Mesolithic Artifacts Unearthed in Northern England
Animal bones, tools and weapons, along with rare evidence of woodworking, were unearthed during excavations at the site near Scarborough
Finds discovered at a Stone Age settlement unearthed in North Yorkshire have helped shed new light on the lives of hunter-gatherers living around 10,500 years ago.
Archaeologists uncovered animal bones, tools and weapons, along with rare evidence of woodworking, during excavations at the site near Scarborough.
Experts said the items suggested their owners were far from “struggling to survive”, as many may imagine of people alive at the time.
Dr Nick Overton, from the University of Manchester, said the excavation had enabled them to learn more about “these early prehistoric communities”.
The site originally lay on the shore of an island in an ancient lake and dates to the Mesolithic period, according to the team from the universities of Manchester and Chester, with thick deposits of peat gradually burying and preserving the site over thousands of years.
“It is so rare to find material this old in such good condition,” Dr Overton said.
“The Mesolithic in Britain was before the introduction of pottery or metals, so finding organic remains like bone, antler and wood, which are usually not preserved, are incredibly important in helping us to reconstruct peoples’ lives.”
Artefacts found on the lake bed included a decorated antler point
The team said the dig uncovered evidence of a wide range of animals being hunted, including elk and red deer, and smaller mammals such as beavers and water birds.
The bodies of hunted animals were also butchered and parts of them intentionally deposited into the wetlands at the island site, they said.
Hunting weapons made of animal bone and antler had also been decorated and taken apart before being deposited on the island’s shore.
This, the archaeologists believed, showed that Mesolithic people had strict rules about how the remains of animals and objects used to kill them were disposed of.
A barbed antler point was also unearthed
Dr Amy Gray Jones, from the University of Chester, said: “People often think of prehistoric hunter-gatherers as living on the edge of starvation, moving from place to place in an endless search for food.
“But here we have people inhabiting a rich network of sites and habitats, taking the time to decorate objects, and taking care over the ways they disposed of animal remains and important artefacts.
“These aren’t people that were struggling to survive. They were people confident in their understanding of this landscape, and of the behaviours and habitats of different animal species that lived there,” she added.
Genome Study Reveals Family Ties in Bronze Age Greece
Bronze Age family harvesting grain, as depicted by artist Nikola Nevenov.
If you wanted to hang on to your land in Bronze Age Greece, you could do worse than marry your cousin.
A team of international researchers analyzing the genomes of ancient human remains has discovered that, unlike in other European societies of the period, first cousins in Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece frequently married each other.
Experts from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, together with an international team of partners, analyzed more than 100 genomes of Bronze Age people from the Aegean.
The team behind the study, published Monday in the scientific journal, Nature Ecology & Evolution, say their findings provide “exciting insights” into the social order of the Aegean Bronze Age.
By analyzing the DNA of people buried in a tomb under the courtyard of a house in a Mycenaean hamlet,on the Greek mainland, the researchers managed to reconstruct the family tree of its inhabitants from the 16th century BCE.
I used DNA analysis to find my birth family and it sent me across three continents
Archaeologist Professor Philipp Stockhammer, one of the study’s lead authors, told CNN: “We wanted to have a look at how were people buried together genetically related and about what you can learn about the relevance of the genetic relativeness for the structure of society.”
“We managed to construct the first family pedigree for the Mediterranean. We can see who lived together in this house from looking at who was buried outside in the courtyard.
“We could see, for example, that the three sons lived as adults in this house. One of the marriage partners brought her sister and a child. It’s a very complex group of people living together.”
Even more surprising was the discovery that around half of those living on the islands married their cousins, while the proportion on the mainland was about a third.
“It’s not 100%, but not everybody has a cousin,” Stockhammer said.
“People have studied thousands of ancestral genomes and there’s hardly any evidence for societies in the past of cousin-cousin marriage. From a historical perspective this really is outstanding,” he added.
Stockhammer and his colleagues believe such unions were down to economics, to prevent family land from being divided.
He explained: “All of the driving force is to unite the land within the family. If you look at what people were growing, it was grapes and also olives for olive oil, but both grapes and olives might need to be at a certain place for decades.
“If you marry in your family it means that you focus on staying in the same area.”
He said that, by contrast, in other parts of Bronze Age Europe, women often traveled hundreds of miles in order to marry. Resources in those areas would have been more plentiful, he explained.
“In Greece, there’s not much space to grow things and things that you plant need decades to grow,” he said.
“We can completely see the cousin to cousin marriage from the genomic evidence. It’s too many people doing it to say it’s pure chance – but it isn’t 100%. I would say it was quite a strict practice.
“It’s an unwritten rule because everyone has done it.”
Stockhammer explained the significance of the discovery, saying: “With this knowledge we are basically forced to rethink the social organizations in this period and societies that were behind these amazing works of art and architecture.
“It’s a society where we have written records about palace administrations but we are now able to say something about the normal people.”
Prehistoric population once lived in Siberia, but mysteriously vanished, genetic study finds
A skull from one of the individuals analyzed in the new study, which revealed the existence of a previously unknown group of hunter-gatherers living in Siberia more than 10,000 years ago. (Image credit: Sergey V Semenov)
Researchers investigating prehistoric DNA have discovered a mysterious group of hunter-gatherers that lived in Siberia perhaps more than 10,000 years ago.
The find was made during a genetic investigation of human remains in North Asia dating from as far back as 7,500 years ago. The study also revealed that gene flow of human DNA not only traveled from Asia to the Americas — as was previously known — but also in the opposite direction, meaning people were moving back and forth like ping pong balls along the Bering Land Bridge.
Furthermore, the team examined the remains of an ancient shaman who lived about 6,500 years ago in western Siberia. This spot is more than 900 miles (1,500 kilometers) west of the group that he had genetic ties with, according to the new genetic analysis.
North Asia, particularly the area stretching from western to northeastern Siberia, was pivotal in humanity’s trek across the globe. Previous work has shown that the first people to arrive in the Americas, since at least 13,000 years ago, likely came either across or along the coast of the land bridge that once connected North Asia with North America. This corridor, known as Beringia, is now flooded by the Bering Strait.
However, much remains unknown about the genetic makeup of the people who lived in this key region at that time. This is because prehistoric human remains with enough DNA to examine from this region “are extremely rare and hard to find,” study senior author Cosimo Posth, an assistant professor in archaeo- and paleogenetics at the University of Tübingen in Germany, told Live Science.
Many of the prehistoric individuals examined in the study were found in the Altai region of Siberia.
In the new study, the scientists analyzed 10 prehistoric human genomes from previously discovered individuals who lived in North Asia as far back as 7,500 years ago.
Many of the individuals were found in an area known as the Altai, a crossroad for migrations between northern Siberia, Central Asia and East Asia for millennia, located near where modern-day Russia, China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan come together. Previous research in the Altai revealed the first evidence of the mysterious and much older human lineage known as the Denisovans, who together with the Neanderthals are the closest extinct relatives of modern humans.
A view of the Nizhnetytkesken Cave site in Altai, Russia
The scientists discovered that a previously unknown group of hunter-gatherers in the Altai was “a mixture between two distinct groups that lived in Siberia during the last Ice Age,” Posth said. DNA from these prehistoric hunter-gatherers was found in many later communities across North Asia, from the Bronze Age (about 3000 B.C. to 1000 B.C.) to the present day, “showing how great the mobility of those foraging communities was,” he added.
In addition, the researchers discovered multiple episodes of gene flow from North America to Asia over the past 5,000 years, with genes from the New World reaching Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula on the Pacific Ocean and central Siberia.
“While there has been a lot of work showing flows of genetic ancestry into the Americas, there has been less evidence for backflow from the American continent to Eurasia,” said Vagheesh Narasim, a geneticist at the University of Texas at Austin, who did not participate in this study. “This work presents a new sample from northeastern Asia to support these results.”
By examining 10 prehistoric genomes, researchers found multiple episodes of gene flow from North America to Asia over the past 5,000 years.
Study lead author Ke Wang, a junior professor in anthropology and human genetics at Fudan University in China, was most surprised by the findings concerning a man’s remains in Nizhnetytkesken Cave in the Altai, who was found with a religious costume and artifacts one might expect of a shaman. His bones date back about 6,500 years, making him about a contemporary of the newly revealed Altai group, but the research team’s analysis revealed that he had genetic ties with groups in the Russian Far East, more than 900 miles to the west of his remains.
“This implies that individuals with very different [genetic] profiles were living in the same region,” Wang told Live Science. “His grave goods appear different from other archeological sites, implying mobility of both culturally and genetically diverse individuals into the Altai region.”
This discovery raises a number of interesting questions and possibilities about people in the region at that time.
Could this discovery regarding this potential shaman “that far west mean that his ancestral group was more widespread than we previously thought?” Shevan Wilkin, a biomolecular archaeologist at the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich, who did not take part in this research, told Live Science. “Or does it mean that he was, in fact, a traveling religious practitioner or healer? All very interesting.”
Overall, the study shows that prehistoric groups were more connected than previously believed.
All in all, “geographically distant hunter-gatherer groups showed evidence of genetic connections to a much larger extent than previously expected,” Posth said. “This suggests that human migrations and admixtures [interbreeding between groups] were not the exception but the norm also for ancient hunter-gatherer societies.”
Wang, Posth and their colleagues detailed their findings online Jan. 12 the journal Current Biology.
Authorities have positively identified the remains of an Army Air Forces pilot from Ohio who died when his plane was shot down over Germany during World War II, the Defense Department announced Thursday.
On May 29, 1944, 1st Lt. Carl Nesbitt was the pilot of a B-17G Flying Fortress bomber during a huge bombing mission over Leipzig, Germany, according to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.
German fighters attacked the bomber’s formation roughly 28 miles northeast of Leipzig, and the plane was shot down.
Six of the 10 crew members were able to escape the plane before it crashed near Horst, while Nesbitt and the rest were killed. Their bodies were believed to have been buried in a local cemetery and, after the war ended, there was no evidence of Nesbitt being a prisoner of war or having survived.
Nesbitt, 23, of Lima, Ohio, was assigned to the 569th Bombardment Squadron, 390th Bombardment Group (Heavy), 13th Bombardment Wing, 3rd Air Division, 8th Air Force.
The American Graves Registration Command, which worked to recover fallen service members in Europe after the war, found the remains of a crew member buried in a cemetery in Horst during a search in September 1946.
But after 1950, worsening diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, which then controlled that part of Germany, prevented the AGRC from investigating further, and Nesbitt was declared nonrecoverable on April 21, 1953.
In July 2012, an investigation team from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, a DPAA predecessor, found the crash site and recovered evidence of a B-17 crash. In 2015, the landowner allowed DPAA to excavate, and the work was done during the summer 2019.
Crews recovered possible material evidence and possible remains, which were eventually sent to a lab at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska.
Scientists used dental and anthropological analysis, mitochondrial DNA analysis and circumstantial and material evidence to identify Nesbitt’s remains. He will be buried May 15 in Annville, Pennsylvania.
Nesbitt was accounted for last September, DPAA officials said, but his family only recently received their full briefing on the case.
The warrior’s tomb was found at one of four archaeological sites unearthed during the construction of a motorway in southeastern Romania.
Workers building a new highway in Romania have unearthed the treasure-laden tomb of a wealthy warrior and his horse. The tomb dates to the fifth century A.D., when the region was controlled by a people known as the Huns.
The tomb is filled with more than 100 artifacts, including weapons, gold-covered objects and pieces of gold jewelry inlaid with gemstones, Silviu Ene(opens in new tab) of the Vasile Pârvan Institute of Archeology in Bucharest, Romania, told Live Science.
Ene is the lead archaeologist investigating the tomb, which was discovered late last year during the construction of a motorway near the town of Mizil in the southeast of Romania, about 140 miles (220 kilometers) from the Black Sea.
Four separate archaeological sites were unearthed during the road construction, and the wealthy warrior’s tomb — which the researchers described as “princely” — was just a part of the most complex site, Ene said.
“This tomb is of major importance because, in addition to the rich inventory, it was discovered at a site along with 900 other archaeological features — [such as] pits, dwellings, and tombs,” he told Live Science in an email.
The sword was made from iron and has mostly rusted away, but its scabbard is decorated throughout its length with gold-leaf.
Invading Huns
The ethnicity of the Mizil warrior still isn’t known, but the rich grave goods suggest that he belonged to the ruling class in the region’s Hunnic period, or “migration era,” when it was controlled by the Huns, Ene and his colleagues told the news outlet Hungary Posts English(opens in new tab).
The Huns were nomadic horsemen who originated in Central Asia. During the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. they invaded and occupied the far east of Europe, while displacing other peoples — such as the Vandals and the Goths — from their lands, causing them to migrate west.
The Huns were a particular problem for the Byzantine (or Eastern) Roman Empire, which until that time had controlled much of the lands west of the Black Sea — a region that now includes Romania.
But the Romans lost the region to the Huns, who went on to invade the Western Roman province of Gaul (modern France and western Germany) and even to attack Rome under their leader Attila the Hun, before losing their territory in Europe to a mixed force of Goths and other Germanic former vassals at the Battle of Nedao — a site now in Croatia — in A.D. 454.
The finds also included several pieces of solid gold jewelery, including this one decorated with gemstones.
The tomb was discovered in bad weather and the excavation had to be completed with flashlights so the road construction project could go ahead.
This part of a saddle for a horse covered with gold-leaf and other objects associated with warhorses were found in the tomb.
Princely tomb
The latest archaeological finds at the Mizil tomb included an iron sword in a gilded scabbard, a dagger, bundles of iron arrowheads and decorated braces of bone that were once fitted to a wooden bow, Ene said.
The dagger is especially ornate, with a gold-covered hilt inlaid with gemstones, he noted.
Archaeologists also unearthed the remains of a gilded saddle, a bronze cauldron, several decorated “sconces” — fittings to hold candles on a wall — and pieces of gold jewelry, he said.
Several weapons were found in the tomb, including a sword, a dagger, parts of a bow and a bundle of iron arrowheads that seem to have been gathered together in a quiver.
The complete skeleton of the warrior and the skull and leg bones of his horse were found in the tomb. The man seems to have been buried wearing a gold mask.
The sword and the dagger found in the tomb are especially ornate; the scabbard of the sword and the hilt of the dagger are decorated with gold leaf.
The hilt of the dagger is covered with gold leaf and decorated with semi-precious gemstones.
The tomb held the warrior’s complete skeleton, and his face seems to have been covered with a gold mask, the remains of which were also unearthed. However, only a leg and the head of his horse have been unearthed so far, Ene said
The archaeologists told Hungary Posts English that the styles of the newfound objects suggest they are from about the fifth century A.D., when most of Europe north of the Danube River was under the control of the Huns.
The excavation of the tomb had to be completed in bad weather and sometimes with flashlights so that the motorway project could go ahead.
The archaeological investigation is now about “half finished,” Ene said. Over the next few months, the bones and artifacts will be cleaned, investigated and put on public display, while the site of the tomb itself will be built over by the motorway project.
World’s oldest runestone found in Norway, archaeologists say
Archaeologists in Norway have found what they claim is the world’s oldest runestone, saying the inscriptions are up to 2,000 years old and date back to the earliest days of the enigmatic history of runic writing.
The discovery of millennia-old runic writing is a ‘sensational’ find, say archaeologists.
The flat, square block of brownish sandstone has carved scribbles, which may be the earliest example of words recorded in writing in Scandinavia, the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo said.
It said it was “among the oldest runic inscriptions ever found” and “the oldest datable runestone in the world”.
“This find will give us a lot of knowledge about the use of runes in the early iron age. This may be one of the first attempts to use runes in Norway and Scandinavia on stone,” said Kristel Zilmer, a professor at the University of Oslo, of which the museum is part.
Older runes have been found on other items, but not on stone. The earliest runic find is on a bone comb found in Denmark. Zilmer said that maybe the tip of a knife or a needle was used to carve the runes.
The runestone was discovered in late 2021 during an excavation of a grave near Tyrifjord, west of Oslo, in a region known for several monumental archaeological finds. Items in the cremation pit – burned bones and charcoal – indicate that the runes were likely inscribed between AD1 and AD250.
“We needed time to analyse and date the runestone,” she said to explain why the finding was first announced on Tuesday.
Measuring 31cm by 32cm (12.2in by 12.6in), the stone has several types of inscriptions and not all make linguistic sense. Eight runes on the front of the stone read “idiberug” – which could be the name of a woman, a man or a family.
Zilmer called the discovery “the most sensational thing that I, as an academic, have had”.
There is still a lot of research to be done on the rock, dubbed the Svingerud stone after the site where it was found.
“Without doubt, we will obtain valuable knowledge about the early history of runic writing,” Zilmer said.
The runestone will be exhibited for a month, starting on 21 January, at the Museum of Cultural History, which has Norway’s largest collection of historical artifacts, from the stone age to modern times.
Runes are the characters in several Germanic alphabets that were used in northern Europe from ancient times until the adoption of the Latin alphabet. They have been found on stones and different household objects.
City Under a City: Metro Reveals Thessaloniki’s Ancient Past
The metro construction in Greece’s Thessaloniki has brought ancient ruins from the city’s life back in the 4th century BC to the surface. The excavation has brought to light Thessaloniki’s central 6th-century highway, a marble plaza, a fountain and a headless statue of Aphrodite.
Thousands of ancient finds such as coins, mosaics and statues have also been uncovered.
“Thessaloniki is unique in that from its foundation in the 4th century BC until today there is city under a city,” Tania Protopsalti, an archaeologist told Greek Reporter.
The city of Thessaloniki was founded in 315 BC by Cassander of Macedon. An important metropolis by the Roman period, Thessaloniki was the second largest and wealthiest city of the Byzantine Empire. It was conquered by the Ottomans in 1430, and passed from the Ottoman Empire to Greece on Nov. 8, 1912.
Most of the findings relate to the Byzantine era. However, Protopsalti says that, as excavations continue, new findings from the Roman era come to the surface.
“Eventually we hope to reach the remnants of the city when it was founded in the Cassander-era,” the Greek archaeologist said.
She added that some wall paintings and small sections of floor mosaics from the 4th century BC have already been uncovered.
The headless statue of Aphrodite
The excavations, filling in gaps in the city’s long history for archaeologists, have focused on the site of Hagia Sophia where a central metro station is being built.
It was there where a central 6th-century highway and marble plaza, two of the most exciting finds, were uncovered.
“The discovery of the marble plaza located south of the central highway gave us an invaluable insight into the urban planning in the 6th century,” archaeologist Stavroula Tzevreni told Greek Reporter.
The marbles have been carefully removed to be reinstated when the metro works are completed at Hagia Sophia.
The square was surrounded by impressive buildings decorated by mosaics that remain in good condition.
They were found in the south entrance of the station Hagia Sophia and are believed to be part of a nearly 315 square meter urban villa dated to the first half of the 4th century AD to the 5th century AD.
Decoration of the mosaic floors consists of geometric patterns, while one includes a central medallion, possibly depicting Aphrodite. The mosaics will be extracted, cleaned and exhibited at the same station they were excavated in.
At the southeast end of the square archaeologists found a 15-metre (nearly 50-foot) fountain structure believed to be one of the largest in the Roman world.
Alongside the stone-paved highway, the Decumanus Maximus, the remains of mud-bricked workshops were uncovered where jewellers plied their trade — as they still do today, in blocks of flats above the subway dig.
Scheduled to be operational in late 2020, the €1.5-billion ($1.7 billion) Thessaloniki metro will at first have 13 stations and run a distance of 9.6 kilometres (six miles).
A future expansion is planned to include the city airport.
3 mummified skeletons were found in Iznik, western Turkey
Archaeologists discovered mummified skeletons dating from the 2nd century A.D. within two sarcophagi at the Hisardere Necropolis in Bursa’s Iznik district.
The excavation is being conducted out by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism under the direction of Aygün Ekin Meriç, an academic at Dokuz Eylül University’s Archeology Department in western Izmir province.
Dokuz Eylul University Faculty of Letters, Archeology Department Lecturer Assoc. Dr. Aygün Ekin Meriç told reporters the necropolis was extensively used during the second and third centuries, and that they have found six sarcophagi in total in the region to date with the addition of the two recent findings.
Unique chamber tombs dating back to the third century were also discovered, he said, noting how spectacular the two newly discovered sarcophagi are.
“Along with the sarcophagi, there are chamber tombs, especially from the 3rd century, unique to Iznik, unmatched anywhere else, with painted interiors and decorated with ornaments.
At the same time, these two latest sarcophagi are very ostentatious.
The sarcophagi were made during the Roman Imperial Period, in the 2nd century. The two came out side by side. Very showy sarcophagi decorated with Eros reliefs on three sides,” he said.
Meriç stated that sarcophagi were unearthed in the illegal excavations carried out in the region since 1989 and that the area was expropriated in 2018 and scientific excavations began in 2019.
Meriç also added that they are excavating a holy basilica built in the cemetery area.
A view from two sarcophagi found in Hisardere Necropolis, Iznik, Bursa, northwestern Turkey.
Pointing out that they also found a small inscription on the mosaic in the basilica, Meriç said, “A woman’s name is mentioned.
The basilica was built in honor of the woman. No name, only the feminine epithet preserved. Excavation of the apse part of the basilica has not been completed.
We will more or less reveal the plan of the basilica in the next period of excavations,” used the phrases.
Meriç said that the basilica is 30 meters wide and 50 meters long, and they think that it was built in a plan similar to the basilica in Lake Iznik from the course of the walls.
