil.
Thus, up until the arrival of the Spanish, Hispaniola remained the main trading partner and exporter of pottery to the Lucayan Islands.
“We knew that the Lucayans were related to people in Hispaniola, and this study shows their enduring relationship over hundreds of years through pottery,” Kracht said.
Australia’s first marine Aboriginal archaeological site questioned
A new study from The University of Western Australia has challenged earlier claims that Aboriginal stone artefacts discovered off the Pilbara coast in Western Australia represent Australia’s first undisturbed underwater archaeological site.
Map of the Dampier Archipelago (Murujuga) showing locations of areas mentioned in the text. (Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data [2020] processed by Sentinel Hub).
The original findings were made in a study published in 2020 in PLOS ONE, by a team of archaeologists and scientists from Flinders University, UWA, James Cook University, ARA (Airborne Research Australia) and the University of York.
The team partnered with the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation to locate and investigate stone scatters at two sites in the Dampier Archipelago.
The “underwater” sites at Cape Bruguieres included hundreds of stone tools found in an area that was dry land many thousands of years ago.
Co-author of the new paper, published in Geoarchaeology, geoarchaeologist Dr. Ingrid Ward from UWA’s School of Social Sciences, said it questioned two key claims made in the original paper—that the artefacts were “permanently submerged” and that they were “in situ” and had not been moved since their original deposition.
“In fact, the artefacts occur in a channel ponded well above the lowest tide, so are not permanently submerged,” Dr. Ward said.
“Further, past and present oceanographic and sediment transport processes indicate that the lithic artefact scatters have almost certainly been moved by waves and currents away from where they were first discarded.”
The new study was carried out in collaboration with UWA’s Dr. Piers Larcombe, Dr. Peter Ross of Flinders University and Dr. Chris Fandry of RPS Energy.
The multidisciplinary team examined the assumptions and claims made in the original paper, concluding that the analysis had been insufficient to justify its findings.
“It remains untested how old the artefacts are—they could be 200 years old, 2,000 years old or 20,000 years old—it is completely unknown at this stage,” Dr. Ward said.
Despite this, she said we could still learn a lot from reworked sites.
“For all archaeological sites, the scientific narrative depends on defensible interpretation, which means understanding the processes that have formed the sites we find today,” she said.
“Science progresses through repeated cycles of research, publication, challenge and correction, and papers that challenge ideas are a normal part of healthy science. Archaeological research of indigenous coastal and marine sites in Australia is still at an early stage.”
Enduring Mystery Surrounds the Ancient Site of Puma Punku
High up the Bolivian altiplano,’ south of Lake Titicaca and the ancient complex of Tiahuanaco, we find the ancient ruins of Puma Punku.
Believed to have been erected by the ancient Tiwanaku culture in the bronze age, between 1,000 and 2,000 years ago, the ancient site is home to some of the most fascinating ancient stone structures on the surface of the planet.
Shrouded in mystery, the archaeological site of Puma Punku is one of the biggest headaches for mainstream archaeologists who are unable to explain how ancient cultures cut and shaped granite stone to incredible precision, transported blocks of stones that weigh more than 50 tons, and placed them in a position like a puzzle so that not a single sheet of paper can fit between them.
But if that wasn’t enough of a mystery, there’s that LITTLE magnetic anomaly present at Puma Punku.
The question that arises here is… how on Earth did the ancients transport these massive blocks of stone, tens of tons in weight across 70 kilometres from their quarry to Puma Punku?
Puma Punku: reconstruction
The Magnetic Anomaly
This mysterious feature which makes Puma Punku even stranger was spotted by researcher and author Brien Foerster.
In a video uploaded onto his YouTube account, Brien Foerster takes us on a trip to the Bolivian Altiplano where he tours through Puma Punku and shows us how certain rocks at the site – Puma Punku’s Grey Stones – display magnetic anomalies.
These curious features have been completely ignored and left unattended by scholars who have studied Puma Punku in the past.
Here is another video where we can see the curious magnetic anomaly present on the grey stones of Puma Punku.
Still, think Puma Punku is just another ordinary ancient site? Think again.
Possible Medieval Children’s Cemetery Found in Southern Turkey
A furnace for commercial production and a child’s grave with glass bracelets and gifts inside has been found for the first time during this year’s excavations in the ancient city of Kelenderis, established on the Mediterranean coast in the southern province of Mersin 2,800 years ago.
Located next to a fisherman’s shelter in the Aydıncık district on the Mersin-Antalya highway, the excavation and restoration/conservation works started in 1987 in the ancient city of Kelenderis and have been ongoing for 35 years uninterruptedly.
For the first time, the skeleton of a child, who was buried with four solid glass bracelets on his arm, gifts, clothes and a wooden coffin, has been unearthed in the ancient city, where nearly 150 tombs have also been found around the Odeon over the last 35 years.
In addition, during the excavations conducted in the region, a furnace, which is thought to be used for tile production, was unearthed for the first time, documenting commercial production.
Speaking about the exciting discovery, the head of the excavations Mahmut Aydın said, “Excavations continue for 12 months of the year in the ancient city of Kelenderis. This year, we have completed the excavation and consolidation of the caves, the sitting area, and the supporting walls behind the Odeon structure.
Now we found a furnace that excites us. We knew for years that there was production here, but we couldn’t find the oven.
The oven is 1,300 years old. We think that roof tiles were produced inside the furnace. Because during the excavations we carried out last year and this year, a large number of roof tiles, dated to the seventh century, were found around the furnace.
Since the roof tiles were faulty, we found them scattered around it. When we completely empty the inside of the furnace, we might find even more faulty roof tiles.”
Speaking about the child’s grave, Aydın said, “We have previously uncovered nearly 150 tombs here, but none of them had burial gifts. In this one, we uncovered four glass bracelets, an inscription on a ceramic piece and a cup. This was a first.
At the same time, there were several baby graves around this child’s grave. We understand from here that a part of the Odeon was used as a children’s burial area.
When the carbon 14 analysis results come, we will be able to identify them more clearly. But we believe that this area was used as a burial area in the Middle Ages. As it is different from other burials, we will only be able to determine exactly when the child died with carbon 14 analysis.”
Indian Farmer Discovers 4,000-year-old Copper Weapons Buried Under a Field
We know India is a rich country when it comes to its heritage and culture. Although a lot of evidence has been lost, through destruction, loot or other reasons, findings from time to time prove that indeed India is a heritage-rich country.
It has given the world the teachings of Buddha to learn from, the richness of the Himalayas that make India the hub of a spiritual journey, and more.
In a recent finding, archaeologists in Agra have found nearly 4000-year-old weapons from beneath the ground in Mainpuri.
The weapons extracted include large swords, some close to 4 feet, and arms having sharp sophisticated shapes. The archaeologists have termed the finding ‘exciting’.
About the finding
According to reports, in the village of Ganeshpur in Mainpuri, a farmer was levelling his field when he found a large number of copper swords and harpoons beneath the soil.
The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) found a variety of swords, some that archaeologists are calling “antenna swords and harpoons”, with a hook at the bottom.
Some of these weapons had a starfish-like shape. These copper hoards, 77 in number, possibly date back to 1600-2000 BC – the later stages of the Chalcolithic Age (the transition period between the Neolithic and Bronze Ages).
The findings according to Vasant Swarnkar, D.
In recent Excavations at Sanauli, Baghpat, UP under Dr SK Manjul, @ASIGoI finds Coffin Burials, furnaces & fascinating artefacts’. The present excavation is carried out to understand the extension of the burial site and also the habitation area in relation to earlier findings in 2018.
The Director of Conservation and spokesperson, suggest that the inhabitants of the area were engaged in fighting, much like the 2018 findings in Sanauli in Baghpat, although that was a burial site.
Earlier in 2018, the ASI in an excavation at Sanauli, Baghpat, Uttar Pradesh found coffin burials, furnaces, and fascinating artefacts.
In 2019, it carried out an excavation to understand the extension of the burial site and also the habitation area in relation to earlier findings.
The find will undergo Thermoluminescence dating, a technique usually used on pottery and other ceramic material. According to Director Swarnkar, similar discoveries have been made in the past in Sakatpur in Saharanpur, Madarpur in Moradabad, and Saifai district.
Ancient microbes may help us find extraterrestrial life forms
Using light-capturing proteins in living microbes, scientists have reconstructed what life was like for some of Earth’s earliest organisms. These efforts could help us recognize signs of life on other planets, whose atmospheres may more closely resemble our pre-oxygen planet.
Rendering of the process by which ancient microbes captured light with rhodopsin proteins.
The earliest living things, including bacteria and single-celled organisms called archaea, inhabited a primarily oceanic planet without an ozone layer to protect them from the sun’s radiation. These microbes evolved rhodopsins—proteins with the ability to turn sunlight into energy, using them to power cellular processes.
“On early Earth, energy may have been very scarce. Bacteria and archaea figured out how to use the plentiful energy from the sun without the complex biomolecules required for photosynthesis,” said UC Riverside astrobiologist Edward Schwieterman, who is co-author of a study describing the research.
Rhodopsins are related to rods and cones in human eyes that enable us to distinguish between light and dark and see colours. They are also widely distributed among modern organisms and environments like saltern ponds, which present a rainbow of vibrant colours.
Using machine learning, the research team analyzed rhodopsin protein sequences from all over the world and tracked how they evolved over time. Then, they created a type of family tree that allowed them to reconstruct rhodopsins from 2.5 to 4 billion years ago and the conditions that they likely faced.
Their findings are detailed in a paper published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.
“Life as we know it is as much an expression of the conditions on our planet as it is of life itself. We resurrected ancient DNA sequences of one molecule, and it allowed us to link to the biology and environment of the past,” said University of Wisconsin-Madison astrobiologist and study lead Betul Kacar.
“It’s like taking the DNA of many grandchildren to reproduce the DNA of their grandparents. Only, it’s not grandparents, but tiny things that lived billions of years ago, all over the world,” Schwieterman said.
Modern rhodopsins absorb blue, green, yellow and orange light, and can appear pink, purple or red by virtue of the light they are not absorbing or complementary pigments. However, according to the team’s reconstructions, ancient rhodopsins were tuned to absorb mainly blue and green light.
Since ancient Earth did not yet have the benefit of an ozone layer, the research team theorizes that billions-of-years-old microbes lived many meters down in the water column to shield themselves from intense UVB radiation at the surface.
Blue and green light best penetrates water, so it is likely that the earliest rhodopsins primarily absorbed these colours. “This could be the best combination of being shielded and still being able to absorb light for energy,” Schwieterman said.
After the Great Oxidation Event, more than 2 billion years ago, Earth’s atmosphere began to experience a rise in the amount of oxygen. With additional oxygen and ozone in the atmosphere, rhodopsins evolved to absorb additional colours of light.
Rhodopsins today are able to absorb colours of light that chlorophyll pigments in plants cannot. Though they represent completely unrelated and independent light capture mechanisms, they absorb complementary areas of the spectrum.
“This suggests co-evolution, in that one group of organisms is exploiting light not absorbed by the other,” Schwieterman said. “This could have been because rhodopsins developed first and screened out the green light, so chlorophylls later developed to absorb the rest. Or it could have happened the other way around.”
Moving forward, the team is hoping to resurrect model rhodopsins in a laboratory using synthetic biology techniques.
“We engineer the ancient DNA inside modern genomes and reprogram the bugs to behave how we believe they did millions of years ago. Rhodopsin is a great candidate for laboratory time-travel studies,” Kacar said.
Ultimately, the team is pleased about the possibilities for research opened up by the techniques they used for this study. Since other signs of life from the deep geologic past need to be physically preserved and only some molecules are amenable to long-term preservation, there are many aspects of life’s history that have not been accessible to researchers until now.
“Our study demonstrates for the first time that the behavioural histories of enzymes are amenable to evolutionary reconstruction in ways that conventional molecular biosignatures are not,” Kacar said.
The team also hopes to take what they learned about the behaviour of early Earth organisms and use it to search the skies for signs of life on other planets.
“Early Earth is an alien environment compared to our world today. Understanding how organisms here have changed with time and in different environments is going to teach us crucial things about how to search for and recognize life elsewhere,” Schwieterman said.
6,000-Year-Old Settlement Found Outside Stonehenge Could “Rewrite British History”
The culture that built Stonehenge might be much older than previously thought. In research that could “rewrite” long-established British history, University of Buckingham archaeologists have discovered a 6,000-year-old Mesolithic settlement located close to the prehistoric monument of Stonehenge.
The discovery of the site, which predates Stonehenge by at least 1,000 years, has massive implications for scholarly understanding of the origins of British civilization.
What they found: History.com reports that the site at Blick Mead is about 1.5 miles from Stonehenge and contains “untouched samples of stone tools, flints and even evidence of possible Mesolithic structures — the only finds of their kind in the Stonehenge World Heritage site.”
The encampment may be proof that Blick Mead was occupied by humans well before Stonehenge was completed between 3,000 and 1,500 B.C., and that Britain had been settled by people before its land bridge to Europe was submerged under what we now call the English Channel more than 8,000 years ago.
Previously, archaeologists had assumed that the Stonehenge site was unoccupied prior to its construction. But the new dig site contains evidence of feasting in the form of aurochs carcasses, indicating that it might have been a meeting site of special significance for hunter-gatherer tribes. It is also located near a valuable natural spring.
“It’s the first proof of people living there earlier, and indicates that Stonehenge could have been planned for years,” a project spokesman told the Daily Mail. “It’s the first indication of a settlement, not just people passing through and dropping tools.”
“British prehistory may have to be rewritten,” dig leader David Jacques said in a press release. “This is the latest-dated Mesolithic encampment ever found in the U.K. Blick Mead site connects the early hunter-gatherer groups returning to Britain after the Ice Age to the Stonehenge area all the way through to the Neolithic in the late 5th millennium B.C.”
“Blick Mead could explain what archaeologists have been searching for centuries — an answer to the story of Stonehenge’s past,” he said.
This has been a big year for Stonehenge: University of Birmingham experts have released other major findings this year, including the results of a sophisticated surveying operation that revealed the Stonehenge site was much bigger than previously understood.
Instead of a standalone structure, the findings suggested that the monument was just the centrepiece of a far larger complex involving at least 17 chapels and hundreds of smaller features.
The survey revealed other secrets of Stonehenge, such as the existence of a burial mound constructed at least 4,000 to 5,000 years ago atop the ruins of a gigantic 6,000-year-old wooden “house of the dead.” New Scientist Sumit Paul-Choudhury writes that the hall was “used to store bodies that had been ritualistically defleshed and disassembled.”
But there’s one major problem: The BBC reports that scheduled tunnel construction to alleviate congestion on the nearby A303 roadway poses the potential to disrupt archaeological study of the site.
“Our only chance to find out about the earliest chapter of Britain’s history could be wrecked if the tunnel goes ahead,” Jacques said. Some researchers worry that the new tunnel could radically alter the local water table, potentially causing serious damage to subsurface relics that have been buried for millennia.
“There is nothing to celebrate about a proposal that would inflict at least a mile of massively damaging road building on the surface of our most iconic world heritage site,” Friends of the Earth spokesman Mike Birkin told the Guardian. “We have a global duty to safeguard the whole site. The international bodies who hold legal responsibility for world heritage sites have not even been consulted — and there are grave concerns about the damage a short tunnel could cause.”
Hopefully, the authorities can work out a plan that preserves Stonehenge and its remaining secrets for future study — because apparently, it still has much to teach us.
