EUROPE, GERMANY, WORLD

3000 years old wooden wishing well discovered in Germany

3000 years old wooden wishing well discovered in Germany

In the town of Germering, in the Germany state of Bavaria, archaeologists have unearthed the remains of a well-preserved Bronze Age wooden well filled with ritual deposits.

People may have sunk jewelry and ceramics as offerings in the special water spring, similar to how coins are still thrown into so-called wishing wells today, according to the archaeologists.

The area of ​​today’s town of Germering in Upper Bavaria was a settlement area early on. Numerous finds from prehistory and early history bear witness to this.

Many new ones have been added since the beginning of 2021: In the run-up to construction work, numerous traces of settlements from the Bronze Age to the early Middle Ages were discovered on an excavation area of ​​around seven hectares.

This also includes the remains of wells that were used by people of different eras to supply water. But one of the wells discovered on the site differed significantly from the others, reports the Bavarian State Office for the Preservation of Monuments (BlfD).

This wooden water point is dated to be more than 3000 years old and, at around five meters (16.4 feet), reached particularly deep into the ground compared to others.

“It is extremely rare for a well to survive more than 3,000 years so well. Its wooden walls have been completely preserved at the bottom and are still partly damp from the groundwater. This also explains the good condition of the finds made from organic materials, which are now being examined more closely. We hope this will provide us with more information about the everyday life of the settlers of the time,” adds Dr. Jochen Haberstroh, a responsible archaeologist at the Bavarian State Office for the Preservation of Monuments.

Medieval pottery from well fill.

The team of archaeologists discovered in what was once the base of the fountain: 26 bronze clothing pins, a bracelet, two metal spirals, a mounted animal tooth, amber beads and more than 70 ceramic vessels.

The archaeologists emphasize that this filling makes this well fundamentally different from the others on the excavation site.

These expensive items, which were typically discovered in Middle Bronze Age graves, were not items for everyday use (1800-1200 B.C.). The state they were in when discovered at the bottom of the well suggests they were carefully lowered into the water rather than dropped or thrown.

“Even today, fountains have something magical about them for many people. They drop coins in the hope that their wishes will be granted. We cannot exactly explain what motives our ancestors 3000 years ago made to offer jewelry and other valuable gifts. But it can be assumed that they were intended as sacrifices for a good harvest,” explains Mathias Pfeil from the BlfD.

Among other things, the archaeologists discovered numerous bronze clothing pins at the bottom of the well.

There may also be a clue in the unusual features of the well: “The depth of this well shows that it was used at a time when the groundwater level had dropped considerably, which indicates a long drought and certainly poor harvest yields.

One can possibly see a reason why the people who lived here at that time sacrificed part of their possessions to their gods in this well,” says Marcus Guckenbiehl, city archaeologist and archivist of Germering.

Archaeologists have been working in advance of construction work for a letter distribution center on the site where the well has now been discovered since the beginning of 2021.

The excavations are among the largest area excavations in Bavaria this year. In the meantime, scientists have documented approximately 13,500 archaeological finds, primarily from the Bronze Age and early Middle Ages.

Some of the discoveries are currently being examined and conserved at the Bavarian State Office for Monument Preservation.

ENGLAND, EUROPE, WORLD

A Little Girl From London Finds a 700,000-Year-old Ancient Bear Tooth

A Little Girl From London Finds a 700,000-Year-old Ancient Bear Tooth

A Little Girl From London Finds a 700,000-Year-old Ancient Bear Tooth
Eagle-eyed Etta spotted the bear tooth on a family holiday – and experts were blown away by the discovery. BBC

Etta, from Hackney in London, made her discovery while on a family holiday on 22 July on Norfolk beach at West Runton.

While she was looking down she found something that she thought it was a fossilised bit of wood so she put it in her pocket, and when they got back to the car park they showed it to a fossil expert and she fell off her chair.

Etta initially thought the tooth was a piece of ancient wood, but it has since been confirmed as a bear’s tooth. BBC

“She said, ‘People search for 20 years and don’t find anything this good’ and told them it was a bear tooth.”

The nine-year-old, and her sisters aged seven and five, “really got into fossils” after attending a Norfolk Wildlife Trust fossil hunting course earlier in the year, their mother Thea Ferner explained.

Etta has loaned the tooth, which is about 9cm long (3in) from tip to root, to Norfolk Museums Service geologist David Waterhouse after meeting him at a fossil identification event at Cromer Museum.

About 1km (0.6 miles) of West Runton beach has been excavated by Norfolk Museums Service experts. BBC

“To find a perfect massive bear canine is a first for me in 16 years working here,” the senior curator of natural history said.

“We normally find lots of deer fossils, for example, but as you go up the food chain, you find fewer and fewer carnivores like the bear.”

He has identified it as an ancestor of the common brown bear.

Dr Waterhouse said “more extreme weather” is speeding up coastal erosion, which is “a double-edged sword – people’s homes and livelihoods are at risk, but it also means that amazing finds such as the Happisburgh footprints are being discovered”.

The Norfolk landscape 700,000 years ago would have had hyenas, lions, deer and mammoths. BBC

Norfolk’s Deep History Coast is a 22-mile (35km) stretch of coastline between Weybourne and Cart Gap.

Some of the more spectacular discoveries include the oldest archaeological site in northern Europe at Happisburgh, where 800,000-year-old human footprints were revealed in 2013. West Runton is also home to the oldest and largest fossilised mammoth ever found in the UK.

They are being unearthed in the Cromer Forest Bed geological layer, which at West Runton is 600,000 to 700,000 years old, said Dr Waterhouse.

The discoveries have pushed back archaeologists’ understanding of life by hundreds of thousands of years – and they have kept coming over the past 10 years, Dr Waterhouse explained.

These revealed the climate would have been like modern Poland’s, with similar summers but much colder winters than today.

About 1km (0.6 miles) of West Runton beach has been excavated by Norfolk Museums Service experts. BBC

“All these little nuances are building up to this rich picture of what animals and plants were thriving 700,000 years ago,” he said.

The earliest humans were Homo antecessor or Pioneer Man and they migrated across a landmass known as Dogger Land, which joined the British coast to present-day Germany and the Netherlands.

Dr Waterhouse said humans were still “a rare species… but everything was just right in Norfolk” for them, from wildfowl, game, shellfish “and crucially flint” to turn into sharp tools.

The nine-year-old said she planned to keep on fossil hunting.

EUROPE, IRELAND, WORLD

A Mysterious Partially Submerged Structure in Ireland is a Prehistoric Tomb, New Research Finds

A Mysterious Partially Submerged Structure in Ireland is a Prehistoric Tomb, New Research Finds

A Mysterious Partially Submerged Structure in Ireland is a Prehistoric Tomb, New Research Finds
The Carraig á Mhaistin stone structure at Rostellan on the eastern shore of Cork Harbour, Ireland.

The tomb-like Carraig á Mhaistin stone structure, uncovered in Ireland’s Cork Harbour years ago, is now believed to be a megalithic dolmen.

Previously, experts have been unsure whether it was prehistoric or a 19th-century “folly.”

New research conducted by archaeologist Michael Gibbons indicated that the monument is in fact a megalithic dolmen.

A small chamber on the west side of an unknown cairn, a man-made stone stack marking a burial mound, measures 82 feet long by 15 feet wide. The cairn was previously concealed due to rising sea levels.

This is significant, as portal and court tombs “occasionally have intact long cairns which are both intended to provide structural support to the chamber itself, and to enhance visual presence in the landscape”, Gibbons told the Irish Examiner.

He believes that the cairn could extend well below the surface, “partially entombed in estuarine mud”.

It is unclear exactly when sea levels in the area rose, but they are believed to have been stable for the last 2,000 years.

There is only one other intertidal portal tomb on the island, and the Carraig á Mhaistin dolmen is one of three intertidal tombs in the country.

Among Irish folklore, portal tombs or dolmens were often known as Diarmuid and Gráinne’s bed—a final resting place for the fugitive couple who were pursued by Gráinne’s husband Fionn mac Cumhaill.

Many of these structures were built close to the coast; however, due to movement in the Atlantic ocean, many have not survived, including Sherkin Island’s sole megalithic tomb on Slievemore townland.

The Carraig á Mhaistin has not been previously included in the state’s survey of megalithic tombs in Ireland, conducted Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin more than forty years ago, due to doubt surrounding its age.

SOUTH AMERICA, WORLD

This Circular Island in Argentina Not Only Floats, But Also Rotates Constantly

This Circular Island in Argentina Not Only Floats, But Also Rotates Constantly

This Circular Island in Argentina Not Only Floats, But Also Rotates Constantly

South America’s second longest river, the Paraná, which has a length of 4,880 kilometers, flows through three countries: Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina. 4,880 kilometers is no short distance – it gives plenty of opportunities for discovering amazing things.

In the case of the Paraná, one of the most exciting discoveries was made at its delta: an island 120 meters in diameter, almost completely circular in shape, and floating freely on its axis.

So-called floating islands are found in many parts of the world, including Finland, Turkey, Italy, Serbia, the Danube Delta in Romania and Ukraine, Lake Titicaca on the border between Bolivia and Peru, Lake Loktak in India, and many other places. However, this Argentinean island stands out from the rest because of its shape and its continuous rotation.

Floating islands are usually based on large roots that have ended up in the water and on which some other aquatic plant starts to grow. Plants found along the shoreline of wetlands often spread inwards from the shore, to where their roots no longer reach the deeper parts of the lake or river. When this happens, they use the oxygen in their root mass as buoyancy and the surrounding vegetation as support to survive in the water.

However, occasional violent storms can tear away these floating islands of vegetation, which can then be carried back and forth across the lake by the wind. Usually, they find calm somewhere again along the shoreline or break up completely due to stronger winds.

In some cases, however, the floating islands may persist for longer periods. In the aforementioned Lake Titicaca, for example, a group of 120 islands has been taken by an indigenous tribe, the Uru, but these islands require constant maintenance to survive.

The unusual piece of land known only as “El Ojo” (Eye Island) was formed by some very special currents that keep the circular island in constant motion. As it collides with its surroundings, it repeatedly detaches the muddy bits that might have given it a rest.

The island itself was just recently discovered by Argentine filmmaker Sergio Neuspiller, who was looking for a location for one of his films about paranormal phenomena when he came across the island in the delta. He didn’t know at the time that the piece of land was spinning around slowly – he only found out when he returned to the site shortly afterwards and was surprised to see that the island had moved elsewhere in the meantime.

The movement can also be seen in Google satellite images taken at different times.

The recordings also prove that the island has been in the Paraná delta for almost 20 years, since 2003.

Neuspiller got preoccupied with the question of the rotating island later, around 2016, when he, together with an engineer from New York, started raising funds to find out what’s behind the phenomenon.

They wanted to collect 50,000 dollars to solve the mystery, but since not even a fifth of the amount came together, their investigation, which would have also covered the supernatural, was not completed. What a shame.

NORTH AMERICA, SOUTH AMERICA, WORLD

Study Investigates Source of Amazon’s “Dark Earth”

Study Investigates Source of Amazon’s “Dark Earth”

Indigenous people in the Amazon may have been deliberately creating fertile soil for farming for thousands of years.

Study Investigates Source of Amazon’s “Dark Earth”
Growing crops in the Amazon’s nutrient-poor dirt is tough. In a tradition that may be thousands of years old, indigenous Kuikuro people in Brazil overcome this issue by making their own fertile soil from ash, food scraps and controlled burns.

At archaeological sites across the Amazon River basin, mysterious patches of unusually fertile soil dot the landscape. Scientists have long debated the origin of this “dark earth,” which is darker in color than surrounding soils and richer in carbon.

Now, researchers have shown that indigenous Kuikuro people in southeastern Brazil intentionally create similar soil around their villages. The finding, presented December 16 at the American Geophysical Union meeting, adds evidence to the idea that long-ago Amazonians deliberately manufactured such soil too.

The fact that Kuikuro people make dark earth today is a “pretty strong argument” that people were also making it in the past, says Paul Baker, a geochemist at Duke University who was not involved in the research.

In doing so, these early inhabitants may have inadvertently stored massive quantities of carbon in the soil, says study presenter Taylor Perron, an earth scientist at MIT. The technique, he says, could provide a blueprint for developing methods of sustainably locking atmospheric carbon in tropical soils, helping fight climate change.   

Indigenous people have altered the Amazon for thousands of years

The Western world has long viewed the Amazon as a vast wilderness that was relatively untouched before Europeans showed up. At the center of this argument is the idea that the Amazon’s soil, which is poor in nutrients like other tropical soils, precluded its inhabitants from developing agriculture at a scale required to support complex societies.     

But a slew of archeological finds in recent decades — including the discovery of ancient urban centers in Amazonian areas of modern-day Bolivia — has revealed that people were actively shaping the Amazon for thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans (SN: 5/25/22).

Most scientists today agree that the presence of dark earth near archaeological sites means that long-ago Amazonians used this soil to grow crops. But while some archaeologists argue that people purposely made the soil, others contend that dark earth was laid down through geologic processes.

Perron and colleagues reviewed interviews of Kuikuro people conducted by a Kuikuro filmmaker in 2018. Those conversations revealed that Kuikuro villagers actively make dark earth — eegepe in Kuikuro — using ash, food scraps and controlled burns.

“When you plant where there is no eegepe, the soil is weak,” explained elder Kanu Kuikuro in one of the interviews. “That is why we throw the ash, manioc peelings and manioc pulp.”

The researchers collected soil samples from around Kuikuro villages and archaeological sites in Brazil’s Xingu River basin. The team found “striking similarities” between dark earth samples from ancient and modern sites, Perron says. Both were far less acidic than surrounding soils — probably thanks to the neutralizing effect of ash — and contained higher levels of plant-friendly nutrients.

Soil that bears a striking resemblance to dark earth can be found in and around Kuikuro villages (one seen here from above) in southeastern Brazil.

Dark earth could store a lot of carbon in the Amazon

These analyses also revealed that dark earth holds twice the amount of carbon as surrounding soils on average. Infrared scans of the Xingu region suggest that the area is pockmarked with dark earth, and that as much as roughly 9 megatons of carbon — the annual carbon emissions of a small, industrialized country — may have gone unaccounted in the area, the researchers reported at the meeting.  

This number, while preliminary, could inflate to roughly the annual carbon emissions of the United States when all dark earth across the Amazon is taken into consideration, Perron says.

Figuring out how much carbon is actually stored in the Amazon could help improve climate simulations. But the researchers’ estimates are a “huge extrapolation from a very small dataset,” Baker cautions — a sentiment echoed by Perron.

Pinning down the true value of carbon stored in the Amazon’s dark earth will require more data, says Antoinette WinklerPrins, a geographer at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the study. Still, the research has “profound implications of the past and future” of the Amazon, she says.

For one thing, the technique highlights how ancient people were able to thrive in the Amazon by developing sustainable farming that doubled as a carbon-sequestration technique. With more and more greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere, making dark earth — or something like it — could be a method of mitigating climate change while supporting agriculture in the tropics.

“People in the ancient past figured out a way to store lots of carbon for hundreds or even thousands of years,” Perron says. “Maybe we can learn something from that.”

MEXICO, NORTH AMERICA, WORLD

Ice Age Hunting Camp Identified in Mexico

Ice Age Hunting Camp Identified in Mexico

This story begins anywhere from 4,000 to 17,000 years ago, when woolly mammoths roamed the Earth. It picks up in Mexico in the mid-1950s, when the remains of a couple of those mammoths — and stone tools with traces of human use — were found in the central part of the country.

Ice Age Hunting Camp Identified in Mexico
Bones of a woolly mammoth found in México state in the 1950s were recently re-examined by a Mexican research team using new technology.

Now flash forward to the present day, when a recent study of those artifacts, using modern science and technology, is giving new glimpses into what researchers now believe was an Ice Age camp of humans in what is today México state.

“The study indicates that it was a seasonal hunter-gatherer camp,” archaeologist Patricia Pérez Martínez, author and coordinator of the project, said Tuesday during a presentation of the study’s findings.

The animal remains and artifacts, found nearly seven decades ago during a public works project in the small community of Santa Isabel Ixtapan, represent “the first material evidence of the existence of this type of site on the shores of Lake Texcoco, around 9,000 years ago,” Pérez said.

Lead researcher on the study Patricia Pérez Martínez heads the Hunter-Gatherer Technology Laboratory at the National School of Anthropology and History in Mexico City.

The findings are significant because small villages of humans in that time period usually existed in caves and rock shelters, often in mountainous regions, usually in the northern region of Mexico.

“Finding a seasonal hunter-gatherer camp in the open air is very [rare],” Pérez said. 

Indeed, the Santa Isabel Ixtapan site is the only one in the Valley of México with direct evidence of stone tools and mammoth bones, she added.

The first set of bones was found here in 1954, and then two years later, another mammoth’s remains, along with stone tools, were found about 250 meters away. Then, between 2019 and 2021, more bones and “possible mammoth traps” were discovered.

These days, in tribute to the area’s prehistoric past, there is a sculpture of the long-tusked, giant beast in the middle of a roundabout in Santa Isabel Ixtapan.

The research project, “Interaction of First Settlers and Megafauna in the Basin of México,” is a joint effort between INAH and the National School of Anthropology and History (ENAH), where Pérez heads the Hunter-Gatherer Technology Laboratory.

Employees hard at work at the Hunter-Gatherer Technology Laboratory.

The effort to reevaluate the site was carried out with advanced technology tools and testing methods that Pérez said can lead to fresh findings about the landscape, megafauna (large animals) and human interactions with the surroundings.

Her hypothesis is that the ancient human inhabitants used and subsisted on the lake’s resources, which she said is supported by the discovery of small fragments of fish bone (seemingly cooked in some sort of charcoal) and obsidian microflakes (indicating residue from a stone that was possibly carved into a tool).

“Since the flakes are very small fragments, we hope that in the next [field research] session, scheduled for this year, we will be able to do extensive excavation that will give us a better context,” said Pérez.

“Likewise, in 2023, the soil samples will be studied in our laboratories, and the traces of use of the three tools found with the second mammoth — which are exhibited in the National Museum of Anthropology — will be analyzed,” she said. 

“Initially, they were thought to be hunting projectile points, but recently, more detailed observations place them as knives, possibly used for butchering.”

ASIA, ISRAEL, WORLD

Byzantine monk chained with iron rings unearthed near Jerusalem

Byzantine monk chained with iron rings unearthed near Jerusalem

Byzantine monk chained with iron rings unearthed near Jerusalem

A skeleton chained with iron rings was discovered at Khirbat el-Masani, about four kilometers northwest of Jerusalem, along the ancient route connecting Lod with Jerusalem via Nebi Samuel/Nabi Samwil.

The 1500-year-old skeleton, chained with iron rings, belonged to a Byzantine monk. No doubt, he wanted to achieve a very special goal and he indeed did it.

In the pursuit of salvation, atonement for sin, or spirituality, ascetic monks led a life marked by abstinence from sensual pleasures.

More extreme forms of asceticism included self-inflicted pain and voluntary suffering, chaining the body to rocks or keeping it in a cell, praying seated on a pillar in the elements, and solitary confinement.

Archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority previously discovered a tri-apsidal Byzantine-era church at Khirbat el-Masani, which was once a part of a monastery with a road inn for passing pilgrims.

The church is partly rock-cut and built using limestone ashlars (finely dressed stone), which may have been dedicated to Saint Zachary by the priest Sabinus.

In the past, the site was surveyed in the Jerusalem Survey Map, and a small excavation was conducted by the Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologist Dr. Gaby Mazor, exposing the front part of two of the apses.

An extensive excavation carried out at the site in 2017, directed by Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologists Zubair Adoi and Kafir Arbiv and funded by Moriah Jerusalem Development Corporation, uncovered a large architectural complex, comprising the monastery and road-inn and, most prominently, the church, enabling an understanding of the plan, construction methods and the date of the church.

Archaeologists recently found the skeleton of a monk, chained with iron rings around his neck, hands, and feet, was discovered in a cist grave next to two small niche-like closed cells in the central apse of the church.

The interred was probably an ascetic monk living in or near the church compound, who bore the chains as part of his devotion.

The practice originated in Syria in the 4th or 5th century AD, but the discovery of the burial shows that during the Byzantine period, this form of extreme asceticism spread as far south as the Jerusalem region.

While the discovery of a chain-clad skeleton is extremely rare in the region, an Israeli Antiquities Authority archaeologist Elena Kogan-Zehavi made a similar discovery in 1991 at Khirbat Tabaliya (Givat Ha-Matos), located between Jerusalem and Bethlehem.

EUROPE, NORWAY, WORLD

New study investigates the development of the Scandinavian gene pool over the latest 2000 years

New study investigates the development of the Scandinavian gene pool over the latest 2000 years

A new study resolves the complex relations between geography, ancestry, and gene flow in Scandinavia – encompassing the Roman Age, the Viking Age, and later periods.

Researchers investigated a 2,000-year genetic transect through Scandinavia spanning the Iron Age to the present, based on 48 new and 249 published ancient genomes and genotypes from 16,638 modern individuals.

A surprising increase of variation during the Viking period indicates that gene flow into Scandinavia was especially intense during this period.

An international study coordinated from Stockholm and Reykjavik investigates the development of the Scandinavian gene pool over the latest 2000 years. In this effort the scientists relied on historic and prehistoric genomes, and from material excavated in Scandinavia.

These ancient genomes were compared with genomic data from 16,638 contemporary Scandinavians. As the geographical origin and the datings were known for all these individuals, it was possible to resolve the development of the gene pool to a level never realised previously.

Archaeological excavation at Sandby Borg.

Dr Ricardo Rodríguez Varela at the Centre for Palaeogenetics*, who analyzed all the data and extracted some of the ancient DNA used in the study, explains: “With this level of resolution we not only confirm the Viking Age migration.

We are also able to trace it to the east Baltic region, the British-Irish Isles and southern Europe. But not all parts of Scandinavia received the same amounts of gene flow from these areas. For example, while British-Irish ancestry became widespread in Scandinavia the eastern-Baltic ancestry mainly reached Gotland and central Sweden.”

The gene pool bounced back after the Viking period

Another new discovery in this study was what happened to the gene pool after the Viking period. The scientists were surprised to find that it bounced back in the direction of what it looked like before the Viking period migration.

Professor Anders Götherström at the Centre for Palaeogenetics, who is a senior scientist on the study, is intrigued: “Interestingly, the non-local ancestry peaks during the Viking period while being lower before and after.

The drop in current levels of external ancestry suggests that the Viking-period migrants got less children, or somehow contributed proportionally less to the gene pool than the people who were already in Scandinavia.”

Yet a new discovery was the history of the northern Scandinavian gene pool. There is a genetic component in northern Scandinavia that is rare in central and western Europe, and scientists were able to track this component in northern Scandinavia through the latest 1000 years.

Underwater excavations of the ship Kronan.

Dr Ricardo Rodríguez Varela comments, “We suspected that there was a chronology to the northern Scandinavian gene pool, and it did indeed prove that a more recent influx of Uralic ancestry into Scandinavia define much of the northern gene pool. But if it is recent, it is comparatively so. For example, we know that this Uralic ancestry was present in northern Scandinavia as early as during the late Viking period”.

Based on well-known Swedish archaeological sites

The study is based on a number of well-known Swedish archaeological sites. For example, there are genomes from the 17th century warship Kronan, from the Viking and Vendel period boat burials in the lake Mälaren Valley, and from the migration period ring fortress Sandby borg on Öland.

Anders Götherström conclude: “We were working on a number of smaller studies on different archaeological sites. And at some point it just made sense to combine them into a larger study on the development of the Scandinavian gene pool.

The study, published today in Cell, is an international effort with several collaborators, but it was led by Dr Ricardo Rodríguez Varela and Professor Anders Götherstörm at Stockholm University, and Professor Agnar Helgason, and Kristjáan Moore at deCODE in Reykavijk.

The article “The genetic history of Scandinavia from the Roman Iron Age to the present” is published in Cell.

All In One Magazine