Discovery at Dartmoor mine rewriting more than 1,000 year’s worth of history
A new discovery at a Dartmoor mine in England dates human activity there back potentially by more than 1,000 years. Initial examination of waste deposits at Kelly Mine, an iron ore mine near Lustleigh, reveals that iron-smelting occurred there far earlier than the contemporary mining activity for which the site is renowned.
Kelly Mine, which operated from the 18th century until 1951, produced a unique type of iron oxide that was utilized for a number of industrial applications.
A concentration of slag was discovered when volunteers were repairing one of the old mine workings, and it turned out to be leftovers from bloomery smelting, an ancient method used to make wrought iron from iron ore.
Dr. Lee Bray, an archaeologist at Dartmoor National Park, has been inspecting and recording the fragments.
He said: “The finds are very exciting because it puts the history of human activity at Kelly Mine back probably by over a thousand years, certainly much earlier than the 18th Century.
An exciting discovery has been made at Kelly Mine on Dartmoor
“The types and quantities of slag present suggest iron was being produced on a relatively small scale, probably just for local needs.
The material looks unlike the typical waste from Medieval or Roman iron production, and it is possible we are looking at evidence for prehistoric smelting on the site. It’s a valuable insight into a lesser-known part of Dartmoor’s history.”
“While its tin mining and industrial sites attract lots of attention, it’s fascinating to discover fresh information that shows a wider range of minerals have been exploited in the region.”
Kelly Mine is one of Dartmoor’s important industrial historical sites. The first reference to workings dates to around 1797 but the first official record of the mine is in 1877.
It ultimately shut down in 1951. For years, the equipment and location sat idle until 1984, when the landowner leased the property to a group of mining enthusiasts.
Mexico to bury archaeological find because of virus costs
The tunnel is part of a 2.5-mile-long network of dikes.
In a strange turn of events, researchers in Mexico have announced they plan to rebury an unusual archaeological monument found in the outskirts of Mexico City – covering up an important historical discovery until some unknown time in the future.
The discovery in question is a tunnel built centuries ago as part of the Albarradón de Ecatepec: a flood-control system of dikes and waterways constructed to protect the historical city of Tenochtitlan from rising waters.
Tenochtitlan, widely viewed as the capital of the Aztec Empire, featured numerous dam systems to prevent flooding from torrential rains, but Spanish conquistadors failed at first to appreciate the ingenuity of this indigenous infrastructure, destroying many of the pre-Hispanic constructions in the early years of Spanish colonization.
However, after numerous floods inundated the early colonial Mexico City, the Albarradón de Ecatepec and other flood-control systems like it were built or repaired in the early 1600s.
Centuries later, archaeologists with the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) discovered one such feature within the Albarradón de Ecatepec, finding in 2019 a tunnel that preserved a unique synthesis of the cultures that created it.
This small tunnel-gate measured just 8.4 meters (27.5 ft) long, representing only a tiny part of the colossal Albarradón de Ecatepec monument, which in total extended for 4 kilometres (2.5 miles), built by thousands of indigenous workers.
But while it was small, it was still an important (and unusual) discovery, with researchers finding several pre-Hispanic glyphs displayed in the structure.
In total, 11 symbols were discovered – including representations of a war shield, the head of a bird of prey, and raindrops, among others.
It’s thought the symbols may have been built into the tunnel by non-Hispanic residents from the towns of Ecatepec and Chiconautla, who helped to construct the Albarradón de Ecatepec.
A war shield and a bird of prey’s head are two of the Pre-Hispanic symbols discovered in the Mexican tunnel.
While the dike featured pre-Hispanic iconography, its overall architecture suggested the Spanish were in charge of the design.
“One objective of our project was to know the construction system of the road, which has allowed us to prove that it does not have pre-Hispanic methods, but rather semicircular arches and andesite voussoirs, lime and sand mortars, and a floor on the upper part, with stone and ashlar master lines,” researchers explained in 2019.
“Everything is Roman and Spanish influence.”
The discovery was intended to be made into a public exhibit so that people could visit and inspect this unusual, centuries-old fusion of Aztec and Spanish cultural elements, but unfortunately, it’s not to be.
Researchers from INAH have now announced that due to a lack of funds to properly construct the exhibit and protect the remarkable structure, the recently discovered tunnel section will now have to be covered up once more – with the tunnel to be reburied so that it doesn’t become damaged, vandalized, or looted from.
According to the researchers, the decision is largely due to the ongoing economic impacts of the COVID-19 crisis in Mexico, which has so far claimed over 237,000 lives.
The researchers say they will construct special masonry to protect the glyphs, and then recover the painstakingly excavated site with earth.
It’s not every day archaeologists have to ‘undiscover’ the cultural treasures they reveal in the ground. Here’s hoping it won’t be too long before this section of the Albarradón de Ecatepec gets to see the light of day once more.
Inscription With Image of Babylonian King Found in Saudi Arabia
A 2,550-year-old inscription, written in the name of Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon, has been discovered carved on basalt stone in northern Saudi Arabia, the Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage recently announced.
An engraving at the top of the inscription shows King Nabonidus holding a scepter alongside four other images that include a snake, a flower and a depiction of the moon, the commission said in a statement, noting that these symbols likely have a religious meaning.
These engravings are followed beneath by about 26 lines of cuneiform text that experts with the commission are currently deciphering. This is the longest cuneiform inscription ever found in Saudi Arabia, the commission said in the statement.
The top of the inscription from the last king of Babylon shows engravings showing Nabonidus and four symbols.
The inscription was found in Al Hait in the Hail Region of northern Saudi Arabia. Known as Fadak in ancient times, Al Hait holds numerous ancient sites, including the remains of fortresses, rock art and water installations, the commission said. “[It] has great historical significance from the first millennium [B.C.] until the early Islamic era.”
King Nabonidus
It remains to be seen what new information this inscription will provide on King Nabonidus (reign 555–539 B.C.).
The Babylonian Empire stretched from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea, and at the start of Nabonidus’ reign, he conquered part of what is now Saudi Arabia and ultimately chose to live at Tayma, a city in what is now Saudi Arabia, until around 543 B.C.
Why Nabonidus chose to live in what is now Saudi Arabia for an extended period of time is a matter of debate among historians, with some experts saying that conflicts between Nabonidus and Babylon’s priests and officials are a likely reason.
At the end of Nabonidus’ reign, the Babylonian Empire came under attack by the Persian Empire, which was led by King Cyrus the Great;
Babylon itself was captured by the Persians in 539 B.C. and the Babylonian empire collapsed. The fate of Nabonidus after the collapse is unclear.
Ancient Roman Road Discovered at the Bottom of Venice Lagoon
In the Venice lagoon, an ancient and now submerged road was unearthed in a location that would have been accessible by land 2,000 years ago during the Roman era.
Fantina Madricardo at the Marine Science Institute in Venice and her colleagues made the discovery after mapping the floor of an area of the lagoon called the Treporti channel.
“We believe it was part of the network of Roman roads in the northeast of the Venice area,” says Madricardo.
The remains of a Roman road have been found underneath Venice, according to a new Italian study.
In the 1980s, the archaeologist Ernesto Canal proposed that there are ancient human-made structures submerged in the Venice lagoon.
This suggestion prompted decades of debate, but couldn’t be confirmed until now as the previously available technology was insufficiently advanced to explore such a challenging environment.
“The area is very difficult to investigate by divers because there are strong currents and the water in the Venice lagoon is very turbid,” says Madricardo.
The team used a multibeam echosounder mounted on a boat to form a picture of what lies underwater. This device sends out acoustic waves that bounce off the lagoon floor, allowing the team to reconstruct images of whatever structures are down there.
Reconstruction of the Roman road in the Treporti channel in the Venice lagoon
The researchers found 12 structures up to 2.7 metres tall and 52.7 metres long that extended along 1140 metres in a southwest to the north-eastern direction in the configuration of a road.
The presence and layout of these structures suggest that there may have been a settlement in the area.
It was then submerged about 2000 years ago – partly due to human activity that diverted the flow of rivers and starved the area of the sediment that was needed to keep it above water.
“Presumably, the road is giving access to this rich environment.
The margins of the land and the water are full of resources that people might have been exploiting,” says James Gerrard at Newcastle University in the UK. “It’s not normal to find, if you like, ‘drowned’ landscapes or be able to study them in this kind of detail.”
Humans Lived in North America 130,000 Years Ago, Study Claims
Three years ago, a team of archaeologists in the United States proposed an extraordinary idea: the first human settlers in the Americas arrived at least 100,000 years earlier than we thought.
The evidence came from a collection of mastodon bones and ancient stones dating back to around 130,000 years ago, which appeared to have been hammered and scraped by early humans.
The remains were found in the suburbs of San Diego in the 1990s, and the researchers think that the nearby stones may have been used as hammers and anvils to work on the bones. But outside of that, no other traces of human activity were found.
Two mastodon femur balls, one face up and one face down, are among the remains found at the Cerutti site in San Diego.
Today, the Cerutti Mastodon (CM) site remains one of the most controversial archaeological digs in the world. For years, scientists have been going back and forth over the results and whether or not they indicate the presence of humans in North America 130,000 years ago, but the original authors are not giving up.
The team has now published a follow-up paper that claims to have found traces of ancient mastodon bones on the upward-facing sides of two cobblestones collected from the site. According to the paper, mastodon bones were indeed placed on top of these rocky ‘anvils’ and struck with some sort of hammer – presumably by humans. If the bones were merely in passive contact with the rocks, you would expect to see their influence everywhere they were touching, not just the top part.
A boulder discovered at the Cerutti Mastodon site was thought to have been used by early humans as a hammerstone.
There also doesn’t appear to be any modern contamination, the authors add. The ancient artefacts were found near a road work site, so some critics think the bones were broken and scraped by the activity of trucks and other similar disturbances.
While this is very much possible, researchers say it doesn’t explain the residue on the stones. When collecting bones and stones from the site, the team in San Diego claims to have taken great care. They say there was no opportunity for bone material to disintegrate or “float” into the air and onto a stone at the original site or in the lab afterwards.
Even in the soil, bone residues from these mastodons were discovered at much lower concentrations than what was measured on some parts of the cobblestones.
“Fossil bone residues documented with the Raman microscope were only found in residue extractions sampled from the potentially used surfaces and are therefore considered to be more likely use-related,” the authors write.
“As our investigations have indicated that the bone residues are less likely to originate from sediments or contact with bones in the bone bed as discussed above, the most parsimonious explanation is that the residues (and wear) derive from deliberate contact with bone. We consider this scenario to be the most likely.”
Still, there is one key missing ingredient: collagen. This is an important part of mammal bones, and if stones were used to break apart the mastodon skeleton, you’d expect to find some traces of collagen.
It’s very possible that the collagen in this case had already disintegrated from the passing of time. Or it could be that measurements simply didn’t pick up on its presence. But archaeologist Gary Haynes, who was not involved in the study, told Science News he thinks the more likely scenario is that road work vehicles buried these stones next to the mastodon bones, long after their collagen had disappeared.
He’s not the only one who’s sceptical. Today, most evidence suggests human settlers arrived in the Americas roughly 14,000 to 20,000 years ago. A date of 130,000 years is quite the claim, and it requires extraordinary evidence, which some scientists argue is lacking. A rebuttal to the original 2017 paper argued that other processes outside of human hammering produced bone damage, especially from heavy construction equipment.
Even before humans came along there was probably disturbance in the area. Over time, as fluvial deposits slowly covered the remains, these mastodon bones would have remained somewhat flexible, and this means they could have been trampled, displaced, fractured, abraded and reoriented by other mammals that used the ancient muddy watercourse.
A schematic of the Cerruit mastodon, showing recovered bones and teeth. Dan Fisher & Adam Rountrey, University of Michigan.
“The extraordinary claim by Holen et al. of prehistoric hominin involvement at the CM site should not be contingent on evidence that is open to multiple, contrasting interpretations,” the authors of the rebuttal argue.
“Until unambiguous evidence of hominin activities can be presented, such as formal stone tools or an abundance of percussion pits, caution requires us to set aside the claims of Holen et al. of prehistoric hominin activities at the CM site.”
Shortly afterwards, the original authors wrote a rebuttal to the rebuttal. In it, they argued that there is no evidence of fluvial deposits and that the bones were broken before they were buried and not trampled afterwards.
“Healthy scepticism is the foundation of good science, and the publication of this discovery is the beginning of a scientific debate, which I welcome and encourage,” Tom Deméré, a palaeontologist at the San Diego Natural History Museum and one of the original authors, argued a few years ago.
“What I didn’t expect was the reluctance of scientists to engage in a two-way conversation to objectively evaluate our hypothesis.”
Archaeologist David Meltzer from Southern Methodist University is sceptical but open to the debate. He says he could be convinced that humans arrived in the Americas 100,000 years earlier than we thought, but that he hasn’t seen enough evidence yet.
“Given everything we know, it makes no sense,” he told Nature in 2018. “You’re not going to flip people’s opinion 180 degrees unless you’ve got absolutely unimpeachable evidence, and this ain’t it.”
Perhaps this new bout of evidence will help clear up some of that doubt. More likely than not, however, it will merely trigger a series of new rebuttals.
Traces of ancient rainforest in Antarctica point to a warmer prehistoric world
According to fossil roots, pollen, and spores recently found in West Antarctica, a thriving temperate rainforest existed around 90 million years ago.
The world was a different place back then. During the middle of the Cretaceous period (145 million to 65 million years ago), dinosaurs roamed Earth and sea levels were 558 feet (170 meters) higher than they are today. Sea-surface temperatures in the tropics were as hot as 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 degrees Celsius).
This scorching climate allowed a rainforest — similar to those seen in New Zealand today — to take root in Antarctica, the researchers said.
The rainforest’s remains were discovered under the ice in a sediment core that a team of international researchers collected from a seabed near Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica in 2017.
As soon as the team saw the core, they knew they had something unusual. The layer that had formed about 90 million years ago was a different colour. “It clearly differed from the layers above it,” study lead researcher Johann Klages, a geologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany, said in a statement.
An operator on the “Polarstern” ship drives the MeBo seabed drilling system using remote technology.
Back at the lab, the team put the core into a CT (computed tomography) scanner. The resulting digital image showed a dense network of roots throughout the entire soil layer. The dirt also revealed ancient pollen, spores and the remnants of flowering plants from the Cretaceous period.
Professor Tina van de Flierdt and Dr Johann Klages work on the sample of ancient soil.
By analyzing the pollen and spores, study co-researcher Ulrich Salzmann, a paleoecologist at Northumbria University in England, was able to reconstruct West Antarctica’s 90 million-year-old vegetation and climate.
“The numerous plant remains indicate that the coast of West Antarctica was, back then, a dense temperate, swampy forest, similar to the forests found in New Zealand today,” Salzmann said in the statement.
The sediment core revealed that during the mid-Cretaceous, West Antarctica had a mild climate, with an annual mean air temperature of about 54 F (12 C), similar to that of Seattle. Summer temperatures were warmer, with an average of 66 F (19 C). In rivers and swamps, the water would have reached up to 68 F (20 C).
In addition, the rainfall back then was comparable to the rainfall of Wales, England, today, the researchers found.
These temperatures are impressively warm, given that Antarctica had a four-month polar night, meaning that a third of every year had no life-giving sunlight.
However, the world was warmer back then, in part, because the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere was high — even higher than previously thought, according to the analysis of the sediment core, the researchers said.
“Before our study, the general assumption was that the global carbon dioxide concentration in the Cretaceous was roughly 1,000 ppm [parts per million],” study co-researcher Gerrit Lohmann, a climate modeler at Alfred Wegener Institute, said in the statement. “But in our model-based experiments, it took concentration levels of 1,120 to 1,680 ppm to reach the average temperatures back then in the Antarctic.”
These findings show how potent greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide can cause temperatures to skyrocket, so much so that today’s freezing West Antarctica once hosted a rainforest. Moreover, it shows how important the cooling effects of today’s ice sheets are, the researchers said.
The context of the rope-making tool at the time of discovery in August 2015 .
Rope and twine are critical components in the technology of mobile hunters and gatherers. In exceptional cases impressions of string have been found in fired clay and on rare occasions string was depicted in the contexts of Ice Age art, but on the whole, almost nothing is known about string, rope and textiles form the Paleolithic.
A key discovery by Conard’s team in Hohle Fels Cave in southwestern Germany and experimental research and testing by Dr. Veerle Rots and her team form the University of Liège is rewriting the history of rope.
The find is a carefully carved and beautifully preserved piece of mammoth ivory 20.4 cm in length with four holes between 7 and 9 mm in diameter. Each of the holes is lined with deep, and precisely cut spiral incisions.
The new find demonstrates that these elaborate carvings are technological features of rope-making equipment rather than just decoration.
Close up of the rope making tool from mammoth ivory from Hohle Fels Cave in southwestern Germany, ca. 40,000 years old .
Similar finds in the past have usually been interpreted as shaft-straighteners, decorated artworks or even musical instruments.
Thanks to the exceptional preservation of the find and rigorous testing by the team in Liège, the researchers have demonstrated that the tool was used for making rope out of plant fibers available near Hohle Fels.
“This tool answers the question of how rope was made in the Paleolithic”, says Veerle Rots, “a question that has puzzled scientists for decades.”
Excavators found the rope-making tool in archaeological horizon Va near the base of the Aurignacian deposits of the site. Like the famous female figurines and the flutes recovered from the Hohle Fels, the rope-making tool dates to about 40,000 years ago, the time when modern humans arrived in Europe.
The discovery underlines the importance of fiber technology and the importance of rope and string for mobile hunters and gatherers trying to cope with challenges of life in the Ice Age.
Prof. Conard’s team has excavated at Hohle Fels over each of the last 20 years, and it is this long-term commitment that has over and over again paid off, to make Hohle Fels one of the best known Paleolithic sites worldwide.
Hohle Fels and neighboring sites from the Ach and Lone Valleys have been nominated for UNESCO World Cultural Heritage status.
Rope making tool from mammoth ivory from Hohle Fels Cave in southwestern Germany, ca. 40,000 years old.
The excavations at Hohle Fels near Schelklingen in the Ach Valley are funded by the HeidelbergCement AG, the Ministry of Science of Baden-Württemberg and the Heidelberger Academie of Sciences.
Artifact Found in Germany Hints at Neanderthal Hunting Practices
Neanderthals from the Swabian Jura hunted horses and reindeer with hafted leaf-shaped stone points 65,000 years ago. The evolution of hunting is recorded by a recently found leaf tip from the UNESCO World Heritage site of Hohle Fels Cave.
Hohle Fels. Leaf point
A team under the direction of Professor Nicholas Conard for the University of Tübingen and the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment in southern Germany recovered the artefact underlying a layer dating to 65,000 years ago, which represents a minimum age for the find.
Microscopic studies document that this carefully made projectile point was mounted on a wooden shaft and used as a thrusting spear to kill a large game. Results of the excavations and analysis of the leaf point appear in two papers in this week’s publication of Archäologische Ausgrabungen in Baden-Württemberg and Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für Urgeschichte.
“The new discovery represents the first time a leaf point has been recovered from a modern excavation, allowing researchers to study the fresh find with state-of-the-art methods,” says Conard. The last time researchers in the region recovered such artefacts was in 1936.
The chert artefact is 7.6 cm long, 4.1 cm wide, 0.9 cm thick and weighs 28 grams. Conard adds that “our results document how the tool was made, used and why it was discarded.” Thanks to a series of four ESR-dates the find is securely dated to over 65,000 years ago.
Until now finds of leaf points were interpreted as belonging to the period between 45,000 and 55,000 years ago, and belonging to the last cultural phase of the Neanderthals in Central Europe. Conard reports “The new results demonstrate that our assumptions about the dating of the cultural groups of the late Neanderthals were wrong and need revision.”
Dr. Veerle Rots from the University of Liège in Belgium conducted detailed microscopic analyses of the leaf point. Damage to the tip indicates that the artefact was used as a hafted spear point and that the spear was likely thrust into prey rather than being thrown.
Rots’ work documents how Neanderthals used plant-based glue and bindings made from plant fibres, sinew or leather to secure the leaf point to the spear. Neanderthals clearly used the spear for hunting. While they re-sharpened the tool it broke, leading to its discard.
Rots remarks “Neanderthals were expert stone knappers and knew exactly how to make and use complex technologies combining multiple parts and materials to produce and maintain deadly weapons.” Earlier fossil humans during the time of Homo heidelbergensis used sharpened wooden spears for hunting, but these spears lacked mounted stone points like those used by Neanderthals.
Hohle Fels. The chert artefact in finding a position.
The leaf point from Hohle Fels will be on display at the “Find of the Year” at the Museum of Prehistory in Blaubeuren from July 22 until January 2022.
“Hohle Fels is a remarkable site where after 25 years of excavation by the current team, spectacular discoveries from the period of the Neanderthals and early modern humans are still being made,” says Dr. Stefanie Kölbl, the director of the Museum of Prehistory.
The Museum of Prehistory in Blaubeuren is the central research museum for topics related to the UNESCO World Heritage sites of the Swabian Caves and for Ice Age Art.
It contains many of the earliest examples of figurative art including the Venus of Hohle Fels and the earliest musical instruments known worldwide.
