ASIA, ISRAEL, WORLD

The first-ever portrait of Jesus Christ in Israel Discovered, 70 ancient books hidden in a cave for nearly 2,000 years

The first-ever portrait of Jesus Christ in Israel Discovered, 70 ancient books hidden in a cave for nearly 2,000 years

The image is eerily familiar: a bearded young man with flowing curly hair. After lying for nearly 2,000 years hidden in a cave in the Holy Land, the fine detail is difficult to determine. But in a certain light, it is not difficult to interpret the marks around the figure’s brow as a crown of thorns.

The extraordinary picture of one of the recently discovered hoards of up to 70 lead codices – booklets – found in a cave in the hills overlooking the Sea of Galilee is one reason Bible historians are clamouring to get their hands on the ancient artefacts.

If genuine, this could be the first-ever portrait of Jesus Christ, possibly even created in the lifetime of those who knew him.

The first-ever portrait of Jesus Christ in Israel Discovered, 70 ancient books hidden in a cave for nearly 2,000 years
Discovery: The impression on this booklet cover shows what could be the earliest image of Christ

The tiny booklet, a little smaller than a modern credit card, is sealed on all sides and has a three-dimensional representation of a human head on both the front and the back. One appears to have a beard and the other is without. Even the maker’s fingerprint can be seen in the lead impression. Beneath both figures is a line of as-yet undeciphered text in an ancient Hebrew script.

Astonishingly, one of the booklets appears to bear the words ‘Saviour of Israel’ – one of the few phrases so far translated.

The owner of the cache is Bedouin trucker Hassan Saida who lives in the Arab village of Umm al-Ghanim, Shibli. He has refused to sell the booklets but two samples were sent to England and Switzerland for testing.

An investigation has revealed that the artefacts were originally found in a cave in the village of Saham in Jordan, close to where Israel, Jordan and Syria’s Golan Heights converge – and within three miles of the Israeli spa and hot springs of Hamat Gader, a religious site for thousands of years.

Precious: This booklet shows what scholars believe to be the map of Christian Jerusalem

According to sources in Saham, they were discovered five years ago after a flash flood scoured away the dusty mountain soil to reveal what looked like a large capstone. When this was levered aside, a cave was discovered with a large number of small niches set into the walls. Each of these niches contained a booklet. There were also other objects, including some metal plates and rolled lead scrolls.

The area is renowned as an age-old refuge for ancient Jews fleeing the bloody aftermath of a series of revolts against the Roman empire in the First and early Second Century AD.

The cave is less than 100 miles from Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, and around 60 miles from Masada, scene of the last stand and mass suicide of an extremist Zealot sect in the face of a Roman Army siege in 72AD – two years after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem.

It is also close to caves that have been used as sanctuaries by refugees from the Bar Kokhba revolt, the third and final Jewish revolt against the Roman Empire in 132AD.

The era is of critical importance to Biblical scholars because it encompasses the political, social and religious upheavals that led to the split between Judaism and Christianity.

It ended with the triumph of Christianity over its rivals as the dominant new religion first for dissident Jews and then for Gentiles.

In this context, it is important that while the Dead Sea Scrolls are rolled pieces of parchment or papyrus containing the earliest-known versions of books of the Hebrew Bible and other texts – the traditional Jewish format for written work – these lead discoveries are in book, or codex, a form which has long been associated with the rise of Christianity.

The codices seen range in size from smaller than 3in x 2in to around 10in x 8in. They each contain an average of eight or nine pages and appear to be cast, rather than inscribed, with images on both sides and bound with lead-ring bindings. Many of them were severely corroded when they were first discovered, although it has been possible to open them with care.

The codex showing what may be the face of Christ is not thought to have been opened yet. Some codices show signs of having been buried – although this could simply be the detritus resulting from lying in a cave for hundreds of years.

Unlike the Dead Sea Scrolls, the lead codices appear to consist of stylised pictures, rather than text, with a relatively small amount of script that appears to be in a Phoenician language, although the exact dialect is yet to be identified. At the time these codices were created, the Holy Land was populated by different sects, including Essenes, Samaritans, Pharisees, Sadducees, Dositheans and Nazoreans.

One lucky owner: Hassan Saida with some of the artefacts that he says he inherited

There was no common script and considerable intermingling of language and writing systems between groups. Which means it could take years of detailed scholarship to accurately interpret the codices.

Many of the books are sealed on all sides with metal rings, suggesting they were not intended to be opened. This could be because they contained holy words which should never be read.

ASIA, ISRAEL, WORLD

A Scientist Thinks These Ancient Roman Nails May Have Been Used To Crucify Jesus Christ

A Scientist Thinks These Ancient Roman Nails May Have Been Used To Crucify Jesus Christ

According to a new analysis, two corroded Roman-era iron nails which some have claimed pinned Jesus to the cross seem to have been used in an ancient crucifixion. The controversy about the origin of the nails was reignited by this study.

A Scientist Thinks These Ancient Roman Nails May Have Been Used To Crucify Jesus Christ
The two Roman-era iron nails are from an unmarked box delivered to Tel Aviv University; new research suggests they could be the two nails lost from the tomb of the Jewish high priest Caiaphas, who presided over the condemnation of Jesus.

The latest research indicates that the nails of the tomb of the Jewish high priest Caiaphas, who supposedly handed Jesus over for execution to the Romans for execution. Slivers of wood and bone fragments suggest they may have been used in a crucifixion.

The connection to Caiaphas and the new evidence did not completely show that the nails were used to crucify Jesus in Jerusalem in A.D. 33, Geologist Aryeh Shimron, the lead author of the study published in the journal Archaeological Discovery.

“I certainly do not want to say that these nails are from the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth,” Shimron told Live Science. “But are they nails from a crucifixion? Very likely, yes.”

Where did the nails originate?

One of the nails was purportedly found in one of the 12 ossuaries within Caiaphas’ tomb, while the other was found on the ground nearby.

Israel Hershkovitz, a renowned anthropologist at Tel Aviv University, received the nails in an unmarked box from the collection of Nicu Haas, an Israeli anthropologist who died in 1986. According to the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), Haas obtained them from a tomb excavated in the 1970s, decades before the Caiaphas tomb was discovered, according to Haaretz. 

But the IAA doesn’t know which tomb the nails came from, and no records of their provenance have ever been found. In a controversial 2011 documentary called “The Nails of the Cross,” however, filmmaker and journalist Simcha Jacobovici suggested the nails were those lost from the Caiaphas tomb — and that the high priest may have been so overcome with guilt about the crucifixion of Jesus that he kept the nails as a memento. 

Haaretz reported that some scholars, though no names were given, have called the latest research highly speculative.  But Shimron, a geologist based in Jerusalem who’s retired from the Israel Geological Survey, said the new study gave weight to the documentary’s ideas. Shimron has not studied the two nails that are the subject of Jacobovici’s 2011 documentary before now, though he was involved in a 2015 study tied to another of Jacobovici’s controversial documentaries on the archaeology of Jesus.

The nails are long enough to have been driven through a person’s palms — and the fact that they are bent upward is consistent with crucifixion.

Workers widening a road discovered the first-century “Caiaphas” tomb in 1990 in a neighbourhood in the southeast of Jerusalem. The tomb contained 12 ossuaries —– one marked with the name “Qayafa” and another, ornately decorated with motifs of flowers, marked with the Aramaic name “Yehosef Bar Qayafa,” or “Joseph son of Caiaphas” in English. Most archaeologists now accept that the tomb was used to bury the first-century high priest Caiaphas and his family, the study said. 

Caiaphas, who is is mentioned several times in both the Christian New Testament and history of the Jews written in the late first century by Flavius Josephus, presided over a sham trial of Jesus for blasphemy, after which Jesus was handed over to the Roman governor Pontius Pilate for execution, according to the Gospel of Matthew. The execution was reportedly carried out on Friday, April 3, 33, when Jesus was nailed to the cross — a common Roman method of capital punishment.

The two nails discovered at Tel Aviv University match the chemical signature of the ossuaries in the Caiaphas tomb and have traces of an unusual fungus found there.

Jerusalem tomb

In the latest study, Shimron and his co-authors compared samples from the two nails with sediments from the ossuaries in the Caiaphas tombstone chests used to hold the bones of people after they had decayed for about a year on a rock shelf. It found that not only did the physical and chemical signatures of the nails and the ossuaries match, but they also seemed to be unique.

For example, the ratios of isotopes of carbon and oxygen — variants of these elements — in both sets of samples suggested they both came from an abnormally humid environment, and they both had significant “flowstone deposits” —– layers of calcite carbonate formed by flowing water.

These findings match the conditions in the Caiaphas tomb, which is located near an ancient aqueduct and often would have been flooded by its overflow. The researchers also found evidence on both the nails and the ossuaries of a specific fungus — an unusual type of yeast — that grows only in very damp conditions and has been found in no other tomb in Jerusalem. “I think the nails came from that tomb,” Shimron said.

Their analysis of the nails with an electron microscope also found slivers of wood on the nails, which they recognized as cedar, and tiny fragments of bone —– unfortunately now fossilized. Those discoveries heightened the possibility that the nails came from crucifixion, but they did not prove it, Shimron said.

Electron microscopy confirmed the two nails contained tiny bone fragments.

Mysterious nails

The IAA says their records show that two iron nails were also found in the Caiaphas tomb — one inside an unmarked ossuary and another on the ground near the ornate ossuary, possibly where it fell when it was disturbed by tomb robbers — but they were later lost. 

The excavator of that tomb suggested they might have been used to scratch inscriptions on the ossuaries, but that idea was never investigated, Shimron said. The new study indicated the nails from Tel Aviv University were indeed those lost from the Caiaphas tomb, despite the IAA’s denial, he said.

According to the theory presented in Jacobovici’s documentary, they might have been buried with Caiaphas because crucifixion nails were thought to be magical — a belief noted in ancient Jewish writings. And because Caiaphas is only known for his role in the crucifixion of Jesus, it’s possible that the nails are linked with that event — although it can only be a supposition, Shimron said. 

Hershkovitz, who still has possession of the two nails, told Live Science he was not convinced by the latest study, but he did not rule out the possibility that the nails came from the Caiaphas tomb. The nails are long enough to have been used on a person’s hands in a crucifixion, and they are bent upward at the end, — perhaps to prevent the hands being lifted off the cross, he said.

But the presence of bone fragments did not prove the nails were from a crucifixion, because bones from the tomb may have stuck to the nails. “Ossuaries are full of human bones,” he said.

Still, “there is a possibility — and we have to keep an open mind for every possibility, as scientists,” Hershkovitz said. 

PERU, SOUTH AMERICA, WORLD

9,000-Year-Old Remains Of Female Hunter Found In Peru

9,000-Year-Old Remains Of Female Hunter Found In Peru

Nine-thousand-year-old human remains discovered at the Andean highland site of Wilamaya Patjxa in Peru appear to have belonged to a woman hunter buried with a toolkit of projectile points and animal processing implements, according to a report in Science Magazine. 

9,000-Year-Old Remains Of Female Hunter Found In Peru
An artist’s depiction of a female hunter 9000 years ago in the Andean highlands of Peru

They were fascinated by a tool kit with 20 stone projectile points and blades lined neatly by the person’s side at a burial pit high in the Andes. Both signs led to a high-status hunter’s discovery.  “Everybody was talking about how this was a great chief, a big man,” says archaeologist Randy Haas of the University of California (UC), Davis.

Then, the University of Arizona bioarchaeologist Jim Watson observed that the bones were slender and light.  “I think your hunter might be female,” he told Haas.

Now, the researchers report that the burial was indeed that of a female, challenging the long-standing “man the hunter” hypothesis. Her existence led them to reexamine reports of other ancient burials in the Americas, and they found 10 additional women buried with projectile points who may also have been hunters. “The message [of the new finding] is that women have always been able to hunt and have in fact hunted,” says archaeologist Bonnie Pitblado of the University of Oklahoma, Norman, who was not part of the study.

The “man the hunter hypothesis,” which prevailed after an influential symposium in Chicago in 1966, held that during the course of human evolution, men hunted and women gathered—and they seldom switched those gender roles.

Some researchers challenged the notion, and ancient female warriors have been found recently, but archaeological evidence of women hunting has been scant. And the idea that all hunters were male has been bolstered by studies of the few present-day groups of hunter-gatherers, such as the Hadza of Tanzania and San of southern Africa. In those cultures, men hunt large animals and women gather tubers, fruits, nuts, and seeds.

Haas and his team, including local Aymara colleagues, weren’t intending to study female hunters. They discovered the fossilized remains of six individuals in burial pits at the archaeological site of Wilamaya Patjxa at 3925 meters’ altitude on the windswept altiplano of southern Peru. Two people were buried with stone tools.

The teenage girl was buried with what archaeologists believe was a hunting tool kit.

One person, likely 17 to 19 years old, was accompanied by four projectile points that would have been attached to short spears for hunting, several cutting blades, a possible knife, and scraper tools likely used for processing animal hides and meat.

The 20 stone tools and ochre, which can be used to tan hides, were neatly stacked next to the top of one individual’s thigh bone as if they had been held in a leather pouch that had disintegrated. Another person, likely 25 to 35 years old at death, was buried with two projectile points. The pits also held bone fragments of Andean deer and camelids, such as vicuña or guanaco.

The researchers figured out the sex of the bones using a new forensics method developed by co-author Glendon Parker of UC Davis. The technique analyzes whether an individual’s tooth enamel carries a male or female version of a protein called amelogenin.

The individual with the impressive toolkit was female; the other person with hunting tools was male. Studies of isotopes of carbon and nitrogen in the woman’s teeth showed she ate a typical hunter’s diet of animal meat and plants.

Others find the evidence of a female hunter convincing. “It’s a smoking gun,” says archaeologist Meg Conkey of UC Berkeley, who was not part of the study. “But skeptics might say it’s a one-off.”

Haas anticipated that concern: In a search of reports of burials at 107 other sites in the Americas older than 8,000 years, he found 10 other women and 16 men also buried with hunting tools. This meta-analysis suggests “early big-game hunting was likely gender-neutral,” he and his colleagues report today in Science Advances.

Robert Kelly of the University of Wyoming applauds the discovery of the female hunter but isn’t convinced by many of the other potential cases. He points out that having tools in the same grave as a person doesn’t always mean they used them in life. Two burials were female infants found with hunting implements, for example. Buried tools could also have been offerings from male hunters to express their sorrow, he says.

Pitblado says that even if not all of those female remains belonged to hunters, the meta-analysis suggests women have long been capable of hunting, and provides hints about where to look more closely for evidence.

It was one of many burials found that featured women hunters in the last 50 years.

Human ecologist Eugenia Gayo of the University of Chile agrees. Such research could help answer questions such as “What was the type of environments where everybody got involved in the hunting?” she says.

It shouldn’t be surprising that women could hunt, Pitblado adds. “These women were living high up in the Andes, at 13,000 feet full time,” she says. “If you can do that, surely you can bring down a deer.”

BULGARIA, ENGLAND, EUROPE

7,000 years old Copper Age Kilns Unearthed in Bulgaria

7,000 years old Copper Age Kilns Unearthed in Bulgaria

Bulgarian archaeology records that two kilns were dated between 4800 and 4600 B.C. A team of researchers from the Ruse Regional Museum of History were discovered on the Bazovets Settlement Mound near the Danube River in northeastern Bulgaria.

7,000 years old Copper Age Kilns Unearthed in Bulgaria
The two prehistoric pottery-making kilns found at the Bazovets Settlement Mound are from an archaeological layer from 4,800 – 4,600 BC.

In the excavation season, 2019 one of the two almost 7,000-year-old prehistoric ovens or furnaces was first partially excavated.

In recent excavations on the Bazovets Settlement Mound, it was fully exposed and a second kiln from the same Chalcolithic facility has been found, the Ruse Regional Museum of History has announced.

The 2020 archaeological excavations at the Copper Age settlement in question took place in September and were led by archaeologist Dimitar Chernakov from the Ruse Regional Museum of History, and his deputy, archaeologist Irena Ruseva from the Svilengrad Museum of History, with archaeologists from the Dobrich Regional Museum of History and the Veliko Tarnovo University “St. Cyril and St. Methodius” also participating.

A total of 57 archaeological artefacts from the said Early Chalcolithic period (4,800 – 4,600 BC) have been found during the latest excavations at the Bazovets Settlement Mound.

An aerial view of the Bazovets Settlement Mound, a 7,000-year-old prehistoric settlement in Northeast Bulgaria close to the Danube River.
An aerial view of the nearly 7,000-year-old Early Copper Age structures exposed during the 2020 excavations of the Bazovets Settlement Mound.

These include artefacts made of flint, animal bones, horns, and ceramics – including fragments from anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figurines. As a result of the research of the Early Copper Age archaeological layer on the site, the archaeologists discovered that the easternmost periphery of the prehistoric settlement was used for manufacturing.

The second of the prehistoric kilns, which was found during the 2020 excavations, had two chambers, a lower chamber for the burning to generate heat, and an upper chamber for the baking of the pottery items.

The Early Chalcolithic kiln was 1.2 meters long, and 1 meter wide, and it was made of wood wattle plastered with a thick layer of clay from the inside and outside.

The opening of the kiln was on its southeastern side, and it was closed with three flat stones which have been discovered right next to it.

The kiln had a groove that would allow for the regulating of the heating temperature, a type of furnaces for the baking of clay that would also be used in later archaeological eras, the Ruse Museum of History notes.

Above the two kilns, the archaeologists have discovered the ruins of a rectangular building with a north-south orientation.

Right next to its entrance, there was a small room seemingly used for food storage where the researchers have unearthed traces from food residues such as animal bones and lots of shells from freshwater mollusks.

In addition to the nearly 7,000-year-old Early Chalcolithic pottery-making kilns, during their 2020 excavations at the Bazovets Settlement Mound, the archaeologists have also found and started to unearth a prehistoric building which was even older than the kilns themselves.

The 2020 excavations of the 7,000-year-old Bazovets Settlement Mound near Bulgaria’s Danube city of Ruse took place in September 2020, building upon the partial exposure of one of the Copper Age kilns in the 2019 season.

The prehistoric building in question was built of wood and clay and was destroyed by a large fire.

In its southern part, the archaeologists have found several intact pottery vessels and bases as well as a horn tool which were placed on a podium. They are going to continue researching the prehistoric building further during their next excavations of the Bazovets Settlement Mound.

In the Neolithic and Chalcolithic, the territory of today’s Bulgaria and much of the rest of the Balkans, for instance, today’s Romania and Serbia, saw the rise of Europe’s first civilization, the prehistoric civilization of the Lower Danube Valley and Western coast of the Black Sea.

This prehistoric civilization from the Neolithic and Chalcolithic, which had the world’s oldest gold, Europe’s oldest town, and seemingly some of the earliest forms of pre-alphabetic writing, is referred to some scholars as “Old Europe”. It predates the famous civilizations of Minoan Crete, Mycenaean Greece, Ancient Egypt and Ancient Mesopotamia by thousands of years.

EUROPE, SPAIN, WORLD

A selfie set in stone: hidden portrait by cheeky mason found in Spain 900 years on

A selfie set in stone: hidden portrait by cheeky mason found in Spain 900 years on

The Guardian reports that art historian Jennifer Alexander of the University of Warwick found a male figure at the top of a pillar in Santiago de Compostela, a twelfth-century cathedral located in northwest Spain while conducting a stone-by-stone survey of the structure. 

Millions of devotees who made the long pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, northwest of Spain, over the years have been unaware of the figure.  He has looked down on them from the top of one of the many pillars that soar upwards, each decorated with carved foliage, among which he is concealed.

The figure was discovered today by a British art scholar who says that he was never supposed to be seen since he is a self-portrait of a stonemason who in the 12th century served in the cathedral.

The 12th-century Santiago de Compostela cathedral in Galicia attracts hundreds of thousands of pilgrims a year.

“You find this in medieval buildings,” Dr Jennifer Alexander told the Observer. “They’re usually in dark corners where only another stonemason would find them.

This one is in a bit of the building where you’d have to be a stonemason to be up there to see it. It’s tucked away in among a whole set of capitals [the top of a column] that are otherwise plain.

A selfie set in stone: hidden portrait by cheeky mason found in Spain 900 years on
Only the masons creating the building could see the figure.

“It’s just such a charming connection between us and the person that carved it. It’s almost as if it was designed just for us to see it by those people working on the building. Of course, this stonemason probably had no idea that he’d have to wait so long to be spotted.”

Despite the supreme talent of such craftsmen, they were completely anonymous, their names lost to history. This is the closest the mason got to signing his work.

Alexander, a reader in art history at the University of Warwick, is a specialist in the architectural history of the great churches and cathedrals of the medieval period. She discovered the figure in conducting an intricate survey of Santiago de Compostela cathedral, a Unesco world heritage site.

Its significance lies in its association with the Camino, the pilgrimage across hundreds of miles to reach the shrine of the apostle St James, which is within the cathedral. Such is its draw that. in 2019 alone, the official number of pilgrims reaching the city was some 350,000.

The current building was begun in the late 11th-century and is a masterpiece of Romanesque architecture, with later additions.

Alexander was conducting a stone-by-stone analysis to work out its construction sequence, in a project funded by the Galician regional government. It was when she was studying the capitals, about 13 metres above the pavement, that “this little figure popped out”, she recalled.

Dr Jennifer Alexander conducted a stone-by-stone analysis in the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.

“A lovely image of a chap hanging on to the middle of the capital as if his life depended on it. It’s in a row of identical off-the-peg capitals where they’ve been knocking them out in granite – ‘we need another 15 of that design’ – and suddenly there’s one that’s different. So we think it’s the man himself.

“He emerges out of the capital and is clinging to it. It’s almost as if it’s swallowing him up.”

The carved figure, which is about 30cm high, is depicted down to his waist. Alexander said: “He’s got a nice little smile. He’s pleased with himself. He’s splendidly carved, with a strongly characterised face.”

Medieval stonemasons learned their craft through apprenticeships that trained them in the back-breaking trade of cutting stone or using templates to create complex mouldings around doorways and other openings. The most promising masons would learn geometry so that they could design plans and manage construction sites.

Alexander said: “These masters had to have many skills since they were also responsible for engineering, the supply of materials, hiring the workforce and dealing with the patron, who might be a senior member of the clergy or the nobility.”

She added that such craftsmen have remained anonymous throughout the centuries even into more recent times: “When they were building Liverpool cathedral in the 20th century, they published lists of the craftsmen that worked on the building and they never mentioned stonemasons. So these are the unsung geniuses.”

ENGLAND, EUROPE, WORLD

48,000-Year-Old Neanderthal Baby Teeth Analyzed

48,000-Year-Old Neanderthal Baby Teeth Analyzed

A big landmark in human evolution is the moment a baby weans from milk to eating solid foods, and now a recent study shows that ancient Neanderthal babies might have taken a similar path.

The new discovery gives groundbreaking insights into how these ancient humans lived, based on chemical analysis of Neanderthal baby teeth. And historically holding theories on how the species died out might even turn around, too.

The lives of young Neanderthals are still poorly understood by anthropologists, partly because the fossil record for these young hominids is so sparse. As a result, researchers have often flip-flopped on what they think early life looked like for these babies, and what set Homo sapiens apart.

The report, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, explains how Neanderthals’ milk teeth were studied by researchers. By comparing their results to humans who lived during the same period, the researchers have uncovered some striking similarities between our species.

Baby teeth are by their very nature temporary, but they’re actually an incredibly important indicator of an animal’s energy requirements, maternal lifestyle, and overall species longevity — ancient hominins included.

Alessia Nava is co-first author of the paper and a post-doctoral anthropology researcher at the University of Kent. She explains that the similarities discovered between ancient humans and Neanderthals are not just an indicator of cultural practices, but evidence of similar physiological needs.

“In modern humans, in fact, the first introduction of solid food occurs at around 6 months of age when the child needs a more energetic food supply, and it is shared by very different cultures and societies,” Nava said in a statement. “[With our study], we know that also Neanderthals started to wean their children when modern humans do”.

Essentially, both our species weaned their babies and introduced foods at about the same time in their development, the results suggest.

Like looking at rings on a tree stump, scientists read the history of Neanderthal babies in the growth rings of their teeth.

DENTAL DISCOVERIES 

The researchers looked at three ancient Neanderthal milk teeth, found in a region of Italy. The teeth belonged to Neanderthal infants living between 45,000 and 70,000 years ago. They also analyzed the baby teeth of a single human child, who lived during the Upper Paleolithic era, which began about 40,000 years ago.

To read the histories hidden in these baby teeth, the scientists studied the tissues making up each tooth and performed chemical analysis. This allowed them to read the tree ring-like growth record left behind in the enamel of these teeth. This biological record also captures the moment the infant switched to eating solid food.

The researchers found that both the Neanderthal babies and the Upper Paleolithic human baby transitioned to eating solid foods at around the same age — between their fifth and sixth months of life.

ANCIENT FAMILY LIFE 

The discovery tells researchers a lot more than just the feeding habits of these ancient babies, the study’s lead author and professor of physical anthropology at the University of Bologna, Stefano Benazzi, said in a statement.

This is a 3D reconstruction of the three Neanderthal milk teeth analyzed in the study. Shown are (from left) the tooth found in the Fumane Cave; the one found in the Broion Cave; and the tooth found in the De Nadale Cave.
This is a 3D reconstruction of the three Neanderthal milk teeth analyzed in the study. Shown are (from left) the tooth found in the Fumane Cave; the one found in the Broion Cave, and the tooth found in the De Nadale Cave.

These teeth hold important clues to the physiology and maternal experience of Neanderthals, too.

“This work’s results imply similar energy demands during early infancy and a close pace of growth between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals,” Benazzi said. “Taken together, these factors possibly suggest that Neanderthal newborns were of similar weight to modern human neonates, pointing to a likely similar gestational history and early-life ontogeny, and potentially shorter inter-birth interval”.

The researchers also gleaned more information about the Neanderthal family’s lifestyle — including that Neanderthal mothers may have tended to stay at home with their infants.

The findings also tell us more about how our ancient relatives died. This study overturns the consensus that weaning age — and its relationship with maternal fertility — somehow contributed to the Neanderthals’ eventual demise as a species. The idea here was that because Neanderthals weaned their children on a different timeline to humans, that could have affected their fertility rate.

But because Neanderthal babies appear to have similar energy requirements and weaning habits to ancient as well as modern humans, other factors — shorter overall lifespans, juvenile mortality, and cultural behaviour — may have been more likely culprits in precipitating Neanderthals’ extinction.

More research will be needed before we can truly piece together the complex history of these ancient hominins’ time on Earth. But the study adds to the mounting evidence that we are not so special a species as we like to think.

PERU, SOUTH AMERICA, WORLD

Two Inca Measurement Systems Calculated By Polish Architect

Two Inca Measurement Systems Calculated By Polish Architect

The Inca used two main units of measurement while constructing Machu Picchu, according to a Science in Poland report. Anna Kubicka of the Wrocław University of Science and Technology analyzed measurements of buildings at the site collected during field research conducted by the staff at Machu Picchu National Archaeological Park, the 3-D Scanning and Modeling Laboratory at the Wrocław University of Science and Technology, and the University of Warsaw between 2010 and 2017.

Dr Kubicka said that until now research on the Inca measurement system was based mainly on 16th and 17th-century chronicles written by colonising  Spaniards, and on their dictionaries of the Quechua language used by the Inca.

These sources contain information on anthropometric measures (measures based on human body parts). But the values assigned to them were not known.

Machu Picchu. Image: Public Domain

Scientists speculated that since the average Inca person was about 1.6 meters tall, Inca ell (arms) could be between 40 and 45 cm.

Field measurements were carried out by employees of the Machu Picchu National Archaeological Park together with the 3D Scanning and Modeling Laboratory team led by Professor Jacek Kościuk from the Wrocław University of Science and Technology.

Anna Kubicka, a PhD student at the time, joined his team. Kościuk’s team started working there in cooperation with Professor Mariusz Ziółkowski from the Center for Pre-Columbian Studies of the University of Warsaw.

The researcher determined that the Incas used two modules (or quanta) to measure their buildings. The basic module was 42 cm long and corresponded to the elbow length.

The second one, measuring 54 cm, is a so far unknown measure and does not result directly from the length of any part of the human body.

Kubicka calls it the ‘royal ell’ because the unit was used to measure structures of a higher rank. The ‘royal ell’ was associated with representative and residential building complexes of the Inca elite, while the other, basic one – with complexes of farm buildings, workshops and buildings for the yanaconas (the servants of the Inca elite).

Asked whether her finding has brought anything new to the knowledge of Machu Picchu, Kubicka says the complex was built at one point, in the first half of the 15th century. Therefore, the metrological data she has obtained is not needed to determine, for example, its age.

Kubicka said: “On the other hand, the question to observe was whether there were modular differences due to different building traditions of the people who came as labour from different regions of the Inca Empire.

At Machu Picchu we have different stonework styles, also used depending on the function of the building or complex of buildings.”

But it turned out that despite the differences in the construction method, only two measurement systems were used. Kubicka believes that this is evidence that the measuring of the Machu Picchu city plan was supervised by imperial engineers who used their own system of measures.

Further research will determine whether the measurement system identified by Dr Kubicka was also used in other places in Inca Peru as so far no one has looked into it. 

But according to Kubicka, it cannot be ruled out that the units of measurement changed overtime before the advent of the Incas. Perhaps, along with the stone processing technologies borrowed from the Tiwanaku culture, one common system of measures was adopted.

For her analyses, Dr Kubicka used the cosine quantogram method developed by the British researcher Kendall in 1974 to analyse length measures in megalithic structures. Simply put, it consists of searching for an indivisible unit of measurement (quantum) in a series of measurement data, the multiple of which is the length of individual elements of architecture.

The research in Machu Picchu was financed with a grant from the National Science Centre.

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Intact Amphora Recovered Off Croatia’s Coast

Intact Amphora Recovered Off Croatia’s Coast

Total Croatia News reports that a table jug for serving wine and a utensil for straining it was found in the Adriatic Sea, near Croatia’s Paklinski Islands and the entrance to the harbour city of Hvar. The pottery was exposed through the loss of seagrasses.

As Morski writes on the 31st of October, 2020, on Saturday, an action was carried out to save an entire late antiquity-period amphora from the seabed close to the Paklinski Islands near Hvar.

In addition to the amphora, two other complete late antiquity wine vessels were found during the dive, marking yet another incredible Hvar archaeological discovery.

The amphora was found by Dr Ivan Cvitkovic and Dr Ante Zuljevic from the Institute of Oceanography and Fisheries during field research on foreign species along the seabed as part of the BENTHIC NIS project, which is otherwise funded by the Croatian Science Foundation.

The wine amphorae are dated to the period between the 3rd and 5th centuries, and the inside is coated with resin because the pottery is porous and liquid would leak through the walls of the vessel.

The action was organised by Tea Katunaric Kirjakov, an underwater archaeologist and lecturer at the Academy of Arts, University of Split, with the assistance of Kantharos d.o.o from Hvar, specialising in archaeological research, surveillance, photographic and photogrammetric documentation.

”The team from the Institute has been monitoring [the area] for many years and they noticed that there are antiquity vessels down there. With the erosion of Posidonia, the discovery of an ancient amphora came to light.

Upon examining the terrain, we found two more ancient wine vessels which were completely preserved. One is a table jug and the other is for straining wine. We also found a number of fragments of amphorae around.

Our goal was to check whether there is a complete amphora or shipwreck remains, however in this survey of the terrain, we haven’t yet been able to specify such a thing.

It will be necessary to undertake another action and look at the deeper parts of the seabed to see whether the amphorae have rolled there,” Tea Katunaric Kirjakov told Morski.

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