Spanish Farmer Finds 3,000 Years Old Lion Sculpture While Ploughing His Olive Grove
On a farm in Cañablanquilla, near San Sebastián de Los Ballesteros (Córdoba, Spain), farmer Gonzalo Crespo was working in the family olive grove when his tractor hit what he thought was a large stone.
When he stopped to inspect what it was he had hit, he was amazed to see a large statue of a lioness capturing her prey.
“I was doing a job and I noticed that the tractor had caught something harder than normal. I thought it was a stone, but when I got closer, I was surprised”, the farmer told Europa Press.
What was found is an archaeological piece of “great value” and around 2,400 years, according to a spokesperson for the Culture and Historical Heritage of the Junta de Andalucía, Cristina Casanueva.
The statue, carved in limestone, resembles a lioness or wolf attacking another animal.
It is thought to be from the year 4BC and remains in perfect condition.
The artefact was transferred to the Archaeological Museum of Cordoba where it will be examined by experts for Culture and Historical Heritage.
“It is necessary to evaluate its state, apparently well preserved, in order to establish future restoration procedures and an in-depth study that allows its enhancement”, said Casanueva.
Temple where Jesus reportedly healed bleeding woman found in Israel
The University of Haifa has excavated an ancient church, claimed by archaeologists to be the site of a biblical “miracle,” at Golan Heights in Israel.
Researchers have unearthed an ancient church — believed to be the site of a biblical “miracle” — in Israel.
Professor Adi Erlich, referring to a biblical story in which Jesus stops the bleeding of a woman who had been suffering for 12 years, as mentioned in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, said, “We suggest that the church uncovered by us may have been this church that was related to the miracle.”
The Christian miracle — in which where the woman touches the back of Jesus’ robes in a bid to get better — takes place while Jesus is on his way to the home of Jairus, whose own daughter was sick, in the Roman city of Caesarea Philippi, previously called Banias.
According to the biblical text, when the sick woman touched Jesus’ garments “immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.”
The region is now part of the Banias Nature Reserve in northern Israel where Erlich and her team of archaeologists have been piecing together ancient history.
The ancient church’s tile floor, adorned with a cross
The team of researchers had previously established that a nearby temple from the fourth century was possibly where Jesus revealed himself as the Messiah to his disciple Peter.
The site was built atop a Roman-era shrine to the Greek god Pan from the third century.
Another clue that the dig revealed: a small souvenir-like stone with crosses carved into it. Erlich theorized that the stone was left by religious pilgrims around the year 400 at the site — suggesting it was a memorial to the miracle and not an active temple at the time.
The possibly holy locale features springs, caves and a ritual “cultic pool and a water aqueduct,” according to the academic.
“Once conservation is over, everybody is welcome to come and visit,” said Erlich.
An altar — with a Greek inscription — excavated at Banias.
4,000-Year-Old Jet Necklace Found At Isle Of Man Round Mounds Dig
During an archaeological excavation on Man Isle, a 4,000-year-old necklace was discovered. The piece of jewellery, located in the west of the island, consists of 122 beads of 1cm and 5cm each which are “intricately” decorated.
Sand on the beads from the burial site will be removed as part of the conservation process
Centred in Whitby, North Yorkshire, it is the first of its kind to be found on Man Island. The necklace was crescent-shaped and made of several strings when completely assembled.
The Round Mounds of the Isle of Man project hopes to discover more about Bronze Age burial practices and the island’s connections with other parts of the British Isles.
The beads were found alongside skeletal remains
The excavation of the ancient burial sites has been running for four years. More than 40 experts and students from two UK universities worked on this year’s four-week dig near Kirk Michael.
The cremated remains of seven people have been found on the site to date but this was the first time an “inhumation”, or skeletal remains, has been uncovered.
Rachel Crellin, of the University of Leicester, is leading the project alongside Chris Fowler of Newcastle University. She said that although the necklace was “undeniably beautiful”, the “real value” of the find was the burial itself.
The grave would allow the team to “connect it up to this story about Britain and Ireland,” Dr Crellin added.
The “deliberate” placing of stones, thought to be a grinding stone and cutting block, next to the body could be of “particular significance” regarding “things like food, productivity and fertility,” Dr Fowler added.
The necklace was found in a grave about 6.5 feet (2m) below the top
Funding for the project was provided by Manx National Heritage (MNH) and the two universities.
MNH Director Edmund Southworth said it was “hoped” the “very fragile” necklace would be put on display, but that would be “some considerable time away”.
The piece will now be digitally reconstructed, while scientific analysis will be carried out on the human remains.
There are intricately carved patterns on the prehistoric beads
Two new 26ft (8m) trenches were excavated this year alongside one first opened up last year
Skull of two-million-year-old human ‘cousin’ unearthed in South Africa
In an archaeological excavation deep in a South African cave system led by Australian, a 2-million-year-old cranium from a big dented remote human cousin was discovered.
The finding is the oldest known and best-preserved case of Paranthropus robustus, a small-brained hominine called Paranthropus robustus, La Trobe University researchers say.
The almost complete male skull, found in the Drimolen cave system near Johannesburg in 2018, may also lead to a new understanding of human microevolution.
Paranthropus robustus walked the Earth at roughly the same time as our direct ancestor Homo erectus, palaeoanthropologist Angeline Leece said, referring to hominins, a small-brained member of the human family tree.
“But these two vastly different species — Homo erectus with their relatively large brains and small teeth, and Paranthropus robustus with their relatively large teeth and small brains — represent divergent evolutionary experiments,” she said.
“While we were the lineage that won out in the end, two million years ago the fossil record suggests that Paranthropus robustus was much more common than Homo erectus on the landscape.”
Until recently, scientists believed Paranthropus robustus existed in social structures similar to gorillas, with large dominant males living in a group of smaller Paranthropus robustus females.
This rare male fossil is closer in size to female specimens previously found at the site, providing the first high-resolution evidence for microevolution within early hominin species.
Researchers argue this discovery could lead to a revised system for classifying and understanding the palaeobiology of human ancestors — a significant development for their field.
The face of the skull is put back together for the first time
Archaeologist Andy Herries said the skull, which was painstakingly reconstructed from hundreds of bone pieces, represented the start of a very successful Paranthropus robustus lineage that existed in South Africa for a million years.
“Like all other creatures on Earth, to remain successful our ancestors adapted and evolved in accordance with the landscape and environment around them,” he said.
“We believe these changes took place during a time when South Africa was drying out, leading to the extinction of a number of contemporaneous mammal species.
“It is likely that climate change produced environmental stressors that drove evolution within Paranthropus robustus.”
Findings from the new discovery in South Africa’s Cradle of Humankind were published in Nature Ecology and Evolution on Tuesday.
How midnight digs at a holy Tibetan cave opened a window to prehistoric humans living on the roof of the world
New DNA data has confirmed that a Himalayan cave high on the Tibetan Plateau once hosted representatives of the enigmatic species of extinct human beings known as Denisovans, research recently published in the journal Science has revealed.
The scientists, led by the Lanzhou University of China and backed up by archaeologists, geologists and geneticists from Australia, Germany and the U.S., said that new DNA and archaeological evidence demonstrated the long-term presence of humans at high altitude some 120,000 years earlier than previously understood—modern humans were not thought to have inhabited the Tibetan Plateau until some 40,000 years ago.
The find confirms that the first modern hominins to inhabit the area were not Neanderthals, as was previously assumed, instead of showing that Denisovan populations are more likely to have been widespread and not limited to Siberia, where the only previously known fossil fragments were discovered in 2010.
“We detected ancient human fragments that matched mitochondrial DNA associated with Denisovans in four different layers of sediment deposited around 100,000 and 60,000 years ago,” said Associate Professor Bo Li of the University of Wollongong, the team’s dating specialist and co-author of the new research.
“We have known that some modern human genomes contain fragments of DNA from Denisovans, suggesting that this species of human must have been widespread in Asia,”
The origins of this discovery took place 40 years ago in 1980, when a segment of the fossilized jawbone, complete with two molars, was discovered by a Buddhist monk in Baishiya Karst Cave in the northeast of the Tibetan Plateau, in what is now Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in the south of China’s Gansu Province.
For Tibetan Buddhist monks, Baishiya Karst Cave is a sacred site and a protected religious sanctuary, sitting at an elevation of 3,280 meters in Xiahe County. The Tibetan monk who made the prehistoric discovery presented the relic to his teacher, the Sixth Gung-Thang Living Buddha, who recognized its potential significance and passed the fossil on to Lanzhou University.
This jawbone fragment represents the only known remains of the mysterious Xiahe Man
Two decades later in 2019, scientists analyzing the fragment reported that the fossilized jawbone belonged to a 160,000-year-old Denisovan, positing that the little-known species of Neanderthal-like hominins inhabited the region thousands of years before modern humans.
“Our painstaking efforts . . . are helping unravel the story of how early humans adapted to live in one of the world’s most remote and mountainous places,” members of the research team said in an article for non-profit website The Conversation. “Our research . . . provides a better understanding of the little-known prehistoric humans who lived tens of thousands of years ago on the roof of the world.”
The Denisovan proposal was initially disputed by other scientists due to a lack of genetic evidence and the prevailing understanding of Denisovan population distributions at the time: this group of mysterious prehistoric humans was originally discovered in Denisova Cave in Siberia.
Researchers excavate a section of the Buddhist cave.
“This [Baishiya Karst Cave ] fossil was not only the earliest evidence of human occupation on the Tibetan Plateau but also the first Denisovan fossil to be found outside of Denisova Cave—and the largest to ever be found,” said the research team.
The ancestral lineage of Denisovans separated from the ancestors of modern humans some 500,000 years ago, although scientists disagree over whether they should be regarded as a distinct species or a subspecies of Homo sapiens.
Whether due to being overcome by populations of modern humans or environmental factors, Denisovans and Neanderthals are both believed to have died out some 40,000–50,000 years ago, although they are known to have interbred with the ancestors of modern humans.
“When our species exited Africa, on the way to moving to Australia, we met Denisovans somewhere in Asia, interbred with them, and carry some of the genetic information,” said Prof. Li. “Modern Tibetans, for example, have a Denisovan gene that lets them thrive at high altitude.”
As well as human remains, the research team at Baishiya Karst Cave also unearthed a wealth of other revealing artefacts, including a large quantity of charcoal, indicating that that the Denisovans used fire, 1,310 rudimentary tools dated to more than 190,000 years ago and as recently as 45,000 years ago, and numerous animal bones, including some from hyenas and rhinos, both of which once were once native to the region.
“After dozens of visits to the cave and others nearby, in 2016 we finally found the first indisputable stone artefacts [probably made by Denisovans] on the cave floor,” the research team explained. “With this, we became further convinced the cave was a treasure trove of archaeological deposits that could help tell the story of the Denisovans. But, as it’s also a Buddhist holy cave, we weren’t allowed to dig inside it—not even one scrape of a trowel.”
After two years of negotiations with the Chinese authorities and the Tibetan monks maintaining the cave, the team were granted permission to excavate within a limited area inside the sacred cave—contingent on the condition that they only work late at night during the Himalayan winter, when no Buddhist monks were using the cave.
Researchers sampling the Baishiya Karst Cave.
Prof. Li observed that here is still much more research to be done at the site: “Our next target is to date more samples from the cave and tries to answer when Denisovans started to occupy the cave and when they ‘disappear’ from the cave.”
A man picking mushrooms in the Czech republic discovers a rare 3000-year-old sword
A man hunting for mushrooms found came away with more than just a bunch of fungus – he discovered two rare Bronze Age weapons. Roman Novák was foraging for fungi after a rainstorm in Jesenick, a small town about 150 miles from Prague when he noticed a piece of metal jutting out of the ground.
Examining it closer, Novák realized it was part of a sword, dating back some 3,300 years ago.
Digging some more, he also uncovered a bronze axe from the same era nearby. The discovery has led local archaeologists to plan an excavation in the area.
A man foraging for mushrooms in a rural part of the Czech Republic uncovered a bronze sword dating to 1300 BC when the Urnfield culture was just developing in Central Europe.
‘It had just rained and I went mushroom-picking,’ Novák told Radio Prague International. As I went, I saw a piece of metal sticking out of some stones. I kicked it and found that it was a blade, part of a sword.’
Archaeologists who examined both pieces say they date to about 1300 BC when Central Europe’s Urnfield culture was just emerging and Jeseník would have been sparsely populated.
Unlike later iron swords, which are hammered into shape while still red hot, bronze swords were made by heating the metal until it turned into a liquid and then pouring it into a mould.
The sword has an octagonal handle, with a bronze hilt intricately carved with circles and crescents. The blade, which is broken near the base but otherwise intact, resemble weapons used mainly in what is now Northern Germany.
The sword has an octagonal handle, with a bronze hilt intricately carved with circles and crescents
‘They were obviously trying their best, but the quality of the casting was actually pretty low,’ said Jiří Juchelka, director of archaeology at the nearby Silesian Museum. ‘X-ray tests show that there are many small bubbles inside the weapon.’
Because of that, Juchelka believes the sword was more ceremonial than something used in combat.
Nevertheless, it’s only the second of its kind found in the region.
‘It is like a puzzle,’ said Milan Rychlý of Jesenick’s Ethnographic Museum. ‘We just have four little shards from the story that took place right now, so we have to start piecing everything together.’
When the excavation of the area is complete, all the items will go on display at the two museums.
The weapons were uncovered in a forest in the Czech Republic’s eastern Jesenick District.
Mushroom picking after it rains is a popular hobby in Eastern Europe: Last month a man foraging in north-central Poland literally stumbled across a trove of 17th-century silver coins.
Bogusław Rumiński’s bike got stuck in a rut while he was riding in his tiny village of Jezuicka Struga.
When he put his hands out to stop his fall, Rumiński landed on dozens of silver pieces dating to the reign of King John II Casimir Vasa. The coins, which are in excellent condition, were minted between 1657 and 1667, shortly after the Deluge, an era of frequent wars involving Russia, Poland and Sweden.
Another mushroom hunter in Poland uncovered dozens of silver coins from between 1657 and 1667, minted during the reign of King John II Casimir Vasa.
Later searching with a metal detector turned up even more coins, bringing the total to 86. Because of the coins’ fine condition, experts believe they were hidden shortly after being produced.
Ancient Viking ship buried an Iron Age cemetery uncovered by scientists
A Viking ship that was laid to rest centuries ago wasn’t alone underground. A feast hall and a cult temple were also buried at the cemetery site, hinting at the elite standing of the community that conducted the burials.
Archaeologists discovered the ship in 2018, after conducting surveys with ground-penetrating radar (GPR) at Gjellestad in southeastern Norway. Since then, further scans and excavations uncovered more clues about the site and the people who created it centuries ago.
GPR scans revealed a total of 13 burial mounds including the ship grave; some of these circular mounds were 98 feet (30 meters) wide. Other burials included buildings that may have been used in rituals, scientists reported in a new study.
The researchers found the mound cluster to the north of a large, previously excavated Iron Age mound — Jell Mound — which dates to about 1,500 year ago (radiocarbon dating revealed that the ship was buried hundreds of years later, likely around the ninth century). Linking Jell Mound to a larger network of burials suggests that Gjellestad was an important cemetery that stood for centuries, according to the study.
In 2017, a gold ornament found near Jell Mound hinted that Gjellestad was a site of some significance. Pendants such as these were often included in burials of high-status women during the Iron Age, around A.D. 1 to A.D. 400, according to the study.
Numerous funerary mounds once studded the landscape around Gjellestad, but many of these were plowed up by farmers during the 19th century, the scientists wrote. However, even after a mound has been destroyed, GPR can still reveal its former location — and what was buried there.
The discovery was made by experts from the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (NIKU) at Gjellestad in southeastern Norway
Gold pendant found near the Jell Mound. This type or ornament was common in high-status female burials from A.D. 1 to A.D. 400.
Near the ship grave, GPR located two large circular mounds, with seven smaller mounds clustered to the north. Four rectangular “settlement structures” lay to the west; the longest was 125 feet (38 m) in length. One of the smaller buildings may have been a farmhouse; another may represent a temple; and the largest building was similar in structure and size to feasting halls found in other Viking settlements, the scientists reported.
“The only structure that can be securely dated to the Viking Age at Gjellestad is the ship burial but, taking the whole site into consideration, we can probably say that it was important for the elite to exhibit their status through lavish and carefully planned burial rituals,” said lead study author Lars Gustavsen, an archaeologist with the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (NIKU).
“We believe that the inclusion of a ship burial in what was probably an already existing — and long-lived — mound cemetery was an effort to associate oneself with an already existing power structure,” Gustavsen told Live Science in an email.
A grave situation
The ship burial itself was highly unusual. Viking burials of boats measuring under 39 feet (12 m) are common, but finding a ship this large — 66 feet (20 m) in length — is exceptionally rare. In fact, only a handful of such burials are known across Norway, Gustavsen said.
The last excavations of large Viking ships took place more than a century ago, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This is the first such ship to be found through GPR-scanning technology, which bodes well for discovering more ship burials that are still hidden, according to the study.
But why did Vikings bury their ships? “We do not really know for certain,” Gustavsen said. “Since these were societies whose identity was closely tied to the sea and seafaring, the ship could, in this specific context, be seen as a vessel transporting the dead from the realm of the living to the realm of the dead,” he said.
“Or it could simply be a display of wealth, or to demonstrate that one belonged to a certain social and political class.”
Archaeologists mapped the Gjellestad site using data collected by GPR scans.
After the ship’s discovery in 2018, the team partially excavated the ship and quickly realized that damp conditions combined with periods of drought had left the ship badly decomposed and riddled with fungus, Live Science previously reported.
Over the summer of 2020, archaeologists mounted a full excavation to recover and preserve what they could of the decaying ship. In October, the team found something unexpected: animal bones, according to a statement published by the University of Oslo’s Museum of Cultural History.
“The animal bones are relatively large in size, so we think that they are the remains of an ox or a horse that has been sacrificed to be part of the burial,” museum representatives said in the statement. “Although the topmost layers of the bones are heavily decomposed, they seem to be better preserved further down. This indicates that it is quite likely that things are better preserved deeper into the ship burial.”
Work on the site is still underway, and is expected to be completed in December, according to Gustavsen.
‘Mona Lisa of ancient age’ found in Southern Turkey
According to a report in the Hurriyet Daily News, a floor mosaic featuring a woman’s portrait has been unearthed in the southern province of Osmaniye’s Kadirli district, turkey.
By a team of researchers led by Ümit Kayişoğlu of the Osmaniye Museum Directorate.
He said that the woman’s pose resembles that of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa of the ancient age,“ attracts attention with its stance, look and similarity to the world-famous Mona Lisa painting.
A mosaic area unearthed during the excavations conducted by the Osmaniye Museum Directorate in the southern province of Osmaniye’s Kadirli district has proved a rival to the ancient city of Zeugma with its awe-striking features.
The mosaic area is believed to have once decorated the floor of a villa between the first and the second centuries, and the female figure is thought to have been the owner of the villa.
“We can call this mosaic the Mona Lisa of Kadirli,” said archaeologist Ümit Kayışoğlu.
“This mosaic area is the only known mosaic area with human figures in Osmaniye. This is the remains of a villa built in the first and second centuries A.D.”
Stating that they have been carrying out devoted work in the mosaic area since 2015, he said, “As the Osmaniye Museum Directorate, we started many excavations when the ruins of the ancient city of Flaviapolis on which the Kadirli district was founded were declared a third-degree site in 2015.”
Describing the mosaics found, he said: “There are four different types of mosaics here.
There is a lady in the middle of one of the mosaics, and we call this person Kadirli’s Mona Lisa. Because her look and stance are reminiscent of the original one.”
