The oldest scaled-down drawings of actual structures go back 9,000 years
Massive ancient hunting traps called desert kites (one in Jordan is shown above) include long walls that converge on enclosed spaces where animals were driven into pits.
Two large, engraved stones found in the Middle East display the oldest known building plans drawn to scale, researchers say.
One carved depiction covers part of a rectangular stone found at a Jordanian campsite dating to about 9,000 years ago. Two other engravings were made roughly 8,000 years ago on a boulder discovered at the base of a cliff in Saudi Arabia.
Carvings on these stones depict nearby desert kites, massive structures once used to capture animal herds, scientists report May 17 in PLOS ONE.
Desert kites consist of stone walls up to five kilometers long that narrow into large enclosures surrounded by pits where hunters trapped animals, such as gazelles and deer (SN: 4/18/11). Kite depictions at the two sites closely resemble the shape, layout, and proportions of desert kites found close by, archaeologist Rémy Crassard and colleagues say.
Scale drawings etched in rock may have served as maps that helped hunters plan strategies for driving animal herds into specific desert kites, the scientists report.
These engravings might also have been blueprints for building desert kites, or public displays of their makers’ ability to transfer large, 3-D structures onto small, flat surfaces.
A rectangular stone found at a Jordanian site (left) contains a roughly 9,000-year-old engraving (shown illustrated in outline at right) that accurately portrays the shape and proportions of a nearby desert kite.
As farming and animal domestication took root in parts of the Middle East, regional hunting groups that built desert kites to trap wild animal herds maintained special regard for massive hunting structures, says Crassard, of the French National Center for Scientific Research in Lyon.
Other ancient maps and structural plans, intended as scaled-down drawings, date to about 4,300 years ago in Mesopotamia. Those depictions, Crassard says, were not as accurate as the newly discovered desert kite engravings.
Researchers Use AI to Read Ancient Mesopotamian Texts
Scholars at Tel Aviv University and Ariel University, in Israel, have used artificial intelligence to translate fragments of ancient cuneiform texts on stone tablets into English with what they say is a high degree of accuracy.
They call the project “another major step toward the preservation and dissemination of the cultural heritage of ancient Mesopotamia.”
The scholars presented the first neural machine translation from Akkadian into English in the May issue of PNAS Nexus. Their results are “on par with those produced by an average machine translation from one modern language to another,” noted Arkeonews.
In the last 200 years, archaeologists have found hundreds of thousands of texts that tell the history of ancient Mesopotamia, most of them written in Sumerian or Akkadian, explained the authors. But most remain untranslated because of their vast quantity and the small number of experts who can read them, as well as the fact that most of the texts are fragmentary.
Furthermore, cuneiform signs are polyvalent, there are many different kinds of texts, and even the names of people and places can be written as complex sentences.
“First, let me state that we believe that A.I. will not replace philological work,” said Luis Sáenz, of the Digital Pasts Lab in the Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology at Ariel University, one of the authors, in an email to Artnet News.
“We want to speed up the process. Our hope is that A.I. will eventually be able to help both Assyriologists and non-Assyriologists read cuneiform texts in the future.”
This is just the latest example of scientists using the newest tools to work with the oldest materials.
The University of Kentucky researchers developed an A.I. system to read scrolls that were incinerated when Mount Vesuvius erupted in the year 79, and archaeologists in Italy are working on a robot that uses A.I. to reconstruct ancient relics from their scattered shards.
“There are, of course, limitations to the model,” says Sáenz. “The lack of context makes ancient languages difficult to translate since we only have fragments of texts. Fragments with only one or two lines are extremely difficult to work with for A.I.
The future will require more tools to digitize data published in papers in order to keep training the model and to improve the results. Also, a user-friendly web-based platform for the public is important.”
Signs of Anemia Detected in Ancient Egyptian Mummies
The mummy of a Romano-Egyptian child from the Egyptian Ptolemaic period (304 B.C. to 30 B.C.) that is now housed at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C.
A large percentage of mummified children from ancient Egypt show signs of blood disorders known as anemias, suggesting that these youngsters may have had a slew of related medical problems, including malnutrition and growth defects, a new study finds.
Using full body CT (computed tomography) scans, a non-destructive way to study objects, an international team of researchers examined the remains of 21 child mummies who had died between the ages of 1 and 14.
The team assessed the mummies for anemia by looking for telltale signs of the disorder, such as abnormal growth in the mummies’ skulls and arm and leg bones.
Seven of the mummies, or 33% of those studied, showed signs of anemia in the form of thickened skull bones, the researchers found. Today, anemia is thought to affect 40% of children under the age of 5 years old globally, according to the World Health Organization.
This research on anemia in ancient Egypt “may shed light on ancient societies’ health issues, dietary inadequacies, and social standards,” Sahar Saleem, head and professor of radiology at Cairo University and a member of the Egyptian Mummy Project, told Live Science in an email. Saleem was not involved in the study.
This study, published April 13 in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, is possibly the first of its kind to analyze the presence of anemia in mummified children. It includes child mummies from various parts of Egypt dating as early as the Old Kingdom (third millennium B.C.) to the Roman Period (fourth century A.D.).
Indigo Reeve, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland who was not involved in the study, defined anemia as “a lack of healthy red blood cells or hemoglobin.” This condition can stem from a variety of causes, including dietary deficiencies, inherited disorders and infections, which can all lead to intestinal blood loss and poor absorption of nutrients, Reeve told Live Science in an email.
Anemia typically causes fatigue and weakness, but it can also cause irregular heartbeat and can be life-threatening depending on the type and severity, she added.
Childhood cases of anemia can cause the expansion of some bone marrow, which is found at the center of most bones, which can lead to odd and abnormal bone growth, such as the thickening of the cranial vault, the part of the skull that holds the brain, Reeve explained. Porous lesions can also appear on bones, especially on the skull, which can cause further medical problems.
The study uncovered some of these anemia-related issues in mummified children.
In one of the seven cases with thickened cranial vaults, a 1-year-old boy showed cranial signs of thalassemia, an inherited blood disorder that can cause mild to severe anemia due to reduced hemoglobin production; other symptoms of thalassemia can include inadequate and unusual bone growth and an increased risk of infections, according to Johns Hopkins Medicine.
The boy also had an enlarged tongue and a condition known as “rodent facies,” which is an abnormal growth of the cheekbones and an elongated skull. This boy’s severe anemia, compounded with other difficulties, likely caused his death, the researchers theorized.
It’s unclear how these ancient children came to have anemias, but the disorder can be caused by malnutrition, iron deficiency in pregnant mothers, chronic gastrointestinal issues, and bacterial, viral, or parasitic infections, all of which are thought to have been prevalent in ancient Egypt, the researchers said.
However, the study’s small sample of 21 child mummies is not representative of an entire population or time period, the researchers noted. Further, the CT scans “produced blurry images due to low resolution that prevented interpretation” of additional signs of anemia, Saleem said.
“However,” Saleem said, “we think that this work may pave the way for additional research on anemia and other ancient health issues in the future.”
DNA study shows migration patterns of ancient Mexican civilizations much more complex than expected
Population continuity and ghost genetic ancestries in pre-Hispanic Mexico. Ancient individuals who inhabited the northern frontier of Mesoamerica (NFM) before and after a 200-year period of severe droughts (shown in timeline) belong to a continuous population. This is in contrast to a previous hypothesis suggesting that hunter-gatherers from Aridoamerica replaced the populations at the NFM following the southward shift of its limits with Mesoamerica (solid and dashed lines). Individuals from Sierra Tarahumara and Cañada de la Virgen show genetic ancestry from two distinct ghost populations (UpopA and UpopA2).
An international team of biologists, geneticists, anthropologists, and biochemists has found, through genetic analysis, that the migration patterns of ancient Mexican civilizations were much more complex than previously thought.
In their study, reported in the journal Science, the group generated genomic and mitochondrial DNA data to test theories surrounding the migration of ancient peoples in Mexico.
Bastien Llamas and Xavier Roca-Rada with the University of Adelaide have published a Perspectives piece in the same journal issue outlining the ethical approach used by the research team to learn more about ancient Mexico.
Prior research, based mostly on archaeological evidence, has suggested that drought-driven migration of ancient people from Mexico’s north to the south occurred many times in the years before Europeans arrived. The northern region, called Aridoamerica, was dry and mostly desert.
The people living there at the time survived as hunter-gatherers. Farther south was Mesoamerica, where early people survived by farming.
Prior research has shown that there were several long-term droughts in Aridoamerica, leading people to move south. But now it appears that these conclusions were in error.
Instead of relying on archaeological evidence, the team in this new effort looked at the DNA of people living there to see if they were migrating.
To learn more about the history of the people living in what is now Mexico, the researchers analyzed DNA samples going back approximately 2,300 years. In all, they were able to study 27 samples obtained from eight archaeological sites from people who lived in regions of what is now Mexico.
The researchers could see that the expected migrations had not occurred.
They point out, for example, that despite droughts, sometimes decades-long, people living in Sierra Gorda did not leave.
The team found none of their DNA in people living farther south.
The research team was not able to explain why the northerners had not migrated south when conditions grew dry, but suggest it might have been related to cinnabar commerce.
The mineral was easily found in the north, and was sacred to people in the south—thus it seems trade was likely.
Regardless of the reasons, the research team suggests migration patterns in early Mexico were far more complex than previously thought.
A 3,500-year-old bronze dagger found in a Polish forest
A rare Bronze Age dagger has been discovered in a forest near Krasnystaw in southeastern Poland. It is in good condition, with no evidence of wear on the edges. It was cast in a lenticular shape with a rib down the center.
The semi-circular base has three rivets on each side to which a handle would have been fastened. The handle, likely made out of wood, is now lost.
The dagger is believed to date to around 1500 B.C. and is the first of its kind found in the area. In fact, it is one of only a dozen or so known to have been found in all of Poland.
It was not of local manufacture but rather arrived in the region with people who inhabited the Danube area in what are now Hungary, the Czech Republic, Austria, and Slovakia.
It was found by a metal detectorist working with the Wolica historical association under the aegis of the Lublin Provincial Conservator of Monuments.
They were looking for objects from the World Wars when they came across the dagger in shallow soil just a few centimeters under the surface. They took pictures and recorded the precise location to report the find, but encountered no other archaeological material at the site.
A comparable riveted dagger was discovered near Olsztyn in northern Poland in 2014. It was found in a grave just below the arable surface which, while damaged, was found to contain other valuable goods including a gold hair jewel, bronze wire beads, and glass beads.
The gold and glass were expensive imported items, and the weapon indicates this was the burial of a high-status male.
The grave was classified as one of the Smoszew type, a cemetery characterized by barrows of the Bronze Age Tumulus Culture, ca. 1600-1300 B.C.
Unfortunately, the recently-discovered dagger was not found in its original context, so we don’t know if it was part of the furnishings of a grave.
The dagger is now being analyzed and studied by the Lublin Provincial Conservator of Monuments.
Archaeologists are exploring the find site for further information about the piece, its age, and how it got there.
A 5,400-year-old tomb discovered in Spain perfectly captures the summer solstice
Archaeologists found the 5,400-year-old stone tomb in the “neck” area of a prominent mountain that looks from some angles like the head of a sleeping giant.
Archaeologists have discovered a 5,400-year-old megalithic tomb near a prominent lone mountain in southern Spain, suggesting the peak may have been meaningful to prehistoric people there.
The area, in the countryside near the city of Antequera, is renowned for its megaliths — prehistoric monuments made from large stones — and the newly found tomb seems to solve one of the mysteries of their alignment.
The tomb was designed to funnel light from the rising midsummer sun into a chamber deep within — much like the contemporary megalithic tomb built more than 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) away at Newgrange in Ireland, suggesting both places shared similar beliefs about the afterlife more than 5,000 years ago.
The tomb was constructed about 3400 B.C. with a passage aligned to sunrise on the summer solstice that cast light onto decorative rocks on the walls of a chamber within
“Newgrange is much bigger and more complex than the tomb we have discovered [in Spain], but they have something in common — the interest of the builders to use sunlight at a specific time of the year, to produce a symbolic — possibly magic — effect,” Leonardo García Sanjuán, an archaeologist at the University of Seville, told Live Science.
The bedrock at the site is tilted away from the position of the sunrise on the solstice at midsummer, so the builders deliberately constructed a cavity to admit its light, according to a study by García Sanjuán and his colleagues published April 14 in the journal Antiquity.
“They worked very cleverly to make an arrangement of stones, which were engraved and possibly painted,” he said. “These were sacred things placed so that the sunrise on the [summer] solstice would go straight into the back of the chamber.”
Megalithic tomb
The archaeologists found human remains in the tomb from several different burials, held there in three major phases for over 1,000 years
The new study describes excavations by García Sanjuán and his team beside a prominent limestone mountain known as La Peña de los Enamorados — the Rock of the Lovers — named after a legend that says two star-crossed lovers once killed themselves by jumping off it.
The mountain is also famous because it looks like the profile of the head of a sleeping giant, especially at times of low light such as sunrise and sunset.
García Sanjuán and his colleagues excavated the tomb in late 2020 in the “neck” region of the mountain, near the Matacabras rock shelter, which is adorned with pictographs thought to be painted about 5,800 years ago.
They think the tomb was first built a few hundred years after the rock paintings were made, and that it was used for burials for more than 1,000 years.
The archaeologists also found stone tools and pieces of pottery in the tomb. They are particularly interested in any residues on the pottery, which could show what they held as grave goods.
The archaeologists have found several deposits of human remains in the newfound tomb, dating from three major phases of its use, as well as pieces of pottery.
Ancient landscape
The tomb was found beside the prominent mountain known as La Peña de los Enamorados — the Rock of the Lovers — because legends say two star-crossed lovers once killed themselves by jumping off it.
The Antequera area is famed for its natural rock formations like La Peña and the megalithic monuments in the region, which may have been influenced by the local geography. The most famous is the Dolmen of Menga — one of the largest and oldest megalithic structures in Europe, which was built between 3800 B.C. and 3600 B.C.
But the passage in Menga is not aligned to a solstice sunrise or sunset, as might be expected — instead, Menga points toward La Peña de los Enamorados, about 4 miles (6.5 km) to the northeast. (The other two megaliths in the region were built later and seem to point elsewhere.)
The alignment suggests La Peña was an important focus for local prehistoric people and solves a mystery of where Menga was pointing: to the location of both the rock art and the newly found tomb at La Peña, while the tomb at La Peña itself pointed to the solstice sunrise, García Sanjuán said.
The inner chamber of the newfound tomb is decorated with a distinctive stone with ripple marks on its surface, which was taken from a region that had once been a beach or part of the seabed.
A passage in the tomb is aligned with the rising sun on the day of the summer solstice. Similar alignments have been seen at megalithic tombs elsewhere in Europe.
The stone was placed so that the light from the rising midsummer sun fell upon it; the part of the burial chamber in front of it seems to have been kept clear of human remains, García Sanjuán said.
“These people chose this stone precisely because it created these waving, undulating shapes,” he said. “This was very theatrical… they were very clever in producing these special visual effects.”
He noted that megalithic structures have been found from Morocco to Sweden and that the people who built them seem to have had similar beliefs.
“There are differences as well, but one common element is the sun,” García Sanjuán said. “The sun was at the center of the worldview of these people.”
A pair of scissors, a razor, and a folded sword were some of the grave goods found at a Celtic cremation tomb in Germany.
Archaeologists in Germany have unearthed a stash of grave goods — including a folded sword that may have been used in battle and an “exceptionally good” pair of scissors — inside a 2,300-year-old Celtic cremation tomb.
Based on the variety of the artifacts, which also include a portion of a shield, a razor, a fibula (clasp), a belt chain, and a spearhead, researchers think that a man and a woman were buried there.
Between the third century B.C. and second century B.C. the Celts — who lived in mainland Europe — burned their dead and buried their remains in pits alongside their belongings, according to a translated statement.
An excavation team searching for explosive devices leftover from World War II discovered the items by chance, according to the statement.
The burial is a remarkable find, however, one grave good caught the attention of researchers: the pair of left-handed scissors.
“The scissors in particular are in exceptionally good condition,” Martina Pauli, an archaeologist with the Bavarian State Office for the Preservation of Monuments in Munich, told Live Science in an email. “One would almost be tempted to cut with it.
The scissors were used — as they are today — for cutting, but could also be used in the craft sector, for example in leather processing or sheep shearing.”
While the nearly 5-inch-long (12 centimeters) shears were likely used for day-to-day tasks, Pauli thinks that the weaponry, including the folded sword, was “most likely used in battle.” It is “quite typical” to find Celtic swords folded in graves in this fashion, she added.
Prior to the burial, the sword “was heated, folded and thus rendered unusable” and would have measured 30 inches (76 cm) in length, according to the statement.
“There are different interpretations [that] range from a very profane point of view, namely that the sword simply had [a] better place in the grave, to a cultic interpretation,” Pauli said.
“There could be a variety of motivations for permanent disabling: prevention of grave robbers, fear of revenants [bodies rising from the dead], and the like.”
Pauli added, “The burial objects indicate socially superior people to whom these heavy metal finds were added. The men’s burial could be that of a warrior, as indicated by the weapons.
The belt chain from the woman’s grave served as a belt that held together and adorned the robe, perhaps a dress, at the hips. The singular fibula from the woman’s grave was also used to fasten a coat together on the shoulder.”
The items were recovered and brought to the state office for monument protection for safekeeping.
A papal bull discovered in a former cemetery dated to the 14th century
A medieval bull found in 2021 in Budzistów village (Kołobrzeg district), Poland has been restored and placed on display in the Museum of Arms in Kołobrzeg.
Found by the PARSĘTA Exploration & Search Group two years back, the decree was uncovered in the area of the former cemetery in Budzistowo.
“This is the most valuable find we have made in our six years of existence,” said Jan Orliński from the PARSĘTA Exploration and Search Group.
Continuing, Orliński added: “I’ve always been interested in papal bulls and I was intrigued as to why there was nothing like that in Kołobrzeg… When I saw what I had found, I was really excited.”
The group immediately recognized what it was and handed it over to the Museum of Arms in Koobrzeg, with whom they had been working for several years. It was then transported to a specialist workshop in Kraków for a meticulous conservation process.
Dating from the 14th century, the papal bull was found in 2021 in a former cemetery by the PARSĘTA Exploration & Search Group.
It was during this that scientists determined that it dated from the reign of Pope Boniface IX (1350-1404).
Dr. Robert Dziemba, the head of the Kołobrzeg History Department, said: “By studying the physio-chemical compositions of the bull, we were able to find it was original.
The most important thing for us was the reverse as it contained information as to which Pope issued the decree. Because of this, we now know that it was issued by Pope Boniface IX.”
Dziemba added: “Even the most interesting artifacts take on a different meaning when they are placed in the right historical context. We knew we had made a great discovery, but we wanted to establish its links to Kołobrzeg.”
According to historians, the bull was possibly kept in the Budzistowo monastery. Chemical compounds used in its manufacture, which were mostly pure lead, were traced to Sardinia, Cyprus, Greece, and Spain.
The bull also features the images of Saint Peter and Saint Paul.
The bull’s potential connections to the former monastery in Budzistowo, though, have piqued researchers’ interest. It was Johann Friederich Wachsen who noted that Pope Boniface IX granted a letter of indulgence to the resident Benedictine nuns in 1397, according to the chronicles he wrote in the 18th century.
Usually attached by silk strings, papal bulls were hung on parchment and scrolls on which papal edicts, privileges, and indulgences were written as a means of authentication. Also featuring images of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, Dziemba speculates that this particular papal bull may have been lost in the 16th century.
