ASIA, CHINA, WORLD

Traces of Beer Detected in 9,000-Year-Old Vessels in China

Traces of Beer Detected in 9,000-Year-Old Vessels in China

Alcoholic beverages have long been known to serve an important socio-cultural function in ancient societies, including ritual feasts. A new study finds evidence of beer drinking 9,000 years ago in southern China, which was likely part of a ritual to honour the dead.

The findings are based on an analysis of ancient pots found at a burial site at Qiaotou, making the site among the oldest in the world for early beer drinking. The results are reported in PLOS ONE.

The ancient pots were discovered in a platform mound (80 m x 50 m wide, with an elevation of 3 m above ground level), which was surrounded by a human-made ditch (10-15 m wide and 1.5-2 m deep), based on ongoing excavations at Qiaotou. No residential structures were found at the site.

Painted pottery vessels for serving drinks and food.

The mound contained two human skeletons and multiple pottery pits with high-quality pottery vessels, many of which were complete vessels. The pottery was painted with white slip and some of the vessels were decorated with abstract designs. As the study reports, these artefacts are probably some of “the earliest known painted pottery in the world.” No pottery of this kind has been found at any other sites dating to this time period.

The research team analyzed different types of pottery found at Qiaotou, which were of varying sizes. Some of the pottery vessels were relatively small and similar in size to drinking vessels used today, and to those found in other parts of the world.

Each of the pots could basically be held in one hand like a cup unlike storage vessels, which are much larger in size. Seven of the 20 vessels, which were part of their analysis, appeared to be long-necked Hu pots, which were used to drink alcohol in the later historical periods.

To confirm that the vessels were used for drinking alcohol, the research team analyzed microfossil residues— starch, phytolith (fossilized plant residue), and fungi, extracted from the interior surfaces of the pots. The residues were compared with control samples obtained from the soil surrounding the vessels.

The team identified micro botanical (starch granules and phytoliths) and microbial (mould and yeast) residues in the pots that were consistent with residues from beer fermentation and are not found naturally in soil or in other artefacts unless they had contained alcohol.

“Through a residue analysis of pots from Qiaotou, our results revealed that the pottery vessels were used to hold beer, in its most general sense— a fermented beverage made of rice (Oryza sp.), a grain called Job’s tears (Coix lacryma-jobi), and unidentified tubers,” says co-author Jiajing Wang, an assistant professor of anthropology at Dartmouth.

“This ancient beer though would not have been like the IPA that we have today. Instead, it was likely a slightly fermented and sweet beverage, which was probably cloudy in colour.”

The results also showed that phytoliths of rice husks and other plants were also present in the residue from the pots. They may have been added to the beer as a fermentation agent.

Although the Yangtze River Valley of southern China is known today as the country’s rice heartland, the domestication of rice occurred gradually between 10,000 and 6,000 years ago, so 9,000 years ago, rice was still in the early stage of domestication.

At that time, most communities were hunter-gatherers who relied primarily on foraging. As the researchers explain in the study, given that rice harvesting and processing was labour-intensive, the beer at Qiaotou was probably a ritually significant drink/beverage.

The residue analysis of the pots also showed traces of mould, which was used in the beermaking process. The mould found in the pots at Qiaotou was very similar to the mould present in koji, which is used to make sake and other fermented rice beverages in East Asia. The results predate earlier research, which found that mould had been used in fermentation processes 8,000 years ago in China.

Beer is technically any fermented beverage made from crops through a two-stage transformation process. In the first phase, enzymes transform starch into sugar (saccharification). In the second phase, the yeasts convert the sugar into alcohol and other states like carbon dioxide (fermentation).

As the researchers explain in the study, mould acts kind of like an agent for both processes, by serving as a saccharification-fermentation starter.

“We don’t know how people made the mould 9,000 years ago, as fermentation can happen naturally,” says Wang. “If people had some leftover rice and the grains became mouldy, they may have noticed that the grains became sweeter and alcoholic with age. While people may not have known the biochemistry associated with grains that became mouldy, they probably observed the fermentation process and leveraged it through trial and error.”

Given that the pottery at Qiaotou was found near the burials in a non-residential area, the researchers conclude that the pots of beer were likely used in ritualistic ceremonies relating to the burial of the dead.

They speculate that ritualized drinking may have been integral to forging social relationships and cooperation, which served as a precursor to complex rice farming societies that emerged 4,000 years later.

EUROPE, SCOTLAND, WORLD

Scientists Reconstruct First-evolved Plant Roots Using 400-million-year-old Fossil

Scientists Reconstruct First-evolved Plant Roots Using 400-million-year-old Fossil

A plant fossil from a geological formation in Scotland sheds light on the development of the earliest known form of roots. A team led by researchers at GMI – the Gregor Mendel Institute of Molecular Plant Biology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Oxford realize the first 3D reconstruction of a Devonian plant-based exclusively on fossil evidence.

Artist’s reconstruction of what Asteroxylon mackiei would have looked like in life. Each leafy shoot is roughly 1 cm in diameter.
Artist’s reconstruction of what Asteroxylon mackiei would have looked like in life. Each leafy shoot is roughly 1 cm in diameter.

The findings demonstrate that the appearance of different axis types at branching points resulted in the evolution complexity soon after land plants evolved sometime before 400 million years ago. The results are published in eLife.

New research demonstrates how the oldest known root axed developed more than 400 million years ago. The evolution of roots at this time was a dramatic event that impacted our planet and atmosphere and resulted in transformative ecological and climate change.

3D reconstruction of Asteroxylon mackiei made from digitally re-assembling thin slices of rock. The reconstruction shows the highly branched leafy shoot in green and the rooting system in blue and purple. 3D scale bar 1 x 0.1 x 0.1 cm

The first evidence-based 3D reconstruction of the fossil Asteroxylon mackiei, the most structurally complex plant from the Rhynie chert has shown how roots and other types of axes developed in this ancient plant. The fossil is preserved in chert (a type of flint) found near the village of Rhynie in Aberdeenshire, Scotland.

The specimens are exceptionally well-preserved in the 407-million-year-old rocks from the Early Devonian period.

The extinct genus Asteroxylon belongs to the group of plants called the lycophytes, a class that also comprises living representatives such as isoetes and selaginella.

The reconstruction has allowed researchers, for the first time, to glean both anatomical and developmental information of this mysterious fossil. This is of particular significance because previous interpretations of the structure of this fossil plant were based to a large extent on comparisons of fragmentary images with extant plants.

A thin slice of the 407 million-year-old Rhynie chert mounted on a glass slide showing the amazing preservation of fossil plants preserved within. Specimen number 4178 in the paleobotanical collection at the University of Münster, Germany. Each interval on the scale bar is 1 mm.

The reconstruction demonstrates that these plants developed roots in an entirely different way than extant plants develop roots today. The rooting axes of A. mackiei are the earliest known types of plant roots.

“These are the oldest known structures that resemble modern roots and now we know how they formed. They developed when a shoot-like axis formed a fork where one prong maintained its shoot identity and the second developed root identity,” says Dolan.

This mechanism of branching, called “dichotomous branching,” is known in living plants within tissues that share structural identity. However, as Dolan stresses: “No roots develop in this way in living plants, demonstrating that this mechanism of root formation is now extinct.” Their findings demonstrate how a now extinct rooting system developed during the evolution of the first complex land plant.

View over the village of Rhynie in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. The fossil deposit known as the Rhynie chert is named after the village of Rhynie where it was first discovered just over a century ago

“100 Years after the discovery of the fossils in Rhynie, our reconstruction demonstrates what these enigmatic plants really looked like! The reconstruction also demonstrates how the roots formed” exclaims GMI group leader Liam Dolan, co-corresponding author on the work.

Understanding the structure and evolution of these plants from the Early Devonian period provides us with an insight into events at a key time in Earth history just after plants colonized the dry surfaces of the continents as they began to spread – radiate – across the land.

“Their evolution, radiation, and spread across all continents had a dramatic impact on the Earth system. Plant roots reduced atmospheric CO2 levels, stabilized the soil and revolutionized water circulation across the surfaces of continents,” states first author and co-corresponding author Alexander (Sandy) J. Hetherington, group leader at the University of Edinburgh. At the root of the environmental and ecological impact of the plant, evolution are the plant roots themselves!

Hetherington highlighted how his research was enabled by fossils that were collected by generations of palaeontologists that are housed in many different museums and universities.

“The answers to so many of the key questions of evolution are lying in shelves in these institutions,” said the scientist who is now based at the University of Edinburgh. “Using digital 3D techniques it is possible for the first time to visualize the complex body plan of A. mackiei allowing us to discover how these enigmatic plants developed. It was brilliant to finally see details that had previously been hidden.”

EUROPE, WORLD

Israeli-Lithuanian Team Reveals Torah Ark at the Site of Vilnius’ Great Synagogue

Israeli-Lithuanian Team Reveals Torah Ark at the Site of Vilnius’ Great Synagogue

Imaging of the podium at the Great Synagogue of Vilnius,

In Vilnius, capital of Lithuania, an excavation of its former Great Synagogue has fully exposed the Torah ark and the podium that was destroyed by Nazi-Germany during the Holocaust.

A joint Israeli-Lithuanian excavation expedition, using a ground-penetrating radar test at the site, announced on Thursday that it had made significant discoveries at the site Thursday at the end of this season of a six-year excavation project.

Imaging of the podium at the Great Synagogue of Vilnius,
The silver Yad found this morning at the Great Synagogue of Vilna

“Just this morning, while sifting the soil in front of the Aron Kodesh (Torah ark), we found a silver Yad (hand). The Yad is a pointer used to read from the Torah scroll”, the archaeologists from Israel Antiquities Authority and the Lithuanian Cultural Heritage Preservation Institute said. The finding will be exhibited at the local Jewish museum.

Vilnius was in the past known as the “Jerusalem of Lithuania”.  The Great Synagogue of Vilnius, built in the 17th century in Renaissance-Baroque style, was the major part of a large Jewish centre of religious and community studies.

The heart of the Lithuanian Jewish community, included synagogues and prayer halls, schools, ritual baths, and the community council.

Around 450 seats in the synagogue can be counted, though the number might have doubled during the high holidays.

Due to the prohibition to build synagogues higher than churches, a foundation was dug well below street level to create the interior height.  Outside, the synagogue looked to be about three stories high, but inside it reached over four stories.

The synagogue is linked to Rabbi Eliyahu ben Shlomo Zalman in the 18th century, known as the Vilna Gaon (the genius of Vilna/Vilnius), a famous Talmudist and author of scientific studies.

The excavation of the Great Synagogue of Vilna in Lithuania showing the area of the Torah ark and two flights of stairs destroyed by the Nazis and the Soviets, August 2021.

Centuries of existence came to an end with the destruction of the Jewish community of Vilnius during the Holocaust.

The synagogue, which was sacred to the Jews of Lithuania, was looted and burned by the Nazis, and in 1956-7 its remains were completely destroyed by the Soviet authorities. A modern school was built on the premises.

“When we arrived to carry out the excavations of the interior of the synagogue, it became clear, unfortunately, that the core of the synagogue had been greatly damaged,” said Dr Jon Seligman from the Israel Antiquities Authority. “Still, two impressive staircases, clearly visible in the many images of the synagogue before its destruction, were discovered and are evidence of their existence.”

What distinguishes the synagogue from other synagogues from the period? “The synagogue is a typical baroque nine-bay synagogue,” Dr Seligman replied.

“Similar structures with a central podium (bimah) inside four supporting columns and nine vaulted bays existed at other places in Eastern Europe, such as Grodno, Lancut, Kalvarija, Druja, and Slonim.”

Are there plans for a memorial at the site or restoration of the building? “That is a question for Vilnius municipality, the Lithuanian Jewish community and Lithuanian society to decide.”

EUROPE, UKRAINE, WORLD

Stalin-Era Mass Graves Discovered in Ukraine

Stalin-Era Mass Graves Discovered in Ukraine

The remains of up to 20,000 people have been found in Ukraine’s southern city of Odessa as excavations continue at a site believed to be a mass grave of victims of Stalin’s Terror, historians said Monday.

People work on the site of mass graves site unearthed near Odessa airport in Ukraine

According to various estimates, the bones of between 5,000 and 20,000 people lie in the ground, making it one of the largest mass graves unearthed in Ukraine so far.

They were discovered this month close to Odessa airport after exploratory works started as part of expansion plans.

“As of today, 29 graves have been discovered. The bodies lie in several layers,” local historian Oleksandr Babych told journalists at the site which until recently was a garbage dump.

The bones of between 5,000 and 20,000 people lie in the ground, making it one of the largest mass graves unearthed in Ukraine

“Already we can clearly see at least five layers”, he said.

Historians believe that these people were executed in the 1930s, the time is known as Stalin’s Great Terror.

Archaeologist Tetyana Samoylova, a chief consultant at the site, highlighted the “cynicism” with which the sentences were carried out.

“They dug out pits in the garbage and threw these people in or shot them dead as they were standing there,” Samoylova said.

“And then they covered them with the same garbage,” she added, standing next to the dozens of graves marked by red tape.

It took 400 trucks to remove the top layer of garbage, according to a search group.

“When we carry out the exhumation, we will decide what to do here. And, of course, we plan to make a memorial,” Odessa mayor Gennady Trukhanov said.

Stalin-Era Mass Graves Discovered in Ukraine
Historians believe the people were executed in the 1930s, the time known as Stalin’s Great Terror

Some mass graves had already been unearthed in this area in previous years.

The prisoners’ nationalities and the crimes for which they were sentenced to die to remain unknown.

According to estimates made by historians, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians were imprisoned or executed in Gulag camps during the Stalinist repressions.

One of the best-known execution sites is the forest near the village of Bykivnia on the outskirts of the capital Kiev, where tens of thousands of victims were buried in 1937-1941.

Millions of Ukrainians also died in the great famine of 1932-1933, which Kiev regards as a genocide orchestrated by Stalin.

NORTH AMERICA, U.S.A, WORLD

Ancient humans could do some impressive things with elephant bones

Ancient humans could do some impressive things with elephant bones

Ancient humans could do some impressive things with elephant bones. 
Bone tools were excavated from Castel di Guido in Italy.

In a new study, University of Colorado Boulder archaeologist Paola Villa and her colleagues surveyed tools excavated from a site in Italy where large numbers of elephants had died. The team discovered that humans at this site roughly 400,000 years ago appropriated those carcasses to produce an unprecedented array of bone tools—some crafted with sophisticated methods that wouldn’t become common for another 100,000 years. 

“We see other sites with bone tools at this time,” said Villa, an adjoint curator at the CU Boulder Museum of Natural History. “But there isn’t this variety of well-defined shapes.”

Top: Elephant tusks and other bones at the Castel di Guido site during excavation; middle: A series of pointed elephant bone tools from Castel di Guido; bottom: A lissoir, or smoother, a tool made from a wild cattle bone.

Villa and her colleagues published their results this month in the journal PLOS ONE.

The study zeroes in on a site called Castel di Guido not far from modern-day Rome. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, it was the location of a gully that had been carved by an ephemeral stream—an environment where 13-foot-tall creatures called straight-tusked elephants (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) quenched their thirst and, occasionally, died. 

Castel di Guido’s hominids made good use of the remains, occupying the site off and on over the years. The researchers report that these Stone Age residents produced tools using a systematic, standardized approach, a bit like a single individual working on a primitive assembly line. 

“At Castel di Guido, humans were breaking the long bones of the elephants in a standardized manner and producing standardized blanks to make bone tools,” Villa said. “This kind of aptitude didn’t become common until much later.”

Stone Age toolbox

These feats of ingenuity came at a significant time for hominids in general.

Right around 400,000 years ago, Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) were just beginning to emerge in Europe. Villa suspects that Castel di Guido’s residents were Neanderthals. 

“About 400,000 years ago, you start to see the habitual use of fire, and it’s the beginning of the Neanderthal lineage,” Villa said. “This is a very important period for Castel di Guido.”

It may have been a productive one, too. In their new study, Villa and her colleagues identified 98 bone tools from Castel di Guido, which was excavated from 1979 to 1991. The findings represent the highest number of flaked bone tools made by pre-modern hominids that researchers have described so far. That rich toolbox offered a wide range of useful items: Some tools were pointed and could, theoretically, have been used to cut meat. Others were wedges that may have been helpful for splitting heavy elephant femurs and other long bones. 

“First you make a groove where you can insert these heavy pieces that have a cutting edge,” Villa said. “Then you hammer it, and at some point, the bone will break.”

But one tool stood out from the rest: The team discovered a single artifact carved from a wild cattle bone that was long and smooth at one end. It resembles what archaeologists call a “lissoir,” or a smoother, a type of tool that hominids used to treat leather. The curious thing: Lissoir tools didn’t become common until about 300,000 years ago.

“At other sites 400,000 years ago, people were just using whatever bone fragments they had available,” Villa said.

Useful finds

Something special, in other words, seemed to be happening at the Italian site. 

Villa doesn’t think that the Castel di Guido hominids were any more intelligent than their counterparts elsewhere in Europe. Instead, these early humans simply used the resources they had lying around. She explained that this region of Italy doesn’t have a lot of naturally occurring, large pieces of flint, so ancient humans couldn’t make many large stone tools. 

What the region might have had a lot of, however, were dead elephants. As the Stone Age progressed, straight-tusked elephants slowly disappeared from Europe. During the era of Castel di Guido’s bone-crafters, these animals may have flocked to watering holes at the site, occasionally dying from natural causes. Humans then found the remains and butchered them for their long bones. 

“The Castel di Guido people had cognitive intellects that allowed them to produce complex bone technology,” Villa said. “At other assemblages, there were enough bones for people to make a few pieces, but not enough to begin a standardized and systematic production of bone tools.”

WORLD

Evidence of advanced Civilizations living on earth more than 100,000 years ago

Evidence of advanced Civilizations living on earth more than 100,000 years ago

It only took five minutes for Gavin Schmidt to out-speculate me.

Schmidt is the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (a.k.a. GISS), a world-class climate science facility. One day last year, I came to GISS with a far-out proposal. In my work as an astrophysicist, I’d begun researching global warming from an “astrobiological perspective.” That meant asking whether any industrial civilization that rises on any planet will, through its own activity, trigger its own version of a climate shift. I was visiting GISS that day hoping to gain some climate science insights and, perhaps, collaborators. That’s how I ended up in Gavin’s office.

Just as I was revving up my pitch, Gavin stopped me in my tracks.

“Wait for a second,” he said. “How do you know we’re the only time there’s been a civilization on our own planet?”

It took me a few seconds to pick up my jaw off the floor. I had certainly come into Gavin’s office prepared for eye rolls at the mention of “exo-civilizations.” But the civilizations he was asking about would have existed many millions of years ago. Sitting there, seeing Earth’s vast evolutionary past telescope before my mind’s eye, I felt a kind of temporal vertigo. “Yeah,” I stammered. “Could we tell if there’d been an industrial civilization that deep in time?”

We never got back to aliens. Instead, that first conversation launched a new study we’ve recently published in the International Journal of Astrobiology. Though neither of us could see it at that moment, Gavin’s penetrating question opened a window not just onto Earth’s past, but also onto our own future.

We’re used to imagining extinct civilizations in terms of sunken statues and subterranean ruins. These kinds of artefacts of previous societies are fine if you’re only interested in the timescales of a few thousands of years. But once you roll the clock back to tens of millions or hundreds of millions of years, things get more complicated.

When it comes to direct evidence of an industrial civilization—things like cities, factories, and roads—the geologic record doesn’t go back past what’s called the Quaternary period 2.6 million years ago. For example, the oldest large-scale stretch of ancient surface lies in the Negev Desert. It’s “just” 1.8 million years old—older surfaces are mostly visible in cross-section via something like a cliff face or rock cuts. Go back much further than the Quaternary, and everything has been turned over and crushed to dust.

And, if we’re going back this far, we’re not talking about human civilizations anymore. Homo sapiens didn’t make their appearance on the planet until just 300,000 years or so ago. That means the question shifts to other species, which is why Gavin called the idea the Silurian hypothesis, after an old Doctor Who episode with intelligent reptiles.

So could researchers find clear evidence that an ancient species built a relatively short-lived industrial civilization long before our own? Perhaps, for example, some early mammal rose briefly to civilization building during the Paleocene epoch, about 60 million years ago. There are fossils, of course. But the fraction of life that gets fossilized is always minuscule and varies a lot depending on time and habitat. It would be easy, therefore, to miss an industrial civilization that lasted only 100,000 years—which would be 500 times longer than our industrial civilization has made it so far.

Given that all direct evidence would be long gone after many millions of years, what kinds of evidence might then still exist? The best way to answer this question is to figure out what evidence we’d leave behind if human civilization collapsed at its current stage of development.

Now that our industrial civilization has truly gone global, humanity’s collective activity is laying down a variety of traces that will be detectable by scientists 100 million years in the future. The extensive use of fertilizer, for example, keeps 7 billion people fed, but it also means we’re redirecting the planet’s flows of nitrogen into food production. Future researchers should see this in characteristics of nitrogen showing up in sediments from our era. Likewise our relentless hunger for the rare-Earth elements used in electronic gizmos. Far more of these atoms are now wandering around the planet’s surface because of us than would otherwise be the case. They might also show up in future sediments, too. Even our creation, and use, of synthetic steroids has now become so pervasive that it too may be detectable in geologic strata 10 million years from now.

And then there’s all that plastic. Studies have shown that increasing amounts of plastic “marine litter” are being deposited on the seafloor everywhere from coastal areas to deep basins, and even in the Arctic. Wind, sun, and waves grind down large-scale plastic artefacts, leaving the seas full of microscopic plastic particles that will eventually rain down on the ocean floor, creating a layer that could persist for geological timescales.

The big question is how long any of these traces of our civilization will last. In our study, we found that each had the possibility of making it into future sediments. Ironically, however, the most promising marker of humanity’s presence as an advanced civilization is a by-product of one activity that may threaten it most.

When we burn fossil fuels, we’re releasing carbon back into the atmosphere that was once part of living tissues. This ancient carbon is depleted in one of that element’s three naturally occurring varieties or isotopes. The more fossil fuels we burn, the more the balance of these carbon isotopes shifts. Atmospheric scientists call this shift the Suess effect and the change in isotopic ratios of carbon due to fossil-fuel use is easy to see over the past century. Increases in temperature also leave isotopic signals. These shifts should be apparent to any future scientist who chemically analyzes exposed layers of rock from our era. Along with these spikes, this Anthropocene layer might also hold brief peaks in nitrogen, plastic nanoparticles, and even synthetic steroids. So if these are traces our civilization is bound to leave for the future, might the same “signals” exist right now in rocks just waiting to tell us of civilizations long gone?

Fifty-six million years ago, Earth passed through the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). During the PETM, the planet’s average temperature climbed as high as 15 degrees Fahrenheit above what we experience today. It was a world almost without ice, as typical summer temperatures at the poles reached close to a balmy 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Looking at the isotopic record from the PETM, scientists see both carbon and oxygen isotope ratios spiking in exactly the way we expect to see in the Anthropocene record. There are also other events like the PETM in Earth’s history that show traces like our hypothetical Anthropocene signal. These include an event a few million years after the PETM dubbed the Eocene Layers of Mysterious Origin, and massive events in the Cretaceous that left the ocean without oxygen for many millennia (or even longer).

Are these events indications of previous nonhuman industrial civilizations? Almost certainly not. While there is evidence that the PETM may have been driven by a massive release of buried fossil carbon into the air, it’s the timescale of these changes that matter. The PETM’s isotope spikes rise and fall over a few hundred thousand years. But what makes the Anthropocene so remarkable in terms of Earth’s history is the speed at which we’re dumping fossil carbon into the atmosphere. There have been geological periods where Earth’s CO2 has been as high or higher than it is today, but never before in the planet’s multibillion-year history has so much buried carbon been dumped back into the atmosphere so quickly. So the isotopic spikes we do see in the geologic record may not be spiky enough to fit the Silurian hypothesis’s bill.

But there is a conundrum here. If an earlier species’ industrial activity is short-lived, we might not be able to easily see it. The PETM’s spikes mostly show us Earth’s timescales for responding to whatever caused it, not necessarily the timescale of the cause. So it might take both dedicated and novel detection methods to find evidence of a truly short-lived event in ancient sediments. In other words, if you’re not explicitly looking for it, you might not see it. That recognition was, perhaps, the most concrete conclusion of our study.

It’s not often that you write a paper proposing a hypothesis that you don’t support. Gavin and I don’t believe the Earth once hosted a 50-million-year-old Paleocene civilization. But by asking if we could “see” truly ancient industrial civilizations, we were forced to ask about the generic kinds of impacts any civilization might have on a planet. That’s exactly what the astrobiological perspective on climate change is all about. Civilization building means harvesting energy from the planet to do work (i.e., the work of civilization building). Once the civilization reaches truly planetary scales, there has to be some feedback on the coupled planetary systems that gave it life (air, water, rock). This will be particularly true for young civilizations like ours still climbing up the ladder of technological capacity. There is, in other words, no free lunch. While some energy sources will have a lower impact—say solar versus fossil fuels—you can’t power a global civilization without some degree of impact on the planet.

Once you realize, through climate change, the need to find lower-impact energy sources, the less impact you will leave. So the more sustainable your civilization becomes, the smaller the signal you’ll leave for future generations.

In addition, our work also opened up the speculative possibility that some planets might have fossil-fuel-driven cycles of civilization building and collapse. If a civilization uses fossil fuels, the climate change they trigger can lead to a large decrease in ocean oxygen levels. These low oxygen levels (called ocean anoxia) help trigger the conditions needed for making fossil fuels like oil and coal in the first place. In this way, a civilization and its demise might sow the seed for new civilizations in the future.

By asking about civilizations lost in deep time, we’re also asking about the possibility for universal rules guiding the evolution of all biospheres in all their creative potential, including the emergence of civilizations. Even without pickup-driving Paleocenians, we’re only now learning to see how rich that potential might be.

ASIA, ISRAEL, WORLD

Possible evidence for biblical earthquake found in City of David

Possible evidence for biblical earthquake found in City of David

Archaeologists have found evidence of an earthquake that hit the City of David in Jerusalem about 2,800 years ago and that could be a major event described in the Hebrew Bible.

Possible evidence for biblical earthquake found in City of David
The 2,800-year-old earthquake was so severe that it was mentioned in the bible, archaeologists say.

During their excavations, the archaeological team, from the Israel Antiquities Authority, discovered a layer of destruction dating to that time in the City of David National Park. Inside the layer was “a row of shattered vessels, including bowls, lamps, cooking utensils, storage and storage jars, which were smashed as [a] building’s walls collapsed,” the archaeological team said in a statement from the IAA.

Archaeologists also found no signs of a fire, and they are doubtful that the city was attacked by an invading force. 

Other sites in the region had similar destruction around 2,800 years ago, the researchers found, adding that the signs of destruction from several sites in the southern Levant could be evidence for a biblical earthquake.

The books of Amos and Zechariah both mention an earthquake that happened around this time when Jerusalem was the capital of the kingdom of Judah and was ruled by a king called Uzziah. “You will flee as you fled from the earthquake in the days of Uzziah king of Judah,” Zechariah 14:5 reads. 

Shown here, part of the area in Jerusalem that the team is excavating. Their finds reveal that the area was hit by an earthquake 2,800 years ago.

“It seems likely that although Jerusalem was not the epicentre [of the earthquake], it was significantly affected,” Joe Uziel, an archaeologist with the Israel Antiquities Authority who is one of the team leaders, told Live Science.

The observation that Jerusalem was likely not the epicentre of the earthquake is based on the damage found in Jerusalem and other sites in the region. 

Excavations reveal that after the destruction, people rebuilt the destroyed buildings and walls, Uziel said. The fact that the earthquake is mentioned in the bible is “a sign that [the earthquake] was likely quite traumatic,” Uziel said.

Did it really happen?

Scholars not involved with the team’s research were cautiously supportive of the team’s conclusions. “The interpretation of the archaeologists sounds possible,” said Israel Finkelstein, a professor emeritus of archaeology at Tel Aviv University in Israel.

The team’s study, including the interpretation of the pottery, has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal, Finkelstein cautioned; the team used that pottery to help date the earthquake.

Finkelstein also said that the area in Jerusalem that was excavated needs to be studied by seismologists to firm up the case for a past earthquake. 

Finkelstein noted that evidence for a large eighth-century B.C. earthquake can also be found at other sites in the region, including at Megiddo — a spot investigated by Finkelstein.

About 15 years ago, a team of seismologists and archaeologists documented evidence for the earthquake at Megiddo, which “included tilted and fractured walls,” said Finkelstein. 

“I haven’t seen the excavations, but it was quite expected that some damage triggered by the mid-eighth century [B.C.] earthquake would be found in Jerusalem,” said Shmuel Marco, a professor of geophysics at Tel Aviv University who took part in the Megiddo earthquake study 15 years ago.

“We found it in the ruins of the same age at Megiddo, and others reported it in other excavations and in the deep Dead Sea drilling.” which suggests that the earthquake impacted a wide area.

The Jerusalem team’s “interpretation seems reasonable to me,” said Jason Radine, who is chair of the Department of Global Religions at Moravian University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

He noted that the Hebrew Bible mentions that Jerusalem was attacked around the 790s or 780s B.C. by Israel (which at the time was a separate kingdom from Judah). However, “such an attack might leave a burn layer, which the excavators point out is not present in their find,” suggesting that an earthquake is the more likely cause of the destruction, Radine said. 

Thomas Levy, who is a distinguished professor of Archaeology at the University of California, San Diego, also thought the damage was likely caused by an earthquake and that a strong case can be made that this earthquake is the same one mentioned in the bible.

“When the biblical data is coupled with the archaeological and paleo-seismic data from the southern Levant, a strong correlation is clearly seen between the Book of Amos, a prophet in the Hebrew Bible, and the archaeological record,” Levy told Live Science. 

The team’s research will be presented in September at the “City of David Research” conference. 

AFRICA, EGYPT, WORLD

2,200 Year Old Alexander the Great Statue Discovered in Alexandria

2,200 Year Old Alexander the Great Statue Discovered in Alexandria

The Ministry of Antiquities in Cairo has discovered a statue of Alexander the Great within an ancient “residential and commercial zone” in Alexandria that they believe was a trade centre in the region during the Ptolemaic period.

These pots were also found at the ancient Alexandria settlement and indicate that it was a major regional trade centre during the Ptolemaic period (305-30 BC).

The archaeologists made their discovery after 9 months of excavations.

The team discovered moulds for statues of Alexander the Great at the site as well as an alabaster bust of the iconic ancient leader. Also amongst these items were materials for creating amulets for warriors.

The new Alexander the Great statue, made of alabaster, was unearthed at a large dig in Alexandria, Egypt.

As they explored this area of Alexandria, known as the al-Shatby neighbourhood, “the mission found a large network of tunnel tanks painted in pink for storing rain, flood and groundwater to be used during the draught time” said Mostafa Waziri, the Secretary-General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities of Egypt to the Xinhua news agency.

Waziri further explained the layout of the town: “it was composed of the main street and several branch roads that are all connected with a sanitation network.”

He believes that the area was active from the 2nd century B.C. to the 4th century A.D. Waziri also noted that the team found an array of pottery pots, coins, plates, fishing tools, and rest houses for travellers.

A wealth of pottery artefacts has been unearthed at the site.

The ruins of the area’s buildings combined with the artefacts found there have led the team to believe that the town had a lively market that sold pots and had workshops for the construction of statues, amulets, and other items.

Amulets were unearthed at the site.

The fascinating Greek history behind the Egyptian city of Alexandria

The story of Hellenism in Alexandria, Egypt’s second-largest city, goes back more than two millennia and is marked by Alexander the Great’s placement of the first stone as part of the city’s first street in 331 BC.

Alexander III, the “Basileus of Macedon”, the “Hegemon of the Hellenic League”, the “Shahanshah” of Persia, the “Pharaoh” of Egypt and the “Lord of Asia” — better known as Alexander the Great — was one of the most significant figures in human history.

Born in Pella, in modern-day Central Macedonia, northern Greece, in 356 B.C., he was the son of Philip II, the King of Macedon and his wife, Olympias.

But Alexander was no royal place-holder. He became renowned at a very early age both for his military and political capabilities.

Hellenistic Alexandria was best known for the Lighthouse of Alexandria (the Pharos), one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World; its Great Library (the largest in the ancient world); and its Necropolis, which was one of the Seven Wonders of the Middle Ages.

Alexandria was at one time the second-most powerful city of the ancient Mediterranean region, after Rome.

In modern times, Greeks began to settle in Alexandria again in the 18th and 19th centuries.

A new wave of immigration flooded Alexandria shortly after the Greek revolution of 1821, marking the beginning of the so-called European era of the city.

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