S. Korea identifies 4 Korean War soldiers from remains found in DMZ
The bones of the soldier and its relics were excavated in arrowhead ridge in the central section of the inter-Korean border in Cheorwon, Gangwon Province, a region of heinous battles in the 1950-53 Korean War that is now inside the Demilitarized Zone.
This photo, provided by the defense ministry on March 9, 2020, shows the remains of a South Korean soldier who fought in the 1950-53 Korean War. The remains were found at Arrowhead Ridge inside the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas during an eight-month government excavation project that ended in November 2019.
The Ministry for Defense, on Monday, has just named four soldiers killed in a war that has been identified.
A sergeant first class, a staff sergeant and two sergeants are believed to have died in the fourth battle that took place on Arrowhead Ridge, now inside the DMZ, about two weeks before a truce ending the Korean War was signed July 27, 1953.
A National Defense Agency for Killed in Action Recovery and Identification (MAKRI) taskforce conducted excavation work on the ridge, a central section of the inter-Korean border in Cheorwon, Gangwon Province, between April and November last year.
The team identified another three soldiers last year.
“Numerous items were found with the remains of the four soldiers, such as water bottles, ammunition, identification tags, insignias, certificates, bayonets, combat shoes, and helmets,” the team said in a press release.
“The four soldiers participated in the Korean War at the age of twenty. Among them, three were married and each had a child left behind with their wives.”
The team said the identification of the dead soldiers was possible thanks to genetic sampling conducted on around 40,000 bereaved family members. But it said it still needs to collect more samples.
Through the excavation conducted last year, the team found about 2,000 bones believed to be from over 260 soldiers as well as 67,000 war items in the DMZ area.
It is estimated that there the remains of over 10,000 war dead are in the area.
The finding of a burial site from the 14th century deep in the tropical forest of Gabon will demonstrate a little known period in Africa’s history.
A cave located in the south-east of the country, which was discovered in 2018 by a French geo-archaeologist, contains hundreds of medieval artifacts with human remains.
“This is a unique discovery in Africa because human remains are almost non-existent,” said Richard Oslisly, leading an expedition financed by the National Agency of National Parks.
An exceptional archaeological cave, Iroungou, was discovered in September 2018 in Gabon by a team of French and Gabonese researchers.
The mission is also funded by the local environmental branch of Singapore’s palm oil giant Olam International, which is well established in Gabon. There are no golden platters or diamonds at the end of the 25 meters (82 feet) of rope needed to reach the floor of the cave, but the site named Iroungou is still a treasure trove for scientists.
Almost 30 skeletons have been discovered on three levels, with more than 500 metallic artifacts made mostly of iron and ranging from knives, axes and spear tips to bracelets and collars. Researchers also found 39 pierced teeth from hyenas and panthers.
Oslisly, 69, only began to speak of the discovery a year afterward, but it has caused a wave of excitement and hope in the regional scientific community.
“This cave will enable us to find out a little more about these peoples of central Africa, largely unrecorded in history,” the French researcher said in his Libreville office, full of local antiquities.
In sub-Saharan Africa, “soils are very acidic, so everything of human and animal origin decomposes very quickly,” said Geoffroy de Saulieu, an archaeologist with France’s Research Institute for Development (IRD).
“It is exceptional to obtain this kind of remains.” With carbon-14 dating practiced on 10 femurs — or thighbones — it was possible to date the skeletons in the cave in the 14th century, a worthwhile discovery in itself.
In this part of the world, vestiges of the past are unusual, but that is also partly because archaeological research is generally insufficiently funded and comes late in the day. The first written texts regarding Gabon came from European adventurers who landed on its Atlantic Coast at the end of the 15th century. It was not until the 19th century that explorers ventured far inland on territory almost completely covered with forest.
The oral record of indigenous clans and families handed down in villages “doesn’t let us go back further than one or two centuries,” said Louis Perrois, a French anthropologist who has studied oral tradition in much of Gabon since the 1960s.
When researchers questioned the elders in villages around the Iroungou cave, nobody was aware of the existence of the site. The villagers said they had no idea who the men and women buried there could be.
Molar teeth extracted from skulls have been sent to France for DNA testing. Scientists can also count on a DNA base compiled with saliva data from peoples across central Africa.
Oslisly hopes to “cross-check the data and, perhaps, to find the descendants of these skeletons,” with the DNA tools used by linguists. In March, a team of anthropologists and specialists in bone pathology — people with skills to diagnose illnesses from remains — were due to go down into the cave.
“We’re going to find out more about the diet of the buried people, and the illnesses they have contracted during their lives,” says Oslisly, still enthusiastic after 35 years of work in Gabon and Cameroon.
“Above all, we’re going to learn what they died of,” he added.
Apart from a collective burial site unearthed at Benin City in southern Nigeria in the 1960s, Iroungou is the only cave grave to be found in Africa. Like the Iroungou skeletons, the bones in Benin City have been dated to the 14th century, an epoch which witnessed the fall of many African civilizations, according to several historians.
Some researchers wonder whether Africa was struck by the Great Plague, over the same decades as it ravaged Europe and Asia. Maybe the Iroungou bones hold an answer.
“In Benin City, the ADN was not saved, but in Iroungou the bones are in very good shape,” de Saulieu says.
Alcohol Bottles Uncovered at Convict Station in Tasmania
In the structural remains of solitary cells of the convicts in Tasmania, archaeologists have unearthed hundreds of convict era artefacts. 160 prisoners took part in the construction of a highway between Hobart and Launceston between 1838 and 1847 at the Picton Road Station in the Southern Midlands.
Archeologists found ceramics, tableware, bottles, bones and tools during an excavation on the site during the summer. Professor Eleanor Casella from the University of Tasmania said they also unearthed solitary cells used to house convicts.
“The solitary cells themselves are brutal,” she said.
“They’re eight foot by four foot [2.4 metres by 1.2 metres]. They’re so small. It wouldn’t have been a comfortable experience.”
Evidence of many types of alcohol was found at the dig.
The presence of so many alcohol bottles Professor Casella has confirmed it was shocking. “It’s supposed to be heavily regulated in these kinds of punishment stations,” she said.
“We’ve got gin case bottles that have been imported all the way from the Netherlands, plus beer bottles.”
The site on private farmland along the Midlands Highway, near Kempton, was discovered in 2012 when a farmer was doing agricultural work. There have been two archaeological digs at the site, carried out with University of Tasmania students and the Southern Midlands Council.
Aerial shot of archaeology dig site project, former Picton Road Station in the Southern Midlands, Tasmania
Archaeologist Angela McGowan said she worked on the excavation of the southern wing of the station, which was the first part built.
Archaeologist Angela McGowan says they have found unexpected evidence of earlier buildings at the site.
“The first and most surprising thing we found was some extra wall footings at the back of the trench, so we found a whole small room that wasn’t on the 1841 plan,” she said.
“We have found a great deal of butchered animal bones, cuts of meat basically.”
Aerial shot of archaeology dig site, former Picton Road Station in the Southern Midlands, Tasmania
Ms McGowan said they also found a drain filled with artefacts.
“We certainly found quite a lot of rubbish, broken bottles, broken china, some bits of iron that had been washed down and washed through the hole in the wall,” she said.
Deborah Baldwin, the collections, exhibitions and data officer at the Southern Midlands Council, said processing the artefacts had given her an idea of what a convict’s diet was like.
Many pieces of broken ceramics were found at the old convict site at Kempton.
“It was pretty heavy on the meat, but because they were working on the road, breaking stones, they did need a reasonable diet,” she said.
“There were lots of sheep jaws, so they were using the heads and lots of long bones, ribs and that sort of thing.”
Ms Baldwin said the ceramics were in good condition.
“The ceramics, because they have been fired, seem to fare fairly well underground,” she said.
“Obviously they get dirty, but the glass can change because it interacts with the salts and moisture in the soil.” Another archaeological dig will be held at the Picton Road Station site in 2021.
Teenage girl’s skeleton discovered in a mysterious grave near Egyptian pyramid
The skeletal remains, hugging in the crypt, of a 13-year-old girl, have been discovered by Egyptian archeologists excavating the pyramid ruins 60 miles out of Cairo.
It is a mystery how or when she died, though the experts say the site itself dates back to the end of the Third Dynasty roughly 4,600 years ago.
The cemetery was empty apart from the skeleton, which was buried in the squatting position, but the team also found two animal skulls and three ceramic vessels nearby that were likely placed as funerary offerings. The skull offerings appear to have come from bulls, according to Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities.
While the newly-discovered bones (left) indicate the remains belong to a girl who was around 13 years old when she died, much about the burial and the skull offerings (right) are still unclear, the researchers say
Researchers came across the burial during work on the partially-collapsed Meidum pyramid, where the team is excavating a cemetery built near the end of the Third Dynasty.
It’s thought that construction on the Meidum period began at the command of the Third Dynasty’s last pharaoh, Huni, and was continued by Sneferu, the first pharaoh of the Fourth Dynasty. Previous efforts at the site uncovered the tomb of Prince Nefar-Maat, Sneferu’s oldest son.
The latest burial was found surrounded by a partially intact brick wall, and the team is now working to restore and reinforce the structures
While the newly-discovered bones indicate the remains belong to a girl who was around 13 years old when she died, much about the burial and the offerings are still unclear.
Researchers do not know the identity of the buried teenager.
The latest burial was found surrounded by a partially intact brick wall, and the team is now working to restore and reinforce the structures.
Elsewhere, in the Sinai Peninsula, the Antiquities Ministry says it discovered an ancient workshop that was used to build and repair ships thousands of years ago.
The site dates back to the Ptolemaic era (332 B.C.-30 B.C) and was found during excavations in the Tel Abu Saifi archaeological site, which is said to have once been the location of the Roman fortress Silla.
The find includes two dry dockyards where the ancient ships were worked on.
Researchers say it dates to the Greco-Roman period in Egypt, which lasted from the arrival of Alexander the Great in the 4th century until the 7th century when the Islamic conquest swept the region.
90,000-year-old human hybrid found in ancient cave
The idea of free love seems to have started even earlier than in the 1960s. A small bone fragment belonging to an ancient hominin called “Denny” by the team, who had a mother Neanderthal and a dad Denisovan-the two nearest extinct relatives of the living humans today, was discovered in an international team of researchers.
90,000-year-old bones provide the first direct evidence of interbreeding between Neanderthals and their close relatives the Denisovans.
The two races have been known to live on the Eurasian Mixed Continent, Neanderthals in the west of the continent until some 40,000 years ago and Denisovans in the east.
Previous genetic studies of ancient hominin remains have shown that they sometimes interbred, but Denny is the only known example of a first-generation child with equal parts Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA.
The bone fragment was found in 2012 at Denisova Cave in Russia and taken to the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig for genetic analysis, after being identified as a hominin bone due to its protein composition. It is thought that the bone is a fragment of the arm or leg of a young female, who would have been aged around 13 when she died some 90,000 years ago.
“It is striking that we find this Neanderthal/Denisovan child among the handful of ancient individuals whose genomes have been sequenced,” said Prof Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute. “Neanderthals and Denisovans may not have had many opportunities to meet. But when they did, they must have mated frequently – much more so than we previously thought.”
Genetic analysis of the bone indicates that the mother was more closely related to the 55,000-year-old Neanderthal remains found in the Vindija Cave in western Europe than those of another, the so-called Altai Neanderthal, that lived in the Denisova Cave at an earlier date. This means that Neanderthals must have at some point traveled between western and eastern Europe.
The team also found evidence in the genome that the Denisovan father had at least one Neanderthal ancestor further back in his family tree – between 8,000 and 17,000 years before Denny lived.
“An interesting aspect of this genome is that it allows us to learn things about two populations – the Neanderthals from the mother’s side, and the Denisovans from the father’s side,” said Dr. Fabrizio Mafessoni, also from the Max Planck Institute.
A reconstruction of what the Neanderthal-Denisovan Denny might have looked like when she was alive
Expert comment
Rebecca Wragg Sykes – Archaeologist based at the Université de Bordeaux
It’s hard to overstate the importance of finding Denny. A decade ago we had no clue that her father’s people even existed, much less that children like her existed.
In May 2010 the first Neanderthal genome was published, proving that rather than usurping them, early Homo sapiens made babies with them. But just the month before, samples from a tiny finger bone in Denisova Cave, Siberia revealed an entirely new hominin species.
Now known as D3, this bone was at least 10,000 years younger than Denny. Thanks to ancient DNA, today we’ve identified five Denisovans. But we know more about their history as a species than we do about their technology or even their appearance. Some of them had genes for dark hair, skin, and eyes, but how tall they were or what their faces were like are mysteries.
Despite all samples so far coming from one site, they were far from isolated. Both they and Neanderthals bred with H. sapiens, but in different times and places. Asians and Native Americans have more Neanderthal DNA than Europeans, which might reflect more interaction in that region, or elsewhere in a group which later moved eastwards.
Denisovan blood is even more unevenly distributed: living populations of Oceania and Australia have up to 25 times more than anywhere else. It’s clear we’re seeing only a fraction of the true picture.
Another extinction theory may soon bite the dust
Neanderthals and Denisovans weren’t shy of each other, either. D3’s genes showed interbreeding tens of thousands of years before she died. Denny’s father’s forebears were also making babies with Neanderthals up to 17,000 years earlier. Intriguingly, those far-off encounters were with a Neanderthal lineage different from that of Denny’s mother.
Finding the child of a Neanderthal and a Denisovan should make us sit up and think. Until now, most evidence has pointed to small, localized populations in both species. Added to this, studies mapping the distances that stone tools were moved from their source pointed to relatively limited territories.
On this basis, dominant theories emphasized Neanderthals as socially ‘exclusive’: avoiding outsiders, limited to topographic, cultural and genetic valleys. If that’s true, it’s unlikely we would ever find the result of such an encounter, so Denny is telling us something about these models is wrong.
Populations were likely small, so the startling fact of Denny’s parentage means the other part of the equation must be wrong: Denisovans and Neanderthals must have been quite keen on strangers. But how did populations who were happy to blend stay so distinct genetically? One theory is that mixed children had a tougher time reproducing, but we just don’t know yet.
Why does this matter? One of the most influential ideas about why the Neanderthals disappeared is that H. sapiens had more extensive territories – if we map the distances stone tools were carried, early H. sapiens come out ahead. But finding Denny strongly suggests stone tool mobility can’t be a real measure of sociability. Another extinction theory may soon bite the dust.
Humans were in America 100,000 years earlier than we thought, study claims
The remnants of a mastodon found in a routine freeway excavation in San Diego shows there was human activity in North America 130,000 years ago — or about 115,000 years earlier than previously thought.
Broken bone fragments show evidence that humans were around much earlier than previously thought.
The fossils of the ancient mammal were revealed more than 20 years ago by paleontologists with the San Diego Natural History Museum. But it wasn’t until now that scientists were able to accurately date the findings, and possibly rewrite the history of the New World as we know it.
“This is a whole new ball game,” Steve Holen, co-director of the Center for American Paleolithic Research and the paper’s lead author, told CNN. The discovery changes the understanding of when humans reached North America.
The study, to be published this week in the science journal Nature, said the numerous limb bones fragments of a young male mastodon found at the site show spiral fractures, indicating they were broken while fresh.
Hammerstones and stone anvils were also found at the site, showing that humans had the manual skill and knowledge to use stone tools to extract the animal’s marrow and possibly to use its bones to make tools.
The discovery took place in 1992 by museum paleontologists, who were doing routine work at a freeway expansion in San Diego County. The site was named Cerutti Mastodon site, in honor of Richard Cerutti, who made the discovery and led the excavation.
Museum paleontologist Tom Deméré, who was involved in the excavation and has also been part of this study, said the project took five months and covered almost 600 square feet. He described the decades-long project as an “incredible odyssey.”
Researchers work at the Cerutti Mastodon site near San Diego.
“We early on realized that this is a special site,” said Deméré, adding later the group was “salvaging fossils as they were being found.”
Five large stones, which were used to break the bones and teeth of the mastodon, were found alongside the animal’s remains, according to the study. The site also contained fossils of other extinct animals, including dire wolf, horse, camel, mammoth and ground sloth.
Scientists specialized in various fields, from archaeology to the environment, have done research at the Cerutti site since its discovery.
Advanced radiometric dating technology allowed scientists to determine the mastodon bones belong to the Late Pleistocene period, or 130,000 years old, with a margin of error of plus or minus 9,400 years.
Some of the Mastodon bones found at the excavation site are seen in an image
“The bones and several teeth show clear signs of having been deliberately broken by humans with manual dexterity and experiential knowledge,” Holen said in a press release.
Experts agreed that the earliest records of human ancestors in North America is about 15,000 years old, but the discovery of the Cerutti site “shows that human ancestors were in the New World ten times that length of time,” said paleontologist Lawrence Vescera.
“This site really nails it because the evidence is really clear.”
The 11 scientists involved in the study told CNN it’s too early to tell the impact of the new findings. For now, they want the general audience to see it and understand it, and for their peers to study it — and even challenge it.
The archaeological treasures found at the Cerutti site will be on display at the San Diego museum. And a partnership with the University of Michigan will allow for even more people to see 3-D models of some of the specimens at their Online Repository of Fossils.
Mexican Government Returns Stolen Bronze Sculpture to Nigeria
Mexican customs officials thwarted an attempt to smuggle the ancient Yoruba sculpture into the country.
Mexico returns a smuggled bronze sculpture to Nigeria ?? after it was seized by customs officials at an airport. The Yoruba artefact is believed to date back to the 6th Century.
The Mexican government has recently returned a stolen bronze sculpture to Nigeria according to Vanguard.
The ancient sculpture was seized by customs officials at Mexico City Airport following an attempt to reportedly smuggle the artefact into the country.
The bronze sculpture itself is thought to be a 6th-century relic from the southwestern Yoruba City of Ife and depicts a man in woven pants sitting cross-legged and holding an instrument.
While it is still unclear how the artefact was obtained in the first place, Mexico’s Deputy Secretary of Foreign Affairs Julián Ventura Valero says, “We oppose the illegal commercialisation of archaeological pieces, an important cause of the impoverishment of the cultural heritage of the nations of origin, since it undermines the integrity of cultures and, therefore, of humanity.”
Several bronze artefacts ranging from a 19th-century cockerel from Benin City to an 18th-century Ethiopian crown have since been returned to their respective countries over the past few years.
Often the result of looting during the colonial era, the governments of these African countries are now rightly demanding that these stolen pieces of significant cultural history be permanently returned to them and not offered on “long-term loans” as has often been the case.
However, thousands more of these invaluable artefacts from many African countries remain housed in museums across Europe. Revisit our interview with anthropologist and curator Niama Safia Sandy about the politics around the repatriation of African art here.
Half-Eaten Cookie Found Inside 16th Century Tudor Manuscript
One timid schoolboy is believed to be leafing through the book which seems to be a chocolate chip cookie about 50 years ago. The manuscript — which dates back almost 500 years — was given to the university by a grammar school in 1970.
The 1529 volume from the complete works of St Augustine is stored inside the university’s rare books archive, where no food, drink or even pens are allowed.
Emily Dourish, the deputy keeper of rare books and early manuscripts, discovered the biscuit.
She explained to The BBC: “It was probably a schoolboy looking at the book over 50 years ago who then accidentally dropped a biscuit and it was forgotten about.”
“When we received the book, somebody will have had a brief look at it, then stored it away. Nobody has properly looked at it since.”
“I was stunned. When we gave it to our conservationist, his jaw dropped.”
Restorers were able to remove the decaying “dry and crumbly” biccie — but it has left a greasy stain on a handwritten page.
The university’s special collections library tweeted: “For future reference, we have an acid-free paper to mark your place. Please don’t use baked goods.”
