NORTH AMERICA, U.S.A, WORLD

A Lowa teenager searching for Arrowheads finds a 30,000-year-old mastodon jawbone instead

A Lowa teenager searching for Arrowheads finds a 30,000-year-old mastodon jawbone instead

When hunting for arrowheads on an Iowa farm a teenager got a huge surprise. Instead of any arrowheads, the teen found a 30-inch jaw bone of a mastodon — a prehistoric hairy elephant, related to the mammoth. 

According to WHO-TV, a paleontology unit at the University of Iowa (UI) retrieved the jaw bone and other associated bones over the weekend.

“A few weeks ago we were informed that someone had discovered a fossil on the property in the middle of a small field,” Tiffany Adrain, head of the UI Paleontology Repository told the media.

A University of Iowa paleontology team was on a farm in southern Iowa to pick up the bone of a prehistoric mastodon.​

Facts About Mastodons

Appearance

Unlike modern elephants, mastodons had much smaller ears and foreheads and were covered in a thick layer of brown hair. Hairs on their coats could grow up to 35 inches (90 centimeters) and the males’ tusks grew to about 8 feet (2.5 meters). Females did not have tusks.

From foot to shoulder, mastodons were between 8 and 10 feet (2.5 and 3 m) tall. They weighed between 4 and 6 tons (3,500 and 5,400 kilograms), according to the Illinois State Museum.

That isn’t much different from their modern counterparts. Modern elephants weigh 3 to 7 tons (2,722 to 6,350 kg) and range from 5 to 14 feet (1.5 to 4.3 m) tall, according to The Defenders of Wildlife. 

Habitat

Though mastodons appeared primarily in North and Central America, they eventually spread all over the world, in every continent except for Antarctica and Australia. They typically inhabited spruce woodlands around valleys and swamps, according to Cochise College. 

Extinction

Mastodons went extinct around 10,000 years ago. There are many theories as to why. Most of these theories boil down to climate change and/or human hunting, according to Simon Fraser University.

Some scientists think that the Earth warmed up from the Ice Age too quickly for the mastodon to adapt or that humans hunted them to extinction.  

Others, like researchers Bruce Rothschild of the Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine and Richard Laub of the Buffalo Museum of Science in New York, have a different theory.

They found that 52 percent of the 113 mastodons they studied had signs of tuberculosis. This led the researchers to think that a tuberculosis pandemic contributed to their extinction.

Though death by disease sounds like a cut-and-dry answer, “Extinction is usually not a one-phenomenon event,” Rothschild told Live Science.

It is likely that the disease didn’t kill off the animals directly, but made them weak. Coupled with the coming out of the Ice Age and fighting off humans, the species just couldn’t survive. 

Sculptures by artist Sergio de la Rosa show three elephant relatives, from left to right: the mastodon, the mammoth and the gomphothere.

Fossil discoveries 

The first mastodon fossils were found in 1705, according to the Oregon History Project, when a large tooth and bone fragments were found in the Hudson River Valley in New York.

Not long after, in 1807, Thomas Jefferson personally financed an expedition that was by led William Clark to excavate mastodon and mammoth fossils from the Big Bone Lick site in Kentucky.

There have been many mastodon fossil discoveries in the past few hundred years. Sometimes, they are found in unusual places. For example, on October 16, 1963, Marshal Erb was using a dragline to excavate a pond and found fossils that came to be known as the Perry Mastodon. In another instance in 2016, a sinkhole in Florida’s Aucilla River was declared an “archaeological gold mine” after an ancient human tool and mastodon bones are found inside.

“It was actually a high school student who had found the object, and the landowners contacted us and notified us [and] sent us photographs. Now we could tell right away it was a jaw bone of a mastodon,” she added.

The bone, which was then donated by the farmers to the UI Paleontology Repository, is believed to have belonged to a young mastodon that might have been 7-feet tall, the Iowa City Press-Citizen reported.

The couple who own the farm and donated the bones asked not to be named so that fossil hunters don’t trespass on their property. About 30 years ago, they had found other bones on their land that belonged to a woolly mammoth, WHOTV reported.

“I think people are finding stuff all the time,” Adrain told the Press-Citizen. “Maybe they are out canoeing or fishing on a bank. Farmers, in particular, on the land can spot things pretty easily.”

MEXICO, NORTH AMERICA, WORLD

Scientists uncover a 60,000-year-old forest underwater and think its preserved trees may help pioneer new medicines

Scientists uncover a 60,000-year-old forest underwater and think its preserved trees may help pioneer new medicines

Roughly 60,000 years ago, pre-historic human beings started to migrate from Africa and shared hunting places and cave residences with Neanderthal populations in what is today Europe. 

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, a vast cypress tree forest carpeted riverbanks off the coast of Alabama in Mobile Bay in the Gulf of Mexico.

In 2004, Hurricane Ivan ripped up the Gulf Coast and revealed the ancient forest, which was found 60 feet below the surface water of Mobile Bay, the ancient underwater forest of withering trees and the shipworms they produce is buried under invasive sediments and sea waters.

The Ancient Secrets of Modern Medicine

A recent Ben Raines documentary film produced by This is Alabama reveals how dive shop owner Chas Broughton first discovered evidence of the ancient forest and invited an environmental journalist and scientists from the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration ( NOAA) to assess his find.

The results were published on the NOAA Ocean Exploration & Research website, saying this ancient submerged forest has remained undisturbed for thousands of years and that it holds “the secret to the creation of new medicines .”

A report in Nature World News says Dr. Kristine DeLong from the Louisiana State University (LSU); marine scientist Robin Cobb from LSU; and Dr. Grant Harley, a dendrochronologist from the University of Southern Mississippi collected and analyzed tree samples to determine the type of marine environment in which the forest had been entombed, and what the climatological conditions were like when the forest was alive.

300 Ancient Animals Found Entombed in Submerged Forest

A sample of tree sap was recovered from within the bark of one tree, that when cut released resin strong enough to “permeate the air” and the tree’s fibers and growth rings were still visible.

Dr. Harley said the tree’s growth rings were narrower and were more uniform in size than those of modern cypress trees, indicating the environment was much colder than our current climate, and Dr. DeLong radiocarbon-dated the sample at 40,000-45,000 years old.

Collected from an ancient cypress forest submerged in Mobile Bay, this log contains hundreds of marine organisms that either burrow into the wood or live in burrows made by other organisms.

Last December, NOAA-funded an expedition of scientists from the University of Utah and Northeastern University, and marine and environmental sciences professor Brian Helmuth, who determined that the ancient trees were very well preserved under sediment layers that had prevented oxygenation and decomposition.

It was Francis Choi, a senior lab manager at Northeastern University Marine Science Center, who looked at organisms buried within the wood and discovered 300 ancient animals.

This dried specimen of Teredo navalis was extracted from the wood and the calcareous tunnel that originally surrounded it and curled into a circle during preservation. The two valves of the shell are the white structures at the anterior end; they are used to dig the tunnel in the wood.

The Anti-Viral Property of Ancient Shipworms

Sometimes called “termites of the sea,” shipworms are tiny marine bivalve mollusks(saltwater clams) with long, soft, naked bodies, and they are notorious for boring into wood immersed in sea water. As these worms bore their way into organic matter, what comes out the other end is converted into animal tissue.

In this study, one hundred bacterial strains from shipworms, many of which were novel, were dated to being at least 60,000 years old.

The team of scientists DNA-sequenced 12 of the strains, determining that they could be applied in the creation of new antibiotics for treatment against “parasites, pain and anti-cancer drugs, antimicrobial activity, and possibly anti-viral drugs”, according to University of Utah medicinal chemistry research professor Margo Haygood.

Ocean Genome Legacy Center Director Dan Distel removes a shipworm. The bacteria that shipworms create may lead to new life-saving medicines.

This is not the first time scientists have studied shipworms in a medical context, in 2017 a paper by Northeastern University scientists titled “’Unicorn’ shipworm could reveal clues about human medicine, bacterial infections” was published by Science Daily.

Researchers discovered a “dark slithering creature four feet long” dwelling in foul mud in a remote Philippines lagoon and this “giant shipworm”, with pinkish siphons at one end and an eyeless head at the other was said to have added to the scientific understanding of how “bacteria cause infections and, in turn, how we might adapt to tolerate, and even benefit from them.”

Modern Virus Halts Research on Ancient Anti-Virus

According to East Idaho News, the COVID-19 pandemic has put a stop to diving at the ancient forest site in the Gulf of Mexico, but Dr. Choi and his team plan to launch unmanned underwater robots to provide 3D visualizations of the forest and Dr. Haygood and her team plan to study more tree samples next year, which NOAA said might have applications in “textile, paper, food, renewable fuel, animal feed, and fine chemical production.”

ASIA, ISRAEL, WORLD

Israeli Archaeologists Solve Mystery of Prehistoric Stone Balls

Israeli Archaeologists Solve Mystery of Prehistoric Stone Balls

For any man-made spherical object of stone petrospheres or spheroids are two archeological terms. Such, mostly prehistoric objects, were found intricately carved and painted, indicating they were deemed important to ancient people as far back as two million years ago.

The balls of stone were discovered in East Africa and throughout Eurasia from the Middle East to China and India, but their purpose had baffled specialists, until now, that is.

Qesem cave ( “magic” cave in Hebrew) is a Lower Paleolithic archaeological site located 12 km (7.46 miles) east of Tel Aviv in Israel that was occupied by early humans between 400,000 and 200,000 years ago.

Burned animal bones from Qesem Cave, Israel.

The evidence of selective game hunting, butchery, and transport of animals has been identified by archeologists back to the cave where meat is cooked and exchanged among the group, but until now a curious collection of petrospheres, which perplexed archaeologists, until now.

In a new study published in PLOS ONE last week, an international team of archeologists led by an archaeologist at the University of Tel Aviv, Ella Assaf, suggesting these enigmatic artifacts were used to break the bones of large animals so that the nutritious marrow could be harvested from within.

This early butchering technique underlines how an “elegant technological solution” allowed hominins to increase their calorific intake over hundreds of thousands of years. This, in turn, helped to develop diverse societies.

According to a report in Haaretz, it wasn’t just the spheres’ “purpose” that remained obscure, but their presence in the cave was considered “anachronistic” (from an alternative time period) because similar spherical artifacts are normally found at much older sites.

The team of researchers analyzed 30 spherical stone artifacts recovered from Qesem Cave in the year 2000. Since then Tel Aviv University archaeologists Avi Gopher and Ran Barkai have uncovered what the new paper describes as “a treasure trove,” including hundreds of thousands of flint tools and animal bones, as well as 13 hominin teeth.

Example of ancient hominin teeth from the Qesem Cave, Israel.

A Magical Cave of Archaeological Mysteries

It is currently unknown who the cave dwellers were, or where they had come from, but these particular distant ancestors of ours were “relatively ahead of their time” going by these stone bone smashing tools.

An archaeologist uses a reproduction of a shaped ball to crack open an animal bone

However, a faction of the world’s archaeologists will be reading this article with more than a modicum of skepticism, for it was this very cave and one of the archaeologists that attracted a lot of negative media attention in December 2010 when reports suggested Israeli and Spanish archaeologists had found “the earliest evidence yet of modern humans.”

However, according to Nature, the whole story received a backlash from the blogosphere that quickly pointed out how the media coverage had inaccurately reflected the details of the scientific report.

Where this “rewriting of the history of human evolution” went wrong was that most of the initial reports were based on a Tel Aviv University press release about a  paper published in  The American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

It was written by Israeli and Spanish scientists and detailed the discovery in Qesem Cave, of eight teeth dating to between 200,000 and 400,000 years ago.

Were these teeth among the oldest “significant early human remains” found anywhere in southwest Asia, the scientists asked. And if they were indeed  Homo sapiens teeth, then modern humans were living in the Levant as early as 400,000 years ago, when most archaeologists maintain we were still hunting in Africa.

Archaeological Controversy at the Magic Cave

The specific wording of the original paper was scientifically safe and the scientists admitted that the teeth “cannot be conclusively identified as belonging to a particular species of human, whether  Homo sapiens –  the first modern humans – Neanderthals, or other humans.”

But the wording of the paper’s press release, and many of the subsequent articles, leaned on the eye-grabbing headline idea that  Homo sapiens might have lived in the Levant almost half a million years ago, challenging mainstream archaeology and anthropology.

Science bloggers  Carl Zimmer and Brian Switek instantly responded to the articles promoting this revolutionary history, which they described as “hype”, and they pointed out to the public all the discrepancies between the original paper and the media coverage, which was a downright horrific show of Fake News.

However, when Nature spoke to archaeologist Avi Gopher from Tel Aviv University, who co-authored the paper, and asked him if the teeth he found in Qesem Cave “really provide evidence that  Homo sapiens did not evolve in Africa;” instead of rejecting the idea, he said “We don’t know. What I can say is that they definitely leave all options open.”

EUROPE, GERMANY, WORLD

Fashionable 2,000-Year-Old Roman Shoe Found in a Well

Fashionable 2,000-Year-Old Roman Shoe Found in a Well

We all know the ancient Romans were skilled engineers, constructing vast highways to cover the enormous lands they conquered.

But did you know they were also fashionable? In the Empire, footwear was used as a status symbol in addition to providing warmth and protection.

And with Italy’s reputation for shoes, it should come as no surprise that their Roman ancestors were also good cobblers.

A stylish shoe on display at The Saalburg in Germany shows just how fashionable women in ancient Rome could be.

The Saalburg is a Roman fort located on the ridge of the High Tanus mountain and was part of ancient border fortifications in the area.

Enormous in scale, the fort and its surrounding village were home to around 2,000 people at its peak.

It was constructed in 90 AD and stayed in operation until around 260 AD when a political and economic crisis caused it to go out of use.

Since 2005, The Saalburg has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site with a museum that displays items found in the area.

This includes a 2,000-year-old shoe discovered in a well before going on exhibit for the world to see. Typical of certain types of ancient Roman footwear, they have a leather upper and a hobnailed sole.

Shoes were often modeled after caligae—heavy-soled military boots with lots of open areas.

This 2000-year-old Roman shoe features heavy-duty leather and exquisite craftsmanship

For women, decorative embroidery and patterns were often added to the shoes in addition to laces. Not only demonstrating the craftsmanship of the maker, but these shoes also helped display the wealth and status of the women wearing them.

These thick-soled shoes would have been worn outdoors, with lighter sandals used indoors.

Their destiny to be discovered in Germany shows just how much craftsmanship and style traveled within the Ancient Roman Empire.

It’s incredible to see that the fashion choices made aren’t far off from the modern shoes we wear ourselves.

ASIA, EUROPE, RUSSIA, WORLD

Scientists Reveal a Perfectly Preserved 18,000-year-old Puppy Discovered Frozen in Russia

Scientists Reveal a Perfectly Preserved 18,000-year-old Puppy Discovered Frozen in Russia

An ancient dog finds in Russia in the Far East that he lived a glorious eighteen thousand years ago. It was found last year in a frozen mud near the city of Yakutsk in Siberia and has been given the affectionate name of “Dogor”.

Researchers carefully cleaned the specimen to reveal it was still mostly covered in fur

More surprising is that it is unusually good with intact fur, skin, whiskers, and eyelashes. It might look just like a sleeping old dog to the casual viewer!

The Russian Wolfhound, also known as the Borzoi breed, is a special dog of tremendous speed, known for the rather remote appearance, associated with Russia.

A quick online search showed that in Russia other dogs mixed wolves with hundreds of massive beast dogs that have been domesticated by patient owners. The owners insist these dogs are half-wolf; whether they’ve been genetically proven to be so is another matter.

That is what scientists believe they have found buried deep in the ice in the Far East reaches of Siberia; an almost perfectly preserved specimen that even retains its fur.

As yet, experts have not determined whether the animal is dog or wolf, but that riddle, they say, is half the fun of the quest. One thing is for sure, it looks like a puppy and perhaps is an evolutionary cross between wolf and dog.

The prehistoric puppy’s teeth, nose, the fur are all incredibly intact.

A piece of the puppy’s bone was immediately shipped off to Stockholm’s Centre for Paleogenetics to determine just what scientists were looking at.

They have determined the animal is 18,000 years old and is preserved perfectly, thanks to the ice in which it was buried.

The pup still has its whiskers, eyelashes, and nose intact.

“We have now generated a nearly complete genome sequence from it and normally when you have two-fold coverage genome, which is what we have, you should be able to relatively easily say whether it’s a dog or a wolf, but we still can’t say, and that makes it even more interesting,” said Love Dalen, professor of evolutionary genetics at the centre.

Whatever the animal’s true ancestry turns out to be, the remains now have a name that applies in either case: Dogor, which is Yakutian for a friend.

Dogor remains are now kept at a private facility, the Northern World Museum. Museum director Nikolai Androsov said, at Dogor’s unveiling to the media, “this puppy has all its limbs…even whiskers.

The nose is visible. There are teeth. We can determine due to some data that it is male” he said at the presentation of Dogor at Yakutsk’s famed Mammoth Museum, which specializes in ancient remains and specimens.

How the prehistoric puppy perished is so far unknown, although scientists do know he was just eight weeks old. Researchers will no doubt continue testing to learn all they can about the fascinating creature.

Russia’s the Far East has provided many incredible finds and animal remains for scientists who study ancient animals in recent years.

Buried deep within Siberia’s permafrost, remains of woolly mammoths, canines and other prehistoric animals are being discovered whenever the ice melts. Mammoth tusk hunters are oftentimes the ones who discover them.

Who knows? One day Dogor the prehistoric puppy may become part of a Russian children’s story, or the basis of a movie. He has already joined other furry, famous canines in getting worldwide attention.

ASIA, JAPAN, WORLD

Massive Stones Unearthed in Shogun’s Garden in Central Japan

Massive Stones Unearthed in Shogun’s Garden in Central Japan

Eight massive stones, including one that weighs nearly ten tons, have been unearthed in the garden at Muromachi-dono, the so-called Flower Palace built by the Ashikaga Shogunate in A.D. 1381. 

A massive stone is unearthed in the garden of the former residence of the Ashikaga Shogunate during the Muromachi Period (1336-1573).

The largest stone is nearly 3 meters long and one of eight, seven of which are situated around the site of a pond in the former residence of the Ashikaga Shogunate.

On April 10 the Kyoto City Center for Archeological Research announced the findings. The Kyoto site of the Kamigyo Ward is called Muromachi-dono, also known as “Hana no Gosho” (Flower Palace).

The unearthed stones, which are unusually huge compared with those found at other garden sites of ruling elites, were undoubtedly intended to show off the great power wielded by the shogun and his family, Expert Said.

In 1381 the complex was completed at the request of the Third Shogun of Ashikaga Shogunate, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358-1408), and used as his and his successors’ residence and headquarters.

The site is estimated to have spanned around 7,600 tsubo, or about half the size of the massive Tokyo Dome in the capital’s Bunkyo Ward. One tsubo is equivalent to about 3.3 square meters.

The residence is also depicted in “Uesugi Rakuchu-Rakugai Zu” (Scenes in and Around the Capital), a national treasure. Kyoto in those days was the capital of Japan.

The eight stones were found in the southeastern part of the site and are deemed an especially important discovery.

They measure between 95 centimeters and 2.7 meters. Seven of them were situated close to each other.

The institute believes the stones were placed during the rule of the eighth Muromachi shogun, Ashikaga Yoshimasa (1436-1490), who also involved in constructing Kyoto’s fabulous Ginkakuji Temple (Silver Pavilion), based on an analysis of earthenware excavated from stratum in which they lay.

The residence is believed to have comprised a group of buildings in the north and a garden that centers around a pond in the south.

During the excavation, researchers also found that the pond stretched at least 45 meters north to south and about 60 meters east to west.

“Ashikaga Yoshimasa until now hadn’t been held in particularly high regard for his political skills because he triggered the Onin War (1467-1477), which was followed by the Warring States period,” said Hisao Suzuki, a professor of archaeology and history of gardens at Kyoto Sangyo University.

“This discovery shows that he excelled at fostering culture and engineering technology.”

The excavation was carried out from January through April 9 ahead of the construction of a building. 

Due to the new coronavirus outbreak, the excavation site will be backfilled, and no on-site briefing session for the public will be held.

NORTH AMERICA, U.S.A, WORLD

Archaeological Sites Investigated in Northern Alaska

Archaeological Sites Investigated in Northern Alaska

Archaeologist Jeff Rasic of the National Park Service has investigated archaeological sites at Howard’s Pass, a several miles–wide tundra plateau located in the mountains of northern Alaska’s Brooks Range.

A National Park Service climate-observing station in Howard Pass, a broad crossing of the Brooks Range between Alaska’s North Slope and the Noatak River drainage.

The sites date back some 11,000 years and include traces of houses, tent rings, food-storage pits, tool-making debris, and cairns that may have been used to help drive caribou into hunting traps. 

Jeff Rasic is an archaeologist for the National Park Service who has sifted through wet soil near Howard Pass. The pass, named for U.S. Navy explorer William Howard (who traversed it during an expedition on April 21, 1886), is more than 100 miles from the closest villages today, Ambler and Kobuk, both to the south.

Howard Pass was not so quiet over the past 11,000 years. In the area, archaeologists have found hundreds of house remains, tent rings, food-storage pits, scattered stone chips from tool makers and cairns that resembled humans to help drive caribou into traps.

“People took advantage of caribou, fish, muskox, berries, waterfowl — and in the earliest period, probably bison,” Rasic wrote about Howard Pass, a tundra bench several miles wide that caribou from the Western Arctic herd still click through during seasonal migrations.

This food-rich area has another side to its character. Howard Pass’s Inupiaq name is Akutuq, a word for a treat made of whipped animal fat, sugar, and berries. Natives gave the pass that name because the wind-tortured snow patterns there reminded them of akutuq.

National Park Service scientists in 2011 installed a rugged weather station at Howard Pass as one of 50 similar climate stations in hard-to-reach parklands across Alaska. The stations are battery and solar-powered and send their data in blips to orbiting satellites.

That information has included — on Feb. 21, 2013 — a wind-chill temperature of minus 96.9 degrees Fahrenheit. The air temperature that day was minus 45.5 degrees F. The wind blew at a sustained 54 miles per hour.

“This was not an isolated event,” Pam Sousanes of the National Park Service said of the Howard Pass windchill. “Similar conditions have been recorded in 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017.”

The average wind chill for Feb. 12-16, 2014, was minus 84.5 degrees F when the highest wind gust through the pass was 103 miles per hour. Wind chills of minus 70 or lower have been recorded each year.

This low spot in the western Brooks Range becomes a wind tunnel when there a great atmospheric-pressure difference that exists between Alaska’s North Slope and the rest of the state. Cold air from the north rips southward though the pass.

“The wind chill can be so severe as to freeze to death caribou caught there by a winter storm,” wrote Ernest Burch in the book “Alliance and Conflict: The World System of the Inupiaq Eskimos.” “After every bad blow, the Eskimos used to go into the pass to look for well-preserved caribou carcasses.”

Sousanes and her colleague Ken Hill have replaced the wind monitor on the Howard Pass station every year; the steel mast that holds it up is pocked by rocks and ice.

Minus 100 degrees does not seem to mesh with human occupation; nor does a place with no firewood.

However, not only is the pass loaded with archaeological sites, a few of them are winter dwellings, Rasic said, with half the living area underground and featuring cold-trap tunnels at the entrances.

Why might people have chosen a spot with such inhumane conditions?

“It’s a reliable place to harvest caribou, and there are lakes with fish,” Rasic said. “If you are someone trying to escape clouds of mosquitoes, winds aren’t necessarily bad. And maybe a windswept place is good for winter travel — hard and crusty, good to get around on.”

EUROPE, IRELAND, WORLD

Uprooted tree reveals a violent death from 1,000 years ago

Uprooted tree reveals a violent death from 1,000 years ago

The remain of a young man who died of what appears to be knife wounds sometimes between ad 1030 and 1200 was discovered tangled in the roots of a 215-year-old beech tree.

A hurricane erupted over the wild Atlantic shores of northwestern Ireland and fell a 215 years old beech tree in the middle of a County Sligo field straight out of the ground.

It was not the huge tree that drew widespread attention, but what was discovered snapped up in his twisted roots – half a human skeleton pulled out of his grave. It was not the massive tree.

After learning of the discovery of the bones, Ireland’s National Monuments Service called in archaeologist Marion Dowd to undertake a rescue excavation of the body that had, in essence, risen from the grave.

In her 20 years of academic and commercial work, Dowd had never seen anything like what she encountered at this site.

Excavating bones from tree roots.

Having just launched her own private firm, Sligo-Leitrim Archaeological Services, Dowd couldn’t have asked for a more bizarre maiden project. “

As excavations go, this was certainly an unusual situation,” Dowd says. “The upper part of the skeleton was raised into the air trapped within the root system.

The lower leg bones, however, remained intact in the ground. Effectively, as the tree collapsed, it snapped the skeleton in two.” The bones still in the burial plot were in a very well preserved condition.

After Dowd’s excavation, osteoarchaeologist Linda Lynch conducted a three-month analysis. Last week, the results of the radiocarbon dating revealed that the grave belonged to a young man between the ages of 17 and 20 who died during the medieval period between 1030 and 1200 A.D.

With a height of 5 feet, 10 inches, he was much taller than the average medieval person, which indicates he came from a family with a relatively high social status who could afford a nourishing diet.

However, he didn’t have an easy childhood as a mild spinal joint disease suggests he was involved in physical labor from an early age.

Dowd determined that the medieval teenager had received a formal Christian burial because his body was placed on his back in a traditional east-west orientation with his arms by his side.

While historical records indicate there was once a church and graveyard in the general area, no other bones or signs of additional burials were discovered in the immediate vicinity of the fallen tree.

Dowd estimates the grave was at least a foot under the ground and says the person who planted the beech tree around 1800 would have been unaware of the presence of a grave just below his feet.

Lower leg bones were in the grave, but the upper body was tangled up in roots.

It appears that the young man’s demise was a violent one. Dowd found two cuts to his ribs that were inflicted by a single-edged weapon, probably a knife.

She also discovered a visible stab wound to the left hand which suggests he may have attempted to defend himself from his attacker.

“This burial gives us an insight into the life and tragic death of a young man in medieval Sligo,” Dowd says. “He was almost certainly from a local Gaelic family, but whether he died in battle or was killed during a personal dispute, we will never know for sure.”

Dowd says there are no plans yet for further analysis of the bones, so this medieval murder mystery may endure.

The remains found beneath the uprooted tree will eventually be sent to the National Museum of Ireland in the capital city of Dublin.

All In One Magazine