Archaeology breakthrough: 2,000-year-old ‘mini Pompeii’ discovered in France
This find took place in the district of Sainte-Colombe, southern Lyon, and was dubbed a Mini Pompei by its similarity to the Roman town buried in Naples after the Vesuvius eruption in 79 A.D.
Archaeologists have discovered vestiges of armor worn by what they believed to be a retired Roman officer, as well as beautiful mosaics and pottery frozen in time.
Like the famous Pompeii, experts believe that the city was buried under ash and debris after a huge disaster, but it did not follow a volcanic eruption.
The site’s main archaeologist, Benjamin Clement, told PBS in 2017: “So we’ve just discovered the pieces of huge armor from the first century.
“Here we have a small part of the belt and this type of decoration comes from the belt on the front of the armor.
Archaeologists uncovered a mini Pompeii
The discovery was made near Lyon
“We have all the parts of the armor, all the little parts that come out of it.
“Only 10 minutes ago we found a little sword, I’ll show it to you.”
“If you come and look, we also have all the protection for the shoulders. “
Clement explained how the findings provide insight into life over two millennia ago. He added, “Mosaics are really interesting because they are part of art, like a statue.
“But for the understanding of the lifestyle of the Roman people, most of them were from the middle and lower classes.
Ancient pottery shows how the Roman Empire was cooking and eating
The French Minister of Culture, Marie-Agnès Gaidon Bunel, added: “There has been an increase in clandestine treasure hunting in France in recent years, with objects recovered from archaeological sites, which we are not at all happy.
“The Minister of Culture is trying to combat this practice because the removal of these objects from their archaeological framework prevents us from dating the site and they are actively marketed outside of France.”
Some have called the discovery the most important of the past 50 years, as it helps to rebuild the stronghold of the Roman Empire over France.
Unlike Pompeii, tourists will not be able to get a first-hand look at the site, as it has now been reconstructed, with an apartment complex and parking.
Human Figure Detected on 14,000-year-old Burial Slab in Israel
HAIFA, ISRAEL—According to researchers Danny Rosenberg, György Lengyel, Dani Nadel, and Rivka Chasan of the University of Haifa have found an engraving on a Natufian burial slab discovered in northern Israel’s Raqefet Cave.
The human figure on a Natufian burial slab: Actual and illustration
The researchers suggest the image resembles a dancing shaman, or perhaps a person dressed as an animal, or even a lizard, and that Natufian burial rites may have been more complex than previously thought.
The stone, which was carried up a cliff and into the cave, was found covering the remains of several people who died between 14,000 and 12,000 years ago.
The picture on the slab is an extremely rare example of a recognizable human figure made by Natufians, the researchers say.
According to scholars, Danny Rosenberg, Györgie Lengyel, and Dani Nadel and researchers, Rivka Chasan, in their recent paper in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology, the Natufian culture exists from around 15,000 to about 11,700 years ago and extend from Sinai in south-northern Syria and east into Jordanian desert.
The protracted period of transition from Paleolithic hunter-gatherer society to Neolithic agriculture that started around 15,000 years ago in the Mediterranean region is dubbed the Natufian period.
Small nomadic groups gave way to complex sedentary or semi-sedentary communities that existed on the threshold of an agricultural society.
At some sites, archaeologists tend to agree that the Natufians actually settled year-round in hamlets. As they settled and began to farm (and had dogs), the Natufians established what may be the earliest distinct cemeteries, where communities buried at least some of their dead.
At least some others who were dearly departed were relegated to beneath the floor of the home or laid to rest nearby.
The incised slab with the humanoid image in Raqefet Cave: front, back and profile
But it seems that when they did bury their dead, Natufian mortuary practices were elaborate.
Their funerals may have featured gathering and feasting, and – going by the newly found crude depiction – dancing.
The figure on the slab could plausibly be a shaman with an exposed penis or be dressed up as an animal, in which case the protuberance could be a tail.
Or maybe it was a lizard. In time, hopefully, more slabs will be found and examination with advanced technology will shed new light on this intriguing phenomenon, the researchers add.
Kneeling Decapitated Skeleton was Ancient Chinese Sacrifice Victim
HENAN PROVINCE, CHINA—According to AncientOrigins report, archaeologists from the Henan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology and the Jiyuan Municipal Cultural Relics.
The undated file photo shows a stove unearthed from the Chaizhuang site in Jiyuan, central China’s Henan Province.
The team has uncovered a headless human skeleton in a pit at central China’s Chaizhuang site, which dates to the late Shang Dynasty (1600–1050 B.C.)
The remains were found facing north in a kneeling position with hands crossed in front, suggesting that the person had been beheaded as a human sacrifice.
Archeologists found a large number of tombs from the Late Shang Dynasty, providing evidence for the study of ancient social and ceremonial rituals, in the excavation of the Chaizhuang site in Jiyuan.
The bone remains found at the site suggest that the human sacrifice was beheaded, facing north and kneeling in the pit with his hands crossed in front of him.
The undated file photo shows a relic unearthed from the Chaizhuang site in Jiyuan, central China’s Henan Province.
“This well-preserved human bone is shaped like the oracle bone inscription of the character ‘Kan,'” said Liang Fawei, head of the Chaizhuang site excavation project.
Liang said according to the study on records of oracle bone inscriptions unearthed in Yin Ruins, sacrificial culture prevailed in the Shang Dynasty and hieroglyphs such as “She,” “Shi,” “Tan” and “Kan” were used to describe sacrificial activities of different rituals.
Among them, the word “Kan” depicts the way of offering sacrifices of people or livestock in pits.
Oracle bone inscriptions, or Jiaguwen, are an ancient Chinese language named for their inscriptions on tortoise shells and animal bones.
They are a primitive form of Chinese characters and the oldest fully-developed characters in China.
The undated file photo shows human bones remains in kneeling position unearthed from the Chaizhuang site in Jiyuan, central China’s Henan Province.
Previously, the remains of human sacrifice discovered were mostly in a lying posture.
Experts assumed that the sacrificial method recorded in the hieroglyph “Kan” suggests burial in an upright position, which must have been a more prevailing burial than that in a lying position.
Archaeologists from the Henan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology and the Jiyuan Municipal Cultural Relics Team have excavated 6,000 square meters of the site since 2019.
Their survey found the ancient Chaizhuang settlement covers 300,000 square meters.
Semi-crypt-type houses, wells, ash pits, roads, and fireworks have been found at the site, along with a trove of relics including pottery, stone, bone, mussel, and jade artifacts.
Antarctica exposed: Very unusual 90 million-year-old dinosaur discovery made after the scan
The group, which included researchers from Imperial College London, explored fossilized remains 30 meters below west Antarctica’s ice for 90 million years.
A study of preserved roots pollen and spores revealed that the environment at that time was much warmer than previously thought. Led by geoscientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, their work suggests summer averages in this Cretaceous environment would have been in the 20Cs (68Fs).
Their findings, published in the journal Nature online, suggests Antarctica once had a thriving rainforest.
ANTARCTICA scientists made a “very unusual” discovery dating back 90 million years to the time when dinosaurs roamed the icy continent.
A video announcing the finds, detailed earlier this month: “A mission to the Antarctic has revealed fossilized plant roots preserved deep under the ocean since the time of the dinosaurs.
“It seems this freezing landscape was once home to a lush forest.
“Johann Klages and his team set out on a ship with a special drill to extract a core of material stretching down 30 meters into the seafloor.
“Studying the core, including analysis of fossilized pollen and spores, is revealing more about the environment of this ancient rainforest.
“This was one of the warmest periods in Earth’s history, with carbon dioxide levels several times higher than they are today.”
Dr. Klages explained how the team took a CT scan of what they found.
He said: “90 million years ago, a temperate rainforest existed in West Antarctica, only 900km away from the South Pole.
“When we extracted the core, we could already see what was inside and that it was very unusual, therefore we decided to scan them in a CT scanner back home.
“What we see here is an overview of the CT-scanned core and the yellow strata that we see is the sandstone, and now we transition into the network of fossil roots, and we can nicely see how the roots are connected with each other and are pristinely preserved.
“We have thin roots, we have thick roots and it’s really a network as you would get in a forest near you if you drilled down.”
Dr. Klages said that it is likely dinosaurs would have roamed the continent more than 90 million years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzs-5HhxYYY
He added: “It revealed a very warm temperature for this latitude and annual mean temperatures that are similar to those of northern Italy.
“It would be very certain that also dinosaurs and insects lived in that environment and in an environment that was dark for about four months during the year because we have the polar light.
“These extreme greenhouse climates are important for us to understand in full detail because it allows us to look into the future of how the planet will look if we excessively emit CO2 as we do now.”
The couple got missing in 1942 found in Melting Swiss Glacier
The bodies of a couple missing for 78 years have been disclosed by a melting Swiss glacier thawed by rising temperatures. It’s not exactly a happy ending for their relatives, but at least it’s an ending, after many decades of uncertainty.
The rural residents who lived near the Diablerets mountains, Marcelin and Francine Dumoulin went out to tend to their cows on 15 August 1942 and never returned. Now DNA matching has confirmed the recovered bodies are the missing couple.
Marceline Udry-Dumoulin, one of her daughters was 4 years old at the time of disappearance and now has 79 years old. She told Le Matin, Sarah Zeines, that she was three times climbing the glacier in the hope of finding traces of her parents
Francine and Marcelin Dumoulin disappeared in 1942.
“We spent our whole lives looking for them,” says Udry-Dumoulin. “I can say that after 78 years of waiting for this news gives me a deep sense of calm.”
The couple’s remains were uncovered on the Tsanfleuron glacier above the Les Diablerets ski resort by a ski lift worker, reports the BBC, at a height of 2,615 meters (8,579 feet). According to the director of the ski lift firm, it’s likely the pair fell into a crevasse.
Les Diablerets, Switzerland
Alongside their bodies were backpacks, a watch, tin bowls, a glass bottle, and male and female shoes still encased in ice. The bodies were found lying next to each other.
After the original disappearance, villagers spent two-and-a-half months searching for the Dumoulin’s, but eventually, their seven children were resettled with other families.
Marcelin and Francine, who were 40 and 37 respectively at the time of their disappearance, are far from the only missing people to be slowly revealed as the ice recedes.
Local police report that bodies hidden for decades are often uncovered, and they have a list of 280 missing people stretching back to 1925.
Warmer temperatures have caused maximum snow depths in the Swiss Alps to drop by 25 percent since 1970, while the ski season has shrunk by 37 days at the same time – an indication of shifting snow levels.
Experts are crediting climate change for revealing other remains, like the two Japanese climbers discovered in the Swiss Alps in 2015, and the New Zealand climber whose body was found at the foot of the country’s Tasman glacier in the same year.
Back in 2014 the Italian Alps even gave up bodies of soldiers who died in World War I.
A steady trickle of frozen artifacts has been discovered in the same region since the 1990s, including a well-preserved love letter to someone named Maria.
As for the Dumoulin’s, they can now be given a proper funeral, although their daughter Marceline isn’t going to go for the usual black clothing.
“I think that white would be more appropriate. It represents hope, which I never lost,” she says.
Artificial Intelligence Identifies Ancient Dog Poop
The mixing of pieces of prehistoric poop is certainly not the definition of a raging good time for many people. However, for archaeologists keen on learning more about the health and diet of past populations—as well as how certain parasites evolved, the evolutionary history of the microbiome—such samples can be a veritable goldmine of information.
Nonetheless, it can be difficult to determine whether fecal samples are human or were produced by other animals, particularly dogs.
According to a recent article in the journal PeerJ, an International team of scientists has now developed a new way of combining host DNA and gut microbiome analysis with open-source machine-learning software.
The challenge of determining
Whether paleofeces and coprolites are of human or animal origin date back to the 1970s. Usually, only those samples found with human skeletons or mummies could be designated as being of human origin with any certainty.
Exceptions could be made for samples found in ancient latrines since they are highly likely to be human; samples found in trash deposits, however, are more ambiguous.
Subsequent work to document the morphology of mammal feces has made it easier to separate human from animal samples, since there are enough differences to make such distinctions. The exception is dog poo, which bears a strikingly close resemblance to human feces in both size and shape, is frequently found at the same archaeological sites, and has a similar composition. And frankly, some ancient societies routinely ate dog meat, while dogs are known to nibble on human feces. So DNA from both can be present in the same archaeological sample.
Dog feces recovered from a 7000-year-old Chinese farming village
There are some helpful clues. For instance, ancient dog poo samples “typically contain masses of short, nibbled dog hairs and odd inclusions, such as fragments of clothing and rope,” the authors of the PeerJ paper wrote.
The presence of specific parasites can also indicate whether a sample is human or canine, such as eggs from pinworms (Enterobius vermicularis), which are typically only present in human feces. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) can also be useful for identifying plant remains (such as pollen grains) in ancient samples. Rehydrating the samples can also help make the distinction since human feces will turn the rehydration solution dark brown or black; animal samples typically remain clear or turn yellow.
Dog or human?
This new coprolite identification method, dubbed coproID, combines host DNA analysis with analysis of the distinct colonies of microbes living inside humans and dogs. The scientists used their open source software to analyze both a previously sequenced modern fecal dataset, as well as a newly sequenced dataset of paleo-poop specimens and sediments from archaeological digs.
For the latter dataset, there were 20 archaeological samples (13 paleofeces, four sediments, and three sediments taken from human pelvic bone) from 10 sites, spanning periods from the prehistoric era to the medieval era, 17 of which were newly sequenced.
They got their modern fecal samples from a long-term Boston type 1 diabetes study, as well as from a broader study on human gut microbiome biodiversity being conducted in villages in the West African Republic of Burkina Faso. Per the authors, “Feces were collected fresh and stored frozen until analysis.”
The researchers found that, using the method, they could distinguish between fecal and non-fecal samples, as well as human and canine fecal samples. “One unexpected finding of our study is the realization that the archaeological record is full of dog poop,” said co-author Christina Warinner of the Max Planck institute for the Science of Human History.
“One unexpected finding is the realization that the archaeological record is full of dog poop.”
Specifically, coproID correctly identified seven of the 13 samples of paleo-poop (five humans, two canines) and flagged the non-fecal sediments as “unknown.” Of the six fecal samples, the software couldn’t identify, three did not have sufficiently preserved microbiome components to make a determination.
The other three uncertain samples hailed from a prehistoric archaeological site in the Rio Zape Valley in Durango, Mexico, and showed both high levels of dog DNA and microbiome profiles more typical of humans.
The Rio Zape samples “could have originated from a human who consumed a recent meal of canine meat,” the authors suggest. “Dogs were consumed in ancient Mesopotamia, but further research on the expected proportion of dietary DNA in human feces is needed to determine whether this is a plausible explanation.”
The alternative is that the samples came from dogs with a different microbiome profile than the microbiome data used in the study, derived from a single study of Labrador retrievers and beagles.
“Identifying human coprolites should be the first step for ancient human microbiome analysis,” said co-author Maxime Borry. “With additional data about the gut metagenomes of non-Westernized rural dogs, we’ll be better able to classify even more ancient dog feces as in fact being canine, as opposed to ‘uncertain.'”
MACAU, CHINA— Reports that a cannon was uncovered during construction work in the Inner Harbor area of the city of Macau, which is located on coastal islands in the South China Sea.
Ming Dynasty officials leased the area to Portuguese traders in the mid-sixteenth century A.D.
The region then became a Portuguese colony in 1887 until 1999 when it was transferred to China.
Officials from the Cultural Affairs Bureau, the Municipal Affairs Bureau, and the Customs Service are investigating the site and examining the cannon.
The statement says that the cannon was dug up last afternoon during construction work for a sewer project in the Inner Harbor district, close to the car park.
The project has been temporarily suspended following the find. According to information provided by workers at the scene, the cannon was accidentally dug out by an excavator at about 4:15 p.m.
Cultural Affairs Bureau (IC) and Municipal Affairs Bureau (IAM) officials, as well as Customs Service and PSP officers, arrived at the scene to investigate.
The statement said the old cannon was possibly a “cultural relic.”
This photo provided by a reader to local media outlets yesterday shows a construction worker with the old cannon dug out by an excavator on a construction site in the Inner Harbour area yesterday.
SIEM REAP, CAMBODIA—Reports that 141 statue fragments were uncovered in Angkor Wat by Apsara Authority workers who were installing an irrigation system.
The statue fragments are thought to make up 21 Buddha statues, although no heads have been recovered.
“The statues were buried and mixed up with some modern items, including a metal door frame, glass shrapnel, a bicycle bell and rim, and even plastic bags,” said project manager Srun Tech, who thinks the statues were buried in the 1960s or 1970s.
More than 100 remnants of Buddha statues were uncovered by archaeological experts in Siem Reap province’s Angkor Wat area
The Apsara Authority said yesterday that more than 100 remains of statues of Buddha were discovered by archeological experts from Angkor Wat Province in Siem Reap.
Srun Tech, manager of the Apsara Authority’s excavation project at Angkor Wat temple, said the artifacts were discovered accidentally on Saturday by the Apsara Authority’s working team, who were implementing an irrigation system management project in the area.
An excavation operation has since unearthed 141 remnants of Buddha figurines, equivalent to 21 whole statues.
“We have mostly found Buddha statues – 21, so far. The statues were buried and mixed up with some modern items, including metal door frame, glass shrapnel, bicycle bell, and rim and even plastic bags. were mostly broken, with no heads attached, prompting the archaeologists to suspect the missing parts could have been buried deeper.
Judging by the way the statues were orderly buried, Mr. Tech said the artifacts may have been buried intentionally to avoid being detected by other people.
“The recent discovery underscores the fact that the Angkor Wat is still an important target for further research,” he said.
I’m Sokrithy, head of Conservation of Monuments in the Angkor Park Department, said as of yesterday, the Apsara Authority’s working group has excavated 40 centimeters of land at the site.
The excavation work will continue to be carried out, including further studies on the era from when the statues were made and the purpose behind the burying of the relics.
In late March, the Apsara Authority’s working team also discovered a wooden structure of more than 1,000 years of age and a Ganesh statue in the middle of the Angkor Wat temple’s northern pond while experts were restoring the pond.
