RTÉ reports that the remains of a child and an iron buckle or fastener were uncovered in Dubh Linn, a dark tidal pool where the River Poddle enters the River Liffey at the site of Dublin Castle, by a team of researchers led by Alan Hayden of University College Dublin.
The find was made during an excavation near Dublin Castle where in ancient times the River Poddle flowed into the Dubh Linn near the River Liffey.
The skeleton, which was largely intact, was found just at the point before the river entered the pool and is thought to date from the 9th or 10th century.
The skeleton is believed to be that of a 10 to 12-year-old boy
After it was excavated it was discovered to be that of a child aged between 10 and 12 years of age – most likely a boy – and is thought to have been wrapped in a shroud before being thrown into the river.
The body was found with shoulders hunched together and an iron buckle or fastener was found with the body.
Alan Hayden from the UCD School of Archaeology who was leading the dig said the fact that it was not given a proper burial and was dumped in this manner could suggest an act of violence.
Further tests will be carried out to determine the date of death, gender and the ethnic origin of the person.
The dig, which is being carried out on the site of office development on Ship Street beside Dublin Castle, has already discovered that the original Dubh Linn was much larger than originally thought, extending beyond the walls of Dublin Castle.
Now the dig has found that the size of the original Viking settlement or Longphort can be shown to be double the extent previously established.
The archaeologists uncovered banks that would have run along the Poddle and the Dubh Linn with gaps to bring in boats. Inland there would have been a high fortification.
The area of the Longphort in the 10th and 11th centuries would have extended from the present-day Molly Malone statue on Suffolk Street to St Patrick’s Cathedral.
The dig has also established that Vikings continued living at the Dubh Linn even after the more famous Wood Quay settlement was established a kilometre away.
The Poddle was culverted in the 12th century and covered over completed in the 18th century. A 19th century well was found on the site.
Neolithic Settlement Discovered Near Turkey’s Black Sea Coast
Hurriyet Daily News reports that a team of researchers led by Nurperi Ayengin of Düzce University are excavating a pre-pottery Neolithic settlement at Kahin Tepe, which is located on northern Turkey’s Black Sea coast.
“We think that this is a sacred area where people came at certain times of the year to hunt, share their knowledge, worship, and make statues of animals,” Ayengin said.
Having started in 2018, the excavations have been going on ever since by the Kastamonu Museum Directorate and consulted by the Düzce University head of the Protohistoric and Near Eastern Archaeology Department, Nurperi Ayengin.
Nineteen students and academics from various universities are working in the excavation field.
Speaking to the Anadolu Agency, Ayengin said that they started the excavations in the region two years ago for a dam rescue project near Başköy village.
Pointing out that Kahin Tepe is located in a strategic location, Ayengin said, “We discovered the settlement dating to the Aceramic Neolithic period, which lasted between 12,000 and 7,000 BC.”
“One of the most famous of this period is Göbeklitepe located in the southeast. When we look at the social structure of the period, we know that the main element was a rigid and complex religious belief,” Ayengin noted.
She stated that new discoveries that would change the history of Anatolia were expected at Kahin Tepe.
“These excavations will yield very serious results in terms of both Anatolia and world history. In the qualified sculptures unearthed in the excavations, we can say that we have determined, which animals the gods of the Aceramic Neolithic period consisted of,” Ayengin added.
“We think that this is a sacred area where people came at certain times of the year to hunt, share their knowledge, worship, and make statues of animals,” she said.
Noting that both the region and the artefacts unearthed in the excavations are very similar to the characteristics of Göbeklitepe, Ayengin said that the city was one of the settlements with the most similar details to Göbeklitepe, especially when looking at the hybrid works and the depictions of the clergy.
“Kahin Tepe is the oldest temple site of the Aceramic Neolithic period in the Black Sea. This is a religious place where people both worship and transfer their knowledge. It is the oldest place of worship found in the Black Sea,” she said.
“We have seen that Anatolian history is pregnant with many unexplored settlements. Much bigger discoveries await us,” she noted, adding that this game-changer excavation will continue to change history.
Last year, the excavations in the region have unearthed findings such as a grinding stone and ornaments belonging to the same period.
500-Year-Old Mummy of an Incan man wearing a feather headdress found near Lima, Peru
Thousands of Inca mummies, some of them bundled together in groups of up to seven, have been unearthed from an ancient cemetery under a shantytown near Lima in Peru.
Believed to be the largest cemetery from one time period excavated in Peru, lead archeologist Guillermo Cock said as many as 10,000 Incas were possibly buried at the site at Puruchuco in Peru’s Rimac Valley between 1480 and 1535.
But Cock, a Peruvian archeologist, said the site was being destroyed at an alarming rate by humans, including the release of thousands of gallons of sewage daily into the shantytown’s streets that had seeped underground and damaged some mummies.
“The consequences of humanity on these burials are terrible,” said Cock, adding that some of the mummies were riddled with worms. “It was not a pretty sight.”
Cock, who estimates they uncovered the remains of between 2,200 and 2,400 Incas, said the cemetery provided a huge scientific sampling of the Inca people from infants to the elderly and from the rich to the very poor.
“We have what in sociological terms, we would call the perfect sample to project presidential elections. Each social class and group and age is proportionally represented,” Cock told a news conference at National Geographic’s Washington headquarters.
“This will give us a unique opportunity to look into the Inca community, study their lives, their health and their culture,” added Cock, who has been doing archeological work in Peru since 1983 and is an adviser to the Peruvian government.
The Incas once ruled a vast swath of South America stretching from Colombia to Chile but Spain’s Francisco Pizarro and his band of 160 treasure hunters, using cannons and horses, brought that empire to a bloody end in 1533.
Some of the “mummy bundles” contained as many as seven people buried along with their possessions and weighed hundreds of pounds. The bundles have yielded amazing discoveries, said Cock, including well-preserved individuals, a copper mask, a war club, hand-painted textiles, and pottery.
The bodies were not embalmed, he said but were mummified by placing them in dry soil packed with textiles that helped them dry out more quickly.
“The process, although natural, was intentional,” he said.
So far, Cock said only three bundles had been unwrapped in what was a painfully slow, expensive process. It would take generations before the full implications of the find were known.
One of the unwrapped bundles, nicknamed the Cotton King, was made up of hundreds of pounds of raw cotton. Inside was the body of an Inca noble and a baby as well as 70 items including food, pottery, animal skins, and corn.
Among the most interesting discoveries was the number of elite members of Inca society, some of whom were still wearing the elaborate feather headdresses they were buried in. Another striking find was 22 intact and 18 disturbed “false heads,” or falsas Cabezas. These are mummy bundles usually reserved for the elite with a bump on top filled with cotton and resembling a human head, many of them with wigs.
These bundles contain several people, one of them the key person and the remainder probably accompanying him in the afterlife. The bodies of adults are in the traditional fetal position, with their possessions arranged around them.
“Prior to our excavations, only one falsas cabezas bundle from the Inca Period had been recovered by an archeologist, in 1956,” said Cock.
Cock said it was unclear whether all of the bodies in these bundles were related but probably when a key person died his body was put aside until the remainder of his party died and could be buried with him.
“Mummy bundles are like time capsules from the Inca,” said Johan Reinhard, explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society. “The huge number of mummies from one period of time provides an unparalleled opportunity for new information about the Incas.”
About 50,000 to 60,000 artifacts were retrieved from the site and 22 of these are on display at National Geographic, including ancient ceramic pots and patterned textiles. Cock and his team worked at a frenetic pace over the past three years to salvage as much as they could from the cemetery before the shantytown was leveled for development.
The site is known as Tupac Amaru by the 1,240 families who sought refuge there from 1989 after fleeing guerrilla fighting in the Peruvian highlands. Aside from the toll, the cemetery has taken from tens of thousands of gallons of liquid being dumped daily into the ground, other graves were destroyed by bulldozers in 1998.
Shantytown dwellers fought to remain on the site and archeologists turned the area into a giant dig, building bridges for people to cross the streets. Some of the residents joined in the dig. Some of the graves were found very close to the surface, especially in a dusty school playground which had been leveled several years ago.
The 700,000-year-old Skull in Greek cave completely shatters the Out of Africa theory
The “Petralona Man,” or “Petralona Archanthropus” is a for 700,000 years old human skull found in 1959. Since then, scientists have tried to locate the origin of this skull, which has created tremendous controversy.
The skull, indicating the oldest human “Europeoid” (presenting European traits), was embedded in a cave’s wall in Petralona, near Chalkidiki in Northern Greece.
A shepherd mistakenly found the cave, dense with stalactites and stalagmites. The cave and skull study was assigned to Dr. Aris Poulianos, an anthropologist specialist, member of UNESCO’s International Union of Anthropology and Ethnology, and president of the Anthropological Association of Greece.
Before that, Dr. Poulianos was already known for his thesis on “The origin of the Greeks”. His thesis was based on craniological and anthropometrical studies of Modern Greek populations, which proved that modern Greeks are related to ancient Greeks and that they are not the descendants of Slavic nations.
After the extensive study on the 700,000-year-old skull, he concluded that the “Petralona man” was not connected to the species that came out of Africa. His arguments were mainly based on the skull’s almost perfect orthography, the shape of its dental arch, and the occipital bone construction.
According to the “Out of Africa” theory, “anatomically modern humans” known as “Homo sapiens” originated in Africa between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago before spreading to the rest of the world. This theory was related to the fact that most prehistoric fossils were found in Africa.
In 1964, two German researchers, anthropologist E. Breitinger and paleontologist O. Sickenberg, who was invited to Greece, suggested that the skull was actually 50,000 years old, thus rejecting Dr. Poulianos’ theory.
Moreover, Breitinger claimed that the skull belonged to the “first African out of Africa”. A few years later, in 1971, US Archaeology magazine confirmed Poulianos’ statement.
According to the scientific magazine, the existence of a cave dating back more than 700,000 years and human presence in almost every geological layer were ascertained.
Additionally, the magazine affirmed that human presence became evident from the discovery of Paleolithic tools of the same age and the most ancient traces of fire that was ever lit by human hand.
The research continued from 1975 to 1983, when the excavation stopped and findings remained inaccessible to study until 1997.
Today, 50 years after the discovery of the “Petralona man”, modern methods of absolute chronology confirm Dr. Poulianos’ theory.
Most academics believe that the skull belongs to an archaic hominid with strong European traits and characteristics of Homo erectus, Neanderthals, and sapiens, but they distinguish it from all these species.
This incredible discovery raises new questions on human evolution and certainly challenges the “Out of Africa” theory.
3,200-year-old Egyptian built fortress found in Israel
A HUGE fortress dating back to the 12th-century BC has been unearthed in Israel and experts are linking it to a structure described in the Bible.
The Canaanite citadel is said to be similar to a building in the Book of Judges, a section of the Bible that describes intense warfare between groups of Canaanites, Israelites, and Philistines.
The design of the fortress and pottery found there indicate that it belonged to Canaanites who would have lived under Egyptian rule at the time.
The fortress was uncovered in Israel
Canaanites are often referred to as the ‘lost people’ of the Bible because a lot of what we know about them just comes from ancient texts describing interactions with civilization.
The 3,200-year-old fortress was found in southern Israel. It measures 60 feet by 60 feet and would have been two stories high. There is evidence to suggest it had watchtowers on each corner and a courtyard featuring stone slabs and columns.
About 3,200 years ago, the fortress was erected to defend against the Philistines.
The Israeli archaeologists working on the dig think the Canaanites built the structure with help from their Egyptian overlords.
Fortresses like this would have been necessary to try and stay protected from the invading Philistines.
The site contained hundreds of pottery vessels inside the rooms of the courtyard. This included one piece of pottery suspected to be used for religious reasons.
Earthenware discovered in a 3,200-year-old citadel unearthed near Guvrin Stream and Kibbutz Gal-On
IAA archaeologists Saar Ganor and Itamar Weissbein said: “The fortress we found provides a glimpse into the geopolitical reality described in the Book of Judges, in which the Canaanites, Israelites, and Philistines are fighting each other.
“In this period, the land of Canaan was ruled by the Egyptians and its inhabitants were under their custody.”
Pottery found at the site was similar to the Egyptian style at the time and even the fortress was similar to an Egyptian ‘governor’s houses’. The Egyptians are thought to have left the Canaan area in the middle of the 12th-century BC.
This means the fortress inhabitants would have been left to defend themselves as the area descended into territorial battles. The archaeological site will soon be opened to the public for free tours.
Archaeologists Find 13,000-Year-Old Engraved Mammoth Tusk in Siberia
The oldest known depictions of the animal ever identified in Asia are Etchings of fighting camels discovered on 13,000-year-old mammoth tusks in Siberia.
The tusk found in lower Tom in western Siberia was analyzed by a team from the Khakassian Research Unit for Language, Literature, and History in Russia. The 5ft long tusk also included an etching of an anthropomorphic image that could show a human wearing a camel disguise, according to study author Yury Esin.
This may have been a way to show how hunters dressed as a camel in order to get closer to the beasts and kill or capture them, the team explained. Among the etchings were depictions of camels locked in a fight that may represent the start of a mating season and a vital stage in the cycle of the human community.
Etchings of fighting camels found on 13,000-year-old mammoth tusks in Siberia are the earliest known drawings of the animal ever found in Asia, researchers claim
The camels shown on the tusk are consistent with images of camels painted in caves from around the same time – the oldest known painting was from the Kapova cave in the Ural mountains dating to about 19,000 years. The difference to those is that this shows camels ‘fighting’ neck to neck and one pair have arrows and wounds suggesting they were hunted by humans.
‘The comparative analysis of the stylistic features of the camel figures shows that they correspond to the age of the tusk itself, making them, at present, the oldest camel images in Asia,’ the authors wrote.
‘The discovery of the engravings in this region is consistent with the theory of mobile population groups moving to western Siberia in the Late Upper Paleolithic.’
Etchings could be designed to show just how important camel fights and hunting were to the culture of the community that created the artworks. This hunting may have been seasonal and the fights likely happened at the start of the mating season, according to Esin.
Among the etchings were depictions of camels locked in fights that may represent the start of a mating season and a vital stage in the cycle of the human community
He speculated that the fights may have marked a vital point in the annual cycle for the human community living around the camels. Not many camel bones have been found in the Tom river – the ones that have been uncovered date to between 30,000 and 55,000 years ago, Esin said.
There are some that date to the time of the tusk, about 13,000 years ago, but they were found much further down – hundreds of miles away from the river. According to Esin, this means the community was likely nomadic. The ‘human disguised as a camel’ was likely an example of a way for hunters to ‘sneak up’ on the beasts and make it easier to kill them.
This tusk was first discovered in 1988 during a construction project but had remained unstudied until Esin and colleagues started their investigation. He said very little is known about the ancient humans living in this area of Siberia but there is evidence they hunted mammoths – and now that they hunted camels.
It wasn’t an easy task for Esin and colleagues as by the time they started studying the tusk it had already started to break and crack due to ‘inappropriate storage’.
The actual engravings themselves are also different from others discovered. The engravings on the tusk from the Tom River have special features, which make them difficult to document,’ said Esin.
‘They have very thin and shallow lines, making them barely visible and tedious to trace and the engravings are on the surface of a round, long, curved and heavy object,’ he explained.
Engravings on the 13,000-year-old mammoth tusk from the Tom River, western Siberia; numbers from (1) to (5) and letters from (a) to (i) mark main images and their details.
This means that the tusk has to be rotated to recognize what has been drawn – but its poor condition made this difficult as it was already crumbling in parts.
They took a series of images, including close-up macro photographs of the engravings to identify ways they may have been created. The engravings were created with a very sharp cutting tool, which, depending on the amount of pressure applied, could produce a line about 0.1–0.15 mm thin, or even less,’ said Esin.
On the surface of the tusk, they found four images of two-humped camels depicted in the same style and using similar techniques and tools. All camels are depicted with only two legs. The lower ends of the foot contours, in most cases, are not connected,’ they said.
‘The engravings were created with a very sharp cutting tool, which, depending on the amount of pressure applied, could produce a line about 0.1–0.15 mm thin, or even less,’ said Esin
‘The camels have patches of thick fur sticking out from the upper parts of their forelegs, bellies, under their necks, at the base of the humps (between the front hump and the neck, the back hump and the croup) and on their foreheads.’
‘All in all, the figures of the animals are quite realistic and demonstrate a good knowledge of the subject. They said they could also detect signs of arrows and wounds on the camel bodies including parallel lines close to the front of each other that could show bleeding.
‘Similar images of camels facing each other are quite common in the art of different cultures of the Bronze Age, Early Iron Age and Medieval period in southern Siberia and Central Asia,’ said Esin.
‘The camels have patches of thick fur sticking out from the upper parts of their forelegs, bellies, under their necks, at the base of the humps (between the front hump and the neck, the back hump, and the croup) and on their foreheads’
This suggests that this composition conveys a memorable and important natural characteristic of camel behaviour – including two male rivers fighting. The resemblance of some stylistic features and content seen in the images on the Tom River tusk and in Upper Paleolithic European art is highly significant,’ he said.
‘This suggests that the reason for the similarities is not only epochal features of human culture but also that some traditions were inherited through space and time.’
He said the Tom River tusk itself demonstrates that engraving different materials was an important part of cultural tradition in the Upper Paleolithic. In this case, stylistic techniques could be consolidated and passed down through generations, as a particular part of labour skills,’ Esin explained.
A Lost Roman City Has Been Discovered in Southern France
Hidden for centuries, mosaic floors from the lost Roman city of Ucetia have been discovered in France. A large excavation is underway in the town of Uzes in southern France to unearth more of the remain’s of this ancient Roman settlement, the existence of which archaeologists had only hints of until the dig.
One of the most impressive finds was a mosaic floor, dating back the second half of the 1st century B.C., discovered in the ruins of what’s thought to be a Roman public building.
The nearby city of Nimes is more famous for its Roman history, largely thanks to the A.D. 70 amphitheater, where events, including bullfights, still take place. Less is known about Uzes, once called Ucetia.
But before the construction of dormitories for a high school there, archaeologists were brought in to investigate a 43,000 square-foot (4,000 square meters) area for pieces of the city’s history.
The French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP) announced that the dig has so far been very fruitful.
Some of the wall’s and structures that were uncovered date to just before the Roman conquest of present day France (called Gaul at the time).
But the most visually stunning find’s are the well preserved Roman era mosaic floors with richly colored patterns and figures.
The archaeologist’s discovered one large structure, 2,700 square feet (250 square meters) in area, with a colonnade that suggest’s it was a public building, and four rooms in a row.
One of those large rooms contains a complex mosaic pavement with geometric patterns like meanders and swastikas, as well as symbols like crowns and chevrons, and animals like an owl, duck, eagle, and fawn.
The archaeologist think this building dates to the first century B.C. and was maintained until the first century A.D.
In another area at the site, the archaeologist unearthed a”domus,” or a large house belonging to a wealthy Roman family.
This building sprawls over 5380 square feet (500 square meters) and dates to the early Roman Empire (1stcentury B.C.).
A room in this family home has a mosaic floors with a geometric pattern, accompanied by stylized dolphins in the four corners.
The home also had a type of central heating system; archaeologist’s found a “hypocaust,” or a crawl space supported by brick columns where hot air would have circulated.
And several “dolia,” or huge ceramic wine vessels, were found there, suggesting the inhabitants might have drunk homemade wines.
The 1.5 million euro ($1.6 million) dig is ongoing, and, according to INRAP, the archaeologists have recently begun excavating another large area of ancient and medieval ruins, including two roads and an intersection.
Seventy thousand years ago, people lived all over South America. Six thousand years ago, people began to construct cities around pyramids, in places like Mesopotamia and China.
The first of these structures in the Americas, between the Andes and the Pacific Oceans, was established 5,000 years ago. Known as Caral, it was a large settlement in the Supe Valley, in what is now Peru. The point is that this gave rise to the first city in the Americas, as well as the most extraordinary archaeological site in the entire world.
Ancient cities all had a common feature, namely their access to freshwater. On the wall, Across-the-board, this is what allowed for the irrigation that was required to form modern cities. In typical fashion, the river in the valley of Caral flowed down from the mountains to the sea.
From this, hoes were then used to dig trenches from the river to the fields. However, since the river only flows between December and April, to have water all year round, they had to build a canal that was fed by two different sources.
Along with the river water, the people of Caral made use of mountain spring water, to hydrate themselves and the plants they depended on. As a result of this, there were soon numerous fruits and vegetables, in a vast oasis, along with acres upon acres of cotton. It must have been an ancient wonder of the world.
Now, although they were expert farmers, the old native Peruvians didn’t know how to fire clay. Instead, they carried things in hand-woven reed baskets. The thing that makes them the most unique, though, is the fact that the Caral-Supe civilization was a peaceful society. That is to say, citizens didn’t own weapons, unlike in almost every other civilization, both ancient and modern alike.
Their overall way of life developed out of a far greater need for welfare than that of warfare. So, the culture didn’t include aggression. Although, it is important to note that, the priests of Caral did engage in human sacrifice.
In this way, they started the tradition of burying people alive in monumental architecture, as would be seen millennia later, in cities like Teotihuacan and Cahokia, in North America. Thus, trapped souls began to serve as protectors of pyramids.
Regardless, Caral was under construction at the same time as the pyramids of Giza, in Ancient Egypt. Like all the other great cities of old, the site was simply enormous.
The remains of the Sacred City of Caral, Peru.
The temple is included was a 100 foot tall, multiple structures, fire altar platform. This was also accompanied by five smaller ritual pyramids, around a central plaza, complete with an amphitheater. There was also housing for 3,000 permanent residents.
As part of this, major repairs needed to be done every two or three generations. Even though they used rather sophisticated anti-seismic methods of construction, it was still necessary to shore up monuments every few decades. They also had to deal with deadly mudslides, in the process.
Nonetheless, in spite of all the hardships they faced, their peaceful society not only survived, it actually thrived. It was all based on a complex trade network, which went to Ecuador, and even hundreds of miles away, deep in the rain forests. So, the farmers in Caral grew chili peppers and guava, among many other crops.
The most important thing they produced, though, was cotton. Manufacturers used it to make a number of textiles, like clothing and fishing nets. Farmers wore the former, and traded the latter to fishermen, miles away in coastal towns. In this way, people in the aristocratic city-state subsisted mainly on shellfish and dried fish, although they had a fairly diverse diet, overall.
The people of Caral brilliantly capitalized on what could have been a disaster. 5,000 years ago, climate change altered the local seascape in the Pacific Ocean.
Remains of the Great Pyramid of Caral.
After the temperature changed, tuna and other big fish moved on to cooler waters. Meanwhile, anchovies and sardines moved in. These new marine products were caught with nets rather than hooks and lines, as people had been doing with the larger fish. Simply put, it became easier to catch smaller fish, in far greater numbers.
In this way, the greater number of fish that were being caught, with the use of more and more nets, allowed for greater and greater surplus, which drove the economy. This made Caral the central trading hub, in the first major marketplace in the Americas.
As the mother civilization of the New World, the Caral-Supe society set the stage for Native American civilizations, far and wide. Without even knowing how to make pottery yet, they were already expert herbalists. They chewed coca leaves with lime, to enhance the cocaine. They also painted each other with an aphrodisiac, made from the achiote plant. Then, they engaged in orgiastic religious festivals.
The natives were flute-playing lovers, not blade-wielding fighters. Everything they did was based on cooperation, not competition. This is how they lived in peace, for a millennium, from 2600 BCE to 1600 BCE. However, all good things seem to come to an end.
Unfortunately for the people of Caral, every few decades, earthquakes would routinely break up the mountains. As a consequence of this, rubble would get swept away by torrential rains. This would then wash into the river, and out into the ocean. So, after a couple of centuries, the silt built up and sealed off the flow of water.
This completely filled the life-giving bays with sand, which prevailing winds then blew inland. Thus, with each passing year, the dunes grew bigger and more menacing on the horizon. In the end, the once fertile fields were all reclaimed, by the inhospitable desert, once more.
