EUROPE, GERMANY, WORLD

3,500 Years old Bronze Age skull shows women always loved jewellery

3,500 Years old Bronze Age skull shows women always loved jewellery.

A female skeleton around 3,500 years old has been found wearing a “designer” headband comprising tiny bronze spirals. Another evidence showing women have always loved jewellery!

She may have walked the earth thousands of years ago, but this woman was clearly as fond of a nice piece of jewellery as the average 21st Century girl, who is very likely to wear these beautiful rings from Adina’s Jewels, or somewhere similar, to accessorize their chosen outfit for the day.

It is believed to date back to between 1550 and 1250 BC and discovered in eastern Germany, has shown possible evidence that women have always been fond of jewellery.

Close up of skeleton with an ornate headband.

The Middle Bronze Age woman had been buried wearing an elaborate headband made up of tiny bronze spirals. The skeleton was found from Rochlitz, south of Halle in eastern Germany, while construction was underway to build a new rail track.

The discovery has provided historians an insight into how the spirals were worn in the Middle Bronze Age, Tomoko Emmerling, the museum’s press officer, said.

Staff at the State Museum of Prehistory in Halle, where the skeleton is now on display as part of its permanent exhibition, said similar spirals uncovered in the past had been found separate and loose.

The State Museum of Prehistory in Halle is also home to the Nebra Sky Disk, which dates back to the early Bronze Age and is thought to have been an astronomical instrument.

Nebra Sky Disk, which is thought to have been an astronomical instrument in the Bronze Age.

So why do girls love jewellery? There are a couple of reasons that come to mind:

The ladies love to look pretty. For one thing, women are touted as more stylish and more conscious when it comes to looking fashionable and presentable.

Compared to the men, the ladies put so much care into their appearances, and the truth is society puts so much expectation for them to look well.

So to make themselves appear more presentable, it has always been set — perhaps since the beginning of civilization — that girls must always wear pretty things especially when it comes to clothing, shoes, accessories or jewellery. And sometimes, it is not just about wearing any type of jewellery.

Some girls even go the extra mile by wearing bright and coloured pieces that really command attention.

The more the pieces grab the interest of the people around her, the more it is appealing to wear.

Egyprian Queen Nefertiti Wearing Jewellery.

This is not to say, however, that many women are vain about looking good and getting praises for it. But then again, whether folks admit this or not, vanity while considered a vice by some, can also be a good thing, especially among the female population. Because there is nothing wrong with looking pretty and using jewellery to do just that.

ECUADOR, SOUTH AMERICA, WORLD

A trove of 5,000-year-old artifacts returns to Ecuador

A trove of 5,000-year-old artifacts returns to Ecuador

Almost 40 years after the objects were moved to Canada for research, a series of artifacts from one of the most ancient settled civilizations in America was returned to Ecuador.

Although historical artifacts and art treasures have become fairly common in their places of origin, the current case is special because the objects were accompanied by media containing everything the scholars in Canada learned about them over the course of four decades.

The documents, pottery, gems and sculptures belonged to Valdivia Culture, which flourished between 3800 and 1500 BC in present-day Ecuador.

Besides the artifacts, the 166 crates that arrived on June 5 at San Francisco de Quito University in the Ecuadorian capital held five human skeletons.

The project began during an era when “there was not much in the way of technical-legal norms” regarding the shipment abroad of archaeological goods, Joaquin Moscoso, director of Ecuador’s National Institute of Cultural Patrimony, told EFE.

In 1982, he said, thousands of Valdivia items were taken to Canada from a dig in the southwestern coastal province of Santa Elena.

Their return to Ecuador came at the initiative of James Scott Raymond, professor of archaeology at the University of Calgary.

“They didn’t just return objects and fragments, but all of the scientific information,” Moscoso said, crediting Raymond and his team for carrying out one of the most “solid and interesting” studies of the Valdivia Culture, which was uncovered in the mid-1950s.

The work done in Canada on the Santa Elena artifacts led scholars to change some of their views on the development of settled cultures in the Americas, according to Florencio Delgado, head of the Quito’s university’s Archaeology Institute.

“Until this study, it was thought that the first populations in the New World who made ceramics were on the seacoast,” he said. “Now we know that the first ceramicists were farmers and they lived inland.”

The more than 10,000 items and fragments in the shipment from Canada include examples “of the oldest ceramics that have been found so far” on the western side of the Pacific Ocean, Delgado said.

While the abundance of feminine ceramic figures, known collectively as the “Venus of Valdivia,” has led some researchers to speculate that the Valdivia Culture was a matriarchal society.

“There are also human remains and now that it’s easier to do DNA (tests), the collection is ready for those scholars who are seeking to understand processes of settlement,” Delgado said.

Looking forward, he expressed the hope that the repatriation of the Valdivia collection from Canada will spur an effort to compile an inventory of Ecuadorian artifacts taken abroad for study.

Ideally, such an inventory would include information on the condition of the items, whether they are under active study, and if it makes sense to request their repatriation.

“There are times it’s better that they stay where they are because they are being investigated and they are being protected. And frequently, we can’t do that,” Delgado said.

ASIA, IRAN, WORLD

Excavation in Northern Iran Recovers Early Islamic Artifacts

Excavation in Northern Iran Recovers Early Islamic Artifacts

During an archeological excavation process that is currently being carried out in a century-long congregational mosque in Rasht, the capital of the Gilan province in northern Iran, historical artifacts have been discovered.

Saturday, the Deputy Provincial Tourism Chief Vali Jahani announced that “the excavations within the historic Saphi Mosque of Rasht had led to the discovery of items with historical values which appear to have been discovered below Islamic era tombs.

“A glass scent-bottle, a pottery handmade bowl, and other glassware are the objects. And the placement of these objects in the lower layers of Islamic-era tombs shows the importance of this historical area,” the official said, CHTN reported.

Excavations at Iranian mosque unearth new evidence on life in early Islamic era

Earlier this month, several ancient glazed tiles were unearthed beneath the mosque while a team of restorers was digging into its mihrab.

Mihrab is a semicircular niche in the wall of a mosque that points out the qibla, the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca and hence the direction that Muslims should face when praying.

Referring to a restoration project, which initially led to such discoveries in the mosque, the official explained “The restoration project has been temporarily suspended to leave the ground for archaeological surveys.”

“Given that the discovered objects will be very useful in the dating of the city of Rasht, so fragments of these works will be sent to advanced laboratories in the country to obtain the absolute antiquity of the objects, and dating will be conducted via the thermoluminescent approach.”

“According to the present evidence, these historical objects discovered from the Safi Mosque belong to the Ilkanind and Timurid periods,” he concluded.

In the month of Farvardin (Mach 20 – April 19) a trench measuring 1.5 m by 1.5 m was carved in the mosque’s shabestan (an underground space that can be usually found in the traditional architecture of mosques in ancient Iran), which resulted in recognizing some additional sections.

Safi Mosque, also known as Sefid and Shahidiyeh Mosque, which is widely considered as the oldest standing monuments in Rasht, was reportedly established before Shah Ismail, the Safavid monarch, assumed power (in 1501).

EUROPE, ICELAND, WORLD

Extinction of Icelandic walrus coincides with Norse settlement

The Vikings may have caused one of the earliest animal extinctions associated with humans

In Iceland, there are no walruses, but there were hundreds at one time . The time of the disappearance of the walruses indicates the loss of population may be one of the earliest known examples of people leading a sea species to local extinction.

The ghost of walruses past

Walruses used to be a major feature of life in Iceland. Several settlements and landmarks along Iceland’s coast still bear names that refer to walruses, and a few of the medieval Sagas (the stories of the island’s early settler families) even mention them.

The Saga of Hrafin Sveinbjarnarson, written down sometime in the late 1100s, tells the story of a chieftain who killed a walrus and brought its tusks and skull to Canterbury Cathedral in England. But the walruses themselves have been reduced to only a few ancient bones and tusks.

A crosier carved from walrus ivory found in Scandinavia dating to around 1100 AD.

Did the walruses disappear before or after the Norse arrived? In other words, did the Norse kill off Iceland’s walruses, or did the population die of natural causes? Because Iceland has no living walruses today, historians have debated whether the place names referred to places where walruses were living when people arrived or just places where settlers found the skulls and tusks of long-dead animals.

The walrus tusks that Hrafin Sveinbjarnarson delivered to England could have been part of a thriving Icelandic walrus population, but it could also have been only a lost wanderer from more distant shores.

To learn more about Iceland’s pinniped past, evolutionary genomicist Xenia Keighley of the University of Copenhagen and her colleagues’ radiocarbon dated and sequenced DNA from 34 samples of bones and tusks from walruses in the Icelandic Museum of Natural History.

The DNA studies also showed that Iceland’s long-lost walruses were a distinct branch of the walrus family. The oldest walrus remains in the museum, dating to 5502-5332 BCE, were related to the ancestors of today’s Atlantic walrus population.

More recent samples, though, belonged to a separate mitochondrial branch of the walrus family tree, genetically distinct from every group that’s known in the North Atlantic—including the older Icelandic walruses.

“I would suspect that the most recent clade represent a colonization event that replaced the lineage represented by the old sample, rather than the old sample being a direct ancestor to the more recent clade,” co-author Morten Olsen, also an evolutionary genomicist at the University of Copenhagen, told Ars.

Radiocarbon dates of the bones, combined with the walruses’ genomes, provided an estimate of the size of their breeding population, which suggested that walruses had lived on Iceland’s coasts for around 7,500 years.

Although their numbers had been small—perhaps around 1,000 walruses at any one time—their foothold on the island had been pretty stable until around 1213-1330 CE, well after Norse settlement began in 870 CE.

Blame the Vikings

So what happened to Iceland’s walruses? As always, the answer is complex, but much of the blame falls squarely on the shoulders of the Norse.

Settlers arrived in Iceland and began hunting walrus for the European ivory trade at a time when Iceland’s walrus population was already struggling with a shifting environment and a series of volcanic eruptions.

Painting depicting the Vikings landing in Iceland.

Walrus ivory was a major trade commodity in markets across Europe for much of the early Middle Ages, and the Norse hunted walrus around most of their territory in the North Atlantic. 

According to a 2020 study of DNA from walrus skulls and tusks found in Western European archaeological sites, most of Europe’s supply of walrus ivory came from a walrus clade (a group of related animals with a common ancestor) living in Greenland, which was home to tens of thousands of walruses.

Iceland’s much smaller walrus population would have been a drop in the bucket by comparison, but the ivory trade would still have put pressure on Iceland’s small population.

When the first Norse hunters reached them, Icelandic walruses were already facing challenges from the Medieval Warm Period (700 to 1100 CE).

A few centuries of relatively warm climate in the North Atlantic were helpful to human explorers, but not so great for walruses, which rely on sea ice as a place to haul themselves out of the water. And at the same time, volcanoes erupted several times near some of the walruses’ key haul-out sites on land. It’s no wonder the walruses couldn’t survive all of that and Vikings.

Some evidence suggests that a Roman fishing industry may have wiped out grey whales in the North Atlantic a few hundred years before the Viking Age, but otherwise, the Norse may have been the first to wipe out a whole population of animals for profit.

ASIA, KAZAKHSTAN, WORLD

A Fossilised Skull Has Revealed When The Last ‘Siberian Unicorn’ Lived on Earth

A Fossilised Skull Has Revealed When The Last ‘Siberian Unicorn’ Lived on Earth

The unicorn first emerged nearly 2.5 million years ago but is believed to have disappeared 350,000 years ago.

However, researchers from Tomsk State University in Siberia, Russia, now believe that Elasmotherium Sibiricum may have been around till as recently as 29,000 years ago.

“Most likely, it was a very large male of very large individual age. The dimensions of this rhino are the biggest of those described in the literature, and the proportions are typical,” said Andrey Shpanski, a paleontologist at Tomsk State University.

A 1903 reconstruction of the Siberian Elasmotherium by W. Kobelt gave the animal a thick coat of shaggy hair.

The researchers are still trying to find out how the unicorn survived longer than other species that became extinct hundreds of thousands of years earlier.

According to early descriptions, the Siberian unicorn stood at roughly 2 metres (6.6 feet) tall, was 4.5 metres (14.7 feet) long, and weighed about 4 tonnes.

That’s closer to woolly mammoth-sized than horse-sized. Despite its very impressive stature, the unicorn probably was a grazer that ate mostly grass.

So, if you want a correct image in your head, think of a fuzzy rhinoceros with one long, slender horn protruding from its face instead of a short, stubby one like today’s rhinos. 

The skull, which was remarkably well-preserved, was found in the Pavlodar region of Kazakhstan. Researchers from Tomsk State University were able to date it to around 29,000 years ago via radiocarbon dating techniques.

Skeleton of the rhino at the Stavropol Museum

Based on the size and condition of the skull, it was likely a very old male, they suggest, but how it actually died remains unknown. 

The question on researchers’ minds is how this unicorn lasted so much longer than those that died out hundreds of thousands of years earlier.

“Most likely, the south of Western Siberia was a refúgium, where this rhino persevered the longest in comparison with the rest of its range,” said one of the team, Andrey Shpanski.

“There is another possibility that it could migrate and dwell for a while in the more southern areas.”

The team hopes that the find will help them better understand how environmental factors played a role in the creature’s extinction, since it seems like some may have lasted a lot longer than previously thought by migrating across great distances. 

Knowing how the species survived for so long, and potentially what wiped it out in the end, could allow us to make more informed choices about the future of our own species, as we find ourselves in a rather perilous situation. 

NORTH AMERICA, U.S.A, WORLD

Scientists In Kansas Discover 91-Million Year Old Fossil Of A Shark That Had Cannibal Babies

Scientists In Kansas Discover 91-Million Year Old Fossil Of A Shark That Had Cannibal Babies

A newly discovered Cretodus Houghtonorum fossil shark aged 91 million years old in the Kansas region is part of the list of large dinosaur-era animals.

Researchers have identified the remains of an entirely new species of prehistoric shark in Kansas, which lived during the age of the dinosaurs and may have measured around 17 feet in length.

Cretodus houghtonorum was a spectacular, almost 7 feet long shark, or slightly more than 5 meters long, preserved in sediment deposited in an ancient ocean called the West’s Inland Waterway which covers North America during the Late Cretaceous period (144 million to66 million years ago), based on a study published in the Journal of Vertebrate paleontology.

In 2010, researchers Kenshu Shimada and Michael Everhart and 2 people of central Kansas, Fred Smith and Gail Pearson, found and excavated the fossil shark on the ranch near Tipton, Kansas.

Researchers excavate a farm in Kansas where the Credotus teeth were found

Shimada is a professor of paleobiology at DePaul University in Chicago. He and Everhart are both adjunct research associates at the Sternberg Museum of Natural History, Fort Hays State University in Hays, Kansas.

The species name houghtonorum is in honor of Keith and Deborah Houghton, the landowners who donated the specimen to the museum for science. Although a largely disarticulated and incomplete skeleton, it represents the best Cretodus specimen discovered in North America, according to Shimada.

The discovery consists of 134 teeth, 61 vertebrae, 23 placoid scales and fragments of calcified cartilage, which when analyzed by scientists provided a vast amount of biological information about the extinct shark.

A tooth belonging to a Credotus houghtonorum, which lived 91 million years ago in the ocean that once covered the Great Plains, including Kansas

Besides its estimated large body size, anatomical data suggested that it was a rather sluggish shark, belonged to a shark group called Lamniformes that includes modern-day great white and sand tiger sharks as distant cousins, and had a rather distinct tooth pattern for a lamniform shark.

“Much of what we know about extinct sharks is based on isolated teeth, but an associated specimen representing a single shark individual like the one we describe provides a wealth of anatomical information that in turn offers better insights into its ecology,” said Shimada, the lead author on the study.

“As important ecological components in marine ecosystems, understanding about sharks in the past and present is critical to evaluate the roles they have played in their environments and biodiversity through time, and more importantly how they may affect the future marine ecosystem if they become extinct,” he said.

During the excavation, Shimada and Everhart believed they had a specimen of Cretodus crassidens, a species originally described from England and subsequently reported commonly from North America.

However, not even a single tooth matched the tooth shape of the original Cretodus crassidens specimen or any other known species of Cretodus, Shimada said.

“That’s when we realized that almost all the teeth from North America previously reported as Cretodus crassidens belong to a different species new to science,” he noted.

The growth model of the shark calibrated from observed vertebral growth rings indicates that the shark could have theoretically reached up to about 22 feet (about 6.8 meters).

“What is more exciting is its inferred large size at birth, almost 4 feet or 1.2 meters in length, suggesting that the cannibalistic behavior for nurturing embryos commonly observed within the uteri of modern female lamniforms must have already evolved by the late Cretaceous period,” Shimada added.

Furthermore, the Cretodus houghtonorum fossil intriguingly co-occurred with isolated teeth of another shark, Squalicorax, as well as with fragments of two fin spines of a yet another shark, a hybodont shark.

“Circumstantially, we think the shark possibly fed on the much smaller hybodont and was in turn scavenged by Squalicorax after its death,” said Everhart.

Discoveries like this would not be possible without the cooperation and generosity of local landowners, and the local knowledge and enthusiasm of amateur fossil collectors, according to the authors.

“We believe that continued cooperation between paleontologists and those who are most familiar with the land is essential to improving our understanding of the geologic history of Kansas and Earth as a whole,” said Everhart.

The new study, “A new large Late Cretaceous lamniform shark from North America with comments on the taxonomy, paleoecology, and evolution of the genus Cretodus,” will appear in the forthcoming issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

MEXICO, NORTH AMERICA, WORLD

This is one of the “Cracked Eggs” you may encounter in the Bisti De Na Zin Wilderness Area

This is one of the “Cracked Eggs” you may encounter in the Bisti De Na Zin Wilderness Area.

In northern New Mexico, the Bisti Badlands are more like a dreamscape than a scenery.

Totem poles of sandstone rocks, or hoodoos, reach haphazardly into the brilliant blue sky, some so crooked that it’s amazing that even the smallest gust of wind doesn’t topple them over.

Resting beneath them sit what only can be described as giant cracked eggs, as if Mother Nature was cooking breakfast only to accidentally drop a carton onto the desert’s sandy floor and abandon the shattered shells.

Hanging out with the alien eggs at Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness in New Mexico
There are all kinds of hoodoos in the Bisti Badlands

How did a bunch of giant eggs get to this desolate area? The true story starts 73 million years ago.

At one time, this 45,000-acre swath of desert called the Bisti Badlands or the Bisti Wilderness Area (Bisti translates to “a large area of shale hills” in Navajo) was completely submerged by a sea called the Western Interior Seaway during the Cretaceous Period.

As the water receded, layers of sandstone, mudstone, shale, and other sedimentary rocks were revealed, creating the Kirtland Formation, only to be carved out by braided streams that flowed through the landscape. The result is today’s dry, eerie badlands.

“Over time, erosion of the soft mudstone weathered away leaving behind channel deposits [that formed into the shape of eggs and hoodoos],” Sherrie Landon, paleontology coordinator for the Farmington District Office of the Bureau of Land Management, tells LiveScience.

She explains that the eggs get their colorful, speckled appearance due to mineral deposits in the stream that cut through the sedimentary rock. “The eggs’ cracks are the result of differential weathering—mudstone weathers faster than other sediments, causing the formations to crack.”

The giant egg formations, which range from five to six-and-a-half feet long, aren’t the only reason to make a three-hour pilgrimage from Albuquerque (Bisti is near Farmington, New Mexico, in the Four Corners Region of the American Southwest).

A petrified forest of juniper and other conifers makes the badlands even more post-apocalyptic. It’s the result of a massive storm that rushed through millions of years ago covering the forest in water and sediment, explains Landon. 

And then there are the dinosaurs. Fossils—including dinosaur bones—have been found in the badlands, too.

“A few months ago, the National Guard airlifted fossils from a baby pentaceratops found here and brought them to the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science,” Landon says. “It’s the only known fossil of a juvenile of this dinosaur species ever found.”

Don’t jump to conclusions—though the huge eggs look like prehistoric creatures could have left them behind, their origins are entirely geological.

And the eggs aren’t the area’s only Easter-like treat: Bisti Badlands also boasts pastel-painted sunsets. If you catch them at the right time, you’ll see the bright yellow sun drop behind the landscape like an egg yolk into a bowl.

ASIA, CHINA, WORLD

Archaeologists Find 13,500-Year-Old Bird Figurine in China

Archaeologists Find 13,500-Year-Old Bird Figurine in China

The oldest known statuette found in China is an ancient bird recovered from a refuse heap that sheds new light on how our ancestors created 3D art and a new study finds.

Lingjing bird carving: (A) photographs of the six aspects of the carvings; (B) 3D renderings of the carving obtained by CT scan. Scale bars – 2 mm.

Researchers uncovered the miniature carving at the Lingjing site in china, where previous excavations revealed 11 layers each of different ages, from 120,000 years ago to the Bronze Age ..

The item was found in a refuse heap leftover from well diggers who removed most of the fifth layer in 1958.

The location possesses a spring, which “may have attracted prehistoric populations at different times,” said study co-author Francesco d’Errico, an archaeologist at the University of Bordeaux in France.

The figurine depicts a songbird on a rectangular pedestal. The artist deliberately added weight to the sculpture by oversizing the tail to prevent the bird from falling forward, d’Errico said. “The artist knew that making a sculpture is a matter of finding the right balance.”

Francesco D’Errico and Luc DoyonA small bird carving is the oldest piece of East Asian three-dimensional art ever discovered.

The sculpture is made of bone that likely came from the limb of an adult medium-size mammal such as a deer, boar, gazelle, or wolf and was burned before carving.

At only 1.9 centimeters (about .75 inches) long and 1.25 centimeters high, the statuette “is so small that it is possible similar carvings were not recognized in previous excavations in which the sediment was not systematically sieved,” d’Errico said.

Other artifacts uncovered from the refuse heap include ceramic potsherds, stone blades, and a pendant made from ostrich eggshell.

Radiocarbon dating of unearthed burned animal remains from the fifth layer, including a bone fragment with gouging marks also seen on the statuette, suggested the artifact is about 13,500 years old, meaning it originated during the Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age when the first human art appeared.

Until now, the oldest known Chinese figurine was a jade songbird about 5,000 years old found near Beijing. This new discovery pushes back the origins of animal sculpture in East Asia by roughly 8,500 years.

Markings on the figurine suggest it was carried around for some time in a leather bag, the researchers said. “Was it a toy? A gaming piece? A religious effigy? Is it art for art’s sake? Something deeper? It’s fascinating to speculate,” said Adam Brumm, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Australia, who did not take part in this research.

Until recently, the earliest human art was found in Europe. However, increasingly scientists have discovered similarly old artwork elsewhere in the world, such as roughly 44,000-year-old cave paintings found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.

Until now, the carving of small figurines was the only artistic practice left that might have potentially originated in Europe, with examples including statuettes carved from mammoth ivory found in Germany dating up to roughly 40,000 years old.

These new findings suggest that prehistoric humans living in China might have independently developed the concept of three-dimensionally representing the world around them — for instance, the bird figurine has a number of features not seen in other Paleolithic sculptures, such as how it was carved from burnt bone, and how it depicts a bird on a pedestal, the researchers noted.

“Before this discovery, we thought that 3D representations were a recent phenomenon in East Asia,” d’Errico said. “This diminutive carving supports the hypothesis that the production of 3D representations does not have a single origin.”

“No doubt, with researchers focusing their attention on East Asia and Southeast Asia at this time, we will see more figurines — of animals or people or other items from life or myths — being recovered over the next few years,” said Michelle Langley, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Australia, who did not participate in this study.

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