Category Archives: WORLD

AUSTRIA, EUROPE, WORLD

Archaeologists find a gold “solar bowl” in a 3,000-year-old settlement in Austria

Archaeologists find a gold “solar bowl” in a 3,000-year-old settlement in Austria

It was, in the words of archaeologist Michał Sip, the “discovery of a lifetime.” Unearthed ahead of construction of a railway station in Ebreichsdorf, just south of Vienna, the roughly 3,000-year-old golden bowl features a sun motif and is the first of its kind found in Austria, reports Szymon Zdziebijowski for the state-run Polish Press Agency (PAP).

The golden bowl may have been used in religious ceremonies honouring the sun.

Vessels of this kind have been found in other European countries, including Spain, France and Switzerland, says Sip, who is leading the excavation for Novetus, a German company that assists with archaeological digs. Only 30 similar bowls are known to exist, according to Heritage Daily.

Measuring about 8 inches long and 2 inches high, the Ebreichsdorf bowl is made of a thin metal consisting of 90 per cent gold, 5 per cent silver and 5 per cent copper.

“This is the [second] find of this type [discovered] to the east of the Alpine line,” Sip tells PAP, per Google Translate.

He adds, “Much more is known from the area of northern Germany, Scandinavia and Denmark because [this kind of pottery was] produced there.”

Archaeologists find a gold “solar bowl” in a 3,000-year-old settlement in Austria
The vessel contained gold bracelets and golden wires wrapped around decomposed fabric.

The golden vessel is linked to the Urnfield culture, a prehistoric society that spread across Europe beginning in the 12th century B.C.E., per Encyclopedia Britannica.

The group derived its name from the funerary ritual of placing ashes in urns and burying the containers in fields.

An image of the sun with rays emanating from it adorns the newly discovered bowl. Inside the vessel, archaeologists found two gold bracelets and coiled golden wires wrapped around now-decomposed fabric or leather.

“They were probably decorative scarves,” Sip tells PAP. He posits that the accessories were used during religious ceremonies honouring the sun.

Sip and his colleagues unearthed around 500 bronze objects, clay pottery and other artefacts at the Austrian site, which appears to have been a sizable prehistoric settlement. The team found the golden bowl in the shallow ground near the wall of a house last year.

“[T]he numerous and valuable finds in the form of bronze and gold objects are unique in this part of Europe, and so is the fact that the settlement in Ebreichsdorf … was so large,” Sip tells PAP.

Soon after the find’s discovery, the Austrian government stepped in to ensure the artefacts’ safety. The golden bowl will soon go on view at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

“The discovery of a treasure hidden 3,000 years ago was spectacular,” Christoph Bazil, president of the Austrian Federal Monuments Office, tells Remonews. “[We] immediately placed the richly decorated gold bowl, the gold spirals and the remnants of a gold woven fabric under protection due to their importance at the European level.

The Ebreichsdorf archaeological excavation goes down in history with this golden treasure.”

Speaking with Austrian broadcaster noe.ORF.at, Franz Bauer, director of ÖBB-Infrastruktur AG, which oversees the country’s rail transport, says the bowl’s presence suggests the region had “intensive trade relations” with other European settlements. It was likely made elsewhere and brought to Ebreichsdorf.

Though archaeologists found the artefacts in 2020, authorities decided to hold off on disclosing the news until a detailed analysis could be completed. Excavations will continue at the site for the next six months.

EUROPE, WORLD

Bosnian pyramid dated at nearly 25,000 years old

Bosnian pyramid dated at nearly 25,000 years old

When Dr. Semir “Sam” Osmanagic discovered the first Bosnian pyramid, he suspected it was a find that could force the re-writing of history. But what he did not know how extremely old this structure really was.

The proof came in June 2012 when a team of volunteers, led by archaeologists from Italy uncovered a fossilized leaf.

They found it on the top of one of the covering blocks on the structure known as the “Mother Pyramid” or “Pyramid of the Sun.”

Bosnian pyramid dated at nearly 25,000 years old

Under the direction of Dr. Riccardo Brett and Niccolo Bisconti, the organic material was sent to a laboratory in Kiev, Ukraine to determine its age.

The carbon 14 test showed that the age of the leaf is within plus or minus 200 years of 24,800. This puts it at least 24,600 and as much as 25,000 years old.

According to current history books, the oldest civilizations on Earth are the Babylonians and Sumerians, who lived around 5,000 years ago, so the Bosnian pyramids pre-date these ancient civilizations by ten millennia.

In 2005, when the Pyramid of the Sun was first discovered, researchers had a sample of earth from the topsoil that covered the structure dated using the radiocarbon method, and it was shown to be as old as 12,000 years.

Discoveries made seven years later continue to support the profound age of this pyramid as well as challenging the scientific establishment to re-think how long civilizations on earth have been creating monumental structures such as the pyramids of Bosnia.

For people who would like to visit the Bosnian pyramids and experience for themselves the oldest known pyramids on the planet, Body Mind Spirit Journeys is offering a group tour for spiritually-minded travellers from March 16 – 27, 2019.

The tour is led by “Ancient Aliens” expert and “Magdalene Line” bestselling author Kathleen McGowan, and features tours of the Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun by its discoverer, Dr. Semir “Sam” Osmanagic.

The video below shows highlights of the Bosnian Pyramid tour as well as views of the hotel in Visoko where we will be staying…

EUROPE, GREECE, WORLD

Marble Source for Greek Archaic Sculpture Identified

Marble Source for Greek Archaic Sculpture Identified

The source of marble for a statue of Apollo on the Greek island of Delos has been a mystery to art historians and archaeologists for decades. The stone’s chemistry pointed geochemists to the southern end of the nearby island of Naxos, but no one thought there were ancient marble quarries there. A geoarchaeologist believes he found the source.

“We had actually been told that we were not going to find what we were looking for,” says geoarchaeologist Scott Pike of Willamette University. But after two field seasons traipsing across Mediterranean shrublands, Pike believes he has found the source.

He is presenting his findings on Monday, 11 October 2021 at the Geological Society of America’s GSA Connects 2021 annual meeting in Portland, Ore.

The Greek Archaic period (approximately 800 to 480 B.C.E.) is known in part for its “larger-than-life” kouros statues, which depicted young men. Together, the massive Apollo kouros on Delos would stand around ten meters (33 feet) high, although today it is broken into several parts.

The massive marble chunks are white and worn; at a glance, some of the pieces hardly resemble parts of a human figure. But the statue has drawn researchers all the same. Searching for its source was sparked in part by an ambiguous inscription at its base, roughly translated as, “I am of the same stone, statue and plinth,” with a later addition stating that the kouros was “from the Naxians, to Apollo,” according to Pike.

Marble Source for Greek Archaic Sculpture Identified

It was not clear whether the inscription referred to the statue’s structure, being hewn from a single piece of marble, or the origin of its stone. Pike sampled various parts from the statue — a hand, the upper and lower torso, a bit of leg — and analyzed its carbon and oxygen isotopic composition. That composition can be used to trace the marble source by comparing it against other analyzed marbles, like finding a fingerprint match in a database.

“The analyses showed the marble came from Naxos, but from a region where there hasn’t been any evidence of ancient quarrying. We know that there are two quarries in the northern part of the island, where there are still large kouroi in place in the quarries. But we didn’t know of any ancient quarries in the south,” says Pike.

Pike headed to the southern side of Naxos, despite locals assuring him his efforts were in vain. He relied on local knowledge of other archaeological sites and geologic maps to guide him as he “scoured the landscape” looking for, essentially, outcrops of white marble and possible small pits. Remnants of Archaic quarries bear little resemblance to the vast open-pit mines humans create today and were difficult for Pike to find.

After a couple of weeks of searching, Pike began finding small bands of white marble that were not marked on the geologic maps. Some were close to archaeological sites, giving Pike some confidence that these small quarries could be the source.

“Finding what we were looking for was exciting because being told several times that you’re not going to find anything is discouraging, but we knew,” Pike says. “The evidence pointed to the south. I felt the most Indiana Jones I’ll ever be.”

Back in the lab, Pike analyzed his marble samples and found that two of the newly-uncovered southern white marbles were good matches for the Apollo kouros at Delos. Knowing that these early marble quarries exist in the south of the island will be helpful for tracing the source for other ancient marble artefacts, such as older Bronze Age Cycladic figurines that have puzzled geoarchaeologists. It also has implications for knowledge of commerce at the time.

“Knowing now that there is a marble source on Naxos for these Bronze Age statues and figurines will place the region more in the centre of commerce, trade and influence than had been previously understood,” Pike says.

NORTH AMERICA, SOUTH AMERICA, WORLD

Researchers say fossil shows humans, dogs lived in C. America in 10,000 BC

Researchers say fossil shows humans, dogs lived in C. America in 10,000 BC

San Jose, Costa Rica: The fossil of a jaw bone could prove that domesticated dogs lived in Central America as far back as 12,000 years ago, according to a study by Latin American scientists. The dogs, and their masters, potentially lived alongside giant animals, researchers say.

Researchers say fossil shows humans, dogs lived in C. America in 10,000 BC
The presence of dogs is a sign that humans were also living in a place (Representational)

A 1978 dig in Nacaome, northeast Costa Rica, found bone remains from the Late Pleistocene. Excavations began in the 1990s and produced the remains of a giant horse, Equus sp, a glyptodon (a large armadillo), a mastodon (an ancestor of the modern elephant) and a piece of the jaw from what was originally thought to be a coyote skull.

“We thought it was very strange to have a coyote in the Pleistocene, that is to say, 12,000 years ago,” Costa Rican researcher Guillermo Vargas told AFP.

“When we started looking at the bone fragments, we started to see characteristics that could have been from a dog.

“So we kept looking, we scanned it… and it showed that it was a dog living with humans 12,000 years ago in Costa Rica.”

Researchers believe this fossil of a jaw bone found in Costa Rica belongs to a dog that lived 12,000 years ago.

The presence of dogs is a sign that humans were also living in a place.

“We thought it was strange that a sample was classified as a coyote because they only arrived in Costa Rica in the 20th century.”

– First of its kind –

The coyote is a relative of the domestic dog, although with a different jaw and more pointed teeth.

“The dog eats the leftovers from human food. Its teeth are not so determinant in its survival,” said Vargas.

“It hunts large prey with its human companions. This sample reflects that difference.”

Humans are believed to have emigrated to the Americas across the Bering Strait from Siberia to Alaska during the last great ice age.

“The first domesticated dogs entered the continent about 15,000 years ago, a product of Asians migrating across the Bering Strait,” said Raul Valadez, a biologist and zooarcheologist from the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

“There have never been dogs without people,” Valadez told AFP by telephone.

The presence of humans during the Pleistocene has been attested in Mexico, Chile and Patagonia, but never in Central America, until now.

“This could be the oldest dog in the Americas,” said Vargas.

So far, the oldest attested dog remains were found in Alaska and are 10,150 years old.

Oxford University has offered to perform DNA and carbon dating tests on the sample to discover more genetic information about the animal and its age.

The fossil is currently held at Costa Rica’s national museum but the sample cannot be re-identified as a dog without validation by a specialist magazine.

“This dog discovery would be the first evidence of humans in Costa Rica during a period much earlier” than currently thought, said Vargas.

“It would show us that there were societies that could keep dogs, that had food surpluses, that had dogs out of desire and that these weren’t war dogs that could cause damage.”

EUROPE, SPAIN, WORLD

Possible Neanderthal Hunting Tactic Explored

Possible Neanderthal Hunting Tactic Explored

Juan Negro crouched in the shadows just outside a cave, wearing his headlamp. For a brief moment, he wasn’t an ornithologist at the Spanish National Research Council’s Doñana Biological Station in Seville. He was a Neandertal, intent on catching dinner. As he waited in the cold, dark hours of the night, crowlike birds called choughs entered the cave.

Possible Neanderthal Hunting Tactic Explored
A red-billed chough (Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax) is an elusive species to hunt during the day. But its nighttime roosting habits could have made it easy prey for Neandertals to catch with their bare hands, a new study suggests.

The “Neandertal” then stealthily snuck in and began the hunt.

This idea to role-play started with butchered bird bones. Piles of ancient tool- and tooth-nicked choughs bones have been found in the same caves that Neandertals frequented, evidence suggesting that the ancient hominids chowed down on the birds. But catching choughs is tricky.

During the day, they fly far to feed on invertebrates, seeds and fruits. At night though, their behaviour practically turns them into sitting ducks. The birds roost in groups and often return to the same spot, even if they’ve been disturbed or preyed on there before.

So the question was, how might Neandertals have managed to catch these avian prey?

To find out, Negro and his colleagues decided to act like, well, Neandertals. Wielding bare hands along with butterfly nets and lamps — a proxy for nets and fire that Neandertals may have had at hand— teams of two to 10 researchers silently snuck into caves and other spots across Spain, where the birds roost to see how many choughs they could catch.

Researchers in Spain attempt to capture choughs with their bare hands in roosting sites such as this building. The effort was part of a study to see if Neandertals could have successfully hunted the birds.

Using flashes of light from flashlights to resemble fire, the “Neandertals” dazzled and confused the choughs. The birds typically fled into dead-end areas of the caves, where they could be easily caught, often bare-handed. Hunting expeditions at 70 sites snared more than 5,500 birds in all, the researchers report September 9 in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.

The birds were then released unharmed. It was “the most exciting piece of research” Negro says he’s ever done.

The results demonstrate that through teamwork, choughs can be captured without fancy tools at night and offer a likely way that Neandertals could have captured choughs. But actual Neandertal bird-catching behaviour remains unknown. If this is in fact how Neandertals hunted, it adds to claims that their behaviour and ability to think strategically is more sophisticated than they are often given credit for.

Red-billed choughs, captured as part of an experiment to see if Neandertals could have caught the birds, sit in a sack. The birds were released unharmed.

“The regular catchment of choughs by Neandertals implies a deep knowledge of the ecology of this species, a previous planning for its obtaining, including procurement techniques, and the ability to plan and anticipate dietary needs for the future,” says Ruth Blasco.

A taphonomist at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution in Tarragona, Spain, Blasco is an expert in the Neandertal diet.

Such role-playing, she notes, is “commonly used by scholars as valid analogies to infer processes that happened in the past.” For instance, reenactments with replicas of wooden spears have suggested that Neandertals could have hurled the weapons to hunt prey at a distance.

The researchers re-creating chough hunts used butterfly nets to catch birds fleeing sites with narrow entrances, as well as bigger nets partially covering larger openings. But “the easiest thing was to grab the birds by hand,” Negro says.

“You have to be intelligent to capture these animals, to process them, to roast and eat them,” he notes. Previous studies have shown that Neandertals may have been similarly adept at foraging for seafood. “We tend to think that [Neandertals] were brutes with no intelligence,” Negro says, “but in fact, the evidence is accumulating that they were very close to Homo sapiens.”

ASIA, LEBANON, WORLD

Mass Grave of 13th Century Warriors Uncovered by Archaeologists in Lebanon

Mass Grave of 13th Century Warriors Uncovered by Archaeologists in Lebanon

Archaeologists digging near a Middle Eastern castle have unearthed two mass graves containing the grisly remains of Christian soldiers vanquished during the medieval Crusades — and some of them could have even been personally buried by a king.

The chipped and charred bones of at least 25 young men and teenage boys were found inside the dry moat of the ruins of St. Louis Castle in Sidon, Lebanon. Radiocarbon dating suggests they were among the many Europeans who, between the 11th and the 13th centuries, were spurred by priests and rulers to take up arms in a doomed effort to reconquer the Holy Land.

Much like many who came to fight and plunder before them, the soldiers’ long and arduous journeys ended with their deaths  — all as a result of wounds they received in battle. But despite the widespread casualties, mass graves from this bloody period of history are incredibly difficult to find. 

In a study published on August 25 in PLOS One, the researchers detailed their findings.

“When we found so many weapon injuries on the bones as we excavated them, I knew we had made a special discovery,” Richard Mikulski, an archaeologist at Bournemouth University in the U.K., who excavated and analyzed the remains, said in a statement.

The archaeologists analyzed DNA alongside naturally occurring radioactive isotopes in the men’s teeth to confirm that some were born in Europe, and an analysis of different versions, or isotopes, of carbon in their bones, suggests that they died sometime during the 13th century. Crusaders first captured St. Louis Castle just after the First Crusade in 1110.

The invaders held onto Sidon, a key strategic port, for more than a century, but historical records show that the castle fell after it was attacked and destroyed twice — at first part by the Mamluks in 1253 and later by the Mongols in 1260.

The researchers said it is “highly likely” that the soldiers perished during one of these battles, and by brutal means: The bones all bear stab and slice wounds from swords and axes, as well as evidence of blunt-force trauma.

The soldiers had more wounds on their backs than on their fronts, suggesting that many were attacked from behind, possibly as they fled during a rout, and the distribution of these blows implies that their attackers charged them down on horseback.

A number of the men’s remains also have blade wounds to the back of their necks — a sign that they may have been captured alive before being beheaded. 

“One individual sustained so many wounds (a minimum of 12 injuries involving a minimum of 16 skeletal elements) that it may represent an incident of overkill, where considerably more violent blows were applied than was actually required to overcome or kill them,” the researchers wrote in their study. 

Charring on some of the bones suggests that someone tried to burn the mens’ bodies in the aftermath of their brutal deaths, after which their corpses were left to rot on the battlefield. 

But the bodies were later swept into a mass grave, possibly after the royal intervention. A belt buckle found among the bones indicates that the soldiers were Frankish and hailed from a region that encompassed modern-day Belgium and France. Their origin, and the date they were killed, suggests that the soldiers could have been buried by King Louis IX of France. 

“Crusader records tell us that King Louis IX of France was on crusade in the Holy Land at the time of the attack on Sidon in 1253,” Piers Mitchell, an anthropologist at the University of Cambridge who was the project’s Crusades expert, said in the statement. “He went to the city after the battle and personally helped to bury the rotting corpses in mass graves such as these. Wouldn’t it be amazing if King Louis himself had helped to bury these bodies?”

The French king, one of the most celebrated rulers of his time who was later canonized as a saint, led two invasions into the Holy Land — the Seventh and Eight crusades — after vowing to God he would retake the territory if he was granted divine assistance in recovering from malaria.

READ ALSO: MOSAICS FROM THE ROMAN ERA WERE JUST UNCOVERED IN LEBANON

The legend was that the devout king later died of plague in 1270 while leading the Eighth Crusade, but a more recent analysis points to him dying of scurvy caused by his refusal to eat foreign food, Live Science previously reported.

The archaeologists may never know who killed and later buried the soldiers in Sidon, but their graves provide a rare insight into a brutal period that is usually only described in written records.

“So many thousands of people died on all sides during the crusades, but it is incredibly rare for archaeologists to find the soldiers killed in these famous battles,” said Mitchell. “The wounds that covered their bodies allow us to start to understand the horrific reality of medieval warfare.”

ASIA, ISRAEL, WORLD

Israel winery: 1,500-year-old Byzantine wine complex found

Israel winery: 1,500-year-old Byzantine wine complex found

A 1,500-year-old wine-making complex, said to have been the world’s largest at the time, has been discovered in Israel, archaeologists say.

Five presses were unearthed at the huge Byzantine-era winery at Yavne, south of Tel Aviv, which is estimated to have produced two million litres a year.

After a sophisticated production process, it was exported around the Mediterranean.

The wine was aged in clay jars known as Gaza Jars, many of which were found intact at the site

Those working at the site said they were surprised by its size. There are plans to make the complex a visitor attraction once preservation work is completed.

The site contains five wine presses spread over a square kilometre (0.4 sq miles), warehouses for ageing and bottling the wine, and kilns for firing the jars used for storing it.

The end product was known as Gaza and Ashkelon wine, after the ports through which it was exported to Europe, North Africa and Asia Minor.

The site is spread over a square kilometre

It had a reputation for quality throughout the Mediterranean region, but at that time wine was also a staple for many.

“This was a major source of nutrition and this was a safe drink because the water was often contaminated,” said Jon Seligman, one of the excavation’s directors.

Decorative niches in the shape of a conch indicate that the factory owners were very wealthy
Tens of thousands of fragments have been found at the site
WORLD

Primordial “Hyper-Eye” Discovered: Astonishing 390 Million-Year-Old Hyper-Compound Eye With 200 Lenses

Primordial “Hyper-Eye” Discovered: Astonishing 390 Million-Year-Old Hyper-Compound Eye With 200 Lenses

A fossilized trilobite first studied by an amateur palaeontologist half a century ago has provided researchers with a whole new way of seeing the world, in a very literal sense. X-rays taken of the ancient arthropod back in the early 1970s have been given a second look, revealing a structure of an eye that is unlike any seen on any animal before or since.

Phacops geesops, a trilobite from the Devonian age.

As head of Siemens radiology department, Wilhelm Stürmer knew a thing or two about using X-rays to reveal hidden secrets. This was especially true when it came to studying fossils, a passion he fueled by fitting out a minibus with X-ray equipment to take out to palaeontology sites. In spite of his expertise in radiology, Stürmer wasn’t a palaeontologist, so few took his claim of discovering optic nerves inside a 390-million-year-old Phacops geesops fossil seriously.

“At that time, the consensus was that only bones and teeth, the hard parts of living things, could be seen in the fossils, but not the soft parts, such as intestines or nerves,” says the University of Cologne palaeontologist Brigitte Schoenemann.

In addition to the nerves was an arrangement of ‘fibres’ that looked uncannily like photoreceptor cells called ommatidia. Only in this case, they were strangely elongated, roughly 25 times their own diameter; far too long to seem plausible as a light-gathering structure.

A lot has changed since then. Today, palaeontologists are comfortable with the idea that soft tissue structures can leave a clear signature in fossilized material. And super-long ommatidia have since been uncovered in the compound eyes of aquatic arthropods.

With that in mind, Schoenemann and her colleagues went back to Stürmer’s original images for a closer look. After double-checking the fossil with modern CT technology, they determined the filaments he spotted were almost certainly optic nerve fibres after all.

But it was what the foam-like nest of fibres was connected to that really grabbed the researchers’ attention: What seemed like two compound eyes were actually hundreds, split across left and right clusters.

“Each of these eyes consisted of about 200 lenses up to one millimetre in size,” says Schoenemann.

“Under each of these lenses, in turn, at least six facets are set up, each of which together again makes up a small compound eye. So we have about 200 compound eyes (one under each lens) in one eye.”

Trilobites more or less dominated the oceans for hundreds of millions of years, adapting to fill a broad range of aquatic niches with a variety of weird and wonderful body plans.

One of their most clever inventions was a visual system of unprecedented complexity. While comparably simple in modern terms, their version of eyes gave them the edge in hunting or hiding and in detecting the subtlest of changes in brightness and movement.

Though their eye anatomy came in many forms, the most common structures would be easily recognizable to most zoologists today, consisting of a neatly arranged pattern of lenses working together to turn diffuse light into a heavily pixelated map of their surroundings.

Modern insects and other arthropods continue to rely on compound eyes like these to great effect. What this pixelated view lacks in resolution is easily made up for in simplicity and adaptability, evolving to overcome limitations with a few tweaks of anatomy.

Yet for the incredible diversity of trilobite eyes, those on certain members of the suborder Phacopina have had palaeontologists stumped.

In what’s known as a schizochroal eye, each lens sits a short distance away from its neighbour, leaving a lot of empty space that could be put to use catching more light.

We now know what appears to be a single lens is, in fact, a single compound eye within two ‘hyper-eyes’.

While it doesn’t tell us why these eyes evolved, it does change what questions we need to ask about this unusual arthropod. Rather than pondering the waste of space between each lens, biologists can now speculate over the benefits hundreds of tiny eyes have in adjusting to low light, or responding to rapid changes in light conditions over a wider area.

“It is also possible that the individual components of the eye performed different functions, enabling, for example, contrast enhancement or the perception of different colours,” says Schoenemann.

READ ALSO: SCIENTISTS DISCOVER “ONCE-IN-A-GENERATION” FOSSILIZED WATER BEAR IN 16-MILLION-YEAR-OLD AMBER

Stürmer must have suspected there was something worth looking at in the eyes, having drawn an arrow in red pen pointing right at the half-dozen facets beneath one of the lenses.

Sadly, the radiologist passed away in the 1980s, long before his discovery was given the validation it deserved.

Like the trilobite, Stürmer was clearly a visionary before his time.