Category Archives: WORLD

PERU, SOUTH AMERICA, WORLD

Meet The Inca Ice Maiden, Perhaps The Best-Preserved Mummy In Human History

Meet The Inca Ice Maiden, Perhaps The Best-Preserved Mummy In Human History

The must-see attraction for visitors to Museo Santuarios Andinos (Museum of Andean Sanctuaries) in Arequipa, Peru is without a doubt the Mummy Juanita, one of the world’s best-preserved corpses.

Her full head of dark hair is still intact and the skin on her hands and arms, discolouration aside, shows almost no decay. The mummy’s discoverer, Johan Reinhard, even made note of just how perfectly the mummy’s skin had been preserved, “down to visible hairs.”

As peaceful as she looks — a far cry from some of the more ghastly mummies that researchers have discovered — Juanita’s life was a short one that ended with her being sacrificed to the Inca gods.

Meet The Inca Ice Maiden, Perhaps The Best-Preserved Mummy In Human History
Mummy Juanita is on display at the Museum of the Nation in Lima, Peru. March 1999.

Scientists estimate that Juanita was between 12 and 15 years old when she died as part of capacocha, a sacrificial rite among the Inca that involved the deaths of children.

Translated as “royal obligation,” capacocha was the Inca’s attempt at ensuring that the best and healthiest among them were sacrificed to appease the gods, often as a way to stop a natural disaster or ensure a healthy harvest. Considering that Juanita’s body was discovered atop Ampato, a volcano in the Andes, her sacrifice very likely played into the Inca’s mountain worship.

Preparation For Death

Juanita’s life prior to her selection for human sacrifice probably wasn’t all that unusual. Her days leading up to her death, however, were very different from the lifestyle of a typical Inca girl. Scientists were able to use DNA from Juanita’s well-preserved hair to create a timeline of those days and deduce what her diet was like before capacocha.

Markers in her hair indicate that she was selected for sacrifice about a year before her actual death and switched from a standard Inca diet of potatoes and vegetables to the more elite foods of animal protein and maze, along with large quantities of coca and alcohol.

As Andrew Wilson, a forensic and archaeological expert, explained to National Geographic, the final six to eight weeks of life of Inca child sacrifices were one of a very intoxicated psychological state altered by the chemical reaction of coca and chicha alcohol.

Thus archaeologists believe that upon Juanita’s death, she was likely in a very docile and relaxed state. While the Incas would eventually perfect this drug mixture — which, coupled with the mountainous high altitudes, would cause the child sacrifices to fall into a permanent sleep — Juanita wasn’t so lucky.

Momia Juanita

Radiologist Elliot Fishman would discover that Juanita’s death was brought about by a massive haemorrhage from a club blow to the head. Fishman concluded that her injuries were “typical of someone who has been hit by a baseball bat.” After the death blow, her skull swelled with blood, pushing her brain to the side. Had blunt trauma to the head not occurred, her brain would have dried symmetrically in the centre of her skull.

Juanita’s Discovery

After her death, sometime between 1450 and 1480, Juanita would sit alone in the mountains until she was uncovered in September 1995 by anthropologist Johan Reinhard and his Peruvian climbing partner, Miguel Zárate.

If it weren’t for volcanic activity, it’s possible that the mummified young girl would have continued to sit on the frozen mountain top for centuries to come. But because of the volcanic activity warming the snow though, Mt. Ampato’s snowcap began to melt, pushing the wrapped mummy and her burial site down the mountain.

Reinhard and Zárate discovered the small bundled mummy inside a crater on the mountain, along with numerous burial items including pottery, shells, and small figurines.

The thin, cold air 20,000-feet up near the summit of Mt. Ampato had left the mummy incredibly intact. “The doctors have been shaking their heads and saying [the mummies] sure don’t look 500 years old [but] could have died a few weeks ago,” Reinhard recalled in a 1999 interview.

The discovery of such a well-preserved mummy instantly created a surge of interest throughout the scientific community. Reinhard would return to the mountain top a month later with a full team and find two more mummified children, this time a boy and a girl.

Reports from a Spanish soldier who witnessed sacrifices of children in pairs suggest that the boy and girl might have been buried as “companion sacrifices” for Mummy Juanita.

All in all, experts estimate that there may be hundreds of Inca children mummified in the mountain peaks of the Andes still waiting to be discovered.

EUROPE, SWITZERLAND, WORLD

Treasure of 1,290 Ancient Roman Coins Discovered by Amateur Archaeologist in Switzerland

Treasure of 1,290 Ancient Roman Coins Discovered by Amateur Archaeologist in Switzerland

An amateur archaeologist has found a big treasure trove of over 1,290 priceless, ancient Roman coins dating back to the 4th Century AD near Bubendorf, a municipality in the district of Liestal, in the canton of Basle-County, in Switzerland.

Treasure of 1,290 Ancient Roman Coins Discovered by Amateur Archaeologist in Switzerland

The hoard was discovered by volunteer archaeological scout Daniel Lüdin in a forested area near Wildenstein Castle in September 2021.

The finder, Daniel Lüdin, was searching a forest with a metal detector near Bubendorf, a municipality in the district of Liestal, in the canton of Basle-County, in Switzerland, when he made the discovery.

When his metal detector signalled a strong alert, Lüdin dug down a little and found a few Roman coins and some potsherds, not enough to explain the strength of the signal. He dug down a little more and hit the jackpot.

The coins which were made during the reign of Constantine the Great (AD 306-337) show portraits of the emperor and his relatives in the front.

Daniel Lüdin was very careful. He reconsidered the find, filled in the hole, and informed Archeologie Baselland.

Thanks to this professional approach, they removed the pot in a soil block so that all of the coins, pot fragments, and any invisible archaeological treasures like traces of organic remains could be excavated under laboratory conditions.

The block removal also allowed researchers to CT scan the soil block to map out the contents.

They revealed that the coins in the pot had been separated in two by a piece of cowhide at the time of their burial, although it is currently unclear why and what purpose this served.

Andreas Fischer, of Archaeologie Baselland said: “One can only speculate about the meaning and purpose of this separation.”

What is clear, however, is that these coins are made of a copper alloy and of silver, and they were all “minted during the reign of Emperor Constantine the Great (306-337 AD). The youngest specimens date from the years 332-335 AD.”

A black space seen in the CT scans between two layers of coins turned out to be a simple piece of leather.

The total value of 1290 coppers was the equivalent of a gold solidus or about two months’ salary for a soldier in the legions.

The expert said that often, there are simple explanations as to why people would bury their valuables, but none of them appears to apply here.

What makes the hoard so unusual is that it was buried during a time of political and economic stability. Coin hoards from the 4th century were typically buried during periods of unrest, but Constantine’s reign was not among them. Hoards from this period are vanishingly rare throughout the Empire.

3D model of the hoard after the external soil was cleaned but before the contents were excavated in the laboratory. Jan von Wartburg.

It seems likely that this one was buried for other reasons. One possibility is a religious offering as the find site was on the border between three known Roman estates, so it could have been a boundary line sacrifice.

WORLD

The Earliest Form of Life From 4.28 Billion Years Ago Discovered

The Earliest Form of Life From 4.28 Billion Years Ago Discovered

Every time we keep on looking back in history to find the earliest traces of life we keep on finding earlier evidence of when life began on this Earth. There is a precise correlation between the prehistoric age and the size of evidence.

The Earliest Form of Life From 4.28 Billion Years Ago Discovered
The oldest rocks on our planet have a source of life at a microscopic level.

A new study has discovered evidence that life on Earth has started somewhere between 3.75 and 4.28 billion years ago. 

A team of researchers from the University College London has gone on a hunt to find microbial life on the oldest rocks that are present on our planet. The research team analyzed a fist-sized rock from Quebec, Canada, estimated to be between 3.75 and 4.28 billion years old.

The rock had been collected from The Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt in Quebec, known to house the oldest rocks on Earth. 

Looking at the rocks on a microscope showed “tree-like” stems with parallel branches as if the rocks have some sort of biological origin. Such a microbiological structure could have not been created through a chemical reaction but through the impact of a biological entity such as ancient bacteria. 

In order to get such an accurate view at a micro level, the researchers had to slice the rock into sections as thick as a piece of paper or 100 microns in order to properly view the structure at a micro-level.

The findings within the rock structure were compared to other old fossils and minerals examined previously. Other ancient rock specimens examined had a similar structure at a microscopic level, making the theory more plausible. 

Researchers also discovered debris on a micro-level that showed the different ways the microbes fed and sustained themselves in the beginning.

There were signs of mineralized chemical by-products in the rocks that are similar to ancient microbes living off the iron, sulfur, and carbon dioxide through a complex system of photosynthesis without oxygen. 

This makes scientists think that life on Earth existed as early as 300 million years after Earth had been created. This microbial life was the first form of life that through the reinforcement of chemical reactions kept mutating and evolving to greater forms. 

Dr. Dominic Papineau, lead author of the research from UCL is supporting the findings: 

“Using many different lines of evidence, our study strongly suggests a number of different types of bacteria existed on Earth between 3.75 and 4.28 billion years ago. This means life could have begun as little as 300 million years after Earth formed. In geological terms, this is quick — about one spin of the Sun around the galaxy.” (Quote by Dr. Dominic Papineau)

Prior to this study, another old rock discovered in Western Australia which dated 3.46 billion years old had been examined, but the scientists from that study came to the conclusion that it was just a fossil with no biological origins.

The technology and techniques that have been involved in this recent study are states of the art, but more samples from diverse parts of the world would be required to give a more plausible conclusion. 

EUROPE, GREECE, WORLD

The ancient computer may have had its clock set to 23 December 178 BC

The ancient computer may have had its clock set to 23 December 178 BC

In 1901, divers looking to research different species of fish next to the tiny island of Antikythera in Grece discovered an old shipwreck from ancient times which contained vast treasures.

The ancient computer may have had its clock set to 23 December 178 BC
CT scan of Antikythera mechanismHoroscopic Astrology

Besides all the treasure, a piece of corroded metal was found which had a very odd shape. Those who discovered it in 1901 didn’t have the knowledge nor the technology to understand what exactly they were looking at.

It was only after 120 years that scientists understood what they were looking for after splitting the object apart.

A CT scan performed on the artefact in 2005 revealed that there were many small bronze gears inside that when turned, would give some sort of value.

The vast knowledge of astrology that is discovered in the writings of ancient Greek historians is crazy and this is something that scientists took into consideration when looking at this mechanism. 

Many years ago a replica was created by Michael Wright who took detailed X-rays of the discovered computer whilst working as a curator of mechanical engineering at the Science Museum in London.

The replica helped us understand that the computer discovered in 1901 was missing a lot of parts as only 82 fragments have survived, that is a third of all the pieces necessary for the mechanism to work. 

Experts say that it had been created to calculate the theories of ancient astrologists. The idea of having a machine able to calculate and validate scientific theories in ancient times is absolutely mind-blowing. Most of the information known about this ancient computer was discovered in 2021 and now even more incredible things are being unveiled. 

Aristeidis Voulgaris of the Thessaloniki Directorate of Culture and Tourism in Greece now supposes the calibration date was around 23 December 178 BC.

Experts call this “Day Zero” or the day that the computer was first used. This reinforces beliefs of the ancient computer being built sometime around 200BC. That date is interesting as Voulgaris mentions a lot of important events that occurred in Greece during 178BC. 

This artefact let alone proves how vastly superior ancient Greeks were. Their technical abilities were far beyond what we initially thought. Other researchers have made their own independent calculations based on the data shown.

The calculations look at how accurate the computer’s astronomical predictions are. The ingeniosity behind the mechanism still leaves everyone baffled. 

There are still many unknown things about this ancient computer, such as the inscriptions on the original part discovered in 1901 which makes experts scratch their heads. It is possible that the computer was used for something else from what the experts are currently predicting, although they can’t see to discover any new functions or mechanisms. 

Historians have also been checking the archives to find some information about this ancient computer. There are many predictions and speculations made along the way, but no concrete information had been found.

Researchers such as Freeth Tony and Jones Alexander who have spent many years analyzing the artefact are trying to decrypt the inscriptions mean, as these may be further instruction on how to properly utilize the ancient computer. 

ENGLAND, EUROPE, WORLD

6000-Year-Old Salt Production House Rewrites Europe’s History

6000-Year-Old Salt Production House Rewrites Europe’s History

Archaeologists in the UK have found an ancient stone age-era salt-production house in North Yorkshire, estimated to be older even than Stonehenge, UK media outlets reported on Wednesday.

6000-Year-Old Salt Production House Rewrites Europe’s History

Dating from the Neolithic period around 3800 B.C.E. the 6,000-year-old find is the latest discovery from the Street House Farm site in Loftus.

Finds unearthed on a shoreline near Loftus include three hearths, fragments of broken Neolithic pottery, a ditch, some still containing salt deposits, shaped stone artefacts, and a storage pit. All of the finds are cited as important evidence of salt processing.

According to Steve Sherlock, the archaeologist who led the dig, the finds are “spectacular and of national significance”.

The discovery is particularly important in that it can substantially rewrite the historical understanding of Neolithic England because the facility is not only the oldest facility found on the island but also one of the oldest facilities found in Western Europe.

This new finding, he explained, according to The Independent, indicates that properly settled civilizations developed on the island earlier than expected, with stone-age Britons transitioning into an agricultural society from a hunter-gather lifestyle. In fact, it pushes salt-making back by nearly 2,400 years.

Fragments of tools for salt processing found at the neolithic site in North Yorkshire

Salt was an extremely valuable commodity, and the extraction process is very complex and implies a certain level of sophistication.

In fact, according to UK sea-salt production expert David Lea-Wilson, “Any ancient coastal culture that was able to master that technology would have been able to expand their economy substantially,” according to The Independent.

Salt was essential to the expansion of the Stone Age. This is because it gave the people of the Neolithic Age the ability to preserve meat.

According to the Independent, James Swift, a traditional meat preservation expert, said that effective management of cattle is almost impossible without salt.

In other words, the fact that salt can be used at all means that the entire early agricultural sector will undergo revolutionary changes. Male calves can be preserved after slaughter throughout the year, and cows have more grass, which in turn means more milk production.

And not only was this salt production house effective but according to Sherlock, salt-making experts said “you’d expect to find that in the Iron Age,” according to the New Scientist news site.

Through some archaeological detective work, Sherlock not only figured out how the salt-making facilities work but also first figured out how the process reached Britain. The pottery used to extract salt from seawater is a special type of bowl that can be traced back to France.

According to The Guardian, there is a theory that migrants from the north of France brought ceramics, and thus even technology, to Britain around 4000 BC.

EUROPE, NORWAY, WORLD

Stunning Roman-looking sandals found deep in the snow in the Norwegian mountains

Stunning Roman-looking sandals found deep in the snow in the Norwegian mountains

Global warming is leading to the retreat of mountain glaciers. Incredibly well preserved and rare artefacts have emerged from melting glaciers and ice patches in North America, the Alps, and Scandinavia.

Stunning Roman-looking sandals found deep in the snow in the Norwegian mountains

Team Secrets of the Ice has been searching for clues about the past in the Norwegian mountains for 15 years, and during this time the scientists have made many unusual discoveries.

One of the most interesting finds the team found is the surprising Roman-looking sandal they found buried deep in the snow in a dangerous Norwegian mountain pass.

The Lendbreen ice patch suffered an incredible melt in the fall of 2019. Finds appeared on the surface of the ice, showing that the melt had reached ice layers not previously touched by melt.

The Lendbreen ice patch in Norway’s Jotunheim Mountains, about 200 miles northwest of Oslo is located high in the mountains of southern Norway.  In the 1800s, the area was dubbed the Jotunheim Mountains, or the home of the Jötnar, the fearful giants in Norse mythology.

The Horse Ice Patch.

Lendbreen has provided the most archaeological finds of any ice patch in Scandinavia and possibly the world.

Among the most significant finds are the hundreds of pre-historic cairns, which are stone structures that signalled to the travellers where the route went, a lost Viking settlement, an iron horseshoe, as well as a 1700-year-old tunic.

Espen Finstad and his team have visited the area on several occasions and their latest finds were recently summarized in a new report.

Did Ancient Romans Visit The Norwegian Mountains?

Would there always have been snow here? Most likely, Finstad says. The amounts would have varied, but in summer or winter, this was no place for flimsy shoes.

A reconstruction of the shoe was made by conservator Vegard Vike at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo.

“I do a lot of hiking in the mountains, and you know, I find myself thinking, why would you wear that shoe up here… it’s just very, open. Full of patterns and holes. But it was there. We found it on the ice”, says Finstad.

“He suggests googling roman shoes for images of similar footwear. The shoe found in the Norwegian mountains is dated to 200-500, so the end of the Roman Empire,” Science in Norway reports.

“It looks almost like a sandal. It’s pretty astonishing, we’re up here at almost 2,000 meters, and we find a shoe with fashion elements, similar to those found on the continent at the time,” Finstad says.

Remains of textiles were found at the Horse Ice Patch. Perhaps something like this was worn inside the shoe?

“We have found quite a number of shoes in the ice, from the Early Bronze Age to the Medieval period,” glacial archaeologist Lars Pilø tweeted about the Horse Ice Patch shoe. “Why did people lose their footwear in the snow? They probably didn’t – the shoes are worn out and probably thrown away as rubbish. Well, we don’t think this shoe is rubbish.”

There was a lot of ice melt in 2019. We were busy rescuing finds from the Lendbreen pass and other sites. Just before winter snow arrived, we received an exciting photo from the Horse Ice Patch pass from a mountain hiker. Isn’t that an Iron Age shoe? We rushed to the pass.

“It’s easy to joke about a roman tourist who didn’t quite understand much about the country he was visiting”, Finstad says.

“But in any case, I believe the people who walked these routes most likely knew what they were doing. They would have worn something inside this shoe that made it work. Perhaps scraps of fabric or animal skin”.

As the ice melts, scientists hope to uncover many more ancient items that may offer clues to those who visited the Lendbreen ice patch in ancient times.

EUROPE, ITALY, WORLD

‘Theodoric the Great’ villa mosaic found near Verona in Italy

‘Theodoric the Great’ villa mosaic found near Verona in Italy

A section of the ancient Roman mosaic flooring from the 5th century AD villa of Ostrogoth king Theodoric the Great has been discovered near the northern Italian city of Verona.

The mosaic was found during digging to replace gas pipes at Montorio outside Verona. There is no direct evidence, but given the extent and wealth of finds, it is reasonable to think that it was a villa referring to the emperor Theodoric or the highest-ranking prime minister of his collaborators.

If it wasn’t Theodoric’s villa, it must have belonged to someone of enormous wealth who was very close to him.

“Bits of mosaic, thermal facilities, and residential complexes have been emerging in a scattered way at Montorio over the past decades and it is now time to systematize them,” said Verona cultural heritage superintendent Vincenzo Tinè.

‘Theodoric the Great’ villa mosaic found near Verona in Italy

Theodoric was not technically a Roman emperor. He was three different varieties of the king, though, starting in 475 A.D. as King of the Ostrogoths, then adding King of Italy in 493 and of the Visigoths in 511.

By the time of his death in 526, Though Theodoric himself only used the title ‘king’ (rex), some scholars characterize him as a Western Roman Emperor in all but name, since he ruled large parts of the former Western Roman Empire, had received the former Western imperial regalia from Constantinople in 497 and was referred to by the title Augustus by some of his subjects.

Theodoric reigned over most of what had been the Western Roman Empire. He spent his childhood as a noble hostage at the imperial court in Constantinople and was educated there in the Eastern Roman tradition.

As ruler of the combined Gothic realms, Theodoric controlled an empire stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Adriatic Sea.

Theodoric promoted the rebuilding of Roman cities and the preservation of ancient monuments in Italy.

He instituted a vast program of reconstruction of Roman cities and infrastructure, restoring ancient aqueducts, baths, churches, the Aurelian walls of Rome, and the defensive walls of myriad other cities in Italy.

He threw in a few new palaces for himself while he was at it, most famously in his capital of Ravenna, but also in other northern Italian cities like Verona.

The mosaic will remain in place. It will be cleaned and documented in detail before being reburied.

Some local residents have proposed covering it with plexiglass so that the mosaic is still visible, something that has already been done in the historic centre of Verona, but this mosaic is in a terribly awkward position, trapped under networks of old pipes surrounded by houses so is unfortunately not a good candidate for display.

COLOMBIA, SOUTH AMERICA, WORLD

Ancient Mayans built pyramids partly from ash after a catastrophic volcanic eruption

Ancient Mayans built pyramids partly from ash after a catastrophic volcanic eruption

Akira Ichikawa, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, has found evidence of Mayans returning to a part of Central America that was destroyed after a catastrophic volcanic eruption, much sooner than previously thought.

In his paper published on the Cambridge University Press site Cambridge Core, he describes his study of the area around what was once the site of San Andrés in the Zapotitán Valley, in what is now El Salvador.

Prior research has shown that in AD 539, the Ilopango volcano erupted in an event now known as the Tierra Blanca Joven eruption, and it was a really big one—the largest in Central America over the past 10,000 years, and the largest on Earth over the past 7,000 years.

The blast was so powerful that it covered the area around the volcano in waist-high ash for 35 kilometers. It also blew itself apart, leaving behind a deep gash that is now a crater lake.

The eruption also greatly impacted the Mayan civilization, sending it into a period of decline due to the loss of nearby settlements and cooler temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere.

Due to lack of evidence, historians have debated for years about how soon the Maya returned to the area, with most suggesting it likely took hundreds of years.

In this new effort, Ichikawa describes evidence of the Mayan people returning to a site 40 miles west of the volcano between 30 and 80 years after the eruption. And not only did they return; they built a large pyramid using ash and dirt.

To learn more about what went on in the area around the site, over the years 2015 to 2019, Ichikawa collected and analyzed samples from the ground and from the Campana structure, a pyramid resting atop a large platform.

He found that work on the structure appears to have begun approximately 30 years after the eruption, though it could have been as long as 80 years.

Ancient Mayans built pyramids partly from ash after a catastrophic volcanic eruption

Either way, the data suggest that the Mayan people returned to the area quickly—soon enough that some could have been survivors of the blast.

Ichikawa suggests it is likely the people built the pyramid as a way to appease the gods who had shown their anger by setting off the eruption.