Tennessee’s Tattooing Tools Dated to More Than 5,500 Years Ago
According to a Science News report, a new study of turkey bones unearthed in 1985 in a burial pit at the Fernvale site in central Tennessee suggests that they may have been used by Native Americans to make tattoos between 5,520 and 3,620 years ago.
Two previously unearthed turkey leg bones with sharpened tips (top) are the oldest known tattooing tools. Two other turkey bones from the same site (bottom) may also have been used for tattooing but lack tips for analysis.
These pigment-stained bones are the world’s oldest known tattooing tools, say archaeologist Aaron Deter-Wolf of the Tennessee Division of Archaeology in Nashville and his colleagues.
Ötzi the Iceman, who lived around 5,250 years ago in Europe, displays the oldest known tattoos (SN: 1/13/16), but researchers haven’t found any of the tools used to make the Iceman’s tattoos.
Excavations in 1985 revealed these turkey bones and other elements of a probable tattoo kit in a man’s burial pit at Tennessee’s Fernvale site, the researchers report in the June Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.
Damage on and near the tips of the two turkey leg bones resembles distinctive wear previously observed on experimental tattooing tools made from deer bones, Deter-Wolf’s team says.
In that research, tattooed lines in fresh slabs of pigskin were produced by a series of punctures with tools that had tips coated in homemade ink.
Experimental tattooing left ink remnants several millimetres from tools’ tips, a pattern also seen with red and black pigment residues on the Fernvale tools.
Two turkey wing bones found in the same Fernvale grave display microscopic wear and pigment residues that likely resulted from applying pigment during tattooing, the scientists say.
Pigment-stained seashells in the grave may have held solutions into which tattooers dipped those tools.
Remains of ‘lost medieval village’ found next to the Scottish motorway
The Scotsman reports that traces of four buildings dating from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries were uncovered during roadwork in southern Scotland at Netherton Cross near Bothwell, North Lanarkshire, next to the hard shoulder of the M74.
An artist’s reconstruction of how the settlement at Netherton Cross would have looked. It disappeared in the 18th Century as the Duke of Hamilton embarked on turning part of his estate into a vast parkland.
Pottery – including sherds of cooking pots and bowls, a clay tobacco pipe, gaming pieces and evidence of metalworking were found on the site in a series of “remarkable” discoveries.
Under one building, an intriguing collection of artefacts was found in the foundations. Among the items were a spindle whorl for weaving, a whetstone for sharpening tools, two 17th Century coins – and an iron dagger.
Archaeologists at the site of the “remarkable” discovery of a lost village right next to the hard shoulder of the M74
It is thought the dagger, which could date from the Iron Age, may have been left as part of a ritual to protect the building and its inhabitants from ‘magical’ harm.
Dr Natasha Ferguson, of GUARD Archaeology, one of the co-authors of the report, said: “The special or talismanic qualities of this dagger as a protective object may have enhanced the ritual act to protect the household from worldly and magical harm.
“The deposition of these objects under the foundation level of one of the houses may have been intended to affirm this space as a place of safety for them and generations to come.”
Map showing the excavation site at Netherton Cross.
The practice of leaving special objects in medieval and post-medieval buildings is well documented and it was believed such a ritual would safeguard the building and its inhabitants.
The report found a “deliberate selection” of objects had been placed at the property.
It is believed the spindle whorl, gaming piece and the whetstone may have represented a personal connection to an individual, activity, or place that would make them special to the occupants.
The report added: “The dagger’s potential antiquity as a prehistoric object perhaps lent it a quality of otherness. Reuse of prehistoric objects as depositions in medieval settings has been recorded in excavations of medieval churches in England, and flint arrowheads were traditionally identified as ‘elf-bolts’ and long recognised for their malevolent magical properties.”
Dr Gemma Cruickshanks, of National Museums Scotland, said it appeared the dagger was covered in a sheath at the time it was buried.
She added: “It was probably intact and still useable at that time. The form of this dagger is indistinguishable from Iron Age examples, indicating this simple dagger form had a very long history.”
Evidence of iron smelting, bloom refining and probable blacksmithing was also recovered, along with a selection of nails.
The settlement was close to the 10th Century Netherton Cross, which now stands in Hamilton Old Parish Church. Netherton Cross is around 1km away from Bothwell Bridge, the scene of the 1679 battle which ended the Covenanter rebellion in Scotland.
“It is very possible the community was affected by the conflict, either suffering damage to property or as a witness to the route of the Covenanter forces,” the report said.
Netherton vanished in the 18th Century given improvements to the estate by the Duke of Hamilton, with a well-ordered and symmetrical parkland built in its place.
The motorway then subsumed most of the village with the four stone structures the last traces of the settlement.
Oldest Ever Fly With Stomach Full Of Food Found After 47 Million Years
When scientists investigated a 47-million-year-old fossilized fly found at the Messel Pit fossil site in Germany, they noticed it looked a bit chonky. So they took a closer look at its “bulging abdomen” and discovered it was stuffed with pollen from different plants.
This ancient fossilized fly had a belly full of pollen.
“The rich pollen content we discovered in the fly’s stomach suggests that flies were already feeding and transporting pollen 47 million years ago and shows it played an important role in the pollen dispersal of several plant taxa,” said paleobotanist Fridgeir Grimsson in a University of Vienna statement Thursday.
Grimsson is a co-author of a paper on the fly published in the journal Current Biology on Wednesday. The researcher suggested that flies of the time period may have outshined bees as pollinators.
This series of images highlights the fossilized fly’s crop where the pollen was found. The fly on the far right shows this same part of the body in a modern-day fly.
The team was able to extract and study the fossil pollen grains and traced them mostly to water willow and virgin ivy plants. Electron microscope images helped to identify the origin of the pollen.
The plant types suggest the fly was feeding around an area of shallow water.
The Messel Pit in Germany is listed on the UNESCO list of world heritage sites as “the richest site in the world for understanding the living environment of the Eocene, between 57 million and 36 million years ago.”
The area was once home to an oil shale mine, but now it’s the subject of scientific study for the many well-preserved fossils of mammals and other animals.
Flies may be considered a modern-day nuisance, but this fossilized fly and its big appetite show they can also be useful emissaries from the deep past.
In June of 1934, two prospectors, Cecil Main and Frank Carr, were using explosives to mine for gold in the San Pedro Mountains of Wyoming. After the dust of one of their blasts cleared, Main and Carr discovered a small room in a cave.
There they found a tiny, mummified body with a deformed head, sitting in a flexed position. The mummy was about 6 inches long and weighed about a pound.
From 1934-1950 the Pedro Mountain Mummy, as it was nicknamed, was sold a few times, as it made the rounds at sideshows and displayed in a drug store window in a glass jar.
From Wikipedia, pictures and x-rays of the Pedro Mountain Mummy
Ivan Goodman, a Casper, Wyoming car salesman, purchased it and used it in car advertisements. The Shoshone, a tribe indigenous to Wyoming, have many legends about “little people.” Goodman believed these legends and displayed the mummy as a pygmy man who was 65 years old when he died.
Before the Pedro Mountain Mummy vanished around 1950, Goodman took the mummy to Dr Harry Shapiro, curator of biological anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where it was examined and x-rayed.
Photo from the Casper College Western History Center, via WyoHistory.org. Casper historian holding the mummy.
Shortly after Goodman took the Pedro Mountain Mummy to the Big Apple it disappeared, and Goodman soon passed away. There are differing stories about what happened to the Pedro Mountain Mummy. Some people say Goodman lost it to a con man others say he sold it.
In 1971, physical anthropologist Dr. George Gill was hired by the University of Wyoming when heard about the mummy from one of his students. He got the x-ray films from Shapiro and found that the mummy was not a hoax, a pygmy, or an old man.
These mummified remains belonged to an infant, maybe Native American, who suffered from anencephaly. Anencephaly is a neural tube defect and one of the most common skull abnormalities, characterized by the absence of a major part of the skull, brain, and scalp.
As the skull develops, the cranial vault may remain open. If anencephalic births are alive, the infant generally dies within a week. Studies show that these disorders may be hereditary, but taking folic acid greatly reduces the chances of the defect.
The Pedro Mountain Mummy was featured in an episode of the 90’s television show, Unsolved Mysteries, which included an interview with Dr. Gill, who asked for the public’s help in locating the lost remains.
After the show aired, a Wyoming rancher brought Gill another mummy he found in 1929 in the San Pedro Mountain area. This second mummy was about four inches long and had blonde hair.
Dr. Gill had this mummy X-rayed and tested. DNA and radiocarbon tests revealed that it was an infant who suffered from anencephaly and died in the eighteenth century.
These results, Gill said, “confirmed everything that I had ever thought” about the Pedro Mountain Mummy, including the diagnosis of anencephaly.
According to Atlas Obscura, Gill recently learned the mummy is somewhere safe but is saying little else.
In Northern California, a park ranger discovers a treasure trove of several million-year-old fossils.
In California, a treasure trove of fossils was discovered, including the fully preserved skeleton of a mastodon and the bones of a 400-pound monster salmon.’ Last summer, while walking through the Mokelumne River’s drainage in the Sierra mountains, forest ranger Greg Francek came across the fossil woods.
Since then, researchers have unearthed the remains of some 600 petrified trees and dozens of animal species, including an elephant ancestor and a giraffe-sized camel.
Experts said that the site — which dates back some around 10 million years ago to the Miocene epoch — is one of the most significant ever found in California.
For now, its exact location is being kept under wraps in order to protect the artefacts until they can be safely extracted from the ground for proper analysis.
The mastodon skull, meanwhile, is scheduled to go on display at the California State University, Chico’s Gateway Science Museum in the autumn of this year.
A treasure trove of fossils including the perfectly preserved skull of a mastodon (whose teeth are pictured) and the remains of a 400-pound ‘monster salmon’ has been found in California
Mr Francek, who works for the East Bay Municipal Utility District, which provides drinking water for the local area, found the site by accident after discovering something that looked like wood but was smooth like stone.
‘I happened upon a petrified tree,’ Mr Francek told LiveScience.
‘This tree was partially encased in the burial sediments, and because one end was exposed, I could actually see the tree rings inside.’
Looking around, the ranger went on to discover more fossilised tree trunks.
It wasn’t until a few weeks later, however, when he returned to conduct an organised survey of the petrified forest that he first spotted the animal fossils among the plants.
‘I located the first vertebrate fossils,’ Mr Francek told SFGate.
‘What I didn’t comprehend at the time was the fact that I was looking at the bones of great beasts that had roamed this landscape millions of years ago.’
At this point, Mr Francek decided that he would reach out to specialist researchers, among whom were California State University, Chico palaeontologist and stratigrapher Russell Shapiro.
‘Few other fossil discoveries like this exist in California,’ Professor Shapiro told SFGate.
‘The discovery is highly significant because of both the sheer number and diversity of specimens found.
‘The bones paint a clearer picture of life 10 million years ago when animals evolved from living in forests to grassland as the landscape changed.’
According to the team, the site was once the location of an oak forest that was ringed by an ocean. Wood from the trees would have been buried in the fine-grained sediments of a delta, floodplain or volcanic ash bed, turning to stone (as pictured) over millions of years
According to the researchers, the site was once the location of an oak forest that was ringed by an ocean. Wood from the trees would have been buried in the fine-grained sediments of a delta, floodplain or volcanic ash bed, turning to stone over the course of millions of years.
The bones of the prehistoric creatures that the team found among the now-petrified forest would have been carried to the region by floods and volcanic debris flows coming from further inland, they explained.
The mastodon tusks spanning almost six feet, were found upside down, each one crossing each other. To preserve the tusks, paleontologists coated them with a mixture of acetone and liquid plastic.
Professor Shapiro and his team reported being particularly surprised to have excavated the skull, teeth and tusks of an astonishingly well-preserved mastodon.
‘What you hope to find is a tip of a tusk,’ he told Chico State Today.
‘Not only do we have the tip, but we have the entire thing. And it’s just beautiful ivory. It’s mind-blowing.’
The mastodon skull (pictured here with the tusks on the left and the rest of the skull on the right), will go on display at the California State University, Chico’s Gateway Science Museum
Researchers Just Found The Deepest Shipwreck On Earth Four Miles Below The Pacific
A US-based team has thoroughly mapped and filmed the world’s deepest recorded shipwreck, a World War II US Navy destroyer. In the Philippine Sea, the USS Johnston is at a depth of 21,180 feet (about 6,500 meters). While its existence has long been established, this is the first time a crew has been able to map and film the entire wreckage.
The USS Johnson, pictured here in 1943.
Caladan Oceanic, a US-based private company that focuses on ocean expeditions, gets credit for reaching the shipwreck on March 31. Its research vessel, the DSV Limiting Factor, was able to survey the wreck, which was more than 100 feet deeper than previously believed, sitting in the darkness more than four miles below the surface of the Pacific.
Caladan Oceanic’s founder is Victor Vescovo, a former US Navy commander who has a long-established passion for visiting some of the world’s most hard-to-get-to places. He holds the record for being the first person in history to have been to the top of all the world’s continents, both poles, and the bottom of all its oceans.
With the survey of the USS Johnston, Vescovo reached another milestone — completing the deepest shipwreck dive in history. He was at the controls of the Limiting Factor for the whole process, which took place in two eight-hour segments over two days.
Sunk during the Battle off Samar.
The USS Johnston was sunk by the Japanese navy on October 25, 1944, during the Battle off Samar. It was one of four naval battles which comprised the Battle of Leyte Gulf, one of the largest battles in the history of naval warfare and engagement that sounded the death knell of the Japanese navy in World War II, according to the US Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC).
Sam Cox, director of the NHHC, said the new images of the wreck of the Johnston help the Navy put the spotlight on the heroism and history of its crew.
The ship was named after Lieutenant John V. Johnston, a Civil War hero.
The Johnston was captained by Cmdr. Ernest Evans, a Native American from Oklahoma. Along with two other US destroyers and four smaller destroyer escorts, Evans led the Johnston in attacking a far superior Japanese force of four battleships, six heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, and 11 destroyers, according to the NHHC account of the battle.
In an initial encounter, fire from the Johnston knocked out a Japanese cruiser, but the US destroyer was heavily damaged and its ammunition depleted. Evans himself was seriously wounded.
Undaunted, Evans regrouped his crew and the Johnston attacked the Japanese ships again, drawing their fire from a nearby US aircraft carrier.
After two-and-a-half hours of fighting, the Johnston was without power and surrounded by Japanese ships. Evans ordered the crew to abandon the ship, and it rolled over and sank.
Researchers believe they found the wreckage of the USS Johnston World War II era destroyer at a depth of 20,400 feet under the Philippine Sea.
Two of the three ships that followed the Johnston into the Japanese battle line were also sunk, said Carl Schuster, a former Navy captain and Hawaii Pacific University instructor.
“The discovery of the USS Johnston serves as yet another reminder of the heroism and sacrifice of that day in Leyte Gulf 77 years ago,” he said.
Of the Johnston’s crew of 327 men,186 died, including Evans. He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor, the first Native American in the US Navy to be awarded his country’s highest military honour, according to the NHHC.
For Vescovo, being able to reach the USS Johnston was a very personal mission.
“In some ways, we have come full circle,” he said in a statement. “The Johnston and our own ship were built in the same shipyard, and both served in the US Navy. As a US Navy officer, I’m proud to have helped bring clarity and closure to the Johnston, its crew, and the families of those who fell there.”
According to a statement released by Uppsala University, a team of researchers led by Mattias Jakobsson has sequenced the genome of a woman whose 35,000-year-old skull was discovered in southern Romania’s Peștera Muierri cave system in the 1950s.
For the first time, researchers have successfully sequenced the entire genome from the skull of Peştera Muierii 1, a woman who lived in today’s Romania 35,000 years ago.
Her high genetic diversity shows that the out of Africa migration was not the great bottleneck in human development but rather this occurred during and after the most recent Ice Age.
“She is a bit more like modern-day Europeans than the individuals in Europe 5,000 years earlier, but the difference is much less than we had thought.
We can see that she is not a direct ancestor of modern Europeans, but she is a predecessor of the hunter-gathers that lived in Europe until the end of the last Ice Age,” says Mattias Jakobsson, professor at the Department of Organismal Biology at Uppsala University and the head of the study.
Very few complete genomes older than 30,000 years have been sequenced. Now that the research team can read the entire genome from Peştera Muierii 1, they can see similarities with modern humans in Europe while also seeing that she is not a direct ancestor.
In previous studies, other researchers observed that the shape of her cranium has similarities with both modern humans and Neanderthals.
For this reason, they assumed that she had a greater fraction of Neanderthal ancestry than other contemporaries, making her stand out from the norm.
But the genetic analysis in the current study shows that she has the same low level of Neanderthal DNA as most other individuals living in her time. Compared with the remains of some individuals who lived 5,000 years earlier, such as Peştera Oase 1, she had only half as much Neanderthal ancestry.
The spread of modern humans out of Africa about 80,000 years ago is an important period in human history and is often described as a genetic bottleneck. Populations moved out of Africa and into Asia and Europe.
The effects of these migrations can be seen even today. Genetic diversity is lower in populations outside of Africa than in African. That Peştera Muierii 1 has high genetic diversity implies that the greatest loss of genetic diversity occurred during the last Ice Age (which ended about 10,000 years ago) instead of during the out of Africa migration.
“This is exciting since it teaches us more about the early population history of Europe. Peştera Muierii 1 has much more genetic diversity than expected for Europe at this time.
This shows that genetic variation outside of Africa was considerable until the last Ice Age and that the Ice Age caused the decrease in diversity in humans outside of Africa.”
The researchers were also able to follow the genetic variation in Europe over the last 35,000 years and see a clear decrease in variations during the last Ice Age.
The reduced genetic diversity has previously been linked to pathogenic variants in genomes being more common among populations outside of Africa, but this is in dispute.
“Access to advanced medical genomics has allowed us to study these ancient remains and even be able to look for genetic diseases. To our surprise, we did not find any differences during the last 35,000 years, even though some individuals alive during the Ice Age had low genetic diversity.
Now we have accessed everything possible from these remains. Peştera Muierii 1 is important from a cultural history perspective and will certainly remain interesting for researchers within other areas, but from a genetic perspective, all the data is now available.”
Fact Peştera Muierii
Peştera Muierii 1 is the name given to one of the three individuals whose remains were found in a cave of the same name. Peştera Muierii (roughly translates to women’s cave) is the name of a cave system in Baia de Fier in southern Romania. It is best known for the remains of cave bears and for the 1950s discovery of skulls and other skeletal parts from three females that lived about 35,000 to 40,000 years ago.
According to a statement released by Flinders University, a team of researchers from Flinders University and Wessex Archaeology surveyed Kalvestene, a Viking burial site on the Danish island of Hjarnø, and compared their findings with a map made in the seventeenth century by the antiquarian Ole Worm.
As part of the first survey since the National Museum of Denmark discovered and restored 10 tombs on a small island off the eastern coast almost a century ago.
The burial site is made up of monuments which, according to legend, commemorate a king named Hiarni who was crowned after writing a beautiful poem on the death of the old king and who was defeated in battle on the island.
The research, published today in The Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology (UICA), shows the design of the famous Kalvestene grave field is unusual when compared to other Danish sites of the same period which typically incorporate circle, oval or triangle stone settings in addition to the ship shaped settings. Instead, there are strong parallels with Southern Swedish sites, raising questions about links between the two regions.
Ole Worm’s 1650 drawings showed more than 20 ship settings at the location, and while data collected by the researchers suggests that there were probably never as many ship settings as that, it is possible that they have identified two new ship settings.
“Our survey identified two new raised areas that could in fact be ship settings that align with Worm’s drawings from 1650. One appears to be a typical ship setting and the second remains ambiguous but it’s impossible to know without excavation and further survey,” says lead author Dr Erin Sebo at Flinders University.
The paper, The Kalvestene: a re-evaluation of the ship settings on the Danish Island of Hjarnø, was co-authored by archaeologists from Flinders University in Australia including Dr Erin Sebo, Chelsea Wiseman, Dr John McCarthy, Dr Katarina Jerbić and Associate Professor Jonathan Benjamin with geophysicist Paul Baggaley from Wessex Archaeology.
“It seems surprising that such a small grave field would be famous and yet the existence of the site was well known in medieval Scandinavia. The island was famous probably because ships would have to sail past to reach a trading centre at Horsens and artefacts from a hoard excavated by Dr Mads Ravn and his team from the Vejle Museum in 2017 suggest the island was visited by foreign traders.”
The ship settings are today interpreted as a religious symbol of the Vikings connection to Norse mythology and the god Njord. His symbol, a ship or Skidbladnir controlled wind and weather so the Vikings paid tribute to him for good sailing conditions.
The researchers analysed medieval records, aerial photogrammetric and LiDAR data collected by the Moesgaard Museum to reveal why Hjarnø is unique in terms of its construction after being adapted to the specific conditions of the small island community.
“An archaeological survey was undertaken in 2018 to record the features of the ship settings and their position in the coastal landscape at Hjarnø,” says Associate Professor Jonathan Benjamin who is the Maritime Archaeology Program Coordinator at Flinders University’s College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.
“Each stone was measured and drawn alongside data we acquired through low altitude photography to provide the landscape, in conjunction with sonar surveying in waters near the Viking site, to check for culturally significant material but no indications of this were located during the survey.”
“While this study is unable to offer a conclusive understanding of the origins of the Kalvestene, it demonstrates the value of combining source criticism and analysis with archaeological data to contribute towards greater understanding about the site.”
